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February 17th, 2009
 | 12:39 pm - hopscotch
The leftover-from-Bush-era-no-matter-what-the-Post-says Justice Department is defending Bush's liberalization of law that allows concealed firearms in national parks. Mind you, I have no problem with unconcealed firearms in western National Parks, where shooting off a gun if you are injured may be the fastest way to help someone find you, since cell phones don't generally work in places like Big Bend and the Grand Canyon and some of the other enormous tracts of land. I'm just not fond of concealed firearms; I tend not to like nasty surprises.
Senate Democrats are checking the ethics of legal opinions in the Bush era that okayed waterboarding prisoners. And a line in an internal Justice Department memo is connecting Bush's support for waterboarding with political influence. USAToday finds that a majority of people (roughly 2/3 of those surveyed) want a criminal investigation or an independent panel to investigate the Bush Administration's torture tactics.
Does anyone but me remember that old ShakeNBake commercial with the little girl who said, "and I halped" ? Well, in the case of the Maryland State Police spying on peacemongering antiwar Maryland citizens innocent of any crime, the Pentagon 'halped'. It should be noted that the spying was inept enough that the cops did not realize at times that they were spying on DC residents (in Takoma Park, one of the roads is the boundary line for the District, and they were on the wrong side of it) and therefore operating outside their jurisdiction.
The Army wants more immigrants. I am very wary of this. It works against people who believe in peacemaking more than in the military, and is a throwback of sorts to the Civil War, in which Northerners hired poor immigrant Irish to fight in their place.
The Pentagon is rethinking its ban on photos of coffins of military personnel killed in war.
Blackwater is being banned by Iraq. So they changed their name to Xe.
Federal authorities are investigating graft in the actions of US officers in Iraq.
If you want a prosecution commision to investigate Bush and Cheney, you may want to look at this link.
Poverty in Upstate New York. You may be surprised; I am not. This is where I grew up, went to university and lived for many years. New York is a state divided by wealth; now, wealth is downstate, in the City, on the Island, in Westchester and Orange and the counties near the City, and to some degree up the Hudson. West of there, north of there, it is a rural state with medium-sized industrial cities whose industrial bases have been hacked apart by political policies and economic change. It is a rural state of dairy farms, miles of orchards and vineyards, vegetable farms and processing plants, lumbering and horse farms, vacation cottages and small wealthy enclaves. It is a place where the "commute" to a job might be 70 miles or more a day, because that's the only job available. Beautiful scenery doesn't put food on the table. Buses and other forms of public transportation that were common after World War II have declined since; trolleys and trams no longer extend 20 or 30 miles out from the cities, and buses run once a day if that on the major roads only, mostly not useful for working people commuting, especially if they're not on the first shift.
When I walk or drive through Rochester, it takes no great effort to track the loss of jobs and industries, and it's not just the big ones, like the places where Kodak has closed plants that housed 10,000 workers. It's also the loss of the smaller ones, like the button factory that made buttons for every kind of clothing; although Hickey Freeman is still making expensive men's suits, I suspect it's smaller than it used to be, also. There were factories making women's clothing, and I remember the location of the building while I forget its name. It's the loss of cloth and flower mills, small factories and shops making technical instruments that served the larger industries, like the little place in a village 20 miles outside the city that made ceramic coatings for the exterior sections of NASA's spacecraft, and the small machine shops that served Bausch & Lomb and General Motors. Every large factory that goes down takes the small ones in its shadow as well unless they can find other clients.
Within my memory there were four or five daily and weekly newspapers flourishing in Rochester; now there is one, owned by Gannett, and I wouldn't call something that's 24 or 30 pages on most days 'flourishing'. There was a German-language daily paper, and a Hebrew-language one as well when I was a child. Now there may still be a business journal printed on pink paper, and a weekly Catholic paper sent out to Catholics, but that's about it. That was also when there were trolleys on the streets, and stores side by side without gaps on Main Street, and the biggest one was the independently owned Sibley's, which had a library in it, which delivered your groceries for you if you lived within the city, which sold furniture and wedding gowns and gardening tools and every kind of clothing and household goods and had a good restaurant on the top floor as well as the coffee shop down on the first floor next to the grocery store. The people who worked there worked there for a lifetime; some of the saleswomen my mother knew from the time she came to Rochester in the 1940s to when the store was bought up by the May Company and destroyed in the 1980s.
I can also remember when the Richardson's Root Beer factory, Standard Ale factory and Old Topper Beer factor stood in the same area of town, along with Genesee Beer (the only one still there), and the air smelled interesting when you drove by. And let's not forget that within the Rochester Metro area there were several hospitals that closed as well, three I can think of offhand, which means that a lot of skilled medical personnel had to find other work.
What did the people do when the factories closed? Some moved from one to another; some job skills were transferable. Some retired, if they had pensions and health care. Some moved to other places where there were still jobs, as long as those jobs lasted, if they had the money for the move. Some took on two or three jobs to stay afloat.
The single largest employer in the city now is the University of Rochester. Not Kodak. Not Xerox (formerly Sybron, founded in Rochester). Not Taylor Instruments or the Gleason Works.
And every one of those places that closed employed a lot of people, some of whom lived in the area and some commuting from the villages and towns elsewhere in the county. Now? Drive through some of those areas and it's like a ghost town. It's like Lackawanna when the steel mills went down, when the entire city lost something like 50% of its employment in the same day.
People still need to eat, out in the country. It's not impossible to be hungry even while you're living in your great-great-great grandfather's heritage cobblestone house, even when the land behind the house will grow pretty much anything you throw into it. Western New York has always been a place of entrepreneurs, but before the Internet it was hard to get anyone's interest in what you were doing unless you left home for a city. Now, I'm not sure it's much better in some places -- and when food is tight, and the electric bills go up, not everyone has money for or access to a computer. Federal unemployment rates are generally understood to be half of the real unemployment rate; poverty rates are also undercounted, because some people are too proud to accept help even when they're hungry, and some don't think they're eligible, and some don't have transportation to get to where they can receive it. If the office where the free cheese is given out is downtown and you live away from the bus route in the country, and it costs you a $5 gallon of gas to get there and back, you're going to think twice about how much you gain from that brick of cheese. (Yes, gas prices in New York State are higher than in DC.)
It doesn't help to be in a tourist area. During the season there's employment and people manage to make what money they can, though mostly in service jobs and not too many professional positions unless you count fishing guides and other very seasonal work. After that? It's a lot like a ghost town with fancy buildings. The poorest (and smallest) central school district in the state is Chautauqua Central School -- because located within that district is one square mile of the wealthiest land in the state, Chautauqua Institution, whose property values rival those in Manhattan. The rest of the district is dairy farms and hamlets. But that one square mile skews the income taxes for the district so that the 550 or so students in the district receive the minimum amount of state funding for their school. I have no idea how they keep the lights on, or pay the gas bill. Back in the mid-80s, the neighboring Panama Central School District drilled its own natural gas well to heat its two small schools. It was estimated that the gas would run out about now; however, by law, schools (like governments) are supposed to support themselves each year from annual taxes. I'm not sure if they were able to set up a dedicated fund to pay the fuel bills when the well runs out.
I love Western New York; parts of it will always be home to me. It hurts to see how difficult life continues to be for people there. And this isn't just happening in New York state. It has been happening across the country. We are not the first world any more; we are a country with third-world rural areas and small cities, punctuated by some first-world wealth, where education is not the infallible remedy for the region because those who earn an education often must leave in order to survive.
In order for this to change, transportation needs to be rethought. Access to public transportation needs to be considered a utility, the same as water (there is municipal water, either from the city or the villages, throughout most of the county). If access to transportation is considered a necessity instead of an option or a luxury, it may be possible to create situations in which people can live where they live and still find work to support themselves without having to move away, where they can gain easier access to education and opportunities. Rochester had such transportation in 1946; it could have it again, if money was made possible at some level to create or renew it. And so could the smaller Southern Tier cities like Jamestown and Olean, Wellsville and Johnson City and Endicott and Corning, and the Finger Lakes cities of Canandaigua and Ithaca.
If you absorb information better from movies, and you want to know more, watch Nobody's Fool, with Paul Newman, set in the Mohawk Valley in New York state, but applicable anywhere else in the state.
Some journalists are trying to be creative in their newsgathering and publishing. Well, God knows we could *use* some straight talk about the Fairness Doctrine, but I'm not seeing a lot of it here. Still, it could come back, requiring broadcasters to air both sides of every issue -- and wouldn't that have been worth the price of admission for the last eight years, to see FauxNews actually having to air competing opinions? Meanwhile, there's no progressive radio within Washington DC, and we have one newspaper whose formerly excellent non-ideological reporting has slid inexorably to the right (Katherine Graham is rotating in her grave at a high speed, I have no doubt) and one that is owned and operated by a far-right-wing Korean ideologue who acts as the mouthpiece for the radical Republicans even in its news coverage.
Which means that the ultra-radical Republicans now in Congress won't be seen in a neutral light.
What does it really mean when the Saudi king appoints a woman to a high government position?
Forgotten books. An online catalog with links to downloads in some cases. Some of the titles are amazing.
I appear to be intermittently offline; if you are not hearing back from me, try again. The Ethernet is working, but nothing is coming in at times.
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