Tag Archives: Corruption

Covfefe Plaza

10 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Politics, Pop Culture

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Cole Spring Plaza (w/atrium in permanent renovation) with Photoshopped spray paint, July 9, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

Well, actually, this post is about Cole Spring Plaza, the luxury apartment high-rise that me and my pregnant wife moved into in 2003, and recently moved out of with our nearly 14-year-old son at the end of June 2017. In all, we lived in the building in downtown Silver Spring for fourteen years and a month, or 5,144 days. For half of those days, it was a pretty good to solid place to live. Although there were a decreasing number of luxuries in our two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat on the eleventh floor, the apartment was a roomy one and our neighbors were friendly. And I could get a good night’s sleep many nights (when I wasn’t sleep-deprived from the first 1,859 days of Noah’s life, 2003-2008). Or, short of that, I could count on getting an afternoon nap, a short after-work nap, or weekend naps to recover.

By the winter of 2011-12, I couldn’t count on that anymore. Not with United Therapeutics and their endless construction projects, underway off and on since 2005. They had torn down their old headquarters adjacent to the Montgomery County Public Parking garage on 1200 Spring Street to build a state-of-the-art solar and geothermal powered monstrosity, including an underground garage. For seven weeks between December 2011 and February 2012, the construction workers pounded away with jackhammers on granite boulders as I attempted to work and teach online at home. I nearly lost my sanity.

Cole Spring Plaza, circa spring 2012 (before new double-paned windows; with trees & bushes in atrium), Silver Spring, MD. (http://www.australiansquashtour.org/).

This, of course, was not Ross Management’s fault, the property managers for Cole Spring Plaza. Nor was the onsite property manager to blame, seeing that they had nothing to do with the jackhammers. What was their fault was that no one in the building had double-paned windows, ones that could seal the noise of downtown Silver Spring and of major construction sites out of our flats. Ross finally replaced our windows in July 2012, but only after it became obvious that more tenants than usual had started moving out.

The granite boulders ordeal was but a symbol of the accumulation of the problems with our living arrangement at Cole Spring Plaza. None of these problems would’ve been a deal breaker for us when we first moved in back in May 2003. After four years in our previous luxury apartment, a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom place, the 1,350-square-footer that was our flat in Cole Spring Plaza seemed spacious. Sure, we knew that it didn’t have a washer and dryer in the unit, or valet parking, or a dry cleaning service on the premises, or a community gym or business office. But it did have the space we needed.

It only became obvious after a few years why the “luxury” part of the sell to us regarding Cole Spring Plaza was a lie. The developers had built the high-rise in 1967, apparently with the idea that it would be a hotel at first. But with Silver Spring not exactly a business or tourist attraction a half-century ago, they settled on the luxury high-rise idea. In the thirty-six years before we moved in, little to no work had been done to replace old plumbing, to repair the central ventilation system, to make washers and dryers available in each flat, or to give each apartment its own central air and heating. This Oscar Madison-Felix Unger setup may have been the definition of a luxury high-rise back in 1973. But in 2017, was a higher end version of my time at 616 (a bit of an exaggeration — the rent was/is way too damn high!). The result of what we did know, combined with the numerous little things we didn’t know, meant a gradual decrease in the quality of living in our place over fourteen years.

The plumbing issues meant for hard water stains that messed up our clothes when we washed them in the building, so by 2011, we were washing them off site. The lack of central ventilation exacerbated my sleep apnea and asthma symptoms, meaning less sleep over time. By 2012, there were two full months out of the year that we didn’t use our HVAC, one month because it was too warm for heat, the other because it was too cool outdoors for air conditioning. It was clear to me by the time our son had finished elementary school that it was time to move.

Spring Colesville public parking (the garage we used off-on for 12 years), Silver Spring, MD, January 23, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

But, move where, exactly? Did we want to stay in the area, or, especially with most of my job interviews taking me to Boston, California, Philly, and Baltimore, did we want to move out-of-town? Would we end up moving, but would I be stuck in long-distance marriage and fatherhood? That was always the main issue for me.

Aside from that, so much had changed since the spring of 2003. A large reason for the choice that we made in Cole Spring Plaza was because we didn’t own a car in 2003. We had looked at the Nissan Xterra and Volvo XC90, but because we lived so close to a Metro stop, we hadn’t seriously considered buying one. That is, until our son came along. We hadn’t looked at other options because for us, there didn’t seem to be that many.

United Therapeutics project after removal of last of garage, Silver Spring, MD, October 27, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

Finally, after Cole Spring Plaza decided that the best way to attract new tenants was to tear down fifty-year-old trees and decades’ old bushes and build a new atrium in June 2015 (which still isn’t complete), me and my wife both knew it was time. That, and United Therapeutics getting another sweet deal from Montgomery County Council Executive Ike Leggett and the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce. After six years of negotiation, the county sold them the parking garage conveniently located across the street from Cole Spring Plaza for $10.2 million. In the twelve months since, Whiting-Turner tore down this garage and has mostly laid the foundation for a six-story, 120,000-square-foot building. That, and the electrical and water and sewage work around the building, left us — and especially mostly working-from-home me — feeling under siege.

United Therapeutics project, Silver Spring, MD, June 19., 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

So we looked, at places in Baltimore, but mostly, between Rockville, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, and even in Bethesda (whose lily-Whiteness I can’t stand), and settled for a town home a couple of miles from our old place. Here, the loudest thing I’ve heard so far is a garbage truck and birds fighting over food.

I wouldn’t recommend Cole Spring Plaza to anyone except to college students, especially if five of them want to room in a two-bed, two-bath flat (I met at least two groups of students doing exactly that). The building, like the rest of downtown Silver Spring, has changed, and not for the better. The building is in disrepair, and will likely get bought out by United Therapeutics in the coming decade.

This isn’t a story of gentrification, for Silver Spring has been a mix of upwardly mobile ethnicities for decades, especially in downtown. No, this is another story of cash-strapped municipalities, the lobbying of Chambers of Commerce, sweet deals for politicians lining their pockets, and corporations encroaching on residential areas. And the story of a family who should’ve moved into a town home three years sooner.

Neoliberals, Neocons, and Other Useless Labels

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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The Matrix, Path of Neo, November 4, 2014. (http://comic.com).

The Matrix, Path of Neo, November 4, 2014. (http://comicvine.com).

I’ve never really had much patience for technical academic jargon, even in my wide-eyed grad school days twenty years ago. And my patience for terms like post-structuralism, post-modern, neo-Marxist and eschatological has grown government-paper-stock-thin as I’ve approached middle-age. Lately, terms like neoliberal and neoconservative have found their way into my sniper sights, especially with the ’14 midterm elections upon us. These terms may have meant something very separate and distinctive fifty or sixty years ago, but they darn sure don’t now. Except, maybe, to academicians and the elite literati, people who somehow believe that these terms are as useful as food, drink and water.

It wasn’t until grad school at the University of Pittsburgh when I became aware of these terms. Back then, I saw neoliberal or neoliberalism in everything I read about race and economic concerns. Whether it was about Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s ridiculous statistical depiction of slavery in Time on the Cross (1974), or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s work on twentieth-century political shifts in his Cycles of American History (1986), they and the reviewers of their books used the term neoliberal like it was parsley for making pesto.

Neoconservative hasn’t been around as long, a term about a decade younger than it’s post-World War II counterpart. It’s definition has evaded most academicians and the vast majority of lay-folk over the last half-century. Sometimes it’s used interchangeably with conservative or politically conservative, sometimes it’s used in the same sentence as right-wing or the religious right or evangelicals.

Asteroid Eros, a near-Earth object, or NEO, June 16, 2014. (http://jpl.nasa.gov). In public domain.

Asteroid Eros, a near-Earth object, or NEO, June 16, 2014. (http://jpl.nasa.gov). In public domain.

Though it’s definition is elusive, it’s history isn’t. Barry Goldwater’s gigantic loss to President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the ’64 Presidential Election led to a host of disaffected Democrats, old-money Republicans and other political misfits getting together and hatching a plan to dismantle the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. They took advantage of the racism and roiling, boiling resentment of Southern Democrats — Dixiecrats, really — toward their party, the federal government and its growing support for Blacks and civil rights. They also took advantage of wealthy Republicans and the ages-old cry of corporations desperate for lower taxes and ever-higher profit margins. All of this came together in Richard Nixon’s ’68 presidential campaign with the Southern Strategy, turning Southern voters from Democrat to Republican. Not to mention with LBJ and Vietnam, the so-called Silent Majority, and their resentment toward rebellious, privileged college students and protestors.

We know it all worked, because fifty years later, to talk of the South as a Democratic bloc today is almost as ludicrous as it was to talk about the South as being ripe for a Republican takeover in ’64. Beyond that, though, with the inclusion of evangelical Christians and other religious and social conservatives came the inclusion of traditional conservatism, neoconservatism, and neoliberalism in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and in the US’ cultural mainstream by the late-1980s.

By then, these terms neoliberal and neoconservative had lost their original meaning, if they were really that different in meaning to begin with. The Republicans had married the terms and allowed the coupling to have kids and then grandkids with names like smaller government, deregulation, lower taxes for the wealthy (so-called “job creators”) and for corporations, prison-industrial complex, ending abortion, welfare reform, education reform, and voter disenfranchisement. This combination of war hawks, an unfettered version of free-market capitalism, with low government regulation and taxes on the rich and corporation, combined with high government regulation of nonconformist activities and peoples (people of color, LGBT marriage rights, women’s reproductive rights, everyone who isn’t Christian or Christian-sounding)? I don’t understand why we don’t call it what it really is.

Quote from Henry A. Wallace, Vice-President of the nited States, 1944. (http://meetville.com).

Quote from Henry A. Wallace, Vice-President of the United States, 1944. (http://meetville.com).

Ladies and gentlemen and transgender, what we have in the US today — and have had in increasing measure for more than four decades — is a mild form of fascism, plain and simple. Yes, you can still vote, but the process is rigged from start to finish by greed and corruption and legal barriers to benefit the rich, the greedy and the corrupt. Yes, we have representation, through gerrymandered districts and hundreds of candidates with lined pockets running unopposed. Yes, we still have a Congress, a group who has done nothing to support ordinary Americans without also benefiting the top 1% in more than thirty years. A group who, in recent years, has done next to nothing at all other than raise more money to run for reelection in the past four years. As for the presidency, despite Congress’ control of the purse strings, every president since FDR’s third term has found a way to increase their political power, even as their influence on the legislative branch has decreased.

With all this, I have no use for the terms neoliberal and neoconservative. Not when all roads have led us to oligarchy, plutocracy and fascism.

Oligarchy: The Future Is Now

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Work

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“History Repeats Itself: The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages and the Robber Barons of Today”, Puck, Samuel Ehrhardt (1889), June 28, 2012. (http://http://www.library.gsu.edu). In public domain.

Though many of us have been fighting this long war against neocon, reactionary, even fascist elements in American society over the course of the past four decades, it appears that, like the Fire Nation in the Avatar: The Last Airbender series (2004-08), that we’ve lost the war. I’m not predicting that Romney will beat Obama in November. But this election will be closer than it ought to be, thanks mostly to the SuperPAC maelstrom stirred up by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) and our own get-rich-quick apathy with politics and responsibility in this country.

More importantly, though, is the reality that this election, even with an Obama win, is merely a chink in the armor that is our American oligarchy, now firmly established. With so much in regulations, social welfare, education, unionization, and other protections for the ordinary American rolled back, it’ll take at least a generation to undo the damage done since the Nixon years to our society, economy and environment. With so much wrong, though, it may well be too late to make course corrections without significant consequences for our nation and for the world.

That only in the past couple of years folks who weren’t staunch progressive or true leftist liberals have come to realize that the neocon endgame was a powerful plutocracy is testimony to the long, successful war of identity politics, wedge issues and other distractions that they have fought since ’68. The funny thing is, though, that for most of American history, our government has been a representative democratic oligarchy, especially for the poor or those whom are of color. How can you explain the history of slavery, even the half-century it took for non-landowning White males to get the right to vote?

“The ‘Brains'” Boss Tweed, by Thomas Nast (1871), June 28, 2012. (Vizu via Wikipedia). In public domain.

There have only been brief periods in American history in which the federal government has been responsive to the ordinary American citizen, a protector of the rights of the many and the minority over the rights of rich individuals and powerful economic interests. One of them came as a result of the Great Depression, the start of a nearly forty-year run where our government, despite its flaws and lies, frequently erred on the side of ordinary citizens. People can talk about the Clinton years being an oasis in the middle of a neocon desert, but between the vast expansion of credit, the tearing down of Glass-Steagall, NAFTA and other corporation-friendly policies, we now know that much of what occurred in the ’90s was a mirage.

What is different now — but not so different from the turn of the twentieth century — is the brazenness with which the rich and powerful flaunt their control over our lives. It’s as if they’ve drugged us, tied us down, and occasionally even tortured us, expecting no response or retaliation. And the media has played its role in this, too. From Kim Kardashian to the Real Housewives of RichLandUSA, and from American Idol to Mad Men to Dancing With The Stars. The rest of us just live vicariously through the oligarchy, or become raging and jealous while laughing at the folly of the rich in the process.

Even the wars we fight and the Supreme Court decisions made are steeped in oligarchy and the privileges of the rich and the corporate. That’s why we spent a decade in Iraq, billions on a military fighter we don’t need (F-22), and think that decisions that treat corporations as people and lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans are good for the country.

That’s why today’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act of 2010 — otherwise known as Obamacare — matters little in the larger scheme. Of course it matters that millions of Americans have access to healthcare. But even before the Supreme Court decision, the best most un- and under-insured Americans could hope for is a system in which they pay less for crappy health insurance. And health insurance isn’t same as healthcare, folks. Either way, the real winners long-term are private health insurance providers, and not ordinary Americans or the Obama Administration.

It is an unfortunate reality that over the past forty-five years, every aspect of government in this country has been infused with oligarchy. It takes tremendous and unyielding pressure for even a city government like New York (e.g., Rockefeller Laws, stop-and-frisk policy, decriminalization of marijuana) to bend to the demands of its own citizenry. Even then, protests, sit-in and petitions don’t always work (see Occupy Wall Street and the fifteen million protestors before the Second Gulf War as examples).

Mitt Romney Bain Capital “money shot,” October 13, 2011. (http://theatlantic.com via Boston Globe).

So, what to do? I haven’t given up hope, but I can’t spend the days I have left — whether it be moments or decades — waiting for the worm to turn. Next best thing is to hope that my son will drink of my wisdom and learn to fight against this kind of ruling class when he is old enough to do so.

USAID suspends District-based nonprofit AED from contracts amid investigation

16 Thursday Dec 2010

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I learned from a friend last night that my former employer, Academy for Educational Development (AED), was suspended by USAID for mismanagement of millions of dollars http://wapo.st/gIhw8Y. I’m mostly unsurprised. But it’s still shocking and very disappointing to learn that a place that I worked so hard for between December 2000 and February ’08 might’ve been involved in corruption, and on a fairly large scale.

The slogan for the organization for most of the time I worked there was “Connecting People, Creating Change.” It seems to me that if this investigation holds water, the C’s for corruption (obvious why) and chaos — for the futures of most of the staff — should be added to its fifty-year legacy. I was never a big fan of the organization, as its corporate structure wasn’t particularly appealing to me. But I did have quite a few friends and colleagues who I enjoyed working with over the course of my seven years. It’s those folks that I feel for the most right now. Especially in our current economic and job climate.