#Oklahoma state labor posters

[tvdas]

John Berryman in 1966, two years after the publication of “77 Dream Songs.” The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters is a book review by Anthony Lane (in The New Yorker) of The Selected Letters of John Berryman. The book is edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae and published by the Belknap Press, at Harvard. My acquaintance, the generous Philip Coleman, mailed me a copy of this book at the end of October.   Lane writes, “. . . anyone who delights in listening to Berryman, and who can’t help wondering how the singer becomes the songs, will find much to treasure here, in these garrulous and pedantic pages. There is hardly a paragraph in which Berryman—poet, pedagogue, boozehound, and symphonic self-destroyer—may not be heard straining toward the condition of music. ‘I have to make my pleasure out of sound,’ he says. The book is full of noises, heartsick with hilarity, and they await their transmutation into verse.” Here is the book review:

The poet John Berryman was born in 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was educated at Columbia and then in England, where he studied at Cambridge, met W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and lit a cigarette for W. B. Yeats. All three men left traces in Berryman’s early work. In 1938, he returned to New York and embarked upon a spate of teaching posts in colleges across the land, beginning at Wayne State University and progressing to stints at Harvard, Princeton, Cincinnati, Berkeley, Brown, and other arenas in which he could feel unsettled. The history of his health, physical and mental, was no less fitful and spasmodic, and alcohol, which has a soft spot for poets, found him an easy mark. In a similar vein, his romantic life was lunging, irrepressible, and desperate, so much so that it squandered any lasting claim to romance. Thrice married, he fathered a son and two daughters. He died in 1972, by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. To the appalled gratification of posterity, his fall was witnessed by somebody named Art Hitman.

Berryman would have laughed at that. In an existence that was littered with loss, the one thing that never failed him, apart from his unwaning and wax-free ear for English verse, was his sense of humor. The first that I heard of Berryman was this:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

“Wag” meaning a witty fellow, or “wag” meaning that he is of no more use than the back end of a mutt? Who on earth is Henry? Also, whoever’s talking, why does he address us as “friends,” as if he were Mark Antony and we were a Roman mob, and why can’t he even honor Achilles—the hero of the Iliad, a foundation stone of “great literature”—with a capital letter? You have to know such literature pretty well before you earn the right to claim that it tires you out. Few knew it better than Berryman, or shouldered the burdens of serious reading with a more remorseless joy. As he once said, “When it came to a choice between buying a book and a sandwich, as it often did, I always chose the book.”

“Life, friends” is the fourteenth of “The Dream Songs,” the many-splendored enterprise that consumed Berryman’s energies in the latter half of his career, and on which his reputation largely rests. His labors on the Songs began in 1955 and led to “77 Dream Songs,” which was published in 1964 and won him a Pulitzer Prize. In the course of the Songs, which he regarded as one long poem, he is represented, or unreliably impersonated, by a figure named Henry, who undergoes “the whole humiliating Human round” on his behalf. As Berryman explained, “Henry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points.” In 1968, along came a further three hundred and eight Songs, under the title “His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.” (A haunting phrase, which grabs the seven ages of man, as outlined in “As You Like It,” and squeezes them down to three.) Two days after publication, he was asked, by the Harvard Advocate, about his profession. “Being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything,” he said. “It’s just something you do.”

There was plenty of all that jazz. Berryman forsook the distillations of Eliot for the profusion of Whitman; the Dream Songs, endlessly rocking and rolling, surge onward in waves. Lay them aside, and you still have the other volumes of Berryman’s poems, including “The Dispossessed” (1948), “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1956), and “Love & Fame” (1970). Bundled together, they fill nearly three hundred pages. If magnitude freaks you out, there are slimmer selections—one from the Library of America, edited by Kevin Young, the poetry editor of this magazine, and another, “The Heart Is Strange,” compiled by Daniel Swift to toast the centenary, in 2014, of the poet’s birth. And don’t forget the authoritative 1982 biography by John Haffenden, who also put together a posthumous collection, “Henry’s Fate and Other Poems,” in 1977, as well as “Berryman’s Shakespeare” (1999), a Falstaffian banquet of his scholarly work on the Bard. Some of Berryman’s critical writings are clustered, invaluably, in “The Freedom of the Poet” (1976). In short, you need space on your shelves, plus a clear head, if you want to join the Berrymaniacs. Proceed with caution; we can be a cranky bunch.

Of late, Berryman’s star has waned. Its glow was never steady in the first place, but it has dimmed appreciably, because of lines like these:

Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip, but is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal.

“The Dream Songs” is a hubbub, and some of it is spoken in blackface—or, to be accurate, in what might be described as blackvoice. It deals in unembarrassed minstrelsy, complete with a caricature of verbal tics, all too pointedly transcribed: “Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.” To say that Berryman was airing the prejudices of his era is hardly to exonerate him; in any case, he seems to be evoking, in purposeful anachronism, an all but vanished age of vaudeville. Kevin Young, who is Black, prefaces his choice of Berryman’s poetry by arguing, “Much of the force of The Dream Songs comes from its use of race and blackface to express a (white) self unraveling.” Some readers will share Young’s generously inquiring attitude; others will veer away from Berryman and never go back.

For anyone willing to stick around, there’s a new book on the block. “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” weighs in at more than seven hundred pages. It is edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, and published by the Belknap Press, at Harvard—a selfless undertaking, given that Berryman derides Harvard as “a haven for the boring and the foolish,” wherein “my students display a form of illiterate urbanity which will soon become very depressing.” (Not that other colleges elude his gibes. Berkeley is summed up as “Paradise, with anthrax.”) The earliest letter, dated September, 1925, is from the schoolboy Berryman to his parents, and ends, “I love you too much to talk about.” In a pleasing symmetry, the final letter printed here, from 1971, shows Berryman rejoicing in his own parenthood. He tells a friend, “We had a baby, Sarah Rebecca, in June—a beauty.”

And what lies in between? More or less the polyphony that you’d expect, should you come pre-tuned into Berryman. “Vigour & fatigue, confidence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry.” Such is the medley, he says, that he finds in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and you can feel Berryman swooping with similar freedom from one tone to the next. “Books I’ve got, copulation I need,” he writes from Cambridge, at the age of twenty-two, thus initiating a lifelong and dangerous refrain. When he reports, two years later, that “I was attacked by an excited loneliness which is still with me and which has so far produced fifteen poems,” is that a grouse or a boast? There are alarming valedictions: “Nurse w. another shot. no more now,” or, “Maybe I better go get a bottle of whisky; maybe I better not.” There are letters to Ezra Pound, one of which, sent with “atlantean respect & affection,” announces, “What we want is a new form of the daring,” a very Poundian demand. And there are smart little swerves into the aphoristic—“Writers should be heard and not seen”; “All modern writers are complicated before they are good”—or into courteous eighteenth-century brusquerie. Pastiche can be useful when you have a grudge to convey: “My dear Sir: You are plainly either a fool or a scoundrel. It is kinder to think you a fool; and so I do.” It’s a letter best taken with a pinch of snuff.

Berryman was a captious and self-heating complainer, slow to cool. Just as the first word of the Iliad means “Wrath,” so the first word of the opening Dream Song is “Huffy.” Seldom can you predict the cause of his looming ire. A concert performance by the Stradivarius Quartet, in the fall of 1941, drives him away: “Beethoven’s op. 130 they took now to be a circus, now to be a sea-chantey, & I fled in the middle to escape their Cavatina.” The following year, an epic letter to his landlord, on Grove Street, in Boston, is almost entirely concerned with a refrigerator, which has “developed a high-pitched scream.” Berryman was not an easy man to live with, or to love, and the likelihood that even household appliances found his company intolerable cannot be dismissed.

Yet the poet was scarcely unique in his vexations; we all have our fridges to bear. Something else, far below the hum of daily pique, resounds through this massive book—a ground bass of doom and dejection. “You may prepare my coffin.” “If this reaches you, you will know I got as far as a letter-box at any rate.” “I write in haste, being back in Hell.” Such are the dirges to which Berryman treats his friends, in the winter of 1939–40, and the odd jauntiness in which he couches his misery somehow makes it worse. It’s one thing to write, “I am fed up with pretending to be alive when in fact I am not,” but quite another to dispatch those words, as Berryman did, to someone whom you are courting; the recipient was Eileen Mulligan, whom he married nine months later, in October, 1942. To the critic Mark Van Doren, who had been his mentor at Columbia, he was more formal in his woe, declaring, “Each year I hope that next year will find me dead, and so far I have been disappointed, but I do not lose that hope, which is almost my only one.” We are close to the borders of Beckett.

There are definite jitters of comedy in so funereal a pose, and detractors of Berryman would say that he keeps trying on his desolation, like a man getting fitted for a dark suit. The trouble is that we know how he died. Even if he is putting on an act, for the horrified benefit of his correspondents, it is still a rehearsal for the main event, and you can’t inspect the long lament that he sends to Eileen in 1953—after they have separated—without glancing ahead, almost twenty years, to the dénouement of his days. The letter leaps, like one of those 3 a.m. frettings which every insomniac will recognize, directly from money to death. “I only have $2.15 to live through the week,” the poet says, before laying out his plans. “My insurance, the only sure way of paying my debts, expires on Thursday. So unless something happens I have to kill myself day after tomorrow evening or earlier.” To be specific, “What I am going to do is drop off the George Washington bridge. I believe one dies on the way down.” If Berryman is playing Cassandra to himself, crying out the details of his own quietus, how did the cry begin?

It is tempting to turn biography into cartography—unrolling the record of somebody’s life, smoothing it flat, and indicating the major fork in the road. Most of us rebut this thesis, as we amble maplessly along. In Berryman’s case, however, there was a fork, so terrible and so palpable that no account of him, and no encounter with his poems, can afford to ignore it. The road didn’t simply split in two; it was cratered, in the summer of 1926, when his father, John Allyn Smith, committed suicide.

The family was living in Clearwater, Florida, at the time, and young John was eleven years old. There was a bizarre prelude to the calamity, when his brother, Robert, was taken out by their father for a swim in the Gulf. What occurred next remains murky, but it seemed, for a while, as if they would not be returning to shore. One of the Dream Songs takes up the tale, mixing memory and denial:

Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong for going on forty years—forgiveness time— I touch now his despair, he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower but he did not swim out with me or my brother as he threatened—

a powerful swimmer, to         take one of us along as company in the defeat sublime, freezing my helpless mother: he only, very early in the morning, rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window and did what was needed.

I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone. I’ve always tried. I—I’m trying to forgive whose frantic passage, when he could not live an instant longer, in the summer dawn left Henry to live on.

Smith’s death would become the primal wound for his older son. Notice how the tough and Hemingway-tinged curtness of “did what was needed” gives way, all too soon, to the halting stammer of “I—I’m trying.” The wound was suppurating and unhealable, and there is little doubt that it deepened the festering of Berryman’s life. As he writes in one of the final Dream Songs, “I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave / who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn / O ho alas alas.” Haffenden quotes these lines, raw with recrimination, in his biography; dryly informs us that the poet, in fact, never visited his father’s grave; and supplies us with relevant notes that Berryman made in 1970—two years before he, in turn, found a bridge and did what he thought was needed. He sounds like a patient striving mightily to become his own shrink:

Did I myself feel any guilt perhaps—long-repressed if so & this is mere speculation (defense here) about Daddy’s death? (I certainly pickt up enough of Mother’s self-blame to accuse her once, drunk & raging, of having actually murdered him & staged a suicide.)

Alternatively:

So maybe my long self-pity has been based on an error, and there has been no (hero-) villain (Father) ruling my life, but only an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring mother, whose life at 75 is still centered wholly on me. And my (omnipotent) feeling that I can get away with anything.

For readers who ask themselves, browsing through “Berryman’s Shakespeare,” why the poet bent his attention, again and again, to “Hamlet,” to the plight of the prince, and to the preoccupations—as Berryman boldly construed them—of the man who wrote the play, here is an answer of sorts. And, for anyone wanting more of this unholy psychodrama, consider the list of characters. Berryman’s mother, born Martha Little, married John Allyn Smith. Less than eleven weeks after his death, she married her landlord, John Angus McAlpin Berryman, and thereafter called herself Jill, or Jill Angel. As for the poet, he was baptized with his father’s name, was known as Billy in infancy, and then, in deference to his brand-new stepfather, became John Berryman. This is like Hamlet having to call himself Claudius, Jr., on top of everything else. As Berryman remarks, “Damn Berrymans and their names.”

A book of back-and-forth correspondence with his mother was published in 1988, under the title “We Dream of Honour.” (Having picked up the habit of British spelling, at Cambridge, Berryman never kicked it.) Inexcusably, it’s now out of print, but worth tracking down; and you could swear, as you leaf through it, that you’d stumbled upon a love affair. The son says to the mother, “I hope you’re well, darling, and less worried.” The mother tells the son, “I have loved you too much for wisdom, or it is perhaps nearer truth to say that with love or in anger, I am not wise.” We are offered a facsimile of a letter from 1953, in which Berryman begins, “Mother, I have always failed; but I am not failing now.”

One obvious shortfall in the “Selected Letters” is that “We Dream of Honour” took the cream of the crop. Only eight letters here are addressed to Martha, six of them mailed from school, and, if you’re approaching Berryman as a novice, your take on him will be unavoidably skewed. By way of compensation, we get a wildly misconceived letter of advice from the middle-aged Berryman to his son, Paul, concluding with the maxim “Strong fathers crush sons.” Paul was four at the time. Haffenden has already cited that letter, however, and doubts whether it was ever sent. One item in the new book that I have never read before, and would prefer not to read again, is a letter from the fourteen-year-old Berryman to his stepfather, whom he calls Uncle Jack, and before whom he cringes as if whipped. “I’m a coward, a cheat, a bully, and a thief if I had the guts to steal,” the boy writes. Things get worse: “I have none of the fine qualities or emotions, and all the baser ones. I don’t understand why God permitted me to be born.” He signs himself “John Berryman,” the sender mirroring the recipient, and adds, “P.S. I’m a disgrace to your name.”

To read such words is to marvel that Berryman survived as long as he did. If one virtue emerged from the wreckage of his early years, it was a capacity to console; later, in the midst of his drinking and his lechery, he remained a reliable guide to grief, and to the blast area that surrounds it. In May, 1955, commiserating with Saul Bellow, whose father has just passed away, Berryman writes, “Unfortunately I am in a v g position to feel with you: my father died for me all over again last week.” He unfolds his larger theme: “His father’s death is one of the few main things that happens to a man, I think, and it matters greatly to the life when it happens.” Bellow’s affliction, Berryman reassures him, lofts him into illustrious company: “Shakespeare was probably in the middle of Hamlet and I think his effort increased.” Freud and Luther are then added to the roster of the fruitfully bereaved.

None of this will surprise an admirer of the Dream Songs. Among the loveliest are those in which the poet mourns departed friends, such as Robert Frost, Louis MacNeice, Theodore Roethke, and Delmore Schwartz. Berryman the comic, who can be scabrously funny, not least at his own expense, consorts with Berryman the frightener (“In slack times visit I the violent dead / and pick their awful brains”) and Berryman the elegist, who can summon whole twilights of sorrow. In this, a tribute to Randall Jarrell, he gradually allows the verse to run on, like overflowing water, across the line breaks, with a grace denied to our harshly end-stopped lives:

In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces, of liberations, and beloved faces, such as now ere dawn he sings. It would not be easy, accustomed to these things, to give up the old world, but he could try; let it all rest, have a good cry.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest: he’s left us now. The panic died and in the panic’s dying so did my old friend. I am headed west also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat and all will be as before when as we sought, among the beloved faces, eminence and were dissatisfied with that and needed more.

A photograph of 1941 shows Berryman in a dark coat, a hat, and a bow tie. His jaw is clean-shaven and firm. With his thin-rimmed spectacles and his ready smile, he looks like a spry young stockbroker on his way home from church. Skip ahead to the older Berryman, and you observe a very different beast, with a beard like the mane of a disenchanted lion. Finches could roost in it. The rims of his glasses are now thick and black, and his hands, in many images, refuse to be at rest. They gesticulate and splay, as if he were conducting an orchestra that he alone can hear. A cigarette serves as his baton.

If you seek to understand this metamorphosis, “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” can help. What greets us here, as often as not, is a parody of a poet. Watch him fumble with the mechanisms of the everyday, “ghoulishly inefficient about details and tickets and visas and trains and money and hotels.” Chores are as heavy as millstones, to his hypersensitive neck: “Do this, do that, phone these, phone those, repair this, drown that, poison the other.” We start to sniff a blend—peculiar to Berryman, like a special tobacco—of the humbled and the immodest. It drifts about, in aromatic puns: “my work is growing by creeps & grounds.” Though the outer world of politics and civil strife may occasionally intrude, it proves no match for the smoke-filled rooms inside the poet’s head. When nuclear tests are carried out at Bikini Atoll, in 1954, they register only briefly, in a letter to Bellow. “This thermonuclear business wd tip me up all over again if I were in shape to attend to it,” Berryman writes, before moving on to a harrowing digest of his diarrhea.

Above all, this is a book-riddled book. No one but Berryman, it’s fair to say, would write from a hospital in Minneapolis, having been admitted in a state of alcoholic and nervous prostration, to a bookstore in Oxford, asking, “Can you let me know what Elizabethan Bibles you have in stock?” The recklessness with which he abuses his body is paired with an indefatigable and nurselike care for textual minutiae. (“Very very tentatively I suggest that the comma might come out.”) Only on the page can he trust his powers of control, although even those desert him at a deliciously inappropriate moment. Writing to William Shawn at The New Yorker, in 1951, and proposing “a Profile on William Shakespeare,” Berryman begins, “Dear Mr Shahn.” Of all the editors of all the magazines in all the world, he misspells him.

No such Profile appeared; nor, to one’s infinite regret, did the edition of “King Lear” on which Berryman toiled for years. What we do have is his fine essay of 1953, “Shakespeare at Thirty,” which begins, “Suppose with me a time, a place, a man who was waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, on a day in latter April long ago—about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday.” Few scholars would have the bravado, or the imaginative dexterity, for such supposings, and it’s a thrill to see a living poet treat a dead one not as a monument but as a partner in crime. “Oh my god! Shakespeare. That multiform & encyclopedic bastard,” Berryman says in a letter of 1952, as if the two of them had just locked horns in a tavern.

Such plunges into the past, with its promise of adventure and refuge, came naturally to Berryman, nowhere more so than in “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” which was published in the Partisan Review in 1953 and, three years later, as a book. This was the poem with which he broke through—discovering not just a receptive audience but a voice that, in its heightened lyrical pressure, sounded like his and nobody else’s. The irony is that he did so by assuming the role of a woman: Anne Bradstreet, herself a poet, who emigrated from England to America, in 1630. It is her tough, pious, and hardscrabble history that Berryman chronicles: “Food endless, people few, all to be done. / As pippins roast, the question of the wolves / turns & turns.” In a celebrated scene, the heroine gives birth. Even if you dispute the male ability (or the right) to articulate such an experience, it’s hard not to be swayed by the fervor of dramatic effort:

I can can no longer and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me

drencht & powerful, I did it with my body! One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous, unforbidding Majesty. Swell, imperious bells. I fly.

What the poem cost its creator, over more than four years, is made plain in the letters, which ring with an exhausted ecstasy. “I feel like weeping all the time,” he tells one friend. “I regard every word in the poem as either a murderer or a lover.” As for Anne, who perished in 1672, “I certainly at some point fell in love with her.” Berryman adds, as if to prove his devotion, “I used three shirts at a time, in relays. I wish I were dead.”

Is this how we like poetry to be brought forth, even now? Though we may never touch the stuff, reading no verse from one year to the next, do we still expect it to be delivered in romantic agony, with attendant birth pangs? (So much for Wallace Stevens, who composed much of his work while gainfully employed, on a handsome salary, as an insurance executive.) Berryman viewed the notion of his being a confessional poet “with rage and contempt,” and rightly so; the label is an insult to his craftsmanship. Nobody pining for mere self-expression, or craving a therapeutic blurt, could lavish on a paramour, as Berryman did, lines as elaborately wrought as these:

Loves are the summer’s. Summer like a bee Sucks out our best, thigh-brushes, and is gone.

You have to reach back to Donne to find so commanding an exercise in the clever-sensual. It comes from “Berryman’s Sonnets,” a sequence of a hundred and fifteen poems, published in 1967. Most of them had been written long before, in 1947, in heat and haste, during an affair with a woman named Chris Haynes. And, in this huge new hoard of letters, how many are addressed to Haynes? Precisely one. Gossip hunters will slouch off in frustration, and good luck to them; on the other hand, anyone who delights in listening to Berryman, and who can’t help wondering how the singer becomes the songs, will find much to treasure here, in these garrulous and pedantic pages. There is hardly a paragraph in which Berryman—poet, pedagogue, boozehound, and symphonic self-destroyer—may not be heard straining toward the condition of music. “I have to make my pleasure out of sound,” he says. The book is full of noises, heartsick with hilarity, and they await their transmutation into verse.

[ryssachrysalis]

By Dr. Ferial Pearson, Muslim Queer Professor at University of Nebraska, Omaha

Some words about the fallout from Mullen:

1. The sheriff saying I was never in any danger is gaslighting me. Saying I have put a black mark on the town is victim-blaming behavior and reprehensible. I didn't cause this controversy or this drama; Deb Cox and the 95-100 other folks from in and around Mullen did. If the folks in the town were as kind as he said, they would unequivocally and loudly denounce her behavior and that of her friends, and demand that they apologize to me. I have yet to hear any apology from her or the folks commenting on her thread. Victim-blaming and gaslighting are abusive behaviors. Any psych expert will tell you that.

2. If I was never in any danger, why would the superintendent say in his email to me (screenshot of that in my Medium essay) that he understood if I was too scared to speak the next day? If I wasn't in any danger, why would he have been asked to be there and why did the superintendent assure me of his presence? He doesn't live in Mullen; he services two other areas.

3. The sheriff was one of 380 to sign a letter supporting Trump's wall. You can find his name on the official letter here: https://www.sheriffs.org/sites/default/files/ImmLtr.pdf

It's a little unsettling to know that a xenophobe was being asked to protect me from xenophobes.

4. The man who suggested someone be Chris Kyle was not in Mullen, but he was suggesting to a MULLEN PARENT who was IN MULLEN and who had my name and whereabouts the next day (thanks to Deb Cox posting that publicly) that he go be Chris Kyle, so the argument that the poster was out of state is not comforting in the least. The ChristChurch Mosque shooter was encouraged by people outside of New Zealand. That didn't make him any less dangerous to the people he murdered IN New Zealand.

5. The man suggesting the Chris Kyle solution to my presence is also a sheriff and was involved in the shooting of an indigenous man in Oklahoma. https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/no-charges-be-filed-against-officers-involved-shooting

6. It was not "just a few" people being vitriolic and perpetuating dangerous rhetoric. It was over 90 people. Again, receipts in my Medium essay. That being said, I have referenced over and over again that the students and staff in Mullen were so kind and supportive and warm to me. I have received messages from them in the days since that have been wonderful. I believe I have friends in Mullen and would probably go back if invited. However, I would not go alone.

7. The World Herald reporter was biased on the phone while interviewing me, saying things like, "Don't you think you're being over dramatic?" and "Did you write the title of the Medium blog all by yourself? Don't you think Islamophobia is a powerful word nowadays?" "You said you were afraid on the drive home. Are you taking poetic license by writing that?" He made me explain what queer meant, he had no idea what Medium was and spent quite a bit of time asking me about that. He never quoted anything I said on the phone to him in his article, didn't name me until the 4th paragraph, didn't use anything from my bio or the information about The Secret Kindness Agents that I sent him, and spent a great deal of time trying to discredit everything I wrote in my Medium piece. The Channel 3 news reporter didn't tell me he had interviewed the sheriff and so I never had a chance in that interview to respond to what the sheriff said; that was unfair and not good practice. Both men gave all the folks in Mullen a chance to respond to what I wrote and said, but never gave me the same courtesy.

8. Yes, you can be queer, AND a Muslim, AND be monogamously married to a straight man. If you're not sure how these things can go together, Professor Google is very helpful, or you can pay me and I'll teach you. I'm through doing free labor for people who don't value my time and my expertise and my three degrees.

9. This was a racist incident in addition to being xenophobic and Islamophobic. Deb Cox spent three hours digging into my background, and had to have spent a lot of energy to find out my faith. Would she have dug into a white person coming just as hard? Sure, this is my speculation, but I suspect not. I was the only brown adult I had seen in my two days there. If you think all of this doesn't exist in this "Nebraska Nice" state, just read the comments on all three news stories about this.

10. I'm the luckiest person in the world to have the friends and family that I do. Your overwhelming support, kindness, love, and concern help me feel strong enough to continue this work. I won't stop, I promise. THANK YOU.

[baxterholmes]

Round-up of fine sentences from This Land:

Josh thought Pastor Bob wanted to say he was sorry for what had happened. He also thought Pastor Bob was taking him to lunch. But it soon became clear that Josh was paying his own way, and Pastor Bob was not there to apologize. Josh ordered a glass of water and watched Pastor Bob eat.

“He quoted scriptures about how I was sinning against God for coming against his church, his ministry,” Josh remembers. But Josh came prepared with scripture passages of his own, about the responsibility of a shepherd to protect his flock. The message fell on deaf ears. Josh drank his water. Pastor Bob ate a big meal and ordered dessert.

-Grace in Broken Arrow by Kiera Feldman

Oral doubled down: If Richard left, he’d walk away with him—arm in arm with his anointed son. Oral called on the faculty to forgive Richard, to take a “fresh start.” He was 89-years-old at this point. His hearing was going, and he needed a walker. But ever the benevolent dictator, Oral demanded obedience. He asked everyone who agreed with him to stand—an old power play from his repertoire. One professor stood and bravely ventured, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘fresh start.’ I can forgive Richard. But I am not going to allow him to come back as president.”

One by one, Oral started grilling the few professors who remained seated. Suddenly, he stopped.

“No, I shouldn’t do this. I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his head in his big, wrinkled hands.

-This is my beloved son by Kiera Feldman

The memory of the Silkwood incident lurks far in the background of life in Crescent–for the most part people don’t particularly care to talk about it, and, polite that Crescent locals are, when they do, most don’t have much to say. Still, the story remains unsettled. When Bradley Manning was growing up it was 20 years less settled.

-Private Manning and the Making of WikiLeaks by Denver Nicks

Jack Taylor does not appear to concern himself with people’s accusations he is a hatchet man for publisher Edward Gaylord. He plods along in his juggernaut fashion, putting in 17-hour workdays, sometimes five, six, seven days a week. He is a sedulous researcher, scouring public records for hours on end, compiling minutiae, interviewing sources (always anonymous and “well-informed”), spending great spans of time at the Xerox machine on the fourth floor of the Oklahoma Publishing Company. Hardly is he a flashy interloper. He is not apt in imitation of Carl Bernstein, to brazen his way into a taxicab, pounce on a public official’s lap, and nonchalantly request an interview. Dramatics like that befit neither his nature nor his bulk.

Taylor, however, is a tenacious journalist, magnificently disciplined and somewhat of a fanatic organizationalist. He diagrams and charts every connection involved in a story, whether it be people or corporate entities. He clips articles from national and local newspapers on the discriminating premise that one day the information might be of some use. He also writes memos of Faulknerian length and files them away in his private office, the sole office at OPUBCO reserved for a single reporter. Jack Wimer, formerly investigative reporter at the Tulsa Tribune and one who cooperated with Taylor on several stories, recalls how “he once wrote a 30-page, single-space, typed memo to himself on a story that he never wrote.” He also once drew up a list of every Freedom of Information Act request that he had ever made, to which governmental agency, how many were approved, how many were denied, how many were denied in part, and what section of the law was cited for denial. These kind of pedantic efforts leave the impression that he is attempting to document, for posterity’s sake, his own endeavors in addition to merely substantiating the stories. Though his meticulousness certainly pays off, the surplus of wasted effort must be enormous.

-Stalking the Smoking Gun by David Fritze

Between statehood and 1923, Oklahoma was America’s largest oil-producing state, and even after it lost its perch to California and later Texas, Oklahoma still managed to increase its share of American output until 1929, when Oklahoma accounted for 750,000 barrels of oil a day and 35 percent of all the oil produced in the United States. Wells in Oklahoma City spat oil ferociously, so high that one out-of-control gusher—the Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Co.’s Mary Sudik No. 1, aka the “Wild Mary Sudik”—managed to sprinkle droplets on students in Norman, 11 miles away. Cushing alone produced 17 percent of American oil in 1919 and 3 percent of the world’s output between 1912 and 1919. And all of this time there was plenty of appetite for new oil. The world’s economy and its demand for petroleum and its distillates were increasing, and oil prices were holding steady for the most part, making Oklahoma’s goliath output enormously profitable. Scores of millionaires were created. The Osage Nation managed to hold onto their mineral rights during the allotment phase. They charged oil companies a flat 10 percent royalty fee and paid each tribe member annual distributions equivalent to more than a million dollars today, which attracted scalawags and con men from all over the country eager to marry an Osage heir, which kicked off a string of killings that would come to be known as the Osage Reign of Terror. Meanwhile, the high wages paid by the oil industry led hundreds of thousands of former sharecroppers to descend on cities like Tulsa and Oklahoma City and the tiny boomtowns that would pop up whenever a new field was found. Oil money created architectural blooms and secondary and tertiary industries: engineering, manufacturing, insurance. There were counter- flows of capital and labor. Universities and colleges sprouted, which in turn revealed new methods of refining petroleum and natural gas. This stoked the economy even more.

-Petro State by James McGirk

A soft-spoken woman from Oklahoma City first saw the pattern. Terri Turner is a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. In September of 2003, a homicide case landed on her desk: a body found along I-40. Turner immediately put out a teletype seeking other female bodies found, like hers, nude, near interstates, and with signs of having been bound. Within 72 hours, two responses came back from Arkansas and Mississippi. At that point, Turner knew she might be looking at linked crimes. She had her communications specialists monitor the teletypes for further cases. In seven months, they had seven homicides. She calls them “my seven girls.”

-Drive-By Truckers by Ginger Strand

With Operation Midnight Ride behind them, Walker and Hargis turned their aspirations to the national political races, making it clear that their choice for president was the libertarian senator Barry Goldwater. In August of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his momentous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.; its hopeful message of peace and unity was in direct opposition to Walker and Hargis’ aggressive calls for civil uprising. Two months later, in October of 1963, Walker attended a conference in Dallas in which he once again bashed President Kennedy and his policies. He was probably unaware that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the audience listening.

-The Strange Love of Dr. Billy James Hargis by Lee Roy Chapman

Contrary to the widespread misconception that it is a late twentieth-century invention, developed as a humane alternative to the medieval barbarisms of the electric chair and the noose, lethal injection hails from older and more ghastly origins. During WWII, Nazi Germany carried out its euthanasia program, granting “mercy deaths” to Jews and Gypsies, the disabled and the mentally ill. In the early stages of the Action T4 program,2 the Nazi regime used an injection of lethal drugs to kill infants and children suffering from physical handicaps and mental impairments. Eventually this method of execution was deemed too slow and expensive, as Hitler would turn to the hyper-efficient gas chambers in his quest for Aryan purity. The experimentation with lethal injection was for the most part lost to history, ceding both spotlight and stigma to the notoriously prolific gas chambers. That is until a few Oklahomans, keen on cutting the costs of Old Sparky and modernizing state-sanctioned executions, resurrected it nearly 40 years later.

-Tinkering with the Machinery of Death by Mike Mariani

One of the detectives just pulled me aside and said he found a syringe in your pocket. I can see Taco, by the way, outside, and he’s still walking around the front yard, mumbling to himself.

He’ll be the next one to die; you know that, don’t you?

Until then, that little fuck, that little shit, gets to go home; he gets to see tomorrow and lie to his parents about needing money for something other than drugs and alcohol; he gets to parlay his grief over you into sympathy and, who knows, maybe more drugs and a blow job from some skanky little whore on meth who will feel bad for him because you died.

The cop who found the syringe told me when he went to ask Taco what happened to you, Taco kept repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know. He was my best friend.”

-Letter to My Son The Weekend He Died by Barry Friedman

The woman stood with the couple’s one-year-old daughter a safe distance across the sage. Tucs told the man to start wetting down the walls of his home using a 12-volt pump drawing water from a cistern. He sent a bystander down the road to help the fire trucks find their way over the unmarked road to the scene. Then he and another bystander began shoveling dirt in front of the path of the stream of vegetable oil, which shot orange flames three feet high as it crept along the earth. As Tucs shoveled load after load in front of the stream, the fire in the shed grew, and the interior of an old sedan parked nearby caught fire. Tucs’ berm slowed the oil from reaching the home, but the dirt saturated and set alight, and more oil escaped through the flames and poured downhill. He started another berm and the same thing happened. The shed streamed fire. Tucs’ bunker gear lacked suspenders, so he kept hauling his pants up as he worked. As fire trucks arrived from area departments and set up on scene, Tucs heard a rupture and a rush of air, and looked up to see three 40-foot tornadoes of fire whirling above the shed into the sky.

-Firefight Along the Prairie by Michael Canyon Meyer

He stood naked by the roadside with a blanket draped around his hips, feebly reaching out for the glimmering cars as they passed in the morning light. He was almost too hideous to look at: Purple and black tracks streaked across his frail limbs, and his hollow eyes peered out from a pale, gray head shaved bald, eyebrows and all. Brandon Andres Green was not from hell, not exactly. He was from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Over the course of the past six days, Green had been tied up in a Tulsa hotel room, where his mind was loaded with powerful psychoactives and his body ravaged. He was then driven 500 miles south and abandoned in a Texas field at night. Green had crawled through the darkness, the occasional moan of a distant car his only guide. Every few feet, he collapsed from exhaustion. By morning, he reached the road. He grasped at fistfuls of air, hoping that someone might notice him.

-Subterranean Psychonaut by Michael Mason, Chris Sandel and Lee Roy Chapman

Lacking the political power he once held through both the Democratic Party and his Klan affiliations, diminished in his fortune, and aggrieved by his son’s death, Brady began to fall apart. Tulsans reported seeing him dining at his hotel alone, staring into space and leaving his meals untouched. Gone was the steeley-eyed entrepreneur. A portrait published in the Tulsa Daily World around this time shows an aged Brady looking weary and morose.

In the early morning hours of August 29, 1925, Brady walked into his kitchen and sat down at the breakfast table. He propped a pillow in the nook of one arm, and rested his head upon it. With his right arm, he took a .44 caliber pistol, pointed it at his temple, and pulled the trigger. [28] Brady, who worked to divide Tulsa along racial lines, died a victim of his own curse.

-The Nightmare of Dreamland by Lee Roy Chapman

Birdwell’s life reads like a John Wayne script. A story in The Daily Oklahoman on October 17, 1931, details an account of Birdwell kidnapping a deputy sheriff in Earlsboro and detaining him so that Birdwell could go to a funeral home to view his father, who had recently died. If Birdwell had attended his father’s funeral, he would have been arrested for robbing banks in Earlsboro, Maud, Mill Creek, and Roff, Oklahoma. After Birdwell saw his father’s body, he returned the deputy sheriff’s gun on the outskirts of town, and rode into the sunset with Pretty Boy Floyd.

But Birdwell and Floyd’s days were numbered. Their names and faces were routinely in the papers, and the FBI was just waiting for one of them to make a mistake. Boley was Birdwell’s biggest mistake.

“Pretty Boy told the gang, ‘Go anywhere else, but do not rob Boley. The people there need their money and they do not have much of it in the bank,’ ” said Henrietta Hicks, Boley municipal judge and unofficial historian. “They just would not listen. You know how Napoleon met his Waterloo? Well, George Birdwell met his Boley-loo.”

-Bandit in Boley by Jamie Birdwell-Branson

Bad men are drawn to the City of God. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it the meeting ground for America’s most sinister extremists. Many Oklahomans regard it as the most dangerous and mysterious place in the state.

For 30-plus years, a small, isolated community in Northeastern Oklahoma has been the subject of endless scrutiny. Law enforcement agencies and conspiracy theorists insist that Elohim City is a breeding ground for neo-Nazis and anti-government militias hell-bent on overthrowing the “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) of the United States. The most damning accusation suggests Elohim City played a central role in the planning and execution of the Oklahoma City bombing.

-Who’s Afriad of Elohim City? by Lee Roy Chapman and Joshua Kline

At the hospital the day Abby was born, a nurse handed me a booklet about being the parent of a dead child. What’s the cost of a funeral for a newborn? Can you take a tax deduction? What should you name a dead child? Is it OK to build the coffin yourself? The booklet plainly answered such questions. It was my introduction to a realm of knowledge I had never known existed.

The answers run like this:

You can build the coffin if you want. It might make you feel better.

Name the child what you meant to name him. Don’t save the name for someone else.

You can claim the baby as a dependent on your taxes if he drew a breath.

-A Stiller Ground by Gordon Grice

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner draws the line of frontier encroachment at the hands of industrial expanse at 1890. He delivered his theory in an 1893 address to the American Historical Association of Chicago titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” now known as the “Turner Thesis.” A year later, at the age of 17, Fraser molded his first End of the Trail. He wrote that it came from an idea that had been haunting him since childhood: “Often hunters, wintering with the Indians, stopped over to visit my grandfather on their way south and in that way I heard many stories about the Indians. On one occasion a fine fuzzy bearded old hunter remarked with some bitterness in his voice, ‘The Injuns will be driven into the Pacific Ocean.’”

-The Indian of their Dreams by Mark Brown

Netarsha slapped her hand on the window behind her.

“I said, ‘NOOOOOOO!’ Bust out laughing. I knew. I knew. I sat up. I didn’t know what to do. I kind of balled up, on my bed, in the corner… and my doorbell rang.”

It was the police, come to tell her.

-We Extend Our Condolences by Brian Ted Jones

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

US teacher of the year stages silent protest as Trump awards prize

Mandy Manning, who works with refugees and immigrants, wears Womens March and trans equality pins at White House

A teacher who leads a classroom for teenage refugees staged a silent protest by wearing several overtly political badges while receiving an award from Donald Trump at the White House.

Mandy Manning works at the Newcomer Center at Joel E Ferris high school in Spokane, Washington, which specializes in English language development for new refugees and immigrant students.

Trump presented her with the National Teacher of the Year award in the East Room and praised her incredible devotion. The US president said: Teachers like Mandy play a vital role in the wellbeing of our children, the strength of our communities and the success of our nation.

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Manning wore six badges on her black dress. According to a pooled report, they included one with a poster for the Womens March that followed Trumps inauguration, one that said Trans Equality Now and one in the shape of an apple with a rainbow.

The badges also represented the teacher of the year programme, National Education Association and Peace Corps, where she began her teaching career.

Handing her the clear glass, apple-shaped award on a podium, Trump did not appear to notice the badges. He smiled as he and Manning posed for photographers. The education secretary, Betsy DeVos; the labor secretary, Alex Acosta; and the Peace Corps director, Jody Olsen, looked on.

Manning told the Associated Press after the ceremony that she used a private moment with Trump to give him stacks of letters written by her students and members of the Spokane community. She said she told Trump she hoped he would read them, and she encouraged him to visit her school.

I just had a very, very brief moment so I made it clear that the students that I teach ... are dedicated and focused, Manning said in an interview. They make the United States the beautiful place that it is.

Manning said the letters conveyed important messages about what coming to the US meant to the immigrants and refugees.

The long-running annual event took place against the backdrop of teachers strikes in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia amid complaints over stagnant pay.

Trump has cracked down on both legal and illegal immigration and suspended the US refugee programme for a period. He has demanded that a wall be built on the Mexican border to keep out murderers, drugs gangs and other criminals.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

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Democrat Warren Confronts 2020 Electability Question Head-On in Ohio

Contents

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Ohio. confronts 2020 electability question head-

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Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio Saturday, May 11, 2019 8:48 a.m. CDT Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks during a townhall event in Columbus, Ohio, U.S.,

Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio May 12, 2019 smartblogs 40 Views 0 Comments Politics CHILLICOTHE, OHIO (Reuters) – At a veterans hall in the mostly white, working-class town of Chillicothe, Ohio, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke to about 200 people on Friday about her plans to fight the opioid epidemic, Washington corruption and economic inequality.

Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks during a townhall event in Columbus,

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Electability is king in the 2020 Democratic primary as voters are choosing. He also routinely performs the best in hypothetical head-to-head. To die-hard warren supporters, however, questions about her electability-and. Ohio does not host one of next year’s early nominating contests.

Oklahoma lawmakers launch state-wide veteran registry He was too young for federal programs and not poor enough for federal and state help. but all avenues for help – Veterans Affairs, social services, Medicaid for nursing home care, even legislators.

Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio. Amanda Becker.. Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks during a.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke on Friday about her plans to fight the opioid epidemic, Washington corruption, and economic inequality.. Democrat Warren Confronts 2020 Electability Question Head.

Democrat Warren Confronts 2020 Electability Question Head-On in Ohio At a veterans hall in the mostly white, working-class town of Chillicothe, Ohio, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke to about.

According to Reuters, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke to about 200 people on Friday about her plans to fight the opioid epidemic, Washington corruption and economic inequality. Warren’s.

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Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio. Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in ohio. confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio.

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Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio CHILLICOTHE, OHIO – At a veterans hall in the mostly white, working-class town of Chillicothe, Ohio, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke to about 200 people on Friday about her plans to fight the opioid epidemic, Washington corruption and economic inequality.

At a veterans hall in the mostly white, working-class town of Chillicothe, Ohio, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke to about 200 people on Friday about her plans to fight the opioid epidemic, Washington corruption and economic inequality. Warren’s decision to campaign in Ohio – a state President

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Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio; Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio. Saturday, May 11, 2019 8:48 a.m. CDT.

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Checklist for Forming a Corporation in Oklahoma

Oklahoma Incorporation and company registration.

Contact the Oklahoma Secretary of State to determine if the proposed corporate name is available for registration. The proposed name of your corporation must be “distinguishable upon the records” of the secretary of state. A name is not considered to be distinguishable from another name if the only difference is:

a) reversing of words (e.g., Fast Copy, Copy Fast);

b) use of Arabic numbers or Roman numerals (e.g., Jim’s Sales I, Jim’s Sales II);

c) use of possessives (e.g., Thompson Auto Body, Thompson’s Auto Body);

d) phonetic spelling (e.g., Quick, Kwik).

2) Determine the availability of the proposed corporate name in any other states in which the business will operate.

3) File the articles of incorporation with the Oklahoma Secretary of State, Business Services Division.

1) The name of the corporation must end with “Company,” “Co.,” “Corporation,” “Corp.,” “Incorporated,” or “Inc.”

2) The articles must indicate the corporation’s principal office—city, village or township, and county.

3) The articles must state the number of authorized shares that can be issued and their express terms. NOTE: The number of shares authorized determines the filing fee.

4) If the corporation plans to have an initial stated capital, it must be included.

5) You may appoint the initial board of directors in the articles.

6) The articles must be signed by all incorporators.

4) Incorporators, or the directors if named in the articles, should start a corporate minute book by acknowledging the filing of the articles and including the original of the filed articles.

a) Incorporators, or the directors if named in the articles, should authorize the issuance of shares.

b) The investors should sign a subscription agreement, the agreement in which the investor agrees to buy the shares for a given price.

c) The incorporators, or the directors if named in the articles, may set the value of noncash assets in payment of the subscriptions.

d) The incorporators, or the directors if named in the articles, accept the subscriptions.

e) The incorporators must give notice of the first shareholders’ meeting.

5) Consider electing a “Subchapter S” corporation status for federal and state tax purposes. See Sections 1362 et seq. of the Internal Revenue Code.

a) Use IRS Form 2553. File with the Internal Revenue Service Center, within the 16th day of the third month of the beginning of the tax year.

b) Shareholders and the corporation must file a notice of the subchapter selection with the Oklahoma Department of Taxation.

6) If the business will operate under a name other than its corporate name, a fictitious name must be filed with the Oklahoma Secretary of State.

7) Make sure your business complies with the Oklahoma securities laws. The most common exemption from the Oklahoma registration requirements for small businesses is a small business equity investment to ten or fewer investors. To comply with this exemption, the subscription agreement must include statements that:

1) the purchaser is aware that no market may exist for resale of the securities;

2) the purchaser is aware of any restrictions on the transfer of the securities, and

3) the purchaser declares that the purchase of equity is for investment purposes and not for redistribution. If there are non-Oklahoma investors, check with their resident state security regulator.

8) Make sure your business complies with federal securities laws. Registration is required unless an exemption is available. Following are the two most common exemptions for small businesses:

a) Intrastate exemption

b) Private placement exemption

9) Obtain the taxpayer identification number from the Internal Revenue Service. Submit Form SS-4. See the procedure set forth on the IRS website: www.irs.ustreas.gov. Note that any person filing a Form SS-4 other than a corporate officer must be designated as the Third Party Designee on the Form SS-4. To handle any other tax matters for the corporation, a person must also file Form 2848 with the IRS.

a) By filing the Form SS-4, the corporation is automatically pre-enrolled in the Electronic Tax Payment System.

b) By filing the form SS-4, the corporation will receive the IRS Circular E Employee’s Tax Guide – Forms for Payroll.

10) Take the following action at the first shareholders’ meeting or by written consent of all

shareholders.

a) Elect directors.

b) If the directors named in the articles have not done so, the shareholders should adopt

the code of regulations for the internal government of the corporation.

c) Consider adopting a close corporation agreement

d) Set value for any non-cash payments by investors to the corporation.

e) Consider adopting a shareholder’s buy and sell agreement.

f) Set the fiscal year for the corporation.

11) Take the following action at the first meeting of the board of directors or by written consent of all directors.

a) Elect officers.

b) Set up a bank account by adopting a bank-provided resolution.

c) Consider adopting benefit plans.

d) Consider adopting a group term life insurance plan (see Internal Revenue Code Section 79).

e) Consider adopting accident and health insurance plan (see Internal Revenue Code Section 105[b]).

f) Consider adopting medical reimbursement plan (see Internal Revenue Code Section 105[b]).

g) Consider adopting a death benefit plan (see Internal Revenue Code Section 101[b]). h) Consider adopting a Section 1244 plan. This allows the stockholders to take an ordinary tax loss rather than a capital loss if the business fails and the stockholders lose their investment (see Internal Revenue Code Section 1244).

i) Adopt a resolution for leasing business space.

j) Adopt a resolution for the purchase of any real estate.

k) Set compensation of key employees

12) Consider requiring key employees to execute employment agreements with covenants not to compete.

13) Issue stock certificates or transaction statements for paid shares.

14) Consider adopting policies about the following issues to protect the company, the directors and the executives:

a) sexual harassment;

b) non-discrimination;

c) trade secret protection;

d) company ethics (e.g., corporate gifts, anti-kickbacks);

e) email, computer and Internet use;

f) compliance with environmental laws;

g) compliance with the anti-trust laws;

h) compliance with the worker safety rules;

i) development of procedures to prevent the hiring of illegal aliens, and

j) political contributions.

15) Obtain the following posters to be placed conspicuously in the workplace:

a) Oklahoma Civil Rights;

b) Fair Labor Standards Act – Minimum Wage poster;

c) Employee Polygraph Protection Act – poster advising employees of federal rights when confronted by a request from an employer to undergo a lie detector test;

d) rights of employees under the Family and Medical Leave Act poster;

e) posted notice of the company’s anti-discrimination policy and anti-harassment policy (sex, race, national origin, etc.);

f) Federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) poster (states the rights of employees under OSHA);

g) Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission poster;

h) Oklahoma Wage and Hour requirements poster

16) Apply for an income tax withholding agent. File Application for Registration as a withholding Agent, with the Oklahoma Department of Taxation.

Starting a new company in Oklahoma. Ecompanies USA offers fast & easy Oklahoma Incorporation, LLC and Business Name Registration services to domestic entrepreneurs and foreign companies wishing to operate in Oklahoma.

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Rosie the Riveters discovered a wartime California dream

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Women shipfitters working on board the USS Nereus at the U.S. Navy Yard in Mare Island, circa 1943. Department of Defense

For many American families, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl struck like swift punches to the gut. New Deal work relief programs like the Works Progress Administration tossed lifelines into the crushing economic waves, but many young people soon started looking farther west for more stable opportunities.

A powerful vision of the California dream took hold in the late 1930s and early 1940s, featuring steady work, nice housing, sometimes love – all bathed in abundant warm sunshine.

Perhaps most important were the jobs. They attracted people to the Pacific Coast’s new airplane factories and shipyards. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to an intensified war effort, and more Americans sought ways to demonstrate patriotism while also taking advantage of new employment opportunities. People from economically downtrodden regions began flooding into California en masse – where nearly 10 percent of all federal government expenditures during the war were spent.

Following wartime opportunities west, “Rosie the Riveters” found more than just jobs, though, when they reached the Golden State. And at the war’s conclusion, each had to decide whether her own version of the California dream had been temporary or something more durable.

Moving on to another life

Moving to find work looms large in the historical memory surrounding the Great Depression, and migration continued in the ensuing years. The Second World War led to the largest mass migration within the United States in the nation’s history.

Posters aimed to recruit women to jobs left vacant by drafted men during the war. Office of War Information

People in rural parts of the country learned about new jobs in different ways. Word of mouth was crucial, as people often chose to travel with a friend or relatives to new jobs in growing cities along the West Coast. Henry Kaiser, whose production company would open seven major shipyards during the war, sent buses around the country recruiting people with the promise of good housing, health care and steady, well-paying work.

Railroad companies, airplane manufacturers and dozens if not hundreds of smaller companies supporting major corporations like Boeing, Douglas and Kaiser all offered similar work opportunities. Eventually the federal government even helped out with child care. Considered against the economic hardships of the Great Depression, the promises often sounded like sweet music.

The Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front Oral History Project, a collaboration of the National Park Service and the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley, collected hundreds of wartime memories.

During an oral history I recorded in 2013 for the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front Oral History project, Oklahoman Doris Whitt remembered seeing an advertising poster for jobs, which sparked her interest in moving to California.

“[T]he way I got in with Douglas Aircraft was I went to the post office, and I saw these posters all over the walls. They were asking people to serve in these different projects that were opening up because the war had started.”

For a kid from the Great Plains, the notion of going to California to help build airplanes seemed like moving to another world. Whitt grew up on a farm without a telephone. Even catching a glimpse of an airplane in the sky was unusual.

Whitt applied and was hired for training almost immediately. She became a “Rosie the Riveter”: one of the estimated seven million American women who joined the labor force during the war. Even the pay Whitt began earning while training in Oklahoma City was more than she had ever made in her life to that point. When she transferred to the West Coast and arrived in Los Angeles, Whitt felt she was living the California dream.

“Oh, it was great. I remember coming through Arizona and seeing all the palm trees, and those were the first I had ever seen. They were way up in the air, and all I could do was look…. Then we got down into Los Angeles, and I was just amazed at the difference…. I just thought, ‘Oh, boy, we’re in Glory Land.’”

Workers install fixtures and assemblies to a B-17 tail fuselage at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant in Long Beach. Alfred T. Palmer, Office of War Information

Whitt began walking to work every day, to a job at an airplane factory disguised as a canning company. She helped assemble P-38 Lighting aircraft by riveting the fuselage together on the day shift. She later moved to Northern California, working as a welder at a shipyard. When I met her more than 70 years later, she still resided in California.

Did California remain a living dream?

Ultimately, the wartime version of the California dream proved real for some people. The state boomed in the war years. Wartime jobs in the defense industries paid well, profoundly so for those coming from rural poverty. African-Americans, especially those working in extremely poor conditions like sharecropping farmers in the South, moved in large numbers to better their lives.

Worker at Vega Aircraft Corporation in Burbank checks electrical assemblies. U.S. Office of War Information

The Golden State didn’t always deliver on the promise it offered to those who moved there during World War II, though.

Many migrants found housing hard to find. Around shipyards, some people even shared “hot beds.” Workers slept in shifts: When one roommate returned home, another would head in to work, leaving behind a still-warm bed. Unauthorized, or “wildcat,” strikes happened across California in spite of wartime rules intended to prevent such labor actions, suggestive of ongoing labor unrest bubbling over in a new wave of strikes happening after the war.

While many women moving to California stayed in relationships, some marriages came to an end as the divorce rate spiked. Whitt and her husband separated not long after her move to California.

And despite wartime factories’ outstanding productivity with women working in traditionally male jobs, women were mostly pushed out of their jobs at war’s end.

Some Rosies returned to their home states. But many others did stay in California, transitioning from wartime work in defense industries to other occupations. After all, the state still offered more progressive social conditions and a wider range of opportunities for women than could be found in many other parts of the country during the post-war era.

Doris Whitt stayed in California and found a job at a meatpacking company, working there for 14 years. She moved to a small town near the ocean where she lived for decades. The California dream never completely disappeared for people like Whitt, but nothing is quite as magical as those few moments when one first discovers it. In her oral history, she remembered seeing San Francisco for the first time:

“Oh, it was fantastic. Fantastic. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. It was just like going to a whole new country, you know? And the ocean… Oh it was just fantastic.”

The California dream continued to evolve in the postwar era, with each passing generation and each new group of migrants making it into something new.

Samuel Redman received funding from the National Park Service to assist in the creation of the oral histories noted in this article.

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Elon Musk Digs In His Heels In Tesla Feud With United Auto Workers

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday brushed off efforts by workers at his California factory to unionize, insisting that joining the United Automobile Workers would yield no benefits.

There are really only disadvantages for someone to want the UAW here, Musk said during a call discussing Teslas earnings with analysts and investors.

The billionaire repeatedclaims he made to Gizmodothis month that an employee who wrote scathing blog post about conditions at the company actually worked for the UAW, one of the countrys largest unions. The worker, Jose Moran, 43, and the UAW both denied he was paid by the union.

There is quite a strong effort by the UAW to unionize Tesla, Musk said Wednesday. Actually, a lot of people at Tesla have been approached by the UAW and expressed concerns about this.He called Moran a de facto UAW employee.

A lot of workers believe we have a right for union representation and a right to represent ourselves and our own interest, Moran said during a conference call with reporters earlier this month. We dont believe the company is doing that for us.

The UAW said recently that it can confirm that Mr Moran and others at Tesla have approached the UAW and we welcome them with open arms.Reached by The Huffington Post on Wednesday evening, UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg said, Our statement stands.

Musks remarks, during the companys first earnings call since Novembers election, comes amid heightened public scrutiny of his political views. The South African-born entrepreneur, who also is CEO of rocket firm SpaceX, serves as an adviser to President Donald Trump, with whom he has cultivated what The New York Times described as a budding bromance.

Moran, in a Feb. 9 post on Medium, described working long hours with machinery that leaves workers prone to injuries. Employees on the assembly line earn hourly wages of $17 to $21, he said, making it difficult to afford rent in the notoriously pricey Bay Area. He cited $25.58 as average pay in the auto industry. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the average hourly wage for motor vehicle manufacturing in December as $29.53.

Preventable injuries happen often, wrote Moran, who has worked at the Fremont, California, assembly plant since 2012. In addition to long working hours, machinery is often not ergonomically compatible with our bodies. There is too much twisting and turning and extra physical movement to do jobs that could be simplified if workers input were welcomed.

Musk fired back on Wednesday, insisting his employees are hurt far less frequently than those at rival auto plants.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk (R) sits beside Senior Counselor to the President Steve Bannon (L) as U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a strategy and policy forum with chief executives of major U.S. companies at the White House in Washington February 3, 2017.

Teslas injury rate is less than half of the industry average, contrary to allegations made, Musk said.

He added that employee equity in the company, whose historically jitterystock price has hovered around $270 this month, places Tesla workers among the best paid in the industry.

The labor feud wasnt the only political topic Musk broached during the 73-minute earnings call. Musk said he urged Trump not to ax government incentives for renewable energy and electric vehicles unless he does the same to the oil, gas and coal industries.

Musk, one of 17 executives advising the president, said Trump did not respond when he briefly raised the issue at a recent summit.

Itd be fine to get rid of incentives and subsidies, but that should be uniformly applied to all industries, Musk said during the call. It would be wrong to get rid of any sort of government intervention in sustainable energy while retaining it in fossil fuels.

Trump, who has repeatedly said he doesnt believe in climate change, vowed to boost the U.S. economy by slashing environmental regulations and bolstering fossil fuel production. He stacked his Cabinet with climate science deniers and oil industry allies. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt cultivated a cozy relationship with oil and gas players during his tenure as Oklahoma attorney general, an office from which he repeatedly sued the agency he now leads. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson previously served as CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., the oil giant that bankrolled a decades-long disinformation campaign against climate scientists.

Citizens for the Republic, a grassroots conservative group with ties to ring-wing radio commentator Laura Ingraham, launched a campaign last year calling on the new Republican-dominated Congress to pass a bill stripping the solar and electric vehicle industries of subsidies. The group made Musk its poster boy, setting up websites with names like StopElonFromFailingAgain.com.

Tillerson, during his confirmation hearings, denied that oil and gas producers receive subsidies.

The companies actually enjoy a vast array of incentives, including direct subsidies to offset the cost of extracting from wells that are nearly spent. Exxon Mobil alone receives between $700 million and $1 billion per year in deductions that tax analysts told HuffPost function like subsidies.

If the principle is to get rid of government intervention, that should be uniformly applied, not unfairly applied, Musk said. That was my comment, but there was no response given.

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Elon Musk Digs In His Heels In Tesla Feud With United Auto Workers

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Elon Musk Digs In His Heels In Tesla Feud With United Auto Workers

Tesla Chief executive officer Elon Musk on Wednesday brushed off efforts by workers at his California factory to unionize, insisting that joining the U . s . Automobile Workers would yield no benefits.

You will find only disadvantages for somebody to wish the United auto workers leader here, Musk stated throughout a call discussing Teslas earnings with analysts and investors.

The millionaire repeatedclaims he made to Gizmodothis month that the worker who authored scathing blog post about conditions at the organization really labored for that United auto workers leader, among the countrys largest unions. The staff member, Jose Moran, 43, and also the United auto workers leader both denied he was compensated through the union.

There’s a significant strong effort through the United auto workers leader to unionize Tesla, Musk stated Wednesday. Really, many people at Tesla happen to be contacted through the United auto workers leader and expressed concerns relating to this.He known as Moran a de facto United auto workers leader worker.

Lots of workers believe there exists a suitable for union representation along with a to represent ourselves and our very own interest, Moran stated throughout a business call with reporters earlier this year. We dont believe the organization does that for all of us.

The United auto workers leader stated lately that it may make sure Mr Moran yet others at Tesla have contacted the United auto workers leader so we welcome all of them with open arms.Arrived at through the Huffington Publish on Wednesday evening, United auto workers leader spokesman John Rothenberg stated, Our statement stands.

Musks remarks, throughout the companys first earnings call since Novembers election, comes among increased public scrutiny of his political opinions. The South African-born entrepreneur, who is also Chief executive officer of rocket firm SpaceX, can serve as an advisor to President Donald Trump, that he’s cultivated exactly what the New You are able to Occasions referred to as a budding bromance.

Moran, inside a February. 9 publish on Medium, described working lengthy hrs with machinery that leaves workers vulnerable to injuries. Employees around the set up line earn hourly wages of $17 to $21, he stated, which makes it hard to afford rent within the notoriously pricey San Francisco Bay Area. He reported $25.58 as what is within the auto industry. The Bls lists the typical hourly wage for automobile manufacturing in December as $29.53.

Avoidable injuries happen frequently, authored Moran, that has labored in the Fremont, California, set up plant since 2012. Additionally to lengthy working hrs, machinery is frequently not ergonomically suitable for our physiques. There’s an excessive amount of twisting and turning and additional physical movement to complete jobs that may be simplified if workers input were welcomed.

Musk fired back on Wednesday, insisting his workers are hurt much less frequently than individuals at rival auto plants.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Tesla Chief executive officer Elon Musk (R) sits beside Senior Counselor towards the President Steve Bannon (L) as U.S. President Jesse Trump hosts a method and policy forum with chief executives of major U.S. companies in the White-colored House in Washington Feb 3, 2017.

Teslas injuries rates are under half of the profession average, unlike allegations made, Musk stated.

He added that worker equity in the organization, whose historically jitterystock cost has hovered around $270 this month, places Tesla workers one of the better compensated in the market.

The labor feud wasnt the only real political subject Musk broached throughout the 73-minute earnings call. Musk stated he advised Trump to not ax government incentives for alternative energy and electric vehicles unless of course he is doing exactly the same towards the oil, gas and coal industries.

Musk, certainly one of 17 executives counseling obama, stated Trump didn’t respond as he briefly elevated the problem in a recent summit.

Itd be fine to eliminate incentives and subsidies, but that needs to be uniformly put on all industries, Musk stated throughout the call. It might be wrong to eliminate any kind of government intervention in sustainable energy while retaining it in non-renewable fuels.

Trump, that has frequently stated he doesnt have confidence in global warming, vowed to improve the U.S. economy by slashing ecological rules and bolstering fossil fuel production. He stacked his Cabinet with climate science deniers and oil industry allies. Ecological Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt cultivated a cozy relationship with gas and oil players throughout his tenure as Oklahoma attorney general, a workplace that he frequently sued the company lucrative leads. Secretary of Condition Rex Tillerson formerly offered as Chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Corp., the oil giant that bankrolled a decades-lengthy disinformation campaign against climate scientists.

Citizens for that Republic, a grassroots conservative group with ties to ring-wing radio commentator Laura Ingraham, launched an offer this past year contacting the brand new Republican-dominated Congress to pass through an invoice stripping the solar and electric vehicle industries of subsidies. The audience made Musk its poster boy, establishing websites with names like StopElonFromFailingAgain.com.

Tillerson, throughout his confirmation proceedings, denied that gas and oil producers receive subsidies.

The businesses really have a wide array of incentives, including direct subsidies to offset the price of removing from wells which are nearly spent. Exxon Mobil alone receives between $700 million and $1 billion each year in deductions that tax analysts told HuffPost function like subsidies.

When the principle would be to eliminate government intervention, that needs to be uniformly applied, not unfairly applied, Musk stated. Which was my comment, but there wasn’t any response given.

Find out more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tesla-uaw_us_58ae3371e4b057efdce8f521?afhiisbc78vnqgds4i&ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009