Weekly Wilson

Ava & Elise Dancing

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Wilson Family Thanksgiving 2010

Thanksgiving Day, 2010, saw 22 Wilsons or Casteleins gather in East Moline, Illinois, for the 42nd straight year.

Here is some film of the youngest members of the clan, Ava & Elise Wilson and Sofia Castelein playing the piano on Thursday, November 25th, 2010.

“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” opened and it is, indeed, a fitting sequel to the 1987 film. Oliver Stone’s revisiting of greed and corruption on “Wall Street” comes to us at a time when we have just dodged the bullet of a second Great Depression (or have we?)

The film opens with a scene of Gordon Gekko’s (Michael Douglas’) release from what is billed as Otis Federal Prison (actually Sing Sing) in 2001, after 8 years behind bars for insider trading and other financial misdeeds while working on Wall Street. When Gordon’s personal belongings are returned to him, the huge cell phone is the most anachronistic object. It is huge, by today’s standards. He walks outside to find no one waiting for him. One imagines the scene to be analogous to what would occur if Bernie Madoff were ever to be released from prison.

The backstory involves Gekko’s purported desire to reconcile with his daughter, Winnie (Carrie Mulligan). He says several times, “Winnie’s all I got left.” Unfortunately, Winnie has not talked to Gordon in several years, apparently the result of her feeling that, had Gordon been there, her brother Rudy would not have died of a drug overdose.

These scenes must have cut very close to the bone for the veteran actor. His brother Eric died of a drug and alcohol overdose on July 6, 2004 at age 46. Couple that with the recent incarceration of Michael Douglas’ only son Cameron for trafficking in meth and you have a man who can relate to the scenes he plays opposite Academy Award nominee Carrie Mulligan as his daughter Winnie

With the recent announcement (Aug. 16, 2010) that Michael Douglas has Stage 4 throat cancer many of the movie’s lines take on added significance, such as this one: “Time is the priority, not money.

Shia LaBoeuf as Jake Moore is in love with Gordon’s (Michael Douglas’) daughter Winnie and has proposed marriage to her. She has accepted. He is a trader on Wall Street and she runs a left-leaning liberal blog called “The Frozen Truth.” To a veteran movie-goer like myself, I consider it noteworthy that, when Jake (LaBoeuf) wants to break news to the world, rather than going to the “New York Times” like Robert Redford did in “Three Days of the Condor” or to the “Washington Post” in “All the President’s Men,” he goes to his girlfriend Carrie and lets her break the story on her blog. (Maybe there’s hope for my www.WeeklyWilson.com blog, after all!).

The best thing about this film is the script, written by Allan Loeb and Steven Schiff, based on the original characters from the 1987 film created by Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser. With the excellent lines that have been scripted for them, all the actors give tour de force performances. All are genuinely convincing right down the line, starting with Douglas, LaBoeuf and Mulligan and moving on to Josh Brolin as  bad guy trader Bretton James, veteran character actor Eli Wallach as “Jules”, Frank Langella as Jake Moore’s elderly mentor, and too many other veteran actors and actresses to mention each by name (Oscar-winner Susan Sarandon plays a small part as Jake’s mother and Sylvia Miles has an even smaller part as a real estate agent.

Here are a few of the lines from the film that will give you its flavor:

Frank Langella, as Lou, the old trader at the fictional firm Keller Zabel, which seems to have been modeled on:  “It’s no fun any more.  It’s just a bunch of machines telling us what to do.”

On September 15, 2008, IRL (in real life), Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy following the housing and credit crash on Wall Street. It was the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, with Lehman Brothers holding more than $600 billion in assets. The U.S. government turned a deaf ear to pleas for help from Lehman Brothers to help it remain afloat. Later, however, the government decided that AIG was “too big to fail’ and bailed out that financial institution (and several others), using U.S. taxpayers’ money. In this fictional account of recent history, Lehman Brothers is represented by the fictional firm of Keller Zabel, whose shares plummet from $79 to an offer of $2 made to old hand Lou (Frank Langella), a low blow, which, in filmdom, is engineered by bad guy Josh Brolin portraying trader Bretton James. There are many pseudonyms for real Wall Street firms in the film. There is the fictitious Churchill Schwarz (Goldman Sachs?) and the nefarious Locust Fund, as well as Hydra Offshore Oil, which is LaBoeuf’s pet project to turn water into a substitute for oil.

At one point in the movie, Jake Moore (Shia LaBoeuf) asks Michael Douglas’ character of Gordon Gekko, “Are we going under?” Douglas responds, “You’re asking the wrong question.” Jacob says, “What’s the right question?” And Gordon responds, “Who isn’t?”

Telling old hand Lou (Frank Langella) that “Your valuations are no longer believable” drives him to commit suicide, and much of the rest of the film is about Jake’s desire to exact revenge for his mentor’s death.

The scene in the college auditorium where Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is lecturing has been in heavy rotation on televison ads for the film, and it is a good scene. Among other things Gordon says (courtesy of scriptwriters Loeb and Schiff), is: “You’re the NINJA generation:  No income. No job. No assets.” Gordon also repeats his mantra that “Greed is good” and says, “Now, it seems, it’s legal.” He says that “Only 75 people in the world know what they are talking about” regarding Wall Street traders and says, “Greed got greedier…The beauty of the deal; no one is responsible because everybody’s drinking the same Kool Ade.” He also says, “The mother of all evil is speculation” as he comments on “borrowing to the hilt.” Listening to the cancer-stricken Douglas (Stage 4 throat cancer) call the Wall Street situation “systemic, global…it’s a cancer” hits home.  Phrases like, “He’s (Lou) one of the toughest guys who ever wore shoes” also resonate, as Shia LaBoeuf relates how Lou (Frank Langella) saw to it that he got a scholarship to Fordham.

Another great soliloquy:  “Money’s a bitch that never sleeps, and if you don[t keep one eye on her, you may end up with it gone forever.” Susan Sarandon is run in as a nurse-turned-realtor who has been making money flipping houses and is constantly turning to her stockbroker son to bail her out as the market crashes.  At one point, Shia says to his mother, “What’d you think:  it was just going to shoot up in perpetuity?” as he writes out checks to his mother for $200,000 first and, later for $30,000 he barely has, at that point. When Shia LaBoeuf reveals that Bretton James has just offered him a job with his firm, Douglas says, “You just rocketed to the center of the Universe.” A later stunt by Jake to get even with Bretton which involves spreading rumors that are not necessarily true leads Douglas to warn LaBoeuf that, “You induced others to trade on information you knew to be false,” warning him that this, too, is a crime punishable by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission).

There are several metaphors for the fragile yet brutal nature of Wall Street trading, including a framed tulip photograph and a painting that is supposedly by Goya. As a seasoned movie-goer you know that, sooner or later, one character or the other will smash either the framed tulip picture or the Goya.

I enjoyed the line that Douglas has when Jake Moore comes to him and tells him that Bretton James “screwed me.” Douglas replies, “Shocker.” Not too heartening is Douglas’ line, “They (greedy traders) never die. They just come back in different forms.”  Here’s another good one from Gordon Gekko (Douglas):  “When choosing between 2 evils, I always like to try the one that I haven’t tried before.”

I genuinely liked this movie (although it didn’t hold my interest nearly as well as “The Town” that is out now), but there were 2 things that I didn’t like that much. One was the music, with original music by Craig Armstrong and Bud Carr as the Executive Music Producer. (The music in “Up in the Air” with Rick Clark supervising was infinitely more appropriate). At the end, the song playing over the credits is reggae-influenced, which seemed somehow out of synch with the world of Wall Street. The other thing that disappointed me was one of two reconciliations that takes place at film’s end. I don’t want to ruin the film for those who have not yet seen it, so I’ll just say that one seemed appropriate and consistent with the character portrayed and one seemed contrived.

A recent line from George Clooney’s “The American,” scrawled on my notepad, seemed to fit this movie, too. “You are Americans. You think you can escape history. You live for the present.” Too true.

In reading today’s Chicago “Tribune,” a turn to pages 6 and 7 revealed a two-page story about the Triumph hog plant in East Moline, the town in which I reside most of the time and the school system which my children attended.

The Triumph hog plant has been hanging fire for 5 years or so. Current Mayor John Thodos said, “This project is already four or five years old, so if anyone has patience, I do.” Thodos came in as Mayor, displacing Jose “Joe” Moreno in a race that saw many discrepancies at a ward level and, I have no doubt, would have shown even more discrepancies had the recount been done city-wide. As the 1st Ward candidate who paid for a recount and has written about the really astonishing irregularities that occurred in just one small ward (i.e., voters who did not exist…but whose addresses were the residences of employees of then-Democratic County Chairman John Gianulis; 3 people in a booth at once; dying people signing absentee ballots that they knew nothing about; actual miscounting of the absentee ballots, proven during a paid-for recount), it has been with some interest that I have watched the progress (or lack thereof) in the city of East Moline since that election.

Most, if not all, of the plans that Mayor Moreno had laid out for the city, which included a downtown Farmers’ Market area among others and a “Revitalize East Moline” committee of leaders in the area, but did not include a giant hog plant that would slaughter 16,000 hogs a day, were buried when Mayor Thodos’ ascended to the throne.   Mayor Thodos recently tried to run (unsuccessfully) for a different county-wide office, so it is clear that he viewed the Mayor’s office only as a stepping-stone in his political career.

Under Mayor Thodos, East Moline has been left “out of the loop,” the Loop being the all-Quad City bus loop. The downtown has continued to deteriorate and businesses have continued to flee. Representative Phil Hare (D, IL) says that “There is 25% unemployment in the building trades right now, and this (Triumph plant) would put at least 600 people to work on construction.  We shouldn’t summarily thumb our nose at these jobs because of something that potentially might happen.  We can act out of fear again or we can act out of trying to improve our economy.” Those of us reading about the impending hog plant might also add, “or we can act intelligently, but in the best long-term interests of the community.”

This last sentiment regarding remediating any odor or groundwater problems the plant creates seems valid and admirable, but there are many who are less enthused…like those who live in East Moline near the plant or those who know the ins-and-outs of giant hog confinement plants, which are growing in number and size. It’s a bit like the BP Gulf Disaster. Wouldn’t an ounce of prevention have been worth a pound of the not-that-successful cure we’ve seen for the past many months?

 In 1980, U.S. hog and farm operations, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, numbered 666,550. As of 2009, there were only 71,450 as small family farmers were gobbled up by large hog confinement operations.  There were 30,000 Illinois hog and pig farming operations in 1980, but the numbers declined with each passing decade, to approximately half that number in 1990 (15,300) to 5,100 in 2000 to only 2,900 in 2007. A drop from 30,000 operations to less than 3,000 in under 30 years is not only astounding, it is over a 90% drop in the old-fashioned family farm(s) of my youth.

Representative Phil Hare, aware of the opposition of some in the community who do not want the hog plant in their back yard, did say, “I would not support the facility for a minute if I thought we were going to have environmental problems.  Triumph is not getting a pass here.  Should any environmental degradation occur, immediate remediation would be necessary.” This sounds admirable, but the fact is that, if a gigantic hog processing plant is placed close to East Moline, factory hog  farms of the same scale cannot be far behind. This is proven by the statistics of our own U.S. Department of Agriculture, just cited. The number of hogs or pigs, per farm, in thousands, has been consistently rising, moving up from fewer than 500 hogs per facility to numbers of 2,000 or more in the years since 1992.

There are knowledgeable opponents, like Jerry Neff, chairman of the local Sierra Club, who say, “It’s a huge plant being built on a wetland and a flood plain that could end up flooding nearby homes.” Max Muller of the Environment Illinois non-profit advocacy group says, “The facility will increase demand for food animals that will probably be met by factory farms in Illinois.  We already have all sorts of environmental problems from factory farms, including manure spills into waterways and odor issues.  Until we clean up regulation of factory farm pollution, we don’t want to be furthering demand for the products from them.”

Triumph is a Missouri-based processor which pays approximately $12.10 an hour, which amounts to approximately $25,100 a year in annual salary, according to spokesman Pat Lilly, who says that construction on the hotly-debated plant could start this spring.

81% of all U.S. hogs are raised in facilities that house 2000+ animals. The toll to small operators and the small family farm has been catastrophic.  To further demonstrate that the plant and the animals (and the problems?) are coming, Triumph officials, who did not agree to be interviewed for the  “Tribune” story, confirmed that they already have contracts with suppliers for hogs to be raised in confinement facilities and raised specifically to be slaughtered at the controversial East Moline plant.

This particular Triumph plant would slaughter 16,000 hogs a day, but taxpayers in the area were asked for millions in local tax breaks. The tax breaks required unanimous approval by 5 local city councils and there was one hold-out back in 2005. Just months later, now-disgraced ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich resuscitated the project with an economic package worth $16 million (while defaulting on a promise to the Silvis Schools to provide $11.4 million for a new school.)

By 2007, Triumph had purchased 116 acres of land in East Moline on which to build. East Moline applied for a $4.8 million economic development grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce, for water and sewer construction on the site. The company is still eligible for the state’s $16 million package, according to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, but the department would neither confirm nor deny whether it was discussing this funding with the company, and Triumph Foods was not talking.

Foes of the Triumph meat processing plant’s location in East Moline of the Illinois Quad Cities include Art Norris, who is a former hog farmer. He described the treatment of animals raised in such facilities as “inhumane” and said the staggering amount of feces created by hogs and the number of plants already discharging into the Rock River are signs that the plant will do the damage that Representative Hare says the city of East Moline would then have to take steps to remediate. No “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” thinking here; just “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Norris continues, “Triumph has already said that a lot of this meat will be going to Japan, so they get the meat and we get the waste the plant leaves behind.” It should be noted that Norris has been dubbed the Quad Cities’ Waterkeeper by a national advocacy group aimed at protecting waterways from pollution.

The fact is that large plants like the one proposed for East Moline by Triumph attract undocumented workers who are more vulnerable to unfair labor practices. These undocumented workers strain social services, including medical and educational facilities. The poorest city in the state of Iowa (Columbus Junction) is one where a huge meat processing plant is located, quite near Iowa City, and the University has found it necessary to take a mobile bus approach to providing any kind of medical services to the poor workers who staff the plant and have no medical benefits for themselves or their children. I attended a meeting about diagnosing ADD and ADHD in such children of workers, as well as providing pap smears and other routine health care to the impoverished workers, who often do not speak English as their native language.

Even more stunning than the indifference to those in the community who have pointed to hog confinement plants, with their large lagoons of manure, as unattractive and dangerous to the ground water of the area is the feeling that, as Bill Wundram phrases it, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?” Yes, somebody is here and cares, but there seems to be little interest in listening to those who are not quite as convinced that “a job is a job is a job” is the right philosophy. With 25% unemployment in the building trades, 600 people needed to build such a behemoth of a plant, and jobs for workers available thereafter (albeit jobs without benefits that attract only hourly workers and yield a very low annual salary), is the benefit to the community worth the cost? Do those who live near the plant want the odor and constant traffic of incoming animals on trucks? What do you think?

For opponents of the plant, there are only 2 bright spots: 1) Triumph has not yet applied for the permits it needs from the Illinois EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and that could take months if not years to process, and (2) On the horizon is a new concept, designed to save the family farmer. This new concept involves a traveling mobile slaughter unit (cost: $250,000 or more for start-up of each), which is being championed by Kim Snyder of Kankakee.  She says, “If we can get this going, I see it growing very, very quickly.” She markets her own meat via www.faithsfarm.com and supplies the Park Grill at Millennium Park in Chicago with its meat.

Adds Snyder, who says the mobile slaughterhouses are safer and travel with an inspector, there are only about 20 mobile slaughter units for poultry and half a dozen for cattle around the country now. But, says Arion Thiboumery of Ames (ISU), “There’s a lot of enthusiasm for this.  In large plants, the animals go by real fast.  This is much smaller; so it’s slower and many people say it’s safer.” Steve Skelton of Kentucky State University says, “It’s made a big difference for farmers. They’re making money again.”  Snyder, who is pioneering the idea of the mobile slaughterhouse says, “How cool would it be for a chef or just for anyone to walk out here and choose an animal, then have it slaughtered and pretty much ready to go?”

For those of us who find the concept of slaughtering animals something we only want to know about in the abstract, it’s not that cool, but the idea of bringing consumers closer to control of the food they are consuming is not only healthy but appealing.  Since the mobile slaughter houses process only 5 cows a day, not only safety for the workers but safety for the food would be pluses for the concept.

I remember visiting my hometown of Independence, Iowa when a large hog confinement plant in the fields nearby made the air so redolent that your eyes stung and you had to stay indoors. The more affluent residents of this cottage town for Waterloo/Cedar Falls and Cedar Rapids were not amused that their expensive summer homes were almost unusable as a result of the hog stench, and the problem was addressed and no longer exists. Here we are, in East Moline (and the Quad Cities, in general) attempting to go down the same road that others have traveled with horrible results.

As someone who was invited to tour the Triumph plant (full disclosure; the invitation was actually extended to my husband, and I would have gone along, had we been available), I can only imagine how vast a difference exists between a large facillity like Triumph’s proposed plant and a small mobile slaughterhouse option.

I am unconvinced that there won’t be unpleasant side-effects for the Quad City community, including odor, strain on social service agencies and schools, an uptick in violent crime, and a generally undesirable reputation that will adhere to the town, just as the presence of the mental health facility did for years. (And I grew up in a town with a mental health institute, one of 4 in the state of Iowa, so I know how “reputation” of  a town hangs on for years.)

I’m also a realist and aware that “money talks and bullshit walks.” Americans, over a lifetime, consume 21,000 animals and, while houses and cars cost fourteen times what they did 50 years ago, the price of chicken hasn’t even doubled, thanks to the efficiency (if not the humanity) of factory poultry farms. We eat 150 times as many chickens a year as we did 80 years ago. (All  poultry facts courtesy of “Life” by Joel Stein in the August 23, 2010 issue of “Time” magazine on pp. 51-52.)

Still, I think some investigation into the intentions of Triumph should be made now, before those EPA permits are applied for and those of us in the Quad Cities, especially East Moline, Illinois, are all awash in sewage sludge.

This is a stream-of-consciousness article, so bear with me.

I was driving in to Chicago (Tuesday) at about 2:30 p.m. and was approaching the city’s heart on LakeShore Drive, near McCormick Place, where there are 3 or 4 lanes going in to the city and 3 or 4 coming out, separated by a short retaining wall.

My peripheral vision is not that great. I am actually restricted on my driver’s license to driving only vehicles “with side mirrors” because I have flunked the peripheral vision test part on the driver’s license eye exam on more than one occasion. I wonder if it is related to cataracts developing around the edges of my cornea?

Regardless of the reason, I saw, out of the corner of my right eye, smoke. I looked over and saw that a car in the far right lane was smoking. It was driving on the axle. And the tire was bouncing across three lanes of busy traffic heading right towards me. I knew that, in order to keep the tire from making contact with my vehicle, a Toyota Prius, I needed to brake hard RIGHT NOW. I prayed that the guy behind me wouldn’t rear-end me (he didn’t). So, the tire missed me by less than six inches, I’d say, and then hit the retaining wall.

I remember thinking: “Oh, oh.”

Rather than rebounding towards me, the tire bounced literally 8 to 10 feet in teh air after hitting the wall and then sailed OVER the wall and continued to bounce its way through the outgoing lanes of traffic. I would have liked to have watched to see what was going to happen, but the traffic was moving at roughly 60 miles an hour, so no deal there, I hope it didn’t cause any accidents for the outgoing traffic.

It made me think of the tire tread that was thrown up and hit my car’s grill, taking out all of the grill-work and tearing the cardboard thing off the bottom of my car that somehow is used to insulate the motor mechanism from the pavement, I guess. St. Christopher has recently been defrocked, but he must have been watching out for me.

<strong><a href=”http://www.planetusa.us/”>PlanetUSA</a></strong>: USA search engine

Weekly Wilson signed up for this.  Not sure what it is, but I was told to post a link to it on my blog, and here it is.

The latest blow to the franchise that was “American Idol” is the news that Ellen DeGeneres will not be reprising her role as judge for a second season.

This comes on the heels of the departure of Simon Cowell, largely thought to signal a death knell for the once-invulnerable show.

There was also a news piece recently that the show did not plan to have tryouts in Chicago next season. Considering that both of this past year’s finalists came out of the Chicago auditions, this seems odd.

And, on an unrelated observation, does anyone else think that the Brit (Simon Fuller) tapped to replace Larry King looks like the departing head of BP, Tony Hayward? Just wondering.

Grant Park flowerbeds.

When it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, you want to take a stroll to see what is happening in Grant Park, which happens to be in my neighborhood.

Besides gorgeous flower beds, there was a young man preparing to jump over a piece of park equipment on a small bicycle, for reasons that only he could explain.

Beginning of bike stunt in Grant Park.

Bike begins to go airborne.

He had no ramp, but he did have a friend ready to take pictures. I took a few of Trent, attired in his Burt Reynolds shirt, too, as he went airborne with his toddler-sized mountain bike.

Then there was the woman with the fat golden retrievers who, instead of walking the , was actually pushing them in what looked like a baby carriage. (And here I thought when people talked about how you have to “walk” dogs, they meant that the dogs would be actually walking.

And, last, but certainly not least, there was the giant eyeball, a sculpture positioned in Pritzker Park at State and VanBuren that stands 30 feet high and weighs 14,000 pounds. The downtown Chicago Loop Alliance commissioned the sculpture from Oak Park artist Tony Tasset, 49, and he used 24 pieces of fiberglass to produce a giant sculpture based on his own blue eye, but magnified over 1,000 times. The pieces of the sculpture, which was crafted in Sparta, Wisconsin, had to be trucked in on 13 trucks, according to the evening news.

Check out this video of a witness being decked outside the Chicago courtroom of the trial. Only in Chicago.

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Here’s the podcast from Asylum Management.  We talked for 90 minutes. Mostly, we talked about the ghosts of Route 66, because of my trilogy set along that Mother Road. The last of the ghostly tales of route 66 is now out. Soon, I hope to have PayPal orderability on the website www.GhostlyTalesofRoute66.com.

Until then, you can always contact Quixote Press.

In 1988 Universal Studios used a farm in Dyersville, Iowa, as the main location for the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, Burt Reynolds and Ray Liotta.

Today, that baseball diamond carved out of a cornfield is for sale for $5.4 million dollars. The sellers are Don and Becky Lansing and the 193-acre plot has been used as a tourist stop ever since the movie came out, with the 2-bedroom farmhouse, 6 buildings including a concession stand and the diamond up for purchase.

Realtor for the sale is Ken Sanders who went 29-45 with a 2.97 Earned Run Average for 8 major league teams during 10 seasons in the 1960′s and 1970′s, before he became a real estate agent.