Featured * :: the big con

The Right-Wing Block-And-Blame Game

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:37:51 -0400

Atlanta: Finishing What General Sherman Started

Rick Perlstein — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:18:34 -0400

[Deer tracks across the parched bed of Atlanta's Lake Lanier. Creative Commons photo by Rusty Tanton]

[Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified Georgia's capital, which is Atlanta, as Augusta.]

Most of our media have been far too busy following the news of what kind of fist bumps terrorists favor, and Luke Russert's exceptional poise under pressure, to notice—well, much of anything. Least of all, the Biblically proportioned drought in one of our nation's fastest growing regions, which is only getting worse, and more consequential for the civilization, by the day.

Atlanta magazine could no longer ignore it. The cover of their "The Water Issue," which I picked up on a recent swing through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, is graced by a water glass that's one-quarter full—scratch that, three-quarters empty. The entire magazine is a fascinating document, a potsherd for future archeologists seeking answers to the kind of neuroses that allowed a civilization let itself be run according to an ideology—conservatism—so singularly unfit to govern a complex, modern society.

Amidst all the schmancy department store and Cartier watch ads, the columns on "Scent marketing" ("among Advertising Age's top ten trends to watch in 2007") and enticements to purchase property at marquee destinations like The Inn At Palmetto Bluff ("50 beautifully appointed waterfront cottages, full-service spa, inspired Lowcountry, cuisine, exclusive Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course...")—the landscaping ad featuring the gushing backyard waterfall alongside the furnished stone gazebo was an especially decadent touch, directly across from a full-page ad for "Brookhaven Retreat, treating both addiction and mental health challenges"—these 176 pages document a narcissistic metropolis on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but not quite able to admit it.

In a letter to subscribers, the editor describes what it was like growing up in the Third World, as a child of missionaries: "In one of the places we stayed, water was piped in only one hour a day—we had to run around with buckets and pots to catch every drop. in another, water that collected in rooftop tanks would turn scalding in the midday tropical heat. No matter where we traveled, flush toilets were a rarity."

That's what she's been thinking of, walking into all the Atlanta bathrooms with "empty buckets near the tub": Atlantans, you see, have begun flushing their toilets with recycled bath water.

The fashion shoot, lithesome models swaddled in this summer's "bright colors and bold lines," is apocalyptically staged in an empty swimming pool. Equally apocalyptic is the comic-book style feature about Atlanta circa 2050 as a civilization straight out of Soylent Green. ("Inevitably, water thieves find a way to get around the system, but penalties are Draconian. The water corps has the legal authority to SHOOT TO KILL.") The accompanying features on what happened and why are exemplary—save for the absence of one concept Atlanta (which on page 26 endorses, tongue only half in cheek, libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr) can't quite bring itself to utter: conservatism.

One phrase they do manage to use: states rights. Portentously, in 1990, two conservative governors, Guy Hunt of Alabama and Robert Martinez of Florida, sued Georgia, "with its endless development" and "unquenchable thirst for water," to keep the Army Corps of Engineers from sharing "their" water resources.

All told over the entire United States, the Army Corps of Engineers built and runs 464 lakes in 43 states, one of them Atlanta's life-giving Lake Lanier; but the notion of the federal government actually coordinating all these resources for the common good would just be too, too un-American to contemplate. Instead, this civil war has ratcheted up to Israel-Palestine levels. "In March, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kepthorne finally put the bickering governors in a collective time-out after they missed a deadline to come up with a tri-state agreement."

There hasn't been any agreement yet. Southerners are a prideful pack, after all, loath to take dictation from pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington.

States rights: that fetish of generations of Southern politicians desperate for a rhetorically innocent way to institutionalize their rage at federal demands for equal racial justice. It has come back now to bite Dixie rather soundly in the ass. Actually, the ideology is more pathological than mere states rights: the zero-sum war of all against all has descended to the level of the localities, with the State House's blessing. "To [Georgia Gov. Sonny] Perdue, water is a local issue. 'The state can be there to help...but we should not be in the business of directing and instructing communities on how to do their business," [press secretary Bert] Brantley says.... Last year, Alabama went to court to stop the city of Canton and the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority's (CCMWA) construction of the Hickory Log Creek Reservoir in Cherokee County—four weeks shy of the dam's projected completion."

One of the package's articles narrates the Hatfield-and-McCoy-like feud between the counties of Douglas and Cobb, when an administrator in the former had the foresight to plan for a possible drought, building a new reservoir, banning outdoor watering—only to see the Cobb connive in the state legislature, like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, to siphon off Douglas's suddenly flush water resources.

[Creative Commons photo. These structures were once referred to as "boats."]

Missed opportunity after missed opportunity are adumbrated therein. Yet the magazine blames not ideology but "bureaucracy." That's all right for our purposes, because the ideology hides in plain sight. Atlanta boomed in the wake of the monster capital investments made in anticipation of the 1996 Olympics, the magazine reports; "In 1990, the Atlanta area was projected to draw 800,000 new residents over the next twenty years; in the ten years following the Olympics, the total population increased by almost 1.4 million.... But in that same ten-year period, the reservoirs that supply our most vital resource grew not a bit."

Nobody could have anticipated the breach in the infrastructure: "In 1969, a study by the Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission...determined that significant infrastructure changes would be required to avoid critical water shortages when the metro area's population soared to between 3 million (reached in 1993) an 5 million (2006). In the 1980s, water planners mapped out a proposed network of reservoirs throughout North Georgia to shore up water for inevitable droughts. Yet the reservoirs never got off paper. By the nineties, the projects were not only deemed to costly to pursue once rainfall returned in abundance, but they also threatened to further antagonize Alabama and Florida in the tri-state water dispute." What did the Atlanta metropolitan area do instead? Issue building permits—48,262 in 1996; 68,240 in 2006. That's the free-market way. The conservative way.

"The drought of 2002 was another wake up call, and then-Govenror Roy Barnes said 2003 would be the 'Year of Water.' Would his plan to build reservoirs and aid municipalities in fixing leaks have worked? No one knows. That year's gubernatorial election came down to Confederate stripes on the state flag."

Like I said, the magazine tells this story well, as far as it goes; but again, what Atlanta magazine can't bring itself to probe is the reason for the season—the ideology that made it all possible, even inevitable. [Why no planning? Why no commitment of resources? Why did politics in Georgia at the most crucial possible juncture come down to the images on a flag?

"Eighteen years, fourteen governors, and endless posturing and finger-pointing" brought on his "tri-state water war," we learn; what we don't learn is that Roy Barnes, the guy who actually stuck his neck out to solve the problem, was a Democrat, and the man who replaced him was the Confederate Flag-baiting Republican; and that besides Barnes, eight of these eleven governors were Republicans; and that the remaining three Democrats were either conservatives or hobbled in whatever enlightened reforms they might have proposed by conservative and/or Republican legislatures. That when Roy Barnes was governor, 61 of Georgia's state legislators, about a quarter—Georgian readers, help me out: is that enough to stymie a tax reform in your state?—signed Grover Norquist's pledge never, ever to support a tax increase, no matter what civilizational collapse might befall the Peachtree State as a consequence (the numbers are now 34 percent of Georgian senators and 30 percent of Georgian house members). And that, by the time the Olympics might have inspired them to reasonably call on the nation's collective coffers to shore up their infrastructure the House was being run by Cobb County's own anti-public investment zealot, Plank Seven of whose "Contract With America" demanded a three-fifths congressional majority to pass any tax increase, and "A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control congress." Who promptly shut down the federal government when he didn't get his budgetary way. Newt Gingrich used to love to talk about saving "civilization." Well, Newt: thanks to you and your boys, in Atlanta, we are beginning to see how civilizations begin to die.

Can you imagine having to go back in time to 1969—the year before the Nixon administration bid for permanent conservative allegiance from Georgia by sending Vice President Agnew to dedicate a Confederate Memorial (the Atlanta Constitution was insulted when Kent State kept President Nixon himself from keeping the appointment—and trying to explain to the Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission's planners that their Confederacy-addled conservative state elites would prove so feckless as to utterly ignore their urgent, wise counsel? To do, simply, nothing but nothing?

Nobody could have anticipated the breach in the infrastructure

Metaphors of babies and bath water, bathtubs not even full enough to drown a government in (we have to save the water to make the toilets work), a dynamic regional economy spiraling down a drain proliferate at my fingertips, all too cheaply. They'll keep proliferating, in Atlanta and everywhere, until we defeat conservatism, and economic individualism, and "free market" madness," as "governing" philosophies.

[Cherokee County. The "buoy" reads: "Boats Keep Out." Mission accomplished. Creative Commons photo.]

Atlanta magazine can't make itself understand this; such are the powers that be, the broken right-wing culture within which it aspires to civic leadership, and in which it is, ultimately, complicit. The package's tone will be familiar to any student of the city's history. It is the cry of the "enlightened" business-boosterism class against the bubbas in the State Capitol who cramp downtown's mojo with their silly wingnut ways: "Last fall, Sonny Perdue prayed publicly for rain. In February, he gave the okay for area pools to open—an interesting and perhaps foolhardy decision given that Lake Lanier at the time was only two feet above its lowest level ever and adequate summer rainfall is unlikely." Perforce, the editors can't quite bring themselves to implicate the region's ür-Booster Business, Coca-Cola: did you know that the bottled water branded by Coke as "Dasani" ("Purified water enhanded with minerals for a pure, fresh taste") is actually pumped from Atlanta's municipal water supply (and is chemically indistinguishable from it); that Coke's flagship plant's monthly water bill from the city is only $27,000; but that, not to fear the plant is working stalwartly to cut its water consumption by 10 percent, and doesn't use as much water as the nearby chicken-processing plants, and has pledged to "replace every drop of water used in its beverages and their production"?

Apparently they're only replacing it in America. To its credit, Atlanta magazine points out the moral evasions in such claims: the "offsetting" is happening "in places such as India, where in the last few years more than 50 communities have complained of water shortages due to nearby Dasani bottling."

In the end, Atlanta magazine is far too busy to hate Coca-Cola Inc. The market made them do it: "In a way, though, we may all be to blame for how much of our water Coca-Cola is bottling and selling right back to us. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. Look around—at the food court, at the ALTA match, at the Dogwood Festival, even here in Atlanta magazine's vending machines. It's perhaps pointless to build a case for Coca-Cola rethinking its Dasani production in a time of drought when we're the ones swallowing, literally, the idea that we can't live without the bottle."

And for all their mockery of crazy old Governor Perdue and his misplaced affection for swimming pools, they do coo sympathetically of his new allowance for the hand-watering of lawns "to alleviate the $2 billion-plus [sic!] hit the local landscaping industry took last year because of the draught."

Those poor, poor landscapers. But no worries: another feature in the package, "Ripple Effect," reminds Atlantans that there's money to be made in them thar empty reservoirs; "In the economics of water, some win and some lose." The landscape and timber businesses gets downward arrows, but things are looking up, no joke, for "rain barrel merchants," "rain recyclers," "roofers, "arborists," "car washers" (at-home car washing has been banned), "stump grinders" and, yes, "golfers": "When a golf ball lands on hard, dry ground, you can get an extra thirty to forty yards off the tee with the bounce. Sweet!"

They Rob You With a Fountain Pen

Robert Borosage — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:39:11 -0400

“As through this world I’ve wandered, I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a gun; And some with a fountain pen.

Woody Guthrie

Look out folks, you’re about to get fleeced. We’re getting sent the bill for the bankers’ bacchanalia. They had the party, made off with the dough, and we’re going to end up paying the price.

Here’s a brief description. Housing prices continue to fall. Down some 8% last year; another 8% in the first quarter this year, with a long way to go. By next year, experts predict one in four homes with a mortgage will be underwater – worth less than what is owed.

Rapacious bankers and investors drove this folly, inflating a housing bubble by huckstering mortgages to folks who couldn’t pay them or didn’t understand them, inventing exotic securities based on mortgages, marketing them widely, without a clue to their actual worth. Under the conservative hand of Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve sat idly by as the bankers had their predators’ ball. Now the banks are in trouble. Their basements are filled with securities that have no market. They are scrambling to sell off assets, raise new capital, and unload the lousy paper.

Who gets stuck with that? Check out the article by the invaluable Charles Morris from the Washington Independent, here. Morris, a recovering banker himself, provides a peak behind the screen.

The Federal Reserve, he estimates, has traded the banks about $500 billion in Treasuries (US bonds, backed by the good faith of American taxpayers) in exchange for dubious instruments, about $200 billion for mortgage backed securities. It is paying 98 cents on the dollar for securities that may be worth 60 cents, or may be worthless.

Meanwhile, the government is considering a bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two private government sponsored entities that finance about ½ of the $12 trillion US housing market. In the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter this year, Morris reports, these entities have been financing mortgages at about twice the level of actual mortgage borrowing. Where did the extra money go? It went to take more of the worthless paper off the hands of banks and investors.

If Freddie and Fannie go belly up, the entire financial house of cards will collapse. So, as John McCain promised yesterday, they won’t be allowed to fail. But if the taxpayers end up bailing them out, then we’re looking at a staggering increase in US debt, and losses of hundreds of billions.

Trying to find a floor for housing prices makes a lot of sense. Helping homeowners who got fleeced by making the banks eat their losses while allowing people to keep their homes either as renters or with affordable mortgages makes sense also.

But remember one thing. The bankers and investors are walking away with millions of dollars in private profits built upon reckless gambling, secure in their confidence that the federal government would not let them fail. And now we’re getting the bill

The only sensible way for Americans to pay this bill would be to levy new taxes of the wealthiest Americans who profited from the folly. Whenever you hear conservatives complain about taxes, whenever you hear them rail about waste in government, whenever you hear their spurious arguments justifying tax breaks for the wealthy, remember the above.

The biggest waste in government is bailing out private follies. The largest thievery comes from privatized companies making out like bandits. The biggest crooks aren’t welfare moms; they are the guys who rob you with fountain pens. And if we have to bail them out to limit the damage to the innocent, the least we can do is tax the money they made off with to pay the bill.

The Meaning of Box 722

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:53:31 -0400

For at least six months now I've been planning, and putting off, this post. The imminent occasion of the first African American major-party nominee forces my hand. It's time for me to help give a sense of just how far we have come.

When I started researching NIXONLAND I knew the congressional elections of 1966 would form a crucial part of the narrative. They'd never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if it ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ's coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction.

That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or antiwar activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)

When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it's cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas's 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world's first mass middle class.

In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... In neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from which they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"—archivsts' metric for how big a collection would be if you stacked the papers one atop another. And somehow, somewhere, I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King's presence in Chicago. I quote many of them in a section of NIXONLAND of which I'm most proud, the one with the most original research and historical insights: the one on how "open housing" opened up the conservative backlash that inaugurated the Republican dominance of the politics of our own generation. I've always wanted to do a post printing, for the historical record, all the letters I put down in my research notes.

That's what I'm about to do. They comprise an unmatched emotional history on how the white middle class built by the New Deal learned to vote Republican. And an unmatched marker of how far this nation has come, now that this same city has given us our first African American presidential nominee.

The first is from March 11, 1965, as the Voting Rights Act was being considered—with nothing in it about open housing.

I am white and am praying that you vote against open housing in the consideration of Equal Rights.
Just because the negro refuses to live among his own race--that alone should give you the answer.
I was forced to sell my home in Chicago ('Lawndale') at a big loss because of the negroes taking over Lawndale--their morals are the lowest (and supported financially by Mayor Daley as you well know)--and the White Race by law.
Please don't take away our bit of peace and freedom to choose our neighbors.
What did Luther King mean when he faced the nation on TV New Year's day--announcing he will not be satisfied until the wealth of America is more evenly divided?
Sounds like Communism to Americans. 'Freedom for all'--including the white race, Please!

The letters start up again in May of 1966, when open housing was actually introduced. At first, there are a flurry of letters, most from liberal clergymen, supporting passage. Then these soon disappear.

From June:

Do you or any of your friends live next door to a negro--why should we have them pushed down our throats?

As a citzen and a taxpayer I was very upset to hear about 'TITLE IV' of the so-called civil rights Bill S. 3296. This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person's rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us.
We designed and built our own home and I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money.

The letters accelerate in July, after a black riot on Chicago's West Side, which brought this response from Mayor Daley—"I think you can't charge it directly to Martin Luther King. But surely some of the people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people how to conduct violence, there on his staff, and they're responsible.... Who makes a Molotov cocktail? Someone has to train the youngsters"—and these from one M.R. Rosen, president of Becker Brothers Carbon in Cicero, and a resident of rural Danville:

Last night there was a show of appreciation for all that has been done to help the colored people. Even those that have been moved from the slums into high rise apartments have seen fit to shoot and wound our policemen. Don't you think it's time to have Dr Martin Luther King and other negro leaders start preaching that they should go to work the same as white folks do, if they wish to improve their lot, instead of continuing to promise them more and more in all their talks.
How much longer are we doing to be the suckers, giving away tax payer's money and in return see what it has got us. Shooting, looting, and additional cost to community in the way of police protection, hospital expenses, replacement of burned and smashed automobiles, etc.

I do not understand the Negro riots in our big cities. These negroes have civil rights. They do not suffer from discrimination. Many are supported by our taxes.

On July 28, 1966, The New York Times reported of deliberations on the civil rights bill, "Fearful of fairly widespread defections in their own ranks, Democratic leaders are counting heavily on Republican help in salvaging the open housing section." On the House floor, conservative Republican William C. Cramer of Florida, cried, "This is not going to bring about the solution of the plethora of problems relating to the ghettos. This is not going to settle the riots." A segregationist Democrat from Alabama warned of "the discord which will be provoked in communities throughout the land if this proposal is adopted.... It is ironic that many who cry for liberty and freedom for special groups...diminish and destroy the rights of all men." Another from Florida said, "In the past when legislation produced bad results, the Congress repealed it. Now sociological reasoning seems to say the solution to a statute which produces looting, burning, and rioting is to pass more of the same." And in Chicago, one Milton J. Hayes, vice president of the American National Bank and Trust Co. of Chicago, wrote his senator after a stroll in Washington D.C. was interrupted by an open housing march:

As a member of the over 150 million white population of this country, I respectfully request that some action be taken to prevent such demonstrations in the Nation's capitol. This is an imposition on the majority and prevents the average citizens from enjoying his capital. This is itself is one of the most severe forms of discrimination.

And a stockbroker wrote on his letterhead:

When the negro community & its leaders talk of civic responsibilities, I will be in favor of further civil rights legislation—not before. I live on the Lake Street 'L,' & all reason on this subject went up in smoke when riders had to lie on the floor to escape snipers' bullets fired from public (!) housing developments. You must assure me and my family of protection from this ghastly sort of thing, before you can expect sympathetic support for negro demands.

Then, the watershed. On July 29, Martin Luther King led what was supposed to be all-night vigil in front of F.H. Halvorsen Real Estate in the Bungalow Belt neighborhood of Gage Park. The police rescued them from an advancing mob. The returned to the same spot the next morning. They were met by a hail of rocks. And Senator Douglas got a raft of letters dated July 30. The one from "Mr and Mrs John Albrecth" included a column by Barry Goldwater arguing that blacks riot because their leaders demand too much, "speaking endlessly of quick solutions, of instantly setting aright old injustices, of changing men's hearts with a stroke of the pen.... We have far too long lived in the world of sociological LSD where political power was supposed to be able to make men healthy, wealth, and wise, even beautiful":

Although I am a staunch Democrat I cannot help but wholeheartedly agree with Barry Goldwater article. I'm almost sorry I didn't vote for him.
"I feel Mr Johnson Pres is much responsible for the present riot by his constant encouragement for the Negro to take any measure to assert himself & demand his rights--Rights, and respect are earned!

This one made it into the book. Elenaor M. Gavior of 5207 S. California, wrote:

As a Gage park resident & that of my in-laws & my parents, & their familes we are living as decent, hard-working people, you should consider martial law to prevent a peaceful community from getting harassed. That you should consider re-establishing law &order & change laws to protect the people and not criminals & people who openly voice their opinions against the majority as well as the government. Our children don't get sprinklers, day courts, new schools, elevators, cheap rent, yet they will be asked shortly to go fight on foreign shores. I think its time to defend our country from within. I have 3 sons & I will gladly have them defend this country here.

And, I wrote, Mrs. Gavion's sons would soon have the chance to do that, from their very own Gage Park front yards. On July 31 five hundred open housing marches were met by a mob of 4,000, and cherry bombs, bottles, and rocks. Priests and nuns ("whores!") were singled out for abuse. A first grade teacher, Sister Mary Angelica, was pummeled to the ground. A cheer went up: "We've got another one!" Marchers returning to their cars found them torched, overturned, or rolled into the muddy Marquette Park lagoon.

Back in Washington, the Republican Party passed a watershed: they chose Goldwaterism as their official ideology on civil rights. At an August 2 press conference of the House Republican Policy Committee, Gerald Ford announced the caucus's opposition to the open housing bill: "Respect for law and order is basic to the achievement of common goals within our nation," he began, and blamed the open housing struggle for law and order's decline. "Since its inception, it has created confusion and bitterness. It has divided the country and fostered discord and animosity when calmness and a unified approach to civil rights problems are desperately needed."

Three days later 600 marched again in Chicago, against 10,000 counterdemonstrators. Some wore Nazi helmets. Others waved Confederate battle flags, carried George Wallace banners, Swastika placards that helpfully explained, "The Symbol of White Power." This was the famous march where Martin Luther King was hit by a giant rock, where he told the press, "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate," where, because Mayor Daley, scared he wouldn't be able to secure the 1968 Democratic convention if King was injured, had the cops give them (relatively) safe passage—one of the reasons (Republican opposition to open housing being the other) for the chants along the route, "Don't vote for Democrats! Don't vote for Democrats."

Letters to Senator Douglas, August 5. Reading them in that archive, I felt like I was peering into the dark soul of America to a depth I'd never thought possible. From 3111 W. 71st:

Recently we members of the Marquette Park area of Chicago witnessed violence over the so called subject of civil rights. Since the Civil Rights Act Act was passed all we have seen is violence, riots, and general defiance of the laws of our land by the Negro population under the guise of this nebulous term, civil rights. When is the Congress going to wake up to the fact that it cannot legislate morals or love?
"We white people have taken a lot from the Negro. We have been patient, and now find ourselves pushed up against a wall by groups that feel it is their God given right to have our property. We have worked hard and saved to get what we now own. Because we do work hard and wish to maintain our property are we to be denied the right to dispose of our property as we see fit? Is the ultimate aim the same as the Soviet Union when all property was collectivized....
The Civil Rights legislation amendment that which deals with the so-called open occupancy law is disgusting and makes me almost ashamed to admit that it has been proposed in America. All this civil rights legislation is un-American.

From 3322 2. 64th:

Will you please do all in your power to make the laws for the benefit of America.
The average citizen is becoming nervous, tense, and disgusted, with people being allowed to cause all this. The marchers are a direct menace to public safety. Are they the devil or communists. I live in Chicago Lawn, stayed in my own house; the noise, confusion, anxiety is impossible to bear.
To your colleagues and anyone voting on our laws. The average citizen is losing his rights.

5715 S. Kolman:

He was quoted on TV tonite as seeing more hate in the Marquette Park area than he saw down South. What I want to know? Is that hate or fear? I think its fear that another neighborhood will go down the drain
For instance, the Southeast side of Chicago had many beautiful areas that have become slums because of dirty & sloppy people. Why don't Dr King, Al Raby, and his fellow followers work at educating thse people on fundamental cleanliness and moral obligations.

7134 S. Avers:

If this is a result of passing a law that was intended to help a group of people and if this is the reaction, something is drastically wrong. IT IS TIME TO CHANGE THE LAW TO PROTECT ALL THE PEOPLE. Maybe then, we will have some kind of peace and order in our cities. Reading this morning's paper makes me shuddering and wonder where it will all end. My husband and I were both of the opinion when the Civil Rights Law was passed that everyone in this country had right to whatever the country had to offer--by hard work as our parents did and as we are doing. They did not demand anything--they worked for what they have.
When a group of people march into neighborhoods--stir up the people with their irresponsible leaders and then say that are against violence--they are talking nonsense--why, their very actions reek with violence...
I am appealing to you to use our elected office to do whatever you can to bring some sanity back into our country before we crumble from within.

5939 S. Richmond:

Up until now many of us have been sympathetic & tolerant. This no longer exists. If our present leaders in Washington are confused, perhaps a completely new group would be able to handle the situation better.

And finally, a set of petitions, also dated August 5, 1966:

We are writing to you, and requesting legislation for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Act wil rob a great many Americans of their rights to property, individual liberty, freedom of choice, and enterprise.
This Act is the wrong vehicle, impracticale and undesirable, and we are bitterly opposed to it.
We also request legislation to stop these civil rights demonstrations.
When civil rghts leaders walk into a community and bring with them the most notorious thugs and gang leaders in the city, it is hypocrisy to call them peaceful demonstrations.
"You cannot substitute the law for incentive, responsibility, initiative, honor, duty, achievement, or creative activity of the individual."

The day after that:

At least fifty square of Chiago is occupied by negroes which means that no part of that area is safe for white people to travel...
It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes....
"NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

The day after that, from 6106 S. Whipple:

Please put me down as one who believes that brotherhood, racial harmony, morals or love cannot be legislated.
I also believe that bigotry, prejudice, or hate cannot be erased by additional laws or by physical force.
It is my opinion that the entire so-called 'civil rights' legislation should be reappraised. Money and laws will not automatically instill responsibility, honor, duty or achievement....
I think Negroes, as a body, will be accepted generally when and if they follow the example of the other ethnic groups that have in the past been discriminated against.
These groups worked hard, built their communities, religious institutions, hospitals, etc. through their thrift, example, education, and encouragement of their offspring to attain higher social status, they won general admiration and acceptance. This all was accomplished without any government hand-out....
Is it any wonder that people of the white race become incensed when they feel there is a threat of invasion or inundation by a people who have demonstrated their inability or incapability for concerted action for improvement of themselves or their surroundings?

This pretty much covers the tone of things for the next couple weeks—dozens of letters: "It is my firm belief, and of all my neighbors, that king should be taken into custody, charged with fomenting civil disorder and anarchy.... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hitler." The only shift: the letters to Senator Douglas make more and more explicit reference to the November election:

While you sit on your butt in Washington Martin Luther King is violating everything I bought and paid for. That jackass Percy is beginning to look good to me.

Paul Douglas, for his part, stiffened his spine—"I am for open occupancy. I believe in equal opportunity of every man and woman. I do not intend to switch or to equivocate"—despite letters like this: "I have been a Democrat for over forty years, but you can be sure on November 8th that I shall turn Republican.... In all my years as a democrat I have not received any favors from any of the parties."

Perhaps he had seen the following poster that began appearing in Chicago's bungalow belt neighborhoods (also from Box 722):

"OUR SLOGAN: 'Your Home is your castle--Keep it that way by Voting STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN.
VOTE STRAIGHT REPUBLICAN IF YOU ARE:
"AGAINST--violence, riots, and marches in the streets;
"AGAINST--disregard for law and order;
"AGAINST--The 3 Rs of today--Riots, Rape & Robbery...
"Did Mayor Daley make a secret deal with Martin Luther King to stop the marches until after the election?... This is you chance to show where you stand on FORCED HOUSING.... Renters, as well as homeowners, would be effected for the law applies everywhere, including the suburbs. WHERE WOULD YOU GO TO BE SAFE?
"The only way to stop this program is by you, your family, and neighbors voting Republican on November 8th."

Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford's talking points to the letter, he went on ABC's "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren't ready to force people to accept those they don't want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.

Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world's first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy's daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas's 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people's unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.

No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:

A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunity to vote you in to the highest office in the land--The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.

Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: Voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their Social Security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.

Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the mid-century American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.

This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.

What's Missing from the Nuclear Power Debate?

Sara Robinson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:59:29 -0400

Ah, you optimistic soul. Did you really think the nuclear power debate died after Three Mile Island brought the reality of its dangers home to insurers, investors and utility companies?

Think again. As both the rhetoric and the reality of global warming heat up in the years ahead, nuclear power is about to rise from the grave like a reanimated zombie. And the bad news is: It looks like we're going to have a harder and harder time escaping some very brain-dead discussion about it.

There's danger here—but it's not what you probably think it is. As the new battle lines are being drawn, we're at serious risk of having the wrong conversation—and, perhaps, fighting the wrong battles as a result. Americans on both sides of the issue are already positioning themselves take up the same positions they abandoned in the early 1990s, with one side presenting the same old technology solutions and the other side countering with the same old arguments. Neither side seems to be even remotely aware of emerging second-generation nuclear technologies, all of which are being developed overseas, that pretty much render every argument on either side absolutely wrong.

Meet Sara Robinson

Sara Robinson will be appearing Saturday evening, July 12, in a panel discussion titled, "Peak Oil and the Media: How Bad Can The News Get?" at the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive in Vancouver, British Columbia. For more information, click here.

This week, I'd like to take a quick look at where nuclear power is headed, and why we might want to keep an open mind about it in the future. That said, I'd like to make a couple of things clear. First, I am in no way suggesting that old-fashioned first-generation nuclear reactors have any place at all in a carbon-free future. We've been there, done that, got the Chernobyl and TMI tee-shirts and the glow-in-the-dark three-eyed frogs. Nobody—not even Wall Street— wants to go back there.

Second, I'm not even convinced personally that second-gen nukes will, in the end, live up to their initial billing. (Few things ever do.) But they are different enough that we need to take them on their own terms. That means keeping our minds open to the new possibilities they might offer. It also means that arguing them down using the same old talking points is only going to make it easy for the industry to portray us as out-of-date and irrational—and probably deservedly so.

So: if we're going to have this conversation again, we need to have it on the basis of the facts as they are in 2008, and not as we recall them being in 1988. Unless you've been paying unusually close attention the past few years, when it comes to the future of nukes, it's quite possible that everything you think you know is wrong.

Not Your Father's Nukes

The game-changing technology is the pebble-bed reactor. They're actually a very old reactor design, predating the rod-based designs that eventually prevailed because Admiral Hyman Rickover chose that design for America's nuclear sub fleet —thus committing the country to what was, even then, a particularly dirty and dangerous form of reactor. But they're on their way back now —especially in South Africa, where PBMR plans to have a fully-operational prototype reactor on line within the next year or two; and China, which is pouring more funding into pebble-bed research than any other nation, and also has its first reactor in the works. Both countries consider PBRs a critical investment in exportable technology for the future.

The "pebbles" in pebble-bed reactors have a core filled with tiny sand-like granules of fissible material. A pea-sized pile of these grains is encased in four layers of specialized ceramics and graphite until the entire unit is the size of a tennis ball. The shell keeps most of the radioactivity inside: you don't want to walk around with a pebble in your backpack, but they can be safely handled by people in standard radioactive hazmat suits. About 360,000 pebbles are stacked up in the reactor core, creating a hot pile. Helium is circulated around the pebbles, conveying the heat to the turbines.

It's a very simple design, and one that offers a multitude of advantages:

Safety: PBRs operate at temperatures of about 1,500 degrees—nothing remotely close to the surface-of-the-sun heat generated by rod-based reactors. If it gets too hot, the reaction stops naturally, with no human intervention. This makes meltdowns impossible.

An early PBR experiment in Germany did result in an atmospheric radiation release in 1988 (which pretty much put an end to that country's research into PBRs). The accident was due to a pebble that got caught and crushed in machinery—a problem that should be fixable in future designs.

Other safety concerns include the lack of a containment building (which allows for air cooling), which could leave the reactor more exposed to terrorism; and possible failures of a pebble's ceramic outer coating, which could allow the inner graphite shell to burn. Again, these are problems that may yield to further research. It should go without saying that PBRs shouldn't be part of our carbon-free energy solution unless problems like these can be definitively resolved.

Expense: Their safety makes PBRs vastly cheaper to build, since they don't require the extreme level of containment and fail-safe equipment of traditional reactors. Furthermore, they're designed to be modular —small enough that an average town can afford to buy a little one, then add another and another over time as demand grows.

Efficiency: One of the strongest criticisms of traditional nukes is that we're likely to run out of uranium not too long after we run out of oil. Current PBRs are many times more efficient at turning radiation into electricity, which means we could stretch the current known 80-year supply for several centuries—or more, as the technology matures and even more efficient reactors are perfected.

Sole-Sourcing Risks: Current PBR designs can run on a variety of fissible materials, including thorium and plutonium. If the supply of one is disrupted, you simply switch to another.

Spent Fuel Handling: PBRs don't solve this problem entirely—the spent fuel still needs to be stored—but it does make it considerably less complicated and dangerous than the nightmare we've already been through. The graphite composite shells are designed to remain intact for a million years, outlasting even plutonium's radioactive lifespan. Transporting the pebbles, while still a dangerous proposition, carries far more manageable risks: even a bad truck or train accident won't contaminate a large area, and it can be far more thoroughly and reliably cleaned up. (The South African facility at Pelindaba can store 80 years of fuel onsite, which means they won't be moving any for a long, long time.) The volume of the shells means that the pebbles take up about the same amount of storage space per watt generated as current systems—but since most of that volume is graphite and ceramics and the overall radioactivity is vastly lower, it's far, far safer for us, and for future generations.

Nobody wants to generate—let alone transport or store—more nuclear waste. But as the threat of climate change looms, the way we weight that equation may change. (Create a few noxious waste storage sites around the globe, or let the whole planet cook? Hmm. Choices, choices....) Having a safer way to move and store the waste doesn't eliminate the hazard, but it may well change the way we reckon the risks.

Weaponization: One serious problem with spent rods is that they can be recycled into fuel for nuclear weapons. But PBR pebbles' greater efficiency means that the fuel is burned more completely—which means there's not much left to weaponize. Furthermore, it's not worth cracking through the heavy shell just to get at that little bit of fuel. As a result, there's no real incentive for countries to go mucking around in each other's spent fuel depots looking for nuclear weapons fuel.

Desalinization: Fifteen hundred degrees is a convenient temperature for distilling very large quantities of seawater—which means PBRs may become a cheap, simple solution for the world's looming potable water crisis. South Africa's PBMR is rumored to have designed systems that use the waste heat generated by the reactor to distill seawater for city taps.

Cooling: Unlike traditional nukes, PBRs are cooled by helium, not water; so there's no hot water discharge that might disrupt ecosystems in neighboring waterways.

You can see why this technology is intriguing enough to merit a fair look.

The Politics of PBRs

Pebble-bed reactors haven't yet entered the American nuclear conversation for a variety of reasons. One is that it's been experimental technology for the past decade, and we're still a good five years from having anything saleable on the world market. Another, of course, money: Our government, plus quite a few corporations, have invested heavily over the decades in first-generation nukes, and aren't ready to abandon those sunk costs to move over to something new. (However, they're not out of the game entirely: Westinghouse and MIT are among the U.S. companies and research institutions that are participating in the South African and Chinese projects; and the Department of Energy has issued a $3 million grant to kick off home-grown PBR research in Idaho.) Another is the intensely nuke-hostile cultural climate of the past 25 years, which has made it harder to generate R&D funds to explore other kinds of nuclear energy.

A couple of weeks ago, I described a scenario in which the United States is eclipsed by another nation—one that emerges to offer the world an energy regime that's more efficient and versatile than oil was. The prospect of a new Chinese empire rising on pebble-bed reactors is one extremely plausible direction this scenario could take. In a 2004 article in Wired, Spencer Reiss notes:

The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.

Taking the long view, the Chinese are not staking their future on coal and oil. By mid-century, they could well be the world's leader in building and using PBRs. And as I noted in that earlier article, nations that dominate the world's power supply tend to end up dominating the world politically and economically as well.

This is why allowing our nuclear conversation to stay stuck in the '80s is so dangerous. We have a choice: We can re-hash the old arguments based on "facts" that are no longer true; or we can ask our own nuclear industry leaders why they're trying to sell us 60-year-old technology instead of looking ahead more aggressively to see what the next generation of nuclear power might bring us. We can also ask them why they're allowing the Chinese to open such a wide lead in the race to the next energy regime—a lead that may well be decisive in China's eventual emergence as the world's next superpower. At the very least, it makes no sense at all to spend a single dollar building even one more old-style plant when something with so much better potential looms so very near in the future.

As I said: second-generation nuclear power will, no doubt, have problems of its own. (There is no such thing as a free lunch, ever.) Furthermore, there is no question whatsoever that the fastest, best way to cut carbon emissions is by increasing the efficiency of our lifestyles.

But, faced with the increasing likelihood that whatever we do will not in the end be enough, it is wise for us to soberly, critically re-consider the nuclear option. Compared to the old technology, 21st-century nuclear power is such a quantum improvement that it deserves to be explored and discussed on its own terms. And Americans—both environmentalists and nuclear scientists—need to approach that conversation with fresh questions and fresh answers, mindful that those little graphite pebbles may well be the start of a whole new ballgame.