Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 09.30.05

[David Shove (shove001]

             P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R     09.30.05

1. Schiff/our parks   9.30 7:30am
2. Counter recruit    9.30 11am
3. Tilsen/Zimmermann  9.30 11:30am
4. Mahnoman feast     9.30 11:30am
5. Palestine vigil    9.30 4:15pm
6. NWA strike         9.30 6pm
7. Future food/film   9.30-10.02 7:15pm
8. Desert Storm play  9.30 7:30pm
9. Transportation/MPR 9.30 9pm

10. Winslow Wheeler - No leaders in congress against this war
11. Dave Lindorff   - Spineless/tired/uninspired: what opposition party?
12. Sasha Abramsky  - Running on fumes
13. ed              - Hil and Bill (poem)

--------1 of 13--------

From: "Schuchman, Noah D" <Noah.Schuchman [at] ci.minneapolis.mn.us>
Subject: Schiff/our parks 9.30 7:30am

Please join Gary Schiff, 9th Ward Minneapolis City Council Member, for
Breakfast with Gary on Friday, September 30th, 2005!

This month at Breakfast with Gary, join Council Member Schiff for a
non-partisan Park Board candidate forum.  All At-Large, District 3, and
District 5 Park Board candidates on the November ballot have been invited.
Candidates will join constituents for breakfast, brief remarks and a
question and answer session.

Friday, September 30 - 7:30-9am
Café of the Americas - 3019 Minnehaha Avenue South
$5 for breakfast


--------2 of 13--------

From: sarah standefer <scsrn [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Counter recruit 9.30 11am

"Our Children Are Not Cannon Fodder"
CounterRecruitment Demonstration
Fridays   11-12 noon
Recruitment Office in Stadium Village at the U of M.
1/2 block east of Oak St on Washington Ave.
for info call Barbara Mishler 612-871-7871


--------3 of 13---------

From: Jenny Heiser <jennyh [at] mn.rr.com>
Subject: Tilsen/Zimmermann 9.30 11:30am

David Tilsen, co-chair of the Zimmermann for Justice Legal Defense
Committee, will have a conversation with program host Don Olson on the
KFAI radio program, Northern Sun News. Don's program airs at 11:30am on
Friday morning, September 30. If you miss tomorrow's program, it will be
accessible in the KFAI program archives for two weeks from the original
air date.

KFAI - 90.3 Minneapolis 106.7 St. Paul - Radio Without Boundaries
<http://www.kfai.org/>

Friday morning, Sept 30 @ 11:30am
Northern Sun News:
Alternative perspectives on energy and political issues.
11:30am-12noon
Hosted by Don Olson


--------4 of 13--------

From: gemgram <gemgram [at] mn.rr.com>
Subject: Mahnoman feast 9.30 11:30am

Each year employees at American Indian Community Development Corporation
works to provide toys, clothing, and other Christmas gifts for the Little
Earth children and young people who for some reason are not served by Toys
for Tots.  The program is called "Partners for Kids".

Last year those employees contributed themselves or raised over $20,000
dollars for the program. The kick off for the drive is a feast to
celebrate the harvesting of wild rice or Mahnomen. AICDC employees work
and cook for a week to prepare the event and feast.  The event will have
demonstrations of preparing and roasting the wild rice, but the best part
is the eating.  (The part I am particularly talented at, and the reason I
might say the word "FOOD" several times.)

The fund raising feast costs a $10.00 tax deductible donation for the
"Partners for Kids", but features door prizes, entertainment, and great
food.  The menu includes roasted venison, buffalo (bison), beef, turkey,
pork, wild rice meatloaf, served with desert, and vegetables too numerous
to list, as well as about ten different wild rice dishes. I probably am
leaving something out. GREAT FOOD!!!

Mahnomen Days Feast

Friday from 11:30am-1:30pm (don't come too late or you might miss
the buffalo)
AICDC building at 2020 Bloomington Avenue South, Minneapolis
Eat and contribute to kids.
It's food for the soul and the stomach!


--------5 of 13-------

From: peace 2u <tkanous [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Palestine vigil 9.30 4:15pm

Every Friday
Vigil to End the Occupation of Palestine
4:15-5:15pm
Summit & Snelling, St. Paul

There are now millions of Palestinians who are refugees due to Israel's
refusal to recognize their right under international law to return to
their own homes since 1948.


--------6 of 13-------

From: David Strand <mncivil [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: NWA strike 9.30 6pm

AIRCRAFT MECHANICS FRATERNAL ASSOCIATION - LOCAL 33
8101 34th Av S  Suite 380 Bloomington, MN 55425
(P)952 224-5410  (F)952 224-5436  www.amfa33.org

Solidarity Fundraiser: Support striking Northwest Mechanics, Cleaners and
Custodians of AMFA Local 3 3

Friday September 30
6pm Social Hour
7pm Program

United Food and Commercial Workers Hall
266 Hardman Ave, South St. Paul

On August 19, more than 4,000 mechanics, cleaners, and custodians, members
of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), struck Northwest
Airlines. They rejected management's plan to get rid of more than half
their jobs, cut their wages by 26% and replace their defined benefit
pensions with a 40IK plan. The issues Northwest workers face are the very
same issues faced by millions of U.S. workers. We must take a stand in
support of the strikers and against NWA's union busting!

For more information on the fundraiser call, (612) 251-9895

Donate: Make checks to AMFA Local 33, 8101 34th Avenue, Ste 380,
Bloomington, MN 55425

Sponsored by the Twin Cities Northwest Workers Solidarity Committee

The Twin Cities Northwest Workers Solidarity Committee is a group of labor
leaders, community activists, and concerned individuals coming to the
defense of workers at Northwest Airlines.


--------7 of 13--------

From: Adam Sekuler <adam [at] mnfilmarts.org>
To: Adam Sekuler <adam [at] mnfilmarts.org>
Subject: Future food/film 9.30-10.02 7:15

THE FUTURE OF FOOD, a feature documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, the
widow of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, offers a startling look at
the changes happening in our food system today. For the first time, a
feature film takes an in-depth look at the takeover of our food supply by
multinational corporations and the widespread advent of unlabeled,
patented, and unregulated genetically modified crops and foods. The film
will open theatrically in Minneapolis on September 30 at The Bell
Auditorium (17th & University Ave SE).

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico,
this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been
negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications,
government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the
reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically
altered crops into our food supply.

Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD
examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing
what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's
food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial
agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions
to the farm crisis today.

The screening on Sunday, October 2 at 7:15pm will be followed by a panel
discussion with Deborah Koons Garcia, director of THE FUTURE OF FOOD; Mark
Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
(IATP) in Minnesota; Ronnie Cummings, current national director of the
Organic Consumers Association. The panel will debate the issues raised by
the film and answer questions from the audience.

Biographies For Panel participants:

MARK RITCHIE

As president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in
Minnesota, Mark Ritchie leads the initiative to promote family farms,
rural communities and ecosystems around the world through research and
education, science and technology and advocacy. He advocates local, state,
federal and international policy in support of rural community development
and natural resource economics. Specifically, his work has helped to
develop and advance trade policy beneficial to farmers, consumers, rural
communities and the environment.

In conjunction with his work at IATP, Ritchie serves as vice-chair of the
Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of
Minnesota. He is a member of the Commission on Globalization of the State
of the World Forum, and was appointed to the official U.S. delegation to
the Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization by U.S. Trade
Representative Charlene Barshefsky. He also was a member of the U.S. Trade
and Environment Policy Advisory Committee.

Ritchie is an accomplished speaker, presenting at events such as the 2003
National Summit on Agriculture and Rural Life, the Institute for
Sustainable Development and International Relations Conference and the
Life Cycle Inventories and Assessments for Agriculture and Food Systems
Conference.

In recognition of his work in the community, Ritchie received the Twin
Cities International Citizens Award. He also was recognized by the
University of Minnesota Academic Health Center for work on childrenšs
health and was named to Utne Readeršs list of Americašs 100 visionaries of
1994.

RONNIE CUMMINGS

Ronnie Cummings, current national director of the Organic Consumers
Association, has been a public interest activist since the 1960s and is
heavily involved in the campaign around sustainable agriculture. He is the
author of Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers.

DEBORAH KOONS GARCIA

Deborah Koons Garcia fell in love with filmmaking when she first picked up
a Bolex while a student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
in 1970. She went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from the San
Francisco Art Institute. Her educational series All About Babies, narrated
by Jane Alexander, won a Cine Golden Eagle and a Gold Medal from the John
Muir Medical Film Festival, among other awards. Her feature film, Poco
Loco, "finds its groove in gentle romantic fantasy" according to Variety,
and won awards at the Philadelphia, Rivertown and Orlando Film Festivals.
She was the instigator and chief Creative Consultant for Grateful Dawg, a
documentary about the musical friendship between her husband Jerry Garcia
and David Grisman. Grateful Dawg premiered at the Telluride Film Festival
and went on to a lively run in film festivals, in theaters and on
television. The Future of Food was shown over a dozen times as a work in
progress in Mendocino County, California before the March 2004 election
and was the primary element in passing Measure H which bans the planting
of genetically engineered crops in the county. It is the first time U.S.
citizens have voted on this very important issue. The California Secretary
of Food and Agriculture requested a copy of The Future of Food while he
was considering whether to allow the planting of rice genetically
engineered with a human gene that creates breast milk and tears. He
subsequently vetoed the planting of the GMO rice. All the people who
worked on The Future of Food are proud that our efforts have had a real
impact in the real world.


--------8 of 13--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: Desert Storm play 9.30 7:30pm

Friday, 9/30 (7:30 pm), Saturday, 10/1 (7:30 pm) and Sunday, 10/2 (2 pm),
Noami Wallace's play "In the Heart of America" about Operation Desert
Storm (and Vietnam and racism and homophobia) at Macalester College
Theater (enter college from St. Clair near Snelling), St. Paul. $7.
651-696-6359.


--------9 of 13--------

From: Lydia Howell <lhowell [at] visi.com>
Subject: Transportation/MPR 9.30 9pm

Friday, Sept 30 @ 9pm on MN Public Radio
KNOW 91.1 fm

Hear a discussion of transoprotation and how it's shaped our
culture/economy/history as a country. With peak Oil loooming, continued
ex-urban sprawl and cuts to public transportation, this should be of
interest.


--------10 of 13--------

Lame Democrats and Tame Republicans
No Leaders in Congress Against This War
By WINSLOW T. WHEELER
CounterPunch
September 29, 2005

More than three decades ago, argument over the war in Indochina raged
among the public and in Congress. Today, opinion polls show real popular
dispute about the war in Iraq, but Congress shows no evidence of genuine
debate, just some toothless carping.

In the early 1970s, I sat in the staff gallery of the Senate and listened
as congressional leaders argued over the merits of bringing home the
troops from the divisive war in Indochina. Senators from both parties
broke away from the fabrications of the Johnson and Nixon administrations
to oppose a war they deemed not in the national interest. They cauterized
policies that sustained the calamity, while war advocates perceived
endless lights at the end of the tunnel and an end to freedom if the
country did not stay the course.

We hear the same rhetoric today, but in the past there was an important
difference: then, the critics of the war did not just talk, they acted
using the prerogatives the Constitution gave them as members of Congress
to pursue their convictions in legislation. Their bills had teeth.
Republican John Sherman Cooper, Ky., joined with Democrat Frank Church
from Idaho, and liberals George McGovern, D-S.D., and Mark Hatfield,
R-Ore., crafted separate amendments to annual defense spending bills to
bring U.S. troops home by a date certain. The Cooper-Church and
McGovern-Hatfield amendments became rallying points for the opposition to
the war, and, if enacted, they would have forced an end to American
involvement.

The sponsors of these bills paid real political prices for their actions.
President Lyndon Johnson's promise that not a single bridge or road would
be built in Idaho as long as Frank Church was its senator is legendary. In
other cases, the punishment was more subtle but even more costly. It
usually came in the form that my former boss, Jacob Javits, R-N.Y., paid
for the crime of sponsoring the first war powers legislation immediately
after Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia. Among Republicans who considered
themselves national security stalwarts, for example John Tower, Tex., and
Barry Goldwater, Ariz., Javits was not a team player. In his own party
caucus, he and a few like-minded others were denied not just back slapping
fellowship but, more importantly, membership in the insider's ring of
party leadership and in the final analysis - for Javits and others like
Clifford Case, N.J. - support in primary fights against more compliant
party regulars.

Nonetheless, senators like Church and Javits persisted and ultimately
prevailed. They paid the price, but they also made themselves historically
valid figures and gave meaning to the term United States Senator.

Things are very different today.

>From Wednesday, July 20, 2005, to Tuesday, July 26, the Senate debated the
2006 National Defense Authorization bill, the most appropriate legislative
vehicle for amendments to impact the war. It is here that Congress
performs its constitutional duty to authorize funding for defense and war
policy to the extent it sees fit.

During the five business days the Senate considered the defense bill,
senators introduced 288 amendments.

Major Democrats, such as presidential aspirants Hilary Clinton, N.Y., Evan
Bayh, Ind., and Joe Biden, Del., together with the senior Democrat on the
Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, Mich., parliamentary leaders Harry
Reid, Nev., and Dick Durbin, Ill., and stalwarts Robert Byrd, W.Va., and
Ted Kennedy, Mass., introduced almost 50 amendments.

A fulsome harking back to the Cooper-Church and McGovern-Hatfield
amendments? Perhaps even a real bell ringer like Javits' prototype of the
War Powers Act? Think again.

Clinton's amendments did things like award shiny new medals to Cold War
veterans and express the "sense of the Senate" about female soldiers in
combat. Bayh wanted to improve military housing, and Biden to address
military vaccinations. Other Democratic amendments addressed military
burials (Reid), university research (Kennedy), and Scott Air Force Base,
Ill. (Durbin).

They also had amendments that addressed war related subjects, including
the treatment of enemy prisoners (Levin), U.S. strategy against terror
(Reid), and profiteering in Iraq and Afghanistan (Byrd). However, these
merely called for reports, expressed the Senate's sentiment, or
established a commission to study the subject; as law, they were
toothless.

Still other amendments did at least have real legislative bite, requiring
the president to take specific action, but they were not related to the
war. Levin sought to transfer less than one percent of the Pentagon's
funding for missile defense to non-proliferation, and Kennedy sought to
end development of a new nuclear weapon.

Not all of the Democrat's amendments were irrelevant to the war and
toothless; Durbin had one on the important but still secondary subject of
American torture of enemy prisoners. However, Durbin's was not brought to
a vote. Neither were any of the other meaningless ones; most were not even
debated.

Republicans had amendments. Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tenn., swept in to
secure Pentagon support for the Boy Scouts. This fluff was debated and
adopted by a rousing vote of 98-0. More conscious of the meaning of the
term leader, Senators John McCain, Ariz., Lindsey Graham, S.C., and John
Warner, Va., introduced amendments to impede torture by Americans, but,
like the Democrats, these senators failed to bring their measures to a
vote.

The bipartisan timidity was heartily encouraged by President Bush, who
promised to veto any bill with amendments that impeded his war policy,
including - apparently - the freedom to abuse enemy prisoners. It seems
that the senators of both parties believe a toothless bill enacted into
law is a better signal to voters that Congress is doing its work than a
controversial bill that embodies what they claim are their convictions.

This sad tale does end with a ray of hope. Majority Leader Frist aborted
further consideration of the defense bill, saying the Senate might resume
on it this fall. The lame performance of the Senate's ostensible
Democratic leaders and self-styled maverick Republicans could, in theory,
sublimate to a real debate on the war complete with legislative action.
Indeed, Democrat Russell Feingold, Wisc., has recently advocated US
withdrawal from Iraq by December 2006, and Republican Chuck Hagel, Neb.,
has sharpened his rhetoric critical of Vice President Richard Cheney's
vision of more lights in the tunnel. Neither, however, has said he intends
to convert his words into legislative action, let alone cooperate with the
other for a bipartisan effort.

Feingold's and Hagel's introducing and forcing a vote on any meaningful
amendment would be extremely problematic for today's Senate. It would show
how empty is the rhetoric of Bush's war critics who have no alternatives
to propose, and it would require both Republicans and Democrats who
present themselves as leaders, even presidential timber, to employ the
tools the Constitution gives them to alter policy they carp about. Indeed,
it would require them to behave in a manner harking back to the past when
the term "senator" seemed to mean something more.

There is hope, but not expectation.

Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project
at the Center for Defense Information. He spent 31 years working for US
Senators from both parties and the Government Accountability Office. He
contributed an essay on the defense budget to CounterPunch's new book:
Dime's Worth of Difference. Wheeler's new book, "The Wastrels of Defense:
How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security," is published by the Naval Institute
Press.

["There is no hope. There is no hope that there's hope. There is only hope
that there's hope that there's hope." -Thomas Hardy]


--------11 of 13--------

Spineless, Tired and Uninspired
What Opposition Party?
By DAVE LINDORFF
CounterPunch
September 29, 2005

Iraq War going to hell, with U.S casualties approaching 2000 dead and
25,000 wounded, at a cost of $200 billion and rising.

Poverty in America on the rise in a period of supposed economic growth.

Republican Party a cesspool of corruption.

White House being investigated for outing undercover CIA agent.

Abortion rights under serious threat, with the Supreme Court being packed
with right-wing judges.

New Orleans, just drying out from disastrous flood, being raped by White
House-linked corporate pirates and scam artists.

Budget deficit topping half trillion dollars.

Gas and heating oil crisis looming, while oil companies reap record
profits.

Bush poll numbers hit historic low as even some Republicans abandon him as
an incompetent.

Oh yeah - all this and global warming and the end of human life as we know
it.

Man, if you were an opposition politician looking to make a run for
Congress next years, or for president in 2008, this would be a magical
time.

But where's the opposition?

The media tell us that the leading candidates for the Democratic
nomination for president in 2008 are Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bill
Richardson and maybe John Kerry. What all these people have in common is
their deafening silence on all the issues of importance facing Americans
and America.

Not one dared show her or his face at the record demonstration against the
Iraq War held in front of the White House last weekend.

None has spoken out on the Republican corruption scandals.

None has called for a public program to hire all the displaced of New
Orleans to put them to work rebuilding the destroyed city. Instead, they
are allowing Bush and the Republican Congress, with the acquiescence of
Louisiana's corrupt local Democratic Party, to bring in speculators and
the same profiteers who have been sucking up the reconstruction money in
Iraq.

None has offered a plan to attack the U.S. deficit and the hollowing out
of the American economy.

None of these "leading opposition candidates" has even taken any kind of
strong stand on global warming - for example calling for a tax surcharge
on low-mileage cars and trucks and strict limits on carbon emissions by
power plants plus a crash program to develop alternative energy sources.

The truth is that when it comes to the Democratic Party, the purported
opposition party, there is no there there. It no longer exists.

You'd think the sorry experience of the last two presidential campaigns,
where two Democratic candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, ran spineless,
uninspired campaigns that managed to avoid taking a progressive stand on
any critical issue of the day, and predictably went down to defeat,
dragging Democrats in Congress down with them, would have been a lesson:
political cowardice and wedge issue pandering has no future.

Yet here we are five years into the Bush presidency, with Republicans
imploding on their own greed and ineptness, and the Democrats are still
afraid of their shadows.

Unless someone comes forward soon with an inspired progressive agenda,
it's probably time to let the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs.

Simply letting the Republicans flounder will not win a single election,
much less the race for the White House.

It used to be said that pulling the lever for a third party candidate was
wasting your vote. These days, voting for a Democrat is wasting a vote.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at
www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff [at] yahoo.com


--------12 of 13--------

Running on Fumes
by SASHA ABRAMSKY
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/abramsky
[from the October 17, 2005 issue]

More than 100 miles north of Sacramento, the flat farmlands of
California's Central Valley give way to the forested mountains and
breathtaking grasslands surrounding the 14,000-foot Mount Shasta. It is a
remote landscape - more akin to Wyoming's Big Sky Country than to the rest
of California - dominated by the glacier-covered Shasta and the menacing
clouds that frequently cluster around its peak; and, when the tourists and
the second-homers from the Bay Area and elsewhere in the region are
factored out, it is a poor landscape. It is also a place where distance is
an irreducible fact of daily life. Because so many residents rely on cars
to get between the far-flung towns, they are particularly vulnerable to
oil price fluctuations, and many are at risk of economic catastrophe as
gas prices at the pump soar.

The towns strung along Interstate 5 and at points east and west of the
highway, hamlets like Dunsmuir, Weed, Fort Jones, Callahan and Yreka, ooze
character. Yreka - one of the few towns in the region not to have
witnessed a population decline since 1990 - still calls itself "the Golden
City," a throwback to its glory days in the mid-nineteenth century, and
still boasts Wild West saloons and elegant Victorian edifices along its
central drags, Main and Miner streets. Similarly, the little railway town
of Dunsmuir continues to pride itself on its charming, somehow
anachronistic, eccentricity - in the window of a downtown law office is a
plaster-cast skeleton reclining in a dentist's chair, an aviator's leather
cap and goggles adorning its skull.

But all the character in the world can't hide the fact that these are
low-income communities - poor cousins to the tourist town of Mount Shasta
itself, where "log cabins" sell for $1 million.

Close to 10 percent of Siskiyou County's workforce is unemployed. For
those with jobs, money is tight: According to Bureau of Economic Analysis
data, the county's per capita personal income is $23,807, only 76 percent
of the national average, placing it forty-third of fifty-eight California
counties. Leave out the government jobs in the county seat of Yreka, and
the numbers are even worse: The unincorporated town of McCloud, for
example, has a per capita income of slightly less than $16,000.

Following the implosion of much of the timber industry, job options aren't
exactly legion here, and what employment there is is concentrated in a
handful of towns: There's a Wal-Mart on the southern edge of town at
Yreka; the county has three bottling plants that package glacial waters
from Shasta; there are shopping malls in Redding, to the south; and there
are the hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists. "We don't have very
much work in the community right now," says Mike Stacher, general manager
of the McCloud Community Services District. "We have $8-an-hour jobs here,
which is unlivable as far as I'm concerned." Not surprisingly, since 1990
a large percentage of Siskiyou County's working-age population has
decamped to other locales.

While much ink has been spilled over the potential problems suburban and
exurban commuters would face if the era of cheap oil really sputtered to a
close, the most immediate victims are likely to be the long-distance
commuters in places like Siskiyou County, too remote even to be considered
exurbs. A perfect storm of economic changes could, quite simply, render
towns like McCloud and Yreka unlivable for working-class residents,
administering a coup de grace to a region already bedeviled by blue-collar
job loss. In the same way that the end of ready pickings from the gold
fields created depopulated mining ghost towns throughout much of the West,
so the series of oil price spikes may profoundly alter the Western
landscape, as well as many other remote, car-dependent regions of the
country.

With only a rudimentary public transport infrastructure, centered on a
handful of rush-hour bus routes to and from Yreka, and with many workers
now having to commute to far-off service-sector workplaces a long way from
the nation's major oil-distribution networks, these towns are being
hammered by some of the highest gas prices in the nation. When I drove up
I-5 on September 12, before Hurricane Rita but two weeks after Katrina
made an already bad gasoline price situation worse, the lowest price I
found along this stretch of highway for a gallon of regular unleaded was
$3.17, with another 20 cents added for the higher-octane stuff used by
many bigger cars and SUVs. The highest, in Castle Crags, was a dizzying
$3.44.

"I'm spending $40 to $50 a week on gas," says 41-year-old Rosie Kerr, a
resident of Grenada who works as a secretary at the Northern California
Indian Development Council on Yreka's Main Street and drives a 1992 blue
Ford Explorer with 164,000 miles on it. Before taxes, Kerr, a mother of
four whose husband is currently unemployed, earns about $21,000 a year.
After taxes, she estimates, that works out to $1,200 per month. Tearfully,
as she sits at her Formica desk, the shelves behind her filled with family
photos alongside a large brown teddy bear, she explains that the higher
gas prices have forced her to borrow from her mother just to be able to
continue working. "My mother helps me. That's the only way I've been
making it back and forth for the past few months. I owe my mom thousands
of dollars for gas. It doesn't feel very good. It literally makes me feel
like a heel. Because I can't pay her back. And she's been helping me with
food too, because I don't have enough income for that either."

Twenty miles east of the pleasant Interstate stop of Dunsmuir, 37-year-old
McCloud resident Christine Gannon lives in her mountainside house. She
estimates that she and her husband are now spending $300 a month on gas
for their vehicles and another few hundred on oil for the generators that
supply their electricity. Christine recently moved from a job at a
hardware store that paid $7.25 an hour to an AmeriCorps position with the
McCloud Community Resource Center that pays only marginally more. Her
husband, a truck driver for a fuel-delivery company, has an income that
fluctuates monthly. The family has health insurance, but it comes with a
steep $4,000 annual deductible. They have student loans to pay off, car
payments to make, two growing boys to feed. Add in the extra few thousand
dollars a year they are now spending on gas, and something's got to give.

"We've had to cut back on entertainment. We've had to cut back on filling
the house with groceries and having plenty of snackables," explains
Christine. "No vacations. We've had to postpone putting money away to buy
a home. It makes me feel like having a decent home and decent life without
having to stress constantly and worry - it seems like it's just never
going to happen, and dreams and hope and plans, they just don't work out."

In the months leading up to Katrina and Rita, as oil prices rose steadily,
pundits kept saying that, in real terms, prices were still lower than
their all-time highs in the early 1980s. Not until the $3 gallon was
reached would that record really be broken. Moreover, many argued, at
least until Katrina shattered the complacency, a vibrant economy was
poised to absorb, with minimal suffering, the additional oil costs.

Yet in some remote California communities, prices had spiked well beyond
the $3 mark as early as April of this year, and had been heading north for
several years - in 2003, as local prices neared the $2.50 mark, residents
of Yreka organized letter-writing campaigns and protests against high pump
prices in front of the county courthouse, the largest, most symbolically
powerful building in town. When I drove to Death Valley this spring along
the arid eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, towns like Bishop
and areas around Mono Lake were already at the $3 level, with local prices
driven up by a combination of California's more stringent environmental
standards for refined gasoline, pipeline problems in the Southwest, higher
gas taxes than in most states and the sheer distances fuel-delivery trucks
have to cover in the California wilderness, as well as global oil market
factors. By midsummer, according to information generated by the Oil Price
Information Service, as well as private websites monitoring county gas
prices, a host of other desert and mountain communities had joined the $3
club. And while many parts of the country were seeing $3 gallons in the
wake of Katrina, California's remotest regions, beset by long-term high
gas prices for reasons having nothing to do with hurricanes in the Gulf of
Mexico, will likely be burdened by high gas prices even if the rest of the
country, after the hurricane season ends, returns to short-term "normalcy"
and complacency about oil prices. That makes them, says Amy Detrick, a
secretary in the county administration office, a harbinger of what's in
store for the rest of the country as the world's supply of gasoline gets
ever tighter and as price spikes triggered by local supply disruptions in
an overstretched market become all too common.

Detrick has started taking the bus to work from the tiny village of Etna.
Her daughter, however, doesn't have that option. She works at a Subway
restaurant in Yreka, a job that nets her about $300 per week. Getting off
work at 9:30 pm, she misses all the buses home and has no choice but to
drive the more than thirty miles each way to and from work. Even in her
new Honda Civic, bought with help from her parents, that's not far shy of
$10 a day in gasoline costs.

"What are you going to do? Not work?" asks Mike Stacher, of McCloud
Community Services. "Maybe it'll get to a point where not working is an
option." Indeed, earlier this summer, as gasoline prices began hitting
record highs, Rosie Kerr's two brothers did both quit their jobs in
McCloud. They could no longer afford to drive their pickup trucks the
fifty-plus miles each way from their homes in Hornbrook, a small community
several miles north of Yreka. It was actually more financially sensible to
become unemployed and to join the legion of casual workers picking up
local bit work whenever possible. If more residents start making similar
decisions, the region's blue-collar backbone could be broken.

That urban and suburban communities - with their affluent professional
classes, increasing numbers of status-enhancing (and expensive) hybrid
cars and at least partial accessibility to public transit systems - can
absorb higher energy prices is not hard to believe. That residents of
low-income areas like Siskiyou County could afford to eat the extra $5,
$10, then $15, $20, $30 and $40 a week they had to spend on gas this year
simply to drive to low-paying jobs in towns like Yreka and Redding, and
that they can continue to do so indefinitely, is harder to believe.
Indeed, the very fact that some commentators, such as the Cato Institute's
Jerry Taylor, so glibly assume (or, at least, assumed pre-Katrina) that an
oil price shock can be painlessly absorbed shows just how invisible the
country's poor have become to much of its pundit class.

These are people who are continually juggling rent and food and medical
bills, who tap their resources days before the start of a new pay cycle
and routinely resort to credit card debt and other borrowing to weather
the lean times. How, then, can the volatile oil market not be hurting
them? People like Rosie Kerr who are already spending a disproportionate
amount of their income on gas face a burden far in excess of that
experienced by middle-class consumers, who spend only 3 to 5 percent of
their money on fuel. Moreover, in regions like Siskiyou County, where
everything has to be delivered over long distances, as gas prices soar so,
too, does the cost of other goods.

"Where I used to deliver free all of my printing jobs, I can no longer do
so," explains 59-year-old Lyle Sauget, a Yreka print shop owner. "If it's
local, I charge $1. If it's Mount Shasta or Weed, it's $5 to $7. Fuel is
affecting everything. Food. Clothing. Everything's gone up. When they
[locals] are already on a tight budget, it makes it pretty difficult. It
takes an already depressed area and takes it down. As a business person,
at a certain point you say, 'I'd rather go work for someone out of the
area than be a business owner.'"

Sauget, a tough-looking Republican whose storefront is bedecked with an
enormous Bush/Cheney poster and whose display case boasts certificates of
appreciation from the local branch of the Army Recruiting Command, is
hardly the type you'd expect to hear denouncing oil companies. But ever
increasing gas prices have him looking for answers. "I'd urge Congress to
put a ceiling on these extreme profits," he states, his face red with
anger, his hand in a fist. "Price caps. They've got us by the short hairs,
and if we don't turn this around we're never going to get out of this. I
support basic Republican ideas, but I've always been of the opinion that
you must control the corporations. If the corporations control you, you're
in big trouble."

In a place where small houses rent for as little as $300 to $500 per
month, some people, says Castle Crags Chevron station manager Nick
Demarco, are likely spending more on gas these days than on rent. An
average fill-up, not too long ago, would have been $20 to $40. Now,
Demarco calculates, "it's $50 to $80. That's considerable change. People
are still buying the same amount of gas, and buying less of other stuff to
make up for it."

Kerr now changes her own oil and tries, as best she can from reading a few
car maintenance books, to give her Explorer its tuneups. "I can't afford
to go downtown to have someone else do it for me," she explains. "I've
thought about selling some of my stuff. I have some antique radios from my
grandmother. I've been putting that off for a year now. I can't fill my
tank. I haven't been able to fill my tank in a year or two. I do $20 here,
$20 there. I do without food to get gas, pretty much regularly. There's
never any breakfast. Nobody eats breakfast in my house. My mom feeds me
lunch after she gets off work. Maybe two times a week we go without
dinner. Eat nothing. My boss was nice enough to let me cash in some
vacation time last month, so I had enough to buy some groceries."

In a nutshell, Kerr's experience shows up the fallacy of the laissez-faire
notion that free-floating prices alone are a fair way to regulate
consumption of a scarce commodity like gasoline. While higher prices might
stop some tourists from driving up to Castle Crags and might curtail the
discretionary gas use of the middle classes, as long as people live in
regions like Siskiyou County and commute to far-away jobs in places that
are hard, if not impossible, to reach by public transportation, these
people are going to need gas. And as long as they need gas simply to
continue working, they are going to do whatever it takes - short-changing
themselves on food and medicine, charging the gas on credit cards,
deferring car repairs or upgrades to better, more fuel-efficient vehicles
- to keep their tanks full. After all, entire communities and lifestyles
and job choices and consumption patterns have been crafted over the better
part of a century on the basis of cheap and plentiful gasoline.  Suddenly
change the equation without offering any government relief and, even
though gas remains cheaper per gallon than in much of the rest of the
world, the relative difference will prove disastrous.

Instead of demand for gas immediately responding inversely to rising
prices, in places like Yreka demand will likely remain stubbornly
resilient until the point of economic collapse, when it will become
unfeasible to borrow any more to pay for gas and residents will simply
have to up their stakes and leave. Paradoxically, it is even conceivable
that the higher prices might, at least in the short term, lead to more
rather than less demand for gasoline in places like Yreka.

In economics there is a mythical beast known as a Giffen Good. A Giffen
Good is a basic commodity that absorbs a large proportion of a poor
population's income. As its price goes up, more and more income is
absorbed, leaving less for anything else. Because it is a staple, as other
staples are forgone what little money is left over gets spent on the
higher-priced good that's causing the financial chaos in the first place.
Nobody's quite sure if such a creature exists. The Victorian-era British
economist Sir Robert Giffen, after whom it is named, argued that potatoes
during the Irish potato famine fit this bill for the starving Irish. Since
potatoes already made up the bulk of their diet and consumed most of their
income, as prices rose due to the potato shortages, what little
discretionary money they had for meat and other food disappeared. No
longer left with enough for even morsels of meat, the peasants desperately
threw their remaining pennies back at the potato vendors for a few more
spuds, thus driving prices of the scarce commodity up still further. More
recently, two economists at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Nolan Miller and Robert Jensen, have made similar claims about
rice consumed by peasants in southern China.

Obviously, at some point, soaring potato prices would have curtailed
absolute demand simply because nobody would have had enough money to buy
any, and the "normal" laws of the market would have been restored.
Giffen's point, however, was that prices would have to rise beyond all
reasonable levels before that critical peak was reached and demand for a
scarce commodity began slacking off.

Extending the argument to gasoline, it is at least possible that, as gas
eats up a higher percentage of poverty-line rural workers' incomes,
drivers will scrimp on things such as their quarterly oil change, their
30,000-mile tuneups, as well as minor repairs to their vehicles. They will
likely also defer the purchase of new cars. People will, in other words,
probably drive older, less well-maintained cars, one side effect of which
will be decreased gas efficiency and the need for even more gas to get
them to and from work than they were consuming earlier in the price cycle.
Kerr's old Explorer gets only twelve to fifteen miles per gallon; her
husband's 1974 truck gets even worse mileage. In a rational world, both
would be able to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. In the Siskiyou County
of 2005, however, neither can scrape together enough to make the upgrade.

If oil prices continue their relentless march upward, Lyle Sauget fears
that "Yreka will eventually collapse. You can only pass so much on to
people who are already overburdened."

With the decline of the local timber industry over the past decade or so,
the age distribution of Siskiyou County's roughly 44,000 residents has
dramatically shifted. Young adults of child-rearing age, along with
children, have been replaced by retirees, many of them coming in for the
landscape from urban sprawls to the south. Fifteen years ago the county
had close to 7,000 residents in the 30-39 age bracket. Today, it has only
3,500. Conversely, the number of residents in the 50-59 age bracket has
risen from about 4,300 to almost 7,500. Add unaffordable gasoline, and
Siskiyou County might one day find itself bereft of most of its
working-age population, its demographics increasingly defined by the
process of geriatric gentrification.

It is a preventable scenario. But prevention involves the sort of
innovation the Bush Administration, besotted as it is with laissez-faire
triumphalism (not to mention oil-industry campaign cash), has been
reluctant to embrace. "You could," says Judi Greenwald, director of
innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, "draw an
analogy with the Low Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program
[LIHEAP], a federal program where grants are given out through the
Department of Health and Human Services to the states. They use the money
for helping poor people pay their heating or energy bills, and to do
upgrades - you can get assistance for insulating your house, filling in
cracks. At least theoretically, one could have a federal program that
gives out grants to states to help people pay gas bills and possibly buy
more fuel-efficient vehicles."

Absent such practical interventions and broader changes in federal energy
policy, Yreka - the Golden City - may one day be a new sort of ghost town,
its homes housing affluent outsider-retirees, its hotels and bars catering
to drive-through tourists and serving up kitschy reminders of the glory
days when oil was cheap and blue-collar people could afford to live in
Siskiyou County.


--------13 of 13--------

 Hil and Bill went to the Hill
 to see just who had bought her
 Hil fell down and split her gown
 And Bill came, fumbling, after.


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   - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
   rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
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