Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied Bombings In Syria And Iraq

Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied  Bombings In Syria And Iraq

Stop The Damn American Killer Drone Attacks Everywhere- Stop The Saudi Bombing Decimation Of Yemen-Stop The American Military Aid To Israel- Hell, Just Stop The Madness In The Middle East  

 

Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19^th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).       

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 
Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on them.    

The biggest problem though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing, wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights out.

All in all though they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it. Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it. 

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Then the endless wars came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for “boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral damage.    

So the wars drove them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession (really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its head publically.

More troubling recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were nobody’s friends, should be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full force.  

Everywhere they went, to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam thought one time, maybe more than one time, that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could.

 

 

As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

Here is what Ralph had to say recently on Fritz Jasper's blog about the endless wars of late:

If you look closely, hell, if you just look at the visual, an old “stick-on” button-Stop The Wars meaning this day Stop The F-----g Wars at the top of this post that I have been wearing for years, that accompanies this sketch you will notice that it is ragged with wear, has been through a lot of hard times over the past decade or so but the message still rings true, still needs to be proclaimed like never before. Today in April 2015 I add the now month long American-supported Saudi aerial decimation of Yemen as the latest installment on the war front, no war fronts, that I had initially written about in February 2015 when I argued against the very real likelihood that Obama (okay, okay I will be civil today since he and his ilk hold all the cards, ah, hold all the weapons, and call him President Obama but I do so holding my nose) would get a resolution through Congress to go full-bore on the ISIS front. He, the President, said at the time not including ground troops, or really no additional ground troops since he has snuck a couple of thousand in as “advisers” in Iraq and Syria who are holding his Iraqi and Syrian agents by the hand as they go into battle already but we should be very wary on that sneaky front since it looks like additional ground forces will be necessary as everybody now has a timetable of a decade of so more of off-hand fighting. AND included at the time some kind of stepped-up military engagement in Ukraine which is looking very much more likely than when I posited the idea in February.

As I said then as well this from a “peace” President (an oxymoron in the United States and a few other countries) who has actually won the Nobel Peace Prize if you can believe that by this unconventionally bellicose man. So you can image what the other guys, the Republicans are up to, are ready to go hammer and tong on (beside their bugaboo Obamacare obsession which really is played out).

So, yes, I am a non-partisan, I willingly go after both parties, on the issues of war and peace and have been doing so since I got “religion” after my own service during the Vietnam War, another war that proved nothing, that we were consciously lied to about, and one that almost tore the United States apart including a near mutiny in the Army by about 1969. Prior to that “religious” conversion, I had had harbored the same kind of bellicose thoughts about America’s enemies in the world, including the benighted Vietnamese as the next guy, excepting a quirky thing about abolishing nuclear weapon learned at the knew of my Catholic Worker-influenced grandmother. So I know both sides and know too the vehemence of my anti-war commitment, the kind of vehemence that is the special Provence of the converted.      

Make no mistake I hold, and those I know who I have worked with lately in Veterans For Peace and the umbrella nation organization United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC), an organization that long ago provided the stick-on button which has seen much wear, hold no truck with ISIS, none for those savages. Hold no truck with all the emerging swarms of religious fanatics from Christian fundamentalist climate nay-sayers to Islamist fundamentalists ready to carry one and all back to the 8^th century (including those advanced jet fighter Saudis who actually think they are running an 8^th century society otherwise) to Zionist irredentists going back to Biblical times for their authority. And you wonder why the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

But that, my friends, is a long way from assuming that the United States, which one way or another has “created” ISIS (and on the other “front” aided the fascist-supported coup in Ukraine which has exploded in its face), should be bombing and threatening ground troops in situations where who knows what the hell is going on. Off the recent track record in the failed state of Iraq, the failed state in Libya, the failed state of Yemen (if it ever really was a state but since everybody of late, every bourgeois academic from Henry Kissinger on down has been yakking about the inviolability of the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 I will let that argument pass) the nearly failed state in Syria (I am still looking for those “moderate” anti-ISIS forces that the United States is trying to supply in Syria) and the also nearly failed state in Ukraine all of which have the fingerprints of American involvement over them the beginning of wisdom is to oppose further military involvement. Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings and Drone Attacks! No Military Aid To Israel! No Military Aid to Ukraine….and that is just for starters.                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration

May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration

A Con Artist Conned-With Katrina, The Girl With The Sparkling Eyes, In Mind

A Con Artist Conned-With Katrina, The Girl With The Sparkling Eyes, In Mind 

 

 

 

By Zack James

Hey, Phil Markin, P.I. private eye to you here to give you the low-done, oops low-down, pardon me for being a little cynical but that must have been a Freudian slip as they say, on my lawyer friend , Tim Clary, (and a guy whom I have worked for on a contract basis for several years in the interest of full disclosure investigating people’s troubles for him in order to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world as he likes to put it on his more liberal and expansive days), who has as usual let himself get in way over his head with a dame, a young dame to boot, who has been leading him by the nose (or another more private part if you ask me) for a few months now.

Usually I like to make some commentary about the cases I am trying to tell you about, to set you straight about what real cases in the private detection business are about not that tripe, hell, that crap you get on television or the movies, get in lurid half-dressed babe covered  crime novels. This time I will just let Tim bask in his glory, his maybe glory,  since apparently this time, this “one last time” as the dame, Katrina, has said right along every time she put the bite on him he has finally got everything right-right for now anyway. This is the way he told me the story one night at Nick’s on Merrimack Street in Lowell where he has his one-man law office in the seen better days Orley Building when we were discussing the details of another case (a missing person’s case where the wife was looking for the left suddenly husband for alimony and child support whom I never found at least under that name and social security number. That is the way of such cases. Usually a client could save his or her money by filing a “missing person’s report” with the public cops and be done with it for all the good getting a private detective to do the work since people who seriously go missing, go for a reason, and go deep down in the crevices). If I have something to say, or the narrative needs a little explanation I will put what I have to say in brackets. Hey Tim, good luck brother-and forget about anymore “one last time” with this one, with this Katrina fox:   

[If you can believe this, although maybe today with all the social media, social networking I think they call it, maybe it isn’t so unbelievable, Tim and this Katrina have never met in the flesh. Have not for reasons that shall not detain us here even talked on the cellphone. All of their communications has been through a few hundred more or less short and almost business e-mails. So what Tim was telling over drinks that night at Nick’s was about the details of an e-mail that he had sent her after she had sent him yet another “request” for dough, for money, this time to get out of a hospital, Saint Tomas’ in Manila, that’s in the Philippines. He had read the dispatch to her composed on his word processor on his computer that he had brought with him so he could do some work at home.]       

 

Sweetie- some days it is great to be a lawyer, to actual help somebody, to help a damsel in distress, you okay, and today is one of them. Yeah, to actually help somebody without having to crush somebody else which is the usual case in our adversarial legal system where in court one side wins and the other side loses most of the time.  Most days are like that, dog eat dog, not at all like they tried to play with your head with in law school about justice being blind and everybody is equal under the law.

And it is not just the court system that is screwed up but I remember back when I was doing more criminal cases starting out like a lot of young hungry lawyers looking to get a start in the business and some guy, usually they were guys, was in court on a drug charge, maybe trafficking, maybe possession of too much dope to not be prosecuted like for kilos or something who would get up on the stand and act all innocent (like I told him to do) and then the prosecutor starts talking about a couple of prior convictions for the same offenses that had been “continued without a finding” (meaning they would go away if the guy kept his nose, literally his nose in cocaine cases, clean for a period long enough to say he was rehabilitated). Of course he never told me that little piece of information when I had asked him about “priors” so naturally I looked like a fool when I went to the bench and asked for some kind of plea bargain rather than the “not guilty” I was looking for. Or the time a guy in all honesty (he was a little simple-minded but not as much as he pretended) thought he had some kind of constitutional right to have a pistol in his hand when he displayed it in a 7/11 store in Dracut and the clerk, scared out of her mind, though it was an armed robbery as she handed over the money. It was, the guy had about six “priors,” for various armed and unarmed robberies.  Had a million cases like that.       

Hell later the civil case clients would still goof with me sometimes like when I did a few divorce cases before I gave that up as too scary once I realized that I would rather defend the low-rent criminals who at least were half honest when they would lie, male or female it didn’t matter, about why they wanted a divorce. Worse when it came to dividing up the property. Christ they fought tooth and nail over a television set or some foolish piece of furniture. I won’t even go into the “civil wars” when there were lawsuits between two unrelated parties about ownership of land, or chattels. Worse when there were personal injury cases (although “win or lose” I made good money on those cases I will admit) and one party would almost ask the judge for the death penalty beside money damages in the case for some car dent or whiplash back deal. Jesus.   

You will appreciate this one. I have to chuckle every time I think about Harry’s case, or rather cases. Harry was from up your way, up in Bedford if I recall, who had a small printing business in Lowell over on Merrimack Street by the river in the Taylor Building (now converted to condos at some outrageous price just because they had a river view but they were poorly constructed and I wouldn’t live in one if you paid me). He was always coming to me to “negotiate” with some customer who was not paying his or her bills. One time a big customer, an independent book publisher, got behind on his payments, had as it turned out made a bunch of bad decisions about what books would sell in the consumers’ market, and got so far behind in his bills that Harry took him to court, rightfully so. When Harry got up on the stand to say his piece he, on his own, started talking about putting the poor guy in now non-existent debtor’s prison like something out of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations which you probably read in school.  Like Harry had never heard of bankruptcy laws (that the guy finally had to go to which was sad in a way because he had in his younger days published some very good if not exactly best-seller books which is always worthwhile). When I asked you about your situation in the hospital and whether you could leave or were being held before you explained everything to my satisfaction I thought of you as a Harry’s case for real.       

[I remember Harry, Harry Argos, a good guy but had been as an immigrant too trusting of what he had heard told to him in those classes he took to become a citizen and so thought justice was on the side of the little guy. Got all riled up when some “native” tried to pull the wool over his eyes and so wound up in Tim’s office half the time for no reason that any court of law could, or would, do anything about.]   

You know even this big deal case from Washington I am working on now that I keep telling you I am busy on is a “one side wins, the other side loses” situation (except me because I am getting paid, paid a lot, or I should say I shall get paid a lot since I am working by the hour on the thing and so not dependent on winning like in some cases I have had, some cases when I put a lot of time in and got nothing for it when the client lost). It is about land, or really land use which people come to me about since I won a case a while back, a big case in Massachusetts, on appeal about who owned the land. Not a big case like the U.S. Supreme Court case in Miranda, the give you your rights case, or Lawrence, the gay civil rights case, but a big land use case that lawyers still refer to when they have what are called “adverse possession” cases. What that means in laymen’s terms is that one guy used land for a long time, over twenty years, thinking it was his but on the land deed it was really another guy’s. That other guy showed no proof of active ownership so the first guy got possession. What was important to the first guy, my guy, was that he have that land to sell because a huge condo developer wanted the land but only if he could have all of it undisputed. That is what the D.C. case is all about but the land use size is much bigger, the developer wants to put 160 condos/townhouses up but needs a disputed strip for a street between sections. Without that-no go.

But enough of these law court “war stories” let’s get to why you should be happy that I feel good to be a lawyer today. [I agree-why the hell is he telling some bimbo who could care less except maybe for the dollar signs lure that might be brought in about these old and new cases. Like she gave a fuck except for her own capers, her own screwball antics.] Last night I was talking to my accountant about your situation, about the blizzard of e-mails we had sent back and forth earlier in the day in order to made a plan to move forward and get you out of “jail,” about what had been happening to you over the past couple of weeks since you paid off that late insurance premium on your mother’s life insurance policy. See I need his authorization from the law office accounts, especially for a large sum like $2100. I have been keeping him “out of the loop” on those bank transfer things that didn’t work because they were being drawn off my credit cards which he doesn’t have control over (meaning he doesn’t have to authorize use although he does need the monthly statements for tax purposes, Christ, he always as you know wants some damn receipt for every little thing).

[Of course this whole “imaginary’ conversation with his accountant, with Sal Manning, who really has kept Tim out of more trouble with more authorities than you can shake a stick at, and that is exactly what it was, had been nothing but a lie. A lie for a lie. See Tim had finally figured out that Katrina, if that was even her real name, had been “scamming” him, had been leading him on a classic scam build-up which at this point involved the idea that Tim was supposed to send dough, a couple of thousand dollars, United States Dollars, to her bank in the Philippine, the Banco de Oro, BOD, to get her out of the hospital she had entered the night before she was supposed to go to an insurance company, Sun Life, and collect about fifty thousand dollars from a life insurance policy her recently deceased mother had left for her and her brother. Tim by the way had paid the “late” premium on that policy otherwise the policy would have lapsed. As I tell you these details you can see what our Katrina was all about and why I said that nasty remark about Tim being led by something more than his nose. The deal she was putting was down at that point was that she needed dough to pay the hospital bills, and her back rent. That hospital part was the key-supposedly she couldn’t leave the hospital until she paid her bill and so couldn’t get to the insurance company to pick up that sweet fifty thousand-in cash. She needed “babe,” her term of endearment for him, to “one last time” help her out. And Jesus he was still ready to.]            

By the way when I told him [Sal Manning, the accountant] about the failed bank transfers from my bank, Bank of America (hereafter B of A), to your bank, Banco de Or, especially from Xoom which he uses all the time and likes and which you said you were not in favor of using he had the problem solved in a jiffy. That paperwork BOD (Banco de Oro) wanted you to sign was because you had a savings account and not a checking account. According to him there was no way Xoom or Bank of America (I mean B of A) could transfer money from my bank account to yours because you didn’t have a routing number. So what that local branch of BOD (Banco de Ora, okay) would have wanted from you if you could have contacted them was to sign off on paperwork to allow international bank transfers into your savings account. That was all.

[This, again for the gullible or easily misled, was all a lie as mentioned in the previous brackets. Never let it be said that once Tim got on his own high horse that he could lie with the best of them, tell a tale as good as he received. Hell he was born on the hard-edged working class section of Riverdale about twenty miles away from Lowell so he was no stranger to the “lie,” the non-professional lie once he saw the light. He did say that night at Nick’s that he had gotten “rusty,” had not seen the tell-tale signs of the scam. I already made my statement about why that was, what he was being led by.]                              

But that wasn’t the reason he, my accountant, called me, although while I had him the line I told him about your situation. You know about you being in the hospital for stomach ulcers since you had not been eating, or had been fasting for some reason, I don’t remember off-hand which it was, the former I think, but basically not taking care of yourself because you had no dough to live on until you cashed in on the $50,000 (sorry I don’t know how many pesos, Philippine pesos that was, about 2,000,000 if I remember the conversion rate correctly) insurance policy we had paid the premium on. That you had gone to the hospital, taken I think by your brother and two cousins, Rufus, no, Ricky, and Jonathan the night before you were supposed to get the big insurance pay-out you were entitled too. Damn getting sick just when you were going to get financially well. (Did you ever tell me your brother’s name I know he is a student and is about seventeen, right?). They had taken you to the same hospital, Saint Tomas, where your mother had been taken to before she passed away and which we had had to buy off for $800 USD (United States dollars, 35,000 pesos right) in medical bills before they would let you give her a proper burial.

My accountant asked about which wing of the hospital you were being held at, the low-rent charity ward or the “plush suites,” his terms since he knew the hospital from trips to Manila on business, and I told him because we had pieced off the place in your  mother’s case with that 800 clams (35,000 peso clams) before they let you be treated with the Mayfair swells, you know the upper crust, in the nicer section (his saying “being held at” like you were a prisoner which is as you know I thought until just yesterday when you straightened me out and so I did the same for him about your wanting to do everything by the book, legally).

Like I said the real reason my accountant called was because he had received an e-mail by some parish priest from that Quinpo (sorry if I misspelt it) church your mother belonged to thanking me for sending the five years Mass Card who although not familiar with your mother’s name, didn’t know her from Adam or Eve from what my accountant said, was pleased that I had thought of her, one of God’s children,  and that of course on her death anniversary day they would do their duty to her by saying a Mass in her name. (I gave February 27^th as her death date since that was the day you left I think and if that is not right then that will still count for her as her remembrance time anyway.) Of course you know I only did that out of respect for you (and indirectly your brother whose name I don’t know, is it Angel, maybe you did tell me). I have mentioned my feelings as an old-time sinner myself about the Church before and I don’t want to get started on that because that is not what this message to you is about. About great news not ancient Catholic childhood mental wounds that have never properly healed. But just be aware that as for your mother somebody is looking out for her when you are away elsewhere.

[Again why the big build up, why would she give a fuck about his traumatic rigid and distorting Catholic that she, we, had suffered through.]                 

Of course since I have known my accountant for a long time and except when he goes crazy over receipts and invoices he and I get along, and he has after all kept me out of trouble, out of serious trouble anyway, he felt free to make his usual “pussy-whipped” comment after I told him about your sad ass tale and your various post insurance premium- related capers. You remember I hope that e-mail I sent you one time about his comment about “thinking with cock, not my brain,” in dealing with you once he saw how pretty you were and how nice too. Here is a copy just in case you forgot what with your other worries and stuff:

“Hi Sweetie-hope things are going well with you-thanks for the revealing photos of you. They certainly had my woodie getting hard just thinking about those beautiful tits of yours (“Woodie” that’s your word for cock right-I remember you calling it that once time when we were talking before you left for the Philippines). Of course I would have to have a closer inspection, a much closer inspection in order to confirm how nice they are.

[Now you finally in detail get what I am talking about in this “relationship” between an older man and a younger woman-right. Forget all the “business’ stuff this is the hard-core truth coming out. The stuff that should half make you think Tim, however innocent, deserved all he got from this vixen. I told him so many times so I am not telling and tales out of school.]  

Now that the business stuff is over let me tell you a story about why I was asking for revealing photos of you. During this last insurance premium go-round my accountant said I was thinking with “my cock and not my brain” in dealing with you what with all the zigzags we went through.  He didn’t exactly put it that way but you know how guys talk about good-looking women and their desire for them  what he meant was that I was pussy-whipped, “cyber-pussy-whipped” by you because every little request by you for anything and I was calling him up day and night to see if it could be done without getting into trouble. That got me to thinking back to the previous photos that you had sent me of you before you went away. I was thinking that if I was pussy-whipped (which you and I know I am not but rather just trying to help a damsel in distress and will in the future too if necessary and we will work out some kind of thing that will be okay for both of us so we are on the same page) then I might as well have a look at the pussy I am being whipped by. Sometime when you get a chance I would not mind a little photo like that. This would be just between us but I would be able to laugh every time he [Sam Manning] went on and on about stuff like that. You could do that for me sweetie I hope.          

As usual when I have gone to Washington I always get behind and so I have been working today to get caught up on an interesting case I will tell you about sometime. I also jogged this morning before the rain started here. If you can believe this and this is no April Fools’ joke tomorrow and the day after (Sunday and Monday here) it is supposed to snow-not much but what the heck it is April. I am also finishing up an interesting novel by Ernest Hemingway-do you know who he is-or remember reading anything by him in high school-about Paris in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. I would like to go Paris this year in the fall so I am reading stuff like that to get motivated to go –Of course Paris is a place you don’t want to go alone if you know what I mean.    

I often think about what you are reading about, what you are doing over there while you are waiting for your fortunes to change. Tell me some stuff like that, what kind of food do they have there, did you go any place of interest. You know stuff like that so we can “reconnect.” 

I have learned the basics of sexting (oops) texting but it takes me a long time to put a message together. I haven’t got all the symbols and shorthand down. As you can tell it is much easier (and faster) for me to write a bunch of stuff in an e-mail-Let me hear from you and what you are up to and remember I will continue to be your amigo as things go forward-Later.” 

Then I sent you another e-mail which went like this:  

 “Hi sweetie- thanks for note- I sent you a note about sending your photos to g-mail address but that can wait until you have a phone-Will you have a phone before you leave the Philippines or wait until you get back to America. I sure would like to have a voice to put with that lovely face. I hope you don't mind me being a little sexy with you- all I know is that “woodie” was pretty hard when I saw those photos-kind of got hard just like that but I am sure you know that would happen when I saw them and I hope you are glad about it-I don't think you do mind about the little sexy stuff but everything I say is just between us.

[Need I say more.]

 As far as my accountant goes if he had seen those photos of you and the ones you sent before he would have the same reaction I did. Then who would be cyber-pussy-whipped. He's a good guy and like I said he has kept me out of trouble for a while and so that is good but he would never understand why I like a nice younger woman like you and have gone out of my way to help you even though we haven't met in person. But accountants are like that-never take a risk because it might throw their balance sheets off. You know the only sheets I am worrying about taking off-I hope.              

It is funny when you say you would never let me down because all through this business stuff whatever was going on I think in the back of my mind I had a feeling you would not, you just seemed to be that way. Maybe it was our both growing up kind of poor, kind of from the wrong side of the tracks as they say that made me feel that way. We can take about that some other time but we should talk about it.

I didn't quite understand about the "constructing church" you were talking about-is that in Paris? I don't remember hearing about that or seeing it the times I have gone there. Have you ever been to Paris? 

You know you might know that guy Hemingway although not his name did you ever read about a story called the Old Man and the Sea where this old-time Cuban fisherman is out by himself and sees a huge fish that will put him on easy street if he can catch it and bring it back to port and sell it. He catches the fish but along the way back to port about seven things happen and when he gets to port there is nothing to sell, the fish is nothing but bones. So much for easy street…” 

You had such a great response-remember. If not here’s the way that went:

“Hello babe thank you so much again I’m glad you like my photos! I know Woodie will like it too xoxoxo! Don't mind your accountant once we meet in person we will both show him and laugh in him for calling you that way! I know you're not that kind of guy he's just bitter because you will be with a fine lady and he won't! I appreciated all your good deeds for me babe and I promise I will never let you down! Speaking of down I can show you my down stairs of course but right after I get a phone with camera xoxo! Lol really? No I don't know that person but I love to read what you been writing! We will both go to the place I wanted so much and see the still constructing church together!! I've been reading a lot of space lately just bunch of random facts about universe and galaxy! I have never been to any nice place here since I don’t have money yet I have been eating more of Philippine foods and I kind of like it its call tinolang manok and pork sisig! Lol I’m glad you learning how to text if you can you can shoot me one sometimes and I will reply back! I only have less than $10 to survive the week and I hope I can get the money by this coming week or next week once I do I will let you know and will keeping you update of my comeback! I miss talking stuff like this with you!” 

Remember too how my accountant went crazy looking for that Sun Life insurance premium invoice or there was going to be hell for me to pay (and you bailed me out by sending the copy which was hard for you do to do when you were hospital and which I haven’t forgotten about, believe me I haven’t forgotten). Here’s a refresher:

“Desperate situation-HELP

Sweetie this is why the situation is desperate and I need your help. I, you maybe, we, are in trouble about that money I loaned you out of my pocket to pay your insurance premium of $1000 or whatever it was. I told my accountant who handles both the law office and my personal financial accounts about my sending you the WU money transfer and when I told him I had lent you from my pocket (what he called “behind his back”) he flipped out-again. Said didn’t I realize that lending the dough for the insurance premiums on top of paying the medical bills and funeral expenses made it look like I had an interest in the insurance money. Make it look like I was in with you on the insurance deal since I am the guy who sent the WU money transfers. In any case lawyers involved with client’s (that was the way the previous medical and funeral expenses went on the books in the law office ) is a big no-no-not legal, not ethical and he will be forced to report that to the Massachusetts Board Of Bar Overseers-the people who make sure lawyers don’t do stuff like that. Where you could be in trouble is that you knew I was a lawyer, knew the money for the medical expenses and funeral expenses and that first time I tried to send you the insurance money where I made a mistake on the name-remember was coming from a lawyer.           

He is not going to lose HIS job or get in trouble with the CPA (Certified Public Accountants) guys who license him so I need to get that damn insurance receipt and fast to show that I just loaned you the money to help you out. Otherwise he will be forced to turn his information over to the Bar Overseers and who knows what will happen. They do not like and there are plenty of cases about it seeing lawyers even looking like they are benefitting from third-party (you) insurance claim. I need to keep my license clean in order to practice law (and help you in the future when you get back to America and your nursing career or whatever else you want to do.

So sweetie can you please, please, please find another computer place there must be more than one in Manila to scan that receipt and send it quickly-very quickly. You can do that sweetie right-I have stood by you and done the best I could by you but now, right now, I need you to help me out.    

After that is done, after we can show that the insurance premium money was just a personal loan, then everything will look right and I can help you with the other stuff like the rent and all and it will just be personal and all right. You can do that for me sweetie-yes. After we get this behind us then I will help you to the best of my ability. And you know that’s true because I have a track record of helping you that you can depend on.       

Right now though nothing else matters but that receipt so let’s get to that. My lawyer said I shouldn’t even be communicating with you except to ask for the receipt but I felt I had to tell what I was up against so you would know how serious the situation is. I will abide by what he says though-no communication- until I get that receipt- I will be glad when this is behind us-su amigo” [Jesus.]

All of this rehashing of e-mails has a purpose though, a purpose that will make you realize what a good guy my accountant really is, how much you and I owe him, and why I am happy to be a lawyer today. I mentioned to my accountant as we were talking last night that because you were, in effect, under house arrest you couldn’t leave the hospital under penalty of arrest and incarceration in a real slammer (jail) and so couldn’t get to your bank to take care of that international money transfer issue that I mentioned above that he had solved for us by cluing us in about what BOD (Banco de Oro) wanted from you. Also that your relationship with Sun Life was thwarted when you got sick the night before you were to complete the deal and couldn’t get over to their offices to get your hands on what I then thought before you straightened me out otherwise was an insurance check you could deposit in your BOD (Banco de Oro) savings account. After you had told me that Sun Life only deals in cash pay-outs on insurance policies, even large ones like $50,000 USD (United States dollars and about 2,000, 000 Philippine pesos) I told him the same thing,

Told him that was why you couldn’t draw the dough out since you had to go there in person. That because you were in gaol (jail) you needed my help for one last time to pay off your jailers (they really are when you think about it since you, trying to act legally, can’t leave except under severe penalty). Needed me to sent you $2100 USD (United States dollars, around 9000 or 10,000 pesos right?) via Moneygram in care of your cousin Rickey, no, Jonathan, Jonathan Mateo because Rickey had either lost his driver’s license or had failed to renew it (that’s right isn’t it, lost it for speeding or something-did he, Ricky, ever get it back).

That’s when my accountant “flipped” out but also when he came back to earth and “saved” us. He told me and I quote, “ What are you crazy, didn’t you know that Moneygram  had been involved in settling a big fraud claims case a few months ago where they had let scammers use their site for illegal actions?” I said no, and that I wasn’t until recently in dealing with you up to speed on all this electronic money transfer stuff. He answered, “I wouldn’t use Moneygram in a million years.” Period.

When he settled down, after I asked him, pretty please, asked him how was I to help you if that avenue was closed off, he, once again, came up with the solution. Here is where it is good to know a few people in key places. See, as you might expect of a business accountant who works for lawyers, he deals with insurance companies all the time, so he knows, Sam Larkin, the Vice-President for International Affairs at Sun Life in America, which Sun Life in the Philippines is a subsidiary of. My accountant called Sam this morning and told him my/your/our story. No problem. Sam has ordered an agent in the Philippines, Tomas Ramos, to go to you at Saint Tomas  Monday or any day you want if Monday is no good and on giving him your insurance policy and premium invoice do whatever you need done. If you want cash or a check, done. He will arrange it. Sam suggested a check because $50, 000 USD (United States dollars, or what did I say before a couple of million Philippines pesos) is a lot of money to be carrying around the Philippines these days and he is right I think from what you have said about not going out at night or just being around that dangerous drug-infested neighborhood you live in with the batos locos hanging out right on that street you live on doing their dirty deeds just like in Manchester [the town that when Tim and Katrina first “met” on a sex site Katrina claimed she lived in ] or Lowell. Damn. If you need a ride to your bank, done. Anything you need to get you right just tell me what day and what time you want Tomas Ramos to come and take care of business I will call Tomas direct and it is done.

[Remember please that all the above is all bullshit, all set up to eventually “catch” Katrina out, or if necessary bring some kindof legal action against her knowing Tim’s wont in such matters. More likely if Katrina ever comes back to America, and that is iffy, I will be “contracted” to find her and bring her to “justice.” The less said about that possibility right now in theory the better.]     

So you can see why I like being a lawyer today. You win, I win, Angel (I think that is his name now that I think about it) wins, Jonathan and Ricky win.  My accountant, a good guy right, wins. Great news-right.              

[You now know why Tim is “on a mission,” or will be once I explain that Katrina told Tim that it was “impossible” for her to meet with Tomas Ramos, the representative from Sun Life in the Philippines that Sam Manning had arranged to meet Katrina in the hospital, no fuss, no muss because the hospital would not “let him in” where she was being held pending payment of her mounting hospital bills, brought on not by continuing care for whatever condition, unknown and never revealed to Tim, but in Catch-22 fashion be her inability to pay. That refusal, a “last straw” for Tim, since no hospital is going to refuse to let an agent in who is going to bring dough to pay them off if nothing else prompted another “lie” feast by him to finally “blow her off” pending whatever else legally or via my investigative prowess he might deem appropriate.]     

Sweetie-I hate to write a note like this but I am really up against it, or could be. I hate to ask for money from anybody since I usually have my own resources but like I said in my last e-mail I am in immediate trouble. I particularly hate to ask girls for money but I figure that we are beyond that, you are my best friend of late and I hope I am yours so it is okay. I know you would never let me down if you could help it and you already know I have not let you down when the deal when down. Another reason I don’t like asking you for money is because I don’t want you to get the idea that I am just hanging around you because you have that $50, 000 USD (United States Dollars, okay, which is what, about two million Philippine pesos, right) just sitting there waiting to be spent or invested (we can talk about that investing later which is a good idea even if like with me it ties up dough so you can’t get to it quickly sometimes).  But I figure there is no harm in trying to see if you can help me since I am the guy that got you the dough to pay the life insurance premium on your late mother’s, RIP, policy in the first place. 

[Tim had the day before written a “distressing” short e-mail about his own mounting bills which had to be paid and which thus made it impossible for him to send that couple of thousand, $2100 USD, United States Dollars, Katrina “needed” to pay out the hospital bills and the back rent. Her response “could he sent say $1500 USD.” Jesus what a vulture.]  

Here is the score and remember this stuff is only something I am telling you about to try to have you do something about to help if other things don’t work out. On May 1^st (our time, May 2^nd your time), or really May 2^nd (May 3^rd your time, right) since May 1^st falls on a Sunday this year my yearly health insurance premium of $4462. 53 USD (United States Dollars, about two hundred thousand Philippine pesos, right) is due. Yeah, I know I should pay by the month like everybody else but stuff like that, stuff that you have to pay anyway, I like to pay in one lump sum. What happens is that Harvard Pilgrim takes that out automatically from my checking account (the one I control but which my accountant monitors for tax purposes and the never-ending freaking receipts and invoices that you know he is crazy for, that makes his day for crying out loud even if he is a good guy otherwise).

The problem like I told you earlier is that with one thing and another I only have about two thousand ($2015 USD, United States Dollars, about a hundred thousand Philippine pesos, right) in the bank as of today, and that includes the one thousand bucks ($1000 USD, United States Dollars) you are not supposed to go below or they whack you with a penalty. So I am short, way short and if some dough I am expecting doesn’t come in from the various accounts (as you know, or maybe you don’t know but I will tell you now, we sent out invoices on monthly billing on the 15^th of the month [our time, the 16^th your time]) I am cooked because that bill will bounce from here to China, or maybe the Philippines anyway.

You know with my recent health problems which means I better have health insurance or go directly to the poor farm and the requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act to keep health insured (you might know that Act as Obamacare but that is the official name, okay) I cannot afford to let my health insurance lapse-even short term-since they double whack you with a premium hike and a penalty on your state/federal taxes. So I need to make sure I have dough to cover to be on the safe side by Friday April 29^th (Saturday April 30^th your time). That is why I need your help. That is why I know you will not let me down, no way, you are not built that way.  I know that already.                

Here’s the way out, here is the caper that depends on you and your help. I know you are in that dirty dungeon of a hospital, (where are you being held now - in the charity wards with the geeks and “lost souls” –damn those bastards holding you like this was the 19^th century and you were in some debtor’s prison out of a Charles Dickens novel). I know too that you have no dough to pay off your freaking mounting hospital bills since you can’t get over to Sun Life to get your hands on that real dough, that $45,000 USD in cash (United States Dollars) that will set you, your brother, your cousins Rudy and Jonathan and ME too up for a while. I know too because you told me and because you are a young woman who is both responsible enough to want to pay her bills as best she can and do stuff legally you don’t want to just “jail break” out of that hellhole. But this is what I want you to do first thing Monday morning your time (Sunday our time)-and it is perfectly legal-just go to the hospital administrator or the head of the billing/accounting department and tell them your story. Tell them (and show them that paid up invoice and the insurance policy too) you need to get out to do business with Sun Life. Let them have somebody go with you if they say they don’t trust you to come back. Tell them you will have dough, cash, dollars to pay off that hospital bill in full (don’t get pesos because as I will tell you in a minute how much I need they don’t help me in the United States, okay). Cry, flirt, go into a fit of despair, threaten them with a lawsuit, mention you have a lawyer (me) who will get to the bottom of this sordid business but make them do the right (and smart for them) thing.

With that done (with or without some escort-does it really matter to you, I hope not because you are up against it and I am too remember) and with your money safely in that BOD savings account (Banco de Oro) you can sent me say $1500 USD (United States Dollars, please), maybe $2000 USD (you know what that USD means now, right) by the best available method. A thousand ($1000 USD) might be enough if a check for $2500 USD comes in from a guy I did work for last month but figure the two numbers I quoted you-okay. You know more about all the aspects of international money transfers than I do so that is up to you-you know my name and address I think and if not I will sent it to you after you do this wonderful deed. I know you are a good girl and that you can do this for me, please. But I need it by Friday okay. You can do this, I know you can and if for some reason I don’t need the dough I will let you know before Friday because like I said I don’t like the idea that you might get the idea that I am just looking for a hand-out since right now you have a ton of dough just waiting to help you out and I am up against it.                     

If there is a snag on this perfectly reasonable plan for some reason here is what I ask you to do. Doesn’t your cousin Rudy, no, Ricky owe me five hundred buck ($500 USD) from back a couple of months ago when I sent him dough from Washington to cover a speeding ticket or some problem he had. Tell him I will settle for say $250 or $300 USD and forget the rest. Your cousin Jonathan sounds like a helpful guy can you hit him up for say another $250-300 USD (maybe he and Ricky have to do it in Philippine pesos but that is okay I will take that and convert it here). How about your brother, I forget his name but I think it was Angel, or maybe I hope he is an angel, he must have few bucks saved up somewhere, say maybe $100 USD (or the peso equivalent). Maybe they can sell some books, or a television or something. Of course with Johnathan and our angel brother I will pay them back-asap-you know that, right. Let’s say they can put together $1000 USD together- that would help. Like I say you know all the money transfer routes so I will leave it up to you what way you sent it but please do so by Friday-okay.

I know you can do that first plan sweetie-do it for your good friend okay and when you get back to America believe me you won’t regret it-no at all.

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

Lawyer Timothy Clary, despite due diligence and the hire of a private investigator, me,  to “track her down like a dog” as he put it to me after, long after he got wise to what she was pulling on him, never heard about or from her again after that e-mail. Surprise-surprise.  Good riddance-that’s me, Phil Markin talking.