Tag Archives: Politics

Investigate the 2024 election for fraud?

by contoveros

Was the 2024 presidential election rigged somehow by some unsavory characters with a history of such actions from the last presidential election?

I don’t know. But I wouldn’t put it pass some Republicans who tried to steal the election away from Biden and Harris in 2020. They may have perfected some of their dastardly ways and avoided media coverage but possible further investigation by my former journalism buddies who – like me – may sense that something just doesn’t seem right about this election.

Continue reading →

State of Our Spiritual Union is Flourishing

by contoveros

True Meaning of Life Flowering Now

     Seeds planted in the 1960s have flowered, and the Age of Aquarius has finally dawned on the world, awakening many of us to a new way of living, a new way of forgiving. The first signs of this new enlightenment began in the 1990s as the Berlin Wall fell, God revealed secrets in the Celestial Prophecy, and the mystical Wisdom of Kabbalah was made known to non-Jews and all women, regardless of age or religious backgrounds. 

     New Age dabblers learned from old age philosophers about the true meaning of life — to Know, Love and Serve God by serving each other.

* * *

JOIN IN. OPEN UP. FEEL FREE!

     We found the divine through our science.

Quantum Physics showed that our world is constantly in flux — that it is totally impermanent — yet cooperating every second with each other “individual” part making us all one whole healthy body.

We are aware now that consciousness connects everything thing in the universe and is in everything in the universe.

    Offer Compassion Through Divine Guidance

It is our duty and our honor now to share that with the rest of humanity. Our goal will be to help them remove the ignorance that nationhood instills in conformity. We will facilitate their “Awakening to the Wisdom they have Within.” Offer all compassion through guidance and a big welcome when they, too, realize that all we need is love. Love is all we ever needed now and forever amen.

Listen to the Voice of a Mystic. His madness may just resonate with the Divine in You!

To ‘be or not to be’ Gay and in Love again

by contoveros

     Deborah loved with a love that was more than a love. Cupid’s arrow struck her just as a choir of angels sang and a special cherub played the most beautiful music in all the land over an ancient lyre, the same instrument that a shepherd boy named David once played to honor the God of the Psalms. 

She loved Fran with all her heart, her mind, and her soul. And she wanted to shout it out to the whole world that there was a love that would never end, never grow old, never die. She needn’t say a word, however. Her devotion and adoring demeanor spoke volumes to those of us meeting the lucky couple for the first time in Philadelphia, my City of Brotherly Love, on Friday night, the summer solstice.

Love shone all around Deborah when she spoke of Fran, and a well-disguised, shy girl from within her nearly blushed as her lover looked deep into her eyes to acknowledge an almost palpable affection. Light from a thousand stars sparkled from their mutual smile, their caressing eyes, their in-tune and synchronized hearts, which seemed to beat as one.

Saring Unconditional Love with Each Other

Taking her hand, Fran walked alongside this beauty of a woman, offering a silent prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving step by step through the long summer night, the longest night of the couple’s young lives. Too soon, they disappeared from view, leaving behind just a memory and an image of what any one of us would give a million dollars to have: the unconditional love of another human being, another man, another woman, even for but one moment of a gay, rich life.

Here’s to Deborah and Francesca. Two women in love. True Love among true lovers, if you have ever seen it in this or any other lifetime!

* * * *

     They were a sight to see and to glorify when you need to recall what love could be, and is, all about. The purest emotion God created for His creatures to share with Him and with one another, sans color, creed, national origin, or sexual orientation. Love has always been color-blind and gender-neutral for the young and old, the sick and the well, the poor and the not-so-poor; even for a 64-year-old whose soul mate just turns out to be a 21-year-old.

Love has triumphed in our world. It’s exploded into space, signally all the many universes that Planet Earth will allow all love to flourish from whatever source or sex it manifests.

Okay to Love and Marry, says Supreme Court

Today, I am Gay. Today, all of us are as Gay as we would like to be or not to be. That is the question the US Supreme Court answered in a shout to the entire world that all who love will never be prosecuted or persecuted for whom they choose to fall in love.

I feel elated and so happy for those who have hidden themselves for far too long. We, society, could not see until now that love is not confined to procreation. It can’t be regulated and legalized only to those wearing opposite types of clothes or having genital differences. Love arises in all of God’s children, no matter how dissimilar one person might be to you or to me.

————-

Fall in Love, Everyone.

Fall for anyone you like. Fall in love again with someone you don’t even like but stay together for the sake of the children. It’s legal. It’s holy. It’s fun!

It’s as gay as gay can be, and it’s all free for you to be or not to be.

Happy Mothers’ Day, Poor Little Thérèse

by contoveros

     How could I – a mother of two with a 10-year drug problem – be facing a life sentence for something stupid I did at the local Rite Aid store? Continue reading →

Vietnam War veteran recalls his journey

by contoveros

     Dealing with the Vietnam War becomes a little easier each time I write about it. I “desensitize” myself. I now see my actions as separate from the emotions I felt while a young soldier, as well as the feelings of guilt many veterans like me, imposed on ourselves while readjusting to civilian life. It’s helpful when a high school student asks questions and you try to be honest and direct.
Continue reading →

Trayvon Martin prosecution fully justified

by contoveros

If I were prosecuting George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, I would charge him with murder and conspiracy to obstruct justice, adding several named officers of the Sanford. Fla., police department – as well as the state attorney – as co-conspirators.  Continue reading →

Rush Limbaugh should study reproduction

by contoveros

We should accept Rush Limbaugh’s apology for calling a woman a slut only if he agrees to take and pass a course on female reproduction. Then, and only then, can we be assured that someone other than locker-room juveniles has finally taught him the real facts about the birds and the bees. Continue reading →

Let Catholics ‘opt out” in birth control plan

by contoveros

I don’t understand all the fuss that Catholic universities and hospitals are raising over providing health care for women that includes mandatory birth control provisions. Why not let “Practicing Catholics” follow the teachings of their church to “opt out” for the coverage, while permitting non-Catholics what doctors and women’s groups say is a health benefit?  Continue reading →

We the People, not We the Corporations

by contoveros

“Corporations are People, my Friend”

Well, if you trace the history of something called corporate “personhood,” you can blame this inglorious recognition on an unelected clerk writing a summary of a court decision that never actually decided this issue.  Continue reading →

Seeing a Veteran’s’ History Never Repeats

by contoveros

Do all of us & yourself a favor.

Keep an eye out for a Veteran.

Actively seek out someone in your church, synagogue or temple and befriend him so that what happened in Philadelphia last week never happens again.  Continue reading →

Don’t ‘better’ yourself by berating another

by contoveros

I was seething when I saw my former US senator decry Blacks receiving food stamps from the government. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania told an Iowa audience this week that he would tackle this “race problem” if elected president, thus echoing the sentiments of his old congressional colleague, Newt Gingrich, who suggested poor students in city schools clean the bathrooms for their more affluent ones, rather than grow up to be pimps or prostitutes.  Continue reading →

‘Too Afraid’ to Say a ‘Woman Scared You’

by contoveros

“Why did you shoot her?”

“I don’t know.”

With these three words, the defendant buried himself, and no matter what I did to rehabilitate a self-defense claim before the jury, we were sunk. It showed that no matter what one plans, sometimes something can, and always will, go wrong.  Continue reading →

Newt, a big-headed, brain-bloated bully

by contoveros

Newton Le Roy Gingrich is a big-headed, brain-bloated bully who is best understood if you picture what kind of kid he might have been and remember why you disliked him and his sophomoric antics while growing up. Continue reading →

My life is dependent on the rest of you

by contoveros

     I am as dependent on you as you are on me, as we all are on the kindness and labor of others we too often take for granted.

     As I look around, I see that my fortune is dependent on the cooperation and contributions of others. Continue reading →

Remembering warriors of all of our ages

by contoveros

     “Warriors have been rewarded for their service  or their families have been provided support, since the beginning of organized society. From the veterans of Egypt in the third millennium B.C. through the Crusaders of medieval Europe, to veterans of today, governments have compensated their military personnel or their survivors, for loss of life, wounds, injuries, or length of service in defense of the state. Continue reading →

‘Right to Work’ — now a State of our Union

by contoveros

I’m a union man. Even though I held but one adult job as a dues-paying member, I will always be a union man. Why? Because I believe it’s the truly right path for the working man to walk.

Not everyone will secure a job represented by a union contract. Less than 18 percent of the US workforce is unionized. But we owe it to unions — starting with the craft guilds in the Middle Ages — for elevating the dignity of the laborer, be it a mechanic, a restaurant worker or the cop on the beat. A union shop at one business helps improve the lot of a dozen non-union workplaces elsewhere. Always has and always will.

Oh, I know there have been excesses. People blame unions for driving manufacturing jobs from industrial states to cheaper labor in developing nations. But for every job lost overseas, I can point to concessions progressive unions have made at home during economic downturns.

    Union help to create greater working conditions

America would not have developed its large middle class had it not been for unions, the blue-collar ones our grandfathers fought to create through collective bargaining, strikes, and long hours on picket lines. Their protests of working conditions led to the creation of a minimum wage, the banishment of child labor, and the acceptance of a 40-hour work week.

————–

     The 40-hour work week is nothing to scoff at, Mr. Union Buster. I recall interns at a metropolitan hospital negotiating with management to lower the hours employees should work to no more than 80 hours per week. That union “demand” headed the list of working improvements young doctors sought, and were glad to have gained

     Negotiating contracts as a newspaper reporter

I’ll never forget serving as a shop steward along with my Republican buddy — a former “Nader’s  Raider”  — as we helped to negotiate a contract between the newspaper we worked for as reporters and The Newspaper Guild. We were “that close” to a settlement when the publisher offered to pay an increase to one person working in the dispatch department, but not the other.

The employees did similar work, but one dealt with the public while the other dealt with newspaper carriers. The public representative was a good-looking blonde who was “being groomed” by management who had caught her eye. The other was an older woman, less-endowed, but nonetheless capable of the exact same work.

I refused to vote for the proposed contract, becoming the lone holdout, and was prepared to “hit the streets” unless and until the publisher offered a raise across the board for the dispatcher position. He did, and I became so inspired by the union that I took a leave of absence to work as an “organizer” to help others form their own unions. I entered law school later to become a labor lawyer.

———–

Union contract negotiators will help everyone

(I don’t think anyone ever told the second dispatcher how her union worked on her behalf. I saw it as my responsibility to a “fellow worker” and believed with all of my heart that another union negotiator would have done the same for me.)

Unions can serve as the moral compass in the workplace by preventing business abuses. Is it any wonder that the rise of corporations and the “one-percenters” in the past 30 years has been with the decline of, and attack on, the union movement?

[“You have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t have a job . . . No one to blame but yourself if you are not rich.”] 

—  Former Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain

War is never the answer today (11-11-11)

by contoveros

On this Veterans Day, 11-11-11, what would you tell yourself if you could go back in time and greet that young man recently returned home from the war?

     War is never the answer,

     But only a failure on all

     Sides to reach an answer. Continue reading →

A noble banker needs to occupy here

by contoveros

Is there a noble banker in the world? Only someone in the lending business who sees his calling as a “service for the people,” I believe, could correct past abuses and recommend changes for, and in the best interests of, us “99 percenters.”

I am sure there are many who entered the field with the best intentions and still work with distinction, living up to the honor bestowed only upon the most trustworthy in society. We need honest and reliable people who know their way around economics to guide the rest of us. When a few abuse the faith we place in them, it cripples the entire process and causes the type of havoc we see in protests by people who feel betrayed, used, and nearly hopeless.

Served as “Payroll Officer” twice as a Lietenant

———-

     Part of my “duty” as a lieutenant in the Army was to serve as a payroll officer in the states and another time in Vietnam. I short-change myself both times, losing $80 once and about $40 the next time. I didn’t report either discrepancy because I did not want superior officers to question my efficiency or competency.

     You see, I felt “honored” to serve in that capacity. I had barely obtained a high school degree with no classes in home economics or any other type of economics. While in the military, I served as “paymaster” in between roles as a training officer in Ft. Polk, Louisiana, and as a combat infantry platoon leader in Southeast Asia. I enjoyed assisting those of all ranks who depended on their monthly pay, and I got so much out of taking part in their lives and what they planned to do with their cash.

     (The Army had also assigned me to prosecute soldiers committing minor infractions and I learned I never wanted to take the side of government against a person ever again. I would eventually end up representing defendants in criminal cases brought by government officials.)

     Bankers are needed by all parts of society

I believe that anyone who works in banking provides a much-needed service to the rest of us. We elevate our financial managers and count on them to give advice to our government leaders to steer us through both good and bad economic times. We depend on them when we need to borrow money, and we trust they won’t take advantage of their unique positions.

But when they do, we need people from within the field to call them out, to decry practices that might have been legal in the eyes of the law, but clearly illegal according to the social contract persons of their station assume when taking on such a role.

Money lending historically has been seen as a necessary evil at best, and grounds for excommunication at worst. (See the practice by the Catholic Church.) A main argument against it was that it created excessive profit and gain without “labor.” Labor was deemed as “work” in a Biblical context. Profits from money-lending or “usury” were not gained from any substantial work but from greed, trickery, and manipulation, according to early tenets in the three major Western religions.

———–

     Unless honorable men practicing in the field step forward and offer to make needed changes today, I believe we’ll return to those “Dark Ages” where more drastic measures were used against those “one percenters.”

Can anyone spell “D E F A U L T” on loans?

A Message to all of the ’99 Percenters’

by contoveros

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

  • — Walt Whitman composed this for the preface to his poem “Leaves of Grass.”
  •     It tells how and why we all should occupy ourselves – all in one flowing sentence!

“Let’s Occupy a Vital Earth” — (L.O.V.E.)

by contoveros

  Let’s Occupy a Vital Earth!

     Try it on.

See if it fits and whether you’d be comfortable in adopting it when the Occupation of Wall Street and the protest at a thousand other locations worldwide come to an end.

And end it will, with nothing to commemorate it save historians remembering in their books the greatest mass demonstration since Abraham protested the Tower of Babel. 

And just like Babel, this rising up will fall into ashes, unless we harness the spirit from this “cry in the wilderness” and put it into action. An action that is both “for” and “against” the economic system we work in, if we’re lucky enough to have a decent job to work.

———–

     How can we do this?

  • — Simply by creating a group of conscientious citizens to recommend improving the economic lot of mankind. Form a committee from a variety of backgrounds whose principal task would be to monitor human affairs from a perspective of ethics and morality. Join religious, political, and scientific people together with bankers, artists, lawyers, and environmentalists. Recruit poets, academics, and writers and set their task to devise a system of commerce that encourages profits but inhibits the destructive competitiveness that places the pursuit of money above all other desires, above all other values.

————

     The wealthiest and most powerful nations understand that you cannot neglect basic human values. The Ninety-Nine Percenters are reminding them they need to change. They should accept a universal responsibility for the common good and the social contract they have with not only the less fortunate, but those of us with some economic security, who know deep inside what the One Percent is doing must end.

Once recommendations are made, the Committee would send its ideas to splinter groups of like-minded persons in each city, state, and country whose citizens could benefit from implementations. Publicize the names of banks, savings and loans and institutions that begin to comply with the voluntary suggestions. Let those with capital decide where to put their investments to perhaps take in less profit but give much more back to those who helped us with our gains.

     L.O.V.E. — that and good old-fashioned compassion will help in the pursuit of happiness, while relieving suffering for others.

Try it. It may Grow on You.

Advice to any & all Wall Street operatives

by contoveros
  • “We all dream of a kinder, happier world. But if we wish to make it a reality, we have to ensure that compassion inspires all our actions. This is especially true with regard to our political and economic policies. Given that probably half the world’s population lacks the basic necessities of adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education, I believe we need to question whether we are really pursuing the wisest course in this regard.  Continue reading →

We have met the Enemy and he is Us!

by contoveros

I looked into the other side of the political spectrum, and I saw something I hardly recognized.

I saw myself.

How did this come about, this kinship I felt develop with those I meant to separate from? 

I refused to see them as a hateful enemy.

And then I saw him as someone I could try to understand from my own perspective from within.

I too place the highest esteem on rugged individualism. I don’t want any handouts and I think persons grow stronger when they must conquer adversities in their lives including economic, social and physical ones.

I like the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and believe that a man has a right to defend himself — and more importantly his family — if he truly believes they’re threatened by serious bodily harm and taking another’s life is the only way to prevent deadly force.

Don’t want to hear about it, but still approve it

I never want to hear that someone got an abortion or learn that a woman would ever find herself in such a desperate situation where the only option left to her was to choose such an irreparable action.

Government should stay out of my private affairs and require “means testing” for recipients of any programs the US and other industrial nations have created as safety nets. I would include America’s Social Security and Medicare programs in those categories.

     I would do away with all wasteful regulations and give bonuses to government workers who devise plans to cut spending, even if it meant savings by trimming their own department’s annual budget.

I want someone to invoke the goodness and compassion of a higher force when someone opens public meetings, but it doesn’t have to be the One I believe in.

Time to whittle away the differences

You know, I ain’t so much different from those guys “over there.” Now that I see how alike we are, perhaps we can whittle away at the differences we believe keep us so far apart. I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.(youtube.com)

 (“We have met the enemy and he is us”

    —from the old Pogo Comic Strip)

Wall Street never profits anyone’s soul

by contoveros

     The phone rang, and Henry Rushing answered it, hoping the call would not delay his weekly trip to church services Sunday morning. The pastor of his Presbyterian Church was on the line. “Henry, you’ve got to prepare yourself,” the cleric said in his most comforting voice. “There are demonstrators outside our building protesting. Their signs have your name on them, and they’re not too charitable with what they’re alleging.” Continue reading →

These are the True Signs of Our Times!

by contoveros

When I read the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were unfocused and without a coherent message, I took a closer look at them in Philadelphia, and discovered some were disheveled street persons looking for handouts, and one was a graduate school political science major spouting Marxist teaching.

     They represented only one percent.

   The remaining 99 percent of the other protestors were mostly young, highly educated, unemployed or underemployed men and women who got tired of the debt-ceiling fiasco and took to the streets to mobilize against the Tea Party followers.  Continue reading →

“For the Signs, they are a ‘Changing'”

by contoveros
(From Part I, These are true signs of our Times/)

The greatest protest of our generation is seeking change in all shapes and sizes. You can see it in the signs the demonstrators carry, writing the letters out really big with magic markers so that passersby need not squint to get the messages.

There is not just one message, but many, which all have one thing in common: a belief that our world can do better for all and not just the few, the ninety-nine percent making $55,000 a year (per family) or less, as opposed to the one percent controlling some 40 percent of the wealth in the United States of America.

     They don’t want your money, Mr. Entrepreneur, only your attention for a moral and ethical way of life that takes into consideration more than the Almighty Dollar.  Continue reading →

You ask me: ‘WHY I AM A DEMOCRAT?’

by contoveros

Why am I a Democrat?

I was born this way.

No, that’s not right.

I was raised this way.

No, that’s not right either.

I chose to be a Democrat.  Continue reading →