Eideard

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Warm sun, white beaches, and million-dollar mansions notwithstanding, Miami has captured the dubious distinction of being the most miserable city in the United States, according to a new poll.

The playground of the rich and famous is home to a crippling housing crisis, one of the highest crime rates in the country, and lengthy daily commutes for workers, all of which have propelled it to the No. 1 position in the Forbes.com list.

“Miami has sun and beautiful weather but other things make people miserable. You have this two-tier society: glitzy South Beach attracts celebrities, but the income inequality has skyrocketed in recent years”.

The rankings are based on factors including jobless rates, violent crime, foreclosures, income and property taxes, as well as considerations like weather, commute time and political corruption…

“We’re trying to judge cities where residents have a lot of complaints. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t terrific things there,” said Kurt Badenhausen. And for the haves Miami’s charms remain undiminished.

“The one percent in Miami is doing fantastic. But for the vast majority, who make less than $75,000 a year, Miami can be a challenging place,” he said. “Forty-seven percent of homeowners sit on underwater mortgages. That’s tough.”

The complete list can be found at: tinyurl.com/75clrr9

Why am I not surprised? Florida voters keep professing their love for politicians devoted to screwing them to a wall of poverty, overextended budgets and reliance on corrupt bureaucrats.

The number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew substantially, by one third, over the past decade, according to a new report, erasing most of the gains from the 1990’s when concentrated poverty declined.

More than 10 percent of America’s poor now live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in the beginning of the decade, an addition of more than 2 million people, according to the report by the Brookings Institution, an independent research group…

The report analyzed Census Bureau income data from 2000 to 2009, the most recent year for which there is comprehensive data.

The data captures the first part of the decade most clearly, when growth in concentrated poverty was highest in metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Of the neighborhoods where poverty became most acute, three were Midwestern: Toledo, Youngstown and Detroit.

The report estimated that in metropolitan areas, worsening economic conditions in 2010 may have bumped up the portion of those living in concentrated poverty metro areas to 15 percent, a notch below the 1990 level, 16.5 percent. The biggest rises were in Sun Belt areas like Cape Coral, Fla., and Fresno, Calif., where the housing bust was biggest…

“It’s the toughest, most malignant poverty that we have in the United States,” said Peter Edelman, the director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy at Georgetown University. “It’s bad outcomes reinforcing each other.”

Just one more thing the Bush/Cheney era can take credit for.

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An 87-year-old Indiana man was arraigned on drug charges in federal court in Detroit on Monday after police found 228 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $2.9 million in his pickup following a routine traffic stop.

A state trooper patrolling Interstate 94 near Ann Arbor pulled over Leo Earl Sharp on Friday for following too closely and executing an improper lane change, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court.

When the trooper asked Sharp if he could search the truck, the octogenarian refused. So the trooper requested a backup unit with a dog trained to detect bombs and illegal drugs.

…During a subsequent search of the truck bed, troopers found 104 bricks of cocaine stashed in five bags…

Sharp was charged with conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute cocaine. If convicted, he faces at least 10 years in prison.

This is beginning to give me an idea. Just as young punks often score a break on being convicted of a crime – “Don’t saddle this poor child with a lifetime of shame because of his first mistake” – I wonder if grayhead gangsters might start looking for special dispensation because of age?

BTW – no mention of how a couple hundred pounds of blow got all the way up to Indiana? And only $10,000 bail for a dude trucking around almost $3,000,000 in drugs?

Police in Detroit are hunting a gang of middle-aged women, nicknamed the “Mad Hatters”, who they blame for a string of robberies, purse snatching and fraud.

The suspects typically steal a woman’s wallet or purse, police said in a statement. Shortly afterward, the credit cards and checks are used at stores to buy merchandise or at banks to get cash.

Surveillance photographs supplied by police show the middle-aged to elderly women wear hats, usually of the floppy, fisherman variety, at the time of the incidents.

Purse-snatching crimes are not uncommon, but what is unusual is the organised nature of the crimes. “Seldom are there these organised rings doing it, such as this one,” Sterling Heights police Lt. Luke Riley said…

The total value of merchandise and cash stolen could be as high as $500,000, police said. The women stole almost $200,000 from one bank.

Riley said authorities are looking for “at least” five or six women in this group.

Where’s Alec Guinness when you need him? He could do a made-for-TV movie and make ‘em a bunch of honest money.

OTOH, they’re certainly not the wives and widows of Republican investment bankers.

Ain’t they cute?

A 12-year-old girl is in custody and expected to face charges for attempted armed robbery and home invasion after attempting to rob a market at gunpoint Friday night.

The girl is in the Oakland County Children’s Village pending a petition from the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office…

A female owner and a worker were reportedly the only people in the store when the girl entered the store dressed in all black, including a knit cap, hoodie and scarf covering her face. She pointed a gun — later determined to be a Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter semi-automatic — at the woman and demanded all the money.

Despite the scarf, the woman recognized the girl as someone who frequented the store and thought it was joke, grabbed the gun and attempted to take it away. As a struggle ensued, the woman yelled for the worker to help her. The girl was finally wrestled to the floor and held there by the owner while the worker made the 9-1-1 call.

The weapon was later determined to be fully loaded with one round in the chamber, deputies said. The handgun had been stolen earlier in the day from the home of one of the girl’s neighbors. Under questioning, the girl admitted she had kept a key to the house obtained a couple years ago when she used to care for the neighbor’s pets. The girl said she knew where the man kept a gun and when no one was home, she went inside and stole it, deputies said.

Anyone surprised? The sum of our culture of violence and stockpiles of weapons throughout the land makes armed robbery by children just another “feature” of life in 21st Century America.

I seem to have bumped into more than the usual number of looneybirds, dumb crooks and foolishly dangerous human beings in my reading around the world, around the Web, today. But, I think I’ll ignore ‘em for a nice guy-tale from General Motors.

Yes, you read that right. General Motors has indeed taken scrap battery covers that would otherwise have been discarded and, with the help of a team of youngsters from the Lasky Recreation Center in Detroit, turned them into duck houses.

Seems odd, no doubt, but we’d certainly rather see creative recycling such as this instead of sending off the scrap bits and pieces to rot for hundreds of years in a landfill or some other ignominious end-of-life scenario.

According to The General, these homes “will provide a safe place for wood ducks and even screech owls to lay their eggs.” For what it’s worth, this is the second such creative recycling project we’ve heard about from the team behind the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the first being the reuse of oil-soaked boom material from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made into underhood plastic Volt parts. Nice work, GM.

I agree.

Think it’s any safer just because it’s older, now?

A security officer at the McNamara Federal Building stored a suspicious package that turned out to contain a bomb for three weeks before alerting authorities, said a spokesman for a union that represents guards at the site, who called the incident “a total embarrassment.”

“He apparently set it aside,” said David Wright, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 918, which represents the Federal Protective Service (FPS) employees, who guard the McNamara and other federal buildings around the country.

“It should have been left in place and he should have called in a canine detection unit to see if they could make a determination about it,” he said Tuesday.

The package was eventually placed behind two dumpsters behind the McNamara Building on Michigan Avenue downtown around 10 a.m. Friday. The Detroit Police Department’s bomb squad collected the device from there and moved it to Belle Isle, where it was detonated…

The contracted security guard has been suspended, said an official with the Washington, D.C., office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday.

Whoo-Hoo! If he loses the gig he can always go to work for the TSA.

Marchionne at 2011 Chrysler product launch in Brampton, Ontario
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Fiat and Chrysler, has been forced on the defensive after causing a political firestorm in Italy by suggesting he could move the Italian company’s headquarters from Turin to the US…

His comments come just a month after he won tough labour concessions at Fiat’s flagship Turin plant on a pledge that he would not move production to cheaper sites in North America or eastern Europe.

Fiat is a symbol of Italy’s industrial might, and business leaders say any decision by Mr Marchionne to reduce its presence there would have a disastrous effect on the country’s already weak image as a place for foreign investment. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the opposition Democratic party, demanding an explanation from Mr Marchionne said it was unacceptable for “Turin and the country to become a suburb of Detroit”.

On Sunday, John Elkann, Fiat chairman, sought to calm tension, telling Turin’s mayor that the city would remain a European headquarters of Fiat in any merger with Chrysler…

Fiat said only that Mr Marchionne spoke in his capacity as Chrysler chief executive. Even so, top bankers familiar with Fiat expect Mr Marchionne, who has made no secret of his frustration with Italian bureaucracy and labour relations, to seek to slim down operations in Italy and lead the group from the US…

How does it feel knowing that our economic worth – and guidance from Wall Street and Washington, DC in recent years – has made us as “desirable” as any other 3rd World country?

I’m not taking the time or space to explain class or history to y’all. I’m not explaining the times I appreciate willingness on the part of Eminem to stand up against imperial war and a scumbag like George W. Bush. Or the times he screws up, too. But, at root and heart this particular cranky old geek never stops being a kid from the East End of Bridgeport. Born and brought up downhill and downwind of coal-fired factories. The same factories where I went to work at seventeen.

Fix it, brother. You rock.

Kimberlynn Collins says she cried when Ted Phillips appeared on her doorstep last summer and asked her whether she knew her house was going to be sold at auction because of delinquent property taxes. “I knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it,” said Collins, 49, of Detroit.

She said a divorce and layoff from her job as a massage therapy instructor put her into a financial tailspin that caused her to fall $5,500 behind in property taxes on her two-story home on Detroit’s west side.

But Phillips, executive director of United Community Housing Coalition in Detroit, was there to deliver hope, not doom.

Thanks to his nonprofit housing advocacy group, Collins and 149 other homeowners bought back their property at the Wayne County Treasurer’s tax auction in October, in most cases for a fraction of what they owed in back taxes.

The feat, accomplished for the modest sum of $194,000, got noticed by other groups.

Equal to the bill for a couple of Sarah Palin speeches.

“We have hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown at the foreclosure problem in Michigan with less than impressive results,” said Lisa Nuszkowski, outgoing director of the Michigan Foreclosure Task Force.

“This shows what kind of impact you can have with a small amount of money,” she added…

180 people trusted their fate to the coalition…

Phillips said his only regret is that the coalition lost the bid on 30 homes.

“It was heartbreaking,” he said, “but we just didn’t have enough money to save them.”

He said the group hopes to help even more homeowners at next year’s auction.

Bravo!

Perish the thought that government beancounters couldn’t have worked this out beforehand.