Welcome to the mob.

When I picked up my press credential at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire for the ABC News Republican Primary Debate on a clear Saturday night in January, I expected to be steered to a press gallery close to the stage in a musky debate hall. But there were more than 600 journalists on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 2012. So we were stationed in a nearby basketball gym, in long rows of tables facing two large projection screens showing the television broadcast. We would be watching the debate the same way most baseball broadcasters watch the ballgame nowadays, on television. But the real-time color commentary would be via twitter, and our press box felt as big as an airport hangar. I grabbed a folding chair on the side between a Norwegian journalist and a nattily dressed Romney national finance chair whom had escaped the packed green room to enjoy the relative roominess of our cavernous press lounge, and because “the food is better.”

I shouldn’t have expected anything less than a sprawling media corps, but the image of a salty fraternity of wise-cracking journos in fedoras dies hard I guess, as do all sentimental tropes of American culture. Shoot, there are upstreamers to accommodate now. Guys like Phil Anderson, a cheery, red-cheeked student and Occupy affiliate up from Boston. He roamed the press hangar in a black peacoat, holding a flip video camera and camping headlamp rigged to a tripod pole by an L bracket and Velcro. He was narrating the proceedings to 15 or 20 people watching his live stream online, pointing his camera at whatever they asked him to via the onscreen chat feed. If that sounds a little technical, just picture a college student walking around with a phone-sized camera strapped to a pole seemingly talking to himself like a schizophrenic, but possibly representing the future of media.

It was an exceptionally punchless debate, full of eye-rolling platitudes and few direct attacks on Mitt Romney, the frontrunner. A local TV cameraman explained that the League of Women voters used to run the debates, but when ABC News took over, it changed from “a news event covered by the news to an entertainment event produced by Disney (ABC’s parent company).” The press stars were there too of course, and mostly bored: Mark Shields, the Washington Post columnist and liberal commentator, shuffling around the food table and hawing in his Boston accent, “No more cookies?” Don Gonyea, NPR’s chief political correspondent, tut-tutting and oohing over such wondrous statements like Rick Santorum’s disdainful retort that, “there are no classes in America.”

When the debate mercifully ended, we all scuttled to a smaller gym next door that served as the official spin room. Amid half a dozen constantly forming and disintegrating press scrums you could make out craggy veteran politicians making a play for a possible cabinet post down the road by talking up the talking points of the candidate they’d chosen to latch onto. Hello Tom Ridge, former homeland security chief, coming out of the woodworks to do a little spin service for Jon Huntsman. Hello Nikki Haley, late Tea-Party sweetheart turned embattled South Carolina governor, stumping and preening for Mitt Romney in a long fringe silver dress. There were the candidates’ spokespeople as well, gamely running out their best lines. Take R.C. Hammond, Newt Gingrich’s spokesperson: “Gingrich walked like a president, talked like a president, must be a president.”

As always, there were the oddballs that our national political carnival attracts, such as Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis, who’d flown out from California to challenge President Obama in the Democratic primary. He handed me about 30 photocopied documents including the official Democratic ballot and a newspaper article about a lawsuit he had won against the Democrat Party in Southern California. I told him to call me if he had an official campaign event, but I later realized that I had probably unknowingly participated in the only type he could afford.

Over the next couple days, I attended the campaign events of all five candidates actively campaigning in New Hampshire. In many ways they are homey events, in rustic town halls, small manufacturing plants, conference rooms of woodsy resort hotels. They range from the booster-club pageantry of bunting, pom-poms, and confetti guns at a Jon Huntsman pep rally to the long-winded bloviations of a Newt Gingrich lecture in a hot and steamy high school gymnasium. They can seem dingy, or at least provincial at the time. But when you watch the clips on television news or see the photos in the paper, they gain an aura of authority.

Ron Paul’s events are the most fun in the aggregate, as you can’t avoid appreciating this wiley, frumpy, 76 year old doctor from southeast Texas who has inspired young people across the country to become constitution-waving enthusiasts. They feel the media constantly portrays them as being crazy, which they are not. They just quote policy specifics with a Star Trek convention-goer’s fluidity, and possess the zeal of a true believer, and so your average non-believer never knows quite where to file them. Barbara, 50, a paraprofessional from Meredith, NH, who didn’t want to give her last name, was unwavering in her support for Paul’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, even though she might lose her job in education. “If that would happen, I’d find jobs elsewhere,” said the former Democrat turned Republican.

The Ron Paul organization that garnered an impressive 23% of New Hamphire’s vote seemed a winning mix of rollicking misfit party bus and cagey professionalism. My humble Red Roof Inn in Loudon, NH, was the home to 90 Youth for Ron Paul volunteers who’d come from out of town, and whenever I came home at night they’d be roaming the hallways like a college dorm. One night they had set up chairs in a circle in the lobby of the hotel and three black jean and jacket rockers were jamming on acoustic guitars. The next morning I found myself making coffee in the hotel breakfast nook next to a young man wearing a suit with a piece of duct tape on the back that said “Statistician.” I asked him if he was the statistician for Ron Paul, and could I get a quote, and he shot me a look: How did I know? When I explained, he was still reluctant to give anything more than the perfunctory “it was a great experience.” James Padilioni, 25, a student from Westchester, PA who was filling out a grad school application on a laptop plastered with stickers for various causes (“Yes We Cannabis,” “SchoolsNotPrisons.com,” “Students for Liberty”) stopped himself when I asked him to describe his election day activities. “Our organization is our secret weapon, nobody else has what we have,” he said. “Why give away your secret recipe?”

Barring political catastrophe, Romney will be the Republican nominee, and his campaign clearly boasts the top talent and money. His events are by far the best produced and tightly scripted, with former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty serving as the curtain-raiser hypeman, and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” accompanying his entrances and exits. (Sample lyric: “free, like an untamed stallion.”) Romney’s desire to be liked has an earnest, almost frantic quality. After introducing his wife and splendid family (the best advertisement for the Mormon church in America right now has to be the gorgeous tableaus of the Romney and Huntsman families), he moved to the side of the stage, and stood with his hands tucked in his pockets, stock-still, seemingly determined to never stop smiling. He fools few people with lines like, “A chance to run for President, wow, I never thought I’d do it,” or the Obama-esque riff, “I was just a high school kid with skinny legs.” Left out is that his father was Governor of Michigan and served in the Nixon administration when he was loping around on his skinny legs.

His ad-libs are pricelessly awkward, such as this opening line at the Rochester Opera House, “I can feel the warmth in this room, not just temperature-wise but emotional-wise.” And his stump speech seems written by an algorithm devised to appeal to all parts of a skeptical Republican base. He has a moment where he asks, “Are there any veterans here? Please raise your hands… thank you,” leading to sustained applause. He admits that his father was born in Mexico, hastily adding, “to American parents living there,” as if to snuff out any potential Birther elements, even though it’s only his father. He closes by quoting from “America the Beautiful,” joking, “I said in Iowa that corn counts as amber waves of grain.” He makes no mention of his Mormon heritage and religion, though his campaign slogan “Believe in America” seems a sly reference to his hope that voters will see past his much maligned religion.

There was short-lived hope among reporters on the trail that Huntsman might make it a close race in New Hampshire. The horse race approach to campaign coverage is, for better or worse, what people want to read about most. Why get bogged down in policy comparisons when politics can become a thrilling sporting event? And at the Jon Huntsman voting night party at The Black Brimmer bar in downtown Manchester, the place was packed with the sort of unlikely supporters reminiscent of Obama’s insurgent 2008 campaign. Jon C. Hopwood, 52, a boisterous progressive who’d previously never voted Republican in his life, had battled through the physical sickness he felt when he was given the Republican ballot at the polling place and cast for Jon Huntsman. “How could he be more conservative than Obama?” Hopwood asked, “Obama cut my mom’s food stamps, he cut my home heating oil. I voted for Obama ‘cause my friends told me he was a progressive, but we got a center-right Republican. Maybe with Huntsman we’ll get an Earl Warren.” Elisabeth Langby, 54, a writer and academic of Swedish birth said, “Huntsman is the best presidential candidate since I became a citizen in 1990.”

But even though Romney is a French-speaking millionaire from liberal Massachusetts, he has run the best campaign so far, and, perhaps by process of elimination, seems to have won the blessing of the Republican establishment as the best chance to defeat Obama in a general election. The parallels to Sen. John Kerry are striking, though he never served in the military, so he will not be swiftboated the way Kerry was in 2004.

The journalists on the trail even seemed ready for Romney to secure a win in South Carolina and deliver what would seem a knockout blow to the rest of the field. All the press photographers I talked to admitted they were addicted to the adrenaline rush of campaign reporting, no matter how brutal the press scrum, and how long the days. But as they pulled out their laptops to download their pictures and send them to their editors around the world, the fatigue was evident. One veteran CNN cameraman talked about how the explosion of independent media has made for press scrums with more amateurs who block shots without getting good ones of their own. But generally the press are a welcoming tribe, willing to share a joke or a cigarette with whoever happens to be with them in the trenches that day.

There is an inevitable insularity on the campaign trail, as journalists spend 16 hours a day covering events, tweeting and writing stories, and reading each other’s coverage of the campaign. As most journalists must file immediately for the digital edition, and instantly on twitter, sometimes they can’t even see the candidate when he gives his stump speech, but just hear him through the speakers and are ready to tweet and then file a story about any flub he makes. It seems a bizarre world, until you join it. Then it’s hard to pull yourself away. Thus I found myself watching Jon Huntsman’s speech at 2am in my hotel room, the same speech I had seen live several hours earlier. I had to talk myself into turning off the television, and even then the images of American flags, of perfectly coiffed candidate hair, of the crush and click of hundreds of camera-laden photographers swirled in my head.

(Occupier named Ray): Comrade.

Schulz: Your colleague, she’d seen the protests in Greece and Europe and elsewhere. Did you guys take your cue from that? Are you hoping to cite certainly what was a lot of the tension, if not police activity? I know over the weekend there were over a hundred arrests and you guys got things fired up. Are you taking your cues from the international movement and how do you want to see this? If you could have it in a perfect way, how would it be?

Occupier Jesse LaGreca: Well I don’t know, it’s really difficult to answer questions leading to those conclusions. I’d say that we didn’t take our cue leading off of anybody really. It became a more spontaneous movement. As far as seeing this end, I wouldn’t like to see this end. I would like to see the conversation continue. This is what we should have been talking about in 2008 when the economy collapsed. We basically patched a hole on the tire and said let the car keep rolling. Unfortunately, it’s fun to talk to the propaganda machine and the media especially conservative media networks such as yourself, because we find that we can’t get conversations for the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of News Corporation, for which you are an employee. But we can certainly ask questions like, you know, why are the poor engaging in class warfare? After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it’s time for some maybe, I don’t know, participation in our democracy that isn’t funded by news cameras and gentlemen such as yourself.

Schulz: But, uh, yeah well, let me give you this challenge Jesse.

LaGreca: Sure.

Schulz: We’re here giving you an opportunity on the record to put any

message you want out there, to give you fair coverage and I’m not

going to in any way…

LaGreca: That’s awesome!

Schulz: …give you advice about it. So, there is an exception in the case, because you wouldn’t be able to get your message out there without us.

LaGreca: No, surely, I mean, take for instance when Glenn Beck was doing his protest and he called the President, uh, a person who hates white people and white culture. That was a low moment in America’s history and you guys kinda had a big part in it. So, I’m glad to see you coming around and kind of paying attention to what the other 99% of Americans are paying attention to, as opposed to the far-right fringe, who, who would just love to destroy the middle class entirely.

Schulz: Alright, fair enough. You have a voice, an important reason to criticize myself, my company and anyone else. But, let me ask you that, in fairness, does this administration, President Obama, have any criticism as to the, the financial situation the country’s in?

LaGreca: I think, myself, uh, as well as many other people, would like to see a little but more economic justice or social justice — Jesus stuff — as far as feeding the poor, healthcare for the sick. You know, I find it really entertaining that people like to hold the Bill of Rights up while they’re screaming at gay soldiers, but they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that a for-profit healthcare system doesn’t work. So, let’s just look at it like this, if we want the President to do more, let’s talk to him on a level that actually reaches people, instead of asking for his birth certificate and wasting time with total nonsense like Solyndra.

Ed note: This Fox-recorded segment was caught on tape by another occupier, and posted on the internet, but was not aired on Fox News.

Last week there came news that Donald Rumsfeld was canceling his subscription to the New York Times because the New York Times had the audacity to print what Paul Krugman wrote to commemorate the disaster known as 9/11. I was curious to read what caused the perpetrator of so much needless death and destruction and economic ruin to cancel the paper that had been so helpful to him during his eight-year reign as on-site puppeteer of George W Bush, and here, in case you missed Krugman’s brief epistle, is what made Dick so mad.

“What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neo cons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

“A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

“The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”

Krugman’s words washed over me like a cool breeze on a hot day, the hot day being the hundreds of newspaper and interweb articles and thousands of minutes of radio and television time spent on further hijacking and poisoning the memory of 9/11. And though the content of Krugman’s note held nothing new for those who don’t swallow the propaganda of our overlords, the placement of Krugman’s note in the nation’s paper-of-record at that moment in history was, in my opinion, a brave act.

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” — Mark Twain

I first became aware of Paul Krugman when I was giving a little help to my friend Robin Chin as she strove day and night for two years to make a documentary entitled There’s Something About W, a movie she hoped would be a valuable weapon in defeating George W. Bush as he ran for a second term as President of the United States. And I am convinced that had even ten per cent of the American voters seen There’s Something About W, George Bush would have been defeated by a landslide.

So there I was watching a rough cut of There’s Something About W in John (Robin’s partner) and Robin’s tiny one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, their little living room converted into an editing studio, when Paul Krugman appeared on the screen, a likable, matter-of-fact fellow explaining in easy-to-understand terms exactly how George and his puppeteers were pulling the economic wool over the eyes of the American public. Krugman appears several times in the course of Robin’s marvelous film, which also features a number of well-known political comedians, and Krugman’s wry delivery of the terrible truth fits perfectly. Over these ensuing eight years, as Krugman’s fame has grown and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, I have been a semi-regular reader of his articles; and it has been fascinating to watch as his warnings prove repeatedly prophetic while our overlords gleefully ignore him — for they most definitely do not want what Krugman wants, which is for the world to be a better place for everyone.

“There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.” — Ken Venturi

Robin Chin and John Grimes are two of my favorite people, and how we became friends is a favorite memory. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and feeling as if you already know them. I’m not talking about especially liking a person the first time you meet them, or falling in love at first sight, but of familiarity, as if you and they might have been roommates or neighbors or siblings, though you’ve never laid eyes on each other, not in this lifetime anyway.

That’s how I felt when I first met Robin and John on a December evening in the early 1990’s — as if I knew them already and had known them for eons. I was camping in an empty cottage in Berkeley owned by my pal David Jouris (the person from whom I cadge many of the quotations I use in my essays), enjoying a brief respite from my swiftly devolving life in Sacramento. David, hoping to cheer me up, invited me to tag along to a holiday party in San Rafael; and though I have never been much of a party guy, being psychically porous, allergic to alcohol, and possessed of a preternatural talent for putting my foot in my mouth, I went with him.

On those rare occasions when I do attend parties, my strategy for survival is to scout around for a good place to hide, procure a plate of food, and return to my hiding place. At this party, however, every square inch of the house was occupied and it was freezing outside, so I settled near the guacamole in the very crowded kitchen next to Robin, a beautiful woman with long black hair who seemed as shell-shocked as I by the cacophonous goings on.

At that point, if memory serves, our mutual friend David waltzed by and introduced us. Robin and I fell into conversation, and when I learned that Robin was a San Francisco-based photographer, I mentioned a commercial photographer I knew in the city who turned out to be someone Robin knew. Then John, who is most definitely a party guy and an indefatigable punster, joined us in conversation, and before we knew it we were all fast friends and planning the first of many reunions.

“Always remember there are two type of people in the world. Those who come into a room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are!”— Frederick L. Collins

Robin and John are definitely “Ah, there you are!” people, and if, during the first several years of our friendship, a person had said to me, “Robin and John are making a major documentary film that could seriously influence who becomes the next President of the United States,” I would have assumed the person was speaking about a different John and Robin. Not that they aren’t talented and creative and passionate, they are, but they are such “Ah, there you are!” people and not at all “Well, here I am!” people that it never occurred to me they might aspire to write and direct and produce something on the scale of a major motion documentary. How such a thing came to pass would make a fine documentary in itself, but an even better fictional comedy based on a true story.

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” — Lewis Carroll

By the time I moved to Berkeley in the mid-1990’s, Robin had transitioned from photography to film editing and would eventually become the assistant editor on a number of award-winning documentaries, while John continued to amplify his success as an illustrator and cartoonist. They were living in the aforementioned tiny apartment where they live to this day, John’s office a desk, computer, and a photocopy machine adjacent to their miniscule kitchen, Robin’s editing studio inseparable from the living room. The interweb boom was just getting underway and the Bay Area was awash in money trickling down sufficiently to support thousands of freelance human beings such as John and Robin and yours truly. Clinton was President, and though we knew he was spearheading the frenzied sundering of the social safety net, destroying our industrial base, and bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, he was technically a Democrat, the economy was literally bubbling along, and we were busily scrambling to pay our rents, so in much the same way that liberals and progressives are neutralized (neutered?) today by Obama being a Democrat and the official “lesser evil,” we were rarely moved to protest.

“I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.”— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

But then Bush was enthroned, the towers came down, and the overlords chanted “weapons of mass destruction” day and night until finally the muddled masses conflated Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden. Then, as W was on the verge of ordering the invasion and demolition of Iraq, millions of Americans and millions of people around the world, old farts and young farts, got off our butts and went to march against going to war; and Robin and John decided to film the anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco.

I remember marching along Market Street with a half-million other passionate people and realizing that something was very different about this march than those anti-war protests of the 1960’s and 70’s; the largest difference being that our overlords had cleverly diverted traffic from several blocks away on either side of Market Street so no one but the marchers could witness the true scale of the protest. And the subservient media, including the shameful San Francisco Chronicle, reported only ten thousand marched against the war that day, and gave equal space to fake little pro-war demonstrations attended by a few dozen shills.

But we who marched knew how many of us there were, and on an island in that river of humanity, Robin and John stood filming the truth as it flowed toward and around them. I like to think it was the passionate energy of those hundreds of thousands of protestors that infused Robin and John with the awesome energy it took to transcend their previous notions of who they were and enable them to make a movie that might very well have changed the world. If only…

Todd: What motivated you, Robin, to start filming the anti-war protests?

Robin: Watching the pre-war reporting on television and in the papers, I felt we were being fed nothing but pro-war propaganda, and I was scared to death about the tragic consequences of the United States going to war and the erosion of our civil liberties the administration (Cheney) would implement. So I wanted to document the protests in San Francisco and interview people with different points of view.

Todd: And what were you going to do with that footage?

Robin: Well, we got so many compelling interviews at those protests, interviews with people from all walks of life, that I thought we’d make a small video to present the anti-war side. And then I tuned in C-SPAN for the very first time so I could watch the debate in Congress about going to war, and I was shocked to see what else was going on in Congress, and what else, policy-wise, the Bush Administration was doing — all these radical changes to our government, the whole New Deal safety net being dismantled, the drive to privatize Social Security, out sourcing of jobs, the Patriot act, the NSA’s invasion of privacy, and on and on. This shifted my idea of making a small piece about the war to the idea of a larger documentary that eventually became There’s Something About W.

Todd: And how were you able to involve Krugman?

Robin: Krugman was one of the first and most articulate people we saw writing and speaking about the radical policies of the Bush Administration, and the first person I saw in the mainstream media calling people in the administration liars. When we saw a video of Krugman talking at the New School, John contacted Krugman’s publicist and we ended up interviewing him in three different venues when he visited the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

Todd: But knowing you as I do, knowing what a private person you always were, and are, I wonder what it was that compelled you to go out of character, so to speak, and undertake the making of such a public epic as There’s Something About W.

Robin: As I was driving home one rainy day I felt something suddenly jump into my body, and I felt a very big responsibility to warn everyone about all the changes and policies the Administration was trying to enact. I didn’t think people were really getting this information. It seemed like the world, as I knew it, was going to be taken over and destroyed by the Bush Administration, and I thought if I was going to take the big leap and make the sacrifice to produce and fund a documentary of my own, there was no better time and no better subject than this one. Having worked on documentaries for Frontline, Frontline/World, and with many other independent filmmakers, I thought I knew how much it would take, though it ended up taking much more than I ever imagined. So I enlisted John and many other friends and people I knew in the film industry to help sound the alarm.

Todd: And what are you doing now?

Robin: I have continued to document the unvarnished history of our government through my video archive that now contains over 20,000 hours of television broadcast footage, and we’re going to have a meeting with the Internet Archive about putting as much of that footage as possible on-line for all to see, and to be a historical record for researchers.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Dick Cheney canceled his New York Times subscription.

Todd’s web site in UnderTheTableBooks.com

Ernie Pyle’s first job started in 1923 at the La Porte Herald. The La Porte Herald is still in business, though they are now the Herald-Argus, presumably because they merged with another paper named the something or other Argus.

I have been trying for a couple of months to contact the Herald-Argus. It is like talking to a brick wall. I started by emailing the business office. I got the address from their website. I also called the business office. Same deal, got the number from the website. There are some irregularities, but I only noticed them because I got no reply so I went back to the website to see what other numbers and emails I could find.

Turned out that the number I got for the business office started with a 269 area code and the other numbers start with a 219 area code. Also, the email ended in @pimginmi.com and all the other emails end in @heraldargus.com. So I sent an email to the original email I had used and at the same time sent one to the publisher. Brick wall. So I called the publisher and left a message. Brick wall. I went back to the website. The business office contact information has been removed from the website. I emailed where they ask people to send feedback concerning the website and pointed out that the business office contact information had been removed from the website. Waited a few days. Brick wall, and the website is still missing the business office contact information as I write. So I sent an ebomb. An ebomb is when you email everybody in an organization using the BCC option so they all think they alone got the email. Brick wall. I expected that the business office and/or publisher would get a dozen forwards. Maybe they did, but a brick wall keeps all secrets so why speculate?

A journalist has to answer calls and emails to function. I’ve done a limited amount of journalism. I know journalists and have met a few actual pros. I’ve also read a bit about journalism and it is absolutely true that a journalist must communicate to function. Stories take work; they seldom just fall from the sky into a reporter’s lap, and when they do one still has to check up on details to get the facts right.

Ernie Pyle is probably the most famous American war correspondent of all time. You’d think that the Herald-Argus would be thrilled to hear that someone is interested in going through their archives and researching his early work. If I owned or ran the paper the first thing you would see when you walked in the door would be a big picture of Ernie with his name and the dates he worked there under it. Then again, if it was my call the collection would be published already. I wonder who ran the paper after WWII and why they failed to publish a collection then? The WWII generation and their parents were still a large population; somebody really blew it big time.

They could have put out a companion volume to Home Country and it would have done well. They hired the cub who went on to be the most famous American war correspondent of all time. What is their problem?

Here is the letter that I ebombed them with, though I have removed my email and the message number of the friend I was staying with. Also, I signed my given name rather than my pen name. I am doing this for personal interest. I would work with them if they want to put out a collection, but I’ll go read even if I know they will deny permission to publish from his first works. I told them that in my first attempt to contact them.

* * *

Greetings,

I have been trying to establish contact for about 6 weeks to do some research in the old Herald morgue. I’ve emailed and called to leave messages and what not, but seem to be unable to get a response. I tried to be more professional about this but I am very serious about researching Ernie Pyle’s cub work and The La Porte Herald was his first employer. As previously stated, I desire access to the paper’s morgue so I can read every last word he wrote at his first job. While I understand that old papers often donate the morgue to local libraries and/or archives, I have been unable to get a response to find out just what the story is at the La Porte Herald Argus. My story nose is starting to go off that I have a story brewing just trying to establish contact, much less find out the status of the morgue and get access. I am an Ernie Pyle enthusiast, and I love his work. The book Home Country has lots of stuff, but only back to his aviation work. His cub work is not there. I am unaware of any collections of his cub work; as far as I know Home Country is the only collection of his pre-WWII war correspondent work. Seeing as how Ernie is the most famous American war correspondent of all time there is room for another book. This period of his life is unavailable. I’ve seen references to various articles in the Tobin bio, but the articles are only referred to, not printed. I want to read them. I could be interested in doing another collection of his stuff. This is what I need to know:

Does the paper have possession of the morgue or is it in some archive or library’s collection?

Where is it?

What do I have to do to get access to it?

How much did he publish before he was given a byline?

How hard will it be to ferret out his stuff from the period when he was just an anonymous reporter?

What else besides his published articles is there?

Is there any employment related paperwork (job applications, ??) or other materials whatsoever?

I tried to reach the business office, but the business office is not in the ‘contact us’ tab on the webpage though it used to be. The call I made to the business office was never returned. When I went back to the page it was no longer available. There were other weird things going on, like a different area code for the phone and the email did not end in heraldargus.com. My nose itches.

— Gene Dickson, Ernie Pyle Enthusiast

* * *

Whatever is going on with these people, I have to return to California now and from here on out I will be communicating with certified mail. Guess what? The snail mail is also missing from the “contact us” section of the webpage! They have the standard copyright notice saying that you need written permission to use any of their articles for redistribution, so where is the snail mail so people can send a letter asking for permission? I got it from the white pages, all hail the internet!

“It’s blown,” he said. I was somewhat relieved, believing that I had pinpointed my van’s troubles. He said they didn’t have it in stock, and if they ordered it it wouldn’t arrive for five days. Since the alternator was for my only car I walked around town until I found an auto parts store on State Street that said they could get it for me the next day. I was reluctant at first to trust this auto parts store. Their front of house inventory hasn’t been changed for nearly twenty years. I looked at their Tasmanian Devil trailer hitch covers with faded packaging and white fuzzy dice hanging there waiting year after year to be bought. I had to be in San Francisco in two days so when they told me they found a match and it would be there the next day I left a deposit and told them I would see them tomorrow.

The next morning I woke up and my girlfriend and I walked to the end of our road and held out a cardboard “Boonville” sign. She was trying to get into town for work, I was trying to get to 253 to hitch a ride back to Ukiah because the MTA bus had already passed through Anderson Valley.

I walked out of Boonville on Highway 253, over the Anderson Creek bridge, eating black berries growing on the shoulder. I held up my “Ukiah” sign at traffic. At a pull-off just over Anderson Creek a newer model car stopped for me and I ran across the gravel. The man inside had black hair and stylish black rimmed glasses. I got in and he said he could take me over the hill into Ukiah. He immediately told me he was the host of a radio show on KZYX. He was on his way home inland from where his show is broadcast in Philo.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“John Sakowicz,” he said, turning to look right in my eyes, looking for a hint of name recognition. “I host ‘The Truth About Money’.”

“I’m Cody.”

I told him that I wrote for the Anderson Valley Advertiser, covering the coastal court in Fort Bragg.

“Oh,” he said, then he was silent for a few seconds.

“They wrote about me, and it wasn’t good. I retired from working on Wall Street and they questioned all of my credentials.”

He was agitated talking about it.

“Bruce Anderson can really hurt someone’s reputation, but will never correct it.”

We rolled up the hill until we were at the three-mile long stretch on top.

“You know he was very instrumental in us losing our previous news director Paul Hanson.”

“Didn’t a newspaper in Oregon report on the lottery scandal he was involved in first?” I asked.

“Well yes but the charges were dropped! He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“So the Oregon newspaper just made something up and reported it?”

“Well, Paul Hanson is a Vietnam veteran and his veteran friend asked him for help.”

Mr. Sakowicz told me that this veteran friend didn’t have any medical benefits so Hanson helped him launder some money.

“It wasn’t even that much money,” Sakowicz told me. His confident DJ voice had begun to morph into an awkward tone, like a student attempting in vain to explain away an incident to their principle.

“Paul Hanson is a friend of mine,” he said. “He had 30-years experience, we were lucky to have him. I think the station was only able to pay him $35,000 a year.”

On July 20th of 2001 Paul Hanson did indeed plead guilty in Marion County Circuit Court in Oregon. The original charges against Hanson were “felony forgery, cheating and attempted theft.” He was accused of forging a winning Oregon State Lottery ticket for $25,000 and attempting to cash it. Hanson pleaded guilty and it was reduced to a misdemeanor. He received 18 months probation, 20 hours community service, and was ordered to pay $100 restitution to the Oregon State Lottery. In the Vancouver, Washington newspaper The Columbian, Hanson claimed the lottery ticket was damaged when he bought it.

“I did nothing wrong. I took the ticket to Oregon State Lottery headquarters knowing full well it would be turned over to the Oregon State Police crime lab.”

Before his KZYX position, Paul Hanson was the news director for KVAN-AM 1550 in Vancouver, Washington.

Once we finished our conversation about Hanson, Sakowicz asked me about Ten Mile Court and said there was a lot of interesting pot cases out there. As Sakowicz moved to different subjects of choice, he spoke the language and jargon. I listened, letting him speak.

“You can grow up to 99 plants with the proper credentials. I’ve thought about doing it myself. The hard thing is that every single gram and dollar and were it goes and comes from has to be accounted for.”

Taking what he said about “retiring from Wall Street” in consideration I asked him how long he had lived in the area.

“Ten years. I used to work for the Mendocino County Sheriffs Department. Not as a deputy but as a corrections officer. It was one of the best experiences of my life.”

He told me he was in charge of the “administrative segregation” unit in the Mendocino County Jail at Low Gap. He said that since there is not a facility to hold and treat mentally ill offenders they must be kept segregated in a special unit of the jail.

“We kept three classifications of prisoners in administrative segregation; the first were the prisoners who had a history of violence while incarcerated, like if they attacked guards or other prisoners. The second classification was the verbally violent prisoners who would taunt and incite and yell.”

“Talk shit,” I offered.

“Yeah,” he said and quickly continued. “The third classification were the special needs prisoners; prisoners on suicide watch or anyone else that should be kept out of the jail’s general population. They are kept in administrative segregation for 23 hours a day.”

We crossed through the eye of the needle and began our long decent down into the Ukiah Valley.

“You may not know it, with all this pot everywhere, but some really dangerous people come through this county. Like the Hells Angel who killed two people about ten years ago, I held him in ad seg. Or the transient who…”

Sakowicz rattled off some more hardcore criminals he held in Mendocino County Jail “ad seg” unit.

“We have to keep them separate from everybody else to prevent what they call ‘jailhouse justice’.”

He told me they also kept white supremacists in administrative segregation. He called them “woods” and I asked him why they were called that.

“Peckerwoods, ‘woods’ is short for peckerwoods.”

A dry haze laid over the dusty inland hills as we spiraled down.

“We kept homosexuals in ad-seg for their own protection. We kept rival gang members in ad-seg. I had Norteños and Sureños in ad-seg. And all of these prisoners were together in one unit! We couldn’t take two prisoners out at once. If a Norteño was in the yard and a Sureño had a court date we had to bring the Norteño back to his cell before we could take out the Sureño.”

“Do you remember that gang sweep the Mendocino County Sheriff conducted a few months ago at Homeland Security’s request?” I asked Sakowicz.

“Yes I do remember that.”

“A lot of people on the Coast thought it was a veiled immigration sweep. And some of the alleged criminal gang affiliates that were called upon from the Homeland Security’s list lived in Anderson Valley.”

“ICE comes through the Valley. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

On May 3rd 2011 Homeland Security Investigations division, Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, Willits Police Department, Fort Bragg Police Department, and Mendocino County Probation began their “gang sweep” in the Ukiah Valley. Officers in the field wore “Gang Task Force” Kevlar vests and held automatic rifles. They arrested three men in Ukiah, two of them were held on immigration detainers. On May 4th the sweep was conducted in Anderson Valley and the Fort Bragg area. Five people were arrested, four of them held on immigration detainers, two had federal apprehension warrants, all lived in or near Fort Bragg.

During the sweep they found Refugio Ortega Vasquez in illegal possession of ammunition in Ukiah. The second day they found 201 illegal marijuana plants and 8 processed pounds at a home in Fort Bragg. According to the Mendocino County Sheriff’s press release about the sweep, “Statements and evidence collected also showed the marijuana was being grown for financial gain.” All of the marijuana was seized but no arrests were made and no charges were filed at the time.

As we neared the Ukiah Valley floor and Highway 101 Mr. Sakowicz asked if I wanted to be dropped off at the corner of State Street and 253 or off the Perkins Street exit in town.

“I’m going near downtown so Perkins Street is fine.”

He got on 101 North. A red and white Cal Fire “Bomber” airtanker dropped a stream of red dust near the mountains lining the east side of the valley.

Sakowicz dropped me off by the Perkins Street exit and I thanked him for the ride. I walked west into town on Perkins and north on State Street to the auto parts store. I picked up the new alternator and carried it to a cafe were I ducked out of the hot Ukiah Valley sun and got a drink. I sat my new alternator on the table and covered it with my wide-brimmed straw hat as I went to the bathroom. Old locals sat and mumbled to each other. The young girls working swept the floor, made lattes, and pumped country music through the speakers installed in the cafe walls.

Soon I ventured back into the sun and walked south on State. My plan was to walk to Highway 253 and hitch a ride back into Anderson Valley with my “Boonville” sign and put the new alternator in my distressed van. The Cal Fire bomber and spotter plans took off and landed in rotation from the airport the whole time I walked through Ukiah that day. As I approached the airport I could read the letters underneath the bomber that said “Cal Fire” in red and white as it took off again.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Air Program has two major support contractors. These are currently Logistics Specialties Incorporated of Layton, Utah, and DynCorp of Falls Church, Virginia. Both are private military and government contractors.

According to the Cal Fire Air Program page on CA.org “DynCorp provides airtanker and airtactical plane pilot services, and all aircraft maintenance services. (All CAL FIRE helicopters are flown by CAL FIRE pilots.) LSI provides procurement and parts management services.” In 2008 Cal Fire awarded DynCorp International with a $137.7 million contract good through 2014, but DynCorp has been involved with Cal Fire since 2001. William L. Ballhaus, DynCorp International President and CEO, said “This is an outstanding example of a state and private sector partnership with tremendous benefits for the people of California.”

DynCorp receives 96% of its annual income amounting to $2 Billion from the U.S. federal government. They provided security for Afghan interim president Hamid Karzai, trains most of the Iraqi and Afghani police forces, assisted in recovery in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, provides contracted maintenance for 85% of NASA aircraft, and worked with the Colombian national police to fight left-wing rebels and eradicate coca fields in Columbia.

A group of Ecuadorian farmers from the Columbia and Ecuador boarder region filed a class-action lawsuit in 2001 against DynCorp in US federal court. The farmers claimed DynCorp sprayed herbicide on a virtual daily basis between January and February 2001 causing health problems in residents and destruction of livestock and food producing fields. The plaintiffs also claimed that DynCorp’s herbicide spraying killed four infants in the region. They filed the suit under the Torture Victim Protection Act and the Alien Tort Claims Act.

But when governments hire a private business to do its dirty work, the blame can be hard to place.

Near the turn of the millennium reports began to surface of DynCorp employees involved in child sex slave trafficking in Bosnia. DynCorp fired two whistleblowers who complained about the conduct of their fellow employees. Their names were Kathryn Bolkovac and Ben Johnston.

Ben Johnston was an aircraft mechanic for DynCorp working in Bosnia. He claimed that DynCorp employees were having sex with children 12 to 15 years old and selling them to each other as slaves.

Members of the 48th Military Police Detachment conducted a sting of the DynCorp hanger at the Comanche Base Camp, one of two U.S. military bases in Bosnia at the time. Army Criminal Investigation Command or CID conducted an investigation. In a sworn testimony to the CID, DynCorp employee Kevin Werner who was stationed in Bosnia said “during my last six months I have come to know a man we call ‘Debeli,’ which is Bosnian for fat boy. He is the operator of a nightclub by the name of Harley’s that offers prostitution. Women are sold hourly, nightly or permanently.”

Kathryn Bolkovac was a U.N. International Police Force monitor who was hired by DynCorp to work in Bosnia. She filed a lawsuit in Great Britain against DynCorp after she discovered that some of the contractor’s officers were involved in the trafficking of young girls for prostitution. Her story was made into a movie called “The Whistleblower” in 2011.

DynCorp was in Bosnia on a $15 million dollar contract to assemble and train police officers. Many employees have been forced to resign, but none have faced criminal charges of any type. When the U.S. Army or government is asked about illegal or corrupt activities that have been carried out by the contractors they hired or sub-contractors, they can often effectively pass the blame away from their core. Contractors like DynCorp are protected by jurisdictional loopholes, obscure international treaties, and the confusion caused by convoluted bureaucracies.

In a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan on June 24th 2009, which was intercepted and released by Wikileaks, the Afghan Minister of the Interior at the time Hanif Atmar suggested to the U.S. that they “quash” any news story about a DynCorp party held at the Kunduz Regional Training Center for the Afghan police recruits. In the cable was a summery of a meeting between U.S. Assistant Ambassador to Afghanistan Joseph A. Mussomeli and Hanif Atmar. The Minister of Interior had conducted an investigation and arrested “two Afghan police officers and nine other Afghans” (which included some of the training center’s language assistants) for facilitating the crime of “purchasing a service from a child.” For the party on April 11, 2009 DynCorp hired a 17-year old Afghan “Dancing Boy” to “perform.” They also obtained an unspecified drug for the party.

Dancing Boys are part of a practice with a long tradition in Northern Afghanistan called Bacha bazi (Persian for “playing with boys”). They are prepubescent or adolescent boys who are sold to wealthy men for entertainment and/or sex. In a Reuters article from November 18th of 2007 a 38 year old Afghan business man said in regards to his Dancing Boy, “’I don’t have a wife. He is like my wife. I dress him in women’s clothes and have him sleep beside me. I enjoy him and he is my everything,’ he said, kissing the photograph.” The boys are often seen as status symbols, dressing up in woman’s gowns and performing dances for groups of men, and are often bought and sold outright for use as personal sex slaves. Atmar warned that if a journalist were to publish a story on the incident it would “endanger lives.” During the Minister of the Interior investigation there were proposals made to station military officers at Regional Training Centers to oversee the military contractors, but it is noted in the cable that “Placing military officers to oversee contractor operations at RTCs is not legally possible under current DynCorp contract.” Soon after MIN Hanif Atmar resigned from his position, taking responsibility for security failure that allowed an attack on President Karzai’s Afghan Peace Jirga in 2010. Assistant Ambassador Mussomeli is now Ambassador to the Republic of Slovenia. The U.S. Embassy Cable states that “Beyond remedial actions taken, we still hope the matter will not be blown out of proportion, and outcome which would not be good for either the U.S. or Afghanistan.”

DynCorp’s Ukiah Airport office is at 1475 South State Street next to Enterprise-Rent-A-Car.

I held up my cardboard “Boonville” sign to passing traffic in vain. Few people in town stop to pick up hitchhikers. I walked on past all the retired motor lodges where rooms are now rented as homes. The dry haze still hung about the hills surrounding Ukiah Valley. The Cal Fire bomber practically skimmed the tops of South Ukiah houses and trees on its way down from the sky again. I stood with sign in hand at 253 next to the large vineyard. I was finally picked up by a kind brother and sister with a small child in a car seat heading back to Anderson Valley. The young man had seen me around Boonville and told his sister to pick me up. The little boy in the car seat next to me switched back and forth between English and Spanish. He told me about the Burger King fries he just ate. When he ran out of things to say he began making animal noises.

“That’s a good cat noise,” I said. “Wow, was that the sound of two different pigs!”

We all laughed and joked back over the hill. They dropped me off outside of Boonville and I thanked them for the ride, the new alternator sitting in the bottom of my backpack wrapped in a flannel shirt, waiting to be installed.

Blankfort: I happen to be on the mailing list for President Barack Obama! I got an email from him the other day! He wrote… What did he write? Here it is. “Friend!” “Friend!” This is from the president! From his e-mail! “I have set aside time for core supporters like you to join me for dinner. My predecessor’s former dinner guest list was with lobbyists and special interests. We didn’t get here doing that and we are not going to start now. We are running a different kind of campaign. We don’t take money from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. We never have and we never will. We rely on everyday Americans giving whatever they can afford. And we want to spend time with a few of you. So you if you make a donation today you will be automatically entered for a chance to be one of the core supporters who sit down with me for dinner. Please donate $5 or more today.” And there’s a website. “We will pay for your flight and the dinner. All you need to bring is your store of new ideas about how we can continue to make this a better country for all Americans. This won’t be a formal affair. It will be a casual meal among friends — the kind I don’t get to have as often as I’d like anymore. I hope you’ll consider joining me.” Then, a little later, I got this email: “Friend, I’ve worked for President Obama for almost five years now and I’ve never actually sat down for dinner with him. That’s why I’m excited about — and maybe a little jealous of — the opportunity you have to join the President for dinner! He’s going to sit down and swap stories over a meal with four core supporters and you could be one of them. You should really give this a shot. Donate $5 or more today to be automatically entered for a chance to have dinner with the president!” And then there’s the big donate box on the website. “This is not going to be a formal affair or banquet with hundreds of guests. It’s just you and three other supporters of President Obama! Sitting down together with an evening among friends! It’s not often you get to talk to the President one-on-one about your hopes for the country and your ideas for this campaign. So I hope you’ll put your name in the running. Donate $5 or more today and you’ll be automatically entered for your chance at getting a seat at the table.” And then there’s the website barackobama.com “Good luck! Signed Juliana — Juliana Smoot.” Then just the other day I got an email from Joe Biden! He said, “Friend!” Gee, a friend of Joe Biden! “The President and I have a routine. We get together for lunch almost every Friday. But all I get is lunch! You could be one of the four supporters who have dinner with him soon! Donate $5 or more today to have your name automatically put in the hat here.” And they have the website, barackobama.com. “I am reminded every week that sitting down for a meal with the President of the United States without TV cameras or big crowds is something only a few people will ever get to do. You’re not going to want to miss this chance. I wish you luck. Signed, Joe.” Wow! I saw a story just the other day about how President Barack Obama has rewarded his 200 largest donors from his last campaign. And that every time he has an event these days it costs $25,000 to have dinner with him. So here for only $5 I can have a chance to have dinner with him. But how big a fool does the President of the United States and those running his campaign — how big a fool do they think the people are? I mean, they obviously figure if they run Michele Bachmann or somebody like that, Jim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and so forth, folks will vote for Obama. But what an insult it is to send this kind of email out. With all the huge amounts of money this administration has been spending on Wall Street — the bailing out of Wall Street, the forgetting about people who’ve lost their homes. The foreclosures going on every day, and this state being among the leaders around the country in foreclosures. And him charging $25,000 per couple for dinners with the president. And then pretending that we’re just plain folks and he wants to just sit down and talk with us and Joe Biden, who probably never saw this email of course, who thinks we’re just plain folks who are going to send in our $5 so we can have a chance to sit down with the president. Oh — we have a call. Maybe that’s the President!

Caller: “Yeah, hello. It’s Memo [Parker]. I’m not the President but we’re the same color.”

— Governor Jerry Brown, vetoing a California bill which would have reinstated the death penalty, 1977.

* * *

I watched a bit of FOX “news” last week. There was Mike Huckabee, hosting a show and then declaring he was not running for president since Jesus told him so (and maybe also told him he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in… never mind).

But before that momentous announcement, his guest was aging rocker Ted Nugent, “gun rights” spokesman in cowboy hat, declaring that “I am a good neighbor, but I told my neighbors that if they came on my property I would kill them.” Then he played his ancient hit “Cat Scratch Fever” with Huckabee on bass (not bad, although I wonder if “family values” guy Huckabee ever listened to the nasty words?). You can’t make this stuff up — although I’ve always preferred Nugent’s other animal hit, “Dog Eat Dog.”

The real question the show raised though was “Why is this blustery nut being given a platform on a political television show?” (and I’d say something similar about, say, Bono if I saw him on some other show, even though he just has to be smarter or at least more articulate than Nugent — although that’s not saying much). Nugent has long been famous mostly for his enthusiasm for guns and killing animals, and his cheapening of the concept of “freedom” thereof. He epitomizes the term “blowhard,” and loves it; if there was to be an American remake of “Spinal Tap,” Nugent would be a prime candidate for a leading role as a clueless washed-up old rocker. On Huckabee’s show, he also repeatedly said we needed to “unleash” the Navy Seal “warriors” who killed Osama bin Laden so they could kill everybody else we don’t like. And why is it not surprising that Nugent never served in the military, and is just another “chicken hawk”?

Nugent and Huckabee are very rich and just shucking and jiving about being common Americans. As at least Nugent admits, they or their hired help would likely shoot you if you got too close. That’s entertainment, and it’s now been well-documented that FOX’s honchos do not really want anybody to think much. But then I watched Elia Kazan’s legendary 1950s film “A Face in the Crowd” and was astonished at how prescient it was in predicting the rise of “rabid radio” and the conning of the common crowd by phony “populists” — and at Andy Griffith’s (!) portrayal of same. The film is excellent and instructive viewing even now — especially now.

So mindless yelling at one another is not new, nor is anti-intellectualism, but they do seem to be more ubiquitous nowadays. A few things have amplified the rant and snark factor — a documented decline in educational standards, the rise of “rabid radio” (and TV), and this thing we call the internet. The acceptance of anonymity is one key element as well. Until only a decade and a half ago, media such as newspapers would not, with few exceptions, publish anything without an author’s name attached, as anonymous words were considered worthless. Now of course fake usernames are a norm online, with resultant steep decline in courtesy and quality of expression. As the old early-internet cartoon had it, online, nobody knows you’re a dog — but I certainly don’t mean to insult dogs.

I’m reminded of this each time I post something remotely controversial online. Beyond the thoughtful, even complimentary comments and courteous criticisms, all manner of anonymous cowards sling all sorts of accusations and names. It’s been called the LCD or Lowest Common Denominator dynamic, and it’s all too common. And it’s also too tempting to get drawn in, responding to remarks that would be laughed out of any decent high school freshman class, and sometimes I do fall for it. But usually, I wind up reminded that the longer one “debates” with any sort of ideological fanatic, the farther from reality one gets. It quickly becomes pointless. Although critiques come from all directions, the most rabid and numerous seem to be from folks who take their cues from hucksters with names like Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Palin, etc — all public figures who have debased public debate in their own pursuit of personal profit.

Thus, when I see myself called “liberal,” “leftist,” a “nanny” and so forth, I can guess where such language and sentiment originated, and it’s not with the people typing them at me. I find such labels meaningless, even when not irrelevant to the topic at hand. But it’s a similar, convoluted picture regarding too many other issues, from climate change, family planning/abortion — even an elected official can now say, when busted lying about Planned Parenthood, that the lie “was not intended to be factual” — secondhand smoke, vaccine issues, “911 truthers” and “birthers” and on and on. It seems that educated experts can’t be trusted, because…well, just because. Layer on the massive amounts of money and time spent by corporations, other “special interests,” and their front groups aimed at undermining science on various issues, and it’s no wonder many are confused. The decline in scientific literacy among Americans comes at a time when scientific knowledge is exploding. Some people find this threatening, and thus ignorance may not be bliss, but it sure can be loud.

In fact, it occurred to me recently that anonymous online ranting is very similar to graffiti — and about as meaningful. Graffiti is usually an adolescent occupation, and just an anonymous way of “shouting” that one exists — even if, or especially if, it annoys others. “I was here!” is all it denotes, unless one is in a gang and sending a warning. But even then it’s still bluster.

All of which is a preamble to my new guidelines for my own writing, and for dealing with — or not dealing with — comments from cyberspace:

1. Anonymous critiques are cowardly and not worth the, er, paper they are printed on. Plus anonymity makes even some decent people nasty; as one popular formula has it, “Anonymous + Audience = Jerk” (actually, it’s a ruder word than “Jerk”). So, if I have something critical to say, I won’t be a coward and will put my real name on it. And expect others to do so as well, if they want to be taken seriously.

2. If I am writing something that purports to reflect expertise on an issue, I will state my credentials — education, experience, etc. Otherwise, I will begin with the new multipurpose disclaimer IKNTNATBHWIT — “I Know Next To Nothing About This But Here’s What I Think” — which is not shameful, but at least honest.

3. If I use terms or slogans or perspectives from a radio or television talk show host or “news” person of any stripe, I will provide that source. It’s only honest, and gives credit (or blame) where it’s due — and people will know anyway.

4. If I feel I must use terms like “liberal” or “leftist” or “nanny” or “right wing” or “left wing” or fascist or…etc, I will recognize in advance that that I am thus “outing” myself as a non-thinking, non-original commenter who just likes to call people names. Like a kid on a playground.

5. If I want to know more about a topic before opining foolishly, I will spend time researching it — Wikipedia may not be best source, and in fact is banned in some newsrooms due to questionable sourcing, but it’s a start. Unbiased scientific, historical, and economic information is easily accessed online now — I’ll use it.

6. If I am not so sure about what I am saying, but feel the need to say it anyway, I will use another new multipurpose slogan — NITBAFS — “Not Intended to Be A Factual Statement.”

Now, I can understand somebody saying, If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen — don’t write anything that people can attack, cowards or not. But I can take it. It’s just that I hate to see so many otherwise good — hopefully — people making jerks of themselves.

“What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not. . .our army and navy. . .Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has implanted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which primed liberty as the heritage of all men everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your door. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.” — Abraham Lincoln

“The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.” — FDR

* * *

Sometimes I think the conglomerated media moguls that have destroyed any appreciation of social reality in this country have done so because, like needy spoiled brats, they want to see just how much bullshit they can sling and get away with. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no doubt our coddled kleptocrats have convinced themselves they stole America’s hearts and minds fair and square, and that the Invisible Hand of Justice has anointed them with blank checks drawn on schoolchildren’s piggybank money, lifetime get-out-of-jail-free cards plus unlimited free lines of credit co-signed by us, their loyal and grateful audience, financiers and enablers, and I can’t say I can blame them much. You get treated like conquering royalty and pretty quick you start thinking like conquering royalty, and the world and all things in it become but the rude means to your noble ends.

The tumultuous managerial shakeup at National Public Radio headquarters for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete with left-leaning or leftist programming.

Ludicrous, that is, unless this criticism’s yardstick is the propaganda regularly exuded by the extreme right-wing Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These “capitalists” use the public’s airwaves free-of-charge to make big money.

The truth is that the frightened executives at public TV and radio have long been more hospitable to interviews with right of center or extreme right-wing and corporatist talking heads than liberal or progressive guests.

PBS’s Charlie Rose has had war-loving William Kristol on 31 times, Henry Kissinger 55 times, Richard Perle ten times, the global corporatist cheerleader, Tom Friedman 70 times. Compare that guest list with Rose’s interviews of widely published left of center guests — Noam Chomsky two times, William Grieder two times, Jim Hightower two times, Charlie Peters two times, Lewis Lapham three times, Bob Herbert six times, Paul Krugman 21 times, Victor Navasky one time, Mark Green five times, and Sy Hersh, once a frequent guest, has not been on since January 2005.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the widely-quoted super-accurate drug industry critic, who is often featured on the commercial TV network shows, has never been on Rose’s show. Nor has the long-time head of Citizens for Tax Justice and widely respected progressive tax analyst, Robert McIntyre.

Far more corporate executives, not known for their leftist inclinations, appear on Rose’s show than do leaders of environmental, consumer, labor and poverty organizations.

In case you are wondering, I’ve appeared four times, but not since August 2005, and not once on the hostile Terri Gross radio show.

The unabashed progressive Bill Moyer’s Show is off the air and has not been replaced. No one can charge PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer with anything other than very straightforward news delivery, bland opinion exchanges and a troubling inclination to avoid much reporting that upsets the power structures in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon or Wall Street.

The longest running show on PBS was hard-line conservative William F. Buckley’s show — Firing Line — which came on the air in 1966 and ended in 1999.

Sponsorship by large corporations, such as Coca Cola and AT&T, have abounded — a largesse not likely to be continued year after year for a leftist media organization.

None of this deters the Far Right that recently got a majority in the House of Representatives to defund the $422 million annual appropriation to the umbrella entity — Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). About 15% of all revenues for all public broadcasting stations comes from this Congressional contribution.

Though he admits to liking National Public Radio, conservative columnist David Harsanyi, believes there is no “practical argument” left “in the defense of federal funding…in an era of nearly unlimited choices…”

Really? Do commercial radio stations give you much news between the Niagara of advertisements and music? Even the frenetic news, sports, traffic and weather flashes, garnished by ads, are either redundant or made up of soundbites (apart from the merely two minutes of network radio news every half-hour). If you want serious news, features and interviews on the radio, you go to public radio or the few community and Pacifica radio stations.

Harsanyi continues: “Something, though, seems awfully wrong with continuing to force taxpayers who disagree with the mission — even if their perceptions are false — to keep giving…”

Public radio’s popular Morning Edition and All Things Considered are the most listened to radio shows after Rush Limbaugh’s, and any taxpayer can turn them off. Compare the relatively small public radio and TV budget allocations with the tens of billions of dollars each year — not counting the Wall Street bailout — in compelling taxpayers to subsidize, through hundreds of programs, greedy, mismanaged, corrupt or polluting corporations either directly in handouts, giveaways and guarantees or indirectly in tax escapes, bloated contracts and grants. Can the taxpayer turn them off?

Here is a solution that will avoid any need for Congressional contributions to CPB. The people own the public airwaves. They are the landlords. The commercial radio and TV stations are the tenants that pay nothing for their 24-hour use of this public property. You pay more for your auto license than the largest television station in New York pays the Federal Communications Commission for its broadcasting license — which is nothing. It has been that way since the 1927 and 1934 communication laws.

Why not charge these profitable businesses rent for use of the public airwaves and direct some of the ample proceeds to nonprofit public radio and public TV as well as an assortment of audience controlled TV and radio channels that could broadcast what is going on in our country locally, regionally, nationally and internationally? (See: Ralph Nader & Claire Riley, ‘Oh, Say Can You See: A Broadcast Network for the Audience,’ 5 J.L. & POL. 1, [1988])

Now that would be a worthy program for public broadcasting. Get Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s companies off welfare. Want to guess what their listeners think about corporate welfare?

I hope Hanson’s departure wasn’t inspired by an odd few hours two weeks ago that began with Hanson’s visit to our office. Here’s what happened: A tv guy passing through Boonville had heard Hanson on the radio. The tv guy asked me if it was the same Paul Hanson who’d tried to pull off a lottery scam up in Oregon some years ago.

I promptly e-mailed Hanson, a man I know only from his radio voice, to ask him if he was the Oregon guy. Ten minutes after the e-mail had whooshed up and away this guy comes running through the door ranting about how “the bull dykes” were trying to ruin his life, that everything I’d heard was a pack of lies, that he loved his daughter and was a Vietnam veteran, and how these unnamed people pursuing him had somehow followed him down here from Oregon. Hanson said he was pretty sure he knew who was “trying to get” him, but they were people from a long time ago, and anyway it was all untrue.

Hanson wanted to know if I was going to write about it. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, although I was already mentally composing an item called, “How I met the KZYX News Department.”

When Hanson had burst through the door, I’d asked him to sit down, to tell us what was bothering him. We get a lot of troubled people passing through and, while not fully qualified as mental health professionals, we do try to be consoling. “I prefer to stand,” Hanson had said. I thought I might have to clip him one. He was that unhinged. As Hanson yodeled about the conspirators bedeviling him, I saw The Major taking a firm grip on The Nut Repeller, a four-foot broomstick The Major has kept under his desk ever since a deranged Frenchman went off on him and Dave Severn last year.

Then, as abruptly as he’d arrived, Hanson stormed out.

Thereupon commenced from him a series of abusive e-mails that accused me of various high crimes and misdemeanors, including an accusation that I’d said his boss, Mr. Coate, had tried to “extort” money for KZYX from a dying woman.

That time, I’d written privately to Mary Aigner, KZYX’s hatchet person, asking Mares if anyone from the station had lately appeared at a diminished donor’s deathbed to pry her last few coins out of her. Aigner replied at length, and it was Aigner’s response that we printed. I’d merely done what any news hound would do — I’d asked for comment then reported the response. Mares and Co. probably resented the inquiry but they got off a plausible denial which soon appeared in print and that was the end of it. Hanson somehow had all this as some kind of attack on the station, which it wasn’t.

I have indeed attacked KZYX every which way since its inception twenty years ago, but it’s been a while since we’ve paid much attention to them although I am pleased to help sponsor Jeff Blankfort’s invaluable program, Takes On The World.

There was some more post flip-out electronic back and forth between Hanson and me. On my end I adopted my calmest, most therapeutic prose, while from him came back a deluge of insults and false accusations that were so unhinged I feared him coming back to the office with a gun, against which The Major’s pathetic length of broomstick would be useless.

So, I wrote to Hanson to say I had no intention of writing about him, although after all his insults I certainly was under no obligation to do him any favors. And Hanson, in a totally schizo about face, apologized to me.

That was the end of it, I thought.

And now he’s resigned, and it’s all out anyway. Frankly, though, I felt sorry for the guy, and I still feel sorry for the guy.

So, what is Hanson’s big secret?

Ten years ago, he’d tried to scam the Oregon Lottery for $25,000. He eventually pled out to a misdemeanor. Ho hum, but it got into the papers up north because those papers aren’t as nice as I am. And Hanson, a public person and career radio news guy, seems to have lost his job over it. Which wouldn’t have been fair, but when has fair ever applied to media?

Anyway, and as I often say, why hold it against the man, especially here in Amnesia County where you are whatever you say you are and history starts all over again every day? No one will remember tomorrow, and today is already half gone. Fresh starts are the cosmic reason Mendocino County exists. Don’t go, Paul. You belong here.

With all due respect to the organization known as Poets & Writers, I have always felt that if there’s no poetry in the writing, who needs it? Oh, I suppose a Chemistry textbook needn’t be rife with lovely language, but in the best of worlds all writing would be touched by the writer’s experience of having read and appreciated great poetry and beautifully crafted prose.

I sold my first short story for actual dollars when I was twenty-five. The year was 1974 and the buyer was Cosmopolitan magazine. This was at the very end of the era when that historic magazine along with a few dozen other large-circulation magazines in America still published fiction. Eventually I would sell stories to teen magazines and men’s magazines, along with several more to Cosmo, as my agent called that trashy mag, but I assure you I wrote all my stories with The New Yorker and Esquire in mind. Alas, those lofty literary realms were off limits to the unwashed likes of me. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as I am wont to do.

That first story I sold was about a black female prizefighter who, through a series of bizarre events, gets a shot at fighting a top-ranked male welterweight boxer. Entitled Willow, the sale of this highly improbable tale allowed me to live for more than a year without having to resort to other means of employment. (They paid me a thousand dollars and my monthly nut for food and shelter was sixty bucks.) Freed from physical labor, I managed to complete two novels, a play, and a dozen short stories before my money ran out.

The rough pattern of my life since dropping out of college in 1969 had been to work for a time, save a few hundred dollars, take a few months off to write, go back to work, take a few months off to write, and so forth. I rented rooms in houses inhabited by several other people, or I would rent cheap garrets, and I ate hippie gruel and never dined out, so my overhead was extremely low. I did make my living as a gigging guitarist singer for a couple years, but that lifestyle left me with little energy or inspiration to write, so I went back to digging ditches. I persevered in this way until I was twenty-seven and came to a defining junction in my life: I decided to stop writing.

Why? My sale of a story to Cosmopolitan had failed to spawn further sales, and I knew if I worked full-time as a landscaper for a year I could make a down payment on a little house in Medford, Oregon, learn to operate a backhoe, get hitched, go fishing, and liberate my marvelous literary agent—the likes of whom will never be seen again on this planet—from trying to sell my unsaleable stuff. I had been writing my heart out since I was a young teen, and that writer’s heart was by then so badly bruised by continuous rejection that I simply couldn’t take it anymore.

For those first few weeks of not writing, I felt so deeply relieved I mistook my relief for happiness. When I came home from a hard day of planting trees and digging ditches, I would luxuriate in a hot bath and sigh with what I imagined was contentment that I was finally over my obsession. Why had I been so driven to share my stories with the world? What difference did it make? The world was full of books and stories. I didn’t need to add to the pile. The money was piling up in my savings account, I had time to socialize, date, goof around, live!

Then my boss got a state contract to landscape a freeway overpass, which meant my wage for the next two months would leap from five to ten dollars an hour! I would make what amounted to, in my world, a fortune! I contacted a realtor. Houses in Medford were dirt cheap in those days. Honey! Life was opening up. I was playing music again. I’d get a house, start a band, have fun on weekends, and keep making those steady dollars.

Then one Saturday morning, a few months after I’d hung up my writing spurs, I woke to a story telling just enough of itself to entice me to start writing the story down and… “No way,” I said to the unseen muse. “I’m over you, babe. I’m going fishing with Fred and then I’m going dancing with Lola and if I know Lola, and I do, then…”

But the story wouldn’t leave me alone. The fish weren’t biting, so I came home, got out paper and pen and…the phone rang.

“Where are you, boyfriend?”

“Lola?”

“You did say dinner and dancing, didn’t you? Well, Lola’s stomach is growling, and Lola’s clock says seven-fifteen.”

I’d been writing for seven hours without having the slightest sense of time passing. The table was piled with pages covered with writing. My writing.

I showered and shaved and spent some sort of an evening with Lola, but the sad truth was that all I could think about was that story. For though I only had a vague idea of what I’d written down, I knew it was, if you will forgive the cliché, why I was alive.

I came home the next morning (thank you, Lola, wherever you are), gathered up the pages and settled down to read them. And I realized as I read that I couldn’t give up writing and that I wasn’t going to buy a house and learn to operate a backhoe. No. I was going to take my fortune and go to New York and finally meet my literary agent who had worked her butt off for me for six years with only one story sold to show for her Herculean effort; and I would meet writers and artists and editors and directors and…see what I could see.

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”–Jean de La Fontaine

I subscribe to Buckminster Fuller’s belief that the universe is a mind-bogglingly intelligent and comprehensively and instantaneously reactive entity, and that she constantly and exquisitely responds with some sort of action to any and every action we take or don’t take.

So…on the Monday following my decision not to give up writing, my agent calls for the first time in six months to say she’s sold another of my stories, this one to Seventeen magazine (a whimsical tale entitled The Swami and the Surfer) and that the purchasing editor also wanted to commission me to write a Christmas story for them. I then described to my agent the story that had come to me on Saturday and she said with her delectable Georgia accent, “Dahlin’, I think Cosmo will snap that one right up.” And they did.

So I finished my two months of high-paying freeway landscaping and went off to the Big Apple to schmooze with my agent and, most importantly, to meet other writers as gone to their art as I. An old friend who was working as a Broadway rehearsal pianist put me up in his tiny apartment in an iffy part of Manhattan, and I spent a month there questing for others of my kind. And though I managed to meet dozens of writers, I didn’t meet a single one who was much interested in writing. They were all totally obsessed with money and trying to connect with people in power; everything else was irrelevant to them.

My friend the rehearsal pianist was also vocal coach to several working actors and so could get us into any play on or off Broadway absolutely free. Thus the main upshot of my stay in Manhattan was that I was badly bitten by the theater bug. Upon my return to Oregon, I felt I had to live in a city brimming with theater companies, so I moved to Seattle and spent the last of my fortune (eleven months) writing plays and trying to get someone, anyone, interested in them. Failing there, and down to my last few dollars, I contacted my former employer in Oregon and asked if he would take me back on his landscaping crew. He said he would be glad to.

And the very next day my agent called to say she had sold my first novel, Inside Moves, to Doubleday, for an advance of…drum roll, please…1500 dollars, minus her 10% commission. To make a very long story short, that novel eventually brought me a good deal of money from a big paperback sale and a movie sale that opened up a bloody Hollywood chapter of my life. But I digress.

So…in 1980 I moved to Sacramento and bought the only house I’ve ever owned and plowed through the Inside Moves money in a few short years of profligate waste and bad judgment. But here’s where I’m going with this. In Sacramento, I met the late great poet Quinton Duval, and through Q I met the visionary poet D.R.Wagner, and through D.R. I met the quietly awesome poet Ann Menebroker. Now aside from being unique and wonderfully eccentric artists, these three are what Kerouac called totally gone cats—gone to their poetry in the same way I get gone to my stories and plays—not for money, because there is no money in poetry, but because their poems come to them and won’t leave them alone until they write those poems down. Why do the poems come to them? Because the poems know that these people have surrendered entirely to why they were born.

A note to those who stuck up your noses and sniffed at my mention of Cosmopolitan magazine: Thirty years ago, at the height of the hullabaloo about my novel being made into a movie, I’m being interviewed on the radio and I mention I sold my first story to Cosmopolitan. The host snickers and says something like, “More and more cleavage every week. Yuck yuck.” Then he takes calls from listeners, and this gal with a fabulous Boston accent calls in and says, “I noted your contempt for Cosmopolitan, but let us never forget that Ernest Hemmingway published his first story therein as well.”

I’m guessing she was a poet.

Todd’s web site is Underthetablebooks.com .

Hollywood produces frauds

From lives that once had meat;

No one in the know applauds

Hollywood’s latest feat

When it produces movies of

Redemption. Triumph. Real love.

* * *

I like watching boxing like I like to watch football. But I always feel guilty because someone’s getting hurt. I watch to see power and skill I wish I had.

Today, Katheryn had a vacation day and I dragged her to see The Fighter, the movie just out that the critics have been raving about. Oscar potential they say.

The history and highly unusual arrangement of Mendocino Community Network owned and operated by Mendocino Unified School District has come up for discussion recently among certain limited circles on the Coast. Since some people continue to believe that there’s nothing wrong with a school district operating and subsidizing a private business, we’re re-posting our original investigative report of MCN which was originally published in late 2000 when the question of MCN’s legitimacy first arose.

Following our report is a lengthy, and somewhat convoluted, response to it from then-MCN Manager Rennie Innis, which is then followed by my concluding remarks on the subject.

(Some of the particulars from our 2000 report and Innis’s reply are dated now, and no longer applicable, but the rest of the report stands up pretty well.)

This re-post was necessitated by recent complaints from a few MCN apologists who continue to believe that MCN gets no public subsidies and was begun with the purest public spirit.

— ms

==========

(AVA, December 13, 2000)

Mendocino Community Network

School for Scammers

by Mark Scaramella

Mendocino County Business License Number 050578 is assigned to “Mendocino Unified School District.” Address: Mendocino Community Network, 10700 Ford St., Mendocino, CA 95460.

Mendocino Unified School District is a business — technically a non-profit business called Mendocino Community Network (MCN.org). MCN.org provides ordinary internet services to thousands of northcoast computer customers which are virtually indistinguishable from its local commercial competitors, Saber.net and Pacific.net.

* * *

MCN is the brainchild of Rennie Innis, a former elementary school teacher in Sacramento who quit teaching to open a gas station in Santa Barbara. Innis learned a little about computers on his own at the gas station and then, in the early 90s, moved to Mendocino and joined with Manuel Martinez to open the “Computer Business Center.” Innis soon realized that his budding computer business was being undercut by the local school district’s ROP (vocational training) center where for the bargain price of $40 a year cyber-short residents of the upper Mendocino Coast could get computer access, laser printing and tech support using school equipment. Innis decided to apply the old adage: If you can’t beat ’em join ’em. Following a leisurely skein of presentations, meetings and a couple of white papers prepared by school staffers, the Mendocino School Board put Innis on the payroll as the school district’s very own internet service business. “The school put me out of business,” Innis chortled to friends, “so now I’ll make the school my business.”

Mendocino County’s ROP (Regional Occupational Program) connection was and continues to be an important part of MCN’s justification for a school district running a commercial internet service business. In 1993 Mendo Unified got a three-year NASA edu-grant to pay for internet connections under the guise of vocational education. To keep the NASA-supplied connection MCN was subsequently formed so that users could be billed when the grant ran out. Users were made into customers. Student “interns” would “learn” about computers by providing youthful techno-exuberance to Mendocino’s on-campus school-run for-profit business. Although some say MCN’s whiz kids get modest wages for their work, there’s no reference to kids as paid staffers in MCN’s budget.

According to a source familiar with the early days of MCN, Innis began by convincing Mendocino and County school administrators to pay him to develop an attendance program with a simple file-management program. The deal reportedly involved Innis being paid $1,800 a month for 2-3 months while he worked on the program. But the program crashed after Mendocino Unified committed $8-$10,000 on it. While Innis was applying his alleged expertise to this independent software contract he was also receiving a $3,600/month salary from the County via the County’s ROP program which he joined after shutting down his own modest and uncompetitive computer-service company.

Seeing that the District had virtually inexhaustible funds if one simply used the words “it’s for the kids” and “internet” in the request, Innis reportedly told several individuals that he was going to build his new business using the school district’s computer equipment, expecting that he could ride the “computers in the classroom” wave that has seen billions of dollars wasted on internet connections and computers in the last few years. Innis effectively merged his new school-business with the school district’s computer equipment, software and staffers who willingly participated in the public/private venture. After all, it had been given the enthusiastic blessings of the Mendo school board.

Innis then leveraged his new computer operation to launch a private Internet business called InnAccess, selling commercial internet ads to B&Bs on the Coast, and it was off to the non-profit races. InnAccess has since morphed into MCN’s commercial “Site Index” with hundreds of listings including “Business Pages,” “Food and Restaurants,” “Lodging,” “Real Estate,” and “Promotional Offers and Reciprocal Links.” Exactly what these services have to do with education is unclear to everyone but, apparently, the Mendocino school board.

Needless to say, the merger of the school’s computer activities with a commercial internet business allows Innis and Associates to benefit greatly — and some say unfairly — from the school’s financial backing — especially since the school board (with one occasional exception) is a big cheerleader for Innis’s private business operating as an educational enterprise. Free rent, free power, student labor, lots of free equipment, loans that don’t have to be paid back — hard to miss in free enterprise with public backing like this.

* * *

MCN is not a separate business with a separate board and independent budget. MCN’s board of directors is the school board itself. When MCN needs working capital, the school board is obligated to provide it. If they don’t, they risk not getting a return on their prior investment of public money, equipment and facilities.

MCN’s budget for 2000-2001 has grown to almost $1.5 million dollars. In the introduction to a recent MCN budget report to the School board, MCN Assistant Manager Mitch Sprague brags in pure business terms that “MCN is meeting sales goals,” and makes vague reference to his captive “student interns.” Typical of the convenient blending of commercial and educational finances are MCN’s “business expenses” for school staffers: $635K in “certficated and classified salaries.”

According to the MCN budget, ten adult-type people work for MCN earning $635K, for an average of some $63.5k per staffer. They also get school-supplied benefits. But if the salaries are distributed in the usual school way, most of the credentialed staffers would be getting teacher level salaries in the $50k range, the classified staff would get in the $30k range which adds up to around $400k. The two  top guys — Innis and Sprague — could be raking in over $100k each. Not bad for a school job in rural Mendocino County. And these fat figures don’t include the income from Innis and Sprague’s side businesses such as InnAccess.

These same “certficated and classified” salary categories are also listed in the school’s own budget. Which is which? Who pays for who? … Don’t ask. MCN and school district time cards aren’t available to critics or, it seems, anybody else..

MCN’s budget also includes a lump sum of $75,000 for “consulting” from the County’s ubiquitous “Netcetera” — a husband and wife team that provides nebulous but expensive computer services such as “formulating a suitable network architecture, and recommending appropriate hardware and software solutions” and “remote system and network administration, custom programming, and troubleshooting of performance and reliability problems” to any school district that can afford their exorbitant fees.

A number of expense categories are conspicuously missing from the MCN budget, indications of the kinds of invisible subsidies the school district provides over and above the student interns, property, operating capital, and other overhead costs. MCN’s utilities budget, for example, makes no reference to PG&E expenses. Nor is there any reference to insurance costs, accounting and auditing, or legal expenses. No reference to equipment or facility maintenance. No copier costs. No water, sewer, heating, trash disposal, admin staff… Only expenses which can be directly attributed to MCN are shown in MCN’s highly selective “budget.” The school district’s general fund picks up the rest with edu-dollars which taxpayers might assume are being used for “education,” not a heavily subsidized private business.

The school district’s own budget lists all these costly overhead and expense categories but makes almost no reference to MCN. MUSD’s typically impenetrable 60-page 2000 budget allocates over $3.2 million for certificated salaries and over $1.2 million in classified salaries. One can only speculate on how much the MCN and MUSD staffers overlap since the “business” and the “school” are the same entity.

* * *

Can a school be a business? Technically, yes, according to Michael Hersher, an attorney with the California Department of Education. Surprisingly, California State law does not expressly prohibit governmental agencies from competing in the private sector, even when the government agency appears to have various unfair advantages, such as captive staff, free use of school buildings, equipment and software, taxpayer-supplied working capital and overhead, and immunity from certain kinds of liability. CDOE attorney Hersher says the state has legally challenged school districts from engaging in commercial activity in the past — “Dawson v. Eastside High School District” — and lost.

“In that case the court held that a school district could engage in commercial activity,” Hersher explains, “if they determined that the commercial activity was reasonably related to their overall educational mission and that the kinds of activity involved didn’t fundamentally interfere with education. … It’s not illegal for a school district to sell something.”

Hersher says that he will continue to challenge the legality of school districts operating as for-profit operations if they are “inconsistent with the educational purposes of the school district.”

Back in 1994 MUSD staffers Jim Tobin and Yolanda Tate told then-Superintendent Ken Matheson that the state Department of Education had “raised some concerns about a school district operating a commercial business,” and recommended that MCN be set up as a separate non-profit with a separate budget and board of directors. Tobin and Tate’s analysis asserted that “the courts have implied that the authority [for government agencies to compete in the private sector] does exist,” and that “other states have specifically held that ‘a governmental agency may, in the absence of some prohibitory statutory or constitutional provision, engage in lawful competition with private concerns’.” Tobin and Tate concluded, however, with a recommendation that the School District set up a separate non-profit, adding, “the District can circumvent or avoid [state Department of Education objections] entirely.” Which it did.

When I asked Hersher recently why a school board would even want to operate a commercial business, he replied, “Well, that way there wouldn’t be a separate board to deal with. It’s simpler. As long as you’re only dealing with one board, you don’t have to worry about disagreements which would inevitably arise as board members on the different boards come and go.”

So as long as you call yourself “non-profit” and you can convince the school board that your commercial business is somehow good for the kids, you’re legal.

* * *

MCN of course has become adept at shrouding itself in edu-bafflegab to convince a credulous school board and community members that Innis’s commercial business is a boon to the kids. Excerpts from MCN’s own website are a veritable fountain of “for the kids” feel-good techno-gibberish:

“Our mission is to provide high-quality, personal Internet Services to our school district, our customers, and the communities that we serve” … “Connecting kids to their education and our community to the world” … “Schools must model support and an entrepreneurial ethics for their students and community” … “Digital technologies and entrepreneurial community engagement have become increasingly important teaching and learning tools” … “MUSD has built a telecommunications-based infrastructure that has had a positive impact on our schools, community, and the local economy” … “Teachers and staff have free dial up accounts from home” … “The technology planning process for MUSD is led by a Technology Committee composed of teachers and administrators and school board members” … “We believe in multiple intelligences” … “Teaching less content and more skills is better” … “Active learning increases decision making” … “Students need to create projects, important projects that they help develop — they’ll feel better about themselves,” “[MCN] helps foster the relationship between the community and the school,” and on and on.

MCN has effectively parlayed meaningless edu-rhetoric to justify an enormous array of tangible equipment and technical expertise at school district expense. From MCN’s website we learn that:

“MCN houses two SUN SPARC systems, one of which functions as the DNS and mail server. The second is available for backup. These servers host email, newsgroups, and websites for over 270 local teachers and 3,800 other statewide dialup subscribers. A Macintosh Power PC uses AppleTalk protocols and functions as a web and file server, and high school mail server for students. A second Macintosh Power PC located at the high school office, is used as a separate server by office staff for school information and records and is not available for general access. … There are currently 240 modems in Mendocino, and 192 modems at PacWest in Oakland, with more being added as use warrants. Dial-in accounts are cost-free to teachers and student assistants, and are available for a fee through (MCN) to other students, parents, community members, businesses, and organizations. … We have chosen to house our NOC [Network Operations Center] near the MTC [Mendocino Tech Center] (which itself is housed on the high school campus). The NOC is located in a separate building adjacent to the Computer Lab at the MTC. … The NOC is staffed by the staff of the Mendocino Community Network, the district run Internet Service Provider. MCN staff includes 7 support personnel, and 3 administrative personnel.  MCN is supported on a consulting basis by professional networking consultants from the Netcetera company. Rapid growth of the system has created the need for a full time District Network Support technician. This position is funded through a partnership between the district and MCN.”

The lines between MCN and the school district are blurred, to say the least.

Sources familiar with MCN’s finances point out that the operation spends all of its budget and hasn’t returned *any* money back to the District’s general fund, yet comparably-sized commercial ISPs like Pacific Internet in Ukiah are reporting profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Since MCN is charging rates comparable to other ISPs while being heavily subsidized by the school district, where is MCN’s “profit” going? High salaries for Innis and Associates? More and more equipment for a commercial business?

* * *

Mendocino County has two legitimate commercial internet service providers (ISPs): Pacific Internet and Sabernet, both based in Ukiah. Jim Sohn, Sabernet’s president, says he doesn’t comment on other internet service providers and doesn’t know anything about MCN.

But Jim Persky, president of Pacific Internet in Ukiah, said he has mixed feelings about MCN, with its government-subsidized advantages, as a legitimate competitor. “My libertarian politics compel me to oppose the government going into business on principle,” Persky said recently. “I fought them at first, but now that they’re there, I don’t have any problem with them. We share some resources and help each other out with technical problems. In fact, I’m glad they’re there. It’s bizarre, but we’re better off because of them.”

Sounds like Persky’s getting some indirect benefit from those edu-dollars, too. Hey, why not? Wouldn’t you? But if Persky’s not careful he might find himself becoming a target of a future hostile takeover by the Mendocino School District.

Persky notes as an aside that he used to be a big supporter of computers in the classroom himself, but now that he’s seen how they’re being used, “I think they should limit them to study halls and libraries. You don’t need them in the classroom. The teachers don’t know how to use them.”

Persky said he’s irritated that some people subscribe to MCN rather than Pacific Internet because they think MCN is somehow “community-related.” “People tell me ‘I want to support the school. I want the money to go to the kids’,” complained Persky. “But I’m community related. I employ people just like them and provide the same service.”

But then, Persky shifts gears again, adding, “But teachers are a pain in the ass anyway, so maybe it’s not really a loss. We get teachers calling for tech support who are real know-it-alls. They won’t listen to directions. They become a support nightmare for us. I think a lot of teachers are forced to use computers by their districts, but they’re not really into it so they need a lot of handholding.”

* * *

Suspicious as MCN may be, however, at this point it’s a fait accompli. Apparently its commercial customers are satisfied with the service, the school board is happy to be a business even though they’re not getting much out of it — even the commercial competition isn’t complaining.

But that’s not all — not by a long shot. MCN is exploding into the dot.com world.

MCN recently got a large donation of some land and a building when a neighboring property owner died and left some of his property to the school. The school board gave it to Innis’s MCN and MCN immediately announced ambitious plans to use the school and the new building to set up a large-scale business incubator for net-head entrepreneurs.

Using Annenberg Foundation edu-grant funding for starters, MCN has already hired an incubator director and has drawn as many coastal business heavies as they can into their new venture. The names of those on-board the MCBI (Mendocino Coast Business Incubator) Express are a virtual who’s who of the area’s business, computer and educational movers and shakers: MUSD Superintendent Mark Iacueniello, ROP counselor Dennis Guido, College of the Redwoods’ Barbara Rice, former superintendent and present Annenberg Grant administrator Ken Matheson and his son Mike (MUSD’s high school principal), County School Superintendent Paul Tichinin, Barbara Azad and Jim Hay of the Coast Chamber of Commerce, County Director of Economic Development and Finance Madelin Holtkamp, Rick Moon of the Small Business Development Corporation, Eric Schmidt from the Savings Bank of Mendocino County, and a collection of “Business Consultants/Entrepreneurs” — Bob Bushansky, Rob Cohen, Jerry Greenberg, Jim Heid (of KZYX’s “Point and Click” radio show), Lee Livezey, Jim Marquardt, Jim Palmer, Michael Potts, Wendy Roberts, Tim Standing, Larry Wagner… All of whom stand to personally benefit from the public-private partnership subsidized by large infusions of taxpayer edu-dollars.

Inevitably, Assemblymember Virginia Strom-Martin and state senator Wes Chesbro have clambered on board Innis’s public/private express. They’re important funding conduits.

“MCBI Capital Requirements and Partnership Opportunities: MCBI is currently seeking start-up funding from public funds with the support of Assemblymember Virginia Strom-Martin and through foundation, corporate, and individual philanthropy. Private investments in the project through Mendocino Unified School District are tax-deductible to the extent of current IRS regulations.”

But isn’t MCBI getting pretty far afield from “the kids”?

“MCBI will operate under the guidelines and mission of MUSD,” insists MCN’s website promotion of MCBI. “MCBI will [provide] affordable resources [i.e., tax dollars] to promising IT [information technology] start-ups and introducing local students to careers that will serve them well and help to transform the region’s collapsing resource-based economy by harvesting its intellectual potential instead of its trees.”

Leave it to educrats to justify their “inappropriate” spending by claiming to save trees!

Pacific Internet’s Jim Persky wasn’t aware of MCN’s latest venture into business incubators. To Persky, MCBI “sounds like it’s getting pretty far afield from school-related activities.”

But, you might ask, isn’t MCBI just a scheme for commercial start-up businesses to get their hands on the school district’s general educational funds and school equipment?

“MCBI will not negatively impact the general fund,” insists Innis and Associates.

“I don’t see how MCBI can help but impact the general fund,” replies the Mendocino School Board’s lone MCBI skeptic, Chuck Wilcher, who happens to earn his living as a computer consultant, “but I’m only one person.”

The Board has voted 4-1 to enthusiastically endorse MCBI. Wilcher worries that MCN and MCBI will get priority access to increasingly tight conventional school district revenues and that the costs for such a speculative operation are going to be much larger than Innis and Associates think.

Conscious of the possibility that using general fund edu-tax dollars for risky business start-ups, MCN adds, “The owner of MCBI is the MUSD. MUSD is responsible for hiring and evaluation of all MCBI personnel, and the approval and auditing of all expenditures and income. MUSD requires that MCBI will not negatively impact the MUSD general fund and that all decisions and practices of MCBI be consistent with the District mission, policies, and procedures.”

But that “requirement” has no teeth. How could the school board refuse money to MCBI once it gets going?

Muddying the funding water further, MCN adds, “Funding [for MCBI] will come from private companies, individuals, government, or philanthropic sources. Funds must come without stipulations in conflict with the business plan and be on-going.” Translation: MCBI plans to be a financial sinkhole. Remember that most “successful” dot.commers have yet to turn a profit — they operate on ad revenue and continuous infusions of venture capital.

MCBI is supposed to have its own board of directors, but that board will operate within the school district, not as a separate entity, making it nothing but a figurehead — and a scapegoat if the entrepreneurial dot.com start-ups take a nosedive.

Superintendent Mark Iacueniello recently told his school board that MCBI would become “a school for entrepreneurs and would enrich the educational program with ROP, MCN, and the High School working together.”

But since when is it a school district’s business to train and fund entrepreneurs? It’s more likely to enrich Rennie Innis and his fellow high-tech high rollers, with all the risk assumed by the taxpayers and studetns of the Mendocino Unified School District. ¥¥

== 30 ==

[Innis’s reply and our comments…]

(AVA, January 24, 2001)

mcnScam.org

Bilking the Kids II

by Mark Scaramella

On December 13 we ran an extensive story about the internent service provider business on the Coast called Mendocino Coast Network. MCN is run within and heavily subsidized by the Mendocino Unified School District.

MCN’s Business Manager, Rennie Innis finally got around to responding to the article a couple of weeks ago by sending an almost incomprehensible annotation of the story which assigned paragraph numbers to my article and commented on each. Without the original article, Innis’s comments make very little sense, therefore I’ve merged Mr. Innis’s comments with the relevant parts or sum­maries of the original article for reference [in bold brackets].

* * *

[MCN business license/address]. Correct.

[Mendocino Unified School District is a business — technically a non-profit business…] Correct, except “technically non-profit,” we are actually part of the school, which is not technically non-profit.

[MCN is the brainchild of Rennie Innis, a former elementary school teacher in Sacramento…] Incorrect. I am a former Sacramento secondary school teacher.]

[…who quit teaching to open a gas station in Santa Barbara.] Incorrect. Although I have worked in service stations while working my way through college, I have never “opened” or owned a service station. Maybe Mark is referring to a business that I partially owned — a cabinet shop in Santa Barbara. It was while running this business that I first became involved in computers in 1983.

[Innis learned a little about computers on his own at the gas station and then, in the early 90s, moved to Mendocino and joined with Manuel Martinez to open the “Computer Business Center.”] Mostly correct.

[Innis soon realized that his budding computer business was being undercut by the local school dis­trict’s ROP (vocational training) center…] Actually, the impetus for starting the CBC was in response to ROP’s intention to tighten up its policy regarding local businesses using the ROP Center as a business resource (using the computers, laser printers, etc.) instead of as a learning resource. CBC was formed to provide a place where these former ROP business users could continue to use the machines that they needed — hence the name Computer Business Center.

[Referring to his decision to close CBC and join the school district: If you can’t beat ’em join ’em.] Once I found out that ROP in fact WAS going to allow continued use of the Center by business people, the financial model and purpose of why I had started CBC changed. It became clear that CBC would not support two partners financially, so I sold my share to my partner (at that time), Manuel Martinez.

[Following a leisurely skein of presentations, meetings and a couple of white papers prepared by school staffers, the Mendocino School Board put Innis on the payroll as the school district’s very own inter­net service business. “The school put me out of busin­ess,” Innis chortled to friends, “so now I’ll make the school my business.”] In my conversation with Bob Blick, I did mention something to this effect. I love working with computers. Prior to CBC, I was a substitute at the ROP Computer Center. When I sold CBC, I returned to substitute again at ROP as often as possible (meaning as often as they needed me). Soon, one of the evening computer instructors quit and I was hired into this part time position. Over time, this position was increased to a full-time position, but at a wage scale that I could not afford to live on. During this time, I aug­mented my wages by cabinet work and computer consulting.

[Mendocino County’s ROP (Regional Occupational Program) connection was and continues to be an important part of MCN’s justification for a school district running a commercial internet service business.] True.

[In 1993 Mendo Unified got a three-year NASA edu-grant to pay for internet connections under the guise of vocational education.] False, it had nothing to do with vocational education. The grant was to the MUSD, and not to the ROP, although ROP certainly benefited greatly from NASA Internet services which were provided to ROP without charge.

[To keep the NASA-supplied connection…] Actually, MCN was formed in order to provide MUSD with an Internet connection AFTER the NASA grant’s 3-year term would have expired. Recall that MUSD did not have an option of choosing a local provider at that time, as there was no local ISP available. The Superintendent asked me if I would be interested in creating a school-owned business to accomplish this and I readily agreed.

[… MCN was subsequently formed so that users could be billed when the grant ran out. Users were made into customers.] True. And willing, happy cus­tomers they were!

[Student “interns” would “learn” about comput­ers by providing youthful techno-exuberance to Mendocino’s on-campus school-run for-profit busin­ess.] True, students learned — a good thing in my opin­ion. Some of them worked at MCN, and were paid minimum wage or better, some volunteered time. The intention of MCN is to charge for the commercial and residential services that it provides in order to take the profits and provide free and low-cost services to our local schools and non-profit organizations.

[Although some say MCN’s whiz kids get modest wages for their work, there’s no reference to kids as paid staffers in MCN’s budget.] False, Intern payroll is included in the MCN Payroll spreadsheet each year and is approved by the MUSD School Board. These are a matter of public record.

[According to a source familiar with the early days of MCN, Innis began by convincing Mendocino and County school administrators to pay him to develop an attendance program with a simple file-management program. The deal reportedly involved Innis being paid $1,800 a month for 2-3 months while he worked on the program. But the program crashed after Mendocino Unified committed $8-$10,000 on it. While Innis was applying his alleged expertise to this independent software contract he was also receiving a $3,600/month salary from the County via the County’s ROP program which he joined after shut­ting down his own modest and uncompetitive com­puter-service company.] Although the dollar amounts are very incorrect (too high by far), the experience was definite a disaster. I acknowledge that the system that I attempted to implement was too complicated for the software at that time. However, as of September 2000, some of that software was still being used to log attend­ance for the ROP Computer Lab.

[Seeing that the District had virtually inexhaust­ible funds if one simply used the words “it’s for the kids” and “internet” in the request…] Mark, you obviously have not been paying attention. The MUSD is hardly a supply of inexhaustible funds. In fact, no District funds have been used to operate MCN. For the most of the first year of operation, MCN did not have the funds to pay my $15 per hour wages, as funds were not available from the MUSD General Fund.  I did not receive these accrued wages until a year or so later.

[Innis reportedly told several individuals that he was going to build his new business using the school district's computer equipment, expecting that he could ride the “computers in the classroom” wave that has seen billions of dollars wasted on internet connections and computers in the last few years. Innis effectively merged his new school-business with the school district’s computer equipment, software and staffers who willingly participated in the pub­lic/private venture. After all, it had been given the enthusiastic blessings of the Mendo school board.] Other than your opinions about whether computers and the Internet are a waste of money, the rest is mostly cor­rect. I WAS confident that using the integrity of MUSD to establish a local ISP that donated ALL of the profits to local schools would be a successful venture. Yes, the MUSD Board enthusiastically backed this idea.

[Innis then leveraged his new computer operation to launch a private Internet business called InnAccess, selling commercial internet ads to B&Bs on the Coast, and it was off to the non-profit races. InnAccess has since morphed into MCN’s commercial “Site Index” with hundreds of listings including “Business Pages,” “Food and Restaurants,” “Lodging,” “Real Estate,” and “Promotional Offers and Reciprocal Links.” Exactly what these services have to do with education is unclear to everyone but, apparently, the Mendocino school board.] MCN is a COMMERCIAL business! It is intended to make money. For the school district. Commercial web sites are an appropriate part of MCN’s commercial services. MCN has never had a complaint that suggests that we remove commercial content from our servers.

[Needless to say, the merger of the school’s com­puter activities with a commercial internet business allows Innis and Associates to benefit greatly — and some say unfairly — from the school’s financial backing — especially since the school board (with one occasional exception) is a big cheerleader for Innis’s private business operating as an educational enter­prise.] Before starting MCN, the MUSD requested and received assurances from the CA Department of Education that MUSD was within its rights to a) own a business (including a Chevron station or a Taco Bell stand, if it chose), and b) to compete on the open market.

[Free rent…] Yes in return for over $100,000 in free services per year. Remember, MUSD owns MCN, why would it charge MCN rent? […free power…] See above. […student labor] See above. […lots of free equipment…] MCN purchases its own equipment from yearly proceeds, and provides some free equipment to MUSD. Last year, MCN provided over $15,000 in equipment to MUSD for non-MCN purposes.[…loans that don’t have to be paid back…] False.

* * *

[MCN is not a separate business with a separate board and independent budget. MCN’s board of directors is the school board itself. When MCN needs working capital, the school board is obligated to pro­vide it. If they don’t, they risk not getting a return on their prior investment of public money, equipment and facilities.] True, although MCN does maintain, and is held to, a separate budget, its budget is encapsulated [sic] by the larger MUSD budget.

[MCN’s budget for 2000-2001 has grown to almost $1.5 million dollars. In the introduction to a recent MCN budget report to the School board, MCN Assistant Manager Mitch Sprague brags in pure business terms that “MCN is meeting sales goals,” and makes vague reference to his captive “student interns.” Typical of the convenient blending of com­mercial and educational finances are MCN’s “business expenses” for school staffers: $635K in “certficated and classified salaries.”] Actually, MCN has a waiting list of students who would like to be cap­tured by MCN. They think that it is a great place to earn money and an education. Other than the tone, the dollar figures are correct.

[According to the MCN budget, ten adult-type people work for MCN earning $635K, for an average of some $63.5k per staffer. They also get school-sup­plied benefits. But if the salaries are distributed in the usual school way, most of the credentialed staffers would be getting teacher level salaries in the $50k range, the classified staff would get in the $30k range which adds up to around $400k. The two  top guys — Innis and Sprague — could be raking in over $100k each. Not bad for a school job in rural Mendocino County. And these fat figures don’t include the income from Innis and Sprague’s side businesses such as InnAccess.] Salary figures are not correct. InnAccess is not owned by Innis or Sprague, but by MCN.

[These same “certficated and classified” salary categories are also listed in the school’s own budget. Which is which? Who pays for who? … Don’t ask. MCN and school district time cards aren’t available to critics or, it seems, anybody else.] Ask MCN, you can see the time cards here at our office.

[MCN’s budget also includes a lump sum of $75,000 for “consulting” from the County’s ubiqui­tous “Netcetera” — a husband and wife team that provides nebulous but expensive computer services such as “formulating a suitable network architecture, and recommending appropriate hardware and soft­ware solutions” and “remote system and network administration, custom programming, and trouble­shooting of performance and reliability problems” to any school district that can afford their exorbitant fees.]. Their fees are very reasonable for the services that they provide, which are Unix, telecommunications, rout­ing, etc. equipment configuration and remote manage­ment. We pay them $60 per hour, similar services pro­vided by their competitors cost in excess of $100 per hour.

[A number of expense categories are conspicuous­ly missing from the MCN budget, indications of the kinds of invisible subsidies the school district provides over and above the student interns, property, operat­ing capital, and other overhead costs. MCN’s utilities budget, for example, makes no reference to PG&E expenses. Nor is there any reference to insurance costs, accounting and auditing, or legal expenses. No reference to equipment or facility maintenance. No copier costs. No water, sewer, heating, trash disposal, admin staff… Only expenses which can be directly attributed to MCN are shown in MCN’s highly select­ive “budget.” The school district’s general fund picks up the rest with edu-dollars which taxpayers might assume are being used for “education,” not a heavily subsidized private business.] True, many of the indirect expenses like PG&E, insurance, accounting, auditing, legal expenses, etc. are lumped in to the MUSD budget. However, all equipment costs, facility improvements, copier costs, sewer, heating (propane), admin staff, etc. are included specifically in the MCN budget, contrary to AVA’s claim.

[The school district’s own budget lists all these costly overhead and expense categories but makes almost no reference to MCN. MUSD’s typically impenetrable 60-page 2000 budget allocates over $3.2 million for certificated salaries and over $1.2 million in classified salaries. One can only speculate on how much the MCN and MUSD staffers overlap since the “business” and the “school” are the same entity.] MCN’s personnel expenses are in a separate budget that is incorporated into the overall MUSD budget.

(Innis agrees that California Department of Education attorney Michael Hersher said a school run­ning a business was technically legal, although ill-advised…)

[The School District set up a separate non-profit, according to an internal district memo “to circum­vent or avoid [state Department of Education objec­tions] entirely.” Which it did.] MUSD did not set up a separate non-profit (as stated by AVA).

(Innis agrees with CDOE attorney Hersher about keeping MCN part of the District, not a separate non-profit because “you don’t have to worry about disagree­ments which would inevitably arise as board members on the different boards come and go.”)

[MCN of course has become adept at shrouding itself in edu-bafflegab to convince a credulous school board and community members that Innis’s commer­cial business is a boon to the kids. Excerpts from MCN’s own website are a veritable fountain of “for the kids” feel-good techno-gibberish: “Our mission is to provide high-quality, personal Internet Services to our school district, our customers, and the communi­ties that we serve” … “Connecting kids to their edu­cation and our community to the world” … “Schools must model support and an entrepreneurial ethics for their students and community” … “Digital technolo­gies and entrepreneurial community engagement have become increasingly important teaching and learning tools” … “MUSD has built a telecommunica­tions-based infrastructure that has had a positive impact on our schools, community, and the local economy” … “Teachers and staff have free dial up accounts from home” … “The technology planning process for MUSD is led by a Technology Committee composed of teachers and administrators and school board members” … “We believe in multiple intelli­gences” … “Teaching less content and more skills is better” … “Active learning increases decision mak­ing” … “Students need to create projects, important projects that they help develop — they'll feel better about themselves,” “[MCN] helps foster the relation­ship between the community and the school,” and on and on.] I agree with the excerpted quotes. They are a good reflection of what we are about.

[MCN has effectively parlayed meaningless edu-rhetoric to justify an enormous array of tangible equipment and technical expertise at school district expense.] None of the equipment used to operate MCN has cost MUSD any money.

(Innis says that the technical info about MCN obtained from the MCN website is out of date.)

[The lines between MCN and the school district are blurred, to say the least.] Says you.

[Sources familiar with MCN’s finances point out that the operation spends all of its budget and hasn’t returned any money back to the District’s general fund, yet comparably-sized commercial ISPs like Pacific Internet in Ukiah are reporting profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Since MCN is charging rates comparable to other ISPs while being heavily subsidized by the school district, where is MCN’s “profit” going? High salaries for Innis and Associates? More and more equipment for a commercial business?] There are a number of factors that make MCN different from normal, commercially operated ISPs:

a) MCN did show a profit of $71,000+ last year. This is held in a bank deposit for contingency purposes. MCN does not have access to this money as it can only be spent at the discretion of the MUSD BOD.

b) In addition to the cash profit, MCN gave away over $195,000 worth of otherwise billable services to MUSD, other Mendocino County school districts, and local non-profits such as the local libraries, environmen­tal centers, shelters, etc. Although I do not have informa­tion regarding the extent of donations made by other ISPs, I am sure that MCN must be near the top of the list regarding the donation of profit to Gross Revenue ratio.

c) MCN was not set up to create a profit. It is true that much of the revenue generated is reinvested into state of the art equipment each year. It is my opinion that MCN owes its customers the best quality service that it can afford to provide to our community.

(Innis says he refers customers to Pacific Internet “when the fit is better or when customers are unhappy with MCN.”)

[(Among other things) Pacific Internet owner Jim Persky says that “teachers are a pain in the ass any­way, so maybe it’s not really a loss. We get teachers calling for tech support who are real know-it-alls. They won’t listen to directions. They become a sup­port nightmare for us. I think a lot of teachers are forced to use computers by their districts, but they’re not really into it so they need a lot of handholding.”] Teachers need tech support. That’s what we are here for. They DO take a lot of tech support!

[MCN is exploding into the dot.com world. MCN recently got a large donation of some land and a building when a neighboring property owner died and left some of his property to the school. The school board gave it to Innis’s MCN and MCN immediately announced ambitious plans to use the school and the new building to set up a large-scale business incuba­tor for net-head entrepreneurs.] True, the building and land were donated to the MUSD. As MCN was in severe need of larger space, and the building was not capable of becoming a classroom, MCN was asked to move into the current “MCN building.” MCN is a “peer” to the Incubator, MCBI is operated by MUSD in conjunction with MCN. MCBI has it’s own budget and will succeed or fail on its own. MCN will offer subsidized services as appropriate in a similar manner to the other sub-entities of the MUSD. Yes, the plans are ambitious — we are excited by the possibilities that MCBI provides for our area.

[Using Annenberg Foundation edu-grant funding for starters, MCN has already hired an incubator director…] Unfortunately, untrue. MUSD has not been able to hire a director at this time.

[…and has drawn as many coastal business heav­ies as they can into their new venture. The names of those on-board the MCBI (Mendocino Coast Business Incubator) Express are a virtual who’s who of the area’s business, computer and educational movers and shakers … All of whom stand to personally ben­efit from the public-private partnership subsidized by large infusions of taxpayer edu-dollars.] How are the people on the advisory board going to personally benefit from MCBI? Only in that MCBI will benefit the com­munity that they live in. The people listed have donated their time to this project.

[Inevitably, Assemblymember Virginia Strom-Martin and state senator Wes Chesbro have clam­bered on board Innis’s public/private express. They’re important funding conduits.] Hurray!

[But, you might ask, isn’t MCBI just a scheme for commercial start-up businesses to get their hands on the school district’s general educational funds and school equipment?] The project has a School to Career component and an ROP Adult Ed component. The pur­pose is to help local business grow, and thrive.

[But that “requirement” (that MCN not impact the general fund) has no teeth. How could the school board refuse money to MCBI once it gets going?] By not approving its budget. MCBI will be operated like other sub-entities of MUSD in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, just like MCN.

[Muddying the funding water further, MCN adds, “Funding [for MCBI] will come from private comp­anies, individuals, government, or philanthropic sources. Funds must come without stipulations in conflict with the business plan and be on-going.” Translation: MCBI plans to be a financial sinkhole. Remember that most “successful” dot.commers have yet to turn a profit — they operate on ad revenue and continuous infusions of venture capital.] Granted, there is currently a need for MCBI to obtain “outside funding” beyond its projected revenue for the foreseeable future — but it will not come from MUSD.

[But since when is it a school district’s business to train and fund entrepreneurs?] Do your research. It’s done all the time.

[It’s more likely to enrich Rennie Innis and his fellow high-tech high rollers, with all the risk assumed by the taxpayers and studetns of the Mendocino Unified School District.] MCBI will not be funding them. They will be paying MCBI for the services that MCBI provides to them. MCBI will assist the entre­preneurs to find funding of their own as a component part of the instructional package.

* * *

Mr. Innis sent the above comments to selected email addresses of people who had expressed concern about MCN based on my December 13 article. He did NOT send it to the AVA — apparently hoping to avoid a response to his non-refutation. Based on these comments, Mr. Innis then claims in his email intro that my article “has many inaccuracies,” using this ridiculous annotation as proof.

But Mr. Innis’s annotation is obviously nothing but a pathetic combination of confirmations, vague denials, info-free self-serving assertions, irrelevant nitpicks, and outright misrepresentations.

In focusing on a few irrelevant trees, Innis conveniently and intentionally ignores the forest. The point is: MCN is operating a for-profit commercial business under the guise of a school district, taking advantage of numerous direct and indirect school subsidies, and marketing it as “good for the kids,” giving MCN and Innis an enormous unfair advantage over anyone else on the coast who tries to enter the internet service business. I know of at least three people who were unable to start or expand internet businesses because they couldn’t compete with Innis’s publicly subsidized scam. In fact the subsidies are much larger than I described in the original article — besides paying no overhead expenses, MCN pays no taxes! None! No property tax, no income tax, no corporate tax.

This, however, did not prevent Innis from claiming credit on KZYX a couple weeks ago for NOT lowering his monthly internet hook-up fee ($19.95/mo.) as a favor to the two other ISP’s in the County, which might complain if Innis undercut them. This cozy ISP cartel maintains artificially high, uncompetitive prices, and blocks competition from entering the market by offering selective discounts to people who complain or threaten to jump ship. This would be bad enough if all of Mendocino’s ISPs were commercial operations, but MCN is heavily subsidized, so the “profits” which flow from MCN’s monopoly-cartel go directly to MCN and Innis. Innis then turns around and claims that some vague “services” are provided “free” to certain subscribers. How generous.

Regarding Mr. Innis’s few marginally substantive comments:

• Mr. Innis says that the fact that “There is no mention of students as paid staffers in MCN’s budget” is “False,” because the “Intern payroll is included in the MCN Payroll spreadsheet” blah-blah-blah… They’re NOT in the budget.

• “No district funds have been used to operate MCN.”

Please. Much of the initial equipment was school district equipment. The labor to start it up was school staff. And, according to the MUSD audit for 1999, hundreds of thousands of dollars which were advanced to MCN were paid back only last year. And MCN’s relatively small fake “surplus” for 2000 didn’t go to the school district’s general fund, it was held for MCN by the school board — without objection from Innis. The audit indicates that MCN is routinely advanced money from the District’s general fund: “These amounts actually represent a temporary cash advance from the General Fund to the MCN Fund that has been made to facilitate the purchase of the electronic equipment required for the MCN operation. For the 1998-99 year, this advance has been recorded as amount due to the General Fund.”

• “Virtually inexhaustible funds…”

Has Mr. Innis been turned down for any funding or school resources? Has his budget ever been turned down. (Are any school budgets turned down?) Isn’t the school district being used as gaurantor and banker of loans and grants applied for and received by MCN? Compared to commercial ISPs, the school/MCN being a public entity backed by taxpayer dollars does indeed give MCN virtually inexhaustible funds.

• Innis claims that MCN provides $100,000 in free services per year in exchange for rent.

How convenient. 1. Let’s have a list of those “free services.” 2. Whatever the “free services” are, they can’t be compared to the rent that must be paid by commercial ISPs. 3. If the “free services” weren’t provided would the school district charge rent? Of course not. It’s all the same entity.

Mr. Innis says that my assertion that the District gives MCN loans that don’t have to be paid back is “False.”

According to the school district’s most recent audit (page 66) they obviously don’t have to be paid back, because big school district advances have been floating for quite a few years. Even if the advance happens to be paid back, they don’t have to be — they’re not like a serious bank loan. There’s certainly no collateral. If MCN had felt like spending more money on equipment or staff and further delayed the payback or increased the advance, there’s no indication that the District or Board would have balked.

• Mr. Innis says that the “salary figures are not correct.”

In the original story I said they were estimates, because they are not broken down in the MCN budget, but individual teacher salaries are shown in the School District budget. So, what are the correct MCN salaries, Mr. Innis?

• Mr. Innis says “all equipment costs, facility improvements, copier costs, sewer, heating (propane), admin staff, etc. are included specifically in the MCN budget, contrary to AVA’s claim.”

The fact that MCN pays less than $2,000 annually for sewer and propane hardly changes the point. The admin staff I was referring to is free overhead admin not the MCN direct admin Innis is referring to. Copier costs are not in the MCN budget, nor are facility improvements or equipment maintenance.

• Mr. Innis says that MCN “gave away $195,000 of services.”

This is more funny money, since MCN itself doesn’t have any money to “give away” in the first place — it’s all mushed together with the school district. And the value is whatever MCN claims it’s worth. Unless there’s a detailed and public accounting of who’s getting what free services so that the public can judge if the handouts are based on board-approved criteria and done even-handedly — not to persons and organizations of Mr. Innis’s personal choosing — this claim is not credible. A number of MCN critics on the Coast say that Innis gives “free service” to 1. his friends, 2. persons who complain and threaten to jump to other internet service providers, 3. persons who promise to give something back to MCN in exchange for the “free services.”

• Mr. Innis says that MCBI’s hiring of a director is “unfortunately untrue.”

The “unfortunately untrue” news that a director had been hired came directly from the MCN website.

• How will the business people benefit? By having MCBI operate as a recruiting and screening operation at no cost or risk to them. They’d be able to pick and choose from the incubator graduates after they’re weeded out and trained; in some cases they’d be able to buy entire businesses on the cheap and absorb them into their own operations. They’ll also be able to influence the naive high school kids and the kinds of incubators that will be focus on to their own advantage.

• According to Innis, school districts training entrepreneurs is “done all the time.”

Whether it’s “done all the time” or not, (and it’s not) the purpose of a public high school is not to train entrepreneurs.

Innis says that “MCBI will not be funding” entrepreneurs. “They will be paying MCBI for the services that MCBI provides to them. MCBI will assist the entrepreneurs to find funding of their own as a component part of the instructional package.”

Conventional small business incubators are designed to be cut-rate facilities to help start-ups. The cut-rate and the “assistance” is the way the entrepreneurs are funded or “subsidized.” And what happens if the “entrepreneurs” are unable to “find funding of their own”?

The fact that Mendo Unified’s board accepts this kind of drivel and dissembling from Innis as justification for MCN may be the only real reason they should be recalled, but too many people in Mendo Unified’s district are benefiting too much from MCN for a serious recall to be mounted on that basis. ¥¥

Capital’s most severe crisis in 70 years ought to be a moment of significant opportunity for the left. But as the right mobilizes disgruntled Americans via its vast radio, television, web, and print empires, the one mass medium available to the left — Pacifica Radio — is driving out its best and brightest. A network that has the potential to reach a quarter of the US public is opting for irrelevant and unlistenable programming at a time when competent and genuinely radical journalism is urgently needed, and justifying its warped choice with the Thatcherite mantra: there is no alternative.

In two previous dispatches to CounterPunch, I described the pathological state of Pacifica’s byzantine governance structure — a national board containing 122 members, baroque bylaws, and vastly expensive and corrupt local board elections. The chief result has been the ascendancy of a kind of Tea Party of the left, featur­ing ex-Scientologists, miracle cure hucksters, and con­spiracists who believe that Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, Pacifica’s premier program, is taking CIA money to suppress “the truth about 9/11.” Add to that an auster­ity plan to stick it to the workers, right out of the Thatcher/Sarkozy playbook, and you have Pacifica Radio in 2010.

There are few things worth giving up a perfect fall after­noon in Upstate New York for, but Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman with live music is one of them. A din­ner break and a return for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, beginning as the sun sets on the other side of Lake Cayuga seals the sac­rifice of those irreplaceable autum­nal hours to the gods of the silver screen.

Before I Am Love, directed by Luca Gaudagnino and released into American movie theaters this summer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Adams had never written a soundtrack. In a way he still hasn’t, since more than 30 minutes of music he supplied for this Italian soap opera without the suds were cannibalized in one and two minute bites from his earlier work. It’s not an unusual way for a composer to get a screen credit, even from beyond the grave. Beethoven did it for A Clockwork Orange, Mozart for Amadeus, and Bach for Tree of Wooden Clogs. Each one of those was a far better movie than I Am Love. At least Adams is still alive and might one day sign on to a movie worthy of his gifts.

Adams once turned down an invitation to do a film score for Francis Ford Coppola, but the composer seems to be on board for I Am Love, which cost him little or no creative energy. After having seen a rough-cut of the film in London in 2009 he made some suggestions, and for the American campaign he has promoted the movie along with the film’s star and co-producer Tilda Swinton.

As more people discover how to send text messages on their ever-present cell phones, we have become a nation of hypnotized zombies who stare into our phones while we drive into telephone poles, walk into trees, wander into fellow pedestrians, jam up traffic in the cereal aisle and generally tune out to what is going on right in front of our noses.

Who ever thought that our culture would be taken over, not by robots, not by the Russians, not by rock and roll, but by little hand-held walkie talkies that send writ­ten notes of no more than 140 characters in length.

It’s as if we’ve collectively returned to fifth grade when we learned the joy of passing notes.

Oh, to get a folded up note! A message from an ora­cle!

A note passed in class was magical. It was concealed. It was secret. As you opened it, you dreamed of the pos­sibilities inside.

The content always disappointed, of course. The mes­sage was meaningless, stupid or incoherent.

But for that moment when you held the note, knew it was meant for you and you only, a special drug took effect.

That drug is hope, for it is always possible that an unopened note might contain the evidence you crave that you are special, loved, complete and whole.

The fifth grade notes always fell short, but enough of the hope drug lingered in the body that the over-all experience was pleasurable. The next note was wel­comed with the exact same exhilarating sense of unreal­istic expectation.

Like lab rats pressing a bar to get their pleasure zones zapped again and again, even at the expense of food, water and safety, people are now passing notes to each other while thousands of miles apart. Or while in the same car.

Did we think it could get worse than people talking on cell phones everywhere?

It just did. People now talk with their thumbs.

Actual cell phone conversations, even though they dis­tract drivers and leave them sitting at stop signs while everybody else waits for them to go, still allow people to use their eyes.

Cell phones used in restaurants for gag-inducing con­versations about Grandma’s colostomy, Ellen’s weight issue or the dog’s ear infection are merely rude.

But text messaging, although bystanders are spared the agony of hearing the message out loud, occupies both eyes, both hands and all of one’s attention.

The people standing right next to you are left to won­der if you even know they are there. When the oracle from beyond issues a message of less than 140 charac­ters, everything stops.

Nobody seems to mind the tremendous inefficiency of talking with one’s thumbs. Sending little text messages takes time, especially for older folks like myself who were taught to type using all of our fingers.

Nobody seems bothered when people tune out mid-conversation to smile at their phone, happy as a fifth grader who just got a note that not-so-incidentally, the person next to them did not get.

Nobody seems to mind that the problem of people tuning out to text is literally taking lives on our high­ways.

Text messaging triggers the production of a powerful drug by our glandular nodes that overrides all other con­cerns.

It is the same drug that makes unopened Christmas gifts under the tree more thrilling than the disappointing box of junk you take home after the gifts are opened.

It is a drug produced by hope that an oracular mes­sage from beyond will finally soothe the unbearable anxieties of existence.

As with all drugs, we love to deny their pernicious effects. Texting is “more efficient,” people say.

Efficient? Try going through the same revolving door as somebody who is trying to finish up a text message.

The reason people insist texting is more efficient is it doesn’t require the hassle of clumsy social conventions like saying hello and goodbye.

Texting doesn’t require that you look a person in the eye.

No wonder 20-something lovebirds now break up with each other by text message.

Text messaging is one more way machines have drained the blood from human communication.

Yes, we can be in constant touch with everybody. Yes, we can get magical messages from beyond. Hun­dreds per day!

But to the extent we prefer oracular machine mes­sages to face-to-face human communication, we set our physical, emotional and mental health aside in favor of a pernicious drug.

Comments on the Oliver Stone film “South of the Bor­der” accompanied by a Carmen Miranda tune, at Berkley’s Elmwood Theatre, July 17, 2011, with econo­mist and scriptwriter Mark Weisbrot (with Tariq Ali-in the film) fielding questions.

The film originated when Oliver Stone decided to interview Hugo Chavez to counter the general distortions in the US media. While in Venezuela Stone apparently took off with the film crew to interview South American Presidents who are the new wave of elected social democrats, who did not come to power via a revolution as in Cuba. Chavez -Venezuela, Correa-Ecuador, Morales-Bolivia, Lugo-Paraguay, Lula-Brazil, Fernan­dez- Argentina, and a snippet of Raul Castro, the only one who came to power via a legitimate revolution.

High Times magazine sponsored the original “Canna­bis Cup” in Amsterdam in 1987. The event inspired plant breeders and publicized their strains and their seed com­panies. It has been held annually ever since — a fine excuse for a trade show and an extended party at harvest time.

The pretext of a cannabis cup is that discerning judges will sample various strains and determine the best (to be announced at the climactic awards ceremony). The truth is, it’s impossible for judges, after sampling strain #1, to then distinguish the effects of sample #2. The body needs an interval of at least three or four hours for a return to baseline cannabinoid levels. Lester Grinspoon, MD, thinks that evaluating only one sample a day would be preferable.

High Times recently launched a glossy quarterly called HT Medical Marijuana News and Reviews, edited in San Francisco. To celebrate their arrival on the scene, the magazine staff organized the first ever “medical” cannabis cup, It was held last week-end at Terra, an events center — an erstwhile factory with a large side-yard — on Harrison St., kitty corner from the Sailors and Seamen’s Union hall.

The weather was okay on Saturday, perfect on Sun­day, and a whompin’ good time was had by about 2,000 medical cannabis users each day. Tickets cost $50, ven­dors paid $1,500 for tables. It was not the standard High Times demographic — there were more middle-aged people and senior citizens. I figured about half the sen­iors had done time. And all had lived in fear of the cops and endured social contempt. Now they were passing joints in the sunshine, ignoring the “no tobacco smok­ing” signs, enjoying a sliver of freedom.

Valerie Corral, the leader of WAMM, had been assigned to judge the strains classified as Sativas. She was given 42 samples to evaluate six days prior to the event. I saw her one day that week at a meeting — she was sampling #32 and conscientiously recording her impressions in a notebook. DJ Short, the renowned plant breeder and seed merchant, had to judge 38 Indica sam­ples. He and Val each managed to select a top five (in consultation with High Times editors), and then Jorge Cervantes, the best-selling author of cultivation guides, made the final call.

Valerie Corral is a very positive woman. She said that every bud she evaluated was “a jewel grown with the best intentions.” But the chemical residue on some made her cough, and one gave her a headache. DJ Short, who is not partial to Indicas in general, didn’t find any he especially liked among the cup entrants. But the show must go on, and Cervantes made executive decisions based on appearance and aroma.

And the winners were… Best Sativa: “God’s Pussy,” from GreenBicycles up in Crescent City… Best Indica: “Cali Gold,” from Mr. Natural, Inc…. Best concentrate (chosen by Chris Conrad and Mikki Norris from among 16 entrants): Ingrid, by the Leonard Moore collective, Mendocino… Best edible: biscotti from Greenway in Santa Cruz.

Steep Hill lab in Oakland tested the entrants for THC content. Steep Hill’s David Lampach says that the canna­bis cup entrants averaged 15-16% THC, whereas the buds the lab ordinarily tests average 10-12% THC. “The winners all had high THC levels,” according to Lam­pach, “but not necessarily the highest.” God’s Pussy was found to contain 18.2%; Cali Gold 18.4%; and Ingrid hash 45.5% THC.

Lampach points out that Cali Gold, though classified as an Indica by the Cup organizers, might actually be a sativa-dominant strain, based on its lineage. The taxon­omy of cannabis is very loose, to put it mildly. Sativas are said to have longer, narrower leaves; to take longer to reach maturity (important for growers); and to have a more cerebral effect (as opposed to sedating Indicas). DJ Short says there is no clear dividing line and cites the example of Flo, a strain he developed that is “a quick finisher but has narrower leaves and a Sativa effect.”

Both Valerie Corral and DJ Short said they were struck by the predominance of cannabis grown indoors and felt impelled to extol the virtues of the sun. So did Jorge Cervantes, who gave a talk on cultivation to a rapt SRO audience. Note that the Amsterdam cannabis cup is held in November, when the outdoor harvest comes in. In California, where most cultivation is indoors, the cup was held in June. Obeying the law of supply and demand requires lots of electricity.

High Times Medical News and Reviews gave an award to Lester Grinspoon, MD, for his enduring service to the cause… Grinspoon winced when he learned the name of the winning Sativa, and High Times promptly took the offensive term down from its website. Grin­spoon has an idea to promote more dignified nomencla­ture in the future: judges should give weight to the name of a strain when evaluating its worth as a medicinal product.

Previously, I raised a point that is crucial for under­standing the situation of Greece today: that all of the images of Greeks as over-paid, lazy, extravagant, blah blah blah— hit the international media after the run on their sovereign debt by financial profiteers had begun. In other words, popular opinion about Greeks is essentially an echo chamber justifying the “judgment of markets,” or the actions of financial debt and derivatives swindlers, hedge fund division, Goldman Sachs conference. So let’s consider just how extravagant Greeks really are.

Community radio enthusiasts descended onto the small town of Garberville, California on May 14th-16th for the 15th Annual Grassroots Radio Confer­ence. Sta­tion managers, show hosts, producers and newsmakers from around the country gathered for the three-day con­ference to share skills, network and dis­cuss all things radio.

Author and independent news producer Laura Fland­ers was the keynote speaker.

She discussed the media’s role in holding public offi­cials accountable, and the mainstream media’s failure in fulfilling that role.

“Keeping someone accountable? We’re no better than the people of Afghanistan,” she said.