Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

Along the way he spends a good deal of time defining what he means by “egalitarianism” and “elitism.” A particular concern for Henry, and one that’s critical to the discussion here, has to do with the nature of equality, which is distinguished from egalitarianism. In specifically addressing equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes, Henry believes (as do nearly all American “conservatives” that I know and have read) that we have in recent decades overemphasized the latter. That Henry was a lifelong Democrat, a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and Northeastern liberal cultural elite of the first order (arts critic for The Boston Globe and Time) adds a bit of spice to the argument.

If you’ve read the previous installments in the series (part 1, part 2, part 3), it should be clear that I see elitism, properly understood, as an important key to a more enlightened society that better serves interests of all of its citizens. This argument has perhaps taken some unexpected turns so far, and there are more twists still to come. For the moment, it’s critical that we understand the following premise: performance elitism, which is necessary to the long-term health of a society, depends on a level playing field.

The concept of “level playing field,” then, is central to our ultimate goal. What do we mean by the term and what do we not mean?

Equality of Outcomes: Bad in Principle, Impossible in Practice and Nobody Believes in it Anyway, So Why are We Talking About It?

In Principle: I’m not sure this argument even needs making to a rational audience, but it’s important to dismiss the popular straw men that the privilege elites and their allies like to trot out in order to distract us from the real issues. For the sake of form, then, here goes.

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a human society that wasn’t hierarchical in some way. So let’s begin by accepting that rigid egalitarianism doesn’t come naturally to the species. But is it a good idea? It’s easy enough to paint a pleasant utopian vision where we’re all equal, so long as we’re all equally prosperous. The problem is that it’s hard to imagine how we get there from here. If we’re to suppose a philosophy that’s grounded more or less in plausibility, then we have to account for what we know about the human animal.

The individualistic/free market/classical liberal premise regarding egalitarianism is that people are motivated to work for personal gain, and the cynical contemporary conservative/Randian corollary is that if the end result is that the guy who innovates and busts his ass has to give it all away so that the lazy guy who refuses to work can have just as much, then nobody will work. Ultimately we’ll all be equal, all right – we’ll all have nothing.

The relative truth or falsity of this belief system aside for a second, this is an awfully dim view of the human spirit. It alleges that people won’t produce for the common good and that people won’t pursue achievement for intrinsic reasons. These conclusions, taken as absolutes (since they’re usually presented that way), have never been demonstrated and are suspect on their face. However, it’s easy enough to accept that they’re valid to some lesser degree. While I might argue that most of us have enough personal pride that we’d never lay down and quit just to spite the system, and while I might also also argue that as things hypothetically got bad enough we’d all pitch in and at least try to survive, the less there is in the way of return on our effort, the less we’re likely to produce – at a macro level, at least. The curve isn’t linear, but there’s no doubt an effect.

Conclusion: Given what we know about human behavior, the radical pursuit of purely equal outcomes would fail to maximize the potential of the system. Fair enough? Good. Moving on.

In Practice: Again, I can’t imagine that this point really needs making, but: assuming a cadre of extreme radical egalitarians somehow seized control of the government (and understand that at present, the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party don’t have a representative in DC who comes anywhere close to fitting this description), how would you enact the measures needed to bring into existence a purely egalitarian society? There are too many people who oppose it, these people have too much money and power, there’s no mechanism by which this money and power could be quickly be stripped, the reformers have no apparent allies in the military or on the Supreme Court (or even the federal circuit bench), and there are simply too many ways by which the haves could circumvent the new regime.

Conclusion: Some people have more than others and it’s impossible to imagine a day in our lifetimes when this will no longer be so. This means that some children are going to be born into better circumstances than others. They’re going to have access to better schools, and when they graduate they’re going to inherit a network of social connections that provide them with better and more lucrative opportunities, regardless of their qualifications. Period.

Nobody Believes It Anyway: In most cases, equality of outcome is equal parts bogeyman and straw man. To be sure, there are social and political movements and philosophies that seem to push in that direction if we insist on misunderstanding them in their shallowest forms (and this is America, so that’s precisely what we do). If all you know of the world comes from shout radio, for instance, feminism doesn’t seek equality of opportunity for men and women, it wants to render men and women the same in every ludicrous way imaginable, so either we outlaw urinals or have government-financed programs teaching women how to use them. And so on. Am I being unfair to conservative shout jocks? Well, I’m coming closer to fairly representing their views than they do the views of feminists.

Sure, there are members of the feminist movement (and this goes for members of all -ism movements) who hold radical views, and there are very likely a few who do propose policies that would result in something like a pure equality of outcome based on gender (as I’ve noted before, there are 300 million Americans, and it’s hard to imagine a proposition that nobody would embrace). But the .01% most radical members of a movement do not comprise, no matter what a media pundit may tell you, a majority, and in fact they are just what the numbers would imply: a very small minority. The majority of feminists, and multiculturalists, and gay rights activists and civil rights activists and so on are bright enough to grasp basic social realities.

Conclusion: A level playing field has nothing to do with a mythical forced equality of outcomes agenda or the non-existent hordes conspiring to inflict them on us.

Equality of Opportunity: A “Fair Chance”

In 2006 I wrote an essay on a man who was born with every advantage imaginable, but who had evolved a self-image that lacked anything remotely like self-awareness. I called the man “Bob,” and it shouldn’t take anyone who knows anything at all about my hometown more than a couple of seconds to realize who Bob really is. Here’s a bit of what I had to say in that piece:

Life is a 100-yard dash. Despite Jefferson’s horsewax about all men being created equal, the truth is that some folks begin with a 99-yard headstart. I get it. I understand that’s how life is. I run as hard as I can and I try not to begrudge anybody their advantages. I also try to keep a clear head about my own advantages, because while I began at the starting line, I know that some people began the race at the bottom of a hole 20 yards back.

Here’s what I’m over, Bob. I’m sick of guys who started a yard from the finish line writing self-absorbed books lecturing the rest of us on how to be better runners. Getting there first in your case proves that your daddy was fast, not you. So take your win for what it is and shut the fuck up.

I know dozens of people as smart as you or smarter, Bob. Maybe hundreds. And a lot of them are struggling just to get to the finish line because of how guys like you have rigged the game. This much I’d bet my life on: had you grown up where I did, you’d be pumping gas. Or, let’s give you some credit. You’re still pretty smart and have some attitude about you, so maybe you’d own the gas station.

I continue to like the 100-yard dash metaphor for its ability to convey proportion. Its limitation is that we can’t take it too literally because a race only has one winner. And as I note above, the reality of life is that some people are simply going to get a head start, while other unfortunate souls are going to have to run with a few handicaps.

When I insist that our society’s public policy must assure a “level playing field,” I don’t mean that we need a Harrison Bergeron-style Handicapper General to make us all “equal”: we don’t need to worry about completely eliminating head starts, even when they overprivilege halfwit douchebags like our most recent former president (although a productive policy would perhaps cultivate a strong progressive tax structure that limits inheritance privilege more than we do at present).

I also don’t mean that we need to obsess over what it means to win – it’s okay if a particular “race” has many winners. The business world has lots and lots of individuals who we’d consider winners. The same goes for the academy. And the world of arts and letters. And sports, and music, and theater, and film, and so on. What matters is that everyone is afforded an opportunity to achieve to their highest potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. If some are born into advantage, so be it, so long as all have a fair chance to succeed.

To this end, America’s public policy needs to:

• provide a minimum baseline of opportunity; this policy set would largely focus on education, although in some cases it may also take into account other factors;
• the goal of the policy should be to assure that young citizens of noteworthy ability who are willing to dedicate themselves to educational and professional achievement can reliably earn their way to the top of their professions (we can argue about the nuts and bolts of this policy later – for now, we’re discussing broad goals and objectives);
• to the extent that children of privilege can attain higher degrees of success despite inferior capabilities, the system would not be deemed a success.

Put more succinctly, when we look at the upper echelons of a given industry, profession or organization, we should see a higher correlation between success and merit than between success and privilege. Until this is the case, we have not sufficiently leveled the playing field and our culture will continue to underperform its potential, to the detriment of all of us.

Egalitarianism, Equality, Democracy

Henry attempted to distinguish between equality of outcome, which he called egalitarianism, and equality of opportunity, which he called democracy, and his use of “democracy” in this context was a little unsatisfying, for a lot of reasons. Still, it’s significant that he linked opportunity and democracy. They’re not the same thing, but one depends on the other.

Perhaps the more important point to make is that we can have democracy without having anything worth having. After all, if we all have a voice and we vote to usher in an age of unparalleled self-degradation, that’s democracy, even if it represents an undesirable state of existence. We can also use our democratic power to vote ourselves into a new era of serfdom – something we’re far closer to doing than makes rational, self-interested sense.

What we mean when we wax eloquent about democracy is a higher-order ideal of self-determination where we all have a shot at prosperity that hinges on our abilities and our willingness to work for a better life and where the fate of the nation rests in the hands of those who legitimately comprise our brightest and best. That sort of democracy is something that doesn’t exist in the United States at present, if it ever did. If we are to achieve this enlightened society someday, then we must maximize the fullest potential of each citizen, and this can only be accomplished by bolstering the default level of opportunity.

So when we say “leveling the playing field,” what we’re really talking about is raising up the low end so that the least fortunate among us still has a reasonable shot of succeeding alongside the most fortunate.

More in the Democracy & Elitism series…

These are neat projects, because they help families help themselves. And they are truly international in scope. But we shouldn’t forget that just as there is want throughout the world, it can also be found close to home. Odds are where you live has a food pantry run by a local church or community organization. And odds are the demand has never been higher. What not give them a call to see what they might need? Spread a little cheer around.

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.

So, for years, I have been throwing stuffed animals at Lou instead of beer bottles. But now I need throw them no more. Lou no longer haunts my 7 p.m. viewing. He quit his CNN program in a multi-syllabic huff this week. CNN’s venerable, respected chief national political correspondent, John King, will take over in January. I’m sure I won’t have to throw stuffed animals at Mr. King.

But I once considered Lou venerable and respected. He’s a Harvard grad, y’know, a self-touted intellectual giant in matters of finance and economics. That’s why I began watching him years ago. I learned from him things I did not know. But for the past few years, Lou has only taught me the face of intellectual arrogance, bigotry, and unexceptional reporting masquerading as “advocacy.”

Lou, he of the annual salary variously estimated between $5 million and $10 million, has come to fancy himself as a champion of the middle class. Mr. King, as host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” has traveled each week to a different state — 44 so far — to sit down with the middle class in their diner, pubs, and livingrooms. Can you remember — or imagine — Lou doing the same? Aside from his carefully staged, perfectly lit, orchestrated “town hall” meetings at which the middle class had to meet Lou on his turf, not theirs?

When he quit, he lamented the “partisanship and ideology” permeating national politics. He did not or could not view his own brand of divisive opinionating as just another form of partisanship.

CNN, I suspect, is glad to see Lou depart despite 27 years’ of mostly worthy service. CNN’s president, Jonathan Klein, larded the cable network’s own news story with bombastic paeans for Lou:

For decades, Lou fearlessly and tirelessly pursued some of the most important and complex stories of our time, often well ahead of the pack. … With characteristic forthrightness, Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere.

So why’d Lou leave? Was it “extremely amicable,” as Mr. Klein said? Or was his ill-reported “advocacy journalism” wearing thin on a network that had begun to position itself as centrist, parked between MSNBC on the left and Fox News Channel on the right? Or, more bluntly, did Lou not pull in sufficient ad revenues to offset his high salary? (And he complained about Wall Street salaries? Sheesh.) By June, Lou’s ratings had shrunk to unacceptable levels. His TV program had been drawing only 650,000 viewers, and only about 180,000 were from that advertiser-favored, 25-to-54 demographic.

Lou has championed the movement opposing illegal immigration. That’s his signature issue following his self-admitted radicalization following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. When he did not appear in any way, shape or form on CNN’s “Latino in America,” it became clear he was a goner at the network.

Lou says he’s leaving because

some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to … engage in constructive problem-solving, as well as to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day. And to continue to do so in the most honest and direct language possible.

Right. But how? Some pundits conjecture he’ll seek public office. Senator Lou? Hardly. Can you imagine Lou, who is wealthy and self-righteous, hitting the campaign trail and pressing the flesh of that middle class with whom he rarely mingles? Can you imagine him dialing for dollars — raising the money to run for office? He’d find that demeaning and beneath him. And he’s hardly likely to self-finance.

Lou won’t be entering politics. He does not like being held accountable by any one, whether individual, corporate, or political, for what he says and does. He wants freedom to act without consequence. Nor does he have the temperament to make the deals and compromises all politicians must.

Will he move on to Fox? Doubtful. Would he view his brand of intellectually arrogant elitism an ill fit for the likes of a network that many argue is anything but intellectual? Probably. And he certainly won’t bury himself in a conservative think tank. He’d have to submerge his ego.

Lou likes money. Lou likes fame. Lou likes being the center of a self-created universe. Note that his own website touts him as “Mr. Independent.” He likes that tag.

Perhaps Lou wants to be Rush. Lou has a nationally syndicated radio program, “The Lou Dobbs Show,” launched a year and a half ago by United Stations Radio Networks. It’s carried on 400 stations and reaches about 5 million listeners.

But conservative talker Rush Limbaugh has the top-rated talk show, reaching more than 14 million listeners. Lou is eighth in national radio ratings, behind mostly conservative rabble rousers I’ll bet he considers his intellectual inferiors. Then there’s the money: In 2006, Rush signed an eight-year contract grossing $400 million, about $50 million a year. Don’t forget his $100 million signing bonus.

Do you think Lou might find that kind of money attractive? Sure, but Lou has also seen the attention centered on Rush. By politicians. By presidents. By pundits. By the powerful. By the proletariat.

That’s Rush’s world. Lou wants to shoulder him aside. But his CNN gig was not going to get him there.

Bye, bye, Lou. And thanks: I can now buy a new TV.

Snark aside, Bondelli does a nice job of addressing Hough, who “argues that the increase in lifetime wages for graduates no longer makes up for the financial burden of university education and the ensuing student loan burden.” He also takes on one of the GOP’s most successful and devastating canards, explaining that

In 2003 when I was lobbying against tuition increases in Arizona, a Republican state legislator argued that a college degree is a personal investment that the students are paying for their own future financial prosperity.

I second Kevin’s thoughts (and encourage you to click over and read the whole post). However, I also think the response needs to run even deeper. In truth, as stupid as that Repub legislator’s argument was (and in all likelihood, as stupid as the legislator was), it’s an argument that wins over a lot of people if you let its underlying assumption go unchallenged.

Bondelli touches on the point in quoting University of Rhode IslandVice President for Administration and Finance Robert Weygand, who explains that

Public colleges need to promote and publicize the work they do for the community and their contributions to economic development. Well-publicized proof that they make a difference to the state, and not just the earning potential of individual graduates, is meaningful to lawmakers, even in tough times.

The underlying issue that must be dragged out into the light and stomped is that somehow a nation’s education policy is all about individual investment. This is “ownership society”-style bullshit and it traces its “intellectual” roots back through the eight-year lie that was the Reagan administration and into the conservative academic framework laid in the 1960s by the likes of Daniel Bell. It culminated in rhetorical low-water marks like “government isn’t the solution to your problems – it is the problem,” and unfortunately the Newspeak linguistic cross-patch that this crowd inflicted on an easily-duped public is still working its corrosive magic today.

The answer we give when faced with this kind of cynical forked-tonguery must make clear that it’s not about Little Billy choosing whether or not to invest in his future. Instead, the question is about what’s best for the nation. In a society where only the top 5% of economic elites can afford a quality education – and we’re heading in that direction at a rapid pace – that means that 95% of the nation’s intelligence, 95% of its genius, 95% of its creativity and insight and inventiveness and problem solving capacity, 95% of its scientific potential – 95% of that nation’s possibility is at risk. It’s likely doomed to go unrealized.

Imagine that nation engaged in a highly competitive global marketplace with countries that make refining their intelligence, regardless of class or station of birth, a top priority. Imagine a nation that’s much like America in size and socioeconomic structure and overall potential. And imagine that while we’re keeping 95% of our brighest and best away from learning as best we can, they’re moving heaven and earth to get their brightest and best all the education possible.

Let’s go a step further and make this a math question. The US has a population of around 300 million. Statistically speaking, “genius” is a term that (as flawed as it may be) refers to the top 2% intellectually. So that means that America is home to roughly 6 million geniuses. Now, say we only provide quality educational opportunities to the richest 5%. That leaves us with 300,000 of our best minds honest to their sharpest potential.

Now consider that other hypothetical country, call it AltAmerica. Same numbers, only this time you educate all your geniuses. Our 300,000 is now up against their 6 million.

Which nation do you think innovates the best products? (I start with that example, because obviously nothing matters besides feeding the consumerist beast, right?) Who more quickly comes up with cures for diseases? Who creates solutions to pressing social challenges? Who is best able to provide for the common weal while preserving the environment?

Over time, which nation comes to dominate and which one fades?

A nation that adopts a “let Billy decide whether to invest in his future” policy will be, in short order, at the mercy of a nation that makes educating Billy a top priority.

If you don’t like my math, fine, adjust to your liking. But the dynamic remains (and I’m framing the discussion in a restrictive fashion, as well, because you don’t have to be a rated genius to be smart enough to change the world). And by the way, I do have a couple of specific nations in mind. Neither of them has a population of 300 million, either. Both have over a billion people, and they have more honor students than we have students.

That politician that Kevin references is either stupid or corrupt, or maybe both. But whether he’s acting out of class-based malice or simple butt-ignorance, the policy he espouses would, over time, reduce the US to the equivalent if a slobbering backwater surrounded by thrumming, intellect-powered New Atlantises. No doubt he’d like to keep the rabble in its place, educated only enough to provide unquestioning labor for the power elite’s enterprises, but the dangerous fact is that he hasn’t thought this thing all the way through.

Which also demonstrates, by the way, that not everybody in that 5% elite is exactly rocket surgeon material. So maybe my scenario above was actually a little … conservative, if you will.

Thanks to Kevin for taking this issue head-on. I hope he won’t mind me adding my two cents…

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.

Or, maybe, this person is you.

I grew up listening to countless versions of the ideology of “Son, we don’t reward failure.”

You have to hold your own. You have to work hard and carry your weight. You have to straighten up and fly right. You have to contribute something to get something back.

You don’t want to live in some welfare state where people get rewarded for being bums.

Well, guess what: We’ve got it.

But the bums aren’t beggars on the street. The bums aren’t addicts living for the next fix, veterans scrounging for shelter rent, teenage runaways (sometimes forcibly ejected from their homes, mind you), solitary women escaping abusive relationships and single moms with nobody to turn to, the sick with no access to medical facilities, once prosperous people who went bankrupt by any number of methods (illness, gambling, substance abuse, traumatic events of all stripes), or anyone in any number of circumstances, largely thanks to the lack of a support system, that can lead to such poverty.

(Go into a homeless shelter, or a country club, or an office building, or a construction site, or a patch of farmland, or a prison, or an airport, or a tenement, or a subway station, or a gated community. Ask a few people what their shoe size is. I guarantee that you’ll find at least one pair, anywhere you go, that your feet would fit into as well.)

Those I’m talking about get your handouts whether you choose to give or not: People who set out to succeed in business by failing in business. People who shit in solid gold toilets and wipe the brown text onto your pink slip.

Who cares how badly you fuck up if you get out rich and you leave some sucker holding the bag, right?

Right. Especially if that sucker is a taxpayer, to whose chest you’ve affixed a smelly pink slip.

We’re their support system. We have rewarded bums. Working people have rewarded failure and propped up fuckups, and with TARP, we made it fashionable to do so outright. We have created the welfare state those plastic chattering wind-up teeth in Congressional offices, and through radio waves, and at $1,000-a-plate luncheons have been bleating on about all these years.

All the while they were crusading to keep that “hard-earned money” out of the hands of the evil, filthy, scheming, sinister poor who go out of their way to avoid joining the workforce by any means necessary just to stick their greedy, slimy hands directly into your pocket and ninja-kick the food out of the mouths of your children–the “Welfare Queens™,” it turns out, were, all along, parasitic sacks of shit some call “business leaders,” with the (tacit and explicit alike) blessing and backing of your government representatives and their backup band of “experts.” The latest wealth redistribution spree on behalf of said Coalition of Overprivileged and Insulated Asshats was thanks to one of their own.

I have found myself repeatedly using lines much like the ones in the first paragraph when grudgingly cutting tax payment checks. Early in my life as a taxpaying citizen, I felt as though it was my duty, regardless. Even if you don’t like what they’re doing with the money, you might as well pay up so you have a shot at changing things with it. If nothing else, being honest on your taxes prevents badness later in the event of an audit. And they take it right out of your paycheck! How sweet is that?

I don’t remember exactly when, during this decade, it first dawned on me, but when I started making quarterly tax payments from money I’d kept laying around, and had to see it directly leaving my checking account and entering the Treasury, I thought:

“Why should I give them this money? They’re just going to spend it on bombs. Why should I support another person’s bad decisions out of my own pocket?”

As I cut the last tax payment for 2008, I thought to myself: “Why should I give this money to those bums? They’re just going to spend it on caviar, private jets, golfing, corporate bonuses and parties. And more bombs.”

Parties, indeed. Think of it this way: Somebody takes out a massive credit line in your name, and he and his friends use it to throw lavish balls at your house while you’re busy at work. They trash every room, fuck on every surface possible, clog your toilet, flood your bathroom, eat everything in your fridge, and leave their empties, roaches and cigarette butts everywhere. Half of your records are scratched and the other half are missing entirely. One of them hires his brother’s cleaning company to straighten the place up, but the crew does so by stuffing whatever will fit under your rugs and couch cushions and setting fire to whatever is left. Your mattress and boxspring are slashed open, your closets and dressers are raided and all available cash is mysteriously gone. Your kitchen is replenished with store brand gruel, canned green beans packed in high fructose corn syrup, and government cheese. There’s a partially shredded banner hanging in your living room that reads:

“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED CONGRADULATIONS ON YOU’RE PARTY FRED”

(For this exercise, your name is Fred. Or Freda.)

You come home from a hard day to the sight of toilet paper-covered shrubberies and the smell of smoke, urine and stale cigarettes wafting through a broken front window. A thick American Excess bill awaits inside your mailbox, from which a pair of lightly soiled and charred panties, still smoking, hangs. The charges include a giant cash advance to reimburse your fellow revelers and cleaning company for the cost of organizing and throwing the gala, and “housesitting.” Another envelope contains a new card with your name on it (don’t worry your pretty little head about it — they’ll authorize the new charges for you). New cards and statements will continue to arrive, and cash advances will be taken out on your behalf to make the minimum payments on those that came previous.

(Or, to put it another way, think of the Dead Milkmen’s “Bitchin’ Camaro,” except you’re the one making the payments and buying the gas.)

Not to worry if you fall behind, which you surely will. On your unceremonious death, the balance will be transferred to an unsuspecting 18-year-old. Just shut up and keep eating — there will always be enough credit for your next meal, they assure you.

A new man knocks on the door. He’s brought a maid with him. “We’ll make this a home again, but it’s going to take a while,” he says. “Ophelia here can’t do it by herself, though, so we’ve brought another mop, bucket and scrub brush so you can help clean up your mess. Yes, relief is on the way!

“Watch for the new card in your mailbox. It’ll include the next payment to your housesitters.”

People like this man are the reason I always giggle when I encounter political and economic theories that hinge on things like “rationality” and “informed self-interest.”

I was reminded of this man today, when the following story found its way to my desktop:

Richest Americans’ Income Doubled as Tax Rate SlashedJan. 30 (Bloomberg) — The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new IRS data show.

This man, best I can tell, regards “tax cuts for the rich” as some sort of evil liberal meme, no doubt crafted in a Satanic sex ceremony involving Jane Fonda in George Soros’ basement. So just to be clear, let’s snip some key facts – yes Virginia, there is such a thing as a fact – from the story:

• “The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration”
• “their average income doubled to $263.3 million”
• Source: IRS data
• “The 17.2 percent tax rate in 2006 was the lowest since the IRS began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992″
• “The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003″
• “Capital gains made up 63 percent of the richest 400 Americans’ adjusted gross income in 2006, or a combined $66.1 billion”

If this man I know is reading, I’m sure he’s angry. And why not. As noted conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert has noted, facts, reality, and even information itself have a well-known liberal bias.

There are usually many more cars than this attempting to turn when they have the green and you’re in their way. Sometimes, when you’re lucky, there’s a cab or a bus waiting there too (I gave up after waiting three light cycles for that shot). And everybody going south on Broadway that wants to turn left on 6th is in a hurry to get somewhere, if even to the 24-hour grocery store, the 24-hour gym, or the fast food drive-thru. All that’s left to process in their tightly wound little motorist-y brains is that they want to get somewhere, they want to get there now, and some asshole with legs not pushing pedals is forcing them to wait an extra ten seconds before proceeding to their destination (via the next red light). All the while, their front bumpers come ever closer to your tender flesh and your easily breakable bones and, if you’re like me, you sometimes have a mood to flash a thumbs-up, a smile, a wink, or a condescending, raised-eyebrow, laser-guided side-glare. You, the asshole (after all, if you’re not driving, there must be something wrong with you), go about your merry way on foot, possibly to stand and wait for a vehicle that will pick you up and then stop every so many blocks to pick up more transit footsoldiers. Sometimes, these people end up stopping and waiting for another vehicle to take them the rest of the way.

(The one time I’ve ever outright lost my temper in this crosswalk was thanks to a cabbie who thought it would be clever to maintain ramming speed and then slam on his brakes to properly express his dismay at being so inconvenienced. The one time I’ve ever complained about a bus driver to RTD–I haven’t seen him again since–was after seeing his grin in his rear-view mirror as he plowed into the path of an unknown woman crossing in that same spot.)

Many moons ago this empty lot was a restaurant called the “White Spot,” popular with, as Mrs. Cho would put it, da gaaaaaAAY. I included the shot of the relatively new Beauvallon building (apartments with lower-level sushi bar and shops and gym and whatnot) mainly because of the gorgeous sky (this camera takes great sky shots when it wants to).

I remember one time at the bus stop right there, someone on one of the balconies was shining a laser pointer at bystanders, including me. I was tempted to make a show of it by putting a hand over an eye, screaming, writhing on the ground (or at least staggering around a bit before dropping to my knees) — instead I just shielded my face and took out my phone and started conspicuously pressing buttons. Funny thing, a few months prior I had also had a laser pointer shined towards me by some ruffians in a passing car. There’s a special place in Hades for someone who would do that in the first place, given that some of those are strong enough to burn retinas.

I’d like to think that I’ll never encounter someone who would do something stupid like that out of specific desire to cause harm to another person, but eight years of Bush have shoveled a cumulative metric shit-ton of protein bars and raw eggs into the maw of my already thriving inner misanthrope. It is clear now that giving a fuck about anyone not directly and immediately benefiting you in some tangible, material way is viewed as a sign of weakness. Whether or not we’re ever going to be marching to that particular drum again, certain memes have wormed their way into the national consciousness and/or subconsciousness, and the depths to which it is acceptable to stoop to get what one wants out of life, if one is in the right job title and/or tax bracket, continue their plunge. The ’60s made pointless, bullshit war seem at least tolerable for the power elite to wage (let’s face it), but Bush II brought treasury looting, torture, humiliation, mercenaries, indifferent snark and finger-pointing-at-piles-of-naked-assed-prisoners-in-photographs into it with open arms.

And whereas the last gasps of the 20th Century forced us to accept the meme, “Government’s job is to outsource everything to the private sector and let the private sector take care of you,” the Bush years gave a massive, shit-smeared thumbs-up to the private sector saying “Fuck off, it’s not my job to take care of you, get your own” as its higher-ups took everything they could grab from their underlings and their government alike. The government’s job is now to drop bombs, provide a paycheck for life to our neutered politicians, cut welfare checks for rich people and force my generation, which from what I can see was largely left to raise itself, to shoulder the burden of supporting its Boomer parents (The “Me Generation” becomes the “Gimme Gimme Generation”) as they fight tooth and nail over that last delicious shipment of Tasty, Tasty America Bars™ that were once available in every corner market in Mayberry and West Mayberry alike. The private sector’s job is to take everything it can grab through your labor, your rigged retirement plan and whatever money the government can borrow on your signature to keep them in mink; and kick your ass out on the street the second you’re no longer–wait for it–tangibly and materially useful, immediately.

The best way I can put it based on my own personal experiences is that I have been cleverly brainwashed into believing that I am a waste of money and I deserve whatever scraps the higher-ups are willing to fart down onto me, and not a scrap more, as I bust my ass and endlessly, ultimately fruitlessly, clamor with the rest for their assurance that I am indeed worthy–not just of a paycheck–but of a good living. I get backed into a corner, it’s my own fault for not being someone else. My job goes overseas and I starve, I must not have been trying hard enough. My CEO runs off with my retirement and leaves me holding a portfolio full of worthless stock, well, sucks to be me. That’s Wall Street for ya. That’s what you get for trying to play that big, bad market casino like the big guns forced you to do.

As a child of divorce, I was conditioned to believe that I was in the way, physically, emotionally and especially financially. As a member of today’s workforce, I feel those attitudes being foisted upon me tenfold. I am a fish, in an ever-shrinking pond, and the guy draining it is telling me I’m an asshole for suffocating.

Let’s see what the fresh-faced, desensitized Leaders of Tomorrow™ will do with all this legitimized behavior as they get ready to assume their thrones in the coming years, shall we?

9th at Corona, this afternoon. Just for shits and grins.

There are no nations at either end.

The current approach to ensuring some degree of fairness is to use the tax system. And, here presented, are various systems of taxation as well as the impacts of targeted changes to tax systems. It does involve some maths, but it is presented as simple tables. Like this one…

Figure 1: Equal Taxation

Much of modern economic theory has been about reducing the gap between rich and poor, and making a more equitable society. Troublingly for social scientists, GINI varies wildly irrespective of economic system. However, poor and autocratic societies tend to be more unequal than wealthy and free ones. And even where income disparities are wide (as in the US, where the poorest 20% of Americans earn as much as the richest 20% of Russians) it doesn’t always mean that the poorest are scrabbling in the dirt while the rich dine on caviar.

In Figure 1, we have a tax system that really would be unfair. But first, the rules behind these graphs:

1. Total GDP (or Gross Domestic Product – the wealth generated by the entire “nation”) is set at 100;
2. The income brackets of this society have been divided into five, with income presented pretty much as it breaks down in the US, with the top 20% earning some 9 time more than the bottom 20%. The sum of all the incomes adds up to 100, so the top 20% earn 45, and the bottom 20% earn 5;
3. Total tax levied against the nation is 17 – this is equivalent to what the US raises from its citizens currently – note that the current deficit of 4% implies that there is a tax under-collection of 19% which is where the current national debt comes in;
4. The blue bar is the gross income accrued by the particular income bracket;
5. The red bar is the total tax levied from that particular income bracket;
6. The green line is a % and reflects the proportion of income that is paid in tax (this definition will change in later figures, but I’ll let you know when);
7. You can click on the images to see a larger figure (and so read the text).

Back to Figure 1

Here, total tax is 17 and has been divided equally (and fairly) across the population. So, everyone gets to pay 3.4. Only problem is, income is not distributed equally, so the poor pay relatively more than do the rich. This is a recipe for riots. There aren’t really any countries in the world that practice this one on purpose.

Lets try some redistribution

There are many different tax systems in the world. Some breathtakingly complex (the US one is quite frightening), and some quite straightforward. One of the easiest (at least, to understand) is the concept of a flat tax. The government intends to raise 17% of GDP to spend on things it deems important, therefore everyone must pay 17% of their revenue to the state.

This looks like this:

Figure 2: Flat Taxation

This is much better, don’t you think? The rich are clearly paying much more in absolute terms than are the poor, and everyone pays the same proportion of their incomes. There is little incentive to try and manipulate things by changing tax brackets, because there is only one bracket.

What’s this bracket thing? Well, the alternative to a flat tax is what is known as a progressive tax. This basically means that income is divided into a set of brackets and, depending on what you earn, you pay a different amount of tax. This is the most popular form of income tax around and results in monstrously complex tax law. The reason is that the last thing any government wants is to create moral hazard here. For instance, if you knew that a salary raise was going to place you in a higher tax bracket and your net take-home pay would actually be LESS than what you were earning before, you wouldn’t want a raise.

Worse, is that investors wouldn’t invest either since any increase in their profits would leave them worse-off than if they hadn’t invested at all. So there are usually all sorts of grants, and back-payments and things like that to make sure that it remains “fair”. Now you get that usual distribution curve where the people at the bottom don’t pay taxes, and the people at the top cover the bill:

Figure 3: Progressive Taxation

This is the situation for most taxpayers in most democracies. Unfortunately, this system creates a lot of problems. Actually … let me demonstrate.

Progressing the tax further

Say a government decides to give tax relief to the middle class (i.e. bracket 3 and, to a lesser extent, 2; brackets 4 and 5 don’t pay tax anyway so you’ll never hear anyone offering to give them tax relief). Let’s take a look at how everyone imagines this will work out (and here, the green line reflects – not the % of income paid as tax – but the % change in gross income, where negative numbers imply a decrease):

Figure 4: Redistributive Taxation

This is what we imagine will happen. The rich will trouser the 2.4% loss to their gross income, while the middle classes earn an extra 1.7% to 4.1%, while the poor don’t experience much of an impact and the net tax effect is neutral since the total collection remains 17.

However, money is liquid and mobile and the rich are – by virtue of the fact that they’re in the top 20% – quite good with money. They have options. For starters, they can simply increase their fees (either in their time, or for the products they sell):

Figure 5: Scenario 1 – Increased Prices

The rich were expected to absorb a 0.9% decrease in their overall take-home pay. Instead, they increased their charges. Their total revenue went from 45 to 45.9. You can see the impact which is felt equally across society. Brackets 2 and 3 are still up from their original salaries – the redistributive tax has still left them better-off – but the poor have taken it in the neck. The poorest 20% have actually seen their salaries negatively impacted by 4.4%.

In other words, a redistributive tax has the impact of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Exactly the opposite effect of what was intended. But this isn’t the worst scenario.

You see, the rich really do have other options. They could decide to invest their money offshore.

Investing Offshore

The rich may decide that the tax option of declaring an income one bracket down is very attractive. So they move a proportion of their investment offshore. Either they close down a factory and move it to China, or they place their investment equity holdings in an emerging market. Consider, emerging markets are expected to grow by 6 to 8% over the next 12 months, while US and EU economies are either to hold still, or even contract. A lot of cash could start moving in unusual directions – especially since US and EU banks now belong to their governments.

Figure 6: Scenario 2 – Investing elsewhere

The richest 20% decided to become the 2nd richest 20%, and sent the rest of their money overseas. Now the total tax take has changed dramatically. Instead of collecting 17, the state now collects 5.1.

Instead of the deficit being 4, the deficit now expands to 15.9. In other words, for every $1 that the state raises through taxes, it is spending another $4.1. That is a recipe for economic collapse.

Conclusions

The most likely result of a tax redistribution is a mix of scenarios 1 and 2. The US deficit will go up as a result of taxing the rich more heavily, but inflation (as the rich raise their fees) will also erode the gains experienced by the rest of the population while increasing the absolute levels of inequality.

Now, we can argue about this. Maybe the rich shouldn’t be so “selfish”. Maybe you can come up with a way to stop them taking the money they already have away. What you can’t do is force investment that did not happen to happen.

You can’t force the young inventor who would have built his new factory in the US from seeking a more favourable tax environment elsewhere. You can’t enslave the young engineering graduate to prevent her from taking her skills to a more favourable country.

The only way is to offer ostensible advantages.

That’s if you want them at all.

Part II: Almost Heaven Level: The Mechanics of Moving Mountains

In the heart of Appalachia, knobs, gaps and hollers define the undulating green landscape. Life is old, travel is slow, and it’s a daunting job to get a bus full of journalists up the steep, rutted dirt road through Cabin Creek Hollow to Larry Gibson’s cabin on Kayford Mountain. But no photos or descriptions of the devastation we are about to witness can do justice to a close-up look at a mountaintop removal mining operation. That is why we are here. That is what Larry wants to provide for reporters on this Society of Environmental Journalists field trip to the coalfields of southern West Virginia in October 2008, in hopes that we will be a conduit for the story he spends his life telling.

Larry’s cabin on Kayford Mountain

Larry Gibson: standing against Big Coal

Larry has been facing down the coal industry for more than three decades, fighting for the survival of this mountain that has been his family’s home for 230 years. Much of the original homestead was seized by devious land companies in the early 20th century, but 50 acres remain. Back in 1993 a spokesman for the Sago Mine told Larry the property was worth $1million an acre to the coal industry, but he was offered $140,000 for all of it. He chose to put it in a land trust instead, and keep it as a base from which to fight against the destruction that now surrounds him and threatens many similar locations in the region.

“My mother gave me birth,” he said, “but these mountains give me life…There should be something in your life that money can’t buy. To me, it was my heritage, my culture, my way of life, of the Appalachian people.”

Larry Gibson

Larry is a lone hold-out on this mountain, which was once home to 60 families before the industry bought them out. He tells visitors, “I don’t need your help getting off this mountain; I need your help staying on it.”

He used to stand on this land and look up at green summits rising more than 3000 feet, surrounding the collection of cabins in the woods. Now, this lone forested flank at 2400 feet is the highest point around. The mountains encircling it have been blown up with millions of tons of dynamite in order to remove the shallow coal seams that lie buried within the layers of rock.

If I hadn’t heard the sounds of heavy equipment in the distance – the grinding engines of earthmovers and massive dump trucks beeping in reverse – I might never have realized what lay just a few hundred yards up a wooded rise from Larry’s cabin. We would discover it, he said, by walking through “Hell’s Gate,” the barrier marking the property line between his family’s land and the Samples Mine, where a subsidiary of Massey Coal has blown away 900 feet and 7500 acres of Kayford Mountain over the last four years. Another 6000 acres on adjacent Coal River Mountain are slated for the same fate. The first blast there went off the week before our arrival, Larry said, even though the permits are not yet final.

Central Appalachian Range in its natural state

Ancient landscapes, lost forever

To understand the atrocity of mountaintop removal mining, you must first have a sense of what is being eradicated. In central Appalachia, lush hardwood forests cover the slopes in a mélange of green, beech, buckeye and maple, ash, shagbark, hickory and oak, tulip tree and flowering dogwood. Beneath their leafy canopy lies an understory of shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron, and hundreds of flowers and herbs, including medicinal plants such as ginseng and goldenseal. Moss and fungi thrive where water is plentiful, as do an amazing assortment of freshwater fish, salamanders and frogs. Deer and black bear drink from the clear streams that fill the narrow valleys, forming the headwaters for the rivers of the Eastern seaboard.

Fall foliage near Larry’s cabin

One of the most biodiverse places on the planet, this region and its ecosystems have been a long time in creation. Some of earth’s most ancient mountains comprise this range, birthed 300 million years ago when North America and Africa were still connected: the Appalachians were formed as part of the same mountain chain as the Anti-Atlas in Morocco.

Deep within their folded slopes lie some of the world’s richest carbon deposits, the product of millennia of compression, the anthracite and bituminous coalfields that hold much of the U.S.’s most plentiful fossil fuel stores.

Intensive efforts to retrieve that coal have been a defining part of the natural and cultural landscape in Appalachia since the Civil War. Where Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia & West Virginia share borders, beauty and pain have resided side by side for 150 years. Coal barons of the 1920s sought to smash miners’ unions in a push to increase production and profits from underground mines, but today’s captains of industry have managed to find a way around the cost and conflicts associated with labor while taking coal out of the earth via a faster mode. In so doing, they are undoing the earth’s geology and devastating whole ecosystems. They call it mountaintop mining. Opponents call it mountaintop removal.

We walk through a golden tracery of lacy maples and red sumac to Hell’s Gate, a low black bar, and approach the rim of a vast pit. As bleak and gray as the clouds overhead, it stretches 270 degrees around us to the horizon. It is as if we have come to an overlook of the surface of the moon. Few people are present except us. Most of the work is being done not by miners, Larry tells us, but by heavy-equipment operators.

But a fraction of the minescape panorama SEJ tour members
viewed at Kayford Mountain

How to move a mountain

Destroying mountains to extract coal requires surprisingly little manpower. Just 19 men do what it used to take 650 to do in an underground mine, Larry says. “It is the most barbaric form of mining I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

First, the trees are clear-cut and removed. The trees on Kayford Mountain were burned, Larry said, though occasionally they are sold for timber in some operations. Explosives are then buried in the ground and detonated. The mountaintop shudders and shakes apart into rubble. Ten to 12 blasts a day split the air at the Samples Mine, just a portion of the 3 million pounds of dynamite exploded every day in Appalachia, Larry said. He added that a single blast in 1999 costing $1 million was the largest non-nuclear blast to be detonated since World War II. Only on Sundays is the mine quiet, when Larry can hear the birds. There used to be 147 species native to Kayford Mountain, but just 39 remain, he said, according to a group of birders who monitor their numbers.

The blasting is hard on other animals, too, Larry says. He tells us that 14 bears were killed on the side of his land, tracked in to the mine zone via radio collars, but never out again.

Huge dump trucks haul away the rock, topsoil and waste that become
valley fill. I am standing next to the front tire.

After the blasting is finished the loose debris – or ‘overburden’ – is placed into enormous dump trucks that hold 240 tons and placed into adjacent valleys as “fill.” Once enough rock is removed to get at the coal seam, it is ripped out by gigantic drag lines and scooped into buckets big enough to hold 24 small cars. Then the process begins again. Each successive blasting round creates a deeper incursion into the mountain until ultimately it resembles a ravaged crater like the Samples Mine.

At the Four Mile Mountain Mine, our second stop, we learned that 25-30 feet of rock are blasted away to reach coal seams that are typically 10-18 inches deep and about 400 feet long. It seems like a lot of effort for a relatively little amount of coal versus rock. That tells you something about how lucrative coal is, and how cheaply it can be mined using these low-labor methods.

Andrew Jordon, CEO, Pritchard Mining

Andrew Jordon, CEO of Pritchard Mining and immediate past chair of the West Virginia Coal Association, told reporters at the site that much of the coal removed in mountaintop mining could not be accessed via traditional underground mining methods, and that which could would require a much greater expense and threat to human safety if surface mining methods were avoided.

Once the coal is removed, it is washed and loaded into trucks and eventually onto trains for transport across the country. Left behind are millions, even billions, of gallons of sludge. Black, stagnant and laden with toxic metals, the waste liquid is injected into old underground mines or impounded behind huge earthen dams that comprise “valley fills.” Hundreds of feet high, these piles of rock and dirt are often dumped into seasonal streambeds, wiping out the flow of water and affecting adjacent stream quality for more than 100 miles downstream.

Bill Raney, president of the WVCA, takes issue with this notion of “dumping.” “A valley fill is one of the most sophisticated structures in earthmoving engineering,” he said. And as for streams obliterated when such fills are placed in hollows?

Brushy Fork impoundment on the the west side of Coal River Mountain,
WV; built to hold 8 billion tons of coal sludge. Photo: Vivan Stockman,
courtesy of SouthWings Air

“Those aren’t streams,” said Rocky Hackforth, Pritchard’s vice president of operations and general manager at Four Mile. Because they only run when it rains, for instance, they are “ephemeral streams,” a term Raney offered, and thus do not meet the definition of a “navigable” waterway off limits to dumping under the Clean Water Act. Currently, law exists to prohibit mining activity within 100 feet of a stream. But the law is blatantly flouted on a regular basis by mountaintop removal operations that skirt the Act through claims that such ephemeral run-offs are exempt from the legal provision.

“Reclaimed” Kayford Mountain MTR site

The semantics of reclamation

Reclamation standards require that mining companies restore the land to a close approximation of its “original contours,” including reinstating streams, but in most cases what results is merely a layer of grass seed tossed over the topsoil-barren moonscape. And even industry leaders admit that attempts to recreate vital streams that offer a natural habitat for fish and other aquatic life have been less than successful.

Jordon’s operation has received recognition for industry best practices in reclamation, however, and a survey of the no-longer-active sections of the Four Mile Mountain mine show 10- to15-foot tall native trees that appear to be coming back nicely. “Our success rate with reforestation has been very, very good,” Jordon said.

Of 6000 acres under lease to Pritchard, 2200 have been mined and reclaimed so far. “We’re here to recover the resources that we’ve been blessed with in West Virginia and then to put it back,” Jordon said.

But to suggest that such replanting will do anything more than provide a veneer of green for decades to come defies reason. It has taken a thousand years to generate the layer of topsoil on the Appalachians, and thousands more to evolve the multitude of species of flora and fauna that reside in the undisturbed forest. Just because wild turkeys and deer “immediately” return to the reclaimed site, according to Hackworth, it’s hard to imagine convincing anyone that the scale and scope of damage inflicted has been mitigated.

Twisted Gun golf course, Mingo County, W. Va. Recreation in one of the
poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation.
Photo: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

In other cases, there is no mandate to restore the land to any semblance of its original character under the Interior Department’s 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act if a “higher and better use” can be demonstrated. This includes economic uses of flat property deemed to benefit the public with the construction of airstrips, schools, prisons, shopping centers and golf courses. The previous, largely vertical landscape was only useful for hunting or timber, while flattened mountaintops expand the range of uses and thus the value of the land, say proponents.

Larry Gibson, and many residents of coal country whose mountain roots and cultural heritage go back centuries, disagree.

At any rate, less than 5 percent of mountaintop removal sites have undergone any sort of economic development, despite the former coal mines being touted by industry and government as ‘gold mines’ for commercial growth.

The National Mining Association now estimates that 14 to 15 percent of the nation’s coal production comes from mountaintop removal mining.  In Appalachia, the number of surface mines now exceeds underground operations. The effects of such extreme methods on the face of the land in Appalachia are profound.   But the effects on Appalachia’s people are also deeply disturbing, as Part III of this series will examine.

Coming up:

Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: The tenacity of hope

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.

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?

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

by Connor O’Steen

We met with the village elder of Yatimak, the nominal leader of a small cluster of houses on the far side of Jawzareen valley. We stood on a dusty path and were greeted by an old man who, for reasons I didn’t entirely grasp, we weren’t allowed to shake hands with. After describing our proposal of helping to create and fund a school for children in their village, we were led to the elder’s son. Idris is a middle aged man, immaculately friendly and with a heavily tanned and lined face. He speaks reasonably good English because, 20 years earlier, he had been a guard at Bamyan University and he took a free night class offered by an American teacher. Come to think of it, considering that he had probably not spoken English since that time, his language skills are tremendous. We sat on his roof in the morning sun, drinking green tea and going over life in the village. “My villagers are a very poor people,” he told us, “but with a little help we could be very prosperous.”

We discussed the school and he seemed very interested but told us he had to discuss things with the other villagers first. This was actually a tremendously positive sign: if Idris likes the program but the villagers reject it, it’s bound to fail. Seeking a democratic consensus is often a rare occurrence in villages.  It was good to see that step. After that, we discussed the possibility of setting up hydro power in the river (because of hot springs, Yatimak’s river is unfrozen year round) and a mobile clinic for the winter months when travel to Bamyan isn’t always an option.

Around 11 o’clock, we left Yatimak and set our sights on the longer part of the day: hiking up the river to observe the summer pastures. Within half an hour my comrades had given up on the climb, not quite ready to drag themselves up the truly daunting hills that composed the trail, and suffering almost immediately from the altitude. Going now at my own pace, and munching on a dry piece of naan (which turned out to be breakfast and lunch), I made my way up the draw created by the fast flowing river and eventually found the first summer pasture. On the surrounding hills, women and children herded large flocks across sparse green grass and stones. I was looking for a lake that I had been told existed, and went up to a man, saying in brilliant Dari, “Big, large, water—where is it?” To which he responded, “What?” To which I said, pantomiming as if my life depended on it: “Large, round, big water. Do you understand?” To which he said, “No.” To which I said, “I’m sorry, thank you, goodbye.”

I realize this doesn’t paint my communication skills in the best light, but in my defense, there is no word for “lake” in Dari. I continued along the river, deciding that this was the best course of action, and soon the trail deteriorated into a field of rocks and boulders.

Around this time I began to notice changes in my state. Calling it hallucinations or delirium would be an exaggeration, but I slowly realized that I was trapped in a persistent and never ending series of daydreams. As I trudged up the steep hillsides, picking my way through the rocks, I first imagined that I was a donkey plodding slowly along. Then I imagined I was hearing military marching cadences. This gave way to a series of randomly ordered memories (some just of meals I had eaten) and, slowly, this turned into a silent recitation of half remembered poetry and book quotations. When I stopped to catch my breath, my surroundings would sharpen again, but my mind felt dull and slow. I would look behind me to see the trail below, and then slowly turn to examine the view. When I reached for my camera or some more naan, my hands felt thick and clumsy. Anything involving fine motor skills took a long time. I knew in a detached way that this was the beginning of altitude sickness. I figured I would adjust.

Before long I lost track of the trail, and stumbled along a rock field beside the fast flowing river. I began to think that the village I had left behind was the last summer pasture; surely no one would guide sheep, goats, and donkeys along this track. I kept walking though, a victim of mental inertia and plain stubbornness. Just when I was about to turn back, I saw someone on the far ridge.  He popped briefly over the hill and then back down again like a gopher. Feeling my way slowly across the rough terrain, I found the final summer pasture, its tents set up in the shadow of an enormous summit that was the source of the river. I descended tentatively from the hills into the valley, partly because I was by this point very tired and feeling short of breath, and partly because it wold have been rude to come so close to the women of the camp without a male escort. Before long, I noticed a teenager, certainly no older than myself and perhaps younger, watching me move over the rocks. I introduced myself and said in broken Dari, “Sheep–over there?” and pointed to a far slope. He nodded agreeably. As is usually the case when I speak Dari, I figured he probably didn’t understand what the hell I was talking about. I thanked him and went on, silently cursing how using Urdu as a fallback had made me lazy in learning the actual language of Afghanistan.

About five minutes later, as I was struggling up the next hill he came up behind me breathing normally and walked beside me the rest of the way. When I stopped to gasp in air (which was frequently) I turned to him and said, “From the village, big time–big travel…I am very tired,” at which point he laughed politely and nodded. We reached the final sheep and goats in the valley and I took a few anemic pictures, by this time almost too tired to care that I had reached my goal. I looked up then and saw, maybe 50 yards away, the highest ridge of the valley right below the stone peaks of the mountain. I stared and said, “Sheep–over there?” “No. Nothing over there.”

I looked on for a little while, “what is your name?” I asked.

“Mohammed,” he said, “what is your name?”

“Connor,” I said, “let’s go.” He grinned and we went on again.

It took me an hour and a half to climb and descend that last 50 yards. As I climbed, my already oxygen-addled brain completely uncottered. I thought to myself that reaching the summit would vindicate my existence. I doubled over every five or six steps. The pressure behind my eyes was strong and my head throbbed with every heart beat. Waves of liquid pain flowed through my legs and lungs. For the last 50 or so feet, Mohammed carried my backpack for me, looking unfazed, and I could’ve hugged him. When we finally crested that last hill, I was overcome with a mixed feeling of joy and nausea. I felt justified, I felt accomplished, I felt I had reached a new standard in life by which other events could be judged, ordered, and quantified. I was drooling but I didn’t care. I saw my problems laid out in the valley below and I saw their solutions. I saw things that I had said, and I saw things that I would say. As easy then as putting a left foot in front of a right. The grander my egomania became, the more earnestly I approached it, as if the climb were a panacea for all troubles and the revelation of all truths. I thought of a passage from Blood Meridian, the only part of which I remembered was, “he would live to look upon the western sea for he was complete at every hour.” I looked it up later that night for the rest of the quote:

“He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its fatal endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.”

My sentiments exactly at the time, although in retrospect I’m embarrassed by their grandiosity. All the while Mohammed sat beside me, saying nothing and staring calmly at the flock below, the tents beyond that, and the river winding around the steep hillsides. I wondered then and wonder now what he was thinking.

I had planned on stopping to eat lunch here (an MRE, Menu Item # 5: Chicken Breast) but I was feeling so sick that I wasn’t sure I could keep anything in my stomach much less food. I drank up the last of my water, and Mohammed led me to the river and waited patiently as I filled my bottle, drank, and filled it again. As we made our way down I lost every semblance of focus and stumbled carelessly down the steep, rocky incline. Every time I tripped, Mohammed and I would laugh.

I thought Mohammed would leave me back at the camp, but through a combination of pantomime and simple words I gathered that he lived in Yatimak and he made this walk every day. This made me feel more ashamed of my delusions on the mountain: I boasted to myself of a feat that was part of a routine for a man my age.

The walk back wasn’t nearly as difficult, although it was hard on my legs. As we descended, the extra oxygen quickly kicked in and soon my heart was beating normally. We walked mostly in silence punctuated by laughter at donkeys and sheepish, furtive exchanges in Dari. I felt an odd mixture of admiration and protectiveness towards Mohammed. Even though I couldn’t speak to him beyond the simplest phrases, I saw in his actions a number of qualities that I desire myself: he was respectful, unselfish, uncomplaining, and radiated a great calm. Now, back in Kabul, I still think of him frequently at various times of the day. I wonder what he is doing, and how he is feeling.

After rejecting an invitation to eat with him (I believe he was offering me meat, quite an honor) and a separate one to have some chai (by now it was 5:15, and I had said that I would be back by 6 at the latest) I made my way to the car and the open arms of Habeeb, who greeted me like a brother, and we chatted about the trip in Urdu. That night we ate delicious chicken kurai and I went to bed early, vaguely noticing the sound of the generator and feeling a dehydration headache that would last through the next morning.

[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

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

I suppose I should really address this to your campaign managers, since you don’t know how to use a computer to read this.  But maybe they’ll print it up and hand it to you.

Anyway, John, your campaign is starting to smell like a beached sturgeon.  The whole thing with Paris Hilton and the other bimbo?  Lame, lame, lame.  I want you to win, man, but you seem to be trying your best to blow it.  Trying to link Obama to some dumb blonde chicks is not gonna get you to the White House, OK?  If you want to get there, you’re going to have to explain yourself and your positions to the  American public.

Take affirmative action, for example.  You’ve come out in favor of amendments in the states banning affirmative action.  Good on ya!  Now there’s a positive message that will get the folks out and pulling that old handle next to your name!  On the other hand, I’ve seen some of your campaign ads, John, and I think you know you could use some help getting your message out.  So, I’ve made up a commercial for you.  You can look at it right below this.  Just get one of your assistants to help you with the mouse.

Oh, and you can have this commercial, John.  Consider it my donation to your campaign.  Keep up the good work.  Fight!  Fight!  Fight!

by Connor O’Steen

First off I’d like to thank you all for your thoughtful and encouraging comments on my previous installments. The first four were published while I was in Bamyan, so I haven’t had a chance to see them or the feedback until now. I admit that I had some initial worries about publishing on a blog: it’s an intimidating idea to publish copy that will subsequently be dragged across the Internet, perhaps to be eviscerated by packs of battle-hardened commentators. I think it reflects well on Scholars and Rogues that trolling is notably muted, here, and it’s convinced me that writing these letters is absolutely worthwhile.

Some of you had great questions that I’m happy to answer.  I hope to make these letters the beginning of a broader conversation, so if you have any questions or comments please do leave them. As long as I have the time and the access, I’ll make sure to respond.

In the future I’ll address questions in the comments sections, but I’ll catch up by going over the ones I’ve missed so far.

Djerrid asked: How effective are these humanitarian efforts? I’ve gathered that ousting the Taliban and scattering Al Qaeda created a much better environment for a year or two (lots of schools for girls opened up, for example) but deteriorated when we couldn’t sustain our attention (which begat the opium explosion). Obama makes the point that since we diverted our resources to Iraq, military and otherwise, we couldn’t finish what we started in Afghanistan. What do you think?

This is a big question and skirts around a larger one that I’ll write much more about in the conclusion of these installments.

First off, I would certainly agree with Obama that the movement of troops and money into Iraq from Afghanistan deteriorated our ability to enforce law and order on all of Afghanistan. This in turn led to disparate levels of aid to different parts of the country. Kandahar gets less development money because you can’t have a sizeable USAID commitment or even a UN one there; it’s simply too dangerous. This, in turn, leads to bitterness and poverty which, in turn, provide a base of support for a Taliban revival. In this way, having adequate resources and manpower is crucial to humanitarian efforts. You can build as many girls’ schools as you want, but if a Talib with an AK-47 is standing at the door making sure no one goes in, no one will go in.

That being said, many humanitarian efforts fail with good security and lots of money. From what I’ve seen, this is the result of a policy that focuses on dropping the money, building the building, and walking away. USAID has built a number of facilities (hospitals, schools, orphanages) across Afghanistan, most costing millions of dollars, and the majority of these are stripped bare after a month or two. Whether through inertia, bureaucracy, or lack of interest, the larger aid agencies seem stuck in Marshall Plan development systems. It’s easy to build a school in post WWII Germany because you have a largely literate population and, in many cases, teachers or former teachers who themselves have had formal educations. Building a school in Afghanistan and then leaving it be does very little: There has to be community engagement and a building of capacity. In Afghanistan, it’s not enough to make a school: You have to convince the local population that they need your school, that they can use your school, and (hardest of all) that they have the ability to maintain and staff the school. If they don’t have this last piece, the building is only as good as what you can get for its various salvaged parts in the bazaar.

I could go on, but I’ll save it for later. Good question.

Russ: I’ll be here for another two months, so plenty of time to bore you all with these dispatches!

On to the letter.

We drove back from Bamyan yesterday afternoon and I’ve had a fun day doing very little and not being in a car. The six days in Bamyan felt so extensive, so full of activity and events, that it seems like any letter will automatically fail at providing a full picture. Even getting started is intimidating. I’ll make this one short, and write a few more about specific experiences, later.

[Editors note:  Bamyan is the largest city in Hazarajat with a population of around 62,000.  You may remember it as the location of the Buddhas of Bamyan, the enormous ancient statues dynamited by the Taliban in 2001. Hazarajat is the land of the ethnic Hazaras, a persecuted, Shia minority of Mongol descent, and is located in central Afghanistan.]

Bamyan is a beautiful, contradictory town. Green fields of potato and wheat terminate abruptly in a labyrinth of mountain ranges that surround the clustered mud-brick houses on every side. The sights are largely agrarian and pastoral, especially outside the main bazaar, but derelict Russian tanks are displayed proudly among the crops. There was no trace of the hostility we encountered in Chaghcharan, but the curiosity of passersby also seems subdued. By this point I’ve become so accustomed to stares that’s it’s strange to me to go to a place where someone might look away and keep on walking after a single glance.

The atmosphere there is unequivocally wonderful. It was safe to walk the streets alone — a rare activity that I took advantage of frequently — and the schedule was loose enough that I was able to explore the surrounding area while still completing PARSA’s requirements for the trip. When we weren’t in Bamyan, we were in Jawzareen, a high valley ringed about by mountains that’s about an hour’s drive away. The phrase ‘achingly beautiful’ is a miserable cliché, but I just can’t think of a better description of that place. In all of the pictures I took, I couldn’t get across how gorgeous the villages there are, or how kind the people. There was something painful about it for me; I never wanted to leave the clear streams, the fresh air, or the green mountains. You could go hiking in all directions for days and still have more to see. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t live with the daily grind. Life in the villages consists of a few activities (drawing water, herding sheep, cutting crops, sowing crops) repeated over and over with no possibility of change. I know that even with the landscape, that kind of routine would break me.

Jawzareen was great in another way, because its villages showed how positive the influence of social ties in small communities can be. Unlike Nasim’s village, practically all children are taken care of and treated well. They definitely work hard at a young age — to a certain extent that kind of labor is necessary to keep afloat in a poor, rural community — but they have access to education, which provides the possibility for a different kind of life in the future.

In addition to their treatment of children, village life in Jawzareen might be the closest thing Afghanistan has to a functioning democracy. I met with the wahli of Yatimak on Saturday, a kind-hearted man with reasonably good English and a genuine desire to improve his village. When I proposed providing support to start classes in his village, he thought it over for a minute and said, “I really must speak with the other villagers before I can give you an answer.” This is a far more promising answer than his simply agreeing, because it means he puts power into a consensus rather than a single opinion.

Our role in Jawzareen was to provide support and conduct evaluations for early childhood development and women’s literacy classes that PARSA started six months ago, along with trying to expand the program into the nearby village of Yatimak. The classes that we’ve started are going well and are heavily attended. Between two women’s classes, there are 110 people that come regularly. The three children’s classes have about 100 kids total.  The younger ones are slowly plodding through the complicated Arabic alphabet, while the older kids are busy trying to spell words like “book” and “apple.” The going is slow sometimes, but the progress is tremendous seeing as how there were no educational opportunities before these classes.

I’ve already written more than I intended in responding to questions, and I don’t want to burn you out on long, tedious copy. I’ll end this letter here and write a few more about Bamyan in the coming week.

[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

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