Obama's America (Part 2)

A couple of days ago I wrote a post assigning a considerable portion of the blame for the Baltimore riots to President Obama in part because of his administration's economic policies that have increased wealth inequality and done nothing to help financially stressed working class Americans. Thus I would be remiss if were I to fail to mention the latest way that Obama is determined to make matters even worse and to set himself up to be showered with hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate largesse consultancies, speaking fees and book advances upon his retirement from office. I'm talking, of course, about the Trans-Pacific "Free" Trade Agreement, the opposition to which is being spearheaded by Senators Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, and includes some strange bedfellows:

The Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP deal since the early days of his presidency. Democrats and a bloc of House Republicans lead by Rep. Walter Jones (N.C.) are concerned that the pact -- which has not been finalized -- will exacerbate income inequality and undermine U.S. authority to write its own regulations, while Obama and Republican leaders say the deal will help all Americans by boosting economic growth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other top corporate lobbying groups support the deal, while environmentalists, organized labor and many Tea Party organizations are opposed. Warren and Brown said that corporate support for the deal shouldn't be surprising.

"Executives of the country's biggest corporations and their lobbyists already have had significant opportunities not only to read [the TPP text], but to shape its terms," the letter reads. "The Administration’s 28 trade advisory committees on different aspects of the TPP have a combined 566 members, and 480 of those members, or 85%, are senior corporate executives or industry lobbyists. Many of the advisory committees -- including those on chemicals and pharmaceuticals, textiles and clothing, and services and finance -- are made up entirely of industry representatives."

So here we have the great President Hopey-Changey, who rode into office in part because of a tsunami of disgust with Wall Street and the abuses of corporate America, looking to cement his legacy by pushing through one last big "fuck you" to the tens of millions of middle class, working class and young voters who placed their hopes in him. This, of course, despite twenty-plus years of evidence that "free" trade enriches the top 10% of the population at the expense of everyone else. What more evidence do you need that the man is a fucking sociopathic monster?

Here we also see the most direct evidence yet of why America is being turned into a virtual police state, which is docilely accepted by most of the population to the point where even Baltimore's black female mayor was throwing around the word "thug," without making any attempt to differentiate between the protestors who were expressing their First Amendment rights and the rioters who were looting and burning cars. This is why all of our electronic communications are being monitored and why police forces all over the country are being outfitted with all the surplus military hardware they can handle. Those in charge know their policies are going to cause greater and greater public outrage as economic desperation worsens and more and more people begin to realize that they have no future.

All of this wouldn't be possible had the Democratic Party not sold its own constituents down the river a long time ago. So is America's liberal party going support its two most progressive Senators and stand firm against their own president? Not hardly...as usual they are more worried about the political fallout than all the lives that would be ground up and spit out by the agreement:

Democrats have been wringing their hands about the potential damage the dispute on Capitol Hill could do to the party, particularly as the 2016 elections get into gear -- a concern that is only compounded by the vitriol now being exchanged between two of its most prominent figures. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has largely avoided addressing TPP in the early stages of her campaign.

Yeah, I'll just bet Hillary is trying to avoid saying anything about this issue, given that it was her fucking husband who pushed through NAFTA and GATT and started America down the "free" trade road to hell.


Bonus: "Hell ain't half full"...so there's plenty of room for Obama

Obama's America

I'll admit that by titling this post as I have and tying it to the riots in Baltimore I'm running this risk of being misunderstood. First of all, lets keep what's happening in perspective. Compared to the LA riots after the initial Rodney King trial, or the many conflagrations that consumed American inner cities during the 1960s, what happened today is like a firecracker going off next to a keg of dynamite. A few cops got injured, a few stored got looted and few cars were burned. By comparison, the LA riots resulted in 53 deaths and over 2000 injuries.

Secondly, I have no doubt that there are plenty of white bigots and racists who are already blaming the president for what they are seeing on their teevee screens. And while I agree with them that a large share of the blame DOES reside with our feckless commender-in-chief, it certainly is NOT for the reasons they think: namely that this is all part of the "socialist-communist-muslim" Obama's "plan" to "undermine" America and turn it over to the Islamic State...or something equally ridiculous.

No, Obama deserves much of the blame for plenty of other reasons. It was, after all, his 2008 campaign that raised the hopes and dreams of black Americans and led them to foolishly believe that having one of their own in the White House would mean they would finally have someone in a position of high power who understood the very real institutional barriers still preventing them from achieving economic parity with whites. It was Obama himself who then deliberately sold out those hopes and dreams by not lifting a finger to help black America (or anyone else who isn't rich) once in office. Obama's administration has presided over an even greater spread of wealth inequality between the rich (mostly white men) and everyone else (blacks included), and his so-called economic recovery has benefitted only about the top 10% of the population, while the lower 90% finds itself more economically stressed than at any time since the Great Depression. Obama has also greatly contributed to this country's culture of violence and the idea that settling disputes requires guns, bombs, missiles and predator drones aimed at non-whites overseas who refuse to to accept American hegemony over the planet.

But finally and most importantly, Obama and his administration has stood around with its thumb up its ass while police killing incident after police killing incident has occurred without any attempt to have his Department of Justice forcefully step in with aggressive civil rights prosecutions--as Daddy Bush did after the Rodney King trial not guilty verdict. Time after time, from George Zimmerman to Darren Wilson and now on to a steady onslaught of cases, cops and cop wannabees have been killing young black men in cold blood without being punished while Obama has done nothing except for what he's best at--running his fucking mouth. Conversely to what the racists and bigots think, it is my contention that Obama's presence in the White House actually served as a distraction that PREVENTED this kind of rioting from breaking out sooner. Eventually, however, as incident after incident unfolded the pressure was going to inevitably increase to the boiling point.

In his seventh year in office, we have reached the point where Obama's America is finally approaching maturity. Thanks to the hopes he raised in order to con his way into the Oval Office and his complete subservience to a corporate America he no doubt hopes will make him a very rich man upon leaving office (as it has the Clintons), the fault lines that were already there are deepening and widening ever so slowly to the point where we are now feeling the first minor tremors presaging a potential future major earthquake that will shake our body politic to its foundations. For awhile now those tremors could be heard in the increasingly hateful right-wing rhetoric being employed against blacks, gays, Muslims and the poor. And as of today, they can now be seen in the looted stores and burning police cars dotting the streets of downtown Baltimore.

Bonus: "There was a shooting...police on my back"

Metals Thefts Spike More Than 450 Percent In Baltimore County

This is a good companion to the story I posted Sunday about the 70,000 pounds of copper wiring being stolen from a Seattle light rail system. Here is a local Maryland radio station with the details:

Baltimore County Police have set up a special team to investigate the spike in thefts of metals.

Chief Jim Johnson has created a Metals Theft Team. He tells WBAL Radio that since 2009, there has been a more than 450 percent increase in metal thefts in the county.

Johnson says aluminum bleachers, poles and products are also been stolen, dismantled and scrapped.

"What we have experienced in the past is a lone individual perhaps stealing a few pounds of copper. Today, we are seeing a more sophisticated network of copper thieves and middle men holding the copper and watching for an increased copper commodity price on the global market and they then move the products," says Johnson.

The police department has teamed up with BGE to try and create more awareness around the theft of metals. Chief Johnson says BGE is now going to paint their copper wires lime green color to make it more identifiable when it is moved through a scrap processor.

Chief Johnson says the police department is receiving cooperation from scrap metal processors in the area.

He says that four years ago copper was going for about $2.50 a pound compared to the last year when it reached $4.80 a pound.

Johnson says its expensive for owners to replace copper gutters for example if those are stolen from a home.

The police department is asking residents to take photos of their metals items around the house that may be stolen to help if authorities are called to investigate. In addition he says citizens can watch out for any suspicious activity involving trucks and scrap metal.

Chief Johnson says the issue is not just local but on a national level.

Sounds to me than in its increasing economic desperation, this country is literally tearing itself apart.

Phillips Foods Closing Baltimore Plant, Cutting 100 Jobs

It's a theme I've often repeated here at TDS...while the national media keeps selling the bogus "recovery" narrative, the local outlets haven't received the message. Here is the Baltimore Business Journal with the details:

Phillips Foods Inc. plans to close its Locust Point manufacturing and distribution facility in July, a move that will result in the loss of 100 jobs.

The seafood distributor said the layoffs will impact 13 percent of its Maryland workforce.
As part of the move, Phillips is shifting its warehousing and distribution to Baltimore-based Merchants Terminal Corp. with additional support from Dot Foods.

“We moved into our current plant in 2002 in hopes of growing our company, but given the difficult economic conditions and industry dynamics, we have not grown as we anticipated,” Phillips spokeswoman Caroline Tippett said in a statement. “Our Baltimore plant is simply too big, and we don’t have the capacity to fill the space.”

On a national level, statistics can be used to try and hide the ongoing devastation in the economy. But businesses have to make decisions based upon real world conditions. It's just that simple.

Stanley Black & Decker, Adventist Cutting 242 Jobs in Baltimore Area

Announcement: The mass layoff notices continue to come in fast and furious. Since I want to keep track of these, for those that are run of the mill I'm going to start putting them up as a fourth late evening daily post with minimal commentary.

In that spirit, here is the Baltimore Business Journal (note that there are actually two different layoff stories here):

Stanley Black & Decker is closing a West Baltimore facility and cutting 142 jobs, according to a notice with the state’s labor department. Meanwhile, Adventist Behavioral Health is closing a Crownsville facility and laying off 100 people, a separate filing with the state said.

Stanley Black & Decker plans to close its Baltimore Protection Net Center on Sisson Street, the filing said. The layoffs will take place in waves, starting April 1-14, and ending with a Oct. 23-Nov. 6 wave.

That's -242 more jobs in Maryland. Anyone still believe the nonsense spewed forth by the Bureau of Labor Lying Statistics?

Defense Contractor AAI Lays Off 184 Workers

Defense War spending is still rising, albeit at a slower pace than in recent years. But that is not enough to avoid defense contractors making layoffs because of reduced revenue. Here is the Baltimore Sun with the latest:

AAI Corp., the Hunt Valley company known for its Shadow spy plane, said Tuesday that it is laying off 184 workers from its Baltimore County location.

Workers were to be notified Tuesday. Before the layoffs, AAI employed more than 1,600 workers in Maryland.

Golly, sounds like wee need another war to get things moving again:

The move comes as the defense contracting dollars from the federal government are expected to dwindle. The overall national defense budget rose only slightly this fiscal year, and military leaders say they're taking a hard look at contracts for cost savings.

So less war = more layoffs. What a grim corner we have collectively managed to paint ourselves into.


Bonus: I guess it's good for keeping people employed, if nothing else

States Doubling Down on Bad Gambling Bets

I've posted several stories here on TDS about recent decline of the gaming gambling industry in the United States as the throngs who used to fill the casinos find themselves unable to come up cash to throw away on the slots or at the Blackjack table. And yet despite all of the evidence that the industry is in deep trouble and no longer the cash cow it used top be, there are still plenty of localities lining up, hoping to boost tax revenues by overcoming their previous resistance to legalizing gambling and opening casinos of their own. MSNBC has the details:

A Malaysian company's plan to build a $4 billion convention center and big-time casino on the outskirts of New York City could be the biggest shot fired yet in a tourism arms race that has seen a growing number of Eastern states embrace gambling as a way to lure visitors and drum up revenue.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week that he would work with the Genting Group, one of the world's largest and most successful gambling companies, to transform the storied, but sleepy, Aqueduct horse track into a megaplex that would eventually include the nation's largest convention center, 3,000 hotel rooms, and a major expansion of a casino that began operating at the site in October.

The proposal came less than two months after once-puritanical Massachusetts passed a law allowing up to three resort casinos, plus a slot machine parlor, at locations around the state.

Ohio is poised to see its first commercial casinos open this year, after voters approved up to four gambling halls in 2009. Maryland's first casino opened last year, with more on the way. Pennsylvania's first casinos opened in 2006, and already the state is threatening to surpass Atlantic City as the nation's second-largest gambling market.

And in Florida, lawmakers are hotly debating a whopper of a bill that would allow up to three multibillion-dollar casinos, plus additional slot machines at dog and horse tracks. Genting appears confident the law will pass. It has already spent around $450 million to acquire waterfront property in Miami, where it wants to build a $3.8 billion complex that would include a casino, dozens of restaurants and a shopping mall.

States have embraced casinos, after years of trepidation about their societal costs, for two simple reasons: a promise of a rich new revenue source, plus the possibility of stimulating tourism.

The article itself actually does a very good job of raising questions as to whether this latest desperate revenue grab by the state governments is at all advisable:

Some experts, however, have questioned whether revenue bonanzas that large are realistic, and say states should be cautious about giving up too much to lure these projects. Competition for a limited pool of gambling and tourism dollars is already fierce, and recent years haven't been kind to casinos.

Nevada's larger casinos lost $4 billion in 2011, according to a report released this month by the state's Gaming Control Board, as the state continued to feel the effects of the global economic slump.

As gambling options have increased in the East, revenue has slid substantially at the pair of Indian tribe-owned casinos in Connecticut and declined by a dramatic 30 percent in Atlantic City, which has lost customers in droves to the new casinos in nearby Philadelphia, according to David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

So the latest players in the legalized gambling game plan to spend billions of dollars to spread the wealth that much thinner even as the slowly collapsing economy continues to squeeze the mass of players suckers they need to be able to make a profit.

How much more proof do you need that the so-called "leaders" of our society are completely out of ideas and have resorted to merely shuffling the deck chairs on the titanic?


Bonus: Wait a minute, is that music I hear on the promenade deck?

University of Maryland Builds $7.2 Million President's House Amid Budget Cuts

image: A huge salary and a free house (pictured) apparently isn't enough for the president of the University of Maryland

Back on November 26th, I posted a story called, "Sign of the Times: University of Maryland Cuts Eight Sports Programs to Save Money," which documented how the university was forced for budgetary reasons to make cutbacks in a number of its sports programs. As it turns out, non-revenue generating athletics at the university may be considered an unnecessary expense in these times of austerity, but that isn't stopping it from blowing more than (cue Dr. Evil) seven MEEELION dollars for fancy new digs for the university president. Here is the Washington Post with the details:

Construction crews are poised to demolish the president’s house at the University of Maryland this week and to pour the foundation for a new 14,000-square-foot on-campus mansion that carries a $7.2 million price tag.

But some question why the school would build such an elaborate house at a time when the flagship university is asking donors to support students who might drop out because they can’t afford tuition. And construction will begin just weeks after President Wallace D. Loh announced that he will cut eight varsity sports teams in June to save an estimated $29 million over the next eight years.

Yeah, that's certainly a question I would be asking if my kid were taking out student loans to pay the insanely high cost of tuition at the University of Maryland. So what's the explanation for building a ritzy new palace for the university's top dog?

University leaders say the school has a dire need for the new facility, which is designed to woo supporters and attract major donations at a time when state funds make up less and less of the overall budget. They say the bill will be picked up by about 30 private donors — not students or taxpayers — and will pay huge dividends. It also will replace a building plagued with problems.

The university will continue to pay for general upkeep and utilities for the mansion, which will be more than twice the size of the current home and will have dedicated entertaining spaces.

Because nothing would make me open my checkbook faster than seeing a clear demonstration that the university's "leadership" believes wasting millions of dollars on such frivolities is a higher priority that spending it on actual education programs for the students. Care to give us a few more details as to what you people were thinking?

“There’s never going to be a good time; it doesn’t matter what the economy is like,” said Brodie Remington, president of the University of Maryland College Park Foundation and a vice president at the school. “This is a good investment.”

Remington said the foundation’s trustees decided it would be easier to rip down the house and start fresh.

The “University House” is scheduled to open this fall and will have two distinct sections: One wing will contain a 4,000-square-foot private residence with four bedrooms that will cost about $2 million. The rest will be a 10,000-square-foot “events center” with a grand foyer, public living room, catering kitchen, office space, a formal dining room for small parties and a large hall that can seat 125. That section will cost $5.2 million.

Loh currently lives in a house he purchased near campus, and it’s unclear if he will relocate. Two university spokesmen declined to make him available for an interview.

“We’re not sure. That will be his choice entirely,” Remington said.“The facility is primarily for events.”

Unlike other entertaining venues, Remington said visiting the president’s house can elicit emotions similar to those felt when receiving an invitation to the White House, governor’s mansion or a friend’s home. “We informally call it the ‘power of the house,’” he said.

Oh, so your logic is that in order to get one-percenters to donate to your university, you have to have your president living like one of them. I got it now.

It seems to me that there is another way of looking at this abomination...that it instead sends the message that the senior leadership of the university only cares about their status and perquisites, and couldn't give a flying fuck whether the students who are impoverishing themselves to attend classes there wind up with an education that is worth anything more than the paper it is printed on in the real world. But maybe that's just me.


Bonus: But hey, maybe with a University of Maryland degree a graduate can become a really awesome street musician

Sign of the Times: University of Maryland Cuts Eight Sports Programs to Save Money

image: the University of Maryland football team isn't the only sports team at the school falling on hard times.

I've written here before about how rising college costs represent one of the biggest bubbles in our economy and how it is likely to pop in the very near future. And now, right on schedule, comes a story from Bloomberg that confirms the first signs that the bubble is starting to burst:

The University of Maryland, which has one of the smallest operating profits from football among major public universities, plans to cut eight sports to save money, school President Wallace D. Loh said.

Men’s cross country; tennis; swimming and diving; indoor track, and outdoor track are to be eliminated, as well as women’s water polo; acrobatics and tumbling, and swimming and diving. The sports will be discontinued on June 30, 2012, Loh said in a letter yesterday on the university’s website.

Loh said the teams would be given the chance to raise enough money by that 2012 deadline to fund themselves for eight years. A similar offer in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, led to five threatened sports being saved.

Maryland made $1.8 million in football revenue during the 2010 fiscal year, ranking 49th of the 53 public schools in college football’s six biggest conferences, according to research compiled by Bloomberg News. Football and men’s basketball are the only two revenue-producing sports at the school and they help subsidize other athletic teams at the university, according to Loh.

“We are different from many other public research universities in that we receive no state support,” Loh said yesterday in a news conference. “We have a financial model for two programs, only two programs, which have to subsidize all the rest of the sports. It is a national model that is faulty, that is inequitable, and that is unsustainable”

Yep, I partly agree with you there, Mr. Loh, your system is in fact quite inequitable and unsustainable. But the problem doesn't lie with your sports program...the problem lies with an entire university system that makes students into debt slaves to obtain degrees that have become nearly worthless in a slowly collapsing economy. So while this sucks for the University of Maryland swimmers and tennis players, it is in fact just the tip of a VERY big iceberg.

The “Beltway Bandits” are Making Out Like Bandits

Last week, in my post, “Corporate Welfare for Dummies: the Federal Government Overpays Private Companies for Contract Employees,” I wrote about how even in this supposed age of “austerity,” the federal government continues to shell out big money to private contractors (known as "Beltway Bandits") who would not be in business were it not for all that federal largess. Yesterday, a friend sent me a Washington Post article from last month that drives home the point even more dramatically:

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman — one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.

Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.

By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue — all of it from government contracts.

Talwar’s success — and that of hundreds of other contractors like her — is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

The signs of that wealth are on display all over, from the string of luxury boutiques such as Gucci and Tory Burch opening at Tysons Galleria to the $15 cocktails served over artisanal ice at the W Hotel in the District to the ever-larger houses rising off River Road in Potomac.

But nowhere is the region’s wealth more concentrated than the place where Talwar purchased her 15,000-square-foot white-brick estate home: Great Falls, a once-rural enclave of about 15,000 residents 17 miles west of the White House.

Sixteen percent of Great Falls households earn $500,000 or above a year, and more than half make at least $250,000, according to Nielsen Claritas. By comparison, 11 percent of households in Potomac earn $500,000 or more, and McLean and Bethesda each boast 10 percent at that level.

Talwar’s neighbors are entrepreneurs, lobbyists, CEOs, tech moguls, financiers and defense contractors for whom two wars have been very, very good business. Their portfolios take hits when the stock market plummets, as it did this month, but the setbacks are usually temporary.

While others have struggled to recover from the recession, many of the residents of Great Falls have continued to launch new business ventures, enjoy easy access to venture capital and reap the benefits of bonuses and deferred compensation plans. Median household income there has increased 32 percent in the last 10 years, helping to widen the divide between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder to a record high in Virginia.

The whole article is quite lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety. I also encourage you to take a look at the accompanying slideshow of pictures showing the luxurious living conditions in and around Great Falls. I live about ten miles from there and have driven through that area many times, so I can attest to the accuracy of the article’s description of it as a swanky enclave. In fact, I always used to wonder exactly who was making the kind of dough that allowed them the conspicuous wealth on display there. Well, now I know.

If you want to know why our so-called “leaders” are having so much trouble wrestling with reducing the federal budget deficit, this is a big part of the answer. These are the people who live in the same neighborhoods as our Congressmen and Senators. Their kids go to the same elite private schools, they all play golf at the same ritzy country clubs and they network over $200 bottles of wine and hors’doeuvers at the same fashionable parties. The chart above also tells you all you need to know about why the DC-area economy continues to boom while much of the rest of the country remains mired in recession.

It should go without saying that any system that enables people who do government work to purchase multimillion dollar homes and live a lifestyle of the rich and famous at a time when so many Americans are out of work and destitute is fundamentally broken. Sadly, it is exactly the sort of thing you would expect to see in a third world banana republic. So far, public anger in the U.S. has mostly been directed on the left at Wall Street and the big banks, or on the right at beneficiaries of government entitlement spending. The Beltway Bandits have largely avoided public scrutiny, except for occasional notorious incidents like when some Blackwater operatives shot innocent civilians in Iraq.

I also find Ms. Talwar’s story to be interesting. Back on May 17th, I wrote a post entitled, “Whatever Your Ancestry, Being an American Means the Freedom to Consume as Much of the Planet's Resources as Possible,” in which I asserted that the delusional American Dream of having the big house, the big cars and all of the luxuries in life in a resource limited world is what really draws people to the United States rather than any naive notion of this supposedly being the land of the free. Clearly, Ms. Talwar is living that dream, even if it was underwritten by the U.S. taxpayers.

Remember this story next month when the deficit reduction commission delivers its recommendations and the next big round of budget battles begins in Congress. An obvious starting point for reducing government spending would be to greatly reduce government contracting. But I’m willing to bet you right now that it is not going to happen any time soon.