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A fluid struggle

No not a GatorADE cage match. But the struggle about how much of the economic stimulus will be devoted to what seems quite fluid at the moment, i.e., pertains to a substance that easily changes shape. So, too, the question of what to do about the “toxic” assets of the major banks. The very misuse of that adjective is even coming into view and the route through nationalization toward a someday re-normalization of the financial sector, while not inevitable in the least, is at least being shoved out onto the stage for a kind of hearing. These whispers need to grow into impatient yelling.

Because unless there is fighting, screaming, wailing all about, little will change. Frederick Douglass spoke of the nature of reform often – how it won’t be, and can’t be, anything less than a torrid affair.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.

A kind of hearing is not enough. We’re vastly afraid of words, especially nationalization, and particularly covetous of the our wealthy, and loathe to spread wealth for the greater good. These blaspheme a specific strain in the paradox of our egalitarian right to prosper and guard our prosperity, and this contradition won’t be reconciled with incrementalist calculation of the possible.

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A fluid struggle

No not a GatorADE cage match. But the struggle about how much of the economic stimulus will be devoted to what seems quite fluid at the moment, i.e., pertains to a substance that easily changes shape. So, too, the question of what to do about the “toxic” assets of the major banks. The very misuse of that adjective is even coming into view and the route through nationalization toward a someday re-normalization of the financial sector, while not inevitable in the least, is at least being shoved out onto the stage for a kind of hearing. These whispers need to grow into impatient yelling.

Because unless there is fighting, screaming, wailing all about, little will change. Frederick Douglass spoke of the nature of reform often – how it won’t be, and can’t be, anything less than a torrid affair.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.

A kind of hearing is not enough. We’re vastly afraid of words, especially nationalization, and particularly covetous of the our wealthy, and loathe to spread wealth for the greater good. These blaspheme a specific strain in the paradox of our egalitarian right to prosper and guard our prosperity, and this contradition won’t be reconciled with incrementalist calculation of the possible.

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Expensive-r gas

I saw this article in the Guardian UK over the weekend, which features Dr. James Hansen of Goddard Institute of Space Studies waxing darkly about green:

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world’s greatest carbon emitter and the planet’s largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal – the world’s worst carbon emitter.

It’s a cheeky lede and all, but the point is taken. All you Nether-philes out there, get serious about getting serious. But then the chorus about a global economic slowdown and its effects on measures to counteract rapidly-advancing climate change pipes in.

Governments are putting plans aimed at mitigating carbon dioxide emissions on hold at a time when concerns are focused on finance rather than ecology and when the collapsing price of oil and gas is undermining incentives to invest in renewable energy.

Another blow to the sector is the tumbling price of permits for emitting carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. In countries where emitters must buy these permits, like those in the European Union, low prices mean emitters have fewer incentives to make their production process more efficient or move to less greenhouse gas intensive fuels.

So… let’s say we have identified a dependable correlation between the price of gas (natural or petrol) and the value of carbon-emitting permits, such that as the price of gas falls, efforts to raise efficiency AND demand for carbon permits also flag. What to do? Call the psychic hotline? Follow your heart?

How about we look into this conundrum and… wait for it: raise the price of gas ON PURPOSE!

Brilliant. villainous. sneaky. shrewd. under-handed. UnAmerican. Exactly.

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423 miles on one gallon

Moving one ton of freight on one gallon of diesel, that it is. But that’s the claim being made in some CSX advertising in print, online and on TV. It’s seems a little curious. I found this old-ish blog item from a [Macon?] Telegraph reporter, who got the following response from a CSX spokesmodel:

On average, railroads can move one ton of freight 423 miles on one gallon of fuel. This is a rail industry statistic calculated by dividing the 2006 annual revenue ton miles (1.772 trillion) by the fuel consumed (4.192 billion), which equates to the industry average of one ton of freight 423 miles on one gallon of fuel. (The 2006 data was the last full year for which total industry data are available.)
Revenue ton miles are those miles for which railroads are compensated for moving freight. (We move empty cars to reposition them, and we move company materials for which we are not compensated). The industry did not include fuel consumed by passenger trains — just freight trains.

There are some follow-up questions, but basically the numbers seem sound and in line with what you might intuit about using rail to move freight. Or even people. Limited stops, less wind resistance, but also… more country songs and all those great views of people’s backyards.

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423 miles on one gallon

Moving one ton of freight on one gallon of diesel, that it is. But that’s the claim being made in some CSX advertising in print, online and on TV. It’s seems a little curious. I found this old-ish blog item from a [Macon?] Telegraph reporter, who got the following response from a CSX spokesmodel:

On average, railroads can move one ton of freight 423 miles on one gallon of fuel. This is a rail industry statistic calculated by dividing the 2006 annual revenue ton miles (1.772 trillion) by the fuel consumed (4.192 billion), which equates to the industry average of one ton of freight 423 miles on one gallon of fuel. (The 2006 data was the last full year for which total industry data are available.)
Revenue ton miles are those miles for which railroads are compensated for moving freight. (We move empty cars to reposition them, and we move company materials for which we are not compensated). The industry did not include fuel consumed by passenger trains — just freight trains.

There are some follow-up questions, but basically the numbers seem sound and in line with what you might intuit about using rail to move freight. Or even people. Limited stops, less wind resistance, but also… more country songs and all those great views of people’s backyards.

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Birth of a New Nation

In his April 7,  1957 sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr., laid out his anti-imperialist vision. Fresh off a trip to Ghana where he and Mrs. King had witnessed the transfer of sovereignty from the British to Ghana’s long imprisoned leader, Kwame Nkrumah, King provides an excellent history lesson based, at least in part, in what he had seen with his own eyes – a people long treated like chattel coming in from the wilderness.

I want to preach this morning from the subject: “The Birth of a New Nation.” And I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together a story that has long since been stenciled on the mental sheets of succeeding generations. It is the story of the Exodus, the story of the flight of the Hebrew people from the bondage of Egypt, through the wilderness, and finally to the Promised Land. It’s a beautiful story. I had the privilege the other night of seeing the story in movie terms in New York City, entitled “The Ten Commandments,” and I came to see it in all of its beauty—the struggle of Moses, the struggle of his devoted followers as they sought to get out of Egypt. And they finally moved on to the wilderness and toward the Promised Land. This is something of the story of every people struggling for freedom. It is the first story of man’s explicit quest for freedom. And it demonstrates the stages that seem to inevitably follow the quest for freedom.

Prior to March the sixth, 1957, there existed a country known as the Gold Coast. This country was a colony of the British Empire. This country was situated in that vast continent known as Africa. I’m sure you know a great deal about Africa, that continent with some two hundred million people and it extends and covers a great deal of territory. There are many familiar names associated with Africa that you would probably remember, and there are some countries in Africa that many people never realize. For instance, Egypt is in Africa. And there is that vast area of North Africa with Egypt and Ethiopia, with Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco and Libya. Then you might move to South Africa and you think of that extensive territory known as the Union of South Africa. There is that capital city Johannesburg that you read so much about these days. Then there is central Africa with places like Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo. And then there is East Africa with places like Kenya and Tanganyika, and places like Uganda and other very powerful countries right there. And then you move over to West Africa, where you find the French West Africa and Nigeria, and Liberia and Sierra Leone and places like that. And it is in this spot, in this section of Africa, that we find the Gold Coast, there in West Africa.

You also know that for years and for centuries, Africa has been one of the most exploited continents in the history of the world. It’s been the “Dark Continent.” It’s been the continent that has suffered all of the pain and the affliction that could be mustered up by other nations. And it is that continent which has experienced slavery, which has experienced all of the lowest standards that we can think about, and its been brought into being by the exploitation inflicted upon it by other nations.

And this country, the Gold Coast, was a part of this extensive continent known as Africa. It’s a little country there in West Africa about ninety-one thousand miles in area, with a population of about five million people, a little more than four and a half million. And it stands there with its capital city, Accra. For years the Gold Coast was exploited and dominated and trampled over. The first European settlers came in there about 1444, the Portuguese, and they started legitimate trade with the people in the Gold Coast. They started dealing with them with their gold, and in turn they gave them guns and ammunition and gunpowder and that type of thing. Well, pretty soon America was discovered a few years later in the fourteen hundreds, and then the British West Indies. And all of these growing discoveries brought about the slave trade. You remember it started in America in 1619.

And there was a big scramble for power in Africa. With the growth of the slave trade, there came into Africa, into the Gold Coast in particular, not only the Portuguese but also the Swedes and the Danes and the Dutch and the British. And all of these nations competed with each other to win the power of the Gold Coast so that they could exploit these people for commercial reasons and sell them into slavery.

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Miller – Durrell letters

Henry Miller was one of the great letter writers of all time, both in prodigious volume and majesterial exposition. But in English novelist Lawrence Durrell, Miller had met his match. Miller and Durrell carried on a correspondence from the time just after they lived in Paris in the ’30’s to well into the 1960’s. Many of the letters have been published; the following is from the ill-titled Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller A Private Correspondence.

Spring 1944, Alexandria, Egypt

Dear Henry,

Yes, I got your letters…

Here we are sweltering in an atmosphere that demands a toast – great passions, short lives. Everything is worn thin as eggshell; it’s the fifth year now and the nervous breakdown is coming out into the open. Old women, ginger dons, nursing sisters begin to behave like bacchantes; they are moving in and out of nursing homes with a steady impetus. meanwhile we are crippled here by an anemia and an apathy and a censorship which prevents the least trace of the human voice – of any calibre. We exist on a machine-made diet of gun bomb and tank – backed up by the slogan.

The atmosphere in this delta is crackling like a Leyden jar. You see, in normal times all the local inhabitants spend six months in Europe a year, so they are as stale and beaten thin as the poor white collar man. The poetry I exude these days is dark grey and streaky, like bad bacon. But the atmosphere of sex and death is staggering in its intensity. Meanwhile the big shots come and go, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, in a money daydream; there is still butter and whisky and cafe viennois. A kind of diseased fat spreads over the faces and buttocks of the local populations, who have skimmed the grease off the war efforts in contracts and profiteering. No, I don’t think you would like it. First the steaming humid flatness – not a hill or mound anywhere – choked to bursting point with bones and crummy deposits of wiped out cultures. Then this smashed up broken down shabby Neapolitan town, with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun. A sea flat, dirty brown and waveless rubbing the port. Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Levant French; no music, no art, no real gaiety. A saturated middle European boredom laced with drink and Packards and beach-cabins. NO SUBJECT OF CONVERSATION EXCEPT MONEY. Even love is thought of in money terms. “You are getting on with her? She has ten thousand a year of her own.” Six hundred greaseball millionaires sweating in ther tarbushes and waiting for the next shot of root-hashish. And the shrieking personal unhappiness and loneliness showing in every face. No, if one could write a single line of anything that had a human smell to it here, one would be a genius. Add to all this a sort of maggot-dance of minor officual place hunting, a Florentine atmosphere of throat slitting and distrust, and you will have some idea of what anyone with a voice or tongue is up against. I am hoping the war will be over soon so I can quit; I’m glad of this little death for all the material it’s put in my way about people and affairs in general. But I’m worn thin with arse-licking and having my grammar corrected by sub-editors from the Bush Times in South America. Here in Alexandria though, I have my own office and almost no interference; so I can run things the way I like. You always used to laugh when I said I was an executive man, but I was right; my office runs like a top; and the people working for me LIKE it. The basic principe is that of the old blind pianist in Paris – remeber? Edgar’s friend Thibaud or some such name. ” Anything that needs effort to do is being done from the wrong centres; it is not worth doing.” Sometime I’ll tell you how I applied that to the running of an effortless speed organization.

…

How about a year in Poros now – baked hard rock and glittering sea; followed by autumn in Athens…? No more writing but lying about and taking a long myopic and unbiased view of the universe. Or do you prefer Savings Bonds, Maximum Employment, better plumbing and a prefabricated spiritual life in tune with the Stock Exchange graphs?

…

If you somehow haven’t read Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, you should be ashamed. And as always, love your neighbor, read your Miller.

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Made by hand, tested by labs

I’m a little late to this but… like many issues, it is woven into a blanket that is easy to forget you have, unless it’s the one you pull up every night to keep warm.

In response to the furor last year over lead in toys from China and elsewhere, the government responded with the Consumer Product safety Improvement Act. Sounds reasonable enough, right? The materials used to fabricate toys should be thoroughly tested before mass production and dissemination through chain retailers and the intertubes. But what about small runs of hand-made items, clothing, dolls, toys from people who have created tiny, sustainable niche markets to make things and support themselves? What about used clothes and thrift stores? No difference at all, the Act says.

For starters, the CPSIA requires end unit testing on every product intended for use by children under 12. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to do this testing, regardless of how small the business. That means that manufacturers (like myself ) will have to pay to get every different product they offer tested. These tests have to be done at a CSPC accredited lab, and cost up to $4,000 with an average of around $150. So for me, I offer 3 different types of dresses. Each dress contains 2 different fabrics, as well as buttons, and thread, so that’s potentially $600 to test one dress. But I have 3 styles, so that’s $1800. And when I get a new bolt of fabric, I need to start all over again. I can only make 15 dresses from one bolt, so there is no way I could make the testing financially feasible.

At present, there are no exemptions for small businesses and “micro” manufacturers like myself and most handcraft artisans.
There is no exception for quantities made, where the garments/products are made or anything else. Nor is there an exception for unadorned fabric components, unfinished wood components, materials which, by their nature, are free of lead and phthalates. Also, the Act takes a “guilty until proven innocent” approach, which would treat a handmade, unfinished wooden toy that doesn’t meet the certification deadline of 2/10/09 as a “banned hazardous substance” which would be illegal to distribute in this country. Each infraction carries a $100,000 felony charge.

This legislation is also retroactive for any pre-existing inventory as of February 10th, 2009. This means that everything on the shelves in those big (or small) stores will also be “banned, hazardous substances” – contraband. Larger corporations that can afford testing will incur thousands, maybe millions of dollars in fees, and this expense will be handed down to the consumer, probably making the prices for children’s products go through the roof. This also means that after that date, even selling your kids old things on eBay or Craigslist will be illegal. Charities will not be able to accept donations without a certificate of compliance either.

Designers and shop owners are being turned into activists by this issue and the looming deadline, as their livelihoods are at stake. The manufacturing scale here should easily connote a distinction in risk, and the handmade fabrication and retail industries should be enlisted as a corrective/alternative to mass-produced, imported goods, not lumped in with them. These are the folks who started out championing local, organic, small scale and sustainable as the cornerstones of new enterprise. And they were right. It is a crucial point of departure which is itself one of the new routes to sustainability. The time in which lawmakers could be insufficiently familiar with this distinction, and other, very related ones, has passed.

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Meanwhile,

On another planet, French president Sarkozy announced that admission to all national museums and monuments would be free to those under 25. It’s weird but the French actually connect their art to their national heritage (“le patrimoine”) and think they can attract more visitors by eliminating the entry fee.

At the same time they proposed spending 100 million euros on the renovation of le patrimoine, they also proposed four free nights at the Louvre, the Orsay, the Pompidou and Quai Branly for people 18-25. That was part of an experiment in the first half of 2008 that opened up the permanent collections in 14 national museums totally free.

Why would you want more people going to museums? Who knows? Go figure.

The Painter’s Studio – a Real Allegory by Gustave Courbet, 1855 Musee Orsay