The African Union’s (AU) heads of state met last week last week in Kampala, where 76 people died in Somalia-linked bombings on July 11.  They endorsed the policy that has failed for years, increasing the scale by adding 2000 or maybe 4000 troops.  If you believe that only Americans think that more is always better, think again. The US did its part by agreeing to put up more money.

There was one holdout.  Eritrea, represented by its foreign minister and returning to international meetings after an extended boycott, opposed sending more troops.  It also opposed the AU decision to let the troops be more aggressive.  Until now, they have been limited to being ‘peace keepers’, though there is no peace to keep.  The AU wanted them to be ‘peace makers’.  The difference is that peace makers can shoot first but peace keepers have to be shot at first. The UN agreed with Eritrea and persuaded the AU to withhold the ’shoot first’ authorization.

It’s ironic that Eritrea, which has refused to talk to its own enemies for years, is the one pushing for dialogue.  Eritrea has rejected talk with Ethiopia for the past seven years, refused until recently to talk to Djibouti after starting a border clash, won’t accept the credentials of the US ambasssador, etc.

The US tried to use force in Somalia in the 1990s and ended up with ‘Blackhawk Down”.  UN blue helmets from Pakistan suffered even more deaths that same year.  Ethiopia invaded in 2006 and withdrew a few years later after achieving little to show but casualties. Now it sends in troops for short incursions with limited goals.  If the AU increase materializes, it will have 8000 or more troops in Somalia — the main effect of which will be to increase the casualties among both the troops and Somali civilians.  Soldiers coming back in body bags are starting to chill public support in their home countries.

An alternative idea known as ‘constructive disengagement’ is becoming fashionable, an impressive label for a flimsy concept.  If  ’disengagement’ means ending the current failed policy, it could have merit.  As for ‘constructive’…well, it’s not clear what that means in practice.   Humanitarian aid would continue and humanitarian aid workers protected.  So far, so good, though that’s no change.

What would be new is the withdrawal of all foreign troops, though occasional interventions  (e.g. drone attacks or other raids) are not ruled out.  A big change would be opening a dialogue with Al Shabaab and other Islamists, something that Eritrea also urges. Eritrea is a reformed (apparently) supporter of some Islamists, with whom it has presumably been talking all along, though probably not about ending the fighting.  What these proposed new ‘constructive’ conversations might be about isn’t clear.

How dialogue differs from simply capitulating to the Islamists also isn’t clear. The Islamists would have even less incentive to relax their grip. On the other hand, fighting the Islamists obviously isn’t working.  The new theory is that Al Shabaab, the dominant Islamist group, is so riven with factions and rivalries that only the presence of foreign fighters…Ethiopians, AU troops, raids by Americans drones and missiles…has kept them united.  Without a common enemy, Al Shabaab would disintegrate into squabbling rivals, or weakened enough for local warlords to chip away at their turf.

It’s possible that Al Shabaab will not survive, with or without ‘constructive disengagement’.  Power struggles among the Islamists are no secret. Al Shabaab is widely hated for banning the World Cup on television, hacking off arms and legs of accused thieves, stoning rape victims for the crime of adultery and other un-Somali fundamentalist excesses.  Traditional  Somali Islam is not Al Qaeda Islam. Also, Al Shabaab now hosts hundreds of foreign jihadi Islamists, making them vulnerable to Somali antagonism toward outsiders meddling in local disputes.

But ‘constructive disengagement’ confuses the possible collapse of Al Shabaab with the restoration of civil order.  For most of the past nineteen years there was no Al Shabaab and no order.  Instead, there was rule by local strongmen, gangsters and extortionists, some along clan lines, some not. But in some local areas traditional leaders and institutions maintained surprisingly effective rule. locally.

There was no ambition to create a national government until the short-lived Islamic Courts in 2006, who brought welcome civil order before they took fundamentalism too far for most Somalis, and absurdly threatened to take the Ogaden from Ethiopia. When Ethiopia invaded, it has now been forgotten, many Somalis greeted them with enthusiasm for ridding Mogadishu of the tyrannical clerics. Few defended the Islamic Courts. If only Ethiopia had left at the end of the week, instead of staying for more than two years….

‘Normal’ countries can’t seem to tolerate anything but a recognizable state, even one like North Korea. Anything else is a ‘failed state’.  The possibility that Somalia might be better off, at least for now, without a central government, with local authority for now in the hands of trusted local leaders and familiar institutional forms, is beyond their imagining.

A few analysts have suggested that this might be more effective than supporting the illusory Transitional Federal Government on one hand, or abandoning Somalia to either Al Shabaab or the vacuum of its collapse on the other.  This approach is also short on specifics, but at least it promises something to build on, which is better than than waiting for Al Shabaab to collapse and praying that what follows isn’t even worse.

So…what to do about Somalia?  African heads of state are clueless.  Europe and the US are equally clueless.  Too many people without a grasp of the reality of Somalia are writing papers for each other. In the meantime, the danger appears to be spreading.  The bombs in Uganda may not be the last.  American and other nations’ Somali immigrants have already been recruited by the Islamists.  Doing nothing is not an option.

Forget about Paul Theroux, Peter Hessler, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Tony D’Souza and all the other noted Peace Corps writers! If you want to know where publishing is headed, read what Jason Boog has to say.

Jason is an RPCV who is ahead of the “publishing game” in New York City. I have been aware of Boog for a few years and watched him from a distance as he has successfully circumnavigated the deep, shark-infested waters of traditional Manhattan literary life.

But who is this smart guy with the weird name, anyway?

After spending two years on top of a mountain in Peace Corps Guatemala, Jason writes that he ”chased the dream of every skinny Midwestern writer boy with glasses: to starve to death in New York City.”

Photo by Coy Gutierrez

Today in New York, he is an editor of Mediabistro Publishing, where he “curates publishing events and helps with the digital publishing curriculum at mediabistro.com. He also edits Mediabistro blogs GalleyCat and eBookNewser.

Before mediabistro.com, Jason was an investigative reporter at Judicial Reports and a publishing blogger for Know More Media. His work has appeared in Granta, Salon.com, and The Believer.  You can follow his daily posts at GalleyCat, mediabistro.com’s publishing website, or follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn or write him at jasonboog [at] gmail [dot] com

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Years ago, when he wasn’t yet famous, I interviewed Jason for our site, PeaceCorpsWriters. Here’s that interview:

Talking with . . .

. . . Jason Boog
An interview by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64)

JASON BOOG (Guatemala 2000-02) joined the Peace Corps after graduating from college. Following his tour, he went to graduate school and lives now in New York City where he has contributed book reviews and essays to our site. In 2006 he won the Peace Corps Writers Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award for his essay, “The Rainy Season in Guatemala.” Besides writing for us, and working full time, he has a wonderful blog for writers that we wanted you to know about, so we interviewed Jason recently about his writing and his unique and valuable blog.

Jason, some background. Where are you from in the States?
I’m from Ionia, Michigan, a little town 30-miles outside of Lansing. I graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in literature.

What got you into the Peace Corps?
Well, I joined Peace Corps as a poor college graduate. I knew plenty of things about literary theory and great writers, but I didn’t really know anything about how the real world worked. I wanted to help people, learn Spanish, and travel, but I had no idea what I was getting into. I joined up, and those two years broke me out of my comfortable, limited bubble. I went in dreaming about being a literature professor, I came out wanting to be a traveling journalist.

What did you do as a Volunteer?
I worked in a pilot program (sadly now suspended) called Rural Youth at Risk. I lived in the dusty eastern side of Guatemala, working in a mountain village called Miramundo to build economic opportunities for teenagers. We created a small bakery and flower nursery business, hosted community talent shows, and worked to bring a high school to the village. Until very recently, school ended at sixth grade for most of my kids.

And then you came back to do graduate work?
Right. I studied magazine writing at New York University’s graduate journalism school.

Have you published much?
So far not much. I’ve been published in magazines and newspapers. I have a few favorite places where I’ve published before: I wrote about Latino immigrants for Newsday, analyzed radio dramas for website The Believer in a piece called “Skinning the Americans” and wrote about my Peace Corps experience for Abroad View Magazine. And, of course, I have published on your site, Peace Corps Writers

Oh, also I just finished my first novel, a faux-memoir about a journalist named “Jason Boog” who uncovers a vast conspiracy behind the toy soldier industry - a strange adventure story that ends in Guatemala. I’m just beginning the tricky search for agents and publishers now.

What about your blog? Tell us about that.
It is called The Publishing Spot. I help fledgling writers find the resources they need to work in a writing world being turned upside-down by the shift from paper to web publications. I conduct practical interviews with professional authors about how they use the Internet to build community, find readers, and survive in this tough new economy for writers.

There are a tremendous number of blogs on the Internet. Is anyone reading them?
The beauty of blogs is that they are specialized, almost surgical about finding the right audience. I love reading the comics pages in the newspaper and reading about Peace Corps news, so I discovered wonderful blogs like Comics Curmudgeon and Peace Corps Writers where I can find other people who like similar things.

My friend Steve, on the other hand, finds both of these topics a little tiresome, so he spends his time reading blogs about web video reelpopblog.com. While no blog will ever rival the audience share of a big network television show, there are a tremendous number of blogs that have dedicated niche audiences to sustain them.

What other blogs do you read?
I dabble in a few different fields when I read. For journalism news, I read Journerdism.com. For literary edification I visit Edward Champion at EdRants.com. For writing advice, I visit LitPark. For my artistic side, I read 52 Projects. For international journalism, I like to visit my friend Adam’s site AdamBellick.com

I keep track of all these blogs using Google Reader. It’s a program that collects all your favorite blogs on a single page so you don’t have to visit all your favorite blogs every day. It helps!

What are some good blogs for Peace Corps writers?
For writing resources and advice, I have a few favorites: the Creative Writing MFA Blog explores the best (and worst) programs around the country.

Practicing Writers has an excellent newsletter about writing markets Practicing-Writing.blogspot.com. Finally, I like reading the different posts at Metaxucafe -a site that collects the best literary blog posts every day.

If you want even more resources, visit my writing website, The Publishing Spot. In the lower right-hand corner I keep a collection of my top ten writing sites. They are all very useful. Every time I find a blog that I enjoy, I check the list of links of websites that the writer enjoys. I usually find more reading material that way. Once again, I recommend Google Reader to keep track of the blogs.

You have a blog . . . how would someone go about creating one?
The most important thing is finding something to write about. Everybody scoffs at blogs because they think they are the diaries of people in pajamas. Not true! The best blogs are written by writers who are enthusiastic about something - your Peace Corps site, pulp fiction novels, knitting, or scuba diving.

As long as you are enthusiastic about your topic, you can find readers. Do a Google Blog Search about your topic, see what other bloggers are writing about your topic. Read these blogs carefully.

Then go to a free blog site like Blogger. Sign up for a free account and design your blog. They allow you to completely customize every aspect of your blog, from web-page colors to headline fonts. The site contains plenty of tutorials on their Help page that will guide the most inexperienced blogger through the process.

Then, start writing about your topic. I recommend reading Copyblogger or Problogger . Both of those websites will teach you how to write gripping, exciting blog posts.

Finally, go visit the blogs that write about your topic. Leave thoughtful comments in the comments section, and engage people in debates about your topic. Before long, people will be checking out your blog to see what you are writing. As long as you stay enthusiastic about your topic, you should keep writing.

Are blogs where we will fine the great writing of the future? Will anyone ever again read a book?
I don’t think blogs will ever replace books. Blogs just make it easier for writers to connect with their readers. A Peace Corps memoirist, for instance, can build a website that includes photos from their service, web videos of their host country, and hyperlinks that can connect readers to other sources of information about the county.

Someday, I hope digital books will be able to incorporate this kind of functionality into the actual text. If and when I publish my novel, I will create some short web videos that let readers explore settings from my book - a trip to my Peace Corps site in Guatemala, a visit to my hometown in Michigan, and a tour of my favorite pub in New York City. I don’t think people will stop reading books - I think they will eventually expect more playful ways to interact with a novel.

Let’s go back to Peace Corps writers for a moment. What books and Peace Corps writers have impressed you?

Of all the Peace Corps writers, I’ve been influenced by Tony D’Souza’s playful, literary style. I read a couple books by Paul Theroux during my time in Peace Corps, he set the bar pretty high for all of us. Tom Bissell has been another big influence, I read his travel pieces immediately after I left Peace Corps - his journalism gave me hope for the kind of stories I wanted to write.

Do you think that there is something we might call a genre of writing that we might call “Peace Corps Literature”?

I wouldn’t call it a genre, the writing is too varied and diverse to classify that way. I would call it a community. I showed up in New York City without knowing a single writer out here. Through the networking and support of the Peace Corps community, I was able to survive the early lean years in this city. In particular, I really benefited from the support of RPCV writers like Nita Noveno and yourself. Both of you helped me find other writers in the city and helped me publish my work as well. Without the returned Peace Corps bond established at Peace Corps Writers and Nita’s Sunday Salon, I think most literary Volunteers would feel a little stranded in New York.

What advice would you give someone who wants to write about their Peace Corps experience? Give us 5 points to think about or consider.

Finally, what do you do for a living. I presume that the blog does not support you at the moment, right?
You presume correctly. However, I am lucky enough to write for a living. I am a staff writer at Judicial Reports, doing investigative reporting about the New York judiciary.

Thanks for the chance to write, John. I have really valued your support over the years, and thank you and Marian Beil for this website for Peace Corps writers.

The so-called ‘cash-in’ mortgage has become more popular of late for a number of reasons. It means paying down the mortgage, which is the opposite of cash-out refinancing where borrowers are taking cash out of the equity in their homes.

The main reasons homeowners are doing cash-in refinancing are first, bringing the loan amount more in line with lower home values. But also homeowners find that paying down, say, a 5 percent mortgage more quickly means they are saving 5 percent, vs. the very low interest rates from regular savings.

Amy Crews Cutts, deputy chief economist for Freddie Mac, says "The Fed doesn’t intend to start raising interest rates for a while…you’re not going to make money in CDs. (And) The stock market is giving people heart attacks on a daily basis with its ups and downs."

Consumers are paying down their overall debts with a vengeance in these uncertain times, as we have said in past columns—in part because mortgage rates are now at all-time lows, with conforming and so-called jumbo-conforming 30-year fixed rates below 4.5 percent. Even super-jumbo rates to $2 million are hovering around 5 percent these days.

And it looks like housing prices are finally on the mend with the latest (May) seasonally-adjusted Case-Shiller Home Price index up 1.3 percent. Economists caution that it is measuring prices during the height of the selling season, but 19 of the 20 cities in the index showed increases.

The Composite 10 is up 5.4 percent compared to May 2009. The Composite 20 is up 4.6 percent compared to May 2009. This is the fourth month with Year-over-Year price increases in a row.

Here are some reasons borrowers might consider a cash-in refinance, according to CBS Marketwatch:

· If it allows the borrower to stop paying private-mortgage insurance, required when the mortgage is more than 80 percent of the home’s value. Extra cash could allow a borrower to eliminate PMI, saving them monthly premium costs.

· Borrowers want to reduce their mortgage term, perhaps moving from a 30-year to a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage, Hsieh said. The extra cash can reduce the mortgage amount and make their monthly payments bearable.

· When the extra funds may get a borrower the lowest rates possible — those that require a loan-to-value ratio of less than 60 percent and a FICO score above 740, said Jack Pritchard, a mortgage consultant who co-founded Refinance.com, a site that helps borrowers evaluate mortgage and refinancing options.

· Extra cash can also sometimes bring a mortgage under the conforming loan limit so the borrower doesn’t have to pay higher jumbo rates. The conforming limit is $417,000 for single-family homes in many markets, and $729,750 in high-cost areas of the contiguous United States.

In what may be another sign of an improving housing market, the homeowner vacancy rate declined to 2.5 percent in Q2 2010. A normal rate for recent years appears to be about 1.7 percent, according to Calculated Risk. “This leaves the homeowner vacancy rate about 0.8 percent above normal. This data is not perfect, but based on the approximately 75 million homeowner occupied homes, we can estimate that there are close to 500 thousand excess vacant homes.”

Note that the vacancy rate rose sharply from 2006 to December 2007, the beginning of the Great Recession, a sign of massive overbuilding that caused the housing bubble. But it has now fallen, though not yet enough to erase the inventory overhang above historical vacancy levels.

But a recovery is in the offing as the combination of record low interest rates, a Fed still in the mood to be accommodative for an “extended period’, and housing prices back to early 2000 levels should entice more buyers into a buying frame of mind.

Harlan Green © 2010

Most historians consider Harry Truman as one of our great Presidents, even though he didn’t consider himself as such. It wasn’t until later years showed the greatness of “give ‘em hell, Harry”, as he was called once at a whistle-stop during his 1948 presidential campaign that defeated the heavily favored New York Governor Thomas Dewey.

He faced tough economics times, as we do now, with an even larger debt load due to WWII, and 5 million servicemen/women returning home and out of work. He was also was faced with a Republican Congress in 1946, unhappy with the huge debt load. Sound familiar, as we said last week?

With so much uncertainty, he did what great Presidents do, he became a transformational leader, in the words of conservative columnist George Will. And he suffered the slings and arrows of disapproval for it. “The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything,” is one of his better-known ‘Trumanisms’.

What were the lessons learned? Daughter Margaret put together a book of his pithy sayings, in WHERE THE BUCK STOPS-The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman. Edited by Margaret Truman. 388 pp. New York: Warner Books, 1989.

Maybe his outstanding trait was that he was plain spoken—who grew up on a small farm in the heartland of Missouri. And he never left his roots, retiring back to his Independence in 1954. He never loved Washington, D.C., either. He once advised, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

””A good president just can’t pay any attention when the press tries to abuse him, Truman writes; ”the papers often abuse him when he’s right. It doesn’t bother any man in office who wants to do the right thing,” he adds. ”He goes ahead and does it no matter what the newspapers may say. I never cared anything about what they said about me as long as they didn’t jump on my family. If they did that, then they got into trouble.

”It doesn’t make any difference whether or not the thing he (the President) decides to do is unpopular, or whether his doing it makes him unpopular for a while. If he does the right thing the popularity will come. If he doesn’t, well, then, too bad.”

But that was just the surface. His economic philosophy mirrored Roosevelt’s New Deal, because he was always for the underdog. In fact, he won over Dewey because the pollsters who had predicted his defeat forgot to poll those lowest on the economic ladder who turned out in droves to vote for him.

And we have the same need now to boost the earning power of those wage and salary earners lowest on the economic ladder who comprise more than 50 percent of the workforce, yet whose incomes have stagnated after inflation since the 1970s.

Job formation has really been increasing since January, and real estate prices have inched up, but sales remain stagnant. This is while corporations have reported record profits over the last 2 quarters with the highest profit margins since WWII, yet they have not been investing in either new plants or employees.

And so government has had to step in to counteract the cash hoarding of some $1.8 trillion being held by the S&P 500 corporations alone. But why such a fear of debt, when the Great Depression has provided us with a lesson of what needs to be done to counteract such fears?

Economist Paul Krugman has pulled up some of the Great Depression’s history and surprise, the Hoover Administration’s emphasis on reducing deficit spending increased debt as a percentage of GDP, while shrinking actual GDP growth (and revenues). But increased government spending (and debt) during Roosevelt’s New Deal increased economic growth, so though debt loads were high, it brought the U.S. out of the 1929-1933 depression and produced 3 years of growth. The double-dip only returned in 1937, when Roosevelt listened to the bankers and tried to reduce the deficit prematurely.

“The experience of the 30s,” writes Krugman, “offers no support to those who worry about the debt consequences of deficit spending in a depressed economy — FDR didn’t do enough stimulus, but the spending he did do was not reflected in a spiraling, or even rising, debt burden. And the evidence is consistent with the view that austerity, Hoover-style, may well be self-defeating even in a narrow fiscal sense.”

Supporting the present picture is weak growth of the Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators, a monthly snapshot of 12 important indicators that affect growth, such as interest rates, and hours worked.

"The LEI decreased in two of the last three months, but its level is still about 4.5 percent above its previous peak before the recession began," said Ataman Ozyildirim, economist at the Conference Board. "Moreover, the gains among the LEI components have been widespread, with the exception of housing permits and stock prices, pointing to an expanding economy, but at a slower pace in the second half of the year."

A major reason for continued sluggish growth is that real estate, the traditional first responder to better conditions has still to work off more than 1 million units in excess inventory built up over the bubble years. Total inventory peaked in 2006, but months of supply didn’t peak until 2008, as the sales’ rate declined drastically with bursting of the credit bubble.

This increase in inventory is especially bad news because the reported inventory is already historically very high, and the 8.9 months of supply in June is well above normal.

So there is good reason for the Fed to continue to hold interest rates at record lows, and Chairman Bernanke has promised to do so for “an extended period” in his latest congressional testimony. "We are ready and we will act if the economy does not continue to improve — if we don’t see the kind of improvements in the labor market that we are hoping for and expecting," he said.

Harlan Green © 2010

Goal One:  It can contribute to the development of critical countries and regions.

Goal Two: It can promote international cooperation and goodwill toward this country.

Goal Three: It can also contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world.

On the morning of Friday, February 24, 1961, Shriver delivered the report-the Peace Corps Magna Carta-to Kennedy and told him: “If you decide to go ahead, we can be in business Monday morning.”

It had taken Shriver, Wofford, Wiggins, Josephson and the other members of the Mayflower Task Force, less than a month to create what TIME Magazine would call that year ”the greatest single success the Kennedy administration had produced.” On March 1, 1961, President Kennedy issued an Executive Order establishing the Peace Corps.

Today, as we see, from this Report to the Peace Corps as we reach 50 years we are still debating what the Peace Corps is all about. As Sarge Shriver thought all those years ago, “the tension between competing purposes is creative, and it should continue.”

Thanks, Sarge, for all those sleepless nights!

Torn in the South Pacific
by Jeff Bronow (Fiji 1988–90)
Publish America
$24.95
246 pages
January 2010

Reviewed by Reilly Ridgell (Micronesia 1971-73)

I’M A SUCKER for books set in the tropical Pacific. I’ve read most from Melville to Stevenson, to London, to Maugham, to Burdick, to Frisbie, to Nordhoff, to Hall, to Michener, to Becke, to Stoddard, to Osbourne, to Russell, to Grimble — all making their best effort to explain, through their European or American eyes, what it’s like on Pacific islands.  Peace Corps has been the great facilitator here, depositing Volunteers in exotic (to us) locations that only fuel the writers’ fire most of us carry. So it is with Jeff Bronow, who had the fortune to find himself living in Fiji shortly after the Pacific’s first military coup d’etat, a bloodless 1987 event that was spawned by British colonial policies dating back more than a century. Bronow has used his experiences to give us his first novel, Torn in the South Pacific, that follows a recently arrived Peace Corps Volunteer John (we never learn his last name), as he struggles with his new environment, tries to comprehend the conflict between Indians and Fijians, and tries to find himself spiritually at the same time.

Bronow does a good job of explaining the conflict between Fiji’s two major ethnic groups:  the indigenous Fijians, proud descendants of the original people who settled Fiji 3,000 years ago, and the Indians, descendants of indentured workers brought in by the British to work the cane fields. By 1987 the Indians outnumbered the Fijians and took control of the government, prompting the coup by the Fijian army which was comprised almost entirely of Fijians. John experiences this conflict at the grass roots level, a good mechanism for the writer to explore the issues involved. He’s a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching at a predominantly Indian high school. Like a Volunteers, he’s supposed to stay neutral on political issues, and he wants to experience both cultures, Indian and Fijian.

There is some good writing here. Bronow does a nice job describing John’s environment and the everyday life he experiences. As a reader, I want to be pulled in and placed in the setting, especially if it’s someplace like Fiji. Bronow does that. His story, slow at first, takes off about half way through with some excellent scenes in a Fijian village, and others featuring the crossing of rain swollen rivers. The final conflict scene is well done also, though Bronow could have mentioned that fire walking is also done by Fijians.

But there are some major concerns and drawbacks to this novel. As mentioned before, it starts slowly, and the opening two chapters are a bit cumbersome. They don’t really grab the reader and that can be the kiss of death for a book. Bronow insists on giving us detailed descriptions of mundane activities that don’t really contribute to the story. Such descriptions are interesting and help the reader appreciate the life style, but they are overdone. The author doesn’t need to recount every conversation had with the neighborhood children every time they bring him some food. The spiritual, religious, and philosophical discussions get a bit ponderous at times, and his psychedelic dreams seem contrived.

The main character has this overpowering spiritual hunger, but we never know why. All we know is that he is from LA — which may explain it. There is nothing about his family back home, nothing about any girlfriend left behind, no explanation of why he joined the Peace Corps, almost nothing about his training and nothing about his interaction with other Volunteers and Peace Corps officials. We don’t know if in training he studied Fijian or Hindi and though he knows simple phrases in each, he appears to be making no concerted effort to learn either language. John has long discussions with an expatriate friend who keeps talking about getting back to God, and he spends time reading the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, but we never really know what his religious beliefs are. Bronow ends the book with a long spiritual discourse and some Bible passages, but I missed whatever point he was trying to make.

Then there are other annoyances. The publisher, Publish America, prints a disclaimer right in the front of the book saying, essentially, that they did no editing. This is a major red flag and says a lot about the publisher and the author. All of us writers need editors, need fresh eyes to see things we can’t because we’ve looked at our manuscript a thousand times. Now I must say the typos aren’t too bad. I ran into only about ten or so. But there is some awkward and repetitive word usage, there’s the aforementioned excessive detail in some scenes, Fijian and Hindi words are not italicized and sometimes not explained, we sometimes don’t know if the person he’s talking to is Fijian or Indian, his new found girlfriend’s hair goes from black to brown to black again, and he drinks lots of yaqona (kava) but doesn’t really describe the effects. Many of these things would have been caught in a good edit. A good edit would have also trimmed the story down a bit and made it move much faster, especially in the first half of the novel. I also think it could use a better title and, good grief, what’s with the cover? This is the South Pacific! Put some palm trees and beaches or some breathtaking scenery from Fiji. Please.

That being said, if you want a good look at the Peace Corps experience in Fiji set against the backdrop of the conflict that, 20 plus years later, is still not resolved, then you will find Torn in the South Pacific a very interesting read.

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

Iracema’s Footprint
(Peace Corps novel)
by Bernard F. Blanche (Brazil 1965–67)
Eloquest Books
$21.95
460 pages
April 2010

Mosquito Operas: New and Selected Short Poems
by Philip Dacey (Nigeria 1964–66)
Rain Mountain Press
$10.00 (from PublishersGraphicsBookstore.com)
73 pages
July 2010

After many years of teaching history and writing in public schools in Long Island, and in colleges (Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Ohio, Oklahoma), Tony taught literature and writing at a teachers’ university in the Peoples Republic of China. The year in China was the second life-changing experience for Tony. Studying, discovering, and appreciating Chinese culture and the people is the subject of The Mind Dancing.

Not just a collection of poems, The Mind Dancing traces his journey of self-discovery from his experiences in China. Part One, “Roots,” establishes the foundations of Chinese culture indispensable for personal growth.  Part Two, “Discovery,” reveals spiritual development from experiencing the environment and people of China.  Part Three, “Separation,” depicts the sadness of separation, but joyfulness of preserving bonds with Chinese friends and culture. 2008 Texas Poet Laureate Larry D. Thomas writes: “These poems, beautifully illustrated with Chinese characters by Vivian Lu, capture the very essence of China.”

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As a PCV Tony taught Nigerian history and English in secondary schools in Zaria and Yola, Nigeria. The experience was very much an initiation into adulthood for him as there was great hostility in the country between the North and South, and riots and other conflicts led to the Biafran War. Those were quite tumultuous times for Tony, and were suspenseful and emotionally exhausting. His first chapbook of poems, Naked Against the Sky, was based on his Peace Corps experiences.

After the Peace Corps, Tony served in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1970. The following is an excerpt from “Becoming a Man in the Sixties: The Peace Corps and the Army” that he wrote for a series of articles for PeaceCorpsWriters.org (January 2005 issue) entitled “War and the Peace Corps.” (The piece was also published in Writers Against War, Winter 2005):

On a dry, sunny day in October 1966, I stepped out of Barclay’s Bank and ran abruptly into a rag-tag mob of young men and teenage boys screaming with hate and chasing a middle-aged Igbo man . . ..

I ran over to the Igbo man and found him unconscious; I could see only the whites of his eyes. When I tried to lift him, I noticed fresh blood oozing from the crown of his head. The leader of the mob shouted out to me, “Batuuree [White man], what you want? This man be your brother?”

I shouted something I’ve long forgotten, and the mob’s leader answered, “Go away, Batuuree. This is our business.”

While I was trying to get help from onlookers to get the man to the hospital, the mob edged closer. Some held rocks and clubs; others swung machetes. I realized that they were not as disorganized as they looked. I also matured a hundred years in those five or ten minutes. I knew I could not save the man. What I could do, I realized, was to look for some Igbo friends in other parts of the town and drive them to safety.

For about three hours, I raced around on my Honda 50 looking for friends. I only managed to transport three people to the airport so they could escape by plane to the northern capital of Kano. One of those I took to the airport was Israel, the young Igbo who worked for me at my house. Unfortunately, the newspaper headlines the following day read that Northern army troops had mounted planes at the Kano airport and killed all Igbo passengers.

My own three years in the Army [serving in Germany], after my experience in Nigeria, seemed almost a mockery of the suffering and agony I saw in Nigeria while teaching with the Peace Corps. Although I know that my experience does not rival the heroism and tragedy of Vietnam, the life lessons are similar. The Nigerian tragedy taught me that I couldn’t change the world. For the first time in my life I began to understand that I am only accountable to my own conscience. And becoming an adult means living with the anguish of our personal limitations and failures.

(A short story based on this event, “Faces of Fear,” appeared in Network Africa (June 1985) and in Okike 25 (1985).

Tony lives in Arlington, TX and teaches writing, American literature, and non-Western literature and culture at Tarrant County College Southeast. He is currently working on a book of poems about the “sweet and sour” emotional journey of growing old tentatively titled Water, Heart, and Sun, the Chinese characters for Eternity.

To order The Mind Dancing from Amazon, click on the book cover or the bold book title — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that helps support these awards.

Keeping the Peace Corps spirit alive, these Colombia I RPCVs, and the University,  will hold a Peace Corps forum on  November 4.  The next morning, Rutgers University’s President, Richard L. McCormick, will preside at a commemorative ceremony, culminating in the unveiling of a plaque on the spot where Colombia I began training for the Peace Corps on June 25,1961.
 
Colombia I RPCVs will host a cumbia-laden celebratory banquet on the evening of November 5, where “elaborations and exaggerations of the truth,” particularly with respect to Peace Corps exploits, will not only be allowed, but  admired and encouraged.

Perhaps it is necessary to once more provide a basic understanding of our energy resources and uses. I ask, what is our primary source of energy? To all of you who reply oil, coal, gas, wood, nuclear, wind, biomass and so on I say, “your are wrong.” Our primary source of energy is solar energy.

What’s that you say, we are far behind other countries in developing solar energy. But you are talking about using solar energy to produce electricity or to heat water. One has to remember that the earth is made habitable by solar energy. The sun does the major work of heating the planet. Solar energy also provides us with fresh water. The sun heats the oceans to produce clouds that bring the rain. No one has ever attempted to calculate the amount of energy required to keep the planet habitable or to bring rain to the lands. But clearly it is vastly greater than all other energy we use.

The problem with solar energy is that we do not have it in full force when the sun don’t shine. Yes, the earth stores a certain amount, but essentially we don’t have the solar energy we need at all times. Even more relevent solar energy does not lend itself to meeting many of our needs. Transportation comes immediately to mind. So we need other energy to supplement solar energy.

Enter fossil fuels that can be carried in our various modes of transportation, e.g. autos, planes, ships. Beside portability we need reasonably priced energy. So prices of various energy becomes important. And fossil fuels are very price competitive.

One application that uses fossil fuels that does not require portability is electric power generation. And here we use hydro-power, solar power, wind power, tidal power, nuclear power as well as fossil fuel power. I would argue that the first step in a new energ policy for the USA would be to reduce the use of fossil fuels for electric power generation. The Obama administration has made a major move here by reinvigorating our nuclear power industry. We also see funds going into wind power for electicity generation. Whatever we use, the objective should be to eliminate fossil fuels from electric power generation as soon as possible with two decades hence not being a too imaginative target date.

We should also work to eliminate using fossile fuels to heat our homes and buildings. Again, these are stationary requirements for energy so portability is not an issue. The issue here is simply price competitiveness. So far the alternatives have proven to be too expensive, mainly because they require fossil fuel back-up systems.

Consider one example. Many homes are now fitted with elaborate solar panels to produce hot water for use in the home. Of course you need a back-up hot water generator to serve when the sun don’t shine. And as far as I have been able to detect there is none designed to provide the heat required to maintain a suitable environment in the home.

In contrast, there are systems to cool homes that are based on using the excessive heat that requires cooling the home. In this case, the stronger the sun shines, the better the machine works, since it uses solar power to cool a refrigerent, rather than warm air or water to heat the home.

I submit it is this type of counterintuitive thinking that is required to bring us less polluting energy.

This report claims six people wrote it, with lots of advisory committees, but I’m told the key writers were Jean Lujan, an attorney, who recently retired from the Department of Justice. She was a PCV in Chile back in 1965-67, and a graduate of the U of Michigan. The other writer (to use the term loosely) was Carlos Torres. He is the founder and former president of I Corporation, a company specializing in international consulting. In other words, a Beltway Bandit. They, and their cohorts, attempts to evaluate the agency, and make recommendations for the future. It was done at the suggestion of Aaron Williams who said during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings that his intention, once confirmed as director, was to “carry out an agency-wide assessment of the Peace Corps as a means of strengthening, reforming, and growing the agency.” Aaron said that “the agency-wide assessment would serve as a valuable tool for the agency to better articulate a strategic vision for the Peace Corps for the next ten years.”

Why anyone would read this report is beyond me. Perhaps that is what they wanted. To write something so ‘unreadable’ that no one would read it! They could collect their per diem and be out of the Peace Corps and no one would know the difference.  It reads like a bad novel, and having written a few bad novels, I know what that prose is like. Here’s an example of an impossible sentences: “The Peace Corps at fifty is ready for a strong new beginning-rooted in the vibrant past of those early days, yet ready to harness twenty-first century American intellectual power, innovation and commitment to result.” What bullshit!

Then, they say (and this is only on page 5!) “Excitement, engagement, and effectiveness are the terms that should characterize the Peace Corps as it moves into the future. As the agency prepares to turn fifty, the agency needs to position itself to be one that looks less in the rear-view mirror at its rich history, but rather, looks forward firmly believing its best days are yet to come.” (Where’s the video of the PCV cheerleaders rallying around this rah-rah quote to carry us all to victory?)

There are some 200 plus pages of such dribble and as I work my way through the document, and the many, many vague recommendations the writers make, I’ll have more to say on other blog entries. But for the moment all this ‘assessment’ language reminds me of what was said and done in the early days of the Peace Corps.

I suggest that the current administration might be wise to look themselves into the ‘rear-view mirror’ and see what Shriver and the other senior staff did 50 years ago, how they did it, why it worked, and use those ideas as the way forward today.

Here are a few examples of what I mean.

Shriver was asked early on about creating a long-term budget estimate, to which he replied by laughing and saying, “That’s a legitimate question, but how the hell do I know where we’re going to be in five years?”  Shriver would top that off by returning the Peace Corps appropriations to the Treasury. He gave back $1.9 million for fiscal year 1962, and $3.9 million for 1963. It was an unprecedented move by a government agency. When is the last time the Peace Corps (or any other agency) returned money not spent at the end of the fiscal year?

Then there is Warren Wiggins. He would write his staff in the first years, “We do not rely upon the rule-book. We operate fast and stay legal, but if something goes wrong, just operate fast.”

Shriver had no time for timid proposal or the bureaucratically inhibited response. He demanded boldness and intellectual daring. “There will be little tolerate of a ‘tomorrow’ philosophy, or ‘it can’t be done because it hasn’t been done before’ attitude,” he told those early employees of the Peace Corps. At the Director he also demanded total commitment from employees. Weekends work and early-morning phone calls to one’s home became standard. And Shriver wanted his Washington staff out in the field, working as Reps with the Volunteers. Harris Wofford went to Ethiopia as CD; Tom Quimby to Liberia; Frank Mankiewicz to Peru. Shriver himself, by 1963, had visited thirty-six of the forty-four countries in which the Peace Corps had program.

Shriver did not want a Peace Corps where the desk-bound bureaucrats made plans, unaware of the actual conditions under which Volunteers work. To make sure that didn’t happen, in 1962, he set up the Evaluation Division, the first of its kind in the federal government.

In recent years, the Peace Corps senior staff never went anywhere. Jodi Olsen, the Deputy Director under the former California cop, Gaddi Vasquez, who gave $100,000 to the Bush campaign to get the Peace Corps job, wasn’t even allowed to travel overseas by Vasquez, and she was the only senior official at the agency who had served as a PCV.

Instead of traveling, the Peace Corps has now gone wild setting up ways and means to ‘evaluate’ the agency’s goals from ‘afar’.

This is not new. Maureen Carroll (Philippines 1961-63) tells that when she was the CD in Botswana in the early 1990s she’d come to work on Monday morning and her office floor would be littered with papers that had been faxed out from PC/Washington over night, all the offices in  PC/Washington wanted to know something. The faxes covered the floor, like so much mice droppings.

Now, in this new digital age of the Internet, starting in 2007, the Office of Strategic Information, Research and Planning (OSIRP) was created and “charged with enhancing the agency’s strategic planning and reporting, evaluation and measurement, and date governance efforts.”

It appears that the agency has pulled together several ‘offices’ in PC/HQ under one giant umbrella. The office does four basic surveys. The first is the Volunteer Reporting Tool, an electronic data management system started in 2009. This ‘tool’ allows posts to “periodically collect detailed qualitative and quantitative data from all Volunteers on activities that relate to the three goals of the Peace Corps.”

The office (OSIRP) second monitoring tool is the Project Status Report which measures the progress of projects toward meeting their goals.

Then there is the “Annual Volunteer Survey to “assess Volunteers’ impressions of their service.”

The last ‘tool’ is the Results Based Field Evaluation. (Don’t you love these names?) This study, started in 2008, ‘collects information from host country counterparts, beneficiaries, host families and stakeholders to help inform Peace Corps on the impact of the Peace Corps’ work primarily focusing on goal one and goal two activities.”

Wouldn’t you think that with all these ‘tools’ the Peace Corps would get it right?

And this is just the beginning of the Peace Corps ‘tools’ for self-evaluation.

There is something called the “Administrative Management Control Survey” as well as reports from the Inspector General Office, also the report adds, “The Peace Corps benefits from the countless number of Ph.D. dissertations, M.A. theses, and academic studies on various aspects of the Peace Corps’ work.”

Really?

I’d like anyone of today’s Senior Staff to quote to me anything that they learned from reading what academics, or for that matter, what RPCVs have to say in their academic research of the Peace Corps.

Since the 90s, I have been giving to Peace Corps Directors, and other ‘new’ (mostly Political Schedule Cs appointments), the names of books written by RPCVs that tell the story of the agency. Not once have any of these people come back to me and commented on what they read or learned. The majority of the senior staff come into the agency totally ignorant of the history or the Peace Corps. It is all “On the Job Training” for them.

All of this brings to mind a story of a Peace Corps Director that I heard about in the late Sixties. This was during the days when CDs really ran their own countries. A Peace Corps HQ official went out to Brazil to see why the Latin America Regional Office wasn’t getting any reports from this post. (The Peace Corps went to Brazil in 1962 and left in 1980.)

Meeting up with the CD on the top floor of the Peace Corps Office in Brazil, the Washington guy had official mail for the Country Director and while they stood together making small talk in front of an open window, the CD casually fingered through the mail, tossing out through the window mail he didn’t want.

Slowly the visiting HQ official began to realized the CD was throwing away (unread) all the ‘official’ mail he had brought with him from D.C. When he glanced out the window, several floors below in the interior courtyard of the building, were hundreds of such official letters from Peace Corps/Washington, tossed away unread by this Country Director.

So much for what Peace Corps/Washington wanted to know about Brazil. This CD was running his own operation and not listening to Peace Corps/Washington.

As Warren Wiggins told his staff years ago, “We do not rely upon the rule-book. We operate fast and stay legal, but if something goes wrong, just operate fast.”

Those were the days!

Stronghold, recommended for readers from 9 to 12 years of age, is a story that combines a boy’s grief, archaeology and the magic of imagination, was inspired by the author’s children when they built forts in the trees near their home, and by the discovery of Anasazi ruins under their home town. Stronghold’s hero, thirteen-year-old Joe Aberdeen finds himself in the middle of a dangerous adventure when he discovers looters in the act of pillaging.

•

Terri McIntyre’s Peace Corps assignment was to start an office skills program in a girls’ high school in Hyderabad, Sind, Pakistan. The only problem during her first month of service, however, was that she had neither students nor typewriters. But she hunkered down and did some serious problem-solving — a skill that would come in handy when she started and taught a program for gifted children years later in a Navajo school.

Her first task as a Volunteer was to build a curriculum, but none of the local girls’ colleges had one to use as a reference in 1964. However, the staff at a men’s college, with amused interest, provided her with a syllabus, and Terri took it from there. Soon she had a curriculum and an empty classroom. In the meantime, as her coworkers looked on and questioned her endlessly about life in the Hollywood versions of America, she was given two duties: start the day leading all 700 girls with exercises in a lot inside the school compound, and assist the Pakistani English teacher, who soon left her in charge.

Terri could have learned much from her this woman who was a cool and modern lady who did not wear a burkah, but Terri was soon too busy drinking 300 cups of tea at the dozens of homes she visited as she tried to convince parents to allow their daughters to join her business office program. Her argument: women, not men, should work in girls’ schools and women’s hospitals. It worked. By spring, she had six students and new typewriters tagged “Ford Foundation” culled from various school district offices, and actually began teaching.

Terri with her student Saghir

When Terri left Pakistan, a local teacher, whom she had trained, was put in charge of the business office skills program in the Government Girls High School. She also left a two-foot wide sombrero and a Navajo rug as gifts to the head teacher and program co-worker. What Terri brought home though was a world view that has kept her pondering and fascinated with life ever since.

She continued college in Arizona (BA in creative writing and literature, graduate studies in secondary education: English, special education, gifted education), married a man from Bangladesh, gave birth to a son of whom she is extremely proud, divorced, taught school for six years with the Juvenile Division of the Department of  Corrections, remarried, and had a daughter she is also extremely proud of, and taught school on the border of the Navajo Reservation.

One of the most direct influences the Peace Corps experience had on Terri’s post-Peace Corps life was in her work with Navajo students through the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program she was asked to organize and teach. The first gifted program in her district was taught after school. Some considered it an elite club and there was much opposition from both teachers and administrators. Once more she found herself battling prejudice. The key breakthrough was a clause in the Gifted Education “Mandate” that encouraged program coordinators to create a talent pool of potentially gifted children, a list of children to be observed and tested. To overcome the elitist aura surrounding the identification of gifted kids (and, by definition, the exclusion of everyone else), her strategy was to create a living talent pool. The small groups of identified gifted were expanded to include the possibly gifted because someone, anyone, including the student, could refer a child who exhibited some special talent. Her justification was that if a child believes she’s gifted, she is gifted. No longer did she hear complaints. Parents formed a support group to address the effects of this approach — after school math club, drama club, and teacher/class workshops in which she could share gifted education strategies and techniques with everyone.

To this day, kids, now adults, come up to her in a store or at the post office and proudly say, “Remember me? I was in your GATE program.” Unfortunately when Terri retired, the program was retired, despite all the manuals she had written and materials and equipment she had obtained with grants over the years. Budgets became tight and the Mandate went downhill with art and music.

Recently she began to wonder what had happened to the office skills program in Hyderabad, so, although she did not physically walk in, she visited Government Girls High School, aka Miira School, via Google Earth. There was the front gate where tongas and rickshaws left off students, her first tiny classroom atop the school building, the kitchen room behind the administration office where she pissed everyone off when she insisted on washing every leaf of lettuce, the wall of roses the girls would pick and chew on the blossoms, the dorm in which she lived for nearly two years next to another teacher’s room, the two rooms sandwiching a brand-spanking new toilet, a little chamber that in 1964 received many visitors, not for use, but for viewing.

And there was that big yard where she stood on the wall leading 700 girls wearing white shalwaar-kamiizes and red sweaters in exercises she made up because, in her words, “I really didn’t know what I was doing.”

To order Stronghold from Amazon, click on the book cover or the bold book title — and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance that helps support these awards.

I’ve read some chefs refuse to bake with anything else, and I must agree they are delicious.  But will a dozen good eggs be enough to convince them to tolerate our unexpected rooster, especially considering he’s not exactly necessary to the production process?  He’s huge and pompous, and when you see what he does to those poor hens, well, I’d have no remorse throwing him in the stew pot.  The thing is, noisy horny arrogant pecker that he is, I really want to keep him.  He’s colorful and fun to watch and that crowing makes it feel like a real farm to me.  I’m not sure why I like that, but I really do.  Though I really do hope it’s not just novelty, because handy hubby likes it so much I don’t I could persuade him to ever leave.

Words, logic, and general functioning seem to be lacking for me these days, I’m blaming it on the weather, so rather than try to write more, I thought I’d add photos instead to illustrate last week’s post.

The bullish wandering cow that has made herself overly-comfortable

Does she feel any need to share?

What a difference a year makes

I keep saying that real recovery will not come until we revive the securitized debt market with its huge credit creation effect. Remember, in the run up to the 2008 Recession we were all borrowing heavily against our homes to buy second homes, new cars, vacations, and more. We were using the equity in our homes to live beyond our pay checks.

It is now obvious that the average American is cutting back on purchases and living closer to his current income. Fear of job loss is one reason for this. Another is the shock of seeing home prices plummet, thus rendering those debts against them larger than their values.

The only way out is to revive the securitized debt market and reintroduce the added income stream coming from this credit. Obviusly debt against homes is out. One alternative is to peg the securitized debt more closely to the asset acquired by this source of credit. New car purchases would be a good example.

To me it has become abundently clear, the only way we can get back to the economic heights we enjoyed until 2008 is through returning to the creative credit mechanisms we enjoyed that allowed us to consume beyond our pay check. In this case the average person simply parallels the policy adopted by the Obama administration, i.e. massive deficit spending.

Have you not read the newspaper or watched TV news lately? Do you not realize how utterly effed up our world — our country, rather — has become?

And this despite Peace Corps efforts. . .

Was it e.e. cummings who said “Listen there’s a helluva good universe next door, let’s go” ?

The  AU summit in Uganda, scheduled long ago, has naturally put Somalia high on its agenda.  Unexpectedly, Eritrea showed up at the meeting.  Since this has led to high level personal contacts by Eritrean officials with both Africans and outside observers, it is clearly a step toward a return by Eritrea to the international community.

The significance is in their presence, even if they say nothing of particular interest.  It seems unquestionable to me that one purpose of attending the meeting is to reestablish personal connections that can be followed up privately.

Maybe we are seeing a return to the smart diplomacy that Isaias practiced so effectively for many years. It may be his decision to do this, or he may be responding to pressure from a frustrated and restive inner circle that is chafing at the international isolation that the UN sanctions made inescapably clear.

I hope both Africans and others will respond positively to such gestures, to encourage the process to continue.

By now, and this was early in 1965, the Peace Corps was starting the “In, Up & Out” policy that Robert Textor had crafted in a memo for the agency, and Bob Gale was thinking of leaving. He didn’t want to be Director of Recruiting for Life, as Shriver had declared at the senior staff meeting in March 1963.

Gale wanted to leave when the going was good. In the academic year 1963-64, his recruiting techniques had bought in thirty-six thousand applications. During the 1964-65 season, his formula attracted forty-six thousand.

“I really wanted to quit while I was winning,” he says. “To have gone stale at the Peace Corps would have been a sad thing.”

The end came for him in the snows of March in Bloomington, Indiana on a trip with Shriver.

It was a classic “Shriver way” to end a career at the Peace Corps.

Shriver was giving a speech to two thousand students on campus in the college auditorium.

“Sarge was doing his Pied Piper number, Gale recalls. “His stem-winder speech, quoting from Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson and the Greek philosophers and the Bible and JFK’s inaugural speech. The kids were going wild.

“We were, as usual, running late and had a plane to catch. The students were following him as he left the auditorium; they were asking for his autograph, wanting to shake his hands. Mobs of them.

“I got  Shriver into the car and we took off for the airport in a blizzard of snow. I had no idea whether we would make the plane, but now Sarge wanted me to go, go! Frazzled I missed the turnoff on the highway. We can’t get up onto the cloverleaf. I didn’t know how or where to double back, out there in the middle of all this farmland.

“Sarge says, ‘go that way!’
“But that’s the opposite exit ramp, Sarge. We can’t.”
“Sure you can. Sure you can. Blink your lights! Honk your horn! Keep honking!’

“So, we head up the exit ramp the wrong way at sixty miles an hour in the blinding snowstorm and Sarge is cheering me on, just as excited as hell. Lights blinking. Horn hooking. Total madness. And I make an insane, suicidal U-turn at the top of the ramp, and we’re off in the right direction. We make the plane!

“To Sarge, making the plane was simply the happy ending to a series of delightful episodes. To me, it was simple The End.”

It was Over. It was time for Bob Gale to leave the Peace Corps and  his legacy, The Wisconsin Plan. Blitz Recruiting. Like everyone else who served in the agency in those early years, he was: In, Up & Out! of the Peace Corps. The greatest job he’d ever loved!

[End]

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke just gave his semi-annual report to Congress, and it looks like Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Governors continue to be cautious in advocating more stimulus. That is too bad, when a consensus is building that more monetary stimulus is needed to put monies into consumers’ pockets with jobs still hard to find.

Why have the Fed governors been so timid? It has more to do with ideology, than economic fundamentals. Since many of the Fed Governors are former bankers, they dislike debt, and the Fed has had to buy more than $2 trillion in mortgage-backed and Treasury securities to add liquidity to the system. This has kept interest rates at historic lows, but has only begun to bring real estate and job creation out of their doldrums.

Job formation has really been increasing since January, and real estate prices have inched up, but sales remain stagnant. This is while corporations have reported record profits over the last 2 quarters with the highest profit margins since WWII, yet have not been investing in either new plants or employees. Bernanke in his latest Humphrey-Hawkins congressional testimony said that it was because corporations had too much excess capacity, (which means they see insufficient demand for their products and services).

And so government has had to step in to counteract the cash hoarding of some $1.8 trillion being held by the S&P 500 corporations alone, to help stimulate that demand. But why such a fear of debt, when the Great Depression has provided us with a lesson of what needs to be done to counteract such fears?

Nobel economist Paul Krugman has pulled up some of the Great Depression’s history, which shows that the Hoover Administration’s emphasis on reducing deficit spending increased debt as a percentage of GDP, while shrinking actual GDP growth (and revenues). But increased government spending (and debt) during Roosevelt’s New Deal increased economic growth; so though debt loads were high, it brought the U.S. out of the 1929-1933 depression and produced 3 years of growth. The double-dip only returned in 1937, when Roosevelt listened to the bankers and tried to reduce the deficit prematurely.

“The experience of the 30s,” writes Krugman, “offers no support to those who worry about the debt consequences of deficit spending in a depressed economy — FDR didn’t do enough stimulus, but the spending he did do was not reflected in a spiraling, or even rising, debt burden. And the evidence is consistent with the view that austerity, Hoover-style, may well be self-defeating even in a narrow fiscal sense.”

Supporting the present picture is weak growth of the Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators, a monthly snapshot of 12 important indicators that affect future growth, such as interest rates, and hours worked.

"The LEI decreased in two of the last three months, but its level is still about 4.5 percent above its previous peak before the recession began," said Ataman Ozyildirim, economist at the Conference Board. "Moreover, the gains among the LEI components have been widespread, with the exception of housing permits and stock prices, pointing to an expanding economy, but at a slower pace in the second half of the year."

A major reason for continued sluggish growth is that real estate has still to work off more than 1 million units in excess inventory built up over the bubble years. Total units of housing inventory peaked in 2006, but months of supply didn’t peak until 2008, as the sales’ rate declined drastically during the credit crisis and failure of lending institutions such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

This increase in inventory is especially bad news because the reported 8.9 months of supply in June is well above normal.

So there is good reason for the Fed to continue to hold interest rates at record lows, and Chairman Bernanke has continued his promise to do so for “an extended period” in his testimony. "We are ready and we will act if the economy does not continue to improve — if we don’t see the kind of improvements in the labor market that we are hoping for and expecting," he said.

Harlan Green © 2010

Untitled 1 (Kitchen)

Darfur in Brooklyn is a documentary photography project that shadows a day in the life of a Sudanese taxi driver named Omar.

Damian met Omar at a protest in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, DC. He soon learned that Omar lived in the neighborhood adjacent to his in Brooklyn that had a large Sudanese population. Damian began shooting portraits of many of the 300 Darfuri refugees that live in Kensington, a Brooklyn neighborhood just south of Prospect Park, but soon realized that Omar’s face reflected the struggle of the Darfuris as a whole.

“The Darfuris accepted me and opened their houses to me. I became friends with many of them, but Omar was the most receptive to being photographed. His home, his hands and his eyes tell me everything that I want to convey about their life and struggle,” says Damian.

Omar came to the United States more than four years ago, leaving behind his entire extended family in order to escape the genocide. Black Africans are being killed strictly because of their race. The genocide continues in Darfur, and photographer Damian Wampler has worked to spread the news about the senseless killing so that perhaps people will take notice, and governments will take action.

“The best documentary photographers give voice to the voiceless. As the tragedy in Darfur drags on, it becomes less popular and seemingly less urgent,” Damian says, hoping to bring Darfur back into the spotlight with stunning, provocative images.

Damian’s approach to documentary photography uses the language of fine art instead of photojournalism. Omar has been thrust into a very alien world, far from his family and friends. In Darfur he earned a university degree in Arabic. Now he drives a taxi. Before coming to America, he didn’t have a driver’s license and had never seen snow.

The process was collaborative, and a friendship between the photographer and the subject developed. Damian took pictures of the Darfur refugee community in Brooklyn over the course of four months in the winter and spring of 2009.

“Omar introduced a new world to me, and it shows in the photographs,” says Damian.

Prior to being acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, five prints from Darfur in Brooklyn were included in the group show Surface Tension at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York in October 2009.

“What impressed me the most about this group of photographers is how fearless each one of them is in capturing their subjects,” Surface Tension curator Dan Halm says, “from technical know-how to emotional impact, they all move beyond what one comes to expect within the realm of digital photography.”

The Brooklyn Museum acquired two prints in June 2009, and Damian donated two other prints to the New York Historical Society.

“The prints are a part of New York’s history, and I want the images to stay there. America has a legacy of sheltering outcasts and refugees that continues to this day. Omar and his children will have a different life in America, and I’m grateful to be one of the people that they embraced here.”

The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York.

See all the images online at http://www.damianwampler.com

Gelman felt Gale’s method was wrong and warned about the “evils of excess” and the grave danger of becoming over-eager to ’sign-up’ people of  two years of service. “The Marines had long since landed.” Gelman wrote. One young applicant expressed his disappointment at the Wisconsin Plan style this way: ‘I thought we were something special. Then I saw that they were just pulling people off the street and testing them later.”

Gelman was an early Evaluator and a tough son-of-a-bitch. I did not know him, but I watched him in the hallways of the building. He always appeared to be in a bad mood about something or other. I never once saw him smile. I kept my distance. In fact, if I saw him on an elevator, I won’t get on it.

Gelman had come to the Peace Corps from the New York Post (the old Post, not what you read today) and had been one of three early Peace Corps recruits from what was called the “Post’s Corner” at the Post: Bill Haddad, Ben Schiff, and Gelman. He was a wonderful writer. His evaluation report on Somalia I is a classic.

Newly RPCVs were just as hard on the ways Washington was selling the Peace Corps. Early Peace Corps advertisements  depicted Nepal as The Land of the Yeti and Everest.” Remember, Peace Corps Goes to Paradise? That was the recruitment poster for Micronesia,  RPCVs were also angry about those, ‘you-too-can-be-a-world-saver” come-ons. Evaluators in the field were hearing protests from PCVs, and HQ was hearing it first hand from RPCVs. The criticism was taken seriously. By ‘63, the Peace Corps was creating posters that stressed sixteen-hour days, monotony, and monquitoes.  One new posters were entitled Before Peace Corps and After Peace Corps. It was the same photo.

People kept applying. Between 1961 and 1964, about 112,000 Americans filled out the questionnaire. And in those early years, only about 20 percent of all applicants were deemed of a high enough caliber to be invited to training. Quality was given preference over quantity. Dave Gelman could stop worrying and smile.

Nevertheless, from 1964–when forty-six thousand applicants were received–the level of Peace Corps applications steadily declined. By 1965, Gale admitted that “With few exception, we are coming back from schools with fewer and fewer numbers. Results from team recruiting are down 22 percent from last year.”

Then the world changed. Johnson was increasing the troops in Vietnam, college graduates were looking for places to  spent time away from the draft. Over the next few years, the Peace Corps would increase dramatically. In 1963 there were 6,646 PCVs and Trainees. Three years later (1966) there were 15,556, the highest number of PCVs, ever. The average age was 24, with the highest percentage, over 86%, under 26. And all because of the draft and the war in Vietnam. 

And all the while, Bob Gale, the Prince of Partying, and his Gang of Recruiters–now RPCVs home from the Third World–were Partying On!

 [End of # 12]