Daily Loaf

The City Council of St. Petersburg will make a decision this Thursday that will signal what path the city is taking for the future. The council will vote on spending nearly $700,000 in taxpayer money for more police and special projects for the owners of BayWalk, including privatization of the sidewalk outside the mall entrance.  BayWalk’s ownership, whose controlling interest is held by Wells Fargo Bank, said without the subsidy and the sidewalk, they cannot possibly turn around the failing entertainment complex.

From the standpoint of public policy that promotes sustainable economics, the council’s choice is clear, I think. Will it continue a worn-out policy of subsidies to out-of-town corporations and mainly profit the wealthy few? Or will it adopt an enlightened, sustainable public policy that promotes economic development of all local residents, in every community, not just the privileged ones?
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This week, Brian and Taylor invite PoHo Wayne Garcia in for a special food-related recession session. We drink vodka flavored with baby aspirin and discuss the reduction in creamy splooge at Dunkin Donuts, SoHo Sushi’s so so sushi, Taylor’s list of recession wines, and the problems restaurants are having in this economy.

Download the episode here.

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Celebrating Independence Day or creating environmental disaster? – Kelly Rothwell looks at the littered aftermath of Fourth of July celebrations and wonder why, instead of giving back in celebration of their freedom, people decide to light off fireworks, leaving mass amounts of debris in the water and on the beach.

Local Food: Dinner in, and from, the garden at Gateway Organic Farm – Chef Gui Alinat gives information about Gateway Organic Farm’s next “Dinner in the Garden” event, an incredible local foods experience featuring nine Bay area chefs.

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Our economy is unsustainable. That means at some point in the future it will cease to be sustained. People will lose homes and jobs, and lifestyles will change. Sound familiar to our present day scenario? In my previous post I added a link to the Crash Course, a video series about the challenges America faces over the coming 10 years from our oil addiction: our generation gap of baby boomers retiring and not enough workers to pay for their retirement, our incredibly increasing debt, our lack of savings, and our exponential growth due to fossil fuel consumption resulting in a degrading supply of resources as well as destruction of the ecology we depend on for life. Peak Oil was another issue I brought up in a recent blog. All of these issues will bring about future scenarios that can play in multiple ways. (You can watch these videos from my post here.)

The context of this post will follow the future energy descent scenarios created by David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture, as per his website Future Scenarios. These scenarios deal with the responses we can go forward with after the peak production of oil arises. Our country imports nearly 70% of its oil - how can our country continue this path of exponential growth if other countries deteriorate in oil exports?
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Every straight male (and some females) have a version of this fantasy: two college-aged girls sitting on a couch, playfully flirting before spontaneously stripping and fondling each other. This is the scene I walk in on Friday.

Two attractive young women share a leather loveseat while watching a muted MTV show. Having just met that morning, the women are overly nice, complimenting the thongs and bras they’ve brought with them in overnight bags. But this isn’t a fantasy: these women are preparing to film their first girl-on-girl scene. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by lanuiop

Destression!  I just heard that word used for the first time today and had to get it out there before it wound up like “octomom,” “perfect storm” and “____is the new____”.  Feel free to add it to your own vocabulary.  Do it now before you’re one of those people who, like me, caught on too late and still says “What the shizzle?”

Defined, in the context as I understood it today, Destression refers to the depression and stress one feels as result of the economic recession.  One might say, “All this worrying over job security, saving money and not having my regular massage has put me into a state of destression.” Read the rest of this entry »

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St Pete City Council’s Public Safety and Infrastructure Committee went to work last Thursday towards adding language to their zoning regulations about community gardens.  Given that more and more people want to grow their own food and green up their neighborhoods these days, it may come as a shock that technically speaking, right now community gardens are not actually allowed.

Like most cities in Florida, St Petersburg’s zoning doesn’t have any provisions for community gardening at all.  Happily, in St Pete this appears to be an oversight — unsurprising given how few long-term community gardens have existed in the state of Florida.  City staff have readily provided temporary use permits to the Bartlett Park Community Garden over the last year (the Azalea garden on 22nd Ave. N is on city park land and doesn’t require permitting).  But more garden projects are in the works all over the city and it will help a great deal to have a more standardized process for getting them established.

If the city can move fast, St Pete could be on the upside of the curve.  Similar ordinances are in the works in places like Safety Harbor and Tampa (Tarpon Springs already passed theirs last year).  In fact, these others are looking at adding community gardens to their comprehensive plans as well as their zoning regulations, which could be really helpful as community gardens become recognized as both a necessity (for food during a recession) and a desirable neighborhood asset (studies show they raise property values and stabilize residency). Read the rest of this entry »

OK, this is awesome. Really. Just awesomely funny. I mean, what good is a depression if you can’t laugh at it? And what’s funnier than real people pretending to be video game characters? From the video humorists at CB Fresh comes this vision of what would happen if Street Fighter IV was really about the economic crisis instead of, well, whatever the hell it’s actually about. To be honest, the Wall Street Fighter story is actually probably more compelling and logical than whatever’s supposed to be going on in actual Street Fighter IV.

Video below the jump:

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Take a moment and study the graphic above, showing job losses during the last three recessions, 1990, 2001 and present day (represented by the green line).

The current period of job loss already exceeds by an order of magnitude anything anyone under the age of 70 has seen. No recession since the Great Depression has lasted even 600 days. But 400 or so days into this one, no one sees an end.

For a more thorough breakdown, click here.

This morning’s report in the New York Times is full of good news:

Worse-than expected job loss:

The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs — the most since December 1974… Economists had forecast a loss of 540,000 jobs..

Worse than-expected unemployment: 7.6 percent instead of the predicted 7.5

Dire statistics: “The jobless rate is at its highest since September 1992.”

And dire predictions:

Many economists expect that the economy will continue to contract until July at the very least, but at a slowing pace in the second quarter. That would make it the longest recession since the 1930s, outlasting the two record-holders, the mid-1970s and early 1980s downturns. Each of these recessions lasted 16 months. The current recession, which started in December 2007, would reach that milestone in April.

Enjoy.

In these hard economic times, it’s nice to sometimes look around and see just how much worse things could be. Then again, if you’re at all human, looking at other people’s misery probably just makes you even more depressed. That’s why I prefer to get my schadenfreude from the virtual world – all of the gloating and none of the guilt. And when it comes to visions of extreme capitalism run amok, there’s no better game out there than last year’s Game of the Year, Bioshock.

Bioshock is a superb first person shooter set in 1960, but not a part of any 1960 you’ll recognize (although it might seem familiar to some of you Objectivists out there). The game begins with a plane crash that leads you to a vast, underwater, art-deco metropolis known as Rapture. Created by Andrew Ryan as a libertarian paradise, this vision of Utopia clearly takes its inspiration from Ayn Rand’s nasty, bloated behemoth of a novel, Atlas Shrugged… Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Times plans to freeze the pensions of its nonunion employees, effective Feb. 6. This comes only days after announcing that those same nonunion workers must also take an unpaid week of leave to save the company money.

Andrea James of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer covers the cutbacks, and includes this rather distressing bit of news to illustrate just how badly the economy has tanked:

The McClatchy Co. owns a 49.5 percent stake in The Times Co. That stake has lost most of its carrying value and is now worth $7.94 million, compared with $102.2 million in 2006, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Behind the times: For newspapers that thought they could get well by selling off their buildings, that time appears to have passed. The Associated Press reports:

At least half a dozen newspaper companies have said this year they plan to sell their buildings, some with the intention of leasing back space for their news operations. Others are moving to smaller offices to save money as staffs dwindle and the era of commanding downtown newspaper buildings appears near an end.

The newspapers could hardly have picked a worse time to put their buildings on the block, with the value of commercial real estate deals plummeting from just a year ago.

The rest of the article lists a number of newspapers feeling the real-estate crunch, and is worth your time.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out Talking Points Memo’s “The Day in 100 Seconds.” It’s amazing how many video clips can be crammed into a minute-forty.

• Obama unveils team of Superfriends to fight crime around the globe.
• First up for the Superfriends …
• Politico: Alex Sink won’t run against Sen. Martinez.
• …but Martinez is vulnerable.
• Pat Kemp wins Hillsborough Democrat chief’s job.
• Crist’s plan to suspend foreclosures through the holidays hits Time magazine.
• Breaking news! Breaking news! We’ve been in a recession since December 2007.
• The stock market takes a shit.
• The Pentagon plans 20,000 troops stationed in the U.S. by 2011.
• And the new host of Meet the Press is …
• The stars aligned. Did you miss it?

At today’s opening bell, the stock market sits below where it was right before Bush took office in 2001. Lehman Bros. failed yesterday. Today it could be AIG or WaMu. The dollar is in the shitter. Wages are down. Chances are, you or someone you know lacks health insurance. Mortgages are getting tougher to come by. The real estate market is in total collapse. And now a message from John McCain:

• Everybody fucking panic!!!!!!
• Baby Bush: Sarah Palin stonewalls Alaska ethics violation investigation.
• From the Wall Street Journal: “Why Obama’s Health Plan is Better.”
• Coming soon: Sarah Palin’s big fade.
• When Karl “McCain has a black baby” Rove says McCain’s ads have crossed the line, you know we’re through the looking glass 0n election 2008.
• Be careful at the ATM, folks. The crooks are more clever than you think.
• Hackers battle al-Qaeda.
• The sinking Rays suck it up in game one against Boston. As added punishment, here is the Boston Globe’s account.