Our current student loan system could have been invented by Tony Soprano. We taxpayers guarantee the loans and the government does most of the underwriting, rate setting and paperwork. Then private banks step in, impose their extra charges on needy students, and walk off with all the profits. Not only do the feds donate tax dollars to these banks (what else is new?), but the banks bribe college officials to send students their way. Bada Bing!

If the bill passed, eliminating Tony as middleman, the government could have saved from $37 to $87 billion dollars over the next decade for use in supporting more Pell grants for low-income students.

To be sure, Republicans, en masse, are opposed to eliminating the no-account middlemen because that would amount to a socialistic takeover of free-enterprise. But, they also are joined a group of Democrats including Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Mark Warner of Virginia and Jim Webb of Virginia. The banks in question just happen to be employers in their states and campaign contributors as well. (See New York Times)

Unfortunately we're having the wrong debate here. The important question isn't who should be saddling students with enormous debt–the government or private banks. It's why anyone should be saddling them with enormous debt. As of 2008, 62 percent of all students at public 4-year colleges and universities took out loans. By graduation they owed a median of $17,700. (See CollegeBoard.com).

Allow me to offer this radical concept: They should graduate with no debt. Going to a public college or university ought to be free.

It used to be that way, at least for vets. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill of Rights) sent 7 million Americans to school for free after WWII. In 1988, a Congressional committee determined that for every dollar invested in that program, $6.90 was returned to the US economy. No reason we couldn't repeat that performance today. Why isn't universal free higher education on the political agenda? Here are some of the reasons:

1. Students won't value what they don't pay for.
Can't you just see it? We let students in for free and they trash the place. If we're not careful, we'll get the '60s all over again. But of course, this argument doesn't apply to students from wealthy families who don't have to pay a dime for college or run up any loans at all. Why the double standard?

More importantly, education is a necessity, not a privilege for the few. Our society always has recognized the need for free public education. As early as the 1600s, the New England colonies provided it. By the 20th century K-12 free public education became the norm. Nobody argued that only those who could pay for it should be allowed to go to high school. Times have changed a bit: Today people need a college degree or advanced vocational training if they're going to do well in the world.

2. The GIs earned it. Why should everyone get it for free?
The original Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 was actually opposed by Franklin Roosevelt. Why? Because he believed that everyone in the country had been part of the war effort–factory workers and farm hands were as important as front-line soldiers. So why reward just the vets with a free college education? But Roosevelt soon realized we had to send the 7 million vets to college for free, or else unemployment might soar after demobilization. No one wanted a replay of the Great Depression.

And we don't want this Great Recession to continue either.. Right now more than 29 million of us are without work or forced into part-time jobs. We need more than 100,000 jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. Free higher education would surely take the pressure off–and it would have that extra bonus of actually educating people and enriching their lives. Unemployed workers of all ages would go back to school if tuition were free.

3. We can't afford it.
Wrong. What we can't afford is what we're doing now: loading up students with debt and slamming the academy's door in people's faces. We need as many people as possible to get a college and advanced vocational education. It's the key to prosperity and a better quality of life. The smarter we are at work, the better the life that we can create for ourselves and our kids. How are people going to tackle global warming, the health care crisis, and all our other challenges without an education?

Also, we need to get a whole lot smarter about economics and governance. Our current economic mess shows just how dumb we are when it comes to protecting people's livelihoods. Millions lost their jobs because we were too damn stupid to stop Wall Street's gambling spree. Worse still, most of the economics profression justified it asit was happening. We've got to figure out how to keep our free-enterprise economy from turning into a billionaire bailout society, which is where we're heading. And our political system needs a little work too. For instance, how about educating some people to come in and fix the U.S. Senate, one of the most dysfunctional institutions ever? (While we're at it, the Texas curriculum board could use a little help too.)

4. There's really no public support for free higher education.
Are we sure? Few have tried to move the issue on a national level.

But if we asked parents and kids, we'd find out that free higher education is a no-brainer. It would be a good idea even if the federal government had to go deeper into debt to finance it. We've pumped more than $8 trillion into Wall Street with our loans, asset guarantees and liquidity programs. God knows how much we squander each year on military boondoggles. Yet, it might cost from $50 billion to $100 billion a year–a relative pittance–to cover all public higher education tuitions. And it would be a huge investment in a brighter future.

But the fact is, we don't have to run up a tab to get free higher education.

Imagine turning a fee on Wall Street gambling into a "college education for free" card for every American. A small financial transaction tax on bankers' speculative deals could fund free higher education in perpetuity. To jump start the program, we could put a windfall profits tax on the $150 billion in bonuses Wall Street executives are now collecting, thanks to our bailout. (Or, if we had the nerve, we could place a 10 percent income tax surcharge on those earning more than $3 million a year.)

The GI Bill's free tuition program was a key factor in building our post-WWII prosperity. If we want our nation grow smarter and stronger again, we need universal free higher education right now.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

 
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

Well, I guess I’m a seasoned reader now that I had two readings in two nights for my book last weekend.

The Amnesia/Modern Times event was more than I ever could have expected. The bar was packed. Lots of old friends were there. So were co-workers, cheese people, and some annoyed people who thought “I Can’t Feel My Face’” was starting early. But man, there were lots of strangers too. I guess that almost-lifesized picture of me in the weekly really worked (Thanks Hiya!)

Look, it’s packed!

(I know the two woman in the front and the smiling guy in red serving cheese, but who are those other folks?)

I’m getting less nervous with every reading, just a couple of hours of sheer terror rather than days. Whoo-hoo!

I feel like this picture really sums up the event:

As I mentioned from the stage it was particularly funny that I did my San Francisco launch at Amnesia since I lived at 20th and Mission and back in 1991 or 1992 it was my local bar (I think my housemates and I started going there after the Crystal Pistol became a tapas bar.) It’s funny because Bucky Sinister started what would become a well-regarded open mic night there (it was then called The Chameleon) and we hated it because it interrupted our regular drinking.

Sorry to any early Saturday night regulars who I annoyed. If we hadn’t provided free cheese I would say that I owe you a beer. I am only hearing now that it was too crowded for a few folks to even get in!

If you missed out than you can watch clips because the wonderful folks from Mission Local took video and interviewed people at the bar.

I tried to get rid of our remaining Cooperative 7”s but at least 25 remain. I think they’ll be given out at Reading Frenzy now. Look out Portland.! Hide your turntables!

Here’s the view from the back of the bar

Thanks to all the folks at Amnesia (especially the folks working that mob scene) and Leah from Modern Times for making this a reality.

One of the first notable acts of the new European Commission presided over by José Manuel Barroso was - on March 2 - to shatter the moratorium on authorization of genetically modified organisms (GMO) that had been established in Europe.

How did this moratorium, initiated in 1998, arise? From the fact that the governments of the member states did not agree to give GMOs a green light. Why didn't they agree? Because, as elected governments, they heard and understood the hostility and the distrust with which the majority of European citizens regard that technology.

Mr. Barroso - and the "elites" - deem the citizens wrong. So the commission chose to authorize the cultivation of a transgenic potato. The decision was taken without a meeting of the commissioners. The issue is no longer managed by the environment commissioner, but by the commissioner charged with "health and consumer protection," as though the GMO question were nothing but a health issue.

The commission based its ruling on the opinion of the European Food Safety Authority, which itself had been criticized by the member states themselves (Council of Ministers, December 2008). And the authorization bestowed involves a GMO that contains an inserted antibiotic-resistant gene, while all the discussion that took place during the 1990's had concluded that such genes must not be used - a conclusion inscribed in the 2001-18 directive that is supposed to guide all decisions in the matter.

A denial of democracy, a determination to bend to producers' desiderata, implicit contempt for any agriculture that would not be industrialized: that's what this decision is. But there is a more serious aspect that affects the European ideal itself. In order to continue to impose GMOs, the commission wants each member state to be able to choose whether to authorize GMOs within its boundaries. That amounts to dividing the Union, allowing it to be pulled in all directions over an eminently significant question which is not one of simple national preference, but involves common agricultural policy. It is a ratification of Europe's weakness in the direction desired by the "godfather" it never succeeds in ridding itself of - the United States.

The commission's decision echoes another failure, in Copenhagen, where Europe abandoned direction of the discussion on climate change to the United States and emerging countries. During the 1990's and at the beginning of the 2000's, Europe was beginning - through GMO, through climate measures - to find a path of environmental diplomacy through which it was outlining a model of development respectful of humans and of the environment.

Europe is abandoning that ambition, undoubtedly the only one that gave it any meaning. The Eurocrats and the "elites" should not be surprised if Europeans most decidedly do not adhere to the feeble conglomeration in thrall to multinationals that is being imposed upon them.

This article first appeared in Le Monde's edition of March 7-8, 2010.

Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.

For over a year, Obama believed that reform required him to govern as a post-ideological bipartisan. Now, mercifully, he has learned that progressive leadership demands taking on the Republicans, just as it requires taking on the insurance and banking industries. There is little common ground on those fronts either.

Since early March, Obama has begun to sound more like the bold figure who won the hearts of voters during the campaign. The showdown is expected late next week. Speaker Nancy Pelosi seldom schedules a vote without having a majority in her pocket. With all the bill's deficiencies, winning its passage would be a triumph, not just for expansion of health coverage, but for Obama's capacity to learn and grow in office and defeat Republican obstruction.

Should he succeed, there will be little public sympathy for Republican caviling about the use of the reconciliation progress to, well, reconcile differences between the House and Senate bills. Technical parliamentary complaints will seem more like the bleating of sore losers. Obama can seize the high ground of majority rule.

And thanks to the sheer extremism of episodes like Sen. Jim Bunning's attempted blockage of unemployment insurance, Liz Cheney's association of lawyers honoring the constitutional right to legal counsel with treason; and the refusal of Congressional Republicans to back even token recovery spending, Obama is well positioned to define a new political mainstream even as he becomes a more effective partisan progressive.

This odyssey was not an easy journey, and it is far from complete. Obama's belief in common ground runs very deep in his being. It remains to be seen whether his reluctant embrace of partisanship to win the health reform battle marks a durable change in his governing style, or a one-off. But a victory on this defining issue, after months of defeatism, would surely taste sweet and would very likely mark a shift in Obama's conception of leadership.

I say all this despite serious misgivings about the health plan itself. The compulsory mandate is a fundamental flaw, as Obama himself recognized during the campaign. There is a world of difference between true social insurance and a mandate to purchase a private product. The former reinforces the value of government and of social solidarity; the latter signals a coercive state in concert with private industry profits. The proposed tax on decent insurance was a tone-deaf assault on wage earners for whom good health coverage is a rare, reliable island in a rising sea of economic insecurity. The diversion of Medicare funds was a political gift to Republicans. And the back-loading of benefits purely for budgetary reasons made the bill a political piñata, with the risks evident and the gains deferred.

All of these elements made the plan a harder sell with legislators of Obama's own party — but all can be fixed. At the end of the day, even Congressional Democrats who worried that voters might punish them for supporting this measure grasped a more fundamental political truth: winning beats losing. There will be time to improve the bill, particularly now that Democrats have given themselves permission to use majority rule rather than defer to Republican obstruction.

Obama's new stance also serves as a role model. Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd's belated abandonment of a futile bipartisan approach to financial reform provides a bookend to the president's new partisan leadership on health reform.

Obama has also just appointed three relative progressives to the Federal Reserve, including Sarah Bloom Raskin of Maryland, widely considered the best of the state financial regulators. There is not a single businessman or banker in the lot.

Including in the health package an overhaul of the student loan program, long blocked in the senate, is another welcome demonstration of presidential nerve. But prevailing on this first round of health reform will be just the first step on a long road back.

Though both Obama and the Republicans treated health reform as the defining issue of his presidency, other challenges loom far larger. Obama has to do better on employment, mortgage relief, and financial reform. He has to deliver more tangible help to people for whom this recovery still feels like a depression. Presidential leadership has been crowded out by the grand distraction of health reform and by Obama's own reluctance to think bigger and fight harder. In these critical areas too, corporate and partisan adversaries have blocked progress. For this to be a true turning point, his new-found partisanship and bolder progressive stance must extend to the larger enterprise of restoring prosperity.

If Obama wins health reform, and goes on to fight harder for a real recovery program, some future historian (doubtless guided by extended interviews with Rahm Emanuel) will report that this latest turn to aggressive partisanship was all part of the grand design. Obama would spend his first year seeking bipartisan consensus, and then when it was clear to one and all that the Republicans were hopeless obstructionists, he'd spring the trap.

The reality was a lot messier. Obama's administration was all over the place strategically, and only came to presidential toughness belatedly and as a last resort. But Obama's behavior during the past two weeks does remind us why we saw great things in this man, and better late than never.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His forthcoming book is A Presidency in Peril.

 
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

© 2010 Drops in a Bucket Blog, www.HarvestingRainwater.com

When I was little I was terrified of death. I often cried myself to sleep as I thought of the end of life. It seemed so bleak, pointless, and severe.

Mom tried to comfort me with the concept of going to heaven. This did not reassure me at all. “How do you know there is a heaven?” I’d ask. “Have you been there?”

Eventually, I just numbed myself to the fear by burying it in the recesses of my mind and body.

Years later the fear evaporated with an incredible discovery – composting. Yes! Here was tangible proof that there was life after death, that everything did not just end/stop/vanish with death. Instead, things transformed. In the compost pile I saw kitchen scraps, weeds, and a dead chicken decompose into beautiful, rich, fertile soil in which earthworms, mycelia, chiles, and all kinds of new life grew.

Death no longer scared me, now it excited me. My composting dead body could generate myriad life! Don’t get me wrong: I’m in no rush to experience this. But when it eventually does happen – no problem.

Maybe.

My dead body could generate life, or more death depending on how it is disposed of.

The conventional death industry embalms bodies with a toxic brew of formaldehyde, phenol, and menthol, which can contaminate groundwater and generate cancer and other disease in those doing the embalming.¹ According to Grave Matters, today the U.S. funeral industry buries over 3 pounds of the formaldehyde-based “formalin” with every embalmed body (totaling 800,000 gallons [3,028,000 liters] of formaldehyde a year),² while from the Civil War era to 1910, arsenic, zinc, and lead where the preferred toxic embalming compounds.³

Then there are the caskets, turning cemeteries into landfills. Grave Matters states, “Over time the typical ten-acre [4 ha] swath of cemetery ground contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons [816,000 kg] of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons [18,143,000 kg] of vault concrete.”⁴

Cremation avoids embalming toxins, and the body can be burned in a shroud or cardboard container instead of a standard casket to consume less fuel and release fewer pollutants. But the fuel needed to incinerate the body is still substantial. Carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide are typical emissions along with toxic trace metals such as mercury – which comes from dental fillings (another good reason to ask for mercury-free fillings while alive).

All crematories in the U.S. may emit 5,000 pounds [2,267 kg] of mercury a year, while in the United Kingdom four times that amount is emitted due to a higher percent of the population choosing cremation.⁵

Depressing.

Deadening.

Friend and mentor Tim Murphy gave me a different vision. He wants to be buried toxin-free and naked, ass up, in the fetal position, with an acorn up his butt. “Plant me, and plant a tree. Years later you and others can come sit under my shade, harvest some acorns, and celebrate what is possible.”

I sometimes think of Tim as a radical traditionalist, and a small, but growing segment of the death industry is enabling others to take a similar path that encourages the natural decomposition of the dead and regeneration of other life from the process rather than trying to halt or slow what will eventually happen anyway. The website www.GreenBurialCouncil.org is one conduit to this path. And the book Caring for the Dead: A Complete Guide for Those Making Funeral Arrangements with or without a Funeral Director by Lisa Carlson is another conduit if you want to reduce or eliminate your participation in a death industry.

A green burial does not allow toxic embalming, concrete vaults, or elaborate caskets, which can reduce the cost of a burial by $8,000 to $12,000, according to memorial ecologist Joe Whittaker. Young trees or an engraved field stone are recommended over tombstones.

I experienced a new green or conservation burial ground for all faiths first hand at Honey Creek Woodlands just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It is a beautiful place with very caring and dedicated staff, including Joe Whittaker. And it is erupting with new life.

It is located on and beside a section of once-grazed and clear-cut forest in the heart of the 2,100-acre [849-ha] grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. The monastery grounds are bordered by and connected to a state park and the network of footpaths, creeks, and wildlife corridors of the park and encompassing 8,000-acre [2,327-ha] Arabia Mountain Heritage Area. This is a huge strength for a final resting place, since many people already feel connected to this land.

First and foremost, the burial grounds are a nature preserve, with the goal of enhancing a 50-year succession back to a mixed hardwood forest, through such practices as selective weeding of invasive exotics, seeding and planting native plant stock, and adding organic matter to the soil.

Bodies are planted just 3 to 3.5 feet [0.9 to 1.06 m] deep because microbial activity and soil life drops tremendously at depths greater than 4 feet [1.21 m]. Above the body the excavated soil is placed in a mound with the topsoil placed back on top for a total initial “depth” of about 5 feet [1.5 m]. This is then covered with a light pine needle mulch and native wildflower seed. The Georgia Native Plant Society ensures only natives are used. Flowers and butterflies soon cover the 2-foot [0.6-m] tall burial mound – over 64 species of butterflies were counted in one day in 2008. The mound settles completely after a few years.

The process is so visible! So beautiful! I visited a day-old burial; fresh flowers still atop the grave. Ten feet [3 m] away, dried and shriveled flowers rested atop a week-old burial. And as I looked about I saw I was surrounded by burials, all in various stages of settling and regeneration. The older they were, the greater the density of vegetation atop them, and the more level the soil.

I saw a family cremation plot circle of field stones surrounding a tree. All were again reunited and rooted around their family’s tree.

I felt revived just being in this regenerating forest. I felt…

Alive!

REFERENCES:

1. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 40, 41.

2. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 40, 56.

3. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 30, 39.

4. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. p. 38.

5. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. p. 61.

Do children need a pile of wrapped toys in order to know that their family and friends are delighted and honored that they share this lifetime with us? Somewhere in our consumer culture, we have confused material items with expressions of love.

My youngest daughter, Ula, and I have birthdays one week apart. Thus, the cusp of February and March contain a lot of conversations about cakes and special birthday plans. As we cozied into bed a few nights ago, we marveled about how she was turning three. I asked her what she would like for her birthday. Apparently she had been waiting for this question, because her answer came very quickly:

“Eggnog and a candy cane.”

“Anything else?” She gave the question a little more consideration, and thought of her two best friends.

“Ania and Katherine.” Smiling, I told her I would make that all happen.

I was reminded of my other daughter, Saoirse, when she was about that age. Her request had been a pink balloon. I thought that was perfectly reasonable, but apparently it caused a stir. Saoirse has an August birthday, and around that time three years ago, I was being interviewed by a magazine for a story they were running on eco-parenting. The reporter had learned about my work on Radical Homemaking, and had called for an interview. She outlined the premise of the piece to me, explaining that she was examining the added financial burdens parents faced when they chose to raise their children in an ecologically responsible way—as examples, she mentioned chlorine-free diapers, bisphenol and phthalate-free baby bottles, organic baby foods and clothing, and all-natural, fair-trade, and zero-impact toys.

Ula was a mobile baby at the time, and as the reporter spoke, I watched her approach her favorite all-natural toy, the family laundry basket. She dumped over the folded clothes, then rifled through until she found a pair of underpants, pulled them over her head, and paused to watch me as I listened to the reporter. Taking a cue from my daughter, I interrupted the conversation. “I’m sorry, but that’s not what eco-parenting means to me. It isn’t about going out and buying ecologically-produced versions of products I think I may need. It’s about discovering what I don’t need.”

“What do you mean?”

I presented some  examples: We never bought a single jar of pre-made baby food, organic or otherwise. My babies ate ground-up versions of whatever Bob and I ate. Children don’t need a lot of toys in order to grow, develop and be happy. And they don’t need to be new, and they don’t even need to technically be toys. Illustrating the point, Ula demonstrated the versatility of her undie hat by converting it first to a facemask, and then to an undie necklace. Re-focusing on the phone conversation, I argued that ecologically sensitive parenting, at least from a Radical Homemaker perspective, was not about adding expenses to the family budget. It was about taking them away. The reporter concluded the conversation and hung up the phone. I assumed she was satisfied.

Apparently, her editors were not. I received another phone call. Under her editor’s direction, the reporter was to present a series of more “hard-hitting” questions about Radical Homemaking. To my surprise, one of the first questions on the list was about birthdays. I mentioned Saoirse’s wish for a pink balloon, and my intention to make her wish come true. We moved on and worked our way through the second interview. I assumed we had covered everything the reporter now needed for her story.

I concur that Saoirse may not have an enduring interest in balloons (although three years later, she still thinks they’re fascinating), but I cannot concur that a birthday, properly celebrated, needs to be a cultivation of and pandering to materialistic desires. What is a birthday? It is an opportunity to celebrate the life and the development of a person. Do my children need to see a table covered with a pile of wrapped toys in order to know that their family and friends are delighted and honored that they share this lifetime with us? Somewhere in our consumer culture, we have confused “presents,” material items, with expressions of love and gratitude. 

For certain, Bob and I enjoy finding a new toy or two to add a fun dimension to the day. And yes, they are often of the all-natural and fair-trade ilk, and yes, they do cost more. They are easily affordable when only one or two are needed. But the present is a marginal part of the celebration. At ages of (nearly) three and six, I have yet to hear from my children “can I have ‘thus and such a toy’ for my birthday?” Instead, my children focus on what we will do, how we will feast, and who we will share the day with. Last year, Saoirse wanted to have a dress-up tea party with her friends and family (we enforce a strict no-presents policy, so there was no gift table). The year before, we made homemade pizzas and took them out to the farm pond for a picnic, where we swam and lounged for the afternoon. For Ula, the family canceled all labors for the day and sat around the kitchen table finger-painting from breakfast (with birthday crepes) until nap time. 

My own birthday was just a few days ago. It came and went in the middle of a snow emergency, where four feet of the white stuff was dumped on our house. My birthday celebration was canceled. Bob and I spent much of the day with shovels in hand, watching as the snow banks towered well above Bob’s six-foot height. While we worked, Saoirse fashioned little dolls for me out of toothpicks, wine corks, and clothespins. When we came in to rest, Ula would climb onto my lap and sing Happy Birthday. Throughout the day, my friends called to wish me a happy day, and my mother called, despairing that she wouldn’t be able to bake me a cake.  

Around sunset, Phil, our plow truck driver, stopped outside the house. Knowing he’d been on duty nearly 24 hours, I rushed out with a cup of coffee and some chocolate chip cookies. I found him making a repair under the truck. “Happy birthday, Shannon,” he called as he climbed out from underneath and took the coffee. “Your neighbors at the bottom of the hill were sorry they couldn’t get up to see you. They wanted to make sure you knew they were thinking of you.”

I was smiling as I came inside. Bob handed me a birthday cocktail, then apologized that he was unable to make me anything special to celebrate. I smiled as I thought of all the love I’d felt that day—from my husband, my kids, my friends, my parents and neighbors, even the plow truck driver. “I had a fantastic birthday,” I said, and we toasted. Three years after that pink balloon interview series, I repeatedly think about those phone conversations, warning me that my blissful, naive ideas about birthday wishes will all change someday. After thirty-six years, they still seem to hold true for me. And now it is time for me to go make some eggnog. We’ve got a party coming up.

We are told that we're already living well beyond our means — that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security will bankrupt us. Forget the solar panels, the smaller classes and the new jobs — we've got to cut back on government programs at all levels.

Meanwhile, the super-rich are still having a ball. In his annual shareholder letter, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote, "We've put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it's raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble." And Forbes Magazine adds, "Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year."

Which brings us back to the federal budget. There are two sides to every ledger: the expenses…and the income. We need to start looking at the income side. With a fairer tax system, we could retrieve some of that money downpour that the elite has been siphoning away from us for decades.

In the 1950s the marginal tax rate on those earning more than $3 million a year (in today's dollars) was 90 percent. By 1990 it was 28 percent. The IRS says that the top 400 richest tax filers actually paid a rate of just 16 percent in 2007 (the latest numbers we have). Yep, the richest earners — people who took in an average of $343 million each — probably paid a lower rate than you did. Something to consider as you sign your 2009 return.

By the way, those 400 people who do so well on tax day have a combined net worth of nearly $1.37 trillion. (According to Forbes Magazine their wealth has gone up on average by more than 16 percent over the past year — the worst economic year since the Great Depression during which 29 million Americans are without work or forced into part-time jobs. )

How do we even wrap our minds around a number so large? Here's the example that brings it down to earth for me. If we had progressive taxes that reduced their wealth to a trifling $100 million each, we'd have enough money to set up a trust fund whose interest could provide tuition-free higher education for students at every public college and university in perpetuity. Imagine that. Our kids could actually leave college without carrying tens of thousands of dollars of debt on their backs.

Could those 400 special people be able to get by on just $100 million a year? I think they might.

So why are we so fearful of taxing the super-rich? Here are the arguments I've heard.

1. They've earned it.
Really? The concept of "earning" is murky when you consider the array of corporate welfare programs we provide. Oil companies have their depletion allowances. Big sugar farmers have their sweet subsidies. The health insurance industry is exempt from anti-trust laws.

One way corporations spend their welfare checks is by providing top management with mind-boggling compensation packages. For instance, in 2009, our financial wizards netted about $150 billion in bonuses - as if in reward for crashing the economy. Were it not for our $10 trillion (not billion) in bailout funds, they would have earned nothing at all. In fact, the financial sector's reckless gambling has lost us over $6 trillion in wealth. But the execs did quite well, thanks to taxpayer largesse.

You'd think we'd be crying out for a windfall profits tax to reclaim our money. But no.

2. Redistribution of Income is Un-American.
During the 2008 campaign, Joe the Plumber got his 15 minutes of fame when he slammed Obama for daring to utter the phrase "redistribution of income." Of course, we redistribute income primarily through progressive taxation - having the rich pay a higher rate.

Joe didn't mention that we already live in a world of massive redistribution. Only it's from the bottom to the top. We still hear about how poor folks game the system and mooch off our hard earned tax dollars. They go to emergency rooms and don't pay. They get Medicaid for free. And many don't pay any taxes at all (mostly because their incomes are so impossibly low). But all of that is chump change compared to the gaming going on at the other end of the economic scale.

Just think of all the scams corporations and the rich are running: ever-rising credit card fees, predatory mortgages, usurious interest rates, check cashing ripoffs, monopoly pricing. They turn income into lower taxed capital gains, find offshore tax shelters, collect subsidies for their runaway shops. And then they netted the big one: Wall Street bailouts. Post-baillout, these too-big-to fail companies are getting even bigger. It all adds up to a major redistribution plan — from the many to the few.

During the post-WWII boom we had one of the fairest income distributions in the world. Not anymore. Today the gap between rich and poor is wider than at any time in U.S. history. Here's a telling statistic: In 1970 the compensation ratio of the top 100 CEOs compared to the average worker was 45 to one. By 2008 it was 1,071 to one. You think they got that much smarter?

3. If we tax the wealthy, we'll hinder investment and kill jobs.
This was the justification politicians and pundits used when they started cutting taxes and eliminating regulations in the late 1970s. Tax cuts were supposed to create a robust investment class whose dollars would fuel the new service economy. Since only the wealthy can make such investments, the argument went, we have to make sure they have the money they need to invest. Otherwise, where will all the new jobs come from?

In theory this sounds good. But we tried this experiment, and it didn't work. When we cut taxes on the super-rich, we got a different kind of investment boom than the politicians and economists had promised. The wealthy literally ran out of investments in factories, equipment and even services. So they flocked to financial investments — which were supposedly safer and more profitable anyway. The super-rich laid their money down in the Wall Street casino, and helped puff up bubble after bubble. Profits in the financial sector soared. In 1960, the sector accounted for about 15 per cent of all corporate profits. By 2008 (before the crash, that is), it was almost 40 percent. The financial sector crased as the direct result of tax cuts for the super-rich and Wall Street deregulation.

4. Government's too big already. We should be cutting the public sector, not raising taxes to expand it.

Many people (like those in and around the Tea Party) dislike tax scams by the wealthy, but dislike government even more. They're outraged that public sector workers often have better wages and pensions than people in the private sector. They've made attacking public employees the new national blood sport.

With unemployment so high, public sector workers are an easy target. Why should taxpayers, many of whom have no pensions, finance the pensions of public sector workers? Why should we protect public sector jobs when we ourselves are unemployed?

Here's one reason: Because cutting state and local payrolls would actually add to our economic woes. If we fire public sector workers, they'll stop paying taxes — which will only add to the tax burden on those people who still have jobs.

Laid off public sector workers — and even those whose wages and benefits have been cut — don't buy as many goods and services. This drop in demand triggers layoffs in the private sector — and a further slide in tax revenues. In short, public sector cutbacks contribute to an economic death spiral: plummeting tax revenues and ever more cutbacks.

By failing to tax the super-rich, we're burrowing even deeper into a billionaire bailout society in which the rich keep on gambling away our money, knowing that we will bail them out if they lose. Yes, we need to regulate Wall Street. But we also need to recognize that these gambling addicts have too much money in their pockets. And society needs that money for constructive investments, not for more gambling.

In the end the real fiscal crisis is in our minds. We don't have to keep fighting over the scraps the wealthy have left us. We can build a new kind of economy, but only if can summon up some courage. Do we have the nerve to tax the super-rich?

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

 
This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Wow, a lot of great press for the book in the last week… While I wish I had nipped the “former punk rocker” thing in the bud, it seems it is now my identity. Oh well. I have always been partial to “post-punk” as a genre anyway, I’ll just have to ease them into calling me that in the future.

Leah Garchik devoted a third of her column to my book and Rainbow today:
Your nose may have been buried in Marcel Proust, Jane Austen, James Patterson or Danielle Steel. My own has been buried in “Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge,” the recently published memoir of Rainbow Grocery cheese man (and former punk rocker) Gordon Edgar.

This is especially satisfying for me because I have been reading the Chron since I was old enough to read. In the new world of daily newspaper budget cuts, they have eviscerated their book section and I was afraid my hometown paper would ignore me.

Another hometown paper also gave me a nice plug:

Gordon Edgar’s memoir Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge is essential reading for city eaters. First, it details the goings-on at Rainbow Grocery, a place that reveals strange wonders upon every visit, from the unwashed man buying a king’s ransom in organic fruit to the frenzied crowds on the Yellow Pages coupon days (check your phone book!). Second: It’s written by a punk rock cheese expert with a don’t-bullshit-the-public ethos.

I have to say that from their food blog, to the events section the SF Weekly has been an early supporter of my blog and my book and I really appreciate it.

In addition my blog post about my first reading was picked up by the Huffington Post, I had a Q & A in the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, Edible San Francisco did a print review, and I got mentioned on Tablehopper and Outblush.com. Wow. I’m seriously touched by all this attention. Thanks everyone. (I appreciate all the linking, up-buzzing, tweeting, and word-of-mouth too!) Don’t tell my publisher, but I think we’ve already sold more copies than I really thought we would, book proposal promises aside.

For your convenience, I have a facebook page for my book which will update folks with reviews, plugs, and readings. I also have a few readings/events coming up that I will take this opportunity to mention. Tell your friends in Marin and Portland!

Saturday at Amnesia Bar 6:30 PM — San Francisco

Sunday at Book Passage 5 PM — Corte Madera

3/20 You can buy the book at the Oregon Cheese Festival all day — Central Point, Oregon

3/21 at Reading Frenzy 7 PM Portland, Oregon

Cheese will be served at all events*

*Thanks to the Epicurean Connection, Marin French Cheese Company, Cypress Grove Chevre, Harley Farms, Rogue Creamery, Rustic Bakery, Cheeseworks West, and the Marin Cheese Company

 
This post was originally published on Gordon Edgar's blog at gordonzola.net.

March  9, 2010 –  There is a revolution brewing in this country. Some are already attempting to define it… perhaps as a means of shaping it. Perhaps as a means of preventing a no-sided melee which no one can win. — Mark my words and mark them well. A left-right labelling of this revolution will mark the failing of our species and condemn millions of Americans to death and suffering. Labels kill us, especially orthodoxies and labels from the old paradigm. This must be a revolution by all the people who get it as opposed to people who don't. — If it isn't, then the bad guys will win again as they always have when it's been framed as a left-right issue and they controlled both sides. The left has failed us as badly as the right. Just the use of the words "left" and "right" closes off a myriad of possible life-saving options. Conservatives and liberals starve and die in exactly the same way. They go homeless the same way. They bleed the same way. The Powers That Be would much rather have us fighting each other rather than them.

In the Civil Rights and Vietnam era, declassified documents and court cases showed that the ONE thing the FBI was more afraid of than anything else was an alliance between blacks and whites: where civil rights met the Vietnam war. As soon as Matrin Luther King started speaking against the war he was marked for death. –  Now, the one thing The Powers That Be are afraid of is any alliance between so-called left and so-called right. That's the only alliance; the only coalition that can possibly save lives and stand up against what's coming. So any time I see crap like "from the left" or "from the right", I shudder. Left and right are meaningless terms to me because I live outside the paradigm — at least in my head.

Anybody who fights the infinite growth economic paradigm is my brother and my sister. Ron Paul is fighting it. Cynthia McKinney is fighting it. And I, for one, am not going to chop either one of them off — and hurt all of us — in the process… because of a freaking label. These are two of the bravest and most honorable people I have ever met. — I am reminded of something attributed to Albert Einstein; "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

Collapsenet will be a voice for and a place where those from either the left or right can come in safety. It will welcome Libertarians, Socialists, Anarchists, Secessionists, Democrats and Republicans. It will embrace all colors and all religions. The only thing we will require is an understanding and agreement that we want to save our own lives, and as many of our fellows' lives as we possibly can.The labels left and right are as doomed as the old paradigm. When the dust settles there will be no conservatives or liberals; only survivors. And in whatever ways we oppose it, our only enemy will always be ONLY the infinite growth monetary paradigm. Our vision will not be distracted. Combat vets understand that the political beliefs or color of the man watching your back, handing you water or ammunition; or carrying you to safety means nothing. He is your brother. All of us at Collapsenet pledge this to you. We want to carry as many of you to some measure of safety as possible because all those labels everyone is so fond of don't mean shit anymore. If you filter your thoughts that way and don't know how to stop it, the bear's going to get you.

There are two labels, however, that will survive. They are "honorable" and "effective".

MCR

As part of our yurt-building adventure with Bill Coperthwaite, we spent two days carving: one day for spoons, another for bowls. There's no more beautiful—nor useful shape than the full, swelling hollow of a well-designed and well-made spoon.

Note the lovely detail where handle meets bowl on the small serving spoon that Bill left with us—his contribution to spoon design.

For bowl carving, Bill invented this simple jig that sits on a bench to hold your bowl-blank, and greatly eases the job of hand-carving a bowl. He has also adapted the traditional Swedish pulling harness for the crooked knife, reducing it to a cord and a toggle handle with which to pull the knife.

Just before X-mas, a friend gave me a book on Shaker hand-craft: Hands to Work and Hearts to God. I saw this one-piece, wooden grain shovel, and wanted to make one just like it—except that we don't grow enough grain to warrant making—much less storing it.

On the next page was a dustpan. The two images clicked against each other, amidst chips and excitement from a couple of bowls and spoons I'd made in the aftermath of the yurt. So I decided to make this maple dustpan as an X-mas present for Hannah. A side-benefit was getting rid of the butt-ugly plastic pan we endured every time we swept. A neighbor provided a piece of green maple firewood, which had some lovely bird's-eyes in it. Now I wish I had copied the high, rounded, form of the Shaker shovel, but it's lovely and light, a pleasure to use, and durable.

I roughed it out with a chainsaw and this adze (from Kestrel tool on Lopez Island, in WA), and finished it with crooked knives, one from kestrel, the other from Pinewood forge in MN — there are interesting design differences between the two knives, but both are just wonderfully beautiful tools (both visible at left in the spoons photo that follows).

Knives and adze are the best hand tools I've got (except, maybe, for my favorite spoon and my Austrian scythe blades). The knives work better than any gouge, and require no mallet, no workbench. The adze is so sharp, light, and so accurate that a "roughed out" piece can be very close to finished.

Since then, I've been carving spoons, bowls, and sticks of various kinds, inspired not only by Bill, but also by aeons of sculpture by all my ancestors who lived by and for beauty, and for whom work was merely a way of participating in what was, and is, both universal and useful—divinely useless, and essential. Particular inspiration this winter came in the form of two books: Patterns that Connect, by Schuster and Carpenter, and Baule: African Art, Western Eyes, by Susan Vogel. The pattern book is just that: a thousand drawings of patterns and patterned objects all representing, according to the authors, a universal human story about who we are and were we come from. It makes far more sense than most "art" books I've ever read (it is also a summary of a previous work that runs to 7,000 illustrations in 12 volumes). Both titles provide abundant evidence of and inspiration for the obvious argument that "art" should not mean things for sale, but a way to live in creative harmony with a universe that spawns endless beauty.

Beauty as gift makes better sense than beauty as commodity, but also makes it hard to hold onto a spoon long enough to photograph it…

Here's a collection of works-in-progress.

and a poem written during my visit to Bill's home, Dickinson's Reach, in northern Maine.

Everything turns,

the sun rises.

I fill a wooden bowl with oats and fruit

And with a wooden spoon,

empty it again,

Every day.

Which master makes us

lay down spoon and bowl

for pen and sword?

It took us ten days to get this far. Nearly all the cross cuts we did with hand saws (most were compound angles). The first time I met Bill, he was putting a new post under his own yurt, in Maine. I got to help, and while we cut various things, he said he was still learning how to use a saw, after nearly 70 years! With his help, I learned how to make a straight cut through a 4×4 (finally!) I had always assumed that with two lines, one vertical and the other horizontal, I ought to be get a straight cut. When I didn't, I assumed the fault was due to my lack of skill or some technical magic. Well, technical magic it was: you need a third line! Every cut since has been (almost) perfectly straight. Slow motion gets you there faster. Amazing, now, to notice how few people use all the teeth in the blade when they cut with a handsaw. If you only use the middle third of the blade, you can push and pull very fast, and feel like a machine, and make big mistakes quick. When you use all the teeth, you go slow, so the blade stays securely in the cut. Meanwhile, the saw rakes the wood with two or three times as many teeth, cuts much faster, and you can put your attention where it belongs, on the line you're cutting to…

It shouldn't have been such a surprise to me that we built it from the top down, but I didn't think about it until after Bill asked for materials I'd planned to get later. We discussed raising the top tier onto it's support pole by hand, and some were surprised when Bill suggested a machine, since he's the "do-it-by-hand" guy. After he reminded us that he'd arrived by jet plane, we rented a telescoping forklift. We happened to have a rigger named Skelk on the crew, who arranged the ropes, and a neighbor, Russ, who had moved a lot of big, heavy things and had also just gotten a crane operator's license. As soon as the rest of us got out of the way, Russ and son set it down on the locust center pole just as pretty as you please. After the whole thing was up, Bill mused that "you could probably cut that post out completely, since the roof and cable are holding everything in place anyway…" As he also pointed out, however, "do you really want to see exactly how many rivets you can take out of the airplane?"

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the building is the interior surface of the upper roof, which consists of two layers of 3/8" fir boards. We carefully tied the first layer of sticks into the requisite curve, making a series of lovely bows, which we secured top and middle by tying them to steel rings. We nailed them around the eave. The tension in the boards would have twisted the whole thing, so after we cut the strings, we screwed the second layer down to the first, which fixed it all firm. Each shingle was hand cut to fit. That was a lovely day's work for a team of about 4, with Bill leading from top center.

After the top was done, the rest happened pretty quick. Bill's gift is to organize a large crew (17, in our case) so that everyone always has something worthwhile to do, and so that all the pieces are cut to size and ready to go when needed—similar, I imagine, to the leader's role in an old-fashioned Amish barn-raising. He also knows the design well, and dreams in numbers—even when there were surprises, he spotted and fixed them quickly. He didn't relax until we were all done. The highpoints, for me, were postscripts: sitting around our table—me, Hannah, two boys, and Bill, shelling corn into a big bowl. Also a long ride in the car, during which Bill talked about Emily Dickinson and other authors who have kept him company over the years. And finally, the ride to the airport, and complex thinking about little things, details of life which escape our notice—unless they're absent—and then we lose the whole kingdom for want of a nail, or a shoe, or a spoon. If more of us spent more time and attention on making good nails and shoes and spoons, we'd have less want, less violence, less war. It's an easy message, but a demanding discipline.

Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.

Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.

Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green.

Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month.

"Things that were unthinkable are now becoming thinkable," said James W. Hughes, dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, who is among the urban experts watching the experiment with interest. "There is now a realization that past glories are never going to be recaptured. Some people probably don't accept that, but that is the reality."

The meaning of what is afoot is now settling in across the city.

"People are afraid," said Deborah L. Younger, past executive director of a group called Detroit Local Initiatives Support Corporation that is working to revitalize five areas of the city. "When you read that neighborhoods may no longer exist, that sends fear."

Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems.

Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars will be needed to buy land, raze buildings and relocate residents, since this financially desperate city does not have the means to do it on its own. It isn't known how many people in the mostly black, blue-collar city might be uprooted, but it could be thousands. Some won't go willingly.

"I like the way things are right here," said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet.

For much of the 20th century, Detroit was an industrial powerhouse — the city that put the nation on wheels. Factory workers lived in neighborhoods of simple single- and two-story homes and walked to work. But then the plants began to close one by one. The riots of 1967 accelerated an exodus of whites to the suburbs, and many middle-class blacks followed.

Now, a city of nearly 2 million in the 1950s has declined to less than half that number. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots.

Several other declining industrial cities, such as Youngstown, Ohio, have also accepted downsizing. Since 2005, Youngstown has been tearing down a few hundred houses a year. But Detroit's plans dwarf that effort. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown.

Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can't continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas.

The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years and pump new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods that would be cleared, the city would offer to relocate residents or buy them out. The city could use tax foreclosure to claim abandoned property and invoke eminent domain for those who refuse to leave, much as cities now do for freeway projects.

The mayor has begun lobbying Washington for support, and in January Detroit was awarded $40.8 million for renewal work. The federally funded Detroit Housing Commission supports Bing's plan.

"It takes a true partnership, because we don't want to invest in a neighborhood that the city is not going to invest in," said Eugene E. Jones, executive director of the commission.

It is not known who might get the cleared land, but with prospects for recruiting industry slim, planners are considering agricultural uses. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.

Maggie DeSantis, a board member of Community Development Advocates of Detroit, said she worries that shutting down neighborhoods without having new uses ready is a "recipe for disaster" that will invite crime and illegal dumping. The group recently proposed such things as the creation of suburban-style neighborhoods and nature parks.

Residents like Hardin want to keep their neighborhoods and eliminate the blight.

"We just try to keep it up," he said. "I've been doing it since I got it, so I don't look at nobody trying to help me do anything."

For others, Bing's plans could represent a way out.

Willie Mae Pickens has lived in her near east-side home since the 1960s and has watched as friends and neighbors left. Her house is the only one standing on her side of the street.

"They can buy it today. Any day," said Pickens, 87, referring to city officials. "I'll get whatever they'll give me for it, because I want to leave."

(This version corrects that Younger is past executive director of group, since she left it last week. It also corrects that renewal work money was granted in January, instead of last month.)

But then the dust settled, Volcker was given a largely ceremonial position as head of an advisory committee that didn't even meet until May, and his advice was largely ignored. Volcker's wise counsel was for much tougher regulation, including the restoration of the Glass-Steagall wall between commercial regulation and more speculative activities such as securities underwriting and proprietary trading — a wall whose dismantling in 1999 laid the groundwork for many of the abuses that led to the great financial collapse.

This counsel ran counter to the views of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. Only when Obama found himself in political trouble in December and January, as a president who seemed hopelessly in bed with Wall Street, did the administration turn to Volcker.

Volcker is no radical. He is the former Fed chairman who raised short term interest rates to 21.5 percent as a cold-bath cure for inflation. He has a tightwad's view of monetary policy, even in a severe recession. But he has been around long enough to know that Wall Street speculators are capable of terrible mischief when regulations are dismantled. When the most radical person on the scene is Paul Volcker, it tells you just how politics have moved to the right.

During the months of his internal exile in the Obama administration, the old lion hadn't been just licking his wounds. Volcker turned out to be a better organizer than Obama. He organized several other senior eminences to support his call to restore Glass-Steagall, including Nicholas Brady, treasury secretary under Bush I, Bill Donaldson, SEC chair under Bush II, and Roger Altman, Robert Rubin's former deputy. Volcker testified. He gave tough speeches — of the kind President Obama should have been giving.

On January 21, right after the Massachusetts senate debacle, President Obama held a carefully staged East Room event dusting off Paul Volcker, in which Obama belatedly and ardently embraced what he termed "The Volcker Rule" — a restoration of the Glass-Steagall wall. Messrs Geithner and Summers made like they had supported the idea all along (thought it was mysteriously absent from all preceding administration legislation.)

That same January week, as the administration was scrambling to appear anti-Wall Street, Obama expressed his strong support for a consumer financial protection agency and for a tax on the profits of the largest banks. And then … nothing happened. The president's attention was focused elsewhere, mainly on the death-from-a-thousand-cuts known as health care reform.

To Senator Chris Dodd, the whole thing looked fishy. Dodd, the lame-duck Banking Committee Chairman, was called to the White House to lend his support to the "Volcker Rule." Dodd initially played along, but quietly steamed. Later, Dodd said that the whole maneuver looked a "political ploy."

Since then, Dodd has seemed determined to repeat the exercise in feckless bipartisanship in the area of financial reform that the White House is finally abandoning when it comes to health reform. First, Dodd tried to write a bipartisan bill with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama. In late February, it finally became clear to Dodd that he and Shelby shared little in common other than criticism of the Federal Reserve.

Dodd then turned to another Committee Republican, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who is fairly critical of Wall Street for a Republican. But in working with Corker, Dodd did a 180 when it came to the Fed. Their working draft legislation proposes more power for the Federal Reserve, not less, and proposes lodging the proposed independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) in the Fed. Barney Frank, Dodd's counterpart in the House, which has already approved a free-standing CFPA, said of Dodd's proposal, "When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke."

No financial reform worth having will come out of the Senate if the price is a bipartisan bill. Chris Dodd is retiring, mainly because he'd have a hard time winning re-election. He might have chosen, as a final act of statesmanship, to hold out for tough reforms. Instead, he is behaving like a legislator looking forward to his next job on Wall Street.

Finally, last week, on March 3, the White House sent Congress its own version of a financial reform package. It included a version of the "Volcker Rule" — limits on securities trading by commercial banks, and also limits on how big any bank can grow. The bill would also limit interlocks between banks and hedge funds and private equity funds. But an exception is carved out for "banks in default or in danger of default." In other words, Geithner, Summers and Bernanke can go right on creating behemoth, too-big-to-fail banks through emergency mergers backed by taxpayer money and credit from the Fed.

The wise guys on Wall Street are already saying that the tougher parts of this belated reform package haven't got a prayer. Neither Corker not Shelby is a fan of Volcker. But the larger moral of the story is that no serious change in our corrupted financial system is possible without hands-on presidential leadership. It's not enough to keep Paul Volcker in a glass case to be taken out in case of political emergencies.

If Obama is serious about financial reform, he needs to fight for it — against corporate Democrats as well as Republicans, and against his chums on Wall Street. It's the same lesson that Obama is belatedly learning on health care. Radical reform is impossible without presidential leadership. Paul Volcker deserves better than intermittent gestures. So do the American people.

Robert Kuttner's forthcoming book is A Presidency in Peril. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.

 
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that as of February 2010, the unemployment rate stands at 9.7 percent, and the official jobless rate is 16.7 percent, which also counts those who have stopped looking for work and those who have been forced into part-time work. See Bureau of Labor Statistics

[An extended unemployment bill] "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work…I'm sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue that it's a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it's a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here," Senator Jon Kyle, Arizona

Unemployment is the scourge of our nation. It causes death and disease. It eats away at family life. It erodes our sense of confidence and well being. And it's a profound insult to the richest country on Earth.

Yet it takes a minor miracle for the Senate just to extend our paltry unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance premium subsidies for a month. Workers are waiting for real jobs, but our government no longer has the will to create them.

How can we allow millions to go without work while Wall Street bankers–the ones who caused people to lose their jobs in the first place– "earn" record bonuses? Why are we putting up with this?

It's not rocket science to create decent and useful jobs, (although it does go beyond the current cranial capacity of the U.S. Senate). It's obvious that we desperately need to repair our infrastructure, increase our energy efficiency, generate more renewable energy, and invest in educating our young. We need millions of new workers to do all this work–right now. Our government has all the money and power (and yes, borrowing capacity) it needs to hire these workers directly or fund contractors and state governments to hire them. Either way, workers would get the jobs, and we would get safer bridges and roads, a greener environment, better schools, and a brighter future all around. So what are we waiting for?

Here's what I've heard:

1. The private sector will create enough jobs, if the government gets out of the way. Possibly, but when? Right now more than 2.7 percent of our entire population has been unemployed for more than 26 weeks — an all time-record since the government began compiling that data in 1948. No one is predicting that the private sector is about to go on a hiring spree. In fact, many analysts think it'll take more than a decade for the labor market to fully recover. You can't tell the unemployed to wait ten years.

Counting on a private sector market miracle is an exercise in faith-based economics. There simply is no evidence that the private sector can create on its own the colossal number of jobs we need. If we wanted to go down to a real unemployment rate of 5% ("full employment"), we'd have to create about 22.4 million jobs. (See Leo Hindery's excellent accounting.) We'd need over 100,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. It's not fair to the unemployed to pray for private sector jobs that might never come through.

2. We can't afford it. Funding public sector jobs will explode the deficit and the country will go broke: This argument always makes intuitive sense because most of us think of the federal budget as a giant version of our household budget - we've got to balance the books, right?

I'd suggest we leave that analogy behind. Governments just don't work the same way as families do. We have to look at the hard realities of unemployment, taxes and deficits.

For instance, every unemployed worker is someone who is not paying taxes. If we're not collecting taxes from the unemployed, then we've got to collect more taxes from everyone who is working. Either that, or we have to cut back on services. If we go with option one and raise taxes on middle and low income earners, they'll have less money to spend on goods and services. When demand goes down, businesses contract–meaning layoffs in the private sector. But if we go with option two and cut government services, we'll have to lay off public sector workers. Now we won't be collecting their taxes, and the downward cycle continues. Plus, we don't get the services.

Or, we could spend the money to create the jobs and just let the deficit rise a bit more. The very thought makes politicians and the public weak in the knees. But in fact this would start a virtuous cycle that would eventually reduce the deficit: Our newly reemployed people start paying taxes again. And with their increased income, they start buying more goods and services. This new demand leads to more hiring in the private sector. These freshly hired private sector workers start paying taxes too. The federal budget swells with new revenue, and the deficit drops.

But let's say you just can't stomach letting the deficit rise right now. You think the government is really out of money–or maybe you hate deficits in principle. There's an easy solution to your problem. Place a windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Impose a steep tax on people collecting $3 million or more. (Another way to do it is to tax the financial transactions involved in speculative investments by Wall Street and the super-rich.)

After all, those fat bonuses are unearned: The entire financial sector is still being bankrolled by the taxpayers, who just doled out $10 trillion (not billion) in loans and guarantees. Besides, taxing the super-rich doesn't put a dent in demand for goods and services the way taxing other people does. The rich can only buy so much. The rest goes into investment, much of it speculative. So a tax on the super rich reduces demand for the very casino type investments that got us into this mess.

3. Private sector jobs are better that public sector jobs.
Why is that? There is a widely shared perception that having a public job is like being on the dole, while having a private sector job is righteous. Maybe people sense that in the private sector you are competing to sell your goods and services in the rough and tumble of the marketplace–and so you must be producing items that buyers want and need. Government jobs are shielded from market forces.

But think about some of our greatest public employment efforts. Was there anything wrong with the government workers at NASA who landed us on the moon? Or with the public sector workers in the Manhattan project charged with winning World War II? Are teachers at public universities somehow less worthy than those in private universities? Let's be honest: a good job is one that contributes to the well-being of society and that provides a fair wage and benefits. During an employment crisis, those jobs might best come directly from federal employment or indirectly through federal contracts and grants to state governments.

This myth also includes the notion that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. Take health care, which accounts for nearly 17 percent of our entire economy. Medicare is a relative model of efficiency, with much lower administrative costs than private health insurers. The average private insurance company worker is far less productive and efficient than an equivalent federal employee working for Medicare. (See study by Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Wolfe)

4. Big government suffocates our freedom. The smaller the central government, the better — period, the end. This is the hardest argument to refute because it is about ideology not facts. Simply put, many Americans believe that the federal government is bad by definition. Some don't like any government at all. Others think power should reside mostly with state governments. This idea goes all the way back to the anti-federalists led by Thomas Jefferson, who feared that yeomen farmers would be ruled (and feasted upon) by far-away economic elites who controlled the nation's money and wealth.

In modern times this has turned into a fear of a totalitarian state with the power to tell us what to do and even deny us our most basic liberties. A government that creates millions of jobs could be seen as a government that's taking over the economy (like taking over GM). It just gets bigger and more intrusive. And more corrupt and pork-ridden. (There's no denying we've got some federal corruption, but again the private sector is hardly immune to the problem. In fact, it lobbies for the pork each and every day.)

It's probably impossible to convince anyone who hates big government to change their minds. But we need to consider what state governments can and cannot do to create jobs. Basically, their hands are tied precisely because they are not permitted by our federal constitution to run up debt. So when tax revenues plunge (as they still are doing) states have to cut back services and/or increase taxes. In effect, the states act as anti-stimulus programs. They are laying off workers and will continue to do so until either the private sector or the federal government creates many more jobs. Unlike the feds, states are in no position to regulate Wall Street. They're not big enough, not strong enough and can easily be played off against each other.

While many fear big government, I fear high unemployment even more. That's because the Petri dish for real totalitarianism is high unemployment — not the relatively benign big government we've experienced in America. When people don't have jobs and see no prospect for finding them, they get desperate — maybe desperate enough to follow leaders who whip up hatred and trample on people's rights in their quest for power. Violent oppression of minority groups often flows from high unemployment. So does war.

No thanks. I'll take a government that puts people to work even if it has to hire 10 million more workers itself. We don't have to sacrifice freedom to put people to work. We just have to muster the will to hire them.

Unfortunately, none of our political leaders have the nerve to declare an employment emergency and get busy creating millions of new jobs. Maybe it's because so many of them got elected with money from the financial industry, and Wall Street doesn't give a damn about jobs. The bankers are happy to continue their taxpayer-financed gambling spree, secure in the knowledge that they are still too big to fail. The Tea Party, instead of focusing its ire on these rapacious bankers, prefers to skewer big government and taxes, giving politicians one more reason to sit on their hands instead of creating jobs now.

Meanwhile, the unemployed are still out in the cold. Maybe the new Coffee Party will provide something more than warm drinks to those without jobs. But you heard it here first: We're going to have big trouble in this country if we don't create jobs for the unemployed in a hurry. They need them. They deserve them. We need to build a movement to demand them.

How about a Jobs Now Party?

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

 
This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

This month's issue of The Atlantic contains a long, thoughtful and depressing article by Don Peck about the possible effects of long-term unemployment on the American national character.

One section in particular is very much up my alley: about how the shifting job market and how it might affect the Millennial generation. Graduating into a recession, it turns out, can afflict your income for a lifetime. "Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate."

As my sister Kezia, a 2009 Yale graduate, commented on Buzz: "UM….scary for peeps my age :(" And her friends chimed in , "Schnikies." " i had this article mentioned to me today during a job interview. needless to say, there was no real job being offered."

The article argues that Millennials are especially ill-equipped to deal with this unprecedented era of long-term joblessness because of their (supposed) cripplingly high-self esteem, and because they don't understand the meaning of hard work. It also argued that there are widespread social consequences of long-term joblessness–especially for men–including depression, alcoholism, and broken families.

But…I think there's a hole in this logic. . Graduating into a recession can hurt your income in two ways. One is if the first few jobs you choose are a bad fit, because you grab anything you can find in desperation. The other is if you become risk-averse in reaction to the trauma, because switching jobs is the best way to increase income. Millennials, by their very nature, are resistant to these problems. We are born for change, and our belief in ourselves is strong. Millennials aren't full of despair if we don't get the "perfect" job right out of college. Young men are free from the demand that they automatically be breadwinners. Young people are learning to cultivate other values outside of work, and to take risks to seek work that meets their values. All that time we're spending inventing and building social networks and new ways of communicating with each other will translate into ever-higher levels of social capital and will serve us to build a society that doesn't depend on income to buy happiness. We will increasingly turn to each other to get what we need and to make what we want.

Yes, we still need to figure out better ways to get people health care and housing and education, and to deal with personal and national debt. The legacy problems of an economy in decline are not going away any time soon. But I have confidence that past performance does not have to guarantee future results. And this generation might just be the perfect people for this time.

It crystallized for me yesterday when I was part of a panel (including this technologist, this simplicity expert, and this social media maven) speaking to Professor Kyra Gaunt's Anthro 101 class at Baruch College. We talked with this very diverse group of 19 and 20 year olds about hacking their way through the system to get what they need from it without giving up what's most important to them. Looking at their faces, I realized that it's exactly this generation's unreasonable optimism that gives me the most hope for our country's future.

My new book is DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.

 
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

This past November, I began a home school unit with my six-year-old daughter, Saoirse, on money. We opened our investigation by reading stories on the history of money. To paraphrase, early people originally made the things they needed. Then they began trading for the things they needed or wanted that they couldn’t make. The barter system worked out fine, as long as each party in the exchange had something that the other wanted. When that was no longer the case, money entered the marketplace as a tool to facilitate exchange. Eventually, in an effort to devise something that was relatively portable and of somewhat universal value, the Sumerians came up with the first silver coins.

From Ancient Sumerians to Modern Sustainability

Saoirse and I traveled around our home and farm and explored the different things we do to earn money, and the different things we spend it on. When it came to the spending, I explained the basic process that my husband Bob and I adhere to. When we are in a store and see something we think we want or need, the first, most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Is this something we can make or grow ourselves?” To illustrate, we talked about the grocery store. "Would we buy meat in a grocery store?”

“No,” she answered.

“Why not?”

“Because we grow it ourselves.” I smiled at the aptitude of my brilliant scholar.

Confident she was understanding, I continued my lesson. “If we decide that this is something we can’t make ourselves, then we must next ask three questions. One: Is it good for the planet? Two: Is it good for my community? Three: Is it important to me?” In an effort to keep things as simple as possible, I told her that typically, if you can answer “yes” to at least two out of the three questions, then you proceed to the final question: Can I afford it?

Three Jars of Money: Charity, Spending and….College Debt?

The next step in our lesson was working for an allowance. Since she is six years old, we selected six jobs, for which she would be paid six dollars at the end of the week. On pay day, I proudly presented her with three jars.

“What are these for?”

“This is how we’re going to divide up your money. The first jar is for charity." (Giving money to causes we cared about had been an earlier lesson.) I helped her spell out the word, and she carefully decorated the jar. Then we counted out ten percent of her allowance and tossed it in. “The second jar is your spending money. What you put in here can be used on anything you like.” Smiling, crayon in hand, she carefully wrote out "SAOIRSE’S SPENDING MONEY." We counted out $2.70, and she plunked it into the jar. “And the last jar is the most important jar. It's for your savings.” She wrote out the word, and as she was about to toss in the remaining money, I added, “that’s money you can use to go to college someday.”

Saoirse’s hand stopped. She didn’t drop a single coin in. Instead, she furrowed her brow and stared at me head-on. “But I don’t want to go to college.”

This? From my own child? Everyone in my family has gone to college. My father, brother, and I all have PhD.s. My father worked for over thirty years as a college professor. From the day we started our family, Bob and I have dutifully kept savings accounts for our children, where we’ve squirreled away ten to fifteen percent of our income. Each girl receives about $2800 per year.

But despite my outward endorsements of a college education, I believe my daughter was honing in on my own insecurities. According to a simple online college savings calculator, if Saoirse attends a four-year public school in-state, the cost will be $158,447. At my family’s current rate of savings, she might be able to purchase one-third of a college degree. To date, I’ve yet to identify a socially responsible, prudent investment vehicle that would enable our money to keep up with the annual increases in college education.

Still, we are better off than most families. Bob and I paid his college debt off before we were married. I lived at home for my first two years of college, and my parents were able to pay for the remaining two years at a state school while I held a job to cover my incidental expenses. I worked as a research assistant in exchange for my graduate education. The added bonus is that we attended school a number of years ago. College tuition for two kids attending at the same time was about 20 percent of my parents’ income. If Bob and I stay on our current trajectory, one year of college for our two children will be almost 200 percent of our family earnings. And we are faring better than many other families. With no college debt of our own, we are an unusual family. Many new parents are saddled with their own school loans while simultaneously facing the expenses of their children’s future degrees.

A New Way of Learning for a New Economy

The above debt figure may seem reasonable to some folks. For many people in this country, assuming debt for an education is an acceptable practice, as is working at jobs that may provide more income to meet these expenses. However, that doesn’t resonate well in our family. To the extent possible, we resist debt, because we feel it forces families into situations that compromise their values.

As Radical Homemakers, Bob and I choose to live our lives by the four tenets of ecological sustainability, social justice, and family and community well-being. Excessive debt or expenses can require parents to spend too many hours away from their children, friends and extended family; to work jobs that may condone the extraction and abuses of our earth’s resources and people; and it can tear families and communities apart as people become nomadic employees, traversing the nation and world seeking higher pay and overlooking the things in life that bring them the most joy.

We could tell our children that they are responsible for their future college expenses. However, while it seems natural to us that a young person may need to borrow some money in order to start her life, stepping out of college with over $100,000 in debt could potentially force our daughters to pursue work that would be an anathema to the values we have tried very hard to uphold as a family.  Parents like us must choose between living according to our values and dreams, and having adequate funds for our children to go away to college. Ultimately, Bob and I decided that allowing our kids to witness their parents and grandparents joyously living their beliefs was a far more powerful education for our daughters than any college tuition.

Yet compulsively, even though I know we won’t be able to afford it, I tuck money away for Saoirse’s schooling. I guess I keep thinking that there will be some kind of divine intervention that will enable us to come up with the funds. As she holds the money over that third jar, I realize that Saoirse is looking at it differently.

"You don’t want to go to college?” I ask her to explain her thinking.

“No. I learn at home.”

I consider her remark carefully, and try to put it in the context of what we’ve been studying together. I reflect on our historical lessons. Early people only engaged in exchanges for things that they could not produce for themselves. And then I remember the first, most important question I put before Saoirse when considering spending money: Is this something I can grow or make myself? Saoirse felt that education was something we could produce ourselves.

As Saoirse hesitates over that third jar, in her innocent questioning, she is identifying a great sickness in our culture. We don’t trust ourselves to be our own teachers. We hesitate to regard a person as intelligent or capable without confirmation of a degree. The upshot of this is that bricks and mortar institutions (which, incidentally, must increasingly seek corporate funding and appeal to corporate interests in order to meet their expenses) are regarded as the sole proprietors of new knowledge and new ideas. When advancements happen outside the institutions, they are looked at as extraordinary marvels, unique exceptions to the rule.

Is it really critical that my daughter goes to college? Maybe not. I am thankful for my own schooling, but in truth, I am a product of a culture that believes education comes from experts. As a result, it has also taken me thirty years to learn to trust myself to be my own teacher. That may not be the case for Saoirse. As the parent, my job is to help her develop her intellect and confidence such that she can pursue her education wherever she chooses—in the classroom, with personal mentors, on a farm, at the local library, or through myriad life experiences. Rather than worrying about paying for college, it is more important that I focus on helping my daughter to become her own teacher. And hopefully, by nurturing an ability to self-teach, our family will participate in a cultural shift, where Americans come to realize that we can take responsibility for our own learning. It need not be something that is spoon-fed to us. And maybe someday, as a nation, we will acknowledge that intelligent, capable people can walk many different paths, and there is not one single route to credentials and wisdom.

Saoirse’s hand is still poised over that jar. Finally I say, “Well, maybe you will want to go to college someday. Maybe you’ll want it for something different. Maybe you’ll use it to start a business, or to do something else that’s really important to you. I guess that’s not something we have to decide today.”

“So what am I saving for?”

“Your future.  Whatever you may choose.”

Satisfied, she plunks the money in the jar.

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers:  Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet, and The Farmer and the Grill. She and her husband Bob Hooper home-school their children and work on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.  She is the host of grassfedcooking.com and radicalhomemakers.com.  All of her books are available through these sites.

Why doesn't Vermont just annex itself to Canada and get it over with?

I cried my entire way through the ice dancing competition during the Olympics. I was rooting for the Canadian pair, although I loved Meryl Davis and Charlie White also. And I was also rooting for the—dare I say it out loud?—the Canadian hockey team. Canadians had won so few medals and in their own country too. They were the underdogs; I always root for the underdog; this used to be an American trait. Americans win too many medals. I wanted Canadians to win at least some. I've got to admit though that some of the Americans who won gold, like Evan Lysacek, were amazingly gracious in victory. I was proud of them, of him.

Canadians are a lot like Vermonters. They're modest, self-effacing, not pushy.

The day after the U.S. beat Canada in hockey, the American goalie was on the street in Vancouver and a Canadian stopped him saying, "You're that American goalie!" What came next was the Canadian version of a bad-mouthing, trash-talking slam. What did the Canadian say? He said, "You're that American goalie! Go Canada!" What a guy!

And when the crowd went wild when they found out that Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir had won the gold medal in ice dancing, after a very short while, Scott Moir made a gesture with both hands and arms to say, "That's enough! Quiet down!" What a guy!

Vermonters are definitely more like Canadians than they are the rest of our countrymen. Let's leave this place, the US of A, and annex ourselves to our neighbors and friends to the north.

Besides, those of us who have been fighting for so long for a national health care system could have one. It's clear now that we aren't going to get it here.*

Vermont has a lot to offer Canada too. The Canadian downhill ski team and the snowboard team would be greatly improved with some Vermonters on it. Vermont has fabulous skiing and within just an hour or two of Montreal. We've got writers and painters and mountains and hiking trails and restaurants—not the equal of Montreal—but mighty fine nonetheless. And we've got a great Congressional delegation that I'm sure Canada could make use of.

Besides, think how cool it would be to have a five-dollar bill with hockey players on it. And, as if that's not enough, there is also a quote from Roch Carrier's great short story "The Sweater" on that five-dollar bill. As a writer myself, my eyes are full of tears thinking about Canada actually quoting one of its writers on a piece of its currency. What a country!

Come on Vermont. Let's do it. Let's get out of here without ever having to go anywhere. Let's join our neighbors to the north. Let's annex ourselves to Canada, that is, if Canada will have us.

 
*For more on this go to: http://www.davidbudbill.com/jme47.html.

From the San Francisco Chronicle (reference info follows article text): A powerful and widely used herbicide called Atrazine changes the sex of many male frogs to females and emasculates three-quarters of others, according to research reported this week by a UC Berkeley professor and molecular toxicologist.

The findings were immediately assailed as "fundamentally flawed" by scientists with Syngenta, the international agribusiness company and the chemical's largest manufacturer.

The controversy has major political implications because the Environmental Protection Agency had approved Atrazine under the Bush administration after rejecting earlier findings, and agency scientists in the Obama administration are now reviewing that EPA rule. The European Union has already banned Atrazine after concluding that minute levels found in lakes and streams severely damaged amphibians.

Research by Tyrone Hayes and his colleagues in their Berkeley laboratory found that 10 percent of their male frogs changed to females after ingesting small doses of Atrazine.

The newly altered females remained genetically male, but proved capable of mating with other males, Hayes said. The offspring of those couples were all male frogs and perfectly capable of mating with normal females.

The new research from Hayes' laboratory at UC Berkeley is being published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hayes said in an interview Tuesday that because Atrazine has been used for many years on crop lands all over the world, there is a strong likelihood that the chemical may be playing a major role in the global decline of populations of other amphibians as well as frogs that has puzzled scientists and altered the ecology in many parts of the world.

"There is more and more evidence from other researchers," he said, "that Atrazine is also damaging the immune systems of fish, reptiles and birds."

The lab work by Hayes and his colleagues involved common laboratory frogs. They later studied wild African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) in the field and confirmed the results in the lab, Hayes said.

Frogs both in the laboratory and in the field were exposed to small doses of Atrazine as larvae, and then for two to three years during their growth from larvae to adulthood.

The herbicide has long been known as an endocrine disruptor - a chemical that alters the functioning of hormones. In the case of the frogs, the disruption showed up clearly as changing testosterone to estrogen in the bodies of the male frogs, Hayes said.

From 1997 to 2000, Hayes said, he was employed by Syngenta as a research biologist, but that when his work began to show dangers from the chemical, his contract was abruptly ended.

At the company's U.S. headquarters in Greensborough, N.C., Tim Pastoor, a toxicologist for the division called Syngenta Crop Protection, said he had examined Hayes's work and found it "basically and fundamentally flawed." He said Hayes' "results are not plausible."

Hayes said that similar research into Atrazine that he did under contract for an environmental firm called Pacific Ecorisk between 1997 and 2000 was ended after he found the compound was indeed an endocrine disruptor.

Scott Ogle, an official at that company, said that he had never heard of Hayes.

————————————————————–

By David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor, Wednesday, March 3, 2010 (article appearing on page C-5)

This is the last installment in my six-part series excerpted from chapter 11 of my book Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World. It shows how over 300 communities in 36 states have built a bottom-up movement, Cool Community campaigns, focused on helping Americans take direct responsibility to reduce our carbon footprints while at the same time substantially reducing our energy expenses. It describes how tens of thousands of people are stepping up to help bring the planet back from the brink–one household, neighborhood and community at a time. And it offers a whole system solution by showing how by scaling up household and community carbon reduction in the short-term we are building demand for legislation and a low-carbon economy over the long-term. In case you missed previous installments of this series here are the links to parts one, two, three, four and five.

In this final piece we look at a city, region and state that have embarked on a remarkable three-year journey to engage between 25 and 85% of the households of their communities to reduce their carbon footprint by 25% using the tools and strategies I have described previously. They are pioneers for the many communities across America and around the world that will need to follow in their footsteps if they wish to substantially reduce their carbon emissions. We also look at the Cool Community dividends these cities are beginning to accrue of environmental sustainability, low-carbon economic development, and social cohesiveness that will enable them to be more livable and prosperous.

Davis, California: A Local Government Steps Up to the Plate

Mitch Sears, the sustainability director and person responsible for addressing climate change for the city of Davis, California, attended our webinar to learn how to develop a full-scale Cool Community campaign. The City had set an aggressive goal of reducing the community's carbon footprint 40 percent by 2015 and to become carbon neutral by 2050.

After much research, they determined that a Cool Community campaign offered them one of the best possibilities to achieve these goals. "Community education and engagement on global warming is the foundation of the Davis climate action strategy, said Sears. We believe that advances in technology must be matched by action at the household and business level to achieve meaningful GHG reductions. At the local level, we need practical, cost effective tools to enable community engagement and near-term action on global warming. We've not found a more effective tool to accomplish this than the Low Carbon Diet program and Cool Community campaign to bring it to scale."

Davis is a city of 65,000 people and describes itself as "a progressive, vigorous community noted for its small-town style, energy conservation, environmental programs, parks, preservation of trees, red double-decker London buses, bicycles, and the quality of its educational institutions." It is also internationally renowned for its sustainability and energy conservation practices.

The city organized 100 households to participate in Low Carbon Diet EcoTeams. Participation included the city council and staff; University of California, Davis, administrators, faculty, staff, and students; local businesses; and community members at large. Results were received from 65 percent of the households who reported reducing their carbon footprint an average of 5,516 pounds.

They are now gearing up to take this program to scale over a three-year period with the participation of 75 percent of the community's households. They will be working in close collaboration with a consortium of partner organizations, including the University of California, Davis, faith-based groups, community organizations, and the local schools. Davis has once again stepped up to the plate to demonstrate what is possible. The world will be watching with great anticipation.

Rochester, New York: Who Says One Person Can't Make a Difference?

Another city mounting a Cool Community campaign is Rochester, New York. Their aspiration is to be the "best midsized city in America." And their motto is, "Oh yes, we can!" Their can-do attitude has allowed them to receive many awards, including one from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for their "creative tools and processes which bridge the gap between residents and government." They got onto my radar screen a number of years ago for their pioneering citizen engagement program, "Neighbors Building Neighborhoods."

Bob Siegel, a Rochester resident, learned about the Low Carbon Diet at a Global Warming Cafe I led for a group of sustainability-oriented businesses and nonprofits. Bob approached me after the cafe and said that he would like to launch a Cool Community campaign in Rochester. I wished him well but did not expect much given the number of hurdles he would need to surmount to organize a campaign. Not an endeavor for the faint-hearted, this was all the more challenging as he did not have any backing or an organization to help him do this.

Six months later Bob had formed an organizing team and convinced the mayors of Rochester and surrounding communities to launch the "Low Carbon Diet Challenge." They organized 120 households into neighborhood, workplace, and faith-based EcoTeams, which achieved an average carbon footprint reduction of 10,828 pounds. Just as important was the enthusiastic and tangible support his organizing team garnered from local businesses, and university, civic, and government leaders who served as community role models by actively participating in EcoTeams.

Rochester's Low Carbon Diet Challenge culminated in a major celebration at City Hall in which Mayor Robert Duffy handed out awards to the program participants, saying, "I look forward to a future award ceremony honoring citizens who have participated in this program taking place at the Riverside Convention Center" (which can accommodate 20,000 people). At that same event, Bob Siegel, now Executive Director of Cool Rochester, offered up the next stage of his vision. "Cool Rochester's goal is to engage the participation of 100,000 people to achieve carbon reduction of a billion pounds by the end of 2012 and put Greater Rochester at the forefront of low carbon communities across the nation."

Given the drive and enthusiasm of Rochester's citizens and mayor, and the organizing skills of Bob Siegel and his team, this community is another serious contender. And a demonstration of what committed citizens can do if they take to heart Rochester's mantra, "Oh yes, we can!"

Cool Mass: Taking Cool Communities to Scale Statewide

By far the most ambitious Cool Community campaign effort is taking place in Massachusetts under the auspices of the state's largest climate change organization, Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN). This is a coalition of local governments and organizations promoting carbon reduction in their communities and leveraging their collective clout to encourage bold climate change policy at the state level. They have built a climate change movement second to none, which represents more than fifty cities and towns encompassing most of the state's population. And they are not only a potent force in Massachusetts, but their Climate Action Network (CAN) model has diffused nationally.

Susan Altman, the outreach manager responsible for supporting these local chapters, had attended our webinar and said that she wished to scale up Cool Communities across the state when the time was right, but her goal for now was introducing the Low Carbon Diet to all of their chapters. Eighteen months later she and Executive Director, Rob Garrity, contacted me. They said that thirty-two of their community chapters had collectively taken more than 1,000 households through the Low Carbon Diet program and achieved an average carbon reduction of 25 percent. Given this success and platform, they felt it was time to take the next step.

"A problem as universal as climate change requires a solution as universal," said Garrity. "The Cool Community campaign will bring our carbon reduction work to scale, rebuild our fractured communities, and engage a whole new generation of leadership. Success is not measured simply in pounds of carbon avoided, but also by people engaged - who then engage others, creating the exponential increase in participants the challenge of climate change requires."

The state of Massachusetts has set the country's most ambitious carbon reduction goal of 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Since 47 percent of the state's footprint comes from the residential sector, they must engage citizens to achieve this ambitious target. To help the state accomplish this goal, MCAN needed to scale up Cool Community campaigns and they invited me to join with them to build the capacity of the participating communities–an offer I relished. We created what we called Cool Mass–the first goal of which was 25-25-2012: Twenty-five percent of the households in the state (approximately 700,000) reducing their carbon footprint 25 percent by 2012. We would then move to 50 percent of the households by 2015 and 75 percent by 2020.

Rob and I launched Cool Mass at MCAN's annual conference at MIT in front of 350 climate change movers and shakers from across the state. There were representatives from local MCAN chapters, municipal and state government, a multitude of community groups, and climate change-related businesses. We announced our Cool Mass goals and stated that our intention was to serve as a prototype for bold and timely carbon reduction action for states across America. We invoked the Massachusetts brand and invited those gathered to start the second American Revolution. Their response to this salvo was a loud and prolonged standing ovation.

After my talk, I led a workshop for communities interested in being selected to start the three-year adventure to get up to 85 percent of their residents through the Low Carbon Diet. I invoked my usual Winston Churchill caveat about this being really hard to do. In spite of this injunction, fifty-nine people representing forty-five communities signed up to be considered. Through a rigorous application process we selected our first wave of communities: Boston, Braintree, Brookline, Dedham, Hingham, Hull, Milton, Newton, and Winchester. They ranged in size from 7,200 to 590,000 for a total population of 955,000. One of the questions we asked them in the application was for their vision of Cool Mass. One answer particularly epitomizes this venture.

"While the goal of Cool Mass is ambitious, it is at the scale that stabilizing climate requires. If we are successful, the culture of our communities will be transformed. Beyond our cities and towns, however, Cool Mass creates a learning network among communities and ultimately a movement through which to set an example for the rest of our Commonwealth and our nation. In so doing, it shows the world that the American people are willing to provide positive leadership in reversing our past unsustainable resource use."

After leading them through a robust two-day training they are now off and running.

Winchester, Massachusetts has gotten off to the fastest start. "People are excited to be part of this grassroots effort because it has many benefits including helping them save money on their energy bill, create community, and help the environment," said Carolyn Starett, president of Sustainable Winchester. She continued, "Cool Winchester has a very ambitious three-year goal to get 85% of the households in our community to participate in EcoTeams with each achieving a 25% reduction in their carbon footprint. Working in collaboration with our local government, we have had a very positive reception among many different community organizations including the nonprofits, businesses, faith-based organizations, and schools - 18 organizations so far. These groups have collectively committed to starting 67 EcoTeams which represents 8% of our goal."

The Green Decade Coalition in Newton, Massachusetts, one of the oldest and most respected community-based environmental organizations in the state, has also gotten a strong response to their campaign. "People are eager to find a venue to make an individual contribution to solving the climate crisis," said Jay Walter, co-director for the Newton initiative. He continued, "The Low Carbon Diet program is an easy-to-use vehicle for people to do this. Our goal is to get a minimum of 25% of the residents of Newton to participate in this program over the next three years. So far we have twenty-two organizations on board including the faith community, Rotary Club, League of Women Voters, YMCA, parent-teacher organizations, and the local colleges. Our first quarter goal was to get to 50 EcoTeams and we are already at 34."

The citizens of Massachusetts, with their huge can-do attitude, passion and commitment, have fired the first shot and are once again leading an American Revolution–in this case, helping America become a model of citizen accountability for the creation of a livable planet.

The Cool Community Dividends

The word "crisis" in Chinese is signified by two symbols, one for danger and one for opportunity. The danger for a city or town in attempting to scale up a Cool Community campaign is that it does not fully reach its goal. The opportunity provided by a Cool Community campaign is in a word–sustainability. This sustainability plays out in three very powerful ways. Environmental sustainability through active citizen participation in conserving the community's natural resources, economic sustainability through building a locally-based green economy, and social sustainability through the generation of massive amounts of social capital from the formation of EcoTeams that can be easily redirected into building a more livable and resilient community.

Beyond these immediate benefits however, a Cool Community generates the civic pride that can only come from rising to a great challenge. With this spirit a community can transform whatever dangers the twenty-first century may bring into opportunities.

And the dividend that accrues to humanity from successful Cool Community campaigns occurring across America and the planet is, in a phrase–rite of passage. The human species will have crossed a threshold by rising to the challenge of our time, smarter, more connected, and more empowered, with the capability of transforming whatever dangers the twenty-first century may bring our planet into opportunities.

David Gershon, founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute, is a leading authority on behavior-change and large-system transformation. He applies his expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change, from low carbon lifestyles, livable neighborhoods, and sustainable communities to organizational talent development, corporate social engagement, and cultural transformation. Gershon is the author of eleven books, including his recently published Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World, winner of the 2009 National Best Book Award and Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds. He co-directs Empowerment Institute's School for Transformative Social Change which empowers social entrepreneurs and change agents to design and implement cutting edge social innovations. He has lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Duke, and served as an advisor to the Clinton White House and the United Nations on behavior change and community empowerment issues. To learn more about Cool Communities or register for the next free webinar on how to implement one in your city or town visit www.empowermentinstitute.net/lcd. To learn more about the social change 2.0 strategies and practices visit www.socialchange2.com and our YouTube channel.

 
This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

However, when you start asking how many people actually attend church, it's a much different picture. Researchers counting actual church attendance in more than 300,000 Christian congregations totaled 52 million people, or 17.7 percent of the American population in 2004.¹ About 82% do not attend church regularly.

The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals.² Since it's hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, the real figures are almost certainly higher. We don't read this in the media because there are no savvy or powerful groups pushing the story. In the Southern Baptist Church, baptisms of people in the eighteen to thirty-four age group fell 40 percent, from 100,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2005. Most of these data come from evangelicals and others "inside" religion, not from Christian-haters. From 2000 to 2005, church attendance declined in all fifty states, and the states with the biggest decline were in the New England region: a traditional bastion of church-going.³ When asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower.⁴

When religion scholars wave these data off by saying (correctly) that churches are always being born and dying, they're failing to mention that these times of death and resurrection are occurring within the much deeper fact that religion in America has been in steady decline since the 1800s. America churches have not kept up with population growth in over a century.⁵

Current Critiques of Religion

Religion's protective halo has been dissolved by the acids of time and moral scandals around sexual hypocrisy and abuse. Critics are rushing to pile on churches the way predators take out the weakest members of the herd. We're no longer surprised to read broad and blunt assessments like these:

1. "There's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ. The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying."
2. "Open heartedness, compassion — it's a capacity from birth. It must be possible to increase that. The majority of the 6 billion people [on Earth], I think, you can count as non-believers. We must find ways and means for promotion of these values" among these non-believers.
3. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us. The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western [culture]…. Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society. The post-Christian narrative … is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step."
4. "Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making."
5. "Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone."
6. "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. Democracy requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason."

Most readers can guess these statements came from some of the "new atheists" - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher and lesser-known enemies of religion.

But no. These six quotations come from, in order, Pope Benedict XVI,⁶ the Dalai Lama,⁷ Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. (President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY - one of the world's largest),⁸ religion scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong,⁹ retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong,¹⁰ and President Barack Obama.¹¹ The background against which religion is viewed has changed. Prominent people on the inside of religion have acknowledged what pundits won't notice: our religions are becoming - and for growing numbers have already become - increasingly irrelevant to our lives. This is true of both supernatural religions promising eternal life elsewhere and later, megachurch preachers that downplay the supernatural afterlives in favor of their here-and-now prosperity gospel, and liberal religions seeking wisdom for living here and now (or at least a hideout where they can find like-minded people).

Some may wish we could return to an imaginary yesteryear when everyone who mattered believed the same thing, and their beliefs held our world together, but we know it won't happen. We can't unlearn the industrial and scientific revolutions any more than we could wish away evolution, a 4-1/2 billion-year-old Earth, and a nearly fourteen billion year old universe. Nor can we unlearn what we have learned about mythology, the history of religions, and the broad theistic, polytheistic and non-theistic array of healthy beliefs serving people in the worldwide smorgasbord. Religious beliefs are matters of personal taste, not wildly incongruent factual claims.

Today's greatest awakening seems to be among the "church alumni" who are leaving the churches in droves. American Christian churches lose six thousand members a day: more than 2 million people a year,¹² while the U.S. population increases by 3.3 million a year. America and religion are heading in opposite directions.

Within Roman Catholicism alone, nuns have been an endangered species for decades, and the ratio of congregants to priests gets larger each year. Nationwide, 1,200 priests retire or die each year, while only about 450 are ordained to take their place.¹³ We're seldom told that all the Catholics in the U.S. represent just seven percent of the world's Catholics. Catholicism has become a third world religion, and the gap between what professors and priests know, and what people in the pews hear, dwarfs the Grand Canyon. Even now, few Catholics are aware that in 1999, Pope John Paul II said that "heaven" was not a place, but a state of mind. That kind of candor, while admired by liberal theologians, is not likely to play well in the demographics of the Church's Third World future - if it would even sit well for many who attend Catholic churches in the U.S.¹⁴

Christmas and Easter, Christianity's two highest holy days - both adopted from far older faiths - have morphed into high-profit days for merchants. Almost all the Christmas and Easter decorations - as well as Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and the rest of our holidays - are put up and paid for by merchants, not churches. These decorations and ads for shoppers may best be seen as "bait" cast by merchants. Large chains like Wal-Mart can make a third of their annual revenue during the Christmas shopping season, where Santa Claus replaced Jesus long ago.

When religions can't even attract people with promises of getting to live for millions or billions of years in a members-only heaven elsewhere and later, they are in dire straits. Think about it: if people actually believed they could live forever after they died, simply by following the teachings and beliefs of one of the 38,000 Christian sects in the world, church attendance would approach 100 percent, the pews filled with hopeful and desperate people, their budgets dwarfing our military expenditures. But as their behavior shows, they don't believe the supernatural stories.

More than 60 years ago, theologian Rudolf Bultmann anticipated this. He noted that the passage of time had "demythologized" biblical religion, and asked what, if anything, a demythologized Christianity still offered to modern people. The continually decreasing number of people in churches suggests that if religion has a useful message, they aren't hearing anything that makes them want to go to church. Almost all of these observations have come from "insiders" - people friendly to religion, not church-haters. To say the "evangelical nation" is falling,¹⁵ or the American churches are "in crisis"¹⁶ is like wondering if all the glaciers might be looking a bit smaller.

But Seriously: Homeland Security?

This is where theologians and religions could learn a lot from Homeland Security. Moving from a broad philosophical perspective to a clear down-to-earth factual situation that sheds light on the biggest problem in American religion today, here's a real-world problem with clear parallels to religion:

A local police officer radioed late one night to his dispatcher that he had just seen a state highway patrol officer's car with a door open stopped along a highway. The officer said he was going to go back to make sure the patrolman was OK. That patrolman was lying in a ditch, barely alive, having been shot eight times with a rifle. The local police dispatcher decided to use plain English rather than code in broadcasting a call for help.

Had she said "10-33," her department's code for "officer down," it would have meant something very different to the Missouri Highway Patrol: "traffic backup." Instead, every state trooper within miles responded, and the officer lived. Being able to communicate quickly and effectively in ordinary language can mean the difference between life and death - both literally and metaphorically.

9-11 and the Katrina disaster in New Orleans showed dramatically that different police and emergency units simply can't communicate in those old-timey code languages, because different agencies use different codes. Federal officials from the department of Homeland Security are now requiring that police officers use plain talk rather than their "10-codes" when responding to a crisis involving multiple agencies.

The people who need to know what's going on can't communicate because they speak different dialects. If the matter is important, they must be able to say what they mean in ordinary language. So if federal Homeland Security officials have their way, the next time a police officer arrives on the scene, he'll simply radio back "I understand" instead of "10-4."¹⁷

When applied to the world of God-talk, the lessons from Homeland Security are revolutionary, crossing over the threshold to secular religion in ordinary language. In ecumenical or inter-religious discussions - or efforts to reach the tens of millions with no brand-name religion - theologians and preachers need to be able to explain what on earth they mean by words like God, Sin, Repentance, Salvation, Grace and the rest if they are to rescue the messages of their religion from jargonian captivity.

A century or two ago, preachers could rely on most people accepting the supernatural world picture in which phrases like "He ascended to Heaven" were coherent. But that's no longer true, when the majority of our planet's six billion people are, as the Dalai Lama put it, "non-believers."

If it's important that police and emergency services be able to communicate in plain talk, it is equally important in discussions of religion, ethics, moral courage, and character formation. Ordinary language includes the people that jargon excludes, and builds bridges rather than linguistic walls.

Though it may seem rude to say so, god-talk is no more sacred than 10-4 talk. It's merely the medium, not the message. When it no longer communicates life-giving messages to all those trying to reconnect with all the people seeking wisdom for living more authentically here and now rather than elsewhere and later, it needs to be translated into this-worldly ordinary language. Expecting theologians and preachers to speak in plain talk rather than Capitalized Words may be naive. But if they can't, history may well see them as accomplices in the ongoing death of a Christianity that is relevant to this world.

Notes

1. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler, "How Many Americans Attend Worship Each Week? An Alternative Approach to Measurement") in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 3 (September 2005): 307-322. Also see David T. Olson's The American Church in Crisis (Zondervan, 2008), p. 23
2. Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 53.
3. David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis (Zondervan, 2008), p. 37.
4. Wicker, p. 143.
5. Olson, pp. 144-145.
6. Sydney Morning Herald, July 28, 2005 (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/western-churches-a-dying-breed-pope/2005/07/28/1122143939067.html)
7. A version of this speech appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 6, 2009.
8. Quoted in "The End of Christian America," by Jon Meacham, Newsweek magazine, April 13, 2009.
9. From an interchange with biologist Richard Dawkins in the September 12, 2009 issue of The Wall Street Journal in the "Life & Style Essays."
10. Bishop John Shelby Spong in Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 99.)
11. From Obama's "Call to Renewal" address on May 28, 2006. The full address is at http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060628-call_to_renewal/
12. Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation (HarperOne, 2008), p. ix.
13. CBS Evening News, July 17, 2007
14. July 21, 1999. Google pope 1999 heaven for dozens of sources and commentary.
15. Christine Wicker, ibid.
16. David T. Olson, ibid.
17. See "10 codes going away?" in Police Link, December 13, 2009 by John Scheibe. http://policelink.monster.com/news/articles/128269-10-codes-going-away.