“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” –– Mark Twain

by Paul Haeder / December 30th, 2020

First, the blatant insipid nature of National Propaganda Radio and “(Not) All Things Considered.” You know, the so-called liberal media that is so-so cutting edge, leftist. How rotten the world is, and how valiant the workers are, the poor, the laborers, and this is taking up their head space for those back East Elites and Trust Fund Babies and Tribal Chosen People’s children and relatives. PBS, NPR, the NYT, Washington Post, they all stink of, well, the liberal class, the rah-rah stand-ins for a, err, kindler and gentler Tough Love Capitalism on Steroids.

President Trump and former first lady Michelle Obama were named the most admired man and woman in 2020, according to an annual survey by Gallup. The analytics and advisory company conducted telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,018 adults across the country in the first weeks of December.

Last year, Trump tied with former President Barack Obama, who was named most admired the past 12 consecutive years. But the president managed to pull away this year with 18%, 3% ahead of his predecessor.

Michelle Obama was ranked as the most admired woman in America for the third year in a row. The runner-up was Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, followed by first lady Melania Trump, according to Gallup.

We do not have to spend time on the irrelevancy and the controlled opposition nature of this non-poll, this goofy “poll” from Gallup, which has a thumb on the pulse of America and the average anal temperature of a true blue GOP or DNC.

Celebrity cults, and, alas, again, no poor, downtrodden, precarious, three-job person doing the news. The buttoned up dead-heads of the East Coast delivering the “news” and determining what ends up on this insipid network.

Moving along – now, another rotting person, giggly and oh-so positive, as if she is selling a hot yoga experience membership, or as if she is so happy to have her Zoom Zoom life, making phone calls to sources (sic).

One system, the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority, mass transit, is not even on life support because of Plan-demic and decades of the USA and major cities giving up to the fucked up car, the worse Uber and Lyft felons, and, alas, now we are talking billions of dollars lost because ridership went down.

But those CNA’s (certified nursing assistants), and cleaners and janitors and restaurant workers, well, the world is about to triple screw them.
Real people with three jobs, needing good, reliable and frequent mass transportation, but this NPR All Things (sic) Considered just is one rotting example of elitism after another.

Sure, two women were interviewed, and one said it clearly – this country runs on the backs and sweat and labor and arms of workers, and low income people are the majority, and thus, a country should be making decisions for and about them.

As in funding what the majority of us need – decent public transportation.
Who cleans the toilets, changes the bedding of granny, cuts and dices the veggies, picks the food, and m moves the goods and services? It can’t be done on Zoom doom, yet the yellow belly elites, their Little Big Man Eichmann’s and the other white collar types, well, they in the super minority, make decisions?

And then elitist NPR and PBS do their bizarre contortions and absurd questions about why we, the USA, DC, NYC, and a multiple of thousands of places have NO GOOD PUBLIC transportation?

These assholes never ever question the system of penury and elite overlord control Capitalism with a bi “C” for Criminal sets up? Think about that – the auto-industry in bed with the fossil fuel industry in bed with the construction and roads and highways corporations in bed with the insurance companies, and, there you have it – Unsafe at Any Speed, the personal vehicle, the 18-wheelers with three tandem box cars whipping around neighborhoods.

It is Fast-Food Nation, but also SOV Nation (single occupancy vehicle). It is highway and by-way and couplet nation, with neighborhoods and downtowns and exurbs polluted with smog, traffic jams, death vehicles.
So, this NPR reporter laughs up a storm when she sees, on a Zoom, the fellow she interviews whose title is — Senior Research Associate Urban Institute.

Game of Thrones on Mass Transit maps. It’s as if this woman/ NPR reader is having a pizza orgasm. Then, the knowledge worker, instead of having guts and reality about how the USA needs to flip the script – no more control of towns, cities, suburbs by the trucking-auto-construction industries —  he talks about underfunding, and taxing citizens in those communities more and more for public transportation.

As if all those CEOs and Stockholders and Millionaire and Billionaire Minions of the Shekel have no skin in the game. The Targets and Walmarts and Amazons and the other thousands of national and multinational companies making book on the labor of people who depend on rides to and from their three jobs a week, nah, don’t dare flush them out for who they are – gigantic continuing corporation welfare criminal enterprises.

Nice hearing the news delivered by a $120,000 a year news spreader and another elite who probably makes a cool $90 K a year at the Urban Institute.
I’ve been up close and personal with these folks, since I did a foray into urban planning with a graduate degree earned face to face and on the ground in urban and regional planning. Imagine that, no Zoom, not on-line communities, but rolling up sleeves, going to neighborhood association meetings, mapping on butcher paper, listening to myriad of community needs, complaints, visions, etc.

Imagine that, going to tribal councils, and going to rural communities to see what kind of signage they might want for some scenic byways. Imagine the hard work of classes with people in them and going through ground-truthing with other students in neighborhoods.

Imagine me also teaching English classes while a graduate student. A radio show on art and then also sustainability. Then a column in both the weekly newspaper and the monthly magazine on urban and regional planning issues, among other issues.

Above all, the planning system has to convince local communities of its ability to deliver urban change to their collective benefit. Enthusiasm for neighborhood planning is highly dependent on communities feeling they have the ability to influence their locality, to command the resources to achieve the change they want and to resist plans for their area being imposed from above with little local input. Thus closing the democratic deficit in planning at local, city and regional scales is also dependent on the ability of the planning system to deliver and thus on the implementation of the other reforms discussed above.

1. Planning should be about wellbeing not just growth
2. Planning powers must be radically devolved
3. The benefits of planning regulation should be recognized
4. Land reform is essential, including local land ownership and land value capture
5. The democratic deficit in planning must be tackled — Source

There a thousand and one non-profits making money parsing what urban and regional planning should or should not do. Lots on urban growth boundaries, and a plethora of terms and characterizations tied to unchecked growth, the tragedy of the commons, failure of the politics of planning and zoning, and much of that is tied to the rapacious nature of the US Chamber of Commerce and then a million lobbies and industry groups grappling over the money, man, the taxpayer money, the largesse of our world.

Never do they want what’s good for the larger community, for the poor and lower economic class. NEVER. And those non-profits working the urban planning gig, those on the sustainability gig, on the environmental gig, they, again, largely controlled by the controllers – East Coast snobs, East Coast graduates, people with big ties to the ugly Ivy League, and, of course, from “families” with connections.

Oh, shit, as my old agent (New York City) told me, my El Paso zip code was a bad zip one for the masters of publishing when they received my short story and novel manuscripts. The best they could attack me with was that I was “a regional writer.”

Then the same luck of another bad zip code for Spokane, as a regional planning aficionado. You think I could get a job in planning journalism, or work with a think tank?

You know, the only way the world will change is when the elites go into their Zoom Doom holes, letting them just yammer and yammer on in their cloistered and controlled environments. . . and the world moving toward some semblance of social-cultural-racial-gender-BIOPOC-environmental justice will be assisted by out embrace of the narratives and strength and collective IQ and acumen of the people – the 80 Percenters, the poor and hard-working men and women and children who are paying the price of Criminal Capitalism.

It’s not just me with sour grapes or resentment, though there is no reason why a few sour grapes and some resentments should not be the primacy of news stories. Or a person’s motive for writing for an on-line blog-newsletter. Or there is no reason why resentment, social injustice railing, sour grapes, and other angry motives should not be parts of reports and conferences and white papers and certainly with community-based decision making.

Alas, when hearing the Trumpies, the various criminals occupying state capitals, the prognosticators in the realm of economy-education-environment-equity-energy (the 5 e’s), the Obama Three Criminals Lining up, the Bumbling Biden-Reagan Tripping, all the others in the media and internet world, all of them, they have nothing to say to the 80 percent.

And the NPR piece listed below is just an encapsulation and emblematic of bad tides that have been lapping our mental shores for decades, and the rising toxic news (sic) tides that are rising as quickly as the ice-drained seas.
It’s all about what the elites do not report, what they miss to report, how they spin, how they shade and craft their perspectives and their frames. And you will get kernels of decent stories, sometimes, on PBS and NPR, but the crowd of “reporters” and “news broadcasters” are myopic in many ways, lost in a parade of elitism and east coast patriarchal and matriarchal mindsets.

They only take a centerline, and they falsely balance, and they create dichotomies in a world of multiple perspectives and solutions. They are controllers, and their sing-songy voices, their enunciations, their clippy wording, their timed ethos, pathos and logos, all of that, it has created the drumming rot of the liberal class.

Again, Capitalism is a big failure, and PBS and NPR and the other dozens of mainstream media maulers, well, they will never bring on the revolutionaries, the people in planning or transportation or economics or politics or sciences who question the very foundation of a military economy, the empire of delusion, the Homo Retailapithecus and Homo Consumopithecus species that Capitalism and especially Western Capitalism have Bred in their Chambers of Insanity-Stupidity-Victimization-Illiteracy-Intolerance-White Supremacy.

I heard Joseph Stiglitz on Democracy Now, and, alas, he is Capitalism’s biggest cheerleader, and he looks so bizarre in his old Jewish Man Way, in a Zoom Box, lecturing the world on, well, $600 plan-demnic check versus $2000 check. Yes, he hits a few points, but again, he is a multimillionaire, safely ensconced in his East Coast abode, Zooming his classes he teaches, Zooming his interviews, while he pens yet another and another book, read by a few NPR and PBS types.

AMY GOODMAN: So, also included in the bill, these tax breaks to the wealthy, including increased military spending for about $5 billion. Americans for Tax Fairness put out a report saying the collective wealth of billionaires in the U.S. has jumped by close to a trillion dollars, $931 billion, since mid-March. The report found 22 million U.S. adults reported not having enough food to eat. More than half of those adults had children in their households. Nearly 62 million U.S. residents lost work between March and September. And yet this massive windfall for the country’s wealthiest billionaires.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, that’s a reflection of what is becoming called the K-shaped recovery. When we kept interest rates so low, when those who have access to Zoom and technology can largely avoid the worst effects of the disease, you’re going to get that kind of K-shaped recovery. The low interest rates benefit those who own shares, and those have done fantastically well. And that’s why, in that context of this very unequal incidence of the disease and the incidence of the economic impact, that $2,000, that goes to those at the bottom, is really important, because it — you know, it doesn’t really remedy the K-shaped recovery, but it ameliorates some of the worst consequences.

And there we have it, the Peace and War/Pandemic Report, by Amy Goodman (millionaire) and the weight of that quasi-alternative media outlet, with, again, a few decent stories, features, so no baby (Democracy Now) out with the bathwater.

What Is The Future Of Public Transit In The U.S.?
Senior Research Associate Urban Institute
Planetizen 

Spaces of Struggle 

The Radical Planning White Paper – Part 1

Five Radical Ideas for a Better Planning System 

Radical planning has two main trends. The first is an anarchist-inspired approach emphasizing decentralized control and the experimentation with alternative societal organizations. The second main school of radical planning is more structurally orientated. It takes a Marxist direction focusing on the impacts of the economic system on class conditions and the role of planning in the class struggle. The first group of radicalist planning theorists includes the environmentalist movements. The Marxist radical version proposes government control of the means of production and that production, instead of being governed by profit motives, should be directed towards meeting societal needs as defined through the political process.

Naess analysed these five main alternative planning theories with a view to determining their ability to deliver sustainable development. The criteria Naess used to evaluate these theoretical positions were:

(a) To what extent will the planning form be able to contribute to long-term preservation of global and national environmental qualities … and management of natural resources in a way that does not reduce the abilities for future generations to meet their needs?

(b) To what extent will the planning form be able to contribute to the preservation of local environmental qualities?

(c) To what extent will the planning form be able to contribute to a distribution of goods which ensures basic rights to welfare for everybody, regardless of nationality or social group?

(d) To what extent will the planning form be able to advance, or be in conflict with civil and political rights, especially minority rights?

(e) To what extent will the planning form be able to contribute to the improvement of the conditions for planning in accordance with the criteria for a sustainable development?

Phoenix, the most unsustainable shit-hole, and Bill Gates is developing tons of land there — this is the sickness of Capitalism —

What do those millionaires and their Little Eichmann’s do for America? Right, trillions for the Mercenary Military Complex, Billions to that Apartheid ” Israel, and bailing out the hedge funders and investment class.

Bank owned — America! Millions of empty buildings, malls, homes.

California’s Hospital Crisis — this is the face of Reagan on down and up that criminal line.