GM Lordstown Plant Closing

When people are discouraged, prevented and/or excluded from serving in positions of power they often show an intense, even obsessive, interest in putting one of their own in the Big Seat, however it is defined. And the people who have one of their own in the Big Seat, often show an intense, even obsessive, interest in keeping that spot, even if they receive little to no material benefit from having one of "theirs" in the top spot. This is just human nature. I don't think it will ever truly change. 

However it continues to be worthwhile to point out over and over again that simply putting a black face in a high place or putting someone in charge who can wear skirts and heels instead of pants without changing the power structure and the nature of the economic relationship is ultimately not worthwhile-at least not worthwhile for anyone except the individual who is making the big money in the top spot. Mary Barra is the Chairman (Chairwoman?) and CEO of GM. 

She is also the first woman to hold that position at GM and any other global automaker. When she ascended to the spot this was heralded as a good thing for women executives, women employees, women in general and the nation in general. Barra makes $21 million/yr in salary. I am sure she has the stock options, deferred compensation, retirement plans, bonus incentives and all of the other benefits that any  major league executive in her position would receive.

Barra also oversaw the recent announced closing of the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio. This will devastate that community and increase the problems of opiate addiction, homelessness, economic inequality, job loss and other issues that plague American workers. The union contract GM signed apparently both forbade closing the planet and/or required additional worker benefits if the plant was closed.

Sickly Newark Grandmother Dies When Power Company Shuts Off Electricity

In the movie Goodfellas mobster Henry Hill, as played by Ray Liotta, explains in voiceover that the animating ethos of the Mafia, as exemplified by local Mob boss Paul Vario (Paul Sorvino) is "F*** you, pay me!!. The Mob exists to extract profit from its clients victims. There is no other reason. Utility companies on the other hand are not just only  supposed to make money from customers. These companies actually do have a charge to help people and provide a public service. Profit should not be the only or highest purpose. When the Mafia deliberately kills someone or is indifferent to a person's death as a cost of business no one is surprised. That organization is working as designed. It is after all a criminal organization.You don't blame the shark for biting you. You blame yourself for swimming with the sharks. When a utility company does the same, though, it is not acting in concert with its charter. 

NEWARK — Linda Daniels had fallen behind on her electricity bills, her meter run up by medical equipment going around the clock and increasingly hot weather. But on July 3, her family said, they pulled together $500 to pay down her debts, believing it would maintain her service. Two days later, her electricity was shut off. It was a sweltering day and temperatures in Newark soared into the 90s. Ms. Daniels’s house was stifling, the air so stuffy that her daughter said it was difficult to breathe. Even more serious: Ms. Daniels relied on an oxygen machine, and it required electricity. 

Ms. Daniels, 68, had various ailments, including congestive heart failure, her relatives said, and in recent months she had been placed in hospice care as her health declined. Her doctors had not given her any indication of how long she had to live, relatives said, but her family wanted her to be comfortable and to be at home. 

Modern Day Loansharking and Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner

Mister Banker Mister please, how much does money mean
Won't you reconsider Mister Won't you do this thing for me
Mr. Banker 
-Lynyrd Skynyrd
I've written before that if you were a criminally minded sort in today's environment you'd be a fool to join the Mafia or other illicit organizations. These days, the benefit is no longer worth the cost. Working outside the law you have to worry about informants, violent paranoid co-workers, electronic surveillance up the wazoo, and long prison terms. That's no good. If you have wicked urges be smart and work inside the law. For example, if you want to assault or kill people, become a cop. You will be virtually untouchable.

If you want to help people gamble away their cash so that you can make a profit, open a liquor store and run the state sponsored lottery. People will give you money for nothing and thank you for the opportunity. And if you want to loan money at extortionate rates, changing or reinterpreting contract terms to your benefit while emptying your client's sucker's pockets, then do what former Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner did and open up/run a finance company that markets predatory loans to impoverished and/or desperate people.

The check arrived out of the blue, issued in his name for $1,200, a mailing from a consumer finance company. Stephen Huggins eyed it carefully. A loan, it said. Smaller type said the interest rate would be 33 percent.

Way too high, Huggins thought. He put it aside.

A week later, though, his 2005 Chevy pickup was in the shop, and he didn’t have enough to pay for the repairs. He needed the truck to get to work, to get the kids to school. So Huggins, a 56-year-old heavy equipment operator in Nashville, fished the check out that day in April 2017 and cashed it.

Handouts for Billionaires: Dan Gilbert's $600 Million Deal

Some people make a strong argument for government intervention, whether in the form of tax breaks, incentives, subsidies, or outright cash transfers to help poor or middle class people get on their feet, get job training, start a business, get an education, buy a house or (ahem) get some health care. 

The devil is in the details of course but if you're living paycheck to paycheck and/or can't immediately put your hands on $1 million in cash, then I won't begrudge you some form of government assistance. There but for the grace of God go I and yada yada yada. If you are a rich person with regards to income or more importantly in regards to wealth (the top 1% households had a little over $10 million in net worth in 2016) then I will suggest that you don't need much assistance from any level of government. You likely work for yourself but even if you don't it's rare that the loss of your job will have you sweating and panicking over a missed paycheck in two weeks. There are some people for whom $10 million is nothing special. They might drop that much on weekend gambling ventures, jewelry for their wives or mistresses, rare cars, vacation homes or child support.

A billion is one thousand million. That's ONE THOUSAND MILLION. If you are worth one billion then you or yours don't want for much. Dan Gilbert owns Quicken Loans, Rock Financial, a few casinos and of course the Cleveland Cavaliers. Dan Gilbert is Michigan's richest resident, and likely Ohio's as well when he's in that state. In 2017 Gilbert was number 91 on the Forbes 400 list. Only a few Americans have more money than Gilbert. Dan Gilbert's net worth is approximately 6.3 Billion dollars or to put it another way, 6300 million. There's little that Gilbert couldn't buy or invest in if he so chose. Money is not a limiting factor for Gilbert. So I'm having trouble understanding why the State of Michigan has decided to give a $600 million subsidy to Gilbert for a real estate deal.

Dan Gilbert, the billionaire who has overhauled downtown Detroit by resurrecting historic buildings, sealed one of his biggest Motor City deals yet by getting final approval Tuesday for a $618 million tax incentive plan.

Detroit Grocery Sells Expired Food

I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.-The Godfather

Until very recently there haven't been many large chain groceries located within the city. The majority of Detroit liquor stores aka "party stores", food wholesalers, and small to mid size grocery stores happen to be owned by people of Middle Eastern descent. Some of these businessmen and businesswomen have a reputation for a certain disdain for their predominantly black and often impoverished clientele. 
This distaste can be expressed in any number of ways. I don't live in Detroit any more so there's no reason for me to shop at such stores. Even when I did live in Detroit I rarely shopped at those stores as I was taught never to spend money with people who have nothing but contempt for you. Unfortunately some consumers in Detroit evidently feel that they have no choice but to spend money on inferior goods and services. More's the pity.

Disgraceful. The Kit Kat Grocery store on Harper near Van Dyke on Detroit's east side, which has a history of health code violations, sells packaged food with expiration dates as far back as 2015, Hank Winchester of WDIV discovers. 
Winchester of "Help Me Hank," a consumer advocate feature on WDIV, finds Sister Schubert rolls that expired in April 2015, Jimmy Dean sausage with a use-by date of September 2016 and bologna that expired on Aug. 29, 2017. The hamburger meat had freezer burns. A box of Betty Crocker potatoes was sealed with Scotch tape and had a best if used by date of November 2017. 

Cheryl Mills, Corruption, Infrastructure and Sweatshops

If there were a generic Republican who was running for President and we learned that this person had not only assisted foreign companies in setting up sweatshops in third world countries but also that this person's top advisor was doing the same while they were on the government dime many people would have an issue with that. Some people have argued and really believe that sweatshop labor is just what third world countries need to bootstrap themselves into prosperity. Other people argue that no one ever got rich providing slave labor for corporations. In my view the second view is closer to being correct. The business model simply doesn't allow for that. So it's a fair question as to why Clinton lawyer, advisor and former government employee Cheryl Mills has been helping a low wage textile firm to set up shop in Haiti while simultaneously using the company's expertise to pursue her own low wage business dreams in Africa and the Caribbean. 

As chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl D. Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti, the centerpiece of United States government efforts to jump-start the island nation’s economy after the 2010 earthquake. Ms. Mills took the lead on smoothing the way for the company, Sae-A Trading, which secured millions of dollars in incentives to make its Haiti investment more attractive, despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. When she presided over the project’s unveiling in September 2010, she introduced Sae-A’s chairman, Woong-ki Kim, as the most important person at the ceremony, which included Mrs. Clinton and the Haitian prime minister. Mr. Kim would later become important to Ms. Mills in a far more personal way — as a financial backer of a company she started after leaving the State Department in 2013. The company, BlackIvy Group, is pursuing infrastructure projects in Tanzania and Ghana, the only African nations in the “Partnership for Growth,” an Obama administration initiative that Mrs. Clinton helped introduce that promotes investment in developing countries. 

Since teaming up through BlackIvy, Ms. Mills and Mr. Kim have maintained close business ties, appearing together last year for the opening of a new Sae-A factory in Costa Rica where they cut the ribbon alongside Costa Rica’s president, Luis Guillermo Solís. In Africa, representatives of the United States Agency for International Development have consulted with BlackIvy and Sae-A about efforts to expand the textile trade in Ghana, where BlackIvy says the country’s 23-cents-an-hour minimum wage “compares favorably” to higher wages in China, Bangladesh and Vietnam. 

Federal officials are barred from using their positions to negotiate future employment or exchange services for something of value, and no evidence has emerged to suggest that occurred with BlackIvy. Both Ms. Mills and Mr. Kim deny that his investment was influenced by the substantial assistance she provided his company while serving as Mrs. Clinton’s right hand at the State Department. 

BlackIvy’s rationale did not sway labor advocates like Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, who had criticized the Haiti project as a misguided American relief effort that glossed over Sae-A’s labor-relations history. “When you urge garment manufacturers producing in countries like Bangladesh, where wages are far too low for workers to adequately support their families, to move production to countries with even lower wages, it undercuts the efforts of apparel workers across the Global South to persuade governments, employers and major apparel brands to lift wages to a decent level,” Mr. Nova said. FULL STORY

If this sort of thing were going on in China or Russia or anywhere in the Middle East then we'd point and laugh and talk about those funny foreigners and their funny accents and their cultures of corruption or crony capitalism or so on and so forth. But it's happening right here, right now. And this is not a partisan problem. Both parties do this, have done it and will continue to do it. The only party difference may be which industries are favored. But that's not really a difference is it. I don't mind if government workers are well paid. I do mind if they are using government contacts to set themselves up for lucrative private business in the future. I do mind if they are using government power to assist private industry with the unspoken expectation that they'll get a little something something as soon as possible. I do mind if US government agencies are helping to outsource labor to cheaper markets.There is nothing illegal with what Mills has done but frankly that's the problem. Government policy should be based on what's best for the people of the United States, not what is best for a well connected cabal of wealthy lawyers, financiers, bureaucrats, corporations and lobbyists. The fact this group's membership may be more diverse than previous years is hardly something that should make any difference to the rest of us. I don't see that government assisted searching for sweatshop labor to make Mills and her friends richer does all that much for me. Black faces in high places means nothing if we have the same patterns of exploitation. This sort of both sides do it malarkey is exactly why the "tear the temple down" feeling is spreading in different ways on both the left and right. 

Detroit Water Bills Redux

Another day, another bad story out of Detroit concerning payment of bills. We've discussed this before. Not much has changed. There is still a big mess. It's a perfect storm of massive unemployment and underemployment, poverty, bad consumer decision making, poor record keeping and accounting by the Water Department and malicious gamesmanship by landlords and speculators. All of this has meant that there are some people who simply won't pay their water bills because they have had the accurate perception that they can get away with not doing so mixed with a population of people who simply don't have the resources to regularly pay their water bills. Poverty is real and limits people's ability to enjoy life. Perhaps some of the people in this latest story should not be shamed but rather all of us should be ashamed for having built a society in which large numbers of people have no opportunity to get ahead. It doesn't matter how much moral opprobrium you vent at someone for their life choices. If they don't have the money, they don't have the money. But public utility bills must be paid. I have little sympathy for someone who makes sure that their cable bill is paid but the water bill isn't. When someone does that they're telling you loud and clear what is most important to them. And it's not the water bill. If you use a service you should pay for it. Without everyone agreeing to that basic deal, society doesn't work. Things fall apart. People at the higher end of the income and wealth spectrum start to resent paying for those they see as deadbeats and freeloaders and become more receptive to the idea of starving the public sector of funds (except for military and police and fire). And people at the lower end of the income and wealth spectrum become more receptive to the idea that virtually every "need" should be provided for by the government free of charge. Throw in some racial resentments around gentrification and the idea that the Water Department has devious reasons for shutoffs and demanding payment and you get  this situation. How do you survive without running water for more than two years? First, get a trash can. Put it under the roof to collect water to flush the toilet. Then, get a bucket and remember what your grandparents taught you in the early 1950s, before indoor plumbing reached all of rural America. “You use your brain. You scramble. You survive because you’re used to dealing with nothing,” said Fayette Coleman, 66, who grew up fetching water from wells in Belleville. She hasn’t had running water in her Brightmoor house since May 2013. The crumbling home is one of at least 4,000 in Detroit — and perhaps many more — whose water was never turned back on after massive shutoffs attracted international attention last year. 

The outcry faded, but the situation hasn’t. Within a block of Coleman’s house on Fielding near Lyndon, at least three neighbors have endured shutoffs, including one who spent months walking up the street, twice a day, to fill buckets at a friend’s before service resumed in mid-November. Citywide, a third of all residential accounts in Detroit— 68,000 of 200,000 — are at least 60 days past due, city records show.
The water issue is coming to light as a special panel studying water affordability is expected to present its plan to the Detroit City Council in January. The group expects to consider recommendations — including lower prices for low-income residents — when it meets for the last time Tuesday. Help is available, said Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. Some 39,000 residents are on payment plans, and the city has nearly $1 million available in payment assistance. “If you come in and say you are having an issue, we can find ways to help people,” Brown said. “But you have to come in.” Coleman gets by using bottled water for drinking, much of which she gets from charity. She heats water for sponge baths and flushes the toilet only after bowel movements. Otherwise, she does without.
             

LINK

Delinquent Water Bills, Detroit and The United Nations

I do my best to pay my bills on time. I expect the same from others. If I use a service I pay for it. If I loan money I want the money returned. I don't think that's too much to ask from other adults. Things can get a little tricky with relatives or other intimates because the relationship warps our understanding of money. So I avoid loaning money to people in those categories. If they need assistance I will give it to them, if I can. But people close to me know that I like my money very much and don't like giving it away. So that preserves the balance.
But where there's no personal relationship there is no misunderstanding of what money means. With people who lack a personal relationship with me there is never any expectation on my part that money loaned won't have to be repaid, regardless of who is the creditor and who is the debtor. My bank expects monthly mortgage payments. The bank is entirely uninterested in my problems making that payment. All they want is their money. I work for pay at my company, not because I enjoy the witty repartee. So, as is incredibly obvious to most adults, when you make a deal or purchase goods or services, you are supposed to live by the deal or pay for the goods or services you bought. Unfortunately in my home town of Detroit, the Water Department is running into some pushback as it seeks to either obtain payment from delinquent customers or shut their water service off. 

The reason for the Water Department's new aggressiveness in going after delinquents is probably related to the city's bankruptcy. Not only has the Emergency Manager made it clear that business as usual can't continue but of course the Detroit Water Department can't be privatized or merged into a regional service provider unless it shows that it can actually get customers to pay their bills.  I mean would you invest in or purchase a business where customers used the product but refused to pay for it? No you wouldn't. These decisions make sense for the entire organization but inevitably there are going to be some people that get hurt and may not even be deadbeats.


On July 1, the department is planning to relaunch its dormant financial assistance program with the help of the Heat and Warmth Fund, also known as THAW. The program is funded by 50-cent donations from paying water customers. More than $800,000 is available.THAW will help determine how much customers who qualify for assistance must pay. DWSD officials stressed that all customers will have to pay something toward their bill. Water service to 7,556 Detroit customers was cut off in April and May, according to the department. Now, the department officials said enough shutoff crews are in place to halt service to 3,000 delinquent accounts per week.

The overall effort to collect on more than 90,000 active accounts owing $90.3 million past due has drawn criticism from activists and a coalition of welfare rights groups. On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, called the shutoffs inhumane and “economically short-sighted.” The department’s shutoff campaign is targeting customers — residential and commercial — who are more than 60 days late on their bills and who owe at least $150. The average monthly bill for water and sewer service in Detroit is $65, according to the department. An 8.7% increase effective next month is expected to increase bills by $5 a month. The rate hike was partially blamed on delinquent bills. City Councilman Gabe Leland, who supported the rate increase, said the financial assistance program’s availability next month — about three months after the shutoffs began — reveals how the DWSD sets its priorities. “It seems like right now the department is taking no prisoners,” Leland said, adding that people should pay their bills. “To shut people off, that’s one thing. Let’s do it with some more preparation.”

LINK

Of course this being Detroit, a welfare rights organization even attempted to get the United Nations involved on the theory that water is a universal human right or that disparate impact theory showed that the people harmed by shutoff notices would be mostly black and thus therefore the shutoff policies were racially discriminatory. This kind of logic makes my head hurt. I'll leave that to lawyers who are actually qualified to discuss it. Bottom line as I see it is if you use a service you pay for the service. All else is folly and laziness on an individual level. If you want to collect water in your backyard from the rain and use that water to brush your teeth, go to the toilet, clean your body and for your drinking needs you go right ahead and do that. But if you want to have clean safe treated water that runs the gamut of your preferred temperature range delivered instantaneously to your home, well you need to pay for that, just like everyone else does. Now, all of that individual responsibility stuff out of the way there are at least three systemic issues here:

1) What happens when an economy simply doesn't need as many people as it used to? Unemployment in Detroit is chronic. This is in large part because the high-wage, relatively low skill auto jobs that built and sustained the middle class in Detroit have vanished thanks in part to automation, globalization and departure for the suburbs or southern states. This didn't happen overnight but honestly there is nothing the current President or either political party is doing to change employment patterns in the "inner city". You can have all the individual responsibility you want to but if you lack money, some bills get dropped. It's a related issue that I haven't touched on for a minute but this is also why I am opposed to "immigration reform". There are too many American citizens that are falling by the wayside. We can't provide jobs for our own and we want to bring in more people? But seriously, what if late model capitalism simply doesn't require the workers that its predecessor model used to? How do we handle that as a society?

2) Isn't there some residual pride left in people? Is it really a human rights violation to have your water shutoff? Again, we may decide that it is. But in that case we will all have to pay additional taxes to provide water "free" of charge to all. I have no issue doing that for seniors or people of extremely low means. But for your run of the mill American, poor or not, I would balk at doing that until I had more information on their circumstances. Housing in Detroit is not exactly expensive. 

3) Related to number one, a black man with an associates degree has roughly the same economic chances as a white man with a high school diploma. Education pays for everyone but it pays better for some people than for others. Again, if we (that is the US) have through history and current practice shut large out numbers of people from the employment market then we're going to end up with some unknown proportion of them not being able to pay water bills. So again, we need to provide jobs for people, even those who do not have a college degree. And the highest need for jobs is in the black community.

I don't have all the answers on this. I think that we have to distinguish between the truly destitute, for whom we can find assistance, and the person who simply doesn't think his or her water bill is something they have to pay. Unfortunately the only way to make that distinction is to shut off service to delinquents. If they want the service, they'll pay their bill. If they can't step forward and let's have a discussion about what happens next. I am sympathetic, especially as the Detroit bureaucracy has a well deserved reputation for notoriously bad record keeping and organization. There will definitely be a high number of false positives caught up. But there will be many more folks who just got used to paying late and are screaming because the free ride is up.

What's your call on this situation?

Atrocity in Africa: Children murdered in front of mother!!!!

There is nothing a mother will not do for her infant but even she cannot protect it from bullets. About a year ago, killers attacked a family in central Africa. The surviving witness of the attack told us that the family's guards were completely outgunned. In the end, the mother, riddled with bullets and crying with pain and fear, was left to use her body to shield her baby. Her sacrifice was for naught; the baby was also killed. 
The above is from an article that I will link just below. Unfortunately this atrocity didn't get the media attention that it deserved in no small part because it's become too common in Central Africa. I was outraged and angered beyond belief when I read about it. Murdering a mother and her baby is beyond foul wouldn't you say. The kinds of people who would do such a thing need to be hunted down and either imprisoned for a long period of time or slowly and painfully permanently removed from the planet so that anyone else who would even think of committing such a crime can look at the corpses of those who did carry out this crime and hopefully take the proper and intended object lesson.

I mean how can you just shoot down a mother and her child. Where is your humanity? Why weren't the killers apprehended and tried in court? This needs to be stopped ASAP. I feel every strongly about such things. Don't you? You probably do feel that way having read what I just laid out. Most moral or normal people would. No one or at least no one who's not cartoonishly EVIL likes to read about the killings of a mother and her baby. That link between mother and child is fundamental to mammalian existence. 

But there's a twist here that may change your thoughts. What if I told you that the mother and child who were each murdered were not in fact human but rather elephants? And they were killed not to feed people or because they had threatened or killed humans but because some humans halfway around the world had a sick desire to use ivory for casual trinkets or displays of wealth. Would you say so what and click on another post? Would you think that the death of intelligent animals was worth this? Because I don't. I don't think it's worth it at all. And I think it must be halted. By what right do we kill an animal for fun? Is that something we ought to be doing? Do you think God gave you this right? Does God look kindly on the slaughter and sexual mutilation of creatures He created?

There is nothing a mother elephant will not do for her infant, but even she cannot protect it from bullets. About a year ago, poachers attacked a family of forest elephants in central Africa. The biologist who witnessed the attack told us that wildlife guards were completely outgunned. In the end, an elephant mother, riddled with bullets and trumpeting with pain and fear, was left to use her enormous body to shield her baby. Her sacrifice was for naught; the baby was also killed.

Such is the reality facing African forest elephants today.This mother and child were just two of the tens of thousands of forest elephants that have been butchered over the past decade. A staggering 62 percent vanished from central Africa between 2002 and 2011, according to a study we have just published with 60 other scientists in the journal PLoS One. It was the largest such study ever conducted in the central African forests, where elephants are being poached out of existence for their ivory.

In China and other countries in the Far East, there has been an astronomical rise in the demand for ivory trinkets that, no matter how exquisitely made, have no essential utility whatsoever. An elephant’s tusks have become bling for consumers who have no idea or simply don’t care that it was obtained by inflicting terror, horrendous pain and death on thinking, feeling, self-aware beings.

One of us recently came face to face with this horror while walking through a forest in central Africa. The sickening stench provided the first warning. As the smell grew more pungent, the humming sound of death that surrounds the body of a dead elephant became more pronounced: thousands of buzzing flies, laying eggs and feeding on the corpse. The body was grotesquely cloaked by white, writhing fly maggots; the belly was swollen with the gas of decay. The elephant’s face was a bloody mess, its tusks hacked out with an ax — an atrocity that is often committed while the animal is alive.

LINK

Now I'm from Michigan. Hunting season is huge here. Growing up I spent my summers down South, where hunting was also a cherished pastime. So I understand it. But I don't like it. I've never had interest in shooting something helpless. I take no joy in snuffing out a life. And there is a HUGE moral difference between killing an animal for your own survival or food, or because it's become numerically excessive and killing an animal strictly for fun, killing an animal which is intelligent enough to grieve and killing an animal which is already endangered and flirting with extinction. I think it's savage and immoral beyond words to murder an animal simply so you can have ivory jewelry. I am not a PETA member. But PETA isn't wrong on everything. You don't need to make deliberately offensive comparisons to slavery or the Holocaust to recognize that morally something is deeply wrong when humans kill rare animals for knick knacks. 

Although I do not like hunting and think it often morally problematic, deer in Michigan are a renewable resource. Deer are not being hunted to extinction. There is a department of natural resources which theoretically attempts to manage the deer population and identify and arrest poachers. When stray dogs and cats are taken into shelters and eventually euthanized I'd rather not think about that animal's last moments. But neither dogs nor cats are in danger of extermination. What the Africans and Asians are doing to the elephant species and for that matter the rhino population is something different in both intent and scale. The continuing existence of these species, among others, is at risk. 

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus.

I think Agent Smith was on to something. It is is increasingly difficult for 7 billion humans to live in balance with other life forms. What is the moral reason that we have for making distinctions between humans and animals? I'm no longer sure there is one. Perhaps if someone were hunting the poachers and their customers, they might understand that killing living creatures for fun isn't really a nice thing to do.

China, similarly to the US and maybe even more so, has some very ugly cultural traits. These were tolerable perhaps when China was poor and limited in its impact. But with China's increasing wealth and power there will be more conflict between China and everyone else over the world's natural resources and various flora and fauna. Just like with carbon emissions, the world may not be able to survive an unhinged and unchecked Chinese demand for natural resources. China has a lot to answer for and must play a more responsible role in future resource utilization. We can not  remove China as a player no matter how much that might help save the elephants so we must find a way to  force China, help China to alter its behavior, even as we change our own.

You would think that since in historical terms, African nations have only recently thrown off the chains of centuries long European resource exploitation via colonialism and imperialism, African nations would be a bit more wary of entering into more or less the same relationship with China. Unfortunately this isn't always the case.

In 30 years of fighting poachers, Paul Onyango had never seen anything like this. Twenty-two dead elephants, including several very young ones, clumped together on the open savanna, many killed by a single bullet to the top of the head.

Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime syndicates are linking up with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China, law enforcement officials say. 

But it is not just outlaws cashing in. Members of some of the African armies that the American government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars — like the Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and newly independent South Sudan’s military — have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory. Congolese soldiers are often arrested for it. South Sudanese forces frequently battle wildlife rangers. 

The vast majority of the illegal ivory — experts say as much as 70 percent — is flowing to China, and though the Chinese have coveted ivory for centuries, never before have so many of them been able to afford it. China’s economic boom has created a vast middle class, pushing the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on the streets of Beijing. 

High-ranking officers in the People’s Liberation Army have a fondness for ivory trinkets as gifts. Chinese online forums offer a thriving, and essentially unregulated, market for ivory chopsticks, bookmarks, rings, cups and combs, along with helpful tips on how to smuggle them (wrap the ivory in tinfoil, says one Web site, to throw off X-ray machines).Last year, more than 150 Chinese citizens were arrested across Africa, from Kenya to Nigeria, for smuggling ivory. And there is growing evidence that poaching increases in elephant-rich areas where Chinese construction workers are building roads. 

“China is the epicenter of demand,” said Robert Hormats, a senior State Department official. “Without the demand from China, this would all but dry up.”He said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who condemned conflict minerals from Congo a few years ago, was pushing the ivory issue with the Chinese “at the highest levels” and that she was “going to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to address this, in a very bold way.” Foreigners have been decimating African elephants for generations. “White gold” was one of the primary reasons King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into his own personal fief in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver ivory stations thinly fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” and planting the seeds for Congo’s free fall today. Ivory Coast got its name from the teeming elephant herds that used to frolic in its forests. Today, after decades of carnage, there is almost no ivory left...

LINK
Now why does this matter? It matters because elephants are rare, intelligent animals. Killing them for trinkets is profoundly morally depraved and filthy. It also matters because removing elephants from the ecosystem may have unforeseen effects. Fewer or extinct elephants means fewer forests means higher carbon emissions means greater climate change. And when that occurs some of the same nations engaged in or underwriting this slaughter will be making pious UN speeches blaming the US for climate change and begging demanding more money. It matters because we simply cannot stand by and allow an atavistic Chinese and East Asian desire for ivory wipe out an entire species. And finally it matters because the violence and corruption endemic in poaching inevitably and literally bleeds out into African societies. How can you have a lawful or peaceful society when well armed criminal organizations or corrupt armies and police feel free to ignore the law and kill those who try to uphold it? How can Africa grow and thrive if it continues to serve primarily if not solely as a natural resource provider to The West and increasingly to China? 

It can't. It won't.

For short term profit, Africans will slaughter the wild animals that live in their countries. Three decades from now when the animals are all gone those countries will probably still be impoverished. If you're interested in getting more information and learning what you can do to help combat this disgusting slaughter please visit these sites.
http://www.cites.org/
http://www.bloodyivory.org/stop-the-ivory-trade
http://www.stoprhinopoaching.com/register.aspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/06/ivory-poaching-sanctions-cites?CMP=twt_gu

Banks and Loan Sharks: Payday Loans and Online Lending

When you think of a "loan shark" you might stereotypically think of a hard nosed man who will advance you some cash when you're in a bind but is rumored to hurt or even murder people who don't pay him back on time. He might be affiliated with the regional office of a national organization of similar businessmen. He probably employs people the size of small refrigerators who collect for him. He may tool around town in a late model Cadillac or older Town Car with an expansive albeit suspiciously stained trunk. If you are late on your payments or if he suspects you might be thinking about being late on your payments, he might suddenly appear at your home and politely ask for his money. Or he may follow you to your anniversary celebration and throw you a beating in front of your spouse and kids. It all depends on his mood and how late you are. 

Hey, all he wants is his money. Since he can't rely on the courts to enforce a technically valid but completely illegal contract, you can understand why he would need to have some, well, unorthodox methods of securing his capital. Since many of his clients are themselves violent lowlifes, criminals and other trash, stern dunning letters and threats to report late payers to credit bureaus won't have the desired effect. Generally speaking baseball bats and tire irons are more effective than plaintive phone calls at getting people's undivided attention.

But if you're a loan shark all this can be hectic and dangerous. Your clientele is often armed themselves. If you kill a debtor you lose that payment stream. Harassing or beating up debtors, while occasionally satisfying, can bring in the police or worse, scare the deadbeat so much that he scurries down to the local FBI office. And then you'd probably be convicted of several racketeering, conspiracy, usury and assault charges and spend the next 40 years in a federal penitentiary. No good. So what's an ambitious hoodlum to do?

Well if he was smart he'd realize that the risks of dealing with criminals and degenerate gamblers, ordering or carrying out beatings and murders, sharing profits with bosses who are even more paranoid and brutal than he is, and spending time worrying that a customer or associate might be an undercover FBI agent or informant don't really justify his shylock profits. I mean you can't spend your money if you're dead or in jail right? And really, who needs all the stress? What if you could make similar profits in a related venture that not only was completely legal (more or less) but also put banks and lawyers on your side for a change? I mean how cool would that be? Wouldn't a loan shark like to have a regular nine to five gig with above board profits, vacation and sick days, 401K opportunities and incentive bonuses without all the messy illegality and violence that used to go along with his business? Classic loan sharks aren't as common as they used to be. They got smart.

A loan shark should enter the payday loan/online lending business. Now, in payday loan lending you might not attain the 1040% annualized nominal interest rate on a typical 6-for-5 mob loan but then again you don't have to pay hoodlums who will beat up, intimidate or kill delinquent clients either. You can start your car without wondering if a co-worker put a bomb under the seat. You can attend last minute meetings with the franchise president without being frightened because the conference room is empty. Your overhead shrinks. You can pay taxes and bank your profits. And banks will help you with your business instead of informing the IRS. And if you like, you can even keep your two-tone pinstripe suits for old time's sake. What a country, eh??

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent. With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.

While the banks, which include giants like JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals. “Without the assistance of the banks in processing and sending electronic funds, these lenders simply couldn’t operate,” said Josh Zinner, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York.

For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts. Roughly 27 percent of payday loan borrowers say that the loans caused them to overdraw their accounts, according to a report released this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That fee income is coveted, given that financial regulations limiting fees on debit and credit cards have cost banks billions of dollars.

Ivy Brodsky, 37, thought she had figured out a way to stop six payday lenders from taking money from her account when she visited her Chase branch in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in March to close it. But Chase kept the account open and between April and May, the six Internet lenders tried to withdraw money from Ms. Brodsky’s account 55 times, according to bank records reviewed by The New York Times. Chase charged her $1,523 in fees — a combination of 44 insufficient fund fees, extended overdraft fees and service fees.

For Subrina Baptiste, 33, an educational assistant in Brooklyn, the overdraft fees levied by Chase cannibalized her child support income. She said she applied for a $400 loan from Loanshoponline.com and a $700 loan from Advancemetoday.com in 2011. The loans, with annual interest rates of 730 percent and 584 percent respectively, skirt New York law. Ms. Baptiste said she asked Chase to revoke the automatic withdrawals in October 2011, but was told that she had to ask the lenders instead. In one month, her bank records show, the lenders tried to take money from her account at least six times. Chase charged her $812 in fees and deducted over $600 from her child-support payments to cover them.“I don’t understand why my own bank just wouldn’t listen to me,” Ms. Baptiste said, adding that Chase ultimately closed her account last January, three months after she asked.

LINK

Now stupid people will often do stupid things. Now why does this even matter you might ask? Well it matters because instead of helping people start businesses and get out of poverty payday/online lenders are largely in the business of helping poor people to stay poor. And wouldn't you know it, black people, who already have lower incomes and wealth than most Americans, are disproportionate customers of payday/online lenders. Black people are about 12% of the US population but make up 23% of payday borrowers. Renters and people of lower income are also more likely to use payday loans than homeowners and higher income Americans. Most people are using payday loans for daily expenses. This means it is more difficult for people who are already behind the 8 ball economically to get over the hump. They are diverting a sizable portion of their already meager resources to interest payments for things that if they really thought about it, they may not have needed. 

Or viewed another way if they really did need them then this is another good reason we need to raise the minimum wage here and work to increase income in this country for our citizens as opposed to helping people in China, India or elsewhere. If people are taking loans just to make ends meet then something has gone drastically wrong with our job generating machine.  I view payday/online lending not just as a symptom of poor personal financial management or temporary desperation but as a wholly predictable outcome of a deunionized workforce with stagnant income growth. JP Morgan Chase, not content with aiding legal loan sharks to rip off low income citizens, also allegedly ripped off other banks by selling them crap mortgages. HSBC escaped criminal charges after willingly assisting drug cartels in laundering their profits. Apparently something has gone drastically wrong with the financial superstructure in this country and world. We need to fix this ASAP because otherwise not only will we continue to have record levels of income inequality as well as financial corruption but growth will also stay anemic. You can't grow when you're spending so much of your income servicing debt.

What we ought to be worried about is not the mob shark but all of the other debttrappers that have proliferated since our credit markets were deregulated. There are more of them now than ever before and most of them have been issued licenses. That is the loan-shark problem regulators should confront.

It looks like financial market deregulation hasn't so much gotten rid of the classic loan shark as it's made him clean up and operate above board, with almost the same business model. It looks like Lucky Luciano was right on the money with his insight.

‘I’d do it legal. I learned too late that you need just as good a brain to make a crooked million, as an honest million. These days, you apply for a license to steal from the public. If I had my time again, I’d make sure I got that license first!’
Charles "Lucky" Luciano

QUESTIONS

1) Should Payday loan/online lending be outlawed completely?

2) Does the government have a role to protect people from themselves? 

3) Is there any difference between a bank and an unregulated lender?

4) Do you know anyone who has used payday loans? Have you used them?

Mitt Romney Secret "Victims" Video Blows Up

In our recent radio show we raised the issue of why, with voters faced with massive income declines and stubbornly high unemployment, Mitt Romney has so far been unable to surpass President Obama's poll numbers. Not only is Romney staying ever so slightly behind President Obama but recent swing state polling data would seem to indicate that Romney might even be headed for an electoral college beatdown were the election to be held today.

Of course the election is not going to be held today but in November after the presidential and vice presidential debates and one more jobs report. So although Mitt Romney hasn't made tingles run up the legs of likely American voters the night isn't over and Mitt still might get lucky. This is despite the fact that some conservatives and Republicans are essentially edging away from him BEFORE the election while some normally Republican voters who hate President Obama are nonetheless resigned to voting for the President instead of Mitt Romney.

Sheryl Harris, a voluble 52-year-old with a Virginia drawl, voted twice for George W. Bush. Raised Baptist, she is convinced -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- that President Barack Obama, a practicing Christian, is Muslim.

So in this year's presidential election, will she support Mitt Romney? Not a chance.

"Romney's going to help the upper class," said Harris, who earns $28,000 a year as activities director of a Lynchburg senior center. "He doesn't know everyday people, except maybe the person who cleans his house."

Neither the President nor Romney is extroverted. Both men keep a close circle of friends and advisers, beyond which they don't venture willingly or for long periods of time. Doing so can be enervating. This is classic introverted behavior. I know because I am an introvert. But introversion doesn't mean you don't have a lot to say to and a lot to share with certain people. And recently Mitt Romney shared his strategy for winning with a small group of supporters. Thanks to Grand Central for bringing this to our attention. Mother Jones magazine infiltrated a recent Romney fundraiser (they won't confirm the location or timing) and took these videos of Romney. Romney said that President Obama started out with an advantage of poor voters who believed they were victims. Although Romney's statements were somewhat insulting and factually untrue, that's really almost besides the point. What I was fascinated by was the passion that animated his statements, though I vehemently disagreed with them.

Romney shows a heretofore unseen self-awareness and vigor. We see the calculation of the 1% businessman who knows that he must carefully market a message to suburban white independents and hopefully peel off a few Hispanics while holding on to his own lunatic fringe. The reason the lunatic fringe is both lunatic and well...a fringe is that they actually believe that their candidate should yell their slogans from the rooftop every chance he gets. Ironically if Romney loses this election it may well be because he veered too far to the right and never could connect to those middle swing voters. These videos do show that however unsure some conservatives might feel about Romney's bona fides on immigration, affirmative action, abortion or contraception when it comes to economic issues he is Mr. 1%. If Romney could put this energy in his campaign President Obama might have something to worry about. I'm happy the videos came out. Romney lays out what appears to be a cool contempt for poor voters, those that he thinks of as lazy. I am sure there will be some damage control around this but it's good to get things out on the table, I always say.

There are numerous problems with Romney's statements but honestly I currently lack the time to point all of them out. I will just say that most people who don't pay federal income taxes don't pay because they are either retired and living on Social Security payments or they are so doggone poor that they don't even earn enough to qualify to pay federal income taxes. That would be somewhere around $20,000/yr. Does Mitt Romney really think that people earning $20,000/yr need to pay more taxes?  Do you know anyone who is earning that kind of money who is happy because although they're poor they're not paying federal income taxes? Would you rather earn $20 million/yr and pay 13% in income taxes or earn $20,000/yr and pay nothing? If you have to think about your answer to that question you might be named Mitt Romney.

The other factoid which Romney left out is that in 2011 there were a fair number of Fortune 500 corporations which paid extremely low income tax rates, no income taxes at all, or in a few cases wound up owed money by the Federal government. There is also the unpleasant fact that the Federal government spends more money on corporate welfare than it does on social welfare.  Are those "people" victims? Should we ensure they pay higher taxes? Anyway there are numerous other issues that are raised by this that maybe we can discuss today.

QUESTIONS
1) Is insulting half the nation a winning election strategy?
2) Does Romney have it right that he essentially has no chance with poor or lower middle class voters?
3) Why isn't Romney running a better campaign?
4) If you were Romney's campaign manager how would you turn this thing around? Is it too late?
5) Should Romney apologize, clarify more or distance himself from these comments?
6) Is this much ado about nothing, since each candidate essentially ignores the other side's base?

Homeless Hotspots Coming Soon!!!

Have you ever run into a dead zone and are unable to connect to the net? And maybe you're too far away from a Starbucks or other Internet cafe? Or maybe your neighbor has shut you out of their Wi-Fi network?

Never fear. Just sidle up to the nearest homeless person in your neck of the woods. Because there's a chance he might be an actual "Homeless Hotspot". Yes, 21st century America is all about getting EVERYBODY plugged in and empowered. Be the change you seek in others. Yes we can! The world is flat!


At the South by South by SouthWest convention, an ad company BBH, decided to think outside the box.

BBH's experiment, dubbed "Homeless Hotspots," launched during the South by Southwest tech-and-entertainment confab in Austin, drawing complaints from critics who viewed the gimmick as exploitative.

In an interview with The New York Post, BBH chairman Emma Cookson said the company has pulled the plug and will not go forward with plans to continue the project in New York."We have no definite, specific plans yet, in New York City or elsewhere," she said. "This was an initial trial program.""We are now listening carefully to the high level of feedback, trying to learn and respond, and we will then consider what is appropriate to do next," she added.  

At SXSW, more than a dozen homeless people were outfitted with wireless routers and T-shirts declaring: "I'm a 4G hotspot."While the effort, which was not associated with the festival, was crafted to provide a digital connection for SXSW Interactive partipants and a charitable service to the city's homeless, outrage quickly gained momentum on social media and among homeless-rights activists.The four-day trial concluded on Monday afternoon, with the door left ajar to expand the project into various cities. But that's a no-go, for now.Users would ask the homeless hotspot for an access code, and were encouraged to donate $2 to their walking Wi-Fi zone for every 15 minutes spent online.

Emma Cookson: Visionary or Cruella DeVille understudy?

So I guess the latest plan to make money off the homeless cure homelessness won't work. So if a homeless man walks up to you and asks for $2, chances are he's not actually a "Homeless Hotspot" but is just a run of the mill beggar.  You should feel free to do whatever you normally do in situations like that, whether it's to offer the money, refuse, give a long lecture or pretend you didn't see or hear the man.  But on the other hand what makes this offer degrading? People have long hired homeless people to pass out flyers for strip clubs, concerts, political rallies and so on. You name it, someone has tried to save on marketing costs by using homeless people. It's not like Ms. Cookson was the first person to use this logic. I guess she reasoned that as long as people were going to be homeless they might as well make themselves useful. Were the people who were complaining about this going to offer a homeless man a job or place to live? Well some of them, maybe. But generally probably not.

Questions
1) What's your take? Was this degrading?
2) Was this an attempt at innovative marketing or a remarkably stupid idea?
3) If this brought more focus to the problem of homelessness was it a good move?