Our man on the spot III

Posted by bob on April 12, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments

BY SPE

Chris Matthews of MSNBC received the statistic from polling that 78% of Black Americans want gun control, responded a U.S. Representative on the condition of anonymity – With those kinds of numbers, of course white homeowners need high capacity magazines. It’s been the right of homeowners since the Declaration, and it’s not necessarily because they’re mostly white.

Representative Gohmert (R) of Texas stated, “Why, a limit on the size of gun magazines is EXACTLY like condoning Gay marriages and bestiality.” (Daily News, Wednesday, April 3, 2013)

I Am a Man image courtesy of Wikipedia

 I Am a Man…I Am a Woman

The slogan of the striking Memphis sanitation workers that Martin Luther King went to support in 1968 was, in indignation at the conditions, “I Am a Man.”

The same slogan, or “I Am A Woman,” was used in New York City, April 4, 2013, on the anniversary of Martin’s murder, by fast-food workers striking McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and other fast-food corporations paying the minimum wage of $7.23. The minimum wage of 1968 is now equivalent to eleven dollars an hour (thanks Chris Hayes!).

As the economy recovers from the recession, fast food corporations are making record profits in the billions (McDonald’s 575 billion in 2012), most new job growth is in the minimum wage industries, while skilled labor jobs come back at a fair lower rate.

Martin Luther King said in 1968, “It’s a crime in the world’s richest country to be paying starvation wages.”

A representative of the fast food trade group did point out that the response could be a hunger strike, like that being staged at Guantanamo by detainees cleared to go, but being held anyway (the courts have no power over ‘detainees’ under military jurisdiction). They could also, like them, be strapped into what resembles an early model electrical execution chair (see eurekaproductions.tv for, “The Great Electric Light War,” or soon, “Grandstand Play”), and have tubes inserted up their noses to ensure forced feeding and the nourishment of a fast food of their choice…

But, there is a brighter side, our gal hitchhiking around America by herself took off a few weeks ago from her home in Mendocino, California, to hitch ALL the Americas. A couple of days ago she texted from Panama City:

“A man stole my shoes while I lay on a bench in a park this morning, police caught him. I feel that was my wrong. I travel the world by grace and gratitude. I should not send anyone to jail. I gave my shoes to him and several dollars, and cried a lot because he had no shoes.”

– Spring Wills, our gal hitchhiking around the Americas

War’s Anniversary

About the ten year anniversary of the “War on Terror” now called “The conflict against Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” Steve Coll writes in the March 4, 2013, New Yorker, “A franchise is a business that typically operates under strict rules laid down by a parent corporation to apply that label to Al Qaeda’s derivative groups today is false, if Al Qaeda is not coherent enough to justify a formal state of war, the war should end…the amorphous threats they pose will require adaptive security policies and, occasionally, military action… BUT…a war against a name is a war in name only.”

Taliban Karachi’s New Gang in Town
(Upsetting Eve Alligators…)

New York Times, March 29, 2013, “In joining Karach’s street wars the Taliban are up-lending a long-established network of competing criminal, ethnic and political armed groups in this combustible city…The militant drive has even distressed Manghopir’s most revered residents: the dozens of crocodiles who inhabit a pool near a Sufi Shrine here, The Muslim Pilgrims who come here to pay homage to the Shrine’s Saint have long also brought scraps of meat for his reptile chargers, but lately, as visitor numbers have dwindled from hundreds per day to barely a few dozen, the roughly 120 crocodiles here have grown hungry, very hungry.”

On Sandy aftermath

From Joe Tirone, the Sandy video – “Return to the Past”

How’s this for an example? The Mayor of New York City. I think everyone was in denial, and perhaps he was too. The New York City Marathon was scheduled November 2nd or 3rd. The Mayor’s mentality was, hey this is New York, we’re tough and we’re going on. I think that people we’re just so bent up at that point that they couldn’t focus on the idea that he, Mayor Bloomberg, wanted to have the Marathon. Then the date came closer, and the reality was setting in that they might have the Marathon, and people became angry. And, it was that outcry that stopped it. People just did not want to see that, and it was how dare you, we’re all in pain, we’re all suffering. New York has an issue. New Yorkers try to lead the nation, like after 9-11, “We’re tough, we came back, and nothing stops us!” But, there’s a time to mourn. There’s a time to stop and realize what happened.

Actually, in my opinion, 9-11 is coming back to bite us as well, because they renamed the victims as heroes…and we’re going back in there, and they started the reconstructions…weeks after that! First it was taking everything to the dump, and then everyone went back to work within two weeks in lower Manhattan. You knew it was poison – you knew it was horrible – but everyone was not only encouraged but forced to go back to work, because “we’re New York, we’re tough!” How you look at all the people who are sick – everything – is because of that mentality, but “we’re gunna go forward!” Certainly we’re going to go forward, but there is a time to stop, to think and to mourn.