That’s My Mitt!

The Article: Mitt Romney Visits Subsidized Farms, Knocks Big Government Spending by Wayne Barrett in The Daily Beast.

The Text: The black-and-white cows lumbering behind Mitt Romney during his sit-down with Bob Schieffer last Sunday on Face the Nation actually feed off the same big government the presidential candidate spent much of the interview deriding. When Romney told Schieffer that “the only solution to taming an out-of-control spending government is to cut spending,” the bovines in the background could be forgiven for worrying.

Jeff and Karen Zuck, who own the 160-acre, 117-head dairy farm that was Romney’s chosen backdrop for the rare non-Fox interview, have collected $195,631 in federal subsidies since 1995. The $44,549 in grants they got in 2009, Barack Obama’s first year in office, was almost twice their previous high in 2002, and was a consequence of the heightened subsidies the Obama administration rushed to deliver as milk prices plummeted in the recession. Only 20 farms in subsidy-rich Lebanon County, Penn., received more federal aid than the Zucks in 2009, and only 30 exceeded the Zuck subsidy over the prior decade and a half. But the farm didn’t even appear on the top 50 list in George W. Bush’s final year in office, when they received a measly $1,177 in subsidies, less than three percent of what Obama gave them the next year.

Regardless, Karen Zuck told The Daily Beast that she and her husband back Romney. “I haven’t liked Obama since before he was president,” said Zuck, who had a hard time pinpointing exactly what she likes about Romney, other than her belief that he’s “going to do more” about “keeping regulations down.” Acknowledging that 2009 and 2010 were their “darkest years,” Zuck admitted that “maybe we did get something from it,” a reference to the Dairy Economic Loss Assistance Program (DELAP) that Obama jump-started in 2009 ($10,243 for the Zucks), and the Milk Income Loss Contract Payment Program that Obama infused with new funding ($34,944 for the Zucks). “We get enough,” said Zuck. “But we’d rather not,” she added, insisting that she’d prefer to let milk prices rise on their own.

Despite their cows’ starring role on the CBS set, the Zucks were never invited to join the Saturday afternoon taping. In fact, Romney never actually set foot on the farm, even though it was billed as a farm visit. Instead he sat in the front yard of Dave and Ceal Bamberger, who own a car-repair and heating-oil delivery company, and whose house is across the way from the Zuck farm. The Bambergers’ son-in-law, Mark Thomas, is the Cornwall Borough Mayor, and Romney’s staff reached out to him for tips on a good secluded location. He picked his in-laws’ house.

“It seemed like a closed set,” Karen Zuck said. “We watched the bus back in and the Secret Service was there on the Bamberger yard.” Since they were at church the next morning when the interview aired, the Zucks never saw their cows’ star turn.

The awkward staging was reminiscent of Romney’s April appearance at an empty Ohio factory that, it turned out, had closed seven months before Obama took office. Or his February rally at Detroit’s 65,000-seat Ford Field, before an audience of about 1000 people.

“We get enough,” said Zuck. “But we’d rather not,” she added, insisting that she’d prefer to let milk prices rise on their own.

Lebanon may seem like a funny place for Romney to take his swipe at big government: out of Pennsylvania’s 64 counties, it’s the fifth largest recipient of federal farm subsidies, and the Zuck farm is right across the border from the No.-1 recipient, Lancaster County (Romney’s already visited there too). Romney’s six-state tour—carrying the message he announced at the outset that “Washington’s big government agenda should not smother small-town dreams”—is actually a reminder of how much small towns, too, depend on big government aid.

Maybe Romney was happy he missed meeting the Zucks and their cows. He recently endorsed the Paul Ryan budget, which cuts $30 billion in farm subsidies over the years.

Introducing The Robin Hood Tax

The Article: Mark Ruffalo and Tom Morello launch Robin Hood tax plan to outlaw Wall Street excess by Adam Gabbett in The Guardian.

The Text: Actor Mark Ruffalo and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello have launched a new US campaign for a “Robin Hood tax”, a small levy on Wall Street transactions that organisers say could generate hundred of billions of dollars a year.

The campaign, backed by National Nurses United, the largest nursing union in the US, has already launched in 14 countries, including the UK, France and Germany.

Organisers of the campaign, which also features Coldplay singer Chris Martin, are calling for a tax of “less than half of 1%” on Wall Street transactions, which they say would not affect most Americans’ financial activity.

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Russia’s Fading Tsar

The Article: Russia’s Fading Tsar by Dakota Smith in The Speckled Axe.

The Text: For the last seven months, Russia has been a nation on the edge. Thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the country’s largest display of political agitation since the early 1990s. The spark was the legislative election of December 2011 where allegations of widespread voter fraud by Putin’s political party, United Russia, sent a diverse array of groups into the streets.

Putin is more than just the Russian president; he considers himself the personal embodiment of the Russian state and has therefore taken the protests very personally. He has mocked the protesters, comparing their white ribbons to condoms, and has derided them as “agents of the West” who seek to destroy Russia. And via Twitter, state media has even accused U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul of being the hidden force behind the protest movements.

The cracks in Putin’s aura of invincibility first started to appear in 2008 when Putin was serving as Prime Minister. Only a few months removed from his second term as President of the Russian Federation, Putin was a man as big as Russia itself. He had single-handedly saved the country from the chaos of the 1990s and was everything that his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had not been. Most of Russia was grateful.

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Life Before Air Conditioning

The Article: Before Air Conditioning by Arthur Miller in The New Yorker.

The Text: EExactly what year it was I can no longer recall—probably 1927 or ’28—there was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow. Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two; the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue.

People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.

Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass; Harlem began above 116th Street then.

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The Great Leisure Gap

The Article: The Leisure Gap by Claude S. Fischer in The Boston Review.

The Text: Folks are sprucing up RVs, parents are packing kids’ camp gear, airlines are adding flights, and hotels are raising prices. The summer vacationers are coming.

What seems like a flood to us, however, is a trickle compared to the tsunami of holidaymakers in Europe, as anyone who has been sardined into a European train, plane, or lane at the beginning of July and August knows. On a recent summer day in Dubrovnik, I’ve been told, five cruise ships’ worth of tour groups created such a pedestrian gridlock that police had to unknot the crowd.

Americans just don’t vacation like other people do. Western European laws require at least ten and usually more than twenty days. And it’s not just the slacker Mediterranean countries. The nose-to-the-grindstone Germans and Austrians require employers to grant at least twenty paid vacation days a year. In the United States, some of us don’t get any vacation at all. Most American workers do get paid vacations from their bosses, but only twelve days on average, much less than the state-guaranteed European minimum. And even when they get vacation time, Americans often don’t use it.

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