Friday, January 29, 2016

Bud Powell Trio 1957 ~ Confirmation



Bud Powell - Piano
George Duvivier - Bass
Art Taylor - Drums

Bud Powell - Tempus Fugit



Bud Powell (piano) 
Ray Brown (bass)
Max Roach (drums)

Un Poco Loco



Bud Powell(p)
Curley Russell(b)
Max Roach(ds)

Bud Powell "Bouncing With Bud"



Sonny Rollins (ts), Fats Navarro (tp), Bud Powell (p), Tommy Potter (b), Roy Haynes (d).
recorded August 1949

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Monday, January 25, 2016

Charlie Parker-Klactoveesedstene



 Miles Davis tpt; Charlie Parker alt; Duke Jordan p;TommyPotterbs;MaxRoachd. WOR Studios, 39th. St. and Broadway, New York City—Tuesday, November 4, 1947.

Charlie Parker - Steeplechase



 Miles Davis (tp), Charlie Parker (as), John Lewis (p), Curley Russell (b), Max Roach (d)

Charlie Parker - "Drifting On A Reed"


Charlie Parker - Red Cross


The Song Is You-by Charlie Parker


Sonny Rollins - It Don't Mean a Thing



Sonny Rollins - tenor sax. Henry Grimes - bass. Joe Harris - drums.
Sweden, 1959

Sunday, January 24, 2016

It is like ‘Nazi Germany’: Federal officer furious after local cops rip apart his car looking for cash

This From "Raw Story" - please follow link to original.
In May of 2014, Ronnie and Lisa Hankins were driving back from his grandfather’s funeral in Virginia when they were targeted by a gang of police officers in search of cash.
As Lisa drove the couple westbound down I-40, they saw an officer, who happened to be with the 23rd Judicial District Drug Task Force, and Hankins correctly predicted that they were about to be pulled over.
“I told her we are going to get pulled over,” Ronnie said to NewsChannel 5.
“What made you think he was going to stop you?” NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked.
“Because we had out-of-state license plates and my wife is Hispanic,” he explained.
The couple was then pulled over, and the officer quickly separated them before beginning his harassment of Lisa. In the video, the officer is heard badgering Lisa in an attempt to get her to consent to a search.
“You say there’s not anything illegal in it. Do you mind if I search it today to make sure?” the officer asked.
Lisa responded, “I’d have to talk to my husband.”
The cop continued to intimidate and harass her, “I am asking you for permission to search your vehicle today — and you are well within your rights to say ‘no,’ and you can say ‘yes.’ It’s totally up to you as to whether you want to show cooperation or not.”
Knowing that they had done nothing wrong and the officer had no reason to search them, Lisa continued to assert her rights and refused the search.
“You have to either give me a yes or no,” the cop continued. “I do need an answer so I can figure out whether I need a dog to go around it or not.”
After going back and forth and realizing that this couple was not going to give consent, a second officer brings out a drug dog. As the Free Thought Project previously reported, data shows that police K-9s will alert almost every single time they are called out, regardless of the presence of drugs. 
The Hankins’ case, on the side of I-40, was no different.
“We’ve ran a dog, and the dog’s alerted on the vehicle. So we are going to be searching it, OK? And whatever is in there we are going to find in just a second,” said the officer to the couple.
“There’s never been any drugs in the vehicle and never will be,” Ronnie declared.
Ronnie became furious as he knew that the dog did not alert on his vehicle; he knows this because he is also a cop. He’s a federal police officer at the Marine Corps Air Station-Miramar in San Diego.
“You are lying about the dog hitting on the car. The dog didn’t hit on the car either. You guys are drug task force. You are out here harassing me and my wife when I am just coming back from a funeral,” he said.
The agent, knowing full well that Ronnie was a cop, responded sarcastically, “That is exactly how I would expect most police officers to act.”
“Just like a child, you can make a child say anything you want. You can make a dog do whatever you want to if you train them the right way,” Ronnie explained to NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
For nearly an hour, cops held the innocent couple on the side of the interstate while they tore Lisa’s new car apart. They even went so far as to rip the dashboard out. They found no drugs.
But after finding no drugs, the truth came out —  these cops weren’t looking for drugs at all — they wanted cash.
“I knew right now they were looking for money to fund their operations,” said Ronnie.
“Well, I’ll be honest with you,” the officer began, as he attempted to justify this outrageous violation of rights. “With you going this direction, I wouldn’t think you’d have drugs in the car — you would have a large amount of money,” he said.
After the cops were finished searching for cash and didn’t find any, they eventually let their victims go. But to support their unlawful detainment, also known as attempted robbery, the officers wrote in the report that they found “marijuana debris” in the driver and passenger floor boards. This ‘debris’ was nothing more than grass from the couple’s feet from the cemetery where Ronnie’s grandfather was buried.
The unfortunate reality of this situation is that nothing will happen to these officers. In their minds, the Hankins are criminals who deserved this treatment and got off lucky without having their property stolen. These officers will continue to rob people on the side of the road as it’s not only condoned by their departments; it’s their entire function — necessary for their own self-preservation.
“It seems like Nazi Germany,” said Ronnie. “You’ve got to have the paperwork and the proper authorities to come through Tennessee.”

Sonny Stitt,Howard McGhee,JJ Johnson,Walter Bishop,Tommy Potter,Kenny Clarke."Buzzy"



Sonny Stitt Alto Sax,
Howard McGhee Trumpet,
JJ Johnson Trombone,
Walter Bishop Piano.
Tommy Potter Bass,
Kenny Clarke Drums

CARMEN MCRAE sings "I'm Glad There is You" 1979


Carmen McRae - When I Fall In Love


Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Who Lost the White Working Class?

The latest from Robert Reich  --  read this please, follow link to original.
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http://robertreich.org/

Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?
The conventional answer is that Republicans skillfully played the race card.
In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.
Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens” (Ronald Reagan popularized the term), being soft on black crime (George W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ads in 1988), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).
The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”  
But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.
Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.
But they’ve done little to change the widening structural imbalances in the economy that have hurt the working class. 
Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.
I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it.
Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
The Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.
And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. 
What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform?
You get an economic structure favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful – while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.
Why haven’t Democrats done more? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations.
In part, it was because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determined electoral outcomes.
Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.
“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. 
Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain.
Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos.
This would give them the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliative programs papering over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.  
But to do this they’d have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.
Will they? If not, a third party might emerge that does it instead.

Friday, January 15, 2016

The following is from Joe.My.God, from The New York Daily News, about Ted Cruz and his "New York values" crack.  It perfectly describes the way I feel about people who know NOTHING about New York describing the place.  I lived in N.Y.  (City and State) for over 64 years.  It is NOTHING like the place described by folks who never lived there.  Perhaps the reason some from New York do not respect most out of towners is simply because they do not respect folks who live and work in New York.

A pox on Ted Cruz and all the folks who don't have the ethics or integrity of the average N.Y. taxidriver.  Follow link to original.
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http://www.joemygod.com/2016/01/15/new-york-daily-news-drop-dead-ted-cruz/

Snork! They write:
Ted Cruz, who only comes here with his hand out, has decided that the most diverse city the world has ever known is filled with people who all think alike. He sounds in these moments like as slow a thinker as we have ever had run for President.
If you are dumb enough to think that New York values are some sort of handicap in this presidential season, then you are as dumb and tone deaf as Jesse Jackson was calling the city “Hymietown,” as dumb as Gerald Ford was when he gave this paper the most famous front page in its history, the day he effectively told New York to drop dead.
Here is what New York values are: New York values are a young guy, a paralegal, literally giving somebody he doesn’t know the shirt off his back on a subway because winter has finally come to the city and brought freezing temperatures with it. New York values are the New York taxi driver who traveled three boroughs across four days to find the guy who had left $1,400 in his cab, so he could return the money to him. You know what that really was? It was the real life of a city that Ted Cruz knows nothing about. He is simply another tourist here, one constantly on the make.
Mic drop!


Republican Inhumanity!!

This from "Escaton" on the Flint water crisis - follow link to original.
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http://www.eschatonblog.com/

And there's probably no actual statute that says "poisoning an entire town is a crime." Even though, you know, pretty sure if I did it I would be in jail.
A group of Virginia Tech researchers who sampled the water in 271 Flint homes last summer found some contained lead levels high enough to meet the EPA's definition of "toxic waste."

A Sample From "Some Assembly Required"

If you do not read "Some Assembly Required" every day  --  you should.  Here is a sample of today's items.  Please follow link to original.
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http://ckm3.blogspot.com/

Alternate Reading: That President Obama offered to loan Joe Biden the money to help pay for the cancer treatments Joe's son needed so that the Biden home would not have to be sold speaks highly of Mr. Obama. That the Vice President of the US would have to sell or mortgage his home to pay for healthcare says a great deal about these United States, too.

Comes The Dawn: Someone besides me has stumbled onto the basic problem with the neolibearal approach to capitalism. If you look to increase your profits by reducing your employment costs, say by shipping factories overseas, and maintain your sales by extending easy credit to your customers, don't come crying to me when your customers – those folks who used to work for you – run out of credit and can no longer buy the crap you are making in China or Indonesia, and your stocks begin to fall. Like all free lunches, it turns out not to be free. Corporate profits keep collapsing, with 4Q2015 reports to be the worst since 2009. US Corporate defaults are at their highest since 2009 and – according to the less than impartial S&P - “the outlook for corporate borrowers worldwide is the worst since the global financial crisis”. Party on.

Morally Upright: Seem's Ted Cruz borrowed over a million bucks from Goldman Sachs during his 2012 Senate campaign and failed to report the loan (investment?) on his campaign finance reports. But it was just “an inadvertent filing” error. Nothing to be seen. Let's prey pray on it.

  The Slow Bern: Bernie is 14 points ahead of Hillary in NH. He's also picked up an endorsement from The Nation and the support of over 3,000 Democratic caucus operatives in Iowa. That may be why why the Clinton machine isspreading lies and innuendo about Sanders' promise to enact a single payer Medicare for All system. Maybe Hillary's so upset because the health care industry paid her nearly $3 million in the last 2 years to make sure nothing upsets their lucrative business.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

“The Big Short” and Bernie’s Plan to Bust Up Wall Street

The latest from Robert Reich  --  a must read.  Please follow link to original
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http://robertreich.org/

If you haven’t yet seen “The Big Short” – directed and co-written by Adam McKay, based on the non-fiction prize-winning book by Michael Lewis about the housing and credit bubble that triggered the Great Recession — I recommend you do so.
Not only is the movie an enjoyable (if that’s the right word) way to understand how the big banks screwed millions of Americans out of their homes, savings, and jobs – and then got bailed out by taxpayers. It’s also a lesson in why they’re on the way to doing all this again – and how their political power continues to erode laws designed to prevent another crisis and to shield their executives from any accountability.
Most importantly, the movie shows why Bernie Sanders’s plan to break up the biggest banks and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (separating investment from commercial banking) is necessary – and why Hillary Clinton’s more modest plan is inadequate. 
I’ll get back to Bernie and Hillary in a moment, but first you need to know why Wall Street wants us to forget what really happened.
The movie gets the story essentially right: Traders on the Street pushed highly-risky mortgage loans, bundled them together into investments that hid the risks, got the major credit-rating agencies to give the bundles Triple-A ratings, and then sold them to unwary investors. It was a fraudulent Ponzi scheme that had to end badly – and it did.
Yet since then, Wall Street and its hired guns (including most current Republican candidates for president) have tried to rewrite this history.
They want us to believe the banks and investment houses were innocent victims of misguided government policies that gave mortgages to poor people who shouldn’t have got them.
That’s pure baloney. The boom in subprime mortgages was concentrated in the private market, not in government. Wall Street itself created the risky mortgage market. It sliced and diced junk mortgages into bundles that hid how bad they were. And it invented the derivatives and CDOs that financed them
The fact is, more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private institutions, and nearly 83 percentof the subprime loans that went to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
Why has Wall Street been pushing its lie, blaming the government for what happened? And why has the Street (along with its right-wing apologists, and its outlets such as Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal) so viciously attacked the movie “The Big Short?”
So we won’t demand tougher laws to prevent another crisis  followed by another “too-big-to-fail” bailout.
Which brings us back to Bernie and Hillary. Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to break up the big banks or resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, as Bernie does
Instead, she’d charge the big banks a bit more for carrying lots of debt and to oversee them more carefully. She’d also give bank regulators more power to break up any particular bank that theyconsider too risky. And she wants more oversight of so-called “shadow banks” such as hedge funds and insurance companies like the infamous AIG.
In a world where the giant Wall Street banks didn’t have huge political power, these measures might be enough. But, if you hadn’t noticed, Wall Street wields extraordinary power.
Which helps explain why no Wall Street executive has been indicted for the fraudulent behavior that led up to the 2008 crash. Or for the criminal price-fixing scheme settled last May. And why even the fines imposed on the banks have been only a fraction of the banks’ gains.
And also why Dodd-Frank is being watered down into vapidity. For example, the law requires major banks to prepare “living wills” describing how they’d unwind their operations if they get into serious trouble. But no big bank has come up with one that passes muster. Federal investigators have found them all “unrealistic.”
Most of Hillary’s proposals could already have been put into effect by the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but they haven’t been – presumably because of the Street’s muscle.
As a practical matter, then, her proposals are invitations to more dilution and finagle.
The only way to contain the Street’s excesses is by taking on its economic and political power directly – with reforms so big, bold, and public they can’t be watered down. Starting with busting up the biggest banks, as Bernie Sanders proposes.
More than a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt broke up the Standard Oil Trust because it posed a danger to the U.S. economy. Today, Wall Street’s biggest banks pose an even greater danger. They’re far larger than they were before the crash of 2008.
Unless they’re broken up and Glass-Steagall resurrected, we face substantial risk of another near-meltdown – once again threatening the incomes, jobs, savings, and homes of millions of Americans.
To paraphrase philosopher George Santayana, those who cannot remember they were screwed by Wall Street are condemned to be screwed again.