Cheez Whiz is legal, so why not pot?

Posted on October 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

The Philadelphia Daily News recently had fun reporting a story about a drug bust involving a manager at Jim’s Steaks. You know, the usual jokes about South Philly accents and dining preferences:

HOW YA LIKE yer cheesesteak…? Whiz Wit’? Maybe with a side of cocaine and Xanax…? Such a delicacy would have been possible at South Street’s Jim’s Steaks, if not for police intervention… Over the summer, investigators uncovered alleged drug dealing inside the steak joint and arrested one of Jim’s managers, Andre McMillian.

McMillian was nabbed by cops on Aug. 4 as he supervised the cooks preparing cheesesteaks behind the counter, said Lt. Joseph Bologna, one of the arresting officers… The narcotics unit confiscated cocaine, marijuana, 272 Percocet pills, 95 Xanax pills, 21 Endocet pills, $2,400 and McMillian’s Chevrolet Venture, according to court documents. Police estimated that the seizure was worth $25,300…

Twenty-five grand is small cheese fries in the world of drug-running, but I guess Daily News couldn’t resist using a story that led with a cheesesteak-wit’-Xanax-on-the-side joke. Reporter Regina Medina (a nom de plume?) noted that this “delicacy” would have been possible “if not for police intervention,” but isn’t it likely the guy was dealing for a long time before the bust? This is South Street, after all, not Ocean Grove, NJ.

Anyway, what’s the big deal about Xanax and pot, aside from the risk of being busted if you don’t pay off the right people? Can those drugs be any worse for the human body than artery-clogging Cheez Whiz and minute steaks? I doubt it.

Just to clarify: I’m not dissing Jim’s Steaks. Whenever someone stops me on the street to ask where Pat’s or Geno’s is — it happens often, tourists believe the hype about those two steak sandwich joints — I tell them go to Jim’s, it’s better, if only for aesthetic reasons. The Art Deco facade at Jim’s is way cooler than the neon nightmare of Pat’s and Geno’s, at Ninth and Passyunk. Standing down there at night feels like being on drugs — really bad drugs.

Posted in Great Recession, humor, livable cities, mainstream media, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Obama sides with banksters, not protesters

Posted on October 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

OK, we knew this all along, but I still winced when I read it in Firedoglake:

For perhaps the first time, President Barack Obama was forced to explain why there have been no prosecutions of Wall Street executives for their fraudulent actions during the run-up to the financial crisis. Asked by Jake Tapper to explain this behavior, Obama basically suggested that most of the actions on Wall Street weren’t illegal but just immoral, and that his Administration worked to re-regulate the financial sector with the Dodd-Frank reform legislation.

“Banks are in the business of making money, and they find loopholes,” the President said. Apparently forging and fabricating documents to prove ownership of homes that are subsequently stolen from borrowers is now a loophole.

The Occupy movement, as it spreads from New York City to all parts of the country, is shining a light on all those murky-minded Democrats who haven’t had the balls to speak up for the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the near-homeless and all the other beleaguered people the Democratic Party used to represent.

The most important of these Dems In Name Only, of course, is President Obama, whose tightrope act — his attempt to reconcile his deep connection with the banksters and his tepid support of the backlash against them — is causing cognitive dissonance among those who voted for him in 2008, even as it is being largely ignored by the corporate media.

An L.A. Times report on the same press conference covered by Firedoglake doesn’t even mention Obama’s negative response to questions about prosecution of banksters. Here is the Times‘s no-shit lede:

President Obama said Thursday that the Occupy Wall Street protests show a “broad-based frustration” among Americans about how the US financial system works.

And here is Firedoglake again, getting to the heart of the matter:

… [Obama] took ownership of the extraordinary financial support given to banks as they teetered on the verge of collapse. And this is a central grievance of the protesters on Wall Street and across the country.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Weird NJ’s phantom tollbooth attendant

Posted on October 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

The good old days

It was a wonderful night until I tried to leave New Jersey.

I’d read my short story “Chokepoint” at the Walt Whitman Arts Center in Camden, and I’d heard sharp, witty poems by West Coast transplant Seve Torres and a virtuosically funny short story by Violet LeVoit, from her collection I Am Genghis Cum.

Everybody was there, even my blogger friend Susan Madrak, an avid Phillies fan who could have stayed home and watched the game but is probably glad she didn’t. (The Cardinals won.)

Heading back to Philly, I got as far as the foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge and realized I didn’t have enough cash to pay the toll, which is up to five dollars. The attendant at the toll booth I approached told me no debit cards or vouchers, they don’t do that sort of thing in Jersey.

Her preternatural calm rattled me. She had belladonna eyes and wore large silver earrings and silver eye makeup and speckles of silver paint on her cheeks. Her voice was barely audible. It’s not even Halloween yet.

My only option was to go back to Camden and get cash, the attendant whispered. I tried arguing with her and reached for my wallet to show her my ID. When I looked up she had vanished, but the gate had been raised so that I could loop back around to the city of the dead.

Two cop cars were parked not far from the tollbooths. I knew they’d be on me in seconds if I tried to cross the bridge, so I swerved to the right and took Lonely Avenue to Tombstone Boulevard, which brought me to Nowhere Road and then to 30 East, where I found a gas station convenience store with an ATM. You don’t know the meaning of “desolate” unless you’ve tried to get from here to there in South Jersey at night.

My second attempt to cross the bridge went smoothly. The attendant was a big, smiling woman. I said to her, “It’s no accident, is it, that you can drive into New Jersey for free but you have to pay to get back out.”

“Have a nice night,” she said after I handed her the cash.

Posted in NJ, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

What’s crazier, belief in UFOs or in ‘free trade’?

Posted on October 5, 2011 by oddmanout215

"Let's watch the American Earthlings destroy themselves."

Who else remembers when presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was kneecapped by the corporate media? During a candidates’ debate in 2007 Tim Russert asked Kucinich if it were true he’d seen a UFO years before. “I did,” Kucinich said. “It was an unidentified flying object, OK? It’s like, it’s unidentified. I saw something.”

Afterwards, Russert and other Beltway journalists pondered Kucinich’s answer out loud and at great length in order to portray him as a kook, as if sighting a UFO was more bizarre than, say, religious beliefs espoused by other presidential candidates.

The truth is that Kucinich was singled out for ridicule because he’s not in lockstep with the corporate interests that own the major news media outlets and fund presidential candidates.

Kucinich isn’t running for president this time, but he’s still saying all the things that make the corporate media and corporate-owned politicians uncomfortable. Yesterday, I read this by Kucinich and thought, damn, I’d vote for him over Barack Obama in a heartbeat:

Today President Obama submitted three free trade agreements to Congress based on the flawed North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model that has been devastating to our economy, American workers and to labor and environmental standards. Hundreds of thousands of American jobs have been displaced and outsourced as a result of our pursuit of trade policies which are adverse to the economic interests of the American people. My home state of Ohio is one of the top-ten states posting the biggest job losses since the passage of NAFTA.

Unfortunately, the proposed free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama do nothing to address the significant flaws in the free trade model that prioritize the rights of multinational companies over the rights of workers and the American economy. The Korea-US and US-Colombia Free Trade Agreements are expected to increase our trade deficit by over $16 billion and result in the displacement or loss of over 200,000 jobs. This is on top of the over 2 million American jobs that have been displaced or eliminated over the past 10 years as a result of our increased trade deficit with China.

The last thing American workers and our economy needs is more NAFTA-style free trade agreements.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, Uncategorized, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

‘Mainstream’ is the wrong word for corporate media

Posted on October 5, 2011 by oddmanout215

Leslie Griffith makes a good point: What we call the “mainstream” media is anything but. She’s not quibbling about semantics, but rather trying to impress upon readers the importance of accurately naming forces that have a direct effect on our welfare:

… We have been sold words that lack any real meaning. The “Main Stream” no longer speaks for Main Street, it speaks for Wall Street. But we buy into the lie when we buy into those words.

We must be more critical of what we see. For example, how many times did we see “reporters” like Brian Williams standing next to our Gulf Coast as the British Petroleum disaster unfolded? What did he tell us in the first days of that ecological disaster? “These are the smartest and most responsible oil workers on the planet.” He gushed, just like the poison spilling into the Gulf… And then there’s Andrea Mitchell. She sleeps with and is married to Alan Greenspan, the man who helped get us in this economic debacle. Mitchell has her own “Main Stream” broadcast. She is sold as “middle of the road.” But, of course, she delivers “Corporate-Government” controlled news…

The “Main Stream” now works for the same power brokers who seem to ignore the fact that we all breathe the same air, eat the same food, drink from the same water faucets and swim in the same sea…

The thought of anyone sleeping with Alan Greenspan makes me queasy, especially right after dinner, but the reality of Greenspan’s wife having a prominent job in TV news has always seemed downright sickening. Even worse is the reality of talking heads such as Williams being introduced on talk shows — Jon Stewart’s faux-news show, for example — as if they were experts on what’s going on in the world.

Griffith is right — the mainstream is we the people, not the entities dishing out the news that fits the interests of the wealthy and powerful. These entities don’t represent us. It makes more sense to think of TV network news, NPR and the major dailies in terms of corporations, and to call them the corporate media.

Posted in mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Tom Friedman’s ‘hyperconnected’ fantasy world

Posted on October 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

The NYT headline was “How did the robot end up with my job?” It was on an op/ed column by Tom Friedman, the corporate media’s foremost cheerleader for the brave new world of downsizing, outsourcing and off-shoring that is the new reality for the growing number of underemployed Americans.

Friedman’s column is about the forces that helped stoke the outrage behind Occupy Wall Street and similar movements around the country. He likes these forces.

The pudgy pollyanna thinks he’s a visionary, of course. He writes with monotonous enthusiasm and salesman-like optimism about opportunities created by the forces that enrich the corporate cutthroats in the vanguard of the push for further globalization. Plug him in and switch on a button and I bet he could chatter for days on this subject. Here he is in print:

In the last decade, we have gone from a connected world… to a hyperconnected world… The connected world was a challenge to blue-collar workers in the industrialized West. They had to compete with a bigger pool of cheap labor. The hyperconnected world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines…

It is a huge inflection point masked by the Great Recession.

It is also both a huge challenge and opportunity. It has never been harder to find a job and never been easier — for those prepared for this world — to invent a job or find a customer. Anyone with the spark of an idea can start a company overnight, using a credit card, while accessing brains, brawn and customers anywhere. It is why Pascal Lamy, chief of the World Trade Organization, argues that terms like “made in America” or “made in China” are phasing out. The proper term, says Lamy, is “made in the world.” More products are designed everywhere, made everywhere and sold everywhere.

How can Friedman, in good conscience, serve up such garbage to readers? In fact, it has never been harder for Americans to find jobs, period. This is largely because the corporate monsters Friedman champions are free to moves jobs overseas with impunity — without even being penalized by the government that has subsidized the growth of these companies, often by granting them outlandish tax breaks.

Friedman notes that competition for high-level freelance jobs that pay next to nothing is becoming fiercer by the day — and he thinks this is a good thing. Coining another of his inane phrases, he refers to “The Great Inflection” that is collapsing multiple jobs into one, in just about every line of work. He believes this is a good thing, too.

Apparently, Friedman thinks the sort of unregulated free market capitalism that continues to lower the quality of life in this country is an incentive for entrepreneurs to be more productive and inventive. He pretends the forces driving the destruction of the middle class and the deeper impoverishment of the poor are inexorable, and that the idea of putting the brakes on these forces is absurd.

Ultimately, Friedman is an apologist for the ruthless few who, for the sake of higher profits, would destroy the existence of a social safety net for the poor and luckless. Like most pollyannas, he is blind to the dark side of his grand notions of how to improve the world.

Posted in economic collapse, God Squad, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Fiction reading Wed. at Rutgers-Camden

Posted on October 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

7 pm Wednesday, Oct. 5
Walt Whitman Arts Center, 2nd Floor
101 Cooper St.
Camden, NJ

David McKenna, a.k.a. Odd Man Out, will read “Chokepoint,” from Idiot Lights, his collection of thematically related short stories set in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, told from the point of view of protagonists who suspect that, rather than moving forward in life, they are harboring delusions of progress that repeatedly bring them back to the same starting points. Their only relief from delusion is achieved through sex or violence, or an occasional good movie (vicarious sex and violence).

Also reading will be fiction writer Violet LeVoit, author of the short story collection I Am Genghis Cum, and poet Seve Torres.

Directions from Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Center City Philly:

1. Stay in the right lane.
2. On Jersey side, take the Sixth Street/Broadway exit toward Camden
3. Turn right onto N 6th Street
4. Turn right onto Cooper Street

Destination will be on the right:

101 Cooper St
Camden, NJ 08102

(For a map, Google “Benjamin Franklin Bridge” to “101 Cooper St., Camden, NJ”)

Posted in arts, Camden, fiction, NJ, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

NPR probes bank’s gift to NYPD (I kid you, NPR)

Posted on October 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

This just in from a National Public Radio investigation sparked by a post on JP Morgan Chase’s website:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.

NPR’s report on the bank’s unprecedented gift featured extensive excerpts from a Naked Capitalism post:

… And what sort of benefits might JPM get? It is unlikely that there would be anything as crass as an explicit quid pro quo. But it certainly is useful to be confident that the police are on your side, say if an executive or worse an entire desk is caught in a sex or drugs scandal. Recall that Charles Ferguson in Inside Job alleged that the use of hookers is pervasive on Wall Street (duh) and is invoiced to the banks.

Or the police might be extra protective of your interests. Today, OccupyWallStreet decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge (a proud New York tradition) to Chase Manhattan Plaza in Brooklyn… Over 700 of the marchers were arrested, and the media has a rather amusing “he said, she said” account, with OccupyWallStreet claiming entrapment and the cops batting their baby blues and trying to look innocent.

I kid you, NPR! By now everyone knows you’re a bunch of whipped dogs, too scared of right-wing politicians to even report the JP Morgan-Chase gift, let alone mention publications that are looking into it.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

NYT’s Ginia B. admits Occupy is for real

Posted on October 2, 2011 by oddmanout215

In her article today, Ginia Bellafante didn’t call Occupy Wall Street “pantomime progressivism” — an improvement — but it seems she still doesn’t quite get what’s going on in Lower Manhattan.

Bellafante’s lede refers to Occupy as “ideologically vague and strategically baffling.” It’s as if she were trying to justify her previous superficial coverage by blaming protesters for not handing her a hardbound manifesto and a diagram of all direct actions they are planning.

Bellafante isn’t giving up on her notion that the event, in its early days, wasn’t worthy of coverage. The main point of her new article — headline: “Every action produces overreaction” — is that Occupy Wall Street is growing and spreading to other cities only because the cops did such a clumsy job of containing it.

And she can’t contain her Maureen Dowd-style snark for long. At one point, she mentions Michael Moore being interviewed in the park on Wednesday and adds:

In the preceding 48 hours, the endorsement of the left’s ruling class had been secured: encouraging words from Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein had been sent to the group; visits were paid by Susan Sarandon and Cornel West.

The left’s ruling class! As if most of the protesters in Lower Manhattan are major fans of Chomsky, or have even read him. As if the millions of people who are jobless and/or homeless are left-wingers waiting for Naomi Klein to tell them what to do. As if Bellafante doesn’t know that the “ruling class” in this country works in the Wall Street office towers and has nothing to do with the left.

Note to Ginia’s editors: Where the f*ck are you guys/gals when B. files her copy?

Progress, maybe: An article about the arrest of 700 protesters yesterday on Brooklyn Bridge actually made it into NYT’s print edition today, albeit on Page 18. But it made me wonder how many other stories involving that many arrests in NYC would not have made The Times‘ front page.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Recession, my ass. Deal with the ‘D’ word.

Posted on October 1, 2011 by oddmanout215

Come on, Robert Reich, you’re almost there. You mentioned there was zero jobs growth in August. You noted that the number of Americans looking for work “has grown by over seven million” since 2007, but that 300,000 fewer Americans actually have jobs now than in ’07. You put in a word for the march for jobs in DC to be led by Al Sharpton, who still voices vigorous support for Barack Obama, even though the latter has done nothing to create jobs since taking office.

But you’re not writing we’re in an unqualified depression because, technically, the economy isn’t depressed so long as the multinational corporations and other large businesses are making huge profits. You write:

America’s ongoing jobs depression – which is what it deserves to be called – is the worst economic calamity to hit this nation since the Great Depression. It’s also terrible news for President Obama, whose chances for re-election now depend almost entirely on the Republican party putting up someone so vacuous and extremist that the nation rallies to Obama regardless.

The problem is on the demand side. Consumers (whose spending is 70% of the economy) can’t boost the American economy on their own. They’re still too burdened by debt, especially on homes that are worth less than their mortgages. In addition, their jobs are disappearing, their pay is dropping, their medical bills are soaring.

You’re the economist, Bob, so what’s the difference between the “jobs depression” and the Great Depression to most Americans? Is the misery index any lower now than in the 1930s? If my parents were alive, I think they’d say no, except that this depression is less visible, because there are food stamps rather than breadlines.

The banksters and the corporations were bailed out, and now they’re hoarding money and refusing to create jobs, except in other countries.

Remove the word “jobs,” Bob, and just call it what it is — a full-blown disaster-course depression.

Footnote: Reich hit a home run in a follow-up column on the same subject:

… When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting “class warfare,” he answered it was “just math.” But it’s more than math. It’s a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we’re all in it together. Their answer is we’re not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Great Recession, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments