Détruit

--Bottle opener, from ReclaimedCleveland.com

A great empire, like a great cake,
is most easily diminished at the edges
--Benjamin Franklin

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

You're a scavenger, Max. You're a maggot.
Did you know that?
You're living off the corpse of the old world.
Tell me your story, Max. C'mon.
What burned you out, huh? Kill one man too many?
See too many people die? Lose some family?
Oh, so that's it, you lost your family?
That makes you something special, does it?
--Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior (1981)
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Stories like this kinda warm the cockles of one's heart:

Ever wondered where those razed, dilapidated inner city buildings go after they've been torn down? Well, an enterprising woodworking company is re-purposing the materials from one-time Best Location in the Nation --Cleveland, Ohio -- and making them into everything from chopping blocks (how ironic) to beds. Maybe Motor Town -- officially facing 10,000 demolitions though the actual number is tens of thousands higher -- could be next.

From the site London Thrillist (where we saw their advert):

Taking origin to brand-new hyper-specifics is Reclaimed Cleveland: an e-furniture shop that not only builds your homegoods using materials salvaged from condemned churches, homes & stores, but also stamps each piece with the exact Cleveland address where its constituent components used to live."

ReclaimedCleveland.com -- to see how and where empire ends.

Wild, Wild Midwest

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun--
My dream.
--A Long Time Ago, Langston Hughes

These cinders need more to be a fire
While the ghosts of the soldiers
That lived there before us
Laugh with their guns by their side
--Life in a Tenement Square,
Flogging Molly

Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own
Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?
What a comfort to the widow, a light to the child
There is power in a Union
--There is Power in a Union, Billy Bragg

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife
--Union Maid, Woody Guthrie
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A Wall Street Journal report this week hails Detroit as a Nuevo Ghost Town, with a population at the city's 1910 level. Even Eminem's scowl can't save it from that plight (Detroit's Population Plunges).

According to the census bureau, "The number of vacant housing units doubled in the past decade to nearly 80,000, more than one-fifth of the city's housing stock." While blacks and whites continue to flee, the Hispanic population is increasing.

Of course we all know the once-proud Motor City has been falling apart for some time, manufacturing jobs drying up, the mortgage crisis providing the coup de grace. But foreign powers see opportunity in our degradation, with BMW's Greer (S.C.) campus employing 7,000, and generating thousands of other ancillary jobs.

The non-union autoworkers at the U.S. BMW factory earn $15 an hour, about half of what their German counterparts earn. "'We are a low-wage country compared to Germany,' said Kristin Dziczek, director of the Labor and Industry Group at the Center for Automotive Research, ", which means the middle-class to which manufacturing workers once aspired is now a pipe dream (In its biggest foreign market, BMW gets skilled workers for Less.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the U.S. rebuild Germany after WW II? Ditto Japan and Korea. The facts of globalization are evident and painful. We have become the Turks working for non-American industrial giants. That has certainly worked out well for us.

What were we fighting for? Wasn't it the right of labor to unionize -- an absent feature of totalitarianism? Didn't the trade union movements, opposing oppression, first crack the facade of communist controls in Poland and elsewhere? It wasn't U.S. military might or Uncle Ronnie that achieved this objective.

"[An]Obama administration commerce official who visited the [BMW] campus last week, Rick C. Wade, called the plant an "example" of what is possible to move toward the president's goal of doubling exports in five years." But, 70% of the vehicle manufactured in the Greer plant go to Germany, so how is this a win-win as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) would have it? We are out of control when our losses are scored as wins.

What if the administration had used the auto bailout money to buy out BMW, Toyota, Kia and Hyundai, and then legislated trade barriers for the auto industry? The business of America is business, but shouldn't that industriousness benefit America? Ranger news flash: Superpowers do not have foreign factories flourishing within their borders, while their own companies flail.

The Obama administration may try an sugar coat this, but the bitter pill is a death knell to our working class once grounded in the factories of America. This is a harbinger of our future, which will be union-free and management-friendly because labor has become beggars at the global banquet.

The death of unions = the death of the middle class.

NOTE: Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire which killed 146 mostly young immigrant women, and gave the impetus for factory workers to unionize. The ensuing labor movement bettered worker's conditions substantially.


--Jim and Lisa

Payday Loans

Joke:

George Bush jogs by a boy who has a box of puppies for sale.
Bush: Whaddya call your puppies?
Boy: Republicans.

Delighted, the next day president Bush brings one of his jogging buddies with him.

Bush: You gotta hear this: "Son, whaddya call yer puppies?"
Boy: "Democrats."
Bush: Whoa, yesterday you told me they were "Republicans".
Boy: Yeah, but today their eyes are open.

Take this job and shove it
I ain't workin' here no more
--Take This job and Shove It, Johnny Paycheck
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We are as a nation of confused puppies with unopened eyes. We are blindly probing for the teat to suckle, but it is not easy to find.

Why do we have a Democracy in the first place? Why not a dictatorship, or Communism or Socialism? A government should serve the following goals:

• Protect and serve the citizens
• Provide services
• Pass and enforce laws for the common welfare
• Provide economic and physical security

These functions provide for the exercise of freedom. Minus any of these legs, the government is out of balance, regardless of what form of government exists. The hungry are not really thrilled that their kids could grow up to be president.

The current U.S. economy shares something with hungry Americans. It is living from payday to payday, taking out loans in order to make ends meet. Both the Right and the Left have eschewed a middle ground, and hatred and fear have replaced those vaunted democratic ideals of security and social well-being.

The distractions and fear-mongering began this administration with the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), a misguided campaign which has added trillions of dollars in present day debt, and untold future debt yet to be incurred. An undertaking with no benefit devolving to the average citizen.

In fact, the U.S. now faces the fact that it can no longer afford to occupy Germany, Japan and Korea. In our newly frugal times, NATO membership should also be questioned, as it is no longer a mutual defensive alliance (if it ever was.)

But if the Payday Loan sharks keep lending Presidents newly-minted bills, what motivation is there to moderate? Government these days is accustomed to doling out money on shrink-wrapped pallets, weighed rather than counted. Money is no longer a precious commodity; it grows on trees. Traditional accounting principles no longer apply.

It seems like the U.S. lacks for long-term fiscal planning; economic and military plans are ad hoc. For many good Americans, those "bad men" (who downed the planes) really are the problem. "Didn't you see them? They laughed in court," one of my well-meaning conservative friends pleaded. But while he and his brethren's eyes are turned to Ring #3, the real action is happening under the Big Tent, only we're not allowed in there.

Obama gives lip service to following George Bush's template, throwing money that we don't have at still opaque problems. No one speaks of Plan B, if the stimulus packages fail. Our plans lack depth and continuity, and fail to address future contingencies.

If the U.S. ceases to be solvent, it loses. To borrow a concept from Paul Simon, there must be 50 ways for the U.S. to lose this endeavor. Some are non-existential -- like loss of world prestige -- while others are non-negotiable, like entering an economic depression.

If the U.S. does fall that far, everyone may say Osama bin Laden is to blame, and they would be correct, though for different reasons. George Bush sunk the country in a fool's errand. Whether the fool was in earnest or not is moot.

In a beginning chapter from Terrorism 101, al-Qaeda prompted a lavish overreaction from our callow leaders who swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. So today we are told Baghdad and Kabul street corners are kinda getting a little safer than they were after our invasion.

But this thrills Ranger not at all when Detroit and Cleveland are dying.

Knife to the Throat

It's a lesson too late for the learnin'
Made of sand, made of sand
--The Last Thing on My Mind, Tom Paxton

Well poor boy spent all he had,
famine come in the land
--Prodigal Son, Rolling Stones

I hear the train a comin'
It's rollin' 'round the bend,
And I ain't seen the sunshine,
Since, I don't know when
--Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash

breaking into Fort Knox,
stealing our intentions,
hangars sitting gripped in oil
Crying FREEDOM!
--B.Y.O.B, S.O.A.D.
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Ranger has been on the road for a month now, thinking, driving and avoiding getting lost. He has been a modern day Jimmy Appleseed, sowing his thoughts -- welcome or not -- throughout his travels.

Yesterday we toured Cleveland, Ranger's stomping grounds. Save for the gentrified downtown, the ubiquitous urban decay of Cleveland reflected that seen in Buffalo, Erie, Toledo, and every other city outside of the Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire leg of the tour.

Eastside Cleveland is a garbage dump, an absolute scab on the wound that that is the current U.S. of A. Everywhere, extreme wealth abutted by the more ubiquitous extreme poverty. Our loathing for the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) intensifies and solidifies. Let us rebuild our shit hole cities before we rebuild foreign shit hole cities. We do not have the money to do both.

Our corroded financial reality is now an open scab for all to see, even the ordinarily clueless George Bush. Though one hopes for decisive corrective action, overheard last night in an Ohio restaurant from a table of retirees was the following: "Things may be bad, but they'll be worse if Obama gets in and tries to nigger-rig things."

Happy for the moment they were in their presumed posture of smug superiority and willful blindness. They refused to recognize the people who actually have placed their retirements in jeopardy. These people are in the bag for McCain and Palin, who can can be dumb as logs as far as they are concerned. They will not vote for Obama. This indicts the foolishness of the Democratic voters as strongly as it does the pathetic bigotry of many citizens.

We met a 30-year firefighter earlier in the day and discussed the event of 9-11, with which he had some relationship. Ranger asked why he thought the people in the first plane didn't take action when the hijackers cut the stewardess's throat.

The answer is the U.S. public is lulled into a sense of security. Someone, somewhere, will know what is going down, and will talk the hijackers down to the tarmac, where most passengers will then be allowed to disembark. That is the way this scenario usually played out, but not this time. However, the learning curve was sharp and the third flight saw a passenger rebellion.

The people can yet summon outrage. But they must first acknowledge and assign responsibility. This economic "crisis" has been a long time in the coming; the train's lights have been bearing down the tunnel a long while. Hardly an unforeseen crisis. It now diverts attention from foreign policy, and it will earn BushCheney's minions a final Big Blowout before the elections. It does nothing for the solid, vanishing middle class citizen on whose backs this nation rides.

Both parties promise tax breaks (Obama caters to the middle class with an $85 billion a year plan; McCain pledges to continue Bush's ill-advised breaks, estimated at $1.5 trillion over 10 years.) The current $650 billion+ U.S. defense budget excludes secret funding and non-emergency bailouts, yet we are promised tax reductions?

Do the taxpaying American people (and that includes members of Congress) actually believe taxes can be cut while federal spending is increased? Did money start growing on the blighted birch trees of the Green Mountains?

Such magical thinking has gotten us into this mess. Both parties propose initiatives which cost money. The solution? Lower taxes. Yet everyone has eyes to see. Biden even mentioned the blight in his home area in tonight's debate.

The inner city blight across America is something that neither Obama nor McCain address, save in the vaguest terms. Last month Thomas Friedman wrote about the primacy of need in the U.S. state of Georgia, while the U.S. government pledged aid to the Caucasus Republic of Georgia, albeit a mere $1 billion (Georgia on My Mind.)

Friedman wrote, "Wow, I thought. That’s great: $1 billion to fix Georgia’s roads and schools. But as I read on, I quickly realized that I had the wrong Georgia."

This is where the outrage should lie.