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The Wealth Defense Industry and the Working-Class Republic: What Equity Means Here

Henry Demarest Lloyd’s 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth made the case that liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. The question 132 years later is whether equity against the one percent can still be won inside a system they pay to keep tilted. Equity against the one percent describes parity of political voice, of legal protection, of access to courts and schools and air and water and a livable wage, with no implication that fortunes themselves must be equal. The republic was built on that equality of standing, however imperfectly executed and however brutally suspended along racial and gender lines. The wealth concentration of the past forty years has retired the idea entirely.

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Chasing Cobblestones: Underfoot and Smothered in Asphalt in the Jersey City Heights

When I was on my recent Red Squares walking tour of Jersey City, I happened upon some street construction that gave me a chance for an aesthetic and professional mulligan: Exposed cobblestones on their way to disappearing again for three decades!

I whipped out my new iPhone 5S and awkwardly began taking photographs to make up for a previously lost opportunity articulated here in a comments stream from two months ago:

I did not take photos of the cobblestones! Gah! I was always mesmerized by them and felt such sadness that the beauty would soon be covered up. I’ll have to look for another street in the area to document! …

Our cobblestones were like square granite bricks and they were put in the street end down — creating a long-lasting, and deep stone that would never wear away. …

I only know the cobblestones here are so massive because I tried to dig one out to keep! I couldn’t do it. Too massive. Too heavy. Too deeply seated in 1600 soil! …

They just covered up the old cobblestones again. They’ll be hidden for the next 30 years until they re-pave it all again.

Here we go!  Caught, in situ, exposed cobblestones half-dead under hot, new, asphalt — and a burning morning sun — but now also half-alive for forever and a half-life, exposed, and memorialized here in this article!

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Crumbling Infrastructure as America Deconstructs

The crumbling of an Interstate bridge in downtown Minneapolis brings to the forefront the Dirty Little Secret of the American Urban Core: Our national infrastructure is neglected and deconstructing and instead of rebuilding it we are rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure.

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