Detasseling Corn, a Peasant Revolt and the Return of the Light Bulb

“The first vehicle I learned to drive was an International Harvester tractor. The second was a bulldozer, which was a heck of a lot more fun. The third was my Dad's pickup truck. Later that year, I turned 11." Kevin O’Brien, The Plain Dealer Full Text

When my sons were kids, age nine and eleven as I recall, they worked one summer de-tasseling corn. The de-tasseling season ran three or four weeks. They worked a four hour shift and were paid around $10 an hour. It was hot and nasty work, but it made both of them “rich.”

This is work our US Department of labor will no longer allow children to perform on America’s farms. The agency has proposed child labor regulations that will severely limit what chores farm kids can do. Needless to say American farmers are alarmed and livid over the proposed rule. It would prohibit children under the age of sixteen from operating farm equipment, handling livestock, and even de-tasseling corn.

More than one hundred of Congress and the US Senate have objected to proposed regulations. They’ve asked that the agency withdraw the proposal claiming it will significantly harm agriculture and the nation’s food supply.

O’Brien reported: “a letter signed by 32 senators raises a host of practical objections rooted in the concept and operation of the family farm, including this one: “Until recently, farms jointly owned and operated by multiple family members had discretion over the responsibilities they gave their children on the farm. But the proposed rule change would do away with that freedom. . . . It is common in rural America for siblings to jointly own and operate farms and for extended family and neighbors to participate in agriculture production. With this rule change, the government is proposing to tell farmers and ranchers: We know what's best for your children, and what they should and should not be doing."”

I am counting on this as the beginning of a peasant revolt.

Today, the last day of 2011, I stocked up on 100 watt incandescent light bulbs. I’ve hoarded twenty-four of them which should last well into 2014. By that time public outrage will force the light bulb law to be repealed, and with it any number of other senseless laws and regulations.

Lake Trout, Mercury and a Bold Faced Lie

This is about fish, clean air and bold faced lies. You need to know something about lies first.

President Obama has spent most of the year pushing for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” These of course are individuals with annual incomes greater than $200 thousand and households exceeding $250 thousand.

As I blogged earlier in The American Peasant Tripping Down Stalin’s Path, taxing all household income above $200 thousand a year at a 100% tax rate would net the US Treasury about $2 trillion, just enough to cover current federal budget deficits with a little left over to begin retiring some of our national dept.

Nevertheless, the President has pushed this mantra hard enough and long enough that some 66% of Americans believe the rich are not paying their fair share in income taxes. It’s a bold faced lie.

In the table below, courtesy of the US Internal Revenue Service, those in the top 10% of adjusted gross income tax returns provided the treasury with of over 70% of its income tax receipts. The top 50% of personal income tax filers coughed up 97.75% of all personal income taxes paid.

Tax Year 2009

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$343,927	36.73
Top 5%	$154,643	58.66
Top 10%	$112,124	70.47
Top 25%	$66,193	87.30
Top 50%	$32,396	97.75
Bottom 50%	<$32,396	2.25
Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income

Now, in politics if you repeat a lie often and with confidence, it becomes a political truth to drive policies that would otherwise be untenable. That is the sad truth infecting not only our legislative bodies, but permeating our regulatory agencies as well. Here is the bold, but veiled face of tyranny. So now for the truth about fish and mercury.

Just before Christmas, the US Environmental Protection Agency published its rules for toxic mercury emissions from coal and oil fired electric power plants. The EPA has full statutory authority to establish emission control standards for toxic air pollutants. But those standards have to reflect human health risks and environmental harm weighted with compliance costs.

Toxic mercury air emissions from coal fired power plant present minimal direct human health risks. Mercury is a bio-accumulating toxin which as it works its way through the aquatic food chain can accumulate to levels of some concern in larger aquatic species if we eat them. Hence, here in Milwaukee for example, we are warned not to eat more than one meal a week of wild caught Lake Michigan lake trout. Pregnant women and nursing mothers are warned not to eat it at all.

EPA’s new regulation was promulgated to address this problem. But here’s how, according to The Politico, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson unveiled the new rule:

““I understand the importance of protection … both my sons struggled with asthma,” Jackson said. “Fifteen years ago, my first son spent his very first Christmas in the hospital,” she said. “I can tell you, I think he was admitted almost 15 years ago to this day.”

EPA says the new standards will prevent 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year, along with 130,000 childhood asthma symptoms and 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis in children.”

Suddenly the rule is no longer about mercury and fish, but is instead about childhood asthma symptoms. It’s bait and switch, the swindle and the big lie. Eating lake trout does not cause childhood asthma or bronchitis.

EPA estimates the rule cost’s to electric utilities and ultimately to consumers will exceed $10 billion. Critics contend the costs could reach $100 billion. According to IHS/Global Insight, the world’s largest economics consulting firm with more than 3800 clients in industry, finance and government worldwide, for every billion dollars spent in complying with the new rule, 16,000 jobs will be lost and the U.S. GDP will be reduced by up to $1.2 billion.  (Full Text – A summary of a cost/benefit white paper by the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council)

In short, if the rule withstands court challenges, what is likely to be one of costliest rules in EPA’s history is justified on a bold faced lie. It will not significantly reduce mercury concentrations in fish. A Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out the total benefits from removing the mercury will amount to less than $8 million. (Full Text)

The questionable health benefits result from the reduction in fine particulates that will also be stripped from the flue gasses in the course of meeting mercury standard. Even those benefits are statistically insignificant.

The AP reported the rule could force the shutdown of between some 30 and 60 coal fired power plants. Other than that, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, on this news the Fourth Estate has remained silent.

On a more positive note, the USEPA has newly launched an internal reform effort. It is trying to reinvent itself as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Environmental Sustainability. (Full Text) It had to reach far back into environmental law to find the statutory authority to do so and could only manage legal justification with a grossly edited and truncated minor paragraph from the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

Tyranny.

A Cristmas Story and a Book of Memories

I’ve become a writer of books or rather of a book only reluctantly. It’s tough work, with few prospects of financial success. My book is a simple thing. It’s the story of my wife’s parents, Ukrainian peasants both. This book isn’t meant for financial success.  I am writing it for my wife, my children and my nieces and nephews. The title is simple too, Gus – A peasant’s journey through the Twentieth Century. I hope to finish it this spring. I’m self-publishing it.  Here is a draft introduction.

This is the story of my wife’s parents through much of the Twentieth Century. The starting point for both Gus and Olga was Ukraine. Both were peasants. Both wound up in suburban middleclass America. Between those two endpoints were: WWI, the Russian Revolution, Collectivization of Soviet Union agriculture, the Great Depression and WWII on both the German eastern and western fronts. This is not a history of monumental people. Those Twentieth Century histories have long been written. It’s a story of story of peasants finding their way through the monumental times of the Twentieth Century.

Sometimes it takes a while to connect the dots. I must have been married for eight or nine years before it occurred to me that my father-in-law, Gus, not only lived through the Russian revolution but likely was old enough at the time to have recollections of it.

I knew he was born in Ukraine in 1908. I knew ethnically and culturally he was German. I knew he immigrated to Canada in the 1920s and then to the US. I knew I had married into a closely knit extended family and most of my wife’s aunts and uncles came to the US following WWII. I knew my mother-in-law was something of mail order bride. I knew she had fled from Ukraine into Austria with the retreating German army in WWII. I knew Olga and Gus had not met prior to her arrival in America. I knew many things and I knew nothing.

Mostly we live in the present. Our personal histories extend primarily to our memories and those shared with others. What I knew about my in-laws was mostly what I knew of them in the present: they were devout Baptists; their social lives were centered on their extended family and church community; and both groups we’re largely populated by ethnic German immigrants and first generation Americans.

Almost ten years after my wife and I had been married we were celebrating Thanksgiving with her parents. In the course of conversation it finally occurred to me that Gus would have been eight or nine years old at the close of WWI and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. My own memories go back to when I eight and before. So I asked Gus if he remembered the Russian Revolution. He did and vividly. 

Throughout the following winter, I visited often, with a tape recorder, and let him tell his life story. That spring I transcribed those interviews and began writing this book. I knew it would be a mammoth project and I also knew I was not a writer of books.  Good grief, I was an industrial salesman.

After drafting the first few thousand words I thought it was time for a reality check. The story I was writing was a combination of Gus’s narrative, family profile and a more detailed history of times and places Gus had told me about and also about the places Rita’s extended family were at in given times.  As a writer this all this adds up to tough transitions. Though, I didn’t know that.

I attended a writer’s workshop to get feel for if what I was doing was any good and worth the effort. I was told something about tough transitions. In a similar vein, that fall I returned to college and enrolled in class on writing non-fiction for publication – more talk on tough transitions. There was something about climbing up and down the ladder abstraction too. Ladders of abstraction and tough transitions aside, the feedback from the writer’s workshop and non-fiction writing course was positive.

That summer, a friend of mine started a legal publishing business and needed writers. Suddenly I found I was a legal journalist reporting on environmental legislation, litigation and regulation. The family history project was placed on a back burner and ultimately tucked away in a closet to be returned to at some later date. Big projects tucked away in closets are things thought of with dread – hard work and foreboding with fears of inadequacy. They are thought of it’s there and ought to be worked on. And at the same time, the dreadful conclusion is I really don’t want to go there.

That later date turned out to be twenty years into the future and some four or five operating systems later. Thank God I had the wisdom to save my work in an ASCII text format.

About Christmas time last year, Rita asked, when are you going to finish my father’s history? By next Christmas, I told her. “It will be a Christmas present.”

That wasn’t going to happen. But it was a deadline. Some deadlines are set in stone. Some are meant to be broken – in place only to keep a project moving forward. Mine was one of the latter.  Now there was much work to do – history to brush up on: the great depression, WWII and the like. Some of the history I needed to know was only just being written. The history of Stalin’s collectivization program only started to come to light in the early 1990s.

 A formal history of European displaced persons at the end of WWII was first published in 2011, as I write now. It’s a huge story. But it was overshadowed by so many other huge stories of WWII it’s almost forgotten. Other stories, such as the Battle of Los Angles are found in old newspaper accounts and in more recent but obscure military histories.

The twenty year lag time was both a blessing and a curse. If I had known then, what I know now, I would have been more able to question Gus and Olga for details and could have presented their narrative fully. But I cannot go back. Both are dead. I am sorry I can’t say to them “tell me more.”

I am sorry too that I can’t go back to both of my parents and say tell me more of your lives, of the times before I was born and of the times neither my sisters nor our brothers can remember. We live in the present after all. Our histories mostly consist of our shared memories and shards and bits of memories from what we know from parents from those times before we were born. There is always the courtship story, after all.

These things become like the frozen and dissolving pixels on our digital TVs when the signal goes bad. Lost. For our roots we try to piecemeal them back together through genealogy and elaborate family trees.

I had the luck once to connect the dots – to ask a question and to say tell me more.

In the end, that simple question resulted in this story. This story is a very simple gift of love, first to my wife and my children. After that it’s a gift wife’s brothers and cousins and their children. And finally, this is a gift to the many people who share a similar history. And in retrospect it is a gift to Gus and Olga. It says I remember.

Rouladen & Other Happy Meals

Rouladen is one of my happy meals. It’s a simple thing too. It’s a thin slice of round or sirloin steak, layered with two strips of bacon then wrapped around a generous dill pickle spear, a rib of celery cut somewhat wider than the slice of steak and a carrot stick of equal proportions.

This beef roll is secured with a couple of toothpicks, seasoned with salt pepper and paprika and baked uncovered with beef stock at 350^o for forty-five or fifty minutes until browned. Add additional stock as necessary for gravy, cover and bake at 275^o for about another hour, until the steak is fork tender.

Thicken the pan drippings with a white wash and season to taste with parsley, garlic and onion powder. Serve up with homemade spätzle and my Bavarian red cabbage and oh my, you have created a Milwaukee, German-American feast fit for royalty. Easy.

McDonald’s also serves up happy meals, but not so much to my liking. Children seem to love them because they include some sort of toy. Now when my own kid were toddlers and preschoolers, my wife took them to McDonald’s one night for supper. They were thrilled. Up until that point in their little lives they had never been to McDonald’s. We were a young, struggling couple with three kids. McDonald’s was simply a too pricey meal for our family of five at the time.

I was off fishing. Rita had been busy putting in a garden and didn’t much want to cook. We’ll go to McDonald’s she told the kids. They squealed in anticipation and joy – a special dinner out and ooh at McDonald’s. Aside from burgers, shakes and fries, McDonald’s servers up a ton of advertising, as in “oh I’m love’n it.”

Little kids buy into that, adults do too. On that day my kid’s expectations met up with reality. The much anticipated McDonald’s happy meal, even with the toy, wasn’t much too their liking. The burgers at home were better. At home they were made better beef, served on a better bun, seared to a juicy perfection and cost a great deal less. At home these burgers were not served with fries, but with a salad.

As for the rouladen, tell me what could delight a child more than a slice of tender beef wrapped around the colorful and tasty splendor of the pickle, carrot and celery stick. I recall taking my two young sons to the mall at Christmas time one night after supper. They were maybe four and five years old. It was mostly to get them out of the house for a while to burn off a bit of steam. We went to the local mall, played hide and seek in the Victoria’s Secret’s store and such. We returned home an hour and a half or two hours later.

When we got home, my youngest son Ed had some sort of wad in his cheek, like a jawbreaker or a slug of chewing tobacco. Neither jawbreakers nor chewing tobacco were part of our evening excursion. It turned out the mysterious wad was in fact a brussels spout that he had squirreled away in is cheek. He was quite literally savoring it all that while.  Brussels sprouts, like rouladen are part of my food culture.

But so is an occasional Big Mac. And I’ve found that their sausage McMuffin with eggs sandwich has medicinal properties for curing hang overs.

Now back to the McDonald’s Happy Meal. San Francisco tried to discourage happy meal sales by focusing on the happy meal toy.

The city enacted an ordinance that prohibited restaurants from including a toy with meals that do meet city generated nutritional standards. The measure was a thinly veiled shot at McDonald’s. In some circles McDonald’s is an evil corporate force largely responsible of “childhood obesity epidemic.” San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar evidently runs in one of those. (view video – it’s a hoot)      

And his ordinance reeks of hypocrisy. San Francisco school lunches don’t meet the city’s nutrition standards either. (Full Text) You would think a city with the audacity to draw up municipal nutrition guidelines would apply them to their school lunch programs first. But no and in the broader scheme of things, what’s up with city nutrition guidelines anyway?

McDonald’s of course took counter measures to get around the silly ordinance. Now in San Francisco you can only get a toy when you order a happy meal. It’s an option. They charge an extra ten cents for it. The extra ten cents goes to Ronald McDonald charities At McDonald’s stores elsewhere the toys can be purchased for separately $2.18, so a health consciences parent could have their child wash down a salad with a cup 2% milk and still thrill them with a toy.

But it’s no longer that way in San Francisco – to get the kid the toy, you have to buy the happy meal. It seems the McDonald’s corporate lawyers have beautifully ironic sense of humor.      

Eric Mar you’ve been outbid, out trumped and checkmated. I suspect you’re ‘not loving it.’