It is not every day that you can walk out on the streets of this bustling port town and comment on how quiet it is. In fact, it’s a bit unnerving to hear the silence. No it’s not that my favorite critic of the paltry press, Dick Pawlowski has stopped calling me names in his blog, or that the residents who suffer from Turrets syndrome are now abiding by the no cursing campaign launched by a naïve Pasadena student who has never heard a longshoreman swear. It’s silence just the same. Enough so that in the middle of the Port of Los Angeles’ executive meeting this week, the silence of the cranes slipped into the room unsuspectedly and begged the obvious question, “Is this the sound of the great recession of 2009?”

The L.A. Times, our great purveyor of civic factoids, even reported on the downturn of commerce in the twin ports of LA and Long Beach without putting a human face on the matter that all of the “steady man” jobs at the terminals have all been sent back to the ILWU hiring hall– the February report states that imports fell some 18.1 percent from a year ago. The decline in trade with the Pacific Rim countries, mostly China, has hit all of the American West Coast ports harder than here. Oddly enough the port of Vancouver, Canada is reported to still be humming along with their direct rail line across the northwest and down into Chicago.

The fears that alternate ports south of the border, in Mexico, will take away trade and jobs is just that– mostly fear. While the previous “resident of the White House,” I really can bring myself to honor him by saying his name, was distracted by his “war on terrorism”, Mexico has exploded into a civil-drug war along our 1,969 mile border. Some 8,000 people have been killed over the last two years alone and in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, the chief of police fled his office under intimidation and 5,000 federal troops now occupy that city. The killing hasn’t stopped and it won’t stop until two things happen. Texas gun dealers have to stop selling guns to the drug cartels and the Obama Administration will have to decriminalize and federally regulate (then tax) black market drugs.

If the $240 billion criminal drug enterprise in Mexico (one of the last “free market” enterprises in the world) is allowed to flourish along our borders, there is no way for billions of dollars of precious cargo being safely transported through it to U.S. markets. Foreign shipping companies might like to think that using this alternative route will force competition on ports and labor here, but the tragic fact is Mexico is corrupt. Like many places, it has a long history of not-so-covert corruption. This always drives up the cost of doing business there. Not that our country is immune from the corruptions of politics and corporate greed, but that it is done here with a ballpoint pen not machine guns.

Yes the biggest bank robbery in the world happened on Wall Street by a bunch of clean-cut crooks that walked away with golden bonuses some topping $33 million after they sank the Titanic. Honestly, we didn’t even see the iceberg. If justice were to actually prevail in this land the Obama Justice Department would go after each and every one of these pin stripped suits and empty out their Swiss Bank accounts to pay off the debt! Now that would be a stimulus plan. But adhering to the law these past few years has been a rather iffy and inconsistent affair.

On Monday March 2, Obama’s DOJ released nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by former UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who concluded that, “in wartime the president was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as counter terrorism operations inside the United States.” Yoo was part of the DOJ cabal under Alberto Gonzales and if not for term limits or success of the former Senator from Illinois, our rights and liberties would consist of those granted by King George II, who failed to lead, failed to protect and ultimately failed the republic as he watched the economy sink beneath the waves like New Orleans after Katrina.

It’s only been a month and a half since we rid ourselves of this idiot-terrible, but the nation has breathed a collective sigh of relief. And if any of you are questioning, whether change has happened yet, then simply reflect on the obvious. These secret letters trashing our Bill of Rights have been exposed, the recalibrated debt has been made public and President Obama is actually trying to save the nation from the excesses of the past eight years.  No Wall Street hasn’t recovered from its binge yet—it took more than a quarter century to recover after 1929––and the mortgage banking industry hasn’t yet hit bottom, but hey, these are the folks who believe that the so called free market adjusts itself and they are now having to live with their own beliefs. Unfortunately so are we!

Special note on the death of newspapers
It has been rattling around the media biz for some time that newspapers are a dying breed. Even young Mr. Stecker of SP Mag fame has run an advertisement in his own paper decrying the inevitable collapse! To which I must reply: The only newspapers and other print publication that will not survive will be those who have forfeited their franchise of telling the truth and have collectively lost the respect of their readers because of their penchant of kissing the asses of their corporate sponsors and their zeal for over leveraging journalism to the Wall Street money changers. The newspapers that die do so by their own hand, a form of suicide by greed, and we all may be better off to be rid of them. Amen.