Summer Reading

Summer reading has been especially stimulating so far this year. The discovery of Rebecca West,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_West  and plowing through most of her output was a source of constant amazement. This author is said to be the best "female" writer in western civ.  William Buckley referred to her in an interview as the best writer, period. For fifty years Ms West struggled with the tension of individual responsibility in community. Her work, be it novel, travel journal, essay, or reportage veers to the moral quandary of what am I to do, in the face of the Holocaust, the oppressive parent, the tradition of the tribe, the expectations of my culture. In her final, unfinished book of essays, "Survivors of Mexico", she revisits the indigenous peoples suffering at the swords of the conquistadors, and moves through the centuries of Mexican history culminating in the attempts of the muralists, in league with leftists, to dignify and edify their history.

And then I read, Things as they are, or The adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin. This book is the first mystery novel in western lit {1794}and is available on line through Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11323. I read the novel without knowing much of Godwin and was so blown away by the book, {no spoilers here},  that I went on to read in his philosophy. He is an early Anarchist and a Utilitarian http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/ and to the extent that I can understand what he is about, concluded that his hope for mankind was that a people rid of government could reach a high order of civilization, if, and here is the leaven, they attain high levels of education. 

Colum McCann's newest novel, "Transatlantic", fictionalizes stories of historical characters who made the crossing from and to Ireland.  In 1845 Fredric Douglas, still a slave, made the crossing to lecture across the island. Upon arrival he is witness to the early stages of the famine, and poverty so severe that he is humbled by the degradation. What an irony. Standing before large crowds demanding suffrage, bread, and freedom,  he is caught in the dilemma of joining with the forces stirring to overcome their suppression while maintaining his personal objective of advancing the cause of emancipation of black slaves. He cops to his cause, raising the funds needed to advance abolition.  

Douglas was caught in the same bind we find ourselves in today. Are we members of an interest group, a position we take because we belong in a special minority membership,  say a feminist is, because she is a woman, or, am I committed to an issue, like gun control? Most organizers believe and act as if any alignment is dilutive and argue against forming alliances with groups with which you might have an affinity. In so doing they deny us the possibility of coalition building that is going to be required to rid of us the oppressors who, without having to announce their affiliations, act as a "community of like interests". The banker who is going to finance the corporation who builds the next intelligent drone doesn't need to announce his pro-war position. It is understood. It is not so easily understood that the Gay Rights lobby has an interest in the Voting Rights Amendment. Liberals don't act as if we are in coalition. There is no rainbow nor big tent that embraces us. We are not in a community of interests. What liberal organizers have failed to appreciate is that we have the potential to get beyond issue and make ethical judgements that transcend our narrow interests. 

I could make the case by example: Some may hate the Justice Department for its pursuit against medical marijuana, its failure to indict Wall Street criminals, the persecution of Edward Snowden, or the suppression of free speech. Many of these very same people are asking the Justice Department to pursue hate crime indictments against George Zimmerman? If they indict him do we forgive and forget the ongoing cluster of behaviors that we despise? These positions represent issues to which we may or may not agree. The narrowness of these positions obfuscate the larger issue of government over-reach. Anyone on the wrong side of a gas attack from militarized "police" doesn't need to be organized in opposition to government suppression. What he or she may need to be reminded of is that I support you in your cause today, for tomorrow it will be my turn.

A more glaring example may be our reaction to a court system that conspicuously denies All of us, justice. We love the Supreme Court reversal of DOMA while we hate their gutting of the Voting Rights Act?  It appears the pr machine that works for the court is aware of the increasing disaffection of the masses and is now trotting out members that appeal to special interests. So Justice Souter suddenly appears on talk shows discussing the process. He is our liberal go to guy. He still loses 5/4 or votes "wrong" when we least expect it. And why not? He is them. What we are learning is we can't pick and choose. We applaud Obama's retreat from the active theaters of war, but we hate his use of drones. We want the economy to expand, to create jobs and "opportunity". We can't live with the downstream consequences of pollution and global warming. 

Four years ago I considered the implications of the "Double Bind" http://mypinksalmon.blogspot.com/2009/06/double-bind.html and hinted at a life strategy that might help us negotiate it.  The thinking then was that I was able to go my own way in a world too big to care about the implications of persons who chose to opt out, form clusters of like minded souls and create practical communities of interest. It won't do. What's changed? Where do you want to start?  No-one cared about a bunch of drug toking hippies living in domes in New Mexico. Governments do care about millions of underemployed, indebted, connected youth who are starting to get the fact that there is no hope for their aspirations. They are a potential force, and policy and practice is to surveil them, thwart them, imprison them, and prepare to violently oppose them. The appropriate response to their repression is to throw the buggers out. We can't be conned by the fear of what might follow. The past is not prologue. We have the ways and means to construct effective alternatives to tyranny. Most importantly we begin by accepting the responsibility of being in this together. Your fight is my fight. I'll be Trayvon Martin, you be my labor union member. I'll be your gay partner, you be my social security advocate. I'll be the parent of Malala, you be my public school advocate.

And Now?

Occupy Wall Street reminds me of the occupation of the administration offices of Columbia U. and other universities across the globe in the late 60's. Net effect?; Nada. It seemed that what those protestors wanted 40 years ago was to change the occupants of the chairs, not fundamentally change the system. What was then, and is still required, is a fundamental change in the system. The system wherein Columbia U faculty is revealed to be co-conspirators in the financial collapse of 2008. See what the University intends to do about the problem here. For the forty ensuing years from the time of the protest and the revelations from the film "Inside Job", students were content to pay their money and earn the tickets they needed to be employed in the companies that perpetrated the greatest financial crisis in history. What they had protested for and won was greater inclusion in the system. They got it. Women and people of color now have equal opportunity to exploit and game a system in which they too can become members of the 1% club.

Many students from Columbia U are on the streets and participating in Occupy Wall Street. While celebrating the act up quality of these actions the fact is that they will come to naught unless protesters focus, and get very specific about who they are targeting. Wall Street is amorphous. It is at home in Greenwich, at work on K street, and their puppets are peppered all through Capitol Hill. Lap dogs are fighting any reform that might prevent the next collapse, any tax reform, and any remedial legislation. The extent of the spider web that is Wall Street extends to international banks, the IMF, and the World Bank, and the collusion of governments world wide. Nothing less than a world in evolution is going to change the foundations on which Wall Street thrives. Therefore protesters are going to have to get very strategic, If, and this is a big if, they really want to change any element of system that exploits them.

As long as the protesters understand the symbolic nature of their protest, and exploit the excessive police push back, they can gain the time they need, and the public forum in which some of them can specify what they demand in outcomes, and the policy changes that will correct the underlying problems they identify.

Maybe the single most horrible aspect of the collapse that has prompted this act-up is the foreclosure crisis.

Not only did Wall Street, (and here I use the terms to indicate the interlocking system of money men in allied agencies), create the systems that crashed on the backs of home owners, they continue to refuse to rectify the conspiracy they created, that is throwing people out of their homes. Let's demand that Fannie and Freddie reset the principle on the loans they control. We own them. We ought to demand they modify mortgages. The same energy that is being harnessed in protest on Wall Street should move to Washington in front of the responsible agencies. We can do this.

In terms of the pragmatics, what we can do to implement an outcome that will signal a change is gonna come, is the boycott. We vote with our pocketbooks. Let's see if there is any willingness to "sacrifice", do without the toys, that are manufactured by the companies represented on Wall Street. Let's begin with the hallowed. Don't like the fact that Apple off-shores the manufacture of all those devices that Steve Jobs created, Boycott Apple. That's what it is going to take. To get beyond the pettiness of personal gain we are going to have to accept our complicity in a system that while it is working to our advantage, is exploiting others. We've been here before. When it was revealed how and by whom, and at what wage rate our sport shoes were being made, we were asked to boycott in protest. We didn't. To protest is easy. To delay the purchase of an Iphone, or a pair of Nikes, that's an act of courage.

We are going to have to rethink what we mean by jobs. We are going to have to get beyond the myth of so called "free markets". We are going to have to stop adoring the rich, and being jealous of the less fortunate who get assistance in life support. We are going to have to fundamentally change a system that is extractive, that measures GDP in terms of the exploitation of nature, and that extends the worst aspects of capitalism to developing nations. We cannot count on politicians and organizers of any stripe that suggest what is needed is more inclusion, more of the same, more, so called, infrastructure development. Roads and bridges and cars got us here. They are not the way out.

Had Enough Yet?

The systems of empire, totalitarianism, institutional slavery, indentured servitude, and the divine right of kings are concepts that have slipped into the trash bin of history.

We are at the threshold of yet another momentous change. It is hard to get your mind around it. There are many vested interests that are in the business of distraction in order to allow them to extract the last vestiges of what they have wrought. This weekend's Iowa nonsense and the media attention to it have the effect of exciting people of all the political spectrum into frenzies of irrelevant mind numbing excitation. The call to prayer, or the return to some imagined time in history when all was well cannot halt the inevitability of the end of an era.

What has quickened the process this time has been the global expansion of an economic system, desired by all, and demonstratively doomed to failure. The evidence is constant; the corpus, be it person, or company, (which have now morphed into the same "being") grows, (capital is drawn to capital), greed engorges the beast and it dies. The neo-liberal expansion of the multi-national corporation, the insatiable desire of the world's population to drive a car, and the most pernicious of all the elements in the drama, the expansion of debt as a "growth" lever all converge and the system collapses of its own weight.

The Economist publishes this world debt clock: 46 trillion and counting. This number is in current dollars and counts debt that we can see, obligations that are actually transparent. It does not take into consideration the debt obligations of say the entitlement obligations of future Americans, estimated to be 65 trillion dollars, to site just one example. We cannot cover this debt. It will be cancelled.

This is but an excerpt. The entire interview is on the WSJ website.

Disbelievers will have all the visual cues they need to reject the premise of this clip. Roubini has an accent and probably hair on his back. He is not a true American. Another darkie bringing the communist manifesto to light. Ironically China, the last great satan state, is closer to collapse after adopting the tenants of unbridled capitalism then it has ever been. It will not be able to sate the demands of the billions to drive that car.

For those with a sharp pencil and a keener understanding than I have are directed to the BIS. This is the world settlement clearing house that monitors debt and to the extent they can, the non transparent OTC derivatives that none of us understand. If you cruise around this site you will see that the value of derivatives (the instruments that precipitated the collapse of 2008) has actually increased to over 600 Trillion dollars in the last two years. You will also read that this is but the notational amount and their true asset value is only 20 some trillion. I don't understand it either. Here is what I know. They will all be settled or else. In the same way bond obligations, no matter how long they are kept off the books, will also be settled or else, default. In a rational world derivitives allowed a commodity producer to stabilize a price, say for a steer. A rancher owned a steer, an option was written of the future price of the steer, he delivered the steer, the option was cleared. What the geniuses who destroyed the world as you knew it did, was create a system of "Open Interest" which meant that persons could place side bets on the steer's price without any underlying interest in the steer. This is the easiest tell on the subject so if you have a problem here skip away. The impact will still effect you. You just won't know what hit you. And some of these bets, the poison ones placed on housing stock, already blew up and we are still paying off the gamblers. The argument is that if they default the world collapses. They will default, the world financial system will collapse.

Had enough yet?

We have to add in the problem of the underlying basis of the entire system, extractive economics. At exactly the same time that we are in a fiscal crisis, which is just a counting game, we have the all too real set of facts that the growth limits models of commodities that we extract from the earth to support all of this economic activity, predict that they are getting scarcer.

The following were excerpted from the NYT this weekend:

Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem?

When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

here is his conclusion “But it’s never absolutely too late,” Grantham said. “It’s never too late to do what we can,” which includes making a lot of money you can use to try to protect whatever and whoever matters to you — biodiversity, family, nation, everybody.

He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Grantham doesn’t dwell on the potential for disaster on an unimaginable scale, but it looms behind his measured language. The world’s population is seven billion and counting. “Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”

This is probably the darkest article I have read in my lifetime. Not the least because of the value free way it is reported. Within the article and this consultant's "letter" to his clients is the understanding that in a zero sum game, the world may collapse but you can profit from it, and, with the gains, put your money to work to secure yourself. But more insidious is his understanding that a stable earth will only support half of its anticipated population. How we eradicate the surplus is the issue. Implying, we can allow them to starve, or more likely, given our history, is we unleash the holy war on them and simply kill them off. This is the behavior of those "vested interests" I alluded to at the top of this post.

There are options to consider that you might want to contemplate. Nothing like world revolution. How about an adjustment of a few basic destructive behaviors that might take the pressure off the world. End the fiscal derivitives market immediately.

End the concept of "growth" and change it to sustainable regardless of how that term has been abused

End the practice of planned obsolescence, and redundancy

Constrict advertising and marketing

End the practice of inflation

Educate, educate, educate, to the realities of the world

End the auto-cracy

It appears Elizabeth Warren is going to run for the senate from Mass. Pity.

Commence

This June every student will participate in some form of graduation or more precisely gradation; to arrange in grades or gradations; establish gradation in. That's what our students have been doing for however many years they have joined in the process. They have allowed themselves to be gradated in carefully calibrated beakers. They have absorbed the most critical component of their respective curricula, they have come together and agreed to participate in the ranking game.
The curriculum itself has always been perceived as but a means to the end. The practice of the curriculum contained little of inherent value but was set up as a way and means of developing obedience and conformity. The fact that battles are fought over what constitutes a core curriculum reveals how arbitrary it really is. One side wins, gender studies or evolution theory is thrown out. Another side wins and Thackeray is exchanged for Naguib Mahfouz.
Students have moved through a nationally agreed upon process whereby it will be determined who amongst them will win the prizes that were held out as the values they have worked so hard for. Or not.

Some of those prizes are now being re-evaluated:
The next, more exclusive level of on-going formal education is being examined from a cost/benefit perspective.
At a post graduation, material level, a single family house for example, once considered to be the great storehouse of wealth (the estate) has lost its primacy in the hierarchy of "things". A broad portfolio of blue chip equities has taken a hit as has prospect of retirement in comfort. Some of the more mundane prizes, the gourmet meal, the high priced wine, the flashy car are like pins in the lane, about to be knocked off as their underlying value is challenged, or realized to be unsustainable, going the way of the lynx wrap.
At a corporate level (the employer of the winners), the ability to maintain advantage is being challenged by a whole new set of players. The prospects are not good that business as usual, the curriculum in practice, will sustain them.
At the governmental level, the power centers from which the corporation and the prize winning individuals are protected, the process of sustaining themselves seems to be cracking as the numbers of losers and their ability to coordinate swell.

Not surprisingly, given the ends are being questioned, the means are being scrutinized. It is being observed that students are being stressed out in the "Race To Nowhere" as the documentary film of that name points out. Don't expect too much from this effort. The "deal" that has been struck by the parents who screen and then discuss this film is that; I won't make the changes by myself. Only if we all agree to stop the resume inflation, cheating, achievement by any means possible, will I relent. I am not going to put my child at a competitive disadvantage by doing the right thing.

No one questions the lesson plans. More math, more science = better rocketry, more fire power, more stealth, better spying technology, these are the core elements we need to "win the future". No world language, no geo-political reality, no deep cultural studies of others, no family practice, no diet and nutrition. We can't afford art, and physical exercise is reserved for the combatants. No peace studies, no alternatives to violence, and no alternative to so-called free market economics.

Paul stopped by to check and tune up the furnace system he installed two years ago. He came up from the basement slightly ashen. "Have you been aware of a bang when the furnace cycled on?" he asked. Yes, we thought it was normal. "Well it isn't normal. What has happened is that there is a leak at the gas fitting and when the ignition comes on it burns off that excess gas. I have to replace the ignitor." What he didn't say and that I could surmise was left un-repaired the house and its contents were at risk. Paul doesn't have an advanced degree. Paul inherited the business from his dad. Paul's value to me and the society is immeasurable.

for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee

To read or listen to Charles Murray requires that you park everything you know and feel and believe, and give in to the "objectivity" of scientific inquiry. That was the case when he co-authored The Bell Curve, 1994, which argued for and was sustained as proof of the genetic inferiority of blacks, and thus a rationale for eliminating the welfare state; The welfare state encourages the creation of black babies, and thus the demise of the nation. I can't say that President Clinton was influenced by the ruckus created by the book. His welfare reform(1996) which threw single moms off the rolls, might just be a coincidence.

To accept the premise of The Bell Curve you have to believe that: You can enslave a people, free them but deny them access to education, jobs, and human services. Ghettoize them, deny them job opportunities, disgrace and humiliate them in the public media. Flood their communities with drugs, profile them for arrest, fail to represent them politically, and assassinate their leaders. and That none of the above explains why they may not be as "productive" as their white tormentors.

The Bell Curve is one of the foundations texts of the right. It is the thinking that informs the rhetoric of the idea that we are a welfare nation, and that we ought to dismantle it. In the interim Murray has authored other texts: "Challenging 'educational romanticism' he wrote Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. His "four simple truths" are:
1. "Ability varies."
2. "Half of the children are below average."
3. "Too many people are going to college."
4. "America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted." wiki

Now Mr. Murray is speaking in advance of a new book in which he posits the unhappy condition of white America. He spoke to his peers at the AEI on April fourth and c-span recorded it here:
Here are some of the highlights I took from the lecture:
American Exceptionalism ( I have been looking for a definition) is the "project" of a free people governing themselves without the interference of government. "The American exception is we are the only nation that does not try to maximize wealth or power. The only nation in which citizens are free from class bondage."

The four (four is a convenient number) virtues of these self governing people are: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion. As regards religion Murray admits that he is an agnostic. In his new book he is going to focus on the "working class" white, non-hispanic population, and a coda regarding the behavior of a new elite, (they are so rich they don't care about the rest of us anymore). What he has been graphing and pushing into statistical results are the following conclusions: Since 1960, working class white men are increasingly not working. He stopped his data collection before the great recession as to not skew for this anomaly. (the end of the American Industrial Age, throwing millions out of work, happened before 2008). Men are increasingly leaching off of their wives. Middle and upper middle class men are working harder than ever.

Marriage among working class white people is falling off and out of wedlock births is growing at an alarming rate among working class white women. Despite what you might guess, upper class whites are married. The consequences of this include the "fact" that single people don't provide social capital. they are selfish and don't volunteer. Among other things I heard was the "fact" that marriage civilizes men. He didn't choose to talk about honesty and well he might not for if you included un-indicted conspirators in the greatest theft in the history of humankind you might see an alarming rise in upper class white collar crime.

He got on a roll re. religion. Despite his own non-participation he observed that the secular states of Europe are about to implode owing to little more than their lack of church attendance and we would be well advised to take a lesson from their failures.

The conclusions he reached were summarized in the following statement: "the working class is making it difficult for their fellow citizens", and culminated in the conclusion at minute 41.55 of the tape, that they are "unsuited for citizenry in a free society." My jaw dropped. Not one reaction from the audience nor question from them regarding this statement. This is class war writ large. When handed the softball question from the former head of the AEI, "given what your prior work concludes, and aware that for political reasons you stopped short of including black and hispanic persons in your new study, nonetheless, did you do any work that included them?" "Well yes, that is Chapter 17. Surprisingly when you include blacks and hispanics the rates don't go up." They are off the hook. Or more accurately, the white working class are the new blacks.

All is not lost. There is hope. The Tea-Party has the answers. The same ones his libertarian brothers have been promoting for these many years. The question for me is, will the members of the so called tea party, who like to represent themselves as the white working class heart of the heartland, accept the premise that they are not fit for citizenship.

"The taste for the superfluous holds sway over a people who are still unacquainted with the necessary". Marquis Astolphe de Custine by way of Donna Leon.

Fat Tuesday

In the run up to Mardi Gras the urge for cajun cooking gets extreme. I was craving red beans and rice. You don't make small quantities of red beans at home. Good beans require you add at least one smoked ham hock to the pot. That means you gonna cook up a mess. This is a good example of deferring to an institution to do the cooking unless you intend to feed a mob or eat red beans for a week. nola.com ran a column on the places to get the best red beans and rice in New Orleans. Popeyes made the top 5. It wasn't the first time someone had recommended them. So Monday, red bean day, we drove the 25 miles to the only Popeyes in the state of Maine. What was I thinking? What are the so-called experts thinking? For those who don't know, one is handed a covered foam cup in which two tablespoons of rice are placed over a red paste of something. I'll stop there.

By the time any chain opens the third store, I don't care what the product, it is not going to warrant the drive. Subway proudly announces it has more units than MickyD. That doesn't say a thing about the quality of the sandwich. And none can compare with the hands on, one off, of say this piece of work at the Num Pang Sandwich Shop.
To say that bigger is not better is to state the obvious. Why then the insatiable urge to grow? In business terms the enterprise trades off quality for profit. In the public sphere the world is far more complex. You will concur, after you read this, that it is obvious to say that the entrepreneurial spirit invades the bureaucracy. Unless you experience it however, you can't appreciate the scale of the behavior. Government agency heads read their budget projections with sweating palms. They fear a cut-back, celebrate an increase, and these numbers have little to do with the delivery of the service they are charged to perform. Bigger is just better. They sit at the cabinet table in ranked order of whose agency is bigger, how large the budget, how huge the staff. They often fund projects with an eye to "continuation of effort", the opportunity to continue the project, not with successful completion. It is how we got where we are.

The behavior of bureaucrats at the local level is no less insidious. Given that the school allocation is always the largest item in any municipal budget it is no wonder that here is where the heat is rising as we contemplate cutbacks. Teachers are front and center of this discussion; fire them, cut their pensions, curtail their ability to bargain. Very little attention is paid to a real budget buster, the building program. School buildings are mortgaged and thus amortized over the life of the instrument. A thirty year building bond appears on the budget in increments. It doesn't feel, or look so bad. Fact is, it is an enormous contributor to your total tax bill. And that bill is brought to you by the same gangsters that brought you the end of the world as you know it.

When we were in Virginia we lived through this way up close and personal. The arguments for shutting down the neighborhood school that had worked well for the previous 70 some years came down to consolidation is a good thing, it will improve the delivery of services because the new bigger school can deliver more, fill in the blanks. There was no empirical evidence to support those claims. It was accepted, not without a fight. The protesters lost. Ground was acquired from a friend of the board at a price that set a record for a land sale at that time. Architects and builders went at it and a shiny new school rose in a farm field and the old time school was abandoned.
Closer to home the same process has just repeated itself. This is what we lost:


After the memorial for the old school, the weeping grads that came back to praise it, and testify as to how they will miss it, blithely accepted the new reality.
This is what we got. Plus a bill for 14+ million dollars.



NEW SCHOOL’S FEATURES
• A prominent principal’s office with large windows overlooking the front entrance, which will be the only public entrance. It will have a closed vestibule with a key-card system for staff members and a two-way communication window to screen visitors.
• Classrooms clustered around four open, carpeted areas with skylights, where teachers can work with students one-on-one or in small groups. Classrooms are in two, two-story wings, with lower grades at ground level.
• Several single-user bathrooms in each classroom wing, meant to increase privacy, decrease the distance from classrooms and reduce the potential for students to misbehave in “gang” bathrooms.
• Various energy-saving and environmentally friendly features, including a roof drainage system planted with greenery, solar-powered hot water and a dual-fired heating system that will allow the school to burn oil or gas, whichever is cheaper.
• A teachers’ lounge and workroom – something Clifford lacks – and a health clinic with a bathroom that’s larger than the nurse’s room at Clifford.

The following is excerpted from an article In The Portland Press Herald:

A tour of the school reveals more features.Each hallway is lined with an occasional grooved tile that reflects the theme of the wing. For instance, the ocean wing has tiles with embedded fish scale patterns.Jenifer Richard, an interior designer from WBRC Architects, said children enjoy running their hands along walls, which is why each wing has special hand tiles.Richard said the other wings' themes are agriculture, forest and mountains.The floors also reflect wing themes. The Ocean Wing floor tiles resemble rippling water. Forest wing floors look like bark with spots of leaves on them.
Another article re the school budget process in rural Maine, contained the following:

If the transition goes smoothly, it will bode well for future building projects, school officials said. They're working on plans to replace or renovate several of Portland's 10 elementary schools, depending on availability of state funding.
They're also preparing to tackle the controversial subject of redistricting within the next few years, which could force residents to reconsider their definition of neighborhood schools.
"We need to communicate with parents and students to make sure this transition goes well," said Jaimey Caron, chairman of the School Committee's facilities subcommittee.
The article provoked the "humble farmer" to write the following letter to the editor:

Robert Karl Skoglund 02/28/2011 06:24 AM
Fifty or so years ago the people in St. George, Maine voted to go into a school administrative district with Thomaston. This is like sending a weekly check to a man who lives with your wife and raises your children.
You might well ask how intelligent Maine people could be suckered into such a con game.
The basic premise is something for nothing. It is absolutely impossible to fleece people unless they are convinced that they can get something for nothing.
Here’s how the school con works.
You, the taxpayer in Maine, give the State and Federal Government your tax dollars. Then, if you do exactly what the government tells you to do, they will give back to your school some of your money.
You smile and feel pretty good that you got all that free money from the government.
Here’s how the school con started.
Building contractors convince top officials in the education business that it’s cheaper to educate children in large central schools. For years Maine people have raised chickens in large, centrally located henhouses. The more chickens you can jam into your henhouse, the more money you can make. The grain bin is right by the door. It’s efficient. So folks very quickly bought the argument that it would be cheaper to educate kids in consolidated schools.
It was a good argument, but there was one hitch. No chicken farmer in his right mind would vote to spend the amount of money it was going to take to build those expensive gyms and playing fields. Because most anyone would ask, “What’s gymnasiums and football fields got to do with education?”
But the wonderful part about the whole deal was that the towns wouldn’t have to pay. The state was going to pick up the tab. So even the most frugal chicken farmer jumped right in. He was suckered, you see, with the promise of something for nothing.
His town sent his tax dollars to Augusta to pay for all the schools in Maine. But there wasn’t enough money to build and run schools in all the towns. Who would believe it?

Maine people who were very frugal, Maine people who would never in their right minds vote to replace their present excellent local school, voted to go into school administrative districts. They might attend church in a building that was built in 1850, but thought that their children couldn’t be properly educated unless it they were housed in a shiny new building. And they wanted to get their share of that money out of that big money barrel in Augusta before their sticky fingered neighbors in the next county got it.
It was cleverly done, wasn’t it? But like any con game, it had to work because most taxpayers can be convinced that you can get something for nothing. Forty years ago we had communities in Maine. When you lose your school, you lose your community. And when you farm out your child’s education by getting into a school administrative district that will “save you money” don’t be surprised to discover that you might be paying for that education twice.

The humble Farmer

People's Protest

The following is an excerpt from a story that appeared in The Nation:
How to Build a Progressive Tea Party, by Johann Hari

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.
Instead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism. It shows that there is an alternative to making the poor and the middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich. It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.
This may sound like a fantasy—but it has all happened. The name of this parallel universe is Britain. As recently as this past fall, people here were asking the same questions liberal Americans have been glumly contemplating: Why is everyone being so passive? Why are we letting ourselves be ripped off? Why are people staying in their homes watching their flat-screens while our politicians strip away services so they can fatten the superrich even more?
And then twelve ordinary citizens—a nurse, a firefighter, a student, a TV researcher and others—met in a pub in London one night and realized they were asking the wrong questions. “We had spent all this energy asking why it wasn’t happening,” says Tom Philips, a 23-year-old nurse who was there that night, “and then we suddenly said, That’s what everybody else is saying too. Why don’t we just do it? Why don’t we just start? If we do it, maybe everybody will stop asking why it isn’t happening and join in. It’s a bit like that Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. We thought, If you build it, they will come.”
The story continues here.
An organization was created called UK Uncut. They maintains a web presence here.

UK Uncut from Fat Rat Films on Vimeo.

The following is a slide show concerning the tax shelter practices of some US corporations.
Slide Show: 8 Corporations That Owe You Money

If you're still not convinced read the report of the US Government Accountability Office re off shore tax avoidance.
Gather some friends, pick a tax dodger and get on the street!

All The Rage

As the nation moves from mourning the loss of the victims of Tucson, to attempts to rectify the causes, we risk becoming mired in the maudlin, the kumbaya, the "both, and", the nonsense of feeling good. This impulse works to the advantage of the embedded powerful. No one asks or expects the banker, the soldier, the politician, to relinquish any part of the power or fortune they have obtained or protect in the name of civility. Only the victims of bankers, soldiers, and politicians are asked to tone it down. That is just as true here as it is in Tunisia, where after intolerable abuse became so apparent, the people rose up to throw the bastards out. They may get nothing for their trouble, but at least it will be a different set of bastards. The world watches and shudders at the prospect of what this might portend. What all the powerful fear is when people have had enough abuse they will rise up in rage against their oppressors.

Anyone new to the community organizing business, will ask his/her mentors why they can't effect change on issues that seem so apparent to the trainee. Those working on issues of joblessness, lack of services, legal or similar abuses are amazed at the quiet on the land regarding issues of such dire import. The wise, experienced teacher will ask their minions, "where is the rage?", knowing rage is the precondition for any meaningful change. Channeling rage into effective action is the most important tool in the change agent's kit.

People with experience in the south preceding the civil rights movement experienced the false civility of white oligarchs asking for and employing "courtesy" in the name of subjugating their "niggras", and the po-white trash that they employed. Southern hospitality was reserved for those who respected the time honored traditions of Gentry. Talking heads are starting to posit that all Americans want to be rich, they identify with their oppressors. That's the reason they tolerate the abuse. Until they don't.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, remembered this day for peaceful, non-violent demonstrations, was no stranger to rage and its uses. The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because it was a no-compromise response to the years of abuse suffered by the black citizenry.

The rage, the reaction, to the assassination of Dr King, was one of the factors leading to the co-joining of his followers civil rights campaign with the anti-war protests, documented here. The coalition forces, previously dispersant, forced the end of the war in Vietnam, and implemented much of the civil rights reform.

What the timid on the left have to accept is their potential alliance with the out-rageous on the right. Who on the left supports the bank bailouts so vehemently protested by the tea party activists? Who on the left is not for reductions in health care costs, elimination of wasteful spending, or the reduction of profligate government? Cut the birther crazies, and racists out of the picture. Get beyond the diversion of a killer mad man. Realize why there is such unanimity amongst the powerful in their desire to quell anti-government rhetoric. They are starting to sense the possibilities of what an anti-status-quo coalition might look like.

At the same time we have to understand that there is often no middle way. Those who beg for diplomacy, or the search for compromise, reduce hard ball issues to a mediated center, insuring that neither side of an argument will be satisfied. And this is posited as a good thing.

There has to be an understanding that many problems cannot be settled by reaching for a middle ground. General Colin Powell means it when he argues that you don't wage war halfway. In an April 1, 2009 interview on The Rachel Maddow Show, Powell set out his doctrine: the Doctrine denotes the exhausting of all "political, economic, and diplomatic means," which, only if those means prove to be futile, should a nation resort to military force. Powell then expands upon the Doctrine, asserting that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.

Bible readers are aware of King Solomon's Baby Decision (1 Kings 3:16-27):
King Solomon had to decide between two women as to which was the mother of a baby. Solomon said (1 Kings 3:25) to cut the living child into two halves and to give one half to each mother. When one woman said she would rather give up her claim than have the child killed, Solomon knew that she was the real mother.

Two enlightened leaders spoke truth to justice and were willing to threaten the end of the so called rule of law, when the issue demanded it. Who among us retains confidence in the court system to mete out justice. Pro-lifers are just as furious with a court they find out of touch as are those appalled with the Citizens United decision. The court smells it and members have hit the book speaking trail, with new fervor. Justices Scalia and Breyer are getting a lot of air time, convincing us of the reasonableness of the system, of the mediated way. They speak to different audiences but both speak to the virtue of incremental change, the self correcting process that is the system of laws. We should be glad to know that while they disagree they remain friends. They are civil. They have found a middle way. For those slaves that lived and died under the Constitutional 3/5 compromise there was no middle way. For those millions of women who never voted there was no middle way. For those disenfranchised that never owned land or the means of production there was no middle way. Those who find themselves in similar circumstances today should not rely on a self correcting mechanism that might make the world a better place for their children. They have a right to demand justice today. They have a right and a responsibility to be outraged at the inequities in the system.

They should not be quieted by the calls for civility. If anything they should get louder and more organized and less civil in their demands for a safer, cleaner, more just world.

That is the legacy of Dr. King.

Election Day Lessons

Moms can't catch a break. The following is an excerpt: From Erica Jong, WSJ Saturday Essay
"Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy. It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole. But the entire planet is a child's home, and other adults are also mothers and fathers. We cannot separate our children from the ills that affect everyone, however hard we try. Aspiring to be perfect parents seems like a pathetic attempt to control what we can while ignoring problems that seem beyond our reach.

As we give up on ideals of community, we focus more and more on our individual children, perhaps not realizing that the community and the child cannot be separated."

The NYT blog response, if read by moms will drive them to distraction. Time better spent focusing on the job at hand. The facts, as witnessed in one tiny village on the Hudson, belie all of the summary statements made by those who write about parenting.

It happened that our kids' schedule conflict allowed us the privilege of child caring. It was election day. The prospect of a long day in a small hurricane was eased when Evelyn invited us to her home where moms were going to gather to staff the phones in a get out the vote pitch. Their children would play together as another coincidence had it that the schools were closed for a work day. No "avoidance" here.


Carrie and I are no strangers to phone banks and so we did our share. The attic was commandeered by the kids and one of us would drift up to check out the scene from time to time. The kids got on well. As moms came and went the conversation ebbed and flowed around the political issues of the day. I shared the perspective that it seemed moms were comfortable in their roles as moms. We had noted that all of the moms in this house had been seen picking up their children from school the day before, and that there was a great turnout and crazy fun had in the previous weekend halloween activities. (Cold Spring, NY is a mecca for over the top halloween celebration). Years earlier a new mom friend of ours howled with frustration; "I am tired of being the only mom in the tot lot!"

These moms are in the process. I heard all manner of civic, and social engagement. No "ignoring problems beyond their reach." They are bonding as a community. This scene was repeated around the country as new energy electrified the electorate. Moms are widely disparate and being manipulated in opposition to each other but that cynical strategy is not going to work. When the pols and the pundits fail to deliver a safe and secure future for their children, the moms are going to unite and create their own. They are going to clear the decks of people who presume to tell them there is A way. The truth is that nothing dramatic happened that day, And that is as it should be.

Waiting for Supermen

Screeners of the new film documentary, "Waiting for Superman" have been told to bring towels. As if the audience had no idea of the state of public education in America. It is true that there are those who live at such a remove from troubled school districts that they may have never actually been in a central city school, those living in rural Montana for example, but the rest of us have either fled them for cause (Obama fesses up) or their cable has been cut for the last 50 years. I spoke on this blog in February to some of the issues.

Let's allow the possibility that what these kids haven't been getting is absolutely known to all of us and we have chosen to do nothing about it. People within the Washington D.C. metro area who are old enough will remember "massive resistance" and those that don't ought to read this link. It is a perfect example of a very public expression of an area of the country saying no to integration because they knew that children of color were under educated in sub par schools and whites were not going to be forced into those schools. They didn't pretend they didn't know what was going on. They had supported keeping those kids in their place. And white kids were not going to that place.

But let's get some perspective here. To make the leap from; we are keeping the black and brown folk down, to, we have a broken system. is the height of public manipulation. Let's get some facts on the table before we get caught up in the great public diversion away from our other problems:
There is not one vacant seat in any of the colleges and universities in America. Evidence includes a discussion group that identifies the acceptance rate at leading universities and includes a discussion of Cal Tech. Cal Tech applicants come from California public schools.
There are millions of highly qualified, educated persons, standing in unemployment lines.
The economic success of the BRICs is not because their schools are better than ours. They have a work force that will work for less.
We are not losing our ability to compete in the world because some inner city kid is being trampled.

Another set of behaviors, educational outcomes, is more interesting to me:
The people who implement all the current forms of "massive or passive resistance" are highly educated.
The persons who designed and built the killer drone unmanned aircraft are all Ph.D. engineers.
The persons who designed and implemented the ad campaign for "Sugar Smacks" were all college grads.
Supreme Court Justices Roberts and Kennedy to name but two, are law school grads who voted to extend to corporations the rights of individuals.
All of the bankers and insurance company executives that have brought the world as we knew it to an end are business school graduates.
The Unabomber is a Harvard Graduate.
The geniuses that destroyed the American auto industry were all graduate engineers.
The persons who are asking for your tax dollars to support a manned mission to Mars, to sustain the thread of life that will expire on Earth, are all graduates of schools of higher education.
The generals that brought you Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all graduates of West Point.
The software engineers that gave you the ability to reduce human existence to the banality of tweets are all highly educated.

After the current round of the education debate is over, refueled by the guilt instilled by the latest film documentary on the subject, I am going to be asked to divert my money away from some form of self indulgence to support the improvement of the educational circumstances of under-privileged kids in city school systems. I will "resist". What I am more than ready to do is give up meat to challenge the efficacy of American higher education. I want my money to be used to create a set of objectives for our graduates that includes ethics, morals, and a sense of responsibility to our fellow human beings on this planet. Moral college graduates will not tolerate the destruction of others. They will improve education.

A Pox on Both Your Houses

The war against the poor is at once brutal, subtle, and rife with contradictions.

The life lessons that had the most effect on me came while I was in the field. None more profound than while on a recruitment tour for a new college my firm had bought and hoped to reform. The argument offered in our catalog was that essentially the administration of this new college has accepted the premises laid out in Donella Meadows publication, Limits To Growth.

If our new reality was that we were going to have to learn to do "more with less", then our curriculum was going to reflect a new set of studies, teaching methods, and evaluations. We imagined these reforms would afford our students a skill set that would serve them well in a world about to radically change.

For example we integrated studies, proposed team work as of the highest value, moved teaching staff from the front of the class to within the body of the learning community, and created courses that included problem solving, design and planning, even within the traditional humanities.

I brought my program to guidance counselors in high schools in MD, NY, and was satisfied with responses from students indicating they would apply. I had yet to meet with parents. I had family in Hartford, Ct and they agreed to host a gathering of prospective students in their home. On the given evening I greeted more than 50 parents and students in this suburban setting. The students were animated, asking tough questions, most of which centered on accreditation. (because of the changes we proposed, our accreditation was under review). There were a disproportionate number of lawyers in the group and this became apparent when the parents, having heard enough, rose up in revolt. Let me reduce it to one parent's statement that summarized the spirit in the room: "I am going to assume that all of your presumptions about the future are correct. More and more people are going to be chasing fewer and fewer resources. In such a scenario I am going to strongly advise my daughter to consider the Ivy league options she has available to her, and increase her competitive advantage." This statement was seconded by all of the parents in the room, and the generation gap widened during the course of the evening. The lesson for me was laid out in that room and learned: When the times get tough, the haves are going to hang on like crazy. These neighbors were friends of my relative, a Democrat, an elected official. This was the voice of the suburban left.

Program policies directed at the poor were traditionally premised on a belief that what had hampered the development of the poor was their lack of inclusion in an economic system that was otherwise sound. No matter the regime, if the political world view was that ours was a nation of plenty, though the methods might change as to how one might stimulate income gains, poverty could be eliminated by the poor gaining access to the system. Now we know that the push back that started with Reagan; rejection of affirmative action, welfare reform, emphasis on the language of so-called equal opportunity at the expense of equal outcomes, might have been embedded in the reality that middle class America was already trying to make do with less. Rather than assuming malignant intent to those who waged war on the poor from the right, it is more likely that they share with their brothers on the left, an awareness that the economy is indeed shrinking, the times are getting tougher, and self interest trumps goodwill every time.

There was something honest about the stated self interest of Dems in Ct. Not so the current harangue from the right that would have you believe that their interests are really not classist, they are concerned with the welfare of the nation. Their objection to the expansion of health care to the poor is to protect the budget. They are deficit hawks, or so they would have you believe. Their stance on immigration is really about homeland security and not a threat to their piece of an ever shrinking pie.

As the ranks of the poor are swelling the questions for us are: Has the forecast of limits been realized? What kind of curriculum do we want in place today? Do we have any responsibility to any of our neighbors? Is this a nation or a pack of dogs, fighting for what they fear is their last meal?

When is enough, enough?

When is enough, enough?
Roman Abramovich, wiki here, gangster, thief, con-man, plutocrat and one of the wealthiest men in the world, has just had his boat, Eclipse, floated. It is notable as the largest private yacht in the world. A set of pics and description are here. It is made of steel. The weight of the boat, 13000 gross tonnes, when converted to pounds is 29,120,000 lbs. Fuel capacity is 8801 liters. ( 2325 gallons) It cruises at 25 knots an hour.
I was unable to obtain fuel consumption figures for the specific boat, but here is the rate for a charter boat half the size:
FUEL CONSUMPTION: 800 ltrs/hour (211 gallons).
GENERATOR CONSUMPTION: 2500 ltrs/day

The descriptions are really only best guesses, written by a salivating media, and the cost estimate is for the boat only, exclusive of furniture and toys. For a look inside another of these behemoths the WSJ recently published this video.

There is a decidedly mixed message within this video. While subtly mocking the $60k water faucet, the "nookie" chamber, or the walls lined with the hides of sting rays, the reporters appear to enjoy cavorting aboard, racing along the corridors and apparently wishing they could extend their stay. Nothing new about that. When boats float on "in the water" boat shows/sales the docks are flooded with on-lookers clawing aboard, wanting to know who owns what, and how much it costs. The owners know of the envy they provoke. Around the world in port after port owners have their yachts docked stern in, and proceed to dine in lavish excess while the proles stroll by and salivate. No fear of protest or a pitched grenade, owners know the poor eat each other.

Here is a list of other yachts that are the "top 100" in size.

We'll know later today if stories regarding the Florida candidate for senate, Jeff Greene, uses and abuses of his yacht sank his election bid.

We were living in Florida, just south of the Port Everglades cut on 9/11/01. Within an hour of the confirmation of the news of what had happened in NY and before we knew if the attack was limited, hundreds of yachts could be seen bobbing in the ocean. I called a boat builder I knew in the area and asked him what he knew, what was up? "They figure if this is it, their chances are better at sea then on shore, they're outta here." Says something about the character of the big boat owner.

We cannot suppose that all of this excess is without consequence. The argument that we have no right to dictate to any of these billionaires what they can or cannot do with their money is an argument WE cannot afford. By example we rarely restrict the scale of housing. If megabucks wants to build a McMansion he is generally free to do what he wants. However there are mitigating circumstances. When in the height of the drought that threatened to parch Atlanta in 2007, the county water authority placed restrictions on water consumption.

When it was discovered that a fat cat was consuming 440,000 gallons of water a month for his mansion the outrage and outcry resulting in forcing him to cut back. Public outrage reined in an excess that threatened the rest of us. This outrage is too rare. As tourists roam the "great houses" of the world they never ask how the wealth was obtained, how many backs were broken in the process of the erection of these monuments to excess.

There is no outrage at the overwhelming excesses of big boat owners. And the scale of their abuses. They are building the equivalent of private hotels that dwarf any of the so-called "great" houses.

One would hope, in a resource starved world, that we would shift the onus of responsibility where it belongs. We are barraged with stories of how marginal peasants, let's use Chiapus as an example, are deforesting the jungle. We blame them, not the end user who converts these exotic hardwoods into railings for his motor yacht.

Are we blind to the fact that having 30 million tons of steel processed for a private yacht is of enormous environmental impact. Do we really accept the idea that because a person can "afford" to burn fuel at the rate of gallons per mile it has no impact on the rest of us. These gluttons are eating our lunch and we don't pull the plate off the table. We stare like beggars at the banquet and validate their excess. We may have no political authority to curb them or rein them in, but we can abhor their behavior and let them know it. Maybe some of the rowdies at a Chelsea ( the team Abramovich just bought) soccer match might carry in a sign or two.

Never Again

I don't want to see this picture ever again. Not this one, or any like it. As we in America inch ever closer to the maelstrom that has already destabilized many world capitals we have to insure that our children are safe from the excesses of "crowd control". As the truth about the damage that has been done to the economy that our children inherit becomes clearer to them, I full well expect that their scattered and relatively quiet reactions are going to bloom into full scale uprisings.

What is now confined to college campuses, where tuition increases and class closing seem to be the issues of the day, is going to migrate as more and more graduates carry debt and no job prospects into their future. Their plight will move off the cartoon pages and onto the front pages. And we, their parents and teachers, and friends, are going to ask them to do the heavy political action.

I have never understood the psychology of those who are given the guns and bayonets when they turn on their own. Simply following orders doesn't seem to do it. And I don't believe there is a great ideological divide between kids in uniforms and their brothers and sisters on the street. Yet it happens over and over. Kids are asked to pummel and shoot each other. In the name of law and order.

I think we have time to get in front of this curve. Every one of those kids in uniform has a parent, a guardian, a relative, a friend who knows them well enough to broach the subject. Every person who knows someone on the force, in the guard, or full time enlisted, ought to begin a campaign to sensitize them to the fact that they are not the handmaidens of the oligarchy. No one joined to protect the vested interests of the bankers against the citizenry. This is not an issue that will break down on party lines. People who are suffering at the hands of this regime ought to have the right to protest against it. They have the right to demand and effect change. And those sworn to protect and defend them must respect that solemn oath.