Corporate Greed

The Michigan Land Use Institute has an excellent story on its website, outlining the efforts of a certain Timothy Stoepker, attorney to the big box stores, who is aggressively litigating to override local government decisions to exclude the stores from their townships. Some of their methods are downright diabolical.  From the page:

“BEAR CREEK TOWNSHIP— An attorney with a controversial history of suing public officials as private citizens has helped force this Emmet County township to spend $388,000 to defend itself against multiple lawsuits he’s filed on behalf of a local developer with downstate roots.”

Bastards.

Up North

You know how I hate that phrase. “Up North.” North in relationship to what, specifically? Up? So basically we are up (not down) and north (not south). So… we are not Detroit, but we still define ourselves in terms of it.

But, geez… maybe those tourists are right!

These pictures were taken this morning, at sunrise, on my way into work. This is pretty much what’s so good about “Up North”.

Sovereign Deed

“If a company comes to you and says, ‘I want to build a plant here but I don’t want you to tell anyone. If you don’t agree to that, I’m going to go somewhere else,’ what are you going to do?” Johnson said. “If you say no, haven’t you hurt the public interest more?”

The Michigan Land Use Institute has posted a story about a nefarious organization called Sovereign Deed, whose purpose seems to be to provide private sector emergency protection to the rich, seeing as FEMA is only for poor chumps with no connections to power, and nobody expects it to work any more. It’s another Blackwater type scenario - fear-based entrepreneur with checkered past sees opportunity to make money for self and fellow patriots at the expense of taxpayers. From the article:

Meanwhile, others are questioning the background of the company’s founder, Barrett Moore. Mr. Moore, an Illinois businessman, previously formed Triple Canopy, a multi-million-dollar company that provides armed security in Iraq. The Michigan Messenger Web siteand Northern Express, the region’s weekly alternative newspaper, reported that Triple Canopy eventually fired Mr. Moore and sued him for “raiding the company’s financial accounts to enrich himself and pay his personal expenses…”

Moore, meanwhile sees it differently:

“Even while the company works to provide its clients ground-breaking life-critical services in the face of disaster, an anti-establishment group seeks to disrupt these objectives by trying to undermine Sovereign Deed’s effort to construct a National Response facility in the State of Michigan. They use unscrupulous and defamatory tactics to promote their agendas. Their bias is evident.”

So, I ask you, how did it come to this, that a privately owned company would secretly use “Pellston’s airport, a publicly owned facility, as a private national emergency response headquarters.” In times of emergency, who do you think would get preferential treatment - Sovereign Deed subscribers, or the great unwashed masses who merely pay taxes?

Yes … I can feel the “superior protection” trickling down now, even as I write.

For more info see the excellent Northern Express article on Sovereign Deed, from which comes this quote:

Analysis: Membership Has Its Privileges
By Anne Stanton

Imagine putting out wildfires in California, but only helping the people who paid $19,000 in annual premiums to insurance giant American International Group.
California clients who lived in a select zip code area were offered the option of extra fire protection. Their homes were sprayed with a special fire retardant, and further protected by a red fire truck that zoomed around to extinguish the fires.
….
Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist, has been almost prescient in privatized mega-disaster rescue. Her book Shock Doctrine just arrived on bookstore shelves, in which she makes the case that the cronies of President George Bush are profiting on the misery, violence, and incompetence of this administration.

Read it, and pass the word!

Big Waves

I was sent some amazing pictures recently…. and it turned out that they were not what they seemed. Here’s what I wrote :

“The first picture … is an aerial shot, taken from above and in front, as the ship makes its way through a mild chop on a sunny day…. The other four pictures are entirely different. They are POV shots taken from ship level, the 500 foot bow stretching out into the distance like an exercise in depth perspective. The water has changed to a swirling chaos which now and then reforms itself into a frightening onslaught of overwhelming ferocity. In picture three the waves tower dizzyingly above the distant bow. In picture four we see the boat engulfed in a white froth, with vague outlines of the bow beneath. Picture five, the most frightening of all, shows a massive blue wave completely engulfing the entire bow, and seems to show the 730 boat bending and perhaps breaking at the far extremities…..”

read the rest of this fascinating essay here …

Ice fishing

Pictures taken this morning on North Lake Leelanau, in the pre-dawn light. It started out at 41 degrees this morning and will be down to 8 this evening.

I suspect those fish shanties will be pretty much frozen in place by then.

Dead Air

We have been laboring under slate-grey skies now for what must be ten days, surely over a week. August has stopped dead in its tracks. The rain may come in brief spasms, but the general atmosphere is still and unhealthy, and generally the ground is dry. Neither fish nor fowl. Neither baking heat nor air clearing storm. There is an industrial smell about tonight, as if we are living next to a badly functioning incinerator at the edge of a northern town. Down at Lake Michigan the seaweed clogs the shore and the waves break lethargically under a viscous skim. A oppressive marmoreal torpor bears down on it all.

Mighty T-Bird on skids

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The Thunderbird, a Lake Leelanau Institution for many years, has finally had to face facts. It seems that many people have fond memories of the quirky store, famous for rubber tomahawks and aggressively fearful tractarian “literature”. I visited the store for the first and last time a couple of summers ago, and was awestruck, but not in a good way. Here’s what I wrote at the time. Look closely at the pics below and you will see how things have turned out.

Tax Tribunal

It’s somehow comforting to know that these old men still exist.  This one came out at tax time to grouse about his new property tax assessment.  I was next in line when he entered.  I had already witnessed two protracted sessions with the men over at the table - the men who decide these things.  The sessions didn’t seem to be going well.  Everything seemed to be involved and contentious, and here I was, next in line, with no real supporting documentation.  Strains of “I Shall Be Released” wafted through my head.

Every year we get a statement, showing us how our property taxes have gone up, clearly stating THIS IS NOT A BILL.  Generally I ignore it, but this year I got one that needed tending to.  I went down to the local meeting place, a former discount furniture center that never really made the grade.  Now it’s a partitioned office building for obscure county government functions.  The room I found myself in consisted of some hastily arranged chairs in a semi-circle spanning each side of the door from outside.  To my right sat a man behind a desk, a kindly sort of older guy who attempted to make chit-chat as we waited.  In front of me, in the center of the room, were the two assessor guys, one looking like he had just stepped off a nature show in his flannel shirt and rough beard, the other a youngish, bookish, balding dude who might have been the brains of the operation…or not, as the case may be.

When this skinny old man came in we were already starting to feel crowded.  The kindly older guy behind the desk had rounded up a few extra chairs from a nearby room to accommodate the four other people who came in after me, but really we were already feeling the squeeze.  Then, in comes this old man with bad posture and knobbly hands.  He had extra big glasses that sat awkwardly on his face.  He was wearing the obligatory winter bill cap with the earflaps up, and a camouflage jacket.  His jeans were pulled way up, halfway to his chest.  He eased himself into the room and shut the door behind him.  Of course, a few of us offered to give him our seats, but he refused, saying he had been sitting too long today as it was.  In his hand was a piece of paper which looked liked it might already have been the object of his anger.

It didn’t take him long to start grousing.  “Gouldamm county must think we’re made of money or sumpthin’,” he started in, speaking to nobody in particular and everybody in general.  He looked at his piece of paper and shook his head.  “Don’t make no sense, when I already read in the Enterprise how land values are down 30% this year, but my taxes go up anyway.”  He paused to ruminate a bit more and sidled over to the right, standing right in front of me.  Then he started making a noise which I at first took for crying, but which was in fact just an intermittent intake of breath through his mouth.

Then he really got going.  “Course you couldn’t get a job on the county planning commission if you knew anything at all.”  Sharp intake of breath, followed by awkward silence.  “Just like the new courthouse there.  Had to build a new one.  Couldn’t make do with fixing up the old one, oh no.  Now they got a new one, but nobody thought about the sewage - drain field too small.  Coulda just gone up with the old one, reinforced the foundations and just made it taller, but no, that wasn’t good enough.  Had to have a new building.  So they must think we’re made of money, I guess.”

And so it went on.  But I think the overall effect was good for me.  By the time I got to the table the assessor guys were so rattled that they didn’t even argue with me. I actually got them to reduce my taxes.

So long

It’s that time of year again, when everything is poised to tip the other way. Crickets chirp and cicadas hum all day long, and the afternoons are dead still. Smells are more localized - a sharp bite of marigold as you pass, and the first hint of decay in the poplar leaves as they rattle and begin to fall. The options are dwindling for the wasps too, and they go stupid.

This morning I walked by a summer house on the lake and saw a young man carrying cases to the family station wagon. They still make station wagons, I suppose, but this one was probably the family relic, used mainly for summer and boarded up in the winter. The back hatch was open and facing the road, and the low sun shone inside. The guy was about college age, carrying a golf bag, zippered up for a flight, and towing a floppy suitcase behind through the morning dew on the grass. He wore a long sleeve button down shirt and long pants. I was prepared to wave and say hi, but he never looked up. It’s back to the other life for him, back to the real world.

Thunderbird

My recent “Forgotten Signs of the M-204 Corridor” raised a blip or two on the radar screen of email comments, and actually caused me to investigate a bit further. On Saturday I paid a visit to The Thunderbird gift shop, a Lake Leelanau institution. Here’s what I saw there.