So, I emailed Cleveland Scene writer Sam Allard links to three stories: Amazon fulfillment centers don’t boost employment, analysis finds; Amazon patents wristband that tracks warehouse workers’ movements and a piece from The Atlantic (much more below). Scene has published extensively about the mega-corporation’s tendrils and Cleveland—mostly about the aftermath of our secret society’s attempt to lure the company here—but also the two warehouses the company does intend to build on the sites of the former Randal Park and Euclid Square malls.

The first two stories are important, but the third, Alana Semuels’ What Amazon Does to Poor Cities: The debate over Amazon’s HQ2 obscures the company’s rapid expansion of warehouses in low-income areas is vital. She begins:

This community was still reeling from the recession in 2012 when it got a piece of what seemed like good news. Amazon, the global internet retailer, was opening a massive 950,000-square-foot distribution center, one of its first in California, and hiring more than 1,000 people here.“This opportunity is a rare and wonderful thing,” San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris told a local newspaper at the time.

In the months and years that followed, Amazon dramatically expanded its footprint in and around San Bernardino, a city 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The company now employs more than 15,000 full-time workers in eight fulfillment centers (where goods are stored and then packed for shipment) and one sortation center (where packages are organized by delivery area) in the Inland Empire, the desert region bordering Los Angeles that encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino counties. This expansion provided a lifeline to the struggling region, creating jobs and contributing tax revenue to an area sorely in need of both. In San Bernardino, the unemployment rate that was as high as 15 percent in 2012 is now 5 percent.

Yet in many ways, Amazon has not been a “rare and wonderful” opportunity for San Bernardino. Workers say the warehouse jobs are grueling and high-stress, and that few people are able to stay in them long enough to reap the offered benefits, many of which don’t become available until people have been with the company a year or more. Some of the jobs Amazon creates are seasonal or temporary, thrusting workers into a precarious situation in which they don’t know how many hours they’ll work a week or what their schedule will be. Though the company does pay more than the minimum wage, and offers benefits like tuition reimbursement, health care, and stock options, the nature of the work obviates many of those benefits, workers say. “It’s a step back from where we were,” said Pat Morris, the former mayor, about the jobs that Amazon offers. “But it’s a lot better than where we would otherwise be,” he said.

This is not news—I’ve often touted Mac McClelland’s 2012 piece for Mother Jones: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave but politicians, like our own in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, are desperate to put numbers on the jobs-created score board and they don’t care if the jobs are—to steal a phrase from the sweet potato Saddam in the very White House—shithole jobs.

Semuels continues:

San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job? These places, often located in the outskirts of major cities, have lost retail and manufacturing jobs and, in many cases, are still recovering from the recession and desperate to attract economic activity. This often means battling each other to lure companies like Amazon, which is rapidly expanding its distribution centers across the country. But as the experience of San Bernardino shows, Amazon can exacerbate the economic problems that city leaders had hoped it would solve. The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived. The median household income in 2016, at $38,456, is 4 percent lower than it was in 2011. This poverty near Amazon facilities is not just an inland California phenomenon—according to a report by the left-leaning group Policy Matters Ohio, one in 10 Amazon employees in Ohio are on food stamps.

In the last decade I’ve written extensively on this issue of corporate welfare in the form of taxpayer supported supplements to corporations that allow them to pay sub-part hourly rates. My focus there has been almost exclusively Walmart, but I have noted that Amazon, Walmart’s nemesis, has increasingly put the brick-and-mortar giant to shame in the area of shameful behavior.

What could make the difference—and terrifies Jeffrey Preston Bezos and the entire Walton family—for warehouse workers? Union.

The arrival of Amazon has been bittersweet for people like Gabriel Alvarado, 35. He started working at Amazon’s San Bernardino distribution center in 2013, making $12 an hour, hoping that the job would help him support his new wife and two stepdaughters. Amazon proved a stressful place to work, with managers chewing out employees for not moving fast enough, he told me, which was tough to put up with for meager pay. (An Amazon spokeswoman, Nina Lindsey, told me that, like most companies, Amazon has performance expectations, but that it supports people not performing with dedicated coaches to help them improve.)

Meanwhile, Gabriel watched as his 39-year-old brother Jose worked across the street, doing the same type of job at a warehouse for the grocery chain Stater Brothers. The 1,000 workers there are unionized and get full medical benefits, pensions, and retiree medical benefits. Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who grab orders—doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon—are rewarded if they go faster than the average speed. Jose Alvarado is able to support a wife and four children on his Stater Brothers salary. When his son was diagnosed with a rare form of anemia, his insurance covered everything.

Clevelanders, and all Ohioans, need to hold that image in their minds when talking about the disastrous (and duplicitously named Right To Work legislation proposed by Ohio Representative John Becker (R-Union Township).

Anyone who wants to understand what is happening to Cuyahoga County needs to read and think hard about what Semuels has written.

I firmly believe that anyone who abuses a position of power to sexually exploit those under their supervision deserve to be charged, tried and, if found guilty in a court of law, be punished to the fullest extent of that law as determined by the society they live in.

That, however, is not what is happening today.

In, The Paradox of Equal Justice, Ralph Nader writes:

Almost every day, entertainment, sports, media, political and even some business organizations are jettisoning their top officials and incumbents after reported accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assaults of their subordinates. They’re not waiting for prosecutors, courts or regulators to take action. “Get out now” is the first punishing order. Then the work product of these asserted offenders—whether music, comedy shows, etc.—are often scrubbed, and recipients of political contributions are under pressure to give these sums to charity. In addition a wider arc of resignations by the heads and Boards of Directors, accused of lax monitoring is emerging.

The speed of punishment is unprecedented. One day millions of people watched Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and others. The next day they were vanished. Although this is only the tip of the iceberg—and there is more to come—the velocity of expulsions coming from these accusations—even when they are denied—is unprecedented. (A major exception, however, are the escapades of Donald Trump over the Continue Reading »

While there’s hoopla over the start of the expansion of Quicken Arena you may not have noticed that we’re still paying for Gund Arena.

They are both the same facility, if you remember.

Cuyahoga County—pushed by Tim Hagan, Mary Boyle, Jim Petro & Mike White—put on the tab back in the 1990s.

On Jan. 15, as the County has done since 1994,sent a check for $8,774,760 to bondholders to continue to pay for bonds financing the arena overruns back in the 1990s.

The payments continue until 2024 and then Cuyahoga County residents will BEGIN to pay on new bonds let by Cuyahoga County: $35-million; $35-million and $70-million. This is for the $140.9-million expansion for Dan “Detroit” Gilbert, also known as the Chiseler.

The County paid $2.3 million of the $8.7-million this monty. Some $6.3 plus million came from the city admission tax, depriving Cleveland residents of this funding source, and the rest from the bed tax.

Cleveland loves to give its revenue to billionaires.

What the hell, Mayor Frank Jackson’s city has money to burn. Why not give it to a billionaire instead.

Some may remember that the arena was to cost $75-million. It originally cost $157-million to build.

The chart below gives the sad story of the legacy of Hagan, Boyle, Petro and White year by year since 1992.

With the payment this year of $8.7 million, the total extra payments for Gund-Quicken Arena totals $173,563,459. That’s $173 MILLION! It costs a lot to be a big leaguer.

That’s $173 million—or more than double what the arena was supposed to cost—and payments have to be made for years to come.

But that’s just the start because the new bond payments of Armond Budish, Jackson and County and Cleveland Council on another $140-million in borrowings will start after 2024. This $140-million is for the expansion, which really is to give Gilbert more revenue-producing space.

You’ll notice that the County did the borrowing, not Gilbert. You know who pays the interest, right? You, the county taxpayer..

The chart of annual bond payments via Cuyahoga County follows:

By Roldo Bartimole…

So, this morning I began to transcribe my notes from Cornel West’s Race Matters (matters of race, not race is important). Written in 1993, the book remains relevant and possibly prophetic in 2018. I came to the book because of West’s dustup with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I probably won’t finish the transcription until tomorrow, but I wanted to get my first note posted because I think West, in this new introduction, reminds us that Donald Trump, no matter how much we would wish it not so, is not an aberration. West writes:

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom—not cause or origin—of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy—all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. p. xviii.

From Race Matters by Cornel West

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

As I read Angus Deaton’s The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem in The New York Times brought a piece on poverty written nearly a century ago: George Orwell’s The Spike where living on eight pence a day in 1931 might be compared to $1.90 a day, or better, in the United States, to $4 a day.

I commented on Deaton’s essay earlier in the week, but I came back to his piece today because I wanted to dive a little deeper. The central part of his thesis is that living in poverty in an industrialized nation is not the same as doing so in a sub-Saharan African or Asian country. He writes:

There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.

The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.

How the hell do 5.3 million Americans live on $4 (or less) a day?

Poorly.

I grew up in a part of rural Ohio, on the edge of Appalachia, where running water and indoor plumbing were not a given. My family depended upon rain water collected in a cistern way past the time when I left home at 18. We were by no stretch of the imagination poor, my dad had a good job and I had no idea what being hungry or cold might mean, but there were students in my school who did. Deaton compares parts of the United States to Bangladesh and Vietnam. In the U.S., he writes:

With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places—the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia—where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt.

Being poor sucks.

Being poor in the wealthiest nation in the world where people pay $100,000 to attend a party at the private resort of the President, really sucks.

This week I read Shooting An Elephant, published on 1 October 1936.

While the major action in the essay is indeed the shooting of a bull elephant—reader warning, if you are at all disturbed by descriptions of the slaughter of animals, as I am, skip that part—in musth, Orwell’s true theme is imperialism. Orwell begins his 3,271-word essay:

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East.

This sense of hated duty is what leads Orwell to his be an Englishman. He continues:

And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd–seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing–no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

This fear of laughter—which Orwell years later comments on regarding goose-stepping in The Lion And The Unicorn—is what finally solidifies Orwell’s resolve:

A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

Stiff upper lip and all that. Perhaps, I suppose, the young Orwell obtained a large share of this attitude from his readings of another very British writer—and champion of imperialism—Rudyard Kipling.

Previously…

Coming next week: BOOKSHOP MEMORIES…

Via Mano Singham…

In his most recent novel—Robicheaux—James Lee Burke puts wise words into the mouth of his police officer protagonist, Dave Robicheaux:

Clete Purcell normally referred to cop shows on television as “the most recent shit Hollywood is foisting on really stupid people.” Clete’s intolerance aside, the facsimile has little to do with the reality. Probably one third of cops are dedicated to the job; one third eat too many doughnuts; and one third are people who should not be given power over others. Female detectives do not show off their cleavage. Many cops carry a drop or throw-down. Cops plant evidence and lie on the stand. In our midst are sadists and racists who taint the rest of us. And the greatest contributor to solving crimes is not the lab but the informant, usually someone who skipped toilet training and couldn’t make a peanut butter sandwich with a diagram. p. 160

If your skin isn’t pale enough, 1-in-3 odds aren’t great.

Yeah, we all get spam and, like most people, I usually send mine right into the spam/block-sender folder.

Occasionally, however, I come across hilarious bits like this example from Mark Gilliam and BookWritingInc. and just shake my head at their chutzpah.

Dear Jeff Hess,

We believe in your ideas and it is time to turn them to reality! It was this very thought that got things going for popular figures like Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, Stephen King, Bills Gates and J. K. Rowling.

As a part of our promotional week (ending today), [Emphasis mine, JH] we are offering you this once is a lifetime chance to become a Best Selling Author in the U.S and other parts of the world by bringing your ideas to life. But do you find it hard to make time and put your ideas down on paper? We can help! View Pricing

HIRE TOP GHOSTWRITERS AT 85% OFF TO CREATE YOUR MASTERPIECE

About Book Writing Inc.
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This is what we have been doing for decades and we are the best in business. Our statured [Now there’s a great word. JH] client list is a testament to our dedication and premium service to our clients, and we promise you the same service standards. Book Writing Inc.’s service includes everything you will ever need to transform your ideas into a beautifully drafted, published book.

Our services are highly recommended by various renowned online publishers, including Google Books, Amazon, Ingram and Barnes and Nobel.

We have helped thousands of authors to get their work published. Are you next?

HIRE TOP GHOSTWRITERS AT 85% OFF TO CREATE YOUR MASTERPIECE

Don’t forget that this is a LIMITED TIME OFFER ending Today! [Emphasis mine, JH] If you have what it takes to become a top-selling published author.

Looking forward to hear from you ASAP!

Regards,
Mark Gilliam
Senior Writing Consultant
BookWritingInc.com
+1-888-588-5175
1111 Wilshire Blvd,
Los Angeles, CA 90017

Now there are a lot of great ghostwriters out there—Ted Sorensen, Tony Schwartz and the great Cleveland writer Ted Schwarz come to mind—but I wouldn’t include Marky in that assembly.

DOJ office says it has found missing text messages of FBI officials.

As near as I can figure this morning, Ohioans should contact Jill Froment, Director of the Ohio Department of Insurance if they want to ensure that they get their cut of President Donald John Trump’s tax boondoggle.. You can email her or go old school on the phone, fax or snailmail.

Ralph Nader in Look for Rate Cuts in Your Auto/Homeowner’s Insurance Coming Soon, writes:

In falsely bragging about the alleged benefits to the middle class from the tax law enacted by the Republicans last month, the Trumpsters neglected to give high visibility to the state regulators who must require utility and insurance companies to pass savings from the tax cuts on to their consumers.

While some regulated utility companies (gas, electric and telephone) did announce that they would be reducing rates for consumers, others seem to be waiting for state regulators to push them. The insurance companies in particular seem to be in need of a nudge.

The indefatigable actuary and consumer advocate for the Consumer Federation of America, J. Robert Hunter is pleased to provide the necessary push. In his usual tightly argued style, he has sent letters to every state insurance commissioner, as well as those officials representing the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Hunter calculates that insurance rates that you, the consumer, are paying, should be reduced by about 5%, “without including the impact of investment income due to lower taxes on that income. So it could be more than 5%.”

Hunter continues: “On a property-casualty industry wide basis, the windfall to insurers from the tax changes are massive. 5% of the $ 539 billion in premiums collected is over $25 billion. For longer-tailed lines, like medical professional liability, the increase in investment income on reserves and surplus will be much greater Continue Reading »

For more on the nasty little shit Miller you can surf over to Now This News which has equally revealing profiles of other White House denizens.

The Guggenheim Museum has offered just the thing for the nasty little shit…

One of the most often uttered phrases in adolescence—topped only by whatever—may be What’s the point?

We humans struggle to fin meaning in a universe that doesn’t have any. Eventually we give up and just create our own meanings and move on.

Today I’m thinking about how a stoic approaches the question.

The Stoics argue that the point of life for human beings is to use reason to build the best society that is humanly possible to build. p. 48

From How To Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy To Live A Modern Life by Massimo Picliucci

That works for me. The key, of course, is to use reason, reason itself a very slippery word that does not mean make shit up.

Roldo sent me a link to Angus Deaton’s The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem in The New York Times. He writes:

You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.

Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.

So, how did we fare? Not well.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).

As striking as these numbers are, they miss a very important fact. There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.

The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.

Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards [Emphasis mine, JH].

The society that I would like to build is one where the least of us is treated with dignity and love.

You?

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Let America Vote…

So, in Buddhist meditation, one of the first phrases you come across is monkey mind. Think of what you see when you visit the monkey house—or if you’re luck enough to live in Cleveland, monkey island—and watch the frenetic action as troops bounce from branch to branch, chattering to each other in what seems like non-stop conversation. That’s your brain when you’re not focused, when you allow your mind to wander instead of wonder.

Robert Wright explains:

The default mode network, a network in the brain that is active when we’re doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it is wandering. p. 45

From Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright

Meditation calms the monkey brain and allows you to stop wandering and begin wondering.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

At the simplest level, we all understand that we can’t fix the world, but we can fix one part of one problem. We can save a starfish or a gallon of gas or help one person to see one patch of light. And that is enough. We ought not to beat ourselves up for not saving the world. Epictetus knew this millennia ago.

“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor, are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing.” —Epictetus. p. 31

From How To Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy To Live A Modern Life by Massimo Picliucci

Each morning we awaken with a small bag containing 1,000 pieces of gold. Each coin is a minute we’ll have today before we lay our heads back on the pillow and go to sleep, to enter the little death from which we have no guarantee we’ll awaken. Yet we do awaken. Until we don’t.

Today, take one action that makes the world better. Spend your gold wisely. That is enough.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.