The (Fat, Old, Pasty) Ugly Americans (Part 2) - Shop Till You Drop

The travel and tourism industry has become such a scam these days. I’m so old I can remember a time when the advertised cost for say, an airline flight or a hotel room, was the actual price you paid and you didn’t get hit with hidden fees every time you turned around.

Due to my illness I hadn’t travelled much the past couple of years, so that might be why it felt like a bucket of cold water dumped had been over my head when I showed up at the airport—proud of myself for travelling lightly enough despite a fairly lengthy journey to be carrying just one large suitcase—only to be charged 25 bucks to check said suitcase. I’d have gladly paid that much more for the fare, but getting unexpectedly stuck in the ass like that on both of my flights really pissed me off.

That was bad enough, but what was even worse was not being informed ahead of time that I would be charged $45 a night to park my rental car at the hotel where I stayed after the cruise (oh, but I got a “great deal” on the room at Priceline!). I’d have told the good people at Hyatt to go fuck themselves on that little bit of highway robbery, ‘cept there wasn’t a public lot anywhere near the place. That particular outrage then got me wondering how these businesses get away with so obviously boning their customers in a country where it is normal for folks to BRAG about what a great deal they got on whatever particular crap it is they just bought, when I thought back to the passengers I was on the cruise with and it struck me: the top 10% in this country are literally partying like there is no tomorrow and it’s their loose wallets that are propping up the creaky American consumer economy.

As anyone whose has cruised in recent years well knows, when it comes to hiding extra charges nobody is better at it than the cruise ship lines. Want to drink any kind of alcoholic beverage during your time on board, or even have a bottle of water or a can of your favorite soft drink? Hotel prices for that, my friend. Want to go anywhere but the usually fairly ugly cruise ship dock at your exotic ports of call and ensure that you get back before the gangplank goes up and you get hopelessly stranded ashore? Oh, that’s another considerable extra charge. Want to generously tip the incredibly hardworking, underpaid staff who are stuck on board for six to eight months at a time? Oh, doesn’t matter if you want to tip them or not—that sizeable collective tip is automatically added daily to your on board account. If you want to give say, your stateroom steward something extra, that’s your call (actually, I was quite proud of myself as the company I booked the cruise with sent me a $500 on board credit, which enabled me since I cannot drink much these days to walk off the boat owing the cruise line just a bit over $11 more than my fare had been. Bet that pissed ‘em off).

But what was really amazing to watch was the relentless flogging of products. Not only did the ship have numerous shops selling “duty free” luxury goods (another scam I’ve never understood the attraction of), but just about every day there were “special” events featuring a different type of jewelry or other fashion accessory. And I know people were being suckered into buying the stuff because at dinner one night the wife of the doctor from Texas was flashing her brand new necklace, and a different night the husband of the couple from Montana was showing off his brand new “atomic” watch (I really have no idea and didn’t ask, was it powered by a tiny nuclear reactor?). What was really funny is that he freely admitted he had no idea how to even set the thing, and was glad that the clerk who sold it to him promised to adjust it to Montana time the night before the end of the cruise.

Even during the shore excursions we were encouraged to make sure we only shopped for jewelry at a cruise line approved jewelry store—ostensibly so we wouldn’t get ripped off by any surly, dark skinned third worlders—but in reality so the line would get its cut of the no doubt highly over inflated prices. And heck, if shopping really isn’t your thing, you could instead while away every night in the ship’s casino where, the activity newsletter reminded us daily, you could bet (and presumably lose) up to $3,000 nightly and have it charged to your on board account. Yep, if I weren’t the type who is perfectly content to park my ass on a deck chair with a good book to while way the lazy hours under the hot tropical sun I could have damn near bankrupted myself.

And after all, isn’t that what travel is REALLY supposed to be about? It isn’t about going to different places, seeing exotic sights, exposing oneself to different cultures and hearing different languages spoken. Nope, it’s all about doing the one thing you could just have easily stayed home and done—shopping. Because it isn’t enough to show off that flashy bit of jewelry to your friends back home—nope, you have just GOT to tell them all about how you bought it while floating somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica.

Yep, it’s people like this boatload of fat, old, pasty, mostly American baby boomers—not truly rich (or they’d have their own yacht) but upper middle class—who are still doing what their great “war president” instructed them to do to save their country after 9/11. Their portfolios were saved by the Wall Street bailouts, and now they're doing a great job of spending their kids’ inheritances. They're bucket listers merely crossing off one more item while frittering away a bit more of their accumulated wealth buying more shit they don’t need because they have completely forgotten (or never acknowledged) that they came of age during a brief moment in time when it looked like just maybe it was possible that their generation could lead the way as America turned its back on big business, war and empire and actually began to live up to its bullshit ideals.

Come on, people, smile at your brother. He just bought himself an atomic watch, whatever that is.


Bonus: "Good Lord, help us all...while we try to stay afloat. If you could Lord, send a boat"

"I'm Getting Really Tired of the Che Guevara Bullshit"

I'm interrupting the intended second part of my last post because I had a conversation the other day that's been bugging me ever since and I just had to write something about it (hey, it's my blog, I can DO that, right?). I promise I'll get back to it.

Anyway, I was chatting with an old high school chum who lives in another part of the country when he brought up some problems his teenage son has been having in school. He attributed much of the trouble to the boy's teacher, whom I take it he does not see eye to eye with politically because he actually said about the woman, "I'm getting really tired of the Che Guevara bullshit."

At first I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly, since I cannot ever recall another occasion in which the late Cuban revolutionary's name has popped up in casual conversation. When it finally sunk in I was horrified, not because of what it indicated about my friend's politics--he did a 20-year stint in the navy, after all--but because I realized that he actually doesn't have a fucking clue what Che Guevara really stood for. He was just mindlessly spewing stupid right wing rhetoric.

How do I know this? Well, my friend lives in a mostly lily white exurban area where, I would be willing to bet a considerable sum, no one who actually preaches the teachings of Che Guevara in a public high school class would remained gainfully employed for very long. In fact, if the poor woman is like most public high school teachers these days she is probably too busy desperately searching for some way to elevate the class's standardized test scores so the school doesn't lose government funding to even think about trying to turn her students into a radical bunch of Commies.

Dwelling on the subject a bit more after the fact, it struck me that it also goes without saying that the hippie nitwits who go around sporting their designer Che Guevara t-shirts and jackets ALSO likely have no real understanding of what the man stood for. They just know it's a cool way to piss off reactionary old farts like my friend.

So there's the American political system in a nutshell--conservatives who are unable to think for themselves versus liberals who think nothing of turning a anti-capitalist revolutionary into a corporate commodity. No wonder we're fucked.


Bonus: "Standing there with her long brown hair...in a Che Guevara t-shirt"

The (Fat, Old, Pasty) Ugly Americans (Part 1)

So I’m back to freezing my rear end off after a few blissful weeks in the tropics. Or at least as long as it took my cruise ship to sail from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. Seeing the canal was one item on my bucket list and yeah, yeah I know how environmentally damaging cruise ships are, but with my health condition there really wasn’t any other way for me to see it.

One thing to note about these giant cruise ships if you’ve never been on one. It is generally pretty easy to tell the difference between passengers (mostly older, fatter and white) and the crew (mostly younger, thinner and darker skinned). There are some exceptions to that rule: ship officers and the staff that greet you when boarding tend to be European born or even occasionally Aussie, Canadian or American. Some of the regular crew might also be European—but they are almost uniformly from former Soviet bloc countries, in other word the kind of people economically desperate enough to join their fellow Thais, Philippines and Chinese working six to eight months straight without a day off. And I mean without a day—these ships pull into their final port of call at 7:00 A.M., discharge 2,000 or more passengers, take on another load of 2,000 or more and are gone again within 12 hours. The profit margins for these boats are so slim that there is no other way the cruise lines can stay in business. But it must REALLY suck for the crews.

Anyway, for the most part I enjoyed my trip. Seeing the canal was as I said a lifelong dream, and some of the other ports of call in Colombia, Costa Rica and Nicaragua were fascinating if all too brief. I would have enjoyed the experience a lot more, however, were it not for having to spend so much time cooped up on board with my fellow passengers.

The very nature of cruising encourages you to get to know those you’ve embarked with. Unfortunately, the very length of this cruise (15 days) meant the passengers were overwhelmingly retirees as few working people can spare that kind of time all at once these days. That also meant the average age of those on board had to be about 70—in other words right in the wheelhouse of being the older half of the baby boomer generation and, worse still, though there were some Canadians, Europeans and Aussie passengers they were mostly AMERICAN baby boomers.

Let me paint you a gruesome picture—imagine a crowd of mostly pasty white, overweight Septuagenarians in bathing attire, some who had to tip the scales at twice to three times healthy body weight for their height (I had to dodge around a lot of “mobility” scooters as well). Now imagine being stuck among that same crowd for two weeks straight. I wouldn’t have even minded the sight of them so much as much as that talking to them revealed that many had as much blubber clogging the space between their ears as they did around their midsections.

One fine morning I was lounging in one of the hot tubs after a vigorous weightlifting workout in the ship’s (largely underutilized) gym when a particularly ugly old specimen climbed in and caused a large amount of water to slosh out over the sides. Dude seemed nice enough at first, and when I described my recent cancer battle said all of the right supportive things. Then he found out I was from the DC area and his brow furrowed. I’ll never forget his reaction: “Of course,” he said, “I’m a true rebel…I’m a proud member of the modern American Tea Party.” Yeah, a true rebel…one no doubt sucking down social security and Medicare benefits as fast he can, and one whose already horribly overtaxed heart would no doubt explode if he ever heard a shot fired in anger. Nevertheless, I was polite. I didn’t laugh right in his pudgy face.

It’s also standard on cruise ships to be seated for dinner each night at a large table with two to three other couples. Again, the people at my table were nice enough (and actually among the slimmer passengers on the boat), but whoo boy what a group of reactionaries. There was the 70s-ish orthopedist from Texas and his much younger Philippine second wife (a rare breakage of the ship’s demographics) who was quite impressed upon hearing about my cancer battle but who just couldn’t resist saying he hopes Ted Cruz runs for president. Probably not coincidentally, he also admitted to not ever reading any books beyond medical journals.

More disappointing was the naturalized couple from Chile who said they had fled their homeland for the states 40 years ago. Intrigued, I asked for details only to be horrified that it was the election of the “monster” Allende who had caused their flight and how grateful they were that Pinochet had “fixed” their country. Though I noted to myself that the Pinochet regime’s torture and murder of thousands of their “monstrous” countrymen weren’t enough to cause them to return from America—
which they claim to love because of all the “glorious opportunities" it offers people.

The nicest couple was actually the pair from Montana. For the most part I enjoyed talking to them—except the one occasion when the Vietnam vet husband went on an extended rant about Jane Fonda. One evening, he and the doctor were comparing the number of foreign countries they have visited in their lifetimes (85 versus 61). But here’s the sad part. Chalking up those numbers seemed to be merely a matter of bragging rights. Anytime I tried to bring up any deeper subject about any of the countries they mentioned having seen they could not have been less interested. So much for the idea that international travel—which so few Americans do anyway—would broaden their perspectives and make them more empathetic towards other nations and cultures.

After 15 days I was more than ready to flee the boat, even if it meant returning to an American homeland I had been desperate to get away from in the first place. I guess the rule is that if you want to get as far away from America as you can you also need to get as far away as you can from Americans. With a few exceptions. The one delightful and meaningful conversation I had during the cruise was with a retiree from USAID. There’s nothing like immersing oneself in third world poverty for much of one's career to give one a deeper perspective about the way the world really is.

So now I’m back, for better or worse. Oh, and if anyone gives a damn, in the wake of the cruise my “number of foreign countries visited” count is now up to 31.


Bonus: Okay, I'll admit Bill probably HATED this song

Heading South...

As of tomorrow, this blog will be on hiatus for about a month as your faithful blogger heads way down south (as in far beyond the U.S. border) to get out of the winter cold that makes his chemo inflicted neuropathy even more painful and uncomfortable. Hopefully, I'll come back full of new topic ideas because I'll admit to having trouble coming up with anything fresh to say lately that I haven't said repeatedly already.

Adios!

Meth and Jesus in West Virginia

Vice magazine just published a grim but fascinating article featuring a woman whose business it is to clean up meth labs in West Virginia. The whole article is worth reading, but the last few paragraphs are particularly harrowing:

Beneath the surface in every case, there's evidence of hardcore drug use. It's almost a game when the three cleaners walk into a house to find the hidden syringes. They're under carpets or flood boards or sewn into mattresses. "We've found them in baby bottles," Jennifer says. "We found them in a hollowed-out Bible once."

"Where there are children involved, that's the worst part," offers Heath. "That affects me a little bit. Otherwise, it's just work." Kids live in 80 percent of the places they clean, he tells me.

Stories about meth often come with theories on why this particular drug has such a foothold in the boonies: Coke and heroin seem exotic and taboo. Meth helps with manual labor. Barns and remote, abandoned buildings provide cover for labs.

A lifelong West Virginian, Jennifer says she knows people who've used meth, "people I would have never expected until they told me. Contractors use it to stay up three days to finish a deadline." She's never had a bust in one of her rentals, though.

Jennifer notes the exploding popularity of some hard drugs in general, like heroin. She's seen enough pill bottles and dope paraphernalia in busted meth sites to think all these drugs are rising in popularity together, and she's seen enough Jesus tchotchkes and throw pillows to know they're all working their way into the banal fabric of normal life here.

Meth and Jesus, both providing false hope of relief from the agonies of living life mired in rural poverty in a bleak landscape where for all but a very few the American Dream has all but permanently disappeared. Rural America has become a place where one of the few decent livings to be had is cleaning up after the awful messes created by the downtrodden, desperate and destitute. Not that I begrudge the entrepreneurial spirit of the subjects of the article. Just that I find the whole thing profoundly sad.


Bonus: "Say my name." "Heisenberg." "You're goddamned right."

Over 40% of Americans Took ZERO Vacation Time in 2014

There have in recent years been a lot of electrons annoyed pointing out the sharp increase in wealth inequality in America. And now comes survey results showing that not only do the well off enjoy a substantially higher standard of living than the working class, they actually have leisure time in which to enjoy their largess. All in all, 41% of American working adults reported taking no vacation time whatsoever. And as the chart above shows, by far the highest percentage of people in that category made less than $25,000 a year. Here are some more of the gory details:

Although it isn’t legally required, most full-time employees in the US receive some paid vacation. It’s around 10 paid work days a year in addition to six federal holidays, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonprofit think tank.

That may seem like small mercy by Western standards (European workers typically get far more), but the sad truth is that Americans aren’t even using the handful of vacation days at their disposal. Last year, Americans left 169 million paid vacation days on the table, saying they were too busy to use them. A series of consumer surveys conducted by travel website Skift throughout 2014 summed up Americans’ woeful travel habits. Here are some highlights:

--Only 13% of Americans traveled abroad for a vacation from August 2013 to August 2014.

--Nearly half of Americans didn’t take a single day off in the summer of 2014.

--63% of Americans did not travel at all from September 2013 to September 2014.

Skift’s latest survey is even bleaker: 41% of Americans didn’t take any vacation days in 2014. The latest survey was administered to 1,500 American adults through Google Consumer Surveys from Jan. 3-5 of this year.

Referring again to the chart above, you'll notice that as incomes rise the percentage of people who did not take any vacation time sharply plummets until it hits zero at $150,000 and higher. There are several points I'd like to make here.

Fist off, imagine just how depressing it would be to be forced to work year in and year out with no time off except for a few measly holidays. Oh, and you can forget about the "six" annual holidays if you work retail, since Thanksgiving has now become another shopping day in which many retail employees are now expected to come to work at 6:00 in the evening instead of getting to spend even that little bit of time with their families.

Secondly, even the ten vacation days a year reported to be average is pretty grim. Say you want to take the day after Thanksgiving and maybe a few days around Christmas to be with your family. Now you're already reduced to just one week away from the workplace during the rest of the year. Even if you take it all at once, it hardly represents enough time to de-stress before having to rejoin the rat race, let alone jet off to Europe to take in a bunch of cultural sites.

Thirdly, the fact that no one making over 150K a year faces this problem shows why the upper middle class, in particular, is so clueless about how awful the American working life has become for those below them on the economic ladder. Why is that so important? Well, if you pay attention at all to our media culture, particularly the commercial advertisements, what you see is that an upper middle class lifestyle is sold to viewers as being the ideal of the American dream. Every sitcom family lives in a nice big house, and every Christmas images of families buying each other a brand new Lexus with nice bow tie ribbon attached to the hood are flashed at just about every commercial break.

Our political battles are also fought at the upper middle class level, as the arguments for both sides are primarily being tailored to appeal to those among each of the two colored tribes who can afford to drive a minivan or an SUV (the difference being the tone of the bumper stickers plastered on the back). Liberal or conservative, the fact that those who serve them their coffee, wait their tables, clean their houses, check them out at the grocery store or who staff the local Macys at dinnertime on Thanksgiving night may not be enjoying the same fabulous leisure lifestyle as they do never occurs to them.

And all of that doesn't even touch on the issue of the unused vacation days that overstressed workers leave on the table not because they are too busy but because they are fearful of being replaced if they are ever absent form work. Add it all up and it makes for a pretty grim picture for anyone outside of about the top 10% of wage earners in this country.

But don't worry. I'm sure some of the money spent next Christmas on those Lexus SUVs will trickle its way down and make things all better.


Bonus: "Vacation...all I ever wanted"

Down the Memory Hole: The Assassination of Alan Berg

In wake of the appalling Charlie Hebdo attack this week, I found it somewhat bemusing to see lots of American right wingers--in their haste to waste no opportunity to smear all Muslims as freedom hating terrorists--valiantly defending a publication they normally would not have stooped to wipe their asses with given that its lampoons of Christianity were every bit as biting as those against Islam. Charlie Hebdo was an equal opportunity basher of religion, and that normally isn't the kind of stance that will get you invited to answer loving, softball type questions as a guest on Fox and Friends.

I frequently make a point on this blog of demonstrating that there is very little difference between America's two major parties, but I will never say the same thing about liberals (however much I loathe mealy-mouthed mainstream liberalism) versus hardcore conservatives, who now unfortunately make up an overwhelming majority of the conservative movement. Because the fact is a liberal will (usually) defend and respect freedom of expression as defined by the Constitution (Congress shall pass no law, etc, etc) whereas far right wingers (who profess to wear the Constitution on their sleeves) often make no bones about how they would love to see those they disagree with silenced by whatever means necessary.

As an example of what I'm saying, one needs to look no further that the most notorious American parallel to the Charlie Hebdo slayings...namely the 1984 (now THERE is irony for you) assassination of liberal Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg. Though it seems difficult to imagine in these times in which talk radio has become a wasteland of rightwing shouters each trying to out-outrage the other, in his day Berg was the liberal equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. His schtick was to spout his unabashed anticonservative views and then rip into those semicoherent callers to his show dumb enough to try and take him on.

Berg must have been quite good at what he did, because he managed to whip up a murderous rage on the part of a white nationalist group called The Order. The group ambushed Berg outside of his home, shooting him twelve times at close range. Two members of The Order were subsequently convicted of the killing. It was by any definition an act of terrorism--one that has sadly been mostly forgotten today despite being fictionalized a few years later in the Oliver Stone movie Talk Radio. Alan Berg was killed for exercising his freedom of expression, just as the staffers of Charlie Hebdo were. Yet the brevity of his Wikipedia page, which doesn't even include the word "terrorism" in the section about his murder, should be an indication of how such acts that do not fit the prevailing narrative get excluded from our national conversation--even at a time when they are quite relevant.

Another aspect of Berg's murder that never gets discussed is whether as an act of terrorism it wasn't actually a huge success. Liberals are always quick to blame corporate media consolidation in the 1990s for the fact that conservatives rule the radio airwaves, and certainly that has been a factor. Conservatives counter that there is no market for liberal radio talk shows as demonstrated by the Air America debacle during the Bush junior years.

I would actually split these arguments. On the one hand corporations are still motivated by profits, and a liberal host who could score big ratings would certainly not be kept off the air. On the other, for some reason the liberal hosts who were on the air in 1990s when media consolidation began failed to survive (there was a halfway decent rabble rouser I used to listen to on WLS when I lived in Chicago in the early 1990s, though I forget his name) just as Air America failed to draw ratings. Why is that?

Could it be that conservative hosts are safe in knowing that they can routinely make base emotional appeals to their audience without worrying about their personal safety? After all, it is hard to imagine a Volvo-driving, Chardonnay drinking, global warming worrying, gun control advocate blowing away Rush Limbaugh. On the flip side, did liberal radio hosts in this country circa 1984 begin to consciously of unconsciously tone down or deliberately intellectualize their arguments after seeing what happened to Alan Berg? And did the resulting lower ratings then give Clear Channel, for example, the excuse it needed to cancel them in favor of another Sean Hannity clone? We'll never know for sure what kind of chilling effect Berg's murder had on his professional colleagues at the time, but it is difficult to imagine that it didn't have any. If I'm right, Berg's death is a major early milestone in the creeping fascism that has been overtaking America these past 35 years.

So RIP, Alan Berg. Unlike the cowards in patriotic guise who killed you, you were a true American hero.


Bonus: "I'm here to lead you by the hand through the dark forest of your own hated and anger and humiliation"

Idiot America: The Keystone Pipeline "Controversy"

As I've said here repeatedly, sometimes you really have to shake your head at the sheer idiotic depths this country has sunk to. Though it really isn't a big surprise, newly (re)installed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just announced that the new Republican Senate's VERY FIRST PRIORITY will be to pass a bill forcing approval to allow the TransCanada corporation to build the controversial Keystone Pipeline. That's right, with all the many problems facing America these days, many of our current elected "leaders" believe that enacting a law that will enrich a FOREIGN COMPANY is the most important thing that needs to be done.

McConnell's announcement is supremely stupid on many levels. Let's start with the fact that the State Department is expected to render a final decision on Keystone later this year after a court case in Nebraska over the pipeline's proposed route is resolved. In other words, there is a chance--probably a very GOOD chance--that the pipeline will be approved in just a few months anyway. THEN there is the little matter of collapsing oil prices, which if they remain at or near their current levels for awhile will likely cause a shutdown of Canadian tar sands production--meaning there could very well be no oil to ship through the pipeline ANYWAY. Oh, and let's not forget that one of the supposed reasons to approve the pipeline--to help the U.S. become less reliant on Middle Eastern oil--totally contradicts all of the crowing in conservative circles about how our own domestic oil shale production is turning us into "Saudi America."

But let's put all of that aside for a moment and consider what it is that is really going on here--namely more sound and fury in the ongoing and sadly successful effort to convince American citizens consumers idiots that there really is a difference between the two parties and that American representative democracy is not in fact dead as a doornail. The biggest reason McConnell and company are making Keystone their top priority is that their troglodyte conservative base DESPISES environmentalists and right now this is the best way to very publicly score political points and stick it to the environmental movement. Forcing Obama to veto the bill (assuming he does) would allow the Republicans to demonstrate how they differ from blue tribe (Obama, of course, would no doubt prefer to sit back and allow the State Department to take the final decision out of his hands).

On the other side of the equation, the environmental movement has been almost as stupid in making the defeat of Keystone such a big (ahem) cornerstone of their own agenda. Even if the pipeline is never built and assuming oil prices quickly rise back into the territory that makes tar sands production economically viable once again, Canada has already indicated that it will build an alternative pipeline on its own soil since much of the tar sands oil is slated to be shipped out to Asia anyway. Assuming the dip in oil prices is short lived, an Obama veto would be at best a pyrrhic victory for the environmental movement. But hey, at least the Democrats would then have their very own "accomplishment" to sell to their idiot base as a reason to keep supporting them. After all, they'll need SOMETHING to point to in 2016 to try and claim that voting for Hillary is a better choice than voting for Jeb.


Bonus: So who's drinking WHOSE milkshake?

My Own Personal Version of the "Two Americas"

I've written numerous posts on this blog about my hometown of Freeport, Illinois, a small manufacturing center in the northwestern corner of the state that interestingly peaked in population (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) in 1970, the same year as conventional U.S. crude oil production. By the 1980s, Freeport was already hurting economically before NAFTA, GATT and the the economic crash of of 2008 really kicked it in the balls. The former Goodyear tire plant where my dad served most of his working life as a middle manager now employs roughly one-tenth the number of workers it did when he retired in the mid-1990s, and as I wrote about back during the 2012 presidential campaign, the local Sensata plant that was bought out by Bain Capital so the operations could be stripped down and shipped out to China is now effectively closed for good.

Meanwhile, like a good number of my high school classmates I split town permanently after I finished college--starting out my career in Chicago before decamping to the Washington area the month before Bill Clinton won his first term. Thanks to the insane levels of federal deficit spending that has accompanied the global war on terror and the economic bailouts after the crash, the DC area these days has become the ultimate boomtown. Everywhere you look there are new McMansions, shopping centers and 20-story office towers going up.

I currently live just outside the capital beltway in Fairfax County, Virginia, and was amazed to see a new sign go up in my neighborhood the other day proudly announcing that one of the few remaining empty spaces around here is about to see the erection of some new homes "starting" at a mere $1.1 million. Mind you, if other recent residential construction around here is any guide these won't be gigantic mansions surrounded by high security walls but oversize, cheaply built, ugly ass faux mansions squeezed onto lots not much bigger than the foundations of the the houses themselves. Once completed they will most likely be occupied either by upper middle class liberal twits or Ayn Rand worshipping contractor assholes who think selling 100% of their vastly overpriced services to the federal government makes them great businesspeople.

Over the holidays, I reconnected by phone with two of my old high school buddies who still live back in Freeport whom I had not seen or spoken with in a very long time, and who did not know about my recent cancer battle until I mentioned it in a note I sent with my Christmas cards. Fortunately, both of them are doing all right health wise and economically. In fact one is an engineer, bizarrely one of about 40 who still work in the office area of that former Sensata plant. He had a front row seat during the 2012 protests over the closing and subsequent election-induced media circus--but it haunts him now to walk through the empty factory facility that used to employ around 400 people, including a few friends from our old high school days.

He also told me another economic anecdote that was quite telling. Growing up, we were neighbors who lived not far from Freeport's east side, which is the older part of town where people who were stung by the first round of globalization in the late 1970s and 1980s began to cluster. As things grew worse, the blight of drugs, petty crime and broken down looking homes spread slowly westward until it eventually enveloped our old neighborhood. The last time I visited back in 2006, the house I where I'd lived was up for sale as part of a HUD auction after the family who bought it from my father had apparently been foreclosed upon.

Anyway, a guy my friend knows bought a house on that same block about ten years ago for around $49,000--as a globalization loser Freeport never really got caught up much in the housing bubble. Yet--and get this--with the continued decline of the neighborhood he now desperately wants to move but can't because he's too far underwater. That's sad not only for what it says about the current state of home values in my hometown but for the homeowner's apparent inability to pay off a house mortgaged a decade ago for about the price of the countless Lexus SUVs I see driving around in my current neighborhood.

I read recently that Brooklyn is now ranked as the least affordable housing market in America. There have also been numerous stories recently about the insane prices that high rise luxury condominiums are going for in midtown Manhattan these days. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which two sectors (other than Silicon Valley) have done the best in Obama's "zombie economy"--finance and government contracting. Yet the average American citizen consumer idiot insanely still believes they'll strike it rich someday playing in the former's rigged markets and that it really matters which party's politicians' pockets are being lined by both.

Back in 1970 my hometown, sporting a brand spanking new tire plant that was only six years old where my father (who was a recruiter then) had to travel all over the midwest to find enough warm bodies willing to make big bucks at what were admittedly physically demanding jobs, was an offshoot from places like Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland of an American manufacturing economy that supported the most robust middle class the world has ever seen. Though the seeds of the destruction of that economic model ultimately lay within that same peaking of crude oil production, it was the parallel rise of the zombie economy (aided and abetted by fearfully ignorant voters who repeatedly elected the same assholes who sold them down the river) that accelerated its demise.

Happy New Year, everybody.

If the NYPD "Turns Its Back On You" You're Doing Something Right

So the NYPD is "turning its back" on Mayor Bill de Blasio for having the audacity to tell his children what every minority parent in the New York City and probably all across the country ought to be telling their children--be very careful in your interactions with the police. And as to those many NYPD officers who literally turned their backs to the mayor when he was doing what a good mayor should--honoring one of their own killed while doing what police are SUPPOSED to be doing, namely protecting the public rather than choking the shit out of them--let me offer up a hearty, "fuck you." As the elected mayor of New York City, de Blasio has a responsibility to ALL the citizens of New York, not just your immature and insular asses. And yes, that also means calling out the thugs among you--and you all know damn well who they are even if each of you are too chickenshit to do the right thing yourselves.

If the NYPD was trying to send a message, this writer heard it loud and clear. The "Turn Our Backs" fiasco with de Blasio made me think of someone else so many of you sanctimonious fuckers in blue, past and present, turned your backs on. His name was Frank Serpico, and he's a true hero who has been living with the consequences of your lack of support for over 40 years now.

I'll admit I'd mostly forgotten about Serpico until just a few months ago when he wrote an essay for Politico entitled, "The Police Are Still Out of Control." In it, he included this chilling passage about the NYPD:

Forty-odd years on, my story probably seems like ancient history to most people, layered over with Hollywood legend. For me it’s not, since at the age of 78 I’m still deaf in one ear and I walk with a limp and I carry fragments of the bullet near my brain. I am also, all these years later, still persona non grata in the NYPD. Never mind that, thanks to Sidney Lumet’s direction and Al Pacino’s brilliant acting, “Serpico” ranks No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of all-time movie heroes, or that as I travel around the country and the world, police officers often tell me they were inspired to join the force after seeing the movie at an early age.

In the NYPD that means little next to my 40-year-old heresy, as they see it. I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers. A couple of years ago after the death of David Durk — the police officer who was one of my few allies inside the department in my efforts to expose graft — the Internet message board “NYPD Rant” featured some choice messages directed at me. “Join your mentor, Rat scum!” said one. An ex-con recently related to me that a precinct captain had once said to him, “If it wasn’t for that fuckin’ Serpico, I coulda been a millionaire today.” My informer went on to say, “Frank, you don’t seem to understand, they had a well-oiled money making machine going and you came along and threw a handful of sand in the gears.”

In 1971 I was awarded the Medal of Honor, the NYPD’s highest award for bravery in action, but it wasn’t for taking on an army of corrupt cops. It was most likely due to the insistence of Police Chief Sid Cooper, a rare good guy who was well aware of the murky side of the NYPD that I’d try to expose. But they handed the medal to me like an afterthought, like tossing me a pack of cigarettes. After all this time, I’ve never been given a proper certificate with my medal. And although living Medal of Honor winners are typically invited to yearly award ceremonies, I’ve only been invited once — and it was by Bernard Kerick, who ironically was the only NYPD commissioner to later serve time in prison. A few years ago, after the New York Police Museum refused my guns and other memorabilia, I loaned them to the Italian-American museum right down street from police headquarters, and they invited me to their annual dinner. I didn’t know it was planned, but the chief of police from Rome, Italy, was there, and he gave me a plaque. The New York City police officers who were there wouldn’t even look at me.

Four decades after Serpico took a bullet to the face because of some cops who were no better than the thugs they were supposedly out to arrest and many in the NYPD, even some I gather who weren't even born yet on the day he was shot, STILL consider what he did to be worse than what he tried to stop.

It's actually a shame that the recent spate of highly publicized police abuse cases have become wrapped up in poisonous racial politics, because ultimately such divides provide the type of backlash political cover that makes it easy for institutional inertia against police reform to continue. Towards the end of the article Frank Serpico, bless him, tries to remain optimistic that his ongoing efforts to combat police abuse will inevitably make a difference. But the sad fact is that until and unless older, well off white people in this country begin to routinely experience what happened to Eric Garner, police will continue carry an effective license to kill. And I say that as one of those who is so insulated--the worst thing any cop ever did to me was write me a speeding ticket.

I rarely feel any sympathy for any politician, but I don't envy de Blasio going forward after having stirred up this hornet's nest. If he gets strung up politically or retreats back into his shell, he'll be the negative example that no other mayor, governor or even president will want to emulate. For every Frank Serpico there are a dozen Daniel Pantaleos, and plenty of others who instinctively turn their backs on the former while covering up for and supporting the latter.


Bonus: "You fire without a warning...without a fucking brain in your head?"

You Might Be An OPWAL If...

Back in the 1990s, mediocre Georgia-born stand up comedian Jeff Foxworthy became a big star thanks to his inane "You Might Be a Redneck If..." routines. Though the routines themselves seemed fairly harmless at the time (Foxworthy was adverse to using profanity on stage), in retrospect it seems that plenty of Americans--and not JUST from the south--were taking perverse pride at being exactly the kind of people he was allegedly poking fun at.

I hadn't thought about Foxworthy for a long time, until the recent news reports about the idiot Greenpeace protestors who damaged a national historical monument in Peru while filming an anti-global warming video to coincide with the recent carbon emissions conference being held in Lima. Somehow, none of the twelve morons who reportedly participated in the protest nor anyone else in Greenpeace who was aware of this pending protest before it happened recognized how culturally tone deaf and idiotic it was for a pack of liberal gringos to go traipsing around on some sensitive 1,500-year-old Native American geolyphs. Not only did this stupid stunt open Greenpeace up to charges of insensitivity to native cultures, it also basically handed its conservative opposition plenty of (ahem) ammunition with which to totally discredit the very message it was trying to get across.

But, sometimes such things happen when you're an OPWAL (Over-Privileged, White, American Liberal). And no, we don't know if ALL the Greenpeace protestors were in fact white, but they all easily demonstrated what I would call an OPWAL mindset.

Exactly what is an OPWAL mindset? And how do you know for sure whether or not you in fact are one? Well, in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy I've developed a series of tests so that you, too, may determine whether or not you are actually an OPWAL. Let's begin, shall we?


If you believe driving a hybrid or even an electric car is good for the environment...you might be an OPWAL.

If you believe having a black followed by a female president is more important that what those presidents actually do while in office...you might be an OPWAL.

If you believe Obama deserved his Nobel Peace Prize...you might be an OPWAL.

If you agree with Obama that the country should "look forward and not dwell on the past" when it comes to the Iraq War, torture and the Wall Street crimes that led to the economic crash of 2008...you might be an OPWAL.

If you blame the Republican minority in congress circa 2009-2011 for blocking the many great things Obama promised to do while in office...you might be an OPWAL.

If you're a registered Democrat but cannot name a single famous labor leader other than Jimmy Hoffa...you might be an OPWAL.

If you believe Bill Clinton was a good president because he presided over a strong economy...you might be an OPWAL.

If you still blame Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the presidency in 2000...you might be an OPWAL.

If you believed that the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity wasn't a complete waste of fucking time and energy...you might be an OPWAL.

If you hate congress as most Americans do, but voted to reelect your Democratic congressperson anyway...you might be an OPWAL.

If you have a "support the troops" sticker on your vehicle but don't personally know anyone in the service...you might be an OPWAL.

If you have a Stop Global Warming bumper sticker on your Minivan or SUV...you might be an OPWAL.

If you call yourself an environmentalist but live in the exurbs because your precious snowflakes "need" to have a yard to play in...you might be an OPWAL.

If you saw no reason for antiwar protests to continue once Obama was elected...you might be an OPWAL.

If you think Obamacare has solved America's health care crisis...you might be an OPWAL.

If you ever read a book based upon a recommendation by Oprah Winfrey...you might be an OPWAL.

If you think MSNBC is a true liberal alternative to Fox News...you might be an OPWAL.

If you think NPR and PBS are unbiased news sources...you might be an OPWAL.

If you still have a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post...you might be an OPWAL.

If you consider yourself progressive on racial issues but the only minorities you interact with on a regular basis are your maid and your coffee barista...you might be an OPWAL.

If you actually think it really matters that the Democrats just lost control of the Senate...you might be an OPWAL.


Anyway, that's enough for now. I'm sure you all could probably come up with plenty of your own. After all, OPWALs are easy targets--almost too easy.


Bonus: "Honey let me introduce you to my redneck friend"

Ian Welsh: America’s Depraved Leadership Has Created a Depraved Population

Fellow blogger Ian Welsh, one of the few opinion writers I have a tremendous respect for, today offered an very grim assessment of the fact that a majority of American citizens consumers idiots now approve of torture:

Before Bush, most Americans were against torture. The endless drumbeat of propaganda and the need to justify what America does (America is good, therefore America does not do evil), has had its effect.

I will make an ethical judgment: people think torture is justified are bad people. Depraved people. A society where a majority thinks it is justified is a depraved culture. (And remember, 51% think it was justified, but 20% don’t have an opinion. Only about a third of Americans are opposed.)

While I totally agree with Ian that America has become a depraved culture, I'm going to offer a slightly different assessment of at least some of the people who approve of torture. After all, the title of his post is contradictory to his conclusion.

It is one thing to offer an answer to a drily worded public opinion survey from the comfort and safety of your own home. It would be another to still favor torture after say, being forced to watch a video of the tactics the CIA was using in action. My bet is that after watching such a video, the number who approve of torture would drop sharply and the dumbass "no opinion" responses would also break overwhelmingly negative.

My point is that the ones who would still approve of torture after seeing it practiced are the truly "bad people" as Ian described them. The remainder are the easily led sheep (I really HATE the term "sheeple") who easily submit to authority and allow themselves to be propagandized. In much the same way that the Nazis were unable to win majority support in Germany until after they were handed power by a cabal of cynical nationalist politicians and could effectively drown out any competing voices from the public sphere, not until America's conservative media organs relentlessly flogged the Jack Nicholson, "You can't HANDLE the truth!" message did torture become an "acceptable" American practice. America's depraved leadership did not really "create" a depraved population, it merely led that population where it wanted it to go.

So does that mean I'm letting those Americans off the hook who are so shallow that they don't really even grasp the evil they are supporting? Fuck no. The only "Good Germans" circa 1933-1945 are those "political undesirables" who ended up in the concentration camps alongside the Jews, gays and Gypsies, or the rare ones who risked the very same fate by trying to hide would-be Nazi victims.

A truly sickening aspect of these public opinion findings for me is that nearly six years after war criminals George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left office I find myself more ashamed and disgusted by my own country than ever. And not that chickenshit Obama was going to use the release of this report to launch an inquiry to hold those responsible for the torture accountable anyway, but now he has even more incentive to stick his thumb up his ass and do nothing.

One last point: if you look at the actual poll results, you'll notice that even a plurality of black Americans now support torture. Which means there had to be quite a few torture supporters out protesting police violence this weekend. That such protestors are unable to make the connection between American war crimes committed overseas and the crimes being perpetrated by the police against their own kind back here at home is yet another dismal example of how there is no hope for America anymore.


Bonus: "You don't like the sound of the truth...coming from my mouth"