Poet's Nook: "Sojourns in the Paralell World" by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension--though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal--then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

–but we have changed, a little.

(Taken from Sands of the Well)

 OneLove

:::MME::: 

Musings

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

1. Half of the world’s wealth is owned by 1% of the population.

2. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 of the 30 counties for which data is available. This means the wealthy are not only making more but paying a smaller percentage in taxes.

3. Wealthy individuals and companies hide $21 trillion in wealth in a web of tax havens around the world. This exceeds the total GDP of the United States.

4. Global corporations routinely use their clout to avoid paying taxes in Africa, where poverty is most acute.

5. In the U.S. the top 1% captured 95% of the growth after the 2009 financial crisis. The bottom 90% actually became poorer.

You can read the full report here.

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Stealing Africa (again)

"The decisiveness of the short period of colonialism and its negative consequences for Africa spring mainly from the fact that Africa lost power. Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one's interests and if necessary to impose one's will by any means available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines maneuverability in bargaining, the extent to which a people survive as a physical and cultural entity. When one society finds itself forced to relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of underdevelopment."
- Walter Rodney

Africa has some of the richest natural resources in the world. Yet the majority of its people have been impoverished by decades of policies imposed by international finance institutions and northern governments. These policies have enabled corporations to accumulate vast profits while dispossessing the people and the continent of its riches, often subsidised by public funds in the form of ‘aid’. But from Egypt to Gabon , South Africa to Tunisia , African people have been resisting. Most people in the West don't have a clue about what's happening in the world beyond what their junk-food news feeds them on a daily basis. Africa to them is a dark, no-man's land always in conflict due to themselves alone. This level of ignorance & false sense of superiority can only be countered by education in the form of books, documentaries and lively discussions with folks who know what's going on. 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction

                                    Documentary: Call Of Life - Facing The Mass Extinction


OneLove

:::MME:::

Nelson Mandela’s Long Death by Glenn Ford

Had Nelson Mandela gone quickly to the grave when a lung infection recurred in March of this year, the world might not have experienced such a fantastic volume of political obituaries on his legacy. The nine-month deathwatch, culminating in an unprecedented send-off by nearly 100 heads of state, provided the space and time for a global examination of, not only the great man’s personal saga, but the tragic trajectory of the South African liberation struggle. Mandela’s long death became a wake, at which the body of his life’s work – and that of his comrades in the African National Congress (ANC) – was on display for collective view, commentary, and assessment.

When a dying Black man is lavished with praise by virtually all the imperial villains of the world, that is news, indeed. As corporate journalists wrote, and then rewrote, their obituaries for the still breathing Mandela, they revi                                                                                through the miraculous ministrations of “Madiba.” For the first time, the “mainstream” media explored the terms of the deal that was struck to reconcile the demands of global capital and the white minority with the aspirations of the Black majority. Thus, a discussion that had previously been largely limited to the financial pages, on one hand, and left publications like this one, on the other, became far more general.

In the dimming twilight of Mandela’s life, the actual history of the “transition” to Black rule was illuminated for the larger public. A straight line could now be drawn connecting the ANC’s early Nineties pact with capital and the massacre of 34 striking Black miners at Marikana, in August, 2012. Foreign audiences could now understand how Cyril Ramaphosa, a former mine workers union leader, a deputy president of the ANC (and presidential contender), became a billionaire board member of the corporation that owns the Marikana mine. South Africa’s 2011 United Nations vote in favor of a no-fly zone over Libya, ultimately resulting in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, a great supporter of the armed struggle against the white regime, makes perfect sense in the context of Mandela’s and the ANC’s capitulation to imperialism, two decades earlier.
 
For non-South Africans, especially, Mandela was the personification of the ANC and the embodiment of the South African struggle. His living aura was a prophylactic against serious analysis of the ANC’s abandonment of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which called for redistribution of the country’s land and nationalization of the mines and banks. When death began to hover, this spring, Mandela’s aura was insufficient to limit the scope of the thousands of political obituaries that were being prepared for distribution.

Ronnie Kasrils, a former fighter in the ANC’s armed wing who became intelligence minister under Black rule and served as a high official in both the ANC and the South African Communist Party, broke the silence in June. “From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the ANC's soul got under way, and was eventually lost to corporate power,” he wrote in an article for the Guardian. “We were entrapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry out, we ‘sold our people down the river.’"

Kasrils, known as “Red Ronnie,” is white. Now that the “deal” is common knowledge, there are attempts to blame it on white communists – to absolve Mandela in much the same way as Black Obama apologists claim that his white advisors tricked or pressured their icon into pursuing anti-Black, reactionary policies. But the communists, who were multiracial, and the ANC (also multi-racial) were thoroughly commingled in the South African leadership; they share responsibility for the betrayal of the revolution. “An ANC-Communist party leadership eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily accepted this devil's pact, only to be damned in the process,” said Kasrils. “It has bequeathed an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the plight of most of our people.”

On Democracy Now! last week, host Amy Goodman repeatedly tried to get Kasrils to acknowledge or admit that Nelson Mandela had been a member of the South African Communist Party’s Central Committee. Kasrils said he would have known if that had been the case, and accepts Mandela’s denial of membership. But Goodman’s pursuit of the matter avoids the central fact of Kasril’s testimony: that the leading figures in the commingled ANC, SACP and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) all endorsed or acquiesced to the “sell-out.”

If the Nineties capitulation had been engineered by a small clique in the leadership, then one could blame the debacle on a few individuals. But the whole forward motion of the South African revolution was turned around, so that when John Pilger interviewed Mandela shortly after he assumed the presidency, he is told the course is irreversible. “…for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy,” said Mandela.

To make sure that the capitalist road was irreversible, the deal included the near-instant creation of a Black business class hopelessly tied to international capital – like Cyril Ramaphosa and other high ranking ANC members – which would provide the African social base for capital’s continued political dominance of the country. When South Africa rises up, once again – and it will – the poor will have to cut and hack their way through this new class of Black compradors. They, too, are Mandela’s children.

                                                                        *******


OneLove

:::MME:::

Five Steps To Tyranny

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. 
 ~James Madison

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.
― Bruce Coville

When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
― Euripides, Orestes 

 As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes. Moreover, the faithful are usually willing to risk their skins in whatever military adventure their government may currently be promoting.
― Tom Robbins

All The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. 
-Albert Camus 

Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.
  -Andre Malraux 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Cell Phones & Cancer

So what if our mobiles are cooking our brains, lowering sperm counts, damaging DNA, causing breast cancer and autism. As long as there is money to be made and folks go crazy over the next dazzling upgrade, damn it all. As brain tumors become children’s number one killer illness, we stand on the precipice of untold suffering to come. A leaked industry memo admits 'wargaming' the science. That is a fancy word for tampering. This shit has been happening for a long time and it will only stop when more people become aware of what is happening to them and making their voices heard loud and clear. Power concedes nothing without a demand.

 OneLove

 :::MME:::

And Inequality for All

                                                 Documentary: Inequality for All




                                                                ************



OneLove


 :::MME:::

A Rebel Exits - Amiri Baraka (October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014)

I can pray
    all day
    & God
    wont come.
But if I call
            911
        The Devil
            Be here

        in a minute!

-Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, the poet and playwright who gave Black arts a capital B, died today. He was 79. In college, I read a number of his books/essays and even took a few courses at Howard with his son Ras Baraka who is just as intellectually precocious. The following essay by one of my favorite poets, Saul Williams, is fantastic so immerse yourself in his rendering of Amiri Baraka's life & legacy.....

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black
people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts,
the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit
rotten white parts alone. — “leroy” (1969)

It is easy to mistake Amiri Baraka for a bitter old man. He grimaces a lot. He hisses when he laughs. He doesn’t hide his anger. Nor does he hide his love. Amiri Baraka loves Black people. The art. The history. The struggle. The musicality. The perseverance. In that sense, he is no different than many across the world who sometimes romanticize the artistic merit of Africans/African-Americans and the struggle from which it arises. Yet, within that love there is a far greater struggle, sometimes called “intellectual rationalization,” where one fights to justify a love being given where very little is given back in return. Amiri Baraka is our greatest living American poet. In this, the hip-hop era, one might expect that to amount to something. In our glorification of original gangstas and rebels how could we ever forget to glorify one of the most original voices of Black anger? The man who turned the New York theatre scene on its head 40 years ago with his play Dutchman. The man who spearheaded the Black Arts Movement of the late ’60s and early seventies, catapulting artists into capital-B, Black artists who flaunted their blackness like custom made bling. The man who, after a generation of horn blowers, dared to use his own baritone as his instrument. What Malcolm was to Islam, Amiri was to art. And art is culture.

We are unfair
And unfair
We are black magicians
Black arts
We make in black labs of the heart.
The fair are fair
And deathly white.
The day will not save them
And we own the night
— “We Own The Night” (1961)

Baraka has gone through phases. A downtown Beat poet who kicked it with Ginsberg, married a white Jewish woman (Hettie Cohen), danced to bebop, and visited Castro. A Black Nationalist who abandoned his white wife, moved to Harlem, studied Malcolm, and paraded with Sun Ra. A Third World Marxist who studied Mao, abandoned Black Nationalism, embraced the struggle of poor people around the world, and moved back to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. Through it all he has remained a literary genius who has been loved and revered as one of America’s most original writers by Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, and a generation of contemporaries. 

At 70 years old, he is the same fiery cannon that blasted through my childhood every February alongside names like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, WEB Dubois, and Paul Robeson, obliterating the idea of art for art’s sake and replacing it with the fundamental principles of the Black Arts Movement: art that serves a function. To uplift. To incite. To engage.

As a lover of theater, the first thing that enters my mind upon mention of Amiri Baraka is his OBIE award-winning play, Dutchman, which he penned when he still went by his birth name, LeRoi Jones. Dutchman was first presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City on March 24, 1964. Baraka had just published his now classic book Blues People: Negro Music in White America and won a Whitney Fellowship. So, he then turned to theater to offer a dramatic interpretation of his music text in one of the most famous monologues ever written:

“…They say, ‘I love Bessie Smith.’ And don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, ‘Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass.’ Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she’s saying, and very plainly, ‘Kiss my black ass.’ And if you don’t know that, it’s you that’s doing the kissing… And I’m the great would be poet. Yes, that’s right. Poet. Some kind of bastard literature… all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be your murder… If Bessie Smith had murdered some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors. No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four.


 Can you imagine?! Well, about 30 books and 20 odd plays later, imagine how it feels to be sitting in his Newark home as he delights in showing us the high craftsmanship of a CD box set of a late jazz musician that includes his liner notes. He’s excited. Happy. It’s obvious that even Amiri Baraka, who I have heard scream at Gen-Xers, “You are Black, first!”, he is an artist at heart. An artist who still gets excited at the prospect of being able to share his art with the people it was intended for. This is something I can relate to, deeply. It is one thing to be able to create, it is another thing, entirely, to be blessed with the opportunity to share that creation with others. And then, it is a completely different thing to have that creation be well received. Some artists gauge their entire careers on how the audience responds. Whether the audience realizes it or not, they are an essential part of the creative process. Baraka recalls the press after the opening night of Dutchman, saying, “I go down to the newsstand that night. All these papers. I look at all the papers, ‘Crazy nigga,’ ‘Nigga talk bad,’ ‘Nigga hate white people,’ and it became clear to me that they [white people] were gonna make me famous. So then, this thing came down to my head. This startling wave of responsibility that I had never had before… ‘oh, so you’re gonna permit me to speak?’” Yes Amiri Baraka was permitted to speak for an entire generation of frustrated black artists during the Black Arts Movement of the early ’70s. Poets took to cafes, open mics, and rallies and added their voices to the telling of his-story which was once singular and exclusive but was now becoming inclusive of greater truths and new realities. Playwrights took to the stage. Fashion took to the streets: dashikis, afros, head wraps. Get it? Art yields influence. (Shout out to Michael Moore)! And Amiri Baraka influenced the Black Panthers, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, you name it. The real power of influence occurs when you influence people who don’t even realize that they’ve been influenced by you. They may not even know who you are. This mainly happens when your art is so deeply embedded with love and your desire to see change in the world that the message becomes detached from the author and travels on its own. From heart to heart. We felt Amiri Baraka. I wasn’t even born yet and I felt him. I felt my mamma feeling him. He was part of the reason my mom turned to my dad, after having already birthed two mid-complexioned daughters, and said, “I just want a dark, dark boy with curly, curly hair.” Presto. Black Magic.

Perhaps, by now, you’re realizing that if you have not studied Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement and you have been schooled in America, then you have been mis-educated. Perhaps you are beginning to question whether the backlash of his post 9/11 poem, “Somebody Blew Up America”, where he questioned why 4,000 Israelis did not show up for work on that fated day, after the same topic had already been addressed in Israeli newspapers and prime time American periodicals, was really worth him losing his position as Poet Laureate of the State of New Jersey. Especially when that question was only one of 200 questions (Literally. I counted them. And you can, too. You know how keywords go. Look it up!) raised in the poem. Perhaps someone knows just how powerful poetry is. Maybe that’s why Laura Bush cancelled that poetry reading that was scheduled at the White House 2 years ago, just as the war on Iraq was beginning, saying that she feared it would become a political forum and that politics had no place in poetry. Maybe she had been reading Keats when he said, “Poets are the midwives of reality.” Maybe she saw that statement as anti-Bush and wanted to insure that her husband’s spell lasted just a little while longer. 

I ask Baraka about the function of the artist and he says, “I believe what Keats and DuBois believed: Truth and beauty… There’s no sense in being an artist except to tell the truth and to make the world more beautiful than it is. Now, the problem is that there are a lot of obstacles in the way of that. First of all, you can’t make a living off truth and beauty, but actually you can make a living by defying them. But in terms of my own view, it has broadened since the ’60s. Then it was Black Nationalist struggle and I felt that was necessary. You know, the whole domination of those folks, not merely for us to tell them but to regard them as being the standard above which we must measure ourselves? That’s bullshit. Don’t tell me how to write a poem… Our art has to be the refining sensibility of our own selves. Not somebody else’s soul. Certainly not our enemies’ soul. It has to refine and define our own lives and history.” And our future.
Amiri Baraka excuses himself from our short interview. He has to attend a basketball game that was organized by his son, in memory of his daughter Shani Baraka, the victim of a hate crime in Newark last year. His sister was murdered in the same way, years ago. He ponders out loud about what he is supposed to learn from these two tragedies in his life. Both sister and daughter victims of the clenched black fist once raised as a symbol of power. Black Power. But we seem to find our greatest strength when our fists clench pens, horns, drumsticks, microphones, balls, and other hands. And even Amiri Baraka, whose lifelong work could practically be described as a treatise on Black Anger, whose fist pounds podiums as he recites his poems, the most beautiful thing about this man is his smile.

                                                                                     

                                                                          ******************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

OneLove

:::MME:::

Decadence: Decline Of The Western World

For 400 years, the Judeo-Christian West has been the pre-eminent civilization - built on exploitation, war and sheer greed & deception.  History charts the rise and fall of civilizations. All the great ones have fallen to the wayside, reduced to dust.  So, where is the West on the timeline? We force our merchandised democracy onto the unwilling. We're so cynical we sue each other for profit. We're all working so much longer and harder to earn more to pay for more. We dream of escaping our treadmill material lifestyles but oftentimes find ourselves running in the same place or falling behind.  We now have no heroes -like Ghandi or Martin Luther King - except "celebrities" of dubious note, little interest in history and either no god or we invoke one that inflames fear and hatred. 

This documentary, Decadence,  will expose a cultural fraud that masquerades as this modern life and includes interviews with leading thinkers of our time which include one of my favorites Noam Chomsky, Lord Robert Winston, John Spong, John Ralston Saul (another favorite) and Lord John Julius Norwich. Using the four seasons as visual metaphors of western 'eras', Decadence will look at contemporary western society through five windows – democracy, money, education, family and god. The West is now at a crossroad. The choice? Another dark age or a new renaissance? I hope for the latter but my gut tells me we're already gasping in the former.....


OneLove

:::MME:::

Don't Plan on Retiring by Mike Whitney

Millions of older Americans say they will never be able to retire. They simply don’t have the savings. According to CNN, “Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings…50% have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all….” (“76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck“, CNN Money)

“No savings at all”?

That’s right. So retirement is out of the question. A sizable chunk of the adult population is going to punch a clock until they keel-over in the office parking lot and get hauled off in the company dumpster. And those are the lucky ones, the so called baby boomers. By the time we get to the millennials it’ll be even worse because the economy will have been ravaged by 25 or 30 years of austerity leaving the proles to scrape by on hardtack and gruel. Pensions are already being looted, Social Security is under fire, and any small stipend that supports the poor, the unemployed, or the infirm is going to be terminated. That’s why everyone is so down-in-the-mouth, because their expectations of the future are so bleak. Check this out from Business Insider:

“For millennials, the situation is even more grim. Compared to their parents at their age, the under-30 set is worth only half as much. And while this is a sobering reminder of the scale of the Great Recession’s impact on younger generations, it’s not the whole story. These households were actually falling behind even before the stock market and housing crash, researchers found.

Young people not only saw their wages stagnate or drop but also suffered a rise in fixed costs. They leave college with an average $27,000 debt load and have a harder time finding jobs that pay well, while facing more expensive health care and housing costs.

“If these generations cannot accumulate wealth, they will be less able to support themselves when unexpected emergencies arise or when they eventually retire,” the study authors said. “This financial uncertainty could reverberate throughout the economy, since entrepreneurial activity, saving, and investment tend to build on a base of confidence and growing wealth.”(“AMERICA IN DECLINE: Young People Are Much Worse Off Than Their Parents Were At That Age“, Business Insider)

An entire generation of young people have been raped and discarded by their government and all the author cares about is the impact it will have on personal consumption.

Go figure. And there’s a larger point here too, which is that Americans have always believed that their children would enjoy a higher standard of living than their own. Until now, that is. Now most people think things are going to get worse, much worse. You see it in all the surveys. Expectations have changed, the future looks darker than ever before, and people are scared. Check this out from CNN:

“Things appear to be looking up for the economy.

On Wednesday the Federal Reserve felt confident enough to begin slowly withdrawing the huge economic stimulus the central bank has been pumping into the economy.

Unemployment is the lowest in five years. Economic growth picked up recently. The housing sector — which got us into this mess in the first place — is bouncing back. Home sales, prices and construction are all on the rise.

Auto sales recently had their strongest growth since 2006. Gas prices have fallen dramatically this year, and the stock market has risen sharply.

And there’s some reason to be hopeful for next year too. The Fed announced a slightly improved outlook for unemployment in 2014.

But things aren’t always as good as they seem. For many Americans, all the good news in the larger economy isn’t translating over to everyday life. Only 24% of the public believe economic conditions are improving, while nearly four-in-ten say the nation’s economy is actually getting worse, according to a recent CNN poll.” (“Is the economy as good as it looks?“, CNN Money)

That’s right; no one is buying the “recovery” crappola any more. They all know it’s BS. And a closer look at the CNN survey tells you why.

“Looking specifically at the economy, 39% feel that the economy is still in a downturn, up six points from April. Only 24% believe that an economic recovery is under way. Thirty-six percent are in the middle – they don’t think we’re in a recovery but they believe conditions have stabilized.” (CNN Politics)

So, 3 out of 4 people think we’re either still in a severe slump or running in place.(stagnation) That’s your recovery in a nutshell. And it explains why people hate bankers, Wall Street, and Congress. It also explains why millennials have given up on Obama after finally acknowledging that the man is a bumptious blowhard who’s never lifted a finger to help the people who shoehorned his worthless keister into office. Take a look at this from Policy Mic:

“Debt-weary millennials are disillusioned with Obama’s performance with regard to the economy, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, his handling of foreign relations”…

A new poll conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has revealed that young Americans’ support for President Barack Obama has reached the lowest point yet. According to the poll, only 41% of Americans aged 18-29 approve of Obama’s performance in office, an 11% drop since April.” (“Millennials officially hate Obama. Here’s why“, policymic)

Ahhh, so people are finally waking up to what an unprincipled phony this guy is. Good!

Unfortunately, ripping Obama won’t pay the bills, which is why so many people are making painful adjustments in their own lives to make ends meet. Aside from cutting back on trips to the doctor and setting the thermostat on “Off”, America’s plenteous graybeards are staying on the job longer than ever. Here’s a clip from an article in Forbes:

“An alarming 37% of middle class Americans believe they’ll work until they’re too sick or until they die.

Another 34% believes retirement will come at the ripe age of 80…

It’s a grim look at the state of retirement which seems to be getting worse for middle class Americans.

Wells Fargo WFC -0.09% interviewed 1,000 Americans between age 25 and 75 and with household income ranging between $25,000 and $99,000. More than half (59%) said their top day-to-day financial concern is paying the monthly bills; that’s up from 52% who said the same last year.

“We do this survey every year and for the past three years, the struggle to pay bills is a growing concern and the prospect of saving for retirement looks dim, particularly for those in their prime saving years,” Laurie Nordquist, head of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement and Trust, says in the report.

And here’s something for leaders in Washington DC to consider: One third of those surveyed said their primary source of retirement income will come from social security. That figure gets even bigger for those who make less than $50,000–48% of those earners say social security is going to be their primary retirement income.” (“Work Until You Die? More Middle Class Americans Say They Can Never Retire“, Halah Touryalai, Forbes)

How do you like that, eh? So nearly half the people who make less than $50,000 are counting on Social Security as their “primary retirement income.” At the same time, our old buddy Obama is planning to cut Social Security to keep his criminal friends on Wall Street happy.

That means a whole lot of us are going to be stuck bussing tables at Olive Garden until they carry us out feet first.

Your doing a hechuva job, Barry!

                                                                         ******

OneLove

::MME:::