"Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating"
If I wasn’t knee-deep in back issues of The New Yorker, I’d consider resubscribing to Rolling Stone just so I could get my fix of Matt Taibbi:
Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as “standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself.”
Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Your average chimpanzee couldn’t fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
Oh, progressive periodicals. Maybe I need to turn to The New American to balance things out?
Strong Towns on MPR
Strong Towns continues spreading their message, this time as guests of the statewide MPR “Midmorning” show. I love seeing where these guys turn up next.
How not to spend $15 million
Reposted from the comments thread at Strong Towns:
@Nathaniel brings up a good point in that optimizing for throughput of cars could lead to a whole host of negative consequences for the rest of the city.
Take, for example, my town of Fergus Falls, which is currently in the midst of building a bridge over the Otter Tail River to the tune of $15 million. There are five crossings of the river in our downtown area, and two farther east, but nothing to the west of downtown until I-94. The particular site where they chose to build the bridge has been eyed for some time now, and apparently the financial pieces finally fell into place to allow for construction of this bridge to commence.
Here’s a map of the crossing [above], which is highlighted in red. The closest crossing to this skirts the west edge of our downtown (blue area), and the typical path that someone from that side of town would take is shown as a blue line. The red area denotes the suburban commercial development area that has been growing for the past 30 years or so.
One can argue that this fills in a gap in our transportation network, but up until now it seems that our town has survived without it. Our downtown, at least compared to other cities of comparable size in the area, is doing well — most of the storefronts are occupied, there’s a healthy residential population above the ground floor shops, there’s no missing teeth along Lincoln Avenue, our main drag, and we’ve even managed to retain a full-service grocery store in the middle of it all, despite the presence of a larger grocer on the old edge of town and a Super Walmart by the interstate. I bet the daily traffic that passes through downtown as a result of our particular configuration of roads has something to do with that.
When you look at what this bridge connects, one wouldn’t be faulted for assuming that it’s just been built to let the southwestern suburban fringe get to Fleet Farm and Target five minutes faster. The official line is that it will lessen the truck traffic from our “main” exit off of the interstate, #54, and allow a more straightforward connection to the industrial park on the north side of town, but I think that’s an explanation in search of a problem. Coming off of exit 54 is a four-lane divided highway, which if it wasn’t built to accommodate trucks, would be overkill for the amount of traffic it regularly receives.
While the city is putting out no general fund money to pay for the bridge — it’s funded by transfer payments from the federal and state levels — it’s going to be put on the county and city’s shoulders to maintain the bridge, which is a perfect example of the “benefit now, pay later” approach that Chuck and Co. regularly warn about.
Finances aside, I worry about what kind of growth example this will set. By building this bridge, we’re just upping the ante on the wager that we can continue to build out a system where happy motoring is the only goal.
Occupy the Internet, local edition
I am somewhat disappointed that we are going to be out of town for the Occupy Fergus Falls (FFDJ) gathering that is going on this Saturday, as I feel very strongly that what every sleepy rural town needs is absurdist political theater and public rallies to shake things up. And it’s only going down a block from our house, so that’s even better. But I’ve done what I could in my limited capacity and made use of the F.A.T. Occupy the Internet service to decorate our city’s two most popular online forums for public “discourse,” the Fergus Falls Daily Journal and the Fergus Forum.
Make signs, not war.
Wherein I channel my inner Kunstler
Let’s not be surprised by the decline in the construction industry. We’ve gone great guns into a single way of building the places where we work, live, and shop — namely the single-use, suburban model — and have built up an excess amount of space that we can neither use nor afford. Take a drive through any typical suburban strip or half-built housing development and witness the “For Lease”, “Lots Available”, and “Foreclosure” signs that abound. We should stop looking wistfully at recent history as something that we’ll return to again, and instead figure out how we’re going to manage the contraction brought on by rising energy prices and the massive unraveling of the financial quackery that we’ve invented in order to help promulgate the lie that what we’re doing is completely normal. Like the hapless Coyote in pursuit of the Road Runner, we’ve run off the cliff and are trying not to look down.
Pessimism is a hard outlook to shake.
Gourds-a-plenty
With the annual family trip to the local pumpkin patch complete, it is safe to say that fall is in full swing in the Krohn household. And you know what that means.
Strong Towns TEDx Talk
I’ve been behind on things and just got the chance to watch this:
Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns recently took his message to the TEDx 1000 Lakes event in Grand Rapids, MN. His talk, titled “The Important Difference Between and Road and a Street,” is a another good primer on the principles behind his group (also not to be missed is the Curbside Chat companion booklet that was recently released).
I’m a big believer in what he’s saying and have tried, with middling levels of success, to use their ideas to influence discussion of local issues in the places where I’ve lived. It was especially entertaining and gratifying, then, to see the main street of Wahpeton, my hometown, being held up as an example of what not to do. Check out the 5:44 mark for a redux of this gem of a photo.
Perhaps the best thing to come out of this project is the realization that we should never do something like this again.
Wise beyond his years
(While picking up litter at the neighborhood playground)
Me: Sigh. Why do people litter?
Gus: I don’t know. ‘Cause they’re idiots?
Fairs as an urban experience
An inspiring prototype for more sustainable, shareable, enjoyable cities rests right under our noses in communities across the nation, particularly mid-America.
In fact, millions of people in farm states pay an admission to amble through car-free districts animated by cafes, beer gardens, music performances and the enduringly interesting parade of people passing by. Locally grown food is all around, some so fresh that it is still on the hoof.
I had a similar 140-character thought while attending the West Otter Tail County fair this summer.
Time to hit the treadmill
Our local paper has a pretty colorful police blotter, which probably says something about both the town and the paper. This recent incident is a real head-scratcher:
City and county law enforcement are looking for a Fergus Falls woman after she allegedly ran from a jail escort in the parking lot of Lake Region Hospital on Saturday. […] The county sheriff’s office reported that after the visit, she and her jail escort were walking back to the jail vehicle when she broke free and ran east on Alcott Avenue around the middle of the 3 p.m. hour. She was lost after a brief foot chase.
Wadell, a blond, was wearing a blue sweatshirt with “OTC” on the front in white letters when she fled. She was also wearing tan pants, along with sandals, and she was handcuffed.
How does one lose a footrace to a handcuffed person in sandals? Inquiring minds want to know.
Update: Well, that was short-lived.
