Thoughts on South Shore Line Expansion in 2022-2023

As anyone who keeps up with this will know, there are presently two projects going on with the South Shore Line (soon to be a system, hopefully enough):

1. Double Track NWI, a project to double track the South Shore line from Gary to Michigan City, and
2. West Lake Corridor, a project to reactivate the Monon line to Dyer, Indiana for transit use.

Both of these projects are useful. Double Track NWI would allow for a denser service and even express service between Michigan City and Gary plus would get the tracks running through Michigan City off the street (by removing the street from where the tracks would be running over); the West Lake Corridor would expand service down to Munster, Dyer, and by extension to Lansing and southern Calumet City in nearby Illinois (and thereby give Pace an objective reason to eliminate the 355 Route, which has been on the ropes for the past ten-plus years since they changed it from an all day commuter route to a rush-hour feeder route that lacked a reverse commute trip or even a mid day option) with the possibility of extending it to St. John and Lowell.

Having followed the ins and outs of South Shore Expansion since the latter part of the oughts (and even earlier), I’ve watched as Valparaiso stood as a siren call for Northwest Indiana for a couple of decades, and while it would have been nice to expand the South Shore along either the Canadian National line (the old Grand Trunk Western Main Line) or along the route that I suggested (check out option 3, or what I called the Griffith-Hobart Cutoff), that turned out to be an illusion that kept them from doing what could be done—namely, they could have built the line to Lowell before The Canadian National bought up the EJ&E (The Monon line through Hammond and Munster was already owned by the local municipalities, and I’m sure that CSX Systems would have been happy with some public monies improving their line at the cost of running public transit on it.).

As for the Double Tracking down the main line, that had been a dream pretty much since a section of the line just past County Line Road in Porter County was double-lined. That section pretty much remained separate from the main double lining from Gary to Kensington (where the South Shore line merges into the Metra Electric line) until the present day, although it had been expanded to the east a few miles in the mid-2000s. There were plans to double the line even then (and probably beforehand), but that was threatened with analysis paralysis as The South Shore Line people first looked at replacing both Miller and Gary Central with a Commuter Stop where I-65 meets up with US-20, then tried to avoid the need to remake the Miller Stop into something more than what it was.

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But now, in 2022, it appears that both projects are finally in the construction phase (or at least pre-construction phase). The Double-Track project is in full swing, with Michigan City well into their remaking of 11th Street from street-running to a train Right Of Way and Miller finally getting the upgrades it needs. In addition, the whole stretch of the West Lake Corridor from Dyer to the future Hammond Gateway Station (where the West Lake Corridor is planned to merge with the Main Line) is being cleared of brush, trash, and the old rail line in preparation for the new line to be built.

If everything goes halfway according to plan (the usual delays, etc.), the Double-Track section should start seeing service in 2024-2025, with the West Lake Corridor joining it in 2025-2026. In a few years the service should be improved, complete with the ability to go from Dyer to South Bend without using a car.

The key phrase being “if everything goes halfway according to plan.”

If inflation is anywhere near what I’ve been hearing it is for various items, there’s a possibility that the costs for the two projects is about to balloon out of control – especially if inflation jumps beyond those limits to ranges that make calculating costs impossible. And once that begins, I would think that they would have a contingent plan set aside so as to finish up ONE of the projects; otherwise we’re going to have a mess that could make the whole thing unworkable as there’s only one yard for the passenger trains, and that’s east side of Michigan City, on the wrong side (so to speak) of the 11th Street Station.

So be prepared – if inflation jumps up to well beyond the present pace and the folks at the South Shore Line need to make decisions as to what needs to be done, don’t be surprised to find the West Lake Corridor abandoned for NICTD to focus their efforts on the Main Line. Sad enough that the West Lake Corridor waited while people ignored what could have been done right away for the sake of a dream extension, imagine if the time it took for them to realize their mistake and correct course was long enough to make that project impossible.

Remember, the West Lake Corridor was designed with the idea of helping people go to Downtown Chicago (and to points to the east, via transfer) without having to drive to Hammond, Hegewisch or East Chicago. It assumed that Downtown Chicago would be attraction enough for jobs and attractions, and that people would still want to commute from NW Indiana (the towns along the State Line near the railroad) for those downtown Chicago jobs.

Well, the jobs aren’t there—at least not to the degree they were before the pandemic caused changes to how meetings were done. I drive to the East Chicago South Shore Station (closest station to where I live now) and where they used to need overflow parking lots, there’s now one big parking lot that’s too big for weekday demand at present. I have no problem finding good parking spots when I show up around Noon on a weekday, when it should be nearly impossible for me to find a spot that doesn’t require that I run a marathon to make it to the train station.

Now, looking at the present time, could you justify a rail line going down to a town that’s a ten mile drive from the nearest active passenger train stations? That parallels a bus line that couldn’t justify itself for ten years before unexpected circumstances enabled a mercy killing of the route? Especially with the drop-off in rides that has occurred over the past two years and which has yet to even get near the old numbers? Add to that the extra costs of setting up a new station for possible transfers (since you’re unlikely to have the route justify all-day trips directly downtown).

That’s for the new branch.

Then, look at the main line. It’s getting some long-awaited upgrades, from a robust double-tracking of a busy section of track to a remaking of the 11th Street Corridor in Michigan City for smoother operation to a redesigning of the Miller Station that involves shooing traffic away from the station and straightening a section of track, thereby shortening the route slightly. To the degree that Downtown Chicago remains important the Main Line of the South Shore has proven its importance to the region, and with present state of the line in flux because of construction (busing between Dune Park and Carroll Avenue, amongst other things) the smart fallback would be to leave the West Lake Corridor cleared but otherwise untouched so that both crews could focus on improving what they have instead of splitting between two different goals to the point of not getting either one.

Another way to look at it: Maybe double-lining the main line would be Gilding the Lily, but better to Gild That Lily if you move from having everything to just enough for one thing. Better the proven route over the hopeful expansion (and, too often, hopeful expansions turn into money pits that don’t stop draining an area even after they’re shut down).

That’s my two cents. Hopefully both projects can be taken care of, but if a choice needs to be made, better to improve what you have.

Destruction Capitalism

A couple of news items, to start:

Alden Global Capital, known for bleeding newspapers dry, buys up the 68% of The Chicago Tribune they didn’t already own

Alden Global Captial is a hedge company that goes around looking for newspapers to buy up and milk dry for their owners and stakeholders to profit from. Since most newspapers have been troubled for the past twenty years (in part because of their response to The Internet over the past THIRTY years), these groups have been there to buy up various assets from people who have either already drained these same newspapers as dry as they can justify to themselves or are looking to get out from properties that they no longer want to deal with.

Over the past couple of months there have been plenty of long-time names who have lost their jobs at the Chicago Tribune. While many of them can be considered as expected or necessary (old people step aside and new people fill their spots, hopefully with the new people having learned their craft and also being given a helping hand by those employees stepping aside), the fact that the present ownership is whom it is hints towards a different outcome: Old people pushed out or retired out without a chance at training their replacements or even mentoring future reporters.

Namdar Realty Group, known for bleeding malls dry, buys up Genesee Valley Center

Malls have been on a downward trend since at least 2001, and since 2008 (with the collapse of the housing market and the blinding ascendence of Amazon) many have closed. However, one would hope that the people who own the malls would look for ways to make their malls into different types of assets to the community.

A few malls have attempted that feat, and Flint has had more than its share of malls that have convincingly remade themselves, even if temporarily. The Dort Mall (With an extreme bare-bones page probably kept up on auto pilot), which has had a couple of names in its past including The Small Mall and The Mid-America Plaza, long close to dead, once had on display a sizeable collection of various items collected through the years (I saw it once, made a sad visit quite happy); sadly from what I’ve read the collection has been slowly disappearing. The Courtland Center (no longer with a webpage, it appears), originally the Eastland Mall, had become the temporary home of The Sloan Museum, a museum centered around The Automobile; now that The Sloan Museum looks to be moving back to its old digs I wonder if the mall will even be open (as noted by the disappearance of its webpage).

That leaves Genesee Valley Center (with a mediocre webpage that still outshines its competition). It was always the top mall in the region, and even as recent as 2015 (my last visit to the malls of Flint before the summer of 2021) It had seemed to survive when the others were flailing or looking to remake themselves. I remember that the Genesee Valley Center still had their whole mall filled with mall stores and a food court that was still more full than empty (did notice a third of the spaces were empty, gave me an insight that maybe the food courts were you first saw that a mall was declining), whereas the Courtland Center had no real food court and more than half the original storefront space was dedicated to various vehicles that had been made in Flint.

Well, the past six years have been rather ugly to the mall. I actually did a couple of visits over the summer (funeral for a stepfather) and found out that they had what seemed to be a 75% occupancy rate and a food court which looked fuller than it was because the 5 or so remaining tenants were given multiple spaces to rent out. There was even a Chinese massage storefront – which I admit to have taken advantage of, and a sign of decline in a space with plenty of decline still left to go (and maybe a chance to recover, given the economy).

Of course, before this I learned that they had been bought up by Namdar Realty Group, a company (based in Long Island of all places, almost neighbors to the company that bled the Orchards Mall of Benton Harbor dry) whose business model is to drain mall properties of all the money they can get and profit out of the properties as much as they can.* You get lower rents and the illusion of a full mall, but with nothing being done to update the mall (and, eventually, to keep up the mall), people stop showing up anyway and the mall slowly empties out, to the benefit of nobody but Namdar (who, having squeezed everything out of the mall that they could, turn the mall into a tax deduction, lots of losses and a burden to the local area).

Yeah, I’m being Pissy. Why?

My problem is that we’re watching these pools of money going out, finding companies that could either use some saving or shepherding through rough times, and watching them strip-mine the companies for the benefit of their owners…and nobody else.

Yes, I know what’s been going on with these companies – the papers having been malresponsive (responding badly and explicitly to their disadvantage) since the early days of the wider internet, the malls having reached saturation point before Amazon started expanding beyond music and books. Cues were missed because what was profitable for the coming year was disastrous ten years down the road, and waiting five years to respond properly was too late.

Still, I’d like to have seen more malls have a chance to take on alternate futures – Flint’s malls had good ideas, but I’d like to see malls start viewing their inner spaces as offering more than wares – I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the two-story malls turn the second story into residences and rejigger the first floor into a more downtown-like atmosphere, as we’re talking about a place that could easily be a walkable downtown type of area, complete with climate control. Granted, we’re talking about the ultimate company town here (and I’m sure there’s other issues), but I’m sure I wasn’t the only person thinking about living in the mall on occasion (for me that was once, when I walked by a furniture store and imagined parcing the area out as a living space and wondering what it’d be like living in such a space).

And as for newspapers, I’m sure some will die – but I’d like to see a newspaper able to spend time freely remaking themselves while they struggled for survival. Money that was sent to Corporate Headquarters elsewhere (say, like Long Island…) could be used to try to remake the paper into something that would be able to make it past the crisis point and to a newer golden age for the company.

And if the Malls and Newspapers ended up spending themselves into oblivion without the Hedge Funds demanding their take, at the very least the money spent would have gone to local people, where the answers would have come up naturally and been embraced by the people with their love and spending, instead of the money running to some other area where the only people allowed to appreciate the extra windfall already have plenty of money on hand and are, indeed, looking at money as something to sit on and hold away from the public at large. I’m sure that a major reason for the printing presses running at The Fed at the moment is in response to people like Alden Global and Namdar Reality grabbing all the money they can and handing it to people who neither wish to spend any of the money they get nor can really spend what they’re getting at the moment. It’s not that they’re trying to start inflation, but they’re trying to get money out there to be spent as the money out there isn’t really doing anything at the moment (other than fueling China’s Belt and Road Initiative, though that’s another item at the moment).

Written February 27, 2021

*Also, note that this may not be the operating activity within New York City itself, where Namdar Realty actually owns a few properties in lower Manhattan and Harlem/The Bronx area.

A Possible Future of Transit, as Seen in 4 Projects

Prologue: The Spanish Flu And It’s Effects.

The last truly major pandemic was the “Spanish Flu of 1918.” And it had major effects on the twenties.

To start with, we have the establishment of the southern cities. Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles–all of them became truly big starting in the 1920s. This is three decades before the development of personal Air Conditioning that would drive people inside and seemingly allow people to move south. However, if you consider that people came to understand that going outside and getting out in the sun has a strong supressive effect on viruses, then the start of the major growth of the South becomes easy to understand from the ’20s to the ’40s.

You also see the development of front porches on houses and a simplification of ornamental design. Before, you had entry rooms in the old Victorian houses, and they were filled with details on the outside. Then, in the twenties, you start seeing a simplification of the design and the development of an outdoors area where visitors can be entertained.

The simplification of detail on the outside also started showing in other buildings. The reason for this was a sudden focus on cleanliness, and how better to show that your building was cleanliness-oriented by simplifying the outside design into a plain, unornamented façade that says “no place for germs to hide?”

Prologue Part 2: Enter The Automobile

Then, of course, there is the development of the car and its rise in popularity.

Think of it—riding on public transit between 1917 and 1920 meant risking exposure to The Spanish Flu. And while one exposed one’s self to that when going anywhere outside, driving your own car meant you weren’t going to catch it while you were driving…at least very much compared to riding on a bus or a trolly that was either overpacked with other riders or coated with people’s sweat, breath and other bodily fluids.

Why else would the car suddenly take on mythical proportions in the 1920s? Why else would the car companies be able to persuade people that the road was made mainly for cars, consigning pedistrians to the sides of the road (where sidewalks were allowed) and bikes to kid’s playthings? Why else would tramways and interurbans peak in the 1920s with people happily hating the systems and their owners?

And when WWII was finished, the people wanted cars space enough to drive them, and the government complied. Soon enough, retail followed them out to the suburbs, and eventually even the jobs would make the transition from urban phenomenon to by the side of the road, within immediate reach of expressways.

Now: The Pandemic of 2020 and its effects:

So now we have the COVID-19 pandemic. What has been the reaction?

Quite simply, the need for more space. Cities that had been suffering from a small but steady outflow of (usually poor) people due to their becoming expensive suddenly found people flowing out to the suburbs once they realized that they could leave the city and pretty much do the same thing. Even where the company (who, suddenly finding they could go without massive offices and the rent they had to pay for them) decided to knock down people’s salaries in accordance to where they were moving to (and thus having many of their employees suddenly realize that living in an overpriced city had hidden the fact that they had been paid poverty wages all along) the people are deciding to stay where they’ve moved to as the lifestyle eeked out in the rural areas has become much more attractive than what they had had in the city.

This has effects on transportation. The “Peak Car” that seemed to happen in 2016 has been pushed off into sometime in the 2020s as people are moving to areas without decent mass transit (if there’s any mass transit in the areas at all…). What presently passes as the Greyhoung bus system (even with all the local and regional companies they use as feeder lines) is nothing like it was in the mid ’90s (when I actually rode it around a few times), never mind the 1950s, (when both Greyhound and the Trailways system blanketed the nation and there were plenty of other bus companies holding their own), Amtrak has been pretty much stuck with the same route system since the mid-seventies (a system that was meant to be shut down after a few years of further declines, may I add), and despite a steady growth in actual service, the local bus and train systems have been pretty much unable to grow fast enough to make any true impact on the cities of the United States.

And the COVID-19 virus has taken transit from growth-management to crisis management. Train systems so full they needed to be expanded suddenly became wasted movement dealt with more as locked systems than actual filling of demand. And the projects to help the systems grow…found themselves endangered

Four Projects, and My Predicted Outcomes

Here is a listing of four projects that were planned out to help increase the local transit systems. From Chicago to Northwest Indiana to Lansing (Michigan), these expansions had plans and supporters. And now…

• The Red/Purple Line Bypass: Since (as of January 2021) it is being built, it will be finished [note: it was opened in late November of 2021, and I have ridden on it]. And while it was indeed needed, one has to wonder whether the time for the project has indeed past. After all, the reason for the Brown Line was to link the Ravenswood Neighborhood with Downtown Chicago, and if Downtown Chicago no longer has the jobs or the shopping, would the bypass end up being considered as something other than an exercise in pork-encrusted lily-guilding? The present setup on the line has been good enough for many years, only becoming obviously sub-optimal in the early 2010s as the Brown (Ravenswood) Line started carrying many more passengers than historically.
• Double-Tracking The South Shore Line: I can see this getting built quickly. After all, you’re doubling the track so as to make it easier for freight trains to use the track. Supposedly it’s to make scheduling express trains and a denser schedule possible, but that can also make for faster and denser freight.
• South Shore Line – West Lake Corridor Expansion: I’ve been following this pretty much since I moved to northwest Indiana, as it would have given me a nice, easy route to and from Downtown Chicago without having to worry about catching a bus or driving to the nearest station. I followed as Pete Visclovsky tried to make a long addition from Hammond to Valparaiso via Munster (which, in retrospect, was a mistake), then followed as NICTD corrected and focused on doing what they could do (i.e. expand transit to Dyer, and from there to Lowell). I even watched as they started preparing the way for the train to make it down to the Dyer-Muster border.
  And now…I get to watch as the route becomes obsolete in the coming age of decentralization and expanding car use. The route, like the Red-Purple Bypass (and the main line double-tracking, in its own way) depends on Downtown Chicago being the repository to Jobs, Culture and Shopping that it has been for many years, and with all that in danger the route itself may be too late for usability (which IS a problem with things being late–there IS such a thing as being TOO late). There’s plans for the area around where the South Shore Line goes into Illinois, but while it’s a good idea to make that a sort of transfer point and center for transit-oriented development, THAT depends on downtown Chicago being the center of activity it has been historically–and may not be from this point on.
• BRT Along Michigan and Grand River Avenue, Lansing/East Lansing/Okemos: The Capitol Area Transit Authority spent much of the time from 2006 to 2016 figuring out that they wanted to remake the streets that the #1 Bus (the most-used and busiest route) ran on into a Transit-Friendly corridor, than backed off in response to the election of Donald Trump. The decision to back off on the transit expansion/remake of the main street on the East side of the Lansing area may end up being prescient, as presently allowed usage (aka 2020-2021) is so low as to make even subsidized service untenable (and the one thing mass transit needs to justify itself is a lot of users).

What’s It Mean

The fact is, we’re seeing changes sort of along the lines of what happened from 1917 to 1920, with one major difference: back in the early 1900s period Mass Transit was the major way people went to and from work, shopping and recreation/entertainment, now it’s the Automobile that’s been planned around for seventy-plus years. In the 1920s the automobile became something to aspire to, now it may become the sole way of moving around.

After all, we’re dealing with the same issues that the people dealing with the Influenza outbreak of 1918–the need for cleanliness and protection, plus the appearance of openness. The personal car that you (or your family) drive around in is much safer than a bus or train when it comes to viruses and bacteria, even as empty as the trains and buses are nowadays at ALL hours of the day and night; plus sitting in the front seat gives you a panorama of what’s in front of you–and even if all you see is the tail end of cars on the freeway, those people are not directly next to you but separated by yards and yards of space and two hard edges. That the view may be ugly is not your concern, just that it’s empty and there are barriers between you and the other people out there.

And if the trains and buses stop running, you can point to COVID-19 as the starting point of said ending. And it will make sense.

15 January 2021

Why Our Roads Suck – A Forced Remembrance.

You know what keeps amazing me? Everyone talking about how “The Government’s gathering up all this money, yet they fix nothing.” The sad thing is that the information is out there, only people don’t care to think about it.

Take the example of roads, bridges and transit:

Right now we pay 18.4 cents/gallon in federal gas taxes, with one penny per gallon dedicated to Mass Transit. This is where it’s been since 1997, when the last bill relating to the Federal Gas Tax was passed.

Fifteen years. Which makes the dollar in 1997 worth seventy cents today, if you’re an optimist…and believe the governmental CPI…and ignore that gas (increased 200%, if my recollections on gas prices are right), material and food prices have shot up much more than what the Governmental CPI is willing to admit.

Add in the fact that much of the construction work today isn’t so much “plant two new ribbons of concrete through miles and miles of farmland” (or even “shut things down to work on everything at once”) but is instead “tear up four lanes to put in six, remake interchanges into SPUIs and make sure traffic keeps moving during the work,” and you have a recipe for less and less being done and costing more and more. Shifting transit funding (all one cent per gallon of it) over to highway funding would just add drops to the bucket.

What’s needed is to change how gas is taxed:

1. Peg the tax as a percentage of the tax – like they do with gas taxes in Indiana and Illinois.
2. Base that percentage to what we paid in 1997. Basically, it would be a tripling of tax money at the moment – at least in step with gas inflation, plus keeping up with the rising prices of other materials (and wages). Even if the percentage was dropped (Say…down to 10%, from the de facto 15-18% between 1997 and 2000) it’s definitely higher than the present 5% de facto rate.
3. Instead of a penny of the tax going to transit, put in a certain percentage written into law. Like…20% of the tax going to transit, 80% going to Roads. Some places are just NOT going to be amenable to highways, ramps, parking lots and lawns.
4. For the first five years, take ten percent off the top for a slush fund, so that when revenue drops commitments made during better times could be completed.

(Not that I expect this to come about. Too many Americans would rather bitch about decaying roads than put their money towards fixing the roads.)

The Anatomy of Apology

It’s been over a week since Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute (and said a whole bunch of other things over the course of days…), and while many people hope for the utter collapse of the Rush Limbaugh edifice (which started when people found out that he had been receiving pre-formatted calls since all the female “I’m a Liberal but you’re right about this…” calls that conveniently flooded his phone lines when his radio show was growing its audience in the early nineties) there are folks hoping for Rush to survive and turn out stronger than before. Rush is one of them – he has already gone on the apology path, having apologized once on Saturday and again on the Monday show.

The first thing that came to mind when hearing this was: “What is Rush expecting?”

If I’m guessing right, he expected that “I’m sorry” would call off the attack gods of the Liberals whom he had been immune to for nearly twenty years, get him back in the good graces of a goodly proportion of the advertisers who had started bolting away from him the moment Liberals actually got pissed off over something he said, and allow him to go back to his Liberal-butchering/Conservative-talking ways.

In short, Rush (like most of the United States) doesn’t know what’s involved in a true apology.

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First thing to note about apologies is that they are not for the “wronged person,” they are for the apologizer.

Simply put, here’s what happens when a person apologizes: that person has worked out in his head that MAYBE it would be good to tell the “wronged other” that he/she is sorry. There’s no sign of whether the other person is wronged, whether that person would accept the apology, whether that person would WANT an apology – just a sign that the person apologizing felt the need to apologize.

This doesn’t mean you should look at every apology with a world-destroying cynicism, but it’s something one should keep in mind. If nothing else, it should balance out the liberal tendency to forgive upon hearing an apology.

The second thing to note about apologies is that they must be followed by actions that prove the sorrow of the person apologizing.

Quite simply, the person apologized to also have the right to see proof of a changed heart before they decide to forgive.

This comes from a simple observation: apologies too often are but requests for carte-blanche from the person proffering the apology:

• “I’m sorry I bet on baseball, now let me sell baseballs and books based on this apology (Pete Rose).”
• “I’m sorry I called you a Slut, now tape yourself so we can see our birth control dollars at work (Rush Limbaugh).”
• “I’m sorry I beat you black and blue, Rhianna, now do a couple duets with me (Chris Brown).”

Those are the most obvious and well-known, you could probably pile on a bunch of your own, both given to you and given BY you…but you get the point.

This point points to a bigger issue: To apologize, you must be ready to repent. And to repent, part of it is you need to show penitence. And often that penitence includes punishment. And you may end up stuck with at least a portion the punishment – something that doesn’t so much say “you’ve done wrong,” but “you’ve proven yourself unworthy of reproving your wortt.

(which is probably why many people NEVER apologize – no admittance of wrong, no reason to step down.).

The third thing to note about apologies is that the person receiving the apology is not required to forgive…or to forget.

The person on the receiving end of “an apology” does not have to blindly forgive the apologizer. I can think of quite a few good reasons for not forgiving the apologizer:

• the apologizee may be waiting for more proof of sorrow
• the apologizee may not trust said person to follow through on what the apology promises
• the apologizee may be too scarred or remember too much to ever accept the person giving the apology
• the apologizee may have suffered something just TOO heinous to be apologized for
• the apologizee may judge the apology as wanting or incomplete
• the apologizee has been apologized to before, with no change in actions (or a change to the worse)
• the apologizee has absolutely decided against forgiving the apologizer – EVER
• the apologizee just would rather not have to deal with the person ever again

Indeed, if a wrong is heinous enough for the wrongdoer to apologize for, it is possibly heinous enough to be unable to be apologized for. And there are indeed some wrongs for which forgiveness is DETRIMENTAL to the person doing the forgiving. And I have seen a case where a forgiving led to some severe problems for the forgivee – I’d bet that it led to her death, in fact. They say she died from Cancer, but I believe she died from forgiving something that shouldn’t have been forgiven.

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In the time since Rush got called out for what had turned out to be a long-term fixation on Ms. Fluke’s possible sex life, he has lost [one hundred forty] sponsors. It’s gotten so bad that some folks given free space in the show called to cancel. There’s also been a couple lawsuits over music played over Rush’s fixation over the Fluke’s possible sex life.

He has also gone on to strike out at women a bit more over the past few days. A sign that his apology was more a move to shore up his position than anything that could be construed as approaching real.

Update: Rush came back stronger than ever – he even helped elect Donald Trump to the Presidential Office in 2016.
He has since died.

Who ARE The One Percent?

Probably the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is their opposition to “The One Percent.” There’s something about being on the right side of an overwhelming majority of people that makes people feel good – whether it’s about the elementary school’s mascot (Gillespie Mustangs, anyone?) to rooting for your side to win a war. And since 99% of the population can’t be wrong (go along with me on this), then it’s obvious that being with the 99% means being on the right side of history.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Now, never mind the idea that almost everyone can be wrong, that sometimes it’s the oddballs who end up being right. Everyone loves such stories, but more often than not the single lone nut is known as a lone nut for a reason – he’s a nut, he’s dead wrong and people avoid him for that reason. That sometimes said lone nut may be right is an occasional occupational hazard that must be dealt with on the rare occasion that it happens (also known as the stuck clock syndrome – twice a day it’s going to be right and for a few minutes either way it will be about right, but that’s by accident and the rest of the time it will be either “wrong” or “with not enough of a clue to be considered wrong.”

Instead, let’s look at it another way: Who ARE The One Percent? Who are these folks who are, in some way, draining our money away like a vampire sucking on a virgin’s neck for dear life? Who are the people going out of their way to make Americans suffer – note that it’s not about money or exchange, that money and exchange are being used as tools here for the actual purpose (which is to create a feudal society, where certain peoples are deemed worthy of worship and surrender to because of who they are).

Here’s my list:

1. Bankers (not the tellers, but those people who have gotten into suits and sit in the offices) – the obvious first part, as these folks have been proven to be actively creating and pushing the situation where houses are being foreclosed up and neighborhoods turned into ruins. Since the recent re-regulation of the bankers has set it up where they have to have a lot of money in the bank to be able to loan (and the Feds have given them this money), they haven’t had the need to give interest to whatever money has been saved by their customers. Ergo, they’re now in the position where they don’t need us but we need them – and they’re using it to their
2. The Investment Class – You know the dream: to have enough money to make money off of it. It’s this dream that has made a wreck of what WAS the American industrial landscape (Don’t think metals or cars, think computers and can openers. Turns out that heavy industry and heavy manufacturing is the hardest thing to export and the easiest thing to import if you have a good enough market), turned the stock market into the gaming mechanism that it’s become and has turned corporations from private endeavors in service to their customers, workers and owners to entities who are SOLELY deserving of personhood in our nation (thereby classifying the actual humans within the USA as subjects at best…). These folks are also blindly in support of the bankers mainly because they understand that their money means nothing without banks to watch over it.
3. Those directly helping the Bankers and The Investment Class. This includes stockbrokers, Newspaper editors who skew the opinions, politicians (from the Libertarians who baldfacedly support them in their impotence through the Republicans who have done their water-bearing to the Democrats who have hid behind “populist” stances and their buying out of certain groups who cherish their nickle more than the Bankers and Investment Classers care about their millions), even down to…
4. The Police and Armed Forces. Yes, many of these people are unintentionally serving the one percent, but their actions works towards the support and expansion of the realm of the bankers and investment class. The arts of crowd control have gone so far as to become a science, complete with studies and a practice that has become rote.
5. Academia. The fact is, there’s always been those who were part of Academia who have happily put themselves in abject service of the one percent. There are whole disciplines set up to serve the one percent (economics and Business are the two most blatantly in service to the one percent, although you can tell the degree of service by how well the various disciplines are funded…), and the universities that serve the one percent well are better funded then those who don’t.
6. Black Bloc “Anarchists.” Cops crowd people into squares, arrest them like mad and beat them up…and these guys get to declare where they’re going to mess things up? I smell major tools of the one percent, getting behind the lines and allowing the other tools of the one percent to paint those in opposition (Occupy Wall Street/Occupy XXX) as raving lunatics out to destroy America.

I’m sure there may be a few other groups, but these are the obvious ones.

Just to note, we’re not just talking about one percent anymore. More like five or six percent. One percent couldn’t rule over everyone without a larger group of willing helpers (and the rest of us willing to put up with it, whether by going along or by being to scared to fight).

So…now we know whom are the one percent (or, more likely, the five in service to the true upper crust).

Following The Press – Interesting Items…

Remember when the Wisconsin teachers took over the State Capitol for a couple of weeks? I do…and I also remember the sudden rush of female teacher “seduces” male student(s) articles that suddenly popped up on Fark.com. A definite agenda being worked on here – and with the convenient release of “Bad Teacher,” the message was suddenly VERY obvious.

So now, in the past month (Sorry I didn’t comment sooner; was busy with the NaNoWriMo challenge. FYI, didn’t make the 50,000 word goal but I DID finish the story.) a couple of new items have broken into the news in such a way that seems more conveniently planned than accidental:

1. After watching both the football players (labor) and the basketball players (again, labor) buckle down and bend to the will of their respective owners (management), we find out that a couple of stellar, long-time pillars of the college sports world have been proven hollow and ready to collapse: Penn State Football and Syracuse Basketball. While it wasn’t the head coaches who were the guilty parties, they definitely worked hard to shelter the guilty parties until AFTER they were pure poison to the Universities. And what’s worse, in both cases people in the press knew what was going on but decided to sit on the news stories because exposure wasn’t in their interest.
2. Strange that, as the news on Occupy Wall Street/Occupy The Banks changed from “What is this, this wasn’t supposed to happen” to “Thank You Lord for the Riot Police to turn these people to mash,” we start getting some strange news on the Lottery Winners front. First a son of the millionaire Marriott hotels president wins over $100 Million drawing, then three guys who work for the top 1% win a $254 Million drawing, and then someone wins a Million Dollars for the second time in three years. Add to that the newscaster who won himself a $2 Million Dollar House, and you got a lot of folks who don’t need the money having it handed to them rather recently.

On one hand, one of the paths to riches for kids who come from the lower parts of society (basketball, football) is not only getting more impoverished but the path up is proving to be rotten to the core. On the other hand, another way of riches would appear to have been hijacked with the express purpose of funding the coffers of those working for the top 1% without having to take any money out of the hands of the 1% themselves.

Add to that the shift in welfare from going to the people in need to the people (and corporations) tasked with watching the people in need, a shift from grants to loans in every sort of endeavour and the ability of the rich and connected to seal up all possible routes of money to reach the lower 99% (of which I am definitely part of, at least in the North American Continent) it looks very much like things have changed.

They’re no longer hiding. Indeed, their bringing the battles out into the open.

I’m not sure how I’m going to fight, but at some point I know it can’t be alone. The poorer among us are gonna have to figure out a way to unite and act as a group, just as the 1% have.

I Am The Ninety-Nine Percent

In many way I’m lucky.

My job pays a minimal wage, but it’s enough to cover everything I need plus a few wants. I’m also able to take time of when I need…or even on an occasion when I want to.

I have room and board taken care of (for the most part).

I can also afford insurance at present. I’m also able to add vitamins and supplements to my diet (Glucosamine and Condroiten means I can still walk…)

I have no student loan debt, and my other debt can be taken care of easily, should I choose.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

But I do calculations on what I make and what I would need to spend to live on my own, and I keep running into the fact that I would be stuck in the place, dependent on the job for room, board and other necessities. If I wanted out, I’d have to go into debt, and that for the OPPORTUNITY to seek an escape.

I watch all the prices rise, even as the government trumpets the death of inflation to the nation. Food prices, gas prices, housing costs, insurance prices, medical costs, education costs all rise even as the reports keep saying “low inflation.” I now think the CPI means “The Corporation Price Index,” since I’ve yet to see wages rise.

Did I mention Health Insurance? That just leaped up 20 percent…for something that just means I’ll have to cover the first $5000…and I can’t help but think that Obama set up a trap with his “Health Insurance Reform Bill” that the Republicans will warp to suit their agenda…starting with the right (or is that obligation? THAT wouldn’t surprise me) to refuse treatment to those without insurance…or with just Medicaid).

And food prices…not only are food prices rising, but the quality of the stuff is going down as well. Wood, Ammonia, Perfume, Petrochemicals, Human Hair – the list makes High Fructose Corn Syrup seem wholesome, doesn’t it? Also, the packages are shrinking…and sometimes in inventive ways.

And Education…when I first went to school, you could get fourteen credit hours and a good weekend’s partying from the Pell Grant. When I first graduated it covered ten credit hours, and you had to take twelve credit hours to get that. Nowadays the only place you can get an education for a Pell Grant is in some Louisiana Colleges, and now people have gone out of the way to say that people are faking going to school in order to scam money from the Pell Program. Don’t be surprised if you see a bunch of “publicly funded” colleges close down – but NOT because people decide not to go, but instead because the states need to “save money to insure their rich don’t move out of the state.”

Trust me, there is a class war going on in the USA. The rich have been waging it against the poor for over thirty years (nearly forty if you ask me), and they’ve become so confident in victory that they don’t even hide it anymore; even with a Democratic President at the helm.

I’ve seen it up close.

You see, I live with a one percenter. And from what I’ve seen, they are indeed as venial and petty as you can think of them as.

Sad thing is, they’ve so fallen in love with their $$$ that they won’t even think of giving to charities until they’re dead. Not so much afraid of needing the money later (that’s their excuse) but not wanting to give the money at all. That they’ve made the excuse of “maybe needing the money for care in their last days” shows at the very least a need to justify themselves.

And many of the rest of us (those who are still bought into the “American Dream” concept) have decided to pass this stuff on as “normal.” “Sure, twenty percent raises in health insurance are normal.” “You’re supposed to mourn the fact that your brother can still get a  job – after all, my students can’t find jobs and they do the work.” “Eighty years old, why should I retire? Kids Today don’t deserve jobs.” “Mass Transit is for those who leech off the system.” (all said by people well up in the middle class)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Revolutions are rough, bloody and may not give what people want, but at the very least it gets the rulers to notice. And when a people are so desperate for change that they’ll confuse anger with action, watch out.

Because sometimes people just want to tear shit up.

Especially when you’ve given them nothing to build up.

99 percenters, take over the nation. Wall Street Can Go To Hell (and stay there).

Borders: Another View On Why It Closed.

On September 18th (of 2011) the remaining Borders’ stores closed down, including the store in Highland, Indiana. I can’t really say I spent a lot of money supporting them directly (between Amazon, the local libraries and plain lack of time to dedicate to reading books), but I’ve always loved the place (and the places which the Borders of 1971-1991 supported).

So enough of pure mourning. The time has come (at least to my mind) for dissection and to see what lessons I can come up with that have been ignored (or just plain overlooked).

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First off, the bookstore didn’t die on September 18th, 2011, or when the Kindle came out, or when Amazon.com first came online, or when Oprah decided to cancel her Book Club. In essence, it died when K-Mart bought out the Borders Brothers for a cool 150 Million in October of 1992.

Think of it: A company that had eaten up its markets in the seventies, that had just been beaten to submission by Walmart at the markets where the two battled each other (smaller towns where the main city served at the county business center) and was saddled with a corporate culture that had no way to deal with changing times. Plus they had no understanding of the book market from their eight-years of owning Waldenbooks. And they were to take over Borders and take them national.

Fact was, I think that K-Mart knew what they wanted to do – take Borders and have them whip Waldenbooks into profitability. Bring in people who knew what they were doing, and set them on the task of fixing the problems. It makes sense, assuming you’re willing to get out of the way and let stuff happen. And when you consider that both K-Mart and Borders were based in Michigan at the time, you have a case of the Borders Brothers knowing what money could do, but not necessarily what money couldn’t do. (It probably also helped K-Mart that Walmart hadn’t made its way to Michigan in a big way until the mid-nineties).

But it didn’t happen that way. Chances are the people at Borders told K-Mart what they wanted to do, and K-Mart turned down their plans…either that, or Waldenbooks proved unsaveable as it was and K-Mart wouldn’t admit that an investment was an absolute bust. Either way, the Borders leadership bailed; leaving Waldenbooks executives to run the whole thing.

In short, what was meant to be Borders was instead Waldenbooks with the Borders name plastered on the front.

Everyone who’s read up on the Death of Borders knows what happened next: the destruction of everything local-based and great about Borders (well, almost – I remember seeing ten whole shelves of witchcraft books at the South Indianapolis Borders. Makes me wonder what REALLY goes on in Indianapolis…or Washington DC, for that matter). Local control of appearances gets centralized into regions, a wide selection of books gets focused on the selling (and making) of bestsellers, the chain buys whole-hog into music at the time that Music started its slow, painful decline back into a niche market (Don’t think Napster, think CD burners and CDR-Ms for sale by the 50s in the mid-nineties), and the technological changes that shook the “intellectual property” world through the oughts were reacted to late, and piecemeal (think subcontracting to Amazon for web presence, think “fourth place in a three-man race” Kobo).

But there’s one other thing which has been de-emphasized, even by those who actually touch of the issue – Cool.

The thing about Borders was that it was a place for the (increasingly displaced) intelligentsia and cognoscenti. Find the place, and you would find people who loved books and were willing to tell you about that love. It was the sort of place where one could be a misfit, and you would be welcomed with open arms.

In short, it was Cool.

And as Borders struggled through mistake after mistake, the one thing that clung to the bookstore like a cardigan sweater on an buxom twenty-something woman was its Cool. And while Cool probably kept Borders alive through some of the mistakes, Cool can only go so far.

This I’ve had to learn over and over again as it seemed that every place that I liked closed up. Coffeehouses, movie theaters, bookstores, record stores and other sundry stores and places that I liked and thought Cool, only to watch them swamped by circumstances, trends and plain lack of support. And while I can’t say that I’ve been blindly supportive of all these places, it’s not just my support that these places needed – it was the support of the marketplace, and over and over again Cool proved unable to make a place survive.

Borders had Cool until the end. And in the end, Cool was the ONLY thing it could claim to have.

And that was nowhere near enough.

Does It Matter Whom The Republicans Put Up?

Well, we’re about to enter into the campaigning “season” (if a year can be considered a season), and it appears that the candidates are either failed retreads (Romney, Ron Paul (even with his believers) and Palin) and outsiders who make the retreads look overqualified (Bachman, Perry). One would hardly believe that there would be ANYONE in this list of candidates who would be able to become president.

Thing is, these aren’t normal times. Not the early twenties (1920’s), not post-WWII, not even during the ’80s.

We got a President who has basically sold everything his party believed in down the river. The health insurance bill he passed will, in the end, push more people out from insurance because of sheer cost of the premiums. His inability to pass tax reform when he had the chance had the incidental effect of making the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid a discussable item (before Obama, there was no decline in taxes for either of these programs). And it seems that the Republicans not only pick their plans and get quick victories, but seemingly could do EVERY battle they wanted and gain more than they hope for with every victory.

One could get the impression that the Republican Leadership wouldn’t mind letting Obama win a second term and waltz into the future corporatist future without having to take any responsibility for the carnage (simply because they weren’t around when it was instituted). But something tells me that one of them will get stuck with the Presidential Office on January 21st, 2013 (the first full day of the term).

It’s like this:

• The Democratic base is shaky, having watched the president be pushed around by bullies and hyperminorities to the point where those minorities have a good case of calling themselves majorities…and may get to claim themselves as true minorities by 2013.
• The Republicans are invigorated. When Sarah Palin, the obvious joke candidate of 2008 (and even worse in 2012 if you can believe that) could conceivably defeat Obama, you know something’s wrong.
• The economic news is slowly turning against the guy. Jobs, long a drag with their sub-par performance, have recently gone to 0 (no net gain on jobs) and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some negative numbers as the campaign gets underway (not that the Republicans would add jobs; they’d just wreck the protections and empty out the shell just to eek out that extra dime of profit).
• Obama was actually elected by being the first serious Black candidate for President, thereby getting a lot of “We Can Do It” votes. How many of these people will vote in 2012 (and how many will vote for Obama) is not yet known.

Right now it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Republicans already consider 2012 as theirs and are trying to figure out how far in their pro-corporate/pro-rich/quiverfull-mandatory desires. Perry is the type who’d campaign on the idea that “government is the problem, rising unemployment numbers is the solution” line.

Heck, why not destroy the New Deal. With people on the right itching to attack it and no one anywhere willing to defend it (even though it’s popular, especially amongst those who would love to destroy it), anything can happen – as long as people talk one way and not the other, certain actions will become seen as inevitable.

So no, I don’t think it would seem to matter. Obama will probably be a one-term President, known as the guy who prepared the way for what was to come. Especially when the history books say “people saw what passed as government under his term and voted for ANYTHING but him.”