Money, Money, Money, Money!

The ability of the United States of America to take on more debt will increase for the following reasons:

a) We exists within a global economy, not a national economy. And for better or for worse, debt is what makes it work.

b) The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency -- a position we are not willing to abandon now.

c) The trees have not yet been shaken (i.e., the stock market has yet to go bananas).

d) The debts ceiling has been raised many times in the past -- this is just polytricks.

e) Push come to shove, President Obama will sign an executive order to raise the debt ceiling if Congress tries to mug his presidency with their obstinance.

Summertime in Atlantic City, NJ

Early Saturday evening in the South Inlet, cira 1977...

After checking in at home for a bathroom break and some dinner -- I'd just eaten too fast -- I dart back out of the house on my way to the Altman Field playground before my mom could remember to yell "stay in here!" First, I stop across the street at the Lighthouse Park to join the slow building crowd around Puerto Rican conga players. They are banging out some Latino rhythms as they alternate between tokes of cigarettes and sips of Budweiser.

Before long, I sneak pass the house and head across the glass strewn dirt lots along the way which had long since become overgrown with weeds knee high.

Out of earshot for my mother's call, I make my way to the corner of Pacific and New Hampshire Avenues. I am consumed with the familiar smell of fumes from Jitney exhaust breezing through the salty air.

Against the clanging of overinflated Dr. J basketballs rebounding off the too loose rims, I hear the steady lap of the ocean colliding with the rocks of the t-jetties on the little beach.

It' s just after dusk. I'm going on thirteen...and I am in-my-world.

Book Review: American Uprising

Daniel Rasmussen has written a very good book about an obscure event in early American history. The subtitle tells it best: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt.

The setting is the plantation coast of New Orleans, along the Mississippi river - today Natchez. He tells of the burgeoning sugar (cane) industry and the voracious appetite it held for the bodies and souls of African laborers. The French aristocracy had been consumed by the rapidly expanding American nation in the Louisiana Purchase. A determined federal official was appointed to oversee the assimilation of the defiant French planters into the style of governance preferred by union planners.

Amid the political volleys occupying French land holders and federal officials, including a conspiracy to undermine claims by the Spanish Crown to land in Florida and Louisiana, three men, were plotting the liberation of their people from a virulent soul-crushing bondage devoid of humanity.

The 1811 insurrection of black slaves of New Orleans -- the largest in history -- is a story that explains the deliberate attempt of African people to free themselves from slavery despite the known risks of unforgiving and brutal reprisal. Rasmussen writes a compelling account of how, despite their failure to achieve freedom, this little known slave revolt exemplifies the realities of United States expansionist history, and the many paradoxes of what we have come to recognize as the American brand: freedom, justice and equality.