UPS USES HYBRID TURCKS
by Mark Ganzer
Meaning that it is more cost efficient (in the long run) than a traditional gas guzzler. You go UPS, just keep showing us the way!.
MacDonald's Manager Does the Unprecedented
Treats Daily Customer to Fruit Drink (Gratis)
By Mark Ganzer
The afternoon manager, after having watched us eat at his establishment 4-5 times a week couldn't contain himiself. He just brought us a m ango smoothie and said: “Try this.” We did, of course, but, as we were eating sundaes, dad had to quite accurately remark, “NOTHING tastes as good as this!”
Last Night I Had, the Strangest Dream
I've Ever Had Before, I Dreamt That I
Had Contact with My God, My God, My Lord
By Amy Guido
Wow...I just had the most incredible God dream I've had in decades. I wanted to share this more privately with you all...because it's personal to me, and very meaningful.
I was in a hotel trying to find the room that Tony and I were staying in. He was there, and I went out to look for something, and got lost.
In my attempt to find our room, I kept running into people, who were at some kind of conference. For whatever reason, I felt prompted to reach out to them physically and touch them (like praying over them). And immediately, the Holy Spirit empowered and over came them. I prayed over them that they would renounce whatever was hurting them, or whatever habit was destroying them....and they readily did without question.
Mirable Dictu – All My Angels Are 9 Weeks Preggers!
Who's the Perp?
By Mark Ganzer
Cheryl Ann Blanke Wildenhain 9 Weeks & craving gummy worms!
Susie Barcroft Congrats Cheryl! Do you think it's a boy or maybe a girl this time around? :)
Mark Raymond Ganzer Thank you Susie Barcroft. Without you poignant question, I would have been lost; like an aborigine tranported to New York City (or even McHenry, village of)
Sue Weber BoettcherI am nine weeks, and I am already craving green chili burritos!!! Yum.
Mark Raymond Ganzer Got a flock of nine weexers craving the weirdest stuff
Mark Raymond Ganzer Congrats Sue - Oh Lord, see to it that our beloved sister Sue takes in the nourishment needed to dine for two. AMEN.
Amy Stuart Guido I am nine weeks, and man oh man...am I ever craving twizzlers...any flavor will do at this point!
Erin Silver is this that game? inbox me the details
Amy Stuart Guido Stephanie didn't tell you? It's definitely something i didn't expect but...
Erin Silver oh yay! congrats!
Amy Stuart Guido Aw......you are such a sweetie!!!
Stephanie Guido Bauer Amy this conversations is sounding like you are pregnant or something haha funny!
Michele Peeters Vanags Better give up the black tar heroin!
Amy Stuart Guido Ah Michele...this is getting interesting, no way!
Melissa Pries Helmick Are you pregnant?
Amy Stuart Guido mmmmmaybe....n....maybe not...hmmmm
Mark Raymond Ganzer Not another nine weexer! Holy ToMolies! Is it the same father in all lthree cases? Enquiring minds want to gossip!
Amy Stuart Guido That's the best one yet Mark! I do believe someone told you something!
This really might be the time to go out and invest money in the stocks of selected specialty food production companies! The makers of GUMMY WORMS; the makers of GREEN CHILI BURRITOS; the makers of TWIZZLERS .. stock tip of the day!
Friends Come Out To Make Sure Ralph
Ganzer Spends Times With Human Beings
Rather than his Metal and Iron Clubs and Putter
by Mark Ganzer
Ralph seems to be doing all right - we've had some company over (just once) but he's getting at least two invites a week to do something he loves with people who love him ... it is a beautiful and wonderful ting to behold --PLUs Marianne returned from Providence RI and worked with Gay at going through mom's clothing, jewelry, books,
Quite frankly, the house is better than its ever been
Kind of hope mom didn't see me write that, she'd say, "What did you expect, you have 3 people working on it 8 hours a day each ... and I was only one!" Got it ma' point made; point taken – you and John and Cottie are really enjoying the brandy a tad too much – well, at least, in heaven, they have designated angels to get you home (they have them here on earth too, but, the heavenly path ways are much more familiar to he Angels!
Our former Pastor Pam Challis responds to this wonderful news: I'm so glad to hear that, Mark. It's going to take time, but it's amazing how things just come together. but, it's sounding good!
Parents Instill Early in their Progeny the
Importance of Writing Thank You Notes
by Mark Ganzer
Found these letters while spring cleaning (the ongoing never ending Sisyphean chore which just keeps on giving), from Marianne to her Uncle 1st Lt James Raymond Hockett (and in many ways, this letters alone make the price of the present MORE than worth it!):
Dec. 26, 1966
Dear Jim the doll was real nice. But I put it in the trunk by mistake and it was locked there for about 40 or 50 minutes to an hour. When we got home I thought that I had left her at your house and that I would have to wait until Easter like grandma said but then I found her in almost the very last box.
P.S. It was a very nice.
From Marianne Ganzer
To Jim
Cool Breeze From the North Floats In @
1:37 p.m. Your Corresondent Suspects Foul Play
by Mark Ganzer
While taking a smoke break, I was assualted by cool breezes from theNorth. Since none of these were predicted by the weather reporters, the only logical explanation is that since it is last call all over the land of the cheezeheads, those sitting at the stools facing North all dropped trou and passed gasses from the @sses, as a sign of mega disrespect to the Bears and all memories of Papa Halas. Classless bastards!
Writers from THEBLACKCOMMENTATOR.COM,
One of Many Fine Weeklies written for the
Black Intellectual Community (Which is much larger
than we caucasians could ever imagine)
weight and inveigh in!
Comparison of Obama & Cynthia McKinney:
Who is the Real Progressive Candidate?
The Editors of The Organizer Newspaper
by Larry Pinckney
[This was originally published in The Organizer Newspaper]
Barack Obama is creating a buzz on the political scene such as we have not seen in a long time - particularly among Black voters and youth. He is forging an electoral grassroots movement that is channeling a lot of the discontent by the American people with the powers-that-be.
Speaking in San Antonio, Texas, on the eve of that state's primary election, Obama sharply denounced the “Bush-McCain course, which threatens a century of war in Iraq, a course where we will spend billions of dollars a week that could be used to rebuild our roads and our schools, to take care of our veterans and send our children to college.”
Obama went on to decry “four more years of tax breaks for the rich, with the argument that we should give more to those with the most and let the chips fall where they may ... in a course that further divides Wall Street from Main Street.” He compared Hillary Clinton to John McCain, and said that both are good at “giving speeches but not at providing solutions.”
Responding to Hillary, he said, “There is nothing empty about the call for affordable healthcare, or jobs at a living wage, or secure pensions, or ensuring the birth-right of every child in this country to live a full, healthy and safe life.” And echoing the Rev. Jesse Jackson, he concluded, “Our task is to set the country on a new course, to keep hope alive, to keep promise alive!”
All this sounds fine and good and many people across the country are buying into it. Obama is viewed as an outsider, a new kid on the block, someone who just might be able to shake things up. Working people and the poor are hurting; they are anguished. They are hoping against hope that Obama will make a difference.
What Are Obama's Policy Solutions? Obama's message for change is compelling, but the question people need to be asking is: how does Obama expect to do all these wonderful things when all his actual policy solutions point in the opposite direction?
Take the question of rebuilding our roads and schools, taking care of our veterans and sending our children to college: How can this be done without drastically slashing the war budget and redirecting our priorities toward meeting human needs? It can't. Is Obama proposing cutting the war budget or curbing the militarism and interventionist policies of the U.S. government? Not for a minute.
Obama is a hawk when it comes to Israel, Iran and U.S. policy in the Middle East. His big objection is that Bush did not go after the “real terrorist states.” Obama called for a nuclear attack, if necessary, against Iran and supports U.S.intervention in Pakistan, if necessary, to dislodge Al Qaeda and to prevent “rogue states” from building nuclear weapons. His statements, public and widely distributed, were praised highly by major sectors of the military-industrial complex. Obama simply wants to shift Bush's “endless war” to other hot spots around the world. How about providing jobs for all at a living wage? Can this be done without breaking with all the corporate “free trade” and privatization agreements? It can't. Is Obama proposing to break with these agreements? Not at all.
Obama, like Clinton, is a supporter of NAFTA, CAFTA and “free trade.” Both Clinton and Obama talk about including workers' and environmental rights in these “free trade” agreements - which is nothing more than a sweetener to get working people to swallow the bitter pill of “free trade.” Such clauses do not change the anti-worker and anti-environment character of these treaties. Obama walked out of the room during the U.S.- Peru FTA vote in Congress last summer - so as not to upset his labor constituents - but he praised the bill in the media, just as he praised “free trade” in his private meetings with Canadian political leaders prior to the Ohio primary. On this score, there is no difference between him and Hillary. How about providing healthcare for all? Can this be done without removing the private insurance companies from the healthcare equation and instituting a single-payer healthcare system? It can't. Is Obama proposing to do this? Not at all.
Obama calls for a “free market” solution that keeps the HMOs in the driver's seat, maintaining the exorbitant administrative costs and profits in an industry that is sicker by the day. He does not propose “individual mandates,” as Hillary does, but his “universal message” would barely place a band-aid on a system that needs fundamental reform - through a Canadian-style, single-payer system. And how about the “birth-right of every child in this country” to have a decent future? Should this not also apply to all immigrant children (and to their parents) - whether legal or “illegal”?
Yet both Obama and Hillary voted to extend the Wall of Shame along the U.S. border. They support militarizing the border, employer sanctions and other such repressive measures against undocumented immigrants. They are strongly opposed to full and immediate legalization/amnesty. And how about closing the gap between Wall Street and Main Street? Can this be done without making the rich pay their fair share of taxes (not simply ending the Bush tax cuts) and radically redistributing the wealth in this country? It can't.
Obama says we have to go beyond race and class, but he offers only a general promise for change, in partnership with Corporate America. But can this corporate-dominated economic and political system be “humanized” by pleas from Obama for change? Can racial oppression and class exploitation be overcome in alliance with the bosses, in the framework of the two-party system, and with vague pleas for change? Obviously not.
How Can We Promote Real Change?
Many prominent political activists have gotten behind Barack Obama, arguing that giving “critical support” to Obama is the best way to hold him accountable and push him to the left.
We disagree. The Democratic Party, as history has demonstrated time and again, is the graveyard of all social protest movements. Pointing working people toward the Democratic Party, however “critically,” is to foster dangerous illusions in the institutional framework of U.S. imperialism and to mislead folks as to how progressive change can be brought about.
If the Democrats don't self-destruct at their upcoming Denver convention over the issue of “super-delegates” or what to do about the Michigan and Florida primaries - and if Obama is actually the Democratic nominee and is then elected president - one cannot exclude the possibility that he could be forced to go further than his program or even intentions would suggest in addressing some of the concerns of the American people.
But this pressure won't come from folks caught up in the workings of the Democratic Party. The only possibility of pushing Obama to address some of the people's needs is if - and ONLY if - there is an INDEPENDENT movement built to advance consciously the issues that are on the front-burner for the people of this country - particularly for the Black people and youth, who are Obama's main constituency.
It was the Civil Rights Movement, after all, that won the Civil Rights Act - not LBJ, as Hillary would have us believe. We even won this with a Republican Chief Justice.
If Obama is elected president, this electoral movement, with its heightened expectations and illusions, is bound to come up against, and clash with, the realities of the policies implemented by Obama. Supporters of the Democratic Party will no doubt tell us - as they have done countless times in the past with other Democratic Party presidents - to give Obama more time and a wider political space to act, and not to push him prematurely (so as not to awaken the Republican sharks waiting to attack him).
We will be told - including by many of Obama's “critical supporters” - to be patient, and then more patient, while at that very same time Obama puts into place the corporatist-type structures used so craftily by the ruling parties and institutions in Europe in the recent period (both of the right and of the so-called left) to co-opt, silence, demobilize and ultimately demoralize the working class and social protest movements.
Central Importance of Cynthia McKinney Campaign
This is why Cynthia McKinney's “Power to the People” candidacy so important today? Brother Larry Pinkney, an editorial board member of Black Commentator, explained it this way:
“Sister Cynthia McKinney has both the credibility and the capacity to truly excite the people in a substantive vs. superficial fashion; and can inspire people to see that they themselves / we ourselves are the only viable solution to the Republicrats and their flawed and corrupt electoral system. We must move the people from being excited about meaningless superficialities that do nothing to address systemic change - to being excited about substance that is the catalyst for systemic change.”
McKinney's independent campaign is needed to lay the groundwork for building an independent political movement for real change - a movement that needs a political instrument: a Reconstruction Party.
This sentiment was expressed concisely by Washington, D.C., activist Netfa Freeman on his blog:
“We need to be about the business of thinking and acting outside the box and building political parties that are outside the box, parties that serve the economic, social, and political interests of the masses of people. This is precisely why the candidacy of former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney for President and the Power To The People Coalition is of such enormous importance for the present and for the future. This coalition is all about collectively laying the foundation for systemic change - which is the only way that we can enjoy real change.”
On January 26, a meeting of the National Organizing Committee for a Reconstruction Party took place in New Orleans with the participation of delegates from seven states, mainly from the South. The meeting produced a powerful Draft Manifesto for a Reconstruction Party that can be accessed by visiting the website of Sister Cynthia McKinney at www.allthingscynthiamckinney.com.
This Draft Manifesto, which is still a work-in progress, puts forward very clear solutions to the front-burner needs and demands of the people in this country - particularly for African Americans and all other oppressed sectors of society.
The time is now. We urge all unionists and political activists to:
1. read and distribute widely this Draft Manifesto for a Reconstruction Party.
2. get behind the Cynthia McKinney “Power to the People” presidential campaign.
3. contact the coordinators of the National Organizing Committee for a Reconstruction Party in New Orleans by writing to - The Editors of The Organizer Newspaper.
“We identified ourselves more by the experience of resistance and triumph than by the nature of our victimization.” bell hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism
“If I consider myself to be coherently progressive, how can I vote for a politician whose rhetoric is an affront to solidarity and an apology for racism?” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series)
Recall with Malcolm a people who toiled generation after generation on this land for the organized thievery of landlords, merchants, and politicians, “in cahoots with the landlords and the merchants.” Many of us transformed ourselves into the people of Moses, collectively, subversively, transgressing against the might of Pharaoh. Hear Robeson sing it! Still for others, the role of warrior was more defiant, more audacious if not perilous.
Descendents of creative (critical) thinkers and warriors of strategies and tactics in the struggle for human rights in the U.S., we have witnessed what John Henrik Clarke calls the “greatest single crime ever committed against a people in world history” ignored. Now we face the “most tragic act of protracted genocide.”
History calls upon us to question our condition in its totality to work in the process of radically transforming this society (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series)). As we act toward the realization that work is required of us to fight against corporate imperialism, we act knowing that our work has always been the most subversive work ever done in U.S. As subversive workers, we’ve defied the laws and many federal, state, and privatized “task forces.” We’ve made homes of shacks. We’ve nourished our children, our community, from the Earth. We’ve endured torture and brutality. We’ve risked our lives and gave up lives.
As bell hooks writes, we are a people who sustained the trauma of losing our leaders (Salvation: Black People and Love). And we had little time to heal from these wounds when, sometime in 1980, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the American public allowed itself to be absorbed by pods! Worse, the Black privileged class abandoned the ship just when the boat needed rocking! They opted to die as a people! They swiftly “assimilation into the values of the dominant white mainstream,” writes hooks. Black elite’s abandonment represented “an unprecedented context for collusion in their own oppression and exploitation.” Most important, this defection permitted the takeover of “poor black communities by a drug economy.” The war on drugs has been the domestic version of “shock and awe” for Black Americans. The media went to work pitting privileged Blacks against the masses while people, following in the footsteps of Sojourner Truth, spoke out against the injustice, were singled out as she was for being, Peterson writes, a “crazy, ignorant, repelling” Black person. In the white backlash, Black consciousness-please-go-away era, our work now is more difficult and no less subversive than at any time in our past.
We didn’t wait for saviors, appointments, metals, or titles. We sang in “personal protest” with Billie Holiday (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday) against the concrete racial injustice evident in hanging Black bodies. Billie wasn’t a defector or an appeaser. On the contrary, she was a creative (critical) thinker. I think of Ella Baker, described as “being tough and confrontational if she had to be” The Founding Fathers' notion of “freedom” and “democracy,” already questionable as these terms excluded the enslaved Blacks, the poor, the lower-working class, and women, receives a face-lift every Republicrat administration in order to justify everything from pre-emptive wars to domestic spying (extended to all Americans now) for corporate interests. Carla L. Peterson reminds us that it was Sojourner Truth’s work not only to give “testimony on the state of the nation” but also to question and to “reconceptualize” notions of freedom, democracy, and, in particular the notion of the “brave.” She was particular keen on reaching audiences of the “brave.” And, of course, there’s good reason to reach the audience of the brave then and now. The brave aren’t fearful of the conclusions they reach as a result of questioning the Black condition in America. Truth wasn’t looking for appeasers; she was seeking creative thinkers and warriors - doers of the word. And the word in this crucial moment is - Movement!
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture)). “Baker’s struggle against racism was as much about standing up for herself as it was about lending her strength to struggles initiated on behalf of others.” I can’t see an appeaser in Baker, the warrior. We need to pick up the mantle from these America’s brave freedom fighters and resume the peoples’ protest movement, apart from the Republicrats and their corporate imperialist partners.
We are creative (critical) thinkers, warriors, militants, about the work of saving ourselves (and through us, the country) before we have reached a point of no return. With all that we, as Black Americans, have endured; our best work is yet to come. We, who are creative (critical) thinkers and warriors - revolutionaries, are in need of our Clearing, our space of protest organizing in living rooms, community centers, prisons, schools, and churches. Our voices should speak of “resistance, indignation, the just anger of those who are deceived and betrayed.” Our voices should speak, too, “of their right to rebel against the ethical transgressions of which they are the long-suffering victims.” This is our Freire speaking!
“Whoever is engaged in ‘right thinking’ knows only too well that words not given body (made flesh) have little or no value,” warns Freire. If our work is one of personal (protest with the struggle of the oppressed against corporate imperialist values, then we will know it’s “right thinking” and aligned with the agenda of the Clearing (the genesis of our past movements). It was forward and progressive, and we know this because, to use Peterson’s words, our work has always been “structured not according to a capitalist economy of exchange.” Nor did our work leave unquestioned the “hierarchies of class, race, and gender.”
Like Malcolm, assassinated 43 years ago, we are the Left in rage with the status quo. If this is subversive, so be it! The work of a brave movement to transform the imperialist world order requires that we denounce the “process of dehumanization,” as Freire tells us, and announce “the dream of a new society.”
In the finally analysis, it’s ridiculous to speak of a dream without recognizing the conditions of the masses of people. A dream consists of what? The dream is always the dream of the people for an end to injustice and inequality - or what else is it? More to the point, whose dream is it? Who will benefit from all this dreamingoutside the peoples’ movement?
I think it’s more of that pod business. Watch you don’t sleep and awake to a nightmare!
"We don’t need anybody on the outside laying out the ground rules by which we are going to fight out battles. We’ll study the battle, study the enemy, study what we’re up against, and then outline or map our own battle strategy…" - Malcolm
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago.
============================================================================================
Nothing can ruin a Sunday morning like a New York Times magazine article with a dubious title such as, “Toward a Unified Theory of Black America.” The alarm bells are immediate because the Times loves to give attention to black people who are either in jail or on welfare or who have impeccable credentials but who are horribly confused.
Roland Fryer is in the latter category. He is a 27-year old assistant professor of economics at Harvard. His ideas explain why economics is called the dismal science. The word dismal doesn’t begin to describe the damage to black people that Fryer and his ilk can cause.
Fryer and his colleagues in the economics department at Harvard somehow managed to get attention by repeating an old medical theory that seeks to explain higher rates of cardio vascular disease among black Americans. It has been hypothesized that survival during the middle passage from Africa to the Americas favored those whose bodies were best able to retain salt and fluids.
“Absolutely there’s an insulation effect. There’s no question that working with Roland is somewhat liberating,” chirps one of his white colleagues, Edward L. Glaeser. Fryer’s friends don’t need to be insulated from discussion about the salt retention abilities of black people. They need the protection he gives them when they seek to prove that everything is A-OK in America. If it works fine then anyone who isn’t doing well, like black people, have only themselves to blame.
The Times article details Fryer’s very difficult upbringing. His father, who was convicted of rape, was an abusive alcoholic. Fryer’s great aunt and cousins are serving very long prison sentences for drug dealing. It is commendable that he overcame these familial challenges to earn a Ph.D. and teach at a prestigious educational institution.
Unfortunately the Fryers among us are more dangerous if they are allowed to get some book learnin’ than if they had none at all. Immediately after winning the brass ring they begin the stale lamentations about the state of black America. What is wrong with black people? Why don’t they do better?
It never occurs to them to ask different questions. What is wrong with the rest of the country? Why is there no Ivy League professor who explains the irresponsible behavior of white people? Individuals, corporations and the government are all irresponsible. Why are only black people poked, prodded and studied to find out why they act in the way they do?
Where is the unified theory of white America? What happened in the Bush family to create people who steal elections, rob the treasury and turn us all into corporate serfs? Did Barbara drop George and Jeb on their heads when they were babies? Perhaps the Bush boys couldn’t live with the shame of knowing that their granddad did business with Nazi Germany after the United States had declared war on Hitler. Maybe the Bush family is genetically inferior.
Confused black people shouldn’t be allowed to earn Ph.D.s or teach at universities. They should go through a vetting process first. Perhaps a team of psychologists might interview the candidates before they are allowed to get lots of letters behind their names and then inform the rest of us that we are just no good.
Anyone who uses personal family experience to explain away the wrongs in American society would be eliminated from consideration for higher education. They might be sent to vocational school instead. They can make a decent living but their personal issues couldn’t be used by the New York Times in its effort to make the rest of us hate ourselves.
There is no end to the foolishness. Fryer thinks that black children would perform better in school if they were paid to learn. Recently this columnist took entertainment impresario and would be political leader Russell Simmons to task for saying the very same thing. If Harvard professors have as little sense as Russell Simmons then no one should save a small fortune or spend money on SAT prep courses to get their kids into those allegedly hallowed halls.
Fryer muses about the persistent gap in test scores for black children. “As soon as you say something like, ‘Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?’ everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn’t that be on the table?”
So be it. Let’s find out why Asian kids continue to best their white counterparts on standardized tests. What will Fryer say when white people get “tensed up” over theories positing their own genetic inferiority?
Here is another homework assignment for Fryer. Maybe he can explain why white people looted Enron and Worldcom. Maybe he can tell us why white people killed 100,000 Iraqis to help their friends make money.
Should he be willing to accept this mission he will of course have his head handed to him. The New York Times will not have nice things to say about him. If he asks his friends to insulate him from criticism he will surely get the cold shoulder.
It is all very simple. The powerful group is never examined. They can get away with everything from slavery to colonization to the eradication of native peoples to the creation of a prison industrial complex to the privatization of foreign nations and they will never be told that they are inferior to anyone.
Fryer needs to get busy. He has his work cut out for him.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in . Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City. She can be reached via e-Mail atmargaret.kimberley@blackcommentator.com. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley's writings at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment