WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER: How NA Confidential is evolving.

If you're just tuning in, or perhaps feel a tad confused, NA Confidential is not a music blog -- although music is a big part of my life.

These past few weeks I've taken to using songs to title my posts. Given the leaden weight of sheer, willful stupidity that has become the hallmark of American society, I find that it soothes me to listen to a song, then post thoughts and links beneath it.

It matters not whether the two are related, as the bulk of discussions in which I find myself engaged these days tends to feature me referencing a blog post I wrote and/or other source reading, and someone else filled with dazzling insight gleaned entirely from glancing at the title but not bothering to read the words therein.

This said, there'll be times when I'm more explicit, using a header borrowed from The Doors: WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER, followed by a conventional title.

Like today.

In terms of subject matter, regular and genuine readers already know that while not entirely denuded of municipal social commentary, the blog is being reduced to a size capable of being stuffed into an emptied can of kippers.

Where it leads, I can’t yet say.

To prevent my friends and neighbors being punished for my truth-telling, certain local topics will remain off-limits. It’s what I must do. Fortunately I’ve studied the lives of dissidents, artists and free-thinkers in the former Soviet Union and other totalitarian societies, and they’ve taught me how to self-censor and defer to the power elites with dignity.

One wishing to "come back" must first go away.

Vive la résistance!

Chain and big box subsidies cost us far more than we imagine, but who cares so long as Starbucks is there?

From the linked Strong Towns article.

I've always wondered if the presumed "neutrality" of chains and big boxes -- they're generic and identical from place to place, all buttons with no fingers -- fills some sort of psychological need in those for whom "localism" implies not a set of economic nuts and bolts, but the local community's parochialism (or worse).

There always have been adherents to internationalism as a corrective to narrower nationalism (or localism), as applicable to seemingly universal belief systems otherwise diametrically opposed: Communism's Internationale versus the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, for example.

As such: "I belong to the worldwide fraternity of Chipotle, where consistency and safety everywhere are the ultimate filters against the messiness of individualism and diversity -- which barely exist in my burg, anyway." 

Admittedly, it's probably more likely that identification with chains and big boxes owes to the narcissistic qualities of consumer culture; I want this or that, and for so long as the price is right, the costs to others be damned.

Or, maybe, that few of us bother to think at all.

Before the Strong Towns link, there's this transcript of a podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, with ILSR's Stacy Mitchell and Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First.

It’s estimated, best ballpark number we have right now, that states and cities spend at least 70 billion, with a B, dollars a year in economic development incentives, and by far most of that is tax breaks, property tax abatements, sales tax exemptions, corporate income tax credits, R&D credits, film production credits. There’s a big menu. The average state has dozens of such programs on the books, which in turn are often locally administered.

Tax increment financing districts, enterprise zones, industrial revenue bonds, all those come under this category. The truth is, as you said, although some of the programs are justified in the name of helping small businesses or helping struggling neighborhoods, and in some cases that’s the way the programs were originally structured and written, over time they’ve become deregulated. Over time they’ve become give-mes that can go anywhere.

So we have TIF districts at the fringe of urban areas piling up apple orchards for Walmart Supercenters. We have subsidies for Amazon sortation centers that are just undermining Macy’s and K-Mart and Sears and all the other retail chains that are laying people off. We have an affluent suburb of Missouri, Des Peres, Missouri, outside of St. Louis, saying or mall is blighted because we don’t have a Nordstrom yet. We need to give a $31 million TIF deal this multinational REIT that owns this mall so that they won’t be blighted anymore and can subsidize bringing in a Nordstrom. It’s gotten really perverse. The anti-poverty argument has been turned upside down and on its head frankly over and over.

In short, government picks winners, and the chosen winners usually are the ones who had enough money to start with.

BIG BOX STORES ARE COSTING OUR CITIES FAR MORE THAN WE EVER IMAGINED, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

Drive a little ways out from the center of any town and you’re likely to find several big box stores—Target, Home Depot, Piggly Wiggly, you name it. They’re everywhere. If you took a helicopter or a drone above these parts of town, you’d likely see a vast amount of land taken up with just a handful of stores and their accompanying parking lots. The houses and small businesses around them would be dwarfed in comparison. Not only do they use up a ton of land, but as a result, big box stores also demand miles of public infrastructure like pipes and roads to serve them.

But here’s the crazy part: Those enormous stores are paying a negligible amount in taxes. For their size, they are contributing hardly anything while meanwhile demanding new electric lines and frontage roads and signalized intersections (among other things). In most cases, their taxes are not nearly enough to pay for the maintenance of these basic services, let alone the many other functions of our local governments that we expect taxes to pay for, like schools and fire protection.

Here’s a textbook example of this, created by our friends at Urban3, a firm that analyzes the relationship between building design and tax production. The illustration below shows the tax value of a big box store near Asheville, North Carolina, compared with a modest downtown building. Pay special attention to the taxes per acre.

Are we winning yet?

Clancy Sigal's essay is less concerned with the amazing 102-year World Series title drought of the Chicago Cubs than what is implied in a larger sense by "losing" and "losers."

What's so great about winning, anyway?, by Clancy Sigal (guardian.co.uk)

If, like me, you're a baseball addict and die-hard Chicago Cubs fan, you learn to live with being 'a loser'. It's a human condition.

Tanned, rested, ready and appreciative.

If you have not already heard, there was an election yesterday, and I lost it.

I’ll have more to say about my personal experience with the electoral process later today, or perhaps tomorrow. First, some much delayed business at work must be finished. In the interim, please be assured that even in defeat, I’m positively elated with the results.

My appreciation cannot be delayed, so please accept one huge, all-purpose, humble THANK YOU to all 1,341 of you who defied local convention, saw past the usual obstructionist blather, and made a compelling collective statement about the primacy of thinking versus the dull platitudes of party business as usual.

As you know, I violated each and every sacred rule of local campaigning, didn’t once fluff the hierarchy, refused to wear a suit, ran lean and green, stood in full view as a commie/atheist/liberal/gadfly, spent less than fifty bucks, bought no newspaper advertising and planted not a single offensive yard sign … and 1,341 of you approved because it's the thought that counts.

Yes, it wasn't quite enough ... this time around. But it’s one hell of a good start, and I cannot thank you enough for it. My only regret is being denied the chance to enjoy a campaign spent denouncing the malignant Republican platform.

Side note to Shea Van Hoy of the News and Tribune: When’s the column coming back? I can get you 900 words for tomorrow by 10:00 a.m. today; right now, in fact. Piece of cake. At least 1,341 people are eager to read all about it, and now more than ever, the newspaper needs it. Whaddya say?