Last week, the wife and I went out for dinner to a new restaurant in our neighbourhood.  The food was awful and the service insulting.  Afterwards a few of the patrons gathered outside.  One man was particularly engaging and inspired us to take action.  We formed an angry mob, set fire to cars in the parking lot and threw stones and burning wood through the windows of the restaurant.

A few days later we went back to the restaurant and – this is the bit you’re going to find outrageous – their service had NOT improved!

Afterwards I led the riots.  We destroyed nearby shops and looted what we could.  Next week we’ll go back and see if they’ve recognised our concerns.

All of this may seem a somewhat surreal way of grappling with a bad customer experience. After all, if it was so dreadful, why not just refuse to go back?  If enough people stay away, wouldn’t the restaurant close and someone else have the opportunity of making a better go of it?

It would seem to make sense.  In the midst of municipal elections in South Africa, voters in numerous towns rioted and vandalised businesses in protest against a lack of service delivery by ruling African National Congress councillors.  Once the votes had been tallied, those same rioters returned those same councillors with an overwhelming majority.

This sort of errant behaviour isn’t limited to South Africa’s fledgling democracy.  Protestors at global summits often attack local businesses when expressing their frustrations.

Democratic governments often assume that Democracy is some natural order that people gravitate towards.  The US has been genuinely surprised that Iraqis and Afghanistanis didn’t become instant democrats when their previously autocratic rulers were removed.  Europeans appear authentic in their conviction that increased aid and negotiation will convert even the most recalcitrant of dictatorships into wealthy democracies.

The people at the receiving end of voting and aid don’t seem to see things the same way.  Their confusion, and the contradictions of the participants’ objectives, are what gives rise to conflict.

Consider the rural, traditional, approach to conflict resolution and discussion.  Whether it be the loya jirga of Afghanistan, the imbizo of Sub-Saharan Africa, or even the folkmoot of ancient Germany, all have a common pattern and purpose.

This is not democracy, it is agreement.  The participants at these gatherings expect to remain in negotiation until all agree.  This can take time.  Members of such a gathering will meet for days to discuss matters of group importance.  If there are people who disagree then the majority do not impose their will on the few.  Rather, they offer compromises until, eventually, an agreement is reached that suites everyone.

This isn’t something that happens only in rural backwaters or amongst unsophisticated societies.  The World Trade Organisation has the same approach to negotiation.  The Doha Round of trade talks started in November 2001.  No-one has any idea when they are likely to conclude, if at all.

Such a leisurely approach to law-making and arbitration can only work where the pace of life is slow and the complexity of relationships is moderate.  If the majority are subsistence farmers then a discussion that affects water rights or requires collective action does demand that everyone agree.  Where the pattern of life has changed, as division of labour creates increasing social complexity, such collective collaboration is impossible.

Complexity requires that individuals negotiate solutions for themselves and only when such processing reaches an impasse does one involve higher authorities.  Complexity also imposes time-constraints.  Others get on with their lives and leave the debatants to their problem.

Where faster solutions are required courts and calls to standard legal frameworks ease litigation.

Even the process of national rule has been converted from a process of negotiation with an hereditary ruling class to one of periodic and total renewal through general elections.  This is only the most obvious end of the chain of democracy.

The United States, the United Kingdom, did not become democracies because the “people” suddenly decided to have set elections.  They became democracies because their complex societies needed a fast and stable way of changing leadership and trying new ideas without having a war every time the prevailing tyranny fell.

If an entire town had to get together to discuss the poor offerings at their only restaurant and numerous ideas were proposed, shot down, and reproposed, nothing else would get done.  Far easier to simply allow anyone to open a restaurant and let individuals make up their own minds as to where to spend money.

Once people get used to this casual act of opinion-forming the obvious next step is to allow similar shopping amongst political representatives.

The problem in the world’s unstable places is one where the forms of democracy are imposed from the top while the institutions of individual interaction still offer no choice at all.

Aid agencies divide up countries into individual fifes.  They don’t compete for beneficiaries through innovative and diverse offerings.  They merely dish it out.  Even where businesses do exist, they are indistinguishable and collusion in pricing and offerings is normal; whether it be the regulated mobile phone services, or even the local grocery store.  Poverty offers little choice and little experience of choice.

With a foundation like that, it is unsurprising that people would rather negotiate with the rulers they know than try anything new.

Even nations with complex patterns of labour division have doubts about distributing choice all the way down to individuals.  Market collapses, such as the 2008 credit crisis, appear to reinforce the view that some things are best left to collective decision-making.

This reflexive return to centralisation is likely to be reversed.  A single person can only have strong opinions on a limited number of things.  A centralised decision-making system would have to have strong and consistent opinions on everything.  This isn’t possible and any act of centralisation must be to the detriment of individual choice, overall economic activity and democracy.

The real social divide is not of wealth and poverty, but of choice and monopoly.  If governments, social activists and aid workers are genuinely determined to promote democracy around the world, then the best way to start is through promoting consumer choice at its most basic level.

A person who has a real choice of business offerings will learn that changing a mind does not have to involve physical conflict.  And democracy really can be built one restaurant at a time.

While our family sponsors George and Monica on an ongoing monthly basis through Compassion International, organizations that care for the world’s poorest children also benefit from single donations that aid children without sponsors or which support community projects where they live. It can be a delight to give your own holiday gift recipients the chance to choose a gift in their name for a child in desperate need.

World Vision’s online gift catalog is a great portal. This relief, development and advocacy organization works with the world’s most vulnerable children, families and communities in more than 100 countries, to overcome poverty and injustice.

Consider a few statistics:

1 in 7 children in the world do not get enough food each day
1 in 6 — that’s a billion people — do not have access to clean water
1 in 6 children in the U.S. lives beneath the poverty line
1 in 3 people in the world is under 18
26,000 children under the age of 5 die each day, from mostly preventable causes
More than 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents due to HIV

It’s especially meaningful to enlist kids in the process of choosing a gift: tell them their present this year is X-number of dollars to spend on helping other children. Then, go to World Vision’s website. Allow them to select a country or a focus for their contribution that interests them. Like Heifer International, World Vision offers a chance to see exactly how far a gift will go to make a difference in people’s lives.

There are many gift options:

* $30 buys a school supply package for a child, including a uniform, backpack and materials.
* $35 buys farming supplies like seeds, fertilizer, hoes and harvest equipment, and irrigation kits, along with training in improved agricultural techniques.
* $50 buys 10 fruit trees, providing an ongoing source of healthy nourishment, shade, seedlings for other families, and in just two to three years, the trees will begin to yield enough so that a family may begin selling fruit to support its income.
* For just $18, you can purchase mosquito bed nets for a family to protect them against malaria. And in the process, use the opportunity to learn about how access to health care for easily treated diseases is an important social justice issue.

Or, a gift to World Vision’s general fund allows it to be applied where the need is currently greatest. In addition to disaster relief and refugee aid, World Vision’s community work includes water and sanitation, health and hygiene, literacy and education, food and agriculture, and economic development.

If your heart is moved in the process of gifting others with these ‘multiplier’ gifts, consider sponsoring a child yourself. Our family has sponsored George for eight years and Monica for six. They are about the same ages that my kids are, and they have taken great interest in each others’ lives, from the boys’ shared interest in soccer, to the drawings that the girls regularly exchange. We pay about a dollar a day to support each child, and in return, we have been given relationships that have changed and blessed our lives – and which have heightened my children’s awareness of injustice and its causes.

When you sponsor a child, global poverty statistics take on a human face, and lives are changed in ways that you can vividly see and appreciate – including your own.

Compassion International just marked the sponsorship of its millionth child, and World Vision is likewise serving millions around the world. But there are still hundreds of thousands of children waiting for sponsors at Compassion and World Vision. Until they are matched, their needs are addressed through World Vision’s various programs, and Compassion’s Unsponsored Children fund. While both are Christian humanitarian organizations, they serve all children regardless of race, religion or ethnic group.

Both groups have been recognized for their financial integrity. Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator, has consistently awarded each their top ranking of four stars, meaning that each organization “exceeds industry standards and outperforms most charities in its cause.” Eighty-seven percent of every dollar donated to World Vision goes directly to program expenses, as does nearly 82 percent of Compassion’s budget.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to the “rationalism” of markets (the theory that every price includes all available information to reflect that price), but I do believe that in relatively unsophisticated African markets there are good reasons why farmers do not farm or invest in productive capacity:  weak rule of law, ineffective property rights, high taxes, bribery and corruption all add up to ensure that the cost exceeds the benefit of investment.

Anthony Mills, a soil scientist at the University of Stellenbosch contacted me regarding the difficulty of conducting development in Africa.  “The Zambian land tenure system is particularly problematic.  By law the land is owned by the President.  In practice it is owned by the chiefs.  The land is consequently probably even further from private ownership than in most developing countries.”

Yet, without any due acknowledgment of the political and legal environment standing in the way of growth and development, international projects duly waste cash on major interventions.  In 2004, the UN launched the Millennium Development Villages project in an effort to demonstrate how the goals for the Millennium Development Goals could be realised.

Promises of the Millennium

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the philanthropist Ray Chambers. The project work of the Millennium Villages are overseen by a Scientific Council composed of leading scientific and development authorities at the UN Millennium Project and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, both of which are headed by Sachs.

The project is a miserable example of the patronising and objectionable way in which development in Africa is imposed, as if like manna from a benevolent West.

The project hasn’t “failed” in the way a business would fail.  Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t been forced to live in a homeless shelter, and the villages themselves aren’t derelict.  My concerns have to do with the nature of the promises, and of the results.  My analysis is based using only their published information and claims (on their sites: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/ and http://www.millenniumvillages.org/).

Their objectives are an overwhelming mish-mash of wants and desires:

“In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide universal access and free distribution of long-lasting, insecticide treated bed nets to fight malaria; (ii) Achieve significant increases in staple crop yields; (iii) Ensure universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school enrollments; and (v) Provide community access to improved and year-round water for consumption. In addition, the MVP emphasized cross-cutting interventions focused on addressing gender inequality; on community mobilization, participation and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and communications technologies (ICT).”

“The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.”

Ending extreme poverty is a known quantity.  Numerous countries have done it (from South Korea to Brazil) and what is required mostly boils down to accountable government and rule of law, plus sound economic principles premised on enforceable property rights.

So much for the background.  Let’s look at the viability of these projects themselves.

The region chosen

“Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.”

According to a quick check, the bottom 20% earn roughly $350 to $450 per annum in this region.  I’m being generous here, since the MDP aims to work with the absolute poorest which the UN usually defines as people earning less than $1/day.

“Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day rose from 227 million to 313 million, and the poverty rate rose from 45 percent to 46 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.”

This implies a total of 62 – 63,000 villages (at their requirement of 5,000 people per village) who fall into the project scope.

The investment

“Each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of $250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional $50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation, community training, and monitoring and evaluation. Note that this level of external support is fully consistent with the 2005 G8 commitments for official development assistance to Africa by 2010. The other $60 per villager per year will come from village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of $110 per person per year.”

This is a fudge.  Firstly, sure, the global community may have promised a grand total of $50billion in support, but that usually has strings attached, and includes a wide range of other bilateral investment.  So the full amount isn’t available.  Secondly, most African governments don’t spend their own money on internal development.  Thirdly, the villages have no money (since that is the reason they were chosen).  One way or another, all of that $110 will have to be donated.

That means we are investing $550k annually for each village over a five-year period (i.e. $2.75 million).  To reach all villages in the scope requires an investment of around $172 billion.

The return on investment

So much for the background.  One of the things I’m often asked on African tourism development projects is, “Does this town/area have good tourism potential for development?”  My answer is always this:  “Are there men and women by the side of the road selling curios?  If not, then no.”

People in Africa are not poor because they are ignorant of their own needs, or of how to earn a living.  Neither are they really victims of circumstances beyond their control.  Given the right environment, Africans are as capable of supporting themselves as is anyone else. When the Zimbabwe currency was worth less than spit, inflation was several trillion % and nothing was available for sale. A few months after the Zimbabwe government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in exchange for the US dollar everything is available, investment is happening and production is shooting up. Zimbabwe may even be entirely self-sufficient for food again by the end of next year. And that is without any major international intervention.

So, as far as the MDP villages are concerned, my first question is this:  “Are other villages visiting the MDP villages, becoming inspired, and copying this model?”

The answer is: No.  No-one is copying the villages.  No private investor has turned up and offered to do something similar.  Scratch that, George Soros turned up and made a spot donation of $50 million in 2006 to fund 33 villages.  But that is hardly investment.

There are a whole host of reasons that I can spot:

1. The investment changes nothing about the legal and economic situation in the country at hand; governments are still corrupt, infrastructure is still non-existent.  Even if the MDV were to produce a major food surplus, who would they sell it to and how would they get it to market?
2. The project makes a great deal of the village-based ownership structure.  This is a collectivist / communist system.  If no-one owns it, then there is little incentive for individuals to work harder, since everyone will get the same outcome.  Like most projects of this nature, the output will continue as long as the expensively-paid consultants are around, then it will return to its base level.  The only reason the Kibbutz system has lasted 100 years is the donations of both the Israeli government and of outside donors.  As soon as the Israeli government cut funding, then the Kibbutzim started to close.  Now only those most hardy (or the very few who have major industries earning revenue) are still functioning.  But at least the Kibbutzim were self-created.  The MDPs rely for their energy on do-gooder outsiders.
3. Who owns the investment?  If something intangible like a “village” owns the products of individual labour and investment, then what does a person with ambition do?  Can he/she sell their stake in the village and use the money to go to university, or buy a house?  Who decides on what the profits (should there be any) be spent on?

Even in the best-case scenario, all that you achieve is that a group of famished and unhealthy people are less famished and less unhealthy.  For an investment of $2.75 million.  Is it really sufficient to take people from earning $1/day to say $2/day?

What else could you achieve with that money?

You could build a nice, labour-intensive factory for $2.75 million.  Imagine the impact of 62,000 new factories on the central African economy?  And imagine all the things that would be required for such a thing to happen … roads, rule of law, healthcare, education.  All of which would be affordable if millions of people were earning proper salaries.

This isn’t happening.  There are no investors in Africa beyond a few resources and the inevitable mobile telephony.  Africa is 2% of the world economy.  To put the MDP investment in perspective ($110 per person), foreign direct investment in Africa is worth only $19 per person per year.

Whitey Basson of Shoprite, a major African retailer, put it best last week:  “It takes 15 inches of paper to cross a border in Africa.”  Africa’s countries are regularly ranked as the most appalling and corrupt places in which to do business.

The MDP villages do not change that situation.  The agricultural techniques behind the project may be sound, but the economics are a failure.

And, if the economics are a failure, then what is the point of the project?

Been a long hard week. All around the college where I work as a benefits coordinator, programs are out of funding for the summer. Financial aid is strained to the breaking point by the influx of new students. Students come flooding in for vocational training designed to switch them out of their now-defunct line of work.

Worker retraining can pay for tuition, but not books. What program offers to pay for childcare? Can I qualify for financial aid if I worked most of last year? I have to stay in school to keep my food stamps; who has grant money? I field a dozen phone calls a day from students trying to find a way out of the current economic situation.

Trying to find a program to help each student is taxing at best and on bad days it is heartbreaking. Our state is broke and our social service safety net gets more threadbare each month. Keeping the hope alive for a struggling student can involve much more than books and tuition. Some students are homeless and need referrals for safe housing. In more flush times we sometimes help pay for their immunizations, utility bills, even transportation, but none of that help is coming this summer.

I read the text of President Obama’s speech in Cairo this morning. Towards the end of the 6,000 words he spoke about the power of educating women. Most of the students I assist are women. I had an interview today with a woman from Iraq attending our college to learn English. She came with her two small children, a social worker and an interpreter. She and her husband came to America to start a new life, but he hasn’t been able to find work so he is going back to Iraq. The children were born in America, so for now she plans to stay. As I sit and write about her now I realize that keeping hope alive also takes lots and lots of people willing to go the distance to help.

It’s easy to be cynical about the language of hope and the call to service issued by our President. When the rubber hits the road it’s going to be the people that embrace hope that will lift our collective boat. It happens with small acts. It happens when enough people show up every day to learn something new. It happens when we share scarce resources. It happens when we believe it can make a difference to embrace hope.

No.

As the American Dream™ continues to gnaw on every last bit of exposed flesh it can pick from our flailing limbs, it will no doubt, for many of us, also eat those debt-strangled, rapidly depreciating havens of dirty secrets, personal failure and indoor allergens known as parcels of real estate.

It will eventually, after a judicial process, a waiting period and probably more judicial processes, send a henchman or three to, at long last, relieve you of the burdens of homeownership and shelter.

But, come on. People in any line of work are nonetheless good, hard-working people too! They know just as well as anybody that remembers what it’s like to be employed in recent memory that work sucks and is hard, and comic relief can get us through even the toughest of times.

Accordingly, when the Evicto Man comes to summon you to your shiny new life as a spent munition in America’s War on Prosperity, here are the:

TOP TEN ADVISORIES FOR YOUR FRIENDLY FORECLOSURE EVICTION REPRESENTATIVE!

10.
“See, I spell it ‘Waynescoting,’ because this stuff is made from actual Waynes and Scots.”

9.
“Well, Gummi worms are so much easier on the back than Pergo™.”

8.
“Won’t be the first time this place has been ‘possessed’!”

7.
“This house is not only the historic site of remakes of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Grease II,’ using actual lambs and grease — most recently I’ve been using the space to film gay chocolate mousse porn for the past six months.

…Hope you’ve got a chisel.”

6.
“You will marvel at the sound-dampening capabilities of refried beans and R-35 grade tortillas.”

5.
“I’ve been breeding fighting wasps who don’t respond well to being taken from the only home they’ve ever known.”

4.
“The next owner will be lucky to have such a radiant living space.”

3.
“The spare key’s in the toaster oven, underneath the rock”

2.
“Right this way! Don’t mind the typewriter and cigarette.”

And, the number 1 advisory to give your friendly foreclosure eviction man:
“THAT’S NOT STUCCO!”

*flying index card* *glass breaks* *uncomfortable silence I’ve grown accustomed to*

Not enough Top-Ten for you? Well, as the golden shower enthusiast said to the Yellow Leprechaun™, urine luck! JAZZ from HELL has a list as well. Pot of gold, indeed.

He was big. He was temperamental. He was covered in green fur and didn’t wear pants. He was ever demanding. His face changed color, shape and expression depending on who was looking at him. Everybody loved Gerg, and Gerg loved everybody, but not in that genuine, heartfelt way — more like a golddigger cherishes her trophy husband, or a cheerleader loves the ugly friend she keeps around to look better in front of guys. But the support was strong, the words as heartfelt as they could sound, and the dubious sincerity of it all was easily drowned out with more wide smiles and more pairs of outstretched arms.

Gerg was, indeed, the town’s beloved mascot. On top of it all, he was always hungry.

The entire town functioned solely for the purpose of feeding Gerg. Nobody ever admitted it outright, but all anybody did was for the benefit of Gerg. “Do for Gerg, do for you,” I heard at least thrice a day in the town square.

I couldn’t really tell what Gerg did besides his almost constant eating and the daily speeches, stage plays, and karaoke performances in the town square, which all revolved around reasons why we needed to keep his brain entertained and his belly full. “Nourish Gerg,” he would proclaim, “so that Gerg may nourish you. Gerg will protect us all from those who would take our delicious foodstuffs. Rodents! Greedy bandits! Giant, gluttonous, brightly colored monsters! Even your own friends, family and neighbors, should you let them, especially if they look or speak in a different manner from yourself! Gerg looks out for your best interests — nay, Gerg is your best interests!”

“Marvel at the bounty Gerg has bestowed upon you,” his windpipe would wail at the exact same time that bounty seemed to be going, one bushel at a time, directly down his foodpipe. “Be grateful for Gerg’s nutritious products, which keep you and your precious children happy, healthy and productive, so that you may continue to hope that one day you, too, will also be the one and only Gerg! After all, you can’t put a price on hope!”

“And just imagine,” he would say, licking his fingers clean. “Imagine how those fresh foodstuffs will taste once we can eat them together!”

Every second of every day in the life of every citizen was devoted either to acquiring foodstuffs for Gerg, seldom sampling them for themselves, in exchange for foodstuffs-shaped, bright green feces; or making new citizens with fresh, capable bodies to help gather more ingredients from the fields, shipping depots, dumpsters, and their own stockpiles alike, should they be fortunate enough to have extras. Most, by the time I’d passed through, didn’t believe in stockpiling. “That’s selfish,” one citizen explained. “We don’t provide for Gerg, Gerg won’t provide for us. We need to keep giving Gerg the foodstuffs we have on hand to produce the Green Substance for us so that we may finally, one day, have access to foodstuffs.”

Gerg was friendly (at least to your face), and his long, giant arms were gentle in accepting the offerings of the townspeople. One hears how great it feels to get a hug from Gerg, but nobody I’ve ever talked to has ever witnessed, or felt, an embrace in the first person. The speeches elicited warm and fuzzy feelings from time to time, but that was about it.

I decided to test Gerg.

“I’ve no foodstuffs left to give,” I hollered towards his head, some 50 feet up in the air. “By the time I get to the fields, the depots, the stockpiles and even the gutters, they’ve all been picked clean! I don’t know where I can go, or what I can do, to have an offering for you when I can neither obtain the Green Substance, nor the foodstuffs required to produce it! I do not starve you deliberately, Gerg! This you must believe!”

He said nothing as his arm slowly approached my face. He caressed it, ran a couple fingers gently through my hair, lovingly scratched behind my ear as though I were the family dog–and with a quick smack, knocked me unconscious.

I awoke inside what looked to be a dark cave. “This is your reward,” read a yellowed poster pinned on the wall above an entertainment center. “Gerg will shelter and protect you in your final hour of need.”

“Look,” a man in a suit, sitting across from me, snapped. “I’ll give it to you straight. Nobody gives a fuck what happens to you because the only thing you have left that can be converted into the Green Substance is your own flesh and bone. The only way you become Gerg is when he absorbs you completely and the rest of the town go on with their lives. You might make it out alive and whatever’s left of you can go back to a semi-happy, semi-productive life in the fields, if Gerg, or your fellow Gergamites, will take you back. They’ll likely be too busy keeping it up out there to care either way.

“Gerg never goes hungry.”

“Well,” I responded, “at least there’s cable, I guess.”

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing. [emphasis in the original]

Lest you reflexively dismiss Rushkoff as a crackpot, let’s be clear on something – he’s a very smart and thoughtful man. Whether you ultimately choose to buy his argument or not – and I’m guessing the “nots” will carry this one handily – he’s making some important points about the house of cards we now find collapsing around us, points that we’d do well to understand as we set about picking up the pieces and rebuilding.

I want to make an observation about the article and conclude with a couple of responses.

The Army of Ludd

First the observation: Rushkoff’s position aligns him with the neo-Luddite movement, and he is not alone in advocating it.

I don’t mean “Luddite” in its commonly (mis)understood, pejorative sense – there are few words in the English language that are more frequently misrepresented. A brief history lesson illustrates the point. The original Luddites revolted against technological advances in the British textile industry from 1811 to 1816. While the term “Luddite” popularly connotes someone who is anti-technology, the actual rebellion was more critically aimed at technology which threatened the sanctity of culture (Rybczynski, Pynchon). Their reaction was not against progress per se – they themselves gladly used the newest weaving technology available, and were “interested in innovation and technical improvements to make their work easier” – but were instead opposed to the dehumanizing dislocations of the industrial economy.

At the turn of the 19th Century, factory looms were the latest innovation, and a factory job meant arriving at dawn for a 15 to 18 hour working day, and the door was locked behind you in the morning and not opened until the end of the shift. To the Luddites, the factory looms spelled the end of a way of life, of craftsmanship, of community and of family (Murphy).

From the perspective of modern-day Luddites, the “original rebels against the future” reacted against technological encroachments on the natural order of human society.

The Luddites had no objection to many technologies such as the carding engine and the spinning jack that supplemented human labour, but were not a threat to their livelihoods. By contrast, the inhuman machines that characterised the Industrial Revolution were new and different in that they were independent of nature, of geography, and season and weather, of sun, of wind, or water, or human or animal power. They not only destroyed jobs, but marked the beginning of an environmental catastrophe (Ludd).

As I was reading Rushkoff’s polemic I couldn’t help thinking about one of today’s leading neo-Luddite voices, Kirkpatrick Sale. I first encountered Sale when working on my dissertation, and his take on the Internet was scalding. For instance, in response to the popular claim that the Net would foster a stronger democracy, finally enabling a truer Jeffersonianism than was ever possible before, Sale replied that, “You can’t democratize – you can’t control – a technology that was established for other reasons.” Created for control and consumption, “This technology does not come with democracy in it” (Robin).

As it turns out, Sale has some thoughts on our current economic situation, as well. Last November, in delivering the keynote before the Manchester Convention, he invoked Thurber (“If you live as humans do, it will be the end of you”) and characterized the 2008 election as a boxing “match fought between two big palookas.”

What can you say about a system that spends nearly a billion dollars and takes two years every four years to produce two palookas to run for high office? What can you say about a system that allows that money effectively to let corporate America buy politicians of so-called “both” parties to serve at its bidding for the next term of office?

What can you say about a system that openly, blatantly proves that its politicians are craven lackeys of the financial plutocracy by having an administration that could invent and a Congress that could pass a measure that robs the public treasury of a trillion dollars, for the benefit of financiers and bankers who created the mess this money is supposed to fix ? And what can you say when that open, blatant admission of corruption, vice, graft, and evil is met by no roar of outrage, no righteous uprising, but passive acceptance by the great majority of the so-called citizenry, who go on to elect a man who thoroughly supported it?

The United States has never shown itself to be more unmanageable and incompetent, more venal and degraded, more undemocratic and ungovernable, than in the last three months.

I don’t want to put words in Rushkoff’s mouth, but I’m not hearing much here that I think he’d quibble with, especially in light of Sale’s comments just last month in Counterpunch.

We’ve got two choices. One is the Lincolnesque way that Obama seems to promise: government subsidies for the larger corporations and banks (as Lincoln pushed in his day, especially for the railroads), refurbishing of the infrastructure (ditto), nationalization of the financial system and reckless printing of currency, increased centralization of the government and its hold on the economy, continuation and expansion of warfare and the war machine (all ditto). That is a continuation of the past, and it is amazing that the nation largely does not recognize it as a recipe for continued collapse. It is in fact not sustainable, nor is the environment in which it is floundering.

The other way is to rejigger, to dismantle, the entire system.

If this all seems a bit radical to you, let’s at least acknowledge the good faith of the authors, who clearly yearn for a better, more sustainable and just way of life for us all. Let’s also acknowledge that it gets harder by the minute to refute Rushkoff’s assessment of our system: “We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.”

So what went wrong? Nothing. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to.

Bernie Madoff and AIG may be the faces of the crisis as reported by the corporate media, but surely we’re all smart enough to understand that we didn’t get where we are because of them. Surely we’re intelligent enough to distinguish between the disease and a couple of symptoms.

The solution? Well, in Rushkoff’s view (shared by Sale and a great many other extremely intelligent commenters out there), Obama is making it worse, not better.

President Obama may be smarter than most of us, but he’s still attempting to rescue the very institutions that robbed us in the first place. He’s not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor. [emphasis in the original]

So, he says, “let it die.”

The Natural Trajectory of Complex Systems

In 1995, Wired’s Kevin Kelly conducted an interview with Sale, and if ever there’s been a one-on-one between two people with more divergent views of the world, I’ve never seen it. At one point, Kelly asks Sale “why are we here? What are humans here for?” The exchange tells us a lot about Sale, and also, I would suggest, about Douglas Rushkoff.

Sale: [Pauses.] To exist.
Kelly: So, what would be a measure of a successful human culture?
Sale: That it’s able to exist in harmony with the rest of nature.

Rushkoff’s closing comments don’t herd us all back into caves, but they do, very explicitly, advocate what we might call a “simpler way of life.” I suspect a lot of us find a certain allure in this, especially now, when the dire complexities of our economic meltdown weigh heavily on us.

History, though, teaches that there’s an inexorable tendency toward more complexity in societies, and if we study what has gone before we can see a pattern: growth, increasing complexity, [something goes wrong], call for return to simpler way of life. Lather, rinse, repeat. Complexity theorists believe that Newton’s second law is countered, in some contexts (biological sciences, economics, social structures, etc.) by an as-yet-unstated law explaining the drive toward ever-higher orders of organization (Waldrop). Obviously economies are one area where we have seen an unrelenting pressure toward greater complexity, and it seems an elementary enough observation that as complexity increases, our ability to fully perceive the system in question and predict its consequences diminishes. If we add the principle of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – aka the “Butterfly Effect” – to the equation (which we certainly should) our inability to comprehend, predict and control very quickly becomes functionally infinite.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t the complexity of the economic system per se (although I agree that we have to be careful about what are essentially autonomous systems). Instead, it’s the political economy serving them. Put another way, what we need isn’t necessarily a simpler way of life, it’s a more pro-human set of guiding principles for the “complex adaptive system.”

I say this because idealizing some moment in a simpler past is always easy, but a close examination of that moment in context almost never reveals it to be the utopia it’s imagined to be. If we look at Rushkoff’s pre-corporate banking moment we’ll find that we knew a lot less back then about things like medicine, for instance. On the health front – infant mortality, life expectancy, succepitibility to communicable disease, and overall quality of life – we’re a lot better off than we were. This matters because economic systems don’t exist in a vacuum – without the massively complex growth in our economy, it’s likely that many other elements of our society would be closer to 1509 than 2009, as well. The small, localized economies that Rushkoff wants to return to weren’t capable of generating the massive resource pools necessary to tackle many of the large challenges we’ve overcome in the last 500 years.

We know that complex adaptive systems operate according to fundamental bottom-up rules. That is, they are not governed (at least not effectively) by lots of tinkering and commanding from on high. Instead, there are a very few fairly simple foundational principles, and in the case of our current system one of those rules driving the behavior of capital appears to be something along the lines of “seek out and remain in close proximity to other capital.” Or maybe this rule isn’t even needed, since chaos theory has taught us enough about “attractors” to know that things accumulate – especially things like money and power.

In any case, what I think Rushkoff wants is a system where the basic rules keep wealth from accumulating in too few hands, instead seeking broader and more level distribution patterns.

If you’re thinking that somewhere in the past few paragraphs this discussion got really academic, you’re probably right, because regardless of whether Rushkoff is right in what he thinks he wants or I’m right in correcting his aim, no plan currently on the table in Washington is going to arrive us in either place. And while I do regard Mr. Obama as someone acting in good faith (by politician standards), and there’s no question that he was the best of the viable options on the ballot in November, he’s certainly the corporatist that Rushkoff accuses him of being. This shouldn’t need illustration, but if it does, ask yourself whether Obama appears committed to saving and “fixing” the existing system or, as Rushkoff advises, letting it die and replacing it with something else entirely.

And now, an honest discussion of the costs

Rushkoff understands that getting from Point A – where we are now – to Point B – his ideal economy – will be hard. He acknowledges that it will be painful.

As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place. And while it may be temporarily uncomfortable for the rich, and even temporarily devastating for the poor, it may be the fastest and least violent way to dismantle a system set in place for the benefit of 14th Century monarchs who have long since left this earth.

There are a number of moving parts in that graf, so let’s take them one at a time. And in doing so, let’s afford him the benefit of the doubt.

…the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place.

Perhaps. More on this in a minute.

And while it may be temporarily uncomfortable for the rich…

“Temporarily” is a prediction that we simply have no foundations for. I’ve been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan of late, and I recommend it highly for those engaged in predicting anything about anything.

…and even temporarily devastating for the poor…

What I just said about “temporary.” Also, we’ll talk in a second about that word “devastating,” because I’d like us to walk away from this discussion clear-eyed about exactly what it means.

…it may be the fastest and least violent way to dismantle a system set in place for the benefit of 14th Century monarchs who have long since left this earth.

Yes, it “may” be. Or it may be the surest path to the most violent civil war the planet has ever witnessed.

Like a lot of people, I oscillate back and forth between my idealist and pragmatist poles. There are moments when I can be dreamier than a doe-eyed schoolgirl and other times when my cynical side would give the shivers to Machiavelli himself. As I read Rushkoff’s modest little proposal I found myself torn. The part of me that lives in Magic Wand Land recognizes the fundamental corruption that Rushkoff describes and believes passionately that we’d be better off living in an economic system that served us all. Truth be told, “Ponzi scheme” is a mild descriptor for our current hegemony, and there are lots of people who deserve worse punishment than they’re likely to get (for that matter, worse than is allowed by the 8th Amendment).

My pragamatic side can’t get past the path from Point A to Point B, though. The only term in Rushkoff’s whole essay milder than “Ponzi scheme” is “devastating.” If we “let it die,” yes, it will be hard times for “hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers.” It will also be tough on a lot of other people. For instance:

• Millions will lose their homes. And not just the millions in trouble right now. All of them and millions more.
• When the stock market declines another 70-80%, we’ll go from a nation where pensions are at risk to one where nearly no one has any retirement cushion at all. Any money that isn’t hidden under a mattress will be gone.
• Forget universal health care – good luck finding health care period. Yes, all those doctors will still exist but their practices and hospital facilities will be history. Maybe a few will be able to get out the door with something more than their little black bags, and if you know one you may be able to barter for care should you or someone in your family fall ill. If not, pray that the doc in question is a saint and isn’t worried about having to feed a family.
• And about feeding a family – if you’re not a farmer, you’re in trouble, because the whole infrastructure is going to collapse. No more supermarket – you’ll either be a farmer or a hunter-gatherer.
• Got a gun? Because you’re going to need one. When your choice is steal or die, steal is going to win a lot of times.
• It’s hard to say whether what emerges at this point is really war, because the sides may be a little fuzzy. Organized civil war is one possibility, but heavily armed neighborhood gang warfare is another.

In other words, people are going to die. Lots of people. Children are going to starve to death in the streets. Maybe your children, but if not, almost certainly the children of someone you know. And since America is so central to the global economy, let’s try not to imagine what happens in areas that are already impoverished.

If we’re lucky enough, at some point, to emerge from this holocaust, it’s pure fantasy to assert that a “real economy” is what results. It’s at least as plausible to suggest that instead we’ll wind up with a system that makes the Bush/Cheney years look like Mother Teresa at Disneyland by comparison.

Think I’m painting a dark picture here? Fine – feel free to explain how Rushkoff’s prediction is more plausible, given what you know about wealth, power and basic human nature.

The Problem with the Future

If I’m landing on Rushkoff a bit hard, I hope it’s at least clear just how much I agree with him concerning both the problems we all face and our desire for a more sustainable, equitable economy. I also applaud him for having the courage to step up and say these things in a public forum, because let’s be honest, not everybody out there is going to be willing to hear the core message. I wonder how many readers never made it past the first sentence.

However, I don’t have a magic wand and neither does he. Perhaps he believes that the price we’d have to pay to “let it die” is worth it. Maybe he’d look hard at the possibility of hundreds of millions dying – and maybe more – and still say that in the long run that would beat the alternative. There are those who argue that our planet is horrifically overpopulated and that the best thing for both it and us (“us” being the species) would be if all but a few million people were to die.

In the long term, in the macro, perhaps these things are true. But if so, and if that is in fact the argument, then let’s acknowledge the full weight of the word “devastating,” which describes the epic brutality of what would happen in terms so tame it barely qualifies as a euphemism.

Further, let’s demonstrate a little more humility about our ability to predict the future. I’ve always been pretty utilitarian, but have had to accept that doing that which will result in the greatest good is a fine goal, but it’s so afflicted with uncertainty and unknown, uncontrollable variables that it’s an impossible course, literally.

I’m sorry that I can’t offer up a solution here, because I know that would be comforting for some (and would give others an even larger target to shoot at). All I can really do is suggest that as we address our economic system, we do so with those foundational principles I mentioned earlier in mind: does a particular action serve the interests of the hyper-wealthy or does it structure the investment so that it seeks broader distribution and geater equity?

That may be all we can do.

____________
UPDATE: Since I posted this piece I’ve been contacted by someone at Arthur Mag named Jay. A quick glance at their masthead suggests that this is probably the editor, Jay Babcock, who is writing to accuse me of shamefully misrepresenting Rushkoff’s positions. (And “shameful” is his word, not mine.) There is a follow-on to the original essay, in which Rushkoff seeks to clarify his positions, I assume because the response he’s received has convinced him that people are missing the point. I recommend this piece as well as the original.

Now, to Babcock’s charge: First, I can only respond to what Rushkoff writes. If his position is somehow different from what’s in the essay, it’s hardly my fault for “missing” it.

However, I don’t think this is what’s happening. I think Rushkoff makes his case clearly and coherently and I can’t see where I have misrepresented it at all. If I have, I quote liberally and link to the original, and am glad to amend if I’ve inaccurately portrayed the intent of the essay.

Second, I think Babcock is the one who misunderstands what’s going on, and in Rushkoff’s second article I think I see the source of the confusion. There are a couple spots that illustrate. First:

For reasons I cannot understand, people seem to think that my explaining this phenomenon somehow means I want us to go back to a hunter-gatherer stage. Or that I long nostalgically for a return to a late-middle-ages lifestyle. Or that I am somehow renouncing my earlier enthusiasm for new technology and media.

Nothing of the kind.

And here:

When I say it’s okay if the Dow Jones goes down another 70 percent, I’m not calling for an apocalypse. I’m calling for the re-balancing of the speculative economy.

In both cases Rushkoff is correct. Nothing he wrote in either place suggests that he wants to return to the wilderness, nor is he hoping for an apocalypse. Instead, he has a vision of a re-balanced economy based on genuine commerce instead of a rigged game of speculation.

My reaction above makes clear that I think what he’s suggesting would cause the bad things I describe to happen, however. Not that it was Rushkoff’s intent, but rather that it could/would be an unintended result. I didn’t spend all that time talking about uncertainty, our inability to predict and the Butterfly Effect for no reason. My point is that as much as I share his sense for what our economy ought to be, and as much as I sympathize with his assessment of our current rescue policies, I do not believe that his proposed course of action – allowing the market to die, an epic crash where it loses up to 80% of its value, etc. – will get us from Point A to Point B. Or that if it does, it will do so at anything like a tolerable cost.

This, Mr. Babcock, isn’t misrepresentation. It’s a basic disagreement over implications. If you’re going to write people to harangue them about intellectual dishonesty, you’d do well to know the difference.

I have asked Babcock to show me examples of where I have misstated Rushkoff, and as of this update said examples have not arrived. If a credible response eventually does turn up in my mailbox I’ll note it and offer a reply here. ____________
UPDATE 2: It’s Sunday and the ed. at Arthur mag, as anticipated, still hasn’t stepped up to back his charge that I was misrepresenting Rushkoff’s positions. He did, however, make time to delete my comment on the post and a follow-up comment I made a few minutes ago, so his lack of response to my request isn’t because he’s taking the weekend off.

I think I may write Rushkoff directly and invite him to respond here if he so chooses. I may even go so far as to invite him to post at S&R if he likes. He hardly needs us, but we could provide him a with a marginally larger audience and an editor who knows the difference between legitimate disagreement over outcomes and intellectual dishonesty.
____________

• Ludd, Eliza & Ned. “New Luddite: Challenging the Legitimacy of Science and Technology.” November 1995. World Wide Web. February 4 1999.
• Kelly, Kevin. “Interview With the Luddite.” Wired June 1995.
• Murphy, Gary Lawrence. “Are We the Neo-Luddites?” February 1998. World Wide Web. February 4 1999.
• Pynchon, Thomas. “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review October 28 1984: 1, 40-41.
• Robin, Michael. “Technology for the Coming Millennium: Progress, Technology and Society According to Kirpatrick Sale.” MicroTimes March 4 1996: 138-144, 282-284.
• Rybczynski, W. Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.
• Sale, Kirkpatrick. “Lessons From the Luddites: Setting Limits on Technology.” The Nation June 5 1995: 785+.
• Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

So I spent some time digging, looking for data that may tell us something about how America is constructed at our current moment in time. Specifically, I went in search of information that would reveal something about the cultural progress we’re making. I’m not the first to do something along these lines – this red state/blue state comparison from after the Bush/Kerry election was revealing, to say the least – but I think it’s important to continue tracking ourselves according to how we’re doing on the values that are most likely to drive us onward and upward.

I focused on things like basic measures of prosperity, education, the arts, and so on. My reasons are pretty simple – education, in particular, is probably the single most important determiner for achievement and social health. More educated people earn more money, engage in fewer anti-social behaviors, contribute more to the economic and tax base, drive more innovation, and so on. Education is strongly linked to any number of economic vitality measures, and a recent study “finds the number of jobs created by increasing education spending is larger than jobs lost from raising taxes to support that spending.” On the whole, there’s no desirable social quality I’m familiar with that doesn’t correlate strongly with education.

I doubt my findings are going to tell you anything you probably don’t already know, but still, maybe the pictures will be interesting.

First, a note or two on methodology. What I did, in essence, was note that we have 51 jurisdictions voting for the president – 50 states + Washington, DC. Obama carried 29, McCain 22. So I color-coded each measure according to that 29-22 break in a way that will make sense once you look at it. Blue represents the high side – the top 29 jurisdictions – and red the low 22. This is not scientific, nor is it intended to be. The data I was able to find is imperfect in places, and I wish some of it were a little more current. The break around the 29-30 mark is often based on minute differences, and so on. So take these maps for exactly what they are – rough depictions of how our nation breaks down along a variety of subjective measures.

Let’s start by having a look at the electoral results from the presidential election.

Next, let’s see how these results correlate with financial well-being. The first graphic here indicates average pay.

Per capita income rates are obviously quite similar…

…as are median household income rates.

It appears that Obama did well in states where people are comparatively better off financially.

Now, let’s compare these maps with a few that tell us about our commitment to education. First, have a look at this graph, which depicts adult population levels with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

If you’re noticing that there’s a higher concentration of grads in blue states, maybe it’s because these states tend to spend more on education.

We don’t exactly lavish our teachers with money anywhere, but again, they have it better in blue states.

I’m not exactly sure what this next map tells us, but it’s interesting to note the relationship between income levels, attendance rates and voting behaviors.

At this stage, we at least have enough evidence to suspect a relationship between academic achievement, financial success and education. We probably won’t be surprised at what happens when we begin adding arts expenditures to the equation. Here, for instance, we see state appropriations for arts organizations.

The Americans for the Arts Action Fund report card evaluations returned results that look strikingly similar.

Do you see a pattern? I know I do. And I suspect that if I had excellent data on every measure of progressive tendency I can think of, the pattern would be even stronger. Is the correlation perfect? Of course not – if you overlay all these maps, what emerges looks like this:

So no, we’re not as perfect bifurcated as we might fear. And that’s good news.

While I hate how we’ve had our country turned into a red vs. blue battleground, for now the colors illustrate something important. Here, blue stands for prosperity, educational achievement and a commitment to the pursuit of our higher selves. And on these measures, bluer is better.

Sources

• National Education Association
• US Census Bureau
• ArtsUSA.org
• Arts Action Fund.org

West:  “You may recognize this famous quote:  ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’  That’s from Karl Marx.  How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around.”

Biden:  “Are you joking?  Is … is this a joke?”

West:  “No.”

Biden:  “Is that a real question?”

West:  “That’s a real question.”

Biden, of course, being caught by surprise, could say little that would be of much use on a television screen.  He could have made the point that all taxation does, in some manner, spread wealth.  Even soldiers are paid from tax dollars and, while they earn their pay, there’s no question that they are being paid from taxpayer’s wealth.  Anyone being paid to serve taxpayers, from dog catchers to police, are part of a wealth spreading scheme of some sort.

What Biden should have done, had he not been blind-sided, was to make the point that all Obama is doing is adjusting the progressive income tax structure that was supported by none other than Adam Smith, the patron saint of free markets, and introduced to the US, originally, by Republican Abraham Lincoln.  Later, the progressive income tax was supported so heavily by Republican Teddy Roosevelt that the Constitution was amended to accommodate the income tax, and Roosevelt made it clear, in a speech delivered in 1910, why he thought a progressive tax was the right way to go.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

When it comes to redistributing wealth, good ol’ Republican Teddy was pretty clear, wasn’t he?  Maybe Teddy Roosevelt was a Marxist.

What about Republican Ronald Reagan, the modern patron saint of conservatism?  Reagan was a big supporter of the earned income credit (EIC), a distribution from wealthy taxpayers to less wealthy ones, saying it is, “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”   Both Reagan and George Bush the First increased funding for the EIC.  Are they both Marxists?

But perhaps the most effective response might have gone like something like this:

Barbara, I’m glad you asked that question, because words like “socialist” and “Marxist” are getting tossed around by people who are afraid of losing an election, hoping that these words will sway enough votes to get them into the White House, riding on a lie.

The fact is, Barbara, that if there is a socialist or Marxist in this race — and I don’t really believe there is — then it has to be Sarah Palin.

In Sarah Palin’s state of Alaska, every citizen gets a check from the government every year for doing absolutely nothing.  Not for work.  Not for anything they’ve earned.  They get that check just for breathing and living in Alaska.  Last year, that check amounted to $3,269 per taxpayer.  And all for nothing.

Do you know where Alaska gets that money?  They get it mostly from the oil companies that pump oil from the state.  More than half of Alaska’s total tax revenues come from separation taxes, which are basically taxes on oil and minerals taken from the ground.  Another 25% or so comes from corporate taxes.  Because companies are paying so much, Alaska citizens pay no income or state sales taxes.

But they do get a check generated from the wealth those big companies generate.  And there is no other state in the Union that doesn’t require either a sales or income tax from its citizens, yet gives them a check every year from money those citizens didn’t earn.

I don’t really think Sarah Palin is a Marxist, Barbara.  I think that’s a word made up by desperate people who will do anything to win – even tear our country apart by demonizing their opponents.  But if there is a Marxist in this race, Sarah Palin would have to be the one.

Maybe we could get Michele Bachmann to investigate Sarah for being un-American.

Journalists survey a mountaintop removal mine operation at Kayford Mountain, WV. Photo: Dennis Dimick

Some 470 mountaintops in central Appalachia look like Kayford. Once blanketed in hardwood forest, their ancient slopes laced with clear streams and inhabited by more species than any place outside the tropics, nearly a million acres of these mountains have become casualties of America’s addiction to cheap energy.

The coal industry has been using mountaintop removal, a radical form of strip-mining, since the 1970s. By clear-cutting the forest and blasting away the rock beneath, mining companies are able to recover shallow seams of coal and expend far less on labor than conventional mining methods involve. The millions of tons of debris left over after the coal is extracted are dumped into adjacent valleys, obliterating 1,200 streams to date and polluting hundreds more. Residents of these remote mountain hollers have been displaced by explosions, dust, flooding and intimidation. As their homes are destroyed, their unique culture and traditions, so closely tied to place, are also endangered.

I traveled with a busload of reporters on a field trip organized by the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) last week to get a close-up look at mountaintop removal mining, and to hear from residents, activists and industry personnel in the process. This series unveils what we learned, and with it, a moral challenge to reject the notion that coal taken via such means can ever be “clean,” regardless of how it is burned.

Aerial shot of Samples Mine at Kayford Mountain.
Photo: Theresa Burriss, via SouthWings Air

Most Americans don’t know about this form of environmental destruction that author Wendell Berry has called “the ecological equivalent of genocide.” Berry, 74, a resident of rural eastern Kentucky where mountaintop removal has been practiced since the 1970s, spoke Sunday at the SEJ annual meeting in Roanoke, Va., suggesting that civil disobedience may be the only means left to effectively resist this “permanent damage to the world.” The political process hasn’t worked, since state governments in coal country, like Kentucky’s, are “wholly owned subsidiaries of the coal industry,” Berry said.

And if the Bush Administration has its way, mountaintop removal mining will become even more widespread. Earlier this month the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) moved forward on a proposed change to the Stream Buffer Zone rule that would overturn the restriction in place since 1983 that forbids mining impacts within 100 feet of a stream. The proposal has now gone to the Environmental Protection Agency for approval, before being published into law. While the existing buffer zone rule has been widely disregarded by mining companies, and legal follow-up is rare or inconsequential, a change in the ruling would effectively encourage as rampant practice what is now done subversively. Comments to the EPA Administrator are being taken through Nov. 23.

Coming up in this series:

Part II: Almost heaven level: the mechanics of moving mountains
Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: Seven simple steps to save Appalachia

James Dobson and the Christian Right activists at Focus on the Family seem to have forgotten that scriptural promise.  Then again, there is a great deal of the Bible they seem to have forgotten, or chosen to blatantly ignore.  Their real “focus” is on scare tactics to frighten conservative evangelicals away from any flirtation with voting for Barack Obama, who may as well be the devil incarnate masquerading beneath a veneer of seductive charisma.

The latest instrument in this campaign of emotional intimidation is a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” [download PDF at website] produced by Focus on the Family Action, the PAC arm of Dobson’s organization.  The document is so over the top that it’s garnered the usual media buzz, which is the goal of the group’s media strategy, according to Focus senior vice president Tom Minnery.  Unfortunately, the press finds such extremism more riveting than the message of a Christian political organization like Matthew 25 that supports Obama and candidates who are likely to promote the moral values expressed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and which takes as its scriptural mandate Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40, “I tell you the truth, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Whoever crafted the 15-page letter clearly had a creative heyday while indulging paranoia at an unprecedented level.  The letter, which is as likely to amuse as to appall most Christians who are more moderate and rational than Dobson’s devotees, outlines a world so transformed in just four years that it has become unrecognizable.  Consider these 15 (and the letter contains more) “natural” outcomes if Obama is elected, most of which are fomented after a 6-3 liberal majority takes over the U.S. Supreme Court:

• Boy Scouts disband after refusing to allow homosexual scoutmasters to sleep in the same tent as young boys

• First-graders get “compulsory training in varieties of gender identity,” and parents can no longer opt out of school-based sex ed for their kids

• Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples

• Military must offer “sensitivity training” for troops forced to accept enlisted homosexuals

• The Supreme Court declares that “proselytizing speech” does not have the same protection as other speech, and Christian ministries are banned from college campuses

• Nurses who do not wish to participate in abortions will lose their jobs, and doctors who deliver babies at hospitals must perform abortions or lose their licenses

• The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn

• States are allowed to ban guns, and illegal gun-owners face stiff fines or prison terms

• Home-schoolers are forced to use state-approved curricula, and rather than do so, many emigrate to New Zealand or Australia where they may teach without restrictions

• The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq prompts a take-over by Al Qaeda, which in turn has carried out terrorist attacks on four U.S. cities

• Russia reclaims most of the old Soviet bloc, including the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria while UN & NATO fail to take action

• Latin America topples toward communism as the U.S.’s pro-Chavez policies give Venezuela more weight

• A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80

• Periodic blackouts are the norm after a moratorium is instituted on new oil drilling, nuclear plants and CO2-emitting coal power plants

• Business owners and entrepreneurs have moved overseas in droves to avoid higher taxes, with a huge loss of U.S. jobs

Wow, that’s one efficient administration.  Even when G.W. Bush had both houses of Congress, a majority of Supreme Court appointees, and two-thirds of federal judgeships in his court, the American political and cultural landscape held relatively steady.  That’s not to say that another four years of Republican control wouldn’t instigate a significant shift farther right – or that change won’t happen under Obama — but a scenario like the one Focus paints in this letter is as ridiculous as it is underhanded in its efforts to exploit the worries of religious conservatives who are beholden to fear rather than faith.

And to push the insult further, it turns out that some Christians themselves will be to blame.  As the letter’s author, “A Christian in 2012,” states in an effort to explain how all this happened, “In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a ‘change,’ and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently…[allowing] the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.”

As a result of these naïve voters’ ignorance, the country has become a pawn in the takeover by “the agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global warming activists, the agenda of the abortion rights activists, the agenda of the gun control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, [and] the agenda of far-left groups in Canada and Europe.”  Heaven help us.  That’s a lot of agendas.

Capitalizing on fear has been a mainstay in the religious right’s persuasion tactics, just as absolutist governments have perpetuated through history.  Fear has always been the most powerful weapon tyrants have utilized to engineer consent to power, or to mobilize people into attacking other nations, races, ethnic groups or cultures. It is always fear that precedes fascism.  And it is ironic that in trumpeting the threats to freedom posed by this litany of “leftist” agendas, Focus on the Family and its ilk would seek to replace existing freedoms with a form of government that leans dangerously toward theocracy.

But the greater irony is that the “gospel” of Jesus translates to “good news,” not “be afraid.”  The Book of Matthew tells the story of the good news Jesus brings to the poor, the grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, and the peacemakers.  It is these, the scriptures say, who will be blessed, comforted, satisfied, and who shall see God.

Not once does the Jesus of the New Testament express concern over homosexuality as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God.  Rather – as is made clear in the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible critiquing the love of money – it is being consumed with materialism and one’s own well-being at the ignorance and expense of others.

In Matthew 25:42-45, Jesus says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me no meat.  I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.  I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.  Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto you?  He answered them, saying, I tell you the truth: inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

Imagine a letter from 2012 in which genuine Christian values – an agenda for “the least of these” – were to prevail.  Now that would be a transformed world.  In the meantime, Dobson and his supporters would do well to heed the words of David in the Psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd, whom shall I fear?”  Indeed, the most frequently expressed command in the Bible is “be not afraid “ or “do not fear.”  Focus on the Family’s political agenda is thus neither Christian, nor right.

When you pay for groceries with a credit card, you are making such a promise. You are declaring that, through the power of your effort, you will create sufficient value during the month ahead to earn an income. You do not earn your salary merely by showing up at a place of work. You earn it by applying your skill and time to performing a task that creates value. The more of the intellect and learning you bring to bear on that task, then (hopefully) the greater that pay-check.

Only once you have earned that money can you pay off the debts — the promissory notes — that you incurred. You, through your behaviour, have brought new value and new cash into the world.

Only with this ability to borrow money that does not yet exist can we overcome the inertia of needing cash to create new value. Without being able to borrow we are limited by what we already have. Debt creates real opportunities for equality.

Without debt, the impoverished could not better themselves. The only educated people would be those who are fortunate enough to have parents with sufficient cash to pay for their educations. Students who borrow money in order to improve their skills through an education are doing so in the knowledge that the value of their future work will be so much greater than the value of their current work that it will pay for both the debt, and their future lifestyle.

The average person would never be able to afford their own home without the opportunities that debt offers them. There are few who could afford, from a monthly salary, to pay for both a large rent and sufficient savings to eventually buy a house for cash. A loan allows you to live in the house you don’t yet own on the promise that you will eventually pay off the debt required to buy it.

When an individual consistently fails to pay back their debts — the promises they made about the value of their work — then they will lose the confidence of lenders and will be denied future opportunities to borrow.

When a lender consistently fails to make wise decisions about who may borrow then they lose the confidence of those who, in turn, have pooled their cash to lend to the lender to lend to another. Then all those promises — the confidence in the value of the future — collapses in one terrible mess.

Cash doesn’t require much from people who exchange it for goods. No one will question the authenticity of the motives behind a person with physical cash in hand. Dictators and tyrants go on shopping trips with as much aplomb as saints and benefactors.

Debt is different. It requires a moral code between the lender and the borrower. There has to be a degree of trust and honesty between them. If the borrower genuinely intends to fulfil on their promise, if the lender genuinely believes that the loan is within the grasp of the borrower to repay, then there can be a transaction. If the borrower suffers a misfortune then such a relationship must be renegotiated. The process of borrowing is founded on the honesty and integrity of the parties to the transaction.

The credit crunch was caused by a weakening of that morality; of lenders and borrowers who assumed that rapidly rising house prices would keep rocketing effortlessly upwards without any effort of their own. Lenders failed to check the abilities of borrowers to repay if the markets turned. Borrowers failed to remember that they will have to repay if the rising market does not.

Whatever else may come of the disasters playing out in the credit markets today, future value, and opportunities for the poor to invest in themselves and create meaningful wealth, will only come about from a robust and healthy credit market.

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Pope

Pope Benedict XVI has already declared where he stands in the world of sophisticated financial instruments. “The pursuit of money and success is pointless,” he said at a meeting of bishops in Rome at the beginning of October. “The word of God,” he said, “is the foundation of everything, it is true reality. And in order to be realists, we must count on this reality. We must change our ideas that the material, solid things, that which can be touched, is the more solid and more secure reality. … We see this today in the collapse of the major banks: this money is disappearing, it is nothing. … Only the word of God is the foundation of all reality, enduring like the sky, and even more than the sky, is reality. We must therefore change our concept of realism. The realist is the one who recognizes in the Word of God, in this apparently feeble reality, the foundation of everything. The realist is the one who builds his life on this foundation that remains forever.”

Those of us who are realists find this overt distortion of the definitions of reality disturbing. The claim that the immeasurable, improvable and unexplainable is a solid foundation for proof and reality is a step towards superstition and the tyranny of those who claim to have some special connection to the unreal over those who do not.

The Catholic Church has been rocked by its own scandals before. In 1498, the pope was Rodrigo Borgia, reigning as Pope Alexander VI. He had various children by various mistresses, including Cesare who was the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince, and a daughter, Lucrezia. And Lucrezia had a child. In 1501, the Pope acknowledged paternity of what would be known as the Infans Romanus. However, Lucrezia was never sure which of her various lovers had sired the child. Lovers who included both her father and her brother, Cesare.

This had little impact on the moral authority of the pope to dispense his version of justice, and to demand that those accused of infractions buy forgiveness from the church.

Psalm 104:5 says, “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.”

“Eppur si muove,” said Galileo after his trial. “And yet it moves.” In 1633, over 100 years after Magellan had proven decisively that the earth was indeed round (despite papal assurances to the contrary), Galileo stood trial for promoting the theories of Copernicus, that the earth moved as part of a larger universe of which it was not the solid centre.

On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II formally recanted Galileo’s finding of guilt by the church and recognised that the earth does, indeed, move.

Despite all this collectivised and organised ignorance, the Catholic Church has not voted itself out of existence or been disgraced beyond return. Even the very real sex abuse cases levied against the organisation has done little to discredit the pope’s continual determination to act as an arbiter of morality.

Yet, that moral authority is supposedly sufficient for the pope to declare that it is satisfactory to stop making money.

If we do so, how else are we to improve the lives of the poor? Oh, that’s right, the meek shall inherit the world and so it is sufficient to keep the poor as submissive slaves to the awfulness of their lives, as long as it also keeps them submissive to the will of the church.

The requirement of Reason over Faith

Democracy, too, has had its share of abuses. Tyrants from Mussolini to Mugabe have traded slim parliamentary majorities into de facto rights to rule indefinitely. Military leaders, as occasionally the only possessors of guns, often trade this asymmetry into a snatch at power during political uncertainty. Pakistan, Thailand, Burma and even tiny Fiji are all dominated by their armies.

Across the world people continue to protest and die for the right to self-determination and self-expression. Even an experience of imperfect democracies, as in much of Africa, does not seem to put people off demanding democracy.

This too is the battle of reason over faith.

The belief that a single leader can have both the knowledge and moral authority to know and determine everything that every individual may need requires a concerted act of faith. It requires faith to believe that a central collective can manage the diverse and complex network of interrelationships between individuals and production. It requires that a leader who, after making a call to unreality, be trusted because of this call for faith rather than because he has reasoned his actions.

But democracy means that people approach each other as equals, with reason determining a mechanism for interacting and settling disagreements.

Capitalism is also an act of reason. All collective organisations require that one have faith in the leadership who claim to represent that collective. That they do not need to be directly answerable through voting or purchasing behaviour but that we take on faith our ability to trust them, because they act in the collective’s name.

Capitalism says that I buy the things I want; that I trade value for value. If you defraud me in some way, I make a call to reason through courts that are themselves independent and reasonable. And the act of offering credit within a capitalist system offers the ability for those who do not yet have cash and wealth and prestige to earn their way into it by leaping ahead of their immediate means.

Ending poverty through mechanisms other than free trade and debt instruments requires an act of faith. Where will the wealth come from to end starvation and deprivation? Trust me.

So even though credit is now difficult to come by; even though trust between institutions and individuals has weakened, there is still only one reasonable way for us to create a just and equitable economic system.

Credit must again provide an opportunity where a moral promise about the future becomes a valid and valued present benefit.

Back from Bamyan; the sewing program; village dominance

by Connor O’Steen

I have now been on the road between Kabul and Bamyan for a total of 32 hours, and it’s safe to say that that’s 32 hours too many for my taste. The road is roughly the quality of a rural mountain road in the United States, but the fact that it feels endless makes it much worse. Going to Bamyan, you cross a number of mountain ranges with valleys nestled between, and beyond each steep ridge I hold out the hope that the next section will be smoother. This, of course, just makes it more frustrating when the sections get progressively rougher, and I have to tighten my white-knuckled grip on the car’s overhead handles. The up and down turbulence is unsurprising, it’s the occasional side to side rocking that’s hard to stomach. This last ride back to Kabul was made worse by the presence of a dog and her eight puppies in our trunk. Just like in Kabul, we take in dogs in our regional offices, and through gross oversight one of them was left unspayed. She also acquired the skill of escaping the compound. 2+2= eight puppies to take care of.

For obvious reasons, no one in the trunk was happy (by extension, no one in the car was happy): not the endlessly mewling puppies with their eyes still closed, and not the mother who tried to jump into the backseat every 15 minutes or so. Every 15 minutes, for eight hours, I fought a running battle with this dog, shoving her back into the trunk every time she tried to jump out. The combination of this with the bumpy road, the crying puppies, and the Dari music blasting from the radio only intensified the fight. By the end of the trip I had bite marks and scratch marks up and down my arms, and had completely lost my temper. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been that angry and upset.

Other than this, we had a successful but difficult trip to Bamyan. We spent all our time working in Jawzareen valley, starting a women’s sewing program and a scholarship program for exceptionally poor and disadvantaged families. Men from the villages and I lugged heavy sewing machines up hills and across rivers, laying them (more or less) gently in various houses where the program would be conducted. Right around this time, the difficulties began.

I should backtrack: living in villages here makes people very hard, very fast. You can see the stages of development in the children. From 0-3 years old, children don’t have responsibilities and they run or crawl around with smiles on their faces, chasing livestock. From about 4-9, you see a kind of early bitterness. It’s something that I see in their eyes and in the way they frown, almost like they’re asking, “Is this it? Is my life going to be filled with herding animals and working the fields?” By around 10, that bitterness has given way to acceptance, people are engaged with you but they seem calmer and almost resigned. Working hard from sunrise to sunset has become second nature, and the consequences of not playing along are demonstrably dire.

Although I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve been told that villagers will casually mention which child, or whose family, froze to death the previous winter because they couldn’t afford heating material. It’s something we don’t often think about, but we have a tremendous safety net in the United States. Our government may be all right with the very poor being very uncomfortable and very hungry, but (for the most part, of course) we as a country aren’t all right with people dying from starvation or exposure. We have food stamps, homeless shelters, rehab clinics, and even credit cards for when someone needs to stretch out the money. In Afghanistan, none of that exists. If your parents die, or more commonly if one of your parents die and the other one remarries and leaves you behind, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be taken in by an uncle. If not, you fend for yourself or you don’t make it through the winter. We work in a series of villages about a one-hour drive out of Bamyan. If the situation is this unforgiving here, the interior villages that are more isolated from NGO and government programs are suffering more.

So, people are very hard, because kindness isn’t a contributing factor to survival. In we come with our limited number of sewing machines, and the problems spring up. As we sat in a small room sipping green tea and sucking on small, sweet pieces of candy, the women from Urgash came in threes and fours and filled the space. Soon they were shouting, really shouting, at our shell-shocked program coordinator, Aisha. Aisha valiantly held her ground, and eventually we left a more-or-less pacified crowd. I only got the full story later that night: the elder woman of the village (all of the elders are relatively very wealthy) showed up at the meeting, and demanded that four of the eight sewing machines be given to her and her family. She said that if we refused to give her these machines, she would make sure that no one used them. The other women in the room were clearly afraid of this woman. The 14 year old girl, Rukiya, who was hosting the machines in her house, was visibly shaking. Aisha responded to this by threatening to take all of the machines back, and really this was the only step she could take. If she had attempted to reach a compromise with the elder, the program would’ve been completely out of her hands. Everyone would boss her around if she didn’t hold her ground.

Starting the sewing machine project was a good lesson in the raw and unabashed power imbalance in Jawzareen. The elder in Urgash was one example, the mullah in Sar-e-Jawzari is another. As we came out of the sewing house in the latter village, we were confronted by three men. Again, there was an angry exchange in Dari and they stormed off. I found out later that they had come from the local mullah, who told them that it was haram to accept money or help from infidels, and that we were “polluting” the area with our sewing machines. Aisha responded by saying that this was “Taliban talk,” a clever but potentially volatile statement. Claiming that anyone is like the Taliban in a Hazara area, where most people have lost at least one family member to the Taliban, is bound to make some angry. Aisha was unafraid, “I know the Quran,” she said. “Let him come here and tell me where it says that in the Quran.”

And of course, she was right. It isn’t in the Quran, and if the mullah actually knows Arabic and can read it in addition to reciting it (a slim chance, for mullahs in rural areas), then he knows that too. In fact, his statements had nothing to do with Islam, and had everything to do with power. The mullah is a very wealthy and influential man.  By bringing in our programs and providing a source of income for others, we undermine his standing in the village. Islam in this scenario, like many other religions at many other times, serves a means to a self-serving end. He attempted to maintain his own position by making the villagers feel morally ashamed of working with us. I’m happy to report that, at least for the time being, his efforts haven’t been successful.

What was most shocking about this for me wasn’t that it occurred. I’m not so gullible as to believe that the villages in Jawzareen are one big happy socialist Utopia. The surprising thing is that no one in positions of power felt the need to justify their own underhanded attempts at acquisition. What I had expected was justification: “We work harder than they do, that’s why we’re richer,” or, “Their family is no good,” or, “They’ll only waste the money.” But the reason didn’t seem to interest anyone. The elder woman asked for machines because she wanted them; she made no claim that she deserved them more than the other girls (all of whom were the sole providers for their families), she just expected them as the spoils of her social position. The mullah didn’t care what benefit came from our program; he was only interested in how we might affect him.

In an ideal Afghan village (so I’m told), the elders and the leaders look out for everyone. If people are destitute, they are cared for, if someone is hurt or abandoned, he or she is supported. I wonder if this society ever existed, if war has destroyed it, or if it was always just a pleasant fantasy.

Past all the blackness of power and who has it, we supported a lot of people who needed it. Five years ago, Habiba’s father died and her mother remarried and left the children on their own. Habiba, who doesn’t know her exact age but is probably 14 or 15, has since taken care of her four brothers and sisters. She is the only one to provide an income for her family, and she’s now hosting our sewing program in her house and receiving a scholarship for starting her own business. Habiba’s story isn’t rare; it’s actually exceptionally common. Of all the women and girls enrolled in the sewing and scholarship program, nearly all of them have lost or been abandoned by both parents, and are now the heads of their households. A few are enrolled because their parents are too old or disabled to work.

This description of the villages might strike some as Hobbesian, and I had some dark moments where I fantasized about preaching the truth of Leviathan from a soapbox, but it’s more complicated than that. I think we would all, deep down, like to feel that, if situations took a turn for the worse, it would illuminate something indomitable and beautiful in us. That, if faced with crisis, we would give our support to those who couldn’t support themselves. Or, to dig up the old question: if you’re a soldier and a commanding officer tells you to open fire on innocent people or be shot for insubordination, what would you do? I think we’d all like to say that we’d sacrifice ourselves for the standards we believe in.

But who knows, if things were a little different, I might be the one fighting over a sewing machine, and the old woman might be looking at me, feeling a mixture of sadness and disappointment.

Ed. note:  You can read more about Connor O’Steen’s experiences in Afghanistan in his prior installments, linked below.  Also, check out Russ Wellen’s take on educating engineers instead of terrorists.]

Installment 1: Dogs, generals and orphans

Installment 2: The hard-working orphans of Chaghcharan

Installment 3: Nasim’s story: making and unmaking terrorists

Installment 4:  Afghanistan, Ghowr Province: an opium village

Installment 5:  Replying to questions and local democracy in Jawzareen

Installment 6:  Having visions with Mohammed

Installment 7: Poisoning dogs; orphan teamwork; getting poisoned

What to do: blow myself up or study engineering at Caltech?

Charlie Cannon imagines a world where our bridges, electricity transmission lines, sewer systems, etc. aren’t invisible externalities we only care about when they abruptly fail. He imagines opportunity where others see only a financial black hole. With all the infrastructure that is close to the end of its useful lifetime, the United States will have no choice but replace bridges, dams, roads, water mains, and so on. And with the need for tens of billions of dollars of public investment over the next several decades, Cannon thinks that we have the chance to rebuild infrastructure in sustainable ways. What that means for him is increased efficiency or modeling our infrastructure off natural systems. But Cannon also thinks that the first step is rethinking the relationships that have, in the past, led to confrontations between environmentalists, environmental justice activists, public and municipal utilities, developers, and elected officials. Cannon proposes that the best way to do that is to design the infrastructure from the very beginning with the awareness of all the interested parties and how they are affected by now included externalities.

Jonathan Greenblatt imagines the end of the need for corporate social responsibility because every corporation has so totally internalized the need to be responsible corporations that it underlies everything they do. Greenblatt also imagines that the markets can be used to create good, to generate businesses who focus on the long term instead of short term profits, and that entrepreneurs can create products that are fundamentally “rooted in authenticity”, that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability throughout their entire supply chain, that are disruptive to the existing markets, and that are transparent to the public and others. The best companies are this already, but most aren’t even remotely close. But perhaps the most imaginative suggestion that Greenblatt had was that the public, corporations, government entities, and non-profits work together in a bottom-up collaborative fashion instead of the failing top down, paternalistic paradigm.

Majora Carter, on the other hand, has dared to imagine something that is arguably even more impressive than Greenblatt’s paradigm shift. Carter imagines a world where sustainability is the foundation, not the penthouse. Instead, she imagines a world where green jobs help solve unemployment, where awareness of the supposed externalities of places like the South Bronx leads to cleaner neighborhoods and thus fewer poisons messing with our bodies and minds. Essentially, Carter imagines sustainabilty as the foundation upon which a building of opportunity will be constructed.

David Orr’s imagination focuses on education and how to fix the problems of education instead of the problems in education. He wants education to be the source of a “more rational rationality, a more scientific science” than the present, Enlightenment-based education system. He sees an education system so sick that mere antibiotics can’t help it anymore, but that major surgery is required to save the patient. Orr imagines an educational system that is inclusive instead of riven by divisive battles over useless testing. But perhaps most importantly, he understands that solving global heating requires new ideas and that new ideas are the domain of education.

Bill Becker imagines a new economy to replace the old, failing carbon-based economy. He imagines that the new economy can be redefined from mere exchange of goods and services to include every way we relate to each other and the natural world. And he believes that we are finally reaching an understanding of the unpleasant realities of peak oil, the rising costs of centralized industrial energy contrasted with the falling prices for distributed renewable energy, the global nature of pollution, the long-term security implications of protecting our carbon energy sources and producers, and humanity’s interconnectedness with the rest of the Earth’s biosphere.

The person who perhaps understands imagination the best is Paul Miller, aka artist DJ Spooky, imagines the United States not struck down by global heating as Ozymandius was by the desert. He imagines a world where the commons of our air, water, and earth are no longer subject to tragedy, and where the oil age is ended before we run out of oil. And perhaps his greatest feat of imagination is his ability to imagine that people like his fellow panelists have sufficient imagination themselves to balance technology, development, economy, and the commons in a way that is sustainable, that creates opportunities where none existed before, and where ideological statements like Reagan’s removal of the solar panels from the roof of the White House are replaced by rational actions.

Where are the homeless?

Before the DNC, there were rumors flying around that the homeless would be rounded up and carted away to some other part of the city, or given money for a meal and a bus ticket out of Denver entirely, or even arrested and held for a week on trumped-up charges that would be conveniently dropped Friday or Saturday after the election. But no-one knew for sure. According to the Voice article “Denver Won’t Hide Homeless for the DNC”, New York city police issued “quality of life” tickets in advance of the 2004 convention, and Denver’s homeless were concerned that the same thing would happen here. The article quoted Denver’s Road Home project manager Jamie Van Leeuwen as saying that the DNC would be largely business as usual for homeless shelters, with a few “extending hours or involving the homeless in politics related activities.” And Commander Deborah Dilley, the Denver Police Department’s downtown district commander said in the article that “the homeless won’t be unfairly targeted by any law enforcement during the DNC.”

So where are they?

Most of Denver’s homeless live in the public spaces of downtown and LoDo, panhandle along the 16th Street Mall and the Cherry Creek Path, and sleep in the large parks and public space that have been taken over or blocked off by the DNC, various security forces, and protesters. But they’re all gone. I’ve been getting into downtown between 7 and 8 AM since Monday, walking from one end of downtown to the other, and the only possible homeless people I’ve seen all week were on Sunday up on Capitol Hill, well outside the main areas where the homeless would congregate. And you’d think that, with such a huge influx of people and wealth, panhandlers would be all over the place trying to get as much money from the delegates, press, staff, and politicians as they possibly could. But they aren’t there. They’re not just invisible, they’re actually gone.

I’ve heard rumors that the homeless were given movie tickets during the day to keep them off the streets. But fellow Scrogue Edmundo Rocha, who used as a homeless specialist for the Harris County Community Development Department says that most cities do exactly what DPD Commander Dilley and Van Leeuwen said they weren’t going to do – they round up the homeless and either detain them at an undisclosed detention center, or they ship them off to economically depressed suburbs and away from the throngs of visitors like all of those attending the DNC.

I’ve asked my fellow Scrogues if they’ve seen any homeless, and the only one of us who has seen more than one or two is Edmundo.

It’s terrible thing to be picked up and hauled away, even temporarily, for the “crime” of not being able to afford a home. But they’re not here in downtown Denver, so they have to have gone somewhere. If you know where they’ve gone, if you’ve talked to some of the sudden influx of homeless in your area and they’re from Denver, let us know. We’d like to know who to point a finger at and accuse of caring more for public appearances during the DNC than for the homeless of Denver.

For entrepreneur Jonathan Greenblatt, many of the externalities are embodied in the rise of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement. If you’re unfamiliar with CSR, the basic idea is that corporations have a responsibility to do more than maximize short term shareholder value and quarterly dividends. Instead, businesses also have a duty to be good corporate citizens with respect to their communities and the the environment. CSR states generally that businesses should work to the betterment of their employees and the communities, should minimize their negative impact on the world, and should publicize how well they’re doing on these issues as much as they publicize their quarterly earnings. Unfortunately, environmental stewardship and community involvement were considered externalities, and in fact are still considered such by many, if not most, major businesses around the world. Entire organizations exist for the express purpose of opposing the growing trend in business toward CSR, and in too many cases, CSR is a public relations ploy rather than a serious attempt to internalize the CSR externalities. Greenblatt, however, wants CSR to fade away into obscurity, not because it’s unimportant, but rather because every business in the world does all its business in a financially, environmentally, and socially responsible fashion.

Activist Majora Carter didn’t use the term “externality” in her monologue, but her entire reason for being an activist is related to the externalities of others. Carter is an activist in one of the most polluted areas of New York, the South Bronx, and has worked with a variety of green organizations (and founded Sustainable South Bronx) in order to improve poor communities that, through the supposed externalities of others, are subject to air, water, and ground pollution. One of Carter’s main points during the congress was that progress for the masses or the wealthy has always resulted in the sacrifice of something, or more likely someone, else. And in every case, those sacrifices – of the people in the S. Bronx who contend with the pollution of four power plants and thousands of trash trucks every day, of the people in Appalachia who are dealing with the resulting pollution from mountaintop removal coal mining – were considered externalities at some point. Or still are.

Previous: Part 1 – Awareness
Next: Part 3 – Imagination

Periander, however, understood Thrasybulus’ actions. He realised that he had been advising him to kill outstanding citizens, and from then on he treated his people with unremitting brutality.

Herodotus, Histories

What Herodotus knew in 440BC, some 2,500 years ago, was this: opportunity is set on the margin. It is the historical power to choose either astonishing innovation, or “unremitting brutality”.

Consider the power of the margin. Say the average inter-city passenger airplane can carry a maximum of 150 passengers. Now, they may fly full at peak times, but they don’t at others, so the airline will set themselves a target of 85% occupancy. Plus, they’ll want a 15% profit (at least) on their capital.

This means that the airline doesn’t begin to make a profit until the 109th person gets on board. Everyone is important, but a plane that flies with only 108 people on board runs at a loss.

These subtle marginal effects can rock markets, bankrupt companies, and destroy nations.

The inequality of nations

Governments have fixed costs for fulfilling their obligations for all the things they promise to do. Unlike businesses, they don’t charge directly for their services. You don’t pay a road surcharge to drive in your area, any more than you pay a monthly subscription to the local police.

The reason for this is one of “fairness”; everyone benefits from these services, but not everyone can afford to pay for them. So governments have introduced a system of charges known as regressive taxation. This means that the wealthiest are charged more, and the poorest are charged less.

The balance of where to place taxes, and how to weight the different groups’ obligations, is the source of much debate and political intrigue.

Consider: rich people spend a smaller proportion of their money on food and clothing, but more of their money on big houses, flashy cars and other obvious markers of wealth. You could tax everyone the same proportion of their incomes and then charge targeted consumption taxes on specific products.

But consumption taxes are unpopular, difficult to enforce and can result in peculiar avoidance behaviour.

In 1662 Charles II, king of England, imposed a hearth tax on his island nation. Henceforth every household would have to pay two shillings per year, per chimney. It was designed to be fair, in that the wealthy had more chimneys and should, therefore, pay more.

It was an extremely unpopular tax, not least because tax inspectors had to come into people’s homes to inspect. Almost immediately people began to avoid the tax by bricking up their chimneys. In 1684 a fire broke out, destroying 20 houses and killing four people in Oxfordshire, after a baker broke through from her stove into a neighbour’s chimney in order to avoid the tax.

In 1689 the tax was repealed and replaced with one that was even sillier; a window tax. People avoided it by, as expected, bricking up their windows. It was even more unpopular being seen as a tax on “light and air”. It may, or may not, have been the origin of the phrase “daylight robbery”.

The point is that people are not mindless automatons. They will react to protect themselves from silly and victimising pieces of legislation.

A careful politician may consider it an equitable tax, but, if it is at all targeted, then those within the target zone will try to avoid it.

Tax one, tax all

When you select against a particular group, then the most ambitious and creative people within that group move. Sometimes they hide out within society by simply quashing the thing that makes them a target. Sometimes they go somewhere else where they feel more accepted.

So, we punish murderers, not to redress the harm they have done, but to frighten other potential murderers into thinking a bit more deeply before committing a murder. And Gary Glitter, a paedophile convicted in the UK, goes to Vietnam in the hopes that he won’t be prosecuted there.

But say you started punishing people for things that are not necessarily harmful, perhaps even beneficial? Racial, religious, gender or sexual orientation laws also act to select for, or against particular groups.

South Africa’s Apartheid laws denied dark-skinned citizens not only the right to vote, but also to work. This allowed the minority of light-skinned South Africans to dominate and control a majority of dark-skinned fellow citizens. Following Thrasybulus’ instructions, the minority leadership sought out and punished outstanding individuals from amongst the dark-skinned citizens. But this also meant that talented doctors, engineers and scientists – who just happened to be dark-skinned – either didn’t work at all, or emigrated and made their skills available to other nations.

Promoting people based on their skin-colour also meant that those in the most responsible positions frequently lacked the ability to perform their jobs. Inadequacy became the expected performance level.

When South Africa eventually discarded Apartheid, the economy was shattered and dominated by idiots.

Any type of bias levied against a particular segment of the population goes on to affect the entire population. In the case of preventing murderers and rapists from being able to operate, this is a bias that society is probably very happy with. In the case of preventing talented surgeons from pursuing their craft because they happen to be female, then the whole of society may not be so happy with the arrangement.

A bias is a form of tax. Some taxes we’re happy to pay; other taxes may please a particular subgroup, but leave the whole of society worse off.

Now consider how much excluding outstanding individuals can hurt a society when marginal effects come into play.

Marginal bias, general effect

Say that a country is able to manage its health needs if it has more than 1.40 doctors per 1,000 people in its population. Turkey has 1.37, about 116,000 doctors. Many of these are women, and many of these women are devout Muslims. At present, wearing a head-scarf, a traditional sign of piety amongst Muslim women, is illegal. So, some women who are pious and doctors made a choice to remove their scarves in order to continue working, some stopped working altogether, and some emigrated to countries where they can be doctors and wear a scarf.

It is the same situation as the airline. All the doctors are equally important, but only a small number need to stop working for all the rest to be unable to meet the demand. In other words, a discriminatory law punishes a small number of people for their beliefs but denies an entire nation good healthcare.

This can work the other way round as well. The Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, was determined that his small island nation would excel at something. He chose public health and subsidised the training of a vast number of doctors. There are now almost six doctors per 1,000 people in Cuba.

This may sound like a good thing but, if you’re a doctor, it’s a bit of a disaster. A society may suffer if it has too few doctors but, once it hits the appropriate level, any extra doctors merely increase supply without adding to demand. The only way doctors can get sufficient business is to discount their prices. In Cuba, doctors are plentiful but poorly paid.

Cuba, poor in so much, has resolved this conflict by becoming probably the only nation to deliberately export doctors on work contracts to other nations in order to purchase foreign currency.

Perverse, too, is promoting individuals based on characteristics that have nothing to do with their performance. You lower the standard for everyone, as in South Africa under Apartheid where people were hired on the basis of being light-skinned and male.

Sometimes the desire to extend a product or service beyond reason results in harm to all. Sub-prime lending is just such an example. It seemed like a reasonable set of assumptions. Most people don’t default on their loans, no matter how onerous they may be. Insurance works on a similar principle; I don’t know which person is going to have their car stolen, but most people manage to get through a year without incident. Work out the base probability of disaster and charge everyone sufficient to cover the disaster, plus a bit extra for your trouble. Hence, insurance.

Very smart people built mathematical models to calculate the cost of sub-prime default, given certain assumptions. Loans were bundled together, discounted for the expected defaults, and sold to hedge funds who would carry the risk of failure if the assumptions were wrong.

This was quite a bit of money and so the hedge funds borrowed the money they used to buy the sub-prime bundles. They borrowed this from banks who, themselves, were selling sub-prime bundles. Everything relied on those assumptions.

It didn’t need everyone to bail on paying their mortgages back, it just needed to happen on the margin. And then all hell broke loose.

The balancing act and the perversity of incentives

So, here we are, trying to design an equitable society that gives those who lack ostensible advantages a shot at improving themselves, while tapping those who got a lot more advantages to pay for it.

Marginal effects mean that, if we don’t allow the most disadvantaged a shot at success, they may take their potential talents elsewhere as economic migrants. Or, some may decide that, since society has failed them, society owes them, and steal what they want.

On the other end, though, if we tax the wealthy too much, they could simply take their cash and go elsewhere, as tax exiles. Or, they may decide not to produce any more wealth than they have to for themselves.

The balance is critical. Get the balance wrong and you introduce asymmetries.

For instance, when the US Forest Service manages an area of environmental value purely for recreational purposes, they have to send that money directly to the Treasury. When they licence an area for logging, they get to keep a portion of that revenue, plus they get cash from Congress to manage the land afterwards.

If the US Forest Service wants to make enough money to carry out its functions, it can only do so by logging the forests it is supposed to be looking after.

This is a perverse incentive. There are lots of them in the average economy.

Consider autoworkers. The rise of manufacturing in Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific has resulted in a falling cost of motor vehicles as companies locate their factories in low-cost production centres. The prices of cars are falling and old manufacturing hubs in the US, Germany and the UK are feeling the pressure.

Both workers and investors stand to lose what they have, their livelihoods. Arguably, it is the owners of these businesses fault. They should have invested in more efficient, lean manufacturing systems, designed more interesting vehicles, or come up with a better strategy.

That shareholders should lose their investments is just-desserts and a powerful part of the capitalist system which ensures that cash should follow value. However, it’s pretty unfair on the workers, who were just doing what they were told.

There are many ways you could help these workers. The most common is to raise tariffs on imports and to pass a subsidy to the manufacturer to allow them to improve their profits without raising their prices too much.

However, this is a distortion. There are plenty of people who work in the auto industry who don’t actually make cars. There are people who import them, have showrooms, service and repair them, or simply write about them. None of these people are affected in any way by the collapse of local manufacturing. However, all of them and every car buyer, is affected by higher prices.

Plus, a company that is protected from competition is also protected from innovation. Forget fuel efficiency or environmental compliance.

In exchange for protecting a handful of jobs, the entire nation has to suffer.

Worse, the benefit doesn’t even go to the workers, who merely get to keep their jobs. Tax money is channelled directly to shareholders who no longer have to work for their money.

A far better response is to admit that the industry is no longer competitive, tell the shareholders to get shafted, and bail out the employees through income support and reskilling.

The marginal effects also come into play. The protection of a small number of businesses deprives the state of using that revenue to pay for other things that may have a significant return on investment. It deprives investors in other industries of a level competitive environment and so denies citizens of their opportunity to benefit from innovation and price drops.

Protecting a few hurts a lot of people and also chases the other few innovators out of the market, since there is no place for them.

The leverage of innovators

Ever wondered what would have happened if Bill Gates had decided to set up in Canada instead of the US? Or if Russia had tried informed capitalism instead of Communism?

When the Berlin Wall came down, the real cost of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” became apparent. Those with the most ability left, leaving everyone getting only as they could produce. The society balanced. You really can only consume as much as you can produce. Any extra comes from the margins.

As with all marginal effects, any society needs a certain number of innovators just to break even. The variance triggers booms or busts.

Innovators have no more votes than does anyone else in their nations, yet they have disproportionate impacts on their societies. Countries that can attract the best and the brightest do better than those who chase them away.

Subsidies and tariffs aimed at the few distort markets in outlandish ways. Subsidies to oil producers push entire economies to rely on cheap oil at the expense of, seemingly, more expensive alternatives. Not costing in the impact of pollution leads to more pollution.

The next time a politician promises you a benefit that you don’t have to pay for, ask yourself who it is costing and how they may react. And not just now, but into the future. No matter how much benefit you may feel that you will derive, you have to remember that the others who must pay for it are not slaves. They may shut-down or go elsewhere.

In the case of murderers, that may make you quite happy. But it if it results in services denied, jobs not created, opportunities foregone, or a future that never happens, then that sounds like a costly bargain.

Denver is known for its beautiful views. One only need look to the west to see its majestic mountainous silhouette. Inspires you want to get outside and do something, doesn’t it? Traveling can take a toll on the waistline, so while you visit, don’t forget your exercise regimen.

For the socially mindful, there’s a fun event that benefits the homeless while helping you stay on track with your workout. You are invited to join us for the 3rd annual ERACE Homelessness 10K/5K Run and 2K Fun Walk at Denver’s historic City Park on Saturday, August 23rd. City Park is conveniently located right in Denver (north 23rd Ave. and east Colorado Blvd cross streets). The event will include music, a massage tent, prizes for the top runners, and more.

All proceeds benefit Senior Support Services, a non-profit agency serving low income and homeless seniors. The agency has been in existence since 1976 and is solely geared toward the needs of this often-overlooked population. Senior Support provides three meals a day, a safe day shelter, and case management for seniors in need. Many find camaraderie in the company of peers, while getting the help they need to live independently and with dignity. Senior Support serves up to 200 seniors daily. Some of the seniors benefiting will be at the race, cheering the runners on.

Just east of downtown, City Park is one of Denver’s largest parks. Among its abundant attractions, the park contains the Museum of Nature and Science, the Denver Zoo, Ferrill and Duck Lakes, paddleboat rentals, fountains, historic memorials, and flower gardens. City Park’s golf course lies just to the north of the park. The City Park area is a popular venue with both residents and visitors, sporting an array of trendy restaurants and stores.

If you go:

• Cost is $25 in advance, $30 on race day and includes a race t-shirt.
• Prizes will be awarded to the top men and women racers, and top racers by age group.
• Registration and check in begins at 8AM Saturday, August 23, 2008. The race begins at 9AM, and the winner’s circle commences at 10AM.
• The 10K and 5K are timed, USATF certified, BolderBoulder qualifying races.
• Pre-register and get more information online. Registration is also available on race day.

It’s a great way to get your exercise in, and support a great cause. Visit the Web site to register and for a map to the event.

Photograph by Kit Hedman.

by Connor O’Steen

It turns out the road between [location excised] and [location excised] is currently held by the Taliban, so until NATO clears things up I’ll be here. Seeing how that’s the case, and I now have some extra time on my hands, I might as well tell you some more about what I’ve seen.

Nasim showed up on our doorstep early in the morning, and when asked what he needed, said that he had been told by some of the other children of Chaghcharan that we ran an orphanage. His face was bruised and slightly purplish, both of his eyes were swollen and there were dark rings underneath.

Nasim is about 14 inches shorter than I am, but he says that he’s fifteen. We’re still unsure whether this is because he’s malnourished or because, like most Afghans, he has no idea when he was born. (As an aside, this is why a number of Afghan passports and ID’s list the date of birth as January 1st, followed by the year. Even the years are often uncertain data). Either way, he didn’t look like he could be older than 12.

Nasim was our guest for about five days as we worked to get him into the orphanage, and in that time, we managed to learn some of his story, the rest of which we gathered through the unique displeasure of visiting his village a few days after that. For the sake of avoiding some tedious explanations and re-explanations of when we learned the chronology of events, I’ll give you the full story rather than the pieces of it.

Nasim’s father and mother divorced about a year and a half ago. Divorce in Afghanistan is a notoriously risky business as it is likely to result in allegations of adultery which, in turn, can result in revenge or honor killings. Still, this one seemed to go all right–Nasim’s mother moved back into the house of her first husband and his father quickly remarried. Nasim found himself left out of both arrangements, however, and had an uneasy existence shuttled back and forth from his mother’s and father’s houses, essentially begging for food and shelter and exchanging labor for meals. A year ago, his father beat him badly and told him that if he ever came back, he would kill him.

After that, Nasim started the 45-mile journey to Chaghcharan. Because he had no money and no food, his progress was painfully slow. As he made his way there, he was exploited for labor, exchanging work for two meals a day. Sitting outside on our porch at night, he told us how he saved up scraps of food so he had something to eat as he jumped from village to village. When we drove to Nasim’s home it took us an hour and a half.

It took Nasim six months to get to Chaghcharan.

His troubles weren’t over there. He found himself excluded from the orphanage because he lacked an ID or an adult to confirm that his parents were unwilling to take care of him. For the following six months, in the harsh winter of Chaghcharan [Ed. note:  Chaghcharan is at around 10,000 feet above sea level], he worked for two meals a day at a tire repair shop and slept in an unheated garage. The bruises under his eyes explain the abuse, and the scabies infecting his arms and legs showed his living conditions.

This isn’t a story designed to ruin your day or make you feel bad about your own life.  In fact, this story isn’t particularly unusual in terms of the way orphans and neglected children are treated here. That’s the point. Labor exploitation has become systematized by three decades of war, hardship, poverty, and the destruction of familial and clan ties. These children, lacking the defense mechanism of parental protection, do hard manual labor to survive. The odds of receiving any kind of money are practically none; most wealth in Afghanistan is inherited, so starting on the bottom is a particular disadvantage. Being an orphan outside of an orphanage is to live a life without any hope for advancement or improvement. You will not be educated, you will not be paid, no one will help you when you get sick or hurt, you’ll only be fed enough to keep you working.

Of course the orphanage isn’t the only option.  You could also do what Nasim’s older brother did. Confronted with the same hopeless situation, he and a group of friends went to Pakistan to study in a madrassa. There’s little doubt in my mind that he’ll be back on Afghan soil soon, working to shape his country into the same frustrated and angry mold that he himself was sculpted into.

There’s a silver lining to this particularly dark cloud. Nasim is in the orphanage now and he says that, for the first time in his life, he has hope for something better. He’s getting an education, and he’s being fed unconditionally. Afghanistan isn’t a doomed country the same way Nasim, by taking his life in his own hands, has never been a doomed child. What our responsibility must be is to make sure that orphanages like these can continue to shelter the children stuck on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder.

[Ed. note:  A "madrassa" is simply a school.  The madrassas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, however, were and are the breeding ground for the Taliban.  During the Soviet-Afghan War, Saudi Arabia funded more than 8,000 madrassas that teach little except the most aggressive, fundamentalist side of Islam - a mixture of Wahhabism and the brand of hatred stemming from the Muslim Brotherhood.]

I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty. He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.

— Rush Limbaugh on presidential candidate Barack Obama; Mr. Limbaugh has renewed his contract with Premiere Radio Networks and Clear Channel Radio, which will pay him more than $400 million; Mr. Limbaugh once referred to Sen Obama and actor Halle Berry as “Halfrican American” on the Jan. 24, 2007, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show; July 6.

We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

— former senator Phil Gramm, one of presidential candidate John McCain’s top economic advisers, likening the nation’s economic problems to a “mental recession“; July 10.

The baby boomers — that prominent group of middle-agers whose massive numbers invite never-ending dissection and speculation — have once again spoken. What they have said is, ” Waaaaaahhh.”

— lede from a Washington Post story by Monica Hesse reporting a Pew Research Center survey measuring “the pessimism, dissatisfaction and general curmudgeonliness of 2,413 adults in various generations”; July 10.

Why should I help you embarrass me?

— response of Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski, whose story revealed that Rep. Rangel has four rent-controlled apartments “on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers … [He uses] uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence”; July 11.

There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. We must begin a phased redeployment of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict.

— from a press release on the campaign Web site of presidential candidate Barack Obama; March 20, 2007.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are also working through this challenging period. They play an important role in our housing markets today and need to continue to play an important role in the future. Their regulator has made clear that they are adequately capitalized.

— Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee; Times reporters Stephen Labaton and Charles Duhigg reported he and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke “sought to reassure the markets about the financial health of the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies as their stock prices plunged to their lowest level in 17 years on fears that they could face the possibility of a government bailout”; July 11.

… a significant reduction … an ambitious goal … we made progress, significant progress, toward a comprehensive approach … hope Congress funds that effort … help developing nations afford … become good stewards … We’re also taking steps to promote … we can become less dependent … we’re going to have to spend some money … to trade freely … the best way to help alleviate poverty … we had good discussions … We also made some progress on alleviating sickness … committed … pledged to provide … to help deal with … stepped forward to support … committed with partner nations … the United States is involved … working to expand our efforts … we had a comprehensive agenda … accountability is an important part of fulfilling our obligations … agreed to release detailed reports … will help ensure … we agreed on steps to deal with … increasing access … we agreed to take new steps … we accomplished a lot.

— from remarks by President Bush following the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

As we listened to the leaders around the room there was universal praise for the major economies process. There was universal recognition that having these countries in the room trying to find common ground was an enormous contribution to the U.N. negotiations. A declaration was adopted, and Jim will go into that. But the most significant take-away from this meeting, in addition to the very substantive leaders’ declaration, was the desire of all leaders to continue this process. And indeed, there was agreement to hold another meeting of the leaders of the major economies at next year’s summit in Italy. The meeting concluded not only with that decision, but with specific recognition for the contributions of President Bush, and a round of applause for the President for initiating this process.

— Dan Price, assistant to the president for international economic affairs and deputy national security advisor, during a White House press briefing on a two-hour-long meeting of the leaders of the major economies, also known as G8, in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

[O]ur dialogue at political, policy, and technical levels has built confidence among our nations and deepened mutual understanding of the many challenges confronting the world community as we consider next steps under the Convention and continue to mobilize political will to combat global climate change.

— from a declaration by the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States on energy security and climate change at the G8 meeting in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

Costello: Well, then, who’s on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Who!
Costello: The guy playing —
Abbott: Who is on first!
Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s on first.
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Abbott: Yes.

— from “Who’s on first” routine by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, reportedly translated into nearly 30 languages.

The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit. It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.

— Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing several hundred plaintiffs suing Verizon and other companies, after the Senate voted 69 to 28 to approve what Times reporter Eric Lichtblau called “the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years”: July 10.

I don’t think shortening the track is what’s going to help stop these events, because 99.9 percent of the time we’re not having a tough time stopping the cars. It’s just when we get in trouble and you can’t stop them. Another 320 feet isn’t going to do it, in my opinion.

— Johnny West, crew chief for Funny Car drag race Jack Beckman, on the decision to decrease the distance Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters race from a quarter mile — 1,320 feet — to 1,000 feet because of the 300-plus mph speeds the vehicles attain; this follows the death of drag racer Scott Kalitta on June 22; July 10.

The question then is, How can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. It is white people who stop us from moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. it is white institutions that do that. They must change. In order — In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die, and the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around the world must also die — must also die.

— Stokely Carmichael, speaking in Berkeley, Calif., in October 1966.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

— from a New York Times story by Peter Applebome, headlined “Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come”; July 10.

Actor Pam Anderson performing a split while wearing 4-inch heels
during an appearance on Australia’s “Big Brother” program; July 10.

We are not going to discuss the steps we have taken or may take to prevent a recurrence.

— New York Times spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis, refusing to discuss — even as workers began removal — alteration of the Times‘ building facade whose design has allowed climbers and protesters to ascend the building; July 10.

In the Congo, women develop quickly, both physically and emotionally, due to the substantial responsibility society places on them from early childhood. In Kinshasa, the vast majority of teenagers are sexually active with men that are substantially older.

— from the argument for leniency presented by ex-diplomat Gons G. Nachman, 42, convicted of having sex with teenage girls in the Congo and Brazil and taping the encounters; prosecutor Ron Walutes countered in court papers, “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Brazil have the same inherent value as children in the United States”; the judge delayed sentencing so that Mr. Nachman could be examined by a forensic psychologist; July 10.

photo credits:

• Rush Limbaugh: Nigel Parry, The New York Times
• Leaders of major developed nations at G8 summit in Japan: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Associated Press
• Scott Kalitta’s souped-up Toyota Solara on fire at 300 mph: Associated Press
• Stokely Carmichael: BlackPast.org
• Wiffle ball field in Greenwich, Conn.: Rob Bennett, The New York Times
• Pamela Anderson: Reuters

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.