His column was on the European money crisis and the gist of his argument is this: it makes economic sense for Germany (Europe’s economic powerhouse) to bail out Greece (Europe’s irresponsible brother-in-law).

The Greeks have gotten themselves – and are dragging the Euro and the Eurozone nations – into this mess with too little austerity and too many early retirements.  It’s the hardworking ants of the Baltic versus the sun-drenched grasshoppers of the Mediterranean.  It’s in Germany’s self-interest to save the Greeks, because if Europe returns to a patchwork of currencies, then those low-value drachmas and lire and pesetas will buy fewer German products.

The Germans, however, resist this logic not for economic, but moral reasons.  “If we bail you out, how will you learn your lesson?” the Germans ask, “Why would you not repeat your mistakes?”  It’s like the parent, about to punish the child, saying, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” and in this case it might be true.

Here’s where Joe Nocera wouldn’t go: why doesn’t Germany just shut up and bail out the Greeks?  Thank you, my cousins, for shifting the terms of the debate from economics to morals.  Now that we’re in that territory, let me remind you that not so long ago, Germany invaded and occupied Greece, killing thousands of its citizens and sending tens of thousands more off to death camps.  (The people with whom I share half my ethnicity hate it when I bring these things up, as if I’m the one who breached decorum.)

In 1945, the Allied nations agreed that forcing Germany to pay reparations for its crimes did not make economic or political sense.  The heavy burden of reparation imposed on Germany after World War I helped aid the rise of the Nazis.  That was a good call and helped get a ravaged Europe back on its feet, but somehow, it insidiously evolved into a dysfunctional denial of history, as if it’s impolite to mention the bombs and bullets.  Forgetting serves no good purpose.

So here’s my proposal: Greece gets a one-time bailout from Germany.  Does that mean that slate is clean?  No, that slate can’t be cleaned.  It just means no further bailouts or reparations or whatever you want to call it from Germany to Greece.

Am I uselessly holding onto the past, onto grudges that serve no one?  I don’t think so.  True reconciliation requires remorse, forgiveness and atonement.  I have faith in German remorse and the forgiveness of Europe.  In more than half a century, there have been no opportunities for real atonement.  Now one presents itself; Germany should take advantage of it.

So, should Spain get a bailout, because the Nazis warmed up for WWII by using Spanish Republicans for Lutwaffe target practice?  What about Poland, France, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and on and on?  If Germany shores up Greece, we hope those nations won’t need German relief.  What about Italy, now also teetering on the brink?  Does Germany owe Italy?  Morally, no, economically perhaps.  This is the danger when one shifts the philosophical grounds of debate.  (Hey Germany, you started it; I’m just taking the moral debate to a logical conclusion.)

Once this moral/economic argument is engaged, things quickly get complicated.  For instance, if Germany should bail out Greece, does that mean the U.S. should pay reparations to African Americans for centuries of slavery?

Yes, I think it does.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

(By the way,  I don’t think “standard” time is standard anymore, as we observe it for only about four months a year, just as a car’s manual transmission is no longer the “standard” equipment it once was.)

The fact that we shift clocks at all is a symptom of industrial society ruled by measured time.  Real farmers rise with the sun, not the clock.  We change from daylight to standard time (and vice versa) in the middle of a weekend to ease the Monday morning transition.  By the light of the flames, we could see ourselves on the cusp of transition from the global, oil soaked era to a new agrarianism.

My neighbor Malgosia said she lit her fire because when she was growing up in Poland, school would let out in the early days of November so children could help with the potato harvest and in the evenings they would burn the dry, desiccated potato plants in the fields, with tubers roasting in the embers.  The failing light and crisp November air reminded her of those days, so a fire seemed appropriate.  We decided to have a backyard potato roast this weekend (weather permitting); if it goes well, maybe another on Thanksgiving eve.

Then we talked about our gardens, what had and hadn’t gone well in the growing season just past.  We’ve started to refer to our block as “the farm” because so many of us have gardens, fruit trees, bees or chickens.  Malgosia from Poland and Margaret, a Vermont native, (they were born one day apart, um… some years ago) are the resident advisors on growing and pruning, canning and preserving.

We agreed that turning our neighborhood into “the farm,” eating locally, learning about foraging and supporting farmers’ markets are the new activism.  Attempts to head off global warming have not worked.  Nor have we stopped overfishing or deforestation, hard as mainstream environmentalists have tried.

Unsuccessful though we may be, we still have to try.  The consequences we face are too severe to stop now.  At the same time, we can’t pretend everything will be all right.  It’s already too far gone for that.  The effects of global warming, overfishing and deforestation are upon us.  This summer’s fires in Texas burned 22 percent of the American cotton crop.  Corn, wheat, peanuts and beef all took hits as well.  The new activism, my neighborhood farm, is going to look smarter every year.

The old activism, my day job, is important too, if for no other reason than it buys time for the new activism to establish itself.  “I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.  He was referring to violence, but I reach for those words when I feel any burden.  “Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives,” Dr. King said.

The harvest is in, the days short and the year is winding down.  Our industrial society is failing, so we return to the land in the ways we can and spontaneously find new harvest rituals.  We plan for the next year, the next spring, the next phase of hope.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

My math was not wrong.  I wrote that commentary the first week of October 1999.  What was faulty was my memory or my credulity.  Have I really been writing these damned things since there were fewer than six billion people?  Guess so.  (Hello, new readers!)

I did a bit of surfing on the subject and found this BBC site that lets one evaluate world population in personal terms.  It claims I was the 3,086,987,341st person on Earth when I was born (extrapolate yourself to find out when) and the 76,783,189,538th person alive on Earth since history began (I’m guessing the BBC starts history with the emergence of writing, around 5,000 years ago).

(Note this: when I wrote in 1999, projections were that we would have 12 billion people on Earth by 2050.  The BBC piece predicts 10 billion by 2083, so the growth curve seems to be flattening out.  Or we just can’t agree on our predictions.)

Clicking through the site reveals Qatar is the fastest-growing nation, adding 514 per day and Moldova is the fastest shrinking, losing 106 people per day.  While both numbers reflect respective birth/death rates, they are turbocharged by immigration.

Moldova, with a population of three million, is already a contender for World’s Worst Nation.  Crime-ridden, corrupt and unstable, it is best known these days for sending young women into the global sex trade.  Before world population reaches eight billion, Moldova will inevitably undergo a momentous change.  Not likely to be a change for the better, but how much worse can things get?  Maybe a rich guy will just buy the whole country.

Qatar, however, is an oil-rich Gulf state with a population of about 850,000, but a citizen population of 300,000.  Watch this trend.  Global migration, spurred not only by an another billion people here or there, but economic dislocation and changing climates will not only push people from the Moldovas to the Qatars, but we’ll increasingly see the establishment of legally-separated castes.  If you listen to the Republican presidential debates, you can hear the seeds being planted in North American soil.  I don’t expect to see the bloom this election cycle, but I’ll be surprised if I don’t see it in the 2016 cycle.

As we approach seven billion, there is the usual overpopulation hand wringing.  I see the merit in it; it’s hard for seven billion people to live lightly on the Earth.  As I wrote in an even earlier commentary, “The most burning population question we face today is not the rate at which world population is growing, but the speed with which a small percentage of that population is consuming the earth’s resources.”

The important number here is zero.  Not zero population growth (worthy goal that it is) but zero sum.  In a world of finite resources, every gain for one person is a loss for someone else.  Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute makes the case better than I can.

It’s bad enough when the resources the first world claims are about energy and wealth, but that’s not the story any more.  Now we’re down to food and water and thus we’ll see Moldovas collapsing, Qatars getting feudal and both trends spreading.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The outrage addressed in the August missive was Wall Street banks driving up the price of gas by reckless oil speculation.

“There is no more debate. Excessive speculation is a major reason oil prices have risen so sharply,” he wrote, referring to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data he recently released. “The data reveals Wall Street speculators played a major role in driving up the price of a barrel of oil to $147 in 2008. During the rampant oil speculation, regular unleaded gas in Vermont hit a record $4.09 a gallon, causing financial hardship for many Vermonters.”

“This report clearly shows that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,” he wrote

Bernie Sanders is right.  It’s hard enough to bump up against the fact that the easily recoverable oil is gone, that coaxing anything new out of the ground will be expensive and (even more!) damaging to the environment, but the fact that the same jerks that destroyed the housing market and sent the global economy to the intensive care unit are keeping their boot on our necks and still getting rich off us is more than any of us should be willing to stand.

The same week Sen. Sanders emailed, Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones about the work of University of San Diego economist James Hamilton.  Professor Hamilton notes that 10 of 11 recessions since the end of World War II have been preceded by a rise in oil prices.

All the more reason to resent the speculators, right?  Right, but there’s more to it than that.  For most of those years, we as a society were able to increase oil supply almost at will, by drilling more holes in the places where we know oil to be.  Not so easy any more.

Not only are the giant oil fields beginning to peak, but the new sources of oil – like Alberta’s oil sands or the arctic fields the corporations are so recklessly eager to get their paws on – take years of slow development before they can be turned into gasoline down at the corner station.

Now throw in political instability in places like Libya, Iran and Venezuela and things get even shakier.  Supply begin to run close to demand or there’s rampant speculation in oil futures – or both – the price shoots up, a recession is born, the economy tanks, demand drops, price drops, the economy picks up again, raising the price of oil, sparking another recession, etc. etc.

This all fits under the rubric of “peak oil.”  Peak oil doesn’t just mean the oil’s running out.  It also means that when it gets so difficult and expensive to bring to market – and becomes so vulnerable to the vampire squids of society – then it’s another reminder that we should have listened to Jimmy Carter 34 years ago.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The answers (I won’t make you wait) are 100 and 98.  No statistically significant number of scientists deny the Earth is growing warmer.  About two percent deny humans are the cause.  Many of that minority are funded, directly or indirectly, by fossil fuel industries.

Kudos to presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr. for saying at the Republican debate last night, “in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.”  He probably wasn’t going to win the nomination in any case, so why spend the next six months pretending to live in La-La land?

Pollsters for the other Republican candidates could have told Mr. Huntsman that adhering to good science is bad politics.  A few hours before the debate, Kevin Drum reported in Mother Jones that most Americans don’t know that global warming science is a settled issue.  He cites the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication as saying that less than 20 percent of Americans know there is scientific consensus on global warming.  Reading that, I had unsettling flashbacks to the “Elvis is alive” mythconception so popular in the mid-80s.

We don’t need reminding in Vermont.  We’ve had two hundred-year floods since May.  The last one, courtesy of Hurricane Irene (Why Irene?  Why not Exxon? Or Cheney?), destroyed 700 homes and washed out hundreds of roads and bridges.

Such calamities are never welcome, but in this third year of massive recession and government budget shortfalls, this is a real economic gut punch to the state.  Inns are closed, festivals have been cancelled, leaf-peeping season – which despite its too-cute name, is extraordinarily important to the tourist economy – will undoubtedly suffer.  (It was shaping up to be a less-than-stellar display this year anyhow, as it is whenever the summer months are dry.  Ironic, isn’t it?)

We’re also an agricultural state and crops contaminated by floodwater are unsafe to consume for both humans and beasts.  That applies to acres of cattle feed and dozens of streamside community-supported-agriculture farms in this localvore-loving state.  The dairy farmers were late getting their crops into the fields and missed their first cut of hay because of heavy spring rains.  (Ironic again?  You’re goddamned right it is.)

Contractors were already hard-pressed to finish planned road construction projects before winter, now we have several hundred new projects that beg completion before the punishing blizzards arrive.  Given the extent of damage all along the East Coast, even if we had the money to bring in workers and equipment from out of state, I doubt they could be found.

This is what the much-scoffed-at-by-right-wing-politicians computer models predict for the northeast.  Warmer and wetter, but the wetter doesn’t happen in a steady, manageable fashion.  Huge spring deluges, then months of parched soil, then more deluges.

This flood was the last thing people need as they are laid off from their jobs, as they lose their houses.  If Bill Gates breaks his leg, he can afford the finest medical care and has a dozen gadgets to keep working as he sits on the couch.  When a low-income laborer breaks her or his leg, it’s a financial crisis – via medical bills and loss of work – which may push his or her family into poverty for years.  That’s how this flood feels in this state right now.  It’s frightening.  And yet a bunch of Republican millionaires stood on a stage last night and complained that poor people don’t pay enough taxes.

Most of those millionaires deny global warming (and evolution, but let’s leave that for another day).  Worse, perhaps because the media puts a climate skeptic in every “balanced” story, most Americans don’t know there is consensus on global warming and what causes it.

In 1944, as he watched the events he would soon turn into “1984,” George Orwell wrote, “One day there will be a big, careful, scientific enquiry into the extent to which propaganda is believed.”  Even George Orwell didn’t foresee that science would be one of propaganda’s victims.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene.  “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are.  Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities.  This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction.  It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.

Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact.  Experts disagree.  James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming.  One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….

If you haven’t already learned about the tar sands, extracting oil from them requires massive abuse of forests, clean water and energy, so the tar sands as a whole is a global warming machine gone berserk.  If oil is an addiction, the tar sands are the dirty needle we heedlessly plunge into our arm.

Thousands of people – citizens – have protested in front of the White House, hundreds have been arrested.  Barack Obama likely believes environmentalists have no choice but to vote for him next year, thus revealing himself to be another calculating politician, who’d rather retire in glory as a two-term president than actually accomplish anything of value in either of his terms of office.  In the addiction analogy, he’s the clueless enabler.

Yesterday, ExxonMobil and Russia – two of the planet’s evil entities – announced an agreement that will open the Russia arctic to oil exploration by Exxon.  Exxon – with help from us – has already gone a long way toward “opening” the arctic.  Global warming has meant the retreat of polar sea ice to the point that the Ruxxons can drill for more oil, to melt more ice, drill for more oil, etc., etc.

Exxon maneuvers at its peril, as Russia is famous for shafting its partners after it’s gotten what it wants.  Maybe Rex Tillerson will end up in a cell next to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch and oil billionaire.  Might be a pleasant meditation for a holiday weekend.

Researching something else last night, I came across an article describing the dumping of nuclear waste and over a dozen vessel-sized reactors in the western Kara Sea – where Exxon just won the right to explore.  The currents in the Kara carry water from west to east; that is, from the radioactive taint all across the rest of the local ocean.  Can’t beat those Soviet smarts.

If the tar sands are the dirty needle of oil addiction, then Tillerson and Vlad Putin are the thuggish pushers who will take our money, beat us senseless and leave us for dead.

Cold turkey is starting to look good.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Late blight is worse, usually taking out the whole plant and while it’s not as bad as it was last year, it’s around Vermont and coming closer to our yard.

Potatoes are a different story.  Late blight wiped them out.  Adrienne had to get rid of the plants and the bags they grew in.  Late blight on potatoes is scary.  One day the plants are healthy, the next they are dissolving into pools of goo.  “It’s just death,” Adrienne said.

It reminded me of June 1977, when I was in the village of Feakle in County Clare in the west of Ireland.  I was staying at a guesthouse with whitewashed walls and flagstone floors.  A small peat fire burned in the hearth in the pub to keep off the chill of a midsummer evening.

The guesthouse had a dining room, which is not a restaurant, because there was no menu.  Meals were served three times a day, but everyone ate the same Irish fare – shepherd’s pie, fish, overcooked beef and always potatoes – mashed, fried or most commonly, boiled in their jackets.

Aside from being a staple of Irish diets, potatoes are a source of pride and they do seem to taste uncommonly good in Ireland.  I’m not sure if it’s the weather or the soil or generally low expectations one has for Irish food, but they’re good.

The British imported potatoes to Ireland from the Americas as something for the peasants to eat while they grew cash crops for the absentee landlords snug in their manors in England.

A family ran the Feakle guesthouse.  A teenaged son was the waiter in the dining room, wearing a dorky sweater that clearly was his “on duty” uniform, because I saw him around the village on his own time in a ragged denim jacket and cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

In the dining room, however, it was the sweater and it, along with his chalky white skin and thatch of thick black hair, made him look like the postcard Irishman the clientele expected.

In 1840-1843, late blight repeatedly wiped out the Irish potato crop, turning healthy plants to mush overnight, just as they did this year in Vermont.  This led to mass starvation and migration of the Irish, who ironically died beside bumper crops of grain – that had to be shipped to England under the terms of the 1798 Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement.  Sound familiar?

One hundred forty-four years later, the day I hold in my memory was a Sunday and the dining room was full of both guests and locals who’d come for early dinner.  The young man was working double fast to get the plates out from the kitchen and on to the table.

A woman at the next table cut into a boiled spud and it collapsed.  The potato was hollow and filled with the noxious black liquid blighted potatoes exhibit.  She dropped her knife to the floor and as heads turned, the room immediately fell into a silence so abrupt it was almost a noise in itself.

The teenaged boy, now paler than I thought was possible for a breathing person to be, quickly scooped up the plate and hurried from the room, but he could not dispel the effect.  It was as if the figure of death – like one might see in an Ingemar Bergman movie – had walked in.  The hum of conversation and the ping of flatware did not resume.  I don’t know whether people finished their meals or not, but the room emptied soon after.

Blight, early or late, is not fatal to hobby gardeners like Adrienne and I, but the economic staples on which we so depend are now in their third year of blight and wilting fast again as I type.  Immigration not an option.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I attended the summer meeting of the Vermont Beekeepers Association Saturday and the main topic of conversation: no honey.  No one’s really sure why, but spring was soaking wet and the bees couldn’t fly.  The constant rain and warm temperatures melted our large snow pack all at once and Lake Champlain suffered the worst flooding in recorded history (which goes back about 180 years around here).

We all prayed for the rain to stop and it did in late June and it might be starting again now, or it might not.  We went from “’too wet to fly” to “too dry for nectar,” or at least that’s what everyone is guessing.

My bees made some honey in the spring but have been eating it themselves in recent weeks.  I thought it was a failure on my part.  (I’ve been having other bee issues this summer that I won’t go into here, other than to say there’s an adage that holds that every beekeeper will make every mistake eventually and I’ve been busy checking off boxes on the list.)

I got to the VBA meeting to hear everyone – even the big operators – have hives empty of honey.  Start feeding, the elders of the group said or your bees might starve.  Now is the springtime of our discontent made glorious summer – and we’re feeding bees.  It’s incredible.  I suppose if you live long enough you’ll see everything, but in this century you don’t have to live long – unless you want to see what used to be called normal.

There is no Colony Collapse Disorder in Vermont.  Not yet, at any rate.  State Apiculturalist Steve Parise reports that mites and foulbrood, two scourges of honeybees are present as always, but don’t present a potent threat this year.

Another oddity being reported for the past few years now is pollen hoarding.  Pollen is naturally stored and eaten by bees (along with water and nectar) but what people are seeing seems like obsessive behavior – bees filling all the cells in a frame with pollen to the point that the queen can’t find empty cells to lay eggs in, thus causing the colony to swarm in some cases.  No one seems to have the first notion as to why this is happening.

So go buy some honey.  Think of it as commodity futures trading on the local market scale.  Nice thing about honey, it doesn’t go bad, so the honey you buy this week will be just as good next year or next century.

The way things are going, it might be the safest investment you can make.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I was working, but then I kept seeing the news about the stock market.  I was going to write about something else today, in fact had it half written, but it seems superficial compared to what’s happening, so I’m subjecting you to this swirl of thoughts which cannot seem to cohere.

At this point, the Dow is off 350 points in mid-day trading, which is nothing compared to the 777 point drop we had one day in 2008, but this time Italy and Spain are getting sucked down the drain in Europe.  It’s one of those days when you just want the markets to close so the bleeding can stop, except that the Asian markets open a few hours later and the whole thing continues.

They told us the great crash of 1929 could never be repeated.  It was caused because people were allowed to buy stocks “on margin.”  If a stock cost $20 per share, one could buy it for say $5 a share and a promise to pay the other $15 later.  If the stock rose to $30/share, one could sell it, pay off the other $15 and keep $10 profit.  Many people did this, including my grandmother, who was a secretary at a brokerage firm.

When the market turned bear, brokers started making “margin calls,” that is, forcing people to pay what they owed, but since the price of stocks was falling rather than rising, people didn’t have the cash to cover their margins, which accelerated the crash.  Investors – grandma included – were wiped out.

In the crash of 2008, the same damn thing happened, except it wasn’t called “margin,” it was called “leverage” and it wasn’t individuals, it was banks and hedge funds and the rate was running 36 dollars of margin, er, leverage to every dollar of cash.

What the market really learned in 79 years was a) keep the little guys away from the party and b) lobby the crap out of the federal government, so that when the market again turns bear and everything goes to hell, the little guy gets the bill and is wiped out.  Again.

I hate to go on like this, but the mainstream media has done a poor, almost criminal, job of explaining this.  It’s not that complex.

What is different this time around is that instead of haplessly trying to fix things (as Herbert Hoover did) or effectively mending things (as Franklin Roosevelt did), we have developed a cancerous politics that feeds on this misery and turns it to advantage, as some other people around in those days did.  How many times will we see that dark side this time around?  In Greece?  Italy (again)?  Norway?

That’s what the last month in Washington has been about: seeking political advantage and the Republican Party doesn’t care who gets hurt.  Over and over right wing activists talk about making government small enough to “drown in a bathtub,” but it’s not about drowning.  It’s about making government weak enough that it cannot stand up to the corporations who are funding the politics that are crippling the government.

Maybe that’s OK with you.  Maybe you think you like the idea of small government, but read the paragraph above.  I didn’t write “small,” I wrote “weak” as compared to the multinational corporations.  For 30 years the politicians owned by the multinationals have told us that make life easier for business will make life better for people, but it hasn’t and it won’t.

The real difference between 1929 and now?  There’s no where we can go to escape this.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I was out in the car last weekend and decided to swing by the store and pick up another bag of charcoal briquettes. (My version of the fetish runs toward charcoal, rather than propane.) (And, no, I don’t use lighter fluid. Thanks for asking.)

I grab the big bag of briquettes and hoist it under my arm and silently congratulate myself. “Man, I’ve still got it. How long have I been grabbing these bags of charcoal? Thirty years? Thirty-five? And the 25-pound bag seems no heavier. I still handle it with the same ease as ever I did.” Seeking written validation of my continued virility, I checked the bottom of the bag to see: “16.6 lbs (7.53 kg) * Lasts the same as an 18 lb bag.”

So 1981’s 25-pound bag is now a 16.6-pound bag apologizing for not being an 18-pound bag and I am getting older. I got over it. I’ll try to age gracefully, the alternatives are unappealing. I do, however, feel bad for the charcoal-buying public, which doesn’t get the value it used to. Call me an old man yearning for days gone by, but there it is.

Now I had a new thought train: is there a hidden algorithm somewhere, dictating my relationship with bagged charcoal? By the time I’m 70, will the “big bag” weigh five pounds (“Lasts the same as a 5.7 lb bag.”) and cost slightly more than I just paid for the 16.6-pound bag? Is there a vanishing point where my barbecue charcoal and I simultaneously disappear from Earth?

Maybe I was influenced by an email Adrienne received from a friend last week. She’s a nutritional therapist, works at a for-profit clinic and was told her salary will be cut by 50 percent. She’s middle-aged too. Was there an algorithm for her? Did an accountant take her age, education, years of experience and zip code (not many nutritional therapy jobs in Vermont), feed it into a computer and determine exactly how much the corporation could decrease her salary so she wants to quit in disgust, but realizes she can’t afford it? Is there an app for that your boss can download to an iPhone?

Sunday evening was rainy and humid; the bugs were out. I threw some green sticks on the glowing coals to make smoke and keep them away. There was an old newspaper section in the top of the charcoal bag. Waiting for the fire to be ready for the ribs, I started reading the politics section.

The debt limit, the deficit, Medicare. Will Social Security go broke? Karl Rove says strategy means not letting a crisis go to waste. There’s no evidence my friend’s clinic is losing money. Quite the contrary, but times are hard, jobs are scarce, so why not send half her salary and those of her colleagues to the company’s bottom line? The Republican Party wants to:

1 – Permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich. No increase in corporate taxes, either.

2 – Raise the retirement age to 70.

It’s not a complicated algorithm, but it will serve. What more do you need to know? The charcoal bag will keep getting smaller and small while the price slowly rises. The rich will get steadily richer and you and I and our friend the nutritional therapist will supply those riches by working until we die.

Unless we decide to change it.

© Mark Floegel, 2011