*MARTA pins its hopes on a transportation tax…wait, why does MARTA have any hopes?
*And, seriously no snark here, I’m glad someone is trying to think outside the box to fix one of America’s systemic problems.
*You’re gonna have to pry the oil from Georgia’s cold, dead hands.
*For real. Cold. Dead. Hands.
*The New York Times had an interesting op/ed piece suggesting that there might be other uses for parking lots, since they’re basically America’s equivalent of a public square.
*And the Wall Street Journal has its normal dissociative problem where the headline suggests some Republican ecological fantasy but the body of the article says the exact opposite. In this case the headline suggests that unnecessary regulation is keeping farmers from making a good living, when in actuality what the government is regulating is the use of water in a place that is basically a desert and shouldn’t be farmland in the first place. Oh yeah, and they just got through one of the worst droughts on record. Damn communiss!
*Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of When the Lights Go Out, uses a small suburban town in Kansas as the spine of a brief tale of how Peak Oil and Climate Change will combine to totally screw over middle America. Sweet dreams.
*But none of these things have anything to do with the massive shortfall in funding for public education. Of course not. Course not.
The AJC was chock full of urban decay stories yesterday. In case you missed it, here are a few of them:
*According to a recent Sperlings Best Cities survey Atlanta is one of the fifteen most stressful cities to live in. One of the main reasons is that the ATL has the third longest commute time per capita in the country. But you’ll pry my endless miles of wasteful concrete from my cold, dead, stressed out hands.
*Atlanta metro and its environs is having some serious sewer problems. The most terrifying thing in this article is the supposed 22 million gallon sewage spill in NW Atlanta. 22 million!?
*Poor Boomers. You don’t get to retire on your private yacht at 55.
*And when news sources like the AJC are actually posting shit like this, you know its gone mainstream. And all the people in this country with a shred of deductive ability heave a collective, “Duh!” Apparently more drilling doesn’t actually effect gas prices.
*Think Progress has an interesting article about transportation use and urban planning in our fair, dysfunctional city.
*While we’re at it, Talking Points Memo also ran a story about public transportation and the end of the Happy Motoring Age.
*And while we’re still at it, Salon chatted a bit about the end of cheap gasoline. They say get used to $4 a gallon. I say get used to $5.
*One more: Rolling Stone and the race for earth’s last resources.
*David Graeber, one of the masterminds behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, is interviewed here and here by The Boston Review. His new book Debt has just been released and it is creating a shit ton of buzz. I bought my copy today. I’ll let you know what I think later.
*The Greek debt time bomb just ticks and ticks and ticks. But, hey, the markets ain’t worried.
*The Wall Street Journal has a pile of dog crap article about the supposed Generation Jobless. Everything surrounding the article suggests that the article is actually going to tackle the rampant unemployment among the Millennials, but instead the article takes the time to highlight the gobs of money that can be made in–wait for it–selling f-ing knives! They, of course, forget to mention that for every one person who makes it with Cutco, about 25 have their dignity completely dragged through the muddy ranks of the lowest dregs. I sold Cutco knives for about thirty-five minutes and as soon as I realized the only way to make it with them was to shill the product to my friends and family (ie, get mom and Aunty Rita to buy a few sets) I bailed for more productive horizons. This article ironically highlights the reasons why the Millennials are so screwed: the only successes in the article are the ones who are willing to do hard sales. I’m not sure when Americans will understand this, but not everyone is a salesman…and that’s a good thing.
*To follow up with their great interviews series with the leaders of the OWS movement, Minyanville has a pretty straight-forward rundown of the top offenders on the growing list of people who should be occupied.
*CNN profiles some Dutch dudes who think they’ve figured out a way to put farm supermarkets inside urban centers.
*Minyanville finds where the jobs are…North f-ing Dakota. Seriously, $17 an hour for jobs at McDonalds.
*My buddy at Chicago Urbanist turned me on to The Atlantic City, which had a profile of the building types that can pretty much be entirely blamed for America’s current energy problems.
*Minyanville also had some awesome interviews with David Graeber (one of the organizers of OWS), one of the economists who most likely coined the term “the 99%,” and Kalle Lasn of AdBusters, which is the anti-capitalist crew that got the ball rolling on OWS. Here is a money quote from Graeber:
“Well, I think that the problem of asking for demands is that, who are you demanding them of? You’re in a sense saying to the people in power, “We would like you to do things differently. Do something for us. Save the whales. Who’s going to save the whales? I’m not going to save the whales, I guess they’re going to go out and save the whales.” But it’s a little ambiguous and slogans like that. But ultimately the idea of protest is you’re saying, “You people in power are doing this wrong and we want you to do something.” And even if that something is “step aside,” you are addressing them directly.
The kind of politics we represent—we represent, I think, we’re more interested in a language of visions, a language of solutions than a language of demands, because we think that the political structure which we would be making demands of is itself part of the problem. It would be like making a demand of people to be someone else. They’re not going to do that.
So rather than recognize the existing structures, we’re saying this isn’t a democratic system at all. It’s completely owned by Big Money. We call ourselves a democracy, but it’s increasingly a sham. As evidence of which the fact that they’re not even talking about the problems that most Americans face in any kind of serious way. And it’s not that there aren’t ideas of how you could resolve this. The problem is there’s hundreds floating around. There’s no possibility of those in power even looking at them or thinking about them, even talking about what the actual, day-to-day dilemmas most Americans face.
So, if this isn’t a democracy, what we want to do is, first of all, create a vision of what democracy actually would be to remind people that it’s possible. And, at the same time, by contrast, demonstrate just how corrupt and undemocratic the system, which is going around the world claiming to promote democracy and represent democracy but doesn’t practice at all, actually is.“
*The New York Times profiled three aggro-entrepreneurs who are bending the rules of what is possible in our bold American future. The best one is the guy in Ohio who has a lawncare business that includes a truck and bunch of sheep.
Nothing is more perfect for surreal juxtapositions than news websites.
*Noreen Malone at New York magazine has a lengthy, but extremely insightful, take on the Millennial generation, which both highlights the very real economic consequences of coming of age in the middle of the Great Recession and also the generational qualities that might be contributing to the impetus for Occupy Wall Street.
*So, in case you haven’t heard, both Occupy Atlanta and Occupy Oakland got raided last night and were driven out of their respective occupied parks. Here’s the local rag’s take on Occupy ATL. As has been typical of the coverage here, the angle is entirely from the view of the police and Mayor. This article takes it one step further by actively digging up probably out-of-context dirt on the supposed “leader” of the OATL crowd. Not only is this stupid because the Occupy protests have publicly stated repeatedly that no one is truly leading these things, but also the journalism is lazy as hell. On top of that this article is tacitly implying that Mr. Franzen is somehow ineligible to be upset about his circumstances and the circumstances of other Americans because he appeared in videos celebrating a lifestyle that seems on the face of it, only a stone’s throw away from the very lifestyle he’s now protesting. But two questions come up immediately when one looks at these videos critically: 1.) Is Mr. Franzen merely a paid actor in these internet clips, and 2.) is making internet videos that show people how to live life to the fullest on a budget really anything like owning a $22 million yacht? The thing is, the author of this article didn’t try to answer any either of these questions because the purpose of the article was not to actually report anything, but to dig up dirt that could be used to discredit the only face that has emerged out of a roiling hydra of a protest movement. At every turn the corporate media proves just how intolerant they are for anything that steps outside the mainstream.Occupy ATL has been fighting an uphill battle from minute one. They have had nearly every aspect of their protest blown out of proportion, from the supposed snubbing of Rep. Lewis to the “levitation” scandal (which was actually an homage to this event), the local media and citizenry have sought to discredit the movement from the very beginning. It’s a shame that in a city with nearly 1/3 of its citizens living under the poverty line and horribly obvious racial and socioeconomic segregation there would be such outright hatred toward the only group willing to stand up and point out the inherent hypocricy in the supposed American Dream.
Occupy Oakland, on the other hand, had a quite different evening than Occupy ATL. They got the ole bean-bag-tear-gas treatment. Why images like this don’t fly every red-blooded American into a blind rage is beyond me.
*But it’s alright folks, Delta post quarterly profits of $549 million. I’m sure they’ll share that with the rest of us.
*Chalk this one up as yet another story about the collapse of America. We are collapsing, folks. The evidence is everywhere if you step outside of a Walmart for four and a half seconds.
*Business Insider has a seriously awesome view of the American decline circa the year 2300. While the sci-fi elements are super-cliched the concise rundown of the obvious fatal flaws in the American system is very illuminating.
*Let’s end on a bright note, Yahoo! Finance has an optimistic view of the future.
I’ve been spending the last few days working my way through this 59-page report from 2000 by the Brookings Institute about the 2000 Census information on the Atlanta Metro area. There is nothing particularly illuminating for anyone who’s actually taken a look around this place and paid attention, but I’ve never read anything that pinpoints so clearly the confluence of environmental, architectural, fiscal, and political problems swirling around this city.
The money quote comes on page 26 when the report puts the insanity of Atlanta’s car-dominated culture in pure dollars and cents:
“As a result of traffic congestion, the average Atlanta-region driver faced 68 hours of traffic delays in 1997, compared to 30 hours in 1990, and only 16 hours a year in 1982. These delays exact a cost not only in time, but in pollution. Atlanta drivers wasted 214 million gallons of gasoline sitting in traffic in 1997–106 gallons of excess fuel per driver. The combination of delay and excess fuel consumption costs the region more than $2 billion a year, and eligible drivers more than $1100 a year.”
And then there’s this:
“The average per capita driving distance in Atlanta is 35 miles per day–farther than an city on Earth.”
And these stats were taken in 1997. Since then Atlanta metro has literally doubled in size. Can you image how much money is being wasted every year during Atlanta’s still-terrible traffic? $2 billion when there were 2.5 million people and now there’s 5 million!? When you compare this with the niggling over the $6 billion for the T-SPLOST it completely boggles the mind, the terrible dysfunction of a society that is willing to waste billions of dollars sitting alone in cars, when those billions could instead be spent on productive, and greener technologies and solutions.
*The AJC has an article pointing out what becomes obvious if you spend anytime driving around Atlanta and the surrounding environs: the city is falling apart. In this episode of American Unexceptionalism, we see neighbors screwing neighbors via the age-old tradition of lowering property values. There truly is a sort of irony in a mortgage crisis hitting a country that has been so damn obsessed with property value for the last fifty years.
*Speaking of crazytown, the AJC also has an article about the deepening of the Savannah port, which beats around the bush but ultimately asks the question: why is this infrastructure such a sacred cow when other infrastructure projects are anathema? That’s a valid question, brah. The answer is simple, really: The petrol-addicted populace of this great city is too infatuated with the bottom-line that they fail to see the long-term economic benefits of light rail, but they see the benefits in a make Savannah a world-class port. I am personally all for deepening the port, but then again I’m always up for infrastructure investment, so, you know, take my endorsement with a grain of salt.
*Aljazeera NA has a plan for giving ailing cities extra tax revenue: tax empty houses. At first glance this idea seems completely ludicrous. Firstly, land and the buildings on land are already taxed whether they are empty or not. Secondly, an empty house is usually indicative of some serious financial stress (maybe the owner can’t afford the house and has walked away? Maybe the owner can’t rent it out? Maybe the owner can’t sell it and is trapped in a despondent loop of self-loathing that they can’t escape?), and creating a special tax for empty houses both seems unenforceable, and also a bit like throwing some leeches on a patient who is dying of hemophilia. Maybe I’m not reading this right, but I don’t buy that this plan would do anything but put one more unenforceable law on the books and stress already stressed homeowners.
*Frieze has a totally killer article that links the increasingly scattered nature of modern protest movements like OWS and the London riots to the Hausmannization of Paris and the barricades of the 19th century, when laborers and communists and anarchists went to the streets and fought for what was rightfully theirs. It used to be that blocking a street was the way to get attention. the barricade itself made a stage on which the drama of class struggle could be played out. But now, with the increasingly fractured media environment, the power of images is paramount, and so small, provocative and unpredictable flashes of rebellion are the call of the day.
*T-SPLOST is ready to be voted down by the voters of Atlanta.
*Here’s today’s sign of the impending apocalypse. The headline reads: “Dekalb Shell Station Mobbed During Gas Giveaway.” Just imagine what people will do if important shit, like food, actually gets expensive.
*Today’s sign of the Apocalypse, volume II: Dudes are stealing bridges for money, now. Bridges!
*A pretty good video and article about The Automatic Earth founder, Nicole Foss’s, plans to make the effects of Peak Oil and future economic destruction as painless as possible.
*Soooo, Anonymous sort of, like, didn’t actually do what they might have said they were going to do, unless of course it wasn’t them who said they were going to do it.
*Meanwhile, the menagerie of GOP candidates are convinced that unicorns and fairy dust are going to get us out of this mess. I, personally, think it’s more likely to be crocodiles with ticking clocks in their bellies.
*Occupy Wall Street has now officially spread to Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, Kansas City, San Fran, etc., etc., etc. Cops across the country have more or less said we are heading toward the end of their patience in w/r/t these protests, so expect more of this in the next few days.
*Here’s the transcript from Slavoj Zizek’s, the infamous philosopher’s, remarks to the protesters at OWS. The beginning is classic:
“Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end.”
*A cool story about Radiohead and the OWS protests. While not being entirely unfair to the band, there is an air of ridicule involved. I mean, these guys have been screaming about revolution more or less for over a decade, and now that it’s going on right under their noses, they don’t even show up to take a gander?
*And the last word on OccupyAtlanta: Kasim Reed isn’t going to start throwing the protesters out just yet, but he’s getting pretty pissed that a perfectly fine city park is getting ruined.
Lost Atlanta 