Jeb Bush's Advice to the Mortgage Bankers Banker Boyz Blues by ALAN FARAGO

OCTOBER 19, 2011

In Miami it is not considered polite or politic to criticize resident and former governor Jeb Bush, whose entire career was fueled by the mad housing boom and its campaign money that is now crashed to cinders. Bush spoke in Chicago last week to the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention.

These days, the speechifying of Jeb! can be interpreted for the direction of the Republican message machine. What was reported was that Bush urged the audience to climb out of their fetal position and go on the offensive. “Who better to advocate a policy to get us out of this mess?” Bush implored the same businesses that shipwrecked the economy on the reefs from which scavengers now ply their trades.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with their taxpayer trillions, sent nearly two hundred fifty executives to Chicago where they rubbed shoulders with the same mortgage rating agencies and mortgage execution companies that used speed in execution as the housing market inflated and speed in execution as the housing market collapsed to “move product” while tens of millions of Americans suffered the consequences. Speed in execution means diminished or eviscerated regulations; one of the GOP’s chief goals whether for the environment or for zoning and development.

Jeb Bush is an elder statesman in the Republican Party these days. Why, is a mystery. On the other hand, who can deny the magic tricks at the heart of American politics tied to campaign finance that Bush mastered and re-materialized as the destruction of so much equity and hope. That is what the Occupy Wall Street’ers in Manhattan, Miami and elsewhere are protesting. Corporations are too powerful. Corporations are NOT people. But Jeb Bush (and his chosen presidential candidate, Mitt Romney) believe otherwise, with the US Supreme Court at their backs.

“Business has gotten way too timid,” said the former governor whose first consulting contract was with Lehman Brothers, the biggest pusher of mortgage derivative debt to the state of Florida. Bush continued with the banker boyz in Chicago, “The natural inclination is to cover. I would encourage you to stand up.” Stand up to the protesters, hinted Bush without also mentioning that between Enron and Lehman, his appointees cost Florida and money held in trust for policemen, firemen, and state and municipal employees nearly a billion dollars.

There is where the 1933 inaugural speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be mashed with the Wall Street whiners and the renewed competition for its campaign cash by both Democrats and Republicans. Roosevelt, speaking to America at the height of the Depression, condemned an earlier generation of bankers; “Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.”

It bears pointing out that the same protections advocated by Roosevelt and built up through the safety net protecting banks, American business and consumers are the target of the GOP, now swept up in a kind of madness aimed against the victims. It is partly President Obama’s fault– he neither presided during the incipient stages of the housing bubble nor had the acuity to understand the nature of its creators — that he cannot say today as President Roosevelt did then, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization… there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.”

In Chicago, Jeb Bush faced the money changers and what he told them was in effect; put more tricks up your sleeve, more pigeons to fly from top hats, more beautiful women to saw in two, to materialize wholesome and Christian with the swipe of a magic wand.

Magic tricks like this: “One of the things that we’ve got to do is to address problems straight on and deal with them in a way that helps us meet goals. And so I want to talk about … one goal and a problem. The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so… And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington? Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. People take a look at the down payment, they say that’s too high, I’m not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don’t have the wherewithal to handle the down payment. We can deal with that. And so I’ve asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy. (Applause.) … (the problem is) that the rules are too complex. People get discouraged by the fine print on the contracts. They take a look and say, well, I’m not so sure I want to sign this. There’s too many words. (Laughter.) There’s too many pitfalls. So one of the things that the Secretary is going to do is he’s going to simplify the closing documents and all the documents that have to deal with homeownership.” (Bob Martinez, then secretary of HUD, would soon become a US Senator from Florida succeeded now by Jeb Bush protege, Marco Rubio.)

Those words, from a June 2002 speech by President George W. Bush, inspired the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. At the time Jeb Bush was governor of Florida, the same Jeb Bush who says, though a dismal decade has passed, that what is hindering the economic recovery are “regulations” and that the banker boyz need to get up out of their Fox Holes. Occupy Wall Street, take note.

Alan Farago is conservation chair of Friends of the Everglades. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net



Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch



One of the Greatest Descriptions of Farm Work Ever Written— Don’t miss Frank Bardacke’s marvelous account from the California fields. ALSO Linn Washington Jr. on the “Black Backlash Against Obama.”

Why She Came to Freedom Plaza Adara Scarlet, Suicide and Single Payer by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Who is Occupying Wall Street and DC?

Adara Scarlet, for one.

Born and raised in Denver, the 27-year old headed east once she heard about the occupy movement.

Her mother died at age 40 of cervical cancer. Adara was 10 years old.

“She was one of those anti-vaccine kind of people,” Scarlet says of her mom. “She thought you could cure everything through holistic means. She tried to meditate her cancer away. It didn’t work. She could have been treated. She had many opportunities to be treated. But she waited until it was too late. She decided to do the chemo ten days before her death. It was too late.”

Adara and her sister moved in with her dad – Martin Goldstein. Her parents had divorced when the sisters were younger.

Goldstein graduated from the University of Louisville School of Law. He was a member of the Colorado Bar. But he found out that he didn’t like practicing law – so he did odd jobs – as a stock broker, taxi driver, and dispatcher.

When he lost his jobs as a dispatcher, he lost his health insurance.

But he had this amazing ability to count cards at the Blackjack table.

So, starting in 2000, Marty would go almost every day to Black Hawk, Colorado and gamble at the casinos.

And he made on average $200 a day.

“He had an amazing memory,” Adara says. “He was a walking talking encyclopedia. He taught me how to count cards when I was ten years old. He could beat the system and he did.”

Adara says that it’s a myth that counting cards at a casino is illegal.

“It’s just something you are doing in your head. He would go there and win around $200 a day – sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.”

“Back then, there was a $5 betting minimum and maximum per hand. If you were to do this today, he would be much more prosperous. Now you can bet up to $100 per hand. Back then, it was just strictly five dollar ante.”

“And he played blackjack. He was clearing $1000 a week. The rent on the house was $1195 a month. He never seemed to have a problem with the grocery shopping. And buying clothes for me and my sister.”

He was able to pay the bills – including $600 a month to Kaiser Permanente for health insurance for himself and the girls.

Then Goldstein started getting sick – and running up medical bills.

“He was having a whole bunch of medical problems,” Adara says. “They never figured out what was wrong with him. We never found out.”

The illness started in about 2000 or 2001.

He smoked a pack a day – menthol cigarettes.

What were the symptoms?

“Legs swollen,” Adara says. “Calves were so swollen they were bigger than his thighs.”

“And he couldn’t eat. He couldn’t keep food down.”

“His circulation was all screwed up, so he was always cold.”

“Kaiser bounced him around to a whole bunch of specialists. But nobody could figure out what was wrong with him – they pretty much gave up after a certain point.”

“Kaiser said – we don’t know what’s wrong with you – now give us our money.”

“But he said he was not going to pay them. He thought he could win in court because they never did anything for him and he was continuing to get sicker. He lost a whole bunch of weight. He was overweight most of his life. He actually got pretty skinny toward the end.”

“He got fed up with Kaiser. He paid all of this money into the system. Not only the premiums, but the co pays. He said – I’m not going to pay this bill – you haven’t figured out what is wrong with me.”

“I assume they wouldn’t cover him anymore, or he just refused to give them any more money.”

“Kaiser said he owed them about $10,000 for all the tests, CAT scans, MRIs. The bills kept piling up. He couldn’t pay it.”

“It was something around $10,000. He couldn’t pay it. He refused to pay it.”

“Kaiser sued him. He went to court and fought them. But Kaiser won the lawsuit.”

“But he didn’t pay. He couldn’t pay.”

“They put bill collectors on it. He was in debt to them. He had bill collectors calling him.”

“Kaiser Permanent is a horrible horrible company,” Adara says.

In early April 2003, Marty Goldstein was eating a bowl of chili in the kitchen. And he said to Adara that he was going to kill himself.

“It was the most casual thing,” Adara said. “He said – I want to talk to you about something. I don’t want you to tell your sister because she is kind of emotional. I don’t want her to get bent out of shape. But I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“And he said – I’ve decided that I have lived my life, it’s time to go, I’m going to stick around for one more birthday.”

“His birthday was April 30.”

“My birthday is May 11.”

“He was 53 that year. I was 18.”

“My response was to freak out and tell my sister, which was exactly what he asked me not to do.”

“He was sitting there eating a bowl of chili while he was talking about it. He was just blowing on the chili, eating the chili, like it was nothing.”

“I went down and told my sister – Dad is talking about killing himself.”

Did he say how he was going to do it?

“No he didn’t. He just said – it was time to bow out. It was so casual.”

“He said that he had lived his life. He said all he had done was get himself into debt. And there was no way he would be able to pay Kaiser. He said – what do I have in my future other than bankrupting my family?”

“He suffered from depression. I’m sure if we had a better mental health care system, he wouldn’t have thought this was the only way out.”

“When I told my sister, she panicked. We went upstairs and cornered my dad and said – you have every reason to live. That kind of thing.”

“He acted like we convinced him. After we were at it for a while, he said – you are absolutely right, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just talking crazy talk. And he never brought it up again.”

That was April 2003.

Did he say anything after that date?

“Never. He never brought it up again.”

But less than a year later – on February 4, 2004 – Marty Goldstein killed himself.

How did he kill himself?

“He shot himself in the head. I got a call from my aunt. It was the cops who called her. He had left a note. He called 911 first. He said – I’m about to kill myself. Please collect my body so my daughters don’t find it. He left a short note for the emergency people. He said – here are the keys to the house for my daughters. He even said what day the trash pick up was. He said – please don’t let my daughters find my body here.”

Did he leave a note for you?

“Yes, a long note in a sealed envelope. It was a 22-page hand written letter.”

“He said when bill collectors come around, they can come and collect my TV, bed, everything like that. I have a small life insurance policy that will pay collectors off at about 75 cents on the dollar.”

“I guess he must have been about $40,000 debt in total, because it was a $30,000 life insurance policy. The life insurance company of course managed to screw us – we didn’t get that.”

“He had actually gotten life insurance with a company that covered suicide. God knows where he found that. It was some place out of Texas. He had done that specifically in the early 1990s.”

“He had this policy for years. Maybe he had suicide on the back of his mind.”

An aunt told Adara that her father’s bills wouldn’t pass on to the family.

“But collectors called me and my sister anyway. They tried to trick us into thinking that we owed it. I’m really glad my aunt told me – you don’t owe anybody any money. Don’t let anyone talk you into thinking that you do. My sister and I just hung up on them. And finally after about a year, they quit calling.”

Adara believes that if we had a single payer national health insurance system, her father might still be alive.

“He was really depressed and he considered suicide as a possibility. But I don’t think he would have done it. The Kaiser Permanente bills were on his mind. He didn’t want to burden his family with bills.”

“My dad’s main killer was depression. And no health insurance. If had been able to pay those bills, he would have stuck it out.”

Adara says she was a changed person after her dad died.

“I was a selfish asshole before he died,” she says. “I had a lot of friends that I would just kind of talk at. I had boyfriends I would use and walk all over. I was not a good person. I hate myself looking back. After my dad died, I had this moment of clarity that life was more important than that. So, I wanted to make amends with everybody I had ever screwed over. And I wanted to apologize to them. I tracked down some people who I had long since lost touch with. And I just apologized.”

“Even though my politics were liberal, I was a hateful person – or you could say an angsty teenager. I hated the cheerleaders just because they were cheerleaders. That kind of thing.”

“I didn’t realize how stupid that was. I waited tables and told horror stories about my customers all the time. I wouldn’t hang out with myself from back then. I was a really negative person. I was a drain on people. I was always complaining about something. And I sort of realized that and wanted to change that after my dad died. It was a slow process. But now I’m pretty much the opposite of who I was back then.”

“Earlier this year, I saw a youtube video of Dennis Trainor. I saw this video where he was inviting to people to come to Washington, D.C. for October 2011. I just decided I had to come. I was already enrolled in college classes.”

Adara slept on Freedom Plaza in DC for a week. And now she’s heading up to Occupy Wall Street.

“Everybody who dies from lack of access to health care is a real person,” Adara says. “And everybody who dies in a war is a real person. I try to keep in the back of mind all of the time – I am not any more important than anyone else.”

One more thing about Adara. She has inherited at least one thing from her dad – his amazing memory.

One of her favorite days is March 14 – Pi day.

As in – 3.14.

Off the top of her head, she can reel off Pi to about 200 digits.

Russell Mokhiber edits Single Payer Action.

Another Neoliberal Hoax Obama’s Jobs Bill and Other Fictions by ROB URIE

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Several seemingly well meaning pundits have asked: if Occupy Wall Street wants jobs, why don’t they come out and support President Obama’s jobs bill? Answering only for myself, the better question is: why doesn’t Obama support his own jobs bill? The White House is claiming that it needs sixty votes to pass the jobs bill in the Senate to overcome a threatened filibuster by Republicans. Maybe, but are these the same Republicans who just passed his toxic free-trade agreement with South Korea, Panama and Colombia with bipartisan support from Democrats? Why yes they are.

At this point in history, the evidence is in that these free trade agreements are a neo-liberal hoax to transfer jobs from the U.S. to low wage countries. Anyone who cares to can view the facts for themselves in the government statistics—the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs has a very high correlation with the advent and implementation of free-trade agreements. Not only have manufacturing jobs been in absolute decline for more than a decade, the Participation Rate, the percentage of the working age population that is employed has been declining with it. As for the purported benefits of so-called free trade, where are they?

So Obama is willing to go to the mat with Republicans to send U.S. jobs elsewhere with a free-trade agreement but he is making only a symbolic effort to pass his weak, pathetic three-and-one-half-years late jobs bill because he needs more votes than George W. Bush ever needed to get his legislation passed?

But what has Obama accomplished with his jobs bill? The panel of pundits on a recent NPR roundtable agreed that he has gotten his poll numbers up on “who cares more about the economy, the president or congressional Republicans” by a full ten points. That is, Obama got what he wanted, an increase in his poll numbers, by creating the appearance of trying to create jobs without creating any jobs. And he did this while destroying jobs in the U.S. with a free trade agreement passed by the same Republicans he claims are holding his jobs bill hostage.

So, support Obama’s jobs bill? Thanks anyway, but Barack Obama and the dysfunctional political system that he represents is the problem. Getting cynical opportunists like him out of public office is the priority, not forever playing the patsy to his misdirections.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist living in New York.

Cease and Desist California’s Message to Obama by JACK RANDOM

OCTOBER 19, 2011

There is an unspoken law in modern electoral politics: Take care of your adversaries; your friends can take care of themselves.

In today’s political universe, progressives have no place to go but Democrat. So it is for minorities, labor advocates, environmentalists and antiwar protesters. There is no choice in electoral politics but to side with the milquetoast moderates of the Democratic Party.

In this environment of winner-take-all and take it for granted politics, the most populous state in the union is also the most neglected and under-represented. That is why a Democratic White House can get away with policies and programs that disregard the interests of California with a callousness that borders on disdain.

Things have gotten so bad in the golden state that even members of the Milquetoast Party are beginning to raise their voices: Thirty two representatives of the California congressional caucus recently went public with their plea for effective relief from the foreclosure crisis, an ongoing catastrophe that blocks any chance of real recovery from the Great Recession.

On the heals of that failure to take effective action, the Obama Justice Department has actively declared war on the one segment of the California economy that shows great promise: Medical Marijuana.

The Obama administration initially signaled that the federal government would not enforce drug laws against marijuana where voters had sanctioned it for medicinal purposes. Then, without cause or reason, Attorney General Eric Holder woke up one day with a new religion. He had seen the enemy and it was not Al Qaeda, it was not Mexican drug lords and the American gun dealers who supply them arms. No, it was California pot growers, suppliers and anyone associated with the expanding industry, including media outlets that accepted advertisements.

It is time for Californians to unite behind the common interest of economic survival. It is time for us all to speak out against the White House and its agents in the Justice Department. It is time to deliver a simple demand:

Cease and desist!

We are already suffering the effects of your failure to bail out the poor, the dispossessed and what remains of a disintegrating middle class. If you cannot help us and it is clear you have no intention of doing so, then at least get out of the way while we attempt to climb out of the ravine.

We have stood on the sidelines while your administration has churned out one Republican policy after another and called it victory. We have stood by in near silence as you extended the Bush tax cuts for the elite, rolled back soft-core Wall Street regulation, peddled a health insurance mandate as comprehensive reform and offered up Social Security to the Republican god of deficit reduction.

That you are speaking out for jobs now when you know it has no chance of passing congress is pure political theater. We know what follows: Another temporary payroll tax reduction financed by creative cuts to so-called entitlement programs. It will not be enough. It will not even be close to enough. You cannot plug the dam after it is broken.

As the Occupy Wall Street spreads and goes global, accomplishing more for the burgeoning victim class in four weeks than you will have been able to do in four years, what is your answer? With enthusiastic Republican support and the applause of chief executive officers everywhere, you push through Free Trade agreements with North Korea, Columbia and Panama.

We can almost see the smirk on your face as you confront your critics on the left: First comes the accusation of ingratitude, then the litany of alleged accomplishments, then the excuses, the endless excuses, a broken government, Republican obstructionism, the Senate filibuster rule, and finally, the ultimate rebuttal: What are you going to do about it?

We can rebut the former until the cow comes home but until we can answer the ultimate challenge emphatically and decisively, we will never get anywhere with the president, with the Democratic Party or with congress.

What are we going to do about it?

The White House can attack the California economy with absolute impunity. Wall Street is on the other coast and that is where the real money is.

What are we going to do about it?

Ask the president as he travels the land, his campaign for re-election already fully engaged: Where do you stand on Occupy Wall Street?

When he gives the standard, patronizing answer full of empathy and passion, ask him: What are you going to do about it? Will you refuse to accept contributions from Wall Street power brokers and the corporate elite? Watch him stammer like Rick Perry on the issue of immigration.

He gave his answer just last week. A president who could not be bothered to keep his promise to labor in actively supporting the fundamental right to organize the workplace by majority vote (the Employee Free Choice Act), a president who could not spare a moment to oppose Wisconsin’s prohibition of collective bargaining for public employees while it was happening, now signals a return to the Free Trade juggernaut.

We are not fools. We know what that means. Whatever the short term gains in certain sectors of the economy, the long-term effect is a continuation of job loss, union busting and lower wages.

What are we going to do about it?

The best immediate answer is Occupy Wall Street. The best long-term answer is to elect public officials who refuse to accept corporate contributions. Remove money from the equation and the stench of corruption will slowly abate.

Until we as a people are willing to reject money politics outright, we will have no power, no influence and no control over what happens next.

Jack Random is the author of Jazzman Chronicles (Crow Dog Press) and Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press.)

From Obama 2008 to Occupy Chicago 2011 Return to Grant Park by MARK T. HARRIS

OCTOBER 19, 2011

It was at Chicago’s Grant Park in the fall of 2008 that presidential candidate Barack Obama celebrated his election night victory with the people. Hope and change was in the air.

Three years later Grant Park is once again the scene of hope and change. But no thanks this time to President Obama or especially former White House chief of staff turned Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. In fact, it was the latter who oversaw the arrest of 175 Occupy Chicago protesters last weekend for refusing to disperse after the park’s 11 pm curfew.

The new version of hope and change is found instead among the thousands of Occupy Chicago supporters who marched in the evening hours of Saturday, October 15, through the city’s loop to Grant Park. In conjunction with the day of global Wall Street protests, the occupiers made their way from their location on the hard sidewalks near Chicago’s Board of Trade and Federal Reserve Bank to the more inviting, grassy expanse of Grant Park.

But not so inviting, thanks to the repressive intervention of Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago police. Unlike Republican retrogrades like House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) or businessman Herman Cain, who condescendingly dismiss Occupy Wall Street as a mob of losers, Emanuel, as a Democrat with ties to both the Clinton and Obama presidential administrations, is well versed in feigning sympathy for the hardships endured by ordinary Americans.

Of course, as the former managing director of the investment banking firm of Wasserstein Perealla, Emanuel is also well versed in how to turn political connections into a financial windfall. It was in 1999 that Emanuel entered Wasserstein Perealla as a managing partner, despite having no experience in banking management. He left two and a half years later $16 million plus richer.

That’s how politics and banking work today. It’s a great club for the lucky few with the right political, business, and family ties. Indeed, for the one percent and their political hangers-on, the American dream is just a phone call or a business luncheon with the right person away. For the rest of the country, however, the system is a big disappointment, rigged from the get-go and getting worse. Indeed, for 30 years average Americans have watched their incomes stagnate, while the elite grow wealthier than ever.

Enter Occupy Wall Street. The 99 Percenters now mobilized in hundreds of American cities and towns represent a radical challenge to a corrupt and torpid status quo. In the broad, idealistic sweep of their demands for democracy and economic justice the movement embodies a better, more humane vision of the world and its potential.

“We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments,” declares the statement adopted by the New York City general assembly at Occupy Wall Street. In a sense, the occupiers are only the advance guard of a far more widespread American anger, percolating now in the fabric of the culture and earning these front line activists more favorable poll ratings in recent days than the man in the White House.

Their complaints are irrefutable in their legitimacy. Record profits and prosperity at the top translate not into an improved life for all, but into stagnant wages, jobs shipped overseas, students burdened with debt, and foreclosed homes. Massive bailouts go to Wall Street firms, given with few restrictions, yet despite record profits still they hoard their money, refusing to create jobs and showering lavish bonuses on themselves.

Instead of a humane, non-profit health care system, they give us corporate health care whose primary mission is not preventive medicine or care for the ill, but profits for private investors and insurers. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars are poured into wars that generate only misery and death.

Predictably, some Democratic leaders such as former President Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) say they view Occupy Wall Street as a positive development. Such support is ethereal at best, the language of co-optation, familiar and second-nature to the Democratic establishment. How well it will play out this time is questionable. President Obama himself appears hesitant before the raw power of the demonstrating masses, offering only placid observations about how he understands the frustrations of Americans. Such sentiment is offered in the same breath as the reminder that it was right to bail out Wall Street.

The mass mobilizations in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year against the right-wing governor’s plan to strip away public unions’ collective bargaining rights were a harbinger of the storm on the horizon. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin mobilizations (and the potential for strike actions) were aborted by the state Democratic Party and their allied union leaders, sacrificed to an ill-conceived recall campaign of elected officials opposed to collective bargaining.

Occupy Wall Street is different. This is a movement independent of any political party, rooted in grassroots activism, nurtured by mass mobilizations, and showing no signs of abating. The hope and change on display in Grant Park in 2008, stirred up by candidate Obama’s promise of “change we can believe in,” is now being called to account.

Where the Occupy Wall Street movement will be in coming months remains to be seen. But the least interesting question among all the questions raised is whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will help Obama’s re-election. How much more interesting instead to ponder the potential of the spirit of activism and idealism now finding expression across the land. As one young woman demonstrating at Grant Park told the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 16, 2011), “My soul has been touched in ways that I can’t even express. I believe it’s my civic duty. I am expecting to be arrested every time I protest.”

Such is the spirit of the burgeoning movement. The professional pundits who want to compress this oceanic social movement into the narrow straits of ponderous talk media banalities reveal only the limits of their petty social vision.

In the 1940 film, The Great Dictator, the great comedian Charlie Chaplin speaks out at the film’s conclusion against the tyranny then threatening the world. At the Grant Park rally, organizers played a recording of Chaplin’s short speech over loudspeakers. It was a telling moment. As Chaplin’s voice rose in passion and indignation, declaring “don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty,” denouncing the “machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts” who would destroy the world with their greed, hate, and violence, the thousands assembled in Grant Park roared their approval.

A social awakening has begun. Indeed, hope and change is in the air. This time it seems like the real thing.

Mark T. Harris is a former Chicago-area writer who now lives in Portland, Oregon. He is a featured contributor to “The Flexible Writer,” fourth edition, by Susanna Rich (Allyn & Bacon/Longman, 2003). Website: www.Mark-T-Harris.com. Email: Mark@Mark-T-Harris.com.

Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope This is Your (Occupied) Land by REBECCA SOLNIT

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,

I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society.

I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.

We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%.


And so Tunisia erupted and overthrew its government, and Egypt caught fire, as did Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where the nonviolent protests elsewhere turned into a civil war the rebels have almost won after several bloody months. Who could have imagined a Middle East without Ben Ali of Tunisia, without Mubarak, without Gaddafi? And yet here we are, in the unimaginable world. Again. And almost everywhere.

Japan was literally shaken loose from its plans and arrangements by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and that country has undergone profound soul-searching about values and priorities. China is turbulent, and no one knows how much longer the discontent of the repressed middle class and the hungry poor there will remain containable. India: who knows? The Saudi government is so frightened it even gave women a few new rights. Syrians wouldn’t go home even when their army began to shoot them down. Crowds of up to a million Italians have been protesting austerity measures in recent months. The Greeks, well, if you’ve been following events, you know about the Greeks. Have I forgotten Israel? Huge demonstrations against the economic status quothere lasted all summer and into this fall.

As you knew at the outset, it’s all about economics. This wild year, Greece boiled over again into crisis with colossal protests, demonstrations, blockades, and outright street warfare. Icelanders continued their fight against bailing out the banks that sank their country’s economy in 2008 and continue pelting politicians with eggs. Their former prime minister may become the first head of state to face legal charges in connection with the global financial collapse. Spanish youth began to rise up on May 15th.

Distinctively, in so many of these uprisings the participants were not advocating for one party or a simple position, but for a better world, for dignity, for respect, for real democracy, for belonging, for hope and possibility — and their economic underpinnings. The Spanish young whose future had been sold out to benefit corporations and their 1% were nicknamed the Indignados, and they lived in the plazas of Spain this summer. Occupied Madrid, like Occupied Tahrir Square, preceded Occupy Wall Street.

In Chile, students outraged by the cost of an education and the profound inequities of their society have been demonstrating since May — with everything from kiss-ins to school occupations to marches of 150,000 or more. Forty thousand students marched against “education reform” in Colombia last week. And in August in Britain the young went on a rampage that tore up London, Birmingham, and dozens of other communities, an event that began when the police shot Mark Duggan, a dark-skinned 29-year-old Londoner. Young Britons had risen up more peaceably over tuition hikes the winter before. There, too, things are bleak and volatile — something I know you would understand. In Mexico, a beautiful movement involving mass demonstrations against the drug war has arisen, triggered by the death of another young man, and by the grief and vision of his father, leftwing poetJavier Cicilia.

The United States had one great eruption in Wisconsin this winter, when the citizenry occupied their state capitol building in Madison for weeks. Egyptians and others elsewhere on the planet called a local pizza parlor and sent pies to the occupiers. We all know the links. We’re all watching. So the Occupy movement has spilled over from Wall Street. Hundreds of occupations are happening all over the North America: in Oklahoma City and Tijuana, inVictoria and Fort Lauderdale.

The 99%

We are the 99% is the cry of the Occupy movement. This summer one of the flyers that helped launch the Occupy Wall Street protest read: “We, the 99%, call for an open general assembly Aug. 9, 7:30 pm at the Potato Famine Memorial NYC.” It was an assembly to discuss the September 17th occupation-to-come.

The Irish Hunger Memorial, so close to Wall Street, commemorates the million Irish peasants who starved in the 1840s, while Ireland remained a food-exporting country and the landed gentry continued to profit. It’s a monument to the exploitation of the many by the few, to the forces that turned some of our ancestors — including my mother’s four Irish grandparents — into immigrants, forces that are still pushing people out of farms, homes, nations, regions.

The Irish famine was one of the great examples of those disasters of the modern era that are not crises of scarcity, but of distribution. The United States is now the wealthiest country the world has ever known, and has an abundance of natural resources, as well as of nurses, doctors, universities, teachers, housing, and food — so ours, too, is a crisis of distribution. Everyone could have everything they need and the rich would still be rich enough, but you know that enough isn’t a concept for them. They’re greedy, and their 30-year grab for yet more has carved away at what’s minimally necessary for the survival and dignity of the rest of us. So the Famine Memorial couldn’t have been a more appropriate place for Occupy Wall Street to begin.

The 99%, those who starve during famines and lose their livelihoods and homes during crashes, were going to respond to the 1% who had been served so well by the Bush administration and by the era of extreme privatization it ushered in. As my friend Andy Kroll reported at TomDispatch, “The top 1% of earners enjoyed 65% of all income growth in America for much of the decade” just passed. “In 2010,” he added, “20.5 million people, or 6.7% of all Americans, scraped by with less than $11,157 for a family of four — that is, less than half of the poverty line.” You can’t get by on less than $1,000 a month in this country where a single visit to an emergency room can cost your annual income, a car twice that, and a year at a private college more than four times that.

Later in August came the website started by a 28-year-old New York City activist,we are the 99 percent, to which hundreds daily now submit photographs of themselves. Each of them also testifies to the bleak conditions they find themselves in, despite their hard work and educations which often left them in debt, despite the promises dangled before them that (if they played the game right) they’d be safe, housed, and living a part of that oversold dream.

It’s a website of unremitting waking nightmares, economic bad dreams that a little wealth redistribution would eliminate (even without eliminating the wealthy). The people contributing aren’t asking for luxuries. They would simply prefer not to be worked to death like so many nineteenth-century millworkers, nor to have their whole world come crashing down if they get sick. They want to survive with dignity, and their testimony will break your heart.

Mohammed Bouazizi, dead at 26, you to whom I’m writing, here is one of the recent posts at that site:

“I am 26 years old. I am $134,000 in debt. I started working at 14 years old, and have worked Full-Time since I turned 20. I work in I.T. and got laid off in July 2011. I was LUCKY, and found a job RIGHT AWAY: with a Pay Cut and MORE HOURS.
 Now, I just found out that my Dad got laid off last week – after 18 YEARS with the same employer. I have debilitating (SP! Sorry!) O.C.D. and can’t take time away from work to get treatment because I can’t afford my mortgage payments if I don’t go to work, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my NEW job if I take time off!!! WE ARE THE 99%.”

Some of the people at we are the 99% offer at least partial views of their faces, but the young IT worker quoted above holds a handwritten letter so long that it obscures his face. Poverty obscures your face too. It obscures your talents, potential, even your distinctive voice, and if it goes deep enough, it eradicates you by degrees of hunger and degradation. Poverty is a creation of the systems against which people all over the planet are revolting this wild year of 2011. The Arab Spring, after all, was an economic revolt. What were all those dictatorships and autocracies for, if not to squeeze as much profit as possible out of subjugated populations — profit for rulers, profit for multinational corporations, profit for that 1%.

“We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers,” was the slogan of the first student protest called in Spain this year. Your beautiful generation, Mohammed Bouazizi, has arisen and is bringing the rest of us along, even here in the United States.

The People’s Microphone

Its earliest critics seemed to think that Occupy Wall Street was a lobbying group whose chosen task on this planet should be to create a package of realistic demands. In other words, they were convinced that the occupiers should become supplicants, asking the powerful for some kind of handout like college debt forgiveness. They were suggesting that a dream as wide as the sky be stuffed into little bottles and put up for sale. Or simply smashed.

In the same way, they wanted this movement to hurry up and appoint leaders, so that there would be someone to single out and investigate, pick off, or corrupt. At heart, however, this is a leaderless movement, an anarchist movement, catalyzed by the grace of civil society and the hard work of the collective. The Occupy movement — like so many movements around the world now — is using general assemblies as its form of protest and process. Its members are not facing the authorities, but each other, coming to know themselves, trying to give rise to the democracy they desire on a small scale rather than merely railing against its absence on a large scale.

These are the famous Occupy general assemblies in which decisions are made by consensus and, in the absence of amplification (by order of the New York City police), the people’s mike is used: those assembled repeat what is said as it’s said, creating a human megaphone effect. This is accompanied by a small vocabulary of hand gestures, which help people participate in the complex process of a huge group having a conversation.

In other words, the process is also the goal: direct democracy. No one can hand that down to you. You live direct democracy in that moment when you find yourself participating in civil society as a citizen with an equal voice. Put another way, the Occupiers are not demanding that something be given to them but formulating something new. That it involves no technology, not even bullhorns, is itself remarkable in this wired era. It’s just passionate people together — and then Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, text messages, emails, and online sites like this one spread the word, along with some print media, notably the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

The beauty and the genius of this movement in this moment is that it has found a way to define its needs and desires without putting limits on them that would automatically exclude so many. In doing so, it has spoken to nearly all of us.

There is the terrible rage at economic injustice that is shared by college students looking at a future of debt and overwork, as well as those who couldn’t afford college in the first place, by working people struggling ever harder for less, by the many who have no jobs and few prospects, by people forced out of their homes by the games banks play with mortgages and profits, and by everyone the catastrophe that is healthcare in this country has affected. And by the rest of us, furious on their behalf (and on our own).

And then there is the joyous hope that things could actually be different. That hope has been fulfilled a little in the way that an open-ended occupation has survived four weeks and more and turned into hundreds of Occupy actions around the country and marches in almost 1,000 cities around the world last Sunday, from Sydney to Tokyo to Santa Rosa. It speaks for so many; it speaks for the 99%; and it speaks clearly, so clearly that an ex-Marine showed up with a hand-lettered sign that said, “2nd time I’ve fought for my country, 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”

The climate change movement showed up at Occupy Wall Street, too. What’s blocking action on climate change is what’s blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what’s at stake is quarterly earnings.

A dozen years ago, after the wildly successful revolt against neoliberal economic policy in Seattle, the slogan that stuck around was: “Another World Is Possible.” I was never sure about that one because in crucial places and ways that other world is already here. In a YouTube video of the New York occupation, however, I watched an old woman in a straw hat say, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” What a beautiful summation! Could any demand be clearer than that? And could the ways in which people have no value under our current economic regime be more obvious?

What Is Your Occupation?

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy together. Occupy New Orleans, Portland, Stockton, Boston, Las Cruces, Minneapolis. Occupy. The very word is a manifesto, a position statement, and a position as well. For so many people, particularly men, their occupation is their identity, and when a job is lost, they become not just unemployed, but no one. The Occupy movement offers them a new occupation, work that won’t pay the bills, but a job worth doing. “Lost my job, found an occupation,” said one sign in the crowd of witty signs.

There is, of course, a bleaker meaning for the word occupation, as in “the U.S. is occupying Iraq.” Even National Public Radio gives the Dow Jones report several times a day, as though the rise and fall of the stock market had not long ago been decoupled from the rise and fall of genuine measures of wellbeing for the 99%. A small part of Wall Street, which has long occupied us as if it were a foreign power, is now occupied as though it were a foreign country.

Wall Street is a foreign country — and maybe an enemy country as well. And now it’s occupied. The way that Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for 18 months four decades ago and galvanized a national Native American rights movement. You pick some place to stand, and when you stand there, you find your other occupation, as a member of civil society.

This May in Ohio, a group of Robin Hoods literally lowered a drawbridge they made so they could cross a “moat” around Chase Bank’s headquarters and invade its shareholders’ meeting. Forty Robin Hoods also showed up en masse last week in kayaks for a national mortgage bankers’ meeting in Chicago. Houses facing foreclosure are being occupied. Foreclosure is, of course, a way of turning people into non-occupants.

At this moment in history, occupation should be everyone’s occupation.

Baby Pictures of a Revolt

Young man whose despair gave birth to hope, no one knows what the future holds. When you set yourself afire almost ten months ago, you certainly didn’t know, nor do any of us know now, what the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring will be, let alone this American Fall. Such a movement arrives in the world like a newborn. Who knows its fate, or even whether it will survive to grow up?

It may be suppressed like the Prague Spring of 1968. It may go through a crazy adolescence like the French Revolution of 1789 and yet grow beyond its parents’ dreams. Radiant at birth, wreathed in smiles, it may become a stolid bourgeois citizen as did such movements in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the reunited Germany after civil society freed those countries from totalitarianism.

It may grow up into turbulence as has the Philippines since its 1986 revolution ousted the kleptocracy of the Marcos family. Revolution may be assassinated young, the way the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh was in Iran in 1953, that of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and President Salvador Allende’s Chilean experiment on September 11, 1973, all three in CIA-backed military coups. On behalf of the 1%.

Whether a human child or a child of history, we can’t know who or what it will become, but it’s still possible to grasp something about it by asking who or what it resembles. What does Occupy Wall Street look like? Well, its siblings born around the world this year, of course, and perhaps in some way the American civil rights movement that began in the 1950s.

There was a national uprising in the United States no less spontaneous in its formation during the great depression of the 1870s, but the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was violent, while the Occupy movement is deeply imbued with the spirit and tactics of nonviolence. The last Great Depression, the one that began in 1929, created a host of radical movements, as well as the Hoovervillesof homeless people. There are family resemblances. The marches and actions against the coming invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003, on all seven continents (yes, including Antarctica) are clearly kin. And the anti-corporate globalization movement is a godmother. And then there’s a sibling just a decade older.

Cousin 9/11

Zuccotti Park is just two blocks from Wall Street, and also just a block from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attack. On that day, it was badly damaged. This September 21st, my dear friend Marina Sitrin wrote me from Occupy Wall Street: “There are people from more diverse backgrounds racially, more diverse age groups, including not just a few children here with their parents, and a number of working people from the area. In particular, some of the security guards from the 9.11 memorial, a block away have been coming by for lunch and chatting with people, as has a local group of construction workers.”

If the Arab Spring was the decade-later antithesis of 9/11, a largely nonviolent, publicly inclusive revolt that forced the Western world to get over its fearful fantasy that all young Muslims are terrorists, jihadis, and suicide bombers, then Occupy Wall Street, which began six days after the 10th anniversary of that nightmarish day in September, is the other half of 9/11 in New York. What was remarkable about that day 10 years ago is how calmly and beautifully everyone behaved. New Yorkers helped each other down those dozens of floors of stairs in the Twin Towers and away from the catastrophe, while others lined up to give blood, desperate to do something, anything, to participate, to be part of a newfound sense of community that arose in the city that day.

There was, for example, a huge commissary organized on Chelsea Piers that provided free food, medical supplies, and work equipment for the people at Ground Zero and also helped find housing for the displaced. It was not an official effort, but one that arose even more spontaneously than Occupy Wall Street, without leaders or institutions — and it was forcibly disbanded when the official organizations got their act together a few days later. Those who participated experienced a sense of democracy amid all the distress and sorrow, a tremendous joy in finding meaningful work and deep social connections, and a little temporary joy, as they often do in disaster.

When I began to study the history of urban disaster years ago, I found such unexpected exhibitions of that kind of joy again and again, uniting the generative moments of protests, demonstrations, revolts, and revolutions with the aftermath of some disasters. Even when the losses were terrible, the ways that people came together to meet the occasion were almost always inspiring.

Since I wrote A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, I have been asked again and again whether economic crisis begets the same kind of community as sudden disasters. It did in Argentina in 2001, when the economy crashed there. And it has now, in the streets of New York and many other cities, in 2011. A sign at Occupy San Francisco said, “IT’S TIME.” It is. It’s been time for a long time.

No Hope But in Ourselves

The birth of this moment was delayed three years. Argentinians reacted immediately to the 2001 crisis and to long-simmering grievances with an economy that had ground so many of them down even before the government froze all bank accounts and the economy crashed. On the other hand, our economy collapsed three years ago this month to headlines like “Capitalism is dead” in the business press. There was certainly some fury and outrage at the time, but the real reaction was delayed, or decoyed.

The outrage of the moment did, in fact, result in a powerful grassroots movement that focused on a single political candidate to fix it all for us, as he promised he would. It was a beautiful movement, a hopeful movement, much more so than its candidate. The movement got its lone candidate into the highest office in the land, where he remains today, and then walked away as though the job was done. It had just begun.

That movement could have fought the corporations, given us a real climate-change policy, and more, but it allowed itself to be disbanded as though one elected politician were the equivalent of ten million citizens, of civil society itself. It was a broad-based movement, of all ages and races, and I think it’s back, disillusioned with politicians and electoral politics, determined this time to do it for itself, beyond and outside the corroded arenas of institutional power.

I don’t know exactly who this baby looks like, but I know that who you look like is not who you will become. This unanticipated baby has a month behind it and a future ahead of it that none of us can see, but its birth should give you hope.

Love,

Rebecca

Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 books, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and this year’sInfinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. She is, from kindergarten to graduate school, a product of the California public education system now being decimated.

This article was originally published by Tom Dispatch.

Chicago Tribune Goes Into War-Mongering Mode; Declares War on Iran

'Tis truly the pity, but this nation's press corpse just LUVS to declare Iran the big Bogey Man. Sadly, what they don't understand, is that for the U.S. to wage war against Iran (Why? Because we want the SHAH back, and Iran can NEVER be forgiven for having deposed OUR GUY, taken 'Murcan citizens hostages, holding them for 400+ days (in a back door deal worked by the Ray-Gun Ad-mis-ministray-Shun, the hostages were not released until AFTER RAYGUN took his oath of office, the better to seal the deal and make the Grade B actor, who co-starred and got second billing acting with a MONKEY, who was a communist, as in card-carrying memeber of the party, who flipped on his Hollywood acquaintances, wanted to ensure Ronnie RAYGUN secure entry into the Republicrat Hall of Presidential Fame ... of such stuff are heroes, and legends made."

So, anyway, the tribune goes all phawkin' nutz and assumes its readers are as dense as its eidtors, reporters, and colmunists (which, if they get the Trib home delivered, is a fairly safe assumption).

www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-iran-20111012,0,1962701.story

chicagotribune.com

The quiet war erupts

oh my! an erupting quiet war? I thought MOST of the war USA's is fightins were quiet. Oh, the difference here, is that most of the 120 other wars have yet to erupt. Warning to US military, CIA, people - when you go to war with Iran, you come dangerously close to picking on an enemy of your own size. We couldn't defeat the Viet Cong, the North Koreans, Poverty (which has no army, no navy, no air-force, no munitions, no bombs,) nor Drugs (which too have no army, no navy, no air-force, no munitions, no bombs,). Fact of the matter is, we would be well-advised to wage war on countries like Panama and Grenada, where the military can go in (no debate in congress) shoot 'em up pretty good, spirit away their lead, and declare victory before the thing is broadcast live on Turner Network Television.

Iranian agents accused of plotting assault on U.S. soil

Iranian agent ACCUSED of plotting assault on U.S. soil? What are they going to do? Nuke U.S. soil? Sexually assualt U.S. soil? How did these evil ones intend to defile U.S. soil? Enquiring minds wants us to know!

October 12, 2011


For years, Iran has quietly waged war against the U.S., allying with and arming this nation's enemies. Now that war has come to U.S. soil.

Time the fuck out! To ally with one nation's enema's and arm that nation's enema's rises to the status of QUIETLY WAGING WAR AGAINST THAT NATION? Then what the fuck does Iran think about the U.S. arming and subsidizing and buy9ing hi tech crap from the fuckin' Israeli's -

WHO ROUTINELY SPY ON U.S. HI TECH COMPANIES, AND WHO ALSO ATTACKED THE U.S.S. LIBERTY IN 1967, CAUSING MASSIVE DAMAGE TO THE VESSEL, KILLING SEAMEN, AND BEING JUST ABOUT THE GREATEST CLUSTERFUCK THAT EVER BEFELL A U.S. NAVAL VESSEL SINCE THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY - an act of war for which TO THIS DAY, Israel has not apologized. If we want to make the world safer, then it should be the U.S. goverrnment's policy to 'take out' by hook or by crook every member of Masad that also belongs to the Likud par-tay

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that federal authorities have foiled a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States by exploding a bomb, possibly at a Washington, D.C., restaurant.

Just how strong now IS that link? And if they wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador, how the fuck is this a declaration of war on 'Murica? Sounds far more like a declaration of war on Saudi Arabia, or, more specifically, on the HOUSE OF SAUD, which is as evil and influential an enema as any that the U.S. government and U.S. peoples face in the world today. These mutah fuckahs got so damn much money, and HATE the US and its military cluster fucks in the middle East.

This chilling news caps a long, slow, deliberate escalation of Iranian provocation:

• Iran's elite military unit, the Revolutionary Guards, armed its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan to target U.S. troops and accelerate the U.S. military withdrawal. U.S. defense officials say Iranian-supplied weapons have killed U.S. soldiers.

It's okay - U.S.-supplied weapons to Saddam have killed 100's of 1,000's of Iranian citizens

• Iranian speedboats have challenged U.S. and allied warships in the Persian Gulf, setting up a series of near-collisions. The U.S. response? An overture to Iran, to set up a military-to-military hotline to defuse such clashes. Tehran's answer: Forget it.

OMG - Curse you Iranian speed boats! You give us the finger! You disrespect us! What a fuckin' cry-baby reporter!

• American officials say Iran has forged an alliance with al-Qaida, allowing the terrorist organization safe passage to send cash, arms and fighters to its operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

American officials say

okay, so THESE assholes, whomever they are, are feeding this unregurgitated bull shit to the Trib reporter who probably got an erection hearing it from the horses' lying mouths. Umm, REALLY, Iran and Al Qaida?

• Iran has armed the terrorists of Hamas in Gaza and dispatched thousands of rockets to Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, posing a direct threat to Israel, a key U.S. ally.

The US supplies billions of $s a year to the Israeli make war on defenseless Gazans complex -- as previously hinted at -- Israel is the worst fucking ally one could have on the planet! We would be better of nuking the piece of shit country (if only some way could be figured to avoid taking out the Palestinians and the West Gazans. The direct threat to Israel posed by the Lebanese resistence is that the Lebanese resistance KICKED PUSSY ISRAEL'S ASS! Clearly, it's much easier to win a fight where you control what armamants the other side gets.

A quiet, largely client-based war. But this war is no longer quiet.

Quite, largely client-based war. You fucking slay me you hack fucking stenographer!

Holder called the plot "an international conspiracy by elements of the Iranian government."

Holder said the two men charged, Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri, are connnected to the Quds Force, a division of the Revolutionary Guards, the power behind Iran's ruling mullahs. Arbabsiar was arrested and reportedly provided details of the plot, but Shakuri is still at large.

"In addition to holding these individual conspirators accountable for their alleged role in this plot, the United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions," he said.

Gonna hold 'em accountable for ther alleged role? What the fuck if it transpires that they are NOT GUILY? ARE WE STILL gonna hold the poor bastards accountable for their alleged role? (Probably, yes, fuckin' A)

So what will the U.S. response be? How will the U.S. hold Iran accountable? By slapping on more economic sanctions? By rushing out a furious diplomatic cable?

I wonder who exactly the offical was that leadked this story, and whether or not he holds joint US-Israel citizenship. And I wonder is some jew-boy editor just got his rocks off jerkin' off while writing this piece of crap hit piect. WE ARE CANCELLING OUR CHICAGO TRIBUNE IN THIE HOUSE EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. How do you like THAT you worhtless pieces of shit?

Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. We should learn more about how complicit its leaders were in this attempt to stage a terrorist attack in the U.S. that would have targeted an ally and most likely claimed U.S. lives.

The US is the greatest terrorist force on the planet. So what the fuck? We stage terrorist attackes EVERY"WHERE, especially on our own citizens both IN and outside of America. GO GO USA

Iran continues to develop a nuclear program. It is a state sponsor of terrorism with a determination to go nuclear. Round after round of economic sanctions haven't deterred Iran, which is closer to atomic bomb-building capability. The Iranians may have conducted experimental work to develop warheads to deliver nuclear payloads.

WEAEL WORDS - at least they get it right - develop a nuclear PROGRAM which, bt(fuckin)w is several orders of magnitudes removed from deveoping a nuclear WEAPONS program, right?

And now, it appears, Iranian agents were plotting to launch an assault in Washington. The war has come home. The fucking war has BEEN home all the long - the propaganda war being waged by the US government and media elites against the basically dumber than ducks 'Murcun Pubics' wonder who wins this round?

On the taking of one's meds for one of the so-called "mental illnesses" (bi-polar)

Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2011 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: [The Power Of Prayer] I had a most worthwhile discussion yesterday with...

Dear Mark, 

I know it's been many years,

My memory suck but I actually remember you when we were young. Don't worry about
the Bi- Polar thing-- I know too many friends with the same affliction- Afuckchion including
my brother, nephew, father--- What ever--- Just please take the medication &be good!!!!! I
pray you follow this simple rule> Sure hope to see you at the reunion!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

No Really
Blairmo!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, as any of you who have followed my writing on this topic would know, I cannot let an opportunity to respond to such a suggestion left unremarked, and thus, I replied via e-mail:

But, what if, as is my contention, bi-polar is NOT a disease in the sense of those things about which Galen wrote, but rather an artificial construct (much like phrenology) which was conceived by a bunch of people who were smart with words, so smart, in fact, that they could fool themselves by inventing BIGGUNS (big words) and convincing themselves they had in fact made a discovery, when in fact, it was all Tower of Babel, making about as much sense as "Manifest Destiny" and causing perhaps even more destruction to life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness.

I submit that bi-polar is a construct, and that the DSM's (all four of them, or five if the fifth one has now been published) are mostly a crock of excrement, which serve the interests of 

(1)  Pharmaceutical companies (that have so little regards for the phsychiatrist - ahem - er - "Pain Management Specialist" that they freely advertise their wares on TV in order that the TV viewer might tell his shrink what meds to prescribe).
(2)  Psychiatric "medicine" practitioners
(3)  Psychiatric Hospitals (and the attendant ancillary functions - ambulances, social workers, etc, etc)
(4)  Lawyers (not guilty by reason of insanity - bull shit - guilty and probably feeling very much afraid of the potential legal consequences, because if you can afford an attorney who will wield THIS defense, you have committed one very heinous crime and will need to pay very big bucks to walk away without doing real prison time).

"All very strongly worded, Mark," your are likely thinking to yourself, "but also so very self-serving!"

Perhaps, but consider this.  In a REAL disease (and depression, Alzheimers, Schizoprenia, dementia, acute drug and alcohol poisoning ARE in fact real diseases - they have an etiology - a predictable path that the disease will run and follow) there is an ETIOLOGY - a predictability of outcomes in the event that no treatment is given.
In the made up "mental illnesses" (historically, the following have been included in the various and sundry Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(s) of Psychiatric and Personality Disorders:

1. Excessive masturbation (by whose standards? and if there is an excessive amount, then surely there must be an optimal amount - please let me know what the optimal amount of time spent whacking is, tyvm).
2. Homosexuality (which has been obersved in over 1,500 different animal types)
3. Chain smoking (how much does it take to become a chainer?)

there will be, under each diagnosed "mental illness" a laundry list of about 9-12 BEHAVIORS, of which, if the client (victim of slanderous and libelous labeling) of the psychiatric label is said to exhibit three (or more), then THIS is the disease the "victim" has, and, based on psuedo-scientific research, here are the meds (poisons) that are typically prescribed TO MASK THE SYMPTOMS; not to cure the disease, but to mask the symptoms.
Consider this:  With what other disease does the patient no longer needing to take medication to mask the symptoms (because the disease has been cured) receive the learned medical advice that YOU MUST CONTINUE TO TAKE YOUR MEDS -
Do you see the irony:  When you have a so-called "mental illness" you have it forever! You can never be cured of it.  WHY then, if you can never be cured of it, does anybody ever bother to see a doctor in the first place?

And WHO pray tell, is competent to judge whether or not I:

(a) drink too much (the capacity for holding one's liquor varies extremely from one individual to the next)
(b) mistakenly believe I talk with God and am protected by Him (church people take such a claim as their own, and for granted)
(c) sleep too little (according to whose standards?  Audobon slept two hours a night his entire adult life, and that was all)
(d) talk exessively and "inappropriately"
(e) dress "inappropriately" (compared to who, what, where, how, when)
(f) flits from one topic to another haphazardly (what if in my world the transition is seamless, because, as Chief Seattle once said, "All things are connected?")
(g) engages in reckless behavior (well, not everybody wears seat belts
(h) engages in "unusual sexual practices" (unusual by whose standards?)

So, rather than an etiology, what we have is a list of behaviors that are of varying degrees of concern to SOME PEOPLE.  But, once you've been labeled, they can now "BLAME" your "illness" and never have to look closely in the mirror to see if perhaps SOME of what is driving you "nuts" is their lack of respect for you, or their failure to appreciate that you have outgrown them.
Sure, first thing that happens when you go off your anti-depressants is that you start to "go nuts." But what an anti-depressant does is to DEPRESS the depressed feelings, and leave you with a certain uncomfortable numbness and an immensely limited range of emotional responses.  Of this, I know of what I speak.  After three years of being on anti-depressants, I gained 95 pounds, showered twice a week, changed into clothes twice a week, spent 12 hours a day in bed and another 10 hours at the computer, or vice-versa, stopped attending church, stopped going to the used vinyl record store, stopped going to the library, stopped riding the suburban commuter trains on the real cheap weekend pass, AND Ma and Pa were convinced that I was getting better; that the meds were working.
Whatever.
If any of this sounds at all familiar (oh, yes, the drugged "mentally ill" person ALWAYS wants to stop taking the meds - because the absence of feeling is a WORSE state, by far, than the presence of unremitting psychic pain - and when you go from the absence of feeling to once again being able to embrace all facets of LIVE and LIVING and LOVING, you become over-joyed, over-whelmed, in very short order, which will INVARIABLY signal to your loved ones who really do care, but SO much prefer that you be depressed, or live with the absence of feelings, that, "There (s)he goes again.  Another manic episode."
Here's how to get well.  YES, with severe depression, one needs to take anti-depressants to get to a place where one can at least function in the absence of feelins (most especially the absence of pain), but graudally, one should be weaned OFF the anti-depressant and GET COMPETENT TALK THERAPY - RAP SESSIONS with those who suffer from the same ill-begotten labeling, to share the experiences (here we enter the realm of the 12-step programs - which work well for a number of their practitioners, but not for everybody - the problem with 12-steppers is that they posit a "disease" where a set of behaviors exists; behaviors can be modified w/o the use of drugs, yes, when they have become habitual, it becomes considerably more difficult to change them, but, if one accepts the premise that "I am an alcoholic (and will always be an alcoholic)" one has acquiesced to surrendering one's autonomy and accepting a label in its place; a label which says, "You have one of those diseases from which you can never recover - in other words, FOR WHICH THERE IS NO CURE" and thus, why the fuck even bother with AA, NA, GA, etc, etc, etc.
And Blair, while I greatly appreciate your concern for me, I hope you will give what I have said here some very serious consideration.
Ultimately, the only way to be "cured" of the label is to move away from those who get upset about your behavior.  In other words, you must become BORN AGAIN - into the same self you had evolved into - but, in a new place where you are accepted for who you are, and what you bring to the table, rather than what they misremember you to have been, and hope that you might once again become.

With Love to you, and ALL YOU LOVE, 
Mark Raymond Ganzer

Shameless Plug for a Dear Friend

In my lifetime, I've met five people who I consider to be smarter than I am. Unsurprisingly, three of them are women, the fourth, quite sadly, is dead. I was best man at the other's wedding.

The three women are:

Georgine Cooper, editor, formerly of Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers

Marla Hegel, writer, teacher, student of comparative religious, honorary PhD from Cal-Tech in Environmental Studies, who wrote the book (and continues to update) that is used by the EPA in promulagating its regulations.

And NANCY EFFERT! Who was the heart and soul of the Actuarial Division of Bankers Life & Casualty for nine of the ten years I worked there (I started about a year before she did.) Nancy started as a clerk (after her dad kicked her out of the house and stopped paying for her college education - she was a pre-med major). She eventually went to work for Gary Stanton (formerly of the Actuarial Division) in the Data Processing Division, worked a while for PolySystems INC, an actuarial hardware, software, firmware, liveware company which developed computer programs for the insurance industry, and then finally she worked for CONSECO, the insurance conglomerate from Indianapolis. She was doing DP / IT work for CONSECO when 9-11 occurred, and like so many in the IT bidness, was laid off and had to reinvent herself, which she did, coming back as a financial consultant.

Nancy ALWAYS wanted to know how things worked. While she was still classified as an actuarial clerk, she picked up five different computer programming languages, and was doing work that actuarial students with 3 and 4 exams were doing. She wanted to know how things worked so that THE NEXT TIME, she could do it herself, and she IS and always has been a very quick study.

FULL DISCLOSURE: She was, is, and has always remained a very good friend, who remembers that, back in the day, before my first major depressive episode, I used to be a fun loving irresponsible drunk lacking a certain amount of savoire faire when it came to holding one's tongue in the presence of one's "superiors." I always let 'er rip. Nancy could too, she just never believed in burning bridges; I don't believe in burning bridges, either - I believe in dropping nuclear bombs on them so that they can't ever be rebuilt.

Nancy and I got together with some other very important people from my life this past Saturday. One extremely interesting and important thing she told me was that all the computer programming that has been outsourced to India, Pakistan, China, etc, has NOT been done nor maintained as well as it would hve been by American trained programmers. It seems like that while 23% of the foreign programmers who have gotten jobs at the expense of American-trained and based professionals, are qualified for what they do, the rest (77%) ore not! And thus, those hi tech programming jobs will be coming back to the USA!

HOORAY!



Wall Street comes to McHenry County

The thought of managing investments is a daunting task for most, and for many conjures up notions of utter frustration. A throbbing headache can occur from opening statements from faceless corporations, including your own company’s 401(k). However, the first institutional money management firm based in McHenry County, Crossroads Advisory Group, is determined to change those perceptions.

Based in Crystal Lake, the group combines the education, experience and energy of Meridith L. Hutchens, portfolio manager and founder of Crossroads Advisory Group, with the local talents of Sandra Briggs, chief financial officer, and Nancy Effert, financial planning specialist and client relationship manager adviser for clients of the firm.

“Most people come to us with a random assortment of investments purchased over the years, stocks, mutual funds and annuities purchased through discount brokers or a friendly salesperson,” Hutchens explains. “Couple this with their current company 401(k), IRA’s, and even money left with a former employer, and the result is myriad assets. Many are afraid or simply too overwhelmed to face the challenge of analyzing their investments.”

Hutchens has nearly 20 years of experience in managing portfolios. Her long list of credentials is impressive, and her approach is inviting. Her success in Chicago and later in McHenry County created an expanding business managing the assets of power players in the area. The institutional aspect of her core business is managing assets for corporate retirement plans 401(k), small banks, as well as other financial advisors.

Her money management prowess has resulted in explosive growth as word of her unique approach spread throughout McHenry County. “The phone has not stopped ringing, and I knew I had to get larger office space and bring qualified people to the firm,” she says.

During this growth period, Hutchens came to the realization that the same techniques that had been successfully applied for managing money for institutions could well serve the needs of individual investors.

“It was my commitment to make certain they got solid investment advice, and I was going to need qualified people to help,” says Hutchens.

Making the decision to expand her business did not come easily for Hutchens, however.

“To be able to use my acumen and instinct, I realized was something that I couldn’t reserve for limited clientele — I realized that was what my commitment was,” Hutchens says. “It’s just the art of what I love, which has been inbred in me since I was 15 years old — managing money. I follow over 300 indexes and I’m a little bit of a chart geek.”

The firm got bigger almost overnight. Sandra Briggs performs the role of business manager and chief financial officer for Crossroads Advisory Group. Her role is to help with day-to-day management, provide support to advisers as well as clients, develop financial budgets and forecasts, and maintain the accounting.

Nancy Effert, a wealth management adviser and owner of Effert Financial Solutions in Crystal Lake, was recruited to focus on the client-adviser relationship side. One of her main roles is to provide financial planning services to those who have indicated a desire to work with Crossroads.

Objectivity is a quality that is an integral part of Effert’s role with Crossroads. Effert Financial Solutions remains a separate entity from Crossroads Advisory Group. Not only does Effert serve as the initial point of contact for Crossroads’ clients, but she also continues to work with her own clients at Effert Financial Solutions to determine their needs, whether it be saving for college, retirement, selling a business or simply improving the performance of their current portfolio.

“Wealth management has become an overused buzzword, it’s really about bringing corporations and individuals into financial awareness,” Hutchens says. “And that was the aspect about (Effert) that made me realize that she was the ideal financial planning specialist for Crossroads. (Effert) does not have an agenda to sell financial products; her dedication is to guide clients into a realistic assessment before she recommends an investment strategy."

For Effert, her relationship with Crossroads has expanded her ability to help clients.

“Working with Crossroads is another tool in my tool kit,” Effert says. “When advising a client I may recommend that part of their portfolio be managed by Crossroads, but we may not commit all their investments to Crossroads. Managing risk can include diversification among money managers as well as asset class.”

Expert insight, proprietary tools
Working with Crossroads Advisory Group, not only provides personal service with years of experience, but the group also has access to a number of proprietary tools. One unique tool is the XRoads XRay™, which Hutchens explains, “We call it the XRoads XRay™ because most of the packaged investments, such as mutual funds and annuities, have anywhere from 100 to 500 positions that are constantly in motion,” Hutchens explains. “The software that’s available to the public or elementary financial planning firms is often data that has expired. It can be six to nine months old. With the institutional tools that we have, the data is current.”

Hutchens elaborates, “The XRoads XRay™ also examines asset class weighting which uncovers not only diversification problems but uncovers hidden fees that are built into most investment products. But the XRoads XRay™ doesn’t stop there. The monumental value to our proprietary software and analysis come in the form of analyzing risk exposure beyond historical rules of thumb.

“Our forward looking projection assigns a fiduciary score that drills down deeply into the stewardship and quality of the investments and then recommends eliminating out-of-favor asset classes,” she explains. “This differs significantly from what you will find at big name firms. We don’t have to keep investments we don’t like just to fill prescribed buckets. In other words, a ‘go anywhere’ approach allows us the freedom to capture upside potential while also hedging downside risk. We are not day-traders nor necessarily long-term investors. We seek high quality positions in the total marketplace while not limiting ourselves to stocks and bonds.

“Crossroads opens its analysis and viewpoint to offer alternative investments in such categories as commodities and real estate,” Hutchens continues. “Most investors are unaware that merely taking 25 percent of their portfolio into alternative investments would have significantly lessened the downward spiral of broad based stock and bond investments. In fact, some investment portfolios had positive returns in what many called a catastrophic year for investments. It’s our job to show people these strategies.”

In addition to the specialized tools, Crossroads Advisory Group also has a noteworthy list of clients, including many area accountants, attorneys and a country-western singer.

“I wouldn’t have the clients that I do if I didn’t produce results, so at the end of the day it’s all about producing results,” Hutchens says. “The first way to do that is to limit downside risk and utilize XRoads XRay™ technology to categorize your investments.”

“There are probably 10 economic benchmarks, we call them leading indicators or lagging indicators that the public knows about, but in reality, there are more than 300,” she continues. “And when those signals line up, the outcome, in my mind, is very easy to predict.”

Also, the XRoads XRay™ monitors trading volume as a core driver for all other investment decisions. “It tells us who is in the market on a given day to determine whether or not the activity is healthy or unhealthy for our clients,” Hutchens says.

“What’s really important is examining the quality of activity, what’s going on and where it’s coming from because that is really only based on 15 or 20 factors and that’s what I look at every day,” Hutchens explains. “Being able to determine if short-term traders are driving the market, large institutions, or everyday investors is what drives all of the other decisions. It’s not inside information, it’s just knowing how to read volume, and I don’t think you can buy it in a book and I don’t think you can be taught because it’s something that after 20 years, I know how to do.”

An individualized approach for everyone
The money management service provided by Crossroads is a departure from the widely held practice of owning investments from multiple providers without a centralized focus.

“Being in a mutual fund is a lot like being on a bus,” Hutchens explains. “When that bus comes to a stop, you get on that bus with a lot of people, everybody who got on the bus a mile back and everybody who got on the bus 15 to 20 miles back. You’re in there, you have their cost basis. You can actually buy a mutual fund in October, lose 30 percent and then get a bill for capital gains.”

In contrast, Crossroads’ approach is designed to provide a strategic, and more dynamic approach that is individualized by using separate accounting for each account, not just lumping all the money together, Hutchens says.

“Having institutional portfolio management with Crossroads is like riding in a limo,” she explains. “You get in, you’re by yourself. You have your own cost basis. You are not inheriting a mixed bag of investments….why would you want to buy into a group of stocks, some of which may have already reached their peak?”

While the independence is advantageous, their investments do not go unchecked. Crossroads works primarily with Charles Schwab to place funds in accounts that Hutchens manages. Their practices also are audited for added assurance by Morningstar and Associates.

In addition, both Hutchens’ style of money management, as well as Effert’s customer service, has left both of the women with complaint-free regulatory records at their respective businesses.

Crossroads’ services are open to those who might only require a financial plan to those who may want a more active institutional approach to managing their portfolio.

“The kind of asset management and attention that we provide has always been thought to only be available to the higher net worth,” Effert says. “Technology advancements within our industry have made separate account management available to lower asset levels.”

Clients also can determine their preferred level of involvement with Crossroads Advisory Group.
“People have a dial, they can control what they want here,” she says. “If they want one-time advice, that’s fine, they can turn that dial down. If they want a personal CEO they can turn the dial up, but there will never be a hidden charge or one that is not pre-approved.”

The company also offers a range of institutional services, Hutchens says, “We would really like to show the businesses in McHenry County that you don’t have to settle for a 401(k) plans with limited options and high internal costs. This will be the next mountain to climb.”

Thinking local
The women also remain loyal to McHenry County and are all long-term residents. They are dedicated to giving back to the community and maintaining their headquarters in the area. The combined experience and maturity of the group provides a well seasoned perspective.

Hutchens, Effert and Briggs also remain committed to Crossroads Advisory Group, as they sum up:
“We are highly motivated and excited to offer these services to our community,” Briggs remarks. “We have a passion for what we do, and I believe it shows.”

Effert continues, “If the last 18 months have proven anything it’s that the mathematically perfect world does not exist.”

Hutchens concurs, “We have witnessed a paradigm shift; no longer will investors accept a pretty 100-page financial plan that paints a rosy picture. Now, more than ever, it’s essential to have active monitoring with institutional level tools.”

For information on Crossroads Advisory Group contact Meridith L. Hutchens and Nancy Effert, 8600 U.S. Highway 14, Suite 2E, Crystal Lake, 815-455-1777.

Copyright © 2011 Northwest Herald. All rights reserved.

Staged a party here chez Insanity - but first a golf outing!

Yes, of course, BLAME BARB! Get those excuses in order. Hell, I don't care, we had a grand time. FIRST of all, while my dad and I were awaiting the maddening throngs at the Barrington Park District Golf Course, he said, "there won't be any body out here for golf. It's just too cold."

"I'll bet you a dime at least one player shows."

And show, she did, Nancy, with a laugh in her face!

So, we trotted over to the first tee (225 par 4, dogleg left - unless you hit your drive about 75 yards, in which case, it becomes a 150 yard par 4!) and I pull out my 7-iron, planning on hitting a high hard draw. W E L L ... instead, I get the damn low straight ball, right into the trap. Nancy (we had each taken three clubs - 22 degree metal, putter, 5-iron for Nancy, 7-iron for me) pulls out the 22 degree club and R I P S it, about 145 (we are into the wind) into the fairway bunker, about 4 feet behind me, also in the bunker).

So, she kind of muffs one out, and I show her my duck-billed platypus stance (feet spread out) for nipping a fuller shot cleanly off a fairway bunker. I lift my head and hit it all chuncky, we are still looking for the gawd damned piece of sheeit golf ball, but, I decided to toss one down, and play it.

Nancy muffs her third, I leave mine just short of the green. Nancy hits her fourth on, about 6 feet away. One thing is quite evident, she has IMPROVED from "back in the day," and is clearly better than Susan B. Gillies ever was when I played with her, ALTHOUGH, that was a long time ago, and if Susan ever retired to the land of luxury and took lessons from instructors as good as the one Nancy has, Susan is probably a single digit handicap player by now.

I chip it tight, take the putt. Nancy hits it a litte too far to the left, EXCEPT, that there is water (cold water, very cold water) in the cup, that she notes as she picks up her ball and we proceed to the next tee, #2, 157 yard par three, straight away, sand traps guarding the green both front left and front right.

I chilly dip a 7-iron leaving it about 50 yards short of the green. Now I must immediately beat nancy to the punch line: "Does your wife play golf too?" I inquire, of myself. "Yes, and she beats me like a baby seal," I reply, with disgust. Nancy hits a VERY high shot (the rubber tees under the mats are very high on most holes out there) but she hits it absolutely squarely.

"Move it wind, move it right," I exhort. YES, dammit, I talk to golf balls in flight. You think this is ridiculous, that nothing I can say will impact the ball after it is struck, its flight is begun, and gravity eventually reigns it in? Well, your thoughts sure align with much of modern scientific theory, but let me ask you this: If it doesn't matter whether or not I DEMAND great things of my balls (or any body else's balls) then so be it; BUT - what if it DOES make a difference, if CHAOS THEORY is correct and that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of a globe is the catalyst for a tsunami that emanates from the other side? In which case, do you now want to sit silent, sit passive, and wait while your loving golf ball is thinking to itself, "What's the matter, mon? Ye cannae e'en cheer me awn? You dun believe in me mon? Where is the laddie of yer yewt dat once played 54 holes wid me, and THEN ya cheert and and ya roart and ya extorted me on as if ya wuz a true believer. What happened to yer faith, laddie? Ah, would but that ya cud play wid your balls like ya wuz a chilt one and again."

And thus and so, I continue to play with my balls like I was a child again. And it is GOOD! And I call out to the heavens, exhorting them on, to do the aerodynamically impossible; to do the topographically unlikely; to do my fawking beck and call, dammit, mon, dontch know?

And, sumbit mutha humpah, there be daze when I swear by the daze still left, we'll not only walk in fields of gold, but the damn ball be LISTENIN' to me, and it HEEDS MY CALL because it knows that I believes in it, and thus, it believes in me.

All things are connected - (Chief Seattle)

There are more things on this earth than are dream't of in your philosophy, Horatio (William Shakespeare)

I get all fast and wristy in my chipper shotter and leave the piece of crap short. Shit. Then chip to 6", take the gimme. "Hole's full of water, Nancy," I tells her, jest to let her know. "Okay, I'll lag," she replies, and does, saving her fingers from the chillin' of the cold water in the cup.

Next hole, Nancy's honors. She hits a dishonorable shot, but, LIKE YOU CHUCK, she has her excuses all lined up. The tee is just too high for this club, which is actually a tight lies metal club. OOPS - my apologies Nancy - you wuzunt making excuses, you were stating a simple truth: Damn tight lies clubs are meant to get your ass out of tight lies, not to hit a ball that is 2" off the friggin mat!

"Take a mully," I tells her. She does, and hits a very solid shot, but, again, we are into the teeth of a Northwesterly gale force wind; has to be 35 mphs.

Now, I am gonna' show her how GOOD I am. Weight pressed forward, hands pressed forward, aimed plenty far to the right (235 yard par 3, slight dog leg left, OB left (the train tracks), 100' tall trees to carry over if you take a direct line from the tee to the pin, a little pond about 110 yards out just to annoy you if you hit a snap hook, with a fence line paralleling the rail road tracks. This is one of the two fence lines we need to take seriously, The other to-be-taken-seriously fence line protects the parking lot and nursery behind the fifth green from being invaded by a herd of raging golfers with bad backs that can't climb through or under its wooden rails, and can't high step over it. HOWEVER, the wooden rail fence behind #1 green is NOT OB, because it is still park district property, although, on a Saturday afternoon, there will be either lots of soccer players (as was the case), or baseball players (as would have been the case April-August).

I RIP the 22 degree club, with a draw, low trajectory, brilliant friggin' shot. The wind beats it down, like a field master on a southern plantation in the 1800's relentlessly giving 100 lashes to some uppity slave thought to be a rabble rouser. It is important to beat the hell out of the suspected rabble rousers, otherwise, their mind set will affect the throngs, and when you are out-numbered by a factor of 100's to one, it would not do for the slaves to come to realize that their numerical advantage alone was sufficient to overthrow their oppressor's yoke, and gain, ultimately, freedom for their race, freedom for their tribe, but a the very-much-alive threat of an early termination of this mortal coil.

When people are willing to lay down their lives for a cause greater than their own solipsistic selves, then they are truly empowered, even more so than when engaged in acts of procreation, or intercessory prayer, and because one is only willing to lay down one's life for a cause greater than one's own ONLY when that cause is righteous, in the end, RIGHTEOUS WINS, as would discover the peoples of French Indo-China (better known as Vietnam), the peoples of Afghanistasn (time and time and time and time and time again - the first three v. the Brits, the fourth v. the Ruskies, and now, finally, against us, the USA, the greatest force for military murder and military destruction ever unleashed upon the face of the earth. FINALLY, and thank fawking Gawd, lest the tear-or-eests win and the American way of life, Capitalism (okay, I'll concede, corporate welfare state), Democracy (okay, again, I'll concede, a Republic - if you can keep it), Christianity (okay, again, I'll concede, the founding fathers were deists, who believed in a Creator of the Universe, but further believed that He had withdrawn from active participation in the affairs of this world; the arrogant fools - they mostly believed in the righteous of the institution of slavery too, which should tell you about all you need to know about most of them; it was a convenience, and fortunes could be made upon the backs of slave labor - the arrogant fools never recognized the miracle God Almighty bestows upon human kind day after day after ceaseless day - the miracle of TIMING - the irregulars survived Valley Forge (Washington despised the irregulars - undisciplined, many had to be flogged, for their own good, of course, and they wouldn't even fight in nice taught lines, as was done in the theaters of the bloody (to the troops) wars in Europe, but fought from behind trees, shot, fell back; they would not stand to fight a vastly superior force, well trained in close quarters combat, they would not stand to fight a far-better armed force; no, they shot, retreated, reloaded, shot again, until their cover or their shells ran out, and then ran lie Calloway to safety. Hardly military men, these. BUT THEY WERE THE ONLY TROOPS HE HAD, AND HE WAS FORCED TO FIGHT WITH THEM, FOR THERE WERE NONE OTHERS ANSWERED THE CALL; these men were insurgents - by definition, an insurgent is a native to the soil that an imperial armed force seeks to control in order that the armed forces sovereign monarch rule and control the peoples and their resources by force of arms. The Brits (and the Hesseians subsequently, the Brits, having over-extended their forces in their always doomed and ill-fated quest to rule the world, and having VASTLY underestimated the resisting force that the guerilla war fare fighters would put up, the Brits would be forced to acknowledge eventually, got a small taste of defeat - by a nation of British-born subjects who merely wanted to make their fortunes in America and trade with Britain, which was a win-win situation for Great Britain, until King George III decided he needed to raise more money for the further imperial adventures in Europe, in Africa, in the Balkans, etc, etc, etc. The resultant loss of trade was perhaps 100 times greater than the tax revenues that would have been raised by the tea tax.

BUT, as my dearly departed brother John was so oft wont to say, "I digress."

Nancy hits her second on the green, checks out the cup, once again, a very wet landing spot. She makes an easy four. I hit a hard-low half-seven iron approach shot that lands 6" behind the hole, but it was so low, it can't stop in its tracks, and ends up rolling about 30' beyond the pin. I also make 4.

Fourth hole, 215 yards par three, straight away, OB left (well, no fence, but parking lot, Irish Bakery, Days Inn, parking lot strongly suggest OB left), gaping bunker protecting the front right half of the green. Nancy, still with the honors, tees off with the 5-iron. Sheeit, the broad was serious about that tight lies club being wrong. She hits a very nice shot, about 160. I take a very smooth, very slow backswing and RRRRRIIIIIPPPPP the best 22 degree metal club of my life, which lands just short of the green, and then, the muthah rolls off over the back edge of the green. One of the five longest tee shots I've ever hit on the hole, 235! What a difference a wind makes!

Nancy hits it on, observes that there is no water in the cup, and damn near makes her 8' putt. I look up and make a wrist wave at my chip shot which rolls 10' past the hole. FAWK, another friggen' Bogey, mon.

Last hole, 140, par three, bunker guards the left side, tree limbs hang out intimidating you into keeping it to the right of their branches, which requires that you aim 15 yards to the right of the pin.

We make two inauspicious fours, and after the first five holes, we are tied!

Nancy quips, "if I'd have known you were going to be counting, I would have taken it much more seriously."

"Hell, Nancy," says I, "If you'd have just quit missing your putts to keep your hands from freezing you would have kicked my butt!"

No reason to tell the players what the game is until after you've won, I always say.

And then we had a great time at lunch - my friend and long-suffering bridge partner Tom Sucher showed up, and brought me a Verner's Cola. Later, my sister showed up. Tom talked with my old man, which was a good thang. Ralph has had constipation (I think he calls it an upset stomach) for almost four weeks (Well, apparently his bowels are working again, I get a descriptive play by play account of "the movements" from him each day. Ralph has lots of friends, but they just want to take him out. Nobody really wants to talk with him (he's boring) or give him a chance to open up and talk about his feelings; his sense of loss having been with her for almost 65 years; but, Tom is very wise in the matters, and, besides, it was a chance for just us girls (Will, Mark, Nancy) to rip roar it up with yucks.

Mo to Follo'

All my best wishes for you and yours
May peace and blessing flow down upon your house like living waters
With Love to you, and ALL YOU LOVE,
Mark Raymond Ganzer