Unsustainable Moments

Eveready Diner • Rhinebeck, NY • October, 2008

 Once upon a time the United States was the only major industrial nation not rubbled by World War. No, not wars...  War! The gap between the first and second halves of the European Psychotic Break was a couple of decades... just enough time to reload and suck the Asian Pacific into its madness. And so it came to pass that world wealth got transferred here in exchange for jobs, finished capital, and consumer goods. 

The bargain was unsustainable. As bright, educated peoples restored their tools... like factories, dams, power grids, roads, rails, airports, institutions, and competitive sanity – trade imbalances shrank and inevitably turned against America. But the 50 or 60 year capital advantage created a golden moment for US consumers got drunken on their temporary possession of so much of the world's wealth. 

Speaking of unsustainability, American union monopsonists struck equally unsustainable deals with their monopolist employer/partners to achieve average wage heights built upon the myth of eternal world pauperism. US labor shared in the flow of world wealth to its shores with no threat from cheaper labor that lacked competitive tools. 

Now they have the tools. 

Ever heard of arbitrage? It means buying cheap and selling dear. Buy stuff made for less in Romania, sell it in London where incomes, hence prices, are higher. Like that. Today financial capital dispatches tools to low wage world spots to produce goods or services for a lot less than American companies whose workers have identical tools but with legacy high wage contracts (and government mandated additional labor costs) unavailable to Romanians, Ethiopians, Peruvians, British, or of course, Chinese. 

Investment capital is the most mobile factor of production. It moves at quantum speeds through digital pipelines. Errors in predicting arbitrage advantages are spotted and overcome, by computers, at light's velocity.  And while actual production and employment follow those directions with a lag... their vast movements are inexorable. 

See the October 2008 Eveready Diner up there? It's a relic of "Mid-Century" America's momentary competitive advantage. Unlike anytime before in history, regular people... typical families... drove there and in air conditioned comfort chose from enormous menus. 

October 2008 was about a month after America came aware that its financial iceberg had calved off over a quarter of its value. Access to financial capital got squeezed in what was to become known as the Great Recession. The lag between financial loss and real economic activity was about to bring down a curtain. The Eveready Diner (which may or may not be gone) stood on quaking economic ground - a 50s lyric of an unsustainable time when thanks to Europe's Psychotic Break - even the poorest consumers in the US were better off than their counterparts anytime in the history of history. 

West-World's Top Dozen - 2020

Source for this ranking? Forbes Magazine and Others

Images expand when clicked upon. OK?

Sequestered at home by fiat, the mind wanders/wonders... "It's artists' jobs to ask questions. Answers though are above their pay grades."

I'm just sayin':

"Did my heart not listen, or was it my head?"

12 Makes Ambani $59.7 Billion

"Life's heirlooms are tiny as a heartbreak."

11 Larry Page $61.1 Billion

"If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme."

10 Carlos Slim Helu (and family) $63.5 Billion

"If you're looking for sympathy, you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."

09 Amancio Ortega Gaona $65 Billion

"The death tax is a victory of political romanticism over economic reality."

08 Larry Ellison $66.4 Billion 

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for." - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

07 Vladimir Putin $70 Billion

"How thick is the line between social and economic justice?"

06 Mark Zuckerberg 76.34 Billion

"In depicting subjects by their parts, people can be reduced to their dignity." - Paul Strand

05 Amancio Ortega $77.1 Billion

"Everything is the way it is because it got that way.

04 Warren Buffett $$88.8 Billion

"The unreality of reality."

03 Bill Gates $108,2 Billion

"A proposition has two parts. You must state a thesis. And you must prove it."

02 Bernard Arnault (and family) $109.2 Billion

"Yes, but what of the forces of brightness?"

01 Jeff Bezos $111.5 Billion

"What didn't happen is a hole in history."

* Wish I could recall the sources of each of these quotes, only three are mine. 

Pacem In Terra

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And away they all flew
Like the down of a thistle...

But I heard him exclaim
Ere he drove out of sight,

"Merry Christmas to all,.
And to all A GOOD NIGHT."

We're at a moment of worry with respect to things economic, with a real possibility that a gale of creative destruction will whip through our places in 2011. We face a moment of challenge which this time I hope will see, as that gale recedes.... Pacem In Terra.

Which is truly the hope we have been waiting for.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Ted

Fall Before The Fall

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This soon may be gone!

Rode my bike through the Pekway region of Lancaster County yesterday. Fall’s come onto the Amish farms.

Next month the EPA will begin enforcing rigorous standards here to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Runoff from these farmland’s had an impact upon the Bay which people downstream claim is negative. Even though this is a record year for the heavily fished bay area, the pleasure boaters and fisher people have colluded with the Obama administration to impose draconian regulations upon the nation’s richest non-irrigated farmland here in Lancaster County.

The results may have the same impact that the EPA’s had upon the Central California Valley where in order to protect some odd species, they’ve shut off that area’s water supply almost entirely. The result? Ruined farmers, a greater dependency upon imports (from countries with no similar endangered species regulations}, and an increase in food prices which fall, of course, most dramatically upon the most fragile American families who are struggling to survive in this recession. I suppose those are the unintended consequences of well meaning people trying to do utopian stuff, huh?

So I’m making images before Lancaster County’s farmers, and urban areas are laid waste with EPA regs that will topple them into bankruptcy. Why the urban areas? Because they built water reclamation plants before the EPA was founded. Those operations do not meet the new standards. However, while the Federal government provided funds for communities which never built any treatment plants, it refuses to provide funds to upgrade the existing facilities (remember the Stimulus Bill and all of those never materialized shovel ready projects?).

Since every city in Pennsylvania is teetering upon insolvency as a result of other sorts of mandates imposed but not funded by the Pennsylvania state government, these waste treatment costs will probably be the last straw, creating ghost towns throughout what is the commonwealth’s most economically diverse and lowest unemployment region.

Go figger, huh?

Oh well, enjoy it before winter sets in….

Canon G10
Lancaster County, PA

Processing: Canon G10: 3 handheld wide angle images stitched together in PS/CS4: AlienSkin/SnapArt, Topaz, custom brushes.

PART TWO

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And thirty miles or so south of that image up top there was this one taken last week at a friend's house overlooking the river meeting the tidal waters of The Chesapeake Bay. Here's on the shore of Northeast, Maryland we're watching the runoff of centuries of Yankee farming flowing into the headwater's of the American South's most treasured Atlantic Coast bay. And here they're arguing that the tons of fertilizer and animal droppings carried by the river system have changed the very nature of their life.

Once again this is PS/CS4 stitching together six handheld Canon G10 images taken with its widest angle at ISO 600 as the sun set. I used Topaz to additionally enhance the dynamic range.

OMG The Baby's Playing With it!

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Not a good idea to let kids play with the dollar. It'll break.

Sold In The USA

Deep beneath the Jefferson Memorial is a gift shop. Inside they sell, like, trash. Trash pens, trash, tee shirts, trash, mugs, trash, busts. For example, here are two... see my point?

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On the left there's a cheepie statue of the Great Man himself (1.) and on the right you can see a representative cup (2.). And now... lettuce turn them over, OK?


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Here's the bottom of the cup sold by the United States Park Service from the Jefferson Memorial gift store (#2).. And its label? See anything, um. odd? Okay.. now let's turn Jefferson over (#1)...


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Sigh... in the entirety of America there was only one place they could find a bust maker. Um, well, a bust importer. The bust maker apparently lives pretty far to the west of Washington, huh? by the way, the folks who knit most of the store's shirts and "Washington D.C." golf caps weren't from Washington's west. Nope... Honduras - sort of to the south, right?

Yep, this is the Uited States government, using US. taxpayer taxes to buy the inventory for the store of the Jefferson Memorial. I didn't see that coming. Did you?

...this kid will pay for it.

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Am watching President Obama tell America why one seventh of the economy needs to be taken-over by the government. Why $500 billion of the payment for the take-over must come from senior citizen care. He explained that he can find this amount in wastage. I've heard government explain how it was going to pay for so much through increased efficiencies. It's not ever happened in my lifetime, so I'm skeptical that this $500 billion will come from waste.

The thing is that policy makers must choose between access and quality unless they can find large amounts of additional health care dollars. If 46 million additional people will lay claims against the existing amount of health care resources, then someone will have to determine who gets what. That rationing... if not done by price... will be done by panels. And if the amount available is specifically reduced by $500 bilion to senior citizens who use the most health care... then those panels will disproportionately ration health care away from the needs of the elderly. Death panels?

Last time the President spoke he promised that government control of health care would decrease costs... tonight he promises us budget neutrality. That means no cost increases. What's next?

There's nothing I can do about any of this. As an economist, I'm terrified. I am going to go and buy a bunch of gold since the first victim of all of this will have to be the dollar. And ... and... As I watch and worry... I'm doing pictures as distractive therapy. And it seems as if the face of youth... who will get the bills for all of this... resonates most strongly with me.

There will be a wave of fury whipping across the land tomorrow. No two waves. They will collide. I hate this.

Goodnight.

Eats

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Recall the tale of the ant and the grasshopper? Like a haunting tune, it's hard, just now, to get out of my mind. I think it's a news thing? Anyway, it's cheerful to have this memory - the kids will cherish it, huh?

Loan Sale

FREE NEWS WIRE

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When can an image be
More than a noun?
When can an image
Become a verb?

Or maybe between
A noun and verb
An image becomes
Adverbial?

Or not, if it
Gets stuck as
A preposition or
A proposition.

Like a
Loan Sale.

Squint

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There are evocative small towns that resonate powerfully - usually with the ghostly yearnings of faded dreams- Of opportunities went away. There are reasons that cities prosper and grow... economic reasons. No amount of wishing will substitute for the throb of creativity which answers vast numbers of wants - desires - needs. Simply put: There are reasons that small towns are small - they imagine one dream, and never dream another.

Then there are places so grand that you cannot purchase a lens wide enough to cram anything about them into one frame. You cannot stand back far enough to capture their roar. They need to be described in pieces. And even pieces communicate just one aspect of their aura. You come away from them with impressions in lieu of tack sharp descriptions. You can only know them emotionally as collections of living, growing, clutching - opportunities. There you can feel, hear, and smell heaven-grasping ambitions.

They make your imagination - squint.

The News

Yep the news is distracting. However the value that we place upon things has not changed, just their monetary descriptions. Only for those who have valued stuff for its price tag... only for those people is the present situation truly alarming. My wife, my dog, our home, our friends, these photos... and so much more are worth no more or less to me at this moment than thye were a moment ago and will probably be worth more in the moments to come. Maybe I'll find a way to express this as an image, perhaps not.

There's an economic expression which is worth understanding just now. It's "The Monetary Veil". Too often we categorize things by their position on a dollar/euro/whuddever scoreboard. Even people, wondering how much someone makes for a living. Sometimes we're fortunate to pierce that monetary veil and see the reality on the other side.

We'll leap this financial chasm that's appearing in front of us on the TV and in the papers. But as we steel our nerves to jump, it's valuable to look around at everything on this side and see it denuded from some monetary number... and actually value the worth of the things beneath that coverlet before they're all tricked out once again in price tags.

NOTE: If you want to read my take on the causes of this economic malais.... In my other - real - world, I have a published article on the causes you can find if you Click here

October 24, 2006: The LCCC Battleground 6

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October's high Fall in Lancaster. The trees are usually either at or just past full color throughout the late parts of the month and brisk days turn to quite cool as we head into November. By this time in 2006, the first fights were fought over the construction of this Convention Center which I've discussed for six day now. And they were delaying the activities which had already been slow to start as a result of earlier court fights.

Original budgets for this project were drawn up in the early part of the decade and contracts were let as interest rates plummeted. Construction and commodity prices as a result of the low interest rate boom had not yet exploded. It was a sweet time to plan a big project like this. But by 2006, after years of wrestling critics led by those rogue commissioners had pushed the project through delays into a time when both prices and interest rates were soaring.

So their actions, while not yet successful in any court order to stop the process, were successful in pushing it into viciously more expensive waters. And still... here on October 24... the machines worked by day, and their operators wondered by night if those commissioners would have locks on all the gates by daybreak. And in County Commission offices a determined obsession seemed to have enveloped those two commissioners and their small cadre of supporters to either stop or strangle the project at all costs...

Cost passed increasingly along to taxpayers.

July 15, 2006: The LCCC's Battleground 5

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For that past four days I showed you views from the roof of that parking garage that slashes horizontally across the top of this picture.

But this time I wanted the fourth wall to fall away, so I stood in front of the Lancaster News Paper's printing building and looked back, first to the left and then to the right. You can see that developments created the gap in a hockey player's smile on the other side of South King Street. Up to the left is the front of the Watt&Shand department store whose facade the designers hoped to preserve to wrap around the front of the new hotel, while in front of me the convention center was planned to rise within the gap. See down there to the right, some buildings were getting stripped away to leave those buildings on the corner. More to tell about them tomorrow.

I can tell from analytics tracking that visitors are coming from all around the world to watch this cultural and economic struggle in Lancaster. And from your private e-mail I know a lot of you are now wondering how this battle's come out. You're wondering if everything in that image up there was brought to a halt, leaving that hockey smile broken into the city's center.

And you should wonder because as I took this picture the contractors were expecting that some judge would issue an injunction to the two county commissioners who were spending tax dollars as if they were their own. No... no... people like that never spend their own money. In fact lots of the actors in this drama expected those commissioners would get an injunction they could use to stop all of this.

"Jump forward Ted," a writer begged me. "Come on... stop the tease. How's this story end? Are we watching a tragedy or a triumph? And for whom?"

July 16, 2006: • The LCCC's Battleground 4

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Here's an image of bravery. A band of people from High Construction, The Lancaster Newspapers, Fulton Financial Corporation,and The Lancaster County Historic Preservation Trust had won the support of every key economic and cultural institution in Lancaster County, including the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce, The Economic Development Corporation, the County's Convention and Visitor's Bureau, and the Mayor, Council and legislators from the City of Lancaster to raze nondescript rotting structures between N. Vine Street on the left of this picture and along S. King Street at the top of this image to make way for the construction I've shown you in the past few days. They'd also won the approval of two of three outgoing County Commissioners to establish the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority... The LCCCA I've mentioned over the past days.

Days before this photo was taken the majority of the old buildings were demolished to clear this area. On the top right of this image you can see yet more large buildings (the dark brick ones) which were scheduled to be pealed away. The remaining structures to the left were scheduled for preservation that would incorporate them into the new convention center.

BUT... two of the three incoming county commissioners, who were elected on pledges of support for this project abruptly abandoned those promises to join with powerful interests of opposition made up of hotel owners, city haters, change opponents, government haters, and a gaggle of anti-everything zealots.

In spite of the astonishing support for this project... those rogue commissioners began to assemble an army of attorneys to restrain and kill this construction. If they were successful the original supporters could lose tens of millions of dollars and economic recovery in Lancaster City would be crippled or probably ended. At the moment I took this peaceful picture, a full on battle had exploded and the other side controlled the entirety of the Lancaster County treasury. The future of an important historical city was plunged into an invisible civil war. Its enemies had captured County Government.

At about that time I asked the executive director of a key agency for his prediction regarding the potential completion of this convention center and its companion hotel. "Ted," he frowned. "A scale of ten? On a good day, I peg its chances of not getting cancelled at 5. No," he thought for a moment. "Make that 4."

May 30 • 2007:• The LCCC's Battleground 3

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There's an odd thing about construction... it appears to happen in spurts. At first the structures on this site were razed in just a few days and everything looked very different. Then the niggling details took over and even after months so little appears different, at least at first glance. But as you study the little things, you sense that tens of thousands of them have occurred. And as all of that was going on, the two commissioners, one a Democrat, the other a Republican continued their battle pouring tens and hundreds of thousands into the pockets of lawyers trying to stop this thing.
Yet oddly, resistance to their resistance seemed to be building. It was faint at first but by May of last year as I travelled around Lancaster County I began to hear supporters emerging. People who sensed that this could mean the rebirth of their county seat. That it could mean a dependable source of revenue for a city staggering under state and federal mandates. But still, one wondered as Spring broke, if backlash could possibly offset those two of three commissioners and their gang of supporters.

Things still felt grim.

March 10, 2007: The LCCC's Battleground 2

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I began this series yesterday in the future, August 11, 2007. That was a scene setter. And what happened before? Today let's step back six months and peer into the hole that might never fill. Or at least that's what rational people thought on March 10th as they cleared the space and dug into the colonial dirt of downtown Lancaster.
As the heavy metal machinery gathered in the pit, heavy hitter lawyers were gathering at the direction of two of three county commissioners who were turreting the guns of the Lancaster County treasury to bear in order to stop these machines.

August 11, 2007: The LCCC's Battleground 1

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This is a battle zone... or it was when I took this picture. Over the next days I shall post some more pictures of this site ... some made earlier... some... later. This is the Lancaster County Convention Center arising in the very epicenter of the City of Lancaster. The actions of a coalition of county hotel owners, anti government activists, anti development activists, economic illiterates, anti Lancaster City activists, and some few superstitious zealots came together with the political aspirations of two of three county commissioners to stop this project. They claimed to speak for the majority of the half million people in lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They mounted every delaying tactic and court maneuver imaginable. Even as this image was taken, there was serious doubt about just who they did represent and whether this hole would ever be filled.

Incidentally, this series of panoramas are each designed to be very large prints of perhaps six to eight feet on their longest edge.

Convergence

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Cities, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Empty spaces must, like scars, be filled... healed. There is an urban imperative toward convergence.

See here along a tiny ancient street just beyond the Farmer's Market? There was a courtyard here. An open space which, while gated, was open to the view of passers by. And the owners had historically gardened it creating a touch of serenity. But now that scab of grey indicates that the city is filling it in, much the way our body's fill in any puncture or gash. And soon it will be another structure built to the street to house an extension to our quilt museum.

Now this county has nourished the world's finest quilters. And stunning examples of their work have been gathered in this collection. So I feel almost uncivil is sighing over the way need for exhibition space has caused the facades here to converge. There always seems some good reason, if there weren't capital would not flow in the direction of neatly converging buildings across open space.

In cities, open space rarely has a constituency. Convergence is not a destination, it is a process. It doesn't promise us a final equilibrium, just a result. That's probably a good thing in a living city as it continues to prosper. I like prosperity... but... but... it's a pity we can't find a way to make some open space spin off a return sufficient to wall out convergence.

Anybody got a plan?

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6),1/200 @ f/11 exposure Bias value: -1, ISO: 400, Focal Length: 47 mm, Date/time: 7/31/07-6:41 pm, Metering Mode: Average, Camera RAW

Ruins

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Last night I saw a picture of an ancient Roman ruin. Then I looked at Stonehenge. And I wondered about their connections. Each was the product of an entirely distinct civilization which overlapped not at all. We think of them as solid pieces of some ancient history. But how solid were they?

Look at my image of the Watt & Shand building at the epicenter of downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Here the facade of a grand building has been stripped from its body to be grafted around a new Convention Center. Like most cities, Lancaster once had a thriving downtown dominated by a large department store. The age of the mighty department stores lasted what? Eighty years? Sixty? Fifty? And then, the automobile pierced their economic air like a pin through a bubble. A romantic attachment to those years has developers piecing that Watt & Shand department store skin onto a body the same way cosmetic surgeons are diddling with breasts, noses, and now even entire faces.

I wonder how long Stonehenge was functional? Twenty years? Sixty? Because it's old, we think of it as epochal. Almost eternal. A legacy of a vast civilization. When in fact, it might have been culturally or economically intriguing for one or two generations. The Celtic equivalent to a long lasting television series.

As much as people seem to like the Watt & Shand ruins, I wonder when the folks in Lancaster will decide to create their own cultural contribution. Something that says that we were here as well. Or we ARE here as well. I worry that we are becoming like the folks who lived around ruins, unable either technically or culturally to take any farther steps.

Hey, preservation's a good thing, but so's progress. It's something the Americans who built this Watt & Shand building believed in. I wonder if we've lost that vision as we paste the skin of old ruins onto today's expressions?

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6),1/400 at f/13, Exposure Bias Value: -1, ISO:200, Focal Length: 22 mm, Date: 7/31/07 @ 6:01pm, Flash: Off, Metering: average, Camera RAW

Award Winner 2007: Mr. Saxovannah

Note: Accepted as one of theworld's finest Performing Arts Images of 2007 for Canon POTN Book to be published in the Fall of 2008.

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Often it seems the guy was right who noticed that we are merely another brand, jostling for attention on a crowded shelf. Which inevitably drives some clever marketers to crank the flamboyant dial way up - which I guess also explains the market for Wunder-Bras and warmly appealing bearded guys in orange who saxophone a haunting shriek of Amazing Grace.

Hey… it’s a plan. Right?