The sport of kings, and of corporate welfare

Posted on September 19, 2013 by oddmanout215

horse

Most non-fans of horse-racing, if they think of the sport at all, probably picture frantic racetrack patrons at ticket windows, or at computers, placing last-minute bets as horses and jockeys mosey up to the starting gate. But an article on Philly.com today explains why it’s incorrect to assume the horse-racing industry in PA is funded by people who gamble on horses:

…Rather, it’s funded by the tens of thousands of small-time Pennsylvania casino patrons who play — and lose at — slot machines. Thanks to a law written primarily by the horse-racing industry itself, slots players — many of whom are retired and elderly — are the primary funders of what some consider a massive corporate welfare program that props up the state’s horse-race industry, and often benefits rich horse owners.

In just six years, more than $1.5 billion has gone to horse owners, race-horse breeders and others in the industry, thanks to a little-known state subsidy that feeds 12 percent of casino slot revenues to the horse-race industry. Last year, slots pulled in $2.4 billion in revenue. While schools struggle, pension funds decline and the state’s roads and bridges crumble, many of the recipients of the horse-race subsidy are out-of-state multimillionaires. Some are billionaires several times over…

Way to go, Ed Rendell, and all you other politicians who played a part in linking the casino racket to horse-racing, once called the sport of kings, which was on its last legs, so to speak, before receiving a massive infusion of cash from the serfs who play the slots.

Footnote: The philly.com story neatly illustrates one of the ways in which state-sponsored casino gambling pretends to pump up regional economies while actually draining money from them.

Posted in casinos, Philadelphia, sports, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Summers’ end (exit Iago)

Posted on September 17, 2013 by oddmanout215

“Look, it’s Larry Summers,” said Swamp Rabbit, pointing at an oil slick on the wetlands that surrounds my shotgun shack in Tinicum. “I think he’s heading north, maybe back to Harvard.”

“No way,” I said. “He gambled away a big chunk of Harvard’s endowment.”

We’d just read that Summers will not be nominated to head the Federal Reserve Board. One less malignant hustler using a powerful post to undermine the quality of life of Americans who aren’t rich. I can’t think of a better possible story out of Washington, D.C. Maybe if Summers had been knocked on his ass by someone who lost a home to one of the banks he helped bail out during the economic crisis he helped cause.

No surprise that Barack Obama, according to The New York Times, had wanted Summers for the job but apparently didn’t choose him because of the political risks:

…But as that Oval Office meeting last year also suggests, Mr. Obama’s one concern about nominating Mr. Summers has been the potential for a Senate battle — not only from Republicans spoiling for fights, but also from Democrats who view Mr. Summers as having been too friendly toward deregulating big banks when he was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration…

“Too friendly” — how’s that for polite understatement? Summers played a key role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall. After the big banks went belly up, he saved them with taxpayers’ money, much of which should have been spent to replace millions of lost jobs, and on a large-scale foreclosure-blocking program. And now, even though he won’t head the Fed, the self-satisfied little toad is still playing Iago to Obama’s Othello.

Footnote: From a piece by Peter Beinart that explains why the Democratic Party will become even more like the GOP unless progressives completely overhaul it:

From Tony Coelho, who during the Reagan years taught House Democrats to raise money from corporate lobbyists to Bill Clinton, who made Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, to Barack Obama, who gave the job to Rubin’s former deputy and alter ego, Larry Summers, Democrats have found it easier to forge relationships with the conservative worlds of big business and high finance because they have not faced much countervailing pressure from an independent movement of the left.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

J.D. Salinger groupie tells all — again!

Posted on September 16, 2013 by oddmanout215

Great stuff, but not as juicy as Joyce Maynard's memoir

Good stuff, but not as juicy as Joyce Maynard’s memoir

My friend Swamp Rabbit, an autodidact who tries to hide his deep knowledge of American literature, was surprised and appalled by a recent piece in The New York Times by the writer Joyce Maynard. It began:

In the 50 years since J.D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped publishing, he has been viewed — more accurately, worshiped — as the human embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many, he was a kind of god.

Now comes the word — though not really news, to some — that over the years when he was cherishing his privacy, Salinger was also carrying on relationships with young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he.

“This ain’t about Salinger, it’s about Joyce Maynard,” the rabbit said after reading the rest of the piece. “Why does she want the whole world to know she was a Salinger groupie?”

My carrot-gnawing friend hasn’t seen much of the world beyond the swamp we both live in and therefore couldn’t believe it when I told him that many Americans would rather read something about Salinger than by him. And they’d rather a tell-all with sex details than, say, a re-evaluation of why Salinger’s first-person narrator in The Catcher In the Rye was so popular with critics and the public.

The rodent looked befuddled. I tried again to explain why people who are bored by Salinger the recluse can’t help but be aroused by the idea that he “was a kind of god” who turned out to be Charlie Manson in disguise, an evil manipulator of innocent girls. They know, sometimes without having read them, that none of the Nine Stories could possibly be as juicy as the story of how poor little rich girl Joyce was victimized during an eight-month “relationship” with the famous author, who died in 2010.

“That’s crazy talk,” Swamp Rabbit said. “We all get used and abused, conned and compromised, bamboozled and betrayed at some time by someone we looked up to or fell in love with. Why carry a grudge like that for forty years?”

My scrawny friend is so naive. I told him that Maynard’s Times piece was written to be in sync with the release of Shane Salerno’s documentary film about Salinger, and with a Salinger biography by Salerno and David Shields. More importantly, she had already dished the dirt on Salinger in her 1999 memoir At Home In the World and is reissuing that book now that the gossipy new movie and biography are out. Which means her Times piece is as much a self-promotional device as it is a cautionary tale for starry-eyed young girls or another stab at revenge. It certainly isn’t news.

Footnote: From Zoe Heller’s 2001 review of At Home In the World:

It is one of the cast-iron rules of biographical writing: the more damaging and transgressive the revelations on offer, the more fervently priggish the author’s explanation of his or her motive.

One more: The Salernos and Maynards of the world will never forgive Salinger for that most un-American of sins — refusing to be a celebrity.

Posted in arts, fiction, mainstream media, movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Making the world safe for plutocracy

Posted on September 12, 2013 by oddmanout215

Obama is a singing an updated version of an old song by Woodrow Wilson.

Obama is singing a variation on an old song by Woodrow Wilson.

I tuned in Wednesday evening for Barack Obama’s let’s-bomb-Syria speech and heard this:

What kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?

My friend Swamp Rabbit stopped reading the new biography of Woodrow Wilson and spit out the window into the swamp. He said to the TV, “Dude, you should never ask a question that begs for an answer you won’t like.”

My pesky, rodent-like friend had a point. An honest answer to Obama’s question would be that we live in a cynical world where dictators — and some presidents — invoke morality and basic decency to justify using raw power to advance their own interests.

As for international law, Obama must be oblivious to irony. Most civilized countries would have put George W. Bush on trial for crimes committed in prosecuting the so-called war on terror, but Obama, when he took office, quickly snuffed out hope that Bush and his gang would even face a federal investigation.

Predictably, Obama used his Wednesday speech to invoke American exceptionalism, something presidents have been doing since Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany so that the world could “be made safe for democracy.” But the joke was on Obama when the devious Vladimir Putin scolded him in yesterday’s New York Times: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

Footnote: Among other things, Obama’s obsession with bombing Syria is his way of distracting attention from the fact that he has done little to restore the economic health of America’s middle class and everything to bail out and increase the wealth of the plutocrats who run the big banks and corporations. Robert Reich:

More than four years after the recession officially ended, 11.5 million Americans are unemployed, many of them for years. Nearly 4 million have given up looking for work altogether…

…And the median wage keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation. Incomes for all but the top 1 percent are below where they were at the start of the economic recovery in 2009…

A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks and schools.

All in good time, I guess. Maybe after the plutocrats hoard another trillion or two.

Posted in economic collapse, history, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

I don’t see color. Obama looks just like Bush.

Posted on September 10, 2013 by oddmanout215

I was back at my shack in Tinicum swamp, eating pizza and reading the Obama administration’s rationale for wanting to bomb Syria. It passes the “common sense test,” an aide said. I don’t know how Barack Obama is defining common sense, but Tom Paine must be spinning in his grave.

Then I read this, from AP:

The U.S. government insists it has the intelligence to prove it, but the American public has yet to see a single piece of concrete evidence – no satellite imagery, no transcripts of Syrian military communications – connecting the government of President Bashar Assad to the alleged chemical weapons attack last month that killed hundreds of people.

In the absence of such evidence, Damascus and its ally Russia have aggressively pushed another scenario: that rebels carried out the Aug. 21 chemical attack. Neither has produced evidence for that case, either. That’s left more questions than answers as the U.S. threatens a possible military strike.

“Neat trick,” I said to my friend Swamp Rabbit. “Obama has turned himself into George W. Bush. This is worse than Libya. It’s the Iraq war scam all over again.”

The rabbit was on the windowsill, leafing through the September issue of Vogue. “And this surprises you?” he said. “You got a lotta nerve calling me stupid.”

I threw a piece of pizza crust at him. It sailed over his head and into the swamp. I hate when the rabbit is right.

Obama’s recent war dance made me think of Stephen Colbert’s recurring joke about race. He looks at the camera and in the solemn tone of a dewy-eyed liberal says something like, “I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because I don’t get frisked.”

I don’t see color either, not when it comes to politics in that swamp called Washington, D.C. From where I sit, out here in my swamp, Obama looks just like Bush.

Posted in history, humor, Iraq war, mainstream media, Obama | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yo, Daily News! Bike theft more than ‘pesky’

Posted on September 5, 2013 by oddmanout215

Don't forget to lock up the bike, you lovebirds.

Don’t forget your bike lock, you lovebirds.

From Tuesday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

Cops in Center City are trying an unusual approach to thwarting bike thieves: They’re letting them steal bikes. Undercover cops… set up stings – like the one Aug. 15 observed by the Daily News – leaving an unlocked “bait bike” out somewhere and then waiting for someone to take it.

They’ve logged more than a dozen arrests this way this year for a pesky quality-of-life crime that historically has had low arrest rates.

It’s great that a local paper devoted time and space to bicycle theft in Philly, where riders have been making slow but steady progress in forcing drivers to share the roads with them. Too bad the reporter didn’t mention some of the reasons why bike theft is so rampant.

Start with the fact that city government and private businesses have done a lousy job of creating parking space for the growing number of riders in Center City and other popular biking areas. Some racks and corrals have been installed, and some poles fitted with metal rings, but finding a safe outdoor spot to lock up can still be a challenge. It’s not uncommon to see a bunch of bikes mashed together and somehow locked to the same pole.

Also, cops rarely put much effort into trying to catch bike thieves, despite the crude entrapment strategy described in the Daily News story. I had more than a half-dozen good bikes stolen in Philly over the past decade and reported each theft. The cops who responded to my complaints shrugged them off, and in some cases laughed in my face.

The Daily News reporter called bike theft “a pesky quality-of-life crime,” an expression that hints at police indifference and points to a big contradiction in the story. Is pesky the right word, given that “11,000 bicycles were reported stolen from 2007 through 2012 in Philly”? Bikes are as important to cyclists as cars are to drivers, but would the Daily News describe the theft of a gas-guzzling Hummer as pesky? And what if the bike owner catches up with the thief and someone gets his head bashed in? Still pesky?

Give the Daily News credit for calling attention to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and StolenBicycleRegistry.com and the Facebook page called Philadelphia Stolen Bikes. Otherwise, the story was mostly a puff piece for the Philly police.

Footnote: Philly might have more bike commuters per capita than any other major city in America, so it’s nice to know city officials are at least working with the Bicycle Coalition to install more racks.

Posted in bicycling, life in the big city, mainstream media, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obamabots to Cornel West: Shut the f*ck up!

Posted on September 2, 2013 by oddmanout215

Cornel West recently called MSNBC’s Al Sharpton “the bonafide house negro of the Barack Obama plantation” in connection with media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. A cheap shot but funny, and it’s hard to argue with West’s main contention — that most media commentators, including Sharpton, voiced nothing but platitudes about the historic speech and didn’t seriously speculate on what MLK might have said about the status quo in contemporary America.

West, the gap-toothed provocateur with the French-style cuffs and old-style Afro, thinks MLK would have found many of Obama’s policies only marginally less repugnant than those of the yahoo who preceded him as president. He figures MLK would have spoken out against bank bailouts, drone bombs, trade agreements that destroy American jobs, and perhaps against Obama’s attempts to portray himself as working to build on MLK’s efforts to help create a more equitable society.

One thing’s for sure — Democrats who aren’t progressive wish West would just go away. I mean Dems like Obama, who congratulates himself for stands he never took (remember how he ignored labor unions under attack by Wisconsin’s reactionary governor?) and is routinely patted on the back by so-called liberals who won’t admit that Obama, although not nearly as loathsome as the high-profile Republicans, has been a major disappointment to progressives of all races.

Footnote: If Sharpton is a house negro, then what should we call MSNBC’s other talking heads — Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and the insufferable Lawrence O’Donnell? I guess “Obamabots” will have to do, although that’s a bit unfair to Maddow. The problem with MSNBC is that support for Obama is intrinsic to its brand, at least for now. Who knows where the network’s unprincipled president, Phil Griffin, will steer it if its ratings continue to plummet?

One more: MSNBC became totally predictable after Keith Olbermann quit, or was fired. He was the only host who seemed a true progressive, eager to shine a light on all the bad guys, not just on the usual suspects.

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Bagel bomber busted at Vital Records

Posted on August 31, 2013 by oddmanout215

My plan was to hitchhike from Tinicum swamp past the junkyards and into Philly through the backdoor. My friend Swamp Rabbit tried to discourage me, but I had no choice, a temp agency was insisting on proof that I really existed, so I had to order a copy of my birth certificate, in person, at the Division of Vital Records, in Center City.

This, of course, is easier said than done. When you get to the Vital Records building, you have to take a number and wait for hours to speak to a clerk through a tiny hole in a bulletproof window. And that’s only if you get past two armed, gray-uniformed guards and their scanning devices, which are to make sure no one brings in bombs or other weapons. Why anyone would want to blow up a bunch of applications for birth and death certificates is a mystery to me, but I guess Big Brother knows.

I was commanded to empty the contents of my pockets into a plastic tray and put the tray and my backpack on the conveyor belt of the x-ray scanner. Then I had to walk between the two poles of another scanner, which (I think) was merely a metal detector. I made it inside but my bag set off an alarm, beep beep. The conveyor belt stopped moving.

The heavier guard took a long look at a monitor I couldn’t see. Then she eyed me suspiciously and said, “You got something shaped like a bagel in that bag?”

“Yes,” I replied, “A bagel.”

The guard ordered me to walk back through the metal detector, zip open the bag and remove the offending article. I pulled back the tin foil in which I’d wrapped a pumpernickel bagel, my favorite kind.

“You can’t bring no bagel into Vital Records,” she said.

I explained that the bagel was my lunch and promised not to eat it until my business inside was finished, but she wasn’t having any of that.

“You got to eat it outside, or throw it away,” she said, eyeing me even more suspiciously.

You’ve heard of the shoe bomber? I guess she thought I was the bagel bomber, armed with an explosive too subtle for x-rays to detect. It was a losing battle, so I threw the bagel into a nearby trashcan. The guard tensed up, as if fearing the bagel might still go off.

I’d learned my lesson — don’t try to sneak a bagel into a municipal building. But too late! My picture was probably being taken from a dozen angles and sent by Big Brother to cops all over the country, with this message: Be on the lookout for this man. May be carrying explosive bagels.

Footnote: Here’s a good piece about x-ray scanners and police states.

Posted in humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, Philadelphia, police state | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Atlantic City’s ultimate crap-out, a.k.a. Revel

Posted on August 28, 2013 by oddmanout215

Revel is a bust, but A.C. is still a great place for enterprising job seekers.

Revel is a bust, but A.C. is still a great place for enterprising job seekers.

They echoed in my head this morning, the words of Swamp Rabbit as he confronted me at my shotgun shack in the Tinicum swamp: “What’s your plan, Odd Man?”

The pesky little rodent mocks me because I tend to bitch about being broke. He tries to provoke me into jumping off the porch into the swamp to try to wring his scrawny neck. His other favorite question is, “If you’re so smart, Odd Man, how come you ain’t rich?”

He still jokes about my recent trip to Atlantic City, where I tried to get work with the beach patrol, making sure women’s bathing skirt hems were no more than four inches above their knees. (Atlantic City is trying to become more of a family resort, or so I have read.)

The women kicked sand in my face when I tried to grab hold of their legs, so I took a walk to see if Revel was hiring. Revel, you might recall, is the $2.4 billion, 47-floor casino-hotel that was going to transform A.C. from a blue-collar gambling town into a chic destination for vacationers who enjoy lunch prepared by Michelin chefs, a dip in the rooftop pool overlooking the ocean, and a few hands of baccarat before the full-body massage. And God help any troglodyte who tried to smoke a cigarette in this upscale consumers’ paradise.

But Revel wasn’t hiring. In fact, it was trying to bounce back from bankruptcy by pulling a one-eighty. Its fate will hinge on whether it can re-invent itself as a hangout for hardcore low-level gamblers (slots players, ugh) rather than a haven for would-be sophisticates. As for the smoking ban — would you like a fresh ash tray with your cigarette, ma’am?

Swamp Rabbit got a few laughs out of Revel’s new incarnation, especially when I told him it had secured $350 million in “exit financing” when it emerged from bankruptcy. He said, “If the guys who run this place are so dumb, how come they ain’t busted?”

Which happens to be the question of the decade, one that reporters never get around to asking about the thieves who still run the economy-killing Wall Street banks that survived only because of government bailouts.

Footnote: Revel’s main financial backer used to be Morgan Stanley, which received a $107.3 bailout from the Fed after the economy tanked in 2008.

One more: A recent newspaper story headlined “Revel sued by gamblers who felt cheated by casino’s ‘You Can’t Lose’ campaign,” provides more evidence that the people who run Revel, and Atlantic City, are dumber than swamp rabbits.

Posted in casinos, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Walter White, working-class hero

Posted on August 26, 2013 by oddmanout215

walter white

Last week the Philadelphia Daily News ran a story about unemployment with a photo of a middle-aged man in a business suit — a former office worker out of luck and money — begging for a job on a streetcorner in Center City.

Reading the story at my shack in the Tinicum swamp, I thought: 1) There but for the grace of God and a few thousand bucks go I, and 2) The only thing worse than having a soul-killing office job is having no job at all, and 3) the guy in the DN story needs to make a survival plan, as Walter White did in the TV series Breaking Bad.

At that moment my friend Swamp Rabbit swam up to me and said, “What’s your plan, Odd Man?”

Good question. I confessed to the rabbit that I’m too ignorant to make a go of it in the digital world and not a good enough thief to prosper in financial services. I don’t have the commercial instincts to make money writing fiction, the racket in which I’ve invested most of my time and energy, and I don’t know enough chemistry to cook high-quality methamphetamine, the substance that has saved Walter White from bankruptcy and worse. The next time I get hit with a serious health- or housing-related expense, I’m busted.

I’m not alone, I added. In my rare unselfish moments, I wonder what will happen to the hordes of recent college grads in debt up to their ears, fighting to land jobs in a country run by a small group of self-obsessed jerks who grow their personal fortunes, and those of their investors, by cutting wages and killing good jobs. And what about the older workers being fired left and right and, in many cases, robbed of their pensions?

A recent piece in AlterNet summed up the situation:

We are living in a zero-sum economy – in which a handful of investors and owners win at everyone else’s expense. But ultimately, it will catch up with investors, too. The U.S. economy is engaged in a vicious cycle in which low-wage jobs and under-employment stimulate little demand, giving companies little reason to hire workers. Would-be workers then get discouraged and drop out of the workforce. They lack money to buy things, so consumer spending sags and companies don’t hire or offer raises to workers they know they can keep. Repeat.

Meanwhile, our elected officials, who are owned by the corporate bosses and the financial wizards who wrecked the economy, are working to put home ownership, higher education and decent medical care out of reach for most Americans. The deck is stacked against us.

The Breaking Bad writers knew this was the key to making Walter sympathetic — show the deck was stacked against him. He’s a family man who had worked hard at a regular job and had always paid his taxes but ended up, because of lung cancer, with debts he couldn’t repay without becoming an outlaw. Who in Walter’s situation wouldn’t break bad to save their families and homes, if they thought they could get away with it?

More importantly, how bad is the drug kingpin Walter compared to the kingpins who created and nurtured our zero-sum economy — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and so on. In the same room with such swine, Walter would smell like a hero.

The rabbit shook his head and ducked underwater for a minute. “Nice speech,” he said, resurfacing. “But what’s your plan, Odd Man?”

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Philadelphia, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment