Another morning walking the dog ... by gimleteye

In other parts of the country, August is the dog day of summer. Or month. Walking my dog in the pre-morning dark, the humidity reminded me that in Miami the dog days of summer are October. A film of sweat covered me before I was halfway home. I was thinking about the 1960's as I tried not to slip on the sidewalk coated with a fine algae. The flu has been the lead story in the evening news for four days running, briefly set back to number two by the deaths of American troops in Afghanistan.

I was fourteen-- 1968-- when I came down with what was later called the Hong Kong flu. Even today I have vivid memory of being ill, throwing up and sweating, dozing in and out of delirium until the fever broke. Then it was over and done with. It was the same year I came of age, politically speaking; fervently hoping Eugene McCarthy would be elected president and end a terrible war against an enemy dug into their jungles with as much determination as Afghani warriors on steep, dusty terrain slippery with scree. We are told that the Afghani people want us to succeed, that they hate the Taliban. The same was said of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong lead by cyphers-- mysterious Asians who we knew nothing about--, until the people could no longer stand the corruption of the South Vietnamese government we supported.

A big difference with the 1960’s was brought home to me in the most recent episode of “Mad Men”. The lead-- an advertising executive, Don Draper-- is called to Rome to look at one of Conrad Hilton’s star properties, the Rome Hilton. His wife, Betty, goes along for the ride. In the summer of 1968 I was lucky to visit Rome and stayed at the Hilton Hotel with my parents. It was the best hotel in Rome, quiet, refined and new compared to the commerce and chaos on bustling Via Veneto. The Hilton was a triumphant symbol of an effervescent, youthful American culture; a point I expressed later that night on the lawn overlooking Rome with a teenage girl from Missouri I had introduced myself to, at the Hilton swimming pool earlier in the day.

“Mad Men” captures that moment of arrival. When Betty Draper nudges her husband for leaving the bell boy a tip almost handsome as he is, she says, “He probably doesn’t make two dollars a week.” And there is the difference, notwithstanding I am forty years older. Simply put, we are fighting all our wars—for health care, for national security, for economic and environmental security—on a dollar that feels more and more like the old lira, then.

I watched on TV, liberal Bill Maher ask the question, the other night, of Nobel Prize winning, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, a writer I normally agree with on all points. In frustration, Maher asked: “Where are we going to get the money to pay for all this shit?” Krugman assured him: we are still a very wealthy nation. We still can generate a lot of wealth. I’m not so sure. Not so sure at all.

The question of the day, economically speaking, is whether we are in a “V” or a “W” recovery from this nasty Great Recession or Little Depression. But to me, most of the conversation and chatter seems to revolve around economic signals that have nothing to do with the real economy that people experience every day. How do we pay for all this shit?

This is what I was thinking as I was finishing my morning walk in the dark with my Chesapeake Bay retriever. We do it with debt and with fraud. There is nothing wrong with debt, per se. But it depends on the ability to repay. It is hard to be complacent when so many conservative standards of honest accounting have been jimmy'd and fixed. In the 1960's, the US economy was still grounded in manufacturing; making things of value that generated wealth. Now it seems we are surrounded by scams. The only fool was the one who wasn't in on the scamming.

There is Dorrin Rolle, Miami-Dade county commissioner from one of the poorest districts in the nation, enriching himself at the expense of constituents relying on the charity he headed. Voters keep returning him to office. His campaign war chest filled with money from developers and real estate interests outside his district, who need his simple vote to obtain their supermajority. There is the county commission, funding a lawsuit against the State of Florida in defense of a new Lowe’s Department Store that would be built outside the Urban Development Boundary in West Dade. The liars and thieves of the public interest need the Lowe’s to fuel more suburban sprawl outside the UDB. For Lowe's continuing to push is a minor, petty cost of doing business even if the business model has been crushed by economic reality.

A county lawsuit against the state for rejecting Lowe's is a total waste of taxpayer dollars, but it does serve to reinforce the pecking order at County Hall. Voters are clueless, or, simply assume that when times are fat, the thieves are fatter. When times are bad, the thieves are hungrier than they are, fat. It is not what voters want. Yet voters keep returning the same unreformable majority of the county commission to office.

Just yesterday, Mayor Carlos Alvarez sent the county commissioners a request to abandon continued expense and support of an application for a zoning change that the state has rejected. Good for him. And FPL still wants to build $20 billion in nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, surrounded by ghost suburbs and the detritus of the building boom and the worst politics in a century. Who will pay for that?