Nicos Gun, laughing at tornadoes

Posted on October 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

From Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test:

Coming up over the Blue Ridge Mountains, everybody was stoned on acid, Cassady included, and it was at that moment that he decided to make it down the steepest, awfulest windingest mountain highway in the history of the world without using brakes. The lurid bus started barreling down… [Ken] Kesey felt totally synched with Cassady… It was as if, if he were panicked, Cassady would be panicked, panic would rush through the bus like an energy. And yet he never felt panic… It was as if Cassady, at the wheel, was in a state of satori, as totally into this very moment, Now, as a being can get, and for that moment they all shared it.

My son Barney’s band mates in Nicos Gun were slowly pulling it together for a tour that will start in Gainesville, FL, then proceed north and end up back in Philly right before Halloween. Barney had dropped off the band’s new CD at my house and I’d just driven him home.

Bodies began to stir, on couches and on the floor of the band’s loft apartment in an old factory building in Kensington. There’s a main room, a kitchen and bath, and a few makeshift bedrooms on the apartment’s second level, which is really part of the first. You’d have to see it to believe it. The place is OK, they told me, except when the service elevator breaks down — about once a week — and they have to haul their equipment up six flights of stairs after a gig.

I tripped over amplifier cords and chatted with the band as they breakfasted on Cocoa Puffs and energy bars. Good guys, upbeat and scruffy, all muscle and bone. A few of them were drinking from little cans of Red Bull, which they get for free because somebody’s girlfriend works for a Red Bull distributor. “You want a Red Bull?” somebody asked me. “No thanks, it would kill me,” I said, meaning the caffeine.

Sunlight was streaming through a large window from which you could see the band’s RV on a lot across the street. Somebody was in the van, puttering — the band’s unofficial driver, the father of one of its members. The father can’t stand living at home because… well, I’d better skip that. I’ll call him Neil, after Neil Cassady in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, except that the band’s Neil isn’t a madman.

Barney told me Neil was there during the Midwest tour in the summer when they parked at a diner in Kansas and a tornado blew up. There was darkness and then hail that ricocheted off the RV like a million BBs. “Get down in case the windows blow,” Neil said, unperturbed. The big black whirling cloud cut a destructive path nearby, but the RV held steady.

Everyone laughed as Barney retold the story, even me, but I was trying not to think about the tornado. A few hours later I was at my computer, writing about something that involved a lot of action. I thought of Barney and the band, which was probably passing through Maryland by then. I remembered this was still hurricane season, but then I dismissed the thought — for a while.

I thought of some of the things I did at Barney’s age, 25, and wondered how I got from there to here, from risk-taking to worrying about the weather report. I can’t even tell you when the terrain began to change. All I know is that reaching middle age is good for your sense of irony, but not much else, not unless you continue to spend a healthy amount of time in the moment, now, though not necessarily as an RV driver for Nicos Gun.

Posted in arts, fiction, Philadelphia, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Question for NYT: WHOSE economy is growing?

Posted on October 11, 2011 by oddmanout215

News stories often raise more questions than they answer. Such is the case with an article by Robert Pear, who seems to agree with Robert Reich that we’re in a “jobs depression,” then says something else:

In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found. Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession – from December 2007 to June 2009 – household income fell 3.2 percent. The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing.

First the gloomy income figures of a country in decline, then the assertion that “the economy has been growing.” How is Pear defining economic growth if the term doesn’t entail improved standards of living for the vast majority of citizens who aren’t wealthy? If, in fact, it can be compatible with declining standards of living?

Growth used to mean increased productivity, more products and markets, cheaper goods and service, increased demand for goods and services sparking job creation and good wages. Now there’s no demand. White-collar and blue-collar jobs continue to be outsourced, off-shored or eliminated. There’s been a 9.2 drop in income from the start of the recession to June 2011. Some of us can’t even afford to buy new shoes.

And yet the usual suspects continue to trumpet economic growth. Anyone who speaks like this is consciously or unconsciously equating growth with the soaring incomes of banksters, CEOs and other members of the owner class who are bleeding everyone else dry.

It’s time to talk about redefining terms such as growth, recession and depression, don’t you think, Robert Pear?

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

Advice from butchers on healing the sick

Posted on October 10, 2011 by oddmanout215

Susan Madrack linked to this earlier today, but I’m bringing it back around because it’s so indicative of everything that’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party. And because it pisses me off in a big way:

In another public demonstration of concern about the struggling economy, President Obama will meet in Pittsburgh on Tuesday with the business and labor leaders he has chosen to counsel him on job creation. But many of the chief executives have cut American jobs and adopted tactics that weaken organized labor — even as their businesses post record profits. The executives are members of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which Obama created in January by appointing 26 leaders of companies including American Express, Comcast and Intel…

“They call it the jobs and competitiveness committee, but when they mean by competitiveness is massive concessions being imposed on working people,” said Chris Townsend, political action director of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which represents 3,500 General Electric workers. Townsend says General Electric has closed 31 U.S. locations and cut 22,000 jobs in the last four years. It has cut wages of nonunion workers and, in the most recent union contract, required employees to pay higher deductibles for health insurance and eradicated pensions for new employees. “We think it speaks of incredibly poor judgment on the part of the White House to select the members of the panel that they’ve selected and try to describe it somehow as a job creation panel,” he said.

It’s not poor judgment; it’s in-your-face cynicism. It’s Obama telling job seekers they’ll have to play ball with his corporatist pals and routinely accept jobs that pay less and involve fewer benefits than their parents enjoyed.

There’s nothing new about this dilemma. What’s new is that a Democratic president is overtly indicating he’s with the bosses, not with the workers. A real Democrat would be advocating for us directly, not sucking up to the people who are outsourcing and off-shoring our jobs for the sake of bigger executive bonuses.

No wonder so many people involved in Occupy Wall Street and similar protests refuse to even acknowledge party politics.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Romney is in a cult, but it’s not Mormonism

Posted on October 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

Don’t wonder if Mitt Romney wears magic Mormon underwear. Don’t fret that he’s a member of the Mormon Church — officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — started by Joseph Smith, a 19th-century con man who claimed he was visited by an angel named Moroni who directed him to a pair of golden plates engraved with ancient characters that Smith somehow translated into what became the Book of Mormon.

Don’t worry about Mormonism, it’s no crazier than any other religion. It has millions of followers. It’s not a cult.

Worry about the cult that Romney does belong to — the corporatocracy, the cult through which corporations dominate governments, “… even those governments nominally elected by the people…” It’s an updated version of the system Dwight Eisenhower warned against in 1961.

Romney is a corporatist of the first order, a vastly wealthy man who made his fortune through leveraged buyouts — “essentially, mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years.” Profits are made at the expense of the rank-and-file workers who typically lose their jobs and are robbed of their pensions after the company’s cash reserves are raided.

Here’s Romney on the campaign trail: “Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.” If he were honest, his sentence would have ended “… to the people who own the corporations.”

Romney is Gordon Gekko without the charisma. His cult is a relatively small group of executives, lobbyists, deregulating lawyers and corrupt politicians who devote their energies to bolstering and defending corporate monopolies and mergers that destroy the jobs and lives of ordinary people. Meanwhile, the favored companies become “too big to fail,” because their failure would mean the collapse of the entire economic system.

Romney is the scum of the earth, but his religion isn’t to blame. He is a cultist, but his cult isn’t Mormonism. He is a corporatist, and corporatists arguably are fascists, but we’re not going to see that argument discussed by the corporate media, are we?

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Do you know a gal, or guy, like Nicole?

Posted on October 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

I was re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and ran across this masterful description of the great divide between rich and poor, in the 1920s and now:

… She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a traveling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes — bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance — but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors — these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze …

Not to be reductive, but I think the novel is partly about the the author’s struggle to appreciate beauty as something that exists above and beyond the trappings of wealth and power. Fitzgerald may not have successfully made this leap in his short life, but his best works are testaments to how well he succeeded in his art.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

These protesters are ‘angry at the right people’

Posted on October 8, 2011 by oddmanout215

Who would have thought a few weeks ago that hundreds of protestors from something called Occupy Philly would set up camp in Center City? The idea is almost as far-fetched as a tent city next to Wall Street.

But there they were at 9:30 Thursday night, with small groups of cops gathered near their campsite, on City Hall’s Dilworth Plaza. About a dozen tents had been pitched and many sleeping bags unrolled. Bicycles were locked up on the plaza, all along the railings that face 15th Street. Motorists sped by honking their horns to show support for the protesters, who cheered back at them.

Placards were stacked against the brick walls of the plaza. There was little light but people hung out, chatting in small groups. Those I spoke to expected the site to remain occupied for a long time, with individuals coming and going.

Stations were set up for the group’s various committees, for everything from first-aid to food. A young guy named Patrick DeWitt was chopping onions in the dark, on a folding table stacked with bowls full of sliced rolls, vegetables and donuts. He and others were glad to hear that a large supply of pizzas might be delivered around noon on Friday. (Call Erika Bell at 609-670-8545 about contributing food.)

The nearby Friends Center and Arch Street Methodist Church are helping. No major hassles regarding permits yet. No confrontations with cops or anyone else. Let’s see how long the honeymoon with the cops lasts.

It’s happening all over the country. Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Buffalo Springfield, got it right in his Friday column: “What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.”

Footnote: Jonathan Alter called Occupy Wall Street “a cross between a Hooverville and Woodstock – the middle-class jobless of the 1930s and the hippie protesters of the 1960s.” This is also a fairly apt description of the Philly site. There were many older people camped out at City Hall, some of them homeless. The big difference between the 1930s and now is that we don’t have an FDR or anyone remotely like him “occupying” the White House or campaigning to do so.

Posted in City Hall, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

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