914 Ms. Hollis' House

914 Ms. Hollis’ House

This story has a happy ending, sort of.  But it sure didn’t look that way for awhile.

Texana Hollis of Detroit lived in her home on Carbondale Avenue, a street of small, neat houses, for about 50 of her 101 years.  In 2002, her son Warren, 64, running her finances, took out a reverse mortgage for about 30-thousand dollars and used the money to fix the roof and make other repairs and didn’t pay the bills or the taxes.  He freely admits this and says he thought they’d never evict her.

But they did.  Just dragged her stuff to the curb and ordered her out.  And out she went, straight to Henry Ford Hospital because she became “disoriented.”.  HUD bought the mortgage some months ago.  Its public relations guy said “we thought it was in foreclosure for taxes.”

This caused a bit of a stir in Southwest Detroit.  To the point where HUD said “oops, our bad”  and told Ms. Hollis she could return home and stay there for the rest of her life as soon as she’s released from the hospital.

Now... what’s to happen to her idiot son?  We’re talking about a handful of tax bills that don’t amount to a whole lot of money -- money that apparently was in her account.  Plus what’s to prevent some computerized and mistaken HUD drone to from doing the same thing somewhere else?

And it’s not a new problem.  In Nassau County on New York’s Long Island -- well before the start of the subprime mortgage crisis, they’d sell houses for unpaid taxes to politically connected speculators who also put people out on the street.  Many of those never got an “oops, our bad,” and ended up on the curb with their furniture as the party faithful buyers huffed that they were not breaking any laws.

And it had to have been happening in places other than Hempstead and on Carbondale Avenue in Detroit.




Shrapnel:

--Seen the “Missoni” line of clothing and accessories at Target?  So many viewers piled on that their website crashed the other day.  Staring at the stuff is a great way to provoke seizures and hallucinations, like with those Japanese video games.

--Why do lens coatings at the opticians cost more than the lenses themselves?  And why do they wear out in strange patterns a year after you buy them?  The good news, though, if you view the Missoni stuff through the weird pattern made by your worn-out lens coatings, the seizures come on faster and the hallucinations have more color..

--In a special election, disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s congressional seat went to a Republican doofus who told the largely Jewish district that America is a “Christian nation” and, oh, by the way, let’s gut Medicare.  The district has been in Democratic hands for 88 years.  This is not a good sign.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

913 Europe

913  Europe

The European Union came to be in its present state in 1993.  It is 18 years old, about the age of the United States in 1794.  While the EU is not a formal, united country it’s a serious aggregation and it’s acting -- as we did in ‘94 -- like an 18 year old.

Sex and military service are legal.  So is drinking in some places.  And all the component states are so busy bickering among themselves that nothing is getting done.

Early on, the US was racked with painful arguments, one state against another. The EU has similar problems within.

Although the individual countries go back, some of them, into ancient times with ancient traditions, cultures and laws, they’re acting like a bunch of high schoolers at a house party when mom and dad are away for the weekend.

“Greece is a bunch of spending maniacs.  We won’t help them until they reign in their evil ways,” says the European Central Bank.  France and others cheer, and prepare punishing loan rollovers that aren’t going to fix anything and are not going to protect their investments. Greece is a tangential economy, but it’s the main focus at the moment.  Other economies are problem plagued, too.  France, Italy, Britain, Spain, Portugal etc.

Belgium doesn’t like the oil and gas deals struck by other member states and is trying to get in the middle: divide and conquer.

Trade disputes within (and with us,) pipeline disputes, air space disputes, court disputes all abound.

Over here, the conflict isn’t so much between states any more, but between states in general  and the central government.  Who has what rights?  Who ultimately governs?  Once, state’s rights was strictly a southern game.  But it has spread nationwide.

The EU has made it close to impossible for member nations to protect their own interests, has big-footed most of the individual currencies and confused everyone.  And the US is coming full circle, from a bunch of ragtag semi independents into a more or less unified whole and -- now -- back into a bunch of ragtag semi independents.

Ah, don’t you love progress.


Shrapnel:

--Half way through a big box of contact lenses, we find one that’s pre-torn.  It may be worth a complaint.  But how do you prove to the optician that it wasn’t a self-inflicted wound?

--Political debates among scads of candidates at a time?  It’s the new reality show and just about as believable as “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent.”  The only thing missing is the vote-by-phone feature.

--It’s always gratifying when someone whose work you admire comes up with approximately the same thought at the same time as you do.  Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, Princeton professor and New York Times columnist has written about hijacking the meaning of 9/11.  Here's a link to his column posted soon after the Wessay™ that made the same point.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

912 The Gas Pump

912 The Gas Pump

The latest in self service gas pumps have started to appear and they are daunting.

It was hard enough to get used to the original electronic pumps.  You had to know which way to insert your credit or debit card, how quickly to withdraw it, whether to choose your grade of gasoline before or after you jumped through the payment hoops.  And afterward you had to make sure you carefully closed your fuel tank with the right number of “clicks” as you twisted the cap back on, and then make sure that you had the tank door closed afterward.

You’d think they’d simplify all this when they installed the shiny new pumps.  But, no.

The first thing you notice is that the little computer-like screens that tell you how many gallons you’ve pumped and how much you owe now do many more things.  No longer is it “do you want a receipt?” Now, it is a full fledged television with full fledged commercials.  Just commercials, no programs.

Contemplate your termites or your lack of storm windows while you pump your unleaded regular.   Or maybe sign up for a degree program at “Western Governors University.”  Or “buy our potato chips.”

Annoying.  Even more annoying than the so-called music they used to play through tinny (but weather resistant) little loudspeakers, probably stolen from a junk yard specializing in cast-off 1950s drive-in movie equipment.

One of these pump monsters asks you -- before you are allowed to put gas in the tank,  but after you’ve established credit  “Do you want a car wash.”  They have an automated car wash.  It’s open 24 hours, should you have the urge to clean up a three o’clock on a Wednesday morning.  You have to press “yes” or “no.”  You can’t find the “yes” or “no” buttons without a magnifying glass even if you know where on the machine to look for them.  And you can’t pump your gas until you’ve passed both the credit test and the car wash test.

So, they charge you something within walking distance of four bucks a gallon and you have to take a test or two before they’ll deign to take your money.  And since your time is worthless, they’ll fill it with animated televised ads?

Ain’t technology grand?


Shrapnel (Jewelry Edition):

--Why is it that with the price of gold approaching $2000 an ounce, most gold jewelry has started to look cheesy?  Maybe it’s because when you look at it you say “this can’t be real.”  Or maybe it always looked that way and we just don’t remember.

--You have to hand it to the jewelry merchants.  They’ve substituted an awful lot of stainless steel for gold and silver these days.  It costs little, looks good, lasts forever, doesn’t turn your skin green and if you lose it, so what?

--That said, stainless isn’t yet the “new gold.”  That’ll only happen when and if Tiffany and Cartier start promoting it as such.  Tiffany quietly lists a few steel items but Cartier has yet to follow the other fashion leaders, Tiffany, Wal-Mart, Costco and Home Shopping Network.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

911 September Eleventh at Ten

911 September Eleventh at Ten


Veterans of the Vietnam war have a saying: If you weren't there, you don't get it. The same can be said of September eleventh, 2001.  Now, ten years later, it’s truer than ever.  

There were three "grounds zero," not one. The main one was the World Trade Center in New York. There also was the Pentagon and a lonely field in Pennsylvania.

As your distance increases from these points, the impact on you tends to decrease. "It wasn't such a big deal" is heard throughout the land, especially with the intervening death of Osama Bin Laden.

The pint size intellectual then in the White House didn't get it when it happened and didn't get it for the rest of his presidency and doesn't get it now. And if you weren't there, neither do you, even if you think you do.

Time fuzzes out the day and the days that followed. We look at the events and the circumstances with gauze over the lens. Or not. It's like when Kennedy was shot. Everyone remembers clearly where they were that day, that hour. And everyone in greater New York lost someone when the Trade Center came down. Everyone knew someone who was trapped in that hell. If not that, then a cop or a firefighter who plunged into the wreckage and died or who live on with godawful afflictions acquired in the line of duty and sometimes without compensation.

And now, here we are, a decade past, and the World Trade Center remains an architectural rendering and a fence and some rental contracts, many unsigned.

The mind, gauze on the lens or none, doesn't grasp three thousand deaths in an attack on American soil. The number is overwhelming. But we grasp the death of a loved one or a neighbor or a friend or a guy who worked at the next desk and went to his reward without you because you were running late that morning.

And the mind, gauze on the lens or none, doesn't totally cloud the unity we all felt in the aftermath, a unity that lives in our minds and hearts but eventually evaporated, like the poisoned smoke the Environmental Ministry told us it wasn't.

Friend and former-colleague Don Mathisen went on the air with me a couple of years ago, and talked about the lessons of the day. Don said he had hoped that the event taught us that the military is needed to protect New York, and that local police and intelligence should be expanded. Don is right, of course. But what would have happened if a flight of Navy F-14s had brought down a civilian airliner? You know the answer.

II.

The stink of this thing took about a week to float its way to the Upper East Side, and it's the kind of stink that stays with you, both in your nose and in your heart. By Tuesday the 18th, we had pretty much the same picture we have now, ten years later. We didn't have an exact death count, but we knew the round number was 3,000. We didn't know the extent of the maladies that would later strike survivors, but that stink in the air told us SOMETHING was coming, eventually.

The feds and the city did air tests. The Environmental Protection Agency's Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey Governor, Horsewoman, elegant, poised in a Miss Manners sort of way, assured us that everything was clean. The party line.

The subways and the commuter railroads got back to normal on the "day of..." though late, after they'd figured out that they weren't targets. In the hours before that, they stopped. Sometimes in darkened tunnels and without explanation. For hours.

There are shocks to the system -- the personal system -- that take time to sink in. This one sunk in immediately. Something like this could not be happening. Back in the newsroom on 59th, we went about our business. But what WAS our business? Reporting the truth. But what WAS the truth? The TV, our transmissions and everyone else’s had pictures of the planes hitting the towers and the fires that followed. There we were in our individual private hells and in the collective hells shared by everyone. The towers, the Pentagon, and later, the Pennsylvania field, all there for the viewing, over and over.

Noses to the grindstone. Get out the facts. Find the mayor. Find the Secretary of Defense, find the President, find the Vice President.

The first wasn't easy. There were no facts. The second WAS easy. The Mayor was on site, downtown, where he belonged. The secretary was scratching his head. The President was airborne -- somewhere. The vice president was encamped at his now-famed "undisclosed location," presumably pulling strings in his sinister way, insuring there were no more hijackings that day by grounding every civilian aircraft in America.  Dick Cheney says in his new book that one of the undisclosed locations was the Vice President’s Residence in Washington and another was his home in Wyoming.  Took ten years to find that out.

On the street, New Yorkers were doing something they always do, but in a new way. We were schmoozing. With total strangers. We were walking... no subways quite yet. We were working our way to Grand Central or to Penn Station or to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, trying to get home. Or hoofing it across the 59th Street Bridge. Or the Brooklyn Bridge. Throngs of us. Talking among ourselves quietly. We were, for the moment, a people unified in horror and brotherhood. We passed the southern entrances to Central Park and smelled horses. The Trade Center stink wouldn't block that out for a week.

We were one people determined to seek safety and to avenge. And now, here it is, all these years later. And where is that unity? It has been splintered by partisan bickering, by the fighting of useless wars, an economic near-depression and we have, in a decade, been lulled into complacency by the death of the enemy’s figurehead and remain only slightly closer to bringing the rest of villains to justice.

This is shameful and unacceptable.

Further, over the intervening decade we have become a nation sunk a Balkanizing quicksand with unprecedented and paralyzing in-fighting and factionalization, mired in depression and inability to compromise on anything.

That, too, is shameful and unacceptable.

III.

It has become a battle of ownership.  “Who is the proprietor of this tragedy?” has become a more important question than any other, it seems.  

The White House has issued “guidelines” on how to observe the anniversary, what we should be thinking about, and who.  The White House does not own 9/11.  The strutting Rudolph Giuliani, whose flagging popularity was raised above the drowning line when the planes hit the buildings does not own 9/11.  The intellectually impotent, double-talking political hack  Rumsfeld doesn’t own 9/11.  Nor do the cable networks, the real networks, the tabloids, Life Magazine or the guy next door who’s been to ground zero and the Pentagon just to gawk.  And neither do the reporters who covered though some of them giving tenth anniversary interviews seem to think so.

Everyone wants a piece of the action after the fact.

And that is the most shameful and unacceptable of all.


I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
©WJR 2009, 2011

910 Outlaw People

910  Outlaw People

“Guns don’t kill people, people do.” -- Long time gun fan slogan.

“48 People shot in NYC over the Labor Day Weekend.”  -- News item.

If the first and second statements are true, then it’s time to get to the root of the problem and outlaw people.  No gun deaths or any others except natural causes.  And, of course, people who are sentenced to death for being people.

New York has probably the toughest gun laws in the country.  Forty eight fewer New Yorkers; no one but immediate friends and family notices the difference.  Except the Mayor, who says it’s all the fault of no federal gun laws, because without them, how do you prevent all those pistols from getting into town undetected.

They could stop people at the bridge and tunnel tolls and hold inspections.  Kind of like customs.  That would mean today’s traffic snarl at the Lincoln Tunnel would have started last June.  Oh, and they’d have to hire enough toll taker/inspectors and, of course, there’s no money for that.

But guns don’t kill people.  So, outlaw people.

Of course, a lot of the people who kill people are not considered people at all.  Ask anyone not involved in Monday’s West Indian day parade about it and you’ll find out.  So NOW what do we outlaw.

This parade, held on Labor Day, even though the Labor Day Parade isn’t, is always violent.  People celebrate.  They wear colorful costumes.  They sing.  They dance.  They get tanked up and cranked up.  They shoot and stab others.  Tradition.  Never fails.

But it doesn’t take a colorful parade or a diminishing of the humanity of one group or another to lead to a lot of shootings.  And it’s not just Columbine or Virginia Tech or the Texas Tower.   It’s little kids with irresponsible parents and who play with guns that mysteriously “go off,” and it’s stickup artists at 7-11 and the bank.  

All this points out a major flaw in the legal system.  The law generally says “If you are convicted of ‘this,’ then ‘that’ will happen to you.  The law is good only after the fact.

A human flaw and all the more reason to outlaw people.



Shrapnel:

--Larry Yount, 77, passed away a few days ago in Taylorsville, North Carolina near Hickory a place you might not think of as a breeding ground of culture, sophistication and subtleness.  Larry was a radio announcer at WPIX and WRFM and WQXR in New York City, a  big man with a naturally big voice and a big but low key sense of humor.  He also was friend, confidant for the past 30 years.

--The newest iPod Nano music player is about the size of four postage stamps arranged in adjacent rows of two.  If it gets any smaller they’re going to have to issue choking warnings.  And magnifying glasses to read the screen.

--Promo:  Coming Friday, 9/9/11... the tenth anniversary comment on 9/11.  The shameful and the unacceptable.  And, ironically, it will be Wessay™ #911.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

909 Labor History Day

909  Labor History Day 2011

The New York Central Labor Council sums up the present condition of unions pretty well in the invitations it sent out to this year’s Labor Day parade -- which should be today, 9/5/11,  but will be held Saturday, 9/10.  Confused, thin-ranked, head held high, and five days late.

They used to dock your pay for lateness like that.  Even in the Teamsters.

Now, it’s tradition.

New York is the U-S home of Labor Day, though Canada celebrated it earlier.

Might as well call it Labor History Day, recalling the union movement’s creation of the middle class, and thus American prosperity.  That’s when the Labor Council’s annual parade was (a) held on Labor Day and (b) took all day to pass the reviewing stand.

Recalling the good organized labor has done for disorganized labor:  the 40 hour week, paid holidays, paid vacations, a living wage, health benefits, a retirement plan.  All stuff your boss wouldn’t give thought to were it not for unions, even if there isn’t one in your shop.

Today, unions have become the enemy and are losing the battle to represent workers.  The ranks have been diminishing, the existing contracts have become law school examples of how to not get what you need or want or deserve.  Organizing efforts?  WHAT organizing efforts?  Handing out handbills at Wal-Mart is not what we used to call “organizing.”

You can summarize the reason for the labor movement in two words “bad bosses.”  American workers often don’t want unions as they clearly demonstrate these days.  But they needed them back then and they need them now, maybe now more than ever.  If you’re in a union shop, just think of how things would be without a wall between you and the Simon Legree or Torquemada who supervises you.  If you’re NOT in a union, you don’t need to think about it... you know better than the rest of us.

Blame all troubles on the “worker greed” and union corruption all you want.  But when Boss Moneybags is at the bargaining table these days, there’s no way he’s going to give up his yacht or join a lesser country club just so you don’t have to pay more into your health insurance plan... not without a union.

Unions help workers become capitalists:  they sell their labor and their brains and like any capitalist have a voice in setting prices and conditions.

It’s an imperfect system, but it works.  Or it did.  So remember when celebrating Labor History Day that the executives at GM also signed those contracts, the ones you say put ‘em out of business.



Shrapnel:

--Customer to waitress:  “You’ve been doing this job a long time, you’re not a kid and you’re obviously sharp minded, sharp-tongued, sharp witted and too verbal to make this a career path. What’s your story?” Waitress: “I raise Beagles.”  Sure beats being an artist or writer, which is what she looks like -- but doesn’t seem like much of a living, either.

--Promo:  The long and winding Wessays™ 9/11 tenth anniversary posting will be here Friday 9/9.  Letting everyone else get a head start.

Wish I’d Said That:  “California has four seasons:  Smog, Mudslide, Brush Fire and Oscar.”  (P.J. O’Rourke in the Wall St. Journal.)

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

908 Still More On NewsWatchers

908  Still More On Newswatchers

For those of you on the The Wessays News Diet we have a new proposal to help you stay on the wagon. But it will take the cooperation of the news cable and regular networks.

You watch TV, you know shows have ratings just like the movies.  If you see that little black and white box in the upper left hand corner of the screen that says, say, “TV14” you know to get the eight year olds out of the room or switch channels.

As new stories start on cable or the morning or evening news programs, the networks could flash little boxes for each.

Blue would mean “regular” news, like firefighters getting a cat out of a tree.

Yellow would mean, maybe, a small crime -- something like a Ponzi scheme or maybe a stickup at the 7-11, or a farmer or store owner or home owner successfully restoring his or her property after a storm or an earthquake.

Orange would be reserved for bigger crimes, especially those in which people get hurt or killed, ATF raids on empty houses, or the actual onset of a natural disaster... say Hurricane Irene.

Blood pressure-spiking red would be reserved for politics.  Anything political.  Anything out of Washington or a campaign or your state or local legislature.

With these symbols, you’d be able to switch channels, turn off the TV or head for the refrigerator or the bathroom as needed because you’d get advance notice.

It’s more subtle than running an on screen lower-third  “super” that says “John Boehner story next” or “tax news coming” plus you wouldn’t have to actually read words to know what to do.

Then, depending on where you are in your NewsWatchers diet, you could take appropriate action, perhaps switching to your TiVo library of Jerry Springer or “Fear Factor” re-runs.  All the excitement and none of the calories.

The average Nightly News item runs from 90 seconds to about three minutes.  Start that stopwatch you always wear but never look at and go back to the news program 90 to 180 seconds later, after the “red” warning passes.

Of course when CNN, Fox or MSNBC put up the red flag, just turn the TV off.  Because once they’re onto a story, they tend to stay with it forever and a day.  Or forever and a month.  

Getting the networks and cable outlets to use the warnings is another matter.  That will take some high level diplomacy, and, as a last resort, a military strike.

Shrapnel:

--Here are two examples of raging optimism.  First taking out a 30 year mortgage at age 65.  Second, being a bank which approves the loan.

--WestraDamus normally predicts only the past and generally gets it wrong.  But here’s his look at the future.   The ATT acquisition of T-Mobil will go through despite justice department opposition based on the original concept of de-regulation, lower prices through increased competition.

--Almost everyone else is jumping the gun.  Not Wessays™.  Our tenth anniversary 9/11 comment will be here Friday, September 9th.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011