Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Makana
As the protest movement takes root, one of the things I’ve been wondering is: Where is the protest music? The 1930s had its Woody Guthrie. The 1960s had its Bob Dylan.
Well, here it comes. I understand that he ambushed President Obama with this song at a summit meeting in Hawaii on Nov. 12.
Ken has an article at Salon on Occupy Wall Street…
I believe that today is Day 5 for Ken at Occupy Wall Street. He sent this photo today from Zuccotti Park (which the occupiers call Liberty Plaza). I don’t think Ken has his laptop with him at Liberty Plaza, so not being wired has delayed his ability to post on his blog and process his photos. But I’m hoping he’ll have a proper blog post soon on Occupy Wall Street.
Update: Ken put up a post today on Friday’s march on Harlem.
The Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh, North Carolina. It was partly financed with taxpayer debt.
When taxpayer money becomes entangled with private, for-profit ventures, there is one thing you can always be sure of: Profits will be privatized, and costs will be socialized. This $3.7 billion boondoggle is a provincial North Carolina tale, but there are lessons in it for everyone, no matter where you live.
First of all, put on your thinking cap and read this lazy-ass dispatch from an Associated Press Raleigh reporter that appeared in today’s lazy-ass Raleigh News and Observer:
NC lawmakers look at steep power bills, city debt
Keep in mind that I spent my career in the newspaper business, with time in the provinces as well as the big city. This story has all the features of lazy-ass reporting by lazy-ass third-string reporters in lazy-ass backwaters of the MSM such as the Associated Press Raleigh bureau.
You’ve got your obligatory lazy-ass anecdotal “lead” with an emotional hook which is supposed to bring the story home to the reader: This poor woman has a $450 power bill!
You get to the gist of story in paragraph 5: Certain North Carolina towns owe billions in debt, and it seems to have something to do with electricity. What’s going on here?
Then you get the propagandized explanation from sources with undisclosed conflicts of interest. The question of how it came to pass that a bunch of North Carolina towns still owe $3.7 billion in debt for something having to do with electricity is largely left unanswered, except to make the propaganda point that it all had to do with government regulation (what else?) and unforeseeable events such as lower coal prices:
“Things went awry. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania led to new nuclear plant requirements and cost overruns. CP&L’s Shearon Harris plant in Wake County – the eastern agency took a 16 percent share in the plant – ended up costing $3.9 billion, or twice the original estimate. Declining fossil fuel prices and declining inflation exacerbated the risks of the strategy, leading to more borrowing. The debt peaked at $6.5 billion.”
What really happened?
Back in the 1970s, North Carolina power companies wanted to build new generators, including the Shearon Harris nuclear plant. But interest rates were high back then. The country had just been through an energy shortage. There had been lines at gas pumps. Well-off people had installed tanks at home to hoard gasoline. Power company executives had a brilliant idea. The cheapest way to borrow money was with municipal debt. How might private power companies use municipal debt to build power plants? Politicians were happy to cooperate, and 51 towns in North Carolina fell for the plan. The towns would issue 30-year bonds for which the towns’ taxpayers were responsible, and in exchange the towns would be able to count on getting lots of cheap electricity, because they’d be part-owners of the power plants.
This was around 30 years ago, so those old bonds should be paid off by now. But during the 1980s and later, when interest rates were lower, the bonds were refinanced at lower interest rates. The old bonds were retired, and new 30-year bonds were issued. The new bonds won’t be paid off until 2026. The towns did not use all the new bond money to pay off the old bonds. Instead, the towns spent the money on all sorts of other things, including — you guessed it — lower tax rates. Does it sound familiar? Spend borrowed money and let the good times roll!
The Associated Press piece says that debt peaked at $6.5 billion. I assume that figure is accurate. But the Shearon Harris plant’s total cost was $3.9 billion. I know that these cities made other “investments” in power plants, but so far I’ve been unable to figure out where $6.5 billion went. Perhaps some of the $6.5 billion was interest accrued on the original borrowings. I don’t know.
And now, of course, the $3.7 billion in remaining debt greatly exceeds the value of the towns’ investments in power plants. Paying off the bonds is pushing up electric rates in the towns, and the high electric rates have become a drag on economic growth, because businesses move to places with lower rates. The good times are not rolling anymore — unless a bailout can be arranged.
Now North Carolina’s Republican legislature is pondering what to do about this. The proposals all come down to the same thing — making everyone in North Carolina pay for the bonds. It could be done directly, by just shifting responsibility for the bonds to North Carolina taxpayers. Or it could be done indirectly, by making the power companies responsible for the bonds and letting the power companies pay off the bonds with rate increases. If I bet on the outcome, I’d bet on a plan that gives the power companies full ownership of the plants while making all the state’s taxpayers pay for the bonds.
And here’s the lazy-ass reporter’s last paragraph, a quote from the mayor of New Bern:
“We’re not asking for a bailout here,” Bettis said. “We’re asking for a level playing field.”
So this is not only a case study in a public-private boondoggle, it’s also a case study in how lazy-ass newspapers and their lazy-ass reporters help to deceive the many for the benefit of the few.
This boondoggle and this bailout will be like every other boondoggle and bailout after you cut through the propaganda and disguised agendas: The good times roll, for a while, for the few; this leads to a “crisis”; and the many get stuck with the bill.
Steve Jobs’ high school photo
Arrested at the Wall Street protests
Old people can be so dumb.
Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement, 2005:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Back in May when I wrote the “Got a revolution” post, I was in almost a state of despair at the passivity and invisibility of today’s young people as our democracy and our economy are stolen out from under us by our political and corporate elite. How could they — for a timely example — be flocking to Apple stores and building entire lifestyles around their technology, while failing to grasp the message that Steve Jobs, a heretic and a visionary, was trying to put across to them. Could today’s young Americans really be as stupid and deluded by propaganda as today’s older Americans (see Medicare sign, above).
How ironic, that Steve Jobs, one of the greatest free spirits of our time, the son of an Arab father, a rabble rouser, became CEO of the biggest corporation in America. Does that change my views of corporations? No. It just reminds us what corporations ought to be, and what corporations ought to do: Bring good things to people at prices they can afford, don’t prey on your customers, beat your competitors by being better rather than seeking a monopoly like Microsoft, and leave government to the people.
Steve Jobs was a philosopher. He was a Martin Luther. He was a Martin Luther King. I hope he is remembered for a long, long time.
And finally, as the Wall Street protests show, our young people are waking up. They know who is eating their lunch. They know who is lying to them.
They also are wired.
The stage is set, I’m afraid, for unfolding events to slowly work out an extremely important historical question. Will technology enslave the people — top down, through surveillance, snooping, the commoditization of personal information, and 24/7 propaganda? Or will technology liberate the people, bottom up?
Our young people will decide. As of today, with young people in the streets, I am optimistic.
I’m also reminded of words by my friend Rob Morse, in his column in the San Francisco Examiner, on the death of Herb Caen, the venerable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle whose death left San Franciscans almost traumatized.
“We’re on our own now,” Morse wrote.
The Irish Times
There are two dangers in not owning a farm: the belief that heat comes from the furnace and food comes from the supermarket. — Aldo Leopold
The Irish Times started a three-part series today on how family farms are making a comeback in Ireland’s depressed economy. In fact, farming is one of the most promising areas of the economy. Young people now see farming as an option. This, of course, is relocalization — a return to the land after people saw what the globalization of the economy got them.
What puzzles me is why that doesn’t seem to be happening here. Compare the story from the Irish Times with the link I posted yesterday to a New Yorker story about economic deterioration in Surry County, North Carolina, the county just to the west of Stokes County, where I live. Young people continue to move away, both in Surry and Stokes, while many old family farms sit more or less intact, but fallow. All too many family farms, however, have been chopped up into subdivisions during the past few decades, if they were near a population center or a main road.
I am speculating, because I don’t have nearly enough information to make such a judgment, but it is as though most people here are at an earlier stage in a process. They have perceived the downsides of the boom and bust and waste brought to us by globalization. But they’re not yet thinking much about what they could do, largely by themselves, with the resources that are close around them. I don’t know if it’s the truth or an urban legend, but one regularly hears that some children don’t know that French fries comes from potatoes. If that’s true, then the cultural connection to the land has been completely severed. Not to mention that education has failed. Maybe things never went that far in Ireland.
Pumpkin vines in 99-degree heat
I haven’t posted lately because I’ve constantly been in a foul and angry mood. I’m afraid my mood is not going to get any better until it rains and the weather turns cooler. And of course it’s not just me made miserable by the weather. This heat wave is affecting something like two-thirds of the country. Thousands and thousands of acres of crops and growing things are being scorched.
Every summer has been like this since I moved here from California in 2008. I’ve been going over the nearest local data from the National Weather Service. In June, July and August, daily high temperatures have been substantially above normal almost 75 percent of the time. I don’t even know how normal is defined anymore, since we’re almost always above normal. Scorching summers are the new normal. That’s clear.
With a practical, data-hungry and reality-modeling mind like mine, what can I make of this? For one, I’ve had to consider the possibility that I simply bought land in the wrong place. I was years behind the curve in understanding just how much the climate has changed. I’ve realized that, not only am I not living in the North Carolina of my childhood, I’m not even living in the North Carolina that I left when I moved to California 20 years ago. This land, which fed generations of people including my ancestors, is now no longer capable of supporting a summer garden without irrigation. I can’t explain how awful it is to face that fact. Sir Walter Raleigh’s men, surveying inland North Carolina in 1585, called it “the goodliest soile under the cope of heaven.” Now it would be dangerous to live here (as in most places) without the cheap energy that makes modern agriculture and long-distance food-hauling possible. If people were smart enough to understand this and let it sink in, I’m sure they would panic. Most people assume that the grocery stores will always be there for them, and that food will always be cheap. My practical, data-hungry, reality-modeling mind knows better than that.
But where could one go where a tiny farm can still operate the way they used to operate? I took a trip last week up to the mountains, westward toward the Tennessee line, where temperatures are lower and there is a bit more summer rainfall. The altitude varies from about 2,400 to 3,500 feet. They do indeed have thriving gardens and beautiful fields of cabbage up there. But to move now is not practical for me, and there are many downsides. There are even some compensations. For example, the growing season is longer here. Less energy is required to get through winter. And the hillbilly culture in those places makes Stokes County seem sophisticated. No, I’ve got to rethink some things and make some changes at Acorn Abbey.
As part of that thinking process, I read Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, hoping that the book might contain some specific, practical ideas for adapting. But I was disappointed. This is not necessarily a criticism of the book, because the book does make it quite clear that there is no single answer and no single strategy for adaptation. As we relocalize and adapt to climate change, we must each relocalize according to our own locations, our local resources and our local problems.
Before I made the decision to move back to North Carolina, I did check the climate models for this area. They showed (and still show) a slight increase of 2 to 3 inches in annual rainfall, in addition to higher temperatures. But what I failed to understand is that water evaporates from the soil much more quickly in high heat. The equations for water loss from the soil are differential equations that look as complicated as the equations for launching a spacecraft toward Mars. I don’t understand the equations, but one thing has become obvious: The soil dries up much more quickly in a run of 98-degree weather than in a run of 88-degree weather. It’s that fact more than any other that has made the summer garden so difficult. I think that’s why people in the mountains north and west of here can still garden in the summer. It’s cooler there, just as it used to be cooler here.
One thing that’s clear is that, next year, I must irrigate. As I’ve said before, I am opposed on principle to irrigating with well water. Well water is simply too precious to be pumped out and used for irrigation. That’s what rain is for. My steep roof is not suited to gutters. Snow avalanches would rip the gutters off. The most practical plan I can come up with is to buy one of those 275-gallon tanks in aluminum frames that are used for shipping industrial liquids. They sell for $100 or less. I’ll buy a gasoline powered water pump from Harbor Freight, about $150. The tank will fit on my utility trailer, and, using the Jeep, I can take the tank down to the stream and fill it up. Then I can park the tank and trailer above the garden and attach a hose to drip-type fixtures in the garden. I also plan to get a local grading guy over and see if there’s a spot where I could make a very small pond. However, I don’t think that’s likely to work.
In any case, this year’s garden is now in salvage mode. The tomato crop, which should have been extensive with more than 30 tomato plants, was very poor. The plants were constantly water stressed, which led to bottom rot. I got small, tasteless tomatoes instead of plump, juicy ones. The tomatoes were simply starved for water and for the nutrients that come up from the roots with the water. The squash dried up and died almost two weeks ago. The peppers barely produced. The corn did fairly well. I had some decent green beans. The cucumber crop was excellent. I may get a couple of pumpkins and one or two watermelons and canteloupes if there’s any rain within the next few days. I’ll have to say this, though. Even with the miserable, dry weather, I don’t think I’ve spent more than $15 on produce in the last three months — some garlic, two or three avocados, a couple of canteloupes. The garden has fed me well and saved me money. But there was not nearly enough of anything to freeze or can.
For those of you who may be reading this blog because you’re planning projects similar to my Acorn Abbey project, I’d urge you to put a lot of thought into your sources of water. It also takes a few years to get your gardening skill — and your soil — up to speed. Even if one had enough land and enough help, I think it would take years to learn what one needs to know to truly become self-supporting. But every little bit helps.
Chioggia beets, kale, abbey bread
When you try to live close to the earth, you’ve got to eat what you’ve got. I had hoped to stretch out the spring crops rather than harvesting them all at once, but the hot, dry weather has forced me to do otherwise. Still, I count my blessings. I haven’t eaten grocery store produce, other than a couple of squash from Whole Foods, in several weeks. I’ve been living off the garden.
When I bought beet seeds, I didn’t know that I was buying chioggia beets. When I realized what I had, I was a bit disappointed. After all, what’s the point of a beet that isn’t blood red? But I’ve found that the chioggia beets are delicious, and I’m not getting tired of them. It seems they’re a new “in” food. Sunset magazine put chioggia beets on a top 10 list of healthy foods.
Yes, I do eat protein foods. I’ve been having the vegetables with vegan pimento cheese. I made a batch that has lasted me for days. When Ken was here, dishes didn’t last as long, and leftovers were rare. Now, with no one to cook for but myself, leftovers are a daily thing.
We people of the grocery store era don’t realize how unnatural it is — or at least how environmentally costly it is — to have such a variety of foods available at any given time. Our ancestors had to eat what was available. When cabbage was plentiful, you ate cabbage, no matter how strong a craving you might have for tomatoes, which you might get later in the season if you were lucky.
Archeologists have shown that, though the Celtic people of the British Isles (my ancestors) ate meat, it was not something they had year round. They mostly ate meat in the late fall, when they thinned the herds that they couldn’t afford to keep over winter.
Yet, we’re not completely without some economic discipline in these matters. Whatever is in season and plentiful will usually be the cheapest. You can have blueberries from Chile, but they won’t be cheap.
As for me, if the beets have to be pulled and the kale has to be cut, that’s what I’ll eat. I’m still trying to figure how how to use all the celery. And today I cut a beautiful cauliflower that I’ll roast tomorrow.
Jefferson Airplane, Woodstock 1969: Got to Revolution
I am dumbfounded at the passivity of today’s young people, particularly recent college graduates. If they got any education at all for the money they spent on a college education, then they ought to be able to see that they are among the designated losers in an already almost-lost class war being waged by the corporate and political elite against the people of America.
My generation would never have put up with it. Even if we lost the struggle, we’d be in the streets raising raising hell and having a good time at it. To quote Jefferson Airplane from the song they sang at Woodstock in 1969:
Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Hey I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution got to revolution
One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey now it’s time for you and me
Got a revolution got to revolution
Come on now we’re marching to the sea
got a revolution got to revolution
Who will take it from you
We will and who are we
We are volunteers of america
The statistics are appalling. Surveys show that 85 percent of this year’s college graduates will be forced to move back home with their parents. Their average student debt is $27,200. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that at least half of college-educated people under age 25 are unemployed or working for low wages in dead-end jobs such as bartending. A survey showed that 71 percent of recent college graduates wish they’d done something differently while they were in school to better prepare for the job market. In other words, they’re blaming themselves.
I already detect that some young readers are about to click the comment button and say that this is a generational problem: That my generation, which grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, got all selfish and self-indulgent as we aged, in spite of our youthful idealism, and that we screwed up the world. Don’t bother, because that’s just right-wing propaganda. The vast majority of we Boomers who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s worked our butts off all our lives to raise the generation that’s now moving back home. The tax money we Boomers paid out was the greatest source of revenue this country ever had. This was not a generational failure, this was a right-wing project: To capture the government and regulatory agencies to serve corporate interests, to shift the tax burden down, to redistribute income up, to starve the schools and the social safety net, to shift government expenditures toward profitable business projects such as war, to privatize profits and socialize costs, and to saturate Americans with propaganda so that we blame the poor, the hard-working, and the weak for the country’s problems while building right-wing hero myths around weak-minded, sociopathic pipsqueaks like Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Right-wingers say that the country is broke. Ha! The United States is richer than ever, so awash in cash that new speculative bubbles may again be forming. Corporate profits are at record highs. The rich are richer than ever, and paying far less in taxes than they used to. There is plenty of money, but all the gains are going to the top. In Reaganomics, you’ll remember, that was the excuse for reducing taxes on the rich and ending regulations on corporations and Wall Street — it would create jobs. How’s that working out for you, recent college graduates? And how do you like the new line that’s coming out of the corporate propaganda machine, that college degrees are a hoax? That’s the new propaganda line: It’s not that economic elites are capturing all the new wealth and productivity gains, it’s that college degrees are a hoax.
Each year, about 3.2 million young people graduate from American colleges and universities. There must now be millions of college-educated young people unemployed and/or living at home. What the devil are they doing with all that free time? If they organized themselves and took to the streets, they all by themselves would have the power to take back the American democracy from corporate control and to get this country’s wealth back into the hands of the people who produce it rather than the greedy, unproductive hands of those who skim, scam, exploit, and tax-avoid their way to the top.
How I wish that today’s young people would start raising a little hell and pushing back against the elites who’ve eaten their lunch and offshored their future. Taking to the streets and civil disobedience are very effective strategies. Right-wingers know this. That’s why rich oilmen like Charles and David Koch pay good money to organize those fake little made-for-TV Tea Party rallies.
If you’re looking for an organization to get started with, consider U.S. Uncut. They’re a sassy new disobedient but non-violent organization going after greedy corporations and the corporate capture of government. They need help starting local chapters.
You don’t even have to have a revolution. You only need to claw back the American democracy from the corporate forces that have bought it with their obscene profits, and shout down the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine.
Right-wing propaganda update: This is from a transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday:
LIMBAUGH: Young people are moving back in with them. Their moms and dads! And some of these people moving back in are 35 and 40. How old are their moms and dads? 60 and 70, try. But they’re 60 and 70 and if they can afford their worthless offspring moving back in with them, just how poverty-stricken are they?
Another update: Ken Ilgunas has written a response to this post on his blog, “Why aren’t we revolutionaries?”
The protests in Wisconsin are growing, and now the farmers have joined in. The Crooks and Liars blog mentions this telling commentary from a Fox News shouting head who thank goodness I’ve never heard of, Jay Townsend:
TOWNSEND: I take away this. Number one, elections have consequences. Number two, unions will never have any trouble renting a riot, and number three, when you gore that pig and wound it, it can make a lot of noise, and that’s the message I would take out of this.
So Townsend would have us believe that these 100,000 people, including the farmers, were rented, the way a few busloads of Tea Party protesters were rented by the Koch brothers. He also reveals that he believes that working people — or at least unionized working people — are pigs. He calls it a riot, which it wasn’t. And he reveals his hypocrisy about elections: Elections have consequences when Republicans win them, but elections are illegitimate when anyone else wins.
What I take away from this is that right-wing propagandists are angry, frustrated, and even a bit scared, because they’re forced to face the fact that their state-of-the-art propaganda doesn’t work on everyone. This must truly frighten the right wing, because they know that they can’t win elections without deceiving large numbers of voters. Having overplayed their hand in Wisconsin, they now face the possibility of recall elections and a massive, reality-driven backlash in which their propaganda has stopped working.
