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Georgia's illegal immigrant law fiasco exposes some cracks in the Republican coalition of working class and wealthy. 


Somehow, when it comes to illegal immigration, employers and political leaders suddenly pretend that they don't understand what a labor market is.  When it suits employers to give people crap wages, then it's all about the natural discipline of markets, like it or lump it.  If you don't take the wage, then somebody else will.  But when companies can't get people to work for crap wages, then they forget about how markets work and all of a sudden Americans are too lazy and greedy to work for a "reasonable wage".


The labor market idea is pretty straightforward.  You raise the amount offered until there are people willing to take the job at that wage.  It might mean that a pint of blueberries costs $3.75 rather than $3.00, but hey, markets.  We don't just make up a price like we were the Soviet Union.


For years, our savvy capitalists have gotten around that pesky downside to markets by encouraging labor from Mexico and Central America, first because these people were poor and ambitious, and second because they arrived conveniently as second class citizens (undocumented immigrants) who couldn't insist on niceties like wage and labor conditions.  If they did get demanding it was easy enough to have them deported.  (Then employers had the gall to say that they had to bring in Mexicans, since Americans wouldn't take these jobs.)


Of course, this was enraging to many existing US citizens, in part since they rightly saw this whole game driving down their wages and "taking jobs".  There was a potential conflict in the Republican Party between popular anger in "the base" about this illegal importation of cheap labor, versus employer enthusiasm for the same.  This conflict could be successfully defused as long as the popular rage could be directed at the illegals themselves, rather than the employers and politicians benefiting from the situation; and as long as political leaders could pretend to care about it, without actually threatening the status quo.


Under popular pressure, however, Arizona and Georgia have broken that compact and passed anti-immigrant legislation that actually does threaten the status quo.  Apparently, Georgia has successfully scared off undocumented workers and outraged employers are claiming they are face a labor shortage, and will have crops rotting in the fields.  Although, the governor hopes that another convenient set of disenfranchised, second class citizens, (e.g. former prisoners and probationers) can fill the gap, there is panic that employers might find themselves exposed to the legal labor market.


It's unfortunate that it took xenophobia and racism to break the logjam that the Republican Party had engineered to prevent immigration and labor reform.  And it is unfortunate that some farmers are going to let their crops rot in the field because $3.75 berries picked by Georgia high school students can't compete with $3.00 berries picked by illegal laborers in North Carolina.  But it may be this implosion of Republican hypocrisy that finally makes room for some version of reform.  It's up to us to make sure those reforms don't just require businesses to stop gaming the labor market, but also bring some justice to working people, whatever the state of their documents.

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The honeybees are busy drawing comb on the foundations.

I'm still not sure where they're flying off to for their nectar and their pollen

The queen came out onto the tops of the frames,

mobbed by her attendants.

I hope she's doing well.

A click beetle with eyespots

landed on my white shirt.

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I found some retsina, 

so Monica

found some ground lamb

 and garlic

 and pine nuts 

and I gathered sorrel from the woods.

And with some olive oil that a Greek lady

who's smitten with Monica 

gave to her from Greece,

 she made Kebabs 
and tzatziki

for the warm bread

and olives, black and green.

And there was a 

happiness of food.

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I got my bees last night from the beekeeper, and this morning, when they were stilly dozy from the cool night, I moved them to the hive.


Within a couple of hours foragers were already returning with golden pollen, and they stayed busy with it all day.


I tried to see where they were going, but they would spiral up into the sky until I was too blinded to follow them.


I'll give them a few days to settle in before I open it again to meet the queen.

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I've sometimes wondered: Do we love flowers because they are beautiful and colorful, with perfumes and sweet nectar?  Or do we just happen to love color and nectar and floral perfume because they are the signals that plants have used for a hundred million years to advertise their proffered concentrations of food and nutrients - and so we have been hardwired to quiver in delight at these signals.  

(And honey, as literally the distillation of this entire seduction, is the ultimate in nature's foods.)

I've wondered:  If a hundred million years ago plants had chosen the carrion flies, rather than the sugar sippers, to be their pollinators, would the world be full of plants reeking of rotting flesh?  And would we be happy connoisseurs of decay and the smell of fly-beloved shit, and would we surround ourselves with gardens decorated with "flowers" comprised of fleshy petals of meat and offal?

I've always liked that idea of the path not taken - of a humanity where grandmothers send each other cards not of saccharine violet bouquets, but decorated with careful, lovely illustrations of rotting flesh-roses.  

The colony of octopus stinkhorn growing on a pile of discarded charcoal reminded of those wonderings. Here's a creature that took that path.  It puts out its fleshy tentacles and attracts the flies with a heady odor of dogshit.  And the flies do come.

And I'm sure the flies find the orange and stinking fungi beautiful and even quiver in delight.

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Milkweed in June

The birds have been fledging.  The chipping sparrows and carolina wrens have pushy, noisy youngsters in tow.  It's hard to tell how many phoebes there are in the yard, but it's more than the two.  And yesterday afternoon in the overgrown yard there was a turkey hen with 4 tawny poults scampering around her.  The catbird looks harried and distracted, but I haven't noticed nest nor nestling.  The 4 eggs in the robin's nest are gone - raccoons maybe?  do we have snakes that will climb into a low-lying pine?


I will set the computer aside and see what else is happening outside.

The Potato Patch

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One of those weeks gone in a blur.  Last week of school for the boys, so that rattled the schedule.  Beach day (each class goes off to a different beach), field day, "lower school rising" (when the students cross a little bridge to their next year's classes).  Monica writing up her teacher's comments and putting together DVD's of the kids singing and showcasing their Spanish language skills.  And she's starting to get sucked into the Nature Center's world for the camp season - meetings, forms, CPR training.  At work I was bouncing between rebuilding the website, editing video that we shot in Ohio on privatization, and helping finish the draft of the report due out today.  

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Mrs. C said she wanted a picture of all the 4th grade girls, 

and they all clamored that Nico needed to be in the picture, too.

So they ran to find him.

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Most of our work this winter and spring has been, in one way or another, about the U.S. economy and the efforts to get people to do something about it.  Nothing I see there dissuades me from my pessimism.  We're entering the post-prosperity era, and no one, not regular people, not the elites, not advocates, not politicians, seem prepared to engage with that reality.  The U.S. middle class has been duped and betrayed by the cheerleaders of market capitalism; the poor are consigned to their dead ends with that same righteous contempt that Charles Dickens portrayed so vividly; the rich are spinning out their ponzi schemes, and the clear-thinking ones are no doubt trying to time their exit jump.  The government is on the verge of being destroyed as a functional institution; the mass media have discredited themselves with each new debasement (and left people to find their place in the archipelagos of a fragmentary and polluted internet infoscape).


The politics of the moment are summed up by a joke making the rounds among liberals:  "A Tea Partier, a Union member and a Wall Street Banker are sitting around a table with 10 cookies on it.  The Banker grabs nine of the cookies and gets up to leave.  He pauses, and says over his shoulder to the Tea Partier, You better watch out, that Union guy wants your cookie."


I wonder about the declining number (and quality) of the cookies we will squabble over.  The U.S. has all the symptoms of a declining empire, but we may not decline alone.  The era of cheap, concentrated fossil energy is drawing to a close, climate destabilization is meeting or exceeded the worst-case scenarios of the climate scientists (and still we continue on the same path, undeterred), and there is no political will or vision to do anything at the scale necessary to change things.

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Hiking the woods by Ell Pond

a song of stone and salt sweat.

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Garden Blogging:

The clavate tortoise beetle, (plagiometriona clavata) cleaves to the potato leaves like a round limpet.  On its back is the silhouette of a brown teddy bear, with tiny, tiny antennae.  It prefers to lays its eggs on the nightshades -- potato, tomato, eggplant.  Maybe they are in the yard thanks to the deadly nightshades that grow up the back of the hedge. I plucked 35 of them from the potato patch, and, since I'm not an angry gardener yet, I put them gently into the freezer to die.

In the natural course of things I will see the invading army of green spiny larvae - making a lace out of the crucial leaves, each tiny monster wielding a black rumpled shield that it builds of exoskeleton and feces.  Much less charming decoration than the teddy bear silhouette.

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My garden this spring is a first step in a longer process - part scientific experiment, part evolutionary system, part skill-set expansion.  I planted eight different varieties of potato.  6 in regular rows, one into broken sod and one under a leaf pile.  I'm planting a mix of squashes as well as a watermelon called moon and stars.  4 heirloom tomato plants went in today, Pruden's Purple, Peacevine Cherry, Black Krim and Jaune Flamme.  Also a quartet of Cassius Cauliflowers and a habanero pepper all bought as starters from the organic nursery.  A patch of parsnips went in just for the heck of it, and basil in a couple of places.  Beans and turnips are still to go in and should fill in the remaining patches.

As much as possible I'm going with heirloom varieties, that is, non-hybrids that breed true and allow you to collect seeds from your more successful plants for the following year.  Not only does it let you fine tune your plants to your local conditions, but it gives you more control over your seed supply (if you can master all the skills involved, of course).  We'll see.

The key to vigor in any evolutionary system is selection from diversity, and that is the logic that guides me here.  It's even more important because I don't trust that our industrial food system (which favors standardization and monoculture over diversity at every step of the process from farm to table) not to get tripped up - either by climate change or fuel shocks or something less foreseeable.  A vigorous gardening culture, with a diversity of varieties could be the key to surviving that with a minimum of malnutrition.

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I want to read this night-leaf tarot:

 . . . Sometimes, deep in the night

it rains; and in the morning I find it hasn’t been
a dream. Tarot waiting to be read on a wet

driveway— random lilac, red maple; sharp
green spades that cradled gardenias: what

do they know of warnings and misfortune?
Leaf of the cherry, red heart, organ of fire:

I name you as if I could thread your bones;
I name you not knowing your mystery.

—Luisa A. Igloria 
05 27 2011

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Backyard blogging:

On the broken, dry-bones parasol

of last year's Queen Anne's Lace

A twiggish damselfly

In my lazy-man's potato patch
(where I simply broke the sod with a shovel, 
tossed down seed potatoes, 
and covered them all with leaves)
a few plants are pushing up through.






Our Jonathan apple blossomed this year, but doesn't look like it set much fruit.  So when I saw a Macoun tree for sale I bought it to keep the other company.  If they bloom at the same time next spring (and cross-pollinate) they should be happier and appleier.

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Perfect weather for doing laundry and planting garden, so I played hooky.  (Actually, one of my co-workers is in Europe and the other on the West Coast, so there was no one to actually play hooky from.)  I got the Harris parsnips in, some Jacob's Cattle beans, 3 hills of Moon and Stars watermelon, 2 hills of butternut squash, 4 hills of Pinetree Seeds summer squash mix, and some random patches of sweet basil.  Only the turnips haven't been planted.  Now let the schooling by the gardening gods begin.  Later this week, I'll pick up some starter plants (tomatoes and maybe hot peppers), some carrot seed, and some pole beans to fill in the rest of the space.

Now where is that colony of bees I've been promised?

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Kimchi recipe

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Rain and rain and rain.  Now my inability to get the garden planted last week doesn't look too bad.  The potatoes are doing fine - erupting up from their subterranean spud reserves - but the cold wet ground can't be a thrill for the other seeds.  Even the violets look a little chastened.  


But meanwhile, here is next month's kimchi about to be packed into the crock . . . .

The recipe for this simplest kimchi:  Chop up a couple of cabbages (in this case red and green for color).  Chop up some carrots as well.  At every layer, knead in some generous shakes of salt and red pepper.  (If, like me, the only hot pepper you have is the stuff for shaking onto pizza, well that seems to work.)  Try to crush and manhandle the cabbage a bit as you knead in the salt.  Then pack it all tightly into a crock, cover it with a plate and weigh the plate down with something heavy.  Set it in the basement for a month or so.  After a few days a brine should form.  Check on it once in a while and skim off any scum that might form.  

I'll let you know how it turns out.

UPDATE: The recipe above left out a crucial ingredient - which is plenty of GARLIC!  Otherwise the kimchi has been a great success.  In later batches I didn't bother with the red cabbage, because I like the crunch of the traditional green cabbage better.

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Even here in the boondocks the sound of lawnmowers echoed.  After weeks of damping gloom, a blue-sky weekend released people into their yards and gardens.  Ourselves included.  I brought a new lawnmower for Monica since she refuses to use or tolerate the Luddite reel mower, and I'd broken the pull cord on the old, dysfunctional power mower the summer before last.  So, with the new one up and gasping its way desperately through our verdant crop of hay, I told Porter he could have the old one.  It was sitting alongside the shed, slimed and blanketed not just by last years leaves but by the rotten remnants of the shed's collapsed side roof.  He and Jake proceeded to clear it off, pull the thing apart, clean it, and put it back together.  Shockingly they got it running, even if it did put out a tremendous amount of smoke in a way that made you expect it to explode any second.  But the smoke lessened before anything crucial caught fire and they mowed through the dead grass and litter along the road.  So now they have a noisy, dirty and dangerous toy that pretty much works, except for the fact that the priming button is busted - so in order to start it they need to take off the filter housing, pour a capful of gasoline directly into the carburetor, put the housing back on and yank on the piece of wood that serves as pull-cord handle until smoke and almost-flame pour out with a great belch of noise. 


And still, no one but me has any affection at all for the Luddite reel mower.

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Backyard blogging

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The Oil Drum picks up an essay by Jeremy Grantham, which has an amusing section where he's trying to explain why humans don't seem able to make any of the needed adjustments to inevitable crises of climate change, resource depletion, and population overshoot:

The Problem with Humans

As a product of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of trial and error, it is perhaps not surprising that our species is excellent at many things. Bred to survive on the open savannah, we can run quite fast, throw quite accurately, and climb well enough. Above all, we have excellent spatial awareness and hand/eye coordination. We are often flexible and occasionally inventive.

For dealing with the modern world, we are not, however, particularly well-equipped. We don’t seem to deal well with long horizon issues and deferring gratification. Because we could not store food for over 99% of our species’ career and were totally concerned with staying alive this year and this week, this is not surprising. We are also innumerate. Our typical math skills seem quite undeveloped relative to our nuanced language skills . . . Have you not admired, as I have, the incredible average skill and, perhaps more importantly, the high minimum skill shown by our species in driving through heavy traffic? At what other activity does almost everyone perform so well? Just imagine what driving would be like if those driving skills, which reflect the requirements of our distant past, were replaced by our average math skills!

Yeah, there's a certain logic to that.  (Also too.)

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There were a few moments of sun, but only between the showers.  The day was in the 60's mostly and we left the doors open, which makes the cat very happy.  The cabbage that I packed into a crock two weeks before Easter is now deliciously pickled and I put a couple of quarts into the fridge.  

Porter ran the light board for the 7th grade play tonight, dressed all in techie black, with his summer souvenir Indian necklace glittering around his neck -  hematite, coral, turquoise.  The play was based on an old Twilight Zone episode, and he explained to me how television could move perspectives by shifting cameras, but they would do it on stage with the lighting.  He only got his hands on the board the day before the show, so I'm not sure how he managed to master it all.  As it was, he was disappointed that in the last show he blew one of the cues and so the show skipped a scene.

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