Here is the story of Camden NJ. It has been under Democratic Party control for five decades. The population was 125,000 in 1950. Today the population is 77,000. The population is 50% black and 35% Puerto Rican. A full 26% of the households consist of married couples. The per capita income is $12,000. Median household income is $18,000. A full 52% of the population lives in poverty. The average home value is $35,000. The official unemployment rate is 20%.
The real question is how did the white man cause this. Surely this shithole became a shithole due to racism. It couldn’t have been the policies implemented by liberal Democrats over the last five decades. I feel tremendous guilt for causing this horrific result. Please take more of my taxes to hand over to the lazy good for nothing free shit army in Camden NJ. I know if we just give them more money Camden will surely revive itself.
City of Ruins
November 4, 2010
Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city’s real unemployment—hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations—is probably 30–40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state’s proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt.
Corruption is rampant, with three mayors sent to prison in a little more than two decades. Five police officers, two of whom are out on bail and three of whom have pleaded guilty, have been charged with planting evidence, making false arrests and trading drugs for information from prostitutes. County prosecutor Warren Faulk has had to drop charges against some 200 suspects, including some who’d spent years in prison, because of the misconduct. The city is dominated by an old-time party boss, George Norcross III. Although he does not live in Camden, his critics contend that he decides who runs for office and who does not, who gets city and state contracts and which projects get funded. Tens of millions in state funds have been used for city projects, from an aquarium on the waterfront to a new law school to an expansion of the Cooper University Hospital and construction of a medical school. In 2002 the state approved a $175 million recovery package to save the city, but according to a yearlong investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer, only 5 percent had been used to combat crime, improve schools, provide jobs or bolster municipal services. Those who oppose Norcross insist he has turned the poverty and despair of Camden into a business. His critics charge that the new medical school, for example, was approved because it was part of a back-room deal Governor Jon Corzine cut with Norcross in Corzine’s failed re-election bid. When I met with him, Norcross dismissed the allegations and defended his huge infrastructure projects as crucial to revitalizing the bleak downtown.
Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation’s largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to the New York Ship Building Corporation and Campbell’s Soup, which still has its international headquarters in a gated section of Camden but no longer makes soup in the city. Camden was a destination for Italian, German, Polish and Irish immigrants, who in the middle of the last century could find decent-paying jobs that required little English or education. The city’s population has fallen by more than 40 percent from its 1950 level of 120,000. There are no movie theaters or hotels. There are lots with used cars but no dealerships that sell new vehicles. The one supermarket is located on the city’s outskirts, away from the endemic street crime.
There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax.
Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated.
* * *
I found the city’s homeless congregated in a collection of blue and gray tents, protected by tarps, set up under the shelter of a Route 676 ramp. The tent city, or “Transitional Park,” was overseen by Lorenzo “Jamaica” Banks, 57, who bought damaged tents from Wal-Mart and Kmart at a reduced price, repaired them and provided them to the homeless—at $10 a pop, police told me. Banks insisted he offered them for free.
When I walked into the encampment with my colleague, comics artist Joe Sacco, Banks was chopping firewood. A man with receding black hair and a beard, Banks was dressed in carpenter’s jeans and a plaid shirt over a gray hooded sweatshirt. There were about fifty tents in the park, and Banks owned forty of them. He spoke in the drumbeat staccato of a man who seems about to snap at any moment. He claimed to be a Vietnam vet, to have been a heroin addict now “clean for thirty-seven years,” to have ended up after the war in a mental institution, to have jumped off the Ben Franklin Bridge in a suicide attempt because of “a lot of flashbacks” and to have spent “twenty-two years, six months, three hours and thirty-three seconds” in prison for shooting to death his best friend because he was “killing his baby in front of me.”
“I’m better now,” he assured us as the commuter train into Philadelphia rumbled along the tracks overhead. “I’m on medication. I live here because it reminds me of the jungle.”
Banks, who called himself “the mayor,” ran the tent city, which had a population of about sixty, ranging in age from 18 to 76, like a military encampment. He had a second-in-command, his “CEO,” who took over when Banks had to buy supplies. There were weekly tent inspections on Saturday, weekly meetings every Tuesday night and a list of sixteen rules written on plywood tacked to a tree. These included restrictions on fighting and arguing, admonishments to clean up the trash, an order not to sell food stamps and several other blunt prohibitions, including: “Don’t bring your tricks here” and “No borrowing money or sex from anyone.” Residents received two warnings for infractions before they were evicted. Drugs were banned. Alcohol was not. Banks had even set up a bank account for the enclave. At night there were shifts when someone—Banks said he preferred a vet—had to stand guard. There was a Dumpster filled with trash at the edge of the encampment, white folding tables with white plastic chairs and five-gallon plastic water containers outside many tents. Firewood lay scattered about the site.
“Take a look at the American Dream,” Banks said as he guided us through the tents, stepping around rusted bicycles and shopping carts. “In today’s society no one is exempt from Transitional Park. Everybody is one paycheck away from being here.”
Officially, Camden has 775 homeless, but there are only 220 beds in the county, so city officials nervously tolerated the encampment, despite its illegality, until late spring, when they swiftly dismantled it. Those tossed out scattered, and about a half-dozen migrated to live in squalor under the concrete ramps of Route 676, where it runs across the river into Philadelphia.
Camden’s streets are filled with the unemployed. Ali Sloan El, who recently got out of prison, is chatting with some men in the street, several of whom are Muslims like him and have shaved heads and long black beards. The group of men around Sloan El have just witnessed a botched robbery at a barbershop a few minutes before Joe and I arrive. A young gunman, nervous and unsure of himself, had pulled out a pistol and tried to rob the barbers. He was chased out of the shop by a group of men and tackled on the sidewalk. One of the barbers is at the police station filing a report.
The mood inside the shop is hostile. “How did you know about the stickup?” asks a barber who says his name is Sam. “We were told about it on the street,” I answer. He arches his eyebrows in disbelief. “No one would talk to you on the street. No one would tell you nothin’,” he says coldly. “A mother with a 2-year-old in a stroller told us,” I tell him. “Yeah,” he admitted reluctantly, “maybe that’s right, maybe a mother would talk.”
The rumor on the street, Sloan El informs us, is that the robber was high on a narcotic called wet. The drug of choice of Camden’s criminal class, wet is made by soaking marijuana in embalming fluid, which is a mixture of formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol and other solvents. Phencyclidine, or PCP, known on the street as angel dust, is often added to the mix. Wet is smoked dry but the leaves, which glisten, give the drug its liquid name. Wet numbs its users and endows them with what seems to them like superhuman strength. Their body temperatures rise, their blood pressure drops and they frequently hallucinate. The high can last up to six hours. Two Camden police officers who do not want to be named tell us they fear confronting street thugs on wet. “You shoot them and they just keep coming,” one says warily.
Those who do not join street gangs live like minnows, darting through the currents to avoid the predatory fish. Darnell Monroe, 33, wearing a new pair of brown Timberlands, a black leather jacket, jeans and a black-and-white checked kaffiyeh as a scarf, sits with us in the barbershop. One of the barbers immediately turns up the radio to a deafening roar, I suspect to drive us out. Monroe, also a Muslim, is a tall man with a shaved head and a full black beard. He spent four years in prison for dealing drugs. He became a father when he was 13. The mother was 16. “I’m sociable,” he says when I ask him about surviving in Camden, “but I keep moving. I don’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention. I don’t want a conflict.”
Monroe was shot three times in the stomach in 1998, when he was coming out of a bar and tried to break up a fight. “To this day I don’t know who shot me,” he says. He awoke in the hospital twelve weeks later. His kidney, liver and upper and lower intestine had been badly damaged. He lifts his shirt and exposes a massive scar on his stomach that looks like a brownish mountain range with jagged edges. “It was a .380 automatic,” he says. Until he was laid off last year, Monroe had a job as a forklift operator in the scrap yards by the port. On the back of his right hand is a tattoo of a padlock with his current wife’s initials, EGK, and under his left eye is a tattooed teardrop he got in jail, in 1993, when his sister died.
The city is busily cannibalizing itself in a desperate bid to generate revenue. Giant scrap piles rise in hulks along the banks of the Delaware. The piles, filled with discarded appliances, rusted filing cabinets, twisted pipes, old turbines and corrugated sheet metal, are as high as a three- or four-story house, and at their base are large pools of brackish water. A crane, outfitted with a large magnet, sways over the pile and swings scrap over to a shredding machine. A pickup and a U-Haul filled with old refrigerators, gates, screen doors and pipes are unloading in front of a small booth when we arrive. There are about twenty scrap merchants in the city, and they have created a market for the metal guts of apartments and houses. As soon as a house is empty—even if only for a few days between renters or because it is being painted—the hustlers break in and strip every pipe, radiator, screen door and window. Over the past three or four decades thousands of owners, faced with the destruction, have walked away from their properties. Camden produces a million tons of scrap a year. Its huge shredding machines in the port can chop up automobiles and stoves into chunks the size of a baseball. Ships from Turkey, China and India pull into the port and take the scrap back to smelters in their countries.
The only white people visible daily on the city’s streets are the hookers. Congregated near the highway ramps on Ferry Street, most are heroin addicts and nearly all are infected with AIDS, hepatitis C or other sexually transmitted diseases. The women sleep in abandoned apartments without running water, heat or electricity.
If arresting someone on wet is the least pleasant duty for Camden police, arresting hookers is the second. “Ninety-nine percent of them are heroin addicts,” a sergeant tells us. “I try not to deal with them. They have diseases. You pat them down and you find needles. You can get stuck with a needle. And they have MRSA, a skin disease with open sores. We have to get our cars disinfected afterward. Ninety-five percent have outstanding warrants, although they usually give us a wrong name.”
* * *
Despite Camden’s bleakness, despite its crime and its deprivation, despite the lost factory jobs that are never coming back—despite all this, valiant souls somehow rise up in magnificent defiance. In a room across the street from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where meals are provided for the homeless on Saturdays, a group of African-American women bow their heads over a table and hold hands. They are led by Lallois Davis, 67, a heavyset woman who radiates an indomitable, unbroken spirit.
“The poor have to help the poor,” Davis says, “because the ones who make the money are helping the people with money.”
Davis raised four children and then, when a neighbor died, leaving behind her two orphaned grandsons, Davis took them in and raised them as well. She wears a large cross around her neck. She is known as Aunt Lallois.
“My heart is heavy,” says a 69-year-old woman named Brenda Hayes, her head bowed and her eyes shut. “There is so much heaviness. It is wounding me. How can I not worry?”
“Yes, Jesus. Yes, Jesus,” the other women respond.
“I know you didn’t carry us this far to drop us now,” she says. “I know there is no burden so heavy that we can’t carry it with your help. I thank you, Lord, for friends who have carried me through the roughest times.”
“Yes, Jesus. Nothing is impossible with you, Jesus,” the women say.
“Bodies,” Hayes says after the prayer. “Bodies out back. Bodies upstairs. People stabbed. I don’t go out at night. The last one was twenty feet away from me on my floor. There was one kid, he lived in the back of the projects, 18 years old. They buried him two months ago. Gunshot. There were four kids I knew murdered, one in the parking lot who was killed last year. He was 12 or 13. He was sleeping—some say he was living—in a car.”
“There are parents who are addicts who send their children out to sell drugs,” Hayes adds. “I know a mother who is a prostitute. Her oldest daughter sells weed to go to school, and one day the mother stole the weed and sold it to buy crack.”
Father Michael Doyle, an Irish priest, has been in the Sacred Heart parish for thirty-five years. He has witnessed the violence of poverty devastating his congregation. Father Doyle was a member of the Camden 28, a group of left-wing Catholics and anti–Vietnam War activists who in 1971 raided the city’s draft board to destroy files. He was sent to Camden as punishment by church leaders who disapproved of his activism.
“Today’s a very hard time to be poor,” says Father Doyle, seated in the church rectory. “Because you know you’re poor. You hear people my age get up and say, ‘We were poor. We put cardboard in our shoes.’ We talk like that. But we didn’t know we were poor. Today you do. And how do you know you’re poor? Your television shows you that you’re poor. So it’s very easy to build up anger in a, say, a high-voltage kid of 17. He knows he’s poor, he looks at the TV and all these people have everything and I have nothing. And so he’s very angry…. I’m talking about the violence that rises out of the marketing that shows the kid what he could have, creates a huge anger that explodes easily. That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. I discovered the anger was so near the surface, you just rub it and it explodes. And there’s no respect for you if you have no money.”
I ask him why the rage is invariably self-destructive. “They can’t get at it,” he said. “You have an enemy, and that enemy is greed and prejudice and injustice and all that type of thing, but you can’t get at it. There’s no head, there’s no clarity, so you take it out on your neighbor. It’s just horrendous what people do.”
“Women have some dignity in a poor ghetto because they bear children and raise them,” Father Doyle goes on. “Men are adding nothing and feeding from the trough. A woman walks down the street pushing a little cart, and a child on it—she’s somebody. But the man standing watching her is nobody.”
It is a bleak, rainy afternoon when we visit Harleigh Cemetery. Walt Whitman’s tomb, based on a design drawn by William Blake, is here with its heavy stone front and peaked roof with the poet’s name in imposing stone letters. So is the grave of another Camden poet, Nicholas Virgilio, who, as Father Doyle says, “mined beauty out of the gutters of Camden.” Virgilio died of a heart attack in 1989. The priest designed his grave in the shape of a podium. One of the poet’s verses is engraved on the stone:
lily:
out of the water…
out of itself.
Virgilio, who wrote his poems in his basement under a naked light bulb next to his washing machine, chronicled the slow strangulation of his city. The hookers knitting baby booties on a bus; sitting alone as he orders eggs and toast in an undertone on Thanksgiving; latchkey children “exploring the wild on public television”; the frozen body of a drunk found on a winter morning in a cardboard box labeled “Fragile: Do Not Crush”; as well as laments for his brother Larry, killed in Vietnam. I open his thin book, Selected Haiku, to a passage and place it on the marble top of his grave. Droplets of rain splatter the page:
the sack of kittens
sinking in the icy creek
increases the cold
Oh, fuck. Dave will be here any moment.
There but for the grace of god go I.
Trapped by the same declining economics and overt racism, how many of us would find a way to rise above it or would we respond with the same surrender and hopelessness and violence?
It’s not the democrats or the blacks or the unions. IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID. The bankers who have shipped the American economy to the third world and created a new third world right here in the USA.
Coming to a neighborhood near you. Soon. Courtesy of Big Banks in collusion with Government stealing us all blind.
marissa
Untrue. It is democratic entitlement policies that caused this. It has nothing to do with racism. NOTHING!!!!
If you pay people to not work, they will not work.
If you reward people for having children out of wedlock, they will have children out of wedlock.
If you pay people whether they educate themselves or not, they will drop out of HS.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WALL STREET BANKS.
Personal responsibility still exists in this world. They are not victims of a conspiracy of bankers. They are lazy entitled dregs of society.
I’m sick and tired of the victim card. It’s complete and utter bullshit.
God has nothing to do with it.
If you work your ass off and study like a fiend, you can succeed in this world. It isn’t guaranteed, but the chances are dramatically higher.
Rewarding lowlife dregs for SHOWING UP at school will do nothing.
Don’t go to school, do drugs, have kids out of wedlock, collect your welfare and declare racism is the mantra of Camden. For the grace of Obama go them.
Unbelievable article. The question I always have is this an anomaly, or is this a preview of what is coming for the rest of the country. Jobs shipped out, corrupt and liberal politicians spending/wasting billions of dollars with no affect.
White people will be in the minority in the U.S. by what, 2030? That sounds like regression to the mean to me, which is Africa and Mexico. If you’ve ever traveled to either place, not somewhere you want to live.
Yea, blame white people, because they’re stupid enough to take responsibility. If you’ve ever been to Canada, there are no dangerous slums, murder capitals, and all the rest of the shit mentioned in this article. What’s the difference? Blacks there don’t blame white people for all their problems. They have to work and produce like everyone else.
It’s all about “learned helplessness” and the victim syndrome. If you put a dog in a cage and shock him several times, then open the door later, he’ll sit in the cage and get the shocks, even though he is able to leave. Being a victim is the easiest way to stay in the shit for generation after generation. When you believe your a victim, you don’t ever have to take responsibility for anything. Just sit on your ass and always expect more and more, because you deserve it since your a victim. Our society perpetuates this decade after decade. It’s never works, and will never work.
Some day, somehow, someone is going to stand up and say “enough.” But, I don’t see it happening until the government is bankrupt and no more free shit. It will cause anarchy for awhile, then people will have to get off their ass and do something positive. Until black leaders decide to get off the victim platform, nothing is going to change.
The final argument, however, is still regression to the mean. Once a “foreign” population reaches a critical mass, everything will change to that population’s normal circumstances. In Africa, they are still killing each other off by the thousands all the time. In Mexico, they are also killing each other off by the thousands. People living is huts and boxes. Imagine what the U.S. used to look like, when the whites moved in. Once they reached a critical mass, they changed their surroundings, then changed the entire country. As whites, we will have to accept this situation once we become a minority, our country will start to look and act more and more like the new majority.
As an example, I’ll use Chicago, which I’ve been to many times and understand. The south side of Chicago is a “no go” zone for police and anyone else. It’s like taking your life in your own hands. I worked at Cook County Hospital ER for a month. It was like a war zone. Black on black violence, 8-10 shootings a night. The entire near west side of the city is now Mexican, and entire suburban towns (like Elgin) have become mexican/spanish. They are dangerous places if your white. Whites in Chicago keep huddling into seperate/segregated neighborhoods, but if the city continues as it is now, it will be majority African and Mexican in 30-40 years. Whites are falling back everywhere.
So, in conclusion, get used to places like Camden, Detroit, Miami, Chicago, LA, St. Louis, and everyplace else that is dangerous. Our government is accelerating this process by providing money (Welfare) for people to pro-create without any negative affects. The white work ethic, morality, discipline are on the decline, and who is going to resurrect these? Our success as a country was based on these principles, but the are all but gone. We have been progressively wiped out, and soon we will be literally wiped out, or at least pushed into minority enclaves with guards at the walls. Just like pre-colonial days.
If that’s racist, so be it. I don’t care if I’m racist. I’ve spent time helping people in Africa, people that have nothing. You can’t help people that don’t want to help themselves. That is the crux of the problem; people that don’t want to help themselves, only help themselves to more free shit.
Camden and the cities of it’s ilk are today’s version of slavery. The democratic power bosses in the cities have replaced the plantation owners of the South. They don’t want poverty to go away. They want to feed their “voting base” so they get re-elected every year. It’s not about race, poverty, or the economy. It’s about power and money. Keep ’em fed, housed and happy and the votes will come in. And don’t think for a second the republicans would do any thing differently if they had the chance.
democrats do what’s best for democrats. republicans do what’s best for republicans.. Either way, America gets fucked.
Two words: Personal responsibility
If you live in a poverty stricken area with no jobs, walk the fuck out, move. Don’t sit around waiting for lighting to strike.
Pick any state I guarantee you I can go find five jobs. May not be doing something I like, but if your willing to ” out work ” someone else, someone will put you to work.
fwiw imho
That’s bullshit. The politicians are parasites off the poor. Some kids work their ass off, as admin said, and become doctors. I know an anesthesiologist in NY named “Howard.”
Every brainless American is programmed to blame somebody else for everything. Those with brains don’t listen to all the programming and know where they are going in life. Being a victim gets nothing except what you can beg or steal from somebody else.
I can’t believe all the stupid fucking idiots who continue to bring up slavery and how somebody is still enslaved. There is no slavery, except sexual slavery in S.E. Asia. Every single person in this country is still free to work their ass off and get ahead in life. REALLY. There is no fucking pseudo-slavery, sorry.
What’s the unemployment rate in Detroit, high right. To prove my point in above post just googled nurssing assistant job in Detroit, to numerous to count. So why are there unfilled jobs in Detroit ?
Lazy Motherfuckers won’t work. Let them starve.
I accept your apology..
You’re missing my point. The poverty pimps don’t want poverty to end. You mentioned Chicago. Where would Jesse Jackson be without poverty? Where would Obama be without a Chicago community to organize? He sure as hell wouldn’t be on Martha’s Vineyard with his much vacationed wife.
Reading this piece is just sick-making. I worked at RCA, Cherry Hill, in the 60’s, traveled Camden’s streets, ate out here and there and it was a _working_class_ blue collar city. Everyone was friendly, and I even lived in the YMCA for two days until my boss at RCA found out, made me rent a car and move to the Cherry Hill Inn.. I felt right at home there, even though I was a small town guy at the time (and still am)..
Now? I don’t know where Stucky is, exactly, in NJ – but anywhere there (including Philli across the river – itself a pit) is too close.. Of course I bet there are similar tales to tell of Newark and places North of Camden as well.
@AwholeDR: I suspect you are right.. Read this week’s National Review about political correctness and gag…..
MA
You know what this pice sounds like it’s describing?
Mad Max in miniature and growing.
Jeez…….
MA
Stucky, if you’re referring to me, what were you expecting?
As for this article, sorry, but you can put rats in a brand new building, and they will still be rats.
Last time I checked the Constitution, it said “All men are created equal.” To me, that means that you don’t deserve to be treated, taxed, or be provided for, more, or different than anyone else. Time for people to be personally responsible for and take advantage of opportunities that are available. Looking for a better life? Get an education, laser off the fucking tattoos, dress in a cleanly manner, speak the English language, and stop crying about you color, nationality, and ancient history.
“marissa
Untrue. It is democratic entitlement policies that caused this. It has nothing to do with racism. NOTHING!!!!
If you pay people to not work, they will not work.
If you reward people for having children out of wedlock, they will have children out of wedlock.
If you pay people whether they educate themselves or not, they will drop out of HS.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WALL STREET BANKS.
Personal responsibility still exists in this world. They are not victims of a conspiracy of bankers. They are lazy entitled dregs of society.”
Did you read the part where “Ships from Turkey, China and India pull into the port and take the scrap back to smelters in their countries.” Why? Because Big Business can run dirty industries in developing countries much more cheaply than they can in New Jersey. Draining away jobs.
Or how about this part, “Camden, like America, WAS once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation’s largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to the New York Ship Building Corporation and Campbell’s Soup” and these industries which used to “in the middle of the last century could find decent-paying jobs that required little English or education”, where did they go? Overseas, south of the border, going going gone.
And hasn’t government and its convoluted labyrinth of tax laws that rewards offshoring of industry—which boosts profit margins to shareholders and produces big bonuses for management—aren’t those tax code profits bought and paid for by Big Business and Wall Street profiteers?
And haven’t there been quite a number of scandals lately about big banks laundering drug money? Drug dealing is churning profits for bankers and they are disinterested in the social devastation those drugs are causing as long as the money keeps rolling in.
If you are poor in Camden NJ, how the hell are you supposed change that? What are the options? Doesn’t look to me like there are any. Jobs gone, industry gone, local bureaucrats looting the public coffers, how are people supposed to self motivate themselves into a better existence when no such thing is available?. I’d probably be sniffing paint on a street corner too.
marissa
What was to stop a brilliant Camdenite from creating the next Google or Facebook? Guess what. Capitalism is about creative destruction. If you aren’t competitive, you go out of business. That doesn’t stop new businesses from being created. Your entire view of the world is based on victimhood.
The POOR bedraggled souls of Camden live 15 minutes across the bridge from Center City Phila. There are thousands of jobs in Philly. But you have to be able to spell, add and not wear your fucking pants around your knees to get a decent job.
Who runs the education system in Camden? Democratic liberals. They’ve run it for 50 years.
Anyone can pick themselves up from poverty through education and hard work. You know how you get educated. You read a fucking book. And then you read another fucking book. And before long you’re smart.
BOO HOO. No Options. No jobs. I might as well do drugs. Bullshit. The statistics say that 20% or 30% are unemployed. That means 70% are employed. How’d that happen with no jobs?
Cherry Hill is 20 minutes away from Camden. Lots of jobs in Cherry Hill for people who aren’t lazy good for nothing fucks.
That liberal victimhood bullshit isn’t gonna fly on my site.
Marissa,
You have a good point about shipping jobs overseas, especially low skilled jobs, BUT as the Admin. states, pay people not to work, and they will not work. 99 weeks of unemployment benifits is proof postive, I know of many, especially the young.
I have a magic thumbs up mechanism, so you got three instead of one. You are welcome. Hope you are still working and have a good weekend.
As was mentioned previously, and is a favorite saying of my old man, “You can’t help those who WON’T help themselves.” The Bible says that those who will not work will not eat. We can turn this ship around, but we have to stop providing incentives to be leaches on society. I recently got an email that sums up the situation:
“Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of SNAP cards; no cash for
Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans,
blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want
steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women
Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test
recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and
piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get
tats and piercings, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks?
You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your
“home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be
inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your
own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or
you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of
trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We
will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo
and speakers and put that money toward the “common good..”
Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of
the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules.. Before
you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,”
consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for
doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least
attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system
rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is
correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will
voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t
welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.”
This also applies to politicians:
“If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least
attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system
rewards them for continuing to make bad choices”.
Vinnie:
You really hit the nail on the head. Well done. I don’t think anyone has solved so many problems so succinctly. Just brilliant. Not a bone to pick. Allowing those who live off the taxpayers to vote is worse than a conflict of interest, it is a feed-back loop to politicians. Imagine what the fucking democrats would do if the 45 million on Welfare couldn’t vote for them. Although they get most of their money from AAJ (American Association for Justice, formerly the American Trial Lawyers Association), they get most of their votes from the entitlement crowd. They’d be out of existence. I’m surprised nobody has demanded the end of this conflict of interest yet. Anyway, good job dude.
I think Marrisa’s point is valid to a certain extent, however that argument held more weight 30 or maybe 20 years ago… since then, the only thing it seems this city exists for is to create a reservation for the poor.
Like Oakland, when the manufacturing base skipped town the descent into poverty truly began, warranting a little public assistance… BUT:
The system is indeed a joke. Free shit makes free shit armies and all the Free Shit officers and generals (local politicians feeding at the HUD trough, churches that seem to fund the preacher’s wristwatches, drug dealing (A Perfect Competition Economic Model), and the welfare industry that comes with it. Hell, I bet that, like Oakland, there’s a scumbag shaking down the pan-handlers for a cut.
Racism didn’t cause this. The lack of a solid income from a manufacturing plant and an entire resultant economy based on the welfare state did. There are cities in the former Soviet Union that the same sort of shit happened in… A monoculture manufacturing plant goes dark and the town is dead. There shouldn’t be ANYONE in Camden, no less 60,000 people! The only reason there’s anyone there it seems is they get “assistance” and don’t move out of their comfort zone… if you call a shit stankin’ dump comfortable.
Sounds like the town needs to be dismantled, not given mass funding. Draft the healthy, move the elderly and bulldoze that shit. Throw the overtly corrupt in jail for good measure.
Giving them aid is like trying to send food to Somalia: The sharks at the top get first pick and distribute the rice at their whim. Fuck this MogadishUSA bullshit. Poverty, violence, corruption and anarchy in this country is getting there. Pathetic. Add up the murder rates and I’d wager they exceed all of our wars in these cities.
I can tell more than a few posters here would do well to read “The Bell Curve” or at the very least “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” – the latter available online.
Note to AWD: you really ought to (when precious time permits) go into “American Renaissance’s” (www.amren.com) treasure-trove of archives and look up the “Martin Luther King Jr.” hospital in LA and investigate what took place over the decades (accepted first-world standards are completely off the table where political correctness is concerned) when given a hospital all their OWN. So for all you folks here who insist it’s about economic injustice, check it out for yourself since we are talking about overwhelmingly “black professionals” in the medical field. Oh yeah… it has absolutely NOTHING to do with affirmative action policies either. You absolutely will not believe the details including the grand finale that mercifully (with all excuses exhausted by the usual media and government drone apologists) caused the state government to shutter the doors for good.
But with Obama care, those kinds of abysmal (third-world) standards will be normalized. Rahmbo Emmanuel’s brother, a physician, wrote the abomination known as “Obamacare” and of course inserted racial quotas (as is the case too with the phony “Finance Reform” bill purportedly written by Franks and Dodd – notwithstanding the banksters’ input). Seeing the staggering levels as noted above in my prior post of grotesque over-hiring of Blacks in the federal behemoth, all’s we can do is pretty much everything we can think of to see that the collectivist, radical legislation is overturned.
State Moves To Revoke King-Harbor’s License
California regulators moved Thursday to revoke the license of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, an action that, if not reversed, would force its closure.
The move, the boldest thus far by the state, follows recent findings by the federal government that patients at the public hospital are in immediate jeopardy of harm or death despite years of reform efforts.
The state Department of Health Services has never before made such a threat against King-Harbor and has not revoked any hospital’s license since 2004.
Supervisor Mike Antonovich agreed. “The time has come to put patients’ lives before incompetent employees or political agendas.”
And later:
Founded in a largely African American area in the wake of the Watts riots, the medical center was seen as a symbol of hope, a testament to racial justice in healthcare and a jobs engine for a struggling region.
But soon after it opened in 1972, the hospital became mired in problems, and it eventually gained the moniker “Killer King.” Over the years, it attracted publicity for patient care failures, some of which resulted in deaths.
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/06/state_moves_to_1.php
The School from Hell:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2011/06/the_school_from.php
African-Americans’ Finest
Howard University 2011 Caribbean Festival Riot
http://worldiswatchin.com/what-i-miss/fights/shyt-really-got-real-d-c-caribbean-festival-2011-brawl-outside-howard-university-fat-boy-goes-wrestlemania-smacking-boys-with-a-steel-chair-wshh-clip/
What a fucking joke. Really, what can be said. I guess we just keep funnelling money into that shithole and hope it shrinks down to nothing.
Time for mutual responsibility. We need to severely limit free shit, and any gree shit should come with huge strings attached – ie you gotta work for it out in the community.
No work – no free shit.
AWD – While I appreciate your compliments, that was an email I received this week and not my contribution to society, though I am in favor of those things. I also agree in that it doesn’t go far enough. To the list of those who shouldn’t vote, I would add government employees, which would include politicians, and those on Social Security Disability. Of course, this would NOT include those who actually had a job in the private sector and are now receiving the benefits of their labor through Social Security.
I would also repeal the 17th amendment, but that is an issue for another day.
The free shit will stop. When that happens truck traffic will grind to a halt. When that happens the free shit nation will become the zombie nation. The zombies will be hard to put down. Survivors will have learned a hard lesson about God, family,work ethic, and thrift, The kneelers in church will need to be refurbished. The family will be loyal and babies will be cherished. Work will be to make the company a profit. And people will have mattress money, stored food and fuel. This will give the progressives a new starting point for their mindless med ling.
According to some people the mean old white man causes all the problems.
I am so sick of the race card being played.
Drowning in parasitism:
You’ve obviously spent some time on this topic. I’m just an angry arm-chair quarterback. Keep it coming though, good stuff.
Move over Jersey Devil George Norcross III is the ANTI CHRIST 666 under that old looking white color hair. He has to hid the numbers and the truth about his evilness.
George E. Norcross III cares about money power and control. He practices plantation politics and uses it on people to divide and conquer. He is really a Dictator, or the Anti Christ. Under his white hair is the numbers 666
His mother is a jackel and his father is Satan. This is a wicked evil thing that got his powers from Voodoo in Haiti from his boy Jimmy Joyce who is still alive and well and setting up flights to George to smuggle drugs in the city of camden, philadelphia, and other towns. George likes to use the race card to divide and conquer and take your mind off of the real problem. George (himself) Greedy evil demon that George Norcross born from a Jackal
Norcross is responsible for the comments. He’s so stupid that he doesn’t realize that his narrow butt is being tracked. I heard people want your butt out Norcross. Soon you will be a thing of the past. People are working on all levels to have ou ABOLISHED.
George E. Norcross Creates the POOREST CITY IN AMERICA
Where is all that stimulous money you greedy piggy wiggy Norcross.
You cursed your own family dummy, your done.
People around the country think Norcross is a criminal, racist, greedy and everything that went wrong in life when he was created
GEORGE E. NORCROSS IS A WASTE OF HIS DADS SPERM
Norcross is the Anti Christ 666 and he is keep racism alive and well. Arent you norcross this is why PA thinks you are a complete JOKE.
Anthony
What do you really think about George Norcross?
[img
?pubId=260701700001[/img]
@ Anthony
We are going to dispactch Fred Flintstone, this George Norcross fellow looks like someone ” Ole Fred ” would like to rear end.
Well maybe not
Correction…The Declaration of Independence. The two white people responsible for fucking up this country the most were Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The list of black and Hispanic people who have fucked up this country by pimping their own people, is too large to add here.
George Norcross created his own nightmare and now he is going to have to live with what is coming down the road.
This city was a direct hit on poverty, drugs sales, homelessness and a city that is deemed the poorest in America. George is about to be the poster child for this. He so dumb he doesn’t realize the enemies he created and the people who have formed an underground to have him removed from this state.
Demonstrations are being set up and a movement is about to come down on this knucklehead. People HATE him literally.
The WORLD ACCORDING TO GEORGE E. NORCROSS IS ABOUT TO BE EXPOSED.
George your threats mean nothing – you better watch what you allow your hitchman to say. It appears you threatened someone again. Look up the word dispatch:
Dispatch: to kill with quick efficiency: obsolete
sensetti says:
@ Anthony
We are going to dispactch Fred Flintstone, this George Norcross fellow looks like someone ” Ole Fred ” would like to rear end.
Well maybe not
Perhaps you need to go back to those Palmyra Tapes. Didn’t you threaten to ???? a certain soliticitor. Now we have to send this comment to the US Justice Department and look you up. Hope this doesn’t come back connected to you!
Big brother is watching you and we have enough evidence but your just giving us more and more. Keep it going George, the more the merrier. How’s Bryant and Fumo. My good buddies. hahahahaha
George Norcross, Camden County Democratic political boss, says he plans to help launch new charter schools in Camden. Funding, he said, would come from his family’s foundations and Cooper University Hospital where he is chairman of the board. He gave no other details. I say how soon can we get those schools up and running? The Camden school district, one of the 31 Abbotts the state has dumped money onto for 30 years because of the lame-brain cackle of clowns otherwise known as the state Supreme Court, has a dismal record in educating kids.
No one is even sure where the money goes. Not to the classrooms, because teachers tell me they had to purchase supplies out of their own pockets. In the old days the school board used their membership to take fancy trips on the taxpayers. The kids and teachers were an afterthought. There was the superintendent who gave herself a raise. The principal who was fired for refusing to change test scores to make it appear students were learning when they weren’t.
It’s disgraceful. And the biggest disgrace is the generations of lost kids. There are parents in Camden who want their children to have a chance and will support the teachers. It’s too bad about the ones who won’t and the kids who don’t want to learn, but we have to try to save the ones we can.
Bring it on, George. Make it tough, make it disciplined, make it work.
State educators are seeking criminal charges against the executives of a charter school operation after an audit found they had misused at least $25.6 million in public education money, including $2.6 million for personal expenses
Now this all makes sense. New found money for George. Steal take steal take. You made a big mistake messing with people who are innocent. But this I don’t give a fuck attitude was the wrong one to have and then to do what your doing is on the RADAR George. You have no idea the reaches we have.
Where is all that money you stole Boy George? Where is the money. RICO BABY
YOU MAY NOT GIVE A FUCK NOW, BUT YOU WILL GIVE A FUCK WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER AND YOUR REPUTATON IS WORSE THAN MADDOFF.
YOUR IN FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE – GET READY AND DON’T TRY THAT PHONE CALL MEET WITH ME VIDICTIVENESS. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING AND IT IS ONLY PUSHING YOU FURTHER INTO A JAIL CELL.
Dave the only person responsible for fucking up Camden is George Norcross, if you want to be added to the list, you certainly can and other just like you. What goes around comes around twice as hard. George is on the OUTS.
This is not a black and white thing, it is a GREED THING. It is an irresponsible, reckless Corrupt Political Machine who is desperate to stay in power, practices Voodoo to keep himself in power under Satans powers and masterminds horrible acts of evil on other.
It not race, it’s the Anti Christ who has divided and conquered and used the race card. We have people of all colors in this movement to shut you down George. We know your games and what you do and we have a remedy to shut that down. It’s about your greed, your evil and what you have done to everyone who gets in your way.
Fire that fuck – remember what you did to Rosenberg and many others and your still violating laws today making those phone calls to board members and other firms. Your in major trouble and evidence is astounding on you. Your going to jail for a list of things that will have you locked up for 2 life terms.
You are Nothing, nobody, just a greedy boy who wants wants wants. You evil, arrogant, rude and have no class. You come from nothing. Your a thug and a thief. Your old and tired. You a complete embarrassment and joke to North Jersey and throughout the country. Once you are exposed to the world, you will be laughing stock of the USA and throughout the Nation.
Your name is mudd right now. The people you have around you and you call your friends helped bring this on and much of this you bought on yourself. Your Children will watch you fall in Disgrace and they will be disgraced because of you
They will say he or she is a Norcross: RUN have nothing to do with that extended scum.
AWD, we saw you in this video with the KKK
Anthony, John, Larry
You are all the same poster. You seem a little out of control.
Why don’t you give us some perspective regarding your hatred for Norcross. Has he done something to you personally?
Welcome to the South. No wonder Codey says George is a Joke
Norcross has hurt alot of people! Can you blame anyone for hating him so much. Look at what he did to the people in South Jersey and how he controls things in a negative way. He has a very bad reputation and people are seeing it. Perhaps he needs to make a list of people he destroyed and really think about his actions. It appears these people are fed up with his nonesense.
Check out Codey’s new book. #1 Seller – Codey himself can’t stand the man, that speaks for itself. Imagine when a group of haters for Norcross get together. Not a pretty sight for him.
Norcross has created thousands of enemies. His image is so bad, there is no way in Hell it can be repaired. Go back to Florida before you make it hard on yourself and the family. Just a little friendly advise.
Well out west its hispanics,i moved to a beautiful neighborhood and counted my family lucky that we could live in such a fine place.Then i started noticing the gunshots and the trash that had to be picked up daily.I noticed how many of my neighbors couldnt/wouldnt speak english.I told one of my coworkers about it,he said ron you can take the people out of the getto but not the getto out of the people.Hispanics seem to love mexico and even if its a toilet they desire to bring it here to the USA.They say hispanics well be the majority in the future.Of course im some old racist,just like anyone who critisizes obama.
White people are dangerous!
Ron why not move to Kensington. You’d fit in good with all that garbage. Good place to raise a white family. Low life white trailer trash
Anthony, John, Larry
The three stooges. Amazing what happens to people with multiple personality disorder when they are off their meds.
If you reward failure, you get MORE failure…
The United States is disintegrating because failure is celebrated and rewarded, with bailouts and welfare, and success is punished with looting and confiscation.
Now imagine what happens when those living on free shit have it taken away from them…
Norcross is the biggest failure we have
Norcross is the reason our economy is down the drain. If your not with him, he creates difficulty like bullies do. Question is, how long will we put up with him before something drastic is done?