Corporations are people - villains

SUBHEAD: Somebody woke up at Justice and is taking the job seriously - at least as far as banks and telcos go.

 
Image above: Bank of America swallowed the scam artists at Country Wide in the 2008 collapse - a poison pill to be sure. From (http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/blog3.php/2011/08/24/bank-of-america-goes-after-blodget).

[IB Publisher's note: It seems were seeing the first salvo in Obama's strategy to get re-elected. Let Eric Holder use the Justice Department to get things done. Today two stories appeared in Bloomberg News that indicate the the gloves are off and Obama is going after corporations as the target. This on the heals of the IPS report (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/08/corporate-tax-dodging.html) about tp US corporations (like Ge and Verizon) paying no federal taxes and lavishing cash on CEO's and lobbtists. The game - let the corporations play the villains and watch the Republicans trip over each other to defend them. This could get interesting.]  


Americans Bilked by Big Banks
By Jacob Greber on 1 September 2011 for Bloomberg  
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-02/u-s-set-to-sue-banks-over-mortgage-securities-n-y-times-says.html)


More than a dozen large banks may be sued by the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency for misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities sold at the height of the housing bubble, the New York Times said.

The agency, which oversees mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is likely to file the lawsuits in coming days and will seek billions of dollars in compensation, the newspaper said, citing three people briefed on the matter that it didn’t identify.

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) are among firms that will be targeted by the suits, which stems from subpoenas issued by the agency a year ago, according to the Times report. The agency will argue that the banks failed to perform the due diligence required under securities law while assembling and selling the mortgage securities, and missed signs that borrowers’ incomes were inflated or falsified, the newspaper said.

The lawsuits may be filed today or on Sept. 6, before a deadline expires for the housing agency to file claims, the Times reported. Rather than demanding that firms buy back the original loans, the agency is seeking reimbursement for losses on the securities held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it said.
Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan declined to comment, the Times said. Frank Kelly, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, told the newspaper the bank can’t comment on a suit it hasn’t seen or hasn’t been filed, according to the report.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have operated under U.S. conservatorship since 2008, when they were seized amid subprime mortgage losses that pushed them toward insolvency.
A call to the federal agency after U.S. business hours wasn’t immediately returned.
Mark Bennewith, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank in Singapore, Rob Stewart, a Hong Kong-based spokesman for Bank of America and Edward Naylor, a spokesman at Goldman Sachs, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News.

---

ATT & T-Mobile Deal Trashed  
By Sara Forden & Jeff Bliss on 1 September 2011 for Bloomberg -  
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-02/at-t-said-to-misread-u-s-signals-in-meetings-before-t-mobile-deal-blocked.html)



 
Image above: ATT as PacMan swallowing T-Mobile to pass Verizon as biggest cell-telco. From (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/20/att-mobile-att-buys-t-mobile-usa).

On the morning of Aug. 31, AT&T Inc. (T) Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said in a television interview that he expected his company’s bid for T-Mobile USA Inc. to get government approval by the first quarter of 2012.

An hour later, his lawyers received a call from the U.S. Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the matter. The attorneys were told the government was suing to block the $39 billion transaction, the person said. The suit halted the biggest deal of the year and drew a line in the sand on antitrust policy that may affect other acquisitions in the pipeline.

The sudden turnaround occurred because the Justice Department came to a meeting the day before looking for AT&T to lay out a game-changing national remedy to eliminate what it saw as the anticompetitive defects in the proposed merger, and that didn’t happen, said another person involved in the meeting. AT&T was under the impression that it would have more time to present ideas that would assuage the government’s reservations about the deal, another person involved in the discussions said.

In the end, the Justice Department concluded the companies on the other side of the table weren’t responding to concerns that the deal would hurt competition and raise consumer prices in the wireless phone market, a person familiar with the decision said.

Skepticism in the antitrust division had been building for weeks as a technical review of national and local markets showed the merger to be highly anticompetitive, the person said.

Justice Department Talks
Against that backdrop, 40 people gathered around a wooden table in a third-floor conference room at the Justice Department on Aug. 30, the day before Stephenson’s televised prediction that the deal would be approved. They included representatives of AT&T, T-Mobile, a unit of Bonn-based Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE), the Justice Department and the Pennsylvania attorney general, the person said. Officials from several state attorneys generals’ officce, including California and New York, listened in by phone, two people said.

Their primary purpose was to brief the acting chief of the antitrust division, Sharis Pozen, said one of the people. The meeting was also called to review the merger’s effect on competition after previous sessions focused on so-called economic models, a person who attended said.

AT&T and T-Mobile’s position on the merger’s benefits was outlined by four people, while Justice Department lawyers interjected questions that they regarded as thoughtful rather than confrontational, one of the people said.

Possible Divestitures
AT&T and T-Mobile representatives said they wanted to discuss with a smaller group, at a later meeting, possible divestitures of customers, network and spectrum that might allow the deal to go forward, according to one person.

At the end of the hour-and-half presentation, Pozen said she was concerned that merging the two companies would leave local and national wireless markets too concentrated, the person said. She also expressed reservations about shrinking the market from four major companies to three -- AT&T-T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp., the person said.

AT&T’s Stephenson, his lawyers and others involved in the acquisition had no idea those reservations would lead to a lawsuit being filed the next day, the people familiar with their mindset said.

“We are deep into the analysis with the Department of Justice, and it’s all the questions and data gathering you might expect,” Stephenson had told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” at 8:39 a.m., about an hour before the company’s lawyers were advised of the complaint.

Caught by Surprise
“The news caught everybody by surprise,” said Steve Largent, president and CEO of CTIA-The Wireles Association, which hadn’t taken a position on the transaction. “AT&T was in the middle of explaining and detailing the merger that was being proposed when the Justice Department filed,” Largent said. CTIA includes AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) among its members.
Jessica Smith, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the details of the meeting or the decision as did Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman in Dallas and T-Mobile spokeswoman Anna Friedges.

“As soon as they decided, they pulled the trigger,” said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, a Washington- based consumer group that opposes the deal.

Pozen and her team made the final decision to sue after the Aug. 30 meeting, a person said. It was approved by Associate U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perrelli and Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole, the department’s second-highest ranking official. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has recused himself from the AT&T review, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler. She declined to elaborate on the reason.

‘Law Enforcement Action’
The White House was not involved in the decision, White House press secretary Jay Carney said yesterday at a news briefing. “This is a law enforcement action.”

Pozen said at a news conference on Aug. 31 after the filing that the department had consistently told AT&T it had serious concerns about the transaction.

“We have been in constant dialogue with the parties, exploring their arguments, exploring the materials they have provided, asking questions, engaging fully with them,” Pozen said.
AT&T, which said it will challenge the lawsuit, is seeking to meet again with Justice Department officials to propose remedies that might allow the deal to go through, according to three people familiar with the company’s position.

Pozen said at the news conference that the department’s “door is open” for further discussion.
“It is true that you can always settle a case, but the Justice Department doesn’t use litigation as a settlement tactic,” said Public Knowledge’s Feld. “This merger creates dangerous levels of concentration in 97 of the top 100 markets-- there isn’t a cure for that. It’s not like you can sell Chatanoooga and give up a few licenses in Milwaukee,” he said.

The case is U.S. v. AT&T Inc., 11-01560, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
.

The Way the Future Wasn't

SUBHEAD: Science fiction novels peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then began a decline that still continues. By John Michael Greer on 13 August 2011 for the Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/08/way-future-wasnt.html) Image above: Detail of Ed Emshwiller (American 1925-1990) painting for "Science Fiction Digest" cover. From (http://cheapscifi.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/emsh-on-the-block/). It’s a funny thing, this attempt to discuss the future in advance. Much of the time, like everyone else in the business, I talk about the future as though it’s a place we simply haven’t reached yet, with a geography that can be explored at least to some extent from the vantage point of the present. That’s not entirely inappropriate; so much of the near future has been defined in advance by choices already made and opportunities long since foregone that it’s not at all hard to sketch out the resulting shape of things. Still, the choices we make in the present are as often as not defined by our beliefs about the future, and so there’s a complicated series of feedback loops that comes into play. Self-fulfilling prophecies are one option, but far from the most common. Much more often, predictions about the future that gain enough of an audience to become a force in their own right kickstart patterns of change that go ricocheting off in unexpected directions and bring about a future that nobody expected. Industrial civilization’s attempt to expand out into interplanetary space, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, is a case in point. The handful of space technologies that turned out to have practical uses, and the technological advances that spun off from each of the major space programs, weren’t anticipated at all by the people who ordered the rockets to be built, the satellites to be launched and the astronauts to risk their lives. Cold War rivalry played a major role, to be sure, but that rivalry could have expressed itself in any number of terrestrial ways. What very few people noticed then or later was the extent to which all parties involved took their core assumptions and ideas from an utterly improbable source—a genre of pulp literature that most people at the time dismissed as lowbrow trash suitable only for twelve-year-old boys. Yes, I’m talking about science fiction. I’m not sure how many people have noticed that science fiction is the one really distinctive form of fiction created by industrial civilization. Romances, satires, and adventure stories are practically as old as written language; the novel of character and manners had its first great flowering in tenth-century Japan, and detective stories were written in medieval China; even fantasy fiction of the modern kind, which deliberately cashes in on legends nobody actually believes any more, flourished in Renaissance Europe—it still amazes me that nobody has rewritten Amadis of Gaul to fit the conventions of modern fantasy fiction and republished it as “the sixteenth century’s number one fantasy bestseller,” which it unquestionably was. Science fiction—the branch of literature that focuses on the impact of scientific and technological progress—is the exception. It’s important, for what follows, to be clear about definitions here. A story about traveling to another world isn’t necessarily a work of science fiction; the ancient Greek satirist Lucian wrote one about a ship tossed up to the Moon by a waterspout, and Cyrano de Bergerac—yes, that Cyrano; you didn’t know he was a real person, did you?—wrote a ripsnorter about traveling to the Moon and the Sun via a series of even more unlikely gimmicks; both of them were engaging pieces of absurdity riffing off the fact that nobody actually thought the thing could ever happen. It took Mary Shelley, watching the rain splash down on a Swiss vacation as her husband’s literary friends toyed with ghost stories in much the same spirit as Lucian imagined moonflight, to create a new kind of literature. Frankenstein, the novel she started on that vacation, became a bestseller precisely because it was believable; recent advances in the life sciences, especially Alessandro Volta’s eerie experiment that caused a frog’s amputated leg to kick by running electricity through it, made it entirely plausible at the time that some researcher might take things the next step and bring a dead body to life. Take a single scientific or technological breakthrough, combine it with the modern world, and see what happens—all through the 19th century, and into the 20th, that’s what science fiction (or “scientifiction,” as it was often called) meant. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the two great masters of the early genre, rang just about every change on that theme that the technology of the age would justify. Of course both of them wrote voyages to the Moon; in an age of explosive technological progress, traveling to the Moon had moved just that little bit closer to plausibility, but it was just one of the many lively improbabilities they and other authors explored in their stories. Except, of course, that a good many of them didn’t stay improbable for long. The feedback loop I mentioned earlier was coming into play; in the first decades of the twentieth century, a generation that had grown up on Verne and Wells started putting scientifiction’s dreams into practice. Captain Nemo’s Nautilus quickly took on an uncomfortable reality as the first U-boats slid down the ways. Wells’ “The Land Ironclads” provided the conceptual blueprint for the first generation of tanks, just as his The War in the Air got militaries around the world thinking of the possibilities of aerial bombardment. Most of the other technological notions in turn of the century science fiction got tried out by somebody or other during those years, and those that worked found ready acceptance among audiences that had plenty of fictional models in the back of their minds. Meanwhile, the fictional models were shifting focus. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that science fiction changed from a genre about any kind of scientific and technological advance you care to name, which it had been until then, to a genre that was basically about space travel. Slowly—it wasn’t an overnight change by any means—stories about spaceships and alien worlds came to dominate the pulp magazines that were the major SF venue of the time; voyages to the Moon became old hat, something to stick in the backstory; Mars and Venus became preferred destinations, and then E.E. “Doc” Smith shot the characters in his Lensman series across interstellar space, and what Brian Aldiss later described as science fiction’s “billion year spree” was on. By the late 1940s, many of the most popular science fiction writers were working within a common vision of the future—a future history that began sometime in the near future with the first voyages to the Moon and then went on from there, colonizing the solar system, then leaping the gap that separated our solar system from others and beginning the settlement of the galaxy. Whether humanity would meet alien life forms out there in space was a subject of much disagreement; the more romantic authors peopled Mars and Venus with intelligent species of their own, but the spectrum ran from there to authors who imagined a galaxy full of empty but inhabitable planets just waiting for Homo sapiens to inhabit them. Even among the imaginary galaxies that bristled with alien species, though, they might as well have been human beings; the universe of the original Star Trek series, where the vast majority of “aliens” were extras from Central Casting with a bit of funny makeup splashed on, was a pretty fair reflection of the SF of a few decades earlier. It’s a useful exercise to go back and read essays by the SF authors of the 20th century’s middle decades—Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were particularly prolific in this vein, but there were plenty of others—and take in what they had to say about the coming Space Age. It wasn’t, by and large, something they felt any need to promote or argue for; it was simply, necessarily going to happen. There would be the first tentative flights into space, followed by the first Moon landing; somewhere in there the first of many space stations would go into orbit, perhaps as a way station to the Moon; Mars and Venus were next on the agenda, first the landings, then the bases, then the colonies, growing as naturally as Jamestown or Plymouth into booming new frontier societies; the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn would follow in due order, followed by the outer planets and the cometary halo, and then would come the challenge of the stars. Among the most fascinating details that popped up here and there in this literature, though, was the conviction that science fiction itself—the literature, the writers, and the subculture that grew up around it in the 1930s and became something like a force of nature in the decades that followed—would play a major role in all this. I’ve long mislaid the title of the Isaac Asimov essay that argued that science fiction had the role of advance scouts on the great onward march of human progress, revealing new avenues for advance here, discovering dead ends and boobytraps there. That wasn’t just Asimov exercising his unusually well-developed ego, either; SF fans, droves of them, shared his opinion. "Fans are Slans," the saying went—I wonder how many people these days even remember A.E. Van Vogt’s novel Slan, much less the race of superhuman mutants that gave it its title; a great many fans saw themselves in that overly roseate light. What makes this all the more intriguing is that all this happened at a time when science fiction was widely considered very nearly the last word in lowbrow reading. Until the paperback revolution of the late 1950s, most science fiction appeared in pulp magazines—so called because of the wretched quality of the paper they were printed on—with trashy covers on the front and ads for X-ray spectacles and Charles Atlas strength lessons in the back. The cheap mass-marketed paperbacks that picked up from the pulps dropped the ads but by and large kept the tacky cover art. ("There has been a great deal of talk about the big questions of science fiction," SF author L. Sprague de Camp said once. "The truly big question of science fiction is ‘What is that woman in a brass brassiere doing on the cover of my book?’") As for the stories themselves—well, there were a handful of very good authors and some very good short stories and novels, but let’s be honest; there was much, much more that was really, astonishingly bad. Just as the young engineers and military officers of 1910 had all grown up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, though, as America stumbled into its age of global empire after the Second World War, a very large number of its young men (and a much smaller but still significant fraction of its young women) had grown up daydreaming of rockets to Mars and adventures with the Space Patrol. All that was required to make those daydreams a powerful force in the American collective imagination was a well-aimed shock, and that was supplied in 1957 when a small group of Soviet scientists and military officers talked their superiors into letting them strap a 22-inch steel sphere on top of a big new ICBM and launch it into Earth orbit. The advent of Sputnik I sent the United States into something halfway between a tantrum and a nervous breakdown. Suddenly it became absolutely essential, in the minds of a great many Americans, for the US to beat "godless Russia" in the Space Race. For their part, delighted to find an effective way to goad the United States, Soviet leaders started putting real money into their space program, scoring one achievement after another while Americans played a feeble game of catch-up. Before long a new US president was announcing a massively funded project to put men on the moon, the first rockets were blasting off from Cape Canaveral, and a nation already intrigued by the notion of outer space, and alternately amused and intrigued by the space-centered folk mythology of the UFO phenomenon, signed on to the opening stages of the grand future history already sketched out for them by decades of pulp science fiction. For the next decade and a half or so, the feedback loop I’ve described shifted into overdrive as fantasies of a future among the stars shaped the decisions of politicians and the public alike. By the time the Apollo program was well underway, staff at NASA was already sketching out the next generation of manned interplanetary spacecraft that would follow the Moon landing and cutting blueprints for the probes that would begin the exploration of the solar system. That’s when things started to run off the rails that seemingly led to the stars, because the solar system revealed by those probes turned out to have very little in common with the "New Worlds for Man" that the fantasies required. It takes a while reading old books on the prospects of space travel to grasp just how wide a gap those first planetary probes opened up. Respected scientists were claiming as late as the 1960s that the Moon was a world of romantic vistas with needle-pointed mountains glinting under starlight; it turned out to be gray, largely featureless, and stunningly dull. Venus was supposed to be a tropical planet, warmer than Earth but still probably inhabitable; it turned out to be a searing furnace of a world with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Since 19th century astronomers mistook optical effects of telescopes pushed to their limit for markings on the Martian surface, Mars had been the great anchor for dreams of alien intelligence and offworld adventure; when the first Viking lander touched down in 1976, the Grand Canals and alien swordsmen of Barsoom and its godzillion equivalents went wherever wet dreams go to die, and were duly replaced by what looked for all of either world like an unusually dull corner of Nevada, minus water, air, and life. Those were also the years when Mariner and Voyager probes brought back image after image of a solar system that, for all its stunning beauty and grandeur, cointained only one world that was fit for human habitation, and that happened to be the one on which we already lived. As the photos of one utterly uninhabitable world after another found their way into one lavish National Geographic article after another, you could all but hear the air leaking out of the dream of space, and even the most vigorous attempts to keep things moving launched by science fiction fans and other enthusiasts for space travel found themselves losing ground steadily. To stand the title of Frederik Pohl’s engaging memoir on its head, science fiction turned out to be the way the future wasn’t. Image above: Detail of science fiction illustration contest honorable mention "Transforming Mars" by Alihahd, 2011. From (http://www.daz3d.com/i/contests/0?id=13). And science fiction itself? It fragmented and faded. The boost in respectability the space program gave to science fiction gave it a larger and more critical market, and thus midwifed some of the greatest works of the genre; a series of loudly ballyhooed literary movements, none of them particularly long-lived, zoomed off in assorted directions and, as avant-garde movements generally do, left most of their audience behind; efforts at crass commercial exploitation, of which the Star Wars franchise was the most lucrative example, came swooping down for their share of the kill. While other media boomed—visual media are always a couple of decades behind print—the sales of science fiction novels peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then began a decline that still continues, and a genre that had once exercised a potent gravitational force on the collective imagination turned back into just another option in the smorgasbord of mass-produced popular entertainment. It’s a trajectory worth studying for more reasons than one. The intersection of imperial extravagance, technological triumphalism, and anti-Communist panic that flung billions of dollars into a quest to put men on the Moon made it possible, for a little while, for a minority of visionaries with a dream about the future to think that their dream was about to become reality. The dream unraveled, though, when the rest of the universe failed to follow the script, and a great many of the visionaries found themselves sitting in the dust wondering what happened. That’s not an uncommon event. The dream of a new American century hawked by the neoconservatives a decade and a half ago, though it ranked down there with the tawdriest bits of pulp science fiction, traced the same trajectory. The election of George W. Bush and the 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington DC gave them a window of opportunity to try to make that dream a reality, and it turned into exactly the sort of disaster you’d expect when a group of academic intellectuals try to impose their theories on the real world. It would be less embarrassing if the notion of invading a Third World country and turning it into a happy little puppet democracy hadn’t been tried over and over again, without a single success, since the Spanish-American War. For that matter, the movement toward sustainability in the 1970s, the subject of a great many posts on this blog, followed a similar trajectory. That movement, as I’ve argued, might have succeeded—I grant that it was a long shot at best. Yet the rush of initial enthusiasm, the real achievements that were made, and the bleak discovery that the political and cultural tide had turned against it and the rest of the dream was not going to come within reach are very reminiscent of the arc traced above. Still, the example that comes most forcefully to mind just now is the one this blog is meant to address, the movement—or perhaps proto-movement—trying to do something useful in the face of peak oil. Right now it’s still gamely poised on the fringes, attracting members and brief bursts of attention, weaving disparate perspectives into early drafts of the vision that will eventually catapult it into the big time. That’s still several years and a Sputnik moment or two away, but the increasingly frantic attempts of both American parties to treat the end of the age of cheap energy as a public relations problem suggest to me that sooner or later that time is going to come. The temptation when that happens, and it’s a potent one, will be to assume that whatever window of opportunity opens then can be counted upon to last, on the one hand, and will lead to whatever encouraging future the vision promises on the other. Neither of those is guaranteed, and depending on the shape the vision takes, neither one may even be possible. The question that needs to be kept in mind, straight through from the giddy enthusiasm of the initial successes to the bitter winding down that will more than likely follow, is how much useful work can be accomplished during the interval we get. See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Elegy for the Age of Space 8/24/11 .

Joel Salatin - Local Food & Energy

SUBHEAD: Chris Martenson interviews Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms on food production and sustainability.

 Introduction by Tyler Durden on 31 August 2011 for Zero Hedge -  
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy) 

  
Image above: Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm in Virginia. From (http://eatatdixiebelles.blogspot.com/2010/11/tonight-i-will-be-inspired-joel-salatin.html).
 
Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms and highly-visible champion of sustainable farming, thinks modern humans have become so far removed from a natural connection to the food they eat, that we no longer have a true understanding of what "normal" food is.

The rise of Big Ag and factory farming over the past century has conditioned us to treat food mechanically (as something to be recoded and retooled) vs biologically. And we don't realize that for all our industrialization and optimization, we're actually getting less yield and less nutrition than natural-based processes can offer.

Whether we like it or not, the arrival of peak oil is going to force us to realize that our heavily-energy intensive practices can't continue at their current scale. And with world population still increasing exponentially, we'll need to find other, more sustainable, ways of growing our food.

"What we view today as "normal" I argue is simply not normal. Just think about if you wanted to go to town 120 years ago. If you wanted to go to town you actually had to go out and hook up a horse. That horse had to eat something, which means you had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed that horse which meant you had to take care of some perennial in order to feed that horse in order to go to town. And so throughout history, you had these kinds of what I call ‘inherent boundaries’ or brakes on how much a single human could abuse the ecology.

And today, during this period of cheap energy, we’ve been able to extricate ourselves from that entire umbilical, if you will, and just run willy-nilly as if there is no constraint or restraint. And now we are starting to see some of the outcome of that boundless, untied progression. And so the chances are, the way to bet, is that in the future we are going to see more food localization, we are going to see more energy localization, we are going to see more personal responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions because it's going to be forced on us to survive economically. We are going to have to start taking some accounting of these ecological principles."

Joel, his family, and the team at Polyface Farms dedicate themselves to developing environmentally, emotionally and economically-enhanced food prototypes and advocate for duplicating their production around the world.

In this interview, Chris and Joel explore what constitutes truly sustainable agriculture and the reasons why our current system has departed so far from it, as well as practical steps individuals can take to increase their own personal resiliency around the food they eat (in short: "find your kitchen", source your food locally, and grow some yourself).

To listen to Chris' interview with Joel you must be registered with his Martenson's site (runtime 44m:15s)
 
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: (http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/transcript-joel-salatin-how-prepare-future-increasingly-defined-localized-food-energy)
 
Chris Martenson: Welcome to another ChrisMartenson.com podcast. I am of course Chris Martenson and today, we are speaking with Joel Salatin, one of the most visible and influential leaders in the organic food and sustainable farming movement. His family owns and manages Polyface Farms which has been featured prominently in such modern food movement masterworks as The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and the documentary Food, Inc. - if you haven’t seen it it’s an incredible eye opener, it was for me.

Joel’s unconventional but highly innovative farming practices are inspiring millions to increase their nutritional and community resiliency by seeking out local sources of chemical-free food raised using natural process-based farming practices. Joel, I’m a huge fan of your work and the practices you advocate. I apply a number of them in the management of my own small homestead in rural Mass. It’s a real honor to be speaking with you.

Joel Salatin: Thank you, it’s an honor to be with you Chris.

Chris Martenson: Well thanks. Could you please give our listeners a short background on what you see as your mission, what its key tenets are and why what you are doing is so important?

Joel Salatin: Sure. Well our mission statement is to develop environmentally, emotionally and economically enhanced food prototypes and duplicate their production throughout the world. So its all about these food production prototypes that not only are economically and environmentally beneficial but also have a social - we say ‘emotional’ just so we can have three E’s - but it’s a triple bottom line deal and wonderfully, if you get creative enough, you don’t have to sacrifice the ecology in order to have a profitable business and you don’t have to sacrifice profit in order to have an ecological business. So the principles are relatively few, you know it all backs up to biomimicry, for sure.

In other words what we want to do is take natural templates and draw a circle around them like a pattern, cut them out and put them on our commercial farming landscape and duplicate those natural patterns. So what are those natural patterns? Well the things that have been regenerated and built soil for centuries are not tillage and annuals, which of course are both things that our culture worships. Rather, they are perennials, both trees and forages and herbivores and periodic disturbance, whether by fire, mob grazing or other disturbances that are created by predator type things. And then rest periods. Rest periods for recuperation and to metabolize the disturbance factor. So as soon as you start doing those kinds of things, that means you are going to move the animals, they are not going to stay in one place, its going to be primarily perennially based, so we are always looking at how can we harvest acorns from the trees into pork for example. It’s going to be perennial grasses, not annual grasses or grains.

And its going to be portable infrastructure, not permanent or non-portable infrastructure which means all of the facilities, the shelters, the control things like fences and things like that are all going to be light-weight, gentle-footprinted, portable type things. The fertility is not going to depend on things brought in from across the world but they are going to depend on recycling solar-created biomass onsite, that’s the carbon cycle. Sun makes the plants, the plants grow, the plants either get eaten or decay and the decay feeds the soil life which makes more plants grow and that carbon cycle moves in a cyclical pattern onsite not from offsite. So there is always a heavy component of animals, perennials, disturbance, rest, portability and real time carbon cycling.

Chris Martenson: And so this, you’ve been doing this for a while, and so you have measurable results that the soil is being built and that you can do this profitably. I assume at this point we can say it’s a success? You can farm this way and it works?

Joel Salatin: [laugh] Oh, unquestionably. Our family came here in 1961, which is 50 years ago. Bought the most run-down, gullied, depleted, mined-out farm in the whole area. In fact we measured the deepest gully was 16’ deep. And we had so little soil we couldn’t even hold up electric fence stakes. Dad poured concrete in old used car tires and then pushed a half inch pipe, one straight up and down and one on a little bit of an angle and my brother, who was a little bit older than I, we’d sit on the platform on the tractor and heave these things off as Dad drove slowly down the field. He’d come along and put electric fence stakes in them because we didn’t have enough soil to hold up electric fence stakes, and it doesn’t take much soil to hold up electric fence stakes.

That’s how we started and we could barely handle ten cows. Today we usually handle 100 cows. All of those bare rock places have several inches of soil over them and the gullies, we filled a lot of the gullies in with silt that we dug out of bottoms to build ponds so we have ponds built and the gullies filled in and arguably the most productive farm in the whole area.

Chris Martenson: And so if this is possible, how many people are following it and of the people who aren’t adhering to these sorts of practices, what’s going on there? Why aren’t they?

Joel Salatin: Well our neighbors think we are bioterrorists. Because only a bioterrorist would run chickens out in the field where they can commiserate with red wing blackbirds and indigo buntings and take our diseases to the science-based types of chicken houses and threaten the planet’s food supply with disease. So not only are people not clamoring to do this but we are being demonized by the mainstream agriculture community and it’s pretty serious, including the food police who don’t like small scale backyard processing or kitchens or anything like that, they want everything to go through a multi-million dollar facility with chlorine and fumigants and a lot of toxic sanitizers to sterilize everything.

There are major, major differences of opinion about what ‘proper food’ is. There is a big difference between sanitation and sterilization. You and I don’t have sterile insides: our insides have three trillion beings to take this food and make it flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone and we better be thinking about what that community wants. And that community is far from sterile. It’s a very active bacterial, biological community. And so, we live in strange days when Coca Cola, Twinkies and Coco Puffs are considered safe but raw milk, compost-grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda’s pickles are considered hazardous substances.

Chris Martenson: There’s a lot to be fighting here, what does the fight center around, is it just as simple as profits at this point in time or is it frankly just easier to farm with the other practices? Where do you draw the line on that?

Joel Salatin: Well we can start with the philosophical difference that we think that food is fundamentally biological and most of the culture thinks that food is primarily mechanical. And that’s why we can pull DNA structure and genes from a pig and put some in a pepper plant and some in a salmon and have a brand new life form, that’s a parts-oriented thing, like pieces of an engine. But some of us believe that life is fundamentally biological not mechanical; the difference being that biological systems can heal, they have resiliency, and they have a reason to be, a reason to exist that demands respect, I call it the “pigness of the pig” and the “cowness of the cow”.

And when you disrespect that - for example when the USDA took farmers like me to free dinners for 30 years to teach us the new science based feeding of cattle with dead cows, we did not do it because we didn’t like the USDA or because we were luddites or not progressive or hated science, we didn’t do it because there was no pattern or template in nature in which herbivores eat carrion. And so, 30 years later, there is this big collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t otta done that.”

You know, as this mechanical approach toward life has caught up to us with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And in fact, that’s exactly what has created, you know the E.coli, salmonella, all these things are modern mutations and toxic proliferations that have become mainstream with a mechanical view towards life. We’ve even got research now going to try to isolate the porcine stress gene so we can take that stress gene out of the pig and abuse him a little more aggressively but at least he won’t be stressed about it. A culture that views its life with that kind of conquistador, mechanical, disrespectful, manipulative mentality will soon view its citizens the same way and other cultures the same way.
 
Chris Martenson: So what’s the end of that story if man, woman, humans set themselves apart from nature? And we do that, when you gaze across the agricultural landscape, what kind of damage are you seeing being done? Is it a one-way cul-de-sac that ends in famine at some point or what is it that you see in these practices that ultimately leads you to very, very strongly eschew them?

Joel Salatin: Yes, well what we are seeing is exactly what we are seeing right now. We are seeing childhood leukemia, we are seeing gluten intolerance, I mean how many people did you know 30 years ago that were intolerant to gluten in wheat?

Chris Martenson: None.

Joel Salatin: And part of that’s because, we streamlined the harvesting so fast industrially that the wheat never gets shocked and never gets any mold in it to break down some of these enzymes that are real hard for our bodies to break down. And so, you are seeing Type II diabetes, you are seeing obesity and we are just seeing a proliferation of these chronic type things that are a result of bushels of material that is not nutrient-dense or is not nutritionally-based and its certainly isn’t food that we have been used to eating.

Our bodies, that three trillion member community in our insides, is not meant to receive substances that you can’t pronounce or you can’t make in your kitchen. Or that were grown with artificials. Sir Albert Howard said in 1943 in his foundational work in agricultural testament that when we use artificial manure (that’s what he called chemical fertilizers) artificial manures for the soil, then they grow artificial plants which then make artificial animals which then make artificial humans which require artificials in order to keep us alive. And if that isn’t a commentary on where we are today with the drug trade and the pharmaceutical industry, I don’t know what is. In the last 35 years, our culture has exchanged an 18% per capita expenditure on food and 9% on health care to 18% on health care and 9% on food. And I would suggest that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think there might be a connection between the inversion of those two numbers.

Chris Martenson: Well, I mean certainly anybody who has seen the obesity maps that I think the NIH has put out, they are really quite impressive stretching from the ‘50’s to current and just watching the obesity epidemic spread across - clearly that has to be due to something, we might think food. One of the areas I’ve been focused on for a while because I’m very focused on the energy sphere and wondering how energy feeds into everything and, of course, it feeds into our food system enormously and one area is in nutrient cycling.

So if we have our typical NPK - nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium - you know those things are mined somewhere or manufactured and trucked and put in a field and then something is grown and harvested and put on a plate and then it gets flushed out to sea, never to be seen again in usable quantities. So, this whole idea of nutrient cycling – but those are just the big ones - there are micronutrients as well that are incredibly important. How does your approach incorporate and deal with the nutrient cycling?

Joel Salatin: Well that’s a great question. Well what stimulates the nutrient cycling is the onsite biomass regeneration cycle. Not the least of which of course is the earthworm community. You know it’s amazing that earthworms can eat a pound of stuff in their front end and send it through their alimentary canal, bring it out their back end, the same pound of stuff, and its like three times the calcium, seven times the nitrogen, eleven times the potassium, fourteen times the phosphorous, plus an elevating of all the whole trace elements, boron, cobalt, copper, molybdenum - all those things are increased.

And what’s amazing is that nobody knows how that’s done. It’s actually not concentrated, it’s actually acted on by some sort of activity in the earthworm. Some bacteria for example, are free living, they are not rhizomes like legume roots like alfalfa and clover, they are free-living bacteria that will bring up to 100 lbs. of nitrogen per acre per year out of the atmosphere and put it in the soil but they only really become active at 4% organic matter and most of our soils are not anywhere close to 4% organic matter anymore. They used to be, back when the buffalo were here and perennial grasses, but they are not now.

I think it’s fascinating that we actually produced more nutrient density in what is now the U.S. 600 years ago, than we actually do today, even with all of our petroleum and everything, So the whole secret of the nutrient cycling is to tap into the green material to capture more solar energy, put it into green material that can de-compose and go into the soil, and the best way to do that is with an herbivore - lamb, goat, cow - some sort of herbivore, that is what I call the bio- mass accumulation re-start button to prune that forage off and re-start the fast biomass accumulation cycle.
If you don’t have that, what you just have is the bio-mass just goes into senescence and in senescence simply vaporizes the CO2 off into the atmosphere and it doesn’t do anything any good. So it’s the animal that recycles, that starts that whole fast metabolism cycle to metabolize the solar energy into biomass through photosynthetic activity.

Chris Martenson: I think you are talking about something really radical here is that our own health is linked to and part and parcel of the health of the world in which we live, I mean its crazy talk right there don’t you think?

Joel Salatin: [laugh] Yes. But that is the only way to only have a regenerative, sustainable system. Our culture is a kind of product of the Greco, Roman, Western, linear, reductionist, compartmentalized, fragmented system that ties parts oriented thinking, in which nothing relates to anything else. And so we study things by tearing them apart and not seeing how they fit into a whole. And of course life isn’t like that.

And you can’t extract your living from the hydrology cycle, from the energy cycle, from the biomass generation cycle, ultimately – what I always tell people is to realize, it’s a profound thought - that everything that we see is completely and utterly dependant on an unseen world of beings in the soil that never make it to the page of a business plan or a bank statement. Nobody asks about this trillion, multiply trillions and trillions of organisms that live in the soil and yet, everyone of us is utterly and completely dependent on that world.

And yet we don’t even put it in the business plan as an important part of what we are doing. We don’t think about it in the shower in the morning when we are getting ready to go to work “Let’s see, how are my activities today going to impact this soil web, this miraculous, mystical, awesome, unseen world that runs all the plants, all the animals, all the water cycle, all the nutrient cycling? What are my activities today going to do to that?” We don’t even think about that in the shower in the morning.

Chris Martenson: Right, we’ve got the U.N. projecting through their population studies – they have a branch that has projected that by 2050 we are going to have to basically double food output across the globe. You know, obviously our oceans are pretty well tapped out and it turns out that a lot of the gains, the productivity gains that we experienced in the so-called “green revolution” - yes there were some neat variety tinkering in genetics and stuff in there, but mostly that was irrigation and the application of the artificial fertilizers and all of that. In your mind, can the type of farming practices that you are talking about, can those be the gateway that will allow us to actually increase our food production to levels that are being talked about or is even that just silly talk at this point in time – we are going to have to fine some other way to adjust here?

Joel Salatin: Oh, there is no question, absolutely no question, that these systems are far more productive. Just to give you an example. On our farm, in our county, one of the measures for pasture production is in cow days per acre. In other words a ‘cow day’ is what one cow will eat in a single day – that’s one cow day. And so in our county, the average cow days per acre is currently 80 cow days per acre. That’s what an acre of pasture does.

On our farm, and I already told you at the top of the program what our farm looked like 50 years ago without a single chemical fertilizer and without planting a seed, we own no plow and no disc, and in 50 years, we have moved this farm to average 400 cow days per acre – that’s five times the county average. And so, the fact is, if Monsanto figured out a way to get 1% increase in yields in something it would make the front page of the New York Times. I’m telling you ways to double and triple production without chemical fertilizer, without even planting anything and it doesn’t make the obitituary page.

So yes, these systems work. And the way they work is to go back to historically – well the way nature built soils in the first place; which was with primarily herbivores. So if you really want to eat on a low energy system, quit eating chicken and quit eating so much pork and eat grass-finished beef because grass-finished herbivore is the most nutrient dense substance that doesn’t require any tillage. It fertilizes itself, and doesn’t require any tillage. As soon as you take that herbivore and put it in a feedlot, on an irrigated grain-based system, then it all breaks down from an energy standpoint and, of course, that’s where a lot of the studies that impugn livestock come from.

But throughout the world, the great prairies and the great soil building regions of the world, from the Serengetti in Africa to the plains of America with buffalo to the Australian continent 200 years ago that had 10 marsupial species to do the disturbance, all of those were built with herbivores, disturbances, and rest and perennials. Those are the four cornerstones of a system that works. The reason all civilizations throughout history have been built around the herbivore, lamb, goat or cow is because the herbivore is the only domestic animal that can harvest non-tilled, non-planted material. Omnivores like chickens and pigs require some sort of a grain component which then requires tillage.
And until cheap energy and cheap machinery, tillage was extremely expensive. You know if you had to go out and walk all day with a sharp stick behind an ox or a yak or a mule, you couldn’t stir very much soil, you had to plant by throwing it out with your hand, then you had to hand weed and you had to hand scythe, shock it up and bring it in to a hard floor where you could beat it to separate the grain from the husk then you had to take a crude wooden pitchfork and fling it up in the air in a breeze to -I’m sorry flailing was the first one – this is winnowing.

To winnow out the chaff and at the end of the day you look on the ground and “Oh we’ve got some grain here and now we are going to try and store it in something away from the mice and the rats for a year.” Before the time of sheet metal and mesh wire, historically, grain was extremely expensive and hard come by - which is why poultry was only eaten by kings and poultry and pigs were only grown enough to salvage the waste stream from the homestead.

The main thing was lamb, goat and cow which was the herbivore. That was the main thing - or deer or bison or whatever - but the point is, that those herbivorous creatures can do or are made to do very well without any tillage whatsoever. And tillage has only actually been doable on a large, grand scale just in the last century.

Chris Martenson: I’m glad you mentioned the energy portion of the cycle. At ChrisMartenson.com we spend a lot of time on energy, we look at the food supply as being critically vulnerable to the impact of peak oil’s arrival. You know after all fossil fuel energy inputs vastly exceed the caloric output of most so-called modern farms. So our view is you we cannot really increasingly use a limited resource forever.

Our view is that most people alive today will experience a decline of oil firsthand, not meaning it runs out but we have slightly less and less. And it’s a huge, huge implication behind that. And we also focus on helping people develop personal resiliency, starting with food: storing food, finding local suppliers, even growing at least a small percentage of their calories so they can be connected to the food supply more personally. What guidance are you offering to people, to our listeners in terms of how they should be or might begin to think about interacting with their food supply?

Joel Salatin: Oh – such a great question. It’s a broad span, I would say number one – find your kitchen. I mean, a processed food is heavily packaged, packaging is extremely expensive: it’s essentially stored for a long time and it has a long distribution cycle. I mean fifteen hundred miles per morsel is kind of the average. And so my first advice to anybody, is buy unprocessed, raw, and fix it in your kitchen. That will drop the energy footprint way, way, way down and as soon as we do that, then of course, the next step is to either grow some or buy it locally. There are thousands of high quality, nutrient-dense ecologically-encouraging farms that are selling - from farmer’s markets to community supported agriculture to on-arm stands to metropolitan buying clubs to retail boutiques, whatever but there are plenty of these kinds of things. Buying organic from a thousand miles away doesn’t get the job done. It’s just as energy intensive as anything else and so we want.. that’s part of this whole local food awareness.

Now, can a locality feed itself? Absolutely, think about the amount of food, the kinds of food that can be grown within 100 miles of you. And just think about going down to the supermarket, walk through the isles and say, how much of this could be grown with 100 miles? And in northern climes if we take off citrus and coffee and tea and sugar, it can almost all be grown there. And so, its arguable, I think this is a fascinating thing, its really arguable right now, whether a culture which has incarcerated twice as many people in prisons as it has farmers growing its food – whether a culture is that disconnected from its ecological umbilical can even survive?

So, I think here again, we have to approach this from an integrated holistic standpoint. If the common temptation is for you and I to say, “Well you gotta do something, you gotta do something different, you need to do this and that and the other.” And we fail to realize that we are part of the issue. And none of the situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into is a result of any one person’s doing – it’s a collective accumulation of a new societal protocol, which I would suggest is very historically abnormal. So first of all, find your kitchen, then source your food locally, and then grow some yourself.

For example, to just show how disintegrated our thinking is, we’ve got now for example, in New England we’ve got confinement dairies who 20 years ago got environmental awards for taking taxpayer money to put in manure lagoons as a manure management program; now they are getting taxpayer sponsored money to cover those lagoons with rubber bladders to capture the methane so they are getting little green environmental awards for being green and capturing methane so they can run all of the expensive fans and machinery and buildings and equipment that’s necessary in a confinement dairy operation.

What we need to be doing is shutting down the confinement dairy operation, turning the herbivores back out on the perennials, like they were meant to be, letting them self-harvest, self-fertilize and shut down the entire concentrated animal feeding operations, with all of its intendant energy requirements. Same thing goes for example, for restaurants or let’s take a college that figures out “let’s take all of our kitchen scraps and send them up the road ten miles to the composing outfit” and then the dining services coordinator gets a nice plaque and a little award for being green because now they are composing their kitchen scraps.

What we need to be doing is building a little chicken house adjoining the back door of the kitchen so all the kitchen scraps can go right out into the chickens, the chickens then can eat that and produce eggs, now we don’t have to grow any grain, till the grain - chickens resume their historically normal cycle which was the homestead salvage operation to take all the kitchen scraps and whey scraps and cheese scraps and all that and convert it into eggs.

Now we don’t even have to have concentrated animal feeding operations for chickens anymore and the Humane Society can rejoice that we don’t have any battery egg production. You don’t have to truck those eggs into the city, into the college, and eggs go right to the dining services and the kitchen scraps go out and it’s a beautiful, beautiful circle. That is the kind of integration - you know we talk about windmills, and getting energy and stuff, my goodness - if we would take, if we would take on every southern exposure of every house and office building and school whatever, if we would just take wire mesh or cattle panels and just tip up a frame and cover it with plastic to make a simple solarium, 8’ out from the southern side of every building we could virtually heat all the buildings without any energy and grow our mesculen mix and shut down all the trucks bringing California produce to New England over the wintertime.

If all the diesel fuel being put through refrigerated trucks to bring unseasonable produce to New England and Virginia – I’ll call it the northern tier – if all that diesel fuel was converted into plastic to make coop houses, season extensions and solariums on the south side of buildings, we wouldn’t have to run any of those trucks, we wouldn’t have to build any of those roads, we wouldn’t have to use any of that energy to do that. And that becomes, see, that’s an integrated holistic approach rather than some sort of “I’m going to continue to eat my California-introduced mesculen mix in February in New York City. Hang the system and let’s figure out how to make more cheap fuel.”

Chris Martenson: Just thinking about the issues before us and maybe trying to find clever ways around it, I’m personally shocked and sometimes dismayed at how far we still seem to need to go. For instance in my local area, in Greenfield, Mass they are proposing a bio-mass plant, it sounds all green and everything right? But its going to require five or six hundred thousand tons of forest to be cut down, trucked to the central location.

And they are building it with the intent that they need to do something with the waste heat so there is all this piping that they are going to have to put in. Anybody who treats heat as a ‘waste stream’ at this point in time, I don’t think really deserves any green plaques, hasn’t really thought it through and doesn’t understand much about what they are trying to solve.

Joel Salatin: Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more. Now, to be sure, I am certainly a friend of biomass and I’m not interested in cutting down all the forest, but it is a very, very renewable resource. In fact in Austria, I’m told that virtually all of the urban homes are heated by wood pellets. So like here in the U.S. where we have the propane or fuel oil truck that goes along and fuels people’s fuel oil tanks and propane tanks. There the same kind of truck goes along with a little auger in it and stops at your basement window and augers your bin full of wood pellets and you know goes on down the street to the next house.

So you know, I absolutely think that biomass certainly has a role to play and I think that we have created some real problems by not cutting crooked and diseased trees and things like that. Our national forests are in deplorable shape. The Yellowstone fires were caused because of a no-cut policy. Well instead of having a no-cut policy, let’s strategically cut but apply good sylvacultural practices and there’s enough wood out there to supply everything. Anytime a Scandinavian comes here for a visit – they just go into epileptic seizures about how terribly inefficient Americans are with their forests. And I couldn’t agree more.

We’ve got a build-up of waste, of junk wood oxidizing on the forest floor and that certainly needs to be used and we need to cull and we need to weed our forests just like anything else. But yes, unfortunately many of these things are, again, they are so industrial scaled and so sized that they are not community appropriate. When I think of energy, I think of community-scaled. The thing is, in a given community, there might be a creek with a lot of fall in it. Well whoever is on that creek can put in a little Pelton wheel to run a hydro project.

Maybe somebody else – like us for example – we have hundreds of acres of really high-quality well-growing trees on our farm, our forest. They need to be culled and thinned and that sort of thing, maybe we could have a little steam engine. And another neighbor with real good bottom land, maybe he wants to grow some corn and run a little alcohol electric generation thing. Maybe somebody else sits on a hilltop and has wind so he puts up a wind generator. The point I’m making, is that when all of us plug into the grid, with what we can offer, suddenly the community has power but its completely decentralized, its autonomous to the community, and its and all the facilities are at a scale that nests into the ecological womb of the village. And that I think makes sense.

Chris Martenson: It does, it makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll get there, is my view. But I think it’s going to require a bit of a crisis first for some reason. We seem to be unable to get there on our own terms. So we will get there by some other terms at some point.

Joel Salatin: Well, disturbance is always a precursor to innovation. You never really have innovation until you have a level of disturbance. And certainly expensive fuel is becoming a societal disturbance right now. And you know if we would quit trying to build empires around the world that would love us enough to continue our flow of oil and keep all that money at home and let the fuel go to wherever it needs to be, it would create a little more disturbance and we’d maybe become a lot more clever about what we are doing.

My mechanic - and I’m sure you have heard this and I’ve collected these kinds of clippings for my lifetime - says that even in the late 1960’s there was plenty of technology to build 100 mile per gallon carburetors but the auto companies kept buying up these backyard entrepreneur innovators, their patents and their products and these things never saw the market. And I think it’s just absolutely unspeakable, unconscionable, that we would have buried technology that would have allowed us to quadruple our miles per gallon for that long. I think it’s obscene.

Chris Martenson: Well there is a lot to be said for these disruptions you are talking about, it’s our view that perhaps some are coming up. Joel, I understand you have a book coming out this fall. Is that right?

Joel Salatin: Yes that’s correct. The title is Folks, This Ain’t Normal. And it actually contains some of the things I’ve just been talking about. When we talk about historical normalcy, high fuel prices and the herbivore, the biomass cycle, all these kinds of things. This whole century of cheap fuel, indiscriminate antibiotic use, the mechanics that went along with it, unpronounceable food, and you know no chores for children [laughs].

These are amazing times, including the whole food police thing where you and I can’t just decide to eat what we want to eat. These are all unprecedented trials in the history of civilization and I think anybody under 50 today just can’t even fathom a time where there were no TV dinners, no supermarkets, when we actually ate seasonally, when 50% of all the vegetables were produced in backyard gardens, when homes actually still had functioning larders - we don’t even use the term larder today.

What we view today as normal I argue is simply not normal. Just think about if you wanted to go to town 100 or 120 years ago, if you wanted to go to town you actually had to go out and hook up a horse. That horse had to eat something, which means you had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed that horse which meant you had to take care of some perennial in order to feed that horse in order to go to town. And so you had, throughout history, you had these kinds of what I call ‘inherent boundaries’ or brakes on how much a single human could abuse the ecology.

And today, during this period of cheap energy, we’ve been able to extricate ourselves from that entire umbilical, if you will, and just run willy-nilly as if there is no constraint or restraint. And now we are starting to see some of the outcome of that boundless, untied progression. And so the chances are, the way to bet, is that in the future we are going to see more food localization, we are going to see more energy localization, we are going to see more personal responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions because its going to be forced on us to survive economically we are going to have to start taking some accounting of these ecological principles. And so those are the kind of themes and the arguments I’ve put in the book. There is a lot of satire, lot of humor and the title is Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Chris Martenson: Great title, I get a lot from the title alone. So if we were to summarize here: we have basically a lot of unsustainable practices that just energetically don’t make sense, maybe ecologically don’t make sense from a sustainability standpoint. Obviously we’d love to be sustainable in this world because I’d like to think in a thousand years, there will still be people here doing wonderful things. And at the same time we note that disruptions are the way things change and so anything that is unsustainable, the definition is it will someday stop. Certainly there are warning signs abundantly strewn about the landscape for anybody who cares to look. A lot of people are, that’s the good news.

And the other good news that I get from your message is that integrated approaches and integrated understandings of how these pieces fit together are well within our grasp. In fact there are working practices out there, your farm being an example, or set of nested examples. So this is all something that is not beyond us. We can do this but we are just going to have to start with the understanding of where we are living today is: “folks, it ain’t normal.”

Joel Salatin: Well said, well said, I couldn’t agree more.

Chris Martenson: Well, Joel it’s been a real pleasure talking to you and I want to think you for this opportunity and wish you all the best.

Joel Salatin: Thank you Chris, it’s been an honor to be with you. Thank you.

Chris Martenson: Goodbye.


Video above: Joel Salatin TED presentation of the essence of egg. From (http://youtu.be/-T9UaP1AsMI).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Breaking Free from Factory Farming 3/30/11
 .

Corporate Tax Dodging

SUBHEAD: More than 25 of America's major corporations pay their CEO's more than companies pay in federal taxes.  

By Sarah Anderson on 31 August 2011 for Institute for Policy Studies -  
(http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2011_the_massive_ceo_rewards_for_tax_dodging)


Image above: Negative 15.8% Tax Rate not low enough for General Electric. It asks for amnesty. From (http://www.ctj.org/taxjusticedigest/archive/2011/07/negative_158_tax_rate_not_low.php).


Guns don't kill people, the old saw goes. People do.

By the same token, corporations don't dodge taxes. People do. The people who run corporations. And these people — America's CEOs — are reaping awesomely lavish rewards for the tax dodging they have their corporations do.

In fact, corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes.

This year's Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report, our 18th annual, explores the intersection between CEO pay and aggressive corporate tax dodging.

We researched the 100 U.S. corporations that shelled out the most last year in CEO compensation. At 25 of these corporate giants, we found, the bill for chief executive compensation actually ran higher than the company's entire federal corporate income tax bill.

Corporate outlays for CEO compensation — despite the lingering Great Recession — are rising. Employment levels have barely rebounded from their recessionary lows. Top executive pay levels, by contrast, have rebounded nearly all the way back from their pre-recession levels.

This contrast shows up starkly in the 2010 ratio between average worker and average CEO compensation. In 2009, we calculate, major corporate CEOs took home 263 times the pay of America's average workers. Last year, this gap leaped to 325-to-1.

Among the nation's top firms, the S&P 500, CEO pay last year averaged $10,762,304, up 27.8 percent over 2009. Average worker pay in 2010? That finished up at $33,121, up just 3.3 percent over the year before.

What are America's CEOs doing to deserve their latest bountiful rewards? We have no evidence that CEOs are fashioning, with their executive leadership, more effective and efficient enterprises. On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that CEOs and their corporations are expending considerably more energy on avoiding taxes than perhaps ever before — at a time when the federal government desperately needs more revenue to maintain basic services for the American people. This disinvestment also undermines the infrastructure and services that small and large businesses also depend upon.

Investigative journalists and tax research organizations have been documenting how U.S.-based global companies are aggressively shearing — and even totally eliminating — their federal income tax obligations. This past March, for instance, The New York Times traced the steps General Electric has taken to avoid U.S. corporate taxes for the last five years. Citizens for Tax Justice, as part of a forthcoming study on tax avoidance among the Fortune 500, has identified 12 corporations that have paid an effective rate of negative 1.5 percent on $171 billion in profits.
 
How do corporations avoid taxes?
In our analysis of companies that last year paid their CEOs more than Uncle Sam, the companies' low tax bills — or large refunds — could not be explained by low profit rates. A large majority of the 25 companies on our list reported high profits in 2010. The low IRS bills these companies faced reflected tax avoidance pure and simple.

Our 25 hyperactive tax-dodging corporations employed a variety of avoidance techniques. Not all of these techniques are nefarious. Some corporate tax breaks can have redeeming social value. Incentives that encourage our economic transition to a green energy economy offer one example of these beneficial breaks. But such incentives as these play only a minor role. The lion's share of tax breaks reward corporate behaviors — from "offshoring" to accelerated depreciation — that are of questionable value to society, especially over the long term.

Ironically, and tellingly, corporations can even lower their tax bills by overcompensating their executives. The higher CEO paychecks soar, the more corporations can deduct off their taxes.

No tax-dodging strategy over recent years has filled U.S. corporate coffers more rapidly than the offshoring of corporate activity to tax havens in low- or no-tax jurisdictions. Eighteen of the 25 firms highlighted in this study operate subsidiaries in offshore tax haven jurisdictions. The firms, all combined, had 556 tax haven subsidiaries last year.

Tax havens are costing the federal treasury, by one estimate, $100 billion a year. These havens are speeding the transfer of wealth out of local communities and the global south into the bank accounts of the planet's wealthiest and most powerful. Tax havens, or more accurately "secrecy jurisdictions," can also facilitate criminal activity, from drug money laundering to the financing of terrorist networks.

How do tax havens work? One common corporate accounting technique, "transfer pricing," helps corporations shift profits offshore. Technology and drug companies regularly open shell companies — in tax havens — that hold their intellectual property rights. They then charge their U.S.-based operations inflated amounts for the use of these rights. These inflated costs get deducted off U.S. taxes. The overseas tax haven profits go un- or lightly taxed. Adding insult to injury, a coalition of corporate tax dodgers is now asking Congress to reward their tax avoidance with a deeply discounted five percent tax rate if they bring these funds back home where many of them started.

This offshore tax gaming has spawned a massive global tax avoidance industry, with teams of lawyers and accountants who add nothing to market efficiency or product development. This "shadow" banking industry played a key role in the 2008 financial crisis. The "shadow" system's reckless financial maneuvering operated through layers of opaque offshore tax havens. The two biggest bank recipients of U.S. taxpayer bailouts — Citigroup and Bank of America — both just happen to be tax haven-happy. Citigroup operates 427 subsidiaries in tax havens, the Bank of America 115.

Accounting games like "transfer pricing" have sent the corporate share of federal revenues plummeting. In 1945, U.S. corporate income taxes added up to 35 percent of all federal government revenue. This year, corporate income taxes will make up just 9 percent of federal receipts. In 1952, the year Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was elected, the effective income tax rate for corporations was 52.8 percent. Last year it was just 10.5 percent.
 
Proposals to rein in tax dodging and excessive pay
Tax-dodging corporations argue they are breaking no laws. They are just, the argument goes, operating "under the rules that Congress has established." They are indeed. But massive corporate outlays for lobbying and campaign contributions shape those rules. The 25 firms highlighted in this study spent a combined total of more than $150 million on lobbying and campaign contributions last year.

All the companies highlighted in this report benefit enormously from their institutional presence in the United States. They utilize our taxpayer-funded infrastructure for transportation. They tap into government-sponsored research and subsidies for technological innovation. They expect the U.S. law enforcement and judicial systems to protect their intellectual and physical property. And they rely on the U.S. military to defend their assets abroad.

U.S. corporations also benefit from the public education of their workforces. In fact, 16 of the 25 CEOs included in this study received at least a portion of their post-secondary education in taxpayer-supported public universities. Yet these same corporations remain content to let others pay the bills.

We have, in short, a corporate tax system today that works for top executives — and no one else.

In this year's edition of our Executive Pay Reform Scorecard, we highlight the many efforts underway to change the rules that are contributing to executive pay excess. These include efforts to rigorously implement the executive pay provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, as well as more far-reaching proposals that would use tax and procurement policies to discourage runaway pay.

Read the full report, Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging.
Take Action!
Sign a petition to Congress demanding the passage of the Stop Corporate Tax Haven Abuse Act.


.

GOP Speed Dating

SUBHEAD: A romantic guide to the Republican suitors of the 2012 presidential race. By Margaret Carlson on 30 August 2011 for Bloomberg News - (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/a-romantic-guide-to-2012-republican-suitors-margaret-carlson.html) Image above: GOP Candidates at the first debate of 2012 race. From (http://www.deadline.com/tag/2012-gop-presidential-candidates). The Republican Party has been speed dating, racing through presidential prospects like a Hollywood starlet working her way through leading men. The fickleness suggests a party that doesn’t know whether its Tea Party heart or its establishment head should prevail in 2012. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was next in line, which is usually the right place to be in a Republican nomination contest. He checks some important boxes -- successful businessman, former governor -- and his conversion to conservative positions occurred far enough in the past that the phrase “flip-flop” no longer shows up in every story about him. He’s against health-care reform, though still dogged by the fact that he once was for it. Trouble is, the base just can’t fall in love with the guy. To many evangelicals, the Mormon Romney belongs to a religious cult. To others, he’s a stiff -- and his open collar and un- gelled hair, newly responsive to the wind, don’t camouflage that fact. Romney has the demeanor of someone for whom every date is the first, occasioning stilted conversation and a desire to please. Eager to fit in, he’ll impulsively call your father “Dad” way before it’s appropriate. No Passing Fancy The party’s reluctance to embrace its putative front-runner has provided plenty of opportunity for political infatuation. The latest heartthrob is Texas Governor Rick Perry. A week after entering the race, Perry shot to a 29-to-17 lead over Romney in the Gallup Poll. Perry’s being treated by George Will, William Kristol and other prominent conservatives as if he’s more than a passing fancy. Yet evidence from the past six months suggests that Republican love burns brightly and fades quickly. There was that spring fling with Donald Trump, for example. After he riled a crowd of conservative activists in Washington in February, the Manhattan huckster with an ego the size of the Taj Mahal (Las Vegas version) was eagerly embraced by the Republican base. Trump required more flip-flops than Romney to win them over -- suddenly finding God and guns while forsaking abortion rights and President Barack Obama, whose American birth he came to doubt publicly. By April, Trump was in first place in a Public Policy Polling survey, clocking in at 26 percent to Romney’s 15 percent. Trump was a distant memory by the time Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann burst on the scene. While Sarah Palin played hard to get, Bachmann jumped into the race with both heels, winning plaudits for her performance at a New Hampshire debate. Feisty, pretty, happy to let the U.S. default on its debt, she climbed from 6 percent to 14 percent in a month. By Aug. 13, the party activists who flock to the Iowa Straw Poll were sufficiently in love to give Bachmann a winning 29 percent of the vote in a eight-candidate field, knocking out Bachmann’s home-state competition, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Bachmann Upstaged Now Bachmann looks like a summer romance. Yesterday’s sweetheart can barely turn a Republican head, even with a promise of $2-per-gallon gasoline. At the Black Hawk County Republican dinner, held in Bachmann’s birthplace, Waterloo, Iowa, on Aug. 14, Perry upstaged her. While Bachmann was cocooned outside in a rock-star bus, her staff was inside adjusting the lighting to suit her cable-TV standards. Perry, meanwhile, worked every table, hugged every woman, slapped every back. After that, he still found time to clean his plate and her clock. Perry out-Bachmanned Bachmann. He’s so big, so craggy, so Texas; he doesn’t just like guns, he packs heat. (He reportedly killed a coyote while jogging, though the details are sketchy.) If Bachmann plays to the base, Perry channels it. He wouldn’t just vote against raising the debt ceiling, as she did. He threatens bodily harm to Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and calls him “almost treasonous.” He is as radical as Bachmann, calling climate change a “hoax” and Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” When he calls the nation’s capital a “seedy place,” he manages to sound folksy. Not Morman Is Perry another one-night stand? He’s a step closer to what the party needs -- a candidate who can excite the base (which powered the Republican win in the 2010 midterm election) without scaring the horses. His mix of executive experience, pro-business absolutism and public Christianity (translation: he’s not a Mormon) has mostly quieted Republican pleas for a white knight. An Associated Press-GfK poll released last week found that about two-thirds of Republicans and Republican- leaning independents are now pleased with the party’s presidential field, compared with just half in June. There are aspects of Perry’s record that don’t rock the Republican base. He’s insufficiently agitated by homosexuality and, having built his career in a state that is more than one- third Hispanic, he’s downright soft on immigration. Romney fired an Anglo shot across Perry’s bow last week, pointing out that as Massachusetts governor he had vetoed legislation allowing children of illegal immigrants to attend college at in-state tuition rates. Perry had supported similar legislation in Texas. As for the so-called Texas jobs miracle, Romney boasts that he has actually created jobs, unlike some unnamed competitor who has just “watched” them being created. For the rougher stuff, including Perry openly rewarding his campaign donors with state appointments and contracts, Romney’s probably hoping Bachmann will do the dirty work. Romney would be grateful for a bruising fight between Perry and Bachmann, as long as the Texas governor doesn’t make a tidy lunch of Romney after polishing off Bachmann for breakfast. Romney’s best hope is that the dashing cowboy proves himself too conservative for the party to bet on in the general election. In that case, Republicans will have to tear themselves away from the one they love, and settle for the one who can win. .

Giuliani 911 NY PD FD Fraud

SUBHEAD: MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell condemns Rudy Giuliani as an incompetent fraud. By Jack Merkinson on 31 August 2011 for Huffingto Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/lawrence-odonnell-giuliani_n_943184.html) Image above: Lawrence O'Donnell criticizing Rudolph Giuliani on MSNBC. From original article.

Lawrence O'Donnell condemned Rudy Giuliani on his Tuesday show, calling the former New York mayor an "ego-driven" "fraud" and saying that his actions made 9/11 worse than it could have been.

O'Donnell was reacting to an interview Giuliani gave to the Associated Press in which he said that 9/11 was "so far beyond what we'd contemplated."

"it certainly was beyond anything Rudy Giuliani had contemplated," O'Donnell began. He accused Giuliani of making "the worst tactical decision in the history of the city of New York" by ordering the city's emergency command center to be placed in the World Trade Center over the objections of police and other officials.

O'Donnell said Giuliani had made this decision because the Twin Towers were closer to the City Hall press corps, and so would provide him with more photo opportunities. He also vehemently criticized the faulty fire department radios which failed to alert hundreds of firefighters that the towers were collapsing.

"Despite the painful truth of these details, which show Rudy Giuliani to have been an ego-driven incompetent in dealing with the threat of terrorism in New York City ... most of the media will continue to portray him as one of the heroes of 9/11," O'Donnell concluded. "Know this: there is no more fraudulent public image in our politics."

.

Recession Forever

SUBHEAD: The New Normal is that long-term unemployed losing hold on middle class and American Dream. By Peter S. Goodman on 31 August 2011 for Huffington Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/long-term-unemployed-middle-class_n_942734.html) Image above: Marginal trailer park with heavy security. From (http://www.thenetwerk.com/entertainment/2010/01/05/trailer-park-tuesday).

If anyone in America could plausibly claim immunity to the unemployment crisis, Joe Sangataldo figured to be the guy. He earned his wages at a county social services center in southern New Jersey, where he helped jobless welfare recipients try to find work. In a nation beset by relentless decline, here was a rare growth industry, one with staying power.

But last fall, confronted with what it portrayed as an otherwise-unbridgeable budget gap, Cumberland County laid off Sangataldo along with six of his co-workers. A career civil servant with a college degree, he suddenly found himself part of the very mass of people he had previously been paid to assist.

"I went from serving the people affected by the recession to being part of the recession," Sangataldo said. "I had to sit there and tell these people, "Well, I won't be here next week. They’re laying people off.' And they're like, 'Well, if they're laying you off, where's the hope for me?'"

Among economists and policymakers, the conversation with greatest currency today centers on fears of a double-dip recession -- whether we are in one, or on the verge. Two years after the official end of the downturn known as the Great Recession, economic growth is again weak, housing prices are still falling and manufacturing is retrenching. But among people like Sangataldo -- the 6.2 million million Americans who have been officially without work for six months and longer -- such talk sounds like an esoteric exercise, one with little connection to daily life.

In many such households, the conversation has changed little in recent years, centering on more basic questions: How do you pay bills without a paycheck? When does unemployment insurance run out? How many rejections can you endure on a job search before you give up?

"In my south Jersey experience," Sangataldo said, "it's been a recession forever."

That perspective speaks to what may be the greatest loss imposed by the recent years of economic downturn in the United States -- as paychecks have been traded for unemployment checks, homeownership has yielded foreclosure and upward mobility has given way to a resigned struggle to avoid slipping into poverty -- a loss of faith in the durability of American middle class life.

"American workers share a grim outlook on the future of the U.S. economy, regardless of their employment status, age or income level," concluded a survey of more than 800 workers interviewed last year by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Some 56 percent of those surveyed said the economy had "undergone a fundamental and lasting change," according to the survey.

In the months since that survey, sources of gloom have only been amplified. A widely-watched gauge of consumer confidence this week dropped to its lowest level since the spring of 2009, when the economy was gripped by recession using any conventional definition.

In the immediate term, economists are focused on this Friday, when the latest monthly snapshot of the nation's job market will be released by the Labor Department, adding data to the debate over whether the unemployment rate -- 9.1 percent as of July -- is on its way down or, as many economists fear, could remain elevated for months or even years.

But whatever the data reveals -- whether the Labor Department counts a surprisingly large number of jobs or affirms a largely dismal picture seen in recent months -- economists are anticipating no alteration to the deeper trends in the American economy: a long-term stagnation of wages and a rapid erosion of working opportunities.

As recently as the middle of 2007, 63 percent of the working age population was employed, according to Labor Department data. As of July, that percentage had sunk to 58.1 percent. That swing -- a drop of nearly five percentage points in the so-called employment-to-population ratio over the course of about four years -- is the steepest such decline since the government began keeping track in 1948.

The only period that comes close was between early 1980 and late 1983, when the employment-to-population ratio fell by nearly three points, from 60 percent to about 57 percent. But that era, which featured a double-dip recession, coincided with the Federal Reserve's decision to lift interest rates sharply to choke off inflation, a step that crimps economic activity. Two years later, in early 1985, employment was back to 60 percent.

This time, the Fed has interest rates at near zero in an aggressive bid to catalyze economic growth, and still hiring is lean. Many economists view this as a deeply entrenched dynamic. Employers are reluctant to add payroll costs, cognizant that many consumers are too anxious and indebted to spend, thereby depriving the economy of the wages that might break the cycle. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of diminishing fortunes.

Sangataldo, 53, stands as a reluctant representative of this trend.

The son of union workers, his father was a World War II veteran who painted traffic markers on streets for the city of Vineland, N.J., and his mother sewed clothing. They never made much money in his memory -- "We were nothing like the doctors' kids," he said -- but neither did they lack the basic pieces of middle class life.

"We had everything," Sangataldo said, recalling vacations to the Poconos and the Jersey Shore with his two brothers. His parents paid off the mortgage on the sprawling ranch house they bought with the savings from their jobs, and they always had two cars in their driveway. When Sangataldo graduated from high school in 1976, his father handed him the keys to his old Chevy sedan.

Neither of his parents made it past the eighth grade, Sangataldo said, but he secured Pell Grants to complete his studies in human resources at nearby Rowan University. He used that degree as a launching pad for a career helping welfare recipients and people with disabilities enter the workforce.

His earnings were always modest, beginning at $10 an hour as a trainee, climbing to $13 an hour as an employment director at a job training agency in Camden, and then to $14 an hour at a similar position in Philadelphia. His last job, with Cumberland County, paid about $19 an hour, he said.

His sense of confidence in the stability of that job stemmed directly from the instability that defined the lives of the clients coming to see him in droves. Before he was laid off, he was responsible for 300 case files -- mostly single people drawing $140 a month in welfare benefits, plus food stamps. They were required to see him to keep their cash assistance flowing.

They entered a lobby in a county one-stop center, stepping into a crush of people lined up to apply for unemployment insurance. They took a seat at his grey cubicle, described their latest job applications and complained about the infrequency of their interviews. He advised them on how to proceed, directing some to complete GED programs; arranging for others to train to become truck drivers or nurse's aides. He knew that most would be lucky to even secure jobs at big box retailers that paid so little -- the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour -- that they would likely qualify for food stamps.

"I'd be honest and tell people the odds were not good, but if you give up and stop looking, you get nothing," Sangataldo said. "They need a base of support to keep their enthusiasm up. If people become complacent, it's even worse. They just crawl up in a hole and die."

What he did not realize was that soon he would enter that crush of people lining up for unemployment insurance. He would need words of encouragement to avoid succumbing to despair.

In the year since he lost his job, Sangataldo has applied for 20 or so government jobs in his field, without landing one. He has applied for two dozen jobs in whatever seems likely to generate a paycheck -- part-time work at a restaurant, manager positions at the International House of Pancakes and jobs at Denny's. On the rare occasion that he hears back at all, the message buried in the pro forma rejections seems clear, he said.

"I make too much," he said. "I'm too old. They want someone young, dumb and willing to work for nothing. I can't lie about having a bachelor's degree."

In surrounding Cumberland County, the unemployment rate now reaches 13.5 percent -- the sort of fact that can sap a person's desire to go out and look.

"I don't know where there's an economy that can support me," he said. "I don't buy any gas. I don't go anywhere."

Sangataldo lives with his mother and his brother, in the same house where he was reared. His mother is 91 now and suffering from kidney problems. He wonders what will happen if, as seems likely, she needs to be transferred to a nursing home. He is not sure how he will hang on to the house with only his unemployment check and his brother's wages from a restaurant job -- the job he took after being laid off as a car salesman.

Sangataldo's life now amounts to a crash course in a contemporary version of home economics: how to sustain yourself on a $407 per week unemployment check in place of a $600 paycheck. How to rely on coupons and the bargain bin of the local grocery store.

He imagines the consequences if his unemployment check runs out at the end the of year -- the outcome unless Congress extends emergency benefits -- and he is not sure how he will respond.

These are the thoughts never far from his mind as he sits in the house his parents bought through a lifetime of work and contemplates what his own life will be without the chance to work. He watches the news obsessively, absorbing talk of the debt crisis and elections.

He hears about the latest cuts to state and city budgets and he struggles to find the logic. So many people need help, and helping people is what he does, yet the system would rather hand him an unemployment check and have him stay home, where he can help no one -- not even himself -- rather than give him a paycheck and let him try to put people on the path to better days.

"I should be working on the solution to this," he said. "It's very frustrating."

And lately he hears the press chattering incessantly about the jobs program supposedly emanating from Washington, words that seem woefully late, he said.

"What do you do with all these people around here?" he asked. "Six months from now, they are going to be living in tents. And talking is nothing. Sooner or later, you're going to need some action."

.