The mowing of lawns is the most worthless task I can think of. If not for concern that my neighbors would complain to me, or the city, about my waist-high grass, I would never mow. I’m not running a golf course here.

Except to clear small areas—like the area around our picnic table and fire pit—I don’t mow our backyard at all. Last year I performed a small experiment by not mowing a strip in the middle of the front yard. Our dogs loved the mini-meadow. This year I expanded the project. I mow the one-third adjacent to the street and the one-third next to the house and have left the middle third to grow naturally. Again, the dogs love the wild area.

I’ve always thought of mowing grass as a kind of pissing contest for non-farmers. (Derf made lawn care a repeating theme for White Suburban Middle Class Man.) Scott Adams has another theory.

Humans are visual creatures. If I see you do something valuable right in front of me it means more than if I hear about something you did in the past. It works the same at your job. If your boss sees you doing something, it means more than if she hears about it later. Optics rule our perceptions.

For many homes, the lawn is the biggest visual cue to a husband’s contribution. In all likelihood, the husband did not build the house. In a two-income household, he didn’t even pay for the entire house. But given our sexist culture, he is probably in charge of the lawn. So if the lawn goes south, he has little to show of his value. His spouse, on the other hand, is often doing one visual thing after another, involving grocery bags, kids, dinner, and keeping up the home. The husband is home at night and on weekends to witness a lot of that action, and, according to studies, he is usually doing less than half of the chores. The husband can witness his wife’s value in a clear, visual way.

The children themselves are also a visual representation of a woman’s value. The man contributed some sperm long ago, probably in the dark. His contribution was visually empty. But nine months of carrying a human in your belly, followed by birth, nursing, and childcare is as visual as you can get.

A typical husband’s contribution to the family happens when he is at work. And unlike the old days where the guy might drag home some animal he killed –which would be visually impressive – today he probably has direct deposit. No one even sees a paycheck.

In 2015, a husband is just an asshole who disappears for half of the day while the wife does all the work.

This is an excellent reason to work from home.

Now that is the speech I, and many others I’m sure, wish our President had delivered.

Eric Foner is one of my important voices on The South. My much read, thumbed, high-lighted and tabbed copy of his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is the cornerstone reference work for my present novel in progress. Elias Isquith, writing in “The face of racism today is not a slaveowner”: Eric Foner on the past and present of white supremacy for Salon, clearly agrees.

SALON: How significant would it be, symbolically, for the Confederate battle flag to be removed by South Carolina?

FONER: As you know, and as it has been reported many times, the Confederate flag was only put up on top of the Statehouse in South Carolina in 1962. It was put there as a rebuke to the civil rights movement. It was not a long-standing commemoration of Southern heritage. It was a purely political act to show black people in South Carolina who was in charge.

Symbolism has its limits. On the other hand, to see that flag flying … it’s a statement by South Carolina. Black people perfectly well understand what it stands for. A lot of white people do also. I think removing it is certainly a positive step.

SALON: Can you tell me a bit about South Carolina’s history in this regard, and why it’s often singled, out even among its fellow former Confederate states?

FONER: I have taught in South Carolina as a visiting professor. I have lectured many times in South Carolina at the University of South Carolina, at Clemson, at Beaufort, in Charleston. I have good friends there and I’m certainly not trying to suggest that everyone in South Carolina is a deep racist or has anything to do with a guy like Dylann Roof. On the other hand, one has to recognize that South Carolina has a very unique and deplorable history when it comes to slavery and race.

It goes way back to the American Revolution. South Carolina had delegates who insisted that Thomas Jefferson take out a clause that condemned slavery from the Declaration of Independence. It was South Carolina delegates who got the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause into the Constitution. It was South Carolina who was the leader in nullification, the leader in secession. The first shot of the Civil War was shot there. South Carolina was the only Southern state in which the majority of white families owned slaves.

In writing my present work I have struggled with writing Black characters because I don’t want to get the portrayal wrong. Writing stereotypes, caricatures, is a pitfall for a white male writer. I’ve avoided doing so by not having any Black men or women as central characters in my story. That is a mistake I need to rectify.

Suggestions?

Roldo Bartimole writes:

If you don’t believe that the city that has for years been the butt of TV late Night jokes is making a big comeback you haven’t been reading national news outlets about Cleveland’s resurgence. Yes, we’re talking that old rust belt, river-on-fire, shrinking city on Lake Erie once self-boasted “The Best Location in the Nation.”

I’ve watched Cleveland—as other cities—fighting to be recognized as special and relevant for 50 years. Now some attention is being paid. Is it real? Are there costs?

From the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times and assorted other media outlets praise Cleveland’s latest resurgence, including its choice as the Republican Party’s 2016 National Convention next July.

Visitors are shown the gloss but sightseers don’t get into the weeds where much of the truth lies.

Hopes are high for this city that once boasting a 1950 population of 914,808. However, 528,287 left since, shrinking Cleveland below 400,000. And contraction continues. The downtown population rise is what gets the glossy notice. It is spurred by converting places where people once worked into subsidized and tax-abated Continue Reading »

My light blue Bernie For President t-shirt arrived this week and on the back of the shirt the message is Join The Political Revolution Today. Clearly more and more Americans have awakened to the possibilities of that message.

CNN is reporting:

Hillary Clinton’s sizable lead among Democrats in New Hampshire has been trimmed to single digits as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders makes a strong push in a state that narrowly broke Clinton’s way in 2008 to keep her campaign alive.

According to a new CNN/WMUR New Hampshire Primary poll, Clinton holds an 8-point edge over Sanders, with 43% behind Clinton and 35% backing Sanders. Vice President Joe Biden clocks in at 8%, with 2% or less supporting Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee.

The poll marks a significant tightening of the contest since the May Granite State Poll, which included Elizabeth Warren on its list of candidates. In that poll, Clinton stood at 51%, with Warren at 20% and Sanders at 13%.

Several shifts in the poll seem to explain much of Sanders’ gain. Looking at the demographic breakdown in primary preferences, men, younger voters and liberals appear to have moved broadly toward Sanders in the last month. Among men, 52% backed Clinton in the May survey, that fell to 32% in the new poll, while 47% now support Sanders. Likewise, among liberals, a 51% to 16% Clinton advantage is now a 48% to 41% Sanders edge. And among voters under age 50, Clinton has fallen from majority support to a near even split in the new poll, 37% back Clinton while 39% favor Sanders.

And likely Democratic primary voters are now more apt to see Sanders as the candidate who “best represents the values of Democrats like yourself.” Sanders trounces Clinton, with 41% of Democratic primary voters saying Sanders does, to 30% who chose Clinton. In the May poll, 38% said Clinton was tops on this question, with 22% choosing Warren and just 13% picking Sanders.

Feel the Bern!

[Update at 0430: Clearly this story has serious legs.]

Yesterday, in WALMART SAYS NO TO RACIST BATTLE FLAG… I applauded Walmart’s decision to no longer stock or sell merchandise bearing the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virgina. Demonstrating the power, for good in this case, of the world’s largest retailer, other retailers are joining Walmart in this boycott of our most racist symbol.

Before anyone jumps all over me for appearing to be a hypocrite about my well documented, and rabid, stance in support of our First Amendment, I will say categorically, that if my neighbor decides to fly the offensive battle flag, I will wholeheartedly support his decision to do so while I pound stakes in the ground to support a large sign declaring my neighbor a racist.

That is how our Constitutional right to free speech works.

Demanding that a government agency, required to represent all citizens, take down the flag, however, is a different matter. Larry Wilmore does an excellent job of laying out the case.

Raif Badawi’s book 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think is available in French and pre-orders are being taken on Amazon.

Raif Badawi’s is an important voice for all of us to hear, mild, nuanced, but clear. His examination of his culture is perceptive and rigorous. Of course he must be saved from the dreadful sentence against him and the appalling conditions of his imprisonment. But he must also be read, so that we understand the struggle within Islam between suffocating orthodoxy and free expression, and make sure we find ourselves on the right side of that struggle.” —Salman Rushdie

On principle, I’ll wait until the book is available from a source other than Amazon, but that is a private decision. No matter where you find the book, buy a copy and read what Badawi has to say.

I’m uncertain as to why The Nightly Show links are posted before they become active, but I expect that this embedded video will work later (the time is now 0753) today.

Until then, here is a direct link.

Our pseudo two-party political system works so well, other oligarchs want to duplicate our success. Jon Schwarz writes in Russian Oligarch Wanted to Turn My Joke Into Reality:

One of my core political beliefs is that there would still be a Soviet Union if they’d been smart enough to have two communist parties that agreed on everything except abortion.

Obviously that’s a joke about the U.S., where we have two capitalist parties that largely agree on everything. The exceptions are issues that matter a lot to the regular people who make up the two parties’ bases, but are largely irrelevant to party elites who fund and run both of them.

I don’t believe Republican and Democratic elites ever sat down together and planned things this way. It’s just natural, because it’s tough for a political party to endure if it doesn’t rest on an economic base of big, overlapping sections of a country’s economy.

But here’s what’s really funny: according to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, oligarch Boris Berezovsky did consciously want to set up post-Soviet politics in Russia to work like this.

Berezovsky made his billions mostly through shady privatization schemes, and was a key supporter of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Then, according to Berezovsky, he chose Vladimir Putin to succeed Yeltsin. According to Gessen, “Berezovsky also had another brilliant idea, which to his regret Putin did not grasp: creating a fake two-party system, with Putin at the head of a socialist-democrat sort of party and Berezovsky leading a neoconservative one, or the other way around.”

Here are Berezovsky’s exact words, in an interview with Gessen from 2008:

When Putin became president, I was for a long time in a state of profound naiveté. Well, I went to him … I told him: “Listen, Volodya, what happened: we destroyed the entire political space. Devoured, not destroyed, but devoured it. We absolutely dominated … Look, I’ll suggest that we can not have effective political system, if there’s a tough competition. So I suggest we create an artificial two-party system. So, let’s say, the left and right. A Socially Oriented party and neo-conservatives liberal party. Choose any. And I’ll make another party. At the same time, my own heart is closer to neoconservatives, and I think so, you [Putin] are socially oriented. ” I earnestly believed then that he understood it. But I think that even then he looked at me like I was crazy.

Berezovsky had a falling-out with Putin that forced him leave Russia permanently, and he died in London in 2013 in what may or may not have been suicide. But it’s certainly worth pondering that at least one of the people at the top of the world has genuinely conceived of electoral politics as a meaningless puppet show, with himself and his friends as puppet masters.

We pretend that this bogus system is somehow new, but the history goes way back as evidenced by this skit from Beyond The Fringe.

Peter Cook:

You see, in America you have a two party system. You have the Republicans who are the equivalent of our Conservative party and you have the Democrats who are the equivalent of our Conservative party.

Republicans and Democrats are like Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches.

There was an amazing power in the images of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

In the United States, there is no official accounting of the people killed by police. To address that void in information, non-governmental and news organizations have been collecting data on such incidents.

Intercept data artist Josh Begley’s new project, “Officer Involved,” uses databases on police brutality compiled by The Guardian to present the problem in a new way. Begley’s project (like several others he has done) is an intervention that makes visible the violence behind the way we live. “Officer Involved” reveals the lack of innocence in the landscape, and, without sensationalism or sentimentality, challenges us to think about a deep injustice that so many of us accept as normal.

In row after row, we see photographs of corners, streets, suburbs, towns, all in daylight, almost all free of human presence. All these images — in spite of the mysterious lyric beauty of some of them — were captured indiscriminately by the all-seeing eye of Google, either with a bird’s-eye view or at street level. They were then selected and set into an array by Begley. In one sense, they are the same as any other stills randomly pulled from Google Maps. But when we look at these photographs in particular, we are also seeing the last thing that some other human being saw. It is an immersion in the environment of someone’s last moments.

If it is true, as our ancestors always suspected, that the dead continue to exert some influence on the places where they lived and died, then Begley’s photographic project makes that insight manifest.

I get Begley’s project, but there is nothing human about a street corner on Google Maps. People, mothers, can make this rolling obscenity real. The United States lacks a Plaza de Mayo, but perhaps the Capitol steps or Lafayette Park could serve just as well.

I know the sentiment of Jim Chase is just the expressions of one person’s emotions at one moment, but Jesus wept, I really wish I hadn’t read the news this morning.

Outside the basketball arena Jim Chase, a marketing executive, said he was pleased with the ruling but added: “I don’t think people in Cleveland care about anything more than basketball tonight. We’ve been losing for a long time and we have a chance to win a championship. The real news can wait right now.”

The Cleveland Cavaliers can win the championship but we will all still be losers.

We are guilty by association of imprisoning blogger Raif Badawi.

We bear responsibility for each of the 50 lashes he received on 9 January of this year.

We will take on further shame if Badawi’s beatings continue tomorrow.

To do nothing is to agree to the barbarism of the House of Saud.

A Saudi Arabian blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes may be flogged for a second time on Friday, campaigners fear.

This week Saudi Arabia’s supreme court upheld a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes on Raif Badawi for insulting Islam. The judgment came despite criticism from the United Nations, United States, European Union, Canada and others.

In January Badawi received the first of 20 sets of 50 lashes. The punishment was ordered to be spread over 20 weeks and carried out on Fridays outside a mosque in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, but subsequent rounds of lashes were postponed on medical grounds.

Human Rights Watch said it believed that a second round of flogging would take place on Friday, following the new court decision.

Badawi co-founded the Saudi Liberal Network internet discussion group, which encouraged online debate about religious and political issues, in 2008. He was arrested in June 2012 under cybercrime provisions and sentenced last May.

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office in London said this week: “We are extremely concerned that Raif Badawi’s sentence has been upheld … We have raised his case at the most senior levels in the government of Saudi Arabia and will continue to do so.”

Saudi Arabia has dismissed criticism of its flogging of Badawi and “strongly denounced the media campaign around the case”.

On 29 May the Saudi embassy in Brussels sent an official statement about the case on behalf of the Saudi foreign affairs ministry to members of the European parliament. The statement condemned any “interference in its internal affairs”, saying that “some international parties and media … drifted into an attempt to infringe and attack on the sovereign right of states”.

Then we have an editorial from The New York Times this morning:

The decision on Sunday by Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court to uphold the depraved sentence imposed on the blogger Raif Badawi last May by the criminal court in Jidda is tantamount to a death sentence for the “crime” of free expression. The criminal court sentenced Mr. Badawi, whose case has invited worldwide condemnation, to 1,000 lashes, 50 to be administered “very harshly,” in public, once a week for 20 weeks. In addition, he is to serve 10 years in prison and pay a fine of 1 million riyals, about $267,000.

There is no further appeal possible in the Saudi courts. At this point, Mr. Badawi’s only hope lies in a pardon from King Salman bin Abdulaziz.

In 2008, Mr. Badawi, now 31 years old, helped found a website, Free Saudi Liberals, that hosted discussion critical of Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment. He was arrested in 2012, charged with cybercrime. His initial sentence of 600 blows and seven years of imprisonment was increased last May after prosecutors deemed his sentence too lenient.

Social media has exploded among Saudi Arabia’s youth, providing a rare outlet for free expression in a society that severely restricts it. It seems clear that the Saudi judiciary intends to make an example of Mr. Badawi.

Mr. Badawi received the first 50 lashes in January. His wounds were so severe that a team of doctors determined he was unfit to receive a second round of lashes the following week. Mr. Badawi has not been flogged since, but there is real fear following the Supreme Court’s decision that the punishment may resume as early as this Friday, putting his life at risk.

His death, or his crippling for life, another real possibility, would be a blot that even Saudi Arabia — known for administering brutal punishments that include amputations and beheadings — would find difficult to live down.

The United States has called Mr. Badawi’s punishment inhumane. The European Union has vowed to make “every effort to engage the Saudi authorities in a dialogue on the need to recognize and respect freedom of speech for all.”

Mr. Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, and the couple’s three children have been granted asylum in Canada. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins June 18. This is a good time for King Salman, crowned four months ago, to demonstrate his magnanimity, grant Mr. Badawi clemency and allow him to join his family.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is infuriated by the international pressure to marginalize and isolate his royal house.

He should be as shamed as we are.

Yes, I know that most of these shootings were justified, but what happened to the days when police officers could go their entire lives without pulling their weapon?

The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 on Wednesday, according to a Guardian investigation, after two young black men were shot dead in New York City and Cincinnati.

Isiah Hampton, 19, was fatally shot by New York police department officers at an apartment building in the Bronx on Wednesday morning, according to police chiefs. His death followed that of Quandavier Hicks, 22, during a confrontation with Cincinnati officers at a house on Tuesday night.

Soldiers weren’t dying this fast in Iraq.

Transcript here…

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

SECOND WALMART PAY-RAISE SHOE DROPS… Here’s what I think. Since 2008 and the beginning of the Republican-generated Great Recession, Walmart got a taste of how good educated employees could be when people lost jobs and were forced to… Keep reading…

WALMART CRANKS UP THE HEAT, FOR WORKERS… Henry Ford was an evil, anti-Semitic feck, but he was an evil, anti-Semitic feck who knew on which side his bread was buttered. CEO Doug McMillon may also be an evil feck—the jury remains in… Keep reading…

WALMART BOOTS DION AND BIEBER… The few times I have shopped at a Walmart—I think the last time may have been in July of 2010—I have never noticed the music playing in the background. This may be a result of learning to tune out hideous… Keep reading…

JUSTIN BIEBER IS NOT WALMART’S PROBLEM… Yesterday I wrote about Walmart’s intention to raise thermostats (controlled from Bentonville) a single degree to take the chill off workers. The company also magnanimously pronounced that the music… Keep reading…

DARTH CEO MCMILLON IS ON THE WRONG SIDE… Even a man as apparently savvy as Doug McMillon can reach too far. Assuming the Jedi mantle and encouraging Walmart workers to think of themselves as members of the Rebel Alliance was one such… Keep reading…

WALMART PASSES SCEPTER TO GREG PENNER… Traditionally, third generations are where business dynasties fail, unless the family is smart enough to pass control to new blood, an in-law. Walmart’s third Chief Executive Officer is the husband of… Keep reading…

WALMART WAGE THEFT ISN’T AN PRIORITY…? If Walmart were interested in reducing shrinkage, the retail term for merchandise paid for but not sold, in order to increase wages of workers I might be interested. That is, of course, not the case. Any… Keep reading…

WALMART NEEDS PLUMBING AND A NEW ROOF…? Back in the middle of April, Walmart gave employees five-hours notice that stores in Pico Rivera, California; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Brandon, Florida; and Midland and Livingston, Texas would close for six… Keep reading…

Previously on Walmart Wednesday…

Back in April I noted the courage of Margot Wallström, Sweden’s foreign minister who told the House of Saud to take 37 million Euros in money-for-arms and, well, you know. Two months later, she still thinks (as do I) that she acted appropriately.

Sweden’s foreign minister has said she stands by her denunciation of a Saudi blogger’s flogging as medieval, three months after her criticism of the Gulf kingdom’s human rights record ignited a diplomatic crisis and infuriated business leaders fearful for trade losses.

Margot Wallström, who vowed to pursue a feminist foreign policy when taking office last year, first hit out at the treatment of Raif Badawi earlier this year after the first 50 of 1,000 lashes was inflicted on him in January for allegedly insulting Islam.

Saudi Arabia reacted furiously to her comments, blocking a speech she was due to give on women’s rights to Arab leaders and temporarily breaking off relations with Sweden.

But speaking on Monday, a day after it emerged that Saudi Arabia’s highest court had upheld Badawi’s punishment, Wallström said she was unrepentant and said again that the flogging amounted to medieval methods.

“I would not have done things differently,” Wallström told the Guardian when asked about her handling of the crisis in March, which also saw Stockholm tear up an arms trade agreement with the Saudis. “No, I do not regret the medieval remark; we have not excused ourselves. But we have explained that this was not an attack on Islam.”

The world needs more Swedens.

[Update on 9 June from The Guardian:

“Unlike Ferguson, North Charleston or Baltimore, no one was killed or injured here. This is an affluent, mostly white area without a history of serious racial tension.

But the expressions of anger and the demands for change on Monday night in McKinney, Texas, recalled scenes from elsewhere in the US: hundreds of demonstrators protested then marched to the spot where three days earlier a police officer shoved a teenage girl in a bathing suit to the ground, swore and pointed a gun at two unarmed boys.

The officer’s response to a minor fracas at a pool party was so intense that a bystander’s video of Eric Casebolt’s actions turned the weekend event into the latest episode of the broiling controversy over police aggression in their encounters with black people.

This is an affluent, mostly white area without a history of serious racial tension. Feck

Of course, Larry Wilmore led with the story.

The whole fuckin’ country needs a time out.]

I am in total agreement with the editorial writer for The Guardian who declared that Mr. Badawi’s sentence is a brutal exercise in public intimidation. We are focused on Badawi, however, because of the publicness of his punishment for speaking out about human rights. We do not need to go back too far in our histories to find sanctioned and non-sanctioned public hangings. Our own veneer of civilization is gossamer thin. That in no way excuses the actions of the House of Saud—and make no mistake, this is not about Saudi Arabia’s supreme court, this is about King Salman—but we have our own house to get in order as well.

We live in a nation where the passing of summary judgments, and executions, upon Black men whose only crime is asserting their Constitutional rights, happens and those responsible rarely punished. Yes, free Raif Badawi, but free the rest of the oppressed as well.

The cruel and unjust sentence passed on the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes, has been upheld by the supreme court in Riyadh. Hopes that the court might reduce or even commute the sentence, particularly as the holy fast of Ramadan begins next week, have been dashed. The only remaining appeal now is to the Saudi monarch, King Salman. From Quebec, where she has been granted asylum with their children, Mr Badawi’s wife Ensaf Haidar has said that she fears the public flogging—50 lashes at a time every Friday after prayers—might resume as soon as this Friday. Mr Badawi had been whipped only once after his sentence was passed, and prison doctors deemed that he was too ill to be flogged again before his appeal was heard. Britain and its allies, conveniently meeting together at the G7 in Germany, must unite and condemn what is almost certainly a life-threatening sentence. They should stand together in defence of their shared values and demand his release.

Mr Badawi’s sentence is a brutal exercise in public intimidation. He has challenged Saudi Arabia’s autocratic and religious state, and even though his arguments could not be more carefully and modestly expressed, to hold them at all is incompatible with the regime under which he lives. His offence was to start a website, the Saudi Free Liberals forum, that argued for secularism and free speech. He carefully avoided direct criticism of the Saudi royal family, but—like many Arab thinkers before him—he is convinced that a separation of faith and state is the best course if his country is to have a future of what he calls “modernisation and hope”. In an expression of his convictions posted five years ago, he wrote: “States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear.” For this belief he faces a punishment from a state that was one of the handful never to endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that that document violates the precepts of Islam.

As this newspaper has argued before, Saudi Arabia ought to be treated as a global pariah. It is a source of a particular strain of jihadist poison, of fanatical preachers, and of young men, like the 9/11 hijackers, who threaten both the west and the whole Middle East by their readiness to fight, often in the cause of Wahhabist Islam. For the past month, a Saudi blockade has been imperilling thousands of innocent Yemenis, and aerial bombardment by Saudi jets is killing scores more. Yet the kingdom continues to be treated with honour by western powers. Britain buys Saudi oil and courts Saudi trade. Even free speech in the UK has been curtailed in order to avoid giving offence to so rich and powerful an ally. Of all the European powers, only Sweden has been prepared to jeopardise relations and its arms trade by taking a stand.

Mr Badawi will never have doubted what a challenge he posed to the kingdom. He will have understood the retribution that it was likely to bring down on his head. It is the kind of courage that demands to be recognised and honoured by everyone who respects human rights. We are and we remain Raif Badawi.

If we do not fight for the freedom of all, we place our own freedom in peril.

Fight.

Cleveland’s Norman Krumholz was ahead of President Barack Obama. He was ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He was earlier, too, than economist Paul Krugman.

Inequality was in his and his city planning staff’s sights in Cleveland in the mid-1970s.

He was thinking how you curb inequality as Cleveland’s city planner 40 years ago.

In 1975, he and his staff likely wrote an annual city planning report like no other before or since. The first page sets the tone:

Individuals are better off with more choices in any decision.

Institutions serve individuals goal most effectively when they provide a wider range of choices to individuals. And most important,

In a context of limited resources, institutions should give priority attention to the task of promoting more choices for those individuals who have few, if any, choices.

Politically speaking, this is heresy. (Especially for a Republican administration. Ralph Perk was mayor). Serve the poor first? Too many other powerful forces in the city have public desires. And they have power and votes. They usually come first.

In 1975 Cleveland wasn’t anyone’s idea of paradise and for low income people it might have been a contestant for Dante’s Inferno.

So Krumholz and his gang came up with the idea that seems so simple but not so easily done:

“Equity requires that locally-responsible government institutions give priority attention to the goal of promoting a wider range of choice.”

It goes on to say that the goal calls “for a more equitable society.”

Krumholz, now 88 and still teaching planning at Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman-Levin College of Urban Affairs, was a child of the Great Depression. He remembers having to move from tenement to tenement. His dad Continue Reading »