Turning stones into bread

Sometimes when humans do wrong, we have trouble facing the music. It's never easy to admit our misdeeds, especially when 99.9 percent of us are involved. Anyway, we didn't choose this one.

It came to me in half-awake slumber one night with the coal-laden night trains' whistles wafting upstream from the Big Horn River bridge into my open bedroom window. As I drifted off to sleep, a nightmare of millions of tons of coal rained down from the sky, rose up and flooded the property around my house like the river did last month and I was frantically and foolishly filling sandbags again.

There really are consequences to the corporate sin of turning stones into bread—black stones stripped from the earth and burned by the megaton to feed our appetite for more calories. It's not just a dream; worldwide climate trends indicate there may be little time to alleviate some of the consequences of our massive burning of fossil fuel. A simple on-line search of "world people's climate change conference Bolivia," and you will find many opinions from both sides of the fence.

It took five hundred thousand years for the earth to sequester the amount of carbon that humans now, in one year, pull out of fossil rock, oxidize and inject into the paper-thin layer of air we breathe according to Fredric L. Quivik of Michigan Technological University. The Creator did not put it underground for people to extract and insert into our atmosphere.

Our human greed motivated us to dig and drill. It's all about turning stones into bread, ostensibly to feed the world's energy needs for the greedy good life.

Here on the Back 40 nature operates mostly within natural law. No plant or breathing animate life gets too far out of balance in proportion to the calories provided by photosynthesis: the essential ingredient for survival in Big Horn County winters and hot summers. Since creation, all life on planet earth had been operating within the calorie limits of the carbon life cycle, harnessing solar energy to photosynthesize carbon into food or energy.

Once the uses of fossil energy were discovered, we began consuming calories from fossil carbon at a rate astronomically beyond the calories available in the carbon life cycle of our planet. We are now injecting carbon into our planet's air at rates unprecedented in human existence. We have gone far out of balance with God's natural carbon life cycle.

In our farming practices in America, we take pride in our efficiency, but we don't look at the calories we burn to produce food calories we harvest to feed the world. In calories consumed to produce calories for food, modern farming is more inefficient than ever. The typical modern commodity agriculture farm uses up ten calories for every calorie produced. Around the world, rapidly advancing farm technology is raising, not lowering, the calorie input proportion to production.

In recent years, climate scientists in our country and abroad have reached a consensus ignored by the media and many politicians – that the burning of fossil energy sources is largely responsible for the imbalance we now face. We have driven carbon dioxide in the atmosphere worldwide up to unprecedented amounts.

Since drastically increasing the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the earth has gone out of balance and dramatic changes are becoming more apparent.

These changes have caused suffering already, and other nations accuse us of contributing to the problem. Of course, there's lots of denial and misinformation on both sides as in any argument, but the privileges we enjoy require us to listen to the outcries of the multitudes suffering because of the carbon ascending into our atmosphere. It really does take an impossible dream: lowering our calorie consumption back in step with the Creator's scientifically determinable design.

Sadly, there is a million-dollar-plus propaganda campaign now snowballed into every sector of public and religious life convincing us to believe a lie: that humans are not responsible for their climate sin against God's creation. They are smugly watching their stock numbers rise as media preachers tell us God is in charge, he has blessed our sin, and will bail us out before we suffer consequences.

Michael Pollan, the food journalist, writes, "When we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating (coal and) oil and spewing greenhouse gases." Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread too.

He rejected that temptation to sin. It's time for us to confess, repent and start making amends along with the rest of the nations of planet earth.

Dave Graber

Hardin, MT 59034

Bullying basics: Let’s stop it where it starts

The only way to stop bullying is to start looking where bullying originates. It's imbedded in our culture. Our children's media, our politicians, our business world and foreign policy teach us that we must have power to command and intimidate other humans to get what we want from them.

Now, in Montana and Big Horn County Schools, we are trying to tell children not to become what every sector of public life portrays as ideal. It's ludicrous to assume we could stop bullies in one sector, our public schools, without even acknowledging the power of teaching bullying in all the others.

From Wall Street to Congress and even down to our towns, the assumption holds that there are winners and losers and that human life ultimately follows the law of the jungle. This evolutionary ideology is prevalent in our business world today, even among adherents of creationism. The slogan – survival of the fittest – goes against the grain of being the humans our Creator intended.

Ancient tribal cultures such as Hebrews from a few thousand years ago and the Apsáalooka and Tsestsestehas of Big Horn County worked hard to teach children communal responsibility. Self-interest in power and acquisition of material things was dampened by personal validation and acceptance – worthy in family and community. Stories and games upheld the principles. It's the bottom line of the Ten Commandments. Greed, the distorted virtue of capitalist politics of the modern media mega-culture, was held in check.

I remember a story from a deceased friend of mine who used to live in Busby, Vern Buller. He started out farming in Ritchie, Montana. In the 40's, he went as a missionary heavy equipment operator to South America, in the Chaco region of Argentina. His job was building a road from Asuncion, Paraguay, through prairie timber and marshland, opening up the region for farming.

The area had already been tribal peoples' home for thousands of years. Their traditional ways of life were profoundly threatened by this intrusion. The destruction of timber and uprooting of a long ribbon of land cutting through the their homeland proved disastrous.

Soon there were casualties. Men who operated equipment were shot with poison arrows. Soon, each team of operators was assigned two or three armed guards, openly carrying weapons as a show of force. This was successful initially, but it brought on escalation. Indians somehow acquired guns and attacked a lightly armed team, capturing the men and severely damaging their equipment.

Being a Mennonite pacifist, Vern refused to work on a team carrying weapons. This created a crisis with the road building command center. However, after considerable negotiation, a cash deposit was made to secure the cost of the equipment and he and his team members who agreed with him were allowed back on the job.

They quickly moved into position to work their section of road, amidst snide comments from teams with armed guards. But the attacks stopped. All along the route it was clear the operation was still being watched. Then one day in the heat of noon, a large group of Indians surrounded Vern's team, the only one with no armed guards. They were ordered off their equipment and seated on the ground in the welcome shade.

They were searched. One of the team carried a concealed handgun. It was found. They feared the worst.

The Indians wanted to talk. They had acquired a translator. Thus began a negotiation process to alter the surveyed course of the road at particular places, meeting the needs of the Indian community to protect sacred locations.

The final months of completion saw the whole operation continue with the Indians providing each team with a security detail. Both sides won.

A few generations ago, American families had time away from TV to teach their children to get along with each other and to talk when needs were threatened. Bullies don't do this. Normal human beings do.

The only way to stop bullying is to stop teaching bullying at every level of our culture.

Somewhere there must be a scriptwriter for children's programming on TV who will write an ending where the hero accesses negotiation power as gifted to humans by the Creator. I've had enough of children's programming promoting the law of the jungle.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Recovering our American Childhood

When it comes to childhood in America, we are facing frightening statistics. We need to return to cultural patterns, now seldom practiced, so more of our children can grow into productive responsible citizens.

Conservatism tends to resist change, to be critical and careful with the new and different. Of course this grates against modern consumer culture where we are conditioned to follow the latest fashion from clothing to raising children. Then there are the reactionary trends to restore old furniture and clothing fashions as well as other efforts to take society back to what we had generations ago. That's what we need for our American childhood. Instead of what we used to wear or sit upon in past decades, let's become fascinated with the disappearing treasure trove of resources for raising children.

Those of us living in our personal second half century remember the way things used to be, especially if we were raised in rural families. We were economic assets far beyond the imagination of families today.

In the late 1940's, my siblings and I learned the responsibility to feed, water and chase the chickens at night that laid the eggs and flavored the Sunday pot-pie after they lost their heads. Much of our work was not fun, such as forking out anaerobic manure from critter sheds after the spring thaw or scraping smelly sheep gut casing for sausage on the butcher block beside the milk house sink.

Fun was unavoidably ingrained into the work. After casings were scraped and washed, I enjoyed helping Grandpa and Uncle Willis run the sausage press. A casing was firmly tied to the spout. Screwing down the pressure pushed the ground sausage out into the casing, forming a long rope coiled by Willis's gentle hands into a tub of salt water.

He helped me hold it carefully to quickly straighten potential kinks, but eventually the resistance was too much for the paper-thin casing, a kink formed and burst, spilling the ground meat. We children, at first shocked with the accident, learned to laugh because the remedy was simple. Grandpa calmly tied it off and had us help scoop up the spilled sausage grindings to dump back into the press. Then he would tie on a new casing and resume running the press until the casing burst again. This continued until all nine of my uncles' and aunts' families had their winter sausage supply coiled in their own tin bucket.

There was plenty of work to be done in order to survive, and while work was difficult with long hours, life had purpose. Our childhood games reflected our life and the tasks of making a living.

Together, young children created imitations of the tasks and strategies for sharing life. We were not to play games against human life, including war games. I remember being punished for playing the popular "Cowboys and Indians," for example, complete with willow bows, stick guns, and falling in the grass dead.

For many years as a young adult I did not appreciate this part of my history. I looked back thankful I had overcome the hard life of my childhood. As a teacher, I didn't have to work so hard physically to make a living. I was grateful to leave the "dumb farmer" image propagated at the time, with a college education as my ticket.

Many children now grow up in an America immersed in stress. No longer an asset, they are now in the way of parents' need to make a living. This factor is ignored as government and private and public policy programs focus on symptoms of children growing into adulthood with pervasive psychological wounds from stress.

Our alarming symptoms are increasing. We have the highest youth incarceration rate in the developed world. Our children have ADD and ADHD at continually increasing levels. Drug and alcohol abuse continue to rise at alarming rates, along with spousal and child abuse.

Premature death by accident, suicide and disease related to substance abuse, childhood and adult obesity, diet and environmental hazards where children live and dismal maternal and child health care delivery, all plague our country. It's the alarming descent of childhood in America at nearly every measure.

Yet we continue to scapegoat these symptoms as if each of them were the core problem. We don't want to look at what has gone wrong with our religious and economic systems. Let's open our eyes to our past, and repel the ideologies that say our Christian faith is defective, or capitalism and democracy are failures. They're not; we have an astounding heritage in our nation's history where our faith and values were experienced in our American childhood.

We children of my parents didn't handle any but a few coins until I made clear my intention to start college. Then I was given the chance to drive Dad's car around selling fruit trees to neighbors. Before that, I remember being entrusted with a nickel that never even reached my pocket, because Dad passed them out to each of us kids when he ground the old 49 Studebaker to a stop by the sign with the curled ice cream tip on the cone. We shyly piled out of the front-opening back seat door and lined up at the window to watch the girl in white twist that tip just right and hand it to each of us kids saying "That'll be five cents please." We didn't miss having little choice with those five pennies. That was before Dairy Queen came up with the chocolate choice. Since soft ice cream had come to town, we learned the blessed experience of spending 5 cents. Our parents and our community knew this: children do not learn to handle money wisely by being entrusted with money.

Our parents did not contrive choices for us. We grew up knowing who we were and where we belonged, because our life did not consist of making money to spend money and living in anxious hope of acquiring more money to spend on more things. Dairy Queen was a ritual, replayed two or three times during that summer it came to town. Then the ritual ended.

The life I shared with my parents, two brothers and three sisters, instead was in our working relationship with the land and its fruit, and sharing those jobs like haying, butchering and processing beeves, pork and poultry we did not sell for family income we never saw, and harvesting cultivated and wild fruit and vegetables, canning and processing to be distributed to each of my Dad's siblings' families according to the number of children.

Seeing the option of college, I was determined to leave the drudgery and smell. I honestly wanted to turn my back on life close to the land. I was tired and embarrassed with the persistent smell of my hands from washing udders every morning before leaving for school. It happened often. I walked into Chemistry class at 8:30 AM. There simply was no lava soap strong enough to take the odor away. More than one girl I wanted to impress would scoot her chair as far away as possible.

Contrast that with now.

Magpies are loud and determined. They fight off competition to do things their way.

I watched a pair building a nest near our barn. The tree was nearly dead, one destined for firewood this summer. I didn't try convincing them they were off base. I can't even approximate their language.

Our nation's crescendo of attacks on families blames parents for the rise focused on two issues. One criticizes our education reforms for focusing on the cheap goal of education for success in our market culture. This criticism is legitimate.

The other criticism focuses on the lack of Christian bias in public education. It is nationally promoted with books, videos and well-funded marketing claiming our public schools are a secular socialist conspiracy to destroy our faith in God, our foundation for marriage and family, and the very essence of our national values. This criticism, while having legitimacy, obscures the real dangers undermining the beliefs and values that built this nation.

Back when public education was founded, American politicians were more interested in being civil. The crisis issue behind our first public schools was rejection of the class warfare in Europe. The citizen-controlled government our founders created said that everyone deserves an "inalienable right" to pursue a living, to succeed in life (except women and slaves, which we have more recently assessed as equally human). They were fed up with the colonial government's elitist private education providing those with inherited wealth the tools to maintain their privilege, and, in the case of the Boston tea party, to tax the poor at the benefit of the hugely wealthy East India Tea Company that ruled the British Crown. So the rich were taxed, and public schooling for all was born.

The effort created an equalizer of opportunity par excellence. For over almost two centuries, until recent decades, our public educators have instilled in our young a social responsibility to maintain a door of access for all. Whether future dirt farmers or CEO's, each was expected to learn to be a productive member of society for the good of all. Public education then recognized that government had an obligation to address the economic disparity our society inherited from England, giving new young citizens an equal right to the economic and educational tools to live as families. For generations, it has been successful.

Recent decades have seen disturbing changes. The last two administration's education secretaries—Obama's and Bush's—have looked with shock at the dismal statistics of rising poverty, a pesky generational poverty culture, and the highest imprisoned population of any so-called "advanced" nation. They see a rising tide of dysfunctional families. They see the drain on our national budget when delinquent youth enter society, bear children, and increase our culture of poverty in America.

But instead of looking carefully at what is happening to our children, they have looked for quick program solutions in the public schools. Bush's "No Child Left Behind," and Obama's "Race to the Top" have ignored the mounting of the greatest threat to our nation's public schools: the loss of civic responsibility for parents with young children. From head start through university graduate programs, personal wealth has become the measure of success. It has taken precedence over what President Kennedy said, with his roots in our heritage, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Even magpies carefully choose the best angling forked branches for their nest. But as useful and legitimate as it is to oppose abortion, gay marriage and evolution, these obsessions obscure the loss of civic responsibility training in our education tree. Our national heritage is at stake. We must recover the story of public education itself, and even read about Jesus as written in the Christian Bible, the most important written document of our civilization.

Read the references in the New Testament on money, wealth and taxes. Jesus was clear that personal selfishness inevitably left people out. His ministry, founded by John the Baptist, was based on righting wrongs in his nation (Luke 3. 7-17). The solution was spiritual wisdom to learn motivation beyond selfishness. It was motivation for the "common good" later emphasized by the founder of our capitalist system, Adam Smith (see his book, Wealth of Nations).

Problems with evolution, gay marriage, abortion and other such issues may be real, and a motivation to pull a child out of public school. But these issues are only symptoms of the more dangerous threat to our democratic values in our nation's heritage in our drift toward marketing and personal competition for wealth in our schooling. Even though addressed with noise and politics, such discussion simply divides Christians and squelches useful discussion we should have in society over a fair, just economy, and the right to exist as human beings.

Somehow, the magpies got the message, probably with all our activity planting grass around "their" tree. They left for another tree. We need to remind our national and state education leaders up in their elitist tree that we the people know how our religious heritage, the arts, music, diversity of language and culture, all teach us respect for others and how to be responsible citizens. Let Wall Street experts return to New York with their marketing expertise. We don't need their values imposed on our schools in Big Horn County.

One honest education researcher is Dr. Mike Rose, look him up on line.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Diane Ravitch. 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3M5B51HC6A4L4&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD (Author)

They should end talk of the government increasing its power to demand gender bias for civil rights of life partners. They should recognize at least limited legitimacy in Biblical exegesis along with the many American Christians who see God in Creation with or without evolution. They should recognize the legitimacy of those who oppose abortion through means other than government judicial action.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The perfect flood – is it over?

The record flood of May, 2011, on the Little Horn, begs for an explanation. Why such a severe flood? I will try a simple one: almost 20 years of drought.

In the 1970's my son and I discovered fishing on the Big Horn. Our favorite place was the St. X bridge, with its wide gravel bars and sandy beaches extending into the water, and the steep place along the east side where larger rainbows lurked. We launched our homemade Cajun pirogue there, caught fish, and my children, young then, enjoyed splashing in the puddles across the wide riverbed.

Take a look next time you cross that bridge. The riverbed is constricted. Over the decades, grasses, then willow brush, and now even Russian olive and cottonwood crowd the river into half its former width.

At 10 p.m. on Saturday, my flashlight shining out my east door at Greenwood Farm revealed muddy turbulent water had risen four inches since 8 p.m., indicated by marks on the stake I planted in the yard that afternoon. I turned in and set the alarm for 1 a.m.. At midnight, I awoke in a sweat. In my dream I was swimming for life in a flood. Awake, still hearing rain, I grabbed my flashlight and went out to check the flood. Up another three inches, and muddy water was rushing in waves over the lane leading from our back door.

It was worrisome, but I was grateful for my family helping fill sandbags to protect our doors. I was even more grateful that our house had no crawl space, and our walls, made of waterproof concrete ten feet high, were plenty strong. I still had a sense of unease. When will the water stop rising? I made my way around the house, turned on lights, and saw flood waters almost encircling our house. A quick estimate said eight inches to go before water would reach the sandbags jammed against our outside doors.

At 2 a.m., the water level was exactly where it had been at midnight. At 4 a.m., it had dropped an inch. I was confident the worst was over.

At 10 a.m. Sunday morning, after dropping by four inches, I read the news on the computer. The Bureau of Land Management had shut down the flow in the Yellowtail Dam to around 3,000 cubic feet per second.

Many others in Big Horn County were not as fortunate, especially along the Little Horn.

I got out the old map of our farm and the nearby river, based on photos taken in the 70's. The back channel next to our house was once a significant part of the river. The island, now the headquarters of the Eagles Nest Lodge, was mostly a gravel bar. Now, Russian Olive has taken over everywhere, and I watched the water meandering slowly through that channel, still rushing madly across my yard and down my lane. It was obvious the river had lost much of its capacity to flow.

I began to understand. The habit of green things is to grow close to the water's edge. With the drought, the water's edge moved in on the river. The normal small floods added sediment to the green things along the shore, and those green things flourished into brush, then trees, then a strong riverbank. The broad river beds with open gravel bars we had in Big Horn County in the 70's are gone. With this pattern happening on our two major rivers in Big Horn County, the present crisis has become inevitable.

Did this record flood remove the brush blocking the river's flow? Did the snow in the high country lose most of its water content with this flood, or will there be another? Will the rains stop and warmer weather come at a gradual pace, allowing normal snow-melt and runoff? Is the water above Yellowtail Dam still rising?

At first, I thought maybe we've seen the end of the only perfect flood of 2011. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe these questions should motivate prayer, and prayer might lead to some action. This flood was enough.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Debunking Greed

I'm a graduate of a Christian college where professors were strong on altruism. In economics I learned Adam Smith's philosophy based on what we understood as greed. Being a rebel, I bought the idea. I used to enjoy debunking altruism in college bull sessions.

"Even that toasted black hen," I used say to a dedicated self-giving friend, "really was preserving her own genetic code in her chicks when she sat still in the face of a fast approaching prairie fire, and died instead of flying away." I was referring to the famous story of the farmer who kicked a lump of ashes, the burned body of a mother hen, and uncovered a nest of peeping unsinged baby chicks. Her singed wings were enough protection to save her young. They were her resurrected life. She really was following a self-serving motivation to give her life, so I argued.

So in college I agreed greed is good. It's still dominant 50 years later in our culture and business practices. But now, in the last ten years, this conventional understanding from Adam Smith's 1776 book, Wealth of Nations, is no longer accepted by many research minded economists. There has been an awesome change in economic philosophy at the most scholarly levels. This debunking of greed needs to trickle down.

My son told me to search on line for a ten-minute video entitled "What Motivates Us." It's easy to find. Using researched documentation, the cute animated cartoon convincingly demonstrates we aren't motivated as much by greed or even self interest as by factors such as purposeful mission, autonomy, preservation of our human family and community, and complex challenges.

Tasks involving these factors aren't enhanced by incentive pay or exorbitant CEO compensation. Inserting the greed incentive into the mix usually lowers accomplishment. Surprising, isn't it? When tasks are cognitively challenging, requiring teamwork and a sense of mission for the benefit of others, incentive pay actually reduces work quality and output. "Whoa," I thought when I first saw this short video, "I'm catching a case of cognitive dissonance."

Well, self-interest does have a place. I see it all over this back 40, our Greenwood Farm. Weeds compete with my Garrison grass and alfalfa for germination and root room. Goose couples compete with each other for prime nesting habitat. And everyone gains with the competition, except the weeds.

But we human managers of this ground have decided greed and self-interest, while clearly credible and powerful, are not our prime motivators. If we were interested in maximizing profit per acre, we would have been much better off buying a parcel of more productive soil. The ground itself cries out for another motivation. How can we resurrect the sterile soil here to best sustain life for human benefit again after years of declining production in conventional farming? Our thinking is not just for next year's profit, but sustainable benefits for the next 10 or 100 or more years. And for this, we are in step with others in Big Horn County.

So the best question is what to do with land that cannot facilitate a greed motivation. Will altruism work here? Who would work here with this motivation?

There are lots of such folks around. For example, check out the Wellknown Buffalo Center at Garryowen. Like us, this summer they are having a group of college students volunteering to get their hands dirty working to make idealism become reality. They are doing summer school with Crow language immersion, gardening, and traditional skills of the Apsaalooke. Ours are coming to learn from our small steps toward sustainable living here on the back 40. This summer will see them working on experimental "earthship" building construction, using discarded tires and rammed earth, helping with farming, learning with folks in Big Horn County.

Like the mother hen, our motivation is preservation and life for our family, the human family. We want our farming practices to look forward to the best ways of not just feeding human beings for survival, but living productive lives in respectful coexistence with others of our kind, with the land and with all creatures great and small. Our tasks are small and not a significant challenge to our economic culture of greed. But new economic research supports our efforts. Together we can chart a better way toward a stronger and more sustainable future for our nation and humankind.

Use this link for the video "what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&playnext_from=TL&videos=qOyhHX6kxN4

A scholarly review of research on a similar vein:

Vailancourt Rosenau, Pauline (2006) "Is Economic Theory Wrong About Human Nature?," Journal of Economic and Social Policy: Vol.10: Iss. 2, Article 4.

Available at: http://epubs.scu.edu.au/jesp/vol10/iss2/4

This website is good on down-to-earth research-based information debunking popular politically correct ideas, this one on the myth that greed is good:

http://makethemaccountable.com/myth/GreedIsGood.htm

Here's some writing from the above website:

The two books by Adam Smith upon which our modern cultural value of greed is supposedly based:

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Smith, Ibid: Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790

A scholarly book on the subject, in reality it demonstrates that Adam Smith was not definitive regarding his analysis of self interest in economics as a contributor to democracy:

Kenneth Lux, Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1990)

Scientific studies are proving that cooperation is a built-in human trait

Brain scans show why we love cooperating MakeThemAccountable.com

Last Updated: 2002-07-17 13:09:43 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research reveals why people often cooperate with each other, even when it is not necessarily to their advantage to do so.

A group of researchers based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, found that when a woman is involved in a situation where she is cooperating with someone else, she experiences activation in brain areas that are also activated by "rewards" such as food, money and drugs.

This indicates that our bodies may have been somehow programmed to "tag cooperation as rewarding," study author Dr. Gregory S. Berns told Reuters Health.

"Which is good, because it probably keeps the social fabric of society together," he added…

[The truth is, when you get past all the hate rhetoric, that millions of years of evolution have made us social beings. We lived in tribes for millions of years, and I assure you that members of a tribe didn't have a greed-is-good mentality. I'm no expert, but what I've read suggests that in a tribal environment generosity was admired and rewarded. And one didn't become a chief simply by being the strongest. An aspirant for chiefdom had to build coalitions of supporters, had to be willing to listen to the wisdom of the elders, and was most likely to become and remain chief if he was known as a brave hunter and warrior, but also as a generous person.]

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Barak Mugabe

I posted below a longer version of the following as a letter to the editor of the Billings Gazette. The edited shorter version is available at the Gazette:

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_2075134d-72ae-516c-ab0c-acb5d9987548.html

Following this letter on line are some 60 blog comments. Anyone can join in the fracas.

Barak Mugabe

First our guns

Then our land

I read these phrases on a sign above the manager's desk at a Billings business last week, one that markets wholesale to constructions companies and farmers. The sign was easily visible to me and the public from the sales lobby. It first struck me that this must represent a perspective of the management at this otherwise reputable business establishment. This business has served me and Greenwood Farm very well, so it is disappointing.

Let me correct the manager publicly, since these surprising and offensive phrases assaulted me in public.

1. Robert Mugabe is the brutal dictator of Zimbabwe. Barack Obama is the democratically elected president of the United States of America. To combine those names is deeply anti-American and slings mud on our nation's honor and values.

2. Our president, unlike Mugabe the tinhorn dictator of Zimbabwe, has neither done nor said nor promoted anything remotely like confiscating my Remington, Savage, or Winchester. The comparison is totally ludicrous, even though the NRA is famous for pushing any paranoia that will sell more guns, even guns for criminals.

3. Our federal government funds our Montana land's productivity. Without federal government subsidy for commodity production and other land use by farmers, most Montana farmers would be driven off their land. The President is strongly dedicated to protecting the family farm, in words and actions.

4. A strong majority of citizens of this nation elected the current president. They affirmed his African descent, along with 100 million or so other citizens born in the USA. The constant barrage questioning his citizenship and legitimacy is racist to the core.

This carefully deniable inflammatory language is what I encountered first from Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society literature in Mississippi in the 60's. What's unprecedented and shocking in America now is mainline commercial media's pundits who encourage such language. This is tantamount to insurrection, with money media giants turning a blind eye.

I would be the first to say such speech is protected by the first amendment. But that doesn't make hate speech patriotic. Such attitudes are just a step away from flag burning, which also is protected speech, but is similarly anti-American.

I'm too old to be tolerant of such inflammatory speech and veiled personal attacks against our president, regardless of the party. I spent two years beginning 2001 as an American language specialist on the faculty of the foreign language department of XiHua University, near Chengdu in China. I can guarantee Chinese citizens were arrested and worse for using much milder language against their government leaders. That doesn't happen here, thank God. But pushing the limits on our 1^st amendment rights should not be the business of an otherwise reputable firm in Billings.

I like America, and I like the company where I do business. But I don't like anti-American speech couched in inflammatory false phrases attacking our president personally in my face when I shop there.

Maybe the minority extremists there would identify better with the hate-America agitators in the Middle East. There's plenty of oil pumped there, and plenty of work for people who do pipes and inflammatory propaganda on both sides of the conflagrations there.

--
David Graber


406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Dawn Breaks Only in Darkness

A recollection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Easter sermon at Dexter Avenue 2nd Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1964

Doctor King's sermon started by retelling the story of two of Jesus' disciples and their walk to Emmaus.

Two disciples, determined not to remain holed up in fear of being arrested in Jerusalem that first Easter, left the city and the Roman crackdown on political unrest stirred up by the crucifixion of Jesus. They walked on through the night of darkness and despair toward the town of Emmaus. Dawn was barely graying when another traveler joined them and listened to their tales of woe. They recounted to the seemingly uninformed traveler Jesus' false arrest, trial, torture and execution on the Roman cross. With emotion they explained their hopes dashed for themselves, their families and the nation, their fears, and their feeling of abandonment. Their darkness was impenetrable even though the traveler quoted scripture to challenge it.

As they neared Emmaus they invited the caring stranger to join them at a friend's house. Their guest was given bread to break to share a meal. That's when dawn broke in the darkness of their despair, and they saw it was Jesus, risen from the dead. Resurrection happened for them too, after all shreds of hope were dashed, and darkness was total.

In his sermon, Dr. King spoke of being in jail in Birmingham in 1963. While there for eleven days, he read newspaper accounts of an open letter criticizing the extremism of the civil rights movement, written and signed by important Christian leaders of the nation. They asked him to stop the movement, and save the nation and the Negro race from civil war and an immanent violent reaction of citizens and governments of the South. They criticized his leadership of aggressive sit-ins, public demonstrations and law violations because permits to parade were withheld.

"Jesus is risen," said Dr. King. He went on to proclaim that God's power is evidenced, even more than by a reviving Jesus' body, by healing the despair of the darkness Jesus and his followers faced. They despaired that God's power was weak against Satan, against the might of Rome and its Jewish collaborators. After Jesus had been dead and buried for three days, there seemed no question where true power lay. The Gospels are clear: the resurrection was powerful because it was so unexpected. All had lost all hope in God, as revealed by Jesus who had been executed.

It's in such darkness that God's resurrection dawns yet today. Dr. King explained the darkness of the despair he risked sharing with his Christian White brothers who opposed him. He didn't expect much from writing this letter.

But God brought a new dawn of resurrection for the downtrodden of America within a month of his release from jail. The laws of segregation were dealt a defeat in the US Supreme Court. God worked his way, after it appeared certain His way was defeated.
This is the time of year when we think of the love of God breaking forth into eternal dawn. We come to see that the most powerful forces in the universe are not those forces of military might but those forces of spiritual might. Dr. King quoted this great hymn of our Christian church:

When I survey the wondrous cross,
On which the prince of glory died,
My richest gains I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

I am not one to remember sermons. But this one had such a deep effect on my life I rehearsed it in my memory over the decades. I hoped to find it on line, with so many of Dr. King's sermons and speeches now posted. Instead I found there are hundreds of his speeches and sermons that, like this, were not recorded. The above is my brief recollection.

For events leading to my hearing this sermon, see "What Would MLK Say," the Big Horn County News archives on line, Spirit and Dust column, Feb 3, 2011. Also, look up "Letter from Birmingham Jail April 1963" for Dr. King's letter written at a time of despair over the failing civil rights movement. He repeatedly referred to this letter in his sermon that Easter Sunday Morning, 1964, "Dawn breaks only in darkness."

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Budget Battle, Common Sense and the Bible

Farmers of Big Horn County and across America are familiar with tough choices in tough times.

When weather turns bad and crops fail, farmers must decide where to cut expenses, when to borrow and how to wisely invest available resources in order to maximize future harvest.

In the endless debate about our national budget, the same wisdom should apply. Everyone agrees spending cuts are necessary—but which ones? To answer wisely, we should look at economics, not politics. Which investments and which cuts are best for all citizens and future generations?

However dire the budget, most farmers would prioritize investing in seed. Our national obligation to invest in children's health; education is no different. And it's a good investment. Studies show a return of 400-700% for every dollar spent on early childhood education. See this link: http://developingchild.harvard.edu/library/multimedia/interactive_features/five-numbers/

Many in Congress still hold to decreasing the tax burden on the wealthy as an investment in "job creators." The theory goes that the more money wealthier people can keep for themselves, the more jobs they will create to spread the wealth to the rest of us. Does this work for our children's future?
To answer that question we need a little foray into tax history, one that politicians and media pundits avoid. Our nation prospered under Eisenhower's 90% tax bracket for the wealthiest. Under Reagan, this tax averaged 50%. G. W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthiest to 35% and funded two wars off of the budget. He took office with a $236 billion budget surplus, remember? His tenure ended with a $415 billion deficit, not counting $150 billion borrowed from social security. And Obama? Like Republicans, he's not serious about the deficit.

The nation's wealthiest 400 now own as much of the nation's wealth as half of the entire population: over 150 million of us. Said another way, for every dollar each of the less-wealthy half of us own, the average one of the wealthiest 400 in America have half a million. When they complain that the tax burden is shifted toward the wealthy--i.e., the biggest percentage of tax income comes from the wealthiest--the reason is obvious: They make more money than the rest of us put together.

And one of the biggest cash cows, the Pentagon, is funded without question-- over $500 billion and increasing. A range of groups, including Cato Institute, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Project for Defense Alternatives have detailed nearly $1 trillion in cuts that could be made to the Pentagon budget in the next ten years, yet congressional leaders in both parties including Tea Party activists are refusing to tackle Pentagon spending.

Instead they blame the poor. They protect tax breaks for the wealthy and then make a ruckus about a tiny fraction of our budget: WIC, Headstart, and other support for low income children. This way of doing almost nothing for the deficit is deceptive. And it's unwise to create new budget crises in millions of homes across America. Here's where the national budget debate needs our nation's moral foundation.

The Bible has more to say about money and "greed, which is idolatry (St. Paul, Col 3.5)," than any other moral issue. This is the very issue by which Jesus separates the nations destined for heaven from nations destined for hell, in Matthew 25: "Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire… for I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink. I was naked, and you did not clothe me. I was an alien and you did not welcome me. I was sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. … Inasmuch as you did not do it for the least of these my brethren, you did not do it for me."

The converse is promised in the book of Isaiah: "If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and …you will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail (58:10).

Last year our farm spent more than it earned. But I'm still buying seed for the west field. Now that the soil's a little healthier, its time to grow some pasture. In a few years, some sheep, goats, or cows will have something good to munch, and the grandkids can have 4H projects. I'm investing in the future, for my children's children. Do our leaders have courage to do the same?

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." - Dr. Martin Luther King. April 4 was the 43rd anniversary of his assassination.

The following is the portion cut for the Big Horn County News "Back 40" column

All over the media are the personal attack words, "Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a real discussion on government spending." Personal attacks are not even appropriate in our American civilization when they are legitimate. But this language, all over the media backed funded by Murdoch, the Koch brothers, etc., reeks of hypocrisy. These Republicans, and for that matter, Democrats as well, don't want to tackle the American wealth accumulating with the wealthiest 1%. So they don't talk about the Pentagon and associated excessive profits in the military/industrial complex Eisenhower warned about. Virtually every economic sector has its hands deep in taxpayer pockets, profits deeply connected to our defense, military and national security apparatus.

Those who now say "everything is on the table" will be keeping smoke and mirrors on the table too again. The mantra of blaming the poor is totally ludicrous. They continue putting out the propaganda that all we have to do to turn around the economy is stop spending taxpayer money on the most vulnerable of socie

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, is waging radical class warfare and ideological privatization schemes and selling it as a debt reduction plan. His newly released FY12 budget proposal, The Path to Prosperity, ought to have the subtitle: "A Windfall For the Already Prosperous."

America's richest 1 percent are getting about $1.5 trillion richer each year. Representative Ryan's tea party inspired budget numbers claim debt reduction. But look what happens. From start to finish, this budget is a smoke screen. Indeed, though Ryan's central claim is that his proposal will cut government spending by $5.8 trillion over the next decade, Joel Packer of the Commitee for Education Funding points out the reality: "For the overall budget over ten years it cuts outlays by $5.8 trillion below CBO baseline but it also cuts revenues by $4.2 trillion below CBO baseline, thus reducing the deficit over ten years by $1.65 trillion." So the richest 1 percent are getting richer each year by almost the amount his budget reduces the federal deficit in ten years.

Yet under the guise of debt reduction, the chairman of the House Budget Committee's budget proposal would take from the already poor, give to the already rich and attempt to achieve debt reduction not by cutting real costs, but by privatizing entitlement programs and shifting costs from the wealthy and corporations to struggling states, seniors, disabled, sick and low-income Americans. And the additional revenues necessary for serious debt reduction is glaringly absent, with proposals that would actually decrease tax-revenue from those most able to pay.

Studies also show that the richest 5 percent hold almost 64 percent of our wealth while and the bottom 80 percent of scrape by on just 12.8 percent of the pie.

Unmentioned in Congress, looming before us all are the two biggie budget busters left off the discretionary table: big business bailouts, especially banking and energy, and the taxpayer funded profits from our wars in the Middle East. The tax system stays in place. The nation's greedy corporations and insatiable wealthy are fattening themselves on the working poor. There's no trickle down. It's the opposite; the rich have been sucking the economic lifeblood from the middle class and poor for decades.

The Bush-Obama budget continues giving millionaires huge tax breaks while seniors and hard-working families pay more for health care and get less coverage. It still helps Wall Street-run health insurance companies make record-breaking profits and pay their CEOs outrageous sums to deny people the care they paid for and need. See Bloomberg.com news April 6:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-06/ryan-s-budget-proposal-would-aid-insurers-a-top-source-of-campaign-cash.h

The GOP's budget simply goes farther than the Democrats breaking America's most basic promise: That if you work hard and play by the rules, you can care for your family and retire with peace of mind. See Huffington Post on the Republican Budget Plan: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-rome/republican-budget-plan-de_b_845256.html

As a country, we face difficult financial choices, but one thing that should not be on the table is to abandon the poor and vulnerable while subsidizing Wall Street and allowing more military spending. Should such big budget items really be considered non-discretionary?

Many Democrats and most Republicans, as well as the Koch brothers' funded Tea Party have it dangerously wrong. It seems the Christian faith is a schizophrenic practice for them. They uphold the adopted principle of greed for corporate and personal profits above civic responsibility to the most vulnerable of our society. But to me, my Republican-leaning parents, and many of my friends in Big Horn County, our faith connects with all of life, including politics.

At a time when billionaires are getting massive tax cuts and Wall Street profits are sky high, balancing the budget on the backs of those most vulnerable in America is simply wrong.

The poor are — once again — under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted "Welfare Reform 2011" bill. (There are other egregious maneuvers in H.R. 1, but I'm sticking to those related to food.)

These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they'd barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending.

For the following, see : The Bush Budget Deficit Death Spiral, by Robert Freeman, NYT

Lenders talk about a debtor's death spiral. It occurs when borrowers get so far in over their heads they begin borrowing money just to cover the interest payments on past borrowings. The borrowers have to do this to keep the lending flowing but they can no longer plausibly pay down the principal. As new debt compounds on old, bankruptcy becomes imminent. Further lending is foolhardy. Foreclosure is only a matter of time.

The U.S. is starting to look like it is entering just such a death spiral. It is foretold not simply by the large and growing deficits, nor by the fact that their carrying costs will rise quickly as interest rates rise. Rather, it is the fact that these trends are becoming irreversible, a structural part of the U.S. economy. This and information on actual deficits and surpluses quoted in the printed column is available:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1022-26.htm

157,000 kids up to age 5, who rely on Head Start for nutrition, education and other services could be cut (1. "House Bill Means Fewer Children in Head Start, Less Help for Students to Attend College, Less Job Training, and Less Funding for Clean Water," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 1, 2011 http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3405)

A big source of the problem is those who cultivate the creep of ignorance across our land. 60 minutes had a special segment last week on corporate tax rates. They cited several huge previously American corporations that have spurned US citizenship and opted out of the country. They abandoned their country. They settled down in a foreign country, where corporate profits are taxed at much lower rates. Since the wealthiest CEO's have kept their residency in America, they do not have the heavy tax rates on large personal vested wealth common in other nations. All this is legal. Is it moral?

Left out is the vital information that America, unlike virtually every other modern democracy, lacks a federal property tax on individually held vested wealth. Since paper profits are a huge portion of corporate profits, our nation has held corporations to an income tax rate not unlike that for individuals. Other nations, recognizing the declarable wealth holdings of corporations distributed to stock holders, tax the net worth of individuals.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org