Joe's Newz Channel

[JoeP]

...for awhile I guess.  Surly was on the right track with this the first time around.

Vacant Detroit becomes dumping ground for the dead


By COREY WILLIAMS
Associated Press
 
DETROIT (AP) -- From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block.

They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit's vast urban wilderness - a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police.

Abandoned and neglected parts of the city are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the dead - at least a dozen bodies in 12 months' time. And authorities acknowledge there's little they can do.

"You can shoot a person, dump a body and it may just go unsolved" because of the time it may take for the corpse to be found, officer John Garner said.

The bodies have been purposely hidden or discarded in alleys, fields, vacant houses, abandoned garages and even a canal. Seven of the victims are believed to have been slain outside Detroit and then dumped within the city.

It's a pattern made possible by more than four decades of urban decay and suburban flight. White residents started moving to burgeoning suburbs in the 1950s, then stepped up their exodus after a deadly 1967 race riot. Detroit's black middle class followed over the next two decades, leaving block after block of empty homes.

Over time, tens of thousands of houses deteriorated. Some collapsed, others were demolished. Empty lots gave way to block-long fields.

Jacob Kudla and Jourdan Bobbish were found July 27 in a field off Lyford Street, a lonely road that borders an industrial area and a small municipal airport. The teens from suburban Westland, 18 and 17, respectively, had been visiting Kudla's uncle in Detroit when they disappeared July 22.

Their corpses were found by someone walking along the desolate block. The closest house, about 100 yards away, belongs to 74-year-old Ella Dunn.

Over the last 24 years, she has watched nearly all her neighbors move out. Now she constantly hears people dumping tires, furniture and trash.

"They drive down and push stuff out," she said.

A nearby parking lot resembles a small landfill for junk - a coloring book based on Bible characters, a yellow toilet, furniture, shoes and five boats.

"Detroit is a dumping ground for a lot of stuff," said Margaret Dewar, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. "There is no one to watch. There is no capacity to enforce laws about dumping. There is a perception you can dump and no one will report it."

In mid-July, the decapitated bodies of a couple were pulled from the Detroit River and a nearby canal. Authorities say they were shot and dismembered in their home in suburban Allen Park, then driven to a little-used Detroit park and dumped in the water. A man who lived with them is charged in the slayings.

The bodies of two Hamtramck women were discovered in March buried in a neglected Detroit park. Five men are accused in the murders.

Back in December, the bodies of two women were found in a car parked near a vacant house. Six days later, the badly burned remains of two other women turned up in a car trunk. Police believe all were killed elsewhere and dumped in Detroit. A man from suburban Sterling Heights has been charged.

Detroit has more than 30,000 vacant houses, and the deficit-strangled city has no resources of its own to level them. Mayor Dave Bing is promoting a plan to tear down as many as possible using federal money. The state is also contributing to the effort.

But it's hard to keep up. About a quarter-million people moved out of Detroit between 2000 and 2010, leaving just over 700,000 residents in a city built for 2 million.

Census figures from two years ago show 793 people living on Lyford and the other 20 or so streets near the Coleman A. Young airport. Two decades earlier, about 2,900 people lived there.

Dunn's modest home is one of only three on the block that are still occupied.

"I couldn't move if I wanted to," she said. "They don't want to give you any money for your house."

On Tuesday, a patrol car slowly rolled by. Officers are more visible after the teens' bodies were found, Dunn added.

A larger police presence is needed across the city, but Detroit can't afford to hire more. The city recently cut police pay by 10 percent.

When he joined the department 13 years ago, Garner patrolled a 3.6-square-mile area in the tough 3rd Precinct, bumping into another officer every 20 minutes. Now he covers 22 square miles and crosses paths with other officers "maybe once every two hours."

"If we know this, the criminals know this," Garner said.

Sparse patrols and slow response times make it less likely that someone will be seen dumping a body.

"Years back, people would go to rural areas" to dump bodies, said Daniel Kennedy, a Michigan-based forensic criminologist. "Now we have rural areas in urban areas."

Detroit's reputation as a violent city with one of the highest crime rates in the country also works against it.

The body of a woman from wealthy Grosse Pointe Park was found in January in her Mercedes-Benz SUV in a Detroit alley. The marketing executive was apparently killed in the garage of her upscale suburban home, but left in the city. A family handyman has been charged.

If a body shows up in Grosse Pointe, Kennedy said, "those officers are sitting around waiting for something to happen, and they are all over it."

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[agelbert]

JoeP,
I think Detroit is ground zero for a look at most U.S. cities and suburbs in the near future. As bad as it is there, I know some good things are happening too to slowly bioremediate the polluted soil and begin to farm vacant lots and form neighborhood mutual protection clusters. There are also still a lot of very livable areas.

Henry Ford, the man who famously said, "history is bunk" spent the last part of his life building an unoccupied historic village without any actual history. This theme park has now been there for eighty years. New buildings and attractions have been added, but since it was built in the 1930s it remains perpetually and intentionally frozen in the 1890s. This village Henry Ford built has, for eighty years, existed solely as a simulacrum of the world Henry Ford destroyed.
If Greenfield Village represents the sort of wholesome, idyllic (and sanitized) environment that most Detroiters sought in the suburbs, then the city of Detroit has for several decades come to represent its opposite: seedy, gritty, blighted, ruined, overgrown, dangerous, poor, and black. Yet as I have tried to document in several series of pictures I together call "The Disappearing City," in the era of exurban sprawl parts of Detroit have lost so much housing stock they are starting to resemble the pastoral environment Cadillac found there two hundred years before the city became a symbol of American industrial might (three hundred years before it came to symbolize its failure). Today these parts of Detroit look more like the actual world Greenfield Village has always tried to represent than any of its once-bucolic suburbs.
That's partly because today Detroit's suburbs are where all the action is. One of the reasons people around here get so mad when journalists and photographers parachute in and represent Detroit as a shithole is because there are millions of people here living in safe, well-kept neighborhoods in dozens of thriving suburban communities.

Henry Ford was a visionary in many ways, and he should be remembered for saving buildings at a time when there was little thought given to historic preservation. When a building was torn down in Ford's day, there was still the hope and promise that what replaced it would be even grander. In Detroit, such hope is long gone. The city is littered with abandoned buildings we simply cannot hope to surpass in style, skill, or even materials.

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2012/04/fauxtopias-of-detroits-suburbs.html

The good news:

DETROIT, MICHIGAN
BACKGROUND: REGIONAL, POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
With a land area of 138 square miles,¹³² Detroit, Michigan is home to just over 900,000 residents.¹³³ Detroit has a thriving grassroots urban agriculture movement and an extensive network of community groups focused on food security. Over 600 community gardens have been created in the city, in spite of the absence of permissive zoning regulations.¹³⁴ Detroit ranked 30th in “Local Food & Agriculture” and 31st overall in SustainLane’s city sustainability rankings.¹³⁵
Under the current zoning code, agriculture is not a permitted use anywhere in Detroit. Accordingly, urban agriculture groups describe Detroit’s community gardens as “flying under the radar.”
¹³⁶ Detroit stands to benefit tremendously from expanding urban agriculture – turning publicly owned parcels of vacant land into urban farms and community gardens could supply Detroit residents with more than 75 percent of their fresh vegetables and 40 percent of their fresh fruits.¹³⁷ Recognizing the incongruity between its restrictive zoning code and the fact that residents and community groups are already engaging in urban agriculture, on May 23, 2010, the City Planning Commission submitted a Draft Policy to the City Council to revise the zoning code to permit urban agriculture. The Council has not yet revised the code.¹³⁸

Page 24 of this 2011 report:
http://www.georgiaorganics.org/Advocacy/urbanagreport.pdf

And this:

Detroit gets growing

Detroit was once the engine of America's automotive industry. Today it is a symbol of urban decay. But a daring bid to return the land to farming is sowing seeds of recovery – and could be a template for cities across the world

Some of Urban Farming's projects, such as Linwood, are huge, spanning several city blocks and generating substantial amounts of food. Others, like planting single gardens on rooftops or creating "living walls", are small. Last year alone the group oversaw the creation of 900 food gardens in Detroit. Some were in people's gardens, others on land donated to charities by local people or bought from the city.

The strange thing about Detroit is that the soil of its urban landscape is capable of supporting farming even after more than a century of urbanisation. Though many factory sites are contaminated, the land under the city's houses is often not. Crouch has tested the soil that Earthworks farms, and though frequently poor in nutrients, it's usually not polluted. Now, with each round of farming, harvesting and composting, it's improving every year. Earthworks' crops of vegetables and fruits are even certified organic.

It is possible that the future of cities is being born in Detroit. If so, that is a vision that Wieske, the genial beekeeper, is happy with. As he drives to his hives, he disturbs a wild pheasant with his car and it bursts into the sky in an explosion of feathers – a scene common to rural America but rarely associated with an inner city. "We get pheasants around here all the time," he says. He smiles and recites the unofficial slogan of Detroit's urban farming revolutionaries: "We are turning Motown into Growtown."

(video included)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/11/detroit-urban-renewal-city-farms-paul-harris



Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit:

Earthworks Urban Farm seeks to build a just, beautiful food system through education, inspiration, and community development.  We seek to restore our connection to the environment and community.  It is a working study in social justice and in knowing the origin of the food we eat.

http://cskdetroit.org/EWG/photo_gallery/summer

http://cskdetroit.org/index.php/EWG

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[JoeP]

Looks's like Romney the Koch brothers have made their decision:

Mitt Romney Names Paul Ryan VP Nominee

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[JoeP]

Feds: Authorities in Meridian, Miss. Violated Rights of Black Children

“The system established by the City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, and DYS to incarcerate children for school suspensions ‘shocks the conscience,’ resulting in the incarceration of children for alleged ‘offenses’ such as dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect.” The Justice Department findings letter noted.

Something about this smells really bad to me.

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[RE]

Thanks for taking my "Suggestion" JP! 

RE

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[WHD]

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE PAUL RYAN'S ABILITY TO ENDEAR HIMSELF TO J6P, though he be a fascist very much inclined to a full-on police state.

 “"I did not make a mistake with this guy," Romney exulted,

A double negative. After he mistakenly called Paul Ryan, "The next President."

Funny that their stated policies once initiated would double the unemployment rate at least. Triple it more likely, if Austerity in Greece and Spain is any indication. Triple the number of detention centers, triple the military budget, triple the wealth of the richest among us, triple the number in abject poverty.

Funny too, Norfolk will be the first American city to go under water permanently, with climate change and rising seas. And the WISCONSIN they posed in front of has been gutted and is no longer a serviceable ship, just like America will be when they get done with it.   

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[JoeP]

Any thoughts about "right to privacy" seem like just a memory of bygone years.

''WIKILEAKS: Surveillance Cameras Around The Country Are Being Used In A Huge Spy Network''

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community.

The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

And then we have this going on in the land of William Hunter Duncan:

Police cameras quietly capture license plates, collect data

So who has access to your location data? Anyone who asks for it, according to Bob Sykora, chief information officer for the Minnesota Board of Public Defense. Sykora warned in a memo this June that location data retained by police is currently public. That means it could be obtained via record requests by data miners or other members of the public, he wrote, enabling burglars to learn someone's daily routine or ex-spouses to track former partners.

"I really believe there's a potential for somebody getting hurt or killed," said Sykora, a member of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Information Task Force, who will tell that body Friday that the Legislature should classify the data as private so only the subject of the data could obtain it.

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[WHD]

And then we have this going on in the land of William Hunter Duncan:

Police cameras quietly capture license plates, collect data

Good thing I don't drive a car. That data will be useful when they start tracking "domestic terrorists" like radical blog writers, with drone technology.

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[JoeP]

Farmers fail under 'missold' swaps
ROB STOCK

In Britain, it's being called a scandal. In New Zealand, there's been barely a squeak.

But with around one in 10 farmers in dire straits with high debt burdens and devalued farms, claims that complex “interest rate swaps” were missold to farmers who did not understand them are surfacing.

The swaps, traditionally used by sophisticated businesses with expert finance staff, were sold in 2007, 2008 and even 2009 by some banks to farmers as insurance against interest rates - and hence floating rate farm mortgages - rising rapidly, farmers say.

But when the opposite happened, the farmers who bought them were left locked in to high interest rates which they could not escape without paying hefty break fees.

Already heavily indebted, some farmers have lost their farms as a result of the instruments.

In Britain in March, the Treasury began an investigation following reports by the Telegraph newspaper that both farmers and small businesses such as hotels and golf clubs had been sold swaps they did not understand.

The same claims are now being made here, and one senior financier, who asked not to be named, likened the swap sales to the sale of Swiss franc and US dollar-denominated loans marketed by some banks to cow cockies in the 1980s as a means of getting lower interest rates.

They too went spectacularly wrong as a result of currency movements leaving some facing loan rates of more than 40 per cent.

Farmers who naively bought swaps following contacts from banks, have suffered two effects.

Firstly, they have been locked into paying interest rates of around 10 per cent, and the break fees on the contracts - similar to the residential mortgage break fees which caused an urban outcry in 2010 - are far too high to allow refinancing with another bank.

Sunday Star-Times spoke to one farmer who estimated the cost to break his swap as $1 million, leaving him paying nearly 10 per cent interest for the next couple of years compared with about 6 per cent for an ordinary floating rate farm mortgage.

“The bank says we are not making any money,” he complained. “But how can we? We have paid $1m more interest than we should have paid had we been in a normal floating rate loan.”

The second effect is the swaps have damaged farm balance sheets as they must be accounted for as a significant liability.

“Now I can see it is just a form of gambling, and I don't gamble," the farmer said.

Ad Feedback Federated Farmers president Bruce Wills, an ex-banker, said there were some problems in some cases with the way the interest rate swaps were sold.

“Senior bankers have told me that some of these products have been pushed out there without enough explanation or understanding.”

Accountant Stephen Stafford-Bush, chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants influential regional advisory committee, is more forthright, and says he believes the swaps were missold in many cases.

“The big question mark is have the banks acted illegally? Probably

not. Have they acted unethically and immorally? In my view, yes," he said.

Stafford-Bush said many farmers who have come to him did not understand the risks they were taking. He said interest rate swaps were a commercial instrument suitable for large, sophisticated companies, not family farms.

A senior financier said the swaps were sold to farmers with the idea they could manage their own interest rate risk. "But these guys are out milking at 6am," he said. "Then they are out calving later. They weren't foreign exchange or interest rate money market dealers. They were farmers. They did not have the expertise or the time to do it."

Stafford-Bush feels there should be more “shared blame” instead of the financial costs falling entirely on farmers.

Farmer Theresa Nicholas said the swap sales and subsequent pain have remained under the radar because farmers suffering under the swaps were too afraid to speak publicly in case they anger their banks, which have the power to put them off their farms.

Similar claims have been made in Britain, and some will speak to the media only on condition of anonymity.

Nicholas said politicians did not want to know, and the Banking Ombudsman Scheme had a cap of $200,000 for complaints, which is too small to cover swap complaints.

A class action lawsuit was being discussed but several years of good dairy payouts, and a more sensitive treatment of affected farmers by banks derailed it.

Nicholas said farmers were able to negotiate some concessions with banks, such as lower interest rates, but had to sign gagging contracts enabling the banks to shut down criticism.

It is not known how wide the sale of swaps to farmers was, and the banks wouldn't say when questioned by Sunday Star-Times, answering specific questions with general descriptions of how they sell interest rate products now.

A Westpac statement said only: “Interest rate swaps make up a small component of our lending book. They are not sold without having a financial markets specialist give an explanation on how they work, so the customer can understand how they might fit their circumstances.”

Adam Boyd, ASB's general manager Global Markets New Zealand, said ASB does offer interest rate swaps to a limited number of rural customers to fix the interest rate on a customer's floating rate debt facilities, producing similar outcomes to fixed rate loans.

All customers are provided with a disclosure statement that outlines the benefits and risks swaps before entering into an agreement with the bank, he said.

"Modelling may also be provided on a case-by-case basis. In recent years there has been a general trend among rural customers towards floating rate debt facilities, with less demand for interest rate swaps."

An ANZ spokesman said interest rate swaps are one of a number of products that businesses, including farming businesses, have used to manage interest rate risk.

"We give customers general information on how the product works and, as with other products, advise them to seek independent advice before entering into a swap to ensure they fully understand the product and its suitability for their business."

Former farmer Jeanette Walker said the swap sales reveal much about banks, but also about how farmers wrongly trusted bank managers.

"People have to get to understand that banks are not your friends. Bank managers are not your business partners. They are in the business of getting the biggest return possible for their shareholders. They are not your mates."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/7462273/Farmers-fail-under-missold-swaps

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[agelbert]

People have to get to understand that banks are not your friends.

Of course. Bankers all agree that the problem with the term "there's another sucker born every minute" is that the rate needs to be increased! The difference betweeen a banker and a con artist is, uh, let me see here, I know there's a difference but I just can't quite put my finger on it.

I know! The name "banker" helps provide cover for a better con!

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[JoeP]

The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Another excellent essay from Michael T. Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency. Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  I've read a few of of his essays but none of his books yet...Anyway, here's a snip from his latest essay:

"Until recently, most scientists were reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts on global warming.  Now, however, a growing number of scientists believe that such links can be demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study focused on extreme weather events in 2011, for instance, climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Great Britain’s National Weather Service concluded that human-induced climate change has made intense heat waves of the kind experienced in Texas in 2011 more likely than ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming had ensured that the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times more likely than it would have been in 1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those experienced in Britain last November were said to be 62 times as likely because of global warming."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175579/

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[JoeP]

Bankers all agree that the problem with the term "there's another sucker born every minute" is that the rate needs to be increased! The difference betweeen a banker and a con artist is, uh, let me see here, I know there's a difference but I just can't quite put my finger on it.

Yes.  My thoughts exactly.  These farmers were suckas.  So sad.  Looking at the list of "known" suckers out there, the one that I can't figure out is primetime sucker Harvard University. How and why did Larry Summers anally screw the University out of big bucks?  Anyway, I think it's related to this topic because of the interest rate swap thing.

I sometimes watch recordings of a TV show "American Greed" - I'm really amazed at how many people that have saved millions over their lifetime go and piss it away because they "trust" someone that is filth.
 

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[JoeP]

On the trail of the land grabbers: The British imperialists snapping up swathes of Africa to cash in on the world's food shortage - and forcing out small farmers

snip:

"But what I saw was small farmers being bumped off their land and replaced by big machines. As Graham Davies, of British investors Altima Partners, told a conference last year, the ‘vast majority of investors in Africa are focused on commercial Western agriculture, largely ignoring the continent’s 60?million small farmers who produce 80 per cent of its food’."



Harvest time: Huge tractors on a soya bean farm in Brazil. Farmland is now considered to be one of the best investments of our time
 

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[RE]

"But what I saw was small farmers being bumped off their land and replaced by big machines. As Graham Davies, of British investors Altima Partners, told a conference last year, the ‘vast majority of investors in Africa are focused on commercial Western agriculture, largely ignoring the continent’s 60?million small farmers who produce 80 per cent of its food’."

Same deal as the Land Grab during the Great Depression, just this time done on the Global Scale.

Turned up a great documentary from the 1950s searching down Grapes of Wrath stuff.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/CM3ZHMBhP2k" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/CM3ZHMBhP2k</a>

RE

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[agelbert]

JoeP,
I heard about the African land grab about a year ago on Amy Goodman's DemocracyNOW! web site. It's just like RE said, the old move em' off the land for whatever reason while promising them they can work as tenants and after the people are off the land, mechanizing the shit out of it and telling the people, "sorry, we don't need that much help!".
During the dust bowel in the U.S. the government EASILY could have provided for the 350,000 or so instead of allowing them to lose everything to the land grabbers (who WERE being bailed out by the government when the small farmers defaulted  on the agricultural loans made to them by the big investors that were grabbing the land as well). It was predatory capitalism then and it's SSDD (same shit different day) now.

Here's how the hedge funds are linked to U.S. universities to steal African land from Africans:

US universities in Africa 'land grab'

Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out

Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from "land grabs" that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world.

The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one of Africa's largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers.

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/08/us-universities-africa-land-grab

Fucking Locusts!

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