CThru.com Presents Tony Ward

Blackberry Self Portrait

Posted By Ed Simmons

Pride. Swallow It

That’s what its there for. I spent the morning, and some of my afternoon, standing in the welfare line. Thank you Senators, for your job well done! A lot of men like me, standing in those lines are not broken men, just angry men. I heard a lot of rude statements about illegal immigrants. Our Government got a lot of people scared of the Sewer Gators, I know illegal immigration is not our problem, we are a Nation of immigrants. What we need, what we want right now, is work! Its important to say, the people working in this welfare office, are wonderful people, they get it. They know the people they’re seeing these days, are only the effect, the cause, a dysfunctional Congress! It takes more than talk, to make something happen. Where have all those shovel ready jobs gone anyhow, its ugly out on the streets out here in LA. Not much going on, nothing much will get going on, until the banksters cut loose with some cash. Why in the hell would they, they make so much more money moving it around markets, they’re still playing both sides of the fence, for them. This is a thing of beauty, the perfect storm!

40% of this Country’s GNP is all about nothing, they aren’t producing product, they just continue the poor business practices that got us into this mess in the first place. WE THE PEOPLE, bailed them out once, don’t be fooled, all this crap is still going on! We need to clean house in this Country, I’m not talking about the immigrants. Who I’m speaking of, are the bastards, and the bastardetts, wasting space in the Congressional Hallways of Washington. I remember hearing more than once, first we’ll kill all the lawyers, we desperately need a cross section of the fabric of America, occupying the seats of Congress, people in touch with the Citizens they represent, the Common People of America, taxi cab drivers, carpenters, janitors, and cooks, our labor force and librarians, our fishermen and our farmers, people not beholden to the corporate scum! In their quest for unbridled profits, these corporations have sabotaged our once Great Nation, just think about this situation for a minute, tent cities, sprouting up, all across our Country.

I’m sure Congress would truly feel shame, if only they cleaned their Capitol Office windows. You know, this assumption I make, hinges on believing they have a conscience, with all we’ve witnessed through these troubled times, we all know they don’t! Christ, all I hear from them, is more tax cuts for the rich, I’m not the sharpest tack in the pack but I know, with the tax base eroded as it is today, any solution other than an increase in tax, is insane.

If I could just get a job, I would be more than happy paying double the tax, I know, I’d be bitching and moaning, in lock step with everyone else. However, as a result of these misdirected polices, firemen, police men, and our teachers in our communities now are loosing their jobs! These are the jobs that grow our society, the professionals that keep our communities safe! So I am going to reread the Secret again this weekend. I’m wearing out the pages in this book. I’m just a little worried the pages may turn to dust before this awful economy turns around! Here is the hope I can believe in, the November Elections are coming and all these clowns in Congress who’s seats are up for election will leave!

Artwork By Mikel Elam

Posted By Mikel Elam

I am getting sick and tired of the blatant attempt to undermine Barack Obama’s intelligence and leadership abilities. Basically he walked into a problem created by the previous administration. Everyone now expects him to solve every problem within one and a half years. I think it’s unfair and I know many will not be able to understand this next statement. Some of it is racially motivated. Probably coming from many who don’t think they are racist. It’s like the comment ,”I am not a racist, some of my best friends are black or latino etc, and yet these “friends” really aren’t so much in their lives.
The art represents Obama in a box. The box is getting smaller and smaller trying to squeeze the life out of him. People are taking shots at him. In this case it’s the splatter from paint balls.(I hope nothing worse ever happens) They take shots at him like comparing him to Hitler and calling him a communist, socialist……the list goes on.

Invisible One

So many forget he is a black and white president and he represents the face of real America in the 21st century. Not the confederate flag waving, wishing it would go back to the old days of whites getting to sit and Blacks standing in the back of the bus mentality.
Yes this country is in financial trouble. I am in financial trouble. So in fact I represent someone who should be angry with the status quo. However I recognize where the problems started and no one seems to be holding that person and their administration accountable for past actions.
Its an unfair practice. A selfish act of aggression without thought. Again this reminds me of the times when a person of color opened their mouth only to have a gun placed there to shut them up. Make them disappear.

Invisible Two

Recently I created a series of portraits .Men of color from around the world. I have entitled the series “Invisible” based somewhat on Ralph Ellison’s great novel,”The Invisible Man” who writes about living in a society where we co-exist with others who want us to stay away unless they need us for servitude.
Obama is a reminder to everyone we are not going back to the days of the settling fathers. And thankfully he is very visible.

For Immediate Release

Posted By Jessica Moats

Introducing KONG Magazine

KONG Magazine is pleased to announce the launch of its inaugural issue on Friday, July 2, 2010. This bi-monthly magazine will be available both online and with a limited edition print version containing all the original artwork from the site. KONG Magazine is a sex and comedy publication that seeks to bring stimulating entertainment and art to women around the world.

Creative Director and Founder, Jessica Moats, uses her impressive background at publications such as New York-based Playgirl and BlackBook Magazines, to create a magazine that will fill the void in the current women’s interest market. KONG Magazine creates an interface were sexual interests coincide with cultural ones by offering the newest trends in music, art, foreplay, design, humor, comedy, politics, technical innovations (including vibrators and other sex gadgetry) and photography—the X-rated kind.

The first issue seamlessly blends the mission of KONG Magazine by entertaining, informing, and promoting collaborations between emerging artists and writers. Cover model, Greg Sestero of famed cult classic, The Room best exemplifies the magazines’ ability to effortlessly mix sex and comedy.

Please email press@kongmagazine.com for a press kit, interview requests, and additional information on the magazine or any of its subjects.

Melissa Norbeck

Posted by Melissa Norbeck

Well, maybe we can just make a few changes. What is wrong with our country?
Quite a few things come to mind: two of them are health care and greed. The health care issue here in the US is ridiculous. Some people don¹t have problems with health care and health insurance, but many do. And so what if one man has insurance and can get his teeth cleaned every six months when the child down the street just died because she doesn¹t have health insurance or enough insurance. Why is health care the way it is? Greed, plain and simple.
The higher-ups care more about money and less about helping people. Sometimes I really feel things are so bad (war, health care, greed, violence, global warming, animal cruelty, etc… that the world just needs to end and start over.

I think it¹s amazing that we the people stand for as much as we do. Supposedly we live in a Democracy ­ NOT. We do have freedom of speech, but that can only get us so far. We do what we¹re told, and that¹s the way it is. I¹ve been saying for a long time how I feel we do not live in a Democracy, and, ironically enough, I just came across a new word: Plutonomy = an economy that is largely influenced by the wealthy; where things are divided into two parts: the wealthy and the rest of us. That is definitely America.

Pharmaceutical Research

It¹s a damn shame that people like teachers and cops -those who serve others and don¹t make much money as is- are taking pay freezes. When was the last time you heard of a CEO or someone who worked for a health insurance company or pharmaceutical company take a pay freeze?

R&D

America is the best country in the world but also the most corrupt. I wish
people worried about others not only themselves. To quote Michael Moore, I refuse to live in a country like this, and I¹m not leaving!

Castro

Posted by Eric Mencher

Cuba is truly a country on the edge. It’s government, for 50 years the authoritative body over the island’s 11,000,000 people, seems forever on the verge of collapse. The people themselves live constantly in flux, with the promise of freedom one day or prison the next. In Old Havana, people lurk in and of the shadows and the sun’s constant glare seems to ask more questions than it illuminates.

Fishing Along The Malecon

Havana is a street photographer’s paradise. The alleys and streets are a constant swarm of human activity, and moments surreal or all too real unfold in an unending stream of live theater. In the five times I’ve visited the island since 1997, there remains one constant in Cuba: the love of life, whether it’s a couple in embrace on the Malecon or kids who seem to dance in the streets to the beat of the ubiquitous music.

Cuban Music

We can learn a lot from the Cubanos–in the face of a harsh living standard, they always seem to maintain their joy, dignity and spirit.

Young Boy Plaza Of The Cathedral In Havana

Streets Of Havanna

Baseball Field In Pinar del Rio

Cuba's Light And Shadow

To learn more about Eric Mencher’s photographs, please log on to www.EricMencher.com.

Wall Street

Posted by Orville Robertson

……….This was Wall Street when the workers were allowed to go out and get lunch. Now I suppose they chain them to their desks to squeeze out the last drop of blood profit.

To learn more about Orville Robertson’s work log on to www.newyorkstreetphotography.com.

Posted by John Grant

Why you can’t call a spade a spade in this country

An op-ed in the New York Times deals with one of the most vitally important issues Americans could get their minds around — the difference between an Empire and a Republic and just who are we as a people as we deal with two foreign wars and a job-devouring recession caused by financial delusion and chicanery. Unfortunately the topic is not treated totally seriously, and the notion of an American Empire is ridiculed. I’ve encountered this attitude in a running dialogue on the topic I had with Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky. Stu sneers at the notion we’re an “empire.” He’s a decent guy, and I reduce his argument with me to: “OK, if we’re supposed to be this empire, where’s the emperor in a toga?” I may be obsessive, but I think it’s a good topic for serious discussion. It’s way too easy in the dumbed-down climate of debate in this nation to ridicule the notion of Empire and, thus, of course, avoid dealing with all the real historical and political decisions that lead to the real dynamics of our current reality that suck so much of the oxygen out of our capacity to solve neglected problems. The list is long; for starters there’s a loss of jobs, a lessening of competitiveness due to shortcomings in our education system, crumbling infrastructure and an over-dependency on oil versus developing alternative, green energies — all things we should have been investing more in for the past 40 years. Now, as we are funding two on-going wars, a Global War On Terror and a dismally failed Drug War, these neglected investments at home are coming home to roost. and unless we change, it will only get worse in the future.

Posted by John Grant

I was just reading an 1898 essay by Leo Tolstoy on the Spanish American War in which he satirizes the United States for defeating the “decrepit and doting old man”  that was the Spanish Empire and, as “a young man in full possession of his strengths,” taking over Spain’s imperial role in Cuba and, especially, in the Philippines. The US beats this “decrepit old man” (known for his cruelty) and “knocks out his teeth, breaks his ribs, and then ecstatically tells his exploits to a vast public of just such young men as he is, and this public rejoices and praises the hero who has maimed an old man.” This from a writer who saw real bloody combat in several places and wrote War And Peace. This is late Tolstoy, when, in the eyes of many, he had gone off the deep end to preach Christian pacifism. War to him at this stage is organized “murder.” He is disgusted with governments who tell their citizens their wars are undertaken to protect them. “What you (governments) say of the threatening danger and of your concern about protecting us against it is a deception.” Sounds familiar, given the past nine years, when our leaders launched two major wars, one of which we are escalating in spite of opposing popular opinion — a war our military commanders have begun assuring the occupied Afghans is about “protecting the Afghan people.”

Now we must absorb the idea of assassination orders for US citizens. Our leaders now openly declare the right to murder American citizens deemed “enemy combatants” — or some such label worked out by PR-savvy lawyers aware of the post-9/11 fear and the lynch mob state of mind in parts of America. First we were worried about warrant-less wiretapping of citizens. Then, it was the three-year “slow torture” of a US citizen in a brig in South Carolina. Now we have graduated to warrant-less assassinations. The President says it’s OK, so sit back on the couch and watch the rest of Hitman4. And the current Supreme Court is probably fine with assassination hits of anybody as long as they are in the pursuit of American Power & Wealth.

The target dejure is the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini Muslim cleric who had conversations with both the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. US intelligence has him pegged as Satan’s child, but, let’s be honest, US intelligence is not the most reliable arbiter of truth and they have been good at providing popular fodder for demonization campaigns. Al-Awlaki has told reliable Arab journalists he did not encourage either of the above to commit the acts they did, though, after the fact, he said what they did was honorable. Al-Awlaki is currently in hiding for his life, but he seems to argue he was a sympathetic ear to these disturbed men, not their instigator. Like the many people involved in some fashion with the loosely confederated global insurgency we are currently engaged with, al-Awlaki is clearly angry at our invasions and on-going occupations of Muslim lands, our support of Israel for its occupation of Palestine and a perceived general war against Islam. The argument for assassinating people like al-Awlaki is the exact same reasoning used in the Phoenix Program to assassinate nationalist Vietnamese leaders opposed to the US occupation of Viet Nam. The difference is the current war is being played out in a globalized context and our assassinations are done by the CIA or by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the hunter-killer teams commanded so well by General Stanley McChrystal and now operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. They currently favor the use of drones directed by some operator in Arizona with a Diet Pepsi on the console next to him to assassinate people by taking out entire buildings. Of course, no one gets a trial; guilt is established in secret by … well, no one is sure.

It’s becoming easier to understand why Tolstoy ended up where he did relinquishing literary and commercial success to take on the war powers of his day. Think back to the 1980s and the outrage in the nation over “war off the books” by Oliver North and his patriotic warriors during the Reagan years. One’s head spins at the moral distance we have traveled since those innocent days. Thanks to rapid technological advances and stagnant human morality, the notion of war off the books is now beyond steroids as a metaphor and approaching some kind of secret robot dystopia in which the soma of the age is a popular culture where The Killer reigns supreme as an iconic figure of comedy and romance.

It’s been 112 years since Tolstoy wrote about how the US employed a campaign of “murder” to supplant the Spanish and create its own fledgling empire out of the spoils. That empire is now in full plumage and its leaders are ordering the assassination of people around the world based on their motivational influence. That our imperial wars are the prime motivational element in these speaker’s arguments is rarely mentioned. Given the distance we have come in the past 20 years, it’s interesting to imagine where things might go in the next 20 years.

John Grant