Myers was removed from office on Tuesday (Jan. 24) by a countywide vote of 941-453, a margin of more than two to one, but in the Crestone-Baca precinct the vote was 87-256, three to one against recall. And while Gomez won election by a countywide vote of 762-319, her opponent Patricia Jenkins prevailed in Crestone, 109-50.

The successor votes are at odds with the rule stated on the ballot: namely, that only those who voted to recall Myers could go ahead and vote for her successor. In other words, 941 voted for recall but 1081 voted for a successor, an error of nearly 15 per cent. But the 140 spurious votes would not affect the succession, since Gomez won by 443 votes.

The highly publicized election  drew more voters than the clerk’s race in the general election of 2010, when Myers beat Gomez. The  ballot was headed by an eight-point statement in English and Spanish accusing Myers of gross negligence, violation of duty, failure to fulfill responsibilities, obstructing access to public records and loss of voter confidence. It also asserted that her election conduct was investigated by a grand jury (which, however, did not indict her).

The statement was the same as the statement in the recall petiion signed by more than 700 registered voters and was required by the Colorado recall law. A ballot statement in response, allowed by the same law, was missing because Myers missed the deadline to submit one, claiming she had not been properly informed.

The the state law allowing recall talking points — and they are little else — to be published on the official ballot is at odds with the universal rule against electioneering (as well as alcohol) in a polling place.  It is prejudicial, in my opinion — or at least it was in this case. The law says the electors shall be the sole judges of “the legality, reasonableness, and sufficiency” of the statement, meaning it can be false. This, it seems to me, is at odds with another Colorado law that prohibits anyone knowlingly or recklessly making a “false statement designed to affect the vote on any issue submitted to electors.”

But it’s unlikely anybody will go to court over these contradictions, since Myers obviously had problems and the recall election has already cost the county an estimated $30,000. (It was conducted by the Treasurer’s office.)

Myers’ primary mistake, apart from not defending herself, was refusing public inspection of the ballots from the disputed 2010 election, in which she defeated Gomez by a few votes after a recount. This drew the attention of truth-in-government activist Marilyn Marks, a former Atlanta trucking company owner and chief executive who retired to Aspen in 2002 (according to the Aspen Times).

In 2009 after losing a race for mayor she sued the city, which refused to give her access to the ballots. She lost in district court but the decision was overturned by the appeals court. The city appealed to the Supreme Court, which still has the case.

The city’s position that her inspection would violate the principle of the “secret,” or anonymous, ballot was the same used by Myers, reflecting the position of a Colorado association that includes election officials. In other words, that interlopers cannot lawfully track individual ballots back to the voters. Marks’ position, as I understand it from reading the Aspen papers, is that ballots should be untrackable in the first place — that is, there should be no marks identifying a voter and therefore public inspection does not violate anything at all.

In my opinion, Marks is right, and it is not a trivial issue. The writer Bev Harris began campaigning against “Blackbox Voting” more than a decade ago out of concern about the potential to rig electronic voting machines. She has been influential in restoring paper ballots in a number of states.

Marks was allied with the recall petition committee, which included some familiar Saguache County figures. Namely, Republican Steve Carlson, who narrowly lost his race for county commission after the 2010 recount, Lisa Cyriacks, who has been active in reapportionment, Mike Garcia, Judy Page and Ed Nielsen.

With the 2012 election now to be conducted in Saguache County by a Republican under general supervision by a Republican Secretary of State, I presume that Gomez will avoid the mistakes of her predecessor and that, among other things, the ballots will be open for public inspection next November.

By Larry Joseph Calloway

The anti-government passion that animates politics nationally was echoing off the walls at Jillian’s studio, where I have experienced yoga classes, a Sufi zirka, a feng schui talk, a sales pitch for ionized water, and such. Crestone is not where Republicans bother to campaign. It voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in both the primary and general elections three years ago.

But here before about 50 residents on folding chairs the speakers, backed by PowerPoint slides on a big screen, were saying we cannot depend upon government – federal, state, county – for relief in the coming upheaval. The main speaker was Vickie Helm, known to most of the gathering, whose only apparent motive in organizing the discussion was to inspire the community to work toward what she called “economic sustainability.”

That title does not convey the spirit of the gathering, just as speaker probably is not the best word for Helm, who was more like an evangelist than economist. She ran back and forth placing imaginary buckets under imaginary sudden leaks in the imaginary roof until, panting and exhausted, she made her point: namely, we’re running around containing leaks without realizing the roof is about to cave in.

OK, call it the sky. Call her Henny Penny. It don’t matter to her, I thought. “In a short period of time we’re going to be going through the same thing that Greece is going through,” she predicted. In other words, our national sovereign credit card is maxed out. “The inconvenient economic truth is this: the United States is broke.” There will be inflation and devaluing of the currency, but no more funding (federal, state, local).

She said somewhere in Kansas a school board proposed charging parents $40 a week to have their kids bussed to school. (I guess that board would never consider a small general tax increase for the general welfare. Oh, no! Forget the communal spirit that used to prevail in rural America if it costs money. Similar problem in Crestone, I thought:  Here an emergency services district to replace the endangered private fire department was created by a thin margin of voters this month, but a peculiar switch of only about 20 of the voters defeated the tax to support it.)

What if everything collapsed by natural disaster or by bankruptcy of the various corporate entities that sell services here but don’t care about the community? Who ya gonna call?

How to weather the coming storm? Up flashed some PowerPoint points:  Support community businesses. Community businesses support each other. How many folks in the audience had businesses? A dozen raised their hands, and she had them stand up. How many would like to learn how to make money on the internet? Two dozen hands went up. “If I get nothing else across to anybody, it is this: The most important thing is where you spend your dollars.”

And, Helm proclaimed the importance of supporting the non-commercial collection of community efforts she called “infrastructure.” Namely, that unfunded Crestone Emergency Services District, Neighbors Helping Neighbors, the various youth programs (thank you, Lisa Bodie and others), the food bank, the charter school (building under construction), the newly consolidated library district. These things, to me, are signs of a young and enthused community with a spirit of American volunteerism.

To the infrastructure she added two information-age essentials that bind the community to itself and to the world: the Crestone Eagle, a successful monthly newspaper in a time when mass circulation dailies are falling like trees (and saving some) and, the fledgling effort to bring high speed internet to this digitally disadvantaged rural area.

Internet. Now here was a cause worth urgent consideration. Cheered on by some in the audience, Mayor Ralph Abrams of Crestone took the floor. He has been working for a year to create a community internet company, and he said it’s going to happen – to begin to fire up in the next few weeks. The company, which he will head, is called Crestone Telecom. It will bring in high-speed internet service with state of the art equipment.

This was the most hopeful project to come up at the meeting (not to dismiss the many undeveloped suggestions for green technology) because it is concrete and ready to go. Problem: the effort is being undermined by a distant corporation. In a word (or maybe two), FairPoint. The sudden unannounced competitiveness on the part of a phone company with more apparent interest in the bankruptcy code than digital engineering is a good preface for the concept economic sustainability. This is probably going to be a test of standard corporate capitalism versus Abrams’ community capitalism.

Further, the year-long drill that Abrams and company were put through by the USDA in applying for a grant under a program that was cancelled at the last minute (budget problems?) is a good case history in support of the argument that we can no longer depend upon government.

Discouraging, this distrust of corporate America and American government (might as well add the corporate media). I stood to say that for reasons of practical politics including the obvious intent of some Republicans to purge all political opposition by driving the economy into the ground, I could not endorse the increasing cynical distance from government. I grew up as a student of the New Deal, which saved America from some of the terrible mistakes made elsewhere (Germany, Italy, even Russia where the mistake began) in reaction to Great Depression I. But that was long ago in a different world.

Anything on the bright side?  Jeff WishMer, a bright young man who works for Chokurei Farm Store, married with a home in the Baca, received a warm applause when he stood to include home-grown food in the infrastructure against the Collapse. He is running for the POA board against an incumbent, Robert Garnett, who opposes the new EMS district and almost anything else that might cost money. WishMer is being criticized by some of these oldtimers because he has said he hates the POA, at least the way it is.

Distrust of government is in the American grain. I became atuned to it not long ago when I went searching in rural North Carolina for family roots. My father’s people were subsistent farmers (and, some of them, moonshiners). These Scot-Irish folks were responsible for the Whiskey Rebellion and many other insurgencies in our history. They’re still around. Take Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., the writer-soldier who won an astonishing victory in 2006, defeating an incumbent Republican to give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. My grandparents on my father’s side were born just 70 miles over the mountains from his grandparents.

Webb has proposed that this Scot-Irish minority, southern in origin but without a history of slavery, has a lot in common with the African-American minority, which goes back almost as many generations. Together they could form a populist force that would revive the Democratic party and its historic principles, particularly in the Republican South (which includes Texas).

Similarly, it occurred to me that the communal sentiments expressed at the meeting in the yoga studio might be wedded with the anti-government sentiments of those  angry folks who seem to support the Tea Party. They might want a divorce, I supposed, once they realize they are being used by corporately funded professional politicians to defeat the many and strengthen government in the interest of the few. Perhaps  Crestone is not that far from Kansas, Dorothy.

In confrontations his reaction is to stand and stare then walk off. I’m not afraid of him — so far — but I do respect him. Incredibly strong, clever, dexterous, steel-clawed, keen-nosed. In the West the bear is the most nearly human animal. Certainly that is why he (yes, or she) was revered for hundreds of years by the Pueblo people south of here. His print is sacred. I suppose he respects us.

Otherwise he would take out a window or even rip through a wall to get at the garbage I keep in sealed containers until trash pickup morning. He knows they’re there (you can’t seal off a scent from a bear). He knows when I’m away or sleeping. That’s why I would rather put the garbage outside in a small bear-proof container.

Last time I checked, however, the only one available was produced at a prison welding shop in Florence. You needed to pre-order. The price was $250. And they don’t deliver.

The community meeting last month with representatives of the Colorado Department of Parks and Recreation got me to thinking: how do you make an affordable bear-proof trash bin? One neighbor showed me two modified 55-gallon oil drums in which she keeps compost, but the modification required bolts and nuts and a steel strap and a lot of torch cuts. And she has to open them with a wrench.

But I thought maybe she was on to something. And while picking up some dog food at Murdock’s, a farm and ranch supplier in Salida, the other day I saw a stack of 55-gallon steel drums for sale at $49.95 each. These were not oil drums with the welded tops and small screw caps, they were former containers of some sort of juice concentrate, with removable tops secured by steel rims.

I bought one, brought it home, put it next to Waste Management, dropped in the 25-pound bag of dog food, tightened the rim bolt and slept securely that night. In the morning I saw the drum still standing. A small victory in the bear war!

My affordable bear-proof container

But what if he just didn’t like dog food or passed it by because it required too much work to get at? That night I unscrewed the rim, lifted the top, dropped in a tied plastic bag of trash which included some corn cobs and a frozen lasagna box and an empty milk carton and maybe a small hunk of sour dough bread and went to sleep.

Next morning when I thought to look out, I had to blink. The steel drum had not been tipped over or rolled. It simply was not there!

Eventually I found it 100 feet down the dirt road, lying in the borrow pit. All around were huge scuff marks. The tracks led back to where the drum had been. It had not been rolled. This 55-gallon steel drum containing 25 pounds of dog food had been…. carried down the road!

But the lid had held. The rim remained unbent and bolted in place. Problem solved, except I needed a dolly to roll the thing back up the road. Next project: tie the thing down somehow. . .

UPDATE:

What I did was dig a hole about two feet deep and dropped in the drum. I tamped the dirt tight around it. I drove a 5-foot-6 steel fence post about three feet into the ground. I fastened the drum to the post with a triple strand of baling wire. Happy with my work, I unbolted the rim, dripped in some garbage, bolted it back, and rested.

The result next morning: he had uprooted the drum. But he couldn’t roll it away. And the top held. Next time, maybe, he’ll sniff on down the road thinking: no more free lunch.

Footnote: I left a screw driver on top of the drum, handy for opening it. A friend who knows about bears commented on the first picture I posted:  ”Better not leave that screw driver there.”  I think he was joking. After the bear uprooted the drum, however, I could not find the screw driver.

(For more on Crestone bears, go to Baca Blog)

Hit headline if “Comments” box does not appear here.

Photo by Lara Calloway

A group of us with some surprise received a warm personal welcome to the Telluride Film Festival from one of its co-directors, Gary Meyer, who then ushered us in to the intimate Le Pierre theatre for a special screening, just for us. No, we were not the press – Telluride gives no privileges to the news media. And for certain we were not wealthy donors, not even purchasers of the regular $780 pass – those happy folks were all gathering with the celebrities in the center of town for the big Opening Night Feed.

What we were was pass-holding Cinephiles. Three years ago Meyer and co-director Tom Luddy created the pass (and probably the word) for film lovers on a budget. In exchange for a $400 discount, we let the festival choose the menu of films we can see. It is a tasteful menu, heavy with restored or rediscovered masterpieces as well as the characteristic new works reflecting the Telluride philosophy of film as art. (Most of us would have been drawn to this menu even if we had the more expensive pass.)

While the Cinephile Pass was not a ticket to, say, the tribute to George Clooney or the personal appearances by Glenn Close, it did entitle us to see all the other Telluride medallion tributes: to Sight and Sound Magazine, to actress Tilda Swinton, to French actor-director Pierre Etaix. Plus, the menu emphasized  programs of short films by students and hopeful new directors and the selection of six favorite films presented by the “guest director” this year, Caetano Veloso.

Mark Cousins, right, at a book signing with Ken Burns.

Consistent with the Telluride philosophy, the special screening for us Cinephiles was the premier of the first two segments of “THE STORY OF FILM” by Mark Cousins, an eloquent writer whose 2006 book of the same title is becoming the preferred text in introductory film classes worldwide.

Telluride (as I have written) is a fine, high celebration of movies as art, and Cousins is a true and poetic exponent. In the introduction to the book, he stated a purpose that certainly resonates with the Telluride Film Festival as I have experienced it for going on 20 years. “By focusing on the innovative rather than the merely beautiful, popular or commercially successful, I am trying to strip the world of movies down to its engine. Innovation drives art…“ Just so, in the astonishing series (it has more than 1,000 film clips) we learn not only the basics of the inter-cut, the parallel cut, and the match cut, but who invented them, way back in the silent era.

As a filmmaker, Cousins is one of those Telluride discoveries (think: Michael Moore, Ken Burns). His charming documentary, “The First Movie,” premiered at Telluride last year. Cousins had taken a film crew to a Kurdish village so remote in Iraq that the children had never seen a movie. He set up an outdoor screen and showed them “E.T.” Then he filmed the kids themselves and screened the result. Finally he handed out video cameras and told the kids to go out and make their own movies. The results were both entertaining and enlightening. The children, for example, came back with narrations of something nobody talked about in person – the genocidal gas attacks by Saddam Hussein. Like “The Story of Film” his first full-length film is a testament to his love and understanding of movies not only as art but as a refuge.

“Story” has 15 segments, which will be serialized this fall by the BBC. While at Telluride, Cousins was invited to the Toronto Film Festival, which planned to screen it in two days, seven hours and eight hours. Cousins autographed my copy of the book with the words, “in cinephile friendship.”

Among the other new films premiering at Telluride, I got to see two stinging documentaries on global crises – “The Island President” and Micha X. Peled’s “Bitter Seeds” – two love stories – “Bonsai” from Chile, “Goodbye First Love” from France – David Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Method” about Jung, Freud and a problematic woman, two lost-boy films – “Le Havre” from Finland, “The Way Home” from India – and two comedies – “Butter” from Hollywood and “Footnote” from Israel.

Myself, waiting to see "Bitter Seeds" Photo by Lara

“THE ISLAND PRESIDENT” is about The Maldives, a nation of 300,000 people living on 200 flat islands in a chain of atolls in the Indian Ocean. Mohamed Nasheed came to power in a popular uprising against the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Gayooma. Nasheen had been jailed, tortured and exiled, but he returned and defeated Gayooma in a surprisingly fair election in 2008. This is interesting enough, but the theme of the film is the probability that this scattered nation will be destroyed by global warming. As the polar ice melts, the oceans rise. The film establishes an intercut rhythm of eroding shores and gloomy music.

Director-cinematographer Jon Shenk told the Telluride audience at the screening I saw that he was drawn to the project when he heard of the young, charismatic president of a Muslim nation who seemed to represent a new political generation – and, he noted, this was before the Arab Spring was ever imagined. Shenk said his first meeting with Nasheed, after months of negotiation, ran five minutes before the decisive young president said, “OK. I’ve got to trust you.” The cameras subsequently followed him for the next 18 months.

It was a dramatic time, climaxing with the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. The summit was widely reported as a failure because the rich nations failed to adopt a standard for reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. Activists and some scientists say a return to 350 parts per million is the only way to arrest catastrophic climate change. The film makes the case, however, that the entire Copenhagen exercise would have collapsed without the skillful political work of Nasheed.

There are skeptics who say The Maldives are profiting from Western guilt and that the island nation is not in peril. But the character of Nasheed, reflected in many candid moments as well as formal appearances, earned my trust. He comes across as an intelligent politician who is both skilful and honest, a rarity in democratic politics, particularly in America. Well advised presidential candidates remember Jimmy Carter’s fatal “malaise” speech to the nation in the midst of the Arab oil embargo. He foresaw the global problems caused by our unrestrained appetite for oil and declared conservation as a moral duty. It was the perfect setup for Ronald Reagan’s winning “It’s Morning in America” theme.

“BITTER SEEDS” is the final film in the Globalization Trilogy, which began with “Store Wars” about Wal-Mart’s overwhelming effect on small retail businesses and continued with “China Blue” about jeans sweatshops. This third one, completed only a few days before its premier showing at Telluride, is about the exploitive marketing of Monsanto seeds among illiterate  traditional village farmers in India. With this film, the story of a global trade circuit is complete: Indian cotton goes to China, Chinese garments go to Walmart.

Peled told the Telluride audience that he was drawn to the rural Maharashtra region by the potential story line: the state is the location of a cluster of suicides by thousands of desperate farmers – heads of traditional families facing hopeless debt due to their inexperience with the systematic use of genetically modified (GM) seeds. The film documents the manipulative and often false marketing by retailers of Monsanto’s globally patented BT Cotton. In one TV ad a proud father drives up on a shiny new motor scooter. He tells his adoring wife and children, “No more bicycle.” And it’s all due to the high yield of BT Cotton! The film follows salesmen parading through a village proclaiming the wonders of this new seed and handing out photos and phone numbers of farmers enriched by the product. All but one of the numbers on one handbill are disconnected, and that one belongs to an apparent retailer shill.

GM seeds, among other things, are constructed to resist herbicides like Roundup, but the cotton farmers in the film weed their several-acres plots by hand. The merchandising promises resistance to certain pests like the boll weevil, but expensive pesticides are required for others like the mealy worm. GM seeds are engineered for high yields, but the system requires costly chemical fertilizers. And it requires a strict schedule of irrigation, but farmers in India depend upon rain.

For thousands of years, a very old man explains, villagers saved seeds at each harvest, planted them in the spring and fertilized with manure from livestock. They did not need to buy anything. Now, trusting the new technology, they take loans to buy the seeds, the pesticides and the nitrates. If the promised yields prove false or the rain is late (climate change, again), or new pests arrive, they go into a debt spiral that ends with a usurious money lender owning their land. (With the debtor dead, the outlawed money lenders have trouble enforcing his thumb-printed mortgage.)

This is the case made by Peled, yet it’s in the background along with the hook of the film: the thousands who have killed themselves. Any story needs a heart, a protagonist. It took months of searching and tryouts until Peled found her: a college-age journalism student whose father drank the poisonous pesticide for which he had gone into debt in a bad year. The camera follows her as she talks to people on both sides of the problem: farmers, retailers, family, orphaned survivors and the brilliant farmers rights advocate, Vandana Shiva. Monsanto as usual would not consent to any interview.

The retailers questioned by the journalism student used the defense of multiple causation, as did Monsanto in a prepared statement. This, however, is no ethno-film, and so the argument is unsubstantiated. The film is too polemical to be an objective study of the culture. It does, however, depict the results of one very heavy tradition of the rural Indian way of life: marriage dowries. Families negotiate the marriages of their daughters based upon what can be paid to the groom’s family. The payments in land, livestock, gold or  cash are huge, and inability to marry off daughters in order of birth is a source of deep shame. The debts from industrialized farming are interwoven with dowries.

In the screening I attended at the Nugget theatre, Peled was joined by Alice Walters, the famous Berkeley restaurateur, who was in Telluride to sign advance copies of her new book, “40 years of Chez Panisse.” She made an impassioned plea for natural food as opposed to the “manufacturing” represented by Monsanto. She argued, as she did in a Telluride publication, “On a local level, we simply have to go to the farmer’s market. We have to get to know the farmers, get out and understand what is happening in the fields, because if we don’t champion the farmers and the land, we’re doomed.”

But is this the answer to the global crisis (famine, grain shortages, spiraling retail costs)? In the Q & A, a hesitant voice rose from the enthused audience that had been pitching supportive softball questions to Peled. It was a blonde woman with a Midwest accent who identified herself as a mother of three young children and a former employee of Monsanto. She stood and said that the problems brought up by the movie were a source of constant discussion among executives at the St. Louis-headquartered company. Peled invited her to the microphone, inviting her to show the film to her former colleagues. She continued with arguments based on the needs to feed the rapidly growing population of the planet and to reduce pesticides. “Agriculture is going through the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution,” she said, and with reference to early fears of automation added: “You can’t stop robots.” Afterwards I asked her name – Katherine Kassim – and judged that she was not a Monsanto plant (so to speak).

I wondered what the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz (a favorite of Barack Obama) would have said if he were interviewed in this film. He did field work among rice growers in several villages in Indonesia and marveled at the way they treated paddies like greenhouse tanks, doing everything by hand with simple tools. “Hordes of laborers drawn from the enormous rural population work with extreme care and thoroughness,” he wrote.  Technology, even then (1960′s), could enable 10 per cent of the workers to produce as much rice.  But then: what of the  other 90 per cent? Work elsewhere? There is no elsewhere. They would starve, Geertz observes.  ”The twin aims of agrarian reform — technological progress and improved social welfare — pull very strongly agains one another; and the more deeply one goes into the problem, the more apparent this unpleasant fact becomes.” he wrote  (“Available Light,” Ch. 2).

“GOODBYE FIRST LOVE” by the young French director Mia Hansen-L0ve (the zero is her spelling) is a simple story of nostalgia and unbearable attachment. At age 15, Camille falls in love with a manly college student named Sullivan. They enjoy their sexuality every chance they get, in secret trysts at her parents’ Paris home or their country estate. Then Sullivan drops out of school to see the world. Camille yearns for him suicidally. His letters become infrequent, then stop. Four years later she is a successful architect living with the divorced older man who heads the firm. Sullivan shows up. He has not changed, and he is the wrong man. But. . .

What stuck with me was the camera work. There are few static shots, yet this is not the annoying product of hand-held cameras. The actors, beautiful and young, are constantly in motion, walking, running, rolling in the grass, jumping into bed – and the camera follows smoothly. This induces energy, the energy of youth. And I will remember the film with a profound longing for it.

“BONSAI” is another story of love and memory – from Chile. It is literary. Director Cristian Jimenez told us, “words are important.” A young couple comes together with a discussion of Proust, which neither has read. There are complications. The story jumps back and forth between now and eight years from now. I bought the slim novel on which the story is based, hoping to understand what exactly goes on in this movie.

“A DANGEROUS METHOD” stars Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, Viggo Mortenson as Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley as the patient who knew both men and had an explosive love affair with Jung. I told two Jungian analysts waiting in a line for another movie that Jung had an ethical problem (sex with someone under his care). They shrugged. The ethical is cultural. I have not read John Kerr’s book from which the film is adapted, but the story of the intellectual conflict between the founder of psychoanalysis and his young colleague and the character of the patient, Sabina Spielrein, is often told elsewhere. There is a foundation for the tendency of  mainstream psychological movies to reduce everything to sexuality. So did Freud. And that is why Jung broke from him, as is depicted in this film by a director and actors at the top of their careers.

The two comedies, “BUTTER” and “FOOTNOTE,” are delightful satires. The first (a sneak preview and not technically on the Telluride program) does for Iowa what the Cohen Brothers did for Minnesota. At the Iowa State Fair, I was told, there actually is a big butter sculpting competition. In this story a ruthless housewife does whatever it takes (sex, again) to defeat her unlikely competitor. The film, which will be released soon, helps me in my resolve not to take the Iowa Republican caucuses seriously.

The second was described to us by its Israeli writer-director, Joseph Cedar, as “the greatest Talmudic scholarship comedy. . . made in Israel. . . this year.” That says it. It’s thoughtful and fun.

“One of my biggest fears has been fire in the Baca,” the sheriff continued. That fear almost became a tragic reality on June 16, when an arsonist started fires 30 minutes apart at South Crestone parking lot, North Crestone camp ground and the Karmapa stupa road. The last one was positioned to flare upslope in thick forest. “One shift in the wind would have been a catastrophe,” Norris said.

Quick response by trained volunteers with six fire departments – and by neighbors including Steve Smilack near the stupa road – quenched the fires at one acre each after Norris issued an “all call.” Criminal investigation of these and two more fires about an hour later near the town of Saguache is under way.

Norris was not a scheduled speaker at the forum, and he had no position on creation of the district, but he said he was there to support the community’s volunteer emergency responders. One problem the new district would attack is the different radio channels and dispatch centers used by the Baca Grande and Crestone fire departments as well as the ambulance service. “It makes sense for everybody to be on the same page,” Norris told the gathering.

Baca Grande Fire Chief Ben Brack, the lead speaker, said in dire emergencies “communication is always the first thing to break down.” (A disparity of radio frequencies contributed to the deaths of fire fighters at the Twin Towers.)

The proposed district is a common-sense solution to several other problems, including the tort liability of the strange private department owned by the Baca Grande Property Owners Association and the subsequent possibility that surrounding governmental departments will be prevented from assisting it in the future.

Still, the new district has its vocal opponents. Their problem, expressed in anger, was a basic distrust of government and resistance to any new taxes – consistent with the Tea Party movement. Christine Chandler objected to the tax increase (offset in part by reduction of POA dues) that will affect only property owners while others get a free ride. Another opponent, Steve Winn, implicitly threatened a law suit, asking, “What court can I go to?”

Many in the crowd of more than 50 Crestone-Baca residents supported Norris’ remarks with descriptions of the horror of wild fires. Some told stories expressing gratitude toward the community’s trained volunteers.

Chandler, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid of no fire, implying that Norris and others were using scare tactics to get the district created. At times screaming to be heard, she said she experienced the Mission Ridge fire at Durango a half dozen years ago and it involved explosive ponderosa stands, while here, in her words, “We’re in the desert.” Longtime fire fighters who understand the pinyon-juniper environment here were obviously astonished by this remark.

For most of the crowd the issue was not about money. Mark Jacobi, who served many years as Baca fire chief, said statistical thinking about finances doesn’t mean much when a fire gets going. “You can grouse about the money but everybody knows the incredible commitment of the volunteers,” he said. “When you talk about taxes keep in mind how much these people are giving for free.”

Brack in his opening remarks said in 61.5 square miles with about 750 houses and a summer population of perhaps 1,000, the  response to all hazards including medical emergencies falls on the shoulders of 45 regular volunteers – “a core group of people who work for the benefit of all.”

Addressing the town-country animosity evoked by the opponents, Brack said, “We share the roads, we share the stores, we share the views, and we share the emergencies. Why make it more difficult to deal with those emergencies together?”

In response to the suspicion that the town, with a population of about 135, will enrich itself by merger with the larger, richer Baca subdivision, former Mayor Kizzen Laki said the town is “perfectly happy doing what it’s doing,” and has no motivation except to help the Crestone and Baca volunteers work together better. The town now is part of the Northern Saguache County Fire Protection District, but Crestone will have more local control in the new district. Besides, she mentioned, she has friends and family living in the Baca.

As to the opposition fear – apparently greater than the fear of fire – that the district organizers will indulge in runaway tax increases, several in the audience were reassuring. Vince Palermo, known for doing his homework on local issues, reminded that the fire district board cannot raise taxes. Any mill levy including the initial 16 mills must be approved in a special  election.

The final note fell to Adam Kinney of Crestone, whom the even-handed moderator Matie Belle Lakish called upon last, noting he had quietly raised his hand several times. He told how when someone irresponsibly set a fire on his property, his home and wife and children were saved by selfless volunteer responders. He told how in another emergency they extricated his son from an oven, where he had become trapped.

“I trust you with my home. I trust you with my family. And I will trust you with my $250 a year,” he said.

A 1937 REA poster by artist Lester Beall

Crestone-Baca  is not on an equal footing with most of the nation in the category of  affordable high-speed internet service. This affects visitors from around the world trying to make reservations at the spiritual centers, home businesses trying to market their handicrafts and other goods, or local people simply trying to place internet orders, communicate with each other, and read a few  blogs. The saddest result is the competitive disadvantage the outdated system here imposes on young people growing up in the digital age. 

Internet  customers here were asked by an independent group to use a standard test to determine their data speeds and report them to the broadband agency of the governor’s office. The graphed results show a median internet download speed of  o.50 mps and an upload sped of 0.25 mps – compared with the FCC definition of broadband as 4.00 mps. 

Such are my ruminations as I sit waiting before a systemically stalled computer screen, wasting away in the shadow of dialup-era internet service and hoping President Obama has not forgotten his various pledges to bring affordable broadband internet service to all Americans. But I wonder what government can do. Can it break the surly bonds of the telecom industry, which is busy lobbying for laws that prohibit communities from creating their own data networks? A sad state of affairs. But then I  recall an inspiring visit I made a couple of years ago to a small museum at a state park down in Georgia.

The exhibits commemorate the achievements of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, he is an unlikely Georgia hero in today’s Newty politics, but in the 1930’s Democrats were quite comfortable in the South. The museum is on the grounds of FDR’s “Little White House,”  his modest retreat near the therapeutic pools of Warm Springs, where he died at the outset of his fourth term in April 1945 (no term limit then). In the museum is a replica of a 1930’s farm house kitchen, modernized. No more wood burning cook stove, ice box and kerosene lanterns – it has electric power, dramatized by a classic meter, as glassy and ostentatious as a TV screen in the early 1950’s.

FDR was beloved in poor rural America – and the agrarian South was more impoverished than elsewhere – if  for no other reason than that meter on the wall in the model kitchen. When he took office in 1933 just over 10 per cent of U.S. farms  had electricity. By 1942, in the middle of his third term,  50 per cent of the farms had electricity – no small statistic in a time when at least  half the population lived on farms.

This  fundamental of modernization, was the work of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA)  authorized by the core legislation of the New Deal in 1935. Because the  power companies would not go into  rural areas, America lagged behind Europe where 90 percent of the farms had power. FDR’s REA began financing and organizing non-profit rural electric cooperatives (the San Luis Valley REC was founded in 1938), and the wiring of non-urban America surged. Not only did the REA bring the country “LIGHT,” as one REA poster proclaimed, it also created jobs in the midst of the Great Depression.

By 1952 the government could say 100 per cent of America had reliable electric power.  Today the successor of the REA is a major division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Rural Utilities Service. The  main business of the RUS is power, but it has a telecommunications subdivision, and this would be the logical agency to take the lead in creating the digital-age equivalent of the rural electrification movement that began 75 years ago.

Back to the future: President Obama first stated his intention to bring broadband to rural America in a talk just after his election. Then in March 2009 he announced his intention to allocate $8 billion, most of it from the emergency stimulus bill, to broadband access. Conservatives on Fox News called it a boondoggle. Some said most Americans don’t want and can’t afford high-speed internet.

That was more than three years ago. What has happened? Well, Obama is no FDR. He is no John F. Kennedy, who began the manned space program. He is no Dwight D. Eisenhower, who launched the interstate highway system.  These were presidents who could have their way with the Congress.

At any rate, the emergency broadband money never reached our  rural community. The presidential pledge, however, was renewed  in this year’s state of the union address.  Obama set a revised goal of making a new technology, 4G wireless internet, accessible to 98 per cent of Americans.

On March 4, the RUS of the USDA filed notice in the Federal Register that it was accepting applications for a “Community Connect Grant Program,” with a deadline of May 3. The one-time grants from a $25 million fund would help set up broadband service in rural communities without it. In a news release at the same time RUS Administrator Jonathan Adelstein said, “Broadband is an important part of the Obama Administration’s effort to help rural America ‘win the future.’”

This spelled opportunity for rural communities where private enterprise was not providing broadband service. Right away Crestone Mayor Ralph Abrams brought together volunteers and got to work. For the next month and a half his task force met on Saturdays at the Black Bear Cafe, gathering demographic data, documenting community needs, soliciting letters of support, calculating a budget, making a business plan, exploring sources of the 15 per cent matching funds, getting construction estimates and reviewing available technology – things required by the 50-page grant application guide. (I contributed the writing of a cover letter.)

As the deadline neared,  the RUS scheduled a big rural broadband workshop for April 20-21 at the Downtown Denver Sheraton. Mayor Abrams was among the hopeful officials from around the nation seeking pieces of the grant pie. Adelstein opened the event with an announcement, in the name of the Obama administration, of $40 million in RUS loans, most of them to telephone companies, for rural broadband projects.  But that was loans, not grants.

Then Abrams and others received some totally unanticipated news, and it was bad news. Community Connect desk officers who had come to Denver from Washington – Long Chen and Janet Malaki – disclosed with great sympathy that the grant money was no longer available.

All that work: poof!

Abrams just wanted to walk out, but he had gone to a lot of trouble, so he stayed and listened. He and others heard about loans (not grants), none of which he was prepared to seek. To get a loan, the record seems to show, you need to be a phone company.

So what happened to the $25 million? I called the RUS telecom division in Washington. Malaki declined comment, referring me to her supervisor, Laurel Feverrier. I called her and after a long delay was told she was not at her desk. I left a voice message stating the question and begging for a response from her or her press secretary, even though I was not a Washington-based journalist. She did not return the call. Next day I sent her an email with the same question and plea. She did not respond.

The likely suspects in the case of the vanishing broadband grant money are telecom lobbyists and, well, the Republicans. The April 13 Continuing Resolution of Congress to fund federal government for the rest of the fiscal year makes a $16 million budget reduction in the USDA category of “distant learning, telemedicine, and broadband program loans and grants.” That must have been the trigger, even though it is  no more than a shaving off the RUS telecom budget item that comprised $1.4 billion for the loans and $55 million for the grants.

The mayor and some of his volunteers came home discouraged. They put the money mystery behind them. And they regrouped: this time, with the goal of bringing broadband to Crestone (and the northern San Luis Valley) without having to rely on the government. They are recreating a non-profit corporation, Crestone Peak, so that it can bring in a broadband “backhaul” from a provider interested in the San Luis Valley and then set up the “last mile” connectivity. A Colorado statute calls for a referendum when a community seeks to do this, but that should be no problem here. The dream of Crestone Peak is affordable high-speed internet by August.

Footnote: While internet services took a hit, the electric power loan money in the RUS budget  was not directly affected  by the Continuing Resolution. And, like a pie in the face, at the same time Crestone was being told to go back to the drawing board, two huge power entities announced they are seeking untold millions of that RUS power money for a project people around here hate.  The announcement by Xcel Energy and Tri-State State Generation in mid April was in  a mass-mailing to the San Luis Valley seeking popular support in hearings on the loan application, to be scheduled later this year.

The  handsomely illustrated mailer promoted a transmission line that would connect the San Luis Valley with the switching yards at its Calumet coal-fired power plant.  The high-voltage power line, with its tall steel towers, will have to cross the mountains near La Veta Pass.  The opposition is based on two main arguments. First,  the routing will invade some pristine mountain habitat, private and public.  Second, the power line will  enable giant solar power developments in the valley – with their production going to the Excel grid. This industrialization would have  consequences for  rural life and the environment in the valley.

I cannot help but see an irony here (and there’s  plenty of time for ironical thinking as I wait for a New York Times story  to load  on my computer screen). The Rural Utilities Service, successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s REA, now seems to be predominantly in the business of making favorable loans to phone companies and power companies.

For comments hit the headline above

For more Crestone-Baca news hit Baca Blog

Canada geese, crane in background

SONG BIRDS: I went to a Crestonian poetry show where Diane Barstow and Matthew Crowley among others performed. I said, Oh I get it now (after 47 years). Poetry is performance! So I rushed home to become a poet and all I could find for instructions was Anne Lamott’s book “Bird by Bird.”

Wherein: “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write [it] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

So, therefore, here:

Pilot SunCatcher plant (slv renewable communities alliance photo)

It would be a noisy Space Age intrusion in one of Colorado’s last pure Old West landscapes, and more industrialization would  follow it into the northern San Luis Valley.

Except for a couple of protestors yelling about jobs, most of the estimated 150 people in the packed crowd of Saguache County ranchers, retirees and quiescent Crestonians raised their voices against it.

The applicants antagonized them with a trust-us-now, ask-questions-later attitude. Their scientific experts failed to prove they had spent much time, if any, at the site. Aware they will have to make a decision in a few weeks, the Saguache County Commission sat in silence except for the chairman’s angry attempts to hurry things along.

The Dec. 6 hearing in the county court house on the application by Tessera Solar North America was recessed after six contentious hours, to be continued at a date not yet announced. The Houston-based company seeks a permit under Colorado’s “1041” law on local development to install about 5,800 innovative “SunCatchers” on about 1,500 acres of ranch land between U.S. 285 and State Highway 17 south of the town of Saguache.

The relatively low-output project (145 megawatts, or one third of 1 percent of the coal-fired Farmington, NM, plants) is a response to Colorado legislation forcing electric utilities to go 20 per cent green. But so far no power purchase agreements have been signed.

A SunCatcher is based on an invention two centuries ago by a Scot named Stirling – an engine driven by the rapid heating and cooling (and therefore expansion and contraction) of a gas in sealed cylinders. In this application each four-cylinder  engine turns a small generator. The heat source is a 30-foot parabolic dish aimed at the sun. The gas is hydrogen, which is explosive.

The works at the focal point of each dish would make noise, and a recording of the sound played at the hearing was grating. Few technical data were presented.  Tessera representatives even puzzled knowledgeable listeners by promising to put mufflers on the closed-system engines (no exhaust), and permit manager Richard Knox admitted he “misspoke” when he said engines were turbines.

Tessera consultant Matt Jones, who had just flown in from Los Angeles, engaged in a long abstract discourse on mathematical modeling of theoretical acoustical effects at the site, according to maps.  Interrupted by a member of the crowd asking if the plant would be heard at the nearby town of Moffat, he responded, “Where?”

Jones and a consultant hired by the county dueled decibels for an hour without resolving the questions: how loud will 5,800 of these engines be at various distances under various climate conditions and will they violate the state noise-nuisance statute? Vince Palermo of Crestone, who has raised the noise issue with some expertise at previous hearings, dismissed the colloquy as “bullshit,” drawing some applause.

Commission chair Sam Pace, however, summarized that both sides seemed to agree the plant very likely would produce about 65 decibels of noise at the property boundary. If so, this would be in violation of the Colorado noise ordinance for residential environments. But, as they say in philosophy 101, what is the sound of a tree falling in the forest if nobody is there to hear it? More to come. . .

Knox had one obvious reassurance: the plant would not operate at night! So, “There will be no noise except a security guard closing a door.” His reliance on imagery (“We’ll sharpen the pencil on this.”) sometimes brought derisive laughter, as when he called the SunCatcher array an “orchard.”

Knox and a company executive determined later to be Randy Etheridge estimated the plant would afford up to 50 permanent jobs, but they could not classify them at this time. Knox said there would be employment for you “if you can work on an engine, if you can wash windows.” Etheridge said there would be a need for skilled controllers and for maintenance workers “not just washing windows.”

The two officers declined to answer funding questions, although Etheridge said, “We will be applying for some of the DOE (Department of Energy) funds that are out there.” Ceal Smith, chair of an organization opposing the project, said later the main funding for similar ventures  expires at the end of the year. Etheridge brushed her off during a brief break, declining to give his name (“You can call me anything you want.”) He left two hours before the hearing recessed.

The two leading points to be considered under the 1401 statute are, first, the health, welfare and safety of the residents and, second, the effects on the environment, both natural and human.

Hydrogen, the lightest element, dissipates even through metal, so the Stirling engines will need constant hydrogen feeds. The safety of hydrogen processing was questioned by a scientifically trained resident named Larry Ewing. “How are you going to generate hydrogen?” he asked. Knox, conceding  “I’m not the hydrogen guy,” wondered why that was important. Ewing said it was important because a caustic fluid is used in one process and others are also dangerous.  After some argument, Ewing concluded, “The bottom line is you don’t know what you’re going to do.” Knox admitted it, saying, “Correct.”

When Knox read from his Powerpoint that there were “no listed fauna or flora or their associated habitats on the project site,” a woman in the crowd drew applause and laughter when she said, “Does that include cows?”

Rancher John Warner, who has 2,000 acres north of the site, objected to the presentation statement that human impact had been considered and would be mitigated satisfactorily. “Nobody came to me and asked anything about it,” Warner said.

Knox got into trouble when he responded that the point was based on typical studies. “While your ranching activity is important to your world,” he began, but was drowned out by groans from the crowd. “We knew this about you before talking to you,” Knox said. “The point is we have analyzed the visual impact for hundreds of projects.”

Local people who have lived with the capricious weather of the San Luis Valley for decades brought up other questions that the Tessera people could not answer:

- Since the only actual experience with SunCatchers is the test array at temperate Phoenix,  how can it be determined how they would work at 20-below-zero temperatures here?

- SunCatchers have to be folded when winds exceed 35 miles an hour, but the process takes eight minutes – enough warning time for valley gusts and dust devils?

- In response to a finding of “no evidence of standing water during the growing season” at the site, Virginia Sutherland showed a panoramic photo of her normally dry looking pasture in 1997 – a lake. Is it feasible to generate electricity while standing in water?

The potentially disabling issue of wetlands at the site was brought up by Jenny Nehring, a wildlife biologist from Monte Vista concerned about the valley’s bird refuges. Tessera has marked water drainages in blue on its rough map of the development, but Nehring maintains that doesn’t tell the whole story.

The hired consultant, Ecosphere of Durango, said in its report: “Assuming that the wetlands as preliminarily identified are correct, the project appears to avoid significant impact to wetlands.” Nehring says to arrive at this finding Ecosphere had to ignore the hydrous soils at the site as well as decades of Corps of Engineers reports.

“You continue to dismiss decade after decade of wetlands inventories,” she told Knox from the audience.

“We still have work to do,” he responded.

In a brief interview, Nehring elaborated: “Water has changed in the valley in the very recent past, and it is going to change dramatically in the future.”  One change will be increased annual deliveries of water beginning in 2012.

Section 404 of the federal Clean Water Act requires a permit from the Corps of Engineers before virtually any disturbance of wetlands. And any disturbance must be mitigated by replacement of lost wetlands, acre for acre. This could be costly for Tessera if the Ecosphere finding is insufficient. Nehring said Tessera would be wise to apply for a 404 permit . . . now.

(For comments, click on headline, please)

_________________________

Moffat, Colorado, a dot in a high 5,000-square-mile dry lake bed called the San Luis Valley. Pure land. Old West. Snow-dusted mountain ranges, San Juans west, Sangre de Cristos east. Collegiate peaks north, infinity south. This town is so small that nobody needs an address for the political reception (Democrat). Willow Springs Bed and Breakfast is the biggest house in town.

Halloween, but nobody is scary.

Photo by Matthew Crowley

A 39-foot rented RV rolls in on schedule. The brothers step down in their polished boots and slim fit Wranglers and fresh dress shirts and hats. John Salazar represents the 3rd Colorado Congressional District. Ken Salazar, the older brother, is Barack Obama’s secretary of interior. Former two-term Gov. Roy Romer, in a leather jacket, steps down.

They begin shaking hands with the small gathering of locals in the dirt street in front of the house, going first to people they don’t know, then to the local candidates —  state Sen. Gail Schwartz, County Commissioners Sam Pace and Linda Joseph, Sheriff Mike Norris, County Clerk Melinda Meyers.

There are issues here — the Air Force plan to resume ground-skimming training flights, the proposed solar steam generation plants, the proposed high-voltage power line, the fight over approval of gas exploration in the Baca National Wildlife Refuge — but the activists are standing down. There are no TV crews, no media mikes open for embarrassing slips. There are no screamers, no sign wavers, no guns. This is personal politics, the way it used to be.

Halloween, and nobody is mad as hell.

The congressman asked how many people are living now in the Crestone-Baca subdivision. Maybe 1,800, but many are part time, I said. He asked about the hot springs. I put the two questions together. The Salazars are sixth-generation (!) natives of the valley. The Baca subdivision is barely one generation old, but rapidly growing.  Yes, Anglos from elsewhere like to soak, and so forth, but Valley View hot springs is owned by a  land trust passionately dedicated to preserving an old ranch, an old mine, some rare bats in a cave. He must know this. He is a curious man.

Inside the B and B after the introductions and snapshots, Romer — he’s not running for anything — spoke warmly of the Salazars and coldly of what is happening to America. The interior secretary took the stairs next (the open landing made a good stage) told  of his attachment to the valley and his love of its beauty. He suggested protection of the valley in the manner of a World Heritage Site. Then he introduced his brother, saying that Karl Rove is putting extra money from his secret donors into the campaign against him. Why? Because John Salazar’s defeat would be posted as a trophy, a coup against the brother of an Obama cabinet member.

Next, the congressman took pride in his vote for the health care bill and his vote for the Obama stimulus package, which helped mediate the financial crisis. Suddenly he recognized Christine Canaly in the group and invited her to the stairs. “I used to hate environmentalists,” he said, giving her a hug. Explanation: he was a farmer and the newcomers with all their issues threatened his livelihood; then came the water fight (a clever entrepreneur was buying up water rights in the valley for future transfer to Denver) and the farmers and environmentalists united and won. “I used to think she was a Republican,” John Salazar said. “Just because you have a good business sense does not mean you are a Republican,” Chris Canaly said.

In the middle of all this came a knock on the door. It was a little kid and his mother. The boy was made up like a zombie or a vampire. “Trick or treat.” He held out his plastic pumpkin basket and went around the room. He got cookies that had  been set out for the reception. He got candy from the house trick-r-treat horde. And he got improvised contributions from the crowd. Money, I think.

As the kid walked out the door with his full pumpkin there were comments that he had a bright future. Fund-raiser, somebody suggested. Visions of Karl Rove, however, came to my mind. Undercover sycophant, agent of  empire masquerading  as a fat kid, going from corporate door to corporate door in the dark of night, sucking handouts from  Big Oil vampires, Big Coal grave diggers, Wall Street hangmen.

Halloween, I thought. Be afraid.

But an hour later we were driving slowly along F Street in Salida to get pizza. It is a classic street of late Victorian houses, perfect for haunting. Hundreds of kids in costume and their parents lined the walks. At some houses they were lined up waiting to approach the doors. Small donations, diverse candidates, door to door, person to person. American democracy. Be not afraid.

((More photos of the event here))

Which was to say, in managing recent disasters Chile did it right and America did not. In the Atacama desert the government  took charge of the rescue, realizing early on that the mining company (although it is state-owned) could not handle it. In the Gulf of Mexico the government stood aside while BP fumbled and prevaricated.

The Chilean strategy involved backup plans and acceptance of expert advice. The BP approach was to try and try again, beginning with the cheapest possible solution. The result was serial failure and a public relations disaster.

CNN anchors kept calling the rescue “historic.” It was, but not in their 24-hour view of history. Not so long ago, in the longer view, if you called Chile you would get  Augusto Pinochet.

The  New York Times interviewed people in the Atacama who live with the memory that 37 years ago a Pinochet death squad flew in by helicopters and murdered 16 suspected communists, including miners, at the same place. The “caravan of death” methodically moved on to other communities of leftists. It’s commander, now an ailing octogenarian as was Pinochet, has been identified but never prosecuted.

The first murders were  in the weeks following the September 1973 military coup that opened with the bombing of the presidential palace in Santiago and the death of the elected president, Salvador Allende, beloved by the labor leaders in the exploitive copper industry.

When Pinochet and his generals had solidified their power by terror, they turned to the economy. Their advisor was the American economist Milton Friedman, then at the University of Chicago.  The economic team in Chile became known as “The Chcago Boys.”

Canadian journalist Naomi Klein makes the case that the Friedmanism of Chile was the actual goal in the dreams of the American neo-conservatives who brought us the Bush era. For Chileans it was a nightmare. Her book “The Shock Doctrine” argues that venal political leaders can sack a government and distribute the proceeds among themselves if they first create a state of shock and awe among the people similar to the sensory deprivation techniques that used to be called brainwashing.

Whatever the theory, the Pinochet regime deliberately withheld economic relief as the Chilean economy disintegrated, then convinced the citizens who were in a state similar to the results of torture that the answer to all their problems was privatization. It worked. The economic numbers seemed to shine. Chile became the Friedmanist model. Washington, with a lot of activity by Henry Kissiner, supported the Pinochet regime as an anti-communist example.

And, although this fact was not trumpeted by the neo-cons, the Pinochet gang became very wealthy. But Chileans know this. They have been through it. They have now restored democracy and moderate social programs (Allende had gone too far). The presidential palace has been repaired and a statue of the Allende, kind and bespectacled, stands nearby. There are no statues of Pinochet, who ruled until 1990, and when he died in exile in 2006 people danced in the streets in Santiago (although there were counter-demonstrations and rioting).

Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate American economist who argues that the Obama administration has not put enough money into job-creating recovery programs, wrote in his New York Times column recently: “It’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.”  No conspiracy theorist, Krugman did not carry his observation further: that is, to say that the creation of the mess was deliberate and the political results carefully calculated under Friedmanist theory. Remember, the neo-con slogan  not so long ago was “Starve the beast,” and the beast was all government social programs beginning with the New Deal. (The neo-cons and their tea party progeny have never seen the Pentagon or the new national security bureaucracy as beastly.)

It now appears that  insurgent  Republicans who believe government is “broken,” meaning the American constitution needs to be fixed, will win significant power in November. To label them as Friedmanists, although it’s doubtful most of their candidates have ever heard of the late economist, is not a logical stretch. On the cover of one of Glenn Beck’s books he is dressed in a tacky military uniform that could qualify him as dictator of a banana republic. It’s not really that funny, if you know anything about Latin American history.

If the radicalization of the neo-con philosophy, not in itself incendiary, starts an uncontrolled wild fire  as a result of the November election, it will  be due in part to complacent and timid politicians who ignore history. This insurgency, which has been building for 30 years, can go terribly wrong. Just  ”call Chile.”