(Paper presented at Green Party national convention, Chicago
Illinois, July 13, 2008)

Let me suggest a context for our discussion of agrarian revival by
describing the two major transformations of our food system. The
second transformation will be upon us in a few years as rising prices
for energy will curtail the industrial food system, and I will
explain this in a few minutes. But first I want to describe the first
transformation which occurred during the twentieth century. This was
the time when the availability of cheap energy made the industrial
food system possible. The abundance of cheap energy gave us an
abundance of cheap food, but not without a whole lot of serious
environmental impacts. As Greens we are aware of environmental
impacts, but I want to review some of these impacts so we have some
basis for affirming the changes that will soon be upon us.

The food system in its totality is the largest industry in this
country and uses the most energy. Oil is used in tractors on the
farm, in trucks for transportation of food, in factories for the
processing of food, and to manufacture chemicals used for pesticides
and fertilizers; coal is used to generate electricity for
refrigeration, cooking, lighting in restaurants and supermarkets; and
natural gas, which is also in short supply, is used to manufacture
anhydrous ammonia which has replaced manure as nitrogen fertilizer.

These are only a few examples of how energy is used in the industrial
food system. The average family of four that buys its food uses more
energy in the food they buy than in the car they drive. The burning
of fossil fuels such as coal (for electricity) , along with oil and
natural gas, has long been recognized as a source of air pollution
with acid rain. More recently we have learned to recognize the
otherwise innocent gas, carbon dioxide, as a pollutant that helps to
create the greenhouse effect which may lead to less hospitable
climate.

There are several reasons why we need to be aware of the problems in
the industrial food system. First, it is designed to make money and
produces food only for that reason. In his new book, The End of Food,
Paul Roberts devotes a whole chapter to how cost-cutting measures
have made food unsafe to eat. Second, the easy availability of food
has changed us from producers to consumers, and many of us have lost
the ability to raise our food. Third, the large corporations that
control this food industry have, along with other energy and retail
corporations, taken over the country. The United States is more of a
plutocracy than a democracy. Fourth, this industrial food system,
which most Americans take for granted as normal, is a unique,
abnormal bonanza made possible by cheap oil. It is not likely to
happen again, there is no substitute for the concentrated power in
oil. The industrial food system is not sustainable.

We are now moving into the discussion of the second transformation of
our food system. The first transformation was made possible by cheap
oil and facilitated by policies to promote the industrialization of
our food system. The second transformation will occur as we move
toward the end of cheap oil. Notice I am not saying the end of oil.

After the rate of oil production peaks and levels off, it will
gradually decline. But all over the world, and especially in India
and China, demand for oil is increasing. The human population is
growing. As demand exceeds supply, prices will rise, and it is the
price of oil that will drive us to a different food system. I am
suggesting that we should actively affirm this as an agrarian
revival, and not just wait in a passive way for it to happen. If we
affirm it we can plan for it -- and for the recovery of democracy.

In calling for an agrarian revival I am following writers like
Wendell Berry who defined the agrarian as the opposite of, or
alternative to, the industrial. The word agrarian refers to a
cultural possibility, a possibility that has deep roots as a
recessive gene in our cultural organism. Thomas Jefferson promoted
this possibility but it was gradually over-shadowed by a culture
based on manufacturing. The end of cheap oil will re-open this debate.

What would a post-petroleum agrarian culture be like? First, it would
be focused on food. Food prices in the United States already rose by
5% in 2007, the greatest increase since 1990. In other countries
rising prices for energy are magnified in rising food process.
Climate change may be causing a decline of yields in some areas. And
as more corn is used to make ethanol in this country less corn is
exported for food, and, as more farmers switch to corn other grains
prices rise as they are in short supply. The irony is that as we try
to prop up the automobile, the hallmark of industrial transportation,
we are burning our food supply.

Rising food prices are already stimulating more people to raise their
own or seek local farmer's markets which are popping up in every
town. There are now nearly 5,000 farmer's markets in this country, up
from around 300 in 1970. during the energy crisis of the 1970s there
was a back-to-the- land movement that demographers subsequently
recognized as a "migration reversal." A larger percentage of people
moved from urban to rural areas than from rural to urban areas. We
can assume this will happen again when it is clear that oil and food
prices will continue to rise. Thus another aspect of an agrarian
culture is a population that is more dispersed into rural areas with
more small towns to serve it. More small towns will be accessible by
rail. The cultural values that we cherish in cities can be accessible
in smaller cities.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I want to be clear that those
Americans who have enough money, and there are a lot of them, will
continue to drive cars and buy food even as the price rises. We are
not yet running out of oil, but the vast majority of us will not be
able to afford to buy it, or the food that is made with inputs from
oil.

Still another aspect of an agrarian culture will be organic methods
of food production, working in harmony with nature. This actually
began in the 1970s with the first energy crisis, and as the quality
of industrial food was called into question, the demand for organic
foods has been growing in recent years by 20% per year. I became an
organic farmer in 1973 as a back-to-the- land part-time farmer, and by
1991 my involvement in the organic movement led me to organize
Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance as a state-wide group
promoting local organic food and farming. I did it then as an
environmentalist, since organic farming does not use chemical
fertilizers and pesticides. Thus it uses 30% less fossil fuel energy.
More recently it was found that organic fertilizers actually
sequester carbon in the soil and this reduces carbon emissions.

Organic farming methods will definitely be normative in the future
even as the energy-intensive Monsantos of this world oppose them and
offer their genetic engineering as a solution.

Another aspect of an agrarian food system is the long-overdue shift
back from specialized agriculture to a diversified farm structure.
When I was growing up farms were still generally small family farms
which included livestock as a source of fertilizer. The availability
of anhydrous ammonia made livestock unnecessary, and so we now have
specialization: large grain farms that are often distant from the
CAFOs that produce cheap meat. Thus manure disposal is a problem.

What I am trying to illustrate here is that transition to an energy-
conserving and more ecological food system is possible on a technical
level, but may be difficult as a political possibility. I mentioned
earlier that we are governed by a plutocracy which has virtually
replaced our democracy. Money rules. We have seen how industrial
civilization facilitated the transfer of wealth into fewer and fewer
hands. Already in 2000 the top 1% of Americans had as much disposable
income as the bottom 100 million, or 35%. We lost our democracy when
we were trained to be good consumers of what the industrial food
system produced. And as long as we had energy slaves to provide our
food, we did not worry about it. Now we face a new situation as the
spike in energy prices creates new threats and opens new political
possibilities.

Green politics could have a vital role to play in the recovery of our
democracy, but we can expect opposition from big money. Oil companies
are making record profits as prices rise; Exxon-Mobile made a profit
of 40 billion in 2007. With this fresh infusion of capital the oil
companies are likely to move into food and water. And in the more
distant future, when labor costs less than oil, we can expect a neo-
feudal arrangement where poor people work on the corporate plantation
to produce food as a commodity for others to buy. What a sad ending
this would be for the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of independent
farmers! But it is reasonable to assume that the recent power of
labor unions, although currently diminished, will generate resistance
to neo-feudalism. It is in this kind of context that an agrarian
culture with a decentralized or local food production system can help
us. Wendell Berry has emphasized that an agrarian economy is first of
all a subsistence economy, and this is what many people will choose --
and are choosing as they spade up their backyards to raise
vegetables. It will be a society with a great deal more informal
economic activity. Local community currencies will complement the
federal money system.

I see evidence that rising costs of oil will contribute to a partial
economic collapse in this country. Writers who have studied societal
collapse, such as Joseph Tainter and Dmitry Orlov, have emphasized
that collapse in a complex society means a shift to a less complex
society. I see this as a shift from an industrial to an agrarian
society. The good thing about this is that it would very likely get
us off the treadmill of economic growth and into a steady-state
society.

In the meantime, large food companies will demand more federal
subsidies in order to provide us with food as energy costs rise.
Efforts will be made to prop up the industrial mode of production
until everyone sees it as obviously counter-productive. So one of the
first political tasks is to urge the reconsideration of federal
subsidies to corporations. The de-industrializatio n of the food
system must eventually be a political program. In Cuba, after the
Soviet regime cut off oil supplies, there were serious food
shortages. But as they gradually de-industrialized their food system
they produced enough food without oil.

The major political task will be to make land available for a new
generation of agrarian growers. It is a daunting task at a time when
ownership of land has been concentrated in fewer hands including both
large family farms and agribusiness corporations. One of the thinkers
who has given serious consideration to a program of "re-ruralization"
is David Orr. He emphasizes that people should be able to move to the
land as "homecomers" rather than as refugees from the city. This
requires a well-planned program with an educational component. Orr
rejects conventional political agencies such as a Presidential
Commission or the land grant universities for this task because they
have become the servants of big money. He suggests that planning for
re-ruralization should begin with the many regional non-profit
organizations that are already working on a transition to a post-
petroleum society. Orr argues that this is a long-term project; he
suggests ten years of planning. It happened faster in Cuba, but
perhaps because Cuba was a more regimented state with a longer
growing season. Many religious institutions could be a part of this
process. I would like to hope that the green politics and party would
participate in this task. And, along with a new homesteading movement
in the countryside, we will need greener cities with more intensive
urban food production.

Arable land will be an increasingly precious resource, especially as
yields are reduced after the end of cheap fossil fuel inputs. One way
to make land available is to require that prime farmland be used for
food production. If large land-owners cannot use their holdings as
energy prices rise they could be required to sell either to the
government, which would redistribute it in smaller tracts, or to
smaller growers directly.

There are other ways of envisioning an agrarian culture. Paul Gilk, a
long-time Green activist and writer from Wisconsin, has just had a
book published entitled Politics is Eutopian. The word "eutopian" is
his way of characterizing an agrarian society. Drawing on the
critique of industrial civilization by Lewis Mumford as a utopian
project, Paul Gilk contrasts utopia, which is noplace, with eutopia,
a good place. A utopian society is noplace in that it is not grounded
in a natural context but exists as a man-made imposition of abstract
and conceptual mental patterns on the natural environment. A utopian
society imposes an artificial order with many rules and regulations.
It is focused on the control of nature and humans. The norm for
eutopia is the village that is rooted in the natural environment, a
real place where people raise food with organic methods and live in
harmony with nature. While such a life demands more physical
exertion, it is likely that better food and more exercise would make
us healthier.

One of Paul Gilks special concerns is the status of women as we move
into an agrarian way of life. In past agrarian societies work was
often gendered with women bearing the brunt of drudgery. If feminism
can remain strong in a post-petroleum society sexist discrimination
may be mitigated. More efficient and appropriate technology might
also be helpful.

My special concern, as a former professor of religion and
environmental studies, is that people's values in a neo-agrarian
culture should be informed by an earth-centered spirituality. This
may take many different forms, but an example might be neo-paganism
with an emphasis on the celebration of seasonal rituals. The
word "pagan" means a country-dweller. A greater emphasis on a
cyclical structure of time, rather than linear time with its focus on
progress, may be conducive to contentment. I wrote about this in my
book, Adapting to the End of Oil: Toward an Earth-Centered
Spirituality. We have copies available.

In summary, as a Green with a concern for "future focus," I have
argued that our society will be moving from an energy-intensive
industrial mode of food production to energy-conserving agrarian and
local food system. This will be a cultural transition, forced on us
by rising prices for energy. We should affirm and support this change
even if the price of oil goes down again in order to slow the process
of climate change. The costs of energy that drive this change are
both monetary and ecological. Agrarian revival may be a radical
economic change, but we must reduce the burning of fossil fuels or we
face a more radical and more destructive ecological change.

Sources Cited:

Paul Gilk, Green Politics is Eutopian
Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse
David Orr, Earth in Mind
Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels
Paul Roberts, The End of Food
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
Norman Wirzba,(ed) The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of
Wendel Berry

For Immediate Release:
Monday, August 11, 2008

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614,
mclarty@greens. org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp. org

America needs the Green Party's solutions to energy and global warming
crises, not the Obama or McCain plans, say Greens

• Greens call rise of gas prices and demand for expanded drilling a
manipulation by oil companies seeking control over US energy policy

WASHINGTON, DC -- Green candidates and leaders called Barack Obama's and
John McCain's positions on energy policy, gas prices, and global warming
a capitulation to corporate lobbies, and urged adoption of the Green
Party's plan to reduce fossil fuel consumption, generate new jobs in
conservation and new energy sources, and curb the advance of climate change.

"Both the McCain and Obama energy plans privilege corporate profits over
the urgent need to transforms our nation's energy policies. Both Mr.
McCain and Mr. Obama are seeking ways to preserve corporate profits at a
time when the future of our planet is at stake," said John M. Wages,
Jr., Green candidate for the US House in Mississippi (District 1)
(http://www.VoteJohn Wages.com). "Barack Obama's support for nuclear
power and ethanol and his recent turnaround on offshore drilling prove
that he, like John McCain, will not challenge the power and profits of
the energy industry. We need the kind of national leadership on energy
and the global warming threat that's represented by our presidential and
congressional Green candidates."

Exelon, a nuclear power company, is among Barack Obama's top corporate
donors ((Source: Center for Responsive Politics,
http://www.opensecr ets.org/pres08/ contrib.php? cycle=2008& cid=N00009638).
(John McCain's corporate donor list:
http://www.opensecr ets.org/pres08/ contrib.php? id=N00006424& cycle2=2008& goButt2.x= 7&goButt2. y=6)
Oil industry contributions to Democrats and Republicans in 2008 are
already soaring, while the percentage gap between contributions to the
two parties' candidates, though consistently higher for Republicans, has
begun to diminish (Source:
http://www.opensecr ets.org/industri es/indus. php?ind=E01).

Greens said that two factors are behind the demand for drilling in the
Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) and in offshore areas,
purportedly to reduce dependence on foreign oil:

(1) The oil companies are manipulating prices to create fear among
Americans to win support for drilling in these areas. In fact, Canada
increased its exports to the States by almost 100 million barrels
between 2005 and 2007, thanks to an oil boom in Alberta's oil sands, and
oil companies have posted record profits recently.

Naomi Klein has written that "drilling in ANWR would have little
discernible impact on actual global oil supplies, as its advocates well
know. The argument that it could nonetheless bring down oil prices is
based not on hard economics but on market psychoanalysis: drilling would
'send a message' to the oil traders that more oil is on the way, which
would cause them to start betting down the price." (The Nation, July
21, 2008, http://www.thenatio n.com/doc/ 20080721/ lookout)

(2) Popular fears over gas prices have given the oil industry greater
leverage over measures to curb global warming at a time when fossil fuel
consumption must be drastically reduced.

Furthermore, Exxon Mobil, Texaco, BP, and other companies are using
their increased leverage during the current gas price panic to win oil
production contracts in Iraq, which will prolong the US occupation
indefinitely. Sen. Obama, while promising a reduction of US troops in
Iraq, would leave a residual occupation force to protect "American
interests," which means US control over Iraqi oil resources.

The Green Party has strongly opposed ANWR and off-shore drilling and
trading of carbon caps, and favors bans on new coal fired-power plants,
new nuclear power plants (as well as early retirement of current nuclear
reactors), and all mountaintop coal removal. The party endorses a
reduction by 90% of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by
2012, targeted carbon taxes, investment in renewable noncarbon-based
energy technology, and reduction of CO2 and SO2 emissions by 80% by
2020. These and other policies are listed in a recommendation for
environmental action for a Green President's first 100 days in office
(http://www.gp. org/press/ pr-national. php?ID=58).

"America's first priorities must be conservation and efficiency. The
Green Party has an effective plan to reorganize the economy, create
millions of new jobs in conversion to safe clean energy, conservation,
and expansion of public transportation to replace car traffic," said
Rosa Clemente, nominated by the Green Party as Cynthia McKinney's
running mate for Vice President of the United States
(http://www.rosaclem ente.com). "Such an effort should be comparable to
America's concerted and internationally cooperative effort to defeat the
Axis powers during World War II. But this time we'd be uniting for
peace, since global warming threatens the security of the entire world
in the coming decades."

"Without such an effort, the disaster we witnessed in New Orleans during
and after Katrina will take place on a global scale. Billions of people
will see their homes, livelihoods, health, and lives threatened, while
corporate interests exploit the devastation for more money and power,"
added Ms. Clemente.

MORE INFORMATION

Green Party of the United States http://www.gp. org
202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN
Fax 202-319-7193
• Green candidate database for 2008 and other campaign information:
http://www.gp. org/elections. shtml
• Green Party News Center http://www.gp. org/newscenter. shtml
• Green Party Speakers Bureau http://www.gp. org/speakers
• Green Party ballot access page http://www.gp. org/2008- elections

Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente 'Power to the People' Campaign for the
White House http://www.runcynth iarun.org

2008 Green National Convention, July 10-13 in Chicago, Illinois
http://www.greenpar ty2008.org

~ END ~

People attending the meeting: Chuck Jordan, Patrick McKearnan, Julie and David Ludwig, Ryan McCoy, Art Toy, Barbara Geisler and Maynard Kaufman.

The first item on the agenda was a report by Chuck Jordan on the meeting of the Michigan Green Party, from which he had just returned. Green candidates for President of the US were discussed.

The second item was introduced by Maynard who reminded the group that the Greens were, and still are, both a movement and a party. As a movement the Greens can focus on issues that may not be appropriate for election campaigns. The issue to which Maynard called attention was the pressing need for us in this country to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. This is necessary in order to mitigate the severity of global warming and to prepare for the imminent end of cheap oil. Maynard argued that it is the most important issue facing us and the group agreed that it underlies the war for oil in Iraq and the possibility of other resource wars..

What followed was a brainstorming session in which the group identified actions and policies that could be suggested to different levels of government as ways to reduce use of fossil fuels. Most of these were relevant to South Haven and Bangor and a few were on the county and state levels.

Policies and Actions on the local city level.
Require green buildings with LEED or Energy Star ratings
Monitor energy use in grounds-keeping by the city
Establish and encourage community gardens and community kitchens for food processing
Promote compact flourescent lighting and require energy-saving tips on utility bills
Help people recognize and avoid phantom loads in electricity use
Give public recognition to energy-conscious and energy-efficient businesses
Help to re-establish recycling possibilities with volunteer monitors
Encourage the city to establish regular bus runs from suburbs to grocery stores
Encourage bicycle and walkways along streets.
Encourage schools to teach real life skills, the importance of healthy local food
Encourage energy audits in schools and in the community by the students.

Policies and Actions in Van Buren County
Encourage continuation of home insulation by Van-Cass-Cap
Begin promoting the need for bus service from South Haven to Kalamazoo
Raise the issue of light rail for passengers on the Van Buren Trail

Policies and Actions on the State level
Make building codes more energy-efficient; require more renewable energy
Encourage manufacture of renewable energy equipment in Michigan, discourage coal and nuclear
Raise awareness of the problems with Confinement Animal Feeding Operations
Start a public campaign for a net metering policy that is fair to small scale energy producers
Discourage bottled water in small plastic containers, or require a deposit on them

Whichever Way the Wind Blows
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Op-Ed Columnist
December 15, 2006 The New York Times
http://select. nytimes.com/ 2006/12/15/ opinion/15friedm an.html
Midland, Tex. Time for another news quiz: Which American state produces
more wind-generated electricity than any other? Answer: Texas. Next
question - this one you'll never get: Which politician launched the
Texas wind industry? Answer: Former Gov., now President, George W. Bush.
Yes, there are many things that baffle me about President Bush, but none
more than how the same man who initiated one of the most effective
renewable energy programs in America, has presided over an
administration that for six years has dragged its feet on alternative
energy, used its regulatory powers to weaken efficiency standards for
major appliances and stuck its head in the sand on global warming. I'll
wait for historians to sort that out. But here is some immediate advice
I can give the president: If you want to salvage any positive legacy, it
will not come from Iraq. There are only tears left there. No, the only
way for you, Mr. President, to salvage any legacy is to get back in
touch with your green Texas roots and devote the rest of your term to
REALLY ending America's oil addiction, liberating us from dependence on
petro-authoritarian regimes and making America the leader in renewable
energies that combat climate change. If this isn't the core of Mr.
Bush's next State of the Union, he might as well go back to Crawford
now. At least there he might be able to contemplate what went wrong with
his presidency under lights powered by clean, wind-generated electricity
that he promoted.

Defeating the Bill of Rights: Bush's Lone Victory

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

George Orwell warned us, but what American would have expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States would become a country in which lies and deception by the President and Vice President were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression, and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution?

If anyone had predicted that the election of George W. Bush to the presidency would result in an American police state and illegal wars of aggression, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic.

What American ever would have thought that any US president and attorney general would defend torture or that a Republican Congress would pass a bill legalizing torture by the executive branch and exempting the executive branch from the Geneva Conventions?

What American ever would have expected the US Congress to accept the president's claim that he is above the law?

What American could have imagined that if such crimes and travesties occurred, nothing would be done about them and that the media and opposition party would be largely silent?

Brainwashed "conservatives" are so accustomed to denouncing federal judges for "judicial activism" that Cheney's charge of overreach goes down smoothly. Vast percentages of the American public are simply unconcerned that their liberty can be revoked at the discretion of a police or military officer and that they can be held without evidence, trial or access to attorney and tortured until they confess to whatever charge their torturers wish to impose.

Americans believe that such things can only happen to "real terrorists," despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the Bush regime's detainees have no connections to terrorism.

When these points are made to fellow citizens, the reply is usually that "I'm doing nothing wrong. I have nothing to fear."

Why, then, did the Founding Fathers write the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

American liberties are the result of an 800 year struggle by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government. For centuries English speaking peoples have understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power. If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government has grown in size, scope and power beyond the imagination of the Founding Fathers.

But, alas, "law and order conservatives" have been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have forgot that we need protection from government more than we need protection from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns on us?

This is the famous question asked by Sir Thomas More in the play, A Man for All Seasons. The answer is that we stand naked, unprotected by law. It is an act of the utmost ignorance and stupidity to assume that only criminals and terrorists will stand unprotected.

Americans should be roused to fury that attorney general Alberto Gonzales and vice president Cheney have condemned the defense of American civil liberty as "a grave threat to US security." This blatant use of an orchestrated and propagandistic fear to create a "national security" wedge against the Bill of Rights is an impeachable offense.

Mark my words, the future of civil liberty in the US depends on the impeachment and conviction of Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Source URL: http://counterpunch.org/roberts11222006.html

America 101
By Bill Moyers
TomPaine.com

Wednesday 01 November 2006

Let's be honest about what we mean by "urban education." We are talking about the poorest and most vulnerable children in America - kids for whom "at risk" has come to describe their fate and not simply their circumstances.

Their education should be the centerpiece of a great and diverse America made stronger by equality and shared prosperity. It has instead become the epitome of public neglect, perpetuated by a class divide so permeated by race that it mocks the bedrock principles of the American Promise.

It has been said that the mark of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics. If so, America's governing class should be knocked off their feet by the fact that more than 70 percent of black children are now attending schools that are overwhelmingly non-white. In 1980 that figure was 63 percent. Latino students are even more isolated. Brown v. Board' s "all deliberate" speed of 1954 has become slow motion in reverse. In Richard Kahlenberg's words, "With the law in retreat, geography takes command."

Not just the kids suffer. A nation that devalues poor children also demeans their teachers. For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. Children aren't born lawyers, corporate executives, engineers and doctors. Their achievements bear the imprint of their teachers. There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis. Is there anyone here whose path was not marked by the inspiration of some teacher? Mary Sullivan, Bessie Bryant, Miss White, the Brotze sisters, Inez Hughes - I cannot imagine my life without them. Their classrooms were my world, and each one of them kept enlarging it.

Inexcusable Underinvestment

One morning I opened The New York Times to read that tuition at Manhattan's elite private schools had reached $26,000 a year, starting in kindergarten. On that same page was another story about a school in Mount Vernon, just across the city line from the Bronx, where 97 percent of the students are black and 90 percent of those are so impoverished they are eligible for free lunches. During Black History month, a six-grader researching Langston Hughes could not find a single book by Hughes in the library. This wasn't an oversight: There were virtually no books relevant to black history in that library. Most of the books on the shelves date back to the l950s and l960s. A child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning to be a telegraph delivery boy!

It has taken constant litigation to bring to light this chronic neglect of basic learning in poor communities. Just seven years ago, in 1999, the Department of Education said that $127 billion was needed to bring "the nation's school facilities into good overall condition." The National Education Association put the figure at $268 billion - that's just to make sure our kids are physically safe, 28 or 30 or even 32 or more to a classroom. Now the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that the New York City school system alone is due approximately $15 billion "to provide students with their constitutional right to the opportunity to receive a sound basic education."

Surely this inexcusable underinvestment is one significant reason why, despite our national wealth and GDP which are higher than virtually all of Europe combined, American students as a whole fare so poorly compared to their counterparts in other advanced countries. In 2003, the United States ranked 24th out of 29 advanced countries in combined mathematical literacy, according to the Program for International Student Assessment. A better ranking in combined reading literacy - 15th out of 27 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in 2000 - might be counted a success when compared to our abysmal math performance, but this can hardly be comforting if we consider that students are performing significantly better in countries without America's vast wealth.

The neglect of urban education - a capital moral offense in its own right - is but a symptom of what is happening in America. We are retreating from our social compact all down the line.

Our country is falling apart. Literally. Last year (2005) the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a report on our crumbling infrastructure. The engineers said we are "failing to maintain even substandard conditions" in our highway system - with significant economic effects. Poor road conditions cost motorists $54 billion a year in repairs and operating costs, and the 3.5 billion hours per year Americans spend stuck in traffic, costs the economy more than $67 billion annually in lost productivity and wasted fuel.

The report said the country's power grid is likewise "in urgent need of modernization" as maintenance spending on transmission facilities has declined 1 percent annually since 1992, while growth in demand has risen 2.4 percent annually over the same period. In 2002, the Department of Energy warned that system "bottlenecks" due to transmission constraints were adding to consumer costs and threatening blackouts. The next August (2003) a blackout blanketed the Midwest and Northeast (and parts of Canada), leaving 50 million people in the dark, some for days, costing billions of dollars in lost commerce and production.

Even our much-touted technological superiority is in doubt. As my colleagues and I reported on my most recent PBS special - "The Net at Risk "- Asian and European countries have raced ahead of us in broadband speed - pushing America from 4th to 12th place on the information superhighway. The Japanese, for example, have near-universal access to high-speed broadband connections, averaging 16 times faster than U.S. connections at a much lower cost.

Connect the dots: Neglected schools, crumbling roads, permanent environmental "dead zones," inadequate emergency systems, understaffed hospitals, library cutbacks, the lack of affordable housing, incompetent government agencies, whether it is FEMA or state bureaucracies charged with protecting helpless children - these are characteristic features of our public sector today. Partly it's about money; little noticed amid all the concern about growing deficits and entitlement spending is this fact - non-defense discretionary spending declined 38 percent between 1980 and 1999 as a share of Gross Domestic Product. According to economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, federal investment in non-defense capacities, including research and education, plummeted in the 1980s - from over 2.5 percent of GDP to only 1.5 percent in the late 1990s.

A Sea of Red Ink

The scariest thing is that this is only the beginning. America's ship of state is floating in a sea of red ink. In an important but largely neglected report in 2002, Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale found that our fiscal gap - the difference (in present value) between the government's future receipts and expenditures - assuming the same net tax rates going forward, was a staggering $45 trillion dollars. This is $4 trillion more than the entire capital stock of industry ($25.9 trillion) and total market capitalization ($14.3 trillion) in 2003.

I said the report was "largely neglected." Ironically, it was originally commissioned by then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, but the government never released it, and O'Neill was fired shortly after it was completed. Later it was made public by a conservative Washington think tank on the condition that all visible traces to the Treasury Department be expunged. Is it possible the suppression had anything to do with the third round of major tax cuts the White House had on tap for 2003?

In their study Smetters and Gokhale provide a "menu of pain" we can choose from to close the fiscal gap. If we start today, we could raise federal income taxes by 69 percent, or increase payroll taxes (our most repressive tax) by 95 percent. On the other hand, we could cut federal discretionary spending by 106 percent, or permanently cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45 percent. Or we could do a combination of both at more "moderate" levels.

The "menu of delayed pain," if we wait even three years to begin significant changes, is far worse. By 2008, to close the fiscal gap we would need to raise payroll taxes 103 percent or cut benefits by 47 percent. If we wait 15 years, compound interest will raise our fiscal gap to $76 trillion. These figures underestimate the problem because the underlying fiscal gap was dramatically increased, by $6 trillion, when Congress, in one of the biggest giveaways to corporations in recent years, passed that new Medicare drug benefit in 2003.

At $51 trillion, government liabilities outstrip the current net worth of our population by nearly $10 trillion. Put another way, as Matt Crenson recently did for The Associated Press, if the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. "That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included," says Crenson.

This is the picture as 77 million longer-living baby boomers are on the way to retirement, confronting America with a "coming generational storm" (Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns) that threatens to swamp the U.S. government if not our entire financial system. Gokhale and Smetters calculate that by 2030 Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion.

It's not that the public at large doesn't care about the looming catastrophe. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important although a lower priority.

Nonetheless, President Bush acts as if he has a divine mandate to make the fiscal gap even worse. When he took office in 2001, his top priority was to give the richest of the rich hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. (Vice President Cheney said they deserved it.) The President prevailed, even pushing through a second and third round of tax cuts despite increased spending on homeland security and fighting terrorists abroad. Bush's 2001 tax cut alone gave the richest 1 percent of Americans $ 479 billion over ten years. His first two tax cuts account for a hefty 15 percent of the total fiscal gap going forward.

At the same time, creditors and employers are now blatantly using government to cushion themselves against future losses, in what is certain to be a broadening trend. Last year the President signed a bill some of his richest contributors had been pushing for eight years. The new law imposes a stringent means test designed to force ordinary people in bankruptcy to continue paying a portion of their debt. Yet the bill does nothing about homestead exemptions used by the privileged to shield their money in real estate. Furthermore, after the new bankruptcy law was passed, a federal judge ruled that United Airlines, reorganizing under bankruptcy, could dump $6.6 billion worth of pension obligations onto the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, essentially making taxpayers pay its pension costs and leaving many of its workers with diminished benefits. The pension agency, it should be noted, is itself already $23 billion in the red.

All this comes at a point when American workers are losing ground in the marketplace as cheaper labor overseas becomes increasingly available through globalization, trade agreements, foreign investment, and technological outsourcing.

Blueprint for Failure

Rub the crystal ball: In the next few decades, when the huge liabilities start coming in due to Social Security and Medicare, there may be nothing left - less than nothing left - for public needs like education, highways, disaster relief, and social services, let alone national healthcare.

Small wonder that the Wall Street investor, Pete Peterson, a life-long Republican who served as President Nixon's Commerce Secretary, says our children's future is being ruined by a reckless fiscal "theology."

Theology asserts propositions that are believed whether or not they meet the test of reality. Not only do our governing elites act as if there's no tomorrow, they behave as if there is no reality. Alas, they won't be around to feel our grandchildren's pain.

In his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , the Pulitzer-prize winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment was one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forests disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare made matters worse as they exhausted dwindling resources. Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, they became casualties of their own privilege.

Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions. Then he describes an America in which elites have cocooned themselves in gated communities, guarded by private security patrols and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. Gradually they lose their motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, social security, and public schools.

"We the People"

The isolation of our schools, the crumbling of our infrastructure and the reckless disregard of our fiscal affairs signal a retreat from the social compact that made America unique among nations. Our culture of democracy derived from the rooted experience of shared values, common dreams, and mutual aspirations that are proclaimed in the most disregarded section in the Constitution - the prologue - which announces a moral contract among "We, the People of the United States." Yes, I know: When those words were written "We, the People" didn't include slaves, or women, or exploited workers, or unwelcome immigrants. To our everlasting shame America nurtured slavery in the cradle of liberty. But, oh, the very idea of it, the vision of it, the potential power of "We, the People" let loose in that brief astonishing span of history was to change the consciousness of the world. How radical it was - the notion that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is every human being's birthright - that all of us are equal in the scheme of Providence - that every citizen shares equally in the consent required for self-government in the grand adventure of independence.

There was a time some years ago when in my head I carried on an argument with Thomas Jefferson about this. I quarreled with his assertion about "equality being self-evident." Where I lived, talent, opportunity and outcomes were not equal. Then, one day, while I was filming a series at Independence Hall for a documentary on the anniversary of the Constitution, it hit me full force: Jefferson had an intimate understanding of the contradiction in his assertion which would give it even greater force down through the years. The hands that wrote "All men are created equal" also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman named Sally Hemings. It's true: The man whose noble words fired the revolutionary spirit in his generation had a long-term sexual relationship with this slave, and the children she bore him - his children - were slaves themselves. One guest at Monticello was startled to look up from dinner to see a young servant who was the spitting image of the master at the head of the table. Jefferson never acknowledged these children as his own, and as he grew older, he relied more and more on slavery to keep him financially afloat. When he died his slaves were sold to satisfy his creditors - with this exception: Through an obscure passage in Jefferson's will - one she must have negotiated with him - Sally Hemings was the only slave at Monticello to secure the freedom of her children.

Think about it: Thomas Jefferson knew the truth even as he was living the lie. He had to know the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms was his equal in her desire for life, her longing for liberty, her passion for happiness. In a PBS series about the Declaration of Independence, the late philosopher Mortimer Adler said that whatever things are really good for any human beings are really good for all human beings - that what the richest parents in the country want for their children - the goods essential for life, liberty, and happiness - is what the poorest parents want for their children. The happy or good life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature. So Sally Hemings' heart burned with the pain of an inaudible cry: Let my children go!

I believe this is the agitating nucleus of the American experience - the relentless dynamo of desire that drives the American Dream. We want a better life for our children. That dream was made possible by the Revolution, for Jefferson's Declaration proclaimed an end to arbitrary rule and ultimately produced a form of government that meant kings and their courtiers - the people at the top - the powerful and the privileged - the master class - couldn't keep it all to themselves. Once let loose the notion "We, the People" - the sentiment of equal rights and equal opportunity and equal citizenship - could never again be caged. In time even slaves would invoke those ideas to claim their freedom. Yes, I know: It took a bloody civil war to end slavery and yet another century before we confronted slavery's bastard son, segregation. Oppression is stubborn and privilege resistant, and the promise of America has long been ripening. But it's in our DNA and you can't kill it - no matter how hard some people keep trying.

Abraham Lincoln understood this. He was the first American president to recognize fully that democracy requires an economic system in which individuals can enjoy the fruits of their labor, and that the job of government was to keep the playing field level. Lincoln fought to preserve the Union because he knew government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" rested on economic opportunity, social mobility, and shared prosperity. America's great strength, in his eyes, derived from a unique and balanced blend of democracy and capitalism, and as the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stephen Heinz, recently put it, "It is hard to imagine either democracy or capitalism functioning at peak performance without the other."

But look around: Democracy has been made subservient to capitalism, and the great ideals of the American Revolution as articulated in the Preamble to the Constitution are being sacrificed to the Gospel of Wealth. (For a brilliant exegesis of this development, read The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth by Norton Garfinkle, Yale University Press, 2006.)

Concentrated Wealth

I could recite all the evidence, but I am sure you've heard it; you see it every day, all around you. Despite continued growth in the economy, real median household income declined between 2000 and 2004. Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1 percent while the real income of the richest 1 percent rose - by 135 percent. In 1976 the top 1 percent of Americans owned 22 percent of our total wealth. Today, the top 1 percent controls 38 percent of our total wealth. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30 fold. Now it is more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case. According to Census Bureau data, Americans have become progressively less likely to advance up the socio-economic ladder. One study cited by Stephen Heinz concludes, "The rich are likely to remain rich and the poor are likely to remain poor."

Aristotle thought injustice resulted from pleonexia, literally, "having more." A class of people having more than their share of the common wealth was the characteristic feature of an unjust society. Plato thought that the common good required a ratio of only 5 to 1 between the richest and poorest members of a society. Even J.P. Morgan thought bosses should only get twenty times more than their workers, at most. How quaint: In 2005 the average CEO earned 262 times what the average worker got.

As hard as it is to believe, the average real weekly wage for blue-collar workers, adjusted for rising costs of living, was about $278 a week in 2004 (in constant 1982 dollars). In 1972, it was $332 a week. That's not a slight downward trend - it's a significant and steady decline. So what of the panacea, economic growth - remember the rising tide that lifts all boats? What we are seeing today is closer to the old view of class struggle. A recent Goldman Sachs report says it outright: "The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income."

Yet in a country where the press now represents the dominant class through an unprecedented concentration of media ownership, instead of this remarkable divergence of profits and wages making news, what grabs the headlines is the triumphal surge of the stock market to old highs. At the same time, the share of Gross Domestic Product going to wages is now at the lowest point since 1947, when the government started measuring things. Those who look fondly on "market discipline" that's been keeping wages down, ignore the deep distortions built into a system in which capital is highly organized and workers are not.

So it is that to make ends meet in the face of stagnant or declining incomes, regular Americans have gone deeper and deeper in debt - with credit card debt nearly tripling since 1989. Poor kids are dropping out of high school and college at alarming rates, the middle class and working poor have been hit hard by a housing squeeze, 45 million or more Americans - eight out of ten of them in working families - are without health insurance. "The strain on working people," says the economist Jeffrey Madrick, "has become significant. Working families and the poor are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."

The American Dream has had its heart cut out, and is on life support.

America as a Shared Project

This wasn't meant to be. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Our system of checks and balances - read the Federalist papers - was going to keep an equilibrium in how power works, and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors - especially the relatively poor - were protected by state law against rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were not restricted to elites. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. Equal access to opportunity began to materialize for millions of us.

When I was born my father was making $2 a day working on the highway. He and my mother were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression and were poor all their lives. But I had access to good public schools. My brother went to college on the GI Bill. When I borrowed $450 to buy my first car, I drove to a public university on public highways and rested in public parks. I discovered America as a shared project, the central engine of our national experience.

I don't need to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America. And it's man-made. Over the last 30 years a disciplined, well-funded and closely-coordinated coalition of corporate elites, power-hungry religious conservatives, and hard-line right-wing operatives has mounted an aggressive drive to dismantle the public foundations and philosophy of shared prosperity and fairness in America.

It's all right there in bold letters in the early manifestos of the Reagan Revolution - essential reading like William Simon's A Time for Truth . He argued that "funds generated by business" would have to "rush by multimillions" into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and the "heretical" morality of the New Deal. An "alliance" between right-wing leaders and "men of action in the capitalist world" must mount a "veritable crusade" against everything brought forth by the Progressive era. Reading right out of the new reactionary playbook, the business press somberly concluded that "some people will obviously have to do with less … It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more," BusinessWeek sermonized.

They succeeded beyond expectations. Instead of trying to keep a level playing field, government now favors the rich, powerful, and privileged. The public institutions, the laws and regulations, the ideas, norms, and beliefs which aimed to protect the common good and helped to create America's iconic middle class, are now gone, greatly weakened, or increasingly vulnerable to attack. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow sums it up succinctly: What it's all about, he says, "is the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful."

Walking out of Union Station in Washington the other day, I saw the huge dome of the Capitol and was immediately struck by the realization that there's not a stone in that building that isn't owned by the people who make the big contributions. They own both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue lock, stock, and barrel. The simple proposition of the common good that might balance the influence of organized wealth with the interests of ordinary people - the most basic assumption of all political teaching since ancient Greece - is written out of Washington life.

The Easiest Targets

Here's an example of the difference it makes. I learned of this parable from the maverick tax journalist David Cay Johnston:

Maritza Reyes cleans houses in East Los Angeles. She scrubs toilets and mops floors for about $7,000 a year. She is also a liar and a fraud, if you believe the IRS after agents audited her tax returns. They didn't find unreported income or mysterious deductions on her returns; no, they found an address they thought made her ineligible to claim an Earned Income Tax Credit. She was ordered to return several years' credits, equal to nearly a year's worth of her wages.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is for the working poor, mainly those with children. First enacted in 1975, praised by Ronald Reagan, and significantly expanded under President Clinton, it helps lift working-poor families out of poverty by reducing their income taxes below zero and thus supplying a refund. It is essentially a type of wage support. Without it we would have many millions more in poverty today.

But after Clinton expanded the credit, the self-styled conservative revolutionaries who took over Congress in 1994 started to attack it as "backdoor welfare," or, as Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles put it, as an "income redistribution program." To save it, Clinton cut a deal with the Republicans that gave them more than $100 million a year for IRS audits of people who file for the credit. It was hard for the radicals to repeal a tax policy that rewarded work when they were trying to abolish welfare for rewarding indolence. So they changed their drumbeat to fraud and deceit, making a cottage industry of attacking the credit as a haven for tax cheats.

The IRS said Reyes was cheating because she had an address that made it appear she lived with her husband. In fact, they were separated and she lived in a cottage at the back of his lot with their younger son - probably one step away from being homeless. Under the law, she is eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit as a single "head of household" with children, but the IRS set out to prove that she was really living high-off-the-hog under her husband's roof and her head-of-household filing was a charade designed to bilk the government.

But when the Tax Court judges came to Los Angeles in 2000, IRS lawyers had no evidence to disprove Reyes' claims that she was head of a separate household on her husband's lot. A student from Chapman Law School helped her prevail before the tax judge, noting that "if just one person had taken the time to listen to her they would have seen what the judge did." To Frank Doti, head of Chapman's legal clinic for poor people, Reyes's case is typical of what he's seen in recent years: government comes down hardest on the easiest targets - those without resources and power to defend themselves.

How does this measure up in the scales of justice?

In 2001, 397,000 people who applied for the Earned Income Tax Credit were audited, one out of every 47 returns. That's a rate eight times higher than the rate for people earning $100,000 or more. Only one out of every 366 returns of wealthy households was audited. Over the previous 11 years, in fact, audit rates for the poor increased by a third, while the wealthiest enjoyed a 90 percent decline in IRS scrutiny. Of all the 744,000 tax returns audited by the IRS in 2002, more than half, David Cay Johnston finds, were filed by the working poor. More than half of IRS audits targeted people who account for less than 20 percent of taxpayers, the poorest 20 percent.

Now take at look at the 1998 tax return of President George W. Bush, when he was part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Never mind that he was also Governor of Texas at the time, he reported income of $18.4 million that year, $15 million of which was a capital gain from his Rangers' stake when the team was sold. In fact, based on his investment, he was only entitled to a $2.2 million capital gain, but he was given a performance bonus for his work as a team executive. This was considered part of his capital gain and not counted as income, however, and so it was taxed at the then-20 percent rate for capital gains (now lowered to 15 percent) instead of at the then-top income tax rate of 39.6 percent. A perfectly legal sleight-of-hand that netted him an extra $3 million dollars in foregone taxes on top of the eight-figure gift conferred by his partners.

It doesn't add up, does it? Spend $100 million a year of taxpayer money to audit the working poor, while actively foregoing billions in revenue from the wealthy who hide or defer their income as capital gains. But of course the government piles much, much more onto the rich man's side of the scale: every year, as much as $70 billion is legally sheltered from taxation in off-shore trusts and other financial devices. Big accounting firms like Ernst & Young actually sell tax shelters for a good share of their own huge profits. One of their "products" costs $5 million and, in exchange, the client gets up to $20 million in tax obligations wiped out.

It's stunning. All told, we have a "tax gap" - the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid - of more than $345 billion a year, more than nine times our entire homeland security budget. There's an entire new cottage industry devoted to making tax obligations disappear. In other words, helping the rich get richer at the expense of those who have no choice but to pay their fair share - and mostly feel obligated to do so anyway. And make no mistake; every foregone dollar the rich owe is one you ultimately pay for in either higher taxes or fewer services down the road. When our tax code permits such public larceny, you know who writes the laws in this country.

And even those who break the law have less and less to fear: last summer the IRS quietly moved to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of its estate tax auditors, a move that one IRS lawyer described as a "backdoor way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax."

The Power of Organized People

William Henry Harrison, our ill-fated ninth president and unlikely Whig populist, once said that it's "true Democratic feeling that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer." I'd say it's more than a feeling. It's the God's honest truth, and we need to see it for what it is - the betrayal of the American Revolution.

The journalist of the revolution, Thomas Paine, described the United States of his day as the Archimedean point of democratic liberty. He quoted the Greek proverb, "Had we a place to stand upon, we might raise the world." To Paine, that place was the United States of America in 1792. But that promise has been blunted by the counter-revolution of the last 30 years celebrating ostentatious wealth, inequality, and social Darwinism. The egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is mocked in all but name, and the bar of tolerance for inequality is now brought so low that genetic sorting in the human population is once again respectfully debated as a leading cause. The wealthy governing elites in America today - corporate executives, wealthy contributors, and the officials they have bankrolled into office - possess a degree of power and separation befitting a true ruling class. They are the Mayan kings and priests of the 21st century.

We know now that "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," can, indeed, perish. And perish not under fallen battlements and bombs raining down and the sneak attack of some fanatical distant foe, but by the deliberate plunder of an organized minority - for our governing elites do not represent the majority of Americans - that methodically imposes its will on the laws and institutions of a people until the whole foundation has become their very throne.

What these 30 years of redistributing wealth upward have done to America is documented in a growing literature on inequality and its social consequences. But the spiritual costs - lost moral confidence in democracy, failing empathy, growing distrust and division - may be greater.

Yet history tells us that concentrated wealth and political power can be challenged. The Jeffersonian "second revolution" of the 1790s; the populist revolt of the 1890s that led to the Progressive era of reform; the powerful electoral ratification of the New Deal; the equally powerful rejection of race and gender discrimination in the 1960s - all manifested the ordinary beliefs and values, collectively revived, to confront the domination by wealthy elites that had debased the American Promise inherent in our revolutionary beginnings.

So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution - that it isn't just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It's about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn't be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it.

Teach your kids they don't have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters - heirs, everyone - of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it's a great big lie - despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they've been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image.

I was at the Presidio in San Francisco yesterday. That former military enclave beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is now a marvelous and beautiful center of vital commerce and civic purpose - saved from exploitation and despoliation by citizens who rose up on its behalf. On the wall of one of the main buildings I came upon a painting of an enormous deep blue wave with white caps against an equally blue sky. The artist's inscription beneath the painting reads: "This human wave expresses the concept of people at the bottom rungs of society waking up to using their united strength to claim their universal rights to economic, social, and environmental justice."

Put that in your core curriculum. It's America 101.

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Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and a veteran journalist. He delivered these remarks in San Diego on October 27 to the Council of Great City Schools, an organization of the nation's largest urban public school systems.

Bill Moyers is grateful to Lew Daly, Senior Fellow of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, for his contributions to this speech.

Top Government Official Says US on Verge of Economic Disaster
By Matt Crenson
The Associated Press

Saturday 28 October 2006

A dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."

But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.

Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.

From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.

What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.

"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity - maybe Oprah - to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.

Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy - he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.

"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States - basically, the government's chief accountant - he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.

This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.

"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.

Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today - as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September - issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.

Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.

So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.

To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.

Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.

A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.

And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.

But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.

And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.

Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.

Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall - the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs - over time.

By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.

Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.

"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."

Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.

Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps - $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare - and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.

Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders - primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners - have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.

In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.

More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.

A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.

Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.

But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit - the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.

"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.

You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.

"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.

The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.

"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.

But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.

So maybe a solution is at hand.

"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.

But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.

"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."

Go to truthout.org

A telephone survey of more than 8,000 people showed that even though Americans spend nearly twice as much per capita for health care, they have more trouble getting care and have more unmet health needs than Canadians do.

The survey was done by Harvard Medical School researchers who include members of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for a national health program in the United States.

"These findings raise serious questions about what we're getting for the $2.1 trillion we're spending on health care this year," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard.

"We pay almost twice what Canada does for care, more than $6,000 for every American, yet Canadians are healthier, and live two to three years longer," Himmelstein added in a statement.

"Canadians had better access to most types of medical care (with the single exception of pap smears)," Himmelstein and colleagues wrote in the study, published in the American Journal of Public Health.

"Canadians were 7 percent more likely to have a regular doctor and 19 percent less likely to have an unmet health need. U.S. respondents were almost twice as likely to go without a needed medicine due to cost (9.9 percent of U.S. respondents couldn't afford medicine versus 5.1 percent in Canada)," they added.

UNMET NEEDS

"After taking into account income, age, sex, race and immigrant status, Canadians were 33 percent more likely to have a regular doctor and 27 percent less likely to have an unmet health need."

The researchers analyzed data from a telephone survey of 3,505 Canadian and 5,103 U.S. adults.

They wanted to see if there were any differences in health between Canadians, who have a tax-supported national health care system, and Americans, whose health care largely depends on private insurers, employers or the free market, with older Americans and the very poor cared for by Medicare, Medicaid and other joint federal-state health insurance plans.

The researchers found that U.S. residents had higher rates of diabetes, arthritis, chronic lung disease, high blood pressure and obesity.

"Most of what we hear about the Canadian health care system is negative; in particular, the long waiting times for medical procedures," Dr. Karen Lasser an instructor of medicine at Harvard who worked on the study, said in a statement.

"But we found that waiting times affect few patients, only 3.5 percent of Canadians versus 0.7 percent of people in the U.S. No one ever talks about the fact that low-income and minority patients fare better in Canada," she added.

"Based on our findings, if I had to choose between the two systems for my patients, I would choose the Canadian system hands down."

The researchers said the study population was representative of 206 million U.S. adults and 24 million Canadian adults but noted that only half the Americans contacted took part in the survey, and 60 percent of the Canadians.

©2006 Reuters

Read the Article >>

At least Google gets it.

Yours truly will be a speaker at this conference.

-Art [Toy]

Saturday, March 18 - 4th Annual Renewable Energy Conference
Scheduled at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute, located in Hastings, MI.

The conference is geared to home and business owners interested in making their facilities more energy efficient, and to renewable energy enthusiasts who wish to increase their knowledge and meet with area experts.

New speakers and topics have been lined up this year. The conference will include a State of the State Energy Report by Pat Hudson. Scott Suddreth will present the keynote session. Mr. Suddreth was the technical advisor the North Carolina's first Zero Energy home built for Habitat for Humanity.

Participants can choose from a variety of breakout session topics on; Building an Energy Efficient Home, Wind Energy, Solar Energy Options, Alternative Fuel, Geothermal Heating and Cooling, The End of Cheap Oil - How and When, and The Natural Gas Crises in North America. The day will conclude with a panel discussion. Energy-related vendors will be on-hand to answer questions and showcase their products. Registration and pre-payment are required.

Visit www.http://www.cedarcreekinstitute.org/conferences.htm for conference agenda and registration information. Register soon as last year's conference was a sell out.

Time: 8:30 - 4 pm
Cost: $30 for adults; $15 for Students
Phone: 269-721-4190

Come hear presentations by Maynard Kaufman, Art Toy, and Richard Orawiec as they speak out on alternative energy. All have experience in producing sustainable energy. Maynard Kaufman, a retired professor from Western Michigan University, lives in a house that is completely off the grid, which means he pays no utility bills. He just installed another wind generator himself with the help of a few friends. Art Toy, who works at Pfizer, has a wind generator that motorists can see from Interstate 94 just north and west of the Lawrence exit. Richard Orawiec is owner of “Backwards to the Future Ltd.” a solar energy equipment supplier & installer since 1988. He is also a member of the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association.

What will we do when gas hits $5.00 a gallon? How much will it cost to transport food from California and Florida to Michigan? What will we do when it costs half of our income to pay for heat? Some people this winter have already felt the pinch and it’s been a mild winter. Even President Bush and some in Congress have begun to talk about our energy needs, but what are they going to do about it? If large corporations are the only ones to develop alternative energy sources, then they will surely cost the consumer plenty. In Michigan, Energy companies and their lobbyists in Lansing have resisted “netmetering” laws that would make it easy to measure energy sold back to the grid. They now charge about 7 cents per kilowatt hour and pay about 2 cents. Wisconsin already has more flexible and generous laws that encourage sustainable energy.

The presentations will be brief with time for questions and discussion encouraged throughout the forum.

This program is brought to you by the Van Buren County Greens. For more information visit http://www.vbcgreens.org.

PDF with more information about this important event >>>

Where:
Location to be announced, but most likely The Old Harbor Inn, the public library, or another downtown location in South Haven, Michigan. The exact location and its address should be known by Monday, December 12, at which time a follow up announcement will be made. Contact Alice Hirt of Don’t Waste Michigan at home number 616.335.3405 or at her cell 616.218.6511, or Kevin Kamps of NIRS at his office 202.328.0002 ext. 14 or his cell 240.462.3216, for the latest on the meeting location.

Who and What:
David Kraft from Nuclear Energy Information Service in Evanston, Illinois will describe citizen epidemiology, a grassroots door-to-door method that could be used to assess what health impacts around Palisades can be attributed to radiation releases from the reactor.

Kevin Kamps from Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C. and Alice Hirt of Don’t Waste Michigan in Holland will give updates on the citizen intervention before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing board against the 20 year license extension being sought by Palisades. They will also discuss recent developments, such as major announcements that Palisades will replace its deteriorated reactor vessel head, and that CMS/Consumers Energy has put Palisades up for sale (seeing as Exelon Nuclear, based in Chicago, is the most likely of any utility to buy Palisades, David Kraft can give us the inside scoop about Exelon – he’s been watch-dogging it – and its predecessor Commonwealth Edison -- for nearly 25 years!).

Maynard Kaufman and Barb Geisler of Michigan Land Trustees, as well as Chuck Jordan of the Green Party of Van Buren County (all official intervenors against the Palisades license extension) will be in attendance and can discuss renewable energy alternatives to nuclear power, such as wind power and solar power, as well as energy efficiency.

A question and answer period and brainstorming session will follow the presentations. Everyone concerned about Palisades can join the discussion and help formulate a strategy to block the 20 year license extension!

Why (a meeting so close to the holidays?):

Because it’s the only chance we have to glean David Kraft’s wisdom before he leaves for an extended stay overseas; because of many recent developments at Palisades; and because the new year will bring many fast-breaking challenges and opportunities that we need to be prepared for!

For more information, contact: Alice Hirt, Don’t Waste Michigan, home 616.335.3405, cell 616.218.6511; Kevin Kamps, NIRS, office phone 202.328.0002 ext. 14, cell phone 240.462.3216.

This event is sponsored by NIRS, Don’t Waste Michigan, Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes, and the Green Party of Van Buren County. These organizations are part of a coalition of two dozen grassroots environmental, public interest, and safe energy organizations representing hundreds of thousands of Michigan residents in opposition to the 20 year license extension at Palisades.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

LAWRENCE
Experts promote renewable energy
By KRISTIN HAY
HP-Correspondent

LAWRENCE — Oil is not running out, but inexpensive oil is disappearing, and that will place an increased emphasis on biodiesel and other alternative forms of energy.

That was the basic message of those speaking during an alternative energy forum last week sponsored by the Van Buren Greens, an environmental group.

“We are not running out of oil, we are running out of cheap oil,” said Marc Perkovic, assistant professor of chemistry at Western Michigan University.

Perkovic is a proponent of bodiesel and believes it could be part of the solution for energy problems because it could be used to power diesel engine cars, buses and trucks.

“The U.S. would not be at the mercy of those who control the oil,” said Perkovic.

Biodiesel is a clean-burning alternative fuel for diesel motors and oil burners that is produced from domestic, renewable resources. It contains no petroleum, but it can be mixed with diesel or fuel oil to produce! a diesel blend.
Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil or animal fat. Crops such as soybeans are now being grown to produce the oil for biodiesel fuel. But Perkovic said the U.S. cannot grow enough soybeans to fill the nation’s voracious appetite for fuel. Scientists have found that algae can be used to produce the biogenic fuel.

Among the benefits he cited: Biodiesel can be used in diesel engines with little or no modifications. When burned, it does not emit gases that contribute to global warming. It produces significantly lower emissions and is free of sulfur and noxious fumes. In fact, the odor emitted by biodiesel is similar to the smell of the air after a heavy rain.

Biodiesel is nontoxic, biodegradable and non-flammable and, as a result, is safer than gasoline. Spills are easy to clean up with hot water and soda and have a low environmental impact. Another presenter, Maynard Kaufman, a former Western Michigan University professor of philosophy, believes the disappearance of cheap oil will have a significant impact on everyone.

“We are so used to having everything,” he said. “The whole last century is an anomaly in human history. Once oil is gone, it will be more difficult than before

there was fossil fuel.” He said the cost of oil in the future and its availability is something people should think about now. Individuals may need to change their lifestyle, move closer to their workplace, and even consider if they can grow their own food, which will become more expensive, he said.

Kaufman has already made major changes that have made his household more self-sufficient. He and his wife, Barbara Geisler, built a house that is energy-efficient and that is completely independent of the commercial electric grid. He said they did it because they are opposed to nuclear power, not to save money. Kaufman generates electricity from a photovoltaic (solar-powered) system supplemented by a wind generator. He heats his house with a wood-burning masonry stove that puts out radiant heat. A tube to the stove provides their hot water.

Art Toy is a chemist at Pfizer Corp. As an environmentalist, he said he is interested in reducing his use of carbon-based fuels. To supply electricity to his 100­ year-old farmhouse in Lawrence, he has installed a 10-kilowatt wind turbine that is linked to the commercial electric grid. He said he will see a return on his investment in 18 years.
Toy also has installed a solar hot water system. He calculates that he will get a return on his hot water system in six years.

Not everybody will have the will or resources to install wind turbines or solar panels. But there are things the average homeowner can do to conserve energy, speakers said. They include replacing lighting fixtures with compact fluorescent bulbs, and buying energy-efficient appliances, which cost a little more up front, but will save money in the long run. Also, the old method of hanging clothes on the line outdoors, rather than using the dryer, is a simple use of solar power.

Kaufman said there is not going to be a magic wand solution to future energy shortages, as some government officials would have us believe. Individuals must take action to ensure a sustainable lifestyle.

“Prepare for the worst,” he said.

On the Web:
www.biodiesel.org