Thursday, March 31, 2016

Maybe I can be a Big Man on Mulberry Street.

247 Mulberry Street, located in Little Italy of yore,  now SOHO, was the location of a mafia hangout known as the Ravenite Social Club. It is not located North of Hester and South of Grand, it's located North of Spring Street just South of Prince.

The neighborhood was pretty immense running from Worth Street near Bowery where it bordered Chinatown all the way West and uptown to roughly 14th Street at Eight Avenue. You could say in those days that Greenwich Village was a predominantly Italian neighborhood contiguous to or a part of Little Italy. Now Little Italy is a remnant of Italian restaurants where Mexicans wait table and very few Italians are found in the apartments above the storefronts.





I can choose any twelve hour shift I want. All I have to do is get to the garage by 2:30 or 3:00 pm and wait to be assigned a taxi at around 5:00 pm. Then I work till 5:00 am. Don't get me wrong. I socialize, joke around with the other guys and blog/Facebook/Tweet at the garage. I always get a place to sit. So this is not a complaint. Also over the past year I always get a taxi to work with. And I like driving,  sometimes conversing, girl watching, stopping for a coffee or a nap. I even enjoy the challenges, like getting a heroin strung out night person trust fund kid out of the cab. But I am curious about panhandling. How much could I make?



I'm large so maybe I could stand outside 247 Mulberry Street singing "Big Man on Mulberry Street " and cage dollars from the passers-by? 







Friday, March 25, 2016

How Donald Trump sucker punched David Duke while the Jews of AIPAC cheered.



Donald Trump,  Grand Marshall,  leading the 2002 Salute to Israel parade.

Anyone with half a brain saw it coming. Trump had showed signs but old style Jew haters as well as a few naive partisans of the Palestinians were living in hope, and we know that the wish is the father of the thought. And the thought? That Donald Trump will champion the Palestinian cause and break the power of the Jewish Lobby mainly embodied in AIPAC, the American Israeli Political Action Committee. David Duke called on his following to go all out for Trump, which they did.


Donald Trump's daughter converted to Orthodox Judaism,  married an Orthodox Jew and is raising a Jewish child. There has been  no public fighting, disowning, criticizing between Grampa Trump and his daughter.

Trump is heavily into hotels and casinos. Real estate is political.  Can you imagine an open opponent of Israel, let alone an old fashioned Jew hater surviving in the world of New York City real estate? Las Vegas? Florida?

Donald Trump can and did crack a Jew Joke with the best of them and this no doubt impressed David Duke who masquerades as a reformed ex Klan Nazi but advocates White / European domination of the United States. He believes that current demographic trends endanger civilization and constitute "white genocide." Given that the majority of infants in the United States are not white, and many occupations have predominantly non white immigrant workforces very drastic, draconian and even violent means would be required to turn back the demographic clock. There is nothing moderate, reasonable, non-racist or democratic about this.  Duke sees Trump's campaign promises as salvation for White Power in the USA. 

Duke also has serious issues with "the Jews." Among other things he attributes the current demographic trend to a willful conspiratorial plan by "the Jews."

The fact that Trump offended a group of rich Jews who contribute big money to the Republican Party with a sly Jew Joke and told them he doesn’t want their money impressed Duke, who is considered a deep thinker by some. Of course, Trump's calls to deport 11,000,000 mainly non white immigrants whose labor is essential to the economy, to build a wall along 1000 plus miles of the United States/Mexican  border and force Mexico or Mexican immigrants to pay for it and to bar Muslims from entering the United States was music to the reformed Nazi's ears.

So white power volunteers, called upon by Duke, helped make Trump the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.  He turned around and thanked them by kissing AIPAC's ass and pledging loyalty to Israel on television. 

He's a slippery fellow, this baby faced David Duke. I think he's spent  too much time studying the Talmud. He plays on the general ignorance of both American history and of his own history.  He was out-foxed by Trump whose hesitation to renounce Duke's support allowed him to dominate the news for days.

Duke got his start as a swatika wearing supporter of United States  genocide in Vietnam. Below you'll see the iconic photo of young Duke dressed in nazi regalia carrying a sign calling for the execution by gas of Vietnam War opponents, political prisoners known as the Chicago 7 who were being tried for alleged multiple felony charges because they were outspoken opponents of the Vietnam genocidal war. 

Were Duke to have ever renounced this activity since his nazi chicken hawk days (an expression meaning a fit young man who though enthusiastic about having a war he manages to avoid military service) it might be unfair to bring this out into the public once again .



 Klansman Duke once urged his fellow  KKK activists
 to wear business suits and "get out of the cow pasture and into the hotel meeting room" which had nothing to do with renouncing racism.

Duke's website featured anti African American visuals as part of his "coverage" of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.


Duke cribbed this New York Daily News front page for his own website. African Americans were being demonized to cover the fact that they as well as whites, were victims of government refusal to build adequate dikes to protect the mostly but not exclusively African American low income Ninth Ward, which was below the level of the Mississippi River. The New York Daily News, by the way, was and is published by one Mortimer Zuckerman, an avid supporter of Israel.

From Duke's Hurricane Katrina report.

The "exJewish" clown car brings up the rear.

Gilad Atzmon is a London based Israeli Army veteran and a jazz musician of some repute. He believes that David Duke knows more about Jewish Identity than he, Atzmon does, and Atzmon is looked upon as an expert on the matter since publishing his book The Wandering Who? 
Duke is a firm believer that Jewishness is a genetic condition and not a religion or caste. This is one reason why Atzmon should be regarded as a Jew, in spite of his laughable denials. Atzmon campaigns against the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. Look at that Yiddischer Punim ( Jewish face).









Wednesday, March 23, 2016

An asshole passenger refused to leave taxi. Got ride to garage in South Bronx .


An asshole passenger refused to leave a taxi, so he got a ride to a taxi garage in the South Bronx followed by an ambulance ride to Lincoln Hospital.

I once had one like that.  When the statute of limitations passes I might tell you how I dealt with it.


Saturday, March 19, 2016

Driving St. Paddy's Day night was like pulling teeth. But I got lucky


This Saint Patrick 's Day didn't start out all that great. I start at my garage on 18th Street in the South Bronx and head into Harlem over the Third Avenue Bridge. I caught my first fare at 12th Street and Lexington Avenue, a thirtyish  Latina and this older and seemingly mentally delayed older white guy. They were going to The Bronx up near the Throggs Neck Bridge. The traffic was brutal most of the way and they were arguing in coded words I took to be drug related. He wanted to get high then and there in my taxi. She had a bag of whatever in her purse and wasn't going to share it till they got home. Surprisingly she not only paid in full, in cash without drama but she even gave me a fairly decent tip. But there I was, nowhere near my next fare, six pm and I had forty dollars. I didn't get another fare till 6:45. 

The entire night was slow, like pulling teeth. The streets were quiet and empty taxis raced each other going nowhere. 

It was at around three in the morning that I picked up my first and only serious drunks of the night, three young Irish guys on Bleeker and MacDougal going to Jersey City. I made an agreement with the spokesman, the one who seemingly knew where he was. Sixty bucks, cash, all in. On the Jersey side he asked me to stop and pull over. He vomited on the sidewalk, not on my door. I appreciated that. They didn't have sixty bucks between them. That I didn't appreciate. The first credit card got declined. Uh oh. It worked out okay though, I got $84 on the third card and headed back to Manhattan.  

As often is the case for me I made good money near the end of the shift. I took a Black cop home from his friend's place in Stuyvesant Town to Park Slope. Forty bucks. Out on Flatbush Avenue, amib an armada of empty taxis racing to the Manhattan Bridge, I had the good fortune of catching another forty dollar ride, all the way to 72nd and Broadway.  From there I caught one back into the Bronx, twenty-nine dollars, no tip, and I turned in for the night at the stroke of five in the morning. I made $249.00 for myself. The closing two hours saved my night.


Thursday, March 3, 2016

United States Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, eats his nasal drip.on Fox TV Republican Presidential debate.





Donald Trump turns GOP Presidential debate into penis size contest.

Memo to Councilmember Richie Torres: How sacred is the right to vote in New York City? Not very.

I'm very glad to see your proposal because it gives me the opportunity to raise two mportant issues regarding voting rights in New York City.  Council member Richie Torres probably isn't aware but at least in the Harlem office of the DMV the law which allows citizens of New York to register to vote or update their voter registration when changing address, called the "Motor Voter" law is a dead letter, and a joke.


I know because circumstances have had me changing my address twice this year, and I updated my drivers license both times at the Harlem DMV. I also submitted my updated voters registration. I should have received an updated voter registration card each time. In neither instance did I receive it. I think, Councilmember Torres, that you possibly can elicit a response from both the DMV and the Board of elections to two questions: How many voter registrations have been submitted at the Harlem DMV?  How many of them have been processed?

Back in 2013 then Mayor Michael Bloomberg complained about the lack of privacy he was accorded when he went to vote. I had the same problem back in 2008, the last time I voted. The workers hovered over the voters, clearly looking at our ballots.  


I plan on voting in the upcoming New York  primary ( assuming that I can successfully update my voter registration to my current address.) I wonder whatever became of Bloomberg's complaint. Could you please follow up on it? Perhaps a large sign at each polling place notifying voters that their votes are confidential, urging voters to take videos of violations and providing a phone number for complaints (which would be staffed by a human being) would assure this supposed sacred right.




'Voting History' Bill Would Boost City's Election Turnout, Councilman Says

By Eddie Small | March 2, 2016 1:51pm














 Councilman Ritchie Torres is sponsoring a bill that would send
Councilman Ritchie Torres is sponsoring a bill that would send "voting histories" to the city's voters as a way to try increasing turnout in elections.
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New York City Council
NEW YORK CITY — Bronx CouncilmanRitchie Torres has a new idea for increasing voter turnout in the city.
The politician is the lead sponsor on a bill that would require the Board of Elections to send "voting histories" to voters, detailing the elections that they were registered to vote for over the past four years and saying whether or not they had voted in those elections.
The card would be mailed to the city's registered voters between Aug. 1 and Aug. 5 every year.
The bill, first reported by the New York Daily News, was introduced in June but just had its first hearing on Monday in the Governmental Operations Committee, and Torres' office expects it to pass within a year.

Only 25 percent of registered voters in New York City participated in the November 2014 elections, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, and a recent special election in The Bronx for a vacant City Councilseat saw roughly 3,300 out of 85,000 registered voters cast ballots.
The "voting history" bill could help increase civic engagement and voter participation, according to Torres' office.
“The purpose of the bill is to empower people to hold themselves accountable as voters," Torres said in a statement, "and to get them to think of voting not as a right but as a civic obligation."