White Woman in Powerlessness.

We all start our day in the morning. The question Life asks of us is "How?"

"It is the morning time. Clarity. It comes in the morning arising with the morning clarity, a sense of a presence in the air and the possibility of a good day. The question to ask is: "What will I do with this chance?"- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 2/9/16

Ivanka Trump attends function at Trump International Hotel in Washington DC that took over the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Ave. between the White House and the Capital! 

Ivanka Trump attending function at Trump International Hotel in Washington DC that took over the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Ave. between the White House and the Capital, glows in a state of unawareness DC residents recognize and don't respect! She is unaware of what the Old Post Office was to Black DC residents. The Pavilion, as it was named when it became a commercial hub of the city, was a focus for social life. Before that, when it was abandoned, the homeless lived there, and transients found solace there. Prior to that DC residents from the top to the bottom of society and people from Virginia and Maryland gathered here for all kinds of reasons. 

Commerce is not for the president's gain, is not to be center of a presidency. But, in this administration Trump is using his office to make money that his devotees won't take into account as a lack of integrity, but as a clever business practice. Pouring U.S. tax dollars into his pockets when he goes to his resorts on official business is defended by his fan base. It is revelatory what we allow. As a nation, our credibility weakens daily under this administration, but the dumbass notions of white supremacy are allowed to undercut the status we have taken, and earned collectively for a simple and obvious reason. 

It is pointless to point this out to his base. Let them live with the inevitable outcome some decades from now, some of us say in disgust. But, being that dismissive is ignorant. Anything done by another affects us all. Citizens have to be conscious and mature enough to care at this level and white Americans have to enlarge their view of their priorities to understand the undercutting effect of their Doctrine of Discovery. 

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 9/9/18 

When Considering Trump, Think!

1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire

Quartz
by Annalisa Merelli
May 8, 2016

On Aug. 3, 378, a battle was fought in Adrianople, in what was then Thrace and is now the province of Edirne, in Turkey. It was a battle that Saint Ambrose referred to as “the end of all humanity, the end of the world.”

 

The Eastern Roman emperor Flavius Julius Valens Augustus—simply known as Valens, and nicknamed Ultimus Romanorum, (the last true Roman)—led his troops against the Goths, a Germanic people that Romans considered “barbarians,” commanded by Fritigern. Valens, who had not waited for the military help of his nephew, Western Roman emperor Gratian, got into the battle with 40,000 soldiers. Fritigern could count on 100,000.

 

It was a massacre: 30,000 Roman soldiers died and the empire was defeated. It was the first of many to come, and it’s considered as the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476. At the time of the battle, Rome ruled a territory of nearly 600 million hectares, with a population of over 55 million.

 

The defeat of Adrianople didn’t happen because of Valens’s stubborn thirst for power or because he grossly underestimated his adversary’s belligerence. What was arguably the most important defeat in the history of the Roman empire had roots in something else: a refugee crisis.

 

Two years earlier the Goths descended toward Roman territory looking for shelter. The mismanagement of Goth refugees started a chain of events that led to the collapse of one of the biggest political and military powers humankind has ever known.

 

It’s a story shockingly similar to what’s happening in Europe right now—and a it should serve as a cautionary tale.

 

According to historian Ammianus Marcellinus, in 376, the Goths were forced to leave their territories, in what’s now Eastern Europe, pushed south by the Huns, in Marcellinus’s words, “a race savage beyond all parallel.” The Huns, Marcellinus writes, “descended like a whirlwind from the lofty mountains, as if they had risen from some secret recess of the earth, and were ravaging and destroying everything which came in their way.”

 

It resulted in terrifying bloodshed, and many of Goths—like many Syrians and others displaced by war—decided to flee.

 

They decided that settling in Thrace, right across the Danube river, was the best solution; the land was fertile, and the river would provide defense to keep the Huns at bay.



map of Roman Empire 1700 years ago.

That wasn’t free land—it was in the Roman empire, under the rule of Valens—and so Fritigern, who was leading the Goths asked to “be received by him as his subjects, promising to live quietly, and to furnish a body of auxiliary troops if any necessity for such a force should arise.” Rome had a lot to gain from this. Those lands needed cultivating, and more soldiers were always welcome by the empire. “By combining the strength of his own people with these foreign forces,” Marcellinus writes of Valens, “he would have an army absolutely invincible.”

 

As a sign of gratitude to Valens, Fritigern converted to Christianity.

 

It all started rather peacefully. The Romans put in place a service not that different from a modern search-and-rescue program. “Not one was left behind,” Marcellinus writes, “not even of those who were stricken with mortal disease.” The Goths, “crossed the stream day and night, without ceasing, embarking in troops on board ships and rafts, and canoes made of the hollow trunks of trees.” Marcellinus recounts that “a great many were drowned, who, because they were too numerous for the vessels, tried to swim across, and in spite of all their exertions were swept away by the stream.”

 

It was an unexpected, unprecedented flow (some estimates say up to 200,000 people). Officials in charge of managing the Goths tried to “to calculate their numbers,” but determined it was hopeless.

 

Traditionally, the Roman attitude toward “barbarians,” though autocratic, had been pretty longsighted. Populations were often sent where the empire needed them the most, with little regard to where they wished to stay; however, there was a strong push toward assimilation that eventually turned foreigners into citizens. Descendants of immigrants would routinely be seen in the high ranks of the military or the administration. The recipe that kept the empire safe from the attacks from other populations was simple: allow them into the empire and make them Roman.

 

But things eventually changed. The military officials who were in charge of provisions for the Goths—an ancient version of support offered to migrants arriving in Greece or Italy—were corrupt and profited off of what was meant for the refugees. The starving Goths were forced to buy dog meat from the Romans.

 

Marcellinus has no doubt: “their treacherous covetousness was the cause of all our [the Romans] disasters.”

 

The trust between the abused Goths and the Romans was broken several times before Adrianople, and the Goths went from wanting to become Roman to wanting to destroy Rome.

 

Less than two years later, Marcellinus writes “with rage flashing in their eyes, the barbarians pursued our men.” And they took down the empire.

 

The migrants trying to get to Europe right now are not about to raise up in arms, and Europe is not—thankfully—the Roman empire. But this story shows well that migration has always and will always be a part of our world. There are two ways to deal with refugees: one is to promote dialogue, and inclusion; the other to be unwelcoming and uncaring. The second has led to disaster before—and in one way or another, is sure to do so again.



Roman art reads, 'The end of all humanity, the end of the world.'

 

Another White Man from our Past...

[Donald Trump is just another self-absorbed white man whose ventures are in his mind unique and all-important. We've have dealing with and suffering from such men for many centuries. It is as if they take the words out of each other's mouth and pass them down to the succeeding generations. These men act as if they are the forces which have caused the arch in the sky, the contours of the earth, shaped the mountains they feel they can physically alter on the whim of a great idea to take from someone and make a lot of money in the dirty process.

There is nothing like Donald Trump different from the men who stole our land and renamed it! - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories (Muskogee/African/Absaroka)]




U.S. Capitol by Chip Somodevilla during East Coast storm Jan. 21, 2016

Tenants Thwarted Donald Trump’s Central Park Real Estate Ambitions

The New York Times

By JONATHAN MAHLER
April 18, 2016

Madelyn Rubinstein moved to New York City from Long Island in 1985 with big dreams of making it as a professional pianist.

 

She had a head start: a very cheap rent-controlled apartment, recently vacated by her grandmother, on Central Park South. When Ms. Rubinstein took possession of it, her rent was $93.08 a month — the same price that her grandmother had been paying since 1967.

 

Several months later, Ms. Rubinstein came home one evening to find an eviction notice on her door.

The building’s new owner, Donald J. Trump, wanted her out.

Mr. Trump’s plan was to knock down the building and the one next door, which he also owned, and replace them with a luxury high-rise condominium complex facing Central Park.

 

What he got instead was a New York brawl with a group of tenants fighting to save their homes and clinging with white knuckles to some of the city’s legendary rent deals. The battle played out for years in courtrooms and the New York news media, becoming a kind of parable of the limits of 1980s capitalist ambition in the social democratic

Looking back on the fight, on the eve of Tuesday’s New York Republican primary, one can see Mr. Trump waging a much different sort of campaign, but with many of the same tactics — the threats, the theatrics, the penchant for hyperbole — that he has deployed in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination.

As far as the tenants are concerned, Mr. Trump lost that contest.

 

“Oh, absolutely, we won,” said Ms. Rubinstein, sitting in the one-bedroom apartment where she still lives. “He wanted this whole corner to be one big Trump building.”

But Mr. Trump refuses to admit defeat.

 

“A great deal,” he said, without hesitation, when describing 100 Central Park South — now known as Trump Parc East — during a phone interview last week. “It was a long battle, but it was a successful battle. As usual, I came out on top.”



Trump Parc East now owned by Donald Trump at 100 Central Park South was the subject of a lengthy dispute betweeen Donald Trump & tenants in the 1980's. photo by Danny Ghitis for New York Times

Mr. Trump paid just $13 million for 100 Central Park South and the building adjoining it, the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, in 1981. At the time, he was 35 and making bold strides to emerge from his father’s shadow. In recent years, he had built the 68-story Trump Tower and completely overhauled the building near Grand Central Terminal that became the Grand Hyatt New York.

This would be a no less audacious project, and on one of the city’s most desirable blocks.

To realize his dream, he had to first clear out the residents of the building, a 15-story tower with 80 apartments, some overlooking Central Park, nearly all inhabited by tenants paying well below market rates.

 

Rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments occupy a kind of mythic place in New York City history. Rent protections were created to guard families from the whims of landlords and the market; they still cover about one million apartments in the city. State laws limit their rent increases and guarantee tenants, and often their children and grandchildren, the right to stay.

 

But in expensive neighborhoods, the deals can become skewed. At 100 Central Park South, for instance, there were three-room apartments overlooking the park with rents as low as $436 per month.

 

Mr. Trump wanted all of the tenants out. But rather than buying them out, a common tactic, he and the management company he hired tried to get the job done free.

 

So the battle — captured in numerous lawsuits, court documents and news media accounts from that time — began. Leaks went unfixed, tenants alleged, and broken appliances went unrepaired. Aluminum foil was placed over windows in empty apartments, giving the building a run-down appearance. (Mr. Trump defended the action as standard procedure for vacant units.)

 

More dramatic were the eviction notices from Mr. Trump’s lawyers, on a variety of grounds. One tenant was told that he had not paid his rent on time. (He presented a canceled check in court to prove that he had.)

 

Others who had done construction on their apartments, with the approval of prior landlords, were told that they had 10 days to restore them to their original conditions.

 

Suzanne Blackmer, a B-movie actress and one of the original Rockettes, was ordered to vacate her two-bedroom unit, for which she paid $203.59 a month, because it was not her primary residence, meaning she was not entitled to rent protections. Ms. Blackmer insisted that it was; after a legal battle that lasted more than a decade, she prevailed.

 

Mr. Trump made his opponents out to be millionaire plutocrats, “people of great wealth.”

 

And also whiners.

 

“Let me tell you something about the rich,” he said in one interview in the midst of the battle. “They have a very low threshold for pain.”

 

Recounting the story later in his memoir “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had deliberately tried to drive out tenants, but he said that most of them were exploiting an undeserved government subsidy. He recalled getting rid of a free telephone in the building’s lobby that he claimed tenants were using “to call their friends in Gstaad and St. Moritz.”

 

Ms. Rubinstein and two other residents from the time said they remembered only a pay phone in the building. And while its roll of renters included a successful fashion designer and an architect, it also included a number of older people living on fixed incomes.

 

As Mr. Trump’s frustration with the tenants grew, he offered the building’s dozen or so empty units as shelters for the homeless, promising free apartments with “beautiful views.”

The city declined, questioning the wisdom of moving people into a building headed for demolition.

 

“I actually thought it was a very generous offer,” Mr. Trump said last week. “I don’t want to see people out on the streets.”

 

The tenants eventually hired a lawyer, David Rozenholc, to represent them. Now a familiar nemesis to New York City developers — last year, he negotiated a $25 million total payout for three clients whom Tishman Speyer was trying to eject from a small apartment building in Hudson Yards — Mr. Rozenholc took advantage of a legal flaw in Mr. Trump’s plans to block his application to begin construction.

 

He also sued Mr. Trump, accusing him of harassing Mr. Rozenholc’s clients. The lawsuit claimed, among other things, that the building’s superintendent had been instructed by the management to spy on tenants.

 

Mr. Trump brought his own action against Mr. Rozenholc, a federal racketeering suit that sought $105 million in damages and found its way to The New York Post before it was filed.

Mr. Rozenholc said the suit, which was dismissed, was entirely frivolous. But he offered some words for Mr. Trump that were relatively kind, given the men’s contentious history.

 

“He knows how to negotiate, he knows how to use leverage and he’s very perceptive about his opponent’s vulnerabilities,” Mr. Rozenholc said. “It didn’t work against me, but when you deal with Putin and Iran, these could be useful qualities.”

 

The tenants were waging their own campaign in the news media, casting Mr. Trump as a slumlord and a bully.

 

 

In 1986, after five years of fighting, Mr. Trump abandoned his plans to knock down the building. The tenants could stay in their apartments, paying their existing rents.

 

Mr. Trump would never realize his vision for the project. But in a sense, his defeat had been a victory, as he claimed. Even as the tenants were refusing to budge, preventing any demolition or construction, the value of the property was soaring along with the rest of New York City’s real estate market in the 1980s.

 

In the late 1990s, Mr. Trump finally converted the building into condominiums, but renters were allowed to remain. Today, some continue to rent one-bedroom units for under $1,000 a month, less than a third of what similar apartments cost.

 

Ms. Rubinstein, who was guaranteed below-market rent for life, chose instead to buy at a steep discount, paying just $150,000 for an apartment that is now worth at least $700,000. She is also a member of the condo board, along with one of her more noteworthy neighbors, who lives on the building’s 13th floor: Mr. Trump’s son Eric.



Ku Klux Klansmen flee from angry counter-protesters after they tried to start a White Lives Matter rally in Anaheim on Feb. 27. 2016  photo by Luis Sinco for the Los Angeles Times

 

Casino NDNS

Reservations News
Kamala Harris Under Fire From Pechanga Crime Family Scion Masiel and Others



The ANK is the story. The story is the ANK.

Original Pechanga's Blog

Protecting Tribal ABUSED from Tribal ABUSERS Shouldn't create an ethical dilemma.Tribal Disenrollment is Rampant in Casino Tribes.The Mark Macarro led Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians Practices Apartheid and Segregation on their Rez and they've Stripped Citizenship from 25% of the tribe. RICH tribes may have the Rolexes, but WE have the Time to fight for OUR Civil and Human RIGHTS.


It's getting harder for the corrupt tribal leaders of Pechanga to find a Senate candidate they can manipulate like they do Barbara Boxer. Scion of the Masiel Basquez crime family of Pechanga now has issues with Kamala Harris. Even adopted tribal members have standards?


The American Indian group also aired a grievance it has with Attorney General Kamala Harris, the other Democrat in the race, for her office’s position in a long-running dispute over the boundaries of a reservation.
“We believe they both display a lack of understanding and sensitivity to Native American tribal issues and individual Indian issues,” caucus Chairwoman Mary Ann Andreas, of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, said in an interview. In a statement with Andrew Masiel, of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, she added that “their comments and actions provide little assurance that they grasp the government-to-government relationship guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” Tribal Disenrollment is Killing Off Generations of Indians


TRIBAL DISENROLLMENT is the most egregious human rights issues that's gripped Indian Country the last decade include the taking of ones citizenship; denial of basic rights - freedoms; and the severing of spiritual/cultural ties to ones people/land.
Replacing actual physical genocide,acts like disenrollment, is “killing off” generations of Indian people.





the Mystery of Angela by Jonathan Charles Irvin for

Enigma Fotos is an appropriate title for this piece. What a story!

March 7, 2014 ·

 

 

 

 

 

DREAM AMERICANS

The "Wolf of Wall Street" is being condemned for its brutal force of storytelling. 


I saw this movie with my brothers a few days ago. I didn't know it was a true story until the end of the movie. My baby brother said the main character did time and was fined $110 million, but there was a backlash about the success of his book and movie. The court ordered him to pay 50% of his earnings back to those he deceived. He chose to return 100% of it. That being said the story was brilliantly told. It was the truth, and the critics yelling about the depiction of the times and industry the main character made his wealth come across as sissies, weak links in the business of telling the truth. 

I remember the debauchery. I lived during those times, and like others have suffered from the free license this industry has used and misused. If Americans want, or need to continue the practice of sugar coating (not seeing) the truth how will we mature? The profane practices within the financial industry are the center piece of our country's financial woes, and if a look into what we've allowed by the dreams we hold of what the American Dream is we will repeat the perilous times our values continue to sink us into. 

If anything is to change in our storytelling, and the stories we share with the world-at-large we need to dream different dreams. Ubuntu. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 1.6.14



American Ubuntu movie 

DAMN, That's right!!!

Ah, the life!

Walmart plays a significant role in the American landscape. As I travel the country it is strange the way Walmart sucks the life out of the host cities, and towns. The dreams, and the small and mid-size businesses are vaporized. It is pointless to talk about it because the support of a nation addicted to convenience becomes mindless, and not too far from killing their grandchildren to feed their children. - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 6.11.13

Julianna Margulies, actress

GREED

The subject of money in the Western context brings up a host of issues, and contradictions to the spiritual claims of Christians and non-Christians. There is a concept, erroneous in character, built around poverty that has centered millions of people around a poor Jesus Christ.



It wasn't possible for Jesus or his disciples to turn on each other greedily because the majority of them, including Jesus, were prosperous, and skilled in the top professions of their day. They operated with good business sense with a treasurer. These men were astute enough to know how to leave their businesses and their families secure in their absence. They could create prosperity without being burdened by the self-depreciating thoughts of Christendom today. Moses, and most of the other 'Fathers' of our faith were wealthy men, and their relationship to money is outside of the lexicon of the average person of faith.

$500,000 in $100 bills

There is also a Native American concept of prosperity not centered on money, and there is also a medicine teaching about greed that comes to my mind, Sinclair. In the sacred Medicine Wheel teachings the Ancient One’s taught us from the Circles of their lives.  This particular wheel taught us about sorcery and darkness. Each element of this teaching carried itself into the shadows of self. Spiritual Materialism, in the North, the Untrue Mind, in the East, the Southern lodge of Greed, the Western Lodge of Envy, and in between South and West (Greed and Envy) in the Southwest are the Dark Sorcerers. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of the Sacred Medicine teachings

actress Carole Shelley as Dragon Lady