A Piece of Ground

 

The Israel Defense Forces host anti-terrorist fantasy camps in the occupied West Bank which are apparently a big draw for tourists, among them American comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his family. Mr. Seinfeld was in Israel to perform his stand up comedy routine in Tel Aviv, and while he was there he and his family traveled into the disputed territory of the West Bank to visit a military fantasy camp where tourists can get a thrill or two by getting close to simulated military action. It’s hard to believe that fantasy camps like that exist, and even harder to understand the attraction for tourists. But they do exist, and they are thriving, and Mr. Seinfeld appears to enjoy them.

 

Baby in vluchtelingenkamp - Sleeping child in refugee camp (5370426971)
Sleeping child in a refugee camp in the West Bank, 1953. Palestinian? Israeli? Does it matter? Photo by Willem van de Poll.

The political situation in the West Bank is a rat’s nest, but in simple terms the Israelis should not be there. They are occupiers. There has been eye for eye terrorism going on there, and in Gaza, and radiating out to the rest of the Middle East for generations, with no end in sight. Each side, of which there are many, feels justified in its use of violence against the others. A rat’s nest. Into this steps Jerry Seinfeld with his big, toothy grin, into a military fantasy camp built in the occupied West Bank. Even if Mr. Seinfeld is oblivious to political considerations, as he may well be, what on earth is helped by his grinning endorsement of a ghoulishly perverted Disneyland? A Disneyland with guns and violence, staged for jaded idiots?

How would it be if someone opened a participatory military theme park in Wounded Knee, South Dakota? Guests would be invited to blast desperate Indians to smithereens in the snow. They had it coming, after all, since they were the terrorists of their day in the eyes of the people who would build such a theme park and those who would pay admission to it. How about Sand Creek? or the Trail of Tears? Now there was a ton of fun that could generate top dollar in admission prices! How about the internment camps built for Japanese-Americans during World War II? If any of those are still around, they could be turned into amusement parks for the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and others who missed out on witnessing suffering first hand.

5000 years old olive tree - panoramio (1)
A 5,000 year old olive tree in the West Bank of occupied Palestine. Photo by Mujaddara.

There are other ghosts of camps in Europe which everyone understands should be hallowed ground, though there some people like the idiot congressman from Louisiana who took a selfie video when he toured Auschwitz. The concentration camps of the Holocaust are rightly regarded as terrible specters from the past which must not return anywhere today or in the future. There are matters of perspective, however, and of the bias of narratives which skew ideas about whether a piece of ground is being or has been hallowed or violated, and by whom.

Pink Floyd playing “Time” in concert during the Delicate Sound of Thunder tour at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York, in August 1988.

Despite the objections of a few crackpots, there is a consensus of revulsion over the Holocaust of World War II. As to the other atrocities humans have visited upon each other in recent memory, it appears there are gradations in the general view, though that is no comfort to those who suffer the consequences. It doesn’t seem too much to ask at any rate for overlords of any stripe not to build amusement parks on the dry bones of the oppressed. Whether some grinning goof decides to visit such an amusement park after it has been built, without regard to good sense or consideration for the objections of others, is entirely his own concern, of course, and we are free in turn to lower our opinion of that person. Time will tell about these things eventually.
― Izzy

 

Just Following Orders

 

For the second time in a week, the current President, the Thug-in-Chief, made despicable assertions in a speech before an organization of uniformed members, bringing them down to his level, though in the case of the cops and cop cadets he addressed on Friday, they did not have as far to fall as the Boy Scouts he spoke to on Monday. In his Friday speech at Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood on Long Island, New York, the current President advocated police brutality in the treatment of criminal suspects in custody, to cheers and applause from his audience. It’s impossible to excuse either the statement or its reception, but in the President’s case disrespect for the rule of law and for basic decency is to be expected, while the cops and cop cadets should know better.

 

January 20 riot cops D.C.
Police in riot gear blocking a checkpoint into the Washington, D.C. parade route at George W. Bush’s second presidential inauguration on January 20, 2005; photo by Jonathan McIntosh. Militarization of the police effectively circumvents the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

 

The presumption of innocence is not stated outright in the United States Constitution, but it is implied in Article I and in several of the Amendments. There is also a long history of the presumption of innocence in common law, and in judicial precedent in the United States. The current President thinks he knows better, and is prepared to act as judge, jury, and executioner whenever he feels the urge, and now he has encouraged the police to do the same. In May 1989, he took out a full page advertisement in the New York City papers inflaming the populace against the Central Park Five, teenaged males who were suspects in the brutal rape and near murder of a female jogger in Central Park two weeks earlier. The five youths were convicted in 1990 and sent to prison.

 

Eleven years later a man stepped forward, claiming he was the lone perpetrator of the assault. After an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney, the convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated by the New York Supreme Court the following year, in 2002. The Central Park Five, now free men in their thirties, sued the city for $250 million, ultimately settling for $41 million in 2014. Through all these investigations and the subsequent lawsuit, in which it became clear the young men’s confessions were coerced by the police, the vulgarian who became president of the country in the 2016 election not only refused to apologize for his inflammatory rhetoric against them, but refused even to acknowledge he had been wrong. As for his blanket call in his full page ad for the police to exercise overly broad, even illegal authority, it’s obvious from his recent remarks that he hasn’t changed his noxious opinion.

In the 1960s TV show Dragnet, the Los Angeles police detectives Joe Friday and Bill Gannon, played by Jack Webb and Harry Morgan, respectively, may be corny, but they display a better grasp of the rule of law and basic decency than the current President. Perhaps if they had known what was in store for our country, they might have talked to him in this video clip. Still, it’s doubtful any of it would have sunk in.

 

Rhetoric encouraging police brutality, when it comes from the head of the executive branch of the federal government, the branch entrusted with enforcing the nation’s laws, is unfathomably irresponsible. At a time when incidents of police brutality, non-judicial executions, and trampling of citizens’ Constitutional rights are making headlines nearly every day, such stupid remarks from the Vulgarian-in-Chief grant permission for cops all over the nation to do more of the same without fear of repercussions, indeed to do so with the excuse that they were just following orders. That’s an excuse with an old, despicable history, and if it becomes acceptable here then we will at last have shut the door on our free society with an echoing, prison cell clang.
― Vita

 

30 Years and 16 Tons

 

Paying off a mortgage is a wonderful thing, and something that is more remarkable now than it was forty or fifty years ago. Tighter lending standards since the burst of the housing bubble in 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, mean fewer people are qualifying for mortgages now, but the people who currently have mortgages are less likely to ever pay them off because low interest rates mean they will refinance at least once, resetting the clock.

 

Until the 1930s, mortgages were an uncommon way to purchase a house, and mortgages with 15 or 30 year terms were unheard of. House buyers put as much as 50% down, and the mortgage was for three to five years, all of it interest. At the end of the term, a balloon payment for the remaining principal was due, and it’s not surprising there was a high default rate. The federal government changed the mortgage market in the 1930s by stepping in and insuring lenders against the risk of default on certain approved loans, and later by buying those loans to sell as securities in financial markets.

AC Mortgage Burning Party
Mortgage burning party of the Antelope Club of Indianapolis, Indiana, in June 1977; photo by Sheariner.

The modern mortgage market followed from those New Deal policies and the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). After World War II, the Veterans Administration (VA) gave another boost to home ownership rates by insuring mortgage loans to veterans with no down payment. The demand for new housing was so great that mass production methods came to house construction and the firm of Levitt & Sons built what would be called Levittown on Long Island, New York, a planned community of over 17,000 houses they built between 1947 and 1951.

 

Subprime Mortgage Offer
The window sign of a mortgage lender in July 2008, offering subprime mortgages; photo by The Truth About.
Housing and mortgage markets stayed healthy through the 1970s, but by the 1980s they turned down when interest rates spiked past 10% nearly to 20%, and wages for middle and working class people started stagnating, as measured against inflation. As home ownership rates slipped, the federal government in the 1980s and 1990s deregulated the financial sector of the economy, loosening restrictions on lending, and especially on the financial instruments related to mortgages. For Wall Street, the doors to the candy store had been flung open.

 

Home ownership rates hit an all time high by 2005, when the bubble was inflated to its biggest extent. That’s not surprising considering all the shady wheeling and dealing going on at the time. What’s also not surprising was what happened next, when the bubble burst – millions of new homeowners defaulting on their mortgages and the housing market tanking; while the Wall Street financiers, and the federal legislators and regulators who were supposed to keep a watchful eye on them, all walked away with hardly a scratch.

Tennessee Ernie Ford sings his number one hit “Sixteen Tons” in this 1955 television appearance.

 

The Wall Street people and their media mouthpieces tried to blame the homeowners for taking on more debt than they could afford. Meanwhile, the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street in 2008 and 2009 did almost nothing to help those homeowners. They weren’t bailed out. No trickle down economics for them. Through all that, the wages of middle and working class people that started stagnating in the 1980s have stayed flat. People who acquired a 30 year mortgage in the 1990s, when the market was turning up, still have to make their payments each month.

From the Monty Python’s Flying Circus television show on the BBC in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

Meanwhile, their other costs of living have gone up, such as the student debt for their children who may now be, in the 2010s, graduating from college. That’s assuming they can help their children pay for college; if not, the children will be saddled with such an onerous debt upon graduation they may not feel ready for a mortgage of their own until they are in their 40s. Who can blame current homeowners (in name only, and not in deed), these indentured servants, these wage slaves, for continually turning to their homes as a source of funds by refinancing again and again, to the point they will never have a mortgage burning party? The only economic positives they see are the low interest rates that make refinancing an attractive, and maybe a sole, option for clinging to the American Dream.
― Vita