June 2015 – Page 2 – Into the Woods

Exploratory drilling — it’s come to that

Today a big truck belonging to Patterson Exploration Services rolled into the little town of Walnut Cove, five days earlier than expected. The truck is a drilling rig that will drill a core-sample hole 1,750 deep to look for the presence of frackable gas. This is at taxpayer expense. The core sample was mandated by the right-wing N.C. General Assembly, now a puppet to corporate influences such as ALEC and banking money out of Charlotte.

The people here feel like they’ve been hit by shock and awe. It might as well be 1968, with Soviet tanks rolling into Prague.

There will be another public meeting Tuesday evening, at which we’ll learn what the people’s next move is going to be.

Here is a link to the story in the Winston-Salem Journal.

I sense something historic here

The Rev. Dr. William Barber II at Rising Star Baptist Church in Walnut Cove

North Carolina government has been taken over by right-wing politicians who have been hastily enacting the billionaire agenda — lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for working people, the worst voter suppression laws in the nation, the privatization of education at the expense of the public schools, refusal to expand Medicaid simply to spite the president, cuts to unemployment insurance, the fast-tracking of fracking, and eagerness for oil drilling off North Carolina’s fragile coast. The chief source of resistance ought to be the state Democratic Party, but the state Democratic Party has been missing in action, largely because of exceptionally lousy leadership and debilitating scandals.

The NAACP rose to the challenge. The Moral Monday events in Raleigh have irritated and embarrassed state government every step of the way. The mastermind of Moral Monday and the president of the North Carolina NAACP is the Rev. Dr. William Barber. In the first two years of Moral Monday, not much was said about environmental issues. But now the NAACP has come out swinging on the matter of environmental justice. One of the catalysts was a deal between the state of North Carolina and the little town of Walnut Cove (in Stokes County) to do a core-sample drilling on town property to assess how much frackable gas might be down there. The site of this drilling is only a couple of miles from a large and dangerous coal ash impoundment owned by Duke Energy (at the Belews Creek Steam Station). It’s also near the Dan River, less than 20 miles upstream from a coal ash spill into the river last year. The coal ash impoundment and the core-drilling site are right on the edge of black neighborhoods.

Last night, the Rev. Barber spoke in Walnut Cove. Actually, it was a sermon, in a small black church nearly full, half with black people and half with white. His sermon was about why taking care of the land and water is a moral issue. I have never heard anything like it. We white people were stunned, because we’re well aware of how some religious people find support for the exploitation of nature and “dominionism” in scripture. But the Rev. Barber found quite the opposite, drawing mostly from Genesis and Zechariah.

Those of us who have been down in the grass roots for the last three years, locally fighting fracking, feel as though the cavalry have ridden in. It’s not just that the NAACP may file suits under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It’s also that no one is better at focusing attention on injustice than the NAACP, or better at organizing people. And frankly, those of us who have been working locally, more or less alone, managed to make our cry for help heard. I suppose it depends on what happens next. But it feels historic to have the NAACP’s most charismatic leader here in our little county. And I think it’s likely that right-wingers won’t control the state of North Carolina for long. They have overplayed their hand and exceeded their mandate, and lots of people including some Republicans are not very happy about it.

This was historic in 1978. To my knowledge, no African-American has run for political office in Stokes County since then. We are working on that.

Just because it’s June …

There will be blackberries.

I’ve sown a lot of red clover seed, but I learned that it’s just too big a plant to grow in the yard. Only white clover, it seems, happily co-exists with grass. But the red clover loves unmowed ditches and banks.

There will be day lilies — lots of them. The deer have not eaten them this year the way they did last year, during a dry spring. I’ve learned that it’s mainly drought that drives the deer into the yard to devastate what’s growing at the abbey. They still come for the clover, but that’s not a problem.

I planted my heirloom beans late, but the first ones are coming up now.

If the promised rains come through, the celery crop will be good.

Review: Inequality: What Can Be Done?

Here are two must-read books for those who care about the human condition in an era in which we are immersed in a dumber-than-rocks political and media culture. I read Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century last year shortly after it came out. That book has received an enormous amount of attention among the intelligentsia and hardly needs a review by me, nor am I qualified to review it. On the other hand, Anthony Atkinson’s book, Inequality: What Can Be Done, ought to be in the hands of everyone who is politically active — or anyone who votes, for that matter.

Piketty’s book is an account of just how appallingly unequal societies have become. Atkinson picks up where Piketty leaves off and explores what might be done about inequality. He develops 15 proposals for reversing increasing inequality. These are not pie-in-the-sky proposals. They are common-sense reversals of the political choices that started around 1980, when an epidemic of voodoo economics and disguised greed (think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) got loose in our political culture and set us on the course we have been on for the last 35 years.

The common wisdom, as Atkinson points out, is that we can’t afford higher taxes on the rich or strengthening the social safety net, because globalization and technology have made everything different now. But Atkinson shows that to be nothing but voodoo. He devotes a section to the history of globalization and points out that there was a strong wave of globalization in the 19th Century, made possible largely because of technological improvements and economies in manufacturing and shipping. And yet it was during that period of 19th Century globalization that many modern reforms that reduced inequality (until the 1980 reversal) got their start. For example, in 1881 in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm I proposed old-age insurance. In 1885, Austria adopted compulsory health insurance. In 1902, the first worker’s compensation law was enacted in the United States.

Atkinson points out that econometric models, aided by fast and cheap computing, have become quite good at modeling what-if scenarios of changes in economic policies and taxation. Though the heirs of Reagan and Thatcher continue to believe and to shout about that higher taxes on the rich will stall economies, actual experience over the last 25 years shows no such thing — nor do the econometric models show any such thing. It is no accident that one of the first deeds of the our new Republican Congress was to castrate the Congressional Budget Office, forcing the CBO to go along with right-wing economic voodoo, which got us where we are today.

Inequality: What Can Be Done. Anthony B. Atkinson. Published May 11, 2015, Harvard University Press.