First off, listen very carefully to the constant, repetitive sound-bite of the “middle class” this and the “middle class” that, without ever referring to “the poor.”  

That’s because the Republicans could sound very Nixonesque by denouncing tax dollars being given by working people to “the poor.”  Nixon enunciated the values of hundreds of millions of working class people by re-defining people who work for a living as “middle class” and then threatening their livelihood and existence with sound bite after sound bite that was summed up with his doctrine that “people who work should live better than people who don’t.”  What it comes down to is blame the poor for welfare, not the system that condemns a certain portion of the populace to a permanent acceptable level of unemployment and under-employment.

With that cultural context instilled in millions of American working class people who’ve been re-defined as “middle class” because they have self-esteem issues when called “working class,” when McCain/Palin accuse Barack Obama of wanting to re-distribute wealth, what they’re really saying to white working class people is that this black guy wants to take tax dollars that you paid with your hard work and sweat and give it to those black and brown welfare bums.  That’s the message.  Make no mistake about it.  This is what’s called in formal logic an “unstated premise,” and it’s a racist message.

John Kerry Power Salute @ NAACP Convention

Can you even image Barack Obama not being afraid to make a power salute at an African American gathering?  I really, really, honestly wish I could, but I can’t.  Another reason I voted for Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez.

First and foremost is because I live in California where Barack Obama is going to win hands down.  If it were close in this state, I’d vote for him because we just can’t stand four more years of Republican rule.  It’s a concept too hard to contemplate.

Next, I voted for the ticket because, while Nader’s politics are okay, Matt Gonzalez is a tremendous individual.  He’s a criminal defense lawyer by trade, he’s spoken at the San Francisco District meeting of the California Association of Licensed Investigators, and he knows the issues of our system of criminal procedure thoroughly.

But perhaps most important, I’m concerned that Barack Obama might be telling the truth about his desire to send more American troops to Afghanistan.  I’d be a lot more comfortable if I thought he was lying about that.

In 1986, with Soviet support, Afghan armed forces totaled 302,000 officially and at the height of Soviet involvement in the country, there were 104,000 Soviet Red Army troops there.

In April 2008, Afghanistan asked NATO for funding to increase the size of its army from 86,000 to 120,000.

As of June 2008, there were approximately 53,000 “International Security Assistance Force” – including American troops, in Afghanistan.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama say that they want to send more troops to Afghanistan.  Sounds to me just like how we got mired in the muck of Vietnam.  Nader and Gonzalez can be counted on not to send more American troops to fight and die and come back wounded–physically and mentally–in that war.  Remember what Pete Seeger sang — speaking truth to power when Lyndon B. Johnson was pushing on for “victory” in Vietnam — “we’re waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to go on.”

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Tucker’s Black Magical Mystery Tour

Macchiavelli wrote in The Prince that “the outcome is what counts” (which got mis-translated as “the ends justify the means.”  Well, the outcome is definitely what counts, whether or not the ends justify the means which is another topic entirely.  What follow may be criticized as illogical because its reasoning is arguably post hoc ergo propter hoc, but consider this:  do you really want to tempt the dark forces of black magic by defying them after you’ve seen their potential…..

Crazy Penny

Penny the Witch began her career in Black Path Wicca by digging up a Kabbala coin in her garden.  Intrigued, she began to study Kabbala which I am told by tradition that it is forbidden to do unless one is male, 40 years old minimum, and thoroughly versed in Talmud and Torah.  Of course, Penny had no such qualifications at the time.

To make a long story short, after she got into Kabbala, she got into witchcraft, after which her mother fessed up to her that she was a fourth generation witch:  her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had all preceded her into the craft.

I had Penny place curses on two prisoners in the Los Angeles County Jail system, one spouse-beater and one jailhouse snitch.  Given that it was her first curse, the Karmic waves got crossed and each one got what the other one was supposed to get, although both curses came into affect simultaneously on the same day.

The wife beater was mistaken for a snitch and shanked by two prisoners.  At the same time, for some unknown and mysterious reason, the real snitch was accidentally transferred by the computer to Wayside Maximum.  Two prisoners who barely knew him were talking to him when all of a sudden, they picked up heavy aluminum lockers and began beating him in the face with the jagged edges.  Four other prisoners who weren’t involved in the conversation grabbed their shanks and started shanking him.

As the last prisoner was being dragged off of him by the guards, he kicked the snitch in the head and said “that’s for your girl friend a—hole.”  When he came out of his coma six months later, he must have been wondering what the hell he did to his girl friend to warrant that beating.

Duey’s Revenge

Arthur pissed off Duey, then-King of the Moshwara Clan of the Gypsies.  There’s no point in determining who was right or wrong in the dispute, but suffice it to say that Duey was pissed and had a 95 year old Gypsy fortune teller put a curse on Arthur that he would get sick for the rest of his life.

At the time of the curse, Duey thought Arthur was in Santa Monica but he was actually studying with the Dalai Lama’s folks in Nepal.  No matter:  Arthur got a mysterious illness and couldn’t get back on a plane for the states for 6 weeks.

When Art got back, I warned him to make peace with Duey.  Arthur thought I was kidding and didn’t.  Next thing, he got flesh eating bacteria in his leg, wound up hospitalized for over a year and almost had his leg amputated three times.

Arthur probably now believes that the curse is real, is still sick, and never made peace with Duey before Duey’s own demise.

Bad Luck Comes in Threes — Irv, Apeshit & the Munchkin

On Halloween 2000, I had the Valcoven–San Fernando Valley Black Path Wicca–put a curse on Irv Rubin and the twin identical brothers Barry (”Apeshit”) and Earl (”the Munchkin”) Krugel of the Jewish Defense League (JDL).  I announced their curses in the January 2001 “Millenium of Evil” Edition of the Voice of Evil.

Well, look at the results:  previously all three were free as a bird, now Irv died reportedly from suicide in prison; Barry died in 2004 from a heart attack; Earl died recently reportedly beaten over the head in prison with concrete.  Shortly after the original curse, a Judge I’d had cursed died in an auto accident and a woman who was cursed was hit by a semi and became a paraplegic.

Is the Outcome What Counts?

So, if Niccolo Macchiavelli was right and the outcome is what counts, don’t run afoul of those with magical powers who can curse you and definitely piss me off or I will have those with the power curse you.  With this track record, you are risking the reverse-Midas touch and everything you touch will definitely not turn to gold!

Greatest Mistranslations

Niccolo Macchiavelli

Macchiavelli never wrote or said that “The ends justify the means.”  What he actually wrote in “The Prince” is “The outcome is what counts.” 

Nikita Khrushchev

When Khrushchev appeared before the United Nations, a Russian translator mistranslated him as warning the Western nations, “We will bury you.”  The problem with having a Russian translate Khrushchev is that he was Ukrainian which is as close to Russian as is Polish:  they are separate languages in the Slavic family, not dialects of the same language.

What Khrushchev actually did was to tell an old Ukrainian proverb:  “We will attend your funeral.”  In other words, we’re very sorry, but Capitalism will kill you, not us.  Unfortunately, the mistranslation at the U.N. exacerbated the Cold War and led to countless complications internationally.

No such thing as race

There is no such thing as race, unless you want to distinguish the human race from other primates….

A few months ago, I went to www.nationalgeographic.com and got involved in the Genographic Project.  I ordered a kit to take a DNA sample and National Geo traced my Y-Chromosome (Male side of the family) DNA.  In a million years, I never expected the results that I got.

Turns out, I am “Haplogroup G (M201)” which is a very rare genetic marker that originated in the Indus Valley of Northwestern Indian sub-continent around 10-20,000 years ago.  Before that, my lineage is from a genetic marker from somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa and going further back, from the marker for “Eurasian Adam” which was the only male to survive the initial crossing out of Africa (all non-Africans are descended from him and 90-95 of non-Africans have the second trait in the chain).

Haplogroup G is usually 1-3% of population groups, but for some reason, it is concentrated in the Caucusus, especially Georgia where 30% of the populace is Haplogroup G.  Probably means I’m related to Stalin.  In the Island of Sardinia off the coast of Italy, 14% of the population is Haplogroup G.

After you’ve done the test and get your results after a couple of months on-line, National Geo gives you an opportunity to put your results in a public data base called the Family DNA Project.  That group has now placed me as an exact Y-Chromosome 12 point match with over 30 people, all Ashkenazic Jews in Britain, Canada, and the United States.  Who’d a thunk it???

Peace to all, goodwill to People

My holiday wish is that every teacher in the world would assign every student this year to read “All Quiet on the Western Front” by my favorite author, Erich Maria Remarque.    I read that book when I was in Fifth Grade and I utilized that book in Mr. Calvin Parlato’s Book Court classroom project to get an extra credit grade.  I went on to read every book that Remarque ever wrote, the last one being Flotsam, about the plight of so-called “illegal aliens” just prior to World War II in Europe; Jews, leftists, small “d” democrats and other minorities struggling to stay out of the grasp of the Nazis and not exactly finding the so-called democracies willing to accept them.

Almost all of Remarque’s books were made into movies, a number of them twice.  All Quiet on the Western Front first starred Lew Ayres, Sr., who became a pacifist from his experience in the movie; and the second version (very different from the first and well worth watching) starring Richard Thomas (who I’ve heard is ethnic Roma [Gypsy] and Ernest Borgnine (whom I once met attending a Shirley Chisolm for President rally at Hansen Damn recreation center in Pacoima in 1972).  Another movie that was made twice from the book was Arch of Triumph.  The first version starred Ingrid Bergmann, Charles Boyer, and Charles Laughton; the latter Anthony Hopkins, Leslie-Anne Down and Donald Pleasance.

In any event, before young people go charging off into war, they need to read Remarque’s books and watch the movies made from them.  If they have never thought seriously about things before, then will think twice about going to war if they are capable of thinking at all.

On “Tookie” Williams

The death of Tookie Williams has a lot of people thinking about the death penalty as it is administered in California.  There are a couple of issues that need to be discussed and thought about.

I wrote Governor Schwarzenneger to make the point that first of all, I don’t know one way or the other whether Tookie Williams was innocent or guilty, but that is precisely the problem:  a trial should leave no reasonable doubt about a defendant’s guilt.  Why am I not convinced?  Well for starters, the following question should have been asked of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office by the Governor and by the Defense to see what kind of answer they could conjure up since the official position of that office is that the District Attorney continues to believe in his guilt:  what if anything would the District Attorney’s office do differently in the prosecution of Tookie Williams today than what they did in 1979 as a matter of policy?

One answer to that question is that as a matter of policy, they would not put informers on the stand who would claim that Williams confessed to them without giving them a polygraph examination.  This change in policy came about after 1990 when a special grand jury exposed the longstanding misuse of jailhouse informers to invent confessions.  I was one of the friendly witnesses called before that grand jury, because I had been trying to expose these abuses for years.

I’d really love to hear the District Attorney’s office answer that question and I’d really like to know whether Governor Schwarzenneger considered the points I made in my letter or whether it just got lost in the shuffle.

Notice that the lemon has claw-like fingers!

Remember the old Calypso tune, “Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat…”  Well, the song for this lemon should be, “Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of this old lemon tree is impossible to believe…”

Nazy is one of the most courageous women I’ve ever met as well as one of the most intelligent.  It’s a real pleasure to know her.  She’s been battling UCLA Medical Center where she works for years.  When she first started there, she performed experimentation to prove that the institution was over-using chemical re-agents at great expense to the taxpayers.  She came to America to be law-abiding and not to put up with corruption.  For that, she was rewarded with being framed on a bogus charge, but after years of proceedings, an arbitrator finally ruled that there were no grounds whatsoever for the disciplinary action in the first place.  Since then, UCLA has been discriminating against her and enabling her harassment, including sexual harassment by a supervisor, in an effort to get rid of her.

In spite of this, she has persevered.  While waiting in the long, long line of new citizens being sworn in, Nazy showed me her Iranian passport and explained how she was so thrilled to never be forced to wear a Hejab again just to take a passport photo; in America women have come a long way even if they still have a long way to go until they get full equality.

With all the ranting and raving these days about immigration, I am still very moved and very mindful of the experience of immigrants.  Unlike most people who spout off on the topic as though they know something about it, I worked undercover for eleven months early in my career in three factories filled with immigrants, both “legal” and sin documentos.  I also lived for a year with una mujer sin documentos. 

For those who have not had the experience of living and working amongst emigrantes, at least do two things before you condemn them:  read Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque to get an idea of the universality of the undocumented immigrant experience and listen to Buffie St. Marie’s Welcome, Welcome, Emigrante.   As it says, and as I think of my own grandparents’ experience, “I am proud, I am proud, I am proud of my forefathers and I sing about their courage.  For they came from far away, to a land they didn’t know.  They spoke a foreign language and they labored with their hands…the same way you do, my friend.”

So to Nazy and to all emigrantes, welcome; welcome home to America.

More recently, Russo had become an active supporter of the San Fernando Valley/Northeast Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization for Women and lectured at meetings of the organization. This brought Russo full circle with an old high school friend from his early years growing up in Suffolk, Virginia, Linda Pruett, who along with myself had become a co-president of the Chapter.

Planning to return to activism in California, Russo returned from Virginia in August 2005 where he announced his intended candidacy for the Peace and Freedom Party’s nomination forUnited States Senate for the 2006 election at my 50th birthday party. We were orchestrating what we hoped would be a campaign in the primary for various party nominations on a slate headed by Tony that would restore the Peace & Freedom Party to some semblance of sanity and take its leadership away from the “Berkeley Bolsheviks” who have periodically managed to snatch defeats from the jaws of victory. Tragically, Russo suffered a heart attack a day after the party. Following heart bypass surgery, he returned to Virginia, but never fully recovered.