Month: June 2015

by William Skink

Stage I fire restrictions will go into effect for Missoula County at 12:01am, July 3rd. That means no fireworks, on either public or private land. Here’s more info:

Stage 1 Restrictions extend the perpetual prohibition of fireworks from County parks, Forest Service and State lands to private lands within the county. No fireworks will be permitted on any land in Missoula County, public or private.

The city-county Office of Emergency Management’s Missoula 9-1-1 Center is staffing a fireworks report line. The public is encouraged to report the use of fireworks to 258-4850. Law enforcement will respond as resources allow. To report a fire call 911.

Stage 1 Restrictions prohibit all fireworks and create severe restrictions on campfires and smoking. Stage 1 Restrictions also mean that responding agencies can hold an individual that starts a fire as a result of fireworks financially liable for the costs of fighting the fire.

This move comes on the heels of the Missoula County Fire Protection Association’s determination that fire danger in Missoula County is Extreme.

Not being able to celebrate America’s b-day by blowing shit up will probably outrage plenty of Montanans. Will those Montanans connect being deprived of detonating explosives with climate change? Probably not, but they should.

In what I would call the most depressing news to come from those haughty “scientists” who keep raining on our capitalist parade, a new report claims Earth is entering its 6th extinction phase. If true, that really sucks. From the link:

The planet is entering a new period of extinction with top scientists warning that species all over the world are “essentially the walking dead” – including our own.

The report, authored by scientists at Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities, found that vertebrates were vanishing at a rate 114 times faster than normal.

In the damning report, published in the Science Advances journal, researchers note that the last similar event was 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs disappeared, most probably as a result of an asteroid.

On some level we know, collectively, that we can’t keep living the way we’ve been living. The “fictional” narratives we consume are increasingly dystopian. And yet, in the face of cataclysmic climate change, we have media sources like NPR running PR pieces about how a California golf course ethically keeps its greens green:

In drought-stricken California, golf is often seen as a bad guy — it can be hard to defend watering acres of grass for fun when residents are being ordered to cut their usage and farmers are draining their wells.

But golf is a $6 billion industry in the state and employs nearly 130,000 workers, according to the California Golf Course Owners Association. So while the greens are staying green, some golf courses are saving every drop of water they can.

A lot of golf courses use recycled or reclaimed water, but Friedlander says Pelican Hill is different.

“We’re here at the practice facility at Pelican Hill golf club. We’re looking at a large, 10 acres worth of land that’s mostly warm season Bermuda grass,” he says.

That grass was chosen because it needs less water and doesn’t grow as quickly. And in the non-playing areas, the course uses native bushes that use no water.

That said, the course is as swanky and fancy as it gets, and Friedlander says the players laying out more than $300 for a round shouldn’t notice any differences in the greens and the fairways. The key is the irrigation system. Course managers can monitor and control irrigation from their smartphones.

“You can water specific areas of the golf course without watering other specific areas,” Friedlander says. “We can isolate each head, so instead of turning on 50 heads, and overwatering an area that doesn’t need water, we can turn on one head and water one area that might need water.”

It was a fun run, fellow homo sapiens, but clearly we don’t have what it takes to adapt. Instead of taking more drastic measures to address what science is predicting we are facing with climate change, rich people would prefer to maintain their golf courses.

by William Skink

Last February, when the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission was examining how to reduce access to cheap alcohol for those with the most frequent contacts with law enforcement, Dan Brooks wrote a cute little piece of snark about Charming the Snake. And though I agree with the subtitle of his piece–a downtown ban on cheap booze avoids the real issue–I wonder if Brooks truly understands the scope of the problem. From the link:

People drinking on the street is a problem, but I’m not sure the problem is drinking. If the city wants to discourage us from getting wasted downtown, it should ensure that more of us have the opportunity to get wasted at home.

To that end, I draw your attention to the other big story in where to drink King Cobra this week: the opening of eight new units in the John Lynn Apartments. Intended for people who have been homeless and suffer from disabilities, the apartments rent for $250 a month and attracted 55 applicants in three days.

Many of those applicants were living in cars or at the Poverello Center. Chances are some of the money they weren’t spending on rent went to tall boys and pint vodka. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Annual Homeless Assessment Report, 35 percent of people who lived in shelters in 2010 had chronic substance abuse problems.

Maybe those people would stop drinking if they had apartments. Maybe they would just pound tall boys and yell in the comfort of their own homes. Either way, they would not be drunk downtown.

What Brooks is trying cleverly to bring into this conversation is the housing first model, exemplified by the efforts in Salt Lake City. While I appreciate and totally support that approach to homelessness, the issue of alcohol abuse and the resulting carnage it produces is a much bigger issue than how the unsheltered self-medicate with cheap booze.

To drive home this point, here are three headlines posted in just the past 4 hours at the Missoulian:

Man accused of stabbing woman at Missoula Hotel

Mother pleads guilty to endangering kids at Missoula hotel

Missoula man allegedly dragged, kicked, strangled mother of his children

These are three headlines posted in one day in Missoula. And if you sit in Municipal Court watching arraignments (which I do sometimes) you will see crime after crime where alcohol was a significant factor.

The effort to remove certain products that Dan Brooks may or may not consume (you can get berry-flavored Steel Reserve at the Food Farm for 69 cents a can, Dan) quickly failed. Why? Because lots of money is made selling this nasty swill to poor people.

This article from the Missoula Independent last April featured a casino actually willing to share some sales figures that would have been impacted by this voluntary removal of cheap booze:

At first, Becki Hamilton wasn’t sure what to think. A few weeks ago, two members of the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission presented Hamilton, manager of the Magic Diamond Casino on West Broadway, with proposals designed to curb problems stemming from alcohol abuse. One idea called for alcohol retailers to voluntarily stop selling certain low-cost beverages with high alcohol content, such as pints of cheap vodka and single cans of malt liquor. The other involved the commission creating a list of people who downtown retailers would all agree to stop selling alcohol to, due to their persistently bad behavior while intoxicated.

The first proposal immediately struck Hamilton as unrealistic.

“I just took the things they listed on the draft [proposal], which was about five items, and over a six-month period it was about $100,000 that we would be missing out in sales,” Hamilton says. “And I explained that a lot of the people who buy the single-serve cans and the smaller portioned beers and vodkas and whiskeys aren’t all bums.”

Clearly the business of profiting from alcohol abuse is doing just fine. Four years ago this July, Forbes ran a piece about the recession-resistent sales of booze:

With the holiday weekend approaching and plans for barbeques and parties on the horizon, you are probably packing your cooler with drinks. With the way sales have been trending, it seems most Americans are.

During the recession, alcohol-related industries were some of the few seeing continued growth, proving alcohol to be a frequent purchase for many Americans. Likewise, over the last 12 months, alcohol manufacturing has grown almost 10 percent, and alcohol retailers and wholesalers have seen growth of over 6%. So is alcohol recession-proof? Not necessarily, but it does seem to be recession-resistant. Despite our uncertain economy, alcohol sales continue to rise. In all four of the alcohol-related industries outlined below- beverage manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and bars- revenue growth is at the highest level it’s been since 2007.

If there’s money to be made, why care about the societal cost? And, as Dan Brooks points out, alcohol can provide a temporary respite from the depressing reality of being poor and/or homeless. So why not?

I wrote a post about alcohol abuse back in January of 2013 at the blog I’m now banned from contributing to, which you can read here. In that post I shared some numbers from a study that put the annual cost of Montana’s alcohol abuse problem at a staggering 642 million dollars. Here’s the breakdown:

Alcohol induced medical care: 100.7 million
Criminal justice system: 49.1 million
Early mortality/lost earnings; disease/vehicle accidents: 296.8 million
Lost productivity: 53.3 million
Treatment costs: 10.7 million

That study was done years ago. Since everything seems to go up (except wages) I can only assume the annual cost to Montana is nearing 3/4 of a billion dollars. That is insane.

Alcohol abuse is a huge problem. I struggle myself with drinking too much too often. My grandpa was an alcoholic and verbally abusive to my grandma. Some of the ugliest moments in my own marriage have come from getting drunk and losing control.

I wish we had better treatment options, better recovery models, but we don’t. Instead we have a stagnant economy teetering on the edge of another collapse with the resultant desire to temporarily escape this harsh reality with booze.

And so it goes.

by William Skink

After writing yesterday’s post about the lack of affordable housing in Missoula and the economic mess in Greece, I ran across at least a half-dozen other articles I could have added.

An article at Counterpunch about The Rent Crunch unpacks what seems like the obvious solution to a lack of affordable housing: building more affordable housing. Too bad it doesn’t work that way. From the link:

Policy experts explain that the rent explosion is caused by a rental housing supply shortage and failure to keep up with demand. But if this is true, wouldn’t the solution be to simply build more housing? There is no shortage of building materials or construction workers. So why isn’t more housing built? The owners of housing respond to changes in supply and demand in a different way. They raise rents. If new housing units are built for the long term, then its to get in on the currently high and rising rents.

The change in market conditions is the lever for the owners of land and housing to extract more money from anyone who needs a roof over their head. This basic need is a means of enrichment. Many people have no land, some have a little, and a few own a lot.

When people can’t afford to live inside, they become homeless. If you happen to be one of the tens of thousands of homeless people in LA, it’s not just surviving you need to worry about. This Pando article about Google moving into town and hiring private security to harass the homeless is a good example of what municipalities probably wish they could do, but can’t (remember, just a few years ago Missoula’s City Council attempted to ban sitting on sidewalks to keep unsightly homeless people from scaring away tourist dollars).

In Hong Kong, many McDonalds become de facto homeless shelters at night because the food is cheap, employees aren’t allowed to throw people out, and 20% of people in Hong Kong live below the poverty line.

While the situation in Greece will get a lot of attention this week, Zerohedge takes a look at the worsening situation in China:

While Greece has understandably been the focal news event over the weekend – after all it has been 5 years in the making – let’s not forget that in another massive move, one geared squarely to prevent a market collapse and to avoid even further panic, the Chinese central bank cut both its policy rate and the reserve rate in a dramatic push to calm down markets after a 10% crash in just two trading days.

Which, incidentally, shows that after the Fed, the BOE, the SNB, the BOJ and the ECB, the PBOC is the latest bank to have cornered itself in a world where it must inflate the bubble at all costs or face the dire consequences. What consequences? Nomura explains:

The policy easing should be viewed as a measure to contain the risk of a hard landing or systemic crisis rather than one to achieve faster growth. In this case, the stronger-than-expected monetary easing may help stem the decline in the equity market following a 10.6% drop over the past two trading days. The positive wealth effect of the equity market on consumption or aggregate demand is limited in China, but an equity market collapse would hurt millions of mid-class households and pose great danger to the economy and social stability.

In Ukraine, a default on its debt could happen at the end of July. At least that is what Goldman Sachs is expecting:

“Ukraine will not make the July 24 coupon payment and, as a result, will enter into default at that point,” Bloomberg quotes Goldman Sachs analyst Andrew Matheny as writing in his research note on Ukraine.

The analyst also warned that Kiev will likely issue a moratorium on its foreign debt repayment plan, as it will fail to settle the disagreement with its creditors.

“We do not expect the ad hoc committee to accept Ukraine’s latest restructuring proposal.”

While Ukraine sinks deeper into civil war and fiscal insolvency, a recent deal between Russia and Germany has dealt a major blow to America’s wedge policy of preventing further Russian economic integration with Europe. Michael Whitney writes about that reality:

Here’s the scoop: Two days before the swaggering Sec-Def touched down in Germany, Gazprom announced that it was putting the finishing touches on a massive deal that would double the amount of Russian gas flowing to Germany via a second Nord Stream pipeline. The shocking announcement made it look like the clueless Carter had no idea what was going on and that his efforts to isolate Russia were a complete flop. And, make no mistake; the deal is huge, big enough to change the geopolitical calculus of the entire region.

Closer to home, Puerto Rico just announced it can’t repay its debt. The implications are significant, especially for cities and states across the US that utilize bonds to improve their communities (like Missoula did with it’s 42 million dollar parks and trails bond last year). Puerto Rico is on the hook for 70 billions dollars. From the link:

The governor of Puerto Rico has decided that the island cannot pay back more than $70 billion in debt, setting up an unprecedented financial crisis that could rock the municipal bond market and lead to higher borrowing costs for governments across the United States.

Puerto Rico’s move could roil financial markets already dealing with the turmoil of the renewed debt crisis in Greece. It also raises questions about the once-staid municipal bond market, which states and cities count on to pay upfront costs for public improvements such as roads, parks and hospitals.

For many years, those bonds were considered safe investments — but those assumptions have been shifting in recent years as a small but steady string of U.S. municipalities, including Detroit, as well as Stockton and Vallejo in California, have tumbled into bankruptcy.

The wheels are coming off the bus. Do the passengers realize a crash is imminent? When they do, it will be a mad scramble for the exits.

by William Skink

A national survey on housing affordability labeled Missoula one of the “expensive surprises”, placing the median cost of owning a home at a quarter of a million dollars. Bob Oaks, director of the North Missoula Community Development Corps., thinks that figure “is pretty crazy“. I don’t disagree.

Housing, though, is just the tip of the crazy iceberg called the economy, which tanked 7 years ago thanks to the bursting of a housing bubble. For more crazy, this Salon piece from last year examines the massive fraud Holder’s Department of Justice failed to address:

Joseph and Mary Romero of Chimayo, N.M., found that their mortgage note was assigned to the Bank of New York three months after the same bank filed a foreclosure complaint against them; in other words, Bank of New York didn’t own the loan when they tried to foreclose on it.

Glenn and Ann Holden of Akron, Ohio, faced foreclosure from Deutsche Bank, but the company filed two different versions of the note at court, each bearing a stamp affirming it as the “true and accurate copy.”

Mary McCulley of Bozeman, Mont., had her loan changed by U.S. Bank without her knowledge, from a $300,000 30-year loan to a $200,000 loan due in 18 months, and in documents submitted to the court, U.S. Bank included four separate loan applications with different terms.

All of these examples, from actual court cases resolved over the last two months, rendered rare judgments in favor of homeowners over banks and mortgage lenders. But despite the fact that the nation’s courtrooms remain active crime scenes, with backdated, forged and fabricated documents still sloshing around them, state and federal regulators have not filed new charges of misconduct against Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank, U.S. Bank or any other mortgage industry participant, since the round of national settlements over foreclosure fraud effectively closed the issue.

Many focus on how the failure to prosecute financial crimes, by Attorney General Eric Holder and colleagues, create a lack of deterrent for the perpetrators, who will surely sin again. But there’s something else that happens when these crimes go unpunished; the root problem, the legacy of fraud, never gets fixed. In this instance, the underlying ownership on potentially millions of loans has been permanently confused, and the resulting disarray will cause chaos for decades into the future, harming homeowners, investors and the broader economy. Holder’s corrupt bargain, to let Wall Street walk, comes at the cost of permanent damage to the largest market in the world, the U.S. residential housing market.

This serious contagion within the U.S. housing market will only be exacerbated by an entire generation so saddled with debt and shitty job opportunities that home ownership will seem an unreachable fantasy. That is basically the conclusion of this NYT article examining the mystery of missing buyers:

Given demographic trends, there should be plenty of housing demand. Immigration has slowed in recent years, but the nation’s population has still grown by about 20 million since the housing downturn began in 2006. Yet those additional people are translating into fewer new households than historical patterns would predict.

This is a problem for the whole economy, and at its core is the mystery of the missing buyers.

“Household formation,” as economists call it, is the foundation of demand in the housing market. When a young adult moves away from home and gets her own apartment, a household is formed; when a retiree moves out of his own place and into the apartment above an adult child’s garage, one ceases to exist. The number of American households is in constant motion; it is determined by millions of individual decisions that Americans make about their living situations.

Since 2007, those decisions have tilted overwhelmingly toward not dividing up into as many households as in the past. The number of households rose by an average of 569,000 a year from 2007 to 2013, according to census data, down from 1.35 million a year from 2001 to 2006.

Using different data sources, Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate information company Trulia, estimates that by last year there were 2.3 million of these “missing” households — households that would exist if historical patterns had held, but instead are nowhere to be found.

Why the missing households? To a large degree, they can be explained by young people choosing — or being forced by circumstance — to remain at home longer than they have in previous generations.

Thanks for solving that mystery for us, NYT. I guess that barista with the masters degree in biology isn’t going to add a quarter million dollars in debt to own a home in Missoula any time soon.

While U.S. bankers continue to avoid any meaningful consequences for their criminal behavior, all eyes will be on Greece this week. As ATMs ran out of cash this weekend, the worsening economic crisis will keep banks closed until at least July 7th, along with the imposition of other capital controls.

Other countries, like Spain and Italy, will be watching what happens to Greece very closely to see how far the ECB is willing to take its austerity war. Stay tuned…

by William Skink

Yesterday SCOTUS made it unambiguously clear that two people with the same under-the-belt mechanics can be legally recognized in all the ways us heterosexual married couples take for granted. That is huge.

Yesterday’s victory took decades to accomplish and shouldn’t be minimized, though pandering politicians and old testament zealots obsessed with sex will try. They will try, and they will fail.

My wife and I talked with our kids about this, and they sorta nodded their heads like, so what? And that is huge. It won’t be nearly as big of a deal for them as they grow up because of the sacrifices and bravery of so many before them.

As much as celebration is warranted, political talons are being sharpened and the news cycle is packed with the dire consequences of racism and terrorism. On the political front, Hillary Clinton is publicly cheering the SCOTUS decision while those without political attention deficit disorder recall a not-so-distant position Clinton had to evolve, as pointed out last year in this Atlantic piece.

In that article, written after Terri Gross’ interview with Clinton exposed a deep vein of defensiveness, Andrew Sullivan is quoted from this piece:

She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed).

What I’d like to hear her answer is whether she regrets that period and whether she will ever take responsibility for it. But she got pissed when merely asked how calculated her position on this was. Here’s my guess: Unlike Obama, she was personally deeply uncomfortable with this for a long time and politically believed the issue was a Republican wedge issue to torment the Clintons rather than a core civil rights cause. I was editor of TNR for five years of the Clintons, aggressively writing and publishing articles in favor of marriage equality and military service, and saw the Clintons’ irritation with and hostility to gay activists up close. Under my editorship, we were a very early 1991 backer of Clinton – so I sure didn’t start out prejudiced against them. They taught me that skepticism all by themselves, and mainly by lying all the time.

On the racism front, there are services and speeches and political opportunities for rhetoric against the Confederate flag. Then, this morning, a beautiful direct action from Bree Newsome removed the symbol of hate flying outside the statehouse in Columbia, SC.

And on the terrorism front, there were attacks across the globe. A tweet from @rConflictNews summed up two days of violence like this:

2 Days of Terror:
156 killed in #Kobane
24 killed in #Kuwait
1 killed in #France
27 killed in #Tunisia
30 killed in #Somalia

There are so many hot spots of war around the world, the amount of refugees fleeing violence have hit levels not seen since WWII.

While it’s important to acknowledge glimmers of hope that we humans can be more humane and inclusive with each other, it’s equally important to recognize how far we need to go to address the violence American foreign policy produces.