Last Wednesday, the FDIC quietly folded a program that was the centerpiece of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's effort to get toxic assets off the books of banks.

The program, whose details were unveiled in late March after six awkward weeks of delay while the administration worked out the details, included special incentives for what Geithner delicately termed "legacy assets." These are the junk securities on banks' balance sheets, mostly backed by sub-prime loans, for which ordinary buyers cannot be found.

The Treasury drafted the Federal Reserve to provide special loans, and the FDIC to run a pilot program to attract speculators to bid on the securities. All told, the government was prepared to put up 94 percent of the capital if private investors would put up 6 percent. Government would guarantee most of the losses, and split the gains 50-50.

The plan took Geithner full circle to something like the original strategy attempted by his predecessor, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, when Paulson came to Congress last September asking for $700 billion to buy up toxic assets from banks. But after Paulson got Congress to approve the money, he concluded that he couldn't make the original plan work. Instead, the Treasury pumped several hundred billions into the banks directly. The toxic assets stayed on the banks' books.

Now, Geithner's do-over seems to have collapsed, too. There are a couple of reasons why.

First, the government has bent the accounting rules to allow the banks to carry nearly worthless securities on their books at their nominal full value. The Wall Street Journal ran a terrific investigative piece June 3 on how the banking lobby and legislators of both parties pressured the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to suspend its rules requiring assets to be carried on banks' books at their current market value.

With this change, banks had no incentive to sell these deeply depressed securities at anything like their actual market value. So if a speculator, armed with Fed funding and a government guarantee against losses was prepared to take a speculative flyer in a bond by bidding, say, 30 cents on the dollar, the bank was not prepared to sell at less than 90. Hence, no deal.

Second, some hedge funds and private equity companies sniffed around these deals and concluded that they weren't worth the bad publicity or government scrutiny if the deals resulted in big windfall profits (the only kind that hedge funds pursue).

Cooking the books to inflate the value of depressed securities also explains how zombie banks like Citigroup could pass the government's "stress tests" with flying colors. Citigroup, which has depended on $45 billion in straight government cash and hundreds of billions more in guarantees, was found by the stress-testers from the Fed and the Treasury to need only $5 billion more to be adequately capitalized. This is, of course, preposterous if you value the junk on its books accurately.

So the banking sector, despite the pretty picture painted by the stress-tests and the banks' recent success in selling stock to investors reassured by the government's too-big-to-fail actions, remains weak. As a result, banks are hesitant to lend. And this weakness keeps dragging down the rest of the economy.

The flipside of weak banks is a depressed housing sector. Just as the administration chose bailout over government takeover of failed banks, the administration opted for an entirely voluntary effort to induce banks to refinance sub-prime and other mortgages that homeowners could not afford. The program, announced by President Obama February 18, aims to help at-risk homeowners keep their homes.

But the terms of the plan exclude the most hard-hit homeowners. Today, one homeowner in four owns a house worth less than the mortgage on it. However, you can qualify for a refinancing only if the home's value is within five percent of the value of the loan. In other words, if you have a $300,000 mortgage on a house valued at $250,000, forget about help. And you are also excluded from help if you are behind in your payments - the situation of most people who need help.

Worst of all, the program depends entirely on the voluntary cooperation of banks. The administration will spend up to $75 billion on inducements to banks to vary the terms of loans. But at this writing, well under 100,000 loans have been modified, out of the several million at risk of foreclosure. As a consequence, people continue losing their homes, depressing the value of other homes. The Times recently reported on a woman who heard about the administration, approached her lender, Countrywide (one of the worst sub-prime offenders and now part of Bank of America) and asked for a refinancing. The bank offered a new loan that would save the woman all of $79 a month, and in return the bank wanted $18,000 up front.

Basically, the banks seem to be viewing refinancings as new profit opportunities. The one stick in a plan full of carrots was a provision empowering bankruptcy judges, as a last resort, to vary the terms of a mortgage. The banking lobby went all out to kill this provision. In the end, twelve Senate Democrats voted against it, and the administration made no political effort to save it.

Rep. Alan Grayson of Orlando, one of the hardest-hit parts of the country in terms of foreclosures, tells the story of a woman with a $300,000 mortgage on a house now worth perhaps $60,000. She could afford the payments on a $60,000 mortgage. But the bank would rather foreclose, bear the expenses of carrying the house which will be at risk of vandalism and deterioration until is it is sold. The bank would actually be better off writing down the mortgage to $60,000 and allowing the woman to stay in the house. But few banks see it that way. In similar circumstances in the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration created the Home Owners Loan Corporation, and the government refinanced mortgages directly. But the Obama administration prefers to work through the private sector, and the private sector is averse to refinancings in most circumstances.

Another progressive Member of Congress, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, tells of cascading foreclosures in her district, where banks are selling foreclosed homes at a few cents on the dollar to syndicates of speculators, some from the very sub-prime lenders who caused the collapse. Rather than sell to local government or local non-profits, which want to keep people on their homes, the banks want to get a few bucks onto their balance sheets fast. The situation cries out for more effective national leadership, and the government's failure to provide that leadership means that the downward spiral in housing will continue.

The weakness of the mortgage relief program and of the banks' balance sheets have one big thing in common–an administration that is far too deferential to the big banks. For the crisis to be solved soon, rather than lingering on and on, we need direct government refinancing of mortgages, and direct government restructuring of zombie banks.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His recent book is "Obama's Challenge."

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

A sister bill, HB 3654, requires county jails to have a plan for medical care of pregnant inmates in county jails as well as requiring administrators to include the number of pregnant women in their population reports. Presently there are NO numbers on pregnant inmates or the number of infants born in jail. Also, under current law, there is no mandate for medical care or nutritional supplements for pregnant inmates. Diana Claitor, executive director of the Texas Jail Project who worked with Texas ACLU staffer Matt Simpson to create the initial drafts for both bills, said many people believe all of the above will occur automatically. But in her experience, unless there is a law on the books, it won’t be considered a priority or even considered at all. Texas county jails hold up to 80,000 inmates a night and approximately 14 percent of those are women. Claitor said, “The public has no idea how many young mothers and their babies come out of jail injured or traumatized.”

Most jail health-care systems function independently, have no checks and balances, and are isolated from the outside medical community, except for inspections by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards which typically look for problems with male inmate overcrowding and fire exits. It doesn’t help that jail administrators and staff are prone to lump complaining inmates into one big group: whiners- liars- and troublemakers. That’s why an inmate with a serious illness and injury can suffer without treatment, often until they are dying or dead.

Claitor said, “I can say with utter conviction that just because you ask for medical care or even beg for medical care in Texas jails, there are plenty of times when you’re not going to get it. Period. If it doesn’t happen when a person is convulsing in seizures or going into a diabetic coma [see a federal report on Dallas County Jail: http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/split/documents/dallas_county_findlet_12-8-06.pdf], it is certainly not likely to happen when a pregnant woman says she is not getting enough food or that she’s in pain and bleeding.”

The Texas Jail Project, a volunteer jail advocacy group that is based in Austin, became increasingly aware of cases on pregnant women through a ‘listening project’ publicized through their website (www.texasjailproject.org). Families and friends were encouraged to email and phone about problems pregnant women faced in county jails, including shackling during childbirth.

Shacking during labor and delivery can cause intense pain, cramping, swelling, reduced circulation and increased risk of thrombosis or blood clots. It can interfere with appropriate medical care, be harmful to the health of the mother and infant, and violate the dignity of the pregnant inmate. It is not uncommon for a shackled inmate to soil herself or her bed sheets because she could not get unshackled quickly enough to get to the bathroom.

One such victim of this practice was Shanna (not her real name) at the Lew Sterret jail in Dallas, Texas, in 2009. She wrote an eloquent letter about what it was like to spend a month in Parkland Hospital eight months pregnant and with a staph infection. She was transported to the hospital with chains around her legs, hands, and lower waist, although she was charged with a non-violent crime. When she reached the hospital she was escorted down a long hallway with people looking at her like she had just killed someone. For one whole month, Shanna was without TV, phone, or books and chained to her hospital bed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even though Shanna’s ankles and feet were badly swollen and she had developed bedsores, the guards refused to allow her to walk around. A doctor had to intercede on her behalf in order for Shanna to be allowed to walk in the hallway, her hands and feet still chained to a long monitoring pole.

An inmate we will call Roberta was a trustee for three months at Harris County’s Baker Unit last year. She described her wait for medical attention sitting on the floor next to a woman who was pregnant with twins. The pregnant woman had waited 5 or 6 hours to see a nurse. She was cramping, in pain, bleeding through her pants onto the floor, and extremely upset. Roberta said she remembered the woman repeating how scared she was that she might lose her babies. Roberta and the other waiting inmates kept telling the guard to take the pregnant woman first, but the guard only replied with something along the lines of, “Shut the f… up!”

Claitor was contacted in March of this year by a woman in Henderson County Jail who said her pregnant daughter had requested to see a doctor four times but had yet to see one. She was having a fever, discharge, swollen glands, and she was six months pregnant. Her daughter ended up in the emergency room where the nurses told her she was dehydrated and undernourished. Luckily, she had only a few days before her release and her mother had her in the doctor’s office the next day. But what if she had another two months to serve?

Women in jails differ from their male counterparts in more ways than that they can get pregnant and give birth. Women's crimes are less likely to be violent and more likely to be motivated by poverty and addiction where drugs are often used to medicate the pain of abusive relationships. Women are seldom drug dealers or traffickers. When they do commit a violent offense, it is often against a man who abused them. They rarely pose a violent threat to the general public. Jailed women also have more challenges to overcome in dealing with their pregnancies and their birth experiences. Their pregnancies are often high-risk and complicated.

Frankie was 24 years old and six months pregnant with her first child when she was picked up on a warrant in Victoria, Texas and thrown into jail. Frankie had a rare uterine condition and so, immediately, she began bleeding. When she notified the guard, the guard demanded that Frankie show her the bloody underwear. Frankie’s condition worsened further: her water broke. But the guard said Frankie was hallucinating and that she wouldn’t have the baby for a month. Then the guards decided that Frankie was faking and a troublemaker so she was put into isolation and threatened with a taser gun if she didn’t go. Frankie proceeded to go into labor in an isolated cell and, with a breech birth, the baby died. Frankie was not even allowed to attend the baby’s funeral.

Last year, 19-year-old Amber was in the Ellis County Jail when she was 10 weeks pregnant. Recently, however, Amber brought the story of her experience to the Texas capitol, where she helped HB 3654 pass the scrutiny of the House County Affairs Committee. Her voice trembling at times, Amber described her stay at the jail. She said no one seemed to care that she needed prenatal vitamins, the right food to eat, or milk to drink for her baby to grow normally. She never saw an obstetrician or had any prenatal checkups. For several weeks she bled and spotted and she reported that to the guards. The guards in turn would call the nurse who gave her Tylenol. She finally saw a doctor who told her that he did not think she was pregnant or even had a uterus. A nurse listened to the baby’s heartbeat and told her she could not hear the baby’s heartbeat. She thought the baby might have died. Amber called her mother and begged her to do something. She became so upset that the jail put her on suicide watch in an isolation cell where she bled even more. After her release, Amber’s baby, Zannah, was born, weighing 6 lbs and 6 ounces. To this day, Amber said, she still worries that something might not be right with Zannah as she grows older because of the neglect and unhealthy conditions that she suffered in the Ellis County Jail.

Amber summed up her unsettling testimony before the Texas legislature in April by saying, “Babies deserve to be taken care of no matter what the mother has done. The baby is not responsible.”

These stories are only too common because many jail administrators, without rules and guidelines, fail to do the right thing for the women in their care and the babies they carry. However, even in the midst of the chaos of a Texas legislative system that was overburdened with bills and dominated by controversy, an unlikely coalition– the Catholic Conference of Texas, Texas ACLU, Texas Right to Life, and Texas Jail Project– worked on passing two small bills that may start Texas on a path to more healthy moms and healthy babies.

During the long tedium of one House committee hearing, Representative Valinda Bolten asked a pointed question of Adan Munoz, the director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. He was providing background information when Bolton abruptly asked, “How long have county jails in Texas been housing incarcerated women?”
Munoz replied, “As long as jails have been open.”
Bolton said, “So…we don’t really have the answer to why it’s taken ‘til 2009 to address this issue of the medical needs of pregnant women.”

It is a question and answer that is long overdue.

and it's the only way to prove to folks the truth of my favorite oven-building adage: "the second time is easier and faster." But it must have been a lazy day, because I let myself be convinced that the dome was adequately curved. It wasn't. A year later, it was bulging downward, at the rate of about one eighth of an inch per month. Collapse was inevitable.

"Well," you must be thinking, "didn't you say the second time is easier and faster!"

Yes, well, OK, but…even had I been able to halve the time for building the oven and the large, sculpted shell containing the loose perlite insulation, I would have needed at least a week, not including the time required to dry out the damp oven itself. The restaurant uses the oven 5 days a week, and I didn't want to be responsible for two weeks of down time—

nor did I want to put in that much (unpaid) time myself.

So the need for speed provided a perfect opportunity to try something I'd been wanting to try: making a brick dome using thin mud bricks laid on an angled bed of mortar, with successive courses in a series of shrinking circles to close in the dome—

without formwork! It's traditional for ovens and vaulted or domed ceilings. I'd seen ceilings done this way in Mexico and wondered, "how did they do that!?" as well as photos of German mud-brick ovens made the same way.

Now I can say from experience that it works! And it makes me appreciate bricks. They are pre-dried, pre-shrunk, easy to work with, and quick. Since they are relatively small, they shrink without cracking, which means you can use mud with a high percentage of clay. Clay holds up better to the thermal demands of an oven than a typically sandy cob mix, which relies on lots of sand to limit shrink. And if you're working in a situation where time = money—that is, if you're building an oven for someone else—you can make bricks at your leisure, and store them for when you need them. Mud has higher value when it's made into a brick, so you can charge a unit price for each nicely squared blob of mud, but since bricks make for a quick build, you don't have to spend so much time on the site building, drying out the oven, etc. (Here starts the slippery slope of professionalism, which is, as Collette said of writing, much like sex: first you do it for love; then you do it as a favor just for friends; then you do it for money. And then you set up guilds and unions, a licensing board with bonding and contract requirements with related insurance and legal industries, then lobbyists and trade agreements and complete control—

which spawns renegade activities like how-to books for home-bakers and oven builders, backyard mud ovens, internet groups, and here we are!)

note the cracking bulge at the top center of the oven ceiling. I cut a story stick that just fit under the bulge without scraping, to keep track of movement. After about a month, I could no longer slide the stick through without scraping. I figured the bulge had dropped another 1/8-3/16 of an inch. Fortunately, our raw clay-sand bricks had dried by then.

Lisa, one of the cooks, helps make bricks—

here she wets the brick form.

Next, she sprinkles sawdust (we didn't have any sand), so the brick will slip off the board.

Throw two handfuls of mud into the form; if you throw it right, the corners come out clean and sharp.

smooth the top surface…

we learned a lot from watching Caramelo, from Oaxaca, an expert adobe-maker… I didn't get his picture, unfortunately…

pull the form: the brick is ready to slide off onto a flat surface for drying.

here's our stack of about 220 bricks, with form.

in mexico, they say you can tell the top of the adobe by the dog prints…

The outer surface of the over is a thin shell containing perlite insulation. I cut a hole in the bottom side to drain out the perlite. I used a piece of old roofing tin to make a chute to direct the flow of perlite. It poured out like water. Nasty dust. A good mask is well worth the money.

here you can see the layers, from outside to inside: colored final clay-sand plaster, insulating sawdust-clay mix, and gypsum-impregnated burlap

a Sawzall came in very handy to cut a hole in the top, and eventually, to cut out a large, wedge-shaped piece of the entire shell. There was virtually no cracking as a result of any cutting. The shell was super-strong and rigid. Note the bamboo armature underneath.

perlite inside the shell, avalanching down to the drain hole…

Lisa peering into the emptied out shell…

good insulation! The bamboo, which was just temporary formwork for the fireproof plaster shell while it dried, is still completely intact: not even charred!

The bamboo supports a layer of burlap impregnated with clay slip and gypsum plaster for a quick-setting, stiff, and fireproof surface that could be plastered immediately.

even the jute twine that I'd used to tie the bamboo hadn't charred—

indeed, it was barely toasted! I would guess that the temperature at that level barely got over 200 degrees F.

In cross-section, you can see the layers of the fire-proof shell that holds the insulation. From top to bottom: white is gypsum and clay impregnated burlap with some sandy-clay plaster, then a layer of insulating and sculptable plaster made of clay and sawdust, then a layer of fine clay-sand finish plaster. 

The surface at the bottom of the photo is the top of the oven dome, made of pure sand and clay. Above that, looking like the edge of a cliff, is a layer of sawdust mixed with clay slip. This close to the heat, the sawdust gets hot enough to completely burn out, leaving an insulative clay foam. It works well, but crumbles at a touch. The white above is perlite, which was pretty well contaminated with the crumbs of crumbled clay-foam, so we had to buy new when we refilled the insulation cavity.

The thermal layer comes down. Note thickness of shell.

The dense thermal layer was not hugely massive because the oven is used primarily for pizza and just a bit of bread. However, with 6-10 inches of perlite all around, it held heat extremely well, and performed beautifully.

Thickness ranged from a bit more than three inches to almost five inches.

Thermal layer completely cleaned out. Note the bottles in perlite exposed around the edges of the floor bricks. The bricks on edge around the perimeter are a "bumper course" to protect the softer mud dome from peels and firewood.

Front arch

the hole in the shell was just big enough for me to step into the oven and sit on the floor. I'm very glad I didn't have to wiggle through the door in order to work!

first courses of bricks, showing the mortar wedge that sets the angle of the dome

a wedge of bricks at the corner nearest the door helps define the line from the (low) front end of the oven to the higher rear end…

story stick shows the 16" target height for the rear of the dome: I angled the bricks to meet the top of the story stick about 6-8" off the back of the oven…

the mortar is just clay and sand, like the bricks. Building an oven with bricks this way means that you can use more clay in the mix; because the bricks are relatively thin and small, they shrink without cracking. The clay is generally more durable under constant use than a typical "cob" mix, which uses a higher percentage of clay to limit cracking.

at work: I was very glad when I realized I could just cut out a big doorway right through the shell. Originally I'd thought I would have to wiggle through the door and work lying down!

the walls start to close in; each course describes a slightly smaller circle and tilts at a steeper angle

I'd only ever seen pictures of this, so was both pleased and amazed at how well the mortar held the bricks against the force of gravity

getting tighter!

I had to clean the bottoms of the mortar joints by feel because I couldn't get low enough to see 'em!

I tried to work as symmetrically as possible, but it's definitely very different than laying up a straight wall.

toward the end, I had to enlarge the opening of the shell just to be able to maneuver.

I used the spray bottle to wet out dry surfaces to take the mortar better.

the dome closing in to the final keystone courses…

these last bricks were almost vertical, but were also held in place by being wedge-shaped. Since the bricks were raw (unfired) they were easy to cut with an old Sawzall blade.

final courses close the dome.

note the angled courses shaping the "throat" leading to the door opening

hard to clean the insides of the final mortar joints; I made a long handled tool that reached through the doorway to scrape the joints clean.

patching the shell was a matter of splitting some new bamboo and wedging it into place

not much structure is needed to support the burlap and gypsum plaster, which is self-supporting once it sets. However, I did "tie" the main bamboo struts with "straps" of gypsum-soaked burlap that wrapped around the bamboo and over the outside of the shell. These got trimmed after the gypsum set.

from burlap to finish plaster was a matter of an hour or so…

I started a drying fire immediately (using the old bits of bamboo for kindling—

nice and dry!)

almost ready for pizza!

There are several fronts: Empathy, feelings, racism, activist judges. Each one has a hidden dimension. And if progressives think conservative attacks are just about Sotomayor, they may wind up helping conservatives regroup.

Conservatives believe that Sotomayor will be confirmed, and so their attacks may seem irrational to Democrats, a last gasp, a grasping at straws, a sign that the party is breaking up.

Actually, something sneakier and possibly dangerous is going on.

Let's start with the attack on empathy. Why empathy? Isn't empathy a good thing?

Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others — not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one's countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species. Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice.

Progressives care about others as well as themselves. They have a moral obligation to act on their empathy — a social responsibility in addition to personal responsibility, a responsibility to make the world better by making themselves better. This leads to a view of a government that cares about its citizens and has a moral obligation to protect and empower them. Protection includes worker, consumer, and environmental protection as well as safety nets and health care. Empowerment includes what is in the President's stimulus plan: infrastructure, education, communication, energy, the availability of credit from banks, a stock market that works. No one can earn anything at all in this country without protection and empowerment by the government. All progressive legislation is made on this basis.

The president wrote of empathy in The Audacity of Hope, "It is at the heart of my moral code and it is how I understand the Golden Rule — not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes."

President Obama has argued that empathy is the basis of our democracy. Why do we promote freedom and fairness for everyone, not just ourselves or the rich and powerful? The answer is empathy. We care about our countrymen and have an obligation to act on that care and to set up a government for the protection and empowerment of all. That is at the heart of everything he does.

The link between empathy and democracy has been established historically by Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA in her important book, Inventing Human Rights. Hear her speak here.

The link between empathy and progressive thought is spelled out in my book Moral Politics and in my new book The Political Mind, just out in paperback.

In describing his ideal Supreme Court justice, President Obama cited empathy as a major desideratum. Why? Because that is what our democracy is about. A justice has to take empathy into account because his or her decisions will affect the lives of others. Before making a decision you have to put yourself in the shoes of those who your decision will affect. Similarly, in judging causation, fairness requires that social causes as well as individual causes be taken into account. Empathy forces you to notice what is crucial in so many Supreme Court cases: systemic and social causes and who a decision can harm. As such, empathy correctly understood is crucial to judgment. A judge without empathy is a judge unfit for a democracy.

President Obama has described Justice Sotomayor in empathetic terms — a life story that would lead her to understand people who live through oppression and deprivation and what it does to them. In other words, a life story that would allow her to appreciate the consequences of judicial decisions and the causal effects of living in an unequal society.

Empathy in this sense is a threat to conservatism, which features individual, not social, responsibility and a strict, punitive form of "justice." It is no surprise that empathy would be a major conservative target in the Sotomayor evaluation.

But the target is not empathy as it really exists. Instead, the conservatives are reframing empathy to make it attackable. Their "empathy" is idiosyncratic, personal feeling for an individual, presumably the defendant in a legal case. With "empathy" reframed in this way, Charles Krauthammer can say, echoing Karl Rove, "Justice is not about empathy." The argument goes like this: Empathy is a matter personal feelings. Personal feelings should not be the basis of a judicial decision of the Supreme Court. Therefore, "justice is not about empathy." Reframe the word "empathy" and it not only disqualifies Sotomayor; it delegitimizes Obama's central moral principle, his approach to government, his understanding of the nature of our democracy, and progressive politics in general.

We cannot let conservatives get away with redefining empathy as irrational and idiosyncratic personal feeling. Empathy is the basis of our democracy and its true meaning must be defended.

But the attack can be sneaky. Take David Brooks' column in the NY Times (May 29, 2009). He frames what he calls "The Empathy Issue" in terms of the use of emotions in decision-making. He is doing a conservative reframing of the issue. What is sneaky is that he starts by saying a number of true things about emotions. As Antonio Damasio pointed out in Descartes' Error, you can't make rational decisions without emotions. If you have a brain injury that wipes out your emotional capacity, you don't know what to want, since like and not-like mean nothing, and you can't tell what others will think of you. Here is Brooks:

People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don't know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.

Supreme Court justices, like all of us, are emotional intuitionists. They begin their decision-making processes with certain models in their heads. These are models of how the world works and should work, which have been idiosyncratically ingrained by genes, culture, education, parents and events. These models shape the way judges perceive the world.

Note the mixture of truth and non-truth. Yes, sensible decisions require emotions. Yes, people without empathy are sociopaths. Yes, we all make decisions based on models in our head of how the world works. That's basic cognitive science. Mixed in with it is conservative reframing. No, empathy is a lot more than a "social emotion." No, using models of the world in decision-making need not be a matter of emotion. It's just how real reason works. Then the conclusion.

But because we're emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it's prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist. It's prudent to have judges who decide cases narrowly, who emphasize the specific context of each case, who value gradual change, small steps and modest self-restraint.

Right-leaning thinkers from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek understood that emotion is prone to overshadow reason. They understood that emotion can be a wise guide in some circumstances and a dangerous deceiver in others. It's not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it's how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice.

Empathy here has been reframed as emotion that is "idiosyncratic" — personal — a danger to reason. "Sentiments," that is, emotions, must be "disciplined" to fit "manners and morals, tradition and practice"– in short, the existing social and political order. This is perfect radical conservatism in the guise of sweet, moderate reasonableness. Where Rove and Krauthammer have the iron fists, Brooks has the velvet glove.

The attack on empathy becomes an attack on feelings, with feelings as not merely at odds with justice, but at odds with good sense. Where Brooks' tone is sweetly reasonable, G. Gordon Liddy is outrageous:

Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

Liddy is saying what Brooks is saying: Emotion is irrational and dangerous. Only Liddy is not nicely-nicely. The attack on feelings is of a piece with the old attack on "bleeding-heart liberals. And one step away from Cheney's attack on Obama and defense of torture.

What about Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a racist? It is linked directly to the personal feeling argument: because of her personal feelings for her own kind — Latinos and women — she will discriminate against white men. It is to support that view that the New Haven firemen case keeps being brought up.

The real target here goes beyond Sotomayor. In the last election, conservative populists moved toward Obama. Conservative populists are working people, mostly white men, who have conservative views of the family, of masculinity, and of the military, and who have bought into the idea of the 'liberal elite" as looking down on them. Right now, they are hurting economically, losing their jobs and their homes. Empathy is something they need. The racist card is an attempt to revive their fears of affirmative action, fears of their jobs — and their pride — being taken by minorities and women. The racist attack has a political purpose, holding onto conservative populists. The overt form of the old conservative argument is made regularly these days: liberalism is identity politics.

Incidentally, Democrats are walking into the Gingrich trap. I heard Ed Schultz defending Sotomayor by saying over and over why she was "not a racist," and using the word "racist" next to her name repeatedly. It was like Nixon saying, "I am not a crook." When Democrats make that mistake, I sometimes wonder why I bothered to write Don't Think of an Elephant!

The attack on Sotomayor as an "activist judge" completes the pattern of radical conservative reasoning: Because of her empathy, which is personal feeling, which in turn is a form of racism, she will interpret the constitution not rationally, blindly, and objectively, but to suit her emotions.

It is vital at this point to understand how conservatives get away with the "activist judge" ploy. As any cognitive linguist knows, there is no such thing as "strict construction" of the Constitution. The reason was given by, of all people, David Brooks, as we discussed above.

Supreme Court justices, like all of us, … begin their decision-making processes with certain models in their heads. These are models of how the world works and should work… These models shape the way judges perceive the world.

These models also shape they way the most "strict constructionist" of judges read the Constitution. Such models are physically part of the brain and typically operate below the level of consciousness. Conservatives are thus as much "judicial activists" as anyone else.

So how do conservative Republicans get away with the "activist judge" ploy? Democrats hand it to them. Why? Because most Democrats grew up with and still believe a view of reason that has been shown in cognitive science and neuroscience to be false. The sciences of mind have shown that real reason is largely unconscious, requires emotion, uses "models" (frames, metaphors, narratives) and so does not fit the world directly.

But Democrats tend to believe that reason is conscious, can fit the world directly, and works by logic, not frames or metaphors. They thus believe that words have fixed literal meanings that fit the world in itself, regardless of models, frames, metaphors, or narratives. If you believe this, then original meaning could make sense. Democrats don't fight it when they should.

Democrats make another move that allows them to keep their view of reason. They adopt the view of the "living constitution," which opens them up to charges of "judicial activism," charges made by conservative judicial activists. The source of the problem lies in the Democrats lack of understanding of their own unconscious reasoning processes. One of many Democrats deepest beliefs contradicts the facts about the brain and the mind and allows conservative judges to be activists while claiming to be strict constructionists.

Taken together, the attacks on Sotomayor work as attacks on Obama and progressive thought. They are also attacks on "moderate" conservatives, who think with progressives on many issues. The attacks activate radical conservative ideas in the brains of those who voted for Bush and the 47% of the voters who voted for McCain.

Radical conservatives know that Sotomayor will be confirmed. They also know that their very understanding of the world is being threatened by Obama's success. But they have a major strength. They have their message machine intact, with trained spokespeople booked on TV and radio shows all over the country. Attacking Sotomayor, even when they know she will win, allows them to rally their forces and get swing-voting conservatives thinking their way again.

How should Democrats respond?

Democrats should go on offense. They need to rally behind empathy — real empathy, not empathy reframed as emotion and personal feeling. They need to speak regularly about empathy as being the basis of our democracy. They need to point out that empathy leads one to notice real social and systemic causes of our troubles and to notice when and how judicial decisions and legislation can harm the most vulnerable of our countrymen. And finally that empathy is the reason that we have the principles of freedom and fairness — which are necessary components of justice.

Above all, Democrats should be aware that the attack on Sotomayor is not just about Sotomayor. It is an attack on the basis of our democracy and must be answered.

George Lakoff is the author of Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate' (Chelsea Green). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

This article originally appeared on Alternet.

Strangely, they have lost sight of their own identity as white males. Do they not bring their own life experiences into decision-making, whether they serve on the Supreme Court, a corporate board, or in the U.S. Congress? Could it be that the white male model has been the template for so long that any American who deviates from this assumed norm is threatening to bring "identity" politics into their decisions? Or, have they simply forgotten—or worse never considered—that identities different from their own have a rightful place in the power structure of a democracy?

Limbaugh went so far as to call Sotomayor a "reverse" racist for claiming that sometimes a strong Latina woman may be better than a strong white man. Hasn't their assumption been that a white man is almost always better than any woman, indicated by the fact that Sotomayor, if confirmed, would be the third women in history to serve on the court, compared to two black and hundreds of white men?

But what we are talking about is not just ethnicity, which is significant by itself, but more importantly, we are talking about bringing a radically different kind of life experience to the Supreme Court. Her white male critics delude themselves into thinking that they have not brought their relatively privileged life experiences into their spheres of influence.

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition. The fact that I was brought up by a single mother, came to this country as a child, has influenced my views.

How could Sotomayor's experience of being brought up by her mother, of being the first person in her family to go to college, of having vaulted over the hurdles of poverty and discrimination to get there not influence her? Better yet why shouldn't it? Life experience is not something to be denied, but to be celebrated. Yes, decisions must be in keeping with the law, but the law has always been, and will continue to be, open to interpretation.

We need only look to Sandra Day O'Connor who was highly respected by both conservatives and liberals. When she left the court she was lauded for her practical interpretation of the law. She had the unusual ability to see what impact legal decisions had on everyday lives.

During a case regarding search and seizure, she questioned the impact of forcing people out of a car if there was a pregnant mother in the back seat who had to get out in the rain.

Who else could imagine a pregnant mother, a poor mother, a struggling student, or understand discrimination, but a strong Latina woman whose parents came to the United States when Puerto Ricans were looked down upon in the same way as many Mexicans are today?

Nothing in Sotomayor's brilliant record indicates that she would rule on a case by ethnic identity alone, but everything in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court indicates that the search for perfect justice will be better served by validating her life experiences—which reflect the life experiences of so many Americans.

President Obama has now signed legislation, The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009, which among other things creates an investigative commission inspired by Pecora.

The new Financial Markets Commission has a sweeping mandate, including subpoena powers, to investigate all the causes of the collapse. The list is as comprehensive as one could wish for.

FUNCTIONS OF THE COMMISSION.–The functions of the Commission are–

(1) to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States, specifically the role of–

(A) fraud and abuse in the financial sector, including fraud and abuse towards consumers in the mortgage sector;

(B) Federal and State financial regulators, including the extent to which they enforced, or failed to enforce statutory, regulatory, or supervisory requirements;

(C) the global imbalance of savings, international capital flows, and fiscal imbalances of various governments;

(D) monetary policy and the availability and terms of credit;

(E) accounting practices, including, mark-to-market and fair value rules, and treatment of off-balance sheet vehicles;

(F) tax treatment of financial products and investments;

(G) capital requirements and regulations on leverage and liquidity, including the capital structures of regulated and non-regulated financial entities;

(H) credit rating agencies in the financial system, including, reliance on credit ratings by financial institutions and Federal financial regulators, the use of credit ratings in financial regulation, and the use of credit ratings in the securitization markets;

(I) lending practices and securitization, including the originate-to-distribute model for extending credit and transferring risk;

(J) affiliations between insured depository institutions and securities, insurance, and other types of nonbanking companies;

(K) the concept that certain institutions are "too-big-to-fail" and its impact on market expectations;

(L) corporate governance, including the impact of company conversions from partnerships to corporations;

(M) compensation structures;

(N) changes in compensation for employees of financial companies, as compared to compensation for others with similar skill sets in the labor market;

(O) the legal and regulatory structure of the United States housing market;

(P) derivatives and unregulated financial products and practices, including credit default swaps;

(Q) short-selling;

(R) financial institution reliance on numerical models, including risk models and credit ratings;

(S) the legal and regulatory structure governing financial institutions, including the extent to which the structure creates the opportunity for financial institutions to engage in regulatory arbitrage;

(T) the legal and regulatory structure governing investor and mortgagor protection;

(U) financial institutions and government-sponsored enterprises; and

(V) the quality of due diligence undertaken by financial institutions;

(2) to examine the causes of the collapse of each major financial institution that failed (including institutions that were acquired to prevent their failure) or was likely to have failed if not for the receipt of exceptional Government assistance from the Secretary of the Treasury during the period beginning in August 2007 through April 2009;

It's hard to improve on that. Whether the commission carries out this mandate, Pecora-style, will depend entirely on who its chair and members are, and whether they hire a tough staff. The ten commission members are to be appointed, three by the Speaker of the House, three by the Senate Majority Leader, and two each by their Republican counterparts. The Staff Director is to be hired jointly by the Chair (a Democrat) and the Vice-Chair (a Republican). Interestingly, none are to be appointed by the White House, and President Obama has already issued a signing statement reserving the right to invoke executive privilege in cases where materials or testimony from the executive branch are requested under subpoena.

To get a flavor of what the original Pecora Committee did, consider this observation from Donald A. Ritchie, associate senate historian, in his study, "The Pecora Wall Street Expose""

With the power of the subpoena, his staff would descend upon a banker or broker, and go through is records, file drawer by file drawer, page by page, selecting and photostating documents. Staff lawyers and accountants would assemble this material to reconstruct motivations, discrepancies, delinquencies, and frauds involved. They drew a multitude of charts, tracing every event and statistic. After narrowing down the documentation, they outlined the subject's transactions in chronological narrative on letter-sized sheets with citations in the margins to specific documents which could prove each assertion.

Will the new Financial Markets Commission be this diligent in exposing the facts and kindling public demands for sweeping reform? You can be sure that House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be getting friendly calls urging them not to make appointments that will embarrass the administration.

Three names have surfaced in the financial press as possible chairs, supposedly based on leaks from the Democratic leadership: Paul Volcker, 81, the former Fed Chairman, Arthur Levitt, Jr., 78, SEC Chairman during the Clinton era, and retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 79. Volcker, an honest conservative, has turned against financial deregulation in recent years, and Levitt was a reasonably tough SEC chair, who bucked (and sometimes buckled) in the face of intense Congressional pressure from both parties not to crack down on abuses. Levitt now advises one of the most powerful private equity companies, the Carlyle Group, not exactly a constituency for tough reform.

Here are two better names:

*Paul Sarbanes, the retired Senate Banking Committee chairman. Sarbanes, a well-liked senator with admirers in both parties was both highly expert, incorruptable, and tough. In the fight to get what became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, cracking down on accounting fraud, he showed real leadership. Sarbanes, now a vigorous 76, stepped down in 2006.

*Harvey Goldschmid, probably the most expert and public-minded SEC commissioner in recent decades. Goldschmid, 69, is now a law professor at Columbia. He was seriously considered by President Obama to chair the SEC, but was passed over in favor of the somewhat weaker Mary Schapiro.

It is important that this investigation be conducted not by a figurehead, but by one with the knowledge, passion, and predisposition to build the public case for sweeping reform, and without fear or favor.

Some Republicans, such as Richard Shelby, the ranking minority member on the Senate Banking Committee, are as disgusted with the Wall Street corruption as progressive Democrats are, though that does not describe the minority leaders in either house, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner, who will make the Republican appointments.

This could be one of those rare, historic commissions that changes the course of history — or it could be window-dressing. Stay tuned.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos www.demos.org. His recent book is "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency".

This article was originally published on The Huffington Post.

The Times credits Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma as one of the main inspirations for the interns. For me it was Wendell Berry's The Gift of Good Land, one of those "it changed my life" books. (It really did, and in a good way as far as I can tell.)

Well, for all those new idealists heading out for the fields, I'd like to offer a bit of advice that I gleaned from my farm internship years ago and pair of subsequent stints as a summer farmhand. The Times article makes it sound as though there are more people looking for internships than there are farms ready to offer them, and that might lead some of the potential interns to go for any position they can find. I'd encourage a little caution. My first stab at farm interning went pretty badly, in part because I didn't ask enough questions of the farmer to figure out if it was going to be a good fit. I was so damn excited to start my new, post-college life in farming that I couldn't imagine anything going wrong.

I didn't care that housing was an old school bus with a bunk bed and propane stove. (I still wouldn't mind living in that thing–it was pretty cool!) I didn't care that I was agreeing to work six days a week for room and board and $20 cash each Sunday. What started turning me sour on the farm was the fact that the brochure I'd seen describing the place had been produced several years before and was distinctly out of date. It described a paradise of eco-agricultural experimentation, with reclaimed gravel pits being rotated from use as fish ponds to garden sites to grazing grounds for geese, and back again. This was exactly what I wanted to see in action, since it would give me experience to a whole range of food production methods. I can't remember if I'd yet heard the term "permaculture" but the concept was there to do more than even just replace conventional agribusiness with organic farming methods, but to look to the full diversity of nature as a primary inspiration for organizing sustainable production.

Only after I arrived did I learn that the farmer (let's call him Bob) had stopped pursuing the rotation plan. He was treating the pits as permanent fish ponds, so the vegetable crops were out and the goose and other animal populations significantly reduced. It didn't help my enthusiasm that this was in a dry part of California, and the farm's large water pump was running 18 hours each day to keep the unlined pits full. So lesson number one: ask questions and make sure you know what the farm is really like, and what kind of work you'll really be doing. Sweaty, sometimes monotonous work for little or no pay is one thing; sweaty, monotonous, unpaid work that is different from what you had been promised (explicitly or implicitly) and willingly agreed to do is another thing altogether.

Then there was the fact that Bob had me working 15, 16, and 17 hours each day, and on those Sunday "days off" I was still putting in 5 or more additional hours. Under the circumstances, I guess I wasn't surprised, one and a half weeks into my time there, to wake up in the wee hours of the night to the sounds of my fellow intern packing up and running off for San Francisco. He'd decided this wasn't a fair deal and he wasn't willing to put up with it any longer. (Flash forward: with some arm twisting by family members, I also left the farm a little while later, though in broad daylight and after giving a teeny, tiny bit of notice.) That's lesson number two: take a moment, maybe more than just one moment, and give real thought to what you think are acceptable and fair demands on your labor. As a category of work, internships are problematic, especially unpaid internships. I think they are mostly a bogus way for business to get cheap labor. Sure, the intern gets a bullet point on their resume, but the conspiracy between the education sector and the business sector is to treat those bullet points as being more valuable than they really are. Universities get payment for the credit hours they issue and the businesses get cheap labor. Why wouldn't they agree to pretend to students that internships are better than jobs that come with pay checks?

Anyhow, I don't mean to dismiss the usefulness of internships entirely, especially given the fact that this is a fallen world and we're a long way off from truly just labor markets at any level up and down the pay scale. It doesn't help that agriculture–small-scale, sustainable agriculture, in particular–has been under terrible economic pressure for many decades and it is a plain fact that most farmers can't afford to pay the wages that would otherwise be fair. So I don't begrudge them too much for utilizing internships, and I don't begrudge youngsters for exchanging a short period of remuneration for a spit-shine on the road to a dream come true.

Even still, there ought to be limits, and a prospective intern can't assume that a farmer, even an organic farmer, is necessarily going to know what that limit ought to be. So that's another set of questions to ask and get clear answers about before signing on the dotted line. It's a worse crime when farmers abuse the vulnerability of immigrant laborers, but that doesn't make abuse of intern labor okay.

What finally broke the straw for me working for Bob was his cult-leader affect. I can't really call him a cult leader–at it's largest, his cult consisted of me and the other intern who was plotting a midnight getaway. But Bob tried to do what I think cult leaders do, which is to psychologically manipulate people in ways that would make them strongly loyal to him. It's been a while, so my memory of the details are a bit hazy, but do I remember one time when he said something very much like, "Jonathan, what you've got to do is transform your brain so that it's like a computer, so that it's purely logical. That way you'll always get the right answer and be more efficient." He was really big into "efficiency," something that has made me wary of the term ever since. (So you can imagine that I was never really comfortable, years later, when I went to graduate school to study economics! "Efficiency of what?" is the question that most people fail to ask. Whatever factor you are making more efficient, there are other factors that are probably being made less efficient in the process. But that's a topic for another time…)

One time, as I was moving geese from one barn to another, Bob stopped me to explain how I could walk more efficiently between the two barns. "If you walk more efficiently, you'll get all your work done more quickly in the day." It's not that I was lollygagging or missing a shortcut–his suggestion was something equivalent to starting off on my left foot instead of my right foot, so that when I got to the corner I could round it a little closer to the barn and shave a few inches off my route. He meant that, in part, as a helpful response to my complaint a couple days earlier that I just couldn't keep up with the workload he was sending my way. But, of course, it wasn't actually helpful. Not only is it insulting to micro-manage a person so severely, but it really wouldn't have mattered. I was so far behind in checking off the to-do list that Bob gave me each day that no amount of humanly possible improvement in my efficiency was going to allow me to accomplish all the tasks, even with the 15+ hour workdays I was maintaining.

And that's my lesson number three: watch out for whackos! Try to get some idea of the farmer's general approach to communication so you'll have some sense of whether it's vaguely compatible with yours. Even ignoring the whacko outliers, there are more than a few farmers who are into farming in part because they are not very social. As one farmer, a new Chelsea Green author, recently said to me, some farmers just don't like people very much which is why they work with animals instead.  (And she should know: despite being marvelously social and friendly, she also prefers working with animals to other people.) And that's great–but when those same farmers agree to take on an intern, they are taking on a social responsibility. Among other things, interns are there to learn, and it's hard to learn from a farmer who is a bad communicator. The problem is that someone who isn't great at communication (with other humans, at least) probably won't be great at explaining that fact to someone asking about an internship. So by default the responsibility falls to you, the prospective intern, to try to scope out that you won't have irreconcilable differences with your potential boss.

A couple years later I worked for a summer at a different farm in Colorado. This was a much better experience on a much better farm. It was an organic truck farm that had run as a CSA for several years, but that season the farmers, a young couple, were scaling back to get a little bit of break from the intensity and overlaod they'd been struggling with. They put 8 of their 10 acres into cover crop, and we grew veggies on the other 2 acres for sale at a roadside stand. I liked them and learned a fair amount. Still, I was living in a tent off on a corner of the farm away from their house, and the social isolation was difficult for me. It was good in that I learned about my personal quota for solo time, and my need for more social interaction, but it was bad in that I didn't have a good sense of whether or not most farming opportunities would be like that. I now know that there are farms that are managed differently, so that while inevitably some work gets done by people off on their own for a few hours at a time, a good deal of work is done in pairs or groups. But between my experience with Bob and the summer in Colorado, I got to feeling like farming just wasn't for me. In there is lesson number four: try to match your general work style with the farm you end up on. If you are comfortable spending long stretches of time with little or no interaction with other people, great. If you need to be around other people a lot more of the time, also great. Just know the difference and get some idea of what the style is on the farm you might intern at. You want to learn the skills that the farmer has to share, but if you end up being emotionally depressed due to other factors of the way the farm works, you're not doing yourself or the world of farming that much of a favor.

If I'd had different experiences, I might well be a farmer today. I still feel the pull. So I offer this advice in the hope that potential interns who stumble across it will have a better chance at a good experience. I went to work for Bob before the whole internet thing had started. (In fact, at the time I headed off to his farm, I had sent and received a combined total of four emails in my entire life, and I'd never seen or heard of a web site, so no Google for me!) It was harder to find an internship on an organic or otherwise sustainability-oriented farm. When I got there and things started to sour, I felt somewhat trapped. I really, really, really wanted the internship to work! I had planned out the next several years of my life based on it working out, and on my loving it and wanting to devote all my time to saving the world through working the soil. It was pretty devastating when that dream ran into a lame reality. But how could I salvage my dream? Well, it took my older brother to knock the sense into my head that this wasn't the only farm in the world, not even the only eco-friendly farm. Finding another one to work at might not be so easy, but I did have alternatives. And one of those alternatives, however hard it might be to find, would include a sane farmer who respected me as a person and worker, and not as a blank robot to be programmed for maximum exertion.

You want to be an intern on a small, organic farm. That means you give a rat's ass about the health of the planet and the justice of our agricultural economy. Don't forget that you are also a living, breathing part of that planet same as the plants and animals you will tend, and have just as much claim to justice in economic relations as the farmers you seek to work with. One of Wendell Berry's important lessons is that a good farmer must have the long view. Cultivate your long view. Taking the first internship that comes your way might be good for your resume and might satisfy the jumping beans in your heart to get out there and do something! But it might not be good for your long view. If it turns out badly, it just might kill your dreams of farming. And the world needs some good new farmers who will stick it out for the long term. Good luck!

For those who don't know, phosphorus is an essential element for plant growth, and thus for agriculture. We simply cannot grow food without it. Plants eat phosphorus, we eat plants, and if you eat meat, then even your meat eats plants. Yet it is a very finite resource that has NO synthetic alternative. Most phosphorus used in agriculture (both organic and conventional/chemical) comes from rock sources that represent ancient deposits. While there are plant and animal sources of phosphorus, these are not renewable without continued input from rock sources. For conventional (chemical) agriculture, phosphorus is used in great amounts before getting lost in runoff or flushed down the toilet. Organic gardening and other methods of soil renewal can recycle much of this lost element through use of composts and manures, etc. As with oil, we have pretty much used up most of the major deposits, and countries like the U.S. import the bulk of what we need from elsewhere.

Not long ago, everyone assumed that the world had more than 300 years' worth of phosphorus deposits left. But when experts began to take a closer look, they realized there was a lot less of this stuff left than anyone had imagined. Recently many scientists have come out and said that we have no more than 30-50 years of such deposits. And this does not take into account the dramatic growth in demand of late, nor does it tell the full story of a resource peak. Apparently, increased biofuel production is eating up our remaining phosphorus at a voracious pace. Recently, several writers and organizations have sounded the alarm that we have just passed, or will soon be passing, the point of peak phosphorus production. For anyone familiar with Hubbert's Peak and peak oil, this means that production will continue after this point, but it begins to fall off as the remaining resource diminishes. As production falls off, the price skyrockets and a mad scramble ensues for what's left. China has already stockpiled large amounts (an estimated 13 billion tons) of rock phosphate and shocked the world by placing limits on exports of this precious resource. Morocco reportedly has the largest remaining reserves in the world at 20-25% of the total (and is the source of most U.S. imports). While there may be more of this stuff under the ocean or in outer space, it will cost a great deal of money to explore and exploit these potential resources, just like with the deepwater oil wells.

I remain hopeful, though still not convinced, that we can wean ourselves off oil and develop renewable energy alternatives. But with peak phosphorus, THERE ARE NO alternatives. It's a fact of life that plants need this stuff to grow, we need to eat plants to live, and so once the phosphorus runs out, the human race cannot live much longer. This is entropy in motion; all we can do is slow it down so it doesn't become a problem for the next several generations (and by then, maybe we'll be really good at deepwater diving or space travel). So before you start stockpiling bonemeal or rock phosphate (the price will continue to climb in the next few years), consider that there is only one way humanity can deal with peak phosphorus: conserving what we have and recycling what we use. That means composting our wastes. Not just kitchen scraps, but humanure, too, which yields a net loss of nutrients which we cannot afford. Too yucky to consider? Then start with composting your kitchen scraps; it's an important step. With so many sizes and shapes of composters, tumblers, and worm bins on the market these days, you can do this even on a balcony or patio. To bust a few stereotypes, composting doesn't have to take up much space, you don't have to turn your pile by hand, and it doesn't have to stink. Most of these composters practically make the compost for you (or you can invest in a worm bin and have them do all the dirty work).

Wherever you live, there are no excuses. Composting is no longer a casual activity, but a necessity. Please do your part and pitch in. You owe it to the soil, to the plants, and to the human race.

More readings on this subject below:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article4193017.ece

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/28720

Everyone has their needs, and place is infinitely important to me–where you live, how you get to work, what landscape you pass through daily, the air you breathe, and what's in that air. I know a lot of people who love the city and thrive off 24-hour delis and cabs at 4am, but for me, it's Vermont. Maybe it's because I spent my childhood in a log cabin in southwestern Colorado, and playing outside. Maybe I can't handle the city, because I'm just not tough enough. Maybe I'm secretly a plug working for the Vermont state tourism unit. Move here! Buy a big house! Take over the farmland and push the locals out! Now that I've officially become part of the green blogging world (if you didn't know it existed, which most people probably don't, now you do…it's a party…) all of a sudden I've been called a Monsanto plug, and a proponent of high fructose corn syrup and diabetic babies, because I talked about the debate between organic and conventional farmers (is organic always better? Is diet the deciding factor in animal health…etc.) Also, I bite. And I go around and pull up crops of certified organic farmers and burn them behind my house while chanting, GMO, GMO, GMO. Fear me.

All jokes aside, this month has been a steady and rapid incline towards summer. When I arrived in central Vermont, the house was covered in snow and nothing around me was anything close to appearing alive. Life consisted of cross-country skiing, ice skating (once) and people telling me fairy tales of "farming" and "the garden," none of which seemed possible in the desolate winter land that is the upper valley. But aside from that, I read my books and I learned how to bake bread, and I straight up chilled. But not no more. No way. We put up a hammock this weekend by the pond, knowing full well no one's going to be relaxing in that thing for a long time…or at least not until it gets dark. Farming has come.

I've been staring at an empty garden bed for about a month now….so to see the peas come up and inch their way up the trellis is magical–I'm still amazed you put things in the ground and they grow. The onions have raced up! And the shallots look like sea creatures prickling out of the ground. We interplanted mesclun mix underneath the broccoli transplants, in the hopes the salad will spread as a ground cover and decrease weeds. Over memorial day weekend, we planted most of our seedlings, saving the tomatoes, squash, and some brassica plants until after the danger of frost. I'm pretty sure my basil is dead, however. Should have waited on that. We also hilled some potatoes…but most exciting are the morels in the area! Some from nearby foraged by family who came up to visit, and a couple from right outside the house. They're delicious cooked up in butter with ramps (also from around the house), and spread on toast or crackers.

And….the animals! We picked up the four piglets at Raycine Farm outside of Norwich, from a sweet farmer couple and their three Australian cattle dogs. We put them in dog crates filled with hay in the back of the pickup and took them home; they're so cute, and so curious. It's hard to believe we're raising them for food, but at the same time, feels totally natural. I can't believe how far I've come from the 25th floor of a midtown hi-rise building in midtown Manhattan. I'd be spending money in yuppy/hippy restaurants and wondering where my food was coming from as I shopped the urban co-ops. Now I'm growing my own, and feeding the animals who will one day feed me. The sense of community–between who lives in our house, the animals, and all the people who filter in and out, eating, helping weed, helping dig rows in the garden, holding the chicks–is huge in my life these days, for which I feel really grateful. And for the past two years, I've been wondering why community felt so fractured to me in the city. I think it's different when you're working with your hands, and then sitting down to eat together, and when the landscape is calming and beautiful, and materialism is less enticing (except Muck Boots, duh). I feel a sense of stability and control in my life, for the first time. I like letting the hens out before I feed myself. It sets a good pattern for the day.

And one morning last week, we got a call from the post office. The baby chicks arrived!!

Now they're living in a wooden incubator in the sugarhouse-in-progress, lined with sawdust and heated with lamps. They're so tiny and cute. Soon they will grow up to be rebellious pullets and meat birds (our laying hens, incidentally, now drink out of the dog's water dish).

So animal-wise we have three cows, four pigs, and 100 or so chickens (and a dog and cat). I'm going to be selling about 20 dozen eggs come fall to the co-op that shares a parking lot with Chelsea Green. Hopefully by then I'll have figured out how to keep the hens from escaping and terrorizing our neighbors.

I also helped with Sam's construction of an earth-sheltered tractor shed. We figured it out, and the whole thing is only costing like, 250 bucks! All the beams/logs for the roof he cut from the woods around the house, the cross beams are salvaged telephone poles (both from the power lines near the house, and donated form an old-time farmer neighbor). For the walls, he got old railroad ties from a guy in Hardwick (which are pressure-treated and massive) which we started stacking braced into the earth, filling dirt in for stability and to adhere it with the ground.

So from here on out, it's chores chores chores, fencing for the cows (and they're being pretty well rotated from pasture to pasture, which makes them less inclined to escape), watering the pigs and chickens, planting the rest of the garden, recovering from rich foraged foods, trying to get enough sleep, trying to keep perspective, keep informed of the farming world….and whatever comes next. I'll keep you posted!

Each of his major speeches of the past week was a tour de force. At Notre Dame he spoke candidly and movingly about reproductive rights and tolerance. His quest for common ground won repeated applause from this largely Catholic audience, some of whom evidently are less dogmatic than their church's leaders. Said Obama:

So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions, let's reduce unintended pregnancies. (Applause.) Let's make adoption more available. (Applause.) Let's provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. (Applause.) Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women." Those are things we can do. (Applause.)

At Annapolis, he sounded as resolutely committed to national defense as any chicken hawk, and rather more serious about what true national security entails — and he got repeated ovations from the midshipmen, among them John McCain IV.

Speaking in the Rose Garden on Friday about credit card abuses, Obama signed a bill that takes a small step on behalf of consumers to prohibit the most extreme of bait-and-switch tactics. The President said, "Statements will be required to tell credit card holders how long it will take to pay off a balance and what it will cost in interest if they only make the minimum monthly payments. We also put a stop to retroactive rate hikes that appear on a bill suddenly with no rhyme or reason." Credit card abuses are the easiest to remedy of the financial scandals, but Obama was on the right side of the issue and in good form.

It was his major address Thursday at the National Archives, with America's most sacred documents as backdrop, that was Obama at his most thoughtful and eloquent, as well as brave. "I have studied the Constitution as a student;" he declared, "I have taught it as a teacher; I have been bound by it as a lawyer and legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief, and as a citizen, I know that we must never — ever — turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake."

Obama stuck to his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo, just a day after the Senate, by a vote of 94-6, denied him the funds to shift detainees, out of concern that alleged terrorists would be instead locked up in maximum security prisons in the continental United States, possibly to escape or might someday be released into American communities. It's an absurd worry, yet where to house terrorists is for most legislators the ultimate NIMBY issue.

Obama himself muddied the waters in his insistence that he planned to keep detainees in "prolonged detention," just not at Guantanamo. That, in turn, created the sense that Obama's insistence about shutting down the prison was more about symbolism than constitutional substance.

His rather complex position provided fodder for critics on both the right and the left. Dick Cheney appointed himself to make a quasi-official response, in an unrepentant speech defending torture. I suppose we are fortunate that the faces of today's Republican Party are Cheney and Rush Limbaugh, guaranteeing that the Republicans will stay around 30 percent of the electorate. On the other hand, it is odd that Obama would seize on the symbolism of Guantanamo as abhorrent and inconsistent with American values while insisting that "prolonged detention" without trial for accused terrorists could be justified. In a letter sent Friday to the president, Sen. Russ Feingold warned that "such detention is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world."

The New York Times editorial page effusively praised the president's stance. Its editorial of May 22 began, "We listened to President Obama's speech on terrorism and detention policy with relief and optimism."

But in two news stories, May 23, Times reporters first pointedly questioned whether the prolonged detention concept was constitutional — and then suggested that Obama had handed Republicans "a wedge issue."

Having taken a principled position, Obama now needs to deliver — with a strategy for handling the remaining detainees that both addresses the security concerns and offers more than a fig leaf of constitutionality.

All week, Obama demonstrated his great skills as a teacher and orator, but it remains to be seen how he will use these outsized gifts as challenges on several fronts continue to unfold. He chose to invest some political capital on the issue of reproductive rights, but not on the issue of gay marriage; he took a real political risk in beginning the process of shutting down the infamous prison at Guantanamo but not in aligning himself with a constitutional treatment of detainees wherever they are ultimately housed. And though he criticized financial excess in general terms and had some good things to say about credit card abuses, he has not yet thrown the full weight of his office behind comprehensive financial reform.

It is tempting to explain his choices simply in terms of his own history and deep knowledge of some issues but not others. If there is any issue that Obama knows well, it is constitutional law. One can see the blend of idealism and calculation in his decision to close Guantanamo, but not to insist on full due process for detainees. Maybe this is all that public opinion and anxious legislators can take for now. We'll have to see how the public reacts as he moves forward with concrete plans to change procedures and move detainees.

On financial reform, however, it is very hard, based on past performance, to imagine Obama staking out a courageous position and trying to move public opinion on an issue where most of the Senate is siding with, say, Wall Street. In the coming months, there will be plenty of opportunities. They will include whether to enact regulation of derivatives, hedge funds and private equity companies; whether to support Elizabeth Warren's proposal for a financial product safety commission; whether to keep on bailing out insolvent banks versus taking them into receivership; and how to get serious about saving several millions of American families from foreclosure. On all of these fronts, administration policy to date has been too weak and far too kind to Wall Street.

One thing we learned this week is that whatever this president's deficits, they do not include a lack of eloquence, leadership, or nerve. It makes his attempt to straddle the issue of the detainees seem less than fully thought through, and his dithering on the financial crisis all the more bewildering.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His recent book is Obama's Challenge.

This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

*  My recent papers on reforming global finance for the Club of Rome and UNCTAD are at www.ethicalmarkets.com.   Another, "Qualitative Growth" which I co-authored with my good friend physicist Fritjof Capra (also on our Advisory Board), will be published in the UK by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales and Tomorrow's Company.

*  We hosted a retreat here with our Brazilian partner Christina Carvalho Pinto, president of Mercado Etico; with Advisory Board members Rosa Alegria and Thais Corral; as well as dear friends Rodrigo Loures, Michel Haradom, Maria Fernanda Tiexera, Giovanni Barontini and Homero Santos.  We moved forward on the design of our proposed Green Brazil Index of sustainable private companies, lesser-known to U.S. and European investors, modeled on the Private Company Index of Entrex (www.entrex.net), the private exchange for smaller companies not wishing to list on Wall Street exchanges.

*  We are supporting Entrex and its new asset class, the TIGRcubs™, which our Brazilian colleagues and many other green, SRI investors see as a way of raising working capital without giving up equity, while listing on Entrex's electronic exchange based in Chicago.  We are  helping set up meetings with Entrex for many of our colleagues.  Let me know if you are interested in learning more about Entrex's "small is beautiful" financial innovations.  The great disintermediation from Wall Street and "too big to fail" banks has begun.  The old "masters of the universe" still don't understand that in this Information Age, we don't need them!  We are bypassing these old "financial hubs," as I discussed with my colleagues at the Dallas Institute's conference on "MONEY" with Scott Burns, financial editor of the Dallas Morning News.

*  We welcome key new members of our Advisory Board: Mark Finser, TBL Capital, California; John Fullerton, Level 3 Capital Advisors, LLC, New York; Ellen Brown, JD, author of Web of Debt, California, and Dr. Marc Weiss, Global Urban Development, Washington, DC.

*  You may enjoy my latest editorial, "The Politics of Economics," to be published by our partner The Schumacher Society.  Also, look for "Coming Home," a TV program on their work in Massachusetts and their famous local currency – Berkshares – which will be airing at www.ethicalmarkets.tv next week.

*  I will be speaking by videocast at the Sustainable Brands Conference, on the topic "The Economy at a Crossroads."   Judi Schweitzer of our Sustainability Research Group will also be representing us.  We can offer a 20% discount if you register here www.regonline.com/sb09 using my personal invitation code spkrptsb09.

*  The 3^rd annual EthicMark® Award for Advertising that Uplifts the Human Spirit and Society, which I founded in 2003, will be presented by Rinaldo Brutoco, president of the World Business Academy on June 2nd at the opening night banquet of the 2009 Global Forum, hosted at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management Center for Business as Agent of World Benefit in partnership with the Academy of Management and the United Nations Global Compact.

As the financial meltdown continues to take its toll on real economies, it is leading to a much-needed world wide re-think of market fundamentalism, as with the historic summit at the United Nations, The UN Conference on the Financial Crisis, June 1-3, of the G-192, i.e., all the world's nations, beyond the older clubs: the G-7, G-8 and G-20.  Stay tuned for my analyses – as well as for our new TV special "The Money Fix" for PBS stations in the Fall.

Warmest wishes,

Hazel

Will have spent two and a half days in Beijing, which, according to our guide (we will call him John) is the size of 24 Hong Kongs, has 81 McDonald's, 70 Kentucky Fried Chickens, lots of Pizza Huts, Subways and Starbucks. The permanent population is 16 million and an additional 7 million called "floaters" who are the migrant workers who do not have any social safety net.

Approaching the city from the airport, it feels as if we have landed on a new planet. Large clusters of exciting architecture designed by world-class architects is startling, innovative, and bold. There is so much new construction (not all of it good) that every time I think I have seen the final family of high-rises, I discover a new one that has sprung up on the next street.

This is a city which hasn't just grown; it has exploded and taken great risks and without a doubt, experienced "a great leap forward," a phrase coined by the Communists for an earlier time.

The virtue of one party rule, John explained, is that once the party decides to do something, it gets it done, moving full speed ahead without the cumbersome obstacle of public input or debate. That is how they prepared for the Olympics, and much of the new city was created to become the showcase to the world. The downside, of course, is that by moving so fast without the usual brakes provided by public input, they may move in the wrong direction.

The variety of the architecture here was made clear to us when we entered our hotel, oddly named The Opposite House. We can just guess that it is opposite of what one might expect. It was designed by a Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, but Chinese owned. The government owns all the land in China, but hotels and restaurants generally are privately owned, contrary to my first assumptions. Developers, government officials, and the families of government officials are the rich people. There is a market here for Lamborghinis and Ferraris, owned by the children of government officials. "Connections" are very important.

The hotel lobby is spacious and minimalist in its design. Our room is made almost entirely of bamboo, including a wooden sink and bathtub, which I had to try out. The effect is that the room smells of fresh wood and the gauzy white drapes allow a soothing light to filter through the floor to ceiling windows. The staff is everywhere, standing in the entrance and ready to respond to every request. With such a large population it is clear that restaurants and hotels employ a lot of people, most of them "floaters."

Some observations continue to surprise me. I happily discovered solar panels attached at the top of lampposts on the way to the Great Wall and some solar hot water heaters on three- or four-story houses. If they could have them everywhere (including the U.S.), think of what a difference this could make.

Good luck and bad luck seem to dominate much of daily life. In every temple and most homes, one must step over a high threshold, "to ward off evil spirits." When I received a red tassel as a gift after having bought things for my grandchildren, I was told that means "happiness forever." Two lions guard the gates of most restaurants and hotels, and of course the temples. It is their roar which keeps bad spirits away. One can distinguish the male from the female lion easily. He has his paw on a round ball, symbolizing the world. She has her paw on a cub lion, lying down.

On these hot days, the streets have been dotted with pastel colored umbrellas, some decorated with lace and sequins. The material is special to protect women against the sun. Almost all the women carry them, in part because pale skin is considered beautiful. Estee Lauder, Oil of Olay do a big business here, promising good skin, (the models are always ivory white) evidenced by the billboards and TV advertisements.

The streets of Beijing are spotless. Street cleaners in orange jackets clean the streets three times a day, according to John. The effect of the Olympics are still visible, flower lined streets and newly planted trees.

The sign in the back seat of the taxi we took to a restaurant said in both English and Chinese: "Over 3 million people ride taxis in Beijing every day. That's over 90 million a month. No wonder I am so busy!"

Our first stop Sunday morning was The Great Wall, built by soldiers and farmers during a period of 200 years from 1368–1644 to protect China from Mongolian invaders. About 25% of them died in the construction process, some because of lack of food. Often they were buried inside the wall.

The mentality behind this gargantuan undertaking is what is so striking—to conceive a project on such a grand scale—it is 3,500 miles from east to west. Fear was the motivation. Anything to keep the enemy out. And it seemed to have worked. Advanced as we think we are, we are not far removed from that concept.

We have built sections of a wall (more recently converted to a virtual wall) along the U.S. Mexican border and Israel has constructed its wall for self-defense. Only Robert Frost observed that there "is something" in us that does not like a wall.

Who do we keep in and who do we keep out?

How to describe it? It is a winding wall that goes up and down mountains, curving gracefully, forming its own calligraphy. It is high. In this section of the wall, they built a gondola lift, just like the gondolas in Stowe. We walked up and down many steps. There are watchtowers about every quarter of a mile. Each time we thought we had walked far enough, we were enticed to walk further.

The crowds were mostly Chinese and visitors from other Asian countries. Groups of tourists from the country side, some wearing all red caps, others yellow caps, crowded the wall. Families with a child, parents and grandparents were having a picnic on the wall. I heard a bit of Russian from a young threesome, some British English from a group of middle-aged women, but Westerners were a small minority. The Wall is revered by the Chinese themselves.

I was surprised to be asked to have my photo taken with one of the Chinese tourists. It happened again in the Forbidden City. I tried to figure out why. In some areas of China they still have not seen many Westerners, and probably not white haired elderly women like me.

Up on a hillside, next to the wall, some large white Chinese characters have been painted on flat rocks. It looked like graffiti. "What do they mean?" I asked our guide.

"Long Live Chairman Mao."

On the other hand, when we took the gondola back down, these words were printed on the window, "President William J. Clinton took this car down the Great Wall on June 28th, 1998." Of the 100 gondolas going up and down, we happened to catch the right one.

The Chinese proclivity to give people instructions sometimes does not translate well. While waiting for the gondola I read the notice. "No drunkard and people who are insane. No smoking, setting off firecrackers. No monkey around in cable car. Culprits should be punished."

The Great Wall is the most important site for Chinese tourists. Next on their list is the Bird's Nest built for the Olympics.

Driving to and from the wall we passed beautiful green fields and fruit orchards. Farmers were selling their produce by the roadside. The sky was blue here and the sun was out, in contrast to the city. All of this area, however, was still Beijing.

Driving to and from the Wall we had lots of time to talk. I asked about the preference for boys. I learned that 65% of the population ages one to twenty is now male. "If I want a girlfriend, I will have to come to America," our guide joked.

John talked quite freely about not believing in Maoism (he was revered like a God and his large portrait dominates Tiananmen Square), but instead he believes in capitalism, though he said he could not say that publicly. His parents were members of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. "But they have changed their thinking."

Some of the older people who were in the Red Guards are nostalgic for those days when salaries were equal and they knew what to believe in. Possibly that is why the horror stories of the Cultural Revolution have not been addressed because not everyone is willing to condemn them. It also would mean that Mao made a terrible mistake, something that is impossible for the government to admit.

But when we toured a small section of the Hu-Tong, the old Beijing of narrow streets and one-story buildings that is now a tourist attraction, we spoke to a woman in her home who talked freely about those days. She was a student of 15 when she was sent away to the countryside and was persecuted because her father had been on the wrong side when the Communists took over. "I remember those days as if they were yesterday," she said.

It is still unacceptable to talk about the Cultural Revolution and novels that have been written about it, like Wild Swans, are banned.

But John supports the Communist Party because "it has helped me improve my life. They did something for ordinary people. We live so much better." As for the student protests in Tiananmen Square—another taboo subject—he believes that some of the students were motivated by people "who wanted to conquer China."

He thinks that China may move to Democracy in 20 or 30 years, but not now. The wall that China is not capable of building is around the Internet. There was a story in The Financial Times this morning about the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party head during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. He had opposed the government crackdown and was then put under house arrest for 16 years. He secretly recorded his memoir.

I asked John if there was any mention in the Chinese press about this. He said no, but he had learned about it on the Internet.

I asked him what the most important thing was for young people today. Without hesitation he said, "To make money." At the age of 29, he already is distinguishing himself from the younger generation in their teens.

"They are just interested in going to bars, music, sex, material things. They reject things Chinese and do not even like to eat Chinese food."

Perhaps that is one explanation for why the Pub bar in our hotel was hopping, the Italian restaurant was crowded, and the Asian fusion restaurant where we ate was almost empty.

This morning we visited The Forbidden City. I had been there on two previous visits to Beijing, but the sight of this huge, beautiful palace struck me with amazement all over again. For the first time I learned that the marble terraces which lead up to the Emperor's palaces are clouds. He is the dragon above the clouds.

The fealty paid to great power, privilege, and wealth (10,000 people served the Emperor here, including 3,000 concubines) exemplified by the Forbidden City is one dramatic indicator of the plight of ordinary people. The city was forbidden to them; they could not walk through these gates or have any hope for a better life. Perhaps this was the fertile soil in which communism was able to take root.

It is impossible to draw firm conclusions about China because there are so many contradictions. There is a love of nature and a veneration of harmony, yet nature has been desecrated here ruthlessly. There is great respect for family, and yet families are being uprooted on a grand scale by migration and by relocation. There is great pride in China's great and long history, and yet it is moving into the future faster than any other country. There is political control, but entrepreneurial freedom on a scale that democracies would not permit.

One conclusion is inevitable. This is a great country, which by virtue of its population and its ambition to continue to grow and prosper will be an increasingly powerful force in the world that will affect everyone on this planet.

Addendum

This morning, before heading to the airport we had time to visit the Lama Buddhist temple known as the Yonghegong Lamasery. It was once a royal palace of count Yong and was converted to a Lama Temple in 1744. It is now both a museum (displaying some extraordinarily beautiful and impressive Buddhas) and a holy place of prayer.

One brass inscription placed before an exhibit talked about "the religious nexus connecting inland, Qinhai-Tibet, plateau and inner Mongolian Grassland of China." Another plaque boasted that the temple displays "exquisite techniques, elegant arts and rich culture connotations."

Next to one gold Buddha sign read, "all of them show you a kind of joyance from the feeling of the men who have conquered the perplexity."

Perhaps that is the point of all religions, "conquering the perplexity."

The official party line in regard to the Temple was spelled out at the first gate.

"Since the founding of the PRC (People's Republic of China), the government has attached great importance to this ancient temple and allocated large sums of money to renovate major historic site under state protection. The Yonghegong Temple has survived the Cultural Revolution from 1966–1976 thanks to Premier Zhou Enlai. In 1981 it re-opened to the public."

Is this their public response to the destruction of temples and repression in Tibet?

It may very well be, but what I had not expected was that this is a holy site for prayer. Iron incense burners were placed throughout the outside series of structures and people purchases sticks of incense, knelt on a cushioned slab before them, and bowed their heads, again and again, in prayer.

A young mother, holding her one-year-old baby, was bending him back and forth trying to teach him to pray.

Those praying were mostly young, and predominantly women. As they knelt, their shoes formed a row of every type of heel, from stiletto, to sneaker, to sandal.

Children accompanied aged grandparents, one couple carrying their aged grandmother up the steps. But most of those praying were young and Chinese.

Another mystery. On one hand, China is notoriously known for suppressing religion, but here at the Lama Temple, it is freely expressed. I have only begun to understand this country.

This was originally posted at Chelsea Green.

Madeleine M. Kunin is the former Governor of Vermont and was the state's first woman governor. She served as Ambassador to Switzerland for President Clinton, and was on the three-person panel that chose Al Gore to be Clinton's VP. She is the author of Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead from Chelsea Green Publishing.

Past winners have included Alberto Mora, then the general counsel of the United States Navy, who blew the whistle on unlawful interrogation practices on detainees at Guantanamo Bay (the 2006 winner); and Doris Voitier, school superintendent in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana (2007) who did whatever it took to reopen public schools in her district in the face of federal and state bureaucratic indifference and hostility after Hurricane Katrina.

You get the idea. Another honoree was Viktor Yushchenko (2005), who narrowly survived a Russian-backed chemical assassination attempt that left him disfigured, to become the democratically elected president of Ukraine.

Two of the three laureates for 2009, who are being honored at a ceremony May 18, are, fittingly enough, Sheila Bair and Brooksley Born, two public servants, one still in office, whose courage has embarrassed three administrations including the incumbent one. The Kennedy Library deserves its own profile in courage award for providing the exclamation point.

Bair, a Republican appointed by George W. Bush, chairs the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She has been an opponent of many aspects of the Paulson-Geithner financial bail-out program, and a supporter of a more direct approach to rescuing distressed mortgages and failed banks. The FDIC is more independent than most bank regulatory agencies, partly because its own insurance funds are at risk when a bank fails and partly because its appointees serve for fixed terms. Bair's term expires in 2011.

When Timothy Geithner, who had been crossing swords with Bair in his previous job as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, became Obama's Treasury Secretary, Geithner reportedly sought to get Bair fired, according to credible accounts in the financial press.

He described her as not a good team player. But Bair's allies, who include her many fans on Capitol Hill, pointedly asked, exactly which team was that? The team Bair had been challenging was team Bush, including Republican Treasury Hank Paulson, Geithner's predecessor.

Today, Bair sits with President Obama, Geithner, Larry Summers, and the other senior economic officials debating the financial rescue. Obama has invoked Doris Goodwin's Team of Rivals as his model of how to seek a wide range of voices. But on economic matters, Sheila Bair is often the sole voice of dissent at the grown-ups' table. As such, she has had to walk a very delicate line offering different views without seeming disloyal.

How did a Republican come to embrace policies that are less captive to Wall Street and more supportive of public solutions? Bair is a Kansas Republican, who came to Washington with then Senator Bob Dole, and served as his senior staffer on the Senate Finance Committee. In an echo of the populist revolt, Kansas bankers complain that the bailout favors Wall Street over Main Street. On this score, there is nothing at all the matter with Kansas.

Bair's Profile in Courage citation reads:

"Sheila Bair has been called a "lone voice in the wilderness" for her early warnings about the sub-prime lending crisis and for her dogged criticism of both Wall Street's and the government's management of the subsequent financial meltdown. As early as 2001, Bair was urging sub-prime lenders to agree on a set of best practices to prevent abuses. Since the onset of the current crisis, she, more than any other government official, has pushed for direct assistance to distressed homeowners as part of the overall effort to stabilize the financial system, a move fiercely resisted by many leaders in both the public and the private sectors. Recently, however, the government has begun to implement many of her mortgage-modification proposals in an effort to slow the alarming increase in foreclosures."

Bair's co-honoree is another lonely voice of early warning in the current financial collapse. As President Clinton's chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born began raising warning that customized derivatives not traded on exchanges were a financial time bomb. Nobody knew how much risk their underwriters were taking, and there was no "price discovery" as there is on an open financial exchange where traders set prices minute to minute. Born distributed for comment a proposed regulation that would have required greater supervision of these so called over-the-counter derivatives. This was back in 1997, a full decade before the meltdown. She warned in congressional testimony that unmonitored trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." This, of course, is precisely what occurred with AIG and its writing of trillions of dollars of credit default swaps backed by no reserves.

For her prescience, Born was excoriated by Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, as well as by the Clinton sub-cabinet official who has been nominated to chair the same CFTC, Gary Gensler, former Treasury Undersecretary. They directed her to stop making noises about regulating derivatives on grounds that this could destabilize markets. But Rubin, Summers and company did not just pressure Born, who eventually left office in 1999. Rubin, Greenspan and then SEC chair Arthur Levitt, Jr. expressly requested Congress to prevent Ms. Born from issuing such regulations. And in 2000, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed through legislation not only shackling the CFTC when it came to derivatives regulation but also exempting energy trades as a favor to Enron.

Born's Profile in Courage citation reads:

"In 1998, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Brooksley Born unsuccessfully tried to bring over-the-counter financial derivatives under the regulatory control of the CFTC. The government's failure to regulate such financial deals has been widely criticized as one of the causes of the current financial crisis. In the booming economic climate of the 1990's, Born battled other regulators in the Clinton Administration, skeptical members of Congress and lobbyists over the regulation of derivatives, warning that unregulated financial contracts such as credit default swaps could pose grave dangers to the economy. Her efforts brought fierce opposition from Wall Street and from Administration officials who believed deregulation was essential to the extraordinary economic growth that was then in full bloom. Her adversaries eventually passed legislation prohibiting the CFTC from any oversight of financial derivatives during her term. She stepped down from the CFTC in 1999 and returned to a distinguished career in public interest law."

This past week, Treasury Secretary Geithner announced proposed legislation that would impose ground rules on derivatives through private clearing houses.

But Geithner's plan still would not go as far as what Brooksley Born proposed long before the extent of the abuses became a full-blown catastrophe. Well placed sources have told me that Summers and Geithner embraced partial reform largely because two other brave public officials have been asking very tough questions of Treasury nominees at confirmation hearings and have threatened to block Senate action on them. These are Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Maria Cantwell of Washington State. Perhaps they will be next year's Profiles in Courage winners.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a Senior Fellow at Demos www.demos.org. His best-selling book is "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency."

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

We have been tourists for the last two days, traveling from Guangzhou to Xi-an, site of the capital of China for 1,300 years for 13 dynasties and known as the city of Kings and Emperors.

Crowded two and a half hour flight; we were the only Westerners on board.

Tourism has grown tremendously here since the discovery of the Terra-Cotta soldiers, in 1974 (the site was opened in 1979). Whatever photographs one may have seen of this site, they cannot convey the enormous scope of this terra-cotta army, which was constructed between 2221 and 2006 BC. Pit #1 is the size of two football fields. At one end, there are rows of reconstructed soldiers, some as high as eight feet, (averaging 6–7 feet) divided by clay barriers. Behind them are the remains of broken soldiers, and behind them are the covered soldiers, not yet unearthed. All the soldiers, chariots and horses were destroyed when a marauding army of angry farmers, tired of being taxed, rebelled against the Emperor and burned the wooden roof, which covered the army. The roof collapsed breaking everything into millions of pieces. It is expected that 6,000 pottery soldiers and horses will eventually be unearthed there. This is a real army, with weapons, officers, and guards—ready for battle. The Emperor wanted to be sure that he would be fully prepared to remain victorious in the afterlife.

The soldiers were discovered by a farmer who was digging a deep well during a drought and came upon some fragments. He immediately reported his discovery to the government (legend had it that a curse would fall on anyone who revealed this site) who treats him like a national monument. He is now 80 years old and can not read or write, but learned to write his name and shows up at the site from time to time. We were lucky enough to meet him and he signed his name in the souvenir book, an unassuming, quiet man. The sign next to him said, "no photos."

What to make of this eighth wonder of the world?

Emperor Qin may have been the first, but not the last to create a huge military-industrial complex. Some 7,000 workers and craftsmen labored for 37 years to build this huge construction site which contains two other pits and an untouched mausoleum which looks like a mountain—all for the afterlife.

Farmers paid an 80% tax and each family had to provide a man to work for to the Emperor. No wonder they rebelled. The Emperor was an egomaniac, so much so that he searched for a magical elixir to enable him to live forever. Unfortunately, he thought he discovered it—a blend of mercury, gold and jade dust. It killed him at the age of 50 while he was touring his kingdom. He is credited with uniting China with a single alphabet and currency.

The effect of entering this archeological site is magical. The figures, each one with a different facial expression, come to life. Every detail of their armor, shoelaces, hairstyles, and scarves is cast and carved with perfect detail. Those who are still partially buried seem to be waking up from a long dream, their heads rising from the clay blanket in which they seem to be wrapped. The bodies of the warriors and horse were cast, but the heads were chiseled and added last. The models were thought to be their fellow workers. Some have wry smiles, others are proud; none look afraid. The archers, both standing and sitting, are caught in mid-motion, ready to release their crossbows. They were originally painted in bright colors, but even now, in their light brown clay (unique in China, taken from a river-bed) they seem alive, monumental and powerful.

Such a crazy idea, to put all that wealth and energy into a tomb for the afterlife, and yet, that idea is now a gargantuan work of art that gives us a clue of a civilization that existed almost 5,000 years ago.

China, which has been so quick to tear down the old and build up the new, no matter what the social or environmental cost, recognized this treasure for what it is—a link to a great past. There are a series of photographs of world leaders who have visited the site, including Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, who came here in 1998. They were given the privilege of entering the pit and standing between the soldiers. Entry is usually restricted to archeologists who painstakingly search for each tiny shard to put it in the right place. The result is, ironically, an afterlife, if not for the Emperor, then for the soldiers themselves.

Our next stop was to a Moslem neighborhood and a revered Mosque, which looked more Chinese than Muslim. I had not expected to see this blend of the ancient Arab world and Chinese cultures here. To get there we went through narrow streets lined with a bustling market, women in head scarves turning large walnuts in a round metal pot with salt to increase the flavor, sticky rice sold from push carts, leeche nuts, dates, pyramids of ripe fruit, and all sorts of kites made a pattern of beautiful colors.

As we wended our way to the mosque, parts of which go back to the opening of the Silk Road, men wearing white round hats were leaving from prayer. Moslems form the biggest minority population in China and they seem to have religious freedom. Only Moslems could go inside the prayer hall, which looked just like a typical ancient Chinese building except for an Arabic sign over the door, and which can hold 700 people. We just caught a glimpse of the brightly colored prayer rugs lining the floor.

Our next stop was the Xi-an museum and the Big Wild Goose pagoda, surrounded by a peaceful garden and filled with sweet smells, a refuge from the smog filled city. Xi-an, unlike Guangzhou, has preserved some of its character—there are two cities, one inside the wall and the other outside. The inner city has made an effort at historic preservation requiring that buildings inside the wall retain a Chinese character. The extent of building outside the wall was only made clear to me when we went to the airport and saw a new "high technology" center that had sprung up just a few years ago—one high-rise after another—apartment buildings and offices seemed to multiply like tall rabbits.

The extent of pollution is evident here as well. I thought it might be better in this part of China—if it is, the difference is barely noticeable—no stars.

Paul Krugman’s visit to China, which coincided with ours, focused on the rapid increase in green house gas emissions here and the disastrous consequences. China is not likely to change its policy soon. Four hundred new cars are registered every day in Xi-an, a city of 8 million, our guide told us. Yesterday’s headline in the English language China Daily read, "China Stance on Climate Talks Firm, Nation urges rich countries to cut gas emission by up to 40%."

Discouraging news. China claims it is a developing nation and has the right to continue to develop full speed ahead. This is the position they are taking to the UN Conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December. How they can be blind to the destruction this is causing is hard to understand.

The paper today announced a visit by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in June. Describing Chinese-American relations, the heading read, "Two grasshoppers by one string."

Interesting what stories make it into the Chinese press. Three columns, half a page long, were filled with a picture of President Obama giving a diploma to a blond graduate at Arizona State with the full story about how the university did not think he had yet completed a body of work.

Lunch was a special treat; an imperial dumpling banquet. Amazing small dumplings, some shaped like chickens, some like flowers, and one delicious one in the shape of a walnut, filled with sweet chopped nuts. They were works of art for the eye and the palate.

It will be hard to go to a Chinese restaurant in the US after tasting the food here. Lots of fresh vegetables, intricately spiced flavors, all delicate and delicious. Our guide told us that southern Chinese food is different from northern, where we are now.

She said with distaste that it is known in southern China, they eat everything with four legs, except the table and chairs. "We never eat cats and dogs," she said.

The Chinese are superstitious—mostly about luck, happiness, death, and fortune. There is no fourteenth floor in buildings. Instead in our hotel there was a floor marked 13A. Four is an unlucky number because it sounds like death. The best number is 8, which means big fortune, 6 means happiness and 9 longevity.

Our Xi-an guide told us we were going to modern China by going to Beijing. Modern is just five to six hundred years ago.

Xi-an, on the other hand, is 5,000 years old. We were reminded of its age when we went to the Xi-an Forest of Stone museum "which is like a book" and holds several thousand stone tablets, going back to Confucius. Our guide told us several times that the Chinese do not revere him because of his religion but as a philosopher.

The final stop before lunch and the ride to the airport was at a jade museum. Xi-an is known for its special jade from the riverbed. Jade has been valued for thousands of years, it is the connection between God and nature, water and mountains, and helps "keep away evil," the museum guide told us. It seems we believed him because my husband bought me a beautiful translucent jade bracelet.

Madeleine M. Kunin is the former Governor of Vermont and was the state's first woman governor. She served as Ambassador to Switzerland for President Clinton, and was on the three-person panel that chose Al Gore to be Clinton’s VP. She is the author of Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead from Chelsea Green Publishing.

And while we're at it, let's not talk about climate change, environmentalism or being socially responsible. Instead, let's talk about efficiency and reflecting the true cost of our lifestyle choices in our product prices. This is the surest way to move our society toward a sustainable future.

We are approaching the eye of the needle when smarter companies realize that we are running out of cheap resources and the cost of raw materials will only go higher. The recent run-up and subsequent decline in gasoline prices is indicative of a worldwide trend in higher raw material costs. Given increased population, increased demand from developing countries and a finite planet, this should come as no surprise to anyone — even climate change deniers.

At the same time, budget-starved governments are increasingly reluctant to subsidize the inefficiencies, waste and toxic byproducts of business, like carbon that will inevitably become a cost of production and will ultimately be reflected in higher consumer prices. In fact, wherever we see huge corporations, we are likely to see huge subsidies and deferred costs.

Why is it that government foots most of the bill to clean up rivers, estuaries and Superfund sites, problems caused by business? Why should government subsidize the oil industry — or the nuclear industry? Why doesn't the price of a nuclear-generated kilowatt-hour reflect the 100-plus years needed to decommission a plant, or to bury the spent fuel, or to properly insure lives and property in the event of accident? Why don't we see the health costs of burning coal reflected in that industry's energy prices? Why isn't the cost of recycling plastic bottles or pulling them out of the ocean built into the price of a Coke? Why should giant agribusiness receive farm subsidies designed for smaller family farms while evading the medical costs associated with modern eating habits they promote?

Conservatives and some pro-business groups howl when any change to promote green business practices gets floated, but why should elected officials support corporate socialism when they won't support civic socialism? Why should taxpayers support dinosaur industries when those subsidies could be used to seed new, more efficient and healthier ones? Why should a kilowatt-hour of clean wind energy cost more than one that comes from dirty coal, when the difference is hidden in deferred cost and subsidies?

Environmentalism and climate change is a convenient whipping boy for those intent on protecting vested interests. However, if the subject is changed to address efficiency and the elimination of subsidies to inefficient businesses, we have a new dialog based on price.

In this environment, companies that rapidly move toward more efficient models (call it greening if you like) will survive. Those that don't won't.

Richard Seireeni is president of The Brand Architect Group, Los Angeles, a strategic brand consultancy with affiliated offices in Tokyo and Shanghai. Richard Seireeni is the author of The Gort Cloud, a new book that describes the invisible network that is powering today's most successful green brands, published by Chelsea Green Publishing.

This article was originally published on GreenBiz.com.

Soddy used the example of the steam engine and what makes a railroad train go. "In one sense or another the credit for the achievement may be claimed by the so-called engine-driver, the guard, the signalman, the manager, the capitalist, or the shareholder – or, again, by the scientific pioneers who discovered the nature of fire, by the inventors who harnessed it, by Labor, which built the railway and the train. The fact remains that all of them by their united efforts could not drive the train. The real engine-driver is the coal. So, in the present state of science, the answer to the question how men live, or how anything lives …, is with few and unimportant exceptions, BY SUNSHINE." (Cartesian Economics, Henderson, London 1922).

In 1971, Romanian scientist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen re-told Soddy's lesson to the current generation of economists in his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Harvard University Press), which I reviewed in the Harvard Business Review in 1971. I had speculated on why economists had ignored both Soddy and Georgescu-Roegen. In handwritten letters to me, Georgescu-Roegen lamented that it was probably impossible for economists to counter his or Soddy's arguments since they destroyed all the core theories of economics. My own experience of the politics of economics, encountered during my service on the Technology Assessment Advisory Council of the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment from 1974 until 1980, led me to agree with Georgescu-Roegen. We shared our frustrations with the economics establishment and their dismissals of critics from other disciplines. Economists had converged on Washington, London and policy-making processes following mathematician John Maynard Keynes and his stimulus recipes for pulling the USA out of the Great Depression used by FDR in the 1930s. Economics with its promises to "manage" whole economies to create full employment colonized national policies in most industrial countries. Even Richard Nixon famously proclaimed "We are all Keynesians now" (New York Times, January 4, 1971).

Yet all was not well. Keynesian pump-priming also led to inflation and the new disease "stagflation" which helped unseat Jimmy Carter, along with OPEC's reminder to the world of the realities of energy-dependent industrial societies. I covered these issues in the British journal Resurgence, edited by Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk from India. Satish insisted that I meet another of his writers, E. F. Schumacher, who in 1973 authored Small is Beautiful. Schumacher and I became friends and I, with Robert Swann (who later founded the Schumacher Society) and Ian Baldwin (who later founded Chelsea Green Publishers), arranged for Schumacher's first lecture tour in the USA. We shared many platforms together, urging economists to look at the realities of energy and environmental dependence of industrial societies. While President Carter and many Senators met with Schumacher and I was invited to testify before many Congressional committees, neither of us could pierce the inner sanctums of the by-then powerful economics profession. Schumacher wrote the forward to my Creating Alternative Futures: the End of Economics (1978), yet both of us were banned from lecturing by the economics departments of most universities.

Meanwhile, the embittered Georgescu-Roegen, then teaching at Vanderbilt University, had nurtured a brilliant student, Herman Daly, who was teaching at the University of Louisiana at Baton Rouge. Herman and I corresponded frequently about impervious economists who simply refused to debate the new challenges to their profession posed by energy and environmental issues.

My views that these issues, described so well by Soddy and Georgescu-Roegen, had rung the death knell for economics made me a pariah, together with my activism with Ralph Nader in the 1968 campaign to Make General Motors Responsible. While students paid me to lecture in their campus-wide events and made my Creating Alternative Futures into an underground bestseller, many of their professors removed it from college libraries.

While I wrote about the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report and criss-crossed the country lecturing on "The Bankruptcy of Economics," and the idiocies of measuring progress by the Gross National Product (GNP), my friend Herman Daly chose to do his missionary work at the World Bank. We connected with our friend Lester Brown, and I joined his board at the Worldwatch Institute in 1975 and served until 2001 when Lester left to found the Earth Policy Institute. Herman Daly became disenchanted with trying to influence World Bank economists and now teaches in the political science department of the University of Maryland. I continued my crusade to correct GNP and include indicators on health, education, poverty gaps and environment. I launched with the Calvert Group, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators in 2000 (updated at www.calvert-henderson.com), and co-organized the European Parliament's "Beyond GDP" conference in 2007 (www.beyond-gdp.eu).

Fast forward to the economic woes of 2008 still plaguing us today, which I had been forecasting in my editorials for InterPress Service since the late 1980s. Economists, whose narrow profit-maximizing models and misuse of mathematics had informed a generation of MBAs and aspiring hedge fund managers, are still in the saddle. They colonized the Obama administration, with Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and legions of Goldman Sachs alumni still calling the shots in favor of their Wall Street friends. Finance and its oligarchs could never have trumped governments and run their global casino without the ideological justifications provided by economic textbooks and their scientific pretensions.

De-frocking the economics priesthood has become easier since the financial collapse. Many scientists have joined in my crusade with Peter Nobel (grandson of Alfred Nobel) to have the Nobel Committee delink the Bank of Sweden's Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel, from the real Nobel Prize. Lawyer Peter Nobel accuses the Bank of Sweden of infringing on Nobel's intellectual property. Many winners in mathematics and other sciences joined this effort to separate this prize in economics from the real Nobels, along with mathematicians, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan; chaos theorist, Ralph Abraham; historian of science Robert Nadeau and others.

Will we see economics demoted and revealed simply as a profession along with lawyers, advocating their policies honestly? This would be the best news from the financial collapse. With Wall Street in disgrace and the spectacle on TV of central banks printing money, we are all learning that money, a useful invention of the human mind, is not wealth. Real wealth is in human talents, wisdom and understanding of the priceless assets and ecological capital of our living planet. Ethical markets and higher morality have become pragmatic.

Hazel Henderson is author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and a Fellow of the Britain's Royal Society for the Arts.

In any case, today is Bike-to-Work Day, the final day of Bike-to-Work week—part of the larger National Bike Month, created by the League of American Bicyclists in 1956.

Did you bike to work today?

Here in White River Junction, it's a beautiful, sunny 64° outside, with a mild breeze and a high of 75° this afternoon. In other words, the perfect day to bike to work—and I have the perfect excuse: National Bike-to-Work Day!

Um…but I forgot. Oops!

Luckily, I live only 4 minutes away by car, so my carbon footprint isn't that bad…. Still, I can't help feeling a twinge of guilt.

Tell you what, Earth: I'll bike in to work every day next week. And every day after that, too (weather permitting). Consider this my official Bike-to-Work pledge, good for the rest of spring, all of summer, and at least half of autumn. I'll call it my personal carbon offset, to make up for all that winter driving.

Deal?