badhat wrote:bike solve all problems
In the last two decades the taxi business has changed radically, from a respected profession to one so scorned that the dispatcher lingo for "driver" is "dog." Twenty years ago, Washington D.C.'s cabbies were primarily American blacks. Today, the local United Taxicab Operators Association estimates, less than 10 percent of the city's cab drivers are U.S.-born blacks, and almost all of them are middle-aged or older. Instead, as any standup comedian will tell you, it is immigrants-largely from south and central Asia and Africa-who pilot America's taxis.
Only thirteen years ago, a Hollywood sitcom could still depict cabbies as overwhelmingly American-born. In James L. Brooks's "Taxi," Judd Hirsch was the philosopher of the road, earning a blue-collar income and forging family-like ties with his coworkers. Many of Hirsch's fellow hacks at the Sunshine Cab Company were boynext-door types: one moonlit at an art gallery, another was a washed-up but charming boxer, a third was a struggling actor. The only buffoonish character was the garage's sole immigrant, Andy Kaufman's Latka Gravas, a mechanic who became famous for speaking in unintelligible English. But today, the all-American image is gone and the Latkas-and the Rajas, Rafiks and Mohammeds-have taken over the business.
Edward Murdock has an explanation for this. Today's poor African American youth, the largest underemployed working-age population in big cities like Washington, don't make the calculation that Murdock and his equally disadvantaged contemporaries made: that grueling work, like cab-driving, is better than no work; that even if the short-term benefits of such toil are meager, the long-term gains are worth waiting for. "If they took up driving," Murdock says of poor black youths today, "they could get out of the ghetto. It's a confusion of respect and the dignity in working hard."
Lately, the meaning of work has become central to what politicians and pundits like to call "the national conversation": in the debates over welfare, worker retraining, the rejuvenation of the AFL-cIo under a new leadership, or the threats of downsizing and immigration. It would appear that work-any work, since all work brings dignity and economic reward-has become an overwhelming priority throughout American society. Or almost any work. When it comes to hard work, physical work or dirty work, the attractions are no longer quite so obvious. In 1978, at the American Enterprise Institute, Jesse Jackson explained that dirty work was better than no work, since it paid in long-term benefits. But his advice has not been universally accepted, not least in his own community. Take household jobs, like maids and gardeners. It used to be that these jobs were the first rung to financial security and social acceptance. People toiled at them so they, or their children, could gain full membership in the larger community. Among poor Americans, however, this is no longer the general rule.
It is immigrants from India, Pakistan and Ethiopia-who have filled the void. Jobs such as cab driving, they say, are the wav to become American. The Washington licensing commission doesn't keep demographic information on hacks, but the Operators Association estimates more than 85 percent of all Washington drivers are foreign-born-up more than 60 percent in the past twenty-five years.
In pursuing their American dream, immigrant taxi drivers endure grueling and dangerous work-the most dangerous work in America, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Hacks often drive seventeen hours a day, six days a week, in cramped cars. Those who get stiffed by a passenger are thankful they weren't mugged; those who get mugged feel lucky they weren't killed. For decades, native-born blacks also accepted such risks in pursuit of upward mobility. Why don't they anymore?
Jim, on the other hand-a dashing African American in his mid-30s from Anacostia-drove a cab five years ago but has since changed jobs. "I was sick of smelling all those curry people," he sneers. "It is low class." His neighbors, he says, would point and laugh when he parked his taxi outside his home. Now he drives for one of Washington's largest limousine companies, where he chauffeurs senators and diplomats, the capital's upper crust. "Now," he says of his peers, "they respect me.... If I pull up in this baby," he adds, caressing the hood with one hand and pointing at a beautiful woman with the other, "I can get that babe. Wanna see me try?"Jim shuffles up to the slinky blonde. He speaks to her. She responds. They talk some more. She nods. She walks over to the car and examines the limo's luxurious interior and wet bar. I interrupt. Would she be equally attracted to a taxi driver? I ask. "What am I on? Some TV show?" she asks, startled, and clomps away. Jim, annoyed, cuts off our interview. While Jim's alleged successes may be little more than locker-room boasting, his rationale for shunning taxis for limos is nonetheless telling. His professional calculus is external and immediate. It is what a 62-year-old black driver called the "woo quotient: How fast can you get in someone's pants?"
Another reason many young black men disdain cabdriving, according to Slippy-a 28-year-old black highschool dropout who has been a hack for one yearis the "Driving Miss Daisy mentality." In the hit offBroadway show and movie, a black chauffeur and his elderly white employer form a friendship unalterably limited by the barriers of privilege and race. "Most of my peers want to know why they should drive a lot of rich white people everywhere they want to go," Slippy says. "For generations this is the only job blacks could get, now they don't want to do it." While this resentment keeps blacks out of the drivers' seats of cabs, he says the trappings of limo driving-particularly the car and access to power-compensate.
When I press Slippy for details about this resentment, he says that other inner-city options are far more esteemed than taxi-driving. "Haven't you reporters taken economics? If you can sell something," he says slyly, "and make much, much more money and probably not get caught, and not be dissed, who wouldn't? Well, a lot of people do that equation every day. And cab driving is lot more dangerous." On a ten-hour day, Slippy grosses between $40 and $80; he says no friends respect his job. Respect for the drug dealer, however, comes not from the work itself but from what it produces: a bulging wallet, an expensive car, nice clothes and women. For Edward Murdock and the entrepreneurial immigrants in Fred Turner's class, the goal is to own their own business, to be their own boss, to find an inherent dignity in the possibilities their work affords, not in the admiration of others.
I was riding with Imran that night, and he was about to drop me off at home when a black man in his early to mid-20s hailed the taxi. It was late. The man on the corner was listening to a walkman. The cab's headlights illuminated his bright white high-tops. This is the type of fare Imran would normally refuse. But there was a pair of police cars on the neighboring corner, and Imran said he didn't want to risk getting a ticket for passing up a rider based on his race. As in many other cities, to insure against discrimination, Washington has deemed it illegal for a cabbie to pass up any customer. Imran pulled up. From the front passenger seat, I could hear the music banging through the passenger's headphones. Unable to judge the volume of his voice, the rider screamed, "Martin Luther King and V," located in one of Washington's poorest neighborhoods, as his destination.
Over the next ten minutes, Imran and I became engrossed in a conversation about his children, ignoring our backseat companion. We passed the White House. Imran's son is in the third grade. Georgetown Law was on our right. The boy has a knack for math. Union Station was coming up on our left. But Imran was worried about his older daughter. Now heading toward Eastern Market. I began to ask, "What grade.... "
"Pull over, cocksucker!" " . is she in?"
"Shut the fuck up, you motherfucker." That sentence was directed at me. I didn't notice, at first, the knife our passenger was now holding up to Imran's neck. Imran was cool and mechanical. He pulled the car over to the right and reached into his breast pocket, handing over the neatly folded bills. The mugger made Imran stop the car and throw the keys out the window..He ran off. A few minutes later Imran recovered the keys.
"These things happen," Imran said coldly on the drive back downtown. "I give them whatever they want. I just want my life." For the next hour or so, Imran and a couple of friends drink beer. This crime, like the others, would never be reported. "If I tell the cops, it'll take all day, and they'll do nothing. Then he'll have stolen two days of my pay." Crimes such as these could be financially crippling, but Imran's friends lend him money so he won't have to tell his wife. He doesn't want her to know how dangerous his job is.
The conversation among Imran and his friends turns to the legend of Kae Bang, a Korean cabdriver-turned-vigilante who is to the D.C. cab community what Stagger Lee was to the Mississippi Delta. As Kae Bang's story goes, the cab driver was, one sticky summer night, bludgeoned`on the head by three brick-wielding black teenagers. Bang quickly recovered and, using his martial arts expertise, struck back at the would-be thieves, hurting them badly. Everyone knows Bang's story, or at least a version of it-in some, he is a Chinese immigrant, in others he's hit with a pipe-but no one knows how to find him. Everyone knows someone who claims to have once met him, but those leads typically turn up just more names of other people who have supposedly met Bang. Bang is not registered to drive with any taxi company. While he is listed in the Maryland suburban phonebook, messages are never returned. Eventually I found him, due mostly to luck. After hours of watching for him in a diner that he's rumored to frequent, I decided to head home. The cab I hailed was his.
Bang is Washington's most respected taxi driver. A loner, he is largely unaware of the legendary status of his fight. Years later, he still wears the beige zip-up jacket he wore that day. A stitched rip near the right shoulder is the only remaining evidence of where the brick struck him. Bang's speech sounds as if it has been dubbed. Each syllable is painfully sounded out. "There is no respect for nobody in this country. What did I do wrong to them, the robbers?"
Many drivers can't understand why muggers would be compelled to take their money. "Don't they understand I worked hard for it?" one cabbie asked me, touchingly bewildered. Among drivers, mugging isn't seen as a way for a desperate poor person to get a quick buck; it's an attack on the system. The criminals show no respect for what is theirs.
powderfinger wrote:I would like to read an oral history of the halcyon days of The Daily Dish where the staffers talk about how hard they had to work to suppress Andrew Sullivan's racism. You know they had to be covertly screening all kinds of stuff and counseling against recurring posts about Big Dick Obama.
badhat wrote:bike solve all problems
delgriffith wrote:Quick Google search reveals that I have no idea what I'm talking about.
delgriffith wrote:Quick Google search reveals that I have no idea what I'm talking about.
badhat wrote:bike solve all problems
Herman and Chomsky argue that “the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.” Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.
Tracy Grant, managing editor of The Washington Post, told DailyMail.com on Sunday: 'National political reporter Felicia Sonmez was placed on administrative leave while The Post reviews whether tweets about the death of Kobe Bryant violated The Post newsroom’s social media policy.
'The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues.'
bachwards wrote:I thought this was well done.
Big Oil wrote:dEMocRaCy DIeS iN DArKneEs
also this Matthew Keys guy seems like a weird vindictive prick! Diseased profession full of hollow people!
Multiple sources familiar with the events told The Daily Beast that last year, Post Executive Editor Marty Baron privately clashed with Lowery, a national correspondent who was part of the paper’s team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of police shootings. The subject in question: Lowery’s tweets.
Last year, Lowery posted a series of tweets questioning why a New York Times retrospective about the Tea Party movement failed to note how the early-2010s conservative was “essentially a hysterical grassroots tantrum about the fact that a black guy was president?” (The Times eventually added the racial context to its piece.)
The tweets were apparently enough to set off Baron, who along with Managing Editor Tracy Grant told Lowery that his tweets violated the Post’s social-media rules and threatened the newspaper’s credibility. In a subsequent meeting, explained to The Daily Beast by two Post insiders, the top editor at the paper told Lowery that he had made overtly political statements about the Tea Party, and had maligned the Times in the process.
The recourse, Barron suggested, would be for Lowery to become an opinion writer, or work for an advocacy organization. The top editor also threatened to fire Lowery if he violated the social-media policy again. The Washington Post declined to comment.
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