Of course, Slab City is no city, and no picnic. Some 640 acres of state-owned sand and scrub near the Salton Sea, it offers no electricity, no sewerage, no running water. Once, it was a Marine training base. When it was decommissioned, nothing was left but the concrete slabs where barracks once stood. Gradually, people with souls to mend or demons to kill started camping on the slabs.
Maybe after the apocalypse the world would look like Slab City. Slabbers live in trailers, trucks and old buses scattered as though a twister had tossed them up and dropped them. Power comes from solar panels, batteries and portable generators — you’re rich here if you have one. Signs and structures are made from tires, wires and spare parts.
Until recently, only about 75 to 100 people called Slab City home all year, and they have their own sad stories to tell, usually involving breakups, bankruptcies or booze. But these days, they’re more interested in talking about the newcomers, who’ve swelled the ranks of the year-round population to about 200.
It says something about the state of the nation, slabbers will tell you, shaking their heads, when Slab City is becoming more of a refuge for the down and out than ever before.
“Some people come by foot,” said Ben Morofsky, who is 49 and has lived in Slab City for 22 years. “They’ve lost everything.”
Tent cities started cropping up all over the country once the recession began taking its toll, and a couple, like Dignity Village in Portland, Ore., or Nickelsville, in Seattle, are officially sanctioned by city officials. Dignity Village even makes prospective residents fill out applications
But there is no squat in the country like Slab City. Here, residents make the rules as they go along, and county and state officials let them be unless real trouble happens. Rarely does a sheriff happen by. It’s even rarer still that one is summoned. Utter detachment from the rest of society may be Slab City’s main attraction.
While there are no official statistics on Slab City — no one counts who comes and goes — judging from interviews here, the newcomers are trekking to the slabs from all over. Seattle to Staten Island, San Diego to Tennessee. Single men, mostly, in their 40s and 50s. But couples, too. Even a few families.
“It’s not the best place for kids,” said James Edward, who moved to the slabs nine months ago from Montgomery, Ala., with his wife and two children, 11 and 14 years old. Edward, 38 years old, was working as a regional manager for the Applebee’s restaurant chain, he said, for many hours and not enough pay. He looked and looked, he said, but could not find a better job. So he and his wife decided to ride out the economy at the slabs.
People come here out of desperation. But like Edward, many also want or need a reprieve from the newest normal, where workers toil longer for the same pay in jobs they hate but fear losing. They’ve heard of Slab City through the 2007 film version of “Into the Wild,” and like the rich pageant of life the movie displays.
“Into the Wild’s” Slab City is a hobo-boho Shangri-La. People live free and happy, selling books to tourists for a living, cooking communal meals. They take visitors to Salvation Mountain, a three-story sculpture made of clay, straw and paint that stands near the entrance to the slabs. They have nightly concerts, strum guitars, clink beers around warming fires.
That’s the Slab City that a 25-year-old woman who hitchhiked to Slab City from Kansas wanted when she decided she didn’t want to worry about paying bills all the time. It’s the Slab City that attracted a 48-year-old man who had left his landscaping business in Staten Island for a relationship in Oregon that failed, leaving him with nothing. “Into the Wild” showed him, he said, that there was a happy alternative to going back to Staten Island a bum and moving in with his parents.
Slabbers are friendly. And Slab City does hold weekly concerts. But it is hardly a romantic life.
Only the strong or the mad survive here. During the summer, temperatures reach 125 degrees in the shade, and the runty Joshua trees are precious and few. Just living is a full-time job. Water, which residents buy in the nearby town, is always being hauled, boiled or bottled. Everything is rationed, and chores like washing dishes or cooking take twice as long as in the real world. Bathing is a luxury, one indulged only when very necessary.
The broken-down town of Niland, five miles west, provides a grocery store and post office. For gas or more shopping, slabbers head to Calipatria, 12 miles south, Brawley, 25 miles south, or across the border to Mexicali, about 50 miles down, where a dollar still buys more than it does in the States.
Most slabbers survive on government checks, food stamps and donations from ministries. Come winter, when hundreds of trailered retirees, or snowbirds, descend on the slabs for the season, the regulars make money doing odd jobs for them. Some newcomers come with a little money in their pockets. Others, like Carranco, rely on the kindness of slabbers.
Carranco, with no cellphone or post office box, had been waiting for word from his girlfriend, who had an actual job and a place to stay near Palm Springs, for nearly two months. Then she came back, broke up with him, took their Chihuahuas and his food stamp card.
“Thank goodness for charity,” Carranco said, rocking himself on the remains of a recliner outside his lean-to. It was 105 degrees, getting dark and he had no source of power save for a solar light on top of his camper and batteries for his portable stereo.
A wiry man with sharp cheekbones, black hair to his shoulders and a growing beard, Carranco looks like an apostle from Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” After a couple of months, new slabbers look like they’ve lived here forever. The men grow beards, the women go gray. People age in dog years. Even the children.
Minister Patrick McFarland, who runs the Slab City Christian Center, a trailer more popular for its daily bread offerings than its sermons, has watched newcomers flee as if being chased.
“It’s kind of a raw experience,” McFarland said. “People don’t expect how hard it is.” He and his wife ran a ministry for outlaw bike groups in Joshua Tree, Calif., before moving here a year and a half ago. Then he was diagnosed with bladder cancer and had to leave for treatment. Back for six months, McFarland still seemed to be adjusting.
He was wondering, he asked an Imperial County sheriff’s deputy who had led an out-of-town visitor to the slabs, whether he could carry a firearm if it was concealed, or displayed?
Neither, without a permit, the deputy said.
“Then, I could carry a knife, I guess,” McFarland said.
The Christian Center had been burglarized a few times, Carranco said, as had his own encampment. The old-timers blamed newcomers who haven’t learned slabber rules.
Jerry Ray Jones, who has lived 62 years the hard way, 26 of them in Slab City, said any article should warn newcomers away.
When he arrived, he said, with a story too long to tell, only about 10 people lived in Slab City. They were bona fide loner types. Crack, meth and liquor brought more people to the slabs, and other reasons. Outright poverty was never No. 1 before now.
You’re a real slabber if you can stick out more than one summer, the saying goes here. But Mary Dillon and her husband had lasted three summers — “Into the Wild” brought them — and they never felt at home.
They were in Niland, buying ice and supplies to take on the road. Dillon, who is 52, said she and her husband were going back to Washington state. They had just sold their trailer, were checking their mail, and were taking off.
Dillon’s husband, a 66-year-old retiree, didn’t want to talk or give his name. He said it was just better that way, given the topic was Slab City.
“We don’t want no trouble,” Dillon said, though she managed to give a sheriff’s deputy an earful about some goings-on at the slabs. “We just want a normal life again.” They had 1,300 miles to drive, and were looking forward to it.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Apocalyptic squattersville for recession refugees - American Spring
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
World on brink of disaster: Bank of England boss
Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King says there are growing signs of a global economic disaster.
THE world is facing the worst financial crisis since at least the 1930s, ''if not ever'', according to the governor of the Bank of England.
Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the central bank's Monetary Policy Committee to put £75 billion ($A119 billion) of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a recession in Britain.
Economists said the bank's decision to resume its quantitative easing (QE), or asset purchase program, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.
Advertisement: Story continues belowSir Mervyn said the bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster. ''This is the most serious financial crisis we've seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We're having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but [will] act calmly and to do the right thing.''
Announcing its decision, the bank said that the euro-zone debt crisis was creating ''severe strains in bank funding markets and financial markets''. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) also said that the inflation-driven ''squeeze on households' real incomes'' and the government's program of spending cuts would ''continue to weigh on domestic spending'' for some time to come.
The ''deterioration in the outlook'' meant more QE was justified, the bank said.
Financial experts said the MPC's move would be a ''Titanic'' disaster for pensioners, savers and workers approaching retirement. Sir Mervyn (pictured) suggested that was a price worth paying to save the economy from recession.
Under QE, the central bank electronically creates new money which it then uses to buy assets such as government bonds, or gilts, from banks. In theory, the banks then use the cash they gain to increase their lending to businesses and individuals.
By increasing the demand for gilts, QE pushes down the interest rate yields paid to holders of these and other bonds. Critics of the policy say it pushes up inflation and drives down the pound.
The National Association of Pension Funds called for urgent talks with ministers to deal with the negative impact of lower gilt yields on pension funds. NAPF chief executive Joanne Segars said QE made it more expensive for employers to provide pensions and would weaken the funding of schemes as their deficits increased. ''All this will put more pressure on employers at a time when they are facing a bleak economic situation,'' she said.
Ros Altman, of Saga Group, said the latest round of QE was ''a Titanic disaster'' that would increase pensioner poverty. As well as fuelling inflation, she said, falling bond yields would make annuities more expensive, ''giving new retirees much less pension income for their money and leaving them permanently poorer in retirement''.
The MPC also voted to leave the bank rate at its historic low of 0.5 per cent, another decision that hurts savers. Protesters outside the bank's headquarters smashed a giant piggy bank to symbolise the situation of pensioners and others forced to raid savings to keep up with the rising cost of living.
Asked about the plight of savers, Sir Mervyn said it was more important to support the wider economy than to support them. He suggested that savers would not be helped by deliberately pushing the British economy into recession. The decision was the first move on QE since 2009, during the global credit crisis, when the bank injected £200 billion into the economy.
Some analysts believe that this round of QE could be less effective than the previous one, forcing the bank to create even more money this time.
Michael Saunders of Citigroup forecast that there could be as much as £225 billion more QE by next year. ''I think they will do lots more QE,'' he said.
''It's both that the economy is weak and also that the MPC's view is that QE is not a very powerful tool; or rather, it takes a large amount of QE to have much effect on the economy.''
The bank is supposed to keep inflation near a target of 2 per cent. Inflation now stands at 4.5 per cent, and the bank admitted it was likely to hit 5 per cent as soon as this month. The bank's own research shows that as well as stimulating the economy, QE pushes up prices.
The governor insisted that the MPC's decisions had been the correct response to events.
''The world economy has slowed, America has slowed, China has slowed and, of course, particularly the European economy has slowed,'' he said. ''The world has changed and so has the right policy response.''
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Poll: Cain surges, opens up 20-point lead on Romney - Yahoo! News
In news sure to inject shock and awe into the Republican political primary season, a Zogby poll released Thursday showed Herman Cain leading the Republican field, topping former front-runner Mitt Romney by an astonishing 20 points. Cain would also narrowly edge out Obama in a general election, the poll found, by a 46�“44 margin.
Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, would lose by a point to the president, 40 percent to 41 percent. Texas governor Rick Perry, who has slipped in the polls of late, would lose to the president 45 percent to 40 percent.
The poll found that 38 percent of Republican primary voters said they would vote for Cain if the primary were held today. Eighteen percent said they would throw their support to Romney, while 12 percent each said they would vote for Perry and Texas congressman Ron Paul. No other candidate attracted double-digit support.
This is the second month in a row in which Zogby has found Cain leading the pack; he has surged another 10 points ahead of his competitors since September. Romney, on the other hand, has remained in the same place, while Perry’s share of the primary vote in the Zogby poll has steadily declined since he announced his candidacy in August.
Other pollsters have found Cain at or near the top of the field, with Fox News declaring him a top-tier candidate following its poll last week. That poll found Cain had 17 percent of the vote, trailing Perry by just two points and Romney by five.
A CBS News poll released Tuesday found Romney and Cain tied at 17 percent, with Perry trailing at 12 percent; a YouGov/Economist poll released Thursday found Cain leading with 21 percent, four points ahead of Romney.
Though many have questioned Cain’s viability as a legitimate candidate, voters are clearly giving him another look.
The IBOPE Zogby International poll is based on an online October 3�“5 survey of 1,581 voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The sample of likely Republican primary voters included 796 Americans, and has an margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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