Do homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages deserve to lose their homes? That's what finance commentator Barry Ritholtz says, in a post called "More Foreclosures, Please." Ritholtz must have been channeling his inner Rick Santelli when he wrote that "the boom and bust saw irresponsible and reckless behavior by lenders and home buyers alike," adding that mortgage relief programs for homeowners rewards those who were "reckless, speculative, and foolish" while punishing those who are not.

It's not reasonable to put Barry Ritholtz in the same category as Santelli, of course. Ritholtz is a highly informative, widely quoted writer on economic issues. Santelli's the frat-boy trader turned CNBC host whose rant about "rewarding the losers" got a cheer out of some morons on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (and started the Tea Party movement). But Ritholtz puts financially beleaguered homeowners in the same "moral hazard" dumping ground as the banks who wrote their mortgages, suggesting that both of them "overused leverage, disregarded risk, (and) ignored history." Is that really fair?

After all, what kind of information was available to the average home buyer during the last decade? How would the average reasonable person have decided whether to buy a home or what kind of mortgage to use - in, say, 2004?

They probably read articles like the one published in February of 2004 in USA Today ("America's newspaper") with the headline "Greenspan says ARMs might be better deal." "Overall, the household sector seems to be in good shape," said Greenspan, who added that adjustable-rate mortgages might be the right choice for many homeowners. Greenspan enthusiastically promoted the new-style mortgages that later played a big role in the meltdown: "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage," he said.

Greenspan wasn't just Chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time. He was the man the press kept touting as a genius, the one they called "Maestro." Were homeowners guilty of a "moral hazard" for listening to him? Should they face foreclosure because they weren't reading Nouriel Roubini or Paul Krugman or Joseph Stieglitz?

Ignorance of the law is no defense, but ignorance of contrarian economic thought circa 2005 should be. If Greenspan and Geithner and Paulson and all the talking heads on CNBC and the other networks couldn't see the bubble, how could the average home buyer?

The truth is, most people buy homes because they need a place to live -- and because for generations they've been told that buying a home is preferable to renting. Our tax code is structured to encourage home ownership, and the ownership message is reinforced in everything from news reporting to popular culture. (Think Miracle on 34th Street.)

And generalizations about irresponsible, speculative borrowing overlook the fact that the nation's housing problems vary widely by geography. Some areas aren't having a housing bust:

Is a homeowner in Glens Falls, NY any more "reckless, speculative, and foolish" than one a few hours down the road in Poughkeepsie? Poughkeepsie experienced a boom in prices followed by a bust, while high-performing Glens Falls experienced a boom with no bust. West of Glens Falls, my home town of Utica did pretty well too, as this chart illustrates:

It probably helps that Utica experienced its financial collapse a long time ago, so housing prices were already unusually low.

Here's something interesting: The areas with stable housing prices had a much lower percentage of nonprime loans than the country as a whole. As the report's authors mention, the explanation for that probably "runs in both directions--an increase in nonprime lending led to more significant home price appreciation, and more rapid home price appreciation led to a rise in nonprime lending."

In other words, it was a cycle: Risky loans drove housing prices up, and climbing housing prices led to greater availability (and selling) of risky loans. That's not a borrower problem -- it's a pattern of lender behavior. It's a sign of banks driving a speculative frenzy as a "get rich quick" scheme, then leaving the borrowers with the wreckage.

Ritholtz makes some excellent points about the weakness of HAMP (the Home Affordable Modification Program), and its tendency to reward banks for their very real "moral hazard." The biggest problem with the revised HAMP program isn't that it's too generous to troubled homeowners. It's that it's a "pretty please" program that only requires lenders to consider lowering the principal on home loans (or, in the Orwellian language of the program's Fact Sheet, "servicers will be required to consider an alternative Modification approach" - "required to consider" being one of those self-contradicting phrases George Carlin used to rattle off, like "jumbo shrimp.")

But the idea of principal reduction - whether it comes from HAMP or individual lenders like Bank of America - is a reasonable one. Most reductions in principal will still leave homeowners owing more than their house is worth, which should give them their just portion of punishment for any "moral hazard."

"More foreclosures, please" is exactly what we don't want. Ritholtz is understandably concerned about the unfairness of "rewarding" homeowners who got in trouble in a way that keeps prices higher for those who behaved responsibly. But he paints an overly rosy scenario of bad actors being driven from their homes like poltergeists, so that new and vibrant families can move in -- families that can afford the mortgage and have money left over to spend in the local economy. The real solution is going to look less like a ghost story and more like Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, where the ghosts and the living learn to live together happily.

The millions of homeowners who got in over their heads have already suffered a lot. Let's get them some help. And let's keep the focus on the people who caused this problem: The bankers who got rich off these schemes, and the politicians and regulators who let them do it.
___________________

Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer, is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. Richard blogs at:

No Middle Class Health Tax
A Night Light

Website: Eskow and Associates

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OPEN LETTER TO BLACK AMERICA
By Kevin Powell

WRITER's NOTE: The following essay appears in the April 2010 issue of EBONY magazine. Feel free to post widely AS IS and with proper credit given to Kevin Powell.

DEAR BLACK AMERICA:

This 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an opportune moment to reflect on how far we've come, and how far we have to go. It calls us to reconsider the words Dr. King gave us at the end of his life, when he said that we need "a radical revolution of values." Certainly, we have much to be proud of. There is the first Black president. There are more Black elected officials, more Blacks in corporate America, the media, and in very real power positions, like Oprah Winfrey, Richard Parsons, Donna Brazile, and Jay-Z.

But, if we are to be brutally honest with ourselves, we've also got to acknowledge that things have not been right for some time. The civil rights era concept that our leaders would deliver us into the promised land has devolved into the idea that all we need to do is show up and follow. We have lost the sense of individual responsibility toward collective change.

Think back to the days immediately after slavery, when it was clear that Blacks wanted two things: education and land. In spite of vicious White terrorism, we plodded forward. There was hope, and a vocabulary of purpose. These values emboldened us during the Civil Rights Movement. And they were re-born during the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet, unlike before, many of us have failed to embrace the miraculous kind of self and community transformation that led us to walk, literally, into the teeth of barking dogs, water hoses, and police brutality, mainly because we refused to let anyone turn us around.

Why, politically, did we come out in record numbers for Barack Obama, then instantly return to apathy? Why do we remain suspended in a state of arrested development, believing that a dynamic leader will be our salvation? A civil rights veteran said it best to me many years ago: "We were just happy to get in the door. We never really had a plan beyond that." So we have to be honest and admit that Black leadership in America, except a few shining examples such as The Brotherhood/Sister Sol in New York City or John Hope Bryant's Operation Hope, has been too often stuck in yesterday. It has been unable to produce an agenda for Black America that will transform our communities in a holistic way. So we've spent 40 years like the Israelites, wandering the wilderness, harboring the misguided expectations that people like Barack, or Oprah, or anyone Black and famous will free us. It simply isn't going to happen.

And while we've been waiting, praying, and producing the same predictable conferences, summits, studies, and reports again and again, Black America is on the brink of catastrophe. We need to remind ourselves that Hurricane Katrina and Haiti's earthquake only magnify the slow forms of devastation happening each day. They include HIV and AIDS, poverty, Black self-hatred and Black-on-Black violence, the huge class divide, mediocre school systems, and the steady march of our youth into jails and cemeteries. We should stop saying this is a post-racial America because of President Obama. It is not. Despite Barack and Michelle we continue to be bombarded with destructive images of Black people in the mass media. As I travel the country speaking at universities and working for social justice, I note that our prisons are packed with black and brown bodies, and every American ghetto looks exactly the same: a lack of resources, services, and jobs, failing public schools, and limited access to the American dream.

That said, let us no longer wait on a savior to come. Do we want to continue wandering or do we want to create our future here and now? We have the power to transform our communities by enacting those "radical revolution of values." So I propose six things we must do immediately: Create a Spiritual Foundation; Move Toward Mental Wellness; Take Care of Our Physical Health; Become Politically Active; Understand the Power of Our Culture; and Start a Plan for Economic Empowerment.

Our spiritual foundation must be rooted in God or something greater than us, and a love for self and for all Black folks, unconditionally. It must grow out of our beliefs and our willingness to act selflessly. And it must begin with mental wellness because we cannot stand up for our convictions, our faith, or ourselves if our self-esteem is not in tact. Susan L. Taylor put it best when it comes to our mental health, Black America: healing is the new activism. Be it the increase in domestic violence, homicides and suicides, or the way so many of us say "I can't" it is clear to me that since the civil rights period our individual and collective psyches have been damaged. But we can heal by seeking counseling and therapy, forming or joining positive support groups, and courageously ridding ourselves of toxic people, even if they are longtime friends, lovers, or kinfolk.

Physically, we can no longer accept that we are pre-destined for diabetes, high-blood pressure, and other ailments. Yes, like all Americans, we should have access to healthcare. But we should also change our diets and exercise regularly. Recently, my mother was hospitalized. After years of sitting on the sofa watching TV and indulging in terrible eating habits, that was her wake-up call. Change your diet and live. Don't change and die a painful and preventable death, as many of our relatives have.

Taking charge of our health and wellness also means changing the way we discuss our realities in America. Let us stop bemoaning our "crises" and start strategizing to meet our "challenges." Let us cease spreading reports that compare us unfavorably to our White sisters and brothers. Likewise, our culture, the way we talk, eat, sing, pray, dance, laugh, and cry must become more balanced so that it no longer reflects solely what is wrong with us, but also projects a vision of how great we can become, or are.

Financially, we've got to disconnect our self-esteem from our clothes and cars and instead focus on building true wealth. If my illiterate late grandparents could own land in South Carolina, by saving coins in their day, then we can, too. We can use our resources to empower ourselves, to help our 'hoods, and to support our people. This means doing more than donating to charity. It means a sincere and consistent giving back in terms of time, energy, and presence.

Black America, we've been surviving for 400 years in this nation. The question for the twenty-first century is this: Do we want to just survive, or do we want to win? The "radical" answers, if we search hard enough, are right there in our own hands.

Kevin Powell is a writer, activist and author of 10 books, including Open Letters to America. He can be reached at kevin@kevinpowell.net.

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I'm the co-founder of a technology company called Greenplum. I'm a second-generation Asian American currently living in Noe Valley, a great San Francisco neighborhood with a population of 21,106, a median household income of $77,479, an average high temperature in March of 62 degrees, and an average commute time of 32.7 minutes. I recently ate a cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake with my family at Barney's Gourmet Hamburgers on 4138 24th Street and the bill was $52.47 -- I paid by credit card. We went there after I returned from a business trip to San Diego that included flying on Southwest Airlines, Flight #2646, seat 14C, and renting a Chevy Impala from Hertz that featured an iPod dock so I could listen to my "most played" song: "The Bends" by Radiohead.

So what? The point is that I know all this detailed information about myself, my neighbors, and my neighborhood because I live in the dawn of a new era--one that is changing the world as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution did. It's an era in which our ability to gather, store, and analyze unprecedented quantities of information is changing our lives, our economy, and our world.

Call It the "Your Data" Revolution

Every minute of every day, we're generating titanic volumes of numbers, words, pictures, and sounds through security cameras, RFID chips, cell phones, scanners, sensors, emails, Tweets, and Facebook updates. We're storing that ocean of data in server farms the size of airports and on flash drives smaller than my thumb. We're searching, manipulating, and cross-referencing data with ever-more powerful computers and software. That's "Your Data," and it is empowering us to do incredible, almost unimaginable things.

Your Data can lead you home with turn-by-turn directions on Mapquest. It can find you love by sorting through the profiles of 20 million other lonely hearts on eHarmony. It brings you up-to-the-second stock prices, sports scores, and flight delay alerts. It helps doctors fight diseases and engineers design safer cars. It gives environmentalists the power to track the movements of endangered animals and biologists the tools to map the structure of our genes.

Your Data, in short, is transforming everything.

The Revolution Is Already Everywhere

As Wired magazine recently put it, data on the current scale isn't just more -- it's different. It's transforming how we do old things and enabling us to do new things that were never before possible.

Your Data has given birth to entirely new industries. Countless companies make products to store and manipulate data -- hard disks, flash drives, and other devices -- not to mention companies that make database software (including Greenplum). Others are generating fortunes just by using data. Google, a company barely 11 years old, has become one of the biggest enterprises in the world without making anything you can hold in your hand. They're strictly data crunchers, ceaselessly sifting through the Internet's ever-changing ocean of information to connect people with what they want to know. Ebay performs a similar trick, tracking millions of items for sale by people all over the world, and matching them in real time with buyers. Pandora.com breaks down millions of songs into their constituent parts--rhythms, chordal patterns, beats per minute -- and then steers subscribers to new tunes similar to their old favorites.

Whole new categories of jobs are being created, while others wither away. Search engine optimization is a great trade to be in these days; newspaper reporting, not so much. Communities in places such as rural Oregon that used to depend on mining and forestry for jobs are now home to gigantic server farms hosting the world's cloud computing infrastructure. There's so much demand for people who know how to crunch information that the New York Times recently reported that statisticians fresh out of college are earning salaries of $125,000.

Even the way physical products move around the world is changing. Consider the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, the biggest in North America. Nearly half of everything Americans import every year -- from Hello Kitty dolls to crude oil -- passes through this port. It's a relentless blizzard of stuff -- and the movement of every item is anticipated, tracked, and ordered by a computerized overseer called the Terminal Operating System. The TOS keeps real-time tabs on every vehicle, machine, and container via a network of RFID scanners, GPS systems, optical character readers, infrared relays, and digital cameras. It knows exactly where every object is, what it weighs, who owns it, where it's from, and where it's supposed to go next. The result: that Hello Kitty doll gets to your local Target a whole lot faster than it used to.

However, a whole lot of information can easily become too much information. Too much data overloads the system, clogs bandwidth, and makes it harder to find the useful needle in the data haystack. IDC estimates that an organization employing 1,000 knowledge workers loses $5.3 million every year in time wasted looking for information. Another $5.7 million in person-hours gets blown reformatting information to move it between applications. Not to mention the cost of keeping that data secure. IDC reckons that corporations will spend $65 billion on security software in 2010. The cost of not keeping data secure is high, too: identity theft affects some 8.4 million Americans every year, incurring billions of dollars in fraudulent charges.

Getting Smart with Data

Here's the most important thing to understand about Your Data: it's only going to get bigger. There's no turning back the tide, no going back to an era when we knew less. You can opt out of the Best Buy mailing list when you register your new plasma TV, but Best Buy still knows you bought a plasma TV. So does your credit card company. And if you miss the payments, next time you apply for a loan the bank will know that, too.

Thanks to Your Data, the government and other huge institutions have more power than ever. But thanks to Your Data, so do you.

Battles are being fought every day by citizens armed with the kind of information that was once available only to governments and corporations. For example, environmentalists can challenge plans for a new shopping mall armed with technical details about how it might impact the area's wildlife, air quality, and small businesses. Information has become democratized.

We can help one another in ways that have never been possible before. Websites such as PatientsLikeMe let people who are suffering from an illness share information about their symptoms and treatments. Other websites let you compare your baby's sleep pattern with those of other kids, or share product reviews to help other people buy the best blender or power drill.

And we can help ourselves live longer and better by collecting data about ourselves. The latest in sports footwear is the Nike Plus, a sneaker with built-in sensors that track how far and fast you run. You can synch that information with iTunes, store it on a log charting your progress, and post the results on Nike's site. Other gadgets and websites let you track your diet, blood glucose level, and even sleep patterns so you can make changes to improve things.

That's right, Your Data isn't just for big institutions. It's something that's already part of our lives -- something we're already using and can use in ways we've only begun to discover. The tricky part is making sure that on balance, we use in the right ways.

For starters, we need to free up data: as much information as is feasible should be distributed as widely as possible. We need corporations, governments, and big organizations to be more transparent and share their data more widely. The Obama administration has taken a step in this direction with the appointment of the nation's first-ever chief information officer. Part of his mandate is to make huge amounts of Washington's trove of statistics, studies, and reports available through a new website, data.gov. Sites such as Public.resource.org, which posts court records for free, are helping, too.

At the same time, though, we also need rules to control certain kinds of information. We need laws to keep sensitive stuff such as credit records and medical histories from getting into the wrong hands. But even with such laws, it's inevitable that information will leak out. So we also need rules about how personal information that might come into the hands of employers, police, lenders, and others can be used. Groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the ACLU are already fighting these fights.

We also need to make sure we can use all the information we're collecting. That means better schools that will turn out kids who are able to cope with the age of Your Data. And we need better, cheaper technologies to enable companies of all sizes, as well as organizations and individuals, to get all the information they want and do something useful with it.

Knowledge is power, and we know more than any previous generation could even conceive. We're moving into a world of infinite information. The challenge we face is turning all that information into insights, conclusions, and revelations -- in other words, turning that knowledge into wisdom, without letting it be turned against us. We need to make sure Your Data doesn't oppress us, but serves us. And we need to do that fast, because the revolution is well underway. Your Data Rules the World.

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Was YouTube, the popular video-streaming website founded in 2005, originally built on copyright piracy? That question lies at the heart of the lawsuit brought by Viacom, the creator of wildly popular television shows and first-run movies against YouTube and Google, which bought YouTube in 2006 for almost $1.8 billion. Documents recently unsealed in this case should remind us that online copyright infringement undermines not only America's world-leading, job-creating creative industries -- but also our world-leading, job-creating Internet pioneers, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, Amazon, Comcast and Google.

The original founders of YouTube seem to have authored some of the most incriminating documents ever disclosed in any U.S. Internet-piracy case. They described an all-too-familiar plan with rare candor: build a business based on pervasive copyright infringement and then sell the "liability-bomb" to someone else. As one founder put it, "our dirty little secret... is that we actually just want to sell out quickly."

As a result, these documents suggest that YouTube's original founders rejected Google's own Don't-Be-Evil motto, and instead built their user-base "as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil." Their role models were piracy-driven services like "Napster" and "KaZaA." Their enemies were copyright-enforcing "bastards" and "a-holes." They bragged about piracy to their board and investors, and they quickly disabled "community flagging" for infringement because it could confirm what they already knew: "probably 75%-80% of our views come from copyrighted material."

Collectively, the YouTube founders seem worse than even the distributors of the Grokster and Morpheus file-sharing programs -- the losing defendants in the Supreme-Court case, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. -- who concealed internal documents from the government because they feared "criminal investigation." Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's condemnation of the Grokster defendants thus seems applicable to the YouTube founders:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: ...[W]what you want to do is to say that unlawfully expropriated property can be used by the owner of the [technology] as part of the startup capital for his product.
[COUNSEL FOR GROKSTER]: I -- well --
JUSTICE KENNEDY: And I -- just from an economic standpoint and a legal standpoint, that sounds wrong to me....

Indeed, that sounds like stealing. And it is wrong -- from any economic, legal, or moral standpoint. Worse yet, if the courts find that YouTube's founders intended to exploit copyright infringement as their unearned "startup capital," then today's YouTube and Google could face huge liabilities because Google bought a company that had intentionally used piracy to destroy law-abiding competitors in the early streaming video market -- like Google's own Google Video site.

Even more ironically, after Google bought YouTube, it realized that legitimate businesses cannot monetize illegal activities like copyright infringement. Google thus stopped monetizing questionable YouTube videos and lost money for years while it cleaned up the site. Not even Viacom complains about the final result. Viacom and other creators have worked with sites like MySpace and Daily Motion to implement a consensus set of "Copyright Principles for [User-Generated Content] Sites" that call for cooperation, licensing, use of sophisticated content-identification technologies, and resolving disputes between users and creators without lawsuits. To their great credit, Google and YouTube have now implemented similar mechanisms.

Today's YouTube thus pays creators and respects copyrights. But that means that today's YouTube, just like yesterday's Google Video, is now another law-abiding, sustainable, job-creating business being undermined by unlawful competition from new, would-be Internet pirate kings -- like the theft-powered Isohunt website that one federal judge just denounced as "old wine in a new bottle."

Starry-eyed academes like Professor Lawrence Lessig once hailed massive copyright infringement as the Internet's "killer app" and "the crack cocaine of the Internet's growth." Sadly, that "crack" analogy has proven all too apt: crack and piracy both create only a brief, false euphoria that is unearned, addictive, and unsustainable.

Such romanticizing of Internet piracy must end. Our laws must encourage Internet entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses based on legally acquired "startup capital" -- including content. And we must also think more seriously about how -- and against whom -- we want copyright owners to enforce their federal civil rights against the massive, global content theft intentionally orchestrated by the distributors of file-sharing programs like Grokster, Morpheus, and KaZaA, and websites like Isohunt.

Only lawful Internet commerce and services will create the sustainable economic growth and jobs that piracy now destroys. That is the real lesson of Viacom v. YouTube and the Internet-piracy cases that preceded it.

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During the past two weeks, at least ten House Democrats who voted for health care reform legislation have received death threats or been targets of vandalism at their district offices. Several have moved their families out of their home districts to Washington. Both the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI are taking the situation very seriously and have offered increased security protection to these Members.

There has been a lot speculation as to how we've reached the point where violence is now being promoted as an acceptable response to democratically-enacted legislation. The truth is that political developments over the past three decades have made such violence tragically inevitable.

The idea that individual Americans have a right to use violence when confronted with oppressive or overbearing government dates back to the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. There is no doubt that our War of Independence was violent and that firearms were part of the necessary tools of victory. Our Founders, however, never intended revolution to be either perpetual or an individual exercise. They made that perfectly clear in 1787 with the drafting of the Constitution.

The Founders came to Philadelphia to begin work on a new governing document because of the fear of disunion and mobocracy that had gripped our young nation (Shay's Rebellion being just one example). The Federalists who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had no intention of creating an individual right to insurrection divorced from any organized authority. The Constitution itself stated that one of the primary purposes of the [State] Militia was to "suppress insurrections"--not foment them--and defined treason against the federal government as a crime punishable by death.

The insurrectionist idea was discredited again during the Civil War, when President Lincoln affirmed that our Constitution is not a suicide pact and can never countenance violence against the state. Nearly a century later, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower embraced Lincoln's view when he used the National Guard to prevent unruly mobs from obstructing the desegregation of Little Rock High School in Arkansas.

Of course, there have always been a small minority of Americans--even at the time of our nation's founding--who feared the consolidation of power in the government and believed the use of force was a legitimate response to federal encroachments. When the National Rifle Association (NRA) took a hard turn to the right after the 1977 "Cincinnati Revolution," the organization's leadership targeted this constituency by injecting the insurrectionist idea into our national political conscience. From the 1980s on, the NRA has expended significant resources promoting the idea in academic and political circles that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms for the express purpose of "preventing government tyranny." Perhaps this viewpoint is best epitomized by NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre's assertion that "the guys with the guns make the rules" in our democracy.

This was a wonderful recruiting and fundraising strategy for the NRA--attracting Libertarians, gun rights extremists, and others with a deep distrust of government. But the gun lobby wasn't the only entity seeking to appeal to the Limited Government constituency, and beginning with Reagan, the Republican Party increasingly began to portray government as a hostile, alien entity that serves only to restrict and deny the individual freedoms of Americans. Simultaneously, the GOP actively began to court gun rights activists that embrace the NRA's insurrectionist precept. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, this political marriage lost some of its appeal, but only temporarily.

Following the election of a progressive, intellectual, African-American, Democratic president in 2008, the GOP saw an opportunity to expand its beleaguered base by reaching deeper into the insurrectionist community. In an act of political expediency aimed at defeating the Democrats' push for health care reform, the GOP forged an alliance with the Tea Party Movement. It also redoubled its efforts to satisfy the NRA and other gun rights groups--even drafting and promoting legislation to exempt the States from all federal firearms regulation.

This new alliance was emboldened by the Supreme Court's decision in the landmark Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller. While most people know Heller as the case that struck down D.C.'s handgun ban, language in the 5-4 decision seemed to embrace the NRA's insurrectionist idea and give license to individuals to take up arms against our government. In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, "If...the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia...if, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment's guarantee -it does not assure the existence of a 'citizens' militia' as a safeguard against tyranny."

Unfortunately, thousands (if not millions) of Americans in the Republican base believe the current administration is "tyrannical," and the GOP quickly lost control of the monster it helped to create. Armed protesters began to show up at health care town hall meetings and presidential speeches with loaded handguns and assault rifles. Calls for Nullification and Secession were heard from Red State politicians. And anti-government zealots began to attack government offices, culminating in the recent spate of political violence following the House's approval of health care legislation.

These are dangerous times for our nation. House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, who recently received a fax with a drawing of a noose, saw the pattern and noted, "If we fail to learn the lessons of our history, we are bound to repeat them." Referring to the former Alabama militia leader who took credit for this month's vandalism of Democratic offices, Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center said, "The ideas that [Mike] Vanderboegh's militia groups were pushing were the same extreme anti-government ideas that inspired McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing."

Ultimately, whether it's by brick or gun or bomb doesn't matter. The most important idea in American political philosophy is that of equality; that one citizen's vote is as important as the next. When violence is used to undermine that principle, it corrodes our basic democratic institutions, including the rule of law.

Republicans and their allies--including the NRA--should be unequivocal in denouncing political violence. They should make it clear that not only is such violence criminal, but also anathema to the system of constitutional government created by our Founders. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) deserves credit for telling his base that "violence and threats are unacceptable" and "not the American way." But it's unlikely to help if he continues to describe the Democratic agenda as "Armageddon." The same goes for Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele who--after threats were reported-- described the signing of health care legislation as "the end of representative government" and said of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "This woman has been derelict in her leadership duty to the country by not listening, by taking...the country down a bad road. And this November, they're going to pay. So let's start getting Nancy ready for the firing line this November." And then there was Sarah Palin's admonition to her followers: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!"

At some point, Republicans need to accept that Barack Obama won the presidency not through a "coup," but through good old-fashioned hard work and the appeal of his platform. You can't overturn the results of our democratic process with violence when you are not satisfied with those results. Republicans should reject over-the-top rhetoric and stick with what really works--organizing, campaigning, and most of all, good governance. That, after all, is the American Way.

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I first met Elaine at the Glendale Winter Shelter. She is a very sweet older woman who has lived on the streets for 20 years. At the shelter, she would come up to us and ask that we help her friends. She never asked for herself, but for those she felt were hurting worse than she was. She was always kind, polite and never once was a problem to anyone. As I spent more time with Elaine, I noticed she would be kind to people who were not kind to her, always saying "thank you" even when people were turning her away.

The Glendale Winter Shelter closed early this year, leaving around 150 homeless people with no place to go. Around three weeks ago, I was in the PATH Achieve outreach van when we noticed Elaine sleeping on the sidewalk. Near the end of a winter shelter season, we try to help those who are in need of housing the most. Elaine was at the top of our list. She is somewhat naive and can easily be taken advantage of on the streets. There was some money left to give hotel vouchers to a few people, while we tried to plug into services. We had tried earlier to connect with Elaine, but it didn't work. This time she said yes, and we drove to the hotel.

Immediately, we noticed a night-and-day improvement. Elaine's hygiene improved. She was washing her own clothes. Once she had a little dignity, she was like a whole new woman. At first, we didn't know if she would stay, but she adapted well and started to even ask, "Can you get me a house?"

I remember grocery shopping with her the very first time. She wanted Hawaiian Punch, but didn't want cups. She said, "I'm homeless, and I usually drink out of the bottle. I don't want you to spend money on me." That wrecked me, and of course we bought her cups to use.

Elaine is disabled and cannot work. She receives a little over $900 per month from Supplemental Security Income, but she cannot get food stamps. The hotel voucher money runs out in a few days and she will be back out on the streets, homeless! Section 8 housing is frozen indefinitely, Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) grants are not for chronic homeless, and there is not enough Shelter Plus Care funding to help her (or the thousands like her).

In desperation, a co-worker started to look for low income housing. The lowest we could find is $700 a month for an unfurnished single. We knew it would be a stretch. Living off $200 a month for everything but housing is crazy, but she is a senior and can eat daily at a local senior center, and we would be there to help. Now we needed to come up with security deposit for her to move in.

We had been looking into grant assistance that we can sometimes get for move-in expenses, but all money had dried up. I put out a 'Hail Mary' tweet on Twitter, and in no time, my good friend David Ruis and the Basileia Community offered to help. You'd think raising money would be the hard part.

We started to fill out the rental application, drove to the Social Security office to get proof of income and then, proceeded to the property manager's office. All afternoon, you could tell Elaine was excited. She kept asking, "When can I move in?"

We arrived at the office. The girl at the first desk started to look at the application and then asked for last known address. We all said in unison, "She's homeless." I wish I could have taken a photo of that woman's face. Her jaw dropped and clearly she was shocked. Right then and there I knew we would soon get an "excuse." The obvious one was that Elaine's income is not three times higher than the rent. But this is a month-to-month lease on an apartment complex that should be used to the type of people who have very low incomes.

My favorite part of that horrible moment was when the lady, who gave Elaine the excuses, somehow had to run out the door to leave for the day, Elaine said to her, "Thank you very much for trying to help me. It was nice to meet you."

The lady before she abruptly left handed everything to another girl in the office. This second woman seemed very nice, but said she would have to check with someone else. (There were several backroom meetings after we walked in.) She took my co-worker's credit check deposit money and said she'd get back to us. We never heard back from her, or anyone else at that property management company.

I know first hand how hard it is to go from homeless to housed. Luckily, I am a fighter. But for the thousands of sweet, innocent seniors, now homeless, there really is very little hope. I cannot tell you the ending to Elaine's story, or even my own for that matter. I am 49 with no assets. There is a very good chance I will spend my senior years on the streets because there is very little affordable housing for seniors, and even with government assistance, I will not be able to afford housing.

Housing alone will not cure homelessness. We must also be community conscious. Elaine would rather live on the streets where she has social contact with people she knows than be housed in a different part of town.

I honestly don't have the answer here. I sure wish I did. In a day or two, if we cannot find low income housing for Elaine, I will be one of the team that drives her back to where we found her on the sidewalk. Imagine dropping your grandmother off to sleep on a sidewalk.

More on The Recession

Anna Lappé's latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, investigates the intersection between the environmental crisis and the food system in more detail than any book that has come before it. Lappé's rendering makes us realize the imperative of addressing these issues, and empowers us to do so by demystifying corporate spin, giving thorough examples of people making change, debunking the myths for maintaining the status quo, and more. Lappé talked to me last week about climate friendly farming, policy and the state of the food movement.

Paula Crossfield: Why do you think these issues, food and the environment, have remained separated for so long?

Anna Lappé: We already did know a lot about the impact food does have on the environment, but to learn what a key driver food and agriculture are in terms of deforestation, in terms of nitrous oxide and methane emissions, and overall that the food sector is contributing a third of greenhouse gas emissions -- and yet we never hear about it. As we've seen agriculture become much more of an industrialized process, I think there has been a real consciousness shift where for many of us there isn't a connection anymore between food and nature. I think its made sense politically that the biggest sectors contributing to climate change -- energy and transport -- have gotten most of the focus in terms of our understanding about climate change. But now that there's even more understanding about how much we absolutely need to get emissions down, we are starting to realize that we need to widen the focus to all sectors that are contributing.

PC: Do you see environmental organizations coming around and starting to take food on as a cause?

AL: Food and agriculture use 70% of all the earth's clean water sources, and when you look at the fact that its largely agricultural-chemical runoff that is contributing to dead zones in the gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay and all around the world, you could go down a long list of the environmental impacts of food, and you could say to yourself, shouldn't all environmental groups have food as one of their key platforms? So I still don't think we're at a place where food is as central as I think it could and should be, but I do think its interesting to see how in the past couple of years many groups that have historically just focused on more traditional environmental issues are starting to develop campaigns that focus on food.

PC: When most people think about the environmental impact of food they often start talking about food miles. How does transportation of food rank in the overall picture of the impact of the food system on the environment?

AL: Food miles, the hundred mile diet, and the locavore movement have gotten a lot of press. Of course greenhouse gas emissions are just one piece of environmental impact, but if you look at those related to the food on our plate what you find is that transportation is actually a tiny percentage. What matters more is the production practices the farmer chose to use, whether synthetic fertilizers or agricultural chemicals were involved, and how well the soil was managed. What I've heard a lot of people say then is, "oh then local doesn't matter." But I think what is important is for us to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what we mean by local. The locavores that I know, they don't just care about how many miles away their food is, but they are making that choice for local food because of a whole set of values.

PC: There seemed to be a real shift in the debate when the UN report, "Livestock's Long Shadow" came out in 2006. Now they are considering revising the report. How you think this report could be improved upon or expanded?

AL: What I noticed when I was reading Livestock's Long Shadow is a real honesty in the presentation of the data. I think its a very sophisticated report, but I think that they were also very clear [in saying] more research needs to be done. This is really trying to pin a flag on the board to say we need to be looking at the livestock sector. These are highly complicated systems that we are talking about, and they are also moving systems in the sense that things are constantly changing. I think that we shouldn't get too focused on bickering over the percentages. To the extent that [Livestock's Long Shadow and] the other studies that my book is based on put food and agriculture on the map is really important and the more we study them the more we'll learn about what is causing this crisis and what we can do to address it.

PC: The healthcare bill has passed, and the Senate is pushing the climate change bill forward, but agriculture is largely left out. Is there is an obvious place for us to begin this debate again?

AL: Waxman-Markey [shows us] how agribusiness could lobby in the future in terms of the climate bill and the farm bill. They lobbied [House Agriculture Chairman] Collin Peterson to get into Waxman-Markey provisions that would have made it possible to get carbon offsets for chemical no-till farming, [and] would have [boosted] corn-based ethanol. I'm worried about are two things: first, that agriculture will be left out of the climate bill, and second, that it will be put in, but put in in the wrong way, that it will look like subsidizing more of the same agriculture that we already know is causing so much of the [climate] crisis and not helping us solve it.

PC: How do we convince farmers that climate-friendly farming is good for them, too -- including their bottom line?

AL: Unfortunately, a lot of farmers are locked into a certain way of farming that relies heavily on fossil fuels because of policies that have been put in place over the years that have created a certain kind of infrastructure that caters to and benefits large-scale commodity and livestock factory farms, and really shuts out more diverse crop farming, smaller-scale farming and a more regionalized system. So I think that its not fair to say, farmers, you should just wake up all of a sudden and change your practices. In the same way that we think about the infrastructure changes that need to happen in the transportation and the energy sectors, we need to think about the same revolution in the food sector. I don't think anyone would expect somebody living in a town without a bus system, subway system or high speed rail to take public transportation to work, and we certainly wouldn't expect them to be digging the subway tunnel themselves, or putting in a high-speed rail line themselves. With bold changes to the food sector, you create opportunities for farmers who want to be farming in ways that are better for the environment, because you've actually built the infrastructure that they can tap into.

PC: You spend a large part of your book discussing the 'spin' in the debate around environmental issues in agriculture. Why was it important to you to deconstruct these ideas?

AL: I felt that it was so important to talk about greenwashing, because we're seeing an incredible number of examples of companies rebranding themselves as a caretaker of the environment, without really actually substantively changing their practices. I think there's two things that we can learn from that: First, if a company like BP is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rebrand itself as green, they're only doing that because they actually think people care, and that to me in an odd way is kind of reassuring and positive. And second, we have to be more savvy about really assessing when companies are substantively changing their practices, and when they are just coming up with a logo and a new campaign slogan. And part of that savviness is understanding that there are some companies and there are some practices that by their very nature are not good for the environment.

PC: One of the questions you tackle head on in this book is whether sustainable agriculture has what it takes to feed the world. Why do you think the arguments about yield are not telling the whole story?

AL: Yield is this really crude figure that doesn't tell us that much at all. For instance with chemical agriculture, it doesn't express the cost of agricultural chemicals in terms of the price the farmers had to pay, or the costs of synthetic fertilizer in terms of the deterioration of the soil, or the impact of the chemical runoff from the fields as far as local water quality and public health. And yield is only just a snapshot of the moment. It doesn't help us understand what the yield might be next year, the year after, or the year after that. There's been some really good studies in some of the areas in India, farmers that were suppose to be the sort of proving ground of the high yield of chemical farming and the so-called green revolution, and what you find is that, if you look over time, and when I went to the Punjab I saw this first hand, is yes you had a spike in yield in the beginning of the introduction of these agricultural chemicals and these water-intensive industrial agricultural practices, but over the years you saw yield fall not just back to the levels before chemicals were introduced, but actually fall far below these levels. At the same time, you saw a total devastation of the local economy as farmers became indebted to the banks because they had to buy these chemicals. The second thing about yield is that I think there is some pretty compelling evidence, which I write about in the book, that if you look at organic agriculture that is done in a very knowledge-intensive way -- by organic agriculture I don't mean just take away the chemicals, I mean developing, honing, advancing practices working with nature for soil fertility, pest resistance, weed management -- what you see is that yields can actually be comparable. Not to mention all the other benefits of the added soil health and the added human health of not being exposed to toxic chemicals, and of course the added benefit of farmers not having to pay for inputs.

PC: Some say that we should embrace the risks of biotechnology because we don't have a choice. Why do you disagree?

AL: I think this idea that we have to embrace risk is total scaremongering on the part of the biotech industry. I mentioned studies in the book that are showing that we have these agro-ecological, natural ways to create farms and soils that are healthier, able to withstand drought [and] flooding that we know [are] going to become more extreme. I think we can look back historically at all the promises the biotech industry has made about what their crops are going to do and see that each one of those promises has fallen flat, and at the same time there's been a lot of unintended consequences because of the release of these crops into the environment. I tend to take a precautionary principle approach, [which] tells us that if there is a potential of risk, that we should move forward cautiously.

PC: I was curious what your definition of climate-friendly farming is.

AL: There is so much contrast in what farming looks like. And I think similarly, climate friendly farming can apply to a lot of different practices, a lot of different scales. I think primarily I try to emphasize is the importance of farming practices that reduce the amount of fossil fuels used, reduce if not eliminate the reliance on synthetic fertilizers, reduce if not eliminate the use of petroleum based agricultural chemicals, and that is thinking about farming as part of a natural cycle -- how to create a healthy water cycle, a healthy carbon cycle, a healthy nitrogen cycle. How do we do that with a farm? I think there are many, many examples around the world of farms that are providing abundant sources of food and doing it in a way that is creating a more healthy ecosystem without depleting it, creating healthier soil as opposed to depleting the soil. I was just reading Vandana Shiva's book Soil Not Oil, and she gave this example of when a twig on a tree breaks, the tree can grow back that limb, but when a part in a car breaks, you've got to bring that car to the mechanic. Climate-friendly farming is about creating a kind of farm that can heal itself, can provide its own fertility and its own sources of pest resistance and weed management.

PC: You've managed to write a book that is about heavy subjects but is not depressing! What are some of the things that give you hope?

AL: Since my first book, Hope's Edge, I've tried to redefine my own sense of hope. I've embraced the definition of hope that is not necessarily based on evidence of, say, whether we're decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases or not. Hope really comes from an internal, endogenous energy source. You feel hope when you are taking action, [or] when you align yourself with ways of being in the world that you think really reflect your values. So I think that when you talk about food and climate change, it is hopeful in a sense that, first of all, connecting yourself with a sustainable food system is increasingly becoming something that more and more of us in this country can do. And the second thing that gives me hope is, as I researched the book, finding out about so many under-reported stories of people who are up against the huge power of agribusiness and yet are still able to create healthy farms, or work to bring healthy food into their communities and their schools.

PC: What are some of the best ways to engage people on these issues? What are the specific things that they can do that can be empowering?

AL: I think this question of what we can do, it really is about each of us tapping into what gets us most excited. When it comes to changing the food system, what is particularly exciting is that there are so many different entry points. Food is a public health issue, food is a family health issue. As a new mom, when I think about food that is good for the climate I also know that its food that is going to be good for my daughter. Food is also a social issue, its a human rights issue, and people can get engaged with it that way, asking the question why is it that certain communities in this country have no ability to access food that is both good for the climate and good for their bodies? I think that what is exciting to see is that as there has been essentially a stalemate on the international level in terms of binding agreements about how to reduce emissions and how to turn around the climate crisis, what we are seeing is communities and cities stepping up to take real leadership and say, look, we're not going to wait for something to come down to us from the international level. What can we do right here, right now, in our own communities?

Originally published on Civil Eats

More on Climate Change

As Moscow recovers from and responds to Monday's suicide bombings, we can turn to writing and literature from the past few decades to help us understand the history behind the attacks and the increasingly long story of tensions between Russia and Chechnya. From the New York Review of Books archive:

"Death In Moscow: The Aftermath" (December 19, 2002)
Christian Caryl

It is likely that the most enduring consequence of the hostage crisis and its grim outcome will be a highly emotional climate, in which war against Chechen rebels and their Muslim supporters will have wide support. The terrorists[4] may have died without seeing their demands fulfilled, and yet on one count they succeeded dramatically. Before October 23, when they took over the theater, the war in Chechnya was an oddly nebulous affair--a war that was never officially declared, and then was declared over, but went on. For years now Putin and his generals have been claiming that the "military phase" of the conflict ended long ago, even though Russian soldiers have been dying in the republic at the steady rate of two or three per day. But strict government censorship of war coverage has helped to sustain the myth of a low-intensity police action on the distant margins of national awareness.

Now the hostage-takers have shattered that fiction. They picked as their target a theater in the center of Moscow that had been showing a hugely popular "home-grown" Russian musical, a naive recycling of a Soviet children's book about Arctic explorers that has long been beloved for its patriotism. During the siege they transformed the theater, rhetorically and physically, into the same sort of urban battleground they knew so well from home--complete with boobytraps and Islamist kamikaze slogans. When negotiators begged the hostage-takers, who included about ten women, to release some of the teenage children in the theater, the Chechens responded that they considered anyone over the age of twelve an adult--not least because male teenagers in Chechnya are sometime victims of the brutal security sweeps, conducted by Russian troops, that often end in the disappearance or death of those detained and that have done so much to stimulate implacable hatred of the Russians among the Chechen population. The imagery of the siege has left a lasting impact. Again and again, during the crisis, I heard Russians wondering aloud what sort of atrocities their troops must have committed to drive the young women among the hostage-takers to take such a desperate action.

In a less polarized atmosphere, such thoughts might lead to a critical reappraisal of policy. The reality, unfortunately, is that the hostage-taking has sharply intensified the traditional hatred between Russians and Chechens--measured most dramatically, perhaps, by the despair of Anna Politkovskaya, the remarkable Russian journalist who has received countless inter- national awards for her brave coverage of the war, mainly for the Russian biweekly Novaya Gazeta, and who negotiated with the hostage-takers in the final hours before the storming of the theater. In the days after the crisis she published an essay criticizing members of the Chechen diaspora in Moscow and elsewhere for their conspicuous failure to condemn the hostage-takers. Read More

"Mysteries of the Caucasus" (March 11, 2004)
Christian Caryl

"Stories I Stole"
by Wendell Steavenson

"The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire"
by Khassan Baiev, with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff

"Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars"
by Nicholas Griffin

"Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War"
by Thomas de Waal

"Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory"
by Yo'av Karny

Why should we care? One might argue that the Ruritanian ways of characters in far-off Georgia have little bearing on the lives of ordinary Americans or Europeans. Yet this is not entirely true. For one thing, over the past decade, in particular, the Caucasus has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for provoking instability. Wars in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian republic of Chechnya have killed hundreds of thousands of people and created millions of refugees. As Thomas de Waal reminds us in "Black Garden," the "frozen conflict" between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the enclave of Nagorny Karabakh remains "a tiny knot at the center of a big international security tangle" nearly fifteen years after it began.

The looming specter, as de Waal points out, is that Russia could intervene militarily on the side of Christian Armenia, one of its traditional allies in the region, while Turkey, a powerful member of the NATO alliance but now with an Islamist government, has contemplated doing the same for Muslim Azerbaijan, whose citizens are ethnically almost identical to the Turks. Meanwhile, a series of suicide bombings by Chechen rebels raise the possibility of the "Palestinization" of the war there--as suggested by the recent bloody terrorist bombing in a Moscow subway. As Russian forces in Chechnya struggle to consolidate their hold over the republic, Chechen guerrillas are resorting increasingly to terrorist tactics as a way of drawing attention to their cause. During last year's hostage crisis in a Moscow theater--in which Russian special forces killed 129 hostages in their attack on the terrorists--they also demonstrated an ominous will- ingness to use the presence of foreign citizens among their victims as a way of getting international publicity, a tactic that could well presage much worse to come.

So far the Caucasus has not chosen to export much of the violence that it has been producing in such enormous quantities. But the West cannot count on these ripples of turmoil to remain confined to the region. If anything, its strategic importance is growing. As the European Union and NATO expand toward the east, the Caucasus is increasingly being drawn into Western security arrangements--to the growing alarm of both Moscow and Tehran. Both Georgia and Azerbaijan have flirted with the idea of NATO membership, while the promise of EU membership for Bulgaria and Romania means that the Black Sea is increasingly becoming a European lake, with obvious consequences for the nations of the Caucasus--most of which, incidentally, consider themselves heirs, if not sources, of European civilization. (If Christianity is considered one of the qualifying criteria, then both Armenia and Georgia can legitimately claim to have accepted Christianity earlier than many of the present regions that now make up the European Union.) This seriously increases the potential for future friction between Europe and Russia, which views the Caucasus as just possibly its most sensitive and crucial frontier. (The North Caucasus, a shaky group of ethnically diverse republics that includes Chechnya, is part of the Russian Federation.) Read More

"Islam: The Russian Solution" (December 21, 2006)
Orlando Figes

"For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia"
by Robert D. Crews

"Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security"
by Shireen T. Hunter with Jeffrey L. Thomas and Alexander Melikishvili, and with a foreword by Ambassador James F. Collins

As the Russian empire extended south and east by conquest, trade, and the collaboration of indigenous elites, its Muslim population steadily increased. The Muslims of the Crimea and the steppelands north of the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea were incorporated into the empire by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century; the Caucasus itself was conquered in the early nineteenth century, although the Russians never really quelled the Muslim hill tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya; and beginning in the 1860s the Russian army pushed the empire's frontier deep into the Kazakh steppe and Central Asia, subjugating rich and ancient centers of Islamic piety and scholarship in Tashkent, Kokand, Bukhara, and Samarkand. By the end of the nineteenth century there were more Muslims governed by the tsar than by the Ottoman sultan.

The encounter between Russia and the Muslim world has been perceived by most observers as a simple tale of imperial conquest and confrontation epitomized by Russia's long and often brutal war with the Muslim rebels in Chechnya and Daghestan. (This is a conflict that goes back to the nineteenth century, when the Daghestani warlord Imam Shamil led the Muslim hill tribes of the northern Caucasus in a fierce campaign against the army of Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled between 1825 and 1855.) In this saga of resistance and suppression, Russia's southern border represents a crucial front in the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and Christianity; the recent war in Chechnya is a return to the "natural state of conflict" between these religious traditions after the collapse of the artificial peace imposed by the Soviet regime.

But as Robert Crews reminds us in his scholarly and timely book "For Prophet and Tsar," the conflict in Chechnya and other parts of the northern Caucasus was in fact unusual in a history of peaceful coexistence and collaboration between Russia and the Muslim world before 1917. The reign of Catherine the Great, which began in 1762, marked the first major expansion of the Russian empire into the Caucasus region. The Russian armies conquered Muslim territories and suppressed resistance; but imperial officials also managed to win the allegiance of Muslim subjects by making Islam and its attendant hierarchies (with clerics and legal scholars at the top) a central institution of imperial rule. As a result of tsarist policies, Crews maintains, "Muslim men and women came to imagine the imperial state as a potential instrument of God's will," and engaged with it to renegotiate their own relationship with Islam as loyal subjects of the tsar. Read More

"Forever Putin?" (February 11, 2010)
Amy Knight

"Bez Putina: Politicheskie Dialogi s Yevgeniem Kiselevym" ("Without Putin: Political Dialogues with Yevgeny Kiselev")
by Mikhail Kasyanov

"Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War"
by Stephen F. Cohen

[I]t is unlikely that Yeltsin considered Putin, a former career KGB officer, to be a democrat when he designated him as his heir apparent. As Stephen Cohen points out in his provocative and insightful book "Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives," Yeltsin's main goal was to ensure that he and his family would not face criminal investigations for corruption after leaving office, and Putin promised him immunity from prosecution. Cohen has little use for the idea that Yeltsin brought democracy to Russia. In his view, Gorbachev deserves the main credit, particularly for the policies of glasnost and perestroika he introduced in the late 1980s. When Gorbachev was forced out of power in 1991, he writes, Russia lost a golden opportunity to modernize, and "Gorbachev's model of evolutionary democratization was deleted from history and thus from politics."

As Cohen stresses, the emergence of Putin was the result of Yeltsin's "de-democratization." The US contributed to this trend by insistent demands that Russia implement economic "shock therapy"--a policy of large-scale privatization and removal of state subsidies and price and currency controls--while it gave uncritical support to Yeltsin. Once Putin came to power, US policy continued to be misguided and counterproductive. By "praising the despised Yeltsin and his shock-therapy 'democrats' while condemning the popular Putin," Cohen writes, the US "further associated democracy with Russia's social pain and humiliations of the 1990s."

Cohen observes correctly that many Russians are deeply suspicious of the West and its notions of democracy, even those in the younger generation. A recent poll of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds by Moscow's Levada Center showed that 40 percent view the US in a negative light because they think it is trying to undermine Russia's stability. But Cohen goes too far in putting the blame for such views primarily on American "crusaders" for democracy. Xenophobic tendencies in Russia, which have increased dramatically since Putin became president, are also the result of the Kremlin's extensive anti-Western propaganda efforts through the state-controlled press, radio, and television. Read More

Read more at the New York Review of Books website.

More on NYR

WASHINGTON — Fifteen phony products – including a gasoline-powered alarm clock – won a label from the government certifying them as energy efficient in a test of the federal "Energy Star" program.

Investigators concluded the program is "vulnerable to fraud and abuse."

A report released Friday said government investigators tried to pass off 20 fake products as energy efficient, and only two were rejected. Three others didn't get a response.

The program run by the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to identify energy-efficient products to help consumers. Tax credits and rebates serve as incentives to buy Energy Star products.

But the General Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, said Energy Star doesn't verify claims made by manufacturers – which might explain the gasoline-powered alarm clock, not to mention a product billed as an air room cleaner that was actually a space heater with a feather duster and fly strips attached, and a computer monitor that won approval within 30 minutes of submission.

The alarm clock's size – 1 1/2-feet high and 15 inches wide – and model name "Black Gold" should have raised alarms with Energy Star, but the automated review system didn't catch on to the deception.

"EPA officials confirmed that because the energy-efficiency information was plausible, it was likely that no one read the product description information," GAO said.

In addition, the four phony GAO companies were able to become Energy Star partners, giving them access to the program's logos and other promotional resources. Energy Star didn't call any of the companies or visit the addresses, and sent only four of the 20 products to be verified by a third-party, GAO said.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who requested the study, said that "taxpayers are shortchanged twice" when Energy Star products are not thoroughly vetted – when consumers are willing to pay more for the products, and when taxpayer dollars are spent encouraging the purchases.

The GAO findings were first reported by The New York Times.

According to the GAO, the EPA and Energy Department told investigators in briefings that although the program is based on manufacturers' certifying their products meet efficiency standards, that efficiency is ensured through aftermarket tests and self-policing. The GAO did not look at those efforts.

The GAO did note that the two agencies said they are shifting to a more rigorous upfront screening process. In a news release last week, they announced additional testing of products and an ongoing verification program.

In a joint statement Friday, the agencies said consumers can have confidence in the Energy Star label.

"In fact, a review last year found that 98 percent of the products tested met or exceeded the Energy Star requirements, and last year alone, Americans with the help of Energy Star saved $17 billion on their energy bills."

But the agencies acknowledge the report raised important issues.

"That's why we have started an enhanced testing program and have already taken enforcement actions against companies that have violated the rules," the agencies' statement said.

How to Train Your Dragon: an IMAX 3D Experience
2010
98 minutes
rated PG (sequences of intense action, some scary images, brief mild language)

by Scott Mendelson

I often talk about how certain directors are actually two different filmmakers who share the same name. Surely the Wes Craven who directed Vampire in Brooklyn and Deadly Friend couldn't be the same guy who directed A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, or Red Eye. And could the same Chris Columbus have helmed both Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief? By that token, the folks at Dreamworks Animation seem to suffer from a sort of split personality disorder as well. Sometimes they give us A Shark Tale and Monsters Vs. Aliens and sometimes they give us Over the Hedge and Kung Fu Panda. Which Dreamworks showed up for work this time? Well, I spent $16.50 on my IMAX 3D ticket and I don't feel the least bit ripped off.

A token amount of plot - In a small Viking village plagued by decades of dragon attacks, the son of the village head yearns to impress his father by becoming a dragon hunter himself. Yet fate casts a wicked spell when the young Hiccup (Jay Barachul) accidentally injures a young dragon and is shocked when it shows mercy. Deciding to nurse the creature back to health, Hiccup soon discovers that dragons are not quite the thoughtless killing machines that the world has presumed, and he's soon torn between his desire to please his father Stoick (Gerard Butler) by becoming a dragon slayer and his realization that the generations-long war between Viking and dragon may not be so simple a conflict.

The story isn't exactly groundbreaking, and it's actually similar in plot and theme to Miss Spider's Froggy Day in Sunny Patch (was one of Tony Jay's last projects). You can probably chart out most (but not all) of the major developments before they occur, but the film is done with such high style and sheer quality that the well-worn myth becomes new again. The animation is beyond beautiful and the 3D is genuinely immersive. With all of the current hub-bub about studios racing to convert their live-action films into 3D, here is a shining example of how powerful a tool it can be in animation, especially if it was planned that way from the start. This film easily stands alongside Coraline and Avatar as one of the finest theatrical 3D experiences thus far. There are moments that look so three-dimensional that I could have sworn I was looking at claymation. To the picture's credit, most of the visual razzle-dazzle is held back until the second half of the picture while the first half is allotted to character development and storytelling. But the visuals are at-times breathtaking, especially the second act moments of Hiccup flying on the back of a newly healed 'Toothless'. If you can, splurge for IMAX and sit as close as you comfortably can.

There's more, including the film's age-appropriateness and its one major flaw. Check out the rest of this review at Mendelson's Memos.