Levittown

#307 Levittown

Happy 60^th Birthday, Levittown, NY. You are and always have been the pits. And the worst single thing to happen to American cities.

That’s pretty politically incorrect. We’re supposed to celebrate, after all. Celebrate great, cheap housing for GIs who returned to the boroughs after World War II and wanted a “better” place to live and raise families. Nice sentiment.

So, Bill Levitt took a pretty big former potato farm and he and his pals at a bank with some unsavory history got together to build a six thousand dollar, four room cape. And then they duplicated it 73-trillion times.

We’re supposed to celebrate. And get all teary and sentimental.

The houses in their present conditions are worth close to half a mil each, unless, of course you try to sell one. Then, depending on how elaborately it’s been re-done (and just about every one of them has been,) you get to bargain and barter and maybe you can get a better price.

The original deeds said “Whites Only.” There’s a good start.

So, where are all those white people going to work? Many, if not most of the original buyers in New York City. But there were no good roads and no railroad connection. They went anyway. They’re still going. Check out the LIRR parking lots in Westbury, Merrick and Bellmore. Check out the Meadowbrook and Northern State Parkways.

All those lots have been expanded and are full. All those roads have been expanded and are full.

The place is a dump.

But that’s not the worst thing about it.

Levitt had the chance to build his horizontal housing project within the five boroughs. But that “whites only” thing got in the way.

What Levittown did was yank a good chunk of the white middle class population out of New York, a population that would have stayed and built a diversified city that would be as vibrant now as it was when all this started.

So much for diversity in New York.

So much for retaining an economic base in New York that would have come to include people of every stripe.

But even THAT is not the worst of it. The worst of it was that this “success” was replicated on the outskirts of practically every other major city in America.

Atlanta, Cleveland, Chicago, Miami, Detroit, St. Louis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles.

Bill Levitt turned America into a giant suburb, with people focused on Little Boxes and little patches of green (you can grow grass in Urbia, too. Did you know that?) and people focused on their cars and their electric ranges and themselves, but not each other.

There’s an accomplishment.

The lauded Mister Levitt died as scandal swirled about him. And his pals at the Franklin National Bank.

A fitting end to a master builder and a master banker and the shady characters who managed to remain mostly in darkness or in jail or in various Town Halls.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Gore

#306 Gore

So, the Nobel Peace Prize goes to Al Gore. And the inconvenient truth is he has to share it with a bunch of panelists from the UN. The Nobel Peace Prize goes to a committee? Only fair, since it’s chosen by a committee and they finally decided to honor one of their own.

At least this one won’t send Alfred Nobel blowing up in his grave, like some of them have. Think Yasser Arafat

But this has been a prize winning year for Gore. First the Oscar, now this.

It’s a good thing he won the Nobel THIS year. In the nick of time. There’s talk about downsizing the prize or maybe combining it with another.

Dubai made a bid to buy 20 percent of the Nobel Committee. It was rejected, but members still may be looking for a white knight. Maybe the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscar Peace Prize. Has a nice ring to it.

Or, to keep things global, the Miss Universe Peace Prize.

But that’s another story for another day. For now, we have to salute President Gore (yeah, he really DID win, but he’s been very subtle about using the office,) because everyone knew he was going to win and therefore, no one expected him to.

So what’s he going to do with the money? Make another movie? “An Inconvenient Sequel.” “Son of Inconvenience?”

Could add another room or two to the Gore Mansion or maybe a Humvee or two to put in that big driveway.

Now, granted, all these prizes are still not as big as the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. And you have to actually go to Europe to claim the prize. Ed McMahon doesn’t deliver the check to your door. But, still, it’s quite an honor.

And it’s going to get all the conservative talk show people a-twitter. They cheapen the thing just by talking about it. They mock it by nominating themselves. And they write it off as irrelevant.

But it ISN’T irrelevant. It does several things. It reminds us that we’re fighting an undeclared war. It reminds us that the present President of the United States won his first election by five black-robed votes. It reminds us that if this year’s winner hadn’t been barred from the White House door, we wouldn’t be in the Iraq-mire we’re in now.

It would have prevented the wholesale destruction of the social institutions that made America America.

The global warming problems that the Nobel Committee frets about are not the same as the global warming problems that the Save The Polar Bears crowd worries about. To the committee and to the UN winners there’s an economic component. Population shifts due to climate and a squeezing of resources that can result.

A serious concern whether climate change is caused by natural phenomena or by all the SUVs in America and all the lead paint factories in China belching toxins into the air in unison.

They should, however, to keep things balanced, add a Nobel War Prize. After all, what did Al Nobel do for a living? And there are plenty of good candidates. G.W. Putch and his legion of merry pirates, a bunch of theocratic crazies in the middle east, Mel Gibson, OPEC and the banking industry.

Again, back to Gore. If you’re going to be in the Miss Universe contest, please skip the swimsuit part.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Dueling Diva Deja Vu

#305 Dueling Diva Déjà vu

It was kind of like old home week. There were Ann Curry and Katie Couric on the same screen at the same time. Just not on the same network.

Brought back memories of working on the “Today” show and the early newscast, called “Sunrise,” which actually had news in it.

But here it is 2007. And these two women have gone their separate ways. Well, not exactly. Curry didn’t go anywhere.

But now, beside “Today News” she’s doing “Nightly News.” And they really shouldn’t let her. She makes everyone else who does it look worse than they are. And she makes Couric, now with CBS, look like a lightweight.

Two things about Curry that have always come out of this corner: (1) She has the best voice in broadcasting, period. (2) The camera loves her. Even if the staff doesn’t always. And that hasn’t changed.

Difficult as she could be on deadline, she was a completely different person after the program ended for the day.

Flipping back and forth between channels to watch both networks’ news is no easy trick. Not only do they do the same stories in close to the same order, but their commercial breaks seem to come at about the same time.

And if the stories have slight variation, the ads sure don’t. Stuff to use if you have: erectile dysfunction, nasal congestion, elimination problems, heart burn, headache, arthritis, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and sleeplessness.

Are these programs watched exclusively in nursing homes?

It’s been that way for years. The ads keep up with the graying audience for the Nightly News, or the Evening News or the News Tonight. But the news doesn’t.

All the interview subjects are either young or old, but so well known that you can’t not interview them when their area of expertise is in the news.

If they could find someone with Colin Powell’s credentials, but no grey hair, you’d better believe they would.

So, even if listening to Curry is like a lullaby, and listening to Couric makes you think of her previous job as the Perky One (she hates the term,) what did you learn from the news?

Well, the government spends (wastes) a lot of money on broadcasts that are supposed to be viewed and heard in Cuba, but aren’t. And traffic is awful, everywhere. And Kangaroos sometimes get on auto race tracks in Australia. And, oh, by the way, a lot more dead guys in Iraq, including two people who died in the Ultimate Traffic Stop. That’s where some mercenaries working for a company based in Dubai tried to pull over a car, and the car wouldn’t pull, so they shot it up and left two dead and no one to call 9-1-1.

Also, if you take Levitra and it works for four hours in a row, see your doctor.

It’s a shame to waste Curry’s talent on such cotton candy.

As for Couric? As we’ve said before, makes you long for them to bring back Dan Rather.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Electronic Antiques

#304 Electronic Antiques

It had to happen. Your Commodore or early Apple computer now is worth serious bucks. Especially if it still works. Likewise your original Palm Pilot (still the best model they made) or your Sharp Wizard.

REAL electronic antiques? There’s no market for them. Try to sell a 1920s Atwater Kent radio or a TravLer radio phonograph combination. No takers. Same with the Victor Talking Machines from the 1920s and 1930s. Antique electronics of an age that make them real antiques even if not electronics don’t matter.

Timex computers matter. So do Osbornes. And car alarms. Car alarms? Yes. If you had one on your 1980 Datson and thought to remove it, it is now worth something, even though it only works on 1980 Datsons, and you can count the number of those remaining on the toes of one foot.

Transistor radios from the 1950s and 1960s are on the fence. The market for them is small, but appears to be growing. This only counts if the radio has a single band. After the FCC mandated that all radios have at least an AM and FM band, the earlier ones became valuable. Even more so, now that the AM band has been extended past 1600. But this is baby stuff compared with the traffic in unusable pagers, early cell phones (the brick-like devices that built strong bodies 12 ways,) and the Palm Pilots.

The pattern emerging here has a demographic counterpart.

Today’s collectors believe “elderly” means someone around 40 or 45 and they respect their elders. Any antique human beings (those born before, say, 1970 ) are right up there with steamer trunks and padded vinyl seat kitchen chairs and empty cans of Knickerbocker Beer (for display and amusement purposes, only.)

The only 25 year old electronic knick-knack that seems to have escaped the upward value spiral is the video game. Pac Man is sooooooooooooo yesterday.

If a pieces of stuff can become a collectible antique in under 25 years, what do we call the older stuff, archeological finds?

Most old stuff is like young kids, puppies and kittens. Wonderful to look at and play with, as long as they’re not your own.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

The Debt That Isn't

#303 The Debt that Isn’t

A caller to the radio program suggested that the national debt is drastically understated and citied an web page endorsed by some influential supply siders, called Grandfather’s Economic report by Michael Hodges.

It’s a long piece that essentially says we spend too much on social programs and not enough on debt reduction. This is fairly typical of the University of Chicago school of economics which is basically the libertarian monetary headquarters.

With all due respect to Milton Friedman and his followers at Chicago, with all due respect to the Nobel committee, to Alan Greenspan, Newt Gingrich and that whole bunch: Nah. With the world economy grown into the complex being that it has become, there is no viable way to retreat from this debt, which is largely a paper debt, and too deeply entrenched to retrench.

Friedman worked fine in the age of the gold standard. And it worked fine when money didn’t circulate at the speed of light through electronic trading terminals. And it worked fine as long as money was used as a placeholder or shorthand for real value, which it hasn’t for decades.

With the instruments of currency trade, derivatives, futures, and so on, and with the psychological component that has become central to trading, we have a system that no one understands.

To reduce the national debt to a level that would satisfy the people like our Mr. Hodges, you would have to eliminate many of the vehicles that make it circulate. To do that would destroy tens of trillions of dollars in real and imagined wealth.

If you don’t like the numbers, the only thing you can do is forgive the debt and start over… the mechanism for which is too difficult to contemplate and carries with it unintended consequences that we cannot even begin to imagine.

Or you can print more money, which would be inflationary, and then try to control the ensuing inflation with interest rates.

The Hodges observations are probably well intentioned. But today, value is less important than the means, speed and complexity of its circulation.

The caller also mentioned under-funded or un-funded pension obligations as a major cause of this debt. Perhaps so. And part of the answer may lie in the recent creation of defined contribution retirement packages, the so-called 401Ks. (Which by the way tax recipients at a potentially higher rate than do old fashioned “regular” pensions.)

He’s right when he says that as an employer, he cannot touch the money once it goes in. But by the same token, he doesn’t account for the underpinnings of this system in which we employees make the investment decisions, usually limited and always based on advice from sources we assume – whether correctly or incorrectly – know more than we do.

Saves a bundle for the employer, even with the relatively generous 50 percent matching that our caller says he provides.

Defined benefit pension plans work as well or better if they’re handled correctly, and if companies don’t try to weasel out of the promises they make… or make promises they can’t possibly keep. And the taxes are much lower, in many cases.

But overall, the economy is its own universe, with its own gravitational fields, its own magnetic forces. The matter and anti-matter are only a part of a system that’s become so complex and reliant on motion that to uproot any single part or group of parts could be universally fatal.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Rush To Judgment

#302 Rush To Judgment

Quick! What do Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus and Dan rather have in common?

Aside from one syllable first names… the wheels have come off or are coming off.

Rather was fired from CBS radio for telling a story, essentially true, but based on bad documentation – Bush was a slacker in the military.

Imus was fired from his syndicated radio show for making a racist comment about the Rutgers Women's Basketball team.

Now, Rush has a problem.

He talked about phony soldiers.

Rather wasn't fired for inaccuracy. Imus wasn't fired for the basketball comment.

Rush hasn't been fired. Yet. But his phony soldiers remark about anti war people in the military have the makings of a final straw on the camel's back.

They'd been gunning for Rather for years and needed a peg to hang it on. Same with Imus. Same with Limbaugh.

That combined with Limbaugh's past defaming of everyone who disagrees with him on anything, his bombastic, fog-horn delivery and his constant lieing about what democrats stand for and what causes every problem from acne to global warming, to medical care problems – the people who call themselves liberals is what will be his undoing.

If you heard some of the more recent Rush programs, you've heard a man on the verge of hysteria.

The sad part about it is what he said about the real phonies is true. But it's not what you say, it's how you say it. And who you are.

What is he? A drug addicted, draft dodging tool of the people who don't want you to have medical coverage, who don't want you to enjoy the fruits of your own labor when you retire, the people who don't care about American workers, who don't understand the underlying principles of this country include compromise, who don't want your children to have a tax supported public education, who want to turn you into a farm animal completely at the mercy of someone else. He is someone who hides behind God while he pops hillbilly heroin… who travels with prescription drugs that are not his own… who pays off his household help to silence his addiction, who uses valuable hospital bed space because his addictions made him deaf.

He blindly supports the incompetent, unthinking polices and actions of the president of the United States is just shy of worship, while occasionally lodging minor criticism just for credibility’s sake.

He's a guy who takes advantage of people's inborn patriotism by accusing denying that anyone who disagrees with him with treason.

He belittles civil rights. He belittles women. He belittles anything his whim directs, hides behind the flag, the bible, the Republican Party and the myth of eroding freedom. He uses Goebbels’ "Big Lie" technique, perfected in World War II Germany and which dictates repeating the same lie over and over and do it with great conviction and passion. Eventually, people believe it’s the truth.

He calls the rest of us the "drive by media," and his own program "alternative media," and yet it's that very "drive by medium," a.m. radio that gives him his channels of distribution.

Sewers have channels of distribution, too. And sewers serve a purpose. They get rid of what comes out of your plumbing.

It pays to know how those things work.

You have to know in order not to step into it when it overflows.

And you have to know about it when it threatens to engulf you.

Move over, Dan and Don. You're about to get some company on the bench.

(Note: As this is written, Don Imus is reported close to a deal with the radio syndication company, Citadel, for a return to the pipes of distribution. Portions of this Wessay were broadcast on my WBLF radio program, for which Rush Limbaugh is the opening act.)

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Ned On The Bench

#301 Ned On The Bench

(ALTOONA, PA) -- Those of us who live in the Party And Football Capital of the Known Universe, try to escape on Saturdays. You can’t get a seat in a restaurant, the supermarkets are out of anything edible, the liquor stores and beer “distributors,” as they call them here are out of everything worthy to drink. So it’s Escape To Altoona, a storied small town that calls itself a city.

The nicest thing about it is there’s almost no one there. That means you can get around easily, even though there isn’t much to get around to. Altoona is a city abandoned by its only claim to fame, the railroads. The Horseshoe Curve is here, yet. It’s kind of like a museum of nothing.

But they have stores, unlike the Party And Football Capital of the Known Universe.

So here it is, late afternoon. Sitting on a stone bench outside a department store that’s kind of a cross between Macy’s (overpriced, but lots of sales,) and S. Klein on Union Square (crowded aisles and “brands” you’ve never heard of and will never hear of again.)

Just taking in the sun and the view of some nice mountains, which although they are not in Altoona, can be seen from Altoona. Maybe this place is the mountain observatory.

Up comes Ned. Probably not his name. It’s probably Michael. Everyone here is Michael. But this guy is a Ned, if ever there was one. And he says “Room for another loafter on that bench?” Sure.

He puts down his cane and sits. Two old guys. Two canes. Lots of sun. He says “you know I don’t have to use this cane all the time, but I did some work around the place yesterday and my artificial hip’s acting up.”

Before long, we’re into hip history. His first shot at it was in 1981. That, he says, was lousy from the start but he tolerated it until 1984, then had it re-done. About ten years later something went wrong with one of the pieces and he had that replaced, but not the whole thing.

Before long, Ned’s offering instructions on how to buy generic extra-strength Excedrin at Wal-Mart.

We compare notes on the effectiveness of plain aspirin, Tylenol, Advil, Aleve, Anacin (yes, they still make that,) and Motrin, and we cannot come to a consensus, which is fine.

Two old men, sitting on a mountain-view stone bench outside a department store. It’s SOOOO Norman Rockwell.

Better than arguing religion and politics. Ned looks like a Republican who goes to church most Sundays. His audience varies between doubtful and hostile to both memberships, depending on how vociferously they are exposited.

When Mrs. Ned appears, shopping bags in hand, Ned excuses himself, expresses wishes for a nice day and they drift off toward their car. Well, she drifts, but he hobbles.

He does not offer to help her with the packages.

Probably no good for his triple hip bypass.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR