Bad News out of Savannah

Check out this report, which aired on Savannah’s local TV news affiliate, WTOC.  About two weeks ago a fire started in an apartment complex, Oaks at Brandlewood, that was inhabited by African Americans, primarily.  Apartment owners sealed off the premises and didn’t let any of the residents back on the property to recover their belongings, saying that the property was completely damaged and the building was structurally unsafe.

Rather than removing the belongings for the residents, Oaks at Brandlewood management prohibited all access and now the building will be demolished with the belongings inside.  Many of the units are only partial damaged, and certainly much of what remains inside is recoverable.

At night thieves have been rumaging through the complex and looting what remains.  This is a sheer lack of interest in the plight of the unfortunate.

The Vox: Bluffton Today and New Media for Cranky Old People

I’m in Del Webb’s Sun City Hilton Head right now.  It’s a (semi)retirement gated residential community for white boomers from the Northeast, and I have to be honest–I like it here.  There’s golf, tennis, pickleball, nature hiking, and a plethora of other activities.

There are many things that bind this community of 6,000-plus households together: old age, disdain for paying taxes, and a shared appreciation for the local rag, Bluffton Today. We’re all becoming increasingly familiar with particpatory media, in which users can interact and say whatever they want.  Newspapers have comment forums that follow stories, CNN news casts have running crawl texts of Twitter feeds, and of course blogs are templates that allow people like myself to say whatever we want without having our content vetted by anyone.  I think everyone agrees that we should consider what free speech means in this brave new world of progressive journalism.

There’s something special about Bluffton Today.  The daily is perhaps only a daily because it dedicates a huge amount of space to a section called “The Vox.”  It’s a little like the “Letter to the Editor” section, except there’s no writing involved.  Essentially, people call in and record messages on the phone, and the paper editors transcribe them, with minimal editing or redaction, and print them.  All of the messages are anonymous, so participants can say whatever they want about whatever they want.

Thankfully, the comments are culled and organized into categories that the paper provides.  They are right now “Sanford,” “Miscellaneous,” “Sun City,” “Michael Jackson,” “Illegals,” and “Business.”  See if you can match the comment with the category.

A smattering of what’s on people’s mind in Sun City, with a giant [sic]:

“All you people fussing about Governor Sanford, you better look at your own husbands and wives, 75 percent of them are messing around on you too.  So look in your own back yard before you judge him.”

“This is in response to the Vox caller complaining about the Edgefield subdivision.  If you don’t like the way things are being handled, all you have to do is move.  Also, I happen to like the rocks at the entrance; it really enhances the place.”

“My husband delivered a letter to the Hardeeville post office to mail to a friend in Tucson, Arizona, on a Tuesday.  She received it in her Thursday mail.  That’s really unheard of since we have such a problem with the Bluffton post office.  Usually it takes five days to get to her from Bluffton, but only two days from Hardeeville.”

“We should not vilify our governor.  We did that when he refused the stimulus.”

“This message is addressed to the people who run Hidden Cypress golf course.  You shut down the course for a month to get it in shape and now the tee boxes, especially 16 and 18, are being overrun by crabgrass and the green on the 16th hole is now being taken over by crabgrass on the fringes.  Please take care of this problem before we have to do it all over again.”

“…There are people dying in Iran for freedom and I just watched five hours of coverage of Michael Jackson, the child molester.  It makes me sick.”

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans; the ones absolutely certain of bringing this nation to ruin.  By preventing all possibility of us to be a nation at all would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.  There is no place for the hyphen in our citizenship.  We are a nation, not a hodgepodge of foreign nationalities.  We are a people, not a polyglot boarding house.”

“If you are considering concrete repair or resurfacing make sure you check the Better Business Bureau for complaints before you select a local contractor. “

“…American taxpayers have spent billions of dollars in military operations covering the borders of countries around the world; however, America’s borders remain open and porous to millions of illegal aliens.  Why does the United States need 69,000 troops in Germany 58 years after WWII and why are there 11,000 in Italy and another 12,000 in Great Britain?  Why do we have 40,000 in Japan?”

Good stuff!  I hope On the Media does a report on this.

Day Two: Chicago to La Crosse

We took a slow day traveling and started out by running a bit and then doing yoga.  Here’s a wrap-up of day two.

Legendary Dining Experience: We stopped at Madison, WI to find a good local place to eat, and we apparently hit the jackpot:  Mickey’s Dairy Bar.  This place still has menus, appliances, and staff from the 1950s (although the prices have jumped a bit).   It’s an institution in Madison, and since it is right outside the football stadium, it’s been featured on ESPN’s “Taste of _____” segment that they air during Saturday evening college football telecasts.

Starla, Andrew, and Leah shop: We have to come all the way to Wisconsin to shop?  Apparently so when it becomes increasingly clear that we didn’t pack enough clothes or the right type of clothes.

Andrew Eats First Boca “Burger”: Our wonderful friends hosted us in La Crosse, and we grilled out some Boca patties.  I have to say that I wasn’t repulsed by the taste, but I also wouldn’t willfully choose to eat another Boca again.

Andrew Walks in Mississippi River:  The Indigo Girls had it right:  the Mississippi is might and it starts in Minnesota.  I hopped in briefly on the Wisconsin side.

On to a long day of driving and a night of camping in the badlands.

Day One: Zombrano’s Temper and Chicago’s Upside

During the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing a special series on our road trip across the continent.  We’re taking a pastoral retreat away from the confusion and strife of Lexington.  We lit out for the territory today on a three week journey that will culminate in Victoria, British Columbia.  I hope that in writing this log, friends and family will be able to follow along on our trip, so much so that when friends ask us how the trip went, what happened, what we did, and where we went, I can just send them a link here.

We started out heading north on I 65 toward Chicago.  Leah inaugurated the leitmotif of male homoerotic entendre, which is apparently based on a Bob and Tom radio sequence.

We arrived at Wrigley Field just in time to see the start of the game.  I’ve always wanted to go to Wrigley, and now I know why:  the park is amazing.  It is itself a testament to the ritual that baseball cherishes.  There’s no rhyme or reason to the scoreboard.  There’s no replay screen; fans are expected to watch every play.

The most exciting moment happened near the end of the game, when Carlos Zombrano got ejected for arguing a play at the plate.  Leah got a great photo of it.

After the game, we had dinner with and old friend for Leah and a new friend for us, and then headed to the suburbs to stay with the Midwest installment of the McFadden clan.

Practicing Yoga; Practicing Peace

I have been practicing yoga fairly regularly for almost two years now.  I’ve  thrown up in class, come to terms with my own lack of strength, my pitiful flexibility, and I’ve reveled in the fact that my balance is way better than most of the middle-aged women in class alongside me, so long as I keep my glasses on so everything isn’t blurry.

I even subscribed to Yoga Journal, which I scan through in spite of its hypocritical and ridiculous advertisements.

It is through this source that I learned I had accumulated a basic familiarity with yoga basics:  asana, pranayama, and meditation, but that I probably didn’t know much about yoga’s deeper ethical underpinnings.

And so I learned about the concept of ashima, or “nonharming.”  According to yoga philosophy, ahisma is the opportunity to relinquish hostility and irritability, and instead make space within your consciousness for peace.  I like this concept of making a space for peace, because it is practical advice for following the ethic of God’s Kingdom.  How is one a peacemaker.  How does one make space for peace, internally and externally?

This is easier said than done, but the intentional practice of ahimsa is a pathway to making this ethic of peace a reality.  As the Yoga Sutra says, “around one who is solidly established in nonviolence, hostility disappears.”

Bluegrass-Aspendale Housing

Some friends of mine who also live in the East End neighborhood in Lexington are involved in a historical preservation project, which seeks to document the remarkable people, places, and buildings that have passed through the area over the years.

One of these places is the Bluegrass-Aspendale housing development.  Built in stages between 1936 and 1951, the development was Lexington’s first venture into public housing.  Initially, it was segregated.  Bluegrass Park was occupied by whites; Aspendale by blacks.  It wasn’t until January 1974 (well into the civil rights movement) that a 300-yard fence, which separated whites from blacks, was torn down.  This fence actually had barbed wire coils on the top of it, since, as Robert Frost once said, good fences make good neighbors.

At its peak, Bluegrass-Aspendale housing complex had 963 units. But around 1990, the Lexington Housing Authority began to thin out the neighborhood by demolishing 295 units. In October 2005 the housing authority received a federal grant to demolish what remained of Bluegrass-Aspendale and redevelop the site. New apartments have already been built, along with a new school. More apartments and single-family homes are planned.

Today, historical ethnographers interpret Bluegrass-Apendale as an example of the challenges faced when cities try to revitalize urban neighborhoods.  It is at least this, and a reminder of the toll that visible signs of segregation can take on a community.

Single Payer Healthcare

Our nation needs to have a single payer healthcare provider:  the U.S. government.  Every year, 22,000 people in our country die because they do not have access to healthcare.

There’s talk and speculation that Barack Obama might attempt to do something about this, but such talk might be optimism.  A Harper’s article juxtaposed the Obama of the mid 1990s with the current Hope and Change President:

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health-care program,” Barack Obama said in 2003. “As all of us know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, we have to take back the House.” And yet as Democrats began to take all of those things back, Obama began to reconsider. In 2007, he recast the debate in terms that were more reflective than prescriptive. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he told The New Yorker, “then a single-payer system would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off.” And now that Democrats have the White House, the Senate, and the House, it is clear that a single- payer program is not a part of their agenda.

I urge everyone to support Single Payer Action, a group dedicated to working toward a solution where all people in the United States will be taken care of.

Payday Advances

Some time last year I wrote a post about the roots of our consumer credit crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis. In that post, I likened the predatory lending and ultimate greed that caused our financial demise to the national behavior of Judah in the Eighth Century B.C.E.  The biblical poet Amos, writing during that time, chastises his audience for trampling the heads of the poor and taking advantage of social policies that extort them.  Surely the Lord will not revoke punishment.

Once again, it’s no secret that the bane of the United States’ existence is its dirty habit of taking advantage of the poorest people in the nation.  Some examples of this include the liquor stores and instant tax rebate stands on every corner in my neighborhood or, even more obviously, our nation’s unwillingness to provide health care to everyone.  To this list we should add the payday lending industry, one of the most infuriating injustices that exists.

Operations like Check Into Cash and Check ‘n Go occupy most rural working class areas, and they are especially prolific in lower class urban areas, like the derelict strip malls and shopping centers on Lexington’s Winchester Rd. 

Daniel Brook’s essay in the current Harper’s, “Usury Country,” exposes how small-town entrepreneurs prey on poor people and fleece them of their money.  I suspect that most people reading this blog know that payday lending joints exist and perhaps even drive by them every day.  Yet few realize exactly how they operate, why they are so repugnant, or what we should do about them.

A typical payday loan transaction seems innocent enough.  If a person needs cash on March 22, say for an unexpected medical bill or for a rent payment to stave off eviction, he signs a few papers and essentially agrees to sell his forthcoming $325 weekly paycheck in exchange for an immediate $295.  He does this by writing a “bad” check to the lender.  Then, a week later, when he does actually get his $325 check on the March 29 payday, he must repay $325 to the lender.  The $30 is a fee for the loan.

The problem is that other expenses exist in life, and when March 29 comes around and the person gets his check, he’s of course already spent the $295 he got, and he’s dipped into the money from his March 29 check to buy gas, groceries, cigarettes, scratch-off lotto tickets, not to mention karate lessons for his son.  His only choice is to go back to the payday advance center and take out another loan for $325, plus a $40 fee.  The next week, April 5, he’ll owe $365, as per the terms of his new loan agreement.  But remember, his check on April 5 will only be for $325, so unless he does not spend a dime over the next week and manages to scrape together an extra $40, he’ll have to take out yet another loan, with yet another fee.  Without assistance from another source, this is impossible.  Payday lending is an endless cycle of crippling debt.

The numbers behind this industry are astonishing.  We convulse when we hear of credit cards that charge a 25 percent APR, but, most payday lending rates are at least ten times higher.  According to the Check Into Cash website, a $100 payday advance with a $15 fee equates to a 391 percent APR.  A $100 late utility bill with a $46 reconnection fee equates to a 1203 percent APR.  Clearly, most people would be better off charging up credit cards.

These rates are so absurd that common sense would suggest that only people on the extreme margins of society would partake of payday lending.  Such people are only the most desperate and almost certainly addicted to drugs.  The fact is that this is just not true.  According to Brook’s article, in the early 1990s there were less than 200 payday lending stores in the United States.  Today, there are more than 22,000 that serve over 10 million households each year.  It’s a $40 Billion industry per year, and there are more payday lending stores than McDonald’s restaurants  in the U.S.  What this tells me is that payday lending is extremely common, and that it is a relatively recent trend, a new scheme to take advantage of the most disadvantaged people in our society.

There are many complex reasons why people partake of payday lending services.  Some people actually are drug users and depend on immediate cash to satiate their habit.  Others suffer from oppressive medical bills and have no other access to credit.  Usually, though, such people live in denial and see their loan as a temporary strategy to make it through a rough week.  Payday lenders know full well that most of their clients do literally live paycheck to paycheck, and so they develop strategies to target these people.  And, if clients cannot pay off their debt at the end of the week, lenders ruthlessly go after their friends, mortgage holders, or landlords.

If these avenues prove ineffective, payday lenders will seek action through the criminal justice system.  They can do this because all loans are filtered through checks rather than “traditional” loan documents.

So what can we do about these enterprises?  Many states have regulations in place that limit the amount of interest lenders can charge or the amount of loans that can be distributed in a single transaction.  However, there are always loopholes around these laws, and most state legislatures see payday lenders as legitimate businesses that deserve the same rights and protections as other businesses operating in our free market.

Recently, in Kentucky, legislators passed laws that stabilize and protect current lenders.  We need to address state representatives and implore them to advance laws that aggressively root out exploitative payday lenders.

Jim Cramer on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show

It seems that the best way to get people to visit your blog is to write about things that are currently buzzing in our media and culture.  No, this post is not about Syracuse University’s amazing 6 OT win over UConn last night.  Instead, I’m going to urge everyone to watch Jon Stewart’s interview with MSNBC financial guru Jim Cramer.

As Howard Kurtz from The Washington Postnotes, Stewart casts aside his over-the-top comical mode and asks serious questions of Cramer, who functions in this interview as a stand-in for our entire corporatized news media.  Stewart demonstrates how Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, understands the “shenanigans” that allowed investment returns to roll in at 30 percent per year for most of the 2000s.  The crucial question Stewart asks is, do shows like Cramer’s Mad Money have an ethical responsibility to be critical, investigative journalists?  Regardless of what the answer to this question is, Stewart’s interview makes it clear to me that our favorite phrase to use when talking about “our current economic crisis,” “we never saw this coming,” is a complete fiction.  I don’t care what Kurtz thinks.

The interview is an example what happens when satire exfoliates to become serious social critique.  Many people who know me also know that I edit a satirical newspaper, The Colonel. Our stories have often been accused of blurring the line between fact and fiction, so much so that the stories are not funny.  I think what Stewart’s interview shows us is that satire does not have to be funny to be effective.  Rather, it’s the context of Stewart as a comedian and political commentator that makes his critique forceful.

Speaking Truth to Power in a Press Conference

Yesterday, an ABC sports studio segment called attention to a recent tirade by UConn men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun.

Apparently, during a post-game press conference, a reporter blindsided Calhoun by asking him how he reconciles the fact that he is the highest paid state employee while there exists a $2 billion budget deficit.  As you can see, Calhoun didn’t like the implications of this question, and claimed that the basketball program brings in $12 million dollars for the university.

The exchange here between Calhoun and the reporter is a microcosm of a longstanding debate about high profile college athletics.  How can we justify shelling out millions of dollars for coaches, training facilities, travel, and so on when many higher education institutions, especially those supported by state tax dollars, are experiencing massive budget shortfalls.?  The cost of receiving an education rises exponentially each year, and even public land grant universities, first founded with the idea that each state has the responsibility to educate its own citizenry.  Further, those actually doing the educating in universities like UConn are being exploited and undercompensated.

The ABC studio hosts debated whether Calhoun was justified in his rage.  One perspective says that the coach is right:  while he draws a large salary, that salary is pocket change when compared to the television revenues, endorsements, scholarship dollars, and other benefits bestowed to UConn for having a successful basketball team.  The other perspective says that Calhoun should not have been so unprofessional to tell the reporter to “shut up,” and that these questions of exorbinant salaries in a general time of “economic crisis” are in fact relevant.

I actually applaud the reporter for having the courage to ask a common sense and valid question.  The media should be asking similar questions of many public figures.  This economic crisis reorients our notion of entitlement and “fair compensation.”

And I applaud the reporter for calling attention to this issue yet again.  Calhoun might be right:  his salary (and the salaries of coaches like him) don’t cost tax payers anything, since these salaries often come from athletic department revenues.  It’s not that simple though (it never is).  Even if athletic departments are “self-sufficient,” that does not justify their extravagance.  Nor does it speak to the reality that widespread allegiance to college athletics causes donors to sink much of their support into booster organizations and ticket funds, rather than scholarship endowments or other investments that would more directly improve the quality of undergraduate education at our universities.

College atheletics are always connected to the universities that support them, so for Calhoun to simply dismiss this reporter as irrational and stupid doesn’t make sense.  There’s a reason why the coach looked so uncomfortable when asked to justify his salary.