Pause---9 SECONDS

This was the first commercial ever broadcast on American Television. It cost $9 to air. A long way from a 2013 15 second advertisement on the Superbowl eh?

I was curious about the first TV commercial and then it struck me that this was the beginning of so many things. Mass marketing through visual movement. Political campaign ads, the psychology of marketing in a new medium and how to move the crowd to your product from another, reaching out and touching millions of people at the same time for profit. Lies and frauds perpetrated on a mass scale. Commercialized Religions. Brand loyalty and name recognition...anything else you can think of?

I know I have been slacking lately with the posts but the pain levels in my neck, back and shoulders have gone up with the weather change and it hurts most during the productive hours. I try to keep busy (moving) because i am fairly certain (see the doc next month) that after all the fusions and slice and dices I am developing arthritis. *shrug* Besides I really think most people are tired of reading me. I know I am not the happiest wordsmith on the planet but if I am going to be truthful in the baring of my soul and heart I have to put down what i feel at the moment I am writing, no tricks, no gimmicks (no good) just me, writing and missing some friends i wish i heard from more--PD--not to mention i am (still) tired of going back and changing i to I.

Send a cloud of sanity over this city of Detroit, bankruptcy is going to be painful to all but for some it is going to wipe out their entire retirement income (Police and Fire never paid into SS, they got an exemption and trusted that their pension funds would be honestly handled but I think this Tea Bag Darling governor Rick Snyder is after the two pension funds to use them to fund his own woefully underfunded state fund. I will say that i can certainly relate to the Eastern European people of the cold war era, we live under a governor appointed one man government who has the legal right to have any final say on any move any body of city elected officials do, he has the right pre bankruptcy to try to settle the debt using whatever money he can find (The Detroit Art collection is 122 years in the building and he may have the right to sell it off est value is about 3-5 billion and it is ranked in the top 10 collections in the world), he has the right to sell off all of the cultural assets of a 300 year old city, he thinks he has the right to modify non uniformed pensions and health care benefits people worked for and took less pay to secure them as a "future payment" of present services rendered.

Only 53% of property owners pay their property taxes in full, which are the highest in the state ranging from 70 dollers per thousand f value to 100 dollars per thousand in value. Though the housing collapse started here in '06 the government has not adjusted housing values to reflect the reality. You CAN but a 2000 sq foot home , brick 4bdrm, 2 bath house here for under 50K and put another 20 into it and you will have one hell of a nice place but the "investors" are swooping in and buying houses at tax auctions for 1000 or less, paying no taxes for 3 years, letting it foreclose after they have collected rent for that 3 year period, then buying it back from the city for less than the taxes owed under another Limited Liability Corporation and at the same time getting to use the lower business tax rate which comes with business deductions like hiring a crew of legal and illegal immigrants to rehab the house for $2,000 then renting it from $750 to $900 a month,

At the same time instead of spending my taxes in my neighborhood where it would go to fund police, fire, lighting, and trash (we pay $250 per year just for trash removal every week) they take a large portion of my taxes and spend it on abatement's and infrastructure improvements for the properties the billionaires buy to make a Downtown Disneyland. A 5 sq mile out of 140 sq miles that has seen almost every rehab dollar for the past 51 years.

The bedroom communities and the old manufacturing areas are what you read about when you read of Detroit's abandoned and blighted areas. The billionaires own quite a bit of this property as well but are doing nothing with it, they have an inside track on what is ten years down the road so they know their vacant land will be worth 100x's as much when it is needed to complete a parcel for development.

Look up (a probably by now familiar) picture of the Detroit Train Depot. That hulk is simply sitting there in ruins owned by a billionaire who will do nothing with it, he let it rot to the point where what was once the worlds tallest train station now has a crumbling foundation. What pisses me off the most though is coming into Detroit from Canada this is the very first building you see when you cross the Ambassador bridge which is owned by the same billionaire that owns the train station.

So what does all of this have to do with the Bulova ad? Nothing much but it was through false advertisement that Henry Ford and others, seduced hundreds of thousands, which eventually became 2 million people to come here from all over the world to work in the auto industry, an industry that does not advertise how they were the first entity to abandon Detroit's laborers, leaving us with an end city population 1/4 of what was peak (2,000,000) 47% of whom can not pay their property taxes even after having lived in the same house for 5 generations and the city will take it away, abandon it, and let the scrappers have it rather than just abate the taxes on it for them who have owned the house but apparently only rent the land from the city.

The World, remember, runs on Bulova time. God save us Bulova time runs awfully slow.