Foto by tgw, New York City, 2005------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Idiocy: US military idiots begin war games with Philippine Army--Philippine Army! Who knew they had an army? We are boldly threatening China. Why?
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Note: Pompous little prick billionaire New York City mayor (for life?), Mike Bloomberg, declares Social Security and Medicare draining New York City coffers. Hey, Mike, you little rich prick, how 'bout workers have paid into Social Security their whole work lives and Medicare from the time they were 50 years of age. That you rich bastards want that money for your Wall Street buddies is your hidden agenda in blaming the city's woes on those two paid-for entitlements.
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Question: What is President Obama doing in Colombia? And with CIA agents in tow with prostitutes?
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Average Rents in New York City
Today, New York City's billionaire mayor's real estate moguls proudly announced that New York City's rents have reached the highest level (Praise the Capitalist God) in the history of the city: $3,184 a month. Focus on that. Can you believe it? That amounts to--hold onto your seat--$38, 208 a year in rent. Throughout my building, which just a matter of 8 years ago was an SRO Class B Hotel where the top rent was $600 a month, all the new tenants I see don't really look like they can afford that kind of rent--I mean, I stop and ponder and just can't believe these people, mostly Koreans and Chinese, can afford $3,184 a month rent. Two young Korean girls are living in a new apartment just up the hall from me. They go to the Fashion Institute and are working in fashion studios for no pay. All I can guess is, their daddys are paying their rent, which though not $3,184 a month, is probably $2,000 a month. I stagger and almost drop with another heart attack when I contemplate me having to pay even that much rent. Another new tenant on my floor is a White single lady. Another new tenant on my floor is an Australian dude and his Asian girlfriend. My newest next-door neighbor is a young Uruguayan lady who works in SOHO. I know her rent is $2,500 a month. I can't believe salaries for these young people are of such magnitude that they can afford such high rents.
To pay $38,208 a year rent means, well, let's calculate: Let's say you make $55,000 a year. After, say, 30% out for taxes (here in NYC we pay triple taxes, Federal, State, and City), that would leave you 38,500. After you paid $38,208 rent, you would be left with $292 to pay your CABLE bill; to pay your electric bill; to buy monthly supplies like toilet paper, cleaning stuff; to pay for getting your dirty clothes laundered or for getting your suits and dress shirts (or dresses, suits, and blouses) cleaned, etc. Even if you are married and your wife, too, is making $55,000 a year, together you would have $584 a month left to live on. And what if you and your wife had say just one curtain-climber? And you had to pay a nanny to take care of the precious little one? All of this not considering the various insurance premiums you'd have to pay. Boy howdy, you'd better have a hell of a lot of credit cards or credit lines or some other source of income or you are headed for debtors prison.
Mayor Bloomberg is on his own teevee channel twenty-four-seven, Channel 25 (2) here in NYC, tooting his own horn about how he's done this and that and that and this, all for the good of New York City--HIS city. Like tonight (Friday the 13th) he's on his private teevee channel tooting about making clean energy out of garbage at his infamous garbage recycling plant on the Hudson River up in the Upper West 60s--this plant that spews out dioxins and mercury and other toxins into this city's fetid air. This billionaire jerk who bragged a few years back how by rezoning the city for high-rise luxury condos and high-rise boutique hotels and high-rise overpriced office buildings he was intending to raise the base rents up to $2,000 a month. Now he's blowing his own horn about how the real estate industry--it was slumping badly during the economic disaster caused by Georgie Porgie Puddin' 'n Pie Bush and his bullshit wars and tax breaks for his wealthy constituents, those that include his own family, and continued on by President "Yes We Can" Obama, is now back on the rise--real estate and tourism now being New York City's number one and two industries.
Our billionaire mayor's agenda from the get-go has been to drive the poor out of New York City--especially to drive the poor out of Manhattan--because the Ayn-Rand-faithful rich despise struggling people, people who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps--and especially this constantly masturbating mayor hates Blacks and Latinos (remember, he grew up in Boston, not known as a racially tolerant city, i.e., Roxbury). You can prove it by taking a look at how he's changed the face of Harlem. You now see in some sections of Harlem more White people than you do Blacks.
Of course, Wall Street financiers on down to the pimply-faced brokers on the floor can afford such high rents; so can upper management real estate brokers; as well as litigating lawyers and high-living doctors and nouveau-Euro-design-mad architects and Euro trash money grubbers and Saudi-Arabian princes's sons and daughters and too-rich-to-fail Dubaians--well, you catch my drift, and that's who are pouring into Manhattan buying up these overpriced apartments and condos--those who are relieved to pay $3, 184-a-month rents--like the Tokyo rich who in order to escape the deadly fumes from Fukujima are flocking over here to invest in "cheap" real estate; escaping from Tokyo, where a cardboard box with no windows costs more than $3, 184 a month rent.
I'm one of the lucky New Yorkers. I live in Midtown Manhattan on a fixed rent due to my age and income situation. Also, I've always known how to get along with landlords. I'm a renter; I've never cared about owning property, even though the elders in my family taught me that the only way to obtain wealth in this country was through owning land--not houses and buildings, but the land they sat on. Henry George, the single-taxer man who almost was elected mayor of New York City, in his landmark book, Progress and Poverty (see our Blessed Blog List on the right side of the page for the Progress and Poverty link), says that land and its usage should be controlled by the citizens of a state or city. This is the concept of a commonwealth, which New York State is one. In a commonwealth, the people own the land and lease it to those who want to improve on it, like build farms on it or make capital improvements on it with factories or businesses or hotels, the catch being as long as they don't lease it and then let it go to weed or disuse. The lease fees are based on how much wealth the lessee can build up on that land--thus the land tax being the only tax, the single tax.
In Progress and Poverty, George stated that the consequences of dire economic policies were moral issues rather than purely economic issues. So he posed moral questions: "Why should a man benefit merely from the act of ownership, when he may render no services to the community in exchange?" and "What gives the wealthy the right to become rich - not for service rendered to the community, but from the good fortune to have advantageously situated land?" He believed that economic problems stemmed from the unavailability of land for those who needed access to it. The injustices of rent robbed the working man of his wages and wild speculation in land led to poverty. [Thanks to Bob DeNigris of the Arden, Delaware, Georgist Gild.]
Answers to our problems lie all around us; yet we Capitalist pigs think we're feeding at an infinitely full trough, blinded by our total ignorance and our racial biases to the fact that that trough is now full of biogenetically engineered slop--like pink slime meat (reenforced with animal snots and the pus from their many sores, I assume). As George Carlin said, Americans will eat anything as long as it's deep fried and then soaked in butter, even raccoon assholes.
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What Is Our Nobel Peace-Prize-Winning President and His George W. Bush Military Geek Holdovers Up To
I've often written that we have a total war economy--we keep these wars perpetuated by being the biggest arms sellers in the world--our recent idiotic arm sales being those intended for the New Egypt, an Egypt now totally run by a military hierarchy, most of whom are old Mubarak stooges--Egypt's Arab Spring not bringing any democracy to that US-controlled part of the world. Recently, our President, yes, the same one who won the Nobel Peace Prize (a big joke, folks), announced that he had approved of plans brought to him by his military goons (all of 'em holdovers from the George W. Bush administration, that bunch of flakes who got us entangled in these endless wars--GWB the same little prick that got NATO involved in the schemes) to spread our war machine's bases into the Pacific Rim countries. Like for the first time since WWII we're placing our troops back on Australia. Like we're going to build military bases on Taiwan (check out what happened to the Formosans who used to call Taiwan theirs) and forcing the South Koreans to militarize a small island off their shores in the direction of Mainland China. What's up with that? Why in the holiest of hells would Obama want to threaten China with war? And also, remember those missile defense systems old Junior Bush wanted to place in Poland? Hey, Obama's going ahead with those plans, plus missile defense systems in Romania and Georgia. How idiotic is that? Threatening Russia now, too. It seems like Obama is following the Christian Bible in setting up Armageddon, the war to end all wars that will allow Jesus X. Christ to come back down to earth on his big white horse with his army of angels to take over Jerusalem as his seat of glorious power. Idiots. We are ruled by idiots. Power-greedy idiots. Corporate idiots. Check out Exxon-Mobil's CEO making 35 million bucks this past year. Doesn't that make We the People of the USA who are struggling to hold on to enough money so we can buy our cat-food dinners or keep eating those deep-fried raccoon assholes on a stick angry as hell? Except, like I've said many a time, Americans have to be the stupidest and dumbest and most gullible people on this planet.
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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Madness and Survival, the Continuing Drama
I saw a swallow this morning. I kid you not. On the top of the water tank on the roof of the building I look across when I look out my bay window toward downtown Manhattan, the New York Harbor, and on a clear day all the way out into the pelagic of the mountainous Atlantic O'Cean, ridin' high in the ocean sky. A damn swallow. I lived in California once and I don't ever remember seeing any swallows, not even around Capistrano, and I went there once half-bombed on Burgermeisters, ah those little Burgies, wonderful moments in highway beer drinking, heading down the Ortega Highway to lovely Tijuana mia, for some fiesta tiempo--I was into bullfights in those days (remember, I once was a Hemingway idolizer) and the Tijuana Plaza del Toros was an old beauty from back in the revolutionary days of Mexico Viejo, which we learned to call it in Tejas because of New Mexico being just across a desert prairie from my hometown, closer to us than Mexico Viejo, which was 500 miles south of me then and existed mostly in my "one day I'll go to Mexico" dreams.
So I saw a swallow, OK, it could have been a damn swift, I'm not a birder--my only ornithological knowledge is of the Yardbird, a Bird of marvelous flights of virtuosic high grooves whose song swings a mood from down to the upward mobility of a crescendo-ing right through the big pearly gates of Utter Chaos, my fabulous Heaven. Chaos makes me special, don't you see? So I saw a swallow and then I got a phone call from a woman with a thick Chinese accent who informed me I was going to receive a lump-sum check in about two weeks I had no idea was coming my way. Praise the Lard, I hollered in my best glory hallelujah voice--Hot damn, I was saved from the pits of eating scrapple in the Apple and selling lead pencils and rotten Hunt's Point fruit at subway entrances, maybe doing my one-man band thing, too--BUT NOT NOW! I throw the BIRD at the hellhounds--and I love the NOW,`like old Mose Allison once sang, "I love the NOW I'm in and like the NOW I love," and don't worry Mose fans, to me the NOW is LIFE, so Mose and I are singing about the same thing. It's the only time for me. Right NOW. Right this second. Boom, did you feel it? Time is so much fun when you're saved by a Messiah, mine was Timothy Leary, who was yours? Like this phone call I got from this Asian swallow this morning--she could have been a Moonie, or she could have been Timothy calling from outer space disguising his voice to sound Asian to throw off the CIA who were prone to capture Timothy, throw him in an open pen after they lobotomized him, like the US Army and then his own government did to Ezra Pound in Italy after WWII, 'cause old crazy opiated Ez had called old aristocrat Roosevelt Jewsevelt, and ah come on, it's so silly NOW especially with Georgie Porgie Bush, our "president," doing all the murderous inhuman shit he's doing in the name of Capitalist Greed and acting like one of Ez's poem characters. OK, so Ez was bullhorning all this shit over his Italian Mussolini Network radio show, otherwise a jolly show of many weird Ezraisms; so old Ez was a Fascist when it came to money, except he had a different kind of industry in mind in his ABCs of Economics. So, hell, I said, "Tim, is that you, you bastard, calling me on the Royal Telephone? How's the LSD in the Heavens? How's Baba Ram Dass? You seen Abbie around in space? Hell no, I don't know what happened to his kid. The kid and the wife turned American on us and disappeared into the woodwork, Timothy. Remember when you used to trash people's apartments--but you weren't involved in that East Village shit--though you were when you sent that LSD to Ginsberg"--and "trashing" was Abby and Mrs. Abby, wadding up paper, or emptying garbage cans, maybe full of wadded up Yippie manifestos, stuffing some schnook's apartment full of trash while you're high as hell on marijuana and red wine, compacted into the room by human force. And the schnook comes home, opens his/her front door and...SHIT, they face a wall of packed trash. [I once knew a writer who was also an artist, hell, he did every damn thing, like me, quite a guy, but one of his best-loved pieces consisted of his collection of Sunday New York Times, about 10,000 of them, and I may not be exaggerating, spread out all over the floor of a gallery, pyramiding up from a solid floor of them to a sun temple-like strange place made out of those damn Sunday Times.]
So I swallow my pride and give a period of grace to that swallow, or maybe it was a swift, I saw this morning; that little split-tailed bugger brought me LUCK, a wheel spun and, YEP, "Youl numbel, Sil, you hit jack's pot." Praise the Lard, or did I shout that already? A happy wolf is still a dangerous wolf.
Have you ever seen a happy wolf, like right after wolfing down several pounds of young female elk meat. I mean they are like children, frisky, full o'pep*, dancing about in glee, maybe stopping and suddenly just F-ing ululating into the cold sweet sky.
* (the second-ever Daily Growler footnote): There used to be an old cereal called Pep. It sponsored a lot of good kid radio dramas back in the yesteryears, like "Hop Harrigan," "Captain Midnight," or "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy" (white as a white sheet, I might add). "Full O'Pep" was their brand tagline on their packaging and as tags to their spots on the radio. I don't remember Pep being around for television.]
That's the kind of wolf I am today thanks to my sacred swallow, my Asian Savior--oh my God, what if I owe allegiance now to the Reverend Moon? I don't give a damn; I'm like Jerry Foolwell and "Doctor" Billy Graham-Cracker, I'll take your damn money I don't give a shit who you are. It's kinda like Pappy Bush's old Big Daddy and Prescott Bush's Big Daddy, too; they took money from Adolph Hitler; they didn't give a shit. Just think, a part of our "president's" family inheritance is money made off Adolph Hitler. They even made money off the construction of concentration camps! Isn't that amazing that they are now almost domitrix-like trying to rule the world Masochistically? Hey, torture's a form of sexual gratification to these human animal hybrids. Ask that Lyndie stupid dumb hillbilly girl soldier who took the rap for all the Rumsfeld-approved torture at Abu Gharib and is doing time with her boyfriend who knocked her up while they were on duty in Iraq. That's amazing, too. But to hell with all of that; to hell with politicians; to hell with global warming; to hell with whichever movie stars committed adultery today; to hell with whatever murders happened; to hell with my rent going up in a few months; to hell with the government spying on me--go ahead--my privacy says, "Bring 'em on"; and to hell with POVERTY.
If Warren Buffett and his suck buddy Little Billy Gates can pool their fortunes into tax-free foundations then why can't I pool mine into something?--OK, so Bill and Melinda (is she the luckiest woman to ever succeed?) want to end disease in the world--which is caca and anybody knows that who has ever hung around really rich folks for a long time. These foundations are set up so they can shovel a hell of a lot of money into them and it sits there making more money for them, same as the old junk bond scheme that Warren Buffett, that crooked bastard, made his billions off of, and in the meantime they only have to spend a modicum of it on ridding the world of disease--I read where it would only take about 11 billion bucks to give everybody in the world at least basic health care. See what I'm saying? Seeing Bill and Melinda amongst those flies-flying-around-their-heads African children, acting so sweet and goody-goody two shoes, gives me the willies. I know they're full of shit, but it works; I criticized Bill the other day and boy did I get chastised back..."Hey, he's trying to stop disease in the world, man, how can you talk bad about a man who's that benevolent, you bastard?"
It's also creepy to think that Bill, Melinda, and Warren could personally save the whole city of New Orleans out of their pocket change. Bill's concerned about those poor Africans; "Hey, Bill, how about your own country's Africans, you bastard?" Nope, folks, Warren and Bill are simply keeping you and me from grabbing their excessive wealth through taxes and fees and tariffs--like in the old days when Bill's and Warren's fortunes would have been subjected to a 90% income tax on everything they made over a certain amount, say 1 million bucks. That's why Bush baby wants to do away with estate taxes and keeps lowering the capital gains taxes. Shit yeah. You better believe the Bush Family has plenty of foundations and hidden money all over the globe, especially in Dubai, I'll betcha anything. Think about this: if you are head of a nonprofit organization, like Bill and Melinda's Foundation, you get charity breaks on your personal fortune, which is set up outside of the foundations, trust me; plus you can legally give yourself and Melinda a salary out of that foundation money--plus you can buy properties in the name of the foundation...need I go on? Remember, I put in several years at the "accounting" firm involved in the BCCI scandal a few years back--totally forgotten by the media now--and I've worked on white papers explaining to billionaires how they can beat taxes all over the world and set up limited partnerships and pool their fortunes into foundations--it's all to protect their fortunes and has nothing to do with their humanitarian bent, I don't give a shit how sincere these trolley dodgers appear to be. Bill Gates is a master actor; he's cool for a man who controls more wealth than half the nations of the world. Sure, he can act low keyed, like one of us, but that's a scam. Trust me, a man that rich ain't concerned one damn pile of shit about you and me and not even really about those poor suffering souls not only in Africa but all over the world including right down there in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana. Maybe we should give Bill and Melinda all those worthless FEMA trailers...those wealthy assholes could build most of the Ninth Ward people new houses, do abstract and paper work for them to help them save their properties or help them pay up their mortgages...do something of true altruistic value like that. But, oh no, not rich people; they don't think further out than their on ego dimensions. God, rich people just chill my ass. Bill Gates has too much F-ing power and now even more that he's hooked up with Warren Buffett, the Jimmy Buffett of finance. Two Dumbo human beings with that much power have got to gloat more over their own good deeds than they really care about their fellow human beings, especially those starving, diseased, and unfairly punished, horribly mistreated African children, African women (mothers), African fathers, African grandparents, the African land. Hell, men, women, and children are being routinely butchered with machetties and brutally beaten with baseball bats just sometimes out of suddenly wanting to kill a whole family who you've otherwise lived peacefully with for years--that's what's going on in some of those African countries Bill, Melinda, and Warren are going to curb diseases in--so you stop tuberculosis in Africa, you still haven't solved the main problem with Africa, the fact that it's having its wealth stolen right out from under it even as Bill and Melinda are over there photo-opting with the kids with the flies flying perpetually around their heads. Did anybody ever think Bill sees all those Africans he's saving from diseases as potential Windows users? I'm sorry; that's so unphilantropic of me.
But then, F Bill and Warren, hell, I'm more powerful than they are this morning. Aha, relief was just a swallow away.
thegrowlingHAPPYwolf
for The Daily Growler
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