Absurdity in America

The Ocean Is Coming

by William Rivers Pitt

It occurs to me that I spend an inordinate amount of time in this space pointing out the ludicrous, the extreme and the absurd in America. Doing so is just slightly less fun than emergency root canal during a national novocaine shortage. To be fair, however, there’s a hell of a lot to talk about in that particular vein, the fodder for these stories are the people running the country, and not nearly enough people in a position to inform the public are talking about it, so I do it.

When a Virginia GOP senator labels all women as incubators - “some refer to them as mothers,” he said – someone needs to shine a light.


When 65 miles of the Mississippi River gets shut down due to a massive oil spill, including the port of New Orleans, when that causes public drinking water intakes to be shuttered, and no bit of it makes the national news, someone needs to say it happened.

When the Tokyo Electric Power Company, a.k.a. Tepco, announces that radiation levels at the disaster zone formerly known as the Fukushima nuclear power plant are being “significantly undercounted,” and nary a word is said about it in the “mainstream” news, someone needs to put the word out.

These serial astonishments make for easy copy, and pointing them out is important for no other reason than they actually and truly fa-chrissakes happened, and people need to know…but merely pointing at absurdity for the sake of exposure changes nothing to the good and turns politics into just another broadcast of a car chase that ends in a messy wreck.

So.

I believe the minimum wage should be somewhere between $15 and $20 an hour, and that all the so-called business “leaders” crowing against any raise to that wage are self-destructive idiots. Commerce needs funds in the hands of consumers to survive and thrive and consumers today are barely handling rent. Put more money in the worker’s pocket and he will spend some of it at your store, because he can. The minimum wage has been stagnant for 30 years, and is due for a right and proper boost. If people don’t have money, your store won’t sell any goods. Get out of your own way and pay your people, so they can have money to spend on what you’re selling. This strikes me as simple arithmetic.

I believe the weather is going crazy because there is an enormous amount of moisture in the atmosphere due to the ongoing collapse of the Arctic ecosystem. More water in the atmosphere leads to fiercer storms and higher tides and every major city on the coast is under dire threat. The ocean is coming, higher and higher each year, so we can either run for high ground, or we can adjust our behavior. The ocean is coming and it brooks no argument. It is stronger than all of us and will take what it pleases.

I believe the Keystone XL pipeline, the drought-causing national practice of fracking, the coal-oriented water disasters in West Virginia and North Carolina, the serial poison spills nationwide, the oil train derailments and the entire practice of allowing the fossil fuels industry to write its own regulations so as to do as it pleases, are collectively a suicide pact that I did not sign up for. The ocean is coming, unless we find a better way.

I believe President Obama, who talks about the environment while pushing the Keystone pipeline, who talks about economic inequality while demanding fast-track authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, is a Hall-of-Fame worthy bullshit artist. I believe the sooner people see this truth for what it is, the better. He is not your friend. He is selling you out.

I believe the 50 percent of eligible American voters who can’t be bothered to turn out one Tuesday every two years should be ashamed of themselves, because this is a good country, but if that goodness doesn’t show up at the polls, we wind up in this ditch with a bunch of self-satisfied non-voters complaining about the mess we’re in. Decisions are made by those who show up, and lately, the small minority of hateful nutbags showing up become a large majority because they’re the only ones pulling the lever.
And that’s for openers.

These things are happening nationally, but they are also happening locally, right in your back yard. These are your fights, in your communities, involving your air and drinking water and basic rights. The ocean is coming, boys and girls, and it will sweep us all away with a flick of its finger — rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike — unless we figure out a few home truths at speed and make serial changes to the way we operate on this small planet.

Stand up.

An insider reveals how Wal-Mart's favorite campus group curries favor with business while pushing gospel to kids

Cult-like, corrupt and Christian conservative: Inside the campus group creating Wal-Mart managers

By Josh Eidelson

For decades, the campus group Students in Free Enterprise has drawn major funding and leadership from Wal-Mart, and channeled scores of students into the retail giant’s management ranks. Renamed Enactus in 2012, the group calls itself “the world’s best-known and most successful program helping university students to create community empowerment projects …” But California State University, Chico, accounting professor and former SIFE insider Curtis DeBerg told Salon that the well-heeled group served as “really a marketing branch to support business leaders who supported SIFE,” and that his decade as one of SIFE’s Sam Walton fellows was marked by fraud, turf war and falsehood. “There’s something entirely inconsistent about servant leadership as Wal-Mart practices it,” said DeBerg, the founder of the now-rival spinoff Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship. DeBerg’s memoir, “How High Is Up?: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of a Sam M. Walton SIFE Fellow,” will be released next month.

Asked about DeBerg’s allegations, Enactus sent a statement from CEO Alvin Rohrs saying that DeBerg “has not been associated with our organization for more than a decade and we are puzzled as to why these complaints would resurface now.” Rohrs told Salon that “we take the integrity of our competitions extremely seriously” and that a three-month investigation by an “independent investigator” into the cheating alleged by DeBerg had “found no impropriety or indication of any unethical behavior.” Rohrs added, “Over the last 11 years we’ve used this incident to continue to improve and strengthen our processes to ensure the highest standards of transparency and accuracy.”

In contrast, University of California, Santa Barbara, labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, the author of “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business,” told Salon over email that DeBerg “offers an inside account of the cultlike character, institutional corruption and corporate conservative ideology of an organization that is a product of the founding generation of Walmart executives,” as well as “part of the cultural apparatus that sustains the entire evangelical capitalist world within which so many retail, hotel, and food processing companies make their way.”

Wal-Mart referred a request for comment to Enactus. Noting that Wal-Mart served as SIFE’s top corporate sponsor and hired over a third of management trainees from SIFE in 2003, the historian Bethany Moreton argued that SIFE, an “economic counterpart” to the right-wing political group Young Americans for Freedom, had been “adopted” by Wal-Mart. Today SIFE has renamed itself Enactus; Wal-Mart’s CEO (SIFE’s most recent past board chair) and its central U.S. vice president sit on Enactus’ board; Wal-Mart and its Sam’s Club subsidiary are seven-figure Enactus donors.

A condensed version of Salon’s interview with DeBerg follows.

What brought you to SIFE, and what kept you there for so many years?

In 1993 … the dean of our college of business got this one-page letter from Rob Walton, who was chairman of the board for Wal-Mart … It explained that [as a Sam Walton fellow] a faculty member would organize a small team of students on campus … teaching community members about free enterprise, and the importance of small business and free enterprise, with their strong bent on reducing the debt …

My natural desire to involve students in real-world problems matched well [with] SIFE’s mission to have university students go out into the community and teach about business.

You note in the book that your team’s mission statement was to “help the citizens in our community become business literate, so that everyone has the opportunity to lead happy and productive lives.” Does becoming “business literate” there effectively mean becoming less critical of companies like Wal-Mart?

I think that’s what SIFE would want us to believe. But … we wrote that with my team leaders at that time because business literacy … was an important initiative of the governor’s office …

A lot of K through 12 educators really detest the fact that business, quote, “sticks its nose into” curricular issues …

“Business literacy” was a softer version, I think, of us saying that we wanted to help students learn about the benefits of free enterprise …  “Business literacy,” to us, was a better entrée into the schools, such that my university students could teach younger kids about the importance of, you know, being creative and innovative, and following their passion — to someday maybe make their own job instead of take somebody else’s job offer.

Bethany Moreton, in her book “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise,” described SIFE’s message to schoolchildren as “profits are beneficial; government is wasteful; unions are illegitimate; corporations are natural persons; free markets abhor environmental regulation but not cartels; monopsony contracts, or military-supported access to foreign raw materials.”

Was SIFE really a marketing branch to support business leaders who supported SIFE, to have faculty like me espouse these same values in our university system? Absolutely.

What SIFE didn’t count on is, when they started leaving the Bible Belt … that there might be some faculty advisers like me that didn’t subscribe to that particular value system.

What surprised you over your time at SIFE?

My first big shock was how conservative and how Christian this organization was, even as it was appealing to secular universities …

The second thing that shocked me is that three people always dominated in the first few years of SIFE. Is was Alvin Rohrs, their CEO … the late [former Wal-Mart COO] Jack Shewmaker … and a guy named Jack Kahl … the CEO [of] … Wal-Mart and Sam Walton’s largest supplier of adhesive duct tape … What we noticed, my students and I, is that Alvin Rohrs, Jack Shewmaker and Jack Kahl were on the stage as much as the students were at these expos in Kansas City — sponsored by Hallmark Cards, OK, another big vendor for Wal-Mart …

It wasn’t necessarily focused on students. It was also focused on Jack Kahl and Jack Shewmaker appealing to business judges, who were invited to be guests, who would fall in love with the university students doing these projects — at which Alvin Rohrs would always end the show, Josh, with this plea … It was like a revival … You’ve seen the wonderful kids, and there’s hope for America — please consider joining our board of directors. And for a seat on the board, Josh, you have to write them a check for $25,000 on your way out, right? So SIFE got all this money from corporate vendors, many of whom were vendors to Wal-Mart …

The third thing that shocked me was in 2003, I discovered that there was cheating going on in the competitions … Four universities won prize money for a competition they hadn’t even entered. The irony there is in SIFE’s mission statement, they talk about all these business leaders, you know, wanting to inculcate corporate social responsibility into these university students …

The chairman of SIFE’s board of directors then was also the vice chairman of Wal-Mart. His name was Tom Coughlin … Just before he retired, it became known within the organization that he was using gift cards to buy personal items, and he was creating fictitious invoices to reimburse himself — for what he later claimed to be anti-union efforts to preclude Las Vegas stores from unionizing … He was convicted of mail fraud and wire fraud [for] having absconded with about $600,000 worth of Wal-Mart merchandise through his scheme …

The year in which we discovered this cheating going on with SIFE, Coughlin was the chairman of the board for SIFE. He commissioned a special investigation to look into this cheating, which ultimately led KPMG to conduct an internal control investigation … Ultimately KPMG said while there were serious problems with SIFE and the judging, they could find no smoking gun that could prove that they deliberately withheld Chico state’s entry from this …

I was fired two weeks before I was to submit my resignation to SIFE as a voluntary Walton fellow. I got a letter from the new … chairman of the board for SIFE … CEO of Rich Products in Buffalo… who sells a lot of product to Wal-Mart.

Robert Rich sent me a one-page letter saying my services are no longer needed at SIFE … He said: You must take care not to defame SIFE in your future as you grow this new organization … Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship … An offshoot of SIFE that I [had] created, which SIFE now believed was a direct competitor with their university organization.

What do you believe motivated the alleged cheating, and then the decision to kick you out?

One of the competitions was sponsored by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurship in Kansas City … So SIFE was earning $50,000 [from Kauffman] … giving away $12,000 in prize money, and pocketing $38K to fund payroll, and fund their ideological whatever. It was very good for [Rohrs mentee] Matt Burton to show there were more entries in the hopper than what there actually were … And in that particular year the year they stuffed the entries …

The entries were being judged ostensibly by business leaders … [But] there were no senior business executives touching these things … They were a cheap way for SIFE to raise a lot of money from founders like Kauffman …

When the error was discovered — quote, “the error” — I would call it gross negligence/fraud – Rohrs, rather than doing anything, covered it up. He called up the four next teams that were judged to be good, and sent them each a $500 check …

In the book I called it a SNAFU — you know, “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.” So when KPMG was hired to do an investigation, ultimately this was to appease my lawyer and my dean and me … They knew that if there was a smoking gun here, where we could prove they pulled Chico State’s entry, then we could have brought the whole SIFE organization down as being fraudulent.

But we could not prove that they intentionally pulled our [contest] entries. But we could prove they intentionally submitted four entries to a competition for which they never intended …

When my team, my SIFE team, won the whole competition in 1999, and Walton fellows were coming to me, Josh, and saying: Curt, your team is doing an amazing job in California. And in 1999, when my team won it all, there were 15 international guests in the audience … That’s when Alvin Rohrs really began to see me as a threat …

[In 2000] Alvin Rohrs wouldn’t even look at me at this [board] meeting — [I had] convinced Jack Shewmaker, “Mr. Sife,” to move the entire board meeting from New York to L.A. to get more academics in California on board. Well, next thing I know, Jack Shewmaker’s invited my students and me to go to Australia to [address] partners and university presidents there. Huge success. That same year he flew us to Orlando to make a presentation …

Rohrs would not acknowledge me … He wouldn’t acknowledge my students and me, who are being used as pawns. But yet he’s collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars based on our good work …

You compare yourself in the book to [Wal-Mart] workers in Canada whose store was shut down after they had a unionization victory. What’s the comparison there?

I had long argued … that SIFE ought to have at least two voting members of their board of directors from academia … But the board was only men, only retailers.

And I’d say … SIFE fellows like me, and my students who are like associates — you keep changing the rules every year, and we go do them — basically for shit wages, $1,000 a year. And we do all these things, and in the end, management collects bonuses, executives collect bonuses and certainly shareholders collect the benefits of a higher stock price.

We — the students, who are like Wal-Mart employees — and me, who is like an assistant manager — have literally walked miles without shoes doing all the stuff for nothing — for nothing — other than the recognition at a SIFE event, where Jack Shewmaker is in the audience, saying what great kids we have, and our future of America is in good hands.

What’s the comparison you’re making in terms of response when you’re pushing for changes?

In May of 2000, I arranged a breakfast meeting with Mr. Shewmaker … I was feeling really good, because since our team had won the whole [competition] event the year before, I thought I was in a position to effect meaningful change…

The [other] Walton fellows … They said, Curt, since you’ve got Mr. Shewmaker there, when you have breakfast with him, will you air some of our grievances?

I was naive … I said: Jack, we would like representation on the board. We would like some say in how the criteria are used. We would love some feedback when we enter these special competitions…

And I said … I wouldn’t mind coming to work for … SIFE for a year [while on sabbatical] … I can help change the direction of this organization. He said: Curt, that’s a great idea; let me talk to the board of directors, the executive committee. Of which Alvin Rohrs was a member.

I go fishing for a week, I come back from a fishing trip, and I get a package from Alvin Rohrs, and I think it’s going to be a job offer for a year. It was not.

And the contents of that letter is what I cannot discuss, because of the confidentiality agreement I signed … There was an allegation made by SIFE at an event against me that I am unable to discuss.

What does Wal-Mart get out of its investment in SIFE?

When you go to a SIFE event … the biggest booth of all is Wal-Mart. All of these young people, dressed in their USA ties and their matching lapel pins, as they’re walking by the booth, [there are] the recruiters for Wal-Mart … [And] all of Wal-Mart’s vendors are there. And instead of them having to go to all of the campuses to recruit, all of the students come to them, at their own expense …

Wal-Mart gets to hand out their business cards, and say, “Hey, stop by our booths and we’ll interview you for a summer internship.” And of course, the teams that win the competition, as the kids leave the stage, the CEO of Wal-Mart … will be handing out his business card …

Walmart recruits so many of its young talent [there], not only the U.S. … these [competitions] are replicated in 39 other countries. It’s the low-cost way to recruit very good managerial talent that has already swallowed the servant leadership Kool-Aid.

Shoot, I’ll take $5,000 less a year, as long as I’m on the track to become the store manager or the district manager. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that — unless Wal-Mart continues to pay shit wages.
And you get Hillary Clinton doing the opening address to [2011’s SIFE] World Cup … She probably doesn’t know … the genesis was … an extremely religious right organization, a Newt Gingrich-type of organization.

In considering “servant leadership,” Bethany Moreton writes that “The feminization of men demanded by the post-1973 economy found in the new Christianity both an ally and an alibi.” And that servant leadership “recast male virtue in feminized terms” and “was how the service economy made patriarchy safe for postindustrial society.” Do you agree?

Absolutely …

Why was Sam Walton able to pay below minimum wages back in Bentonville and Fayetteville and Rogers, Ark.? … The men, as the store managers, were kind of like the head of the farm. They were the breadwinner. And now, if the man is running the store here, that used to be viewed kind of like ladies’ work. But if he could be the manager or the district manager, he was still the boss … He could hire the women to be the clerks, to do the heavy lifting if you will, the stocking of the shelves …

People are coming off the farm after 1973, where you have the industrialization of the farm … That man has to do something, so he migrates to the city. And in the cities now, like Bentonville or Fayetteville, there’s a home for him … He’s managing the store. And the women now are being hired, and they’re part of the flock … Wal-Mart almost became a surrogate church …

How does SIFE help us understand the relationship between Christianity, conservatism and servant leadership in the culture of Wal-Mart?

What drew me to SIFE was service learning … [But] so many people in SIFE serve themselves first, because they’re getting themselves ready to get a good job. And ultimately a lot of these students ultimately see the competition as being more than the service …

In Wal-Mart’s form of servant leadership, you as a manager are empowering your employees, and you as a manager are going to become one of them. You will shave your head if you meet a certain goal, Or you’ll dance the hula on Main Street, if you’re Sam Walton — in a hula dress … So a servant leader like them says, “I’m one of you guys — aw shucks.”

But then, when you do the research, you see that Jack Shewmaker’s net worth [$153 million in Wal-Mart stock as of 2009] … Would a “servant leader” like Jack Shewmaker really believe in servant leadership, if he was making such great profits even though his part-time workers from Wal-Mart are having to draw SNAP, food stamps?

… There’s something entirely inconsistent about servant leadership as Wal-Mart practices it.

How does your experience with SIFE inform the way you look at recent controversies at Wal-Mart?

My experience with SIFE has changed my life dramatically … it prompted me to look deeper at how I approach my profession …

As an educator of tomorrow’s future leaders, I don’t want them to be management leaders for Wal-Mart unless Wal-Mart truly has an epiphany. [Unless] Wal-Mart’s leaders truly — and I say this tongue-in-cheek — find god.

America used to value the concept of retreat. Now we just shoot.

“Stand Your Ground” Nation

By Dahlia Lithwick

Ever since George Zimmerman gunned down Trayvon Martin in his Sanford, Fla., gated community, it’s become an article of faith that the rash of lethal shootings in public places—from the Florida moviegoer who was killed after a texting and popcorn-throwing incident to Jordan Davis, shot in his car at a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station to last week’s lethal shooting in an Arizona Walmart—is attributable to the “stand your ground” laws enacted over the past decade in 26 states across the country. Aggressive human interaction, post-Trayvon, now follows a painfully familiar pattern: An altercation occurs. Someone says he feared for his life. An unarmed victim (often young, black, and male) is shot and killed. The headlines either explicitly or implicitly invoke “stand your ground.”

Last week, Kriston Charles Belinte Chee, an unarmed man, got into a fight with Cyle Wayne Quadlin at a Walmart in suburban Arizona. Quadlin opened fire midargument and killed Chee. Officers decided not to charge Quadlin because, they concluded, the killing was in self-defense. According to the police spokesman, “Mr. Quadlin was losing the fight and indicated he ‘was in fear for his life.’” Just a week earlier, a jury in Jacksonville, Fla., found Michael Dunn guilty on four counts of attempted murder but did not convict him on the most serious charge of first-degree murder, in the death of 17-year-old Jordan Davis. Dunn shot and killed Davis, also unarmed, because the music coming from his car was too loud. Dunn claimed he saw something like a gun in the vehicle, and that was apparently enough for some members of the jury to conclude that Dunn hadn’t committed first-degree murder.

Given all this, it’s not unreasonable to argue that, in America, you can be shot and killed, without consequences for the shooter, for playing loud music, wearing a hoodie, or shopping at a Walmart. The question is whether the wave of “stand your ground” legislation is to blame.

Let’s first define terms: “Stand your ground” laws are different from the Castle Doctrine, which has its roots in centuries-old British common law and allows you to use force to protect yourself in your home. “Stand your ground” essentially provides that you can bring your castle wherever you go. The rule allows you to shoot first, not just in your home, but anyplace you have a right to be and is a much newer, and more controversial, proposition. (The first “stand your ground” law was enacted in Florida in 2005.) Historically, United States self-defense laws have followed British common law by imposing a duty to retreat, requiring those in a dangerous situation to try to withdraw (if they could do so safely) before resorting to killing. (Under the Castle Doctrine there is no duty to retreat because you’re already home, in your safe haven.)

“Stand your ground” by design cancels out the duty to retreat and, in sum, allows you to shoot first if you feel your life is in danger, just like you can do at home. The relevant language in Florida’s self-defense statute provides just that: “A person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if: He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself."

Legal purists on both sides of the gun debate argue that neither Zimmerman nor Dunn even invoked the “stand your ground” defense in their cases. In their view, the doctrine has been unfairly blamed. Dan Abrams argues that “neither defendant invoked the controversial aspects of Florida's law. In fact, both defendants argued basic self defense law that would have been similar in just about every state in the nation.” David Kopel similarly points out that “the assertion that Stand Your Ground may have been a reason why the [Dunn] jury hung on the first degree murder charge is totally implausible. The three convictions for second-degree murder show that the jury had determined there was no self-defense; ergo, jury confusion about self-defense was not the reason why the jury deadlocked on first-degree murder.”

But Nicole Flatow at ThinkProgress contends that “stand your ground” had everything to do with both cases. As she writes, “Dunn’s lawyer Cory Strolla cited Florida’s Stand Your Ground law in his closing argument: ‘His honor will further tell you that if Michael Dunn was in a public place where he had a legal right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.’” Moreover, in both the Zimmerman and Dunn trials, the provision was included in the jury instructions. (Some say that this is immaterial because jurors are often read instructions that do not apply to the case before them. But do jurors know that?)

It’s clear that at least some of the jurors in both cases took the principle of “stand your ground” into account to some degree during deliberations. We now know that at least one juror, and possibly two, in Dunn’s trial took to heart the specific instruction that Dunn “had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” Whether or not jurors in Florida are technically instructed to apply the “stand your ground” component of self-defense law, it’s increasingly clear that they are, at minimum, confused about it (understandably) and may even be starting to apply it reflexively. Yes, Dunn's attorney argued traditional self-defense. But, as former assistant U.S. attorney David Weinstein told the Associated Press, “I think people will say that because some of the language from the stand your ground statute gets embedded into the jury instructions, that stand your ground has an effect.”

I might go further. I might say that whether or not specific jurisdictions define self-defense to include a duty to retreat, and whether or not specific juries are charged to apply it, America is quickly becoming one big “stand your ground” state, as a matter of culture if not the letter of the law.

The fact that “stand your ground” defenses have been staggeringly successful in Florida in recent years (one study shows it’s been invoked more than 200 times since being enacted in 2005 and used successfully in 70 percent of the cases) suggests that it’s been embedded into more than just jury instructions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a Tampa Bay Times study from 2012 shows that “as ‘stand your ground’ claims have increased, so too has the number of Floridians with guns. Concealed weapons permits now stand at 1.1 million, three times as many as in 2005 when the law was passed.” Put bluntly: As Floridians sense that other Floridians plan to shoot first, they buy more guns.

Think about it: The National Rifle Association that has pushed so hard for “stand your ground” laws in recent years is the same National Rifle Association that has put so many guns, and such lethal guns, in so many hands—concealed carry, open carry, wave-it-around-and-call-it-free-speech carry. The gun lobby has single-handedly made certain that the very definition of what one might reasonably expect from an altercation at a Walmart, a movie theater, or a gas station has changed. By seeking to arm everyone in America, the NRA has in fact changed our reasonable expectation of how fights will end, into a self-fulfilling prophecy about how fights will end. It should surprise you not at all to learn that of the 10 states with the most lenient gun laws in America, seven support “stand your ground.” In those jurisdictions shooting first isn’t merely “reasonable.” It borders on sensible.

And it’s not just cultural expectations that are shifting. We’re also shifting what we ask of our jurors. Under “stand your ground,” we are asking jurors to impose a subjective test about whether the shooter was experiencing a profound moment of existential panic. We are asking them whether—in a country seemingly full of people who are both armed and terrified that everyone else is armed—shooting first makes sense. By redirecting jurors to contemplate whether people who are armed and ready to kill are thinking reasonably about others they believe to be armed and ready to kill, we have created a framework in which one’s subjective fears about the world are all that matters. Or as the father of one victim explained to the Washington Post, “Somehow, we've reached the point where the shooter's word is the law.”

Every time we hear about a Zimmerman, a Dunn, or a Cyle Wayne Quadlin, we get a little bit closer to believing that we need to become a Zimmerman, a Dunn, or a Cyle Wayne Quadlin merely to protect ourselves. And then it gets a little bit easier for us to relate to, and to believe, the next Zimmerman, Dunn, or Cyle Wayne Quadlin. It’s a perfect loop of logic. We define the reasonableness of a lethal response by the growing number of lethal responders. “Stand your ground” laws, or at least the public conception of what they do, are changing the way the rest of us think about self-protection. This is, of course, exactly the world the NRA dreams of constructing: Everyone armed and paranoid that everyone else is armed. But the old canard that an armed society is a polite society is pretty much bunk. Ours is not a polite society; we are rude and hotheaded and terrified. Now we have guns to help us sort it all out.

And this is not just in Florida. We are quickly becoming a nation that would rather shoot than stand down, or at least one that thinks everyone has the right to. We are a nation of jurors who carefully consider the emotional state of a killer who had no obligation to even investigate the emotional state of the person he believed was attempting to kill him. We are a nation whose courts and legislatures have enshrined the American values of individualism, property rights, and mistrust of the state while eroding our duty to retreat.

After Trayvon Martin was killed, for a long time it was fashionable to say, “I am Trayvon Martin,” in solidarity with him and his family. But a far more worrisome possibility has begun to creep into our culture. With each successful “stand your ground” claim, explicit or implicit, we are all in peril of becoming more frightened, more violent, and more apt to shoot first and justify it later. The only thing more terrifying than the prospect of becoming a nation of Trayvon Martins is the possibility that we are unconsciously morphing into a nation of George Zimmermans.

Maybe a good thing the US is out of Cuba and the greedy corporations can't destroy the country....

Obama Should End America’s Stupidest Foreign Policy: Isolating Cuba

By Robert Shrum

What rational basis is there for punishing the Castro regime when the U.S. will trade with China, talk to Iran, or deal with Vietnam? It’s time to end the cold war that outlasted the Cold War.

Facing a House of Representatives frozen in its own ideology, Barack Obama is relying on executive action: first to raise the minimum wage for new federal contract workers and soon to impose new limits on carbon emissions. Some observers see this as an implicit admission of a presidency in twilight. In reality, Obama can and should act in history-making ways, at home on issues like climate change, and overseas on the longest, if not the dumbest, American foreign-policy mistake, just 90 miles from our shores.

The attempted isolation of Cuba, the vain resolve to overthrow or punish the Castro regime, has been perpetuated for over half a century by presidents of both parties. Granted, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama have each ventured a measure of détente without fundamentally reversing a course that has brought only persistent failure. And in the mid-1990s, when the Cuban Air Force shot down two airplanes dispatched by a Miami – based exile group, Brothers to the Rescue, which had previously dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets over Havana, the United States reverted to a hard anti–Castro line.

Congress passed the Helms–Burton Act to tighten the sanctions regime and write it into the law. Democratic opposition had blocked the bill in 1995, but in the wake of attack Bill Clinton, anxious to carry Florida in his reelection bid, swiftly signed it into law.

Most Democratic presidents – and perhaps secretly even George H.W. Bush – have understood the folly of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Ironically, John F. Kennedy, who had tried overtly and covertly to topple Castro, seemed to be moving in a decisively different direction by 1963. He dispatched unofficial envoys to discuss rapprochement; one of them, French journalist Jean Daniel, was with Fidel Castro when the news of Kennedy's assassination came. "This is terrible," Castro exclaimed. "There goes your mission of peace." Not long after, normalizing relations with Castro would become a third rail in politics with pivotal Florida in the sway of a growing population of violently anti-Castro Cuban-American citizens.

Thus Cuba morphed into the cold war that has outlasted the Cold War. Seldom if ever has any foreign-policy toward any country endured across decades without any rational basis to believe it will ever succeed. Even the delusion of isolating China, fed by paranoia and demagoguery, was dispensed with in less than 25 years–and by the fervently anti-communist Richard Nixon, who decided it was time to get real.

It is long past time to get real about Cuba. I was there for ten days last month, the first time I had returned since a trip to Havana in the 1970s with Senator George McGovern. Yes, there are dissidents; there is repression. But there is also palpable pride in the revolution, which overthrew an American–blessed regime presiding over a corrupt, gangster–ridden economy that lavished wealth on the few and impoverished the vast majority. That Cuba was no free society. As one Cuban put it, the revolution was one of the few times in history when the underdog triumphed against all the odds.

Nor is there any sign that the passing of Castro, who has outlasted generations of American adversaries and the disappearance of his Soviet allies, will trigger a counter-revolution. While his record, even on his own terms, is mixed, there are social reforms that ordinary Cubans prize – and would not be willing to jeopardize.

Education and literacy, once denied to so many, are universal. So are retirement benefits. And there has been a sustained revolution in health care. The CIA World Factbook reports that Cuban life expectancy approximates life expectancy in the U.S.--and infant mortality is measurably lower. Critics question the reliability of the data, but in any event, Cuba is far better off in standard measures of health than most of Latin America.

On the other hand, the economic model is as threadbare as many of the buildings and much of the island's infrastructure. Cuba lost $13 billion a year in subsidies and export sales with the fall of the Soviet Union. The Venezuela of the late Hugo Chavez, now in turmoil, which sends in cut-rate oil, can't be permanently relied on.

Castro himself, who once scorned tourism as a vestige of the old order, did a complete about-face, describing it as "gold" after the withdrawal of Soviet largesse. There is now a rising tide of tourism – from Canada, Europe, and Asia – along with a modest wave of Americans who have to travel with an official license as part of an educational or cultural trip. If Americans could travel to Cuba freely, their numbers could swell to 1 million and then 2 million a year– and U.S. companies, not just the British or German or Spanish ones who are there already, could build the hotels of the future.

Tourism by itself can't resolve the country's economic problem – and tourism both alleviates and exacerbates it. It is difficult to grow and prosper when a bellhop or a tour guide can earn more in tips in the day than a doctor makes in a month, which is why doctors and others have opened house restaurants throughout the island. Lifting or easing American sanctions wouldn't be a deus ex machina either, even if it relieved shortages of basic goods like soap and toilet paper.

The Castro regime itself has to embark on new reforms, and that's happening. Cubans can now start not only house restaurants, but their own small businesses. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's new president, has proposed a law to permit large-scale foreign investment across the Cuban economy, even in the formerly off – limits agricultural sector. There is no doubt the law will pass – and there is every prospect it will achieve its goals of "attract[ing] foreign capital, generat[ing] new jobs, and bolster[ing] domestic industry."

The Europeans will be there. So will Canadian, Asian, and Latin American investors. Only U.S. companies will be locked out – not by Cuba, but by our own government. This isn't a policy in any coherent sense of that word; it's an artifact of resentment, a self-defeating relic from another era.

But what about Cuba’s human-rights violations? There are far more pervasive and egregious abuses in other nations with which we routinely do business like China and Russia. Obama has said the embargo could be lifted under certain conditions, including democratic elections for the Cuban presidency. We don't make a similar demand, or impose similar penalties, on Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia or a host of countries that conduct Potemkin elections. Indeed, a greater American presence on the island is far more likely than isolation to foster liberalization in a society where, as a Cuban said to me, "We can think or mostly say what we want; we just can't act."

According to a new poll conducted for the Atlantic Council by Democrat Paul Maslin and Republican Glen Bolger, 56 percent of Americans and 63 percent of Floridians support "normalizing relations or engaging more directly with Cuba." Surprisingly, 52 percent of Republicans agree, and so do 64 percent% of residents of Miami-Dade County, the center of the Cuban diaspora.

It is telling that sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul, who fled Cuba after the revolution, now says he's ready to invest there "under the right circumstances." He has already visited the island several times and argues that the U.S. and Cuba should "find a way" for "the whole Cuban community to live and work together."

Without the Elian Gonzalez controversy – when the Clinton administration returned a young child to Cuba after his mother drowned trying to reach Florida-- Al Gore almost certainly would have won the state by enough votes so he could not have been counted out of the presidency by virtue of a confusing butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County or a Supreme Court majority that acted like a GOP ward committee. But the political landscape will not be the same in 2016. Obviously, Obama won't be seeking reelection-- and the Atlantic Council numbers mean that he and other Democrats don't have to worry that Hillary Clinton, the inevitable nominee, will lose Florida if the U.S. regains its senses and renounces the cold war with Cuba.

The president, of course, can't do it all on his own; Helms–Burton codifies the embargo. But the Cuba Study Group outlines eleven measures Obama can take-- such as authorizing "more imports of certain goods and services," permitting "the sale of telecommunications hardware," and removing the absurd designation of Cuba as "a state sponsor of terrorism." It's undeniable that this Congress won't come to its senses; it's indisputable that the president can – and should – act.

The bitter-end exile movement, as the Atlantic Council poll demonstrates, now has a markedly diminished hold on Miami and the Cuban-American community. Still there was predictable fury when Barack Obama refused to conspicuously insult Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela's funeral and instead shook his hand. Senator Marco Rubio blasted Obama-- and the reliably obnoxious Ted Cruz, who was part of the official delegation to the funeral, walked out when Castro spoke.

For the sake of a sane foreign-policy, the president should now make Rubio, Cruz, and their ilk even angrier by reaching out his hand again – and with the stroke of a pen, begin to end the most protracted foreign policy failure in our history.

Screwed

Now That the Olympics Are Over, Is Sochi Screwed?

By Alec Luhn

The Sochi Olympics, which began with the hashtag #sochiproblems, ended with Russia winning the medal count and enjoying a dose of national pride and international prestige. But now the authorities will be left to figure out what to do with 206 stadiums and assorted buildings, and residents will have to deal with the “Olympic legacy,” whether that’s a highway built through their yard, bulldozed homes or environmental damage in the 8,700 acres of the Sochi National Park that have been affected.

The Russian government’s promise of a “Zero Waste Games” has already been discredited, and now its compensation efforts are also proving to “have only a minor effect compared to the environmental damage,” as the United Nations Environmental Programme predicted after reviewing the Sochi Olympic project in 2008. In one tragicomic example, after Russian Railways planted 55,000 compensatory trees and rare plants, more than half of them died from improper planting techniques and a complete lack of care, Russia’s state environmental watchdog found.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak’s recent claim that Sochi’s air and water have become cleaner doesn’t seem to apply to the Mzymta River, which has been polluted by chemicals and debris to the point that endangered Atlantic salmon no longer spawn here, WWF Russia head Igor Chestin wrote in a recent article. These salmon are just one among many animals suffering from habitat destruction, including red deer, wild boar, bears and ibex.

But the epitome of miscarried compensation has to be the Ornithological Park that Russia promised in its Olympic application to ameliorate damage to the Imeretinskaya lowland. Once designated one of the world’s “Important Bird Areas” by BirdLife International, the lowland was filled in with gravel to create space for the coastal cluster of Olympic venues.

The park was originally planned as a contiguous 740-acre territory (scientists had recommended 2,000 acres) to preserve the lowland’s lakes as a wintering place for up to sixty-five species of birds—peregrine falcons, Dalmation pelicans and pygmy cormorants among them—and a habitat for protected plants. But it was eventually spread out over fourteen chunks of swampland, drainage ponds and abandoned farmland.

The Russian Bird Preservation Union opposed the park as far back as 2009 on the grounds that it would “not meet the biological needs of birds” and would include “only an insignificant part of the territory that has been important so far for preserving birds.”

On a cloudy afternoon last week, about a dozen geese could be spotted in one section of the park that has been covered with lawn and criss-crossed with walking paths, benches and palm trees (several parts of the reserve are now planned to double as public parks). Another section of the park located right next to the Olympic Village, though, was full of trash, wimpy trees and power boxes, and there wasn’t a bird in sight.

According to park employee Sergei, who declined to give his last name, shrubs have been planted so birds can feed. He said “a lot of nature has been preserved,” but also admitted that “nature and the Olympics can’t be compatible.” The Ornithological Park can restore some bird life in the Imeretinskaya lowland, he said, although “not in the same amount” as in years past.

“It’s hard to say how much it will compensate, but hope dies last,” he said, using a common Russian expression.

But the president of the Russian Bird Union recently called the park a “profanation.” It doesn’t look like it will even come close to restoring this migration spot, since two-thirds of the park territory is located outside the lowland, where “there aren’t reservoirs suitable for water fowl to winter,” the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus concluded in a recent sweeping report on environmental destruction related to the Games.

Corporate welfare

The shocking numbers behind corporate welfare

By David Cay Johnston

State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.

Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.

Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.

The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.

In fact, the numbers significantly understate the true value of taxpayer subsidies to businesses, for reasons explained below.

On a shoestring budget — roughly $1 million a year — Good Jobs First has for years dug through disclosure statements in all 50 states to compile reports on subsidies. Many of these subsidies exist despite strong provisions in many state constitutions prohibiting corporate welfare. New York state, for example, gets around this because its highest court ruled in 2011 that while the state may not give gifts directly, it can create an agency and let it give the gifts.

Good Jobs First does not oppose all subsidies. Rather, it favors transparency in the hope, executive director Greg LeRoy said, that any subsidies will be used wisely to expand the economy and not just prop up inefficient enterprises.

The data on welfare paid to companies come from Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker 2.0, an improved Web tool that examines subsidies by linking subsidiaries to parent companies. The older version of the tool obscured the benefits to brand name corporate parents such as Apple, Google, Toyota and Walt Disney.

The size and range of the subsidies the tool has uncovered helps explain the burdens taxpayers must bear because so many major corporations rely on welfare for much or all of their profits rather than earning them.
Such burdens are especially hard on the poor. The bottom fifth of households in all but one state pay a larger share of their income in state and local taxes than the top 1 percent of earners. This means that corporate welfare effectively redistributes from the poor to those rich enough to own corporate stock.

Many forms of subsidies to business are excluded from Subsidy Tracker 2.0. For example, Good Jobs First does not count federal subsidies. It also leaves out indirect subsidies like perpetual monopoly rights of way for pipelines as well as rules that limit competition in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications and a host of other industries.

Phil Mattera, the organization’s research director, starts with publicly announced subsidies. With his small staff, he then gathers whatever records state and local governments make public or disclose through various Freedom of Information Act–type laws.

We know far too little about taxpayer support for business because of the ways governments do and do not collect data.

Federal, state and local governments publish exhaustively detailed statistical reports on welfare to the poor, disabled, sick, elderly and other individuals who cannot support themselves. The cost of subsidized food, housing and medical care are all documented at government expense, with the statistics posted on government websites.

But corporate welfare is not the subject of any comprehensive reporting at the federal level. Disclosures by state and local governments vary greatly, from substantial to nearly nonexistent.

Good Jobs First has prodded some states to expand disclosures. In many cases, though, the amounts and terms of corporate welfare are unknown because state and local governments assert that the information is confidential.

The best estimate of total state and local subsidies comes from Professor Kenneth Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. In 2010 he calculated the annual cost at $70 billion. No serious challenge has been made to this conservatively calculated figure, which in 2014 dollars comes to $75 billion. That is about $240 per person — nearly $1,000 annually for a family of four. That amounts to more than a week’s take-home pay for a median-income family with two parents and two children.

Few people realize the cost, however, because it is not represented by a deduction on their paychecks. What appears, rather, are burdens they bear in the form of taxes and Social Security.

Good Jobs First found that just 965 companies collected 75 percent of the value from 25,000 subsidy deals identified in Subsidy Tracker 2.0.

Boeing’s $13.2 billion is a bit more than its pretax profits for the last two years. It is also equals a stunning 70 percent of the $18.2 billion of equity owned by Boeing shareholders.

Measured against the number of commercial jetliners sold — 648 last year, at an average of nearly $79 million per plane — these subsidies come to more than $20 million per aircraft.

While the subsidies did not go just to commercial jets and were not for one year, those figures give some perspective to the huge amount of money that taxpayers lavish on Boeing. Boeing declined to comment.

Second on the subsidy list is Alcoa, the old Aluminum Co. of America, which benefits from 91 subsidies totaling $5.6 billion. On the basis of its pretax income for last four years, that amounts to all the pretax profits Alcoa shareholders can expect for the next 189 years.

Alcoa operates in 35 countries, so I also calculated its state and local subsidies against its share of U.S. business for the last three profitable years. Measured this way, the subsidies equal 17 years of pretax U.S. profits.

These facts may surprise Alcoa shareholders, since the company makes virtually no mention of these gifts from taxpayers in its annual 10-K disclosure report. The only mention of subsidy is in terms of how Medicare drug benefits for retirees will lower annual pension costs, explaining about a nickel on each dollar of subsidy that Alcoa collects from American taxpayers.

In response to the findings, Alcoa said that, due to complexities in electricity pricing and to closing part of its New York smelting operation, the value of the subsidy was significantly less than Subsidy Tracker showed.

Taxpayers who want to understand the full dimension of their burdens should demand that Congress require and pay for detailed annual statistical reports showing every federal, state and local subsidy received by corporations, including the value of indirect subsidies like those perpetual rights of way to pipelines and other legal monopolies.

Without that information, we have no idea of the true cost of welfare or the cost of propping up companies that, evidently, cannot make their way on their own.

David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times, is a best-selling author who teaches the business, tax and property law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law.

Heckuva job - 1 Million Workers.....

Oops: GOP Bill Would Strip 1 Million Workers Of Health Coverage

By Sahil Kapur

A Republican-led bill designed to "save American workers" would cause 1 million workers to lose their health care coverage and increase the deficit by $74 billion, according to Congress' official scorekeeper.

The legislation, offered by Rep. Todd Young (R-IN) and 208 co-sponsors as a tweak to Obamacare, would change the definition of a full-time work week under the health care law from 30 hours per week to 40 hours. The aim was to mitigate the effect of the law's employer mandate, which says businesses with 50 or more workers must offer insurance to full-time employees.

An analysis of the bill, released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, found that it would cause 1 million people to lose their employer-based insurance coverage. The report projected that more than 500,000 of them would end up getting coverage through Medicaid, the Children's Health Care Program or the Obamacare exchanges. The rest, CBO and JCT said, would become uninsured.

The legislation would also lower the amount the federal government collects in penalties from businesses who don't abide by the employer mandate. As a result, the report found, the deficit would go up by $74 billion over 10 years.

Titled the "Save American Workers Act," the bill was touted by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) as part of the GOP's winter 2014 agenda. It cleared the House Ways & Means Committee on a party line vote earlier this month and was slated for a full House vote perhaps as early as next week. Of the bill's 208 cosponsors, seven are Democrats.

The CBO findings are problematic for Republicans in part because they've raised hell about insurance cancellations and market disruptions due to Obamacare's minimum coverage standards and other provisions.
A spokesman for Young didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

"[A]s the administration continues to stumble through implementation of the law, many Americans are still confused with how this sweeping law will work and what its impact will be," the congressman said upon introducing his bill. "Repealing this redefinition [of 'full time employment'] and restoring it to the historical norm ensures this bill not only protects working poor and middle class employees, it also ensures that laws governing employment are consistent."

The reality, it appears, is less simple.

"I think this shows that [the Republicans'] repeal agenda will actually hurt or destroy jobs, and make it harder for people to get health insurance," said Alex Nguyen, a spokesman for Democrats on the Ways & Means Committee.

John McCain and Carl Levin say offshore schemes operated by Swiss firm helped 22,000 Americans hide billions from taxman

Credit Suisse 'cloak-and-dagger' tactics cost US taxpayers billions – senators

By Dominic Rushe

Credit Suisse used “cloak-and-dagger schemes that belong in a spy novel” to help 22,000 US customers hide billions of dollars from US tax inspectors, top senators said Tuesday as they released their latest report into offshore tax schemes.

Senators Carl Levin and John McCain had harsh words for the Justice Department and the Swiss government, too, as they released a 178-page permanent subcommittee on investigation (PSI) report into offshore tax avoidance. McCain said US authorities had done too little to prosecute bankers, and accused the Swiss government of trying to “close the door” on misconduct.

The PSI report was released before a congressional hearing Wednesday at which Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan and three other senior bank officers are scheduled to appear.

Levin and other US officials have for more than six years been investigating how Americans dodged taxes by hiding assets in secret Swiss bank accounts.

At a press briefing, McCain said offshore tax practices operated by Credit Suisse and other institutions had cost US taxpayers $337.3bn in potential revenue, which he called “the largest amount of tax revenue lost due to evasion in the world.” He said Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, had “greatly profited from this infamous business model”.

The report sets out in detail some of the practices used by Credit Suisse to help its customers avoid the US authorities – practices McCain said “belong in a spy novel.”

According to the report, bankers filed false visa applications pretending they were tourists, and conducted business at sponsored golf events. One customer told the investigation that his bank statements were passed to him over a business breakfast hidden inside a copy of Sports Illustrated. US clients who visited the bank in Switzerland were whisked to meetings in a button-less, remote controlled elevator. Once they arrived, they would be advised on the best way to circumvent US tax laws, said Levin.

Credit Suisse’s US office used a series of intermediaries, some of which have since come under indictment, to set up a series of offshore shell companies for US clients “in order to hide their assets,” according to Levin. Large sums were divided into smaller ones before they were sent to the US so as not to trigger investigations by US tax authorities.

The practices went on from at least 2001 to 2008, according to the report. In 2011, the Department of Justice told the bank and seven of its bankers that they were the subject of an investigation, but neither the bank nor its bankers have yet been held accountable, said the senators. Over the past five years the Justice Department has “obtained information, including US client names, for only 238 undeclared Swiss accounts out of the tens of thousands opened offshore,” said Levin.

“The bottom line is this: collecting taxes owed by tax evaders is vitally important.”

The terms of the Senate hearing prevent Credit Suisse from commenting on the report.

An investigation into similar practices at UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, ultimately led to the recovery of $6bn in undeclared taxes from US customers, Levin said.

“You might remember that just a few days ago we struggled to avert a $6bn cut to retirement benefits for our veterans. It’s a basic question of fairness. Individuals who use bank secrecy to hide income, to evade taxes, are cheating not just the government but honest Americans who pay what they owe,” said Levin.

The senator claimed investigations into the tax schemes had been hampered by the Swiss government. “Instead of turning over the names of US taxpayers who have Swiss accounts like UBS did, the Swiss government has delayed requests for assistance and prevented banks from turning over information in an effort to close the door on past conduct,” said Levin

Last week Credit Suisse agreed to pay $197m to regulators after it admitted to servicing thousands of US clients without approval. The agreement left unsettled a criminal probe into Credit Suisse and others over whether they helped Americans evade taxes.

McCain said: “This fine pales in comparison to the full range of wrongdoing perpetrated by the bank and its unwillingness to take responsibility for its actions immediately.”

He added: “No one, no individual has been held responsible. Individuals should be identified.” The senators said the Justice Department had decided to tackle the issue by filing treaty requests, with little success. McCain said he would be quizzing Justice Department officials about why they had not made more progress.

Crunching Test Scores

Crunching Test Scores Isn’t Enough to Educate Our Kids

By David Tansey and Elaine Weiss

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor Kaya Henderson are urging us to celebrate gains in the district’s standardized test scores and give credit for those gains to the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

But as a math teacher in a heavily minority, high-poverty high school, I’m not popping any champagne yet. The five-point overall fourth grade reading gain masks the fact that the improvement among higher-income students was quadruple that of their low-income counterparts, widening what was already a huge gap. I am even more troubled by the tiny two-point gain in reading for low-income fourth graders since 2009, which is dwarfed by a 19-point gain for their more advantaged peers.

I agree with Duncan and Henderson that zip code should not determine a child’s odds of school success. But it’s important to tell the hard, uncomfortable truth that it often does, and I see every day how DCPS policies make it harder, not easier, for my students to compete with their more advantaged counterparts.

I consider myself a reform-minded teacher. I’m an advocate for using data to inform instruction and to monitor my students’ progress. But I have learned in my years of teaching — and running a club for young men at Dunbar High School — that our obsession with testable elements of the high-school experience has taken focus away from making that content meaningful, so that students might do well in school despite the hardships they face. I can thank the students in our club, the Gentlemen of Dunbar, for this lesson.

My first year teaching was exhausting and frustrating. I stuck to what I had been told worked. I maintained high expectations, established classroom routines and created structure. But no matter how much effort I put into preparation, I was disconnected from my students. One day an agreeable kid told me I was “cool” but that, as a teacher, I was “the enemy.”

Much to my good fortune, our club allows me to explore how my students perceive class and life. Indeed, the purpose and utility of school is a recurring topic of discussion. Every imaginable reason has been proposed: to prepare students for a career, to ensure an informed electorate, to provide parents with a de facto daycare service, and, most commonly, “I don’t know.”

Effective instruction is difficult when a teacher and his or her students don’t agree on what the purpose of education is. So, although it is not a tested standard, I led my class through a dialogue meant to establish that purpose. After many students repeatedly raised the concern that “we will never use” this or that mathematical skill, I created a classroom rule: if I cannot explain how you will use what we are learning then we can skip it — and “because you will need it for the test” doesn’t count.

Teachers at schools with higher test scores don’t need to do this. I went to a suburban school where everyone assumed they would go to college — like it was the equivalent of 13^th through 16^th grade — and continue on to a white-collar career. That path had benefited our parents, so my peers and I assumed it was worth following. I learned people skills and how to navigate a career path from my parents and their upper middle-class friends. Taking AP-level math classes in high school didn’t do nearly as much for me as did this awareness of the professional world. But living in that world made the school-success connection clear, a connection that confers major benefits.

Clubs like mine make up for some of this gap in opportunity. They allow students to witness what graduation could mean, and they motivate students to achieve what students before them have. But we have not prioritized such components of the high school experience. Indeed, teacher churn has made it almost impossible to provide DCPS students with experiences beyond the classroom. The Gentlemen of Dunbar is the only non-athletic after-school program that has existed for more than four years straight. This makes students feel like they are simply riding the standards-based conveyor belt to graduation, whatever that signifies.

I believe we can do better. But it will take an honest reassessment of what really fosters “success.” Then we have to take on the equally difficult task of determining how to duplicate our experiences for students whose status in life does not provide a familiar, beaten path upward. I recommend we start by speaking to students about how they see the world. Making use of this second lens might give us the depth of insight into social mobility our nation so desperately needs. And it is infinitely more likely to produce NAEP scores that advance, rather than impede, that mobility.

Tea Party’s Hold

Why the Tea Party’s Hold Persists

by Theda Skocpol

The demise of the tea party was loudly announced right after Congress voted on October 16 to lift the debt ceiling and reopen the federal government. “Finally! The Republican Fever Is Broken,” exulted Jamelle Bouie at The Daily Beast, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson proclaimed President Obama’s “victory” over the tea party just as “devastating as Sherman’s march through the South.” With most Americans telling pollsters they do not like the tea party and its tactics, the GOP will eventually have to pivot back to the median voter, explained Noah Feldman in his Bloomberg column, “How the Tea Party Will Die.”

Other optimists placed greater emphasis on the supposed new will of business interests and Republican Party elders to recapture party control. Offering reassurance, supporters of Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner told the pre-eminent inside-the-Beltway gossip site Politico that their guy was more effectively in charge of his raucous GOP caucus following the shutdown debacle. Karl Rove vowed to block far-right tea party challengers in GOP primaries, and the Chamber of Commerce started to make noises about supporting some supposed “moderates” against tea party candidates in 2014 GOP primaries.

But we have heard all this before. The tea party was supposed to be dead and the GOP on the way to moderate repositioning after Obama’s victory and Democratic congressional gains in November 2012. Yet less than a year after post-election GOP soul searching supposedly occurred, radical forces pulled almost all GOP House and Senate members into at least going along with more than two weeks of extortion tactics to try to force President Obama and Senate Democrats to gut the Affordable Care Act and grant a long laundry list of other GOP priorities suspiciously similar to the platform on which the party had run and lost in 2012. The tea party’s hold on the GOP persists beyond each burial ceremony.

In 2011, Vanessa Williamson and I published our book The tea party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, which used a full panoply of research — from interviews and local observations to media and website analysis and tracking of national surveys — to explain the dynamics of this radical movement. We showed how bottom-up and top-down forces intersect to give the tea party both leverage over the Republican Party and the clout to push national politics sharply to the right.

At the grassroots, volunteer activists formed hundreds of local tea parties, meeting regularly to plot public protests against the Obama Administration and place steady pressure on GOP organizations and candidates at all levels. At least half of all GOP voters sympathize with this tea party upsurge. They are overwhelmingly older, white, conservative-minded men and women who fear that “their country” is about to be lost to mass immigration and new extensions of taxpayer-funded social programs (like the Affordable Care Act) for low- and moderate-income working-aged people, many of whom are black or brown. Fiscal conservatism is often said to be the top grassroots tea party priority, but Williamson and I did not find this to be true.

Crackdowns on immigrants, fierce opposition to Democrats, and cuts in spending for the young were the overriding priorities we heard from volunteer Tea Partiers, who are often, themselves, collecting costly Social Security, Medicare, and veterans benefits to which they feel fully entitled as Americans who have “paid their dues” in lifetimes of hard work.

On the other end of the organizational spectrum, big-money funders and free-market advocacy organizations used angry grassroots protests to expand their email lists and boost longstanding campaigns to slash taxes, shrink social spending, privatize Medicare and Social Security, and eliminate or block regulations (including carbon controls). In 2009, groups such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, and Tea Party Express (a renamed conservative GOP political action committee) leapt on the bandwagon; more recently, the Senate Conservative Action Fund and Heritage Action have greatly bolstered the leveraging capacities of the tea party as a whole. Elite activities ramped up after many tea party legislators were elected in 2010.

Earth's brilliant morning star

Venus now appears as planet Earth's brilliant morning star standing above the eastern horizon before dawn. For most, the silvery celestial beacon rose in a close pairing with an old crescent Moon on February 26. But seen from locations in western Africa before sunrise, the lunar crescent actually occulted or passed in front of Venus, also in a crescent phase. Farther to the east, the occultation occurred during daylight hours. In fact, this telescopic snapshot of the dueling crescents was captured just before the occultation began under an afternoon's crystal clear skies from Yunnan Province, China. The unforgettable scene was easily visible to the naked eye in broad daylight.

H-IIA rocket

The H-IIA rocket with the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory aboard rolled out to Launch Pad 1 at 1:04 p.m. on Feb. 27 (Japan time) at Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. The rocket is scheduled to lift off during a launch window that opens at 3:37 a.m.

After an overnight rainstorm, clear skies and a blustery wind set the stage as the largest sliding door in the world opened. For the past month inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, launch services provider Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has been preparing the rocket. The GPM Core Observatory is safely nestled inside the white fairing, the nose cone of the rocket that will protect the satellite during launch.

An announcement in both Japanese and English over the outdoor loudspeakers asked all personnel not working during the rollout to clear out of the 250-meter radius of the launch area. Then, to the sound of beeping two-tone notes familiar to large moving vehicles, the mobile launcher began inching outside.

The gray H-shaped umbilical tower emerged first, "H-IIA F-23" painted on the sides. The umbilical tower has swooping connections to the rocket, providing power, air, and communication to the onboard systems of both the GPM Core Observatory and the rocket itself. About nine hours before launch, engineers use the umbilical tower to fuel the first and second stages of the rocket with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen -- each in their own tanks until mixed to create explosive thrust at liftoff.

H-IIA rocket No. 23 glided into view next, orange body, white tip, and the GPM logo on one side. From a distance it doesn't look big, but then tiny people walking beside it came into view, giving scale to the 174 foot (53 meter) tall H-IIA atop the mobile launcher.

Full rocket assembly occured on the mobile launcher inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, which protects the rocket from wind and rain. Then the whole assembly is moved out to the launch pad as a single unit. Two green "crawlers" drive into their slots at the base of mobile launcher, like pins into a pre-made hole. Then they lift the mobile launcher off the ground and slowly take it out. The crawlers drive themselves automatically with their onboard computers, running in sync and overseen by people in the crawler's cabin. The crawlers each have 56 wheels and travel about 1.2 mph (2 kph) across the 525 yards (480 meters) to the launch pad.


After 22 minutes, the mobile launcher, the rocket, and the GPM spacecraft in the fairing stopped between the red and white towers of Launch Pad 1, almost ready to fly.

Ice... Ice... Baby...

On Feb. 19, 2014 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over the Great Lakes and captured this striking false-colored image of the heavily frozen Great Lakes – one of the hardest freeze-ups in four decades.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), ice cover on North America’s Great Lakes peaked at 88.42% on Feb. 12-13 – a percentage not recorded since 1994. The ice extent has surpassed 80% just five times in four decades. The average maximum ice extent since 1973 is just over 50%.

Unusually cold temperatures in the first two months of the year, especially in January, are responsible for the high ice coverage. Very cold air blowing over the surface of the water removes heat from the water at the surface. When the surface temperature drops to freezing, a thin layer of surface ice begins to form. Once ice formation begins, persistently cold temperatures, with or without wind, is the major factor in thickening ice.

This false-color image uses a combination of shortwave infrared, near infrared and red (MODIS bands 7,2,1) to help distinguish ice from snow, water and clouds. Open, unfrozen water appears inky blue-black. Ice is pale blue, with thicker ice appearing brighter and thin, melting ice appearing a darker true-blue. Snow appears blue-green. Clouds are white to blue-green, with the colder or icy clouds appearing blue-green to blue.

NASA's Kepler Mission Announces a Planet Bonanza

715 New Worlds 

NASA's Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds.”

Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system roughly two decades ago, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet process. Now, scientists have a statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once when they are found in systems that harbor more than one planet around the same star.
To verify this bounty of planets, a research team co-led by Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., analyzed stars with more than one potential planet, all of which were detected in the first two years of Kepler's observations -- May 2009 to March 2011.

The research team used a technique called verification by multiplicity, which relies in part on the logic of probability. Kepler observes 150,000 stars, and has found a few thousand of those to have planet candidates. If the candidates were randomly distributed among Kepler's stars, only a handful would have more than one planet candidate. However, Kepler observed hundreds of stars that have multiple planet candidates. Through a careful study of this sample, these 715 new planets were verified.

This method can be likened to the behavior we know of lions and lionesses. In our imaginary savannah, the lions are the Kepler stars and the lionesses are the planet candidates. The lionesses would sometimes be observed grouped together whereas lions tend to roam on their own. If you see two lions it could be a lion and a lioness or it could be two lions. But if more than two large felines are gathered, then it is very likely to be a lion and his pride. Thus, through multiplicity the lioness can be reliably identified in much the same way multiple planet candidates can be found around the same star.

"Four years ago, Kepler began a string of announcements of first hundreds, then thousands, of planet candidates --but they were only candidate worlds," said Lissauer. "We've now developed a process to verify multiple planet candidates in bulk to deliver planets wholesale, and have used it to unveil a veritable bonanza of new worlds."

These multiple-planet systems are fertile grounds for studying individual planets and the configuration of planetary neighborhoods. This provides clues to planet formation.

Four of these new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone, defined as the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet may be suitable for life-giving liquid water.

One of these new habitable zone planets, called Kepler-296f, orbits a star half the size and 5 percent as bright as our sun. Kepler-296f is twice the size of Earth, but scientists do not know whether the planet is a gaseous world, with a thick hydrogen-helium envelope, or it is a water world surrounded by a deep ocean.

"From this study we learn planets in these multi-systems are small and their orbits are flat and circular -- resembling pancakes -- not your classical view of an atom," said Jason Rowe, research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and co-leader of the research. "The more we explore the more we find familiar traces of ourselves amongst the stars that remind us of home."

This latest discovery brings the confirmed count of planets outside our solar system to nearly 1,700. As we continue to reach toward the stars, each discovery brings us one step closer to a more accurate understanding of our place in the galaxy.


Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. Discoveries include more than 3,600 planet candidates, of which 961 have been verified as bona-fide worlds.

Just hangin’

This weekend a crocodile was just hangin’ around, trying to soak up the sun and catch some waves off the western coast of Australia, but his shenanigans ended up shutting down Cable Beach in the town of Broome, the West Australian reports.

Before getting kicked out, beach-goers gathered around to check out the 12-foot beast, who was apparently lingering all day Saturday. By Sunday, he had packed up his invisible surfboard and moved on.

Humanity

Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. In this broadcast you will meet an effervescent man who still believes we can make democracy work. Later we’ll talk about those people in Washington who refuse to let it work, but first Wendell Berry. A master of the written word, he rarely appears on television. For one thing, when he’s not writing, he’s farming—and that can keep a fellow busy from sunrise to sunset. But we met recently and after considerable persuasion he said “OK, bring your cameras with you.” This portrait is the result. Produced with the Schumann Media Center, which I head.

WENDELL BERRY: We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?

BILL MOYERS: For Wendell Berry, the defense of the Earth is a mission that admits no compromise. This quiet and modest man who lives and works far from the center of power on a farm in Kentucky where his family has lived for 200 years has become an outspoken, even angry advocate for a revolution in our treatment of the land.

WENDELL BERRY: “A Warning to My Readers.”
Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

BILL MOYERS: Berry rarely gives television interviews, but recently, here at St. Catharine College, near Louisville, he agreed to sit down with me to read some of his work and talk about his passions.

PRESIDENT WILLIAM HUSTON: Good morning everyone, my name is….

BILL MOYERS: It was a special occasion, from far and wide, friends and followers of Berry gathered in the Louisville area to celebrate the 35th Anniversary of his landmark work, The Unsettling Of America. It’s one of forty books in Berry’s prolific career: poems, essays, novels, short stories. The two day conference addressing what it will take to resettle America, brought together advocates of sustainable agriculture, environmentalists, leaders in the local food movement, and others who recognize Wendell Berry as a visionary.

BILL MCKIBBEN: He understood what was happening on this planet a long time before everybody else. He’s, you might say, a prophet of responsibility.

PATRICK HOLDEN: This conference is at a very important moment because it’s a turning point. You’ve got all the elders, the founders of the sustainable agriculture movement gathered here and we’re all now involved with the need for a transition towards more sustainable food systems.

VANDANA SHIVA: I do see this as a defense of democracy and freedom, for survival. And so I’m here.

BILL MOYERS: It was just a year ago on Earth Day you said, “People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.” And some of us who have read you and followed you took that as an indication that maybe, maybe the mad farmer is getting a little madder, a little more radical.

WENDELL BERRY: Well I have grown more radical the older I’ve become. I don’t remember saying that, but it sounds like me.

BILL MOYERS: Which is why I could have made it up, but I didn’t.

WENDELL BERRY: Well when you say you have to stop somebody, in our time, you would... ought to qualify. You don’t mean bomb them. And I didn’t mean stop them by violence, but they do have to be stopped.

“The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer.”

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck in Heaven’s favor, in spite of the best advice…

BILL MCKIBBEN: He is one of if not the great writer at work in American letters right now, he’s built this body of work that’s coherence, cohesive, powerful, beautiful, quite amazing. And it also happens that it’s about the most important subject that we have. Whether or not we’re going to be able to build the kind of communities that can successfully inhabit this Earth or not.

BILL MOYERS: As he nears 80 years of age, Berry is going beyond words to civil disobedience.

WENDELL BERRY: Keep up the good fight you all.

BILL MOYERS: In 2011 he joined a four day sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office to protest the mountaintop removal of coal.

What prompted that? A man your age?

WENDELL BERRY: Well good company. What prompted me was the thought that when you have a major problem in your state, to which state government is utterly indifferent, and you’ve taken every obvious and legitimate recourse, trying to meet and talk and influence and demonstrate and speak and write and nothing had worked.

BILL MOYERS: Why is that? Why do we concede to organizations like the coal companies such monolithic control over resources that should be the people’s?

WENDELL BERRY: Because in our society, people with money are bigger and more powerful and more noticeable and count more as citizens than people without much money. So we did confront the governor and tell him we weren’t going to leave.

WENDELL BERRY: We’re here to make our grievances and our petition heard.

And the governor then made a very, very clever move, he invited us to stay. And we did stay the whole weekend, did a lot of publicity for our side and were beautifully treated by the security staff. And people who sent us food and bedding and good wishes and even came in and gave us massages. And it was all together one of the loveliest weekends I’ve ever spent in my life.

BILL MOYERS: Are...are you going to do it again?

WENDELL BERRY: I don’t think that there’s any plan afoot again, but I wouldn’t mind it.

BILL MOYERS: Did you have a conversation with the governor about why you were there and what you hoped would happen?

WENDELL BERRY: We tried to have a conversation with the governor and we tried previously to have a conversation with the governor, but the uh, state government of Kentucky is not set up for dialogue or discourse on difficult problems. The issue of clean water in eastern Kentucky has so far not been possible to raise in the halls of the government.

BILL MOYERS: What’s happened to the water there?

WENDELL BERRY: Well it’s being poisoned by the, uh, outflow from those strip mines. If you expose those streams to surface erosion and runoff you let loose all kinds of poisons. And so they’re getting into the watershed.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think you accomplished. The streams are still flowing dirty in eastern…

WENDELL BERRY: The streams are still flowing dirty. But a lot has been done in the last 50 years to stop that and they’re still flowing dirty. That’s a tragedy and it’s to be suffered. And I live on the Kentucky River. I know that it’s got stuff in it that nobody is talking about. I know it has. For one thing, the native black willows are gone from the shores. For some reason, they can’t live by the Kentucky River anymore. As a resident of the uh, Kentucky River valley, I feel directly is a threat. If the willows can’t live there, how sure can I be that I will continue to be able to live there?

BILL MOYERS: Why can’t they live there?

WENDELL BERRY: I don’t know. It’s something in the water. That’s why we went down to the governor’s office. This is intolerable. There’s no excuse for it. And there’s no justification for the permanent destruction of the world. My belief and I’ve written out of it for many years is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts. We have the world to live in and the use of it to live from on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it and we have to know how to take care of it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it. And we’ve ignored all that all these years.

BILL MOYERS: You wrote quite recently that the two great aims of industrialization, replacement of people by technology and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy seem, in your words, close to fulfillment. What do you think from your life’s experience might stall the momentum and perhaps even reverse it?

WENDELL BERRY: I don’t know. There are two or three things that we haven’t been able to confront or even acknowledge politically. One is that the aim of the Industrial Revolution from year one has been to replace people with technology. So it’s a little contemptible to hear these people express in surprise at this late date that we have an unemployment problem. I don’t know that there’s any politician of visibility who could say that. So that’s, it’s important for people like me to say it, who have no power.

The other thing that we’re having trouble confronting and both sides are having trouble to confront it publicly and speak of it, is the disaster of being governed by the corporations. Those fictitious persons. And uh, you know you’re waiting for the day when some politician of stature and visibility will finally say, we can’t have this any longer, we’re here in Washington or Frankfort to represent the people, not to be employed or bought by the corporations and to serve them.

BILL MOYERS: Are corporations which have been given person rights under the First Amendment, are they acting humanly, even though they possess......

WENDELL BERRY: Well of course not. They can’t act human. You can’t have a bunch of people uh, combining into a person. That’s not physically possible. In confronting these people who are so immensely more powerful than we are...they’re in trouble on two fronts.

BILL MOYERS: The...the big corporations?

WENDELL BERRY: The big corporations. One is the people like these who are working against them so to speak from the inside. And then because their premises are wrong, creation is working against them from the outside.

BILL MOYERS: What have you come to understand is the natural logic of capitalism?

WENDELL BERRY: That you have a right to as much as you want of anything you want and by extension, the right to use any means available to get it. I’ve been talking for a long time about leadership from the bottom and I’m convinced perfectly that it’s happening and the, that leadership consists of people who simply see something that needs to be done and they start doing it.

BILL MOYERS: I’m wondering if putting your faith in the people is a wise investment.

WENDELL BERRY: I’m not putting my faith in the people, I’m putting my faith in some of the people.

BILL MOYERS: Which ones?

WENDELL BERRY: The ones who are committed. These people. The, the country and I think Vandana could tell you, the world is full of people now who are doing what I just said, seeing something that needs to be done and starting to do it, without the government’s permission, or official advice, or expert advice, or applying for grants or anything else. They just start doing it.

BILL MOYERS: At the age of 30, Wendell Berry decided to return to the land of his birthplace. He left the writers life in New York City to settle on the farm in Kentucky with his wife Tanya.

BILL MCKIBBEN: One of the reasons that his realization and his writing was so powerful, was that it stemmed directly from his life and what he was doing. Had he written all the things that he wrote without that piece of land, they would have still been powerful but it was that wedding of man and message, of life and of idea that I think makes him uniquely powerful character in our culture.

BILL MOYERS: Can you talk about what sustains you, what has grounded you, you talked about coming home to Kentucky. Somehow it seems to me that your love for language, your...your continuing search to find the word that expresses precisely what you think. Your, your determination to do justice to the subject may have also grounded you. There’s a remarkable consistency in the 40 books and works that you’ve produced.

WENDELL BERRY: Well, the language is secondary, but it imposes an obligation. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in my life. I’ve lived in a place I’ve loved. I’ve been a friend and ally with my brother all these years. Lived with a woman I’ve loved….love. It’s a sacrament and it’s probably some kind of necessity, to take responsibility, to be, to love somebody, and marriage is a way of acknowledging and accepting the responsibility.

BILL MOYERS: How long have you and Tanya been married?

WENDELL BERRY: Fifty…seven? Long time. And then I’ve had my children for neighbors, which is really unusual in, in our time, to have your children for neighbors. And then I’ve had a part in raising my grandchildren.

BILL MOYERS: Many years ago, you said, if you make a commitment and you stick to it to the end, there will be rewards.

WENDELL BERRY: Well that’s a, that’s...comes under the heading, faith.

BILL MOYERS: Faith. You still consider yourself a Christian.

WENDELL BERRY: I still consider myself a person who takes the gospels very seriously. And I read in them and am sometimes shamed by them and sometimes utterly baffled by them. But there is a good bit of the gospel that I do get, I think. I believe I understand it accurately. And I’m sticking to that. And I’m hanging on for the parts that I don’t understand. And, you know willing to endure the shame of falling short as a price of admission. All that places a very heavy and exacting obligation on me as a writer. A lot of my writing I think has been, when it hasn’t been in defense of precious things, has been a giving of thanks for precious things. So that enforces the art.

BILL MOYERS: What are the precious things that you think are endangered now?

WENDELL BERRY: It’s mighty hard right now to think of anything that’s precious that isn’t endangered. But maybe that’s an advantage. The poet, William Butler Yeats said somewhere, “things reveal themselves passing away.” And it may be that the danger that we’ve now inflicted upon every precious thing reveals the preciousness of it and shows us our duty. Some of us, these people and their friends and allies that now cover the world, these people are free to acknowledge the preciousness of the precious things.

BILL MOYERS: When did you know you were free? And I ask that because of the poem you wrote, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

WENDELL BERRY: You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.

BILL MOYERS: Then read your own poem.

WENDELL BERRY: This....this was a long time ago. “The Peace of Wild Things.”

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

BILL MOYERS: The grace of the world, take that a little further for me.

WENDELL BERRY: I meant it in the religious sense. The people of, people of religious faith know that the world is, is maintained every day by the same force that created it. It’s an article of my faith and belief, that all creatures live by breathing God’s breath and participating in his spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy. The whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally I see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse. Not just as…as human oppression. But as desecration. As blasphemy.

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this. “No amount…” This is you. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it … can for long disguise its failure" to conserve the wealth and health of nature. "Eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up … thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.” That’s as powerful an indictment of the consequences of runaway capitalism as I’ve ever read and surely if that’s happening as we know it is, it takes more than reverence, and it takes more than words to try to reverse it. What do you say to those people who say Wendell, please tell me what I can do?

WENDELL BERRY: All right. Well, you’ve put me in the place I’m always winding up in and…that is to say well we’ve acknowledged that the problems are big, now where’s the big solution? When you ask the question what is the big answer, then you’re implying that we can impose the answer. But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers. The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you. You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me. And this can’t be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

BILL MOYERS: Among Wendell Berry’s neighbors in Kentucky, young people are taking up that challenge. Jonas Hurley is an emergency room doctor, but he and his wife Julie want to become fulltime farmers.

JONAS HURLEY: We looked for about two years for land. We lived in a neighboring town, in town and just been dying to get…get some ground under our feet and looked for a couple years and found this little parcel of land a few years back. Not certified organic, but we don’t use any, any chemicals. All of our own animal manures to fertilize the field.

JULIE HURLEY: Movable fences for the animals. That’s key, movable fences. We move our fences around a lot just so the animals have fresh pasture regularly and then they leave behind what nurtures the field.

JONAS HURLEY: Good rich soil makes good strong plants, good strong plants can fight many, many diseases on their own. There’s netting on the bottom because they will burrow out. Come on out. We’re fairly well self-sufficient feeding ourselves and friends and family. We’d like for it to pay the bills so I can quite my day job and putter here and we’d like for it to you know help feed good food to our community.

WENDELL BERRY: I say to the young people, don’t get into this with the idea that you're going to save it and solve all the problems even in your lifetime. The important thing to do is to learn all you can about where you are and if you're going to work there it becomes even more important to learn everything you can about that place to make common cause with that place and then resigning yourself, becoming patient enough to work with it over a long time. And then what you do is increase the possibility that you will make a good example and what we’re looking for in this is good examples.

BILL MOYERS: You and Wes Jackson have proposed, speaking of patience, and part of the answer, a 50 year farm bill. What is the heart of it?

WENDELL BERRY: The heart of it is to recognize that agriculture as we are now practicing it involves a highly destructive ratio between people and land. More and more land is being used and used fairly destructively by fewer and fewer people. This…used destructively because the fewness of the people implies and requires a dependence on more and more mechanical power and more and more toxic chemicals.

BILL MOYERS: Arthur Young, a farmer whose land is down the road from St. Catharine College, learned for himself what chemicals can do.

ARTHUR YOUNG: I got to looking around at modern farming and I knew something was not right on my land. The water was running off quickly, it was not going in the soil, the land was becoming compacted, and I said this is not going to work. And I…I just said enough is enough and that’s really when I got into this thing of sustained agriculture. See that little pile of dirt? That is a worm casting. It’s very, very rich in nutrients. I’m on about my third year without fertilizer. Not a lot of synthetic stuff goes on this soil. But I know it’s getting better because I can see the production and my grasses are getting better every year.

BILL MOYERS: You also recommend taking animals out of their confinement and putting them back in…

WENDELL BERRY: Putting them back on grass where they belong.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

WENDELL BERRY: Because in the first place it’s wrong for people to mistreat fellow creatures. To use them inconsiderately and...and cruelly. Let me say that there is an inescapable cruelty involved in our life. We have to live at the expense of other creatures. Doesn’t make any difference how vegetarian we are, we’re still displacing other creatures. But the rule in using other creatures and I mean plants and animals is to use them with the minimum of violence.

BILL MOYERS: As you talk about that I thought of your poem, “For the Hog Killing.” Would you read that?

WENDELL BERRY: All right. This is all about the…the practical ethics.

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye, let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall, let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let its freshet be full, let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around, for today we celebrate again our lives' wedding with the world, for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.

BILL MOYERS: When you and I were born in 1934 there were almost seven million family farms in this country. There are now roughly around two million family farms and most of us are further away from the foundations of nature than we’ve ever been.

WENDELL BERRY: Well, there’s another tough problem. And so you have to look ahead a little bit. I don't like to talk about the future very much because it doesn’t exist, and we don’t know anything about it. But one thing we know right now is that people want to be healthy and to be healthy you have to have a diverse diet and diverse agriculture employs a lot more people than monoculture. So you imagine people moving out into the landscape because it will pay them to do it. It’ll be what we now vulgarly call job creation.

BILL MOYERS: But this will take a lot of patience, won’t it?

WENDELL BERRY: It’ll take a long time.

BILL MOYERS: Do we have time given what agribusiness is doing?

WENDELL BERRY: We don’t have a right to ask that question. We have to ask what’s the right thing to do and go ahead and do it and take no thought for the morrow.

BILL MOYERS: Resettling of America means….?

WENDELL BERRY: It means putting people on the land enough people on the land to take proper care of it and pay them decently for doing it. The fact that we and our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn’t make a living there, is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn’t make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living is preposterous and it’s a result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.

BILL MOYERS: What have you seen over a long life that prevents you from being fatally pessimistic?

WENDELL BERRY: Well, hope. And…and in my work, in my…especially in the essays, I’ve always been trying to construct or lay out, map out the grounds of a legitimate, authentic hope. And if you can find one good example, then you’ve got the grounds for hope. If you can change yourself, if you can make certain requirements of yourself that you are then able to fulfill, you have a reason for hope.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that you’ve put yourself in front of the locomotive of history, waving your arms and shouting, “Stop!”?

WENDELL BERRY: Oh sure. And you can do that very comfortably if you’re willing to be run over. I suppose I went with my friends to sit in the governor’s office because I was willing to be run over.

BILL MOYERS: Were you?

WENDELL BERRY: Yeah. Of course. You can’t do that without being willing to be…it’s dangerous to…to do acts of civil disobedience. I think once you’ve…once you’ve crossed that line, well, something is settled.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve got to be contrary.

WENDELL BERRY: Well, you’ve got to be contrary, but there’s a world of pleasure in contrariness.
"Dance," they told me, and I stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. "Pray," they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth’s brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan. When they said, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," I told them, "He’s dead." And when they told me, "God is dead," I answered, "He goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see him often. … Going against men, I’ve heard at times a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they asked me what I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.

BILL MOYERS: So as you talked about hope and I thought of your poem, “A Poem on Hope”, if you will read this.

WENDELL BERRY: All right.

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old, for hope must not depend on feeling good and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight. You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future, which surely will surprise us, and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you say to yourself. Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it, as you care for no other place… This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work. … Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. … Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot…. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.

BILL MOYERS: Wendell Berry, thank you for…