When Sheltering Possesions Trumps Sheltering People

With roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rent-able space for things, junk, stuff, possessions, etc., in the United States--a $38 billion industry!--America is a demonstrably materialistic society and becoming more materialistic every single day. It's  to the point where things, junk, stuff, possessions matter more than human beings....far more than people, it seems, considering the increasing number of homeless people across America,  the wealthiest nation on earth! 

“...the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space. In other words, the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times.”

This "need" for storage doesn't stem from frugal "depression babies" who feel the need to save everything just in case, because  the square footage of American homes has essentially doubled since the children of the Depression era started buying houses. No, the need for storage has increased right along with the  cache in our homes, which implies that, for the most part, things, junk, stuff, possessions have taken on an importance that just isn't there.  Not to say that  there are not legitimate reasons to rent storage for belongings: moving; changing circumstances; incarceration; future business endeavors, and ironically, homelessness ...but, certainly not  $38 billion worth! 

Take Orange County, California, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States.  It is home to four of the industry’s top 20 storage firms, in addition to the California Self Storage Association, the industry trade group, which is based in Irvine. Ironically, with its immense capacity to house junk, its capacity to house people is not so great. The 2017 federally mandated snapshot, taken every two years in Orange County, recorded 4,792 homeless people, more than half living without shelter. That's an 8% increase since 2015 because as one homeless man, Patrick Hogan, in Orange County said after losing his job after the 2008 financial crash ten years ago, "$10 an hour jobs doesn't cut it" in one of the most expensive corners of the nation.

“My experience has taught me one thing, the most discriminated group of people, at least in America, are the poor." -- Patrick Hogan

Today, Orange County is making headlines as it  faces bitter backlash over homeless relocation plans  as it is now under federal pressure to address what homeless advocates in court filings have called a humanitarian crisis.  According to the Los Angeles Times, affluent Orange County "faces special challenges because it has a relatively sparse infrastructure of services and support for homeless people." Of course, Ocean County is not unique. There is a relatively sparse infrastructure of services and support for homeless people all over America.

“A lot of people in America don't realize they might be two checks, three checks, four checks away from being homeless," -- Thomas Butler Jr., who stays in a carefully organized tent near a freeway ramp in downtown Los Angeles.

And you can't trust the official homeless rate in America.  To be sure, the reported rate is far lower than the actuality. The point-in-time (PIT) homeless counts often occur on a single night in January and are thus subject to significant sampling variability.  The accuracy of the count itself depends on   the number of volunteers, the weather, the count methodologies, and countless other variables that contribute to its inaccuracy.    In other words, the homeless population is hugely under-represented.

 For instance, Compass Family Services in San Francisco gathered their own data and discovered more than 35 times the number cited in the city’s report. 

“After a count of people on the streets and in shelters, conducted one night in January, and a follow-up survey, the city report found just nine families, or a total of 26 individuals in families who are homeless. Moreover, 87 percent of them live in some sort of shelter.

But between January and May, Compass recorded 319 homeless families — more than 35 times the number cited in the city’s report. And even that, Keller suggested, might be low.

According to a new study. the number of people living on the streets in San Diego County may be 50 percent higher than thought.

The bottom line is don't count on the PIT for accurate statistics on the homeless population, as it always under-counts, under-represents, and/or underestimates by a significant percentage.  The reason is, of course, obvious: the less homeless they count, the less money and resources they have to fork out.   

Links:

Self-storage: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38 billion industry

Self-storage business owners on alert for people living in units

Living in a Storage Unit: Alexander Ruggie’s Story

Self-storage industry keeps on keeping

Orange County At A Loss Over What To Do With People It Evicted From Homeless Encampment

Protests Push O.C. to Kill Its First Real Plan to Help the Homeless

America's Homeless Population Rises for First Time in Years

Dynamics of Homelessness in Urban America

Read more...

The Top Ten America's Greediest of 2013

America’s Greediest: The 2013 Top Ten By Sam Pizzigati

“Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. You won’t find any of them on our annual Too Much list of America’s most avaricious. You will find wheelers and dealers and a candy store heiress.

The impact on America’s super rich — and super-rich wannabees? Not much. They haven’t even deigned to slow their grabbing...

10/ Angela Spaccia: Pint-Sized Pilfering

We start this year’s top ten with garden-variety greed, the sort that inevitably grows in the shadows of escalating grand fortunes. In that shade, people in positions of modest power and authority regularly — and clumsily — try to emulate the avaricious high and mighty they see all around them.

In Bell, a small Los Angeles County working class community, that modest power and authority once belonged to Angela Spaccia. As Bell’s assistant city manager for a seven-year span that ended in 2010, Spaccia helped stuff hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of the city’s top officials, including herself. Spaccia in one year alone took in $564,000.

Prosecutors eventually caught up with Spaccia and her pals. Her boss, the Bell city manager, cut a plea deal in October to 69 corruption charges. He pulled in $1.18 million in his most lucrative year. Spaccia chose to go to trial instead, claiming she did nothing illegal.

“Everyone’s greedy,” her defense attorney argued  in November. “There’s no crime in taking too much money.”

Jurors disagreed. Last week, they found Spaccia guilty on multiple counts of criminal behavior, including one misappropriation of public funds designed to pump $15.5 million in pension checks to Spaccia and her boss.

9/ Dylan Lauren: Sweet Squeezer

They don’t come more suave and sophisticated than Dylan Lauren, the only child of billionaire designer Ralph Lauren. Or more ambitious either.

Not for Dylan the empty heiress life. Over a decade ago, she opened up her own business, a luxury candy emporium on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where moldings atop display cabinets mimic dripping chocolate and a cocktail bar offers Gummy Bear martinis.

“Dylan’s Candy Bar” would go on to become wildly successful, expanding into Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons, all the prime watering holes for America’s super rich.

Things today could hardly be peachier for the young Lauren. She has by her side a totally smitten hedge fund manager husband. Maybe even better, the 39-year-old has realized the life’s dream she’s had ever since she first saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at the ripe old age of six.

“I just wanted,” as Dylan gushed recently, “to live in a world full of candy.”

Dylan’s employees, meanwhile, would be satisfied with a world where they could just make ends meet. Workers at her Manhattan flagship store have been protesting  their meager $8.50 hourly compensation and management policies that make sure employees never work enough hours to qualify for overtime pay.

The New York workers are seeking full-time weekly set schedules and a hourly wage at $13.99, the price of a Dylan’s Candy Bar pound of candy.

Earlier this month, in a pouring rain, the workers demonstrated to make their case, carrying lollipops that read, “Dylan, we’re not suckers.” Their chant: “Dylan, Dylan, Candy Queen, you’re filthy rich, so share your green!”

8/ Michael Duke: Low Wages All the Time

This may well be Walmart CEO Michel Duke’s last hurrah in America’s most greedy. He’ll be stepping down as CEO early in 2014, after an embarrassing final year at Walmart’s summit.

The crowning embarrassment? At the company’s 2013 annual meeting, a glitzy affair that management packs with “loyal” employees, one Walmart worker actually won cheers when she denounced Duke’s $20.7 million 2012 paycheck.

Researchers have calculated that Duke is essentially making $6,898 an hour, 779 times the $8.86 average Walmart wage.

In the nation’s capital this fall, city council members tried to up that worker average. They passed a bill that would have required Walmart stores in D.C. to pay at least $12.50 an hour. Duke reacted swiftly. He had his company threaten to pull up stakes if the bill became law.

Washington’s mayor promptly panicked and vetoed the measure.

Duke took a PR pounding for that threat and still another pounding when the Demos think tank in New York revealed  that the $7.6 billion Duke had Walmart spend last year buying back company shares, if redirected to worker compensation, could have raised Walmart’s lowest wages by $5.83 an hour — and ensured all the company’s workers at least $25,000 for full-time work.

Poor Michael Duke won’t have to face any more pounding come his retirement this February. He won’t face any financial worries either. Duke is sitting on $113.2 million in retirement assets, thanks to a tax loophole that lets corporate execs annually set aside unlimited sums, tax-free, into their retirement accounts.

Duke’s retirement stash, notes the Institute for Policy Studies, “could yield him a monthly retirement check of $669,169.” The average Walmart worker 401(k), by contrast, will generate a monthly retirement check of $89.

7/ Art Pope: A Backroom Bully Goes Public

In North Carolina these days, few people think Francis first when they hear “Pope.” A different Pope has been dominating headlines here, an exceedingly deep pocket who owes his fortune to a discount store chain his daddy built.

In the run-up to the 2012 elections, this Art Pope invested over $40 million of his personal wealth to gerrymander how North Carolinians cast their votes.

The gerrymandering worked. This year opened with the state sporting — for the first time ever — a conservative GOP governor, Supreme Court majority, and legislature all at the same time. The state budget director? Pope himself.

Pope’s budget priorities would soon start wreaking havoc with the lives of North Carolina’s most vulnerable. In a state with America’s fifth-highest jobless rate, lawmakers indebted to Pope and his millions slashed top weekly jobless benefits and denied 170,000 long-term jobless special federal aid.

North Carolina’s conservatives didn’t stop there. They put in place, notes one Duke University analyst, an agenda that cuts education and social programs, shifts the tax burden “toward the less affluent,” and restricts voting rights.

North Carolinians have responded to this rich people-friendly legislative onslaught with spirited demonstrations. The latest protest: an “educational picket campaign” outside the discount stores the Pope family owns.

Art Pope, notes state NAACP president William Barber, has brought a “cynical and sinister form of wealth and power manipulation” to North Carolina.

Pope has put his stores “deliberately and publicly in communities of low wealth,” exploited people in these communities with low wages, and then employed his resulting wealth “to push and promote policies,” sums up Reverend Barber, that undercut the quality of average people’s lives.

6/ Tim Cook: Lost Even with a Compass

The $100 million club, researchers from the corporate watchdog GMI Ratings revealed  this past October, has become a bit less exclusive. Last year, for the first time, America’s ten highest-paid CEOs all realized over $100 million in compensation. High on that list, at $143.8 million: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Cook’s good fortune came as no surprise to computer industry observers. Apple retail stores, notes  Forbes, “take in more money per square foot than any other United States retailer.”

Yet Apple store employees only average $25,000, and Apple can’t seem to afford to compensate its 42,000 retail workers for the time they spend every day waiting to get searched — for stolen goods — before they can leave the store premises. Two former Apple employees have filed  a class-action lawsuit to recoup those unpaid wages, estimated at about $1,500 per year.

But give Apple credit. The company remains an equal-opportunity exploiter. The company mistreats workers both at home and abroad. Workers at Apple’s offshore suppliers continue to work in factories that, says  the Economic Policy Institute, “reflect some of the worst practices of the industrial era.”

Apple, details EPI analyst Isaac Shapiro, “has not met commitments to ensure that workers in its supply chain receive retroactive compensation for working unpaid overtime” or “ensured promised wage increases.”

Apple CEO Cook’s response to critiques like this?

“Apple,” he told reporters before U.S. Senate testimony this past spring, “has a very strong moral compass.”

5/ Ron Packard: The ABCs of Avarice

Some of us look at school buildings and see students learning. Ron Packard looks at schools and sees himself becoming fabulously richer — if he could only empty the buildings.

Packard runs K12 Inc., a for-profit company that specializes in “virtual” education. K12 Inc. operates online “schools” that supply lessons to kids sitting in front of computers, a business endeavor that Packard pronounces a noble step toward “educational liberty.”

“Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” he has declared.

An army of corporate lobbyists has been spreading this message over the past five years, backed by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, and more than three dozen states have now enacted legislation that lets companies like K12 Inc. grab students — and tax dollars.

K12 Inc. currently has nearly 130,000 students in its “virtual learning” empire, with only one problem. Compared to their traditional school peers, K12 Inc. students are not doing much learning. Critics are, understandably, blasting the K12 Inc. business model as a giant scam.

In that model, heavy K12 Inc. advertising on kid-centric media like Nickelodeon gets kids enrolled for the company’s offerings. State government education officials, after their annual student “head count,” then pay K12 Inc. for each kid signed up. But after the head count, many of the “virtual” students drop out. K12 Inc. doesn’t mind. The company gets to keep the money.

Lots of it, enough to reward Packard over $19 million in personal compensation the last five years. Not bad, notes the Center for Media and Democracy, for a former Goldman Sachs executive “who started K12 Inc. with a $10 million investment from convicted junk-bond king Michael Milken.”

4/ Lloyd Blankfein: An Appetite for Aluminum

Five years ago, Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs tottered near disaster, as did every other major U.S. bank.

America’s taxpayers came to the rescue. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein soon had at his disposal $814 billion in near zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve and $10 billion from the Treasury Department.

Blankfein has made the most of this generous support. Forbes calculates his total compensation for the last five years at $159.5 million. Blankfein currently holds over a quarter-billion dollars worth of Goldman shares in his personal portfolio.

How have Blankfein and Goldman Sachs done so nicely the past five years? We learned a good bit about that in 2013. The juiciest revelations came over the summer when the New York Times exposed a commodity speculation scheme that Goldman “intentionally created” to drive up the global price of aluminum.

This scheming, the Times estimates, has cost consumers $5 billion since 2010.

Blankfein has shared, at tax time, precious little of the profits from Goldman’s speculative ventures, thanks in large part to Goldman’s dozens of offshore tax havens. In 2010, these tax havens cut Goldman’s tax bill by $3.32 billion.

Blankfein is putting his share of those tax savings to something less than productive social use. News reports have him down as an advance buyer in the new $1 billion Faena Miami Beach, an 18-story oceanfront luxury tower set to open next year. The tower’s 47 residences are going for up to $50 million each.

3/ Jim McNerney: Middle Class Manslaughter

The U.S. manufacturing giant Boeing, analyst Harold Meyerson observed last week, has only one global rival in the large-scale passenger-plane market, the European conglomerate Airbus.

Workers at these two aerospace giants turn out to make about the same compensation. But executives at Boeing make more.

Question: Given these realities, what should Boeing do to compete more effectively? The answer from Boeing CEO Jim McNerney: Cut Boeing worker wages, benefits, and pensions!

Earlier this fall, McNerney gave his Seattle area workers an ultimatum: Either accept a contract “extension” that would leave them paying more for health care and getting less in retirement — and force new hires to work 10 extra years at substandard wages — or Boeing would go elsewhere to manufacture its new 777x passenger jetliner.

Boeing gave Washington State’s political leaders a similar ultimatum: Either fork over new subsidies and tax breaks or see your state lose jobs by the thousands. Washington lawmakers caved almost instantly. They voted Boeing the largest subsidy deal in U.S. history, over half a billion annually for the next 16 years, over double  the state’s annual funding for the University of Washington.

Boeing’s workers didn’t cave. They rejected the Boeing ultimatum, and McNerney, who pulled in [39] $27.5 million in take-home last year after $23 million the year before, is now parsing subsidy offers from half a dozen other states.

How does this story end? Maybe with the “Walmartization of aerospace.”

“This,” as Seattle author Timothy Egan puts it, “is how the middle class dies.”

2/ David Novak: Fast-Food Glutton

At first glance, corporate CEO David Novak doesn’t need a subsidy from anybody. The fast-food empire Novak oversees, Yum! Brands, amassed $1.59 billion in profits last year.

And Yum — think Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC — is doing pretty well by Novak, too. He pocketed $94 million worth of “performance pay,” notes an Institute for Policy Studies analysis, in just 2011 and 2012 alone.

But Novak and Yum are collecting subsidies anyway — and plenty of them. One comes directly from the U.S. tax code. Current tax law lets corporations deduct executive “performance” pay off their taxable income. This sweet subsidy saved Yum $33 million the last two years on Novak’s ample compensation.

Average Americans are actually subsidizing Novak and Yum at much higher levels than this single tax break suggests. In fact, taxpayers are subsidizing Yum’s entire fast-food business.

Workers at fast food giants like Yum simply don’t make enough to make ends meet for their families. So how do these workers get by? They depend on taxpayer-financed social safety net programs, from food stamps to Medicaid.

Overall, researchers noted  in 2013, American taxpayers “are spending nearly $7 billion a year to supplement the wages of fast-food workers.”

And how are fast-food executives like David Novak spending the profits this generous taxpayer support makes possible? They’re having their companies, for starters, buy back shares of company stock off the open market, a strategy designed solely to bump up their share prices.

Higher share prices, in the meantime, produce higher “performance pay” awards for execs like Novak.

If Novak had plowed the vast millions that Yum spent last year on share buybacks into worker pay, estimate researchers from Demos, worker wages at Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC would have jumped by as much as $3 per hour.

1/ Larry Ellison: An Awesome Arrogance

Drum roll, please. Our 2013 greediest of them all: Larry Ellison, the longtime chief exec at business software kingpin Oracle.

Ellison currently owns a quarter of Oracle, a chunk that makes the 69-year-old the ninth richest individual in the world. His total net worth sat last week at $38.6 billion.

Enough? Not for Ellison. Last year, the software kingpin had Oracle award him $96.2 million in compensation. Unhappy shareholders considered those millions a tad excessive. In a nonbinding 2012 say-on-pay vote, an Oracle shareholder majority turned thumbs-down on Ellison’s pay package.

Ellison, of course, gave none of that $96.2 million back. This year, he had Oracle hand him another $76.9 million. Unhappy shareholders again expressed their displeasure, making Oracle just the 12th company  in U.S. corporate history to have its shareholders go on record against their CEO’s pay in consecutive years.

No frustrated shareholder better try getting any of Ellison’s latest paycheck back. Oracle spends $1.5 million a year on security personnel to protect him. And why not? Ellison, as Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley gushes, rates as Oracle’s “most critical strategic visionary.”

Sign up for To Much Ellison pays dearly to surround himself with such fawning adulation. His two top executive underlings collected $43.6 million each in compensation in Oracle’s fiscal 2013.

Ellison’s billions, to be sure, buy him more than office sycophants. This past year Ellison hosted global yachting’s premiere race, the America’s Cup, in San Francisco Bay. Each race’s host sets the race’s rules. Ellison’s rules limited the field to ultra-expensive — and ultra-dangerous — catamarans.

One sailor died in training runs for the race.

Whose yacht eventually won? Guess.

Links:

Super Sizing Public Costs How Low Wages at Top Fast-Food Chains Leave Taxpayers Footing the Bill

“The Fast Food industry is marked by two extremes: on the one hand, the leading companies in the industry earn billions in profits each year, award chief executives generous compensation packages, and regularly distribute substantial amounts of money in the form of dividends and share buybacks.

At the same time, the overwhelming share of jobs in the fast-food industry pay low wages that force millions of workers to rely on public assistance in order to afford health care, food, and other basic necessities. This report focuses on the 10 largest fast-food companies in the united States and estimates the substantial costs that these highly profitable companies’ low-wage, no-benefits business model imposes on taxpayers.
our findings include the following:

• Low wages and lack of benefits at the 10 largest fast-food companies in the united States cost tax-payers an estimated $3.8 billion per year. Mcdonald’s alone costs taxpayers an estimated$1.2 billion each year.
• While low wages and lack of benefits cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, the seven publicly-traded corporations on this list remain in strong financial condition today. Last year, these companies collectively:

• Earned $7.44 billion in profits;
• Paid $52.7 million to their highest-paid executives;
• Distributed $7.7 billion in dividends and buybacks

Read more...

The Pathology of the Rich

On The Real News Network. with Paul Jay, Chris Hedges discusses the decadence of the ruling elite, the psychology of the super rich; their sense of entitlement, the dehumanization of workers, and mistaken belief that their wealth will insulate them from the coming storms. "Après moi, le déluge"

Hedges asserts that the intellectual class serves the system--that allows those at the top to plunder the wealth from the rest of the population-- don't have a job.

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The Crash of 2016?

Is the response to the 2008 financial meltdown a band-aid fix that "punished none of the financial abusers, propped up the major culprits at the expense of consumers and taxpayers, and brought us closer to an even worse disaster?" That is the question radio host Thom Hartmann, author of “The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America and What We Can Do to Stop It,” answers on NPR's  show, The Takeaway..

Hartmann claims the crash of 2008, that really began in 2006 when housing started to collapse, is still ongoing, despite the over-the-top performance of the stock market.  Millions of people have fallen out of the middle class since the 1980s, including 700,000 in the last couple of years, driving wealth inequality to an all time high. These enormous concentrations of wealth are not being used productively in the economy as they are invested internationally and stored in Swiss bank accounts.

One of the main problems is that banking has replaced manufacturing as the fundamental impetus of our economy, yet it creates no wealth, not to mention, Glass-Steagall Act (1933) has never been replaced so the banks are still gambling with our deposits.  Then there is the the quantitative easing program that's devaluing our currency more and more every day.  Half of the program is buying toxic securities--junk--from the banks to the tune of $35-$40 billion per month.  That is they're  buying junk left on the books of the banks left over from the unregulated derivatives market that Phil Gramm created in 1999 and 2000 when the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) Act of 1999 was passed and even more importantly, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) a law that opened the door to unregulated trading of credit default swaps, the financial instruments blamed, for the 2008 economic meltdown.  The passing of this Act catapulted the derivatives market to $800 trillion in 2008! (Keep in mind, the GDP of the entire planet is $65 trillion.) Right after the crash in 2008, It fell to $500 trillion, but according to the Bank of International Settlements it's back up to $800 trillion!

Since the wheels of commerce started to spin, there's always been some sort of  commodities futures market in play, where farmers and merchants could lock in on actual physical things--pork bellies, wheat, oil, etc.--in advance at a fixed price. Up until 2000, the commodities futures market ran through the Chicago Board of Trade and has always been transparent.  For example, airlines could hedge their bets by buying futures in oil.  With the CFMA it became possible to make these kind of bets on the non-physical, and it became possible to make bets on bets on bets.  In other words, they've created an economy that has absolutely no value!

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Narcoland: How Massive Profits Are Being Made Out of Mexico's Bloody Drug War

Anabel Hernández's new book Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers exposes how politicians and businessmen in the U.S. and Mexico are raking it in by backing illegal plantations and traffickers.

The following is an excerpt from Anabel Hernández's new book Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers

“My introduction to the life of Joaquín Guzmán Loera began at 6:30 in the morning of June 11, 2005. That is when I boarded a bus that would take me and photographer Ernesto Ramírez to Guadalupe y Calvo, a small, storm-prone municipality in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, deep in the “golden triangle” spanned by the towering Sierra Madre Occidental. It was the start of a five day voyage to the land of drug kingpins: Ismael El Mayo Zambada, Eduardo Quintero Payán, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, a.k.a. El Azul—and Joaquín El Chapo (Shorty) Guzmán, the man Forbes magazine has called “the biggest drug lord of all time” (and in their latest ranking, the fifty-fifth most powerful person in the world). I still have the notebook in which I recorded the journey. It was one that was to change forever my view of the drug trade, which is today the backbone of organized crime in Mexico.

Most of the road to Guadalupe y Calvo runs through a dreamlike landscape of serried pinewoods. The sky was that intense blue you can sense in a black-and-white photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. At 10:50 in the morning we arrived at the town of Rio Verde, where they hang meat on the line like washed socks. Unfortunately it’s no longer just beef, but also the bodies of victims from the “war on drugs.”

The winding road began to climb as steeply as a big dipper. The driver was an old hand. He threw the bus round the bends entrusting our fates to Pope John Paul II, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and St. Juan Diego, whose pictures were stuck on the windscreen. At one stop a newspaper vendor called Federico Chávez got on. The youngster exchanged greetings with almost all of the passengers; we were the only outsiders. Before we left Mexico City, Iván Noé Licón, a Chihuahua education official, had warned me on the phone to be discreet about our identity. “People are cagey with strangers, because they think they’re police,” he told me. So when some of the travelers took Ernesto for a priest, we didn’t say anything. It seems teachers and priests are the only outsiders who are greeted without suspicion in those parts.

After eight hours, we finally reached our destination: the municipal capital of Guadalupe y Calvo. From there we planned to tour the surrounding villages—although that is a manner of speaking, because on the bumpy tracks that link these hamlets it takes five or six hours to get anywhere. We met up with Chava, a local official who would be our guide and friend in this world we knew so little of. It was impossible not to be moved by the majestic beauty of the place, and the tragedy of its inhabitants. They were five unforgettable days.

As a journalist I had come to investigate the story of child exploitation in the area, where minors are put often to work by their parents on the poppy and marijuana harvests. These are kids who become criminals without even realizing it. Many, from the age of seven upwards, die of poisoning by the pesticides used on the plantations. Those who survive into adolescence are already carrying AK-47s, or “goat’s horns” as these weapons are popularly known.

We entered this mountain world along its narrow dirt tracks and cattle trails, learning of its customs, dreams, and legends, as well as its poverty. We visited remote places like Baborigame, Dolores, El Saucito de Araujo, and Mesa del Frijol, where more than 80 percent of the population grow drug crops. In these communities, long forgotten by federal or state social programs, you nonetheless see four-wheel-drive Cadillac Escalades, satellite dishes, and men with walkie-talkies and a pistol in their belt.

Here I met Father Martín, a Peruvian priest with a dark, glossy complexion, an extraordinary sense of humor and a great heart, who had chosen to stay in Guadalupe y Calvo rather than accept a transfer to the safety of El Paso, Texas. He carried out his pastoral work with matchless energy, even if his sermons against the wrong kind of seeds fell on deaf ears. Talking to him helped me to understand the human dimension of the problem, as opposed to the perspective of military and police operations.

People have been doing this for decades. They don’t know any other way of life, and no one has shown them an alternative. No doubt in these humid ravines you could grow guava, papaya, or other fruits, but the lack of decent roads makes it impossible to transport such produce. To make matters worse, residents say some places here, like Baborigame, didn’t get electricity until 2001. Many illegal plantations have been supported by the Mexican and US governments. But the authorities don’t understand that being nurtured here are not just drug crops, but future drug traffickers. Kids don’t want to be firemen or doctors when they grow up; they want to become drug barons. That’s the only measure of success they know.

Stories abound of El Chapo roaming the streets of Guadalupe y Calvo, flanked by bodyguards dressed in black. People have embraced the myth of the generous godfather figure, the sponsor of baptisms, first communions, and weddings.

I climbed to the top of Mohinora, in the south of the Tarahumara range. At 3,307 meters, it’s the highest peak in Chihuahua. Below, in season, you can see the green valley flooded with red poppies. Its beauty is enough to make you cry—and so are the consequences of this trade. I had gone to research a story about child labor, but I came back with much more: the knowledge of a way of life which for these people is as necessary as the blood that runs in their veins—and that now increasingly runs in the streets.

At the end of 2005, the lawyer Eduardo Sahagún called me at the Mexico City offices of La Revista, the magazine of El Universal, the newspaper where I was working. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in the story of a client of his, Luis Francisco Fernández Ruiz, the former assistant warden of the Puente Grande maximum security prison, in the state of Jalisco. Fernández wanted to talk to me about his case. He was being tried along with sixty-seven other public employees who had been working at Puente Grande’s Federal Center for Social Rehabilitation Number 2 on the night of January 19, 2001, the night El Chapo Guzmán went missing from the prison. They were all accused of taking bribes and facilitating El Chapo’s escape. Fernández had already spent nearly five years in jail, and he still hadn’t been sentenced. “The state prosecutor’s office has always refused an on-the-spot inspection and a reconstruction of the escape, to establish how El Chapo got away and who was responsible,” the lawyertoldme.All I’d heard about the affair were the Hollywoodesque stories circulating afterwards, of how the drug baron had fled in a laundry cart. This improbable version of events was repeated so often in the domestic and international media that it had become an unquestionable truth; the same thing happened with many other stories of Mexico’s drug trade.

I finally met Fernández in the visiting rooms of Mexico City’s Reclusorio Oriente detention center. It was a short encounter, during which he expounded his innocence. The former assistant warden of Puente Grande told me of his dealings with the drug baron, and gave me his impressions of the man: “He was introverted, with a serious, withdrawn manner, not at all overbearing or rude, and he was intelligent, very intelligent.” There was no admiration in Fernández’s words, but a certain respect for the drug trafficker, who was in his custody from 1999 until the day he was sprung from Puente Grande.

“After the alarm was raised following the escape, the Federal Police took control of the prison, we were all shut into the hall, and armed personnel in balaclavas moved in,” recalled Fernández. Two years later this fact would prove crucial.

Soon after I published my interview with Luis Fernández in La Revista, he won his appeal and was released. Today there is almost no one still behind bars for what the authorities call “El Chapo’s escape.” Even the warden of the maximum security prison, Leonardo Beltrán Santana, whose path I crossed a couple of times in the VIP dormitory of the Reclusorio Oriente, was freed in 2010.

In May 2006, at the Nikko Hotel in Mexico City, I met a DEA agent who confirmed my growing conviction that Joaquín Guzmán and the drug trade were essential to understanding a key aspect of corruption in Mexico, perhaps the most important aspect of all: the one that involves top government figures putting prices on the country’s millions of inhabitants, as if they were head of cattle.

According to this agent, DEA informers infiltrated into the organization of drug lord Ignacio Coronel Villarreal had told him that El Chapo Guzmán left Puente Grande penitentiary after paying a multimillion-dollar bribe to the family of President Vicente Fox, of the National Action Party (PAN). And that the deal included systematic protection by the federal government of him and his group, the all-powerful Pacific cartel. Fox is now a leading advocate for the legalization of not only the consumption, but also the production, distribution, and sale of every class of drug.

***

I read avidly the thousands of pages of evidence in the case of “El Chapo’s escape.” Through the dozens of statements given by cooks, laundry workers, inmates, detention officers, and prison police commanders that make up the proceedings of penal case 16/2001, I learned of Guzmán’s passion for painting landscapes, how much he missed his mother, his “romantic” side, his brutality as a rapist, his need for Viagra, his taste for candy and volleyball, but above all his infinite capacity to corrupt everyone and everything in his path. Similarly, hundreds of sheets of official documents allowed me to confirm that in 2001 El Chapo did not escape from Puente Grande in that famous laundry cart: instead, high-ranking officials took him out, disguised as a policeman.

I also obtained recently declassified CIA and DEA documents on the Iran-Contra affair—something nobody seems to remember anymore—which is what turned Mexican drug traffickers from humble marijuana and poppy farmers into sophisticated international dealers in cocaine and synthetic drugs. I retrieved files eliminated from the archives of the federal prosecutor’s office, referring to the businessmen who, in the early 1990s, sheltered in their hangars the planes of El Chapo, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Héctor El Güero Palma. Today, these eminent entrepreneurs are the owners of hotel chains, hospitals, and newspapers. I found a different account of the air crash that killed the former interior secretary, Juan Camilo Mouriño, on November 4, 2008, which suggests that the crash was not an accident but an act of revenge by drug barons for agreements not kept.

In similar fashion, I discovered the identity of the businessmen who appear as the owners of a company supposedly run by Ismael El Mayo Zambada, which operates out of a hangar in Mexico City International Airport and transports drugs and money, with both the knowledge and consent of the Communications and Transport Secretariat and the airport administration.

The story of how Joaquín Guzmán Loera became a great drug baron, the king of betrayal and bribery, and the boss of top Federal Police commanders, is intimately linked to a process of decay in Mexico where two factors are constant: corruption, and an unbridled ambition for money and power.

Semi-illiterate peasants like El Príncipe, Don Neto, El Azul, El Mayo, and El Chapo would not have got far without the collusion of businessmen, politicians, and policemen, and all those who exercise everyday power from behind a false halo of legality. We see their faces all the time, not in the mug shots of most wanted felons put out by the Attorney General’s Office, but in the front page stories, business sections, and society columns of the main papers. All these are the true godfathers of Narcoland, the true lords of the drug world.

Often the protection given to drug barons continues until they commit a major blunder, are ratted out by others anxious to take their place, or simply cease to be useful for business. Now there also exists the option of voluntary retirement, like that taken by Nacho Coronel or Edgar Valdez, La Barbie. There will always be substitute candidates for support to continue the criminal enterprise. Many have seen their time come in this way: Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Joaquín Guzmán Loera alone will quit when he feels like it, not when the authorities choose. Some say he is already preparing his exit.

The current war on drugs, launched by the government of Felipe Calderón, is just as fake as that undertaken by the administration of Vicente Fox. In both cases, the “strategy” has been limited to protecting the Sinaloa cartel. The continuity of such protection has been underwritten by the shady police chief and Calderón’s secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna, and his team of collaborators: the previously unpublished documents presented here are irrefutable proof of this. García Luna is the man who aimed to become, with Calderón’s support, the single head of all the country’s police forces. He has even stated, with complete impunity, that there is no option but to let El Chapo operate freely and “bring to heel” the other criminal organizations, since it would be easier for the government to negotiate with just one cartel, rather than five. The bloody results of war between opposing cartels we know only too well.

Currently, all the old rules governing relations between the drug barons and the centers of economic and political power have broken down. The drug traffickers impose their own law. The businessmen who launder their money are their partners, while local and federal officials are viewed as employees to be paid off in advance, for example by financing their political campaigns. The culture of terror encouraged by the federal government itself, as well as by the criminal gangs through their grotesque violence, produces a paralyzing fear at all levels of society. [...] They have tried to convince us that the drug barons and their cronies are immovable and untouchable. [But] as citizens or as journalists, we must never allow the state and the authorities to give up on their duty to provide security, and simply hand the country over to an outlaw network made up of drug traffickers, businessmen, and politicians, allowing them to impose on all Mexicans their intolerable law of “silver or lead.” Pay up or die.

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The Weird Mental Illness of Consumerism

Rampant consumerism has become the cornerstone of the post-industrial age, and the ever-growing purchasing and consumption of material possessions has become a significant measure of our lives. We consume goods and services as a means to feel good about ourselves,  however, after that brief high that most of us get after acquiring that new car, computer, clothing, etc., the opposite occurs, and we're left feeling more empty than ever.  This desire for, and acquisition of non-essential products is only a temporary "fix", as we try to fill a void that can never be filled with gadgets, "money" and bling, try as we might..

Has our insatiable appetite driven us into “the jaws of the beast?”

“The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic needs, now relied on the creation of new consumer demands--on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the need is forcibly brought to their attention by mass media." -- Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

“As a religion, consumerism is even more powerful than scientism, and its influence holds sway in many circles that are antagonistic or indifferent to science. We might characterize the religion as follows. Its god is economic growth for its own sake; its priests are the public policy makers who provide access to growth; its evangelists are the advertisers who display the products of growth and try to convice us that we cannot be happy without them; its church is the shopping mall. Its primary creeds are “bigger is better” and “more is better” and “faster is better” and “you can have it all.” Its doctrine of creation is that the earth is real estate to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Its doctrine of human existence is that we are skin encapsulated egos cut off from the world by the boundaries of our skin. And its doctrine of salvation is that we are saved – or made whole – not by grace through faith as Christians claim, or by wisdom through letting go as Buddhists claim, but by appearance, affluence, and marketable achievement." -- Dr. Jay McDaniel

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Global Water Capitalists War for Our Water.

For thousands of years, water has been seen as a free public good, with no price attached, but that's changing right before our eyes thanks to insatiable corporate greed. Their monopolistic exploitation of water – the world's most important raw material – in order to provide fabulous returns to investors from a captive market of consumers will eventually make water, like gold, too expensive for everyone but the wealthiest of the psychopathic elite if this global water cartel gets its way.  Unfortunately, although, there is life without gold, there is no life without water...I bet you didn't know that.

And speaking of psychopaths--not to mention, disappearing lakes--here's a clear example of one: former CEO Nestlé, now Chairman of the Board, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who strongly believes our food--GMO farming /Monsanto--and water supply should be entirely controlled by corporations like Nestle (Nestle Waters North America received permission to bottle up to 210 million gallons a year from an aquifer north of Grand Rapids that recharges the Muskegon River, a major Lake Michigan tributary), with over $65 billion--or 90 billion Swiss francs-- in profit per year.

What's more, by using a little-known loophole--the bottled water loophole-- in the 2006 Great Lakes Compact that allows water to be labeled a "commodity," our government supports the plundering of our water supply.  Not only does Nestle Company siphon water for it's bottled water brand, it exports  fresh water out of Lake Michigan and ships it to China at a "240 times markup!" Their profit: an estimated $500,000 to $1.8 million per day. That's right. Our government representatives are allowing these multinationals all the cheap water they can get in order to make large profits. If we don't fight to protect the most valuable resource we have, that is, water,

And guess how much Nestle pays for the millions, perhaps billions, of gallons of water it drains? One hundred dollars annually. And let's not forget Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens who is “the largest individual water owner in America, with rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a year, at least until the land goes dry.”

“Nestlé PURE LIFE has become in 2008 the largest bottled water brand sold in the world. The company is in 36 countries spanning 5 continents with 64 brands.

Other Nestlé products are Perrier, Vittel, Acqua Panna, Vera, Contrex, Aquarel, Poland Spring, S.Pellegrino, Vie Pure in Algeria and Nestle Pureza vital in some Latin American Countries. Nestlé, has been acquiring water companies since 1969 when it acquired its first 30 percent stake in the Société Générale des Eaux Minérales de Vittel, in France.

It gets even better. Not only is our government involved in this water securitzation scheme, the United Nations is the brainchild of this scam.  UNESCO's Intergovernmental Council of the International Hydrological Program's document HS 15322 explains how the "UN plans to secure resources to use at their disposal. Through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under-developed countries are forced to sell their resources to the global Elite as “full cost recovery” to the global central bankers. Once those resources are under the complete control of the creditors, they become assets to be reallocated back to the enslaved nations for a price."

With the securitization of water  , it makes water sources under central privatization cost more and become less accessible to those who desperately need it. In other words, pursuit of water security means whoever gets the water, chooses who lives and who dies.

“The one water-export method that has been taking off is bottled water. It is among the fastest-growing and least-regulated industries in the world. In the 1970s, the annual volume of water bottled and traded around the world was 300 million US gallons (about 1 billion liters). By 1980, the figure had climbed to 650 million US gallons (about 2.5 billion liters), and toward the end of the decade, 2 billion US gallons (7.5 billion liters) of bottled water were being consumed in countries around the world.

But in the past five years [10 years ago], the volume of bottled water sales has skyrocketed, and in 2000, 22.3 billion US gallons (84 billion liters) of water were bottled and sold. Moreover, one-quarter of all the water bottled was traded and consumed outside its country of origin.

Among the brand name products are Perrier, Evian, Naya, Poland Spring, Clearly Canadian, La Croix, Purely Alaskan, and many more. Nestle is the world market leader in bottled water, with no fewer than 68 brands, including Perrier, Vittel, and San Pellegrino. As a past chairman of Perrier put it: "It struck me ... that all you had to do is take the water out of the ground and then sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or for that matter, oil."

While bottled water may have started out as a pampered Western consumer affectation, Nestle has found a growing market niche for bottled water in nonindustrialized countries where safe tap water is rare or nonexistent. In these countries, its main product line is Nestle Pure Life, a low-cost purified tap water with added minerals. Marketed on a platform of "basic wholesomeness," Nestle Pure Life has sold well in Pakistan and Brazil, as have some of the corporation's other bottled water products in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Mexico

[...]

“If the OPEC model were followed, the countries containing large supplies of fresh water in the form of lakes, rivers, and glaciers would constitute such a cartel.

Studies by the highly respected Russian hydrologist Igor Shiklomanov, described by Peter Gleick in his book Water in Crisis, identify the countries with the most fresh water in the world. Twenty-eight of the world's largest fresh water lakes, he writes, account for 85 percent of the volume of all lake water, including Russia's Lake Baikal, Africa's Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Superior on the U.S.-Canadian border.

As the world's largest lake system, the Great Lakes together account for 27 percent of global lake volumes. The world's largest 25 rivers include: 11 in Asia (the Ganges, Yangtze, Yenisei, Lena, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Ob, Chutsyan, Amur, Indus, and Salween); 5 in North America (the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Mackenzie, Columbia, and Yukon); 4 in Latin America (the Amazon, Parana, Orinoco, and Magdalena); 3 in Africa (the Congo, Niger, and Nile); and 2 in all of Europe (the Danube and the Volga).

I'm not really sure what the protocol is when posting a quote from someone commenting through Facebook on another website.  For instance, should I post their name?  Or do I even have the right to post the quote in the first place?  So I'll just post the link for the article from where the quote [below] originated because I think this quote is very revealing.

“Out here in Oregon Nestle some how managed to wrangle access to the Columbia river for a new water bottling facility. My husband is a Water Rights Examiner, licensed in Oregon and Washington. I know how difficult it is for citizens to obtain water. In many areas water rights are not available to them. They are hotly contested and we've had guns drawn on us when out doing Water Rights surveys. Then along comes Nestle and they procure a Water Right for billions of gallons, for profitizing?!!! Oregon and Washington citizens have been raped by Nestle. Please don't buy Nestle water. If we don't unite to show our outrage now, they will get control of all the water."

Links:

Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation

Flow for Water Advancing Public Trust Solutions to Save The Great Lakes

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Sentencing Two Populations to Generations of Debt Slavery

The first real test of establishing America’s commitment to "democracy" came from Greece after WWII. During the war, the Left Wing National Liberation Front had provided the majority of resistance to the Nazis. It also set up interim governments across the nation. Though its military government leaders were communist, the partisan governments bore no resemblance to Stalinist Russia. They were decentralized and participatory. The peasants were treated fairly and their status, raised. It was a real people’s government. The goal was to make Greece independent, free from all ties.

But Winston Churchill claimed anarchy and demanded the return of the monarchy. He wanted to keep Greece in their sphere of influence in the Mediterranean for their own political ends. In other words, they wanted to restore the old order in Greece. They wanted the King back on his throne because he was the best guarantee of British interest in Greece: political, economic, and strategic, despite the fact that all of the Greek people hated the oppressive regime of the King.

So America stepped in and a network of concentration camps were set up across the Greek islands while right winged death squads terrorized villages. A favorite technique was beheading. President Truman gave $400 million to aid in restoring the old order. In 1947, 74,000 tons of military equipment was sent to Greece including massive stocks of napalm, and during the Civil War in Greece, the Truman Doctrine was announced which was in effect to crush the peasant and worker based anti-Nazi resistance and restore the traditional fascist order. As a result, 150,000 Greeks were killed. Greece was the first major police task which the United States took on in the postwar world.

Fast forward almost 60 years, and the European feudal system is scapegoating Greece, along with its tiny neighbor, Cyprus --many Cypriots consider themselves Greeks; they share the same National Anthem, are Orthodox and of course they speak Greek--once again, only this time, instead of tanks, they're using banks.

"At least 1,600 Greek businesses - from shipping, retail to tourism - will suffer from the Cyprus bailout deal announced on Sunday after a showdown between Brussels and Nicosia, according to Vasilis Korkidis, head of the National Confederation of Greek Commerce (ESEE).

“The tragic situation in Cyprus will certainly have immediate effects on the Greek market, since a large part of the domestic businesses maintain close ties with Cypriot companies,” Korkidis said in a statement on Tuesday. He was particularly critical of the capital controls and the impending haircut on large deposits (over 100,000 euros) expected to be more than 40%.

Greece's exports to Cyprus exceed 1billion euros annually and the country is Cyprus’ biggest trade partner, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany.

According to Korkidis, the Eurogroup’s Cyprus deal establishes new, severely punitive rules for countries needing emergency aid in the future.

He also slammed the Eurogroup deal (which he called the "German plan" to stress the key role played by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the negotiations) for “crippling” Cyprus. He said the deal is “tragic” because it “sentences” Cyprus - the country’s markets and economy - to a long period of recession and debt.

Without blinking an eye, the troika of International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank (ECB) wipes out the savings of a people, while imposing draconian capital controls, sentencing two populations to generations of debt slavery. This is the new model. Other countries will surely follow.

Links:

List Released With 132 Names Who Pulled Cyprus Deposits Ahead Of "Confiscation Day"

With every passing day, it becomes clearer and clearer the Cyprus deposit confiscation "news" was the most unsurprising outcome for the nation's financial system and was known by virtually everyone on the ground days and weeks in advance: first it was disclosed that Russians had been pulling their money, then it was suggested the president himself had made sure some €21 million of his family's money was parked safely in London, then we showed a massive surge in Cyprus deposit outflows in February, and now the latest news is that a list of 132 companies and individuals has emerged who withdrew their €-denominated deposits in the two weeks from March 1 to March 15, among which the previously noted company Loutsios & Sons which is alleged to have ties with the current Cypriot president Anastasiadis.

From Sigma:

"Money transfers made within 15 days, namely from 1 until March 15. On Friday, March 15, had met the Eurogroup, which officially decided to impose a tax on deposits by companies and individuals in all financial institutions in Cyprus.

These 132 companies and individuals have withdrawn all deposits in euros, dollars and rubles, which were transferred to other banks outside Cyprus.

The disclosure of the list, which shows that the outflow of deposits from local banks other financial institutions outside Cyprus became massively raises suspicion that some had inside information about the decisions taken by the other 16 eurozone countries in exchange for financing deficits of the economy.

In listings, and the company is Loutsios and Sons Ltd, which carried 21 million deposit in a UK bank, while the owner of the company is alleged to have family ties with the President of the Republic, Nikos Anastasiadis.

The first column are names of companies and individuals in the second record of the amounts withdrawn in the third column refers to the amount withdrawn in the same currency, the currency in the fourth and the fifth and last column refers to the date of transfer.

The Timeline of the Unfolding Eurozone Crisis

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The True Welfare Queen.

Tintern Abbey in Wales is also part of the Crown Estate.

Does the Queen of England deserve a 16% hike, while the rest of the world faces increasing austerity measures? Well, does she?

After all, she has a tough job. She has to wave to crowds of adoring peasants and occasionally cut a ribbon or two. Not to mention, she employs people to do things like break in her new shoes, document and name her outfits, stir her tea, and wipe her...well, you get the point.

The Queen’s income will receive a boost next year after record profits from her lucrative Crown Estate property empire.

Controversial changes made last year tying Royal Family funding to Crown Estate profits means the Queen and royal household will be entitled to a 16 per cent hike in their official duties grant - to £36million from next April, up from £31million this year.

The rise follows the Government’s move last year to scrap the Civil List and link funding for the royals to profits from the Crown Estate, as part of a new sovereign grant.

The royal household is entitled to 15 per cent of profits from the Crown Estate - which belongs to the nation and includes a host of historic properties, such as Regent Street in the West End of London, Windsor Park, Royal Ascot and most of Britain’s coastline.

Figures for the Crown Estate reveal the portfolio enjoyed the best performance in its history, with profits rising to £240million in the year to March 31 from £231million the year before.

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Everything is Backwards.

Who got it?

The ruling class, political elite, powers that be...whatever you want to call them, have rigged the system to plunder an ever-increasing share of the world’s wealth and power, while the dwindling middle class and growing poverty sector face unemployment, soaring student debt, homelessness, sky-rocketing health care and food costs, the disappearance of retirement savings, not to mention the possible disappearance of retirement, altogether.

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality."---Michael Ellner

Enough said.

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Lessons of the Eastland Lost:: When Technology and Profit Trumps Humanity:

Early, one sunny Saturday morning, July 24, 1915, 7,000 eager and excited men, women and children, dressed in their summer Sunday best, prepared to board chartered lake steamers that would carry them across Lake Michigan, from the Chicago River piers to the picnic site in Michigan City, Indiana for Western Electric's 5th annual company picnic. The festive mood was thoroughly contagious.  Laughter and shouts filled the air as a mandolin-and fiddle orchestra belted out upbeat ragtime tunes, making the tens of thousands of people gathered at the dock, looking out at the "sea of white shirts, white duck trousers, and fluttering white handkerchiefs" waving from on deck of the large steamship, [1] totally immune to thoughts of potential tragedy.

Of all the chartered steamers, it was the SS Eastland that was the star. Bold and breathtaking, with her sleek lines, twin funnels from which rose tall plumes of smoke, at 265 feet long, 38 feet wide, weighing 1,963 tons, she was built for speed; her reputation, the fastest boat on the lakes. Despite, the Titanic tragedy, just three years prior, "newspaper ads heralded her as: 'the Twin-Screw steel ship, Eastland, Largest, Finest, and Fastest Excursion Steamship...' The ads neglected to mention that the Eastland had a history of being an unstable ship." [2]

It wasn't long before hints of impending disaster became obvious to anyone paying attention; however, the jovial atmosphere, and the encouragement of uniformed officials, and crew blinded all, but the most observantly realistic to what was to become one of the greatest and heartbreaking maritime tragedies in recent history. Oh, people noticed the tilt of the massive ship, especially upon embarking, but, apparently, thought nothing of it, given the celebratory festivity, and, even more importantly, the emboldening promotions of authority. 

Yes, the star of the show, the Eastland, was listing at an angle of at least thirty degrees! That's before the massive ship even departed. People were herded like cattle, pressed cheek to jowl, on the upper deck, waving their handkerchiefs in the air as the captain gave the order for the tug to pull her down the river, out into Lake Michigan

“When boarding the boat we all remarked jestingly: ‘The boat is listing!’ Reaching the big dancing hall on the lower deck where many hundreds of excursionists were enjoying the music, we noticed that the floor was strongly tilted. Then a man cried: ‘All hurry to the other side, lest the boat tip!’ Even now we enjoyed rushing up the sharply inclined dance floor, when suddenly the mighty boat rolled to the opposite side, and all occupants were hurled into a helpless heap. In the dance hall the furniture, the tables and chairs, the heavy piano, the large icebox and counter of the tavern, crashed upon the poor victims, so that many were killed outright. Those who had been on deck were trapped deep down in the river, under twenty-three feet of water.”

“I was one of the few who came out of the water although I was imprisoned inside the dance hall. I could swim well and tried to rescue a little girl, but a man took hold of my arm and pleaded, ‘Lady, please save me!’ I screamed: ‘Let me go! I have all I can do to save myself and this child!’ Then the fellow pulled me and the child down to the bottom. I fought him off, and in the scuffle I lost hold of the poor child. Only five other girls and men were swimming within the dance hall. Luckily they found a ledge to which they now clung, and they called me to come and hold on. For half an hour we took this rest, but the suspense became unbearable. We screamed for help. Finally we were noticed and strong arms drew us through a porthole.” - an anonymous passenger gave her account to a news reporter after she was rescued

While still moored to the dock, all aboard suddenly noticed that the ship was tipping over into the river.  After a moment of surreal silence, the horrified screaming began. "Men, women and children slid from her like ants brushed from a plank. ... The entire surface of the river was black with writhing, drowning humanity." [3] Out of the 2,500 on board, 812 met their death in all of six terrifying minutes. The death toll later reached up to as many as 1080, wiping out 22 entire families.

Later, it was disclosed that the SS Eastland was known as "the crank ship of the Lakes." This was not the first time the ship started to tip. Several times before, passengers had been ordered to shift from side to side until she stabilized. However, on this perilous day, the passengers couldn't have shifted if they wanted, they were so tightly packed together. In fact, reports of the Eastland's instability had become so widespread that in 1910 her owners, the Port Huron firm,  had run an ad in the newspaper offering $5,000 to professionals who would claim her seaworthiness.

People lined up outside the temporary morgue at the Second Regiment Armory to identify victims of
the Eastland disaster

All of the evidence pointed to the fact that the only goal of the shipbuilders was "a ship fast enough to make the 170-mile round trip between Chicago and Grand Haven Michigan, twice, in 24 hours", safety, be damned. Lawsuits were brought into the courts, by survivors courts as late as 1935.  Despite overwhelming evidence of neglect and conspiracy to cover up life threatening flaws, no one one was indicted for contributing to the disaster.

The entire Sinclair family- all eight members -perished on the Eastland

Fireman holds dead child after the Eastland tipped over.

Moreover, in a tragic twist of fate, the mandated - by the 1915 federal Seaman's Act passed because of the  Titanic disaster - complete set of lifeboats, absent on the Titanic, made the already top heavy Eastland, more so.  Although the lifeboats required by this act were said to have the potential to cause many Great Lakes boats to capsize, it was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, anyway. Never mind that the SS Eastland was already so top-heavy that it had special restrictions concerning the number of passengers that could be carried. The additional weight of the new lifeboats made the ship even more unstable than before.

The interior of the Eastland changed suddenly, as if by the dark magic of a fun house mirror. Floors became walls, port holes became skylights, and the gigantic influx of water turned the mahogany trimmed rooms into sealed chambers worthy of Harry Houdini’s worst nightmares. - Jay Bonansinga wrote in his book, The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy

One has to wonder why this tragic event was brushed under the rug while the memory of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, is as fresh as if it happened last year. Could it be that the Eastland's passengers were not as worthy of the attention, due to their "working class" status? Possibly. But more than likely, it has to do with the lessons that could have been learned from this atrocity that could've been easily prevented. What lessons? The danger of blindly trusting "officials" or so-called "authorities", while ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room. The danger of valuing profit and technology over human life. In other words, diminishing the value of humanity to a technological, profit-above-all-else society is not only dangerous to mankind, left unchecked, this type of society can wipe out mankind, or, at least, those of us who aren't in "the club".

Reference:

[1] Griggs, John. "Excursion to Death" American Heritage. February 1965: 32-35, 111.

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

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CEO Bankruptcy Bonuses

Some CEOs get bonuses even when their corporations go bankrupt.

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SOPA Supporters Distribute and Encourage File-Sharing Software Use for Pirating Copyrighted Material

Mike Mozart (see video below) of Jeepers Media discovered that the very same people who are complaining about copyright infringement, who want to impose SOPA, establishing gestapo like powers over the Internet, are the very same people who distribute file-sharing software! Why? So, they can sue you, of course.

Not only that, Hollywood is inflating piracy figures to push SOPA, and the lesser known PIPA, to censor "we the people" without due process, while cutting President Obama off from further funding, for supposedly refusing to pander. It's an election year after all.

Then there is Orin Hatch, whose INDUCE Act of 2004 set out to "illegalize anything that might make you more likely to infringe copyright. It's written in such overly broad language that you can't tell whether it would outlaw the iPod, tape recorders, libraries, the Internet, or just technology in general. After all, one could argue that all of these have made people more likely to commit copyright infringement".

The bottom line is that, per usual, We the People are made out to be the enemy, when, in reality, it's the infinitely rapacious elite - in this case, the Hollywood moguls and media corporations - employing the Hegelian Dialectic, once again. Problem, reaction, solution.

MGM vs Grokster Copyright Ruling: "We hold that one who "DISTRIBUTES" a "DEVICE" with the object of "PROMOTING" its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is "LIABLE" for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties." . . . . . . . Regardless of the device's non-infringing uses.

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