Getting Richer

For a mere 129,000,000, you can have a waterfront mansion in the Tampa, Florida area.  It includes 465 ft. of beachfront, a 2 million dollar gold leaf staircase and 11 bathrooms.  That is the most expensive publically offered house in America today.  For that price you could buy a pretty large chunk of the NCR with cash to spare.  If this is a snapshot of America's future, we are in more trouble than I thought.  The level of inequality in this country is rapidly approaching the age of Louis XIIII.  And we all know what happened then.  Just sayin...

Another comedian gone

Unlike Robin Williams, but embracing a similar vein of humor, Joan Rivers was a phenomenon during the 60s and 70s.  I never much cared for the skewer everyone type of humor she specialized in, but she spared no one, including herself.  She re-invented herself several times, from a talk show gadfly to a one woman hurricane and a QVC pitchman and finally the host of a fashion put down show.  She never lost the sharp edge which cut everything in its path.  Ironically, the Divine Mrs. M appreciated the QVC Joan Rivers as she never did earlier in her career.  In any case, I salute her and mourn the passing of another funny person.  We need them more than ever.

Another last hurrah

Corn, beans, squash and peppers are loving the late season blast of warm we are getting.  Even the late plantings of lettuce that looked to be late are catching up.  We need a little moisture, and Mother Nature looks willing to oblige on Saturday.  I am trying to resist the siren call of the planter, but I'll probably make one last planting of broccoli rabe this weekend.  It is supposed to mature in 40 days, although as we approach October it will be more like 60 days.  I will also plant some spinach and other greens in the cold frames this weekend.   It should be ready for Thanksgiving here on the NCR.  After that, the next thing I plant will be the garlic in October.

Taking on the partisan right

In the NYT today, Thomas Edsall, a normally even handed columnist bends over backwards to make the "they both do it" narrative of left and right approaches to the problem of poverty fit his narrative.  After painstakingly grabbing at straws such as the left's reaction to Patrick Moynihan's somewhat racist paper on the black ghettoes in the US, he finally admits some on the right are moving toward a more nuanced view of poverty in the US rather than the default position of blaming the poor for their plight.   Off shoring of American jobs, increasing inequality and the breakdown of the working class due to these factors are now being touted by some on the right as possible reasons for the divisions in our society.  Of course, until the white working class stumbled into the abyss, it was assumed by these same pundits that blacks were to blame for their inability to break out of the cycle of poverty.  Amazing how viewpoints can change.   At the end of his column, Edsall appeals to both sides to come together.  He then admits there is little to be done in the present global environment where capital has the upper hand and labor is hobbled by low wage competition in developing countries.  Government action to level the playing field is really the only option, and that will be opposed by the right.

Musings on jobs well done

Charley Pierce's labor day blog post was very much to the point of teh murky scribble I posted earlier today.  He was musing about the role of unions in the pride Americans seemed to take in their work in the middle of the last century.  The focus of his remembrance is a carousel, built in 1909, hand carved and still running in a tawdry mall in Minneapolis.  The men who carved those horses did a job for the ages, not for next week.  The same goes for the people who made our cars, our furniture and the thousands of other products we use each day.  Most of them are now made in China or Vietnam by people who work for starvation wages so we can have cheap consumer goods.  Neither the nameless masses in the far east or the American consumer has the time or the money to enjoy the fruits of their labor.  Meanwhile, even among the 12% of Americans who are still unionized, there is antagonism instead of solidarity.  It would seem the gilded age has come again and will stay as long as the sheeple allow themselves to be manipulated by the powerful. 

To have and to have not

Joe Nocera, the business columnist of the NYT says we should be educating our kids to take advantage of the"knowledge economy" and let the rest of the world make our consumer goods.  Who needs factory jobs, he says.  Meanwhile, nearly 2 billion Indians and Chinese are probably hearing the same message and will be rapidly educating 5 times our number of children to take these same jobs.  Do you hear a giant sucking sound as the internet enables well educated people around the world to do our banking, investing, health care diagnoses, etc.  If this sounds like a replay of the loss of American factory jobs, it is.  Only this time around, there is no educational alternative to get us to the next job.   What the pundit class and Americans in general don't seem to realize is there is a class of low education Americans who for whatever reason can't or won't be assimilated into the knowledge economy.  For these people, the middle class factory job is the end of the rainbow.  Besides, the keyboard commandoes who think they will be masters of the universe will soon find themselves working for peanuts as they compete against billions of highly educated people around the world.  Those factory jobs may be the future....

Too hot, too dry

I never thought I would use hot and dry in the same sentence this year, but as we celebrate Labor Day, it appears I must.  We were supposed to have some rain yesterday, but we didn't get enough to settle the dust.  Chances of showers are predicted throughout the week, but as it gets drier, the rain probability tends to evaporate.  There remains ample subsurface moisture, so established crops will continue to mature, but the lettuce and other shallow rooted or newly planted crops need some rain.  The weeding and harvesting continue, and spaghetti sauce making has commenced.   I will probably plant some spinach in cold frames later this week for late fall/ early winter use, but that is about it for seeding.  The dry weather should also give the lawn mowers a rest.