A hurricane of middle class Mainer revenge

Let her rip!

The typical cry of “batten down the hatches” applies of course to the last stronghold the native Mainer has along the coast: commercial fisheries. But to the rest of the residential southern Maine coastline, that over the last fifteen years has been completely usurped by folks from away, bring on the wrath.

Over the course of this week’s media build-up to stormageddon, it was insinuated more than once from a few different sources that we Mainers were taking talk of a devastating storm with a grain of salt. It was assumed that our general malaise was the result of forecasts over the years promising great devastation, but that ended instead in a tipped-over Adirondack.

I see our “pfft” attitude as having a more sinister underlayment. See, back in the 1980’s during our local and state government’s push to build utopia and provide Ramen noodles to “less fortunate” people, also mostly from away, that were too busy making children to achieve full employment – coupled with the Federal government’s decent in to the double-D bosoms of the corporate banking coffers that allowed for inflationary bubbles that included real estate; Mainers who for generations had enjoyed their summers along the coast in cottages built by their forefathers were forced to flee inland.

The property tax bills kept creeping ever higher. First we got to the ten thousand dollar per year mark, then came fifteen. When they got so high, the Mainers still hanging on to the cottages they loved so much were forced to rent out their properties when finally, after only being able to enjoy them for only a few weeks in the year or not at all in order to collect enough to pay the government, we sold them to the rich folks from away who had been renting them.

In the fifteen or so years since most Mainers were forced from the coast like a Kurd in northern Iraq, our cottages have been replaced in large part by glorious McMansions, forever transforming the look of our residential coast, and forever leaving it deserted from September to May.

We remember or have heard stories from family about the devastation caused by the last major ocean storm to cause catastrophic damage, the Blizzard of 1978. Mainers, still mostly occupying the now gated-communities, rebuilt, repaired and fortified the old cottages. The little cottages that made it were of a different cloth and for the most part, the Mainers that owned them could make the repairs on their own. The McMansions don’t stand a chance, and the wealthy folks can’t so much as even roll paint on a wall. Guess who they’re going to have to turn to, to rebuild?

Add to that the logic of renowned economist and NewYork Times columnist Paul Krugman's recent tweet after this week's east coast earthquake; "People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage," and put in motion you have the makings of the ultimate middle class Maine revenge: Jobs!

So let her rip! We'll look at the pictures of the homeowners surveying the damage with one foot out of the Benz and one ear in the blackberry and we'll get to work when the phone calls they make go to the thousands of Maine businesses that will serve to put everything back together.

Of course, if this puppy pushes hard inland, we're all in trouble. I guess I'll bring in the Adirondack from the field where I have beach flashbacks - just in case.

Be safe everyone!

Go-Go Gadget Column!

  All five of you who don’t skip over the opinion page with the sometimes asterized banner atop it may have wondered what happened last week to this very column. Did “they” get to him? Was he silenced for daring to write against the empire? Did he get magically selected for an IRS audit for stating the fact that people here in Portland might be feeling a tad revolutionary?

  Actually, none of the above has happened… Yet. No, instead my column fell victim to the almighty Netflix.

  I plugged back into the grid, fired up the Wii for the first time since I bought it two years ago, and found exactly what the doctor ordered for the (greater) depression-era summer staycation: Inspector Gadget.



The inspector.

   That’s right. They’ve got all 86 episodes of the 1983-1986 hand-animated gems. So, instead of following the corrupt federal corporation posing as government, the inept state government reporting (surprise, surprise) revenue shortfalls from budget forecasts and our city’s clustereff.portland.gov taxation extraction machine; I followed Gadget, Penny, Dr Claw and the comedic stylings of Brain the dog.

  So I had nothing to write about, and I loved it. I can see why the last 30 or so years have been so great for the average American. I had not a care in the world. I consumed beverages high in high-fructose corn syrup, gained 5 pounds on five different varieties of Drakes snack cakes and even read an US magazine to satisfy my news appetite. In it, I even got to see a scantily-clad Miley Cyrus romping on the shore of some exotic locale smoking a butt. Did you know she smoked menthols? Hot.

  As the week wore on, I felt I had separated myself enough from reality to be able to fully function in what is now considered society. I even read a story about a recent visit by former first lady Barbara Bush to the children’s hospital at Maine Med without once even thinking about the irony of naming a center that heals children after the matriarch of a family whose member’s policies and warmongering directives over the years directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children around the globe. Not even once. The kids looked so happy in the picture accompanying the story. Isn’t that cute!

  I no longer felt estranged from society. I could log on to Facebook, and finally commiserate with what I used to consider one-time acquaintances, but now my true friends, about having “a case of the Mondays,” or even the excitement that comes with the Friday afternoon release from corporate wage-slave prisons – Err, rather – Can anyone say “Happy-hour time!?!” Bloomberg in my “news feed” reporting market volatility and Reuters on there spouting this or that about how the Fukushima meltdown is starting to look like a classic China Syndrome scenario and how experts are saying it’s about to set off a chain reaction and life on earth is basically effed? Um, I totally clicked the X and removed that drivel from the feed.

  I even saw postings from friends celebrating the success of rebels in taking down the evil Ghadaffi regime! “Go America!” they were yelling in a nutshell. I liked that my new Netflix-enchanted self didn’t stop to consider how the dictator was taken down not because he was evil, which he was, but rather because he dared to switch from basing his oil sales in dollars in favor of the euro and had recently entered into an agreement with China to sell them Libyan oil. No time for that kind of thinking – Big Brother is on, and Matt might get the boot this week. I figured I would tune back in when the real big brother got around to hanging Mohammar Saddam-style; Dangling the carrot of the noose on the screen and then cutting away right before the floor was dropped out from underneath him. That was fun, right? Totally.

  So as you can see, I was enjoying my week off from thoughts of anything based in the situation of now, which ‘taint pretty and is heading rapidly toward a state of global chaos. I was having so much fun I was willing to stay in this state until I was lying in the burned-out basement.

  Then it happened, an unmistakable sign of the end of days. Higgins is running for mayor. Suddenly, thrust back into reality by thoughts of cheesy-poofs and stinky feet in council chambers, I had no choice. The command was issued from the back of my mind: “Staycation over; Go-go gadget column.”

  See you next week.

The Dow and the ‘R’ word

  Did anyone find Tuesday’s newspaper headlines reading “Markets Soar,” and “Dow posts biggest gains since 2009” as amusing as I did when I first saw them trickle to out to newsstands at 2am that morning? The markets, coming off a huge decline of 634.76 points Monday, managed to eke out a 429.62 point recovery Tuesday. Still being down doesn’t say “soar” to me, but to a populace that the government and their paradigm-defending media treat like short-attention-spanned children, a headline implying great improvement and including positive keywords was just the trick to kick the can and cross a finger another day.

  And kicking the can has really been what the last ten years have been all about. Though not showing itself in an obvious way until autumn 2008 and its recent return to undeniable decline this week, the greater depression that took hold in early 2001 has now advanced to the point where it is no longer possible to artificially inflate the economy by the inventive financial means so masterfully created by the banking sector with the help of loosened regulation.

  As I discovered through recent, totally random conversations, Portlanders are really starting to notice this whole “collapse” thing.

  When I decided that something “just isn’t right,” a few years ago, I went off the “media grid” of smart phones, Hollywood entertainment and spoon-fed news and learned through hundreds of hours of research that in a nutshell the entire globalization experiment launched in earnest after World War 2 is now in the throes of collapse, beyond repair and is disappearing without anything in the wings to replace it. Our federal government, which was co-opted by the corporate globalization movement, has proven ineffectual and at the highest levels has shown time and again to be overtly corrupt. There is no fix for this system – and we’re all just sitting by idly waiting for what’s next.

  Although no one but perhaps the much ballyhooed “top two percent” of earners laments the loss of the trickle-up society they helped create over the last 50 years, the scary thing for the people I’ve talked to seems to be not knowing what’s coming next. It’s what scares me too.

  I was down at the recycling lot down in Bayside last Saturday talking with one of the guys I know who works for the city, shooting the fecal matter, if you will, about the recycling rumor mill and the new city manager, when the conversation turned toward the economy. We both agreed that things were bad, going to get worse and he mentioned how he was worried about his family’s security as they continued to worsen. He offered an anecdote about last winter’s ice storm and how during it there were four (what he considered to be) unsavory people he didn’t recognize hanging out around his house on Broadway in SoPo. The roads, being totally un-passable, would certainly be difficult to navigate with an emergency vehicle if the suspicious looking dudes decided they wanted to pay a visit and he needed help. He said that he had no way to defend himself, wife or kids – and told me he was thinking, with the hard times ahead in mind that are sure to include a lot of hungry and angry people, of getting a gun for just such an occasion. Without any prompting from me, he mentioned there could even be a revolution in this country if things continued to get much worse. We both ended the conversation agreeing that as long as we were both still running into each other while on the job, things were okay for at least the two of us.

  Then, Monday night after the big Dow decline, I was sitting in my driveway with my son on the tailgate of my truck when my neighbor walked by and stopped to chat. He was with his two boys and we started talking about some of the great fishing his older son had done this year and some of the all time great fishing spots in the state. I asked him how his business was doing, and he said he was having an excellent summer. I told him that was great, because things were tough out there. He agreed, saying that a lot of guys were losing their shirts in the markets and at the register. Then, he turned to be and said “Things are so bad out there, there could even be a revolution” and “A lot of guys I know are saying it.”

  These two “R-word” conversations in particular and others I’ve had around the city recently in general made me feel better because I no longer felt alone. They also scared me because by showing me more and more people were starting to see that this surreal socioeconomic choo-choo we’ve been riding in during this “lost decade” is about to hit the big wall of whatever is next at three hundred miles per hour, the chats made our situation seem more “real.”

  Of course, we didn’t need the Dow drop to tell us that. Sure, it murders our 401k plans, but for the big money, it’s a number that really only effects the so-called two per centers in the wallet. Our wallets already empty, the rest of us feel the impact of collapse like a brick dropped on our collective heads from the top of the Observatory.

  Looking ahead, will some great, currently unknown leader step forward to tell us what’s next, or are we going to have to collectively design whatever it may be on our own? Things will unveil themselves and the natural course of the universe will answer that soon enough. One thing our society’s next evolutionary step is not; is a return to the ways of the late twentieth century we all thought we loved, but turned out to be a mirage that provided the population with a Matrix-like image of an idealized society. It turns out that behind the scenes, while we were taking the Taurus wagon to Disneyland with Bon Jovi blaring, clever elitists were working to squander everything that made America great until there was nothing left. Thomas Jefferson said it best when he correctly prophesized this very moment, saying: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currencies, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their prosperity until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." So they have, and so we are. And, unless we figure out how to stop them, our children don’t even have a chance.

  Whatever is coming next, it is time to get past the denial stage, come together and get ready for it.

The Volvo 240 invaded Portland in 1974 and never left!

  When I’m driving around the West End, I don’t notice the relatively clean streets, tree-lined corridors and well-kept buildings. I notice the unusually large number of Volvo 240s.

  There are the ones that stand out, like the unusually beat-up, rear-bumper-on-the-street white sedan parked on Danforth Street or the primer black GL in the Andrews Square area. The others are all well kept and otherwise nondescript. While especially abundant in the West End, they are everywhere in Portland. So much so, it makes me believe Portland has the largest human-to-Volvo 240 ratio in the United States.

  It makes sense. The Volvo 240 is a lot like us. Our city is old, not perfect, but it always runs - reliably at that. It goes in the snow, but slips a lot without the proper traction. Like when our public services department recycles materials from dismantled areas for new sidewalks, you can easily switch out your own parts with a 240 junkyard victim. (Rest in peace, junk yard Volvos. If you were in Portland, this wouldn’t have happened.)

  Anyone who has ever grown up with, been in or driven the 240 in the rest of the country seem to care a lot less about the 240 than people do here in Portland. Maybe it’s because the people here in their mid twenties to mid thirties, the latest caretakers of the fleet, are letting everyone in on the fact that they now know what the older 240 skippers felt while sailing the streets of the city. The feeling you get when driving these machines is much like the feeling you get living in Portland – A feeling of safety; A feeling that no matter what happens anywhere else, (or in an accident with another car on the road,) everything is going to be okay here.

  Whatever it is, I’m glad to see them all out there. I grew up in a 240 family. There was the maroon 1980 244 DL when I was real little, followed by a silver 86 Turbo. When I got my license, I went on to have a couple of my own. I had an 88 sedan and an 83 2-door DL coupe. I loved them all.

  But as technology improved in vehicles, so too did the safety features. Those of us who started families needed to take advantage of airbags and “latch” systems (car seat fasteners) for little ones in the car. Sadly, we had to relinquish our guardianships to the next generation. Thankfully, the next generation took on the task.

  So the unofficial-Official car of Portland, the Volvo 240, lives on for another ten years. The car that perfectly represents both the city and our feelings for it also occupies its boundaries more than anyplace else. We should make it official and proclaim it on the books. We could have a festival with them all on display lined up and down Deering Oaks. Just think how cool the city seal would look with a 240 flying out of it beneath “Resurgam”!

  So, next time you see a 240 around town, thank the driver. Praise them if they have one with the four headlights. Bow to them if their 240 is even older and has two round ones and denotes the number of doors in the badging. They are preserving part of the street art landscape and motorcar tradition that makes Portland so unique.

It’s time to take the “Civic” out of the Center

  Portland was looking pretty down and out back in the mid-seventies. The forest city had just gone through a brutal period of Urban Renewal; Results of which saw the severing of the city in two by an interstate, a massive swath of Bayside obliterated with the Franklin Art and the removal of many blocks in the center of the city to make way for the Spring Street jetliner runway.

  For the latter, I can imagine the area “powers that be” decided they needed something to jazz the street up and bring it to life. Also, Portland didn’t have a venue larger than 3,000 seats with which to attract national acts that would bring people with their money into the city.

  In 1977, the Cumberland County Civic Center was born.

  And at the time, it was not only a great idea but sorely needed. Things here in Portland then seemed like they do now in places like Las Vegas. The economy just quickly died, leaving a formerly prosperous city figuring out what to do about it. And to a huge degree, the Civic Center and the business it brought here helped to make today’s Portland one of the most (long-term) economically viable and desirable places in this country to live.

  But the whole Greater Portland area has grown up from those times. We have morphed from a little city with a bunch of farmland around it to the economic nucleus which props-up the rest of this state, no matter what our Governor might think of us. We no longer need to publically subsidize large multi-purpose spaces.

  You only need to look to the awesome plan for Thompson’s Point for proof. While this wouldn’t be the case 30 years ago, Portland is viable enough now for a group of private investors to spend massive amounts of money to build an arena ten times better than the Civic Center that can perform all its major functions.

  It’s time to open the whole drab Civic Center area up to investors that could potentially create another awesome project out of it. Government is learning right now that they can’t build and operate this kind of project any more, and probably shouldn’t have in the first place. So, here we are. Now, we need to convince our government to get out of the arena business and put it up for sale. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still spend the 33 million dollars you might, but shouldn’t decide to spend to renovate it.

  That kind of money needs to be spent to further improve Portland’s future. The money could go a long way to building a light rail trolley system that has tracks coming in from Westbrook, Riverton, No Deering, the Jetport and South Portland. You could even use it to do something radical with the Franklin Street corridor. With homelessness on the rise, a permanent homeless solution could be found and funded, enabling the further revitalization of the Elm/Preble/Oxford portion of Bayside. Most of all, we could feed every mouth in this region by quickly re-establishing our local food system that grows and raises everything we need within a quick horse cart ride.

  But for any government entity to continue to publically subsidize these types of large twentieth century public arenas, when as we’re seeing now everywhere with debt that publicly subsiding anything doesn’t sustain itself long-term, seems like a bad idea to me. That money, that reported ten extra dollars on the county portion of the property tax bill, can be better spent elsewhere.

What will the game changer be?

  I feel that we’re in a moment of flux. The bread and circuses parade that is one-two-ing us at every turn with murder trials of pretty white girls, perjury trials of sports figures, rape trials of top level monetary policy makers, ineffectual congressmen and media conglomerate malfeasance is swamping the airwaves. Everything presented to us feels contrived in a fashion that seems to serve one purpose: To focus our instinctual abilities away from what may lie ahead.

  A few weeks ago I asked if “you could feel it,” but found out from readers that while there was certainly a feeling of something not right in the world, it was impossible to put a finger on exactly what “it” is.

  Human nature is a phenomenal force in this universe. One of the most phenomenal things about it is that as a human, you are remiss to try to explain in a five paragraph essay its intricacies, and an attempt to do so would be an act of arrogance. Sometimes our place in this world is best explained in one’s gut; on your own and to yourself. In my gut I know that everything we’re being spoon-fed by the media machine in these last ten years has nothing to do with, and is not sufficiently preparing us for what’s to come.

  What my inner gut is telling me when I talk to people, when I stop to feel how nature is acting while outside gardening, when I read what people in local humanitarian organizations are saying, is that people are sensing something big is afoot - A game changer. But in what form will that game changer manifest itself?

  Will it be governmental? Will government end its corruptive ways on its own and return itself to being for and by the people without the engagement of the citizenry? It seems as if the United States has passed the point of no return in this regard. Will it come in the form of a massive change in our government with the help of a modern-day Spartacus to lead us to revolution? There is certainly a case to be made for that in the history annals of human civilization. Will government perform yet another black flag operation to further oppress us and take away more of our freedoms? Nothing hides economic malaise better than an allowed attack on a harbor or a metropolitan building complex to provide tens of thousands of jobs in the industrial military complex or in airports ripping off Grammy’s diaper.

  Will it be natural? Will the changes to our earth increase at a faster clip? The weather over the last few years and the steady increase in seismic activity certainly adds to the feeling. Massive dust storms in Phoenix and massive draught in many parts of the world are even making the headlines on a daily basis.

  Or, will it be cosmic? Will there be something to Hopi prophecy and the end of the Mayan calendar? Could it be that we are witnessing the death throes of a global control structure designed to oppress? Everything we think we know and have been told or taught could be deemed unimportant and we could be playing witness to a human enlightenment that reveals the truths about ourselves and our place in the universe. We could potentially be the witnesses of something beautiful. God, I truly hope that is what this feeling is. I can’t take an extension and continuation of the now; and a World War exploding out of the untelevised monetary, resource and cyber battles going on between the sovereigns of the world right now is something no sane human being wants.

  Whatever the game changer may be, this surreal period in time we find ourselves living will be rapidly exposed for what it is or isn’t. My gut is telling me that “it,” in whatever form “it” takes, is going to make itself known sooner rather than later. I can’t wait.

  So if you can feel it, hang in there. “It” is coming soon.

Scuttling the Hannaford brand is ‘essentially’ hard to swallow

  Three weeks ago my wife, son and I were enjoying dinner at a friend’s home when I noticed the latest addition to their mustard collection. My friend Drew is somewhat of a mustard connoisseur. We both believe that our mustards need to be hot – very hot. Hot enough to require the assistance of the fire department-hot. We discussed different mustard brand names when the conversation turned into a discussion of different brand names in general. Then, Drew turned to me and said “What I really don’t like is how Hannaford has replaced their Hannaford brand with something called My Essentials.”

  This was news to me. I usually go grocery shopping once every two weeks. I told him that I hadn’t seen the My Essentials cans on the shelves at my Forest Ave Hannaford and supposed that he was mistaken and the My Essentials was just an additional brand brought into the store. I couldn’t imagine that Hannaford Brothers would scuttle a long-known brand that to a lot of Mainers is considered a “name brand,” as opposed to a cheap-looking “store brand” like, say, Wal-mart’s “Great Value.”

  Come to find out, Drew was right.

Saying 'so long' to yet another Maine brand

  I was at the Forest Ave Hannaford last Saturday morning doing my “grocery thang.” I navigated through the veggies, grabbed a couple things from the deli and rounded isle four to grab a couple cans of Hannaford French-Style Green Beans. I looked down to the middle row where before me was a sea of canned green beans and couldn’t find it. Focusing harder, there it was. The My Essentials French Style Green Beans stacked oh so neatly with a little one inch by one inch sticker that confirmed Drew’s story. The sign read, printed in a super-small 6 point font, “This My Essentials product has replaced the Hannaford Brand.”

  I picked up a can and gave it a gander. It was cheap-looking. The font describing the product, the picture of the beans and the white background looked as though they had been focus-grouped down in some white-walled room in Arkansas. One could literally cut out a “Great Value” label from a Wal-Mart can, paste it over My Essentials and not tell the difference. I put the can down, picked up a can of Green Giant, and continued shopping. As I did, I noticed the slow rotation that was gradually replacing most of the Hannaford products I had been used to buying for so many years. It was awful.

  After I left the store, knowing full well that more than likely the products were the same contents with just a different label, I asked myself whether this brand change was something that was bothering just me and Drew, as we’re both a little quirky. I certainly hadn’t seen anything in the news about the change and it seems as though Hannaford is trying to quietly extinguish the Hannaford brand in the stores. After a little search, I found out we were not alone.

  I discovered an online message forum that was full of messages from Hannaford customers that shared the same feelings. Comments included “My Essentials sounds lame, bland and cheap” and “As a Mainer, it’s kind of depressing to see Hannaford losing its regional identity.” The last quote served to describe exactly how I feel.

  In stories about Hannaford-parent Delhaize America’s decision to replace all of their store brands, including the Sweet Bay and Food Lion chains’ individual banners with My Essentials, Delhaize explains that they want to increase sales of their generic foods in all their stores. In all their chains, with the exception of Hannaford, it appears that their store brands were not performing well, and My Essentials was the answer to turn that part of their business around. The My Essentials switcharoo has apparently been in the works since July of last year, as a quick search for the My Essentials trademark with the U.S. Trademark office shows that the My Essentials trademark was filed on July 29, 2010. In their other chains, the change to My Essentials is being heralded in the stores and in the media as a good thing. In Hannaford country, it’s happening quietly. Why? It is because it’s a bad idea for the Hannaford chain.

  From a global corporate governance standpoint, the change makes sense. Delhaize will save money by only having to produce one product for all their stores. They even insist that having one brand will enable them to better leverage themselves when purchasing from suppliers. And, the increased sales they expect will certainly reap benefits for investors. Maybe their plan to increase profits in all their stores, even if there is a little dip at Hannaford from formerly-loyal customers, is more clandestine. In one online comment, a Hannaford customer writes: “The rollout of My Essentials at DZA's Hannaford banner is off to a rocky start. Shoppers have noticed, for example, that the 8 ounce light yogurt under the Hannaford brand has been replaced by a 6 ounce My Essentials container with no price change to account for the 25% shrinkage.”

  But to me, if there are enough people that feel the same way I do about the Hannaford brand going the way of Jordan’s Ball Park Franks and Deering Ice Cream, the increased revenue Delhaize is forecasting from increased sales at their other chains and charging the same price for less could potentially be off set by a large decrease of store brand sales in their Hannaford stores. Then what? Will they scuttle the name all together and one day invite us to shop at the Forest Avenue Food Lion? The quick wave of the hand and executive board room decision thousands of miles away from Portland that eliminated the Hannaford brand could make that happen, too. Hannaford would of course claim this would never happen, but what would the leaders of Hannaford say about discontinuing the Hannaford brand if asked in 2006?

  So for me, because nothing says “I’m cheap” to dinner guests like a spice rack full of cheap-looking spice bottles, when my bottle of Hannaford Basil Leaves runs out, I’ll spend the extra buck and buy McCormick, all the while lamenting over the loss of yet another Maine brand to global corporatism.