Existing in New York City: Caught Reading Proudhon

Foto by tgw, New York City, December 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Amiri Baraka, a big surprise since I had just seen him a little before X-mas.  Amiri Baraka, 79, American poet, writer and activist, Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002–2003).

Wise I

    WHYS (Nobody Knows
    The Trouble I Seen)
    Traditional

If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred years
to get 
out!
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Say Goodbye to: Tabby Thomas, the long-time Baton Rouge swamp-style blues man. Tabby Thomas, 84, American blues musician.
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Reading Proudhon
I've been caught by one of my detractors reading Proudhon.  "I thought you were a Marxist," he quipped, "Proudhon and Marx didn't see eye to eye...."  I shut him up with a cold glare.  "So, does that mean I can't read Proudhon and remain a promoter of Marx?"  Proudhon also liked to discredit Kant, Hegel, and my patron saint of Sociology, August Comte.  I mean, Proudhon was a man with the fortitude to say that "property is evil."  And since property is evil, then so, too, are proprietors. That grabbed my attention.  Proudhon was also relating Liberty to anarchy and as a true libertarian, he believed in anarchy as the solution to government or monarchial rule.

Proudhon as a young man said, "I spit on the gods and on men, and I believe only in study and friendships."  I can go whole hog agreeable with that statement.  I, too, believe only in study and friendships, both of which I have in abundance.

Dig this from Proudhon: "If I were asked to answer the following question, 'What is slavery?' and I should answer in one word, 'Murder,' my answer would be understood at once.  No further argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a man is to kill him.  Why, then, to this other question: 'What is property?' may I not answer, 'Theft'?"

But enough on Proudhon and his philosophy.  Reading what he thought about property and proprietors (he believed the workers should control their production...doesn't that sound like Marx?), I got to thinking about how openly and proudly crooked (thieves) and murderous (just since Obama's been in power we've killed thousands upon thousands of human beings with our omnipresent military and covert agencies) our government is.  I got so pissed when I heard that Nancy Pelosi's husband, a rather shady dude, has landed himself a whole passel of post offices to sell off...it'll add more millions to his already overflowing coffers.  And then I was further pissed off when I read an open letter to the makers of "The Wolf of Wall Street" from Christina McDowell, who was once Christina Prousalis, the daughter of Tom Prousalis, Jordan Belfort's partner in much crime and sleaziness, including stealing his daughter's identity and putting her and her mother into deep debt and embarrassment.

Jordan Belfort is the Wolf of Wall Street and what a genuine sleaze bag he was and still is.  Of course, Hollywood, a pack of sleaze bags themselves, love movies about Wall Street criminals, and that's what these assholes are, folks, common criminals.  Belfort's now coming "clean" with revealing Wall Street shenanigans and its devious crimes that have ruined the lives of millions upon millions of people all around the world.  Of course, this little sniveling bastard is making a killing off this movie and his tell-all book.  In the meantime Christina's worthless bastard of a father after serving time in the big house is now living well in Albania where he's remarried a young Albania babe and is working for the weird Albanian Commie government (Proudhon, by the way, was against communism because he said it took away individuality).  Here you go, read Christina's revealing article: blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2013/12/wolf_of_wall_street_prousalis.php

Jordan Belfort in the movie is played by another prick, Leonardo deCaprio, who to me is an F-ing phony...well, hell, he's an actor, so he ain't real is he?

I've heard Jordan Belfort speak and he's a sorry son of a bitch, a 100% sleaze bag.

And then what does Obama do, why that SoB hires another corporate crony to be Under Secretary of Education, this little privatizing prick is Ted Mitchell, a dude who made $735,000-a-year working for an educational non-profit that worked in cahoots with Pearson the largest promoter of turning our public education system over to the corporate privatizers.  Hey, think about it.  Who can afford to send their kids to private schools now?  Rich White folks.  So who's left to go to public schools?  You can surely answer that without any clue from me.

And how 'bout old Hillbilly Hillary defending Wall Street in a speech to Wall Street crooks who were paying her $400,000.  She's kissing Wall Street ass getting ready to need a bundle of their tainted money when she runs for the presidency in 2016 and some gods help us if she gets elected.

Are you aware of what her sorry-ass hick husband did when he was president?  NAFTA, herding the Haitians up and imprisoning them at Guantanamo before sending them back to Haiti, putting a naval blockade around Haiti so no more of them could escape that horrible place thanks to US corporate raping of this once beautiful island paradise, deregulated the banks and financial firms and insurance companies, diddled a young girl in the Oval Office then lied about it when the Republicans tried to impeach him.

And how disappointed was I in reading today that our new "progressive" mayor is going to be sworn into office by SLICK WILLIE CLINTON.  What is so special about this low-life buzzard?  DeBlasio a progressive...in a pig's eye he's a progressive.  He'll continue on in old Mikey Bloomberg's corporatized footsteps rezoning the city and allowing hi-rise development to go berserk while he lines his own pockets with the filthy lucre he'll reap from the developers and Wall Street.  

In the meantime, the idiot people of Okinawa have agreed to allow our military to continue using their paradisiacal island to house 36 bases and 12,000 US troops.  I ask you, why the hell do we need military bases on Okinawa?

Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon says it has misplaced several trillion dollars of our money.

Quoting Proudhon: 

“What they always want is inequality of wealth, delegation of sovereignty and government by influential people . . . democracy says that the people reign and do not govern, which is to deny the Revolution.”

“it is the liberty that is the mother, not the daughter, of order.”

thegrowlingwolf 
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: "I saw a $100,000 Porsche parked in front of my apartment building"

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Herman "Trigger" Alpert, swing-era bass player with Glenn Miller and later with various other bands; one album of his own, Trigger Happy, on Riverside.  In 1970, he became a photographer.  Hey, he lived to be 97.  Trigger Alpert, 97, American jazz double-bassist (Glenn Miller band).
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Say Goodbye to: Yusef Lateef, jazz man, saxophonist, flautist (first one I ever heard humming through the flute), oboeist; at his best on Canonball Adderley in Japan album on "Jive Samba" and featured on "Trouble in Mind." Yusef Lateef, 93, American Grammy Award-winning saxophonist (Yusef Lateef's Little Symphony).
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Say Goodbye to: Al Goldstein, the sleazy, fat, randy, old bastard who in the 70s published Pleasure, a sex-related publication that was as raunchy and masturbational as its publisher.  Whatever you thought of Al, he did have the balls to print what he preached.  Al Goldstein, 77, American publisher and pornographer, renal failure.
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Say Goodbye to: Brunon Synak, a fellow Sociologist.  Brunon Synak, 70, Polish sociologist and politician.
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From Chris Hedges: Something that should piss you off if you've got even a dollop of passion for your fellow man in you. As you read this, there is a little brat White boy in Texas who killed 4 people 'cause he was driving drunk but who because he was suffering from "afluenza" will spend not one minute in jail or prison.  www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20655-the-plays-the-thing
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End Times?
I mean, are our leaders so corrupt that they don't mind that their greed and pompous standing of their wealth-soaked ground is perhaps assisting CHAOS in the eventual fulfillment of the human race's death wish?  Do our most successful humans so loath those of us who aren't so successful that they are willing to bring us all down as they commit societal suicide?  Like that little rich brat-rat Little Billy Gates and his blooming-idiot wife Lucky Melinda are on a mission to eradicate polio from the world and yet the vaccines they are promoting are actually causing polio---on the rise in India, for instance.  And Warren Buffett, that junk-bond, corporate-takeover asshole, is now investing heavily in the tar sands oil rape of Canada and the USA.  And Obama, that clown of a man, is covertly, too, approving of more and more tar sands crude oil (the crudest of oils) to be piped over our nation's midsection so that the Koch Brothers' refineries in South Texas can process it and then ship it off to oil-starved China or Europe.  OIL, the life blood of our military adventures around the world, military adventures that are intent on killing more and more and more humans, more humans than ever before in the history of the almost continual warfare we've been involved in since our own disgusting Civil War, a war, I say, still has this country divided.

I just read where pundits who keep such statistics are now saying over 1 million plain folks in Iraq died due to our stupid, inane, and criminal invasion and occupation of that nation.  Just a few days ago, Obama's murdering drone strikes killed 17 civilians in Yemen (continuing payback for the attack on the USS Cole) who were on their way to a wedding.  Our creepy CIA stooges with the consent of our Nobel Peace Prize president said there were a host of al-Queda leaders in that bunch...well, maybe, they weren't really for sure.  Has anybody ever totaled up how many al-Queda we have killed?  I mean this al-Queda must be one of the largest military forces in the world.  And what we all should know, there would be no al-Queda if it weren't for our CIA creating it to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, another unnecessary and, to me, insanely criminal war that is turning into a perpetual war.  In the meantime, our Nobel Peace Prize president keeps spinning the hell out of when we're getting out for good of both Iraq and Afghanistan and keeps spinning in high-flown bullshit why we're killing folks via drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen (for sure), and god knows where else in the world.

Our crooked-as-snakes-at-night administration goons are totally ignoring the mess we caused in the Congo.  You don't hear a god-damn word about that conflict that has been going on since our CIA killed Patrice Lumumba way back when, perpetual war that has left that once beautifully wild country along the Congo River a cesspool of dead humans, maimed humans, raped women, and ruined earth.

I listen to ignoramuses like John Bonehead, Hillbilly Hillary Clinton, Paul "the Catholic" Ryan, Patty Murray, Slick Willie Clinton, Ted "Texas Dumbass" Cruz, Darrell "Neanderthal" Issa spouting backwards-thinking philosophies and I cringe in wonder about what possesses these, to me, idiots in their corrupted reasoning to spout such bullshit that surely down-deep in their calcified brains they know is pure bullshit?  Of course, the answer to that question is MONEY and POWER, the same motivation that led Hitler to gas six million Jews.

I watched the bullshit ceremonies in South Africa "honoring" Nelson Mandela and I marveled at the sorry sons of bitches in their wild military uniforms or their corrupted native costumes as they piled into that humungous soccer stadium that sprawls across what was once the Soweto ghetto (Nelson Mandela brought championship soccer to South Africa) and while I'm watching this hypocritical bullshit going on, I'm reading Danny Schecter, who was a personal friend of Mandela's, writing about how the Whites in South Africa shucked and jived this tortured man and set him up as a puppet while continuing to promote and enforce economic apartheid (South African Whites still control South Africa's wealth).  Mandela was a Communist; but you'd never know it after he was released from prison.  (I laughed my ass off at the sign-language dude signing absolute nonsense during Obama's bullshit speech.)

And here in this fucked-up nation, we're still going about killing each other and our kids with raging vengeance as the NRA continues to promote KILLING and defending our "right to bear arms," a right we have in order to form a militia, which reverts back to the Revolutionary War days when in case our slave population got out of control, the White folks would have the firearms to form militias to put down slave revolts.

I'm currently reading Francis Parkman's beautifully written histories of the perpetual wars that went on during the colonization of the US and Canada.  How Brit Whites and French Whites invaded this land of the Native Americans and how though worse than savage themselves gave an OK to their killing of Native Americans and driving them off their lands as protecting their Christian/Catholic selves against "demon savages," the uncivilized.  Yet, the civilized White man is up to the moment the most savage animal in recorded history.

And this diatribe was set off when the other morning returning from breakfast, I saw a $100,000 Porsche parked in front of my apartment building.  And that riled me up, not in terms of animosity for any one human being who can afford such a luxury car, but the fact that our billionaire mayor is still actively rezoning this city to benefit his real estate developer buddies.  He's allowed over (dig this) 40,000 new high-rise luxury office and high-end housing high rises to be built during his disastrous-for-the-poor-working-class regime, a final regime he authoritatively demanded and got, a staged election he almost lost to an unknown Black cat.  All around me, hammers are ringing forth their wrath as new construction is going on and high-rise buildings are popping up like wild mushrooms up and down both Fifth and Sixth avenues, the perimeters of my neighborhood that was once a workingclass neighborhood and is now a haven for overpriced real estate for the thousands of billionaires and the millions of ass-kissing millionaires that have flooded into NYC from all over the world to drive out the old born-in-NYC population and change the face of this once great industrial city that is now a playground for the rich and a tourist trap for the millions of turista fops who flock to this city now every year.

Yes, the CIA, the Mafia, under the covert blessing of Lyndon B. (for Big Balls) Johnson, killed President Kennedy.  Sure they did.  There's no doubt in my mind.  Just like there's no doubt in my mind that Fascism is now the intention (total totalitarian control) of our bullshit backwards-thinking politicians.  The world is corrupt.  And that's just what our true God, Chaos, stands for.  Chaos Bless America.

theirategrowlingwolf 
for The Irate Daily Growler


The Art of Francisco Goya