“ So what happens? He gets the title shot in the ballpark. What do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville.”

Terry Malloy, “On the Waterfront”

Enjoy the full movie clip here:

How can you not love this movie? A regular guy “takes a moral position against his own self-interest”…and wins. In this clip, Marlon Brando’s character, Terry Malloy, is lamenting his lost shot at the title and what he got instead: “A one-way ticket to Palookaville.” (By the way, I’m thrilled to finally be able to put one of my favorite movie lines to good use, so just keep repeating “Palookaville” as you read this newsletter).

This is supposed to be a country where we all have a shot at the title—fair and square— or at least that’s what we’ve been told. But how many of you believe you have gotten a “fair shot”, a clear path to thrive, rather than just exist? In reality, what so many of us seem to get instead is that “one-way ticket to Palookaville”. We never quite seem to pull ourselves up and out of our downtrodden circumstances or even our barely middle-class life, and get that shot at greatness. Or if not greatness, how about that shot at a middle-class and upper middle-class life where we don’t have to worry about every penny?

In our case, though, it’s not a mob boss who brings us down, it’s our country’s laws and culture that keep the average working class person’s head down, incentivize behemoth corporations to use money to dictate the trajectory of our laws and determine what we get in the way of support.

In Crime and Punishment, I’ve written about how our country’s uncapped interest rates, manipulated credit scores, massive corporate subsidies, punishing personal bankruptcy laws and the failure of our elected officials to see the value of investment in our country and its people, directly keep millions of America’s people poor in one way or another.

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In the next year, I’ll take deeper dives into many of these issues, call out the surprising ways companies, particularly those in the financial industry, flaunt existing laws designed to protect the consumer, and investigate the myriad racial disparities that continue to plague people and communities of color, including land, air and water pollution.

I’ll also focus more on the things we can accomplish together to stop this overt assault on fairness and equity. I’ve always believed that real power is created when people join together to fight for justice, and there are countless examples in our country’s short history, like the civil rights movement, including today’s #BlackLivesMatter organized protests, and peaceful marches for LBGTQ rights, animal rights, strikes for workers’ rights, and more. And this activism comes from the bottom up—when many regular folks like you and me join their voices and say: “To hell with the way it is, we need and want our lives to be different and better!” As Senator Sanders says:“Not Me, Us”.

And for that I’ll need your regular engagement and support in 2022. We are all in this together, and I intend to build a community here that will encourage each of us to learn and grow. What I will continue with on Crime and Punishment is to curate these important stories of injustice for you, analyze them in historical context, and guide us, with your help, to just protests and solutions that will benefit the many, not just the few. Americans deserve more than “a one way ticket to Palookaville”, don’t you think?

I am thankful for the number of subscribers who have joined Crime and Punishment since my inaugural post on September 15, 2021, and look forward to the new year with gratitude for all those who choose to join our community.

Here’s to a wonderful New Year for all of you!

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