Glen Beck's dog whistle message. Nuke Detroit

Yeah yeah yeah Detroit sucks.  That's some really fresh material there Glen Beck.  Wow.  And we all heard your sekrit message in the Hiroshima comparison.  The dog whistle aint working.  That Detroit is so f*ed up we should just blow it up literally and start over. Look, see how Hiroshima is all shiny and beautiful now.  No abandoned cars, no crack houses, no piles of trash, no empty gutted skyscrapers, and oh yeah minor detail but no n*s there either, right Glenn!  In fact, Detroit is such a complete craphole the only way to fix it is to blow it up and start over.  Tell everyone to leave town and just nuke it.  Now normally when some racist makes makes that joke they first turn left and right to make sure there are none of "them" around to hear it but Beck doesn't need to worry, he's way smarter than that.  He doesn't say outright we need to nuke Detroit. No, he pulls out the Hiroshima metaphor instead and Fox nation knows eggs-actly what he's talking about and they shout Hell Yes Glen! at the TV.  Ahh ratings...

One thing, Glenn Beck doesn't make anything up on his own.  If he ever had an original idea it would die of loneliness. He and his staff muck around the bottom-feeders of the net and read through Bircher pamphlets and all the conspiracy theory chain e-mails your Uncle Paul sends you and even listen in on the Alex Jones radio show to steal the latest juiciest scoops and then tone down the kookiness just enough to eke by the Ethical Standards Department at Fox News.  He isn't really leading the parade like a drum major.  He's just a clown who saw the band marching by and jumped out in front.

So yeah  we all know Detroit has tons of abandoned homes that need to be levelled and neighborhoods that need to be rebuilt and a school system that needs to be overhauled.  It needs to attract new industry build a new infrastructure and every city department needs to be scrubbed clean of the crooks and liars.  And its going to take more than just administrative tweaking, the entire system for providing all municipal services needs to be rethought from the ground up.  If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.. right?  But really, other than the part about all the abandoned homes, the same problems could be cited for nearly every urban area in the USA.  But go ahead, kick the D.  That theme always scores well in the ratings and that's the only thing that drives Glenn Beck.
Another thing, a minor point I suppose, for all the horrible photos Beck showed of the decay in the city, what he didn't give a hint to was how lush and green the city becomes in the Spring and Summer, what with all the abandoned lots on every street, all the vacant fields becoming overgrown with plants and trees again.  I could do without the packs of wild mutts roaming the streets and alleys, but there is no doubt the city is rejuvenating itself its own way while man tries to figure out how.

In this climate Mother Nature reclaims land quickly by sprouting trees and inviting critters back if you don't mow the fields for a few years.  I call it this natural greening effect "Ghettos to Meadows" and Detroit is perhaps the greenest ghetto of them all.  I wouldn't be surprised to see start-up farms sprouting with all the available acreage of vacant land in the city, the tempered climate, the water supply and food prices going through the roof from climate chaos.  More on that some other time..
 
Oh and I had my own post about Detroit a while back here.

Urgent need for America.. A new pipeline to export oil? HuH?

If oil were truly a global commodity as it is always referred to, then it would be portable to all markets and its price from any source around the globe would be the same.  However, if crude oil from stockpiles in Cushing, Oklahoma sells for less on the open market than crude oil from the Middle East or the North Sea, for whatever reason, then it kind of belies that assumption about portability.  And lately the disparity on the open market between West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude has reached historic levels, as high as $17 per barrel.   Interesting topic that I hadn't read about before.  Here are a couple recent stories to get the flavor,  

Wall Street Pit:  Brent-WTI Spread 

International Business Times:  Disparity means higher oil prices

Heres a key detail in this situation that I'm guessing not too many people are up on..

"...That also brings up another important point. When we quote oil prices today, we're quoting West Texas Intermediate, which is priced out of the Cushing hub in central Oklahoma. Currently, there's a meaningful bottleneck of supply in the middle of North America. We have a lot of increased oil production out of Canada, the Bakken and the Permian Basin that all congregate in Cushing, Oklahoma; and at the current time, we don't possess the ability to really move that oil out...

The average investor can't take advantage of structural imbalance. Now, the companies involved with transporting oil will look at that price differential and ultimately react by building more takeaway capacity."

OK, now I get it.  In the USA we have a stable political system, an increasing oil supply base (thanks to the Canadians) and a multi-faceted focus on reducing consumption (including lots of taxes) and since that is apparently creating a glut in the domestic oil storage capacity, the focus now for the oil speculators is to increase the capacity to transfer oil from Cushing, Oklahoma to ports on the Gulf so their oil can be shipped from the USA to foreign lands where it will fetch a higher price for those speculators who essentially gamble with tankers of oil and hope for the blessing of a sudden price spike.

Now, I understand how supply and demand and free markets work.  But I have been under the impression that all of our investing in efforts to reduce consumption and increase supply from North American sources were intended to decrease our energy dependency from the ME and thus improve our National Security.  In fact I have tried to make the point that for the USA's benefit, perhaps oil should be treated like a public utility So I'm a bit surprised/disappointed to read that now there is actually a glut of oil stored here it has become a mad rush in the murky but legal world of oil speculation to increase the capacity to transfer oil from Oklahoma down to the Gulf and out then to the rest of the world so speculators can take advantage of the price spread between WTI and Brent crude.  Of course, as the oil moves out of Oklahoma to ports around the world, it will eliminate the glut and cause prices here to rise to the level in the more volatile regions. Ideally I suppose it would cost the same to all buyers anywhere.  Thats the ultimate sign of an open and free market.  

I'm not quite seeing how that benefits the USA consumers and taxpayers.   I just hope we aren't the ones investing in the pipeline out of Cushing OK that will eventually serve to bring higher prices for oil here. If oil is cheaper here than elsewhere, I don't see any urgency to eliminate the disparity by making us pay more.

Cool and Exclusive.. Logan Miller improv tap-off to Flobots "Handlebars"

Molly spent the last couple days at Turning Pointe dance studio in St. Clair Shores learning a new number with the Detroit Tap Repertory.  The choreographer and teacher for the weekend was a 20 year-old amazing tapper from NYC named Logan Miller who came into town to teach the dance to the group of local Detroit dancers from ages 13 to 30-ish.

It was a real treat to catch this impromptu tap-off between Logan and Denise after the class was over and everyone was just kind of milling around getting ready to leave after two straight days of tapping.

To the tune of "I can ride my bike with no handlebars, no handlebars.."   Enjoy!

U-G-L-Y You aint got no alibi. Shocking mug shots reveal toll of drug abuse.

Multnomah Oregon mug shots reveal how drug use will make you uglier,  or maybe the message is you'll be too poor to afford to buy makeup.   

OK, I saw this story yesterday, and I think this is a revolting idea for an anti-drug promotion.  Shocking mug shots reveal toll of drug abuse.  

Its a series of comparisons of two mug shots of the same person, some taken months apart, some taken years apart. The point is to show how drug use accelerates aging and turns you into a butt-ugly, grotesque, toothless, leathery skinned, busted up, acne-ridden loser of a freak show. I bet the guys back at the station had a quite a hoot sifting through all the drug offender mug shots looking for the worst cases of ugliness.


If these were prisoners at Gitmo it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention to wave them around in the media or for propaganda purposes. But hey, these are just some ugly druggie losers in the system, who gives a crap about them? Besides, we did it for the kids. Nice job Deputy Bret King of Multnomah County, Ore. You get the Jerk of the Week award.


Hey why stop there? Why not search for some prisoners who died from lung cancer to scare the kids away from smoking. While you're at it, you could locate a few prisoners dying from AIDS to scare kids away from unprotected sex and sharing needles too. What a treasure trove of free material the Deputy has stumbled across here. No need to worry about signed release forms from these people, heck they're all just lowlife drug offenders anyways. Besides, we did it for the kids.


I think this campaign is disgusting and should be pulled. The Deputy should quit surfing the prisoner database looking for ugly people and go back to doing his real job whatever that might be.

When looking for culprits of the housing crisis, don't forget your local zoning board

I've read dozens of explanations for how the USA got into the massive housing crisis.  These explanations  are typically political in nature.  1)  The GOP deregulated banking leading to the banks writing mortgages for houses people couldn't really afford.  2) The Democrats forced the banks into loosening credit standards to enable mortgages for houses people couldn't really afford.

The fact is that the global economic downturn caused the double whammy of fewer qualified buyers and a flood of mortgages in default which combined to create a huge glut in the real estate market and we all know what happens to prices when there is a glut in supply.  Better described as "falling off the table" than declining.

I would like to add another suspect to the list of co-conspirators who helped steer us into the abyss.  That would be all the local city and township councils and zoning boards across the Country who forced home builders to abandon building neighborhoods of smaller sensible homes (you know, like the ones in all the older neighborhoods around town..) and meet large minimum requirements for lot and home sizes.  So while for generations a 1,000 square foot home on a 60' lot in a neighborhood represented the American Dream, modern America demanded the builders go no lower than 2500 square feet on 1/2 acre lots.

Of course, a cost-conscious home buyer could always buy a new modular home in a modular home park if they couldn't afford the $300,000 or so for the Township minimum standard house and lot, but then again, the same zoning boards that specified the mega-homes have never been very crazy about "trailer parks" and modular home developments either so that option may not even exist in a given community.  One part of the explanation is that schools are typically funded through local property taxes and property taxes are based on how much a home is worth.  To maximize property tax receipts while minimizing the number of children in the district, the basic strategy for the local boards was to force developers to build large, expensive homes that would fetch big property taxes and not bring so many children into the school district.  For the opposite reason they typically oppose the zoning and building of modular home communities;  the ratio of school-aged children to property tax potential is too high.

SO to sum it all up the big evil bankers on Wall Street with their Beltway-mandated loose credit applications conspired unknowingly with the hack politicians in cities and Townships across the USA to fill all those massive homes in sprawling subdivisions with dupes who really couldn't afford to be there long-term.  And as one development after another sold out, the local boards got more and more greedy for revenue and those massive homes just kept getting bigger and bigger.  Until someone sneezed on the house of cards.

So while we all play 52 card pickup for the next few decades, don't forget that the bumpkins on Township board helped build that house of cards.  It wasn't all evil greedy moneychangers far away.          

Should gasoline be treated as a public utility..

There is little to question that petroleum is the lifeblood of the American economy.  Its not just a discretionary expense for most consumers, but a basic necessity.  True, consumers will find ways to reduce fuel usage as prices increase, but few of us can avoid using our cars or trucks altogether.

The supply of petroleum is not quite a free market system.  More like an oligopoly of a small number of mega-producers competing around the globe to make deals with the locals for the rights to drill there.  Good luck breaking into that business with a start-up firm. Oil is a global commodity, bought and sold in an open market the mechanisms of which I can't begin to explain but I trust is at least somewhat governed by the Supply-Demand curve.  I don't buy into any of the conspiracies that say an evil cabal of fill-in-the-blanks control the price of oil and crank it up and down at their whim.  That's nuts.  However there are some complicated purchasing schemes and speculative finances involved in the oil market, the main purpose of which is to make money for those involved lucky enough to cash in on a price spike from a panicky unstable market.

And that is why I wonder if petroleum shouldn't be treated at some level, like a public utility such as natural gas, electricity, water, etc and our system account for some degree of public oversight into long-term supply and pricing agreements for the Nation.  Do consumers really benefit from the cottage industry of speculating investors scheming to make a bundle trading oil back and forth between the time its loaded on a tanker and arrives at the port?  If they make a killing, its their cash.  If they lose a killing, we'll probably have to bail them out anyway.  Call me a cynic.

I have little idea how transforming the petroleum market here to something resembling a public utility could be accomplished.  Certainly there couldn't be long-term price guarantees, because there is no guarantee of stable long-term supply, and there is no telling how much another Nation might bid up the pricing and take away that supply.  So I'm not advocating that we jump into nationalizing any industry or turning the whole thing over to politicians and civil servant bureaucrats.  The immediate risk from any Government price controls would of course be shortages and no one wants that.  For that reason, I hesitate to advocate any Government involvement whatsoever.   

But I do think that as important as petroleum is to our economy and very society, we should recognize the importance of trying in some small way to stabilize supply and pricing for consumers.  A market this basic to our Nation's economic survival should not be fraught with layers of scheming investors looking to make windfall profits when uncertainty in the world leads to price spikes.  And to those dead-opposed to this, I would ask if its OK for the oil market, then why not open up the same Wild-West financial opportunities for speculative investing in the municipal water supply?    

Just a thought-starter.

Unionized Teachers. Professionals trapped in their job like no other.

Many public school teachers belong to unions affiliated with either the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association.  And its pretty well accepted that teachers represented by unions enjoy decent pay and benefits, maybe not the highest of tax brackets, but comfortable and generally secure, and given the shortened work year with all the holidays off, not a bad career choice for a young person, assuming one can actually land that cherished unionized public school teaching gig..

But there is one trade-off that goes along with the union representation.  A near total lack of job portability unseen throughout the range of professional career choices a student might otherwise make.  Teachers are essentially trapped in the first school district into which they are hired.  Engineers can look around and switch jobs to chase promotions and higher salaries, the same goes for doctors, lawyers, nurses, managers, researchers, marketers, therapists, and every other sort of professional.  But not teachers.  School districts are like a Roach Motel for teachers.  Maybe the Hotel California?

Teacher salaries index up from starting wages to top of the scale depending on years of seniority and level of degree.  A first year teacher with a Bachelor's degree might make $30,000.  In that same district a teacher might max out with 10 years seniority and a Master's Degree at $80,000.  Not too shabby.  Now, if that high seniority teacher with the advanced degree decides to leave and take a job in the school district down the road a mile or two, guess what happens.  Their seniority would start back at zero and they would earn entry level pay scale.  So, they never leave.  Of course they don't. The object is to get the Masters Degree and the 10th year index and ride it out until retirement in the same district. Unless your job was an absolute living hell, there would be no decent reason to cut your salary in half or less and start over in a new district.

This is the downside of that wonderful union protection.  Teachers are degreed professionals with negotiated rules governing their pay and benefits that are essentially the same as they are for the floor sweepers union just with different numbers.  Salary based primarily on seniority, not performance or effort or qualifications.  To the district, you are a commodity, a warm body.  They never share that detail with College students looking to become teachers.

On a side-note, this effect has contributed to the underfunded public employee pension mess.  In the past, school districts looking to cut costs have offered early retirement packages to high seniority teachers at the top of the pay scale so they could replace them with new hires at the bottom of the pay scale.  Voila! The district saved money!  But it was only short term savings that turned into long-term liabilities.  Over time, the ranks of relatively young retired teachers receiving pensions swelled higher and higher, while those new hires indexed up to the top of the pay scale themselves.  So the districts are eventually back in the crunch and the pension funds are overburdened as well.  All in the name of austerity.

And its plausible that some of the general malaise in the classrooms might be traced to teachers who see little or no reason to go the extra mile for the classroom or the students when there's no possibility all that extra effort might impact their salary or earn them a promotion.  If you're a sweeper, better not sweep too fast or you'll just cheese off all your co-workers.