Pulling the Plug on Camden, New Jersey: The Racist Capital of the World?

"Uncle Tom!" The epitaph pierced one's ears, a scream, not shouted. Welcome to "revitalization", welcome to Camden, New Jersey.

Voted the worst crime-ridden ghetto in the United States, I moved to 3rd and Cooper Streets in Camden as one of the news media's crowned "New Pioneers" in 2004. In January 2006, I pulled the plug on Camden, abandoning it to its racism and affluent suburban predators.

In the 1990s, Camden provided free bus tours of Camden neighborhoods to showcase property for real estate development. People from as far away as New York City were recruited. What Camden received in return was not New York City development wealth - but a Buena, New Jersey, slumlord.

Ted Laguna, a former minor league baseball player in the 1950s Milwaukee Braves organization, owns the Castle Apartments at the corner of Third and Cooper - a premier, by Camden standards, real estate rental property. The apartment building is located directly across the street from the Rutgers University campus, less than two blocks from the Rutgers-Camden Law School.

Laguna gleefully advertises that he "played with Hank Aaron on the Atlanta Braves" as part of his sales tactic. The gambit is the first of many frauds. In fact, Laguna never played with the Braves on the major league level according to the Atlanta Braves website. He did play for the Atlanta "Crackers" a minor league team of interesting racial epitaph that will become relevant shortly. He also played for minor league teams in Nebraska and Toledo, batting .194 in 46 games as a catcher in Nebraska.

From the outset, Laguna falsifies. That sociopathic tendency carries over into the legal realm as well. Laguna falsifies leases, enticing tenants to sign arguably illegal boilerplate documents and inspection reports that are deliberately crafted to be altered after they have been signed. In fact, Ted Laguna does alter those documents. And he will falsify any document or statement that he finds apt.

In return, the residents of the Castle Apartments get dubious quality. In one incident, Laguna allowed a broken sewer pipe to flood raw sewage onto his tenants for the better part of three months. Instead of paying to have the plumbing inspected, Laguna advised his maintenance staff to harass anyone taking a shower for being careless in spilling water on the floor.

In another incident, Laguna left a broken window - freely viewable from a common area balcony - unrepaired for nearly 15 months. Despite 10 degree temperatures, Laguna refused to fix the window.

Plumbing fixtures are so old and deteriorated that paint peels off bathtubs in large chunks. Urine stains floors. Holes in walls allow bugs and rodents free access - including flea infestations from the dog owned by Laguna's superintendent. Lice also exist.

And the matter is hardly within the control of the tenants. Laguna refuses to pay for anything more than once per week trash removal of an apartment building holding more than 20 units. And he provides only one trash dumpster. In 2004, and much of 2005, the dumpster overflowed an average of 27 days out of any given month - with trash and discarded food littering almost 50 feet in any direction.

Camden, for all its bus ride euphoria, inherited a slumlord.

Much can be speculated as to why any human being would act like Ted Laguna. Greed and racism would appear to be sensible theories.

Laguna refers to his Black male employees as "My Man" - much akin to the pre-Civil Rights nomenclature referring to Black slaves and menial employees.

And, in return for some of the most pathetic living conditions imaginable, one pays $600 per month for an efficiency apartment. In September 2005, Laguna more than likely failed a State of New Jersey Health Inspection - on the date of the inspection, all the conditions listed above were in existence, including the broken windows and trash overflowing onto the street. (The State of New Jersey refuses to publish the inspection report. Despite being a public record. In New Jersey, one of the most corrupt governmental organizations in modern times, anything can be directly or indirectly bought under the guise of 'law'. Including silence. And ignorance.)

Just two blocks away, the Victor Building has garnered the exclusive Camden residential revitalization attention, showcasing Dranoff Properties as a beacon in Camden's revival. The media overlooks that the Victor Building project is quite secluded on the fringe of Camden's waterfront. And that it is hardly exemplary of the type of investors that Camden is attracting. Ted Laguna - a financial predator by any reasonable conclusion - may be more normative.

And it would be within keeping with Camden being the crime capital of the United States - a multi-faceted slum whose economy is largely predicated, directly or indirectly, to a cocaine black market economy that utilizes Camden residents, particularly the Black community, as entertainment pawns.

Gone are the days of fiddle playing servants and token sports stars. In the 21st Century, and throughout much of the closing decades of the 20th Century, Camden remains a gateway to both the past and the future. And like a proverbial gateway, Camden can neither go forward or move backward - it is stuck in "cocaine" idle.

The predominate economy in Camden is feeding the drug habits of its wealthier, almost exclusively Caucasian, suburban neighbors.

All too glaring testimony of that fact occurred in the mid-1990s when the law journal of the Rutgers-Camden Law School would hold cocaine parties in a federal courthouse parking lot located at the corner of Fifth and Penn Streets - in broad daylight, less than one block from the Rutgers Police Department door.

And there is no shortage of ability to generically place the blame: when I went to vote in the November 2004 election, Camden's Black poll workers made it quite clear that neither the vote or presence of any member of the White community in Camden is appreciated. That resentment is palpable, the disgust self-evident.

The "Uncle Tom!" screaming incident noted above occured within one week of my arrival in Camden.

By default, unable to solve the voracious cocaine appetites of America suburbia, and unable to salve a deep-seeded racial antipathy by the Black community against America's White community for intentionally creating the cocaine economy - and relegating the Black community to any real estate unwanted by the White community, Camden continues to spiral out of control.

As everyone so glaringly witnessed, the historical tradition of real estate racial "red-lining" is alive and well: a change in century has not matured the White community's insatiable thirst for get-rich-quick financial scams, including those predicated along racial lines. The Camden County Democratic Party's championing of one such racial profiling real estate scam by the name of Cherokee won no friends among minorities in Camden. It was perceived by the minority community in Camden - along with many in the suburban White community - for what it was: unabashed financial-racial bigotry designed to uproot impoverished minorities in favor of a more affluent White community. And, notably, with White members of the Camden County Democratic Party reaping much fianncial benefit and first crack consideration for the newly "freed" real estate.

The local media has been relatively timid in addressing racial profiling and real estate corruption in nexus with the Camden County Democratic Party and the de facto New Jersey legal community that is, invariably, strewn throughout such scams around the state. Eloquent argument can be mounted that, on a de facto basis, the New Jersey Bar is an organized crime operation - all good efforts by honest members notwithstanding.

The advent of the contemporary Camden County Democratic Party and its efforts to "revitalize" the City of Camden are an apt point in the argument.

What the future holds is anyone's guess. But one suspects the City of Camden will see more Ted Lagunas and fundamentally bigoted real estate development plans like Cherokee before Camden ever sees the light of a positive future.

On January 5, 2006, I abandoned Camden. Or was Camden abandoned long ago into a racial, exploitive abyss? It is, at very least, an interesting question.

I, Journalista: Fashionistas by Any Other Name?

Conformity in the journalistic dormitories is at a premium in the age of media consolidation - the only tell-tale sign of hope for a substantive Fourth Estate in 21st Century America is the advent of the Internet.

Come hither or nigh, public scrutiny is greater than ever. So is the dissemination of knowledge. No longer is ‘mass’ America dependent on ‘mass media’ as a solitary source of current event information.

Disgruntled workers to societal victims, free reign is now at hand to publish. While on first take, the ability to publish may seem indiscriminate - the Internet does contain as much error as accuracy - the sheer volume of Internet publication provides an automatic ‘check and balance’. In short, more than at any time in human history, the common people have access to a higher quality of information about their societies and about their governments.

All one need do is drop by a public library, or a tolerant university, and login to the Internet free of charge.

The fact has not gone unnoticed. Some attempt to cash in on the Internet phenomena is being made by newspapers like the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Whether rightly, or harmlessly, an attempt to guide readers into ‘pre-approved’ line of thought is becoming apparent in the online offerings of these news organizations.

The tendency is more glaring at the Philadelphia Inquirer, a smaller newspaper that is more cash-strapped than its wealthier cousin The New York Times. Money buys influence. Money can also free one from influence to a greater degree, and with more agility, than if impoverished. It is the latter phenomena that becomes noticeable with the smaller newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While arguments can be mounted that any news organization slants its coverage of world events, some economic realities do apply.

When the Philadelphia Inquirer saw the Internet - that Gutenberg in every home - beginning to provide news content without the need for the Inquirer, it did the obvious thing. It started a website. And it started to contribute to that online news content. But, interestingly, it also started to guide readers to pre-approved webpages that more or less camouflaged “authors” employed directly by the Inquirer. Only in afterthought does the Inquirer mention, if it does at all, that the content on these webpages are written by Inquirer employees.

One thinks one is getting a broad expansion of the news found in the Inquirer - when all that you get is a manicured illusion reproducing the same philosophical news content, content that may or may not be balanced at any given moment.

While harmless in these early days of the Internet, the clear desire to garner a larger share of Internet information - to control what is being read - is apparent. Small, insignificant in the overall for the moment, the trend shows potential to grow.

Particularly disturbing is the promotion of ‘blogs’ - supposedly autonomously written web pages that are in fact in-house productions by the Philadelphia Inquirer. One is reading individual commentary, but with a Metropolis/1984 twist, one is really reading the corporate Inquirer. It is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the two.

The phenomena has a bizarre, but all too real, parallel. Joseph Stalin infiltrated virtually every civic and military organization with ‘party spokesmen’ - for all intent and purpose, a civic official or military officer that looked like anyone else. Yet their sole purpose was to use that illusionary sleight of hand to infuse the Communist Party line into every aspect of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. People would think that it was a government official making decisions in the best interests of the local people. In fact, he was a pre-approved Moscow party line bullhorn whose only loyalty was to Moscow. And he or she would recommend what was in Moscow’s best interest, not the local people.

It is difficult to envision the news industry become anything like the Orwellian ‘Communist Party’ of the Stalin and post-Stalin eras. However, noticeable similarities do exist.

One of the more interesting is the employment of former lawyers as ‘experts’ on news or as news commentarians. While American society is desperately in need of apt legal commentary, all too often, what one gets is a Catherine Crier and Greta Van Susteren - stereotype driven, self-centered, and poorly educated, the Crier-Van Susteren ‘module’ of news reporting is disturbing. And ultimately hollow.

Catherine Crier has been known to conduct national broadcasts on social issues that she knows nothing about and clearly had done little research in an effort to do so. Such an incident took place concerning the federal John’s Law/Drunk Driving legislation in which friends can be held liable for the acts of an intoxicated person. Greta Van Susteren, and Nancy Grace, both fall into a slightly different ‘module’ of the news industry - not only do they know little about the topics discussed on their shows, as a guest on such shows, it becomes painfully clear that neither was much interested from the inception.

As an experiment, when watching all three of these news commentarians, focus on their word selection. A profound invocation of “I” is strewn throughout their language - as if they have personally experienced every topic discussed, whether it is poverty, rape, or auto accidents resulting in murder charges. Ms. Van Susteren is prone to invoking “I’ve been around the block a few times” - in appropriate dismissing tone - to squirm her way out of difficult on-air discussions, usually when she realizes she knows too little about the topic at hand to fend for herself among the guests.

On several national and regional network television appearances, the in-residence network legal ‘expert’ turned to me just before going on camera and asked what he was supposed to be talking about. “All I know is that involved an accident.” Oh.

One ‘expert’ criminal lawyer on CN8 - whom, fascinatingly, no one in his local county courthouse in New Jersey can remember him ever trying a criminal case in his career - asked what he “should say” just seconds before air time. “I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” During a commercial break, the ‘expert’ repeated the gambit. “You will let me know if I get off line, won’t you?” (As not an entirely unrelated aside, it should be known that the supposed expert is known to be intimately involved with female staff members at local television stations.)

Experts beg for knowledge? The oxymoron would appear inherent.

Anything goes in the 21st Century media exploits - anything to compete with the free flow of information via the Internet.

Which is precisely why so many news organizations are banding together to kill Google’s news search engine. Grafted from free news organization websites around the world, Google’s webpage actually outperforms the Associated Press and The New York Times in breaking stories - at times. As the recent unfortunate mine tragedy in West Virginia noted well, Google outperformed much smaller news outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s webpage hands down. The Inquirer was left standing in the informational dust with a hard-copy newspaper that blared a joyous headline that 12 miners had survived. In fact, all 12 were dead.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess, but it is clear that the traditional gatekeepers of information are mourning their loss of control over Americans - and licking their financial wounds as well. The Philadelphia Inquirer - and many of its brethren in the Knight-Ridder organization - are up for sale.

Look for increasingly desperate attempts by these news organizations to impinge on free access to information on the Internet in the pell-mell pursuit of profits.

Media Mania - Killer Lightning, the Internet and the Law

As the 21st Century deepens hits hold on the American philosophical landscape, public knowledge about that landscape is broadening on an exponential basis.

Mainstream television and newspaper news organizations are increasingly finding themselves on the fringes of the traditional Fourth Estate - as profits of the New York Times and other news organizations dwindle. What is shoving them aside is a new mechanism for disseminating hard ‘news’. The Internet.

Anyone can ‘publish’ in light of 21st Century technology, all too often they do. A Gutenberg in every home.

The media’s inability to compete with the ‘new printing press’ - and its inability to escape manipulation by the very news ‘sources’ that it covers - is becoming increasingly glaring.

While profits have plummeted at the New York Times, wealth and inertia as one of America’s pre-eminent news outlets have allowed it to keep a journalistic edge, breaking news stories like the abuse of the Foreign Surveillance Act by President George W. Bush and the plights of Camden, New Jersey, the worst crime capital in the United States.

Other news organizations haven’t been so lucky. The erosion was first notable with the tendency of television stations to disaster-fy weather reports: simple thunderstorms morphed, seemingly overnight, into life threatening phenomena. Killer lightning and ‘dangerous’ storms are now a common clarion call.

More pragmatically, the erosion of news quality has expanded. Investigative reporting has largely disappeared. In fact, in-depth longterm reporting of key social issues has evaporated from most major city daily newspapers, entities traditionally entrusted with guarding the pubic welfare.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is a prime example, although it is hardly alone.

What one sees in reading the Inquirer is a growing phenomena nationwide: newspaper reporters are no longer 'reading' their own newspapers. More glaringly, they do not appear to be reading their individualistic news articles over a prolonged period of time. Hence, the news coverage is becoming increasingly disjointed and scattershot on overarching social issues.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s inability to penetrate the Veterans Administration and Social Security Administration is an eloquent point - while dutifully documenting that thousands of veterans' widows are not collecting entitled payments, the Inquirer completely missed the much larger issue of how the Veterans Administration disseminates - or, more aptly, withholds - information from potential beneficiaries. It is a phenomena the that the General Accounting Office has commented upon in assessing the kindred Social Security Administration. And it is a widespread operational phenomena in the private financial sector. It is called “DK’ing”. Financial entities from insurance companies to stock brokerage firms ‘Do not Know’ any given client when it becomes apparent that the client is owed money. In much the same fashion, the Veterans Administration and Social Security Administration fail to publish or enforce their own programs to enhance salary budgets in a twisted stroke of financial nepotism.

While it may seem inconsequential, in the long term, the growing trend of reporters to not 'read' leads a news organization to have a decided inability to make connections. The political rise of George E. Norcross III as party chieftain of the Democratic Party in the southern portions of New Jersey is just one example.

While the New York Times has reported on the overall philosophical elements of political corruption in New Jersey, the Philadelphia Inquirer has largely remained quiet. Instead of focusing on large scale social issues involved with the Norcross empire, the Philadelphia Inquirer focuses on whatever attendant circumstances that happen to stumble into public view. And one should note the words ‘stumble into view’ well. Increasingly, the modern newspaper industry conducts no research. Instead, it takes a reactionary approach as the Inquirer’s forays with the Veterans Administration note.

When the Democratic Party in southern New Jersey decided to return to its 20th Century roots of racial discrimination by reverse redlining a large section of North Camden for redevelopment - by tossing out the current residents in favor of newer, more affluent ones - the Inquirer did report the procedural relocation. Yet it entirely missed the ‘redlining issue’ - a well-known financial ploy that is historically tied to real estate development schemes in urban areas. And tied to unabashed racism. And closely tied to political corruption as well. At the trickle down economic end of ‘red-lining’ one will usually find a smiling affiliate of the local political party - whether banker, lawyer, real estate mogul or insurance company.

The late 1800s/early 1900s creation of Harlem in New York City is but one example of the racial/financial/political exploitation of human beings based on race.

What is fascinating is that, concurrent with the North Camden redevelopment articles, the Inquirer was simultaneously reporting on the exploits of Mr. Norcross and his employer, Commerce Bank. Despite federal indictments, and subsequent convictions of Commerce executives on fraud charges, The Philadelphia Inquirer remained largely quiet on reporting any political corruption in southern New Jersey - even though Mr. Norcross heads the Democratic Party and even though Commerce Bank is headquartered in New Jersey.

While the New York Times documented payola scams involving lawyers and political officials in the Democratic Party of Middlesex County, virtually nothing has appeared of the same caliber in the Inquirer. Despite the death of a young woman after her evening commute home on a Delaware River Port Authority train - an organization dominated by the southern New Jersey Democratic Party - it took nearly four years for the Inquirer to question how the DRPA was spending ticket, tax and federal revenues.

Procedurally, the Inquirer has reported on the DRPA’s expenditures. Yet, virtually nowhere does any overall assessment of that spending appear. It was not until the waning days of 2005 - several years after Christine Eberle was dragged from the train station parking lot and strangled - did an apt-minded reporter by the name of Elisa Ung brave what has become all too uncommon in modern media reporting - she postulated a theory.

In quoting the Longshoremen’s Union, Ms. Ung hit common sense: perhaps the DRPA and the southern New Jersey Democratic Party are embezzling money in artful ways - instead of providing funding to dredge the ‘port’, what was the DRPA planning to do with that same $40 million dollars?

It was a philosophical question the Philadelphia Inquirer failed to ask concerning the death of Christine Eberle. What, precisely, did the DRPA and the Democratic Party under George E. Norcross III do with revenues instead of providing police protection at the train stations?

When three children suffocated to death in Camden, right in front of television cameras as police failed to examine a locked car trunk, the Philadelphia Inquirer again failed to examine the substantive chain of events. It did report the lack of proper police tactics. It did report that the police failed to properly examine the car. But it failed to ask what happened to the money to properly train the City of Camden’s police officers. And it failed to ask why Camden County, in supervisory control of the Camden Police via the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, did not correct the lack of training.

In short, once again, where was tax money going? Afterall, millions of dollars had been set aside by the State of New Jersey to revitalize Camden. And to support Camden County via the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office - some of that funding in the form of federal grants. On these issues, the Inquirer remained philosophically silent.

To date, even in light of the murder of one of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s own employees due to the political spending decisions in southern New Jersey, the Inquirer has arguably turned its back on informing the public. (An Inquirer truck driver was murdered in the same parking lot from which Ms. Eberle was kidnapped yet, fascinatingly, no DRPA security existed thereafter at the location.)

As the recent payola scandals involving the media point out, it is fairly easy to “buy” news coverage. Whether favorable articles about the federal “No Child Left Behind Program” or news reporting in Iraq, the media has a seedy, on-going history of being on the take. Though profitable in a number of capacities, organized crime flourished in the late 1800s through the 1980s largely on the steam of media manipulations. No serious reporting on the social phenomena took place until the 1970s. And even then, despite open gunslinging, it took a lot of provocation to get newspapers like the Inquirer to tackle the matter seriously. (Al Capone's obituary in the New York Times is an eloquent point.)

When the duty to report the Mafia phenomena became undeniable, the news industry did report the philosophical elements rather well...in the long run. But one cannot forget, from a historical point of view, that it took nearly 100 years for the newspaper industry to do so.

The New York Times, in closing out 2005, printed a fascinating article detailing the New Jersey Bar’s de facto involvement in corruption in Monmouth County. And the de facto nexus of the New Jersey Bar with political corruption around the state. To date, in covering Mr. Norcross, the Philadelphia Inquirer has demurred on drawing similar connections in Camden County. It remains a provocative mystery in light of the deaths, more so in light of the Longshoremen’s Union commentary - a union that itself is no stranger to financial/political scandals. It would appear the union would have a wealth of historical expertise behind it's observations of Camden County, it's motivations via the DRPA, and the nexus with a Democratic Party largely dominated by members of the New Jersey Bar.

The lack of “substantive’ coverage is not going unnoticed among Camden County residents. What the future holds is anyone’s guess. But the rise of the Internet has engendered a broader definition of the Fourth Estate. Access to information is larger and more expansive than ever. And increasingly, old dog newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer are finding themselves marginalized and enslaved to revenue, marketing and advertisement realities.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many of its large city kindred, are now up for potential sale.

At some point a critical decision arises: When is reporting ‘news’ reporting nothing at all? When are reporters hired to facilitate an expensive, quite polished, delivery mechanism for ads?

Perhaps it is a question answerable by reflecting upon the newspaper industry’s television counterparts and their weather story phenomena: When is ‘killer lightning’ just a thunderstorm?