Thursday, May 15, 2014
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Postcard from the End of America: Manhattan
by Linh Dinh / May 5th, 2014
Getting
off the Greyhound bus at the Port Authority Terminal, I immediately saw
a man in
his mid 50′s digging through a garbage can. With his right hand, he
held a plastic tray on which were placed whatever edible scraps he could
find. Lickable flecks clung to his ample brown beard. Chewing while
scavenging, he was quite leisurely with his task and no one among the
many people sitting or standing nearby paid him any attention. Done with
one trash can, he moved to the next, and since there were so many in
this huge building, I imagined his daily buffet to be quite ample and
varied.
Like central libraries, bus stations are daytime
havens for America’s homeless, but the man described above is a throw
back of sort, for his number has dwindled considerably ever since
Giuliani decided to hose most of them away. Los Angeles has its Skid
Row, San Francisco the Tenderloin, and you can find hundreds of roofless
Americans sprawling all over Northwest DC, the showcase quarter, but
much of Manhattan has become quite
sanitized, purged of not just the homeless but any other kind of poorer
Americans, as well as the artsy, Bohemian types, who have mostly
migrated to Brooklyn. Pumped up by Wall Street, much of Manhattan has
become off limits to all but the super affluent. You can work there,
sure, after taking two trains and a bus, but don’t think of moving in,
not even into a closet, or curtained off corner of a roach motel-sized,
shared apartment. As the rest of the country sinks, this island is
buoyed by bailouts and quantitative easing directly deposited into its
too-big-to-fail swindling houses, but hey, the Bangladeshi cab drivers
and CUNY-graduated waiters and bellhops also get their short stacks of
nickels and dimes, so don’t bitch, OK? Dwelling in this Green Zone, it
would be easy to think that this country’s near collapse is but a
ridiculous rumor.
Speaking of Gotham cabbies, only 8% are
native-born these days, and pointing to
this fact, Pat Buchanan blames the liberal welfare state for the
decline of the American work ethics. What he ignores is that the terms
for driving a cab in New York are
so bad, even many Pakistani immigrants have stopped driving. Instead of
pocketing a share of each fare, most drivers must rent their vehicle at
a fixed rate, so that they may even lose money at the end of a 12-hour
shift. Thanks to an increasingly superfluous supply of labor, however,
you can always get someone to do anything, and this is the direct result
of having a porous border in a sinking economy. Globalism is not just
about exporting decent jobs, but also importing cheap labor until
everyone everywhere makes just about nothing. That’s the master plan,
dude, so although ningún ser humano es ilegal is self-evidently true,
it’s also a smoke screen to make slaves out of us all.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Media Pile On
Don Sterling Yes, the Empire NO!
by Phillip Faruggio / May 4th, 2014
Let
me preface these new thoughts by stating that what another billionaire
says or does because he feels ‘above the rest of we serfs‘ is never
surprising to me. What Don Sterling, owner
of the Clippers basketball team, said and implied is murmured to this
writer many times by many people… always in either whispers or in secure
settings. Racism is alive and well in Amerika, as it always has been
since our founding. What cracks me up is how much television and radio
time is reserved for this latest “major scandal”. One can understand the
sports media jumping all over this incident. Yet, even they have
devoted too much time in bombarding us with what this man said, past and
present. Enough already! Oh, yes! The league is suspending him for life
from the game, but… he will keep ownership of his team. But wait! They
may push him to sell… for over $500 million for a team he bought for
less than $20 million. Poor Don Sterling.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Lessons Learned as I Prepare for Retirement
I have looked forward to retiring for years. The idea of having
control of my time to do what I want sounds about as good at it gets. As
an obsessively organized person who likes to have a bit of control over
things, I am not comfortable adopting a wait and see attitude,
especially when it comes to something as important as planning for my
retired life. I don't want to let retirement just happen. I want to do
what I can to provide for the best second act possible.
About
four years ago I began seriously researching retirement. I visited
popular websites, read books, subscribed to newsletters and joined AARP
in an effort to get a better handle on what was ahead. During the
process I created a blog to share my discoveries and get feedback from
those navigating their own personal retirement journey. What I have
learned has caused me to adjust some of my initial perceptions and
raised my optimism for the future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)