Bob Herbert’s commentary highlights the lasting relevance of Dr King’s remarks from fifty years ago….

We Still Don’t Hear Him

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/opinion/03herbert.html?ref=opinion

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Two things are very  evident. 1/Many of my neighbors are absolute slobs.
And,  2/the city is falling flat on its face insofar as code enforcement is concerned.

Cleaning Main street may be important, but the truth is the neighborhood is what needs a focus far more than Main st.

Gary Staiger

Stay tuned.

The Dayton Police Vice Unit has now established a hotline that individuals may use to report suspected prostitution activity.  The Vice detectives will act on the information accordingly, and it may lead to a letter being sent to the registered owner of a vehicle used by a suspected john or other action. In addition, the drug hotline can now accept complaints in Spanish.

333-VICE (8423)

We ask that you share this information at the neighborhood meetings and your newsletters, so the public is aware.  Please emphasize the importance of being specific with observed activity and descriptions.

The  Hotline should NOT take the place of calling the dispatch center [911] for crimes in progress.

THEY WANT THEIR HOMES RETESTED FOR TRICHLOROETHYLENE, A DANGEROUS INDUSTRIAL CHEMICAL.

Here is the link to the video on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8tXRg3-bEg

Three years ago, people who live in the McCook Field neighborhood of Dayton Ohio learned that the former Chrysler Airtemp plant at Leo and Webster Streets, now owned by Behr, had leaked trichloroethylene (TCE), into the ground and that toxic vapor from the chemical was coming up into their houses at unsafe levels.  Over 400 homes have been tested for vapors and elevated TCE levels were found in more than half. Contamination levels as much as 650 times the official “action level” have been found. One school has been closed due to contamination. The USEPA says this is one of the worst contamination sites in the country and has made it a Superfund site.

Mitigation systems, which are a patch but not a fix for the problem, have been installed in many homes but the TCE plume continues to move through the groundwater causing levels under the homes to constantly change.  For that reason, all of the homes need to be periodically retested in order to insure that they are safe, something the USEPA has not yet agreed to do.

BVOCAL spokesperson Jerry Bowling says, “We want to tell our story and to encourage the USEPA to retest all of our homes on an ongoing basis until the problem is resolved.”

The Ohio Department of Health has found that TCE exposure is linked to kidney cancer, liver cancer, non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and several other types of cancer including Hodgkin’s lymphoma and cervical cancer.  A cancer incidence study of the McCook Field area completed by the Ohio Department of Health in August 2008 found that for all cancer types, the neighborhood had a significantly higher than expected number of cancer cases and that for 4 types of cancer associated with TCE exposure; liver, non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and cervical cancer, there were more observed cases in the area than would have been expected.

TCE exposure can also cause other health effects such as headaches, lung irritation, dizziness, coordination and concentration difficulties, skin rashes, nerve and immune system damage and damage to fetal development. Many of these problems have been reported by residents of the neighborhood.

Chrysler discovered the TCE contamination on its property in 1989 or 1990.  Almost 20 years later, the site is still not being cleaned up despite the severity of the contamination and the number of people affected.

Now that Chrysler has filed bankruptcy, it appears that it may try to completely walk away from it’s responsibilities to this neighborhood.  The BVOCAL group is working to make sure that doesn’t happen and that the USEPA does everything it can to protect this community.

BVOCAL can be reached at, bo68chev@att.net , 937-224-5058, 522 Herbert St., Dayton, OH 45404.

Let me be clear. I’ve seen Dylan in concert before and a great singer he’s not, a  stylistic Icon, yes…great singer, no. And from what I hear from folks who had seen him even earlier, he wasn’t all that great [as a singer] back then either.

As the opening croak of Lay Lady Lay tried to crawl off the stage in center field at the Dayton  Dragon’s ballpark July 10th, there was a palpable sense of seat shifting, a rustling, heads joined together, whispering, a quite rumbling, groaning. I said to my companion, ” I know he’s not a great singer, but, what was that!!??” She shrugged her shoulder and said” I don’t know but it sounds really awful.”

According to Wikpedia Lay Lady Lay “was originally written for the soundtrack of the movie Midnight Cowboy, but wasn’t submitted in time to make the final cut. ^[2]

Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers has been quoted that Dylan offered them the song to record in the following way: The Everlys were appearing at the Bottom Line in New York, and after the show, Dylan went backstage to visit with them. Phil asked if Bob had any new songs they might record, and he said yes, there was one they could have. He picked up a guitar and sang, but so quietly that the Everlys could not clearly make out all the words, and thought they heard “lay lady lay, lay across my big breasts, babe.” Thinking it was a song about lesbians, Don Everly said “thank you, it’s a great song, but I don’t think we could get away with that”, and declined to record it. Dylan did not question them about it and went on to cut the track himself. Months later, they heard Dylan’s version on the radio and realized they’d misunderstood the words. The Everlys felt they’d missed a big opportunity and later recorded the song on their album, EB 84.”

Yep, Don and Phil blew a chance to sing and hit the charts with one of Bob Dylan’s greatest  love songs.
And then, sadly,  Bob blew it last night.

He wasn’t working on Maggies Farm no more, although his band was working, he was not. He might have been drinking some bad bad whiskey but, if he’d a’thought about it,  he would have known that in fact, it’s not alright, Ma. He might have been like a rolling stone, but to my ears he was lost somewhere out there with the highway 61 blues. And, I really really hate to say it, but the truth is it might just really be true that it’s all over now, Baby Blue..

Ok, enough with the metaphors. And Ok,  you went  so you could tell your grand kids that you saw Bob Dylan in concert. That would be accurate. It would even be accurate if you said you saw him on stage performing. But, if you said you hear him singing, you’d  be uttering  a  terrible prevarication of the truth. Sounds yes. Croaks yes. Gravel tumbling through the sound system, yes. Singing? No.

I respect Dylan as a song writer, as a recording artist, even yes, as a singer. . He made it known that the Times They Are A Changing, he made Blonde on Blonde, he had us Knocked Out and Loaded in the live Hard Rain, took us to the Nashville Skyline and showed us Desire. But last night… last night he left Blood on the Tracks.

He showed us Another side of Bob Dylan,  and he shouldn’t have.

If you had a good time and you liked Dylan, good for you, your bucks were well spent, you saw the Icon on stage. Fine. That’s my only concession.

But, if you tell your grandkids you heard him singing,  you’d be lying.

BtW: I thought Willie Nelson was very good, even through the muddy mix that somewhat buried his voice in the music.  I was really pleasantly surprised by John Mellencamp, who gave a rockin’ interpretation of what happens when you put a really really good Bar Band on a big stage in front of thousands…they Rocked!

By Dean Baker Guardian(UK)

February 2, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/02/obama-bad-bank-plan

Leaks in the media indicate that the banks are about to inhale another helping of taxpayer dollars. This round is likely to be considerably larger than the $350 billion that they swallowed in the bailout last October.

The leaks from Obama administration officials without names suggest that the money will provide a further subsidy to bank executives and shareholders and may not even resolve the banks’ financial crisis. In other words, the banks may yet come back for more.

The rumored plan is for the government to buy up hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debt from banks and place it in a “bad bank.” The bad bank would then resell these assets for whatever price it could get from private buyers.

The basic problem with this sort of plan is that it requires that the government overpay for the bad assets. If we just pay Citigroup, Bank of America, and the rest what their assets are worth, then they would be bankrupt. They have taken enormous losses on these assets. If they had to own up to their losses, it would wipe out the capital of many, if not most, of the banks in the country.

Recent estimates from Goldman Sachs and Nouriel Roubini put the cumulative losses to the banking system at around $2.0 trillion. There is a lot of room for guess work in such estimates, but there can be little doubt that this number is in the right neighborhood.

We are in the process of losing $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth. Most of this will be absorbed by homeowners, but if just 10 percent of this loss accrues to banks, that would be $800 billion. In addition, banks have lent $3 trillion to support a bubble in commercial real estate. If one third of these more speculative loans go bad, and half of that loss is incurred by banks, that gets us another $500 billion. Add in $200 billion each in losses on credit card debt, car loans, and small business loans, all of which are now far shakier because borrowers no longer have home equity as a backdrop, and you get to the $2 trillion neighborhood.

This $2 trillion loss compares with bank capital of just $1.4 trillion, a large portion of which is rapidly disappearing “goodwill.” In other words, the losses to the banking system will almost certainly vastly exceed its capital. This is why the banks need to tap our wallets.

If we go the bad bank route and pay too much for bad assets, then taxpayers are effectively subsidizing bank shareholders, who would otherwise be wiped out, and bank executives, who would otherwise be looking at big pay cuts or unemployment.

But it gets even worse. There is no reason to think that the bad bank route will be sufficient for resolving the banks problems, at least not in Round I, because they may not come clean with all their bad assets.

It is important to remember that these banks are run by people who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble. It is likely that they still don’t know the full seriousness of their problems. (The same can be said of Treasury Secretary Tim Geitthner and National Economic Advisor Larry Summers, the bad bank’s designers.)

Many of their loans have not yet gone bad. For example, underwater mortgages that are still current. The bad news on these loans will come when homeowners have to make short sales, which could leave banks with losses of $100k, or more, per loan. This means that the “bad bank” created under this plan will have to be an ongoing business, handing out more taxpayer dollars for the banks’ junk over the next several years.

There is a simple alternative, which can be called “bank rationalization” in order to avoid the “n” word. Under this scenario, the government would take possession of insolvent banks. This is not interference with the market, it is the market. Bankrupt banks go out of business, but due to their importance to the economy, we can’t let them be tied up in bankruptcy proceedings for years.

Dealing with the matter all at once can both allow for a quicker fix to the financial system and also ensure fairer treatment of bank creditors. First, the shareholders of bankrupt institutions must be forced to eat their losses. However, we may not want to honor all the debts of the banks at 100 cents on the dollar, which has been current practice.

While the government has guaranteed most deposits, it has not guaranteed the bonds and commercial paper of the banks, nor their commitments on credit default swaps (CDS) and other derivative instruments. If it takes possession of all the bankrupt banks at once, it can apply a uniform policy. For example, it could honor bonds at 90 cents on the dollar or only pay off full CDS obligations to those who actually own the bond that was being insured against default.

To force banks to own up to insolvency, bank rationalization can apply punitive terms to banks that fail subsequently and allow their creditors to hold bank executives personally liable for their losses. Such rules would lead to more truth telling from our bankers.

In short, bank rationalization is both much fairer and better for the economy than the bad bank plan. If only the people who missed the housing bubble can be forced to recognize this fact.