Buzzflash
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RedditI never imagined I'd visit Alaska, so one of the delights of the cruise is the surprise of seeing this extraordinary place (though mostly from sail-by range, since our shore visits are pretty brief, only a few hours long). With only half a million residents, and a mostly punishing climate, it doesn't attract people looking for the comforts of civilization.
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Our Gilded Age
Doug Henwood: Today's elite spend on a grand scale while pretending to be "just folks."
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A Rally in Juneau
Doug Henwood: Veterans for Peace in Juneau greeted the Nation cruise when it docked in their city with a rally against the war.
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The Stuff of Heartbreak
Doug Henwood: When an ardently progressive magazine sponsors a cruise through the fragile waters off the coast of Alaska, the environmental, economic and human realities are ripe for contemplation.
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Blackstone's Bell
Corporate Responsibility & Accountability
Doug Henwood: Is the private equity boom about to go bust?
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Cooler Elites
Global Warming & Climate Change
Doug Henwood: Can the ruling classes save the world from global warming?
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Leaking Bubble
Doug Henwood: The US housing market has been responsible for about half the economy's recent growth, but increasing dependence on home-equity credit could create a financial disaster.
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Letters
A couple of days later, we stopped in Ketchikan, a city of about 8,000 that is even more incredibly the state's fourth largest. As we were walking around downtown on an unusually warm and sunny day, we ran into a couple of locals and started talking with them. I asked what happened to all the tourist shops in the winter when the cruise ships were tooling around the Caribbean instead of the frigid Alaskan waters. One of the Ketchikaners--who now found the town too crowded and moved out into the hills outside of town--said they get boarded up and their proprietors head down to the Caribbean themselves. Of about forty jewelry stores, only one is locally owned. The principal occupation of many, he told me, is selling drugs, and the jewelry shops are a fine way to launder the proceeds.
Ketchikan used to be a rough town. The New York Hotel, on the main drag, used to rent rooms for $2 a night. Next door was a strip club. Up the street was a red-light district. Then in the early 1990s the cruise ships started coming. The New York hotel was renovated and jacked its room rates up to $100-150. The strip club closed, and the red light district is now memorialized by Dolly's, a museum and gift shop with a woman in nineteenth-century prostitute's dress chatting up passersby.
Memo to Annabelle: no apology necessary on the diapers. The personal is political, after all.
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