State of the nation
This map, prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, vividly shows the deep unemployment in the U.S. It covers the 12-month period ending June 2010, when the official U.S. unemployment rate was 9.7. People who quit looking for work aren’t counted in the labor force; people who are working part-time involuntarily are considered working. The darkest color represents unemployment exceeding 10 percent. For more, read “Voices of the Unemployed,” posted by Progress Illinois.
See the map advance month by month as the recession deepens here. Be sure to click on the play button in the middle of the map.
Under the radar
East Side player Gary Fears and his diverse business associates are betting that his military aviation business finally takes off. Whether it will fly is still up in the air.
By C.D. STELZER / cdstelzer@gmail.com
Part two of a two-part series
For a free PDF download of these stories, go to http://www.scribd.com/Fears-Stories/d/33114607
“It’s interesting that the guys who came here to help move the plane actually were Russian nationals,” says Cheryl Hill, a prosecutor in Marquette, Michigan.
Hill is referring to a gargantuan Soviet military aircraft worth millions of dollars that has been stranded for the better part of the last year at a former U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command base in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The spring thaw has melted the snow that accumulated around the aircraft over the winter, but mysteries surrounding its presence at Sawyer International Airport remain.
A fuel-leaking Cold War relic, the 94-ton behemoth has been the subject of both curiosity and consternation in Marquette since it touched down in July. Almost immediately, five members of the Ilyushin IL-78’s nine-man Ukrainian crew were deported for visa violations.
Hill, the local official charged with interim custody of the plane, recalls that one of the foreign-born aviators dispatched by the U.S. Customs Service to move the plane off the runway told her that he had flown the same aircraft during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. She mentions the coincidence as an aside, her prosecutorial inquisitiveness piqued more by the plane’s flight plan from last summer. Read the rest of this entry »
Fears and lobbying in Collinsville
Illinois kingpin Gary Fears works in mysterious ways
By C.D. STELZER / cdstelzer@gmail.com
Part one of a two-part series
For a free PDF download of these stories, go to http://www.scribd.com/Fears-Stories/d/33114607
Nine Gateway Drive is far from K Street, the center of Washington’s influence-peddling industry. The address belongs to a now-vacant space in a strip mall located in Collinsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis.
This small town, which bills itself as the horseradish capital of the world, seems an odd place for the Kingdom of Morocco to be doing business, but, according to a 2006 congressional lobbying report, the North African nation hired Collinsville-based Avatar Enterprises Inc. to help represent its interests in the United States.
Gary R. Fears, the 63-year-old owner of Avatar, now lives in Boca Raton, Florida, but his career is deeply rooted in Madison County politics, where he made his bones decades ago as a Downstate operative for then-Gov. Dan Walker. Since leaving public life, Fears has traded on his insider status and political connections to parlay a series of controversial deals into a byzantine financial empire. Read the rest of this entry »
100 sites about journalism, communications
What happens when hundreds and hundreds of unemployed or underemployed communications workers converge with digital media? You get a veritable revolution, staged on multiple platforms, and the flowering of hundreds and hundreds of websites devoted to criticism, analysis, innovation, self-promotion and related topics. [Here] are 100 of them of varying quality, listed alphabetically. Feel free to repurpose this info, make it viral and stick in everybody’s content bucket. You supply the emoticons. Send recommendations or corrections to focusmidwest@yahoo.com
Parallels between Twitter and Orwell’s Newspeak
It can be argued that Twitter has emerged as a legitimate form of communication that could influence how children will spell — and think — in the future. Both Fox News and CNN have adopted the form and syntax of Twitter for their closed captions, so that Twitter is no longer merely a computer shorthand but has become an integral facet of our mainstream media.
To illustrate: On Sept. 11, 2001, Fox News carried a story about President Bush’s immediate response to the terrorists’ attacks that adopted Twitter as the style for their closed-caption account (he “did rht thin”).
This year, a new keyboard was introduced called “Tweetboard.” The traditional keyboard has been reconfigured, so that Twitter symbols assume prominent positions on the top row: @ (reply), # (hashtags), RT (retweet), and via @. Another key is for shortening URLs. Read the rest of this entry »
Will books become just a memory?
This story, about two St. Louis entrepreneurs, appeared in 1990. They were about 20 years early. Read Alan Kaufman’s recent essay about electronic books, “The Electronic Book Burning,” by clicking on this link.
Dust off the books on the shelf. Put ‘em in a box and take it to a recycling center.
You might not need them anymore, if a small St. Louis company has its way. The home library of the future could be reduced to a shoebox full of memory modules, each about the size of a quarter.
VPR Systems Ltd. — headed by Robert Griesedieck, 66, a former brewing executive, and Michael Saigh, 37, a stockbroker and business professor — plans to introduce a hand-held electronic book by the fall of 1991.
Unlike other manufacturers, who are developing systems that use compact discs for text and graphics, VPR’s ‘video pocket reader’ uses an interchangeable, reprogrammable memory module. Read the rest of this entry »
“All nature was in a state of dissolution”
It hit New Madrid, Mo., on Dec. 16, 1811, at 2 in the morning. Settlers ran terror-stricken from tottering and falling buildings to find the earth belching forth great volumes of sand and water. Stores and houses fell into great fissures. The river rose five or six feet in a few minutes. Its color changed to a reddish hue and became thick with mud roiled from its bottom. The surface of the Mississippi was covered with foam and the jets on the shore went higher than the treetops. Within five minutes, the clear serene night became overcast and purplish. The air was filled with a dense, sulfurous vapor that left the inhabitants gasping for breath. The overcast stayed until daybreak; aftershocks (twenty-seven of them) occurring every six to ten minutes accompanied by sudden flashes of fire brought a night full of horror. The fissures ran from southeast to northwest. People felled trees across the direction of cleavage and hung to the trunks to keep from being buried alive. The churchyard with its dead was gone. The great fissures bared the bones of gigantic mastodons and ichthyosauri.
Between New Madrid and Vick’s Plantation, now Vicksburg, there wasn’t the sign of a town remaining along the 300-mile stretch of river. Read the rest of this entry »
“A two-bit mayor” in the Midwest
Who would have guessed a two-bit mayor of a little town in the American Midwest could wind up going into the exile-creation business? Twenty-six Iranian students were involved in a disorderly protest against the regime of the Shah of Iran earlier this month at a Methodist Church in Jefferson City, Mo. They were arrested and appeared before the local police court on disturbance charges. Fair enough, and that should have been the end of it.
But no. Jefferson City Mayor Robert L. Hyder, former chief counsel of the Missouri Highway Department, took it upon himself to send the names and photographs of the kids to the Shah.
In Iran, it’s not a matter of a police court but of a police state, where opposition to His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is punishable by anything and everything that strikes the fancy of the Shahanshah or his agents, with no niceties about venue or statue of limitations to protect the students — when and if they return.
Granted, the state bureaucracy is not much of a place to learn about how things like torture work elsewhere, but that’s hardly an excuse for Hyder; he chose to ignore explanations and pleas made before his mailing.
– From “We hope he sleeps well at night,” a FOCUS/Midwest editorial published in the Nov.-Dec. 1974 edition. The Shah was overthrown in 1979; Hyder died in 2001.
Reflections of a radio demagogue
During the Great Depression, an estimated 50 million people tuned into Father Charles Coughlin’s radio programs, which were known for their ultra-conservative denunciations of the Roosevelt administration and poorly concealed anti-Semitism. Coughlin left the airwaves in the early 1940s. Nearly a quarter-century later, FOCUS/Midwest contributing editor Bernard Eismann interviewed Coughlin, and found a substantially different man.
The white-haired priest, cassock skirts flapping, moved with short, quick steps along the snow-spotted pavement that runs parallel to broad Woodward Avenue in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. As he turned to enter the church his ruddy face, hardly showing seventy-one years, was brought into sharp relief against the gray stone background of the Shrine of the Little Flower that dominates the corner with a 150-foot tower supporting a stone image of Christ on the Cross. The priest is the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a living ghost of the angry Thirties, described in a chronicle of the decade as the master in “the arts of vituperation and demagoguery.”
In his study the radio priest of the Thirties, whose vein-straining oratory enraptured hundreds of thousands more than two decades ago, recently talked after keeping silent since 1940. The fire is not gone after the years of public exile, but Coughlin has mellowed, suffering no longer from what he calls the arrogance of youth. Read the rest of this entry »
