Shots of information, not coffee, unfortunately. Sitting here this week I’m looking at six pieces that I’ve been trying to read, and blog, for some time. I’m not going to get around to doing in-depth, individual, posts, but in the tradition of my Time Shovel Out The Blog Pile posts, here are quick reflections on the first of the six articles.

No. 1: from 2 March, Sharon Kelly’s How America’s clean coal dream unravelled for The Guardian. She begins:

High above the red dirt and evergreen trees of Kemper County, Mississippi, gleams a 15-story monolith of pipes surrounded by a town-sized array of steel towers and white buildings. The hi-tech industrial site juts out of the surrounding forest, its sharp silhouette out of place amid the gray crumbling roads, catfish stands and trailer homes of nearby De Kalb, population: 1,164.

The $7.5bn Kemper power plant once drew officials from as far as Saudi Arabia, Japan and Norway to marvel at a 21st-century power project so technologically complex its builder compared it to the moonshot of the 1960s. It’s promise? Energy from “clean coal”.

“I’m impressed,” said Jukka Uosukainen, the United Nations director for the Climate Technology Centre and Network, after a 2014 tour, citing Kemper as an example of how “maybe using coal in the future is possible”.

Kemper, its managers claimed, would harness dirt-cheap lignite coal—the world’s least efficient and most abundant form of coal—to power homes and businesses in America’s lowest-income state while causing the least climate-changing pollution of any fossil fuel. It was a promise they wouldn’t keep.

Last summer the plant’s owner, Southern Company, America’s second-largest utility company, announced it was abandoning construction after years of blown-out budgets and missed construction deadlines.

This is what happens when people get trapped in the echo chamber and start believing their own fantasies. What I found to be the most important paragraph—what Andrew Sullivan used to call the money shot until his mother asked him what he meant—comes high in the story:

Company officials have blamed the failure on factors ranging from competition from tumbling natural gas prices to bad weather, bad timing and plain old bad luck.

But a review by the Guardian of more than 5,000 pages of confidential company documents, internal emails, white papers, and other materials provided anonymously by several former Southern Co insiders, plus on- and off-record interviews with other former Kemper engineers and managers, found evidence that top executives covered up construction problems and fundamental design flaws at the plant and knew, years before they admitted it publicly, that their plans had gone awry.

This is why public relations and advertising folks make the big buck.

More tomorrow…

At the end of chapter five of Black Reconstruction In America, The Coming Of The Lord, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the first stanza of An die Freude (an anti-epigraph of sorts):

Freude, schoner Gotterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Briider,
Wo dein sanfter Fliigel weilt.
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!

Alle Menschen …
Alle Menschen …

—Johann Schiller, 1759-1805

This was, of course, the inspiration for the 4th movement of the 9th symphony, in my opinion the greatest single piece of music in human history.

*I’m certain that our president’s statement does not apply to anyone reading this.

No wrongdoing has been established at this point. But the [Southern District of New York] investigation is a serious matter.

That’s how Andrew McCarthy concluded his piece—The Real Investigation—in National Review. For me, there are two vital points about McCarthy’s essay: first, National Review published it and second, there are comments.

On the first, McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and now senior fellow at the National Review Institute, as well as a contributing editor of the magazine, has written a nuanced and alarming (to supporters of President Donald John Trump) examination of the FBI raids of the offices and residence of Trump’s fixer: Michael Cohen. I would have expected such an article in the Guardian, New York Times or Washington Post. McCarthy begins:

President Trump now has real legal peril. The potential jeopardy stems from the investigation that came to light this week when the FBI conducted raids on the office and residences of his lawyer and self-professed “fixer,” Michael Cohen.

I’ve never thought “collusion with Russia” posed jeopardy. If there had been anything criminal to that storyline, the politicized anti-Trump factions in the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies would have leaked it. And, notwithstanding Trump’s nauseating nods to Putin, the administration has taken enough aggressive steps against Russia that it is past time for the Kremlin to broadcast the big kompromat file if it exists.

I’ve also never thought Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s other known angle, obstruction, posed a great risk. There is a line between foolishness and crime. For important policy reasons, a president should not weigh in with the FBI director on the merits of investigating a friend and political ally; and it would be better if he did not make personnel moves that could be perceived as efforts to influence witnesses or affect the course of an investigation. But as long as a president’s actions — e.g., firing the FBI director, discussing the possibility of pardons — are on their face legal and within his legitimate constitutional authority, I do not believe they can validly predicate an obstruction prosecution. (In theory, they could be grist for impeachment, which involves a political inquiry into abuse of power, not a legal proceeding to establish the essential elements of a statutory crime.)

The matter now under investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, however, is a very live criminal investigation. Anyone potentially connected to it should be worried.

If you’re a Trump supporter, this should worry you, and clearly, 45 are, because they wrote comments. I suspect that there would be a lot more, except—and I could be very wrong about this—this is the first time I’ve seen an option to leave any comment on National Review.

I just did a quick check of the site this morning and I see the red “dialogue balloons are everywhere. Is this new or did I somehow miss this? That I’m not seeing other stories actually with comments leads me to believe that this is a change for the magazine and that readers haven’t caught on yet.

Based on my hourly rate, I make a little less than $100,000 a year. Not all that great in 2017, but well above the median and quite comfortable for me. (Full disclosure, since I don’t work my day job full-time, my actual income is much less, but I’m not complaining. I’m comfortable and have time to write.) How do we arrive at an acceptable hourly rate though? If you’re not self-employed—as I am—you often don’t have a great deal of choice, but if you do get to set a figure, how do you find that figure?

When I first went freelance I decided on an annual figure and then divided that number by 2,000 (50, 40-hour weeks). I decided whether or not to take writing jobs based on if I thought I could complete the assignment in a number of hours equal to the editor’s offered fee divided by my rate. Back in the ’90s that would have looked like this: a magazine offers me $600 for 1,000 words. At my rate at the time that would have been about a week’s work. I’d take that job. If the pay were, say, $500 for 3,000 words, I’d pass.

There are a lot of factors involved—number of phone calls, travel time for face-to-face interview, &c.—but I knew my work habits well enough by that time to be able to estimate pretty closely what my time commitments would be.

My system worked.

All of this is a set up for Peter C. Baker’s How much is an hour worth? The war over the minimum wage in the Guardian. I haven’t worked for minimum wage since high school, but in today’s economy far too many people are expected to do so and support families. Baker begins:

No idea in economics provokes more furious argument than the minimum wage. Every time a government debates whether to raise the lowest amount it is legal to pay for an hour of labour, a bitter and emotional battle is sure to follow—rife with charges of ignorance, cruelty and ideological bias. In order to understand this fight, it is necessary to understand that every minimum-wage law is about more than just money. To dictate how much a company must pay its workers is to tinker with the beating heart of the employer-employee relationship, a central component of life under capitalism. This is why the dispute over these laws and their effects—which has raged for decades—is so acrimonious: it is ultimately a clash between competing visions of politics and economics.

What follows is a detailed and nuanced examination of the short history—a little more than perhaps 100 years—of state-mandated minimum wages or wage floors. What is missing from Baker’s excellent examination are two simple words that put all that he writes in proper context: Within Capitalism.

Baker restricts his piece to two conflicting views: one, that minimum wages cost workers hours and jobs and the other, that minimum wages ensure that workers are paid a living wage. He does not examine what happens when workers are not cogs in the machine, but full partners in the enterprise.

I’ve long argued against a minimum wage because it supplies, at best, a temporary fix that fades as employers adjust other factors to maintain their profit margin. Simply put, if wages go up, then prices go up and the balance again shifts to favor the capitalist over the worker. As long as that is the case, that profit defeats all other arguments, we will not see a sensible solution that makes workers part of the discussion and not widgets to be swapped in and out.

Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. From The Miami Herald:

Not the most normal sight: a gun left in the bathroom stall.

But that’s exactly what went down on Sunday in a men’s room at the Deerfield Beach Pier.

The circumstances of how the Glock 9mm got there are unusual.

According to the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the weapon was left by Sean Simpson. If his name sounds familiar, he’s the teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas who said he’d be willing to arm himself while on duty.

Can the clowns wanting to wave guns around and pretend they’re Wyatt Earp get any clownier?

So, when Larry Wilmore lost his spot on Comedy Central—a bad move on CC’s part, but hey, they didn’t ask me—I picked up Jordan Klepper’s spoof of Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

I enjoy the show, but last evening’s was particularly good and worthy of watching in its entirety for the segments on Paul Ryan, Alan Dershowitz and Sally Kohn. I had not heard of Kohn previously, but in talking about her book, The Opposite of Hate (a play on the opposite of love meme—hint: hate and love are not opposites), she makes a point that I’ve made time and time again: that if we’re not willing to talk to people we disagree with and just shout that they’re idiots or stupid (are you listening Xavier?), then we’re not going to accomplish very much.

Also, Joshua Johnson interviewed Kohn on 1A this morning.

As is often the case, good quotes are shortened to make them more accessible, more pithy and what we often lose is the setup, the context. This can lead to misinterpretation and confusion, even chaos. What Frederich Nietzsche wrote was:

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. —Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886.

Ralph Nader understands that fighting monsters is dangerous, but we have to fight. Nader, writing in The Hour is Late —Speak Out, Stand Tall Ex-Officials, explains:

As a failed businessman, saved by business bankruptcies which he called a “competitive advantage,” Donald Trump believed in chaos as a strategy. Unfortunately, chaos and foreign policy don’t mix. Chaos may bring war. And tragically, military aggression can explosively boomerang back to the U.S. mainland.

On April 3rd, Trump declared he was going to pull soldiers out of Syria. After the recent alleged chemical attack on Syrian civilians outside of Damascus, Trump threatened his friend, Vladimir Putin, saying he will pay a price, and that the Continue Reading »

At the end of Chapter 3 of Black Reconstruction In America, The General Strike, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the opening verse (an anti-epigraph of sorts) of The Battle Hymn Of The Republic:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,
His Truth is marching on!

—Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910

As Du Bois notes, the song began life as a battalion marching song for the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia: John Brown’s Song. The song traveled very much further, however.

Kimball’s battalion was dispatched to Murray, Kentucky early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops outside Washington D.C. on Upton Hill, Virginia. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company “K” of the 6th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. Howe’s companion at the review, The Reverend James Freeman Clarke,[8] suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men’s song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.[9] Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembered:

I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.” So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.

Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first published on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly of February 1862. The sixth verse written by Howe, which is less commonly sung, was not published at that time. The song was also published as a broadside in 1863 by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Philadelphia.

I remember singing the song in music class in the ’60s. I have to wonder if any of my students would recognize the song or know who John Brown was.

I confess that listening to the The United States Army Field Band version just now brought tears to my eyes.

The debate at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school has taken a dark turn.

No, the kids are still alright, but the adults in the room are really, really struggling.

Anne Branigin, writing in A ‘Double Standard’: Black Parkland, Fla., Students Speak Out on Black Lives Matter Message Being Shut Down by School Days Before Shooting for The Root, explains:

Just one week before a mass shooting would launch their school into the national spotlight, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School put on a Black History Month show at the Parkland, Fla., school. In a last-minute, unrehearsed addition, black student organizers wanted to address a letter that had appeared in the school’s newspaper.

Titled “All Lives Matter,” the student-penned letter had harsh words for the Black Lives Matter movement, calling it “ridiculous” and “good for nothing but creating mistrust between civilians and police.”

As WLRN-TV reports, black students at the school had planned on rebutting the letter in the school paper but saw the show, held on Feb. 9, as another, timely opportunity to speak to the importance and legitimacy of the BLM movement.

But their message was shut down. Reporter Nadege Green, speaking to the students who had organized the response, writes that a teacher had the speaker’s mic cut off and “asked the student to leave the stage before she could finish it.”

The young men and women at the school recognize bull shit when they see it and aren’t afraid to call bull shit out. The students told the world that their school was 25 percent African American, a fact that we probably would have never learned from the usual talking heads.

I am reminded of an episode of the Phil Donahue Show on crack cocaine where a Black woman stood up to tell Donahue and the guests that crack had been a scourge in Black communities for 10 years, but the dangers were only getting noticed because White people were effected. Gun violence in schools, Branigin reminds her readers, is much the same:

Tyah-Amoy Roberts, who spoke at the March press conference, told WLRN that black students around the country have been calling attention to gun violence for years.

“The Black Lives Matter movement has been addressing this topic since the murder of Trayvon Martin, since 2012,” Roberts said. “Yet we’ve never seen this kind of support for our cause. And we surely do not feel that the lives or voices of minorities are as valued as our white counterparts.”

And, oh, Tom Tomorrow’s Glib Sociopath Indignant White Guy is just the calm and collected version of Alex Jones. Yes, I know, Jones is spiking his blood pressure over demons reading books to children, but the clip is just too good to pass up.

Before I became a real journalist I played one in high school, the Navy and college. I use the term played here advisedly because nothing I did came close to the work done by the staff of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school Eagle Eye. The work done by these young women—and a couple of guys, what’s up with that?—continues to impress.

Lois Beckett, writing in Florida school shooting survivors release ‘cathartic’ memorial magazine for the Guardian, explains:

The latest issue of the Eagle Eye, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school news magazine, is a memorial to the 17 students and teachers who were killed less than two months ago in one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.

Teenage survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Florida have galvanized the national movement for gun control reform, giving advocates hope politicians might finally pay a price for a vicious cycle of inaction.

The Eagle Eye’s student journalists took over Guardian US last month during the March for Our Lives, which drew hundreds of thousands to rallies in Washington DC and around the world. Eagle Eye staffers assigned stories and reported from the Washington rally for the Guardian.

But the student writers have also continued to mourn their classmates and teachers, a process that has turned ordinary school activities – like publishing a student magazine – into acts of remembrance.

“They really wanted to capture the essence of who each person was,” Eagle Eye adviser Melissa Falkowski said of the memorial issue. “That was the mission of the issue. They were just really determined, even if it was going to be hard, they were determined to do it right.”

And damn, did they ever.

At the end of Chapter 3 of Black Reconstruction In America, The Planter, W.E.B. Du Bois placed six lines (an anti-epigraph of sorts) from James Rorty’s Not Spring:

Not spring; from us no agony of birth
Is asked or needed; in a crimson tide
Upon the down-slope of the world
We, the elect, are hurled
In fearful power and brief pride
Burning at last to silence and dark earth.

—Not Spring by James Rorty, 1890-1973

Rorty, the self-proclaimed last of the muckrakers, had a long career.

In 1913, he began his career with work in the advertising industry. He also worked in settlement houses.

During World War I, Rorty served as a stretcher bearer on the Argonne front, an experience that led him to become a “militant pacifist.”

Rorty worked a journalist, poet for more than sixty years. He considered himself “the last of the muckrakers” as a combatant against social injustice in America.

During World War I, Rorty moved to San Francisco to continue his career in advertising and to write experimental poetry.

In 1925, Rorty moved to New York City, where he was a founding editor (with Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, Hugo Gellert, John Sloan, and others) of the New Masses, a Communist literary magazine, which launched the following year. However, Rorty left that next year when fellow editors rejected his publication of Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Apology for Bad Dreams.”

In 1927, Rorty was one of many arrested during protests against execution by electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

To earn money, he also worked as an editor, journalist, advertising copy writer, and consultant for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In 1932, he supported and then quit the campaign to support William Z. Foster for U.S. president.

I’ll check this afternoon at the library for a hardcopy of the poem.

So, I’m reading James Comey treads fine line as book set to turn up heat on Trump by Tom McCarthy on the Guardian and about half way down I came across this paragraph:

[Former FBI Director James] Comey’s role in the election brought multiple criticisms from [Clinton adviser Philippe] Reines. “One, more than anything, I think he’s naive,” he said. “Two, I think he’s sanctimonious. And three, he’s very self-involved. And let me unpack those.” The conversation went on at greater length than can be quoted here.[Emphasis mine, JH]

While that is true for the print edition of your newspaper, Mr. McCarthy, the assertion is wrong, wrong, wrong in the online edition. We could have gotten the entire interview and some, like myself, would have liked to have read (or heard) all that Reines had to say.

The top strip is from 6 April. The bottom strip is from 7 April.

I came to Lynn Johnston’s For Better Or For Worse sometime in the mid-80s so I missed the first five or six years. I was glad to see that when she concluded her strip that she chose to go back to the beginning and make minor corrections and enhancements while preserving her original narrative.

While this process continues, Johnston has other projects on her drawing board, including this essay published last month in which she begins:

When I was barely 20 years old, I got married. My husband and I settled into an old apartment in Vancouver, near English Bay. He was working for the CBC as a cameraman and I was an ink and paint artist for Canawest Films. I wanted to be an animator and was learning the industry from the ground up. We did commercials, public service announcements and piece work for Hanna Barbera. I was one of 16 young women hired to hand colour acetate cells. Having signed an agreement to not join a union, we took shifts and worked around the clock for $1.50 an hour. It was hard work, but I learned quickly and I realized that an animator makes other people’s drawings, other people’s characters, other people’s dreams come to life. With no children to occupy my time at home, I decided to try my hand at creating stories and characters of my own. I have always been more at home with realistic scenarios, so I decided to tell short stories about my childhood. Within a few weeks, I had a few tall tales worked out and perhaps, 15 coloured drawings. I wondered if they might even be published some day. It was 1968 and I was creating a graphic novel.

If I was starting out today, knowing what I do about the internet vs syndicated comic art, I think I would choose to become a graphic novelist.

Now, that’s a graphic novel I would want to read.

At the end of Chapter 2 of Black Reconstruction In America, The White Worker, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the fourth and fifth stanzas (an anti-epigraph of sorts) from Men Of England:

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Du Bois, of course, selected only eight lines, but the whole of the poem—written in 1819 and presented here by an anonymous reader—would certainly have been revolutionary and seditious in the antebellum South. In particular, the sixth stanza…

Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth—let no imposter heap:
Weave robes—let not the idle wear:
Forge arms—in your defence to bear.

…would have been riotous.

The business of journalism has always been about profit. When crusading stories serve that purpose, then publishers (and journalists) will pursue them. When they don’t, they don’t. Only when money is removed from the writing—and the reporting slips into the realm of propaganda (ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause)—is the reader able to judge the source and then the reliability of what is presented.

That is simply the nature of the beast and the silly phrase Fair And Balanced notwithstanding, we all need to keep that in minds, regardless of what we’re reading, watching or listening to.

Ralph Nader, writing Degrading Newspapers’ Business Sections, details his recent experience:

It’s alarming that there are far fewer media outlets for consumer protection news and features than there were thirty years ago. Recall the huge Phil Donahue Show, the regional radio show and TV news shows, the television networks and syndicated radio shows that would report and interview consumer advocates about the injustice, rip-offs, and harms done to the consumer by unscrupulous corporations. These shows are largely gone now. Shows marked by fluff, narcissism, trivia, and sensationalist, frenetic news bits are their replacements.

What is disturbing is that the major newspapers – the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal—are cutting back reporting on the revelations and doings of active consumers, and consumer organizations. Sure, they do occasional features that may gain them big journalism prizes. But the regular coverage of very important consumer struggles with Congress, the White House, the courts, and the state legislatures has vastly shrunken. Moreover, the media, especially Continue Reading »

Update on 8 April—Because they already own the souls of their employees serfs…