Oyster Run 2013

[ed. Oyster Run 2013. My favorite community event of the year. Pretty windy day with periodic downpours but that didn't quell the enthusiasm of the crowd. Hats off to all riders that came despite the weather (still a great turnout). Here are a few pics.]

Free oyster shooters!

 Arrival

Last Meals

In January 1985, Pizza Hut aired a commercial in South Carolina that featured a condemned prisoner ordering delivery for his last meal. Two weeks earlier, the state had carried out its first execution in twenty-two years, electrocuting a man named Joseph Carl Shaw. Shaw’s last-meal request had been pizza, although not from Pizza Hut. Complaints came quickly; the spot was pulled, and a company official claimed the ad was never intended to run in South Carolina.

It’s not hard to understand why Pizza Hut’s creative team thought the ad was a good idea. The last meal offers an irresistible blend of food, death, and crime that drives a commercial and voyeuristic cottage industry. Studiofeast, an invitation-only supper club in New York City, hosts an annual event based on the best responses to the question, “You’re about to die, what’s your last meal?” There are books and magazine articles and art projects that address, among other things, what celebrity chefs—like Mario Batali and Marcus Samuelsson—would have for their last meals, or what the famous and the infamous ate before dying. Newspapers reported that Saddam Hussein was offered but refused chicken, while Esquire published an article about the terminally ill Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, who had Marennes oysters, foie gras, and, the pièce de résistance, two ortolan songbirds. The bird is thought to represent the French soul and, because it’s protected, is illegal to consume.

While the number of yearly executions in the United States has generally declined since a high of ninety-eight in 1999, the website Dead Man Eating tracked and commented on last-meal requests of death-row inmates across the country during the first decade of the new millennium. One of the site’s last posts, in January 2010, was the request of Bobby Wayne Woods, who was executed in Texas for raping and killing an eleven-year-old girl: “Two chicken-fried steaks, two fried chicken breasts, three fried pork chops, two hamburgers with lettuce, tomato, onion, and salad dressing, four slices of bread, half a pound of fried potatoes with onion, half a pound of onion rings with ketchup, half a pan of chocolate cake with icing, and two pitchers of milk.”

There are also efforts to leverage the pop-culture spectacle of last meals to protest the death penalty. An Oregon artist has vowed to paint images of fifty last-meal requests of U.S. inmates on ceramic plates every year until the death penalty is outlawed. Amnesty International launched an anti-capital punishment campaign this past February that featured depictions of the last meals of prisoners who were later exonerated of their crimes.

No matter your stance on capital punishment, eating and dying are universal and densely symbolic human processes. Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country. If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly). And when this combination of factors is set against America’s already fraught relationship with food, supersized or slow, and with weight and weight loss, it’s almost surprising that Pizza Hut didn’t have a winner on its hands.

The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point. As Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed by the state of Arkansas in 1995, said in regard to his last meal, “It’s just like putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.”

by Brent Cunningham, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Prisoners Exercising by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. (Pushkin Museum of Fine Art)

Han Bing for Numéro China, March 2013
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What's Wrong with the Modern World

Karl Kraus was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna's famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death in 1936, he edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel (The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine's sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus was especially well known for his aphorisms – for example, "Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure" – and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.

The thing about Kraus is that he's very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: "If he understands one sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing." If you read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment. (...)

First footnote: Kraus's suspicion of the "melody of life" in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here – that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself – is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the "envy me" tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you're taking a trip to Germany, you'd better be able to explain what specifically you're planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you're not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus's time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.

This suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus's dichotomy: Mac versus PC. Isn't the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your Mac Air. Simply using a Mac Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you're working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC "sobers" what you're doing; it allows you to see it unadorned. This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows.

One of the developments that Kraus will decry in this essay – the Viennese dolling-up of German language and culture with decorative elements imported from Romance language and culture – has a correlative in more recent editions of Windows, which borrow ever more features from Apple but still can't conceal their essential uncool Windowsness. Worse yet, in chasing after Apple elegance, they betray the old austere beauty of PC functionality. They still don't work as well as Macs do, and they're ugly by both cool and utilitarian standards.

And yet, to echo Kraus, I'd still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument was eminently reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn't want to read a novel about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy? Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered, like a human being. (...)

Maybe apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. I have a brief tenure on Earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. If I'd been born in 1159, when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at 53, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending. But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon basin was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows. It wasn't necessarily a better world (we had bomb shelters and segregated swimming pools), but it was the only world I knew to try to find my place in as a writer. And so today, 53 years later, Kraus's signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past – can't help ringing true to me. Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse. Naturally, because he was the first, the changes felt particular and unique to him, but in fact he was registering something that has become a fixture of modernity.

by Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Imagno/Getty Images

Michael Powers

[ed. My golf partner today. Thanks, Michael. Hope we tee it up again sometime soon.]

Ana Zanic
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Kim Hamlet, Where Land Meets the Sea
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An Interview With Horace Dediu: On Blogging, Apple And What’s Next

Q: Turning to Apple, where is it at right now as a company in this post-Steve Jobs period?

A: Still too early to tell. They seem to be cooking a lot of things and the great experiment of whether a company can be Jobsian without Jobs is still going on. I have been trying to put together a picture of how it operates. It’s hard because that’s their biggest secret. It’s also a picture that few people have ever seen, even those who worked there a long time. The glimpses so far are tantalizing but there is so much we don’t know and thus can’t assess how robust it is. One thing that is clear to me is that there is no absorption by mainstream observers of what makes Apple tick. It’s hiding in plain sight because what it is isn’t anything anyone can recognize. Case in point is the functional and integrated dimensions. It’s the largest functional organization outside the US Army and more integrated than Henry Ford’s production system. Just describing it sounds medieval and it’s so far outside convention that it’s not something reasonable people are willing to believe actually exists.

Q: Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time?

A: I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the “Chief Magical Officer” but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do.

Look at it another way: I subscribe to the idea that any sufficiently large company is a system and needs to be analyzed using a lost art called “Systems Analysis”. This is a complete review of all parts and the way they inter-relate. However, since for most of its life Apple was personified as an individual, what came to pass for Apple analysis was actually the psychoanalysis of that individual. It makes for great journalism and best selling books. It’s also banal and almost certainly wrong. The proof is in the vastness of complexity and number of people involved. Engineers tend to think about constraints and the constraints on companies are innumerable.

Q: You’ve written extensively on the post-PC period, when will we come to the post-phone period – if ever?

A: I think less than 10 years. Maybe even five. A wristband today can have more processing power than the original iPhone. An iPhone has more power than a desktop did 4 years ago. The speed of change is incredible.

Q: What’s going to be the “next big thing” for Apple? Watches, TVs, something else?

A: I segment along “jobs to be done” which are basically unstated and unmet needs. Unstated because they are usually so deep and so pervasive that they’re taken for granted. We have the need to feel good about our lives, to be healthy and to be connected in meaningful ways to others. These jobs are very poorly served by technology today and there are many non-technology products that are hired as poor proxies to help. The speed with which technology changes means that the trajectory of improvement will undoubtedly intersect that of the job. Even a small job like losing weight and eating well is probably worth as much as half the mobile phone market. Imagine if someone gives us a magic tool that does that for us. How much would you pay? How many of us would pay? There are so many next big things that I cannot choose. (By the way think of the job Facebook is hired to do: make me feel good about myself because I can show others how good I am. Boom!)

Eric Jackson interview of Horace Dediu, Asymco |  Read more:

Chinese painted horn comb, bird motif.
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NOAH Short

[ed. Pretty interesting... break-ups in the age of distraction.]

In a story that plays out entirely on a teenager's computer screen, Noah follows its eponymous protagonist as his relationship takes a rapid turn for the worse in this fascinating study of behaviour (and romance) in the digital age.

Halftime Speech

O.K., everyone, have a seat, grab a water, and listen up.

That was garbage. Seriously. If I could throw that first half into the trash can, I would. And I’d throw your cleats in after it, because clearly you don’t want to be playing soccer today.

What do I tell you every practice? Wait, I’m sorry. Do you even remember practice? Because, based on how you just “played” out there, I don’t think your brains have retained anything I have ever told you. Like, what’s the one thing I say every practice? Hmm? All together now: I can accept mistakes, but I will not accept lazy mistakes. That’s right, Lola-Belle, I’m talking to you. I hope you’re enjoying your career as a butterfly spotter, because your career at right halfback is over. Until next weekend, because everyone plays.

Listen, ladies, we went into this season with our eyes open. We knew we were stepping up a level. Girls’ U-8 separates the big girls from the little girls, and the under-eight girls from the under-nine girls, which I think is an important distinction, because there are a lot of developmental changes that year. But I thought we agreed that we were going to bring it! And play with intensity every game. Not just against the Purple People Eaters, who, as long as we’re remembering things, start a girl with a leg brace. So I’m glad you were all so pumped to beat them 2-1 last week.

But today . . . I mean, you were just strolling around out there like it was a picnic! When you all know the picnic isn’t until after the second-to-last game, because the twins are going to be out of town for the last game.

Honestly, the only one of you who played with any intensity that half was Jenna, and I know some of you are, like, “Ooh, shocking, Coach Mike said his daughter was the best,” but that’s not what I’m saying. She’s not the best. Maya’s probably a step faster, and if Stella M. took the time she spends braiding her hair every day and used it to practice her ball skills, she’d be killing it out there.

Seriously, girls, practice your ball skills at home. Please.

But what Jenna lacks in natural ability, which comes from her mother’s side, she makes up for in—what’s that word again?—intensity. It’s what I bring to my commercial-real-estate business, which is why my Shale Creek development is scheduled to open with only four per cent vacancy. Four per cent. Tell your parents, Stella R.—I can beat the rent they’re paying downtown.

Point is, I’m proud to see Jenna carrying my intensity onto the field, even if it’s on her mother’s bow legs. Don’t look around; she’s not here. She’s probably with her boyfriend, Scott, Mr. My-Rich-Dad-Handed-Me-A-Job. Go ask that guy about intensity—I hope you like thirty seconds of confused silence.

But, Jenna, I really am proud of you. And I don’t want you to worry about the sacrifices I’m making to coach this team, because that’s not important. Like, did you even realize, while I was teaching you how to trap the ball last week, that I missed a call about a zoning problem on Sixth Street? No, you didn’t, and that’s the way I want it, because it’s not important. Missing that call cost me twelve grand in fees and penalties, but that’s not important. Frustrating and preventable, but . . . you get the idea. What’s important is that we’re sharing this—the good and the bad, the wins and the losses—and that we have something that’s just between us, like you seem to have all those things with your mom.

A twelve-thousand-dollar phone call. Jesus.

by Kirk J. Rudell, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Carrie Boretz/Corbis

Scenery - Only Yesterday
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Robert Longo
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The Orange Trapper

Fishing from a canoe in the Delaware River, I like to ship the paddle and let the boat go where it will. I watch the stony bottom, which flies by under fast-moving water. This is not Philadelphia. This is two hundred river miles above Philadelphia, where the stream-rounded rocks are so clear they look printed. Shoving the rocks, anadromous lampreys have built fortress nests, which are spread around the river like craters of the moon. Mesmerized, I watch the rocks go by. Fly-casting for bass, I see golf balls. (...)

When you are flying along on fast current, you don’t just get off your canoe and prop it up on a kickstand in order to pick up a golf ball. Over time, seeing so many golf balls in the river was such a threatening frustration that I had to do something about it. Research led to the telephone number of a company then in Michigan. A real person answered and was even more than real. She understood me. She knew what I was asking and did not call 911. Instead, she had questions of her own: What was the speed of the current? What was the depth of the river? Was the bottom freestone? Sand? Clay? Silt? After completing the interview, she said, “You want the Orange Trapper.”

“The Orange Trapper?”

“The Orange Trapper.”

It came in various lengths. I said I thought the nine-footer would do. The nine might be stiffer in the current than the twelve, the fifteen, the eighteen, the twenty-one, or the twenty-four. Besides, nine (actually, 9.6) just felt right. It was the length of my fly rods.

What came in the mail was only twenty-one inches long, with an orange head, a black grip, and a shaft that consisted of ten concentric stainless tubes with a maximum diameter of five-eighths of an inch. You could conduct an orchestra with it. It was beautiful. The orange head was a band of industrial-strength plastic, as obovate as a pear and slightly wider than a golf ball. A depression in its inside top was there to secure one side of a ball, but the genius of the device was in a working part, a bevelled “flipper” that came up through the throat and would waggle into place on the other side of the ball. The Orange Trapper worked two ways. It had no upside or downside. You could surround a golf ball with either side, then lift it up as if you were playing lacrosse with no strings. You could turn the head over—a hundred and eighty degrees—and the ball would generally stay put. But flip the thing over once more and the ball would always roll free. Made by JTD Enterprises, it could have been designed by Apple.

Even so, finesse was required to trap a ball in shallow current. After seeing one, and swinging around, and going hard upstream, and shipping the paddle, you had about five seconds to place the head of the Trapper over the ball. I missed as often as not. It wasn’t the Trapper’s fault. My average would have been higher chasing hummingbirds with a butterfly net. The river is an almost endless sequence of shallows, riffles, rapids, and slow pools. For the real action, I went below some white water into a long deep pool with Don Schlaefer in his johnboat. Don is a fishing pal. He plays golf. He had no interest in the balls in the river, but he could put his boat right over them and hold it there while I fished with the Orange Trapper. I picked up a dozen golf balls in half an hour.

Marvelling at the craziness, Don said, “Why are you doing this? They’re only golf balls. Golf balls are cheap.”

I said, “Money has nothing to do with it.”

A Titleist Pro V1, currently the Prada golf ball, costs four or five dollars on the Internet and more in a pro shop. If a person of Scottish blood says money has nothing to do with that, he is really around the corner. True, I don’t find balls of such quality often in the river. But they’re a high percentage of what I pick up in the roadside woods of New Jersey. Titleist makes about a million balls a day. In the United States, for all qualities and brands, a present estimate is that golfers lose three hundred million golf balls a year.

Why? Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton, now lives in central New Hampshire, and is a member of Bald Peak, Yeamans Hall, Pine Valley, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

Hackl: “It is an indication of the vast disparity of wealth in this country that golfers in some places can hit seven-dollar balls into woods and thickets and not even bother to look for them.”

There is less to it than that. Golfers have egos in the surgeon range. They hit a drive, miss the fairway, and go looking for the ball thirty yards past where it landed. When their next drive goes into timber and sounds like a woodpecker in the trees, there is no way to know the vector of the carom, so they drop another ball and play on. It must be said, in their defense, that various pressures concatenate and force them to keep moving, no matter the cost in golf balls. The foursome behind is impatient. A major issue is how long it takes to play. It is infra dig to cause “undue delay.” In the Rules of Golf, there’s a five-minute time limit on looking for lost balls. The rule may be unknown to some golfers and by others ignored, but five minutes or less is what most golfers give to finding lost balls. The rest are mine. (...)

In the frenzy of marketing, golf balls are sold in such complex variety that golf’s pro shops are not far behind fishing’s fly shops, where line weights and rod weights and tip flex and reel seats are sold in so many forms for so many different capabilities and so many different situations that people’s basements are forested with tackle. And, as with fishing equipment, the spectrum of subtlety in golf balls includes price. The difference is not among manufacturers but within the product lines of manufacturers. You can buy a dozen Titleist DT SoLos for less than twenty dollars. I know a golfer who has spoken as follows about looking for a wayward ball: “If you don’t find yours but find another of the same quality, you’re even. If you find a ball that’s not up to your standards, you leave it there for a lower class of golfer.” How he happened to get into the woods in the first place was not a topic he addressed. He reminded me of a pirate in the Guayas River near Guayaquil. With six other pirates, he came off a needle boat and over the stern of a Lykes Brothers merchant ship. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at a sailor’s throat while others tied him to a king post. A pirate pointed at the sailor’s watch, and said, “Give me.” The sailor handed over the watch. The pirate looked at it and gave it back.

by John McPhee, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Phillip Toledano

Bruno Munari, L’ora x clock (1945)
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William Roberts The Lake 1964.
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Not Weird About Brooklyn

[ed. The Saturn return]

I had to put my leather loveseat up on Craigslist three times before someone answered the ad, and then that someone, in all of New York City, was the guy my closest friend had been sleeping with a few months earlier. I’d never met him, but I knew that he’d once had to leave her house late at night to go take some kind of medication, and that he got really, really sweaty during sex. Also that he didn’t have Internet access at home, kissed exclusively in chaste little pecks, and had two alarmingly close friends who were women. He and Marie were both writing novels about angels. They’d met at the university where they both taught writing and had both earned MFAs in fiction (at different times), and after they’d written together at a coffee shop one winter afternoon, they relocated to his kitchen table for what Marie called “the download”: a pre-hookup conversation about family and spirituality that lasted for hours.

Comfy, well-loved small couch/loveseat, I’d posted. Has a tear in one of the cushions (see photo) but otherwise in good condition. VERY comfortable. Free if you can help me carry it down from my third-floor apartment (it’s not too heavy). Should fit in the back of an SUV; we’ve done it before. I’d taken the pictures haphazardly, in a spasm of sudden anxiety (couldn’t possibly start packing before I made some space in the apartment!), and now, as I considered the coincidence of Eytan having been the first person to respond, I wondered whether the fact that there had been books in the photos (a copy of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and a notebook lay beside the cushion-rip for scale; Eating Animals, Revolutionary Road, and The Lost Origins of the Essay were strewn in the foreground) had somehow limited my audience. It seemed typical of New York that the person to answer my ad at last would be someone of my precise demographic, as if the ad’s imagery and syntax (was it the semicolon?) could communicate only with people exactly like me.

Because I was moving away in nine days, such New York typicalities were aggressively making themselves known. I recognized the reaction as a defense mechanism, a sort of mental packing-up, but still it freaked me out. For years I’d rolled my eyes at those gullible plebes and out-of-touch patricians who called New Yorkers busy (I’d never worked full-time!) or the city expensive (I’d saved money while making $24K a year!) or the life there hard (my job was a scenic ten-minute bike ride away!)—but then, in July, my first subway trip after a long vacation had subjected me to just such a stereotype, producing the unpleasant and unshakeable sensation of acting in a bad SNL skit about riding the subway. Pressed to my left was a woman putting on makeup and violently sneezing, while on my right another woman dozed, her head periodically thunking my shoulder and then jerking away. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to feel disdain toward the city, or relief about leaving, and it felt like betrayal. As I’d confessed to Marie one night that spring, when the move first became a possibility, I’d always thought of my friends who left New York as the ones who had failed.

Now I called Marie to confirm that Eytan was Eytan and to ask whether we could meet in Red Hook a little later that afternoon—she and I had plans to knock out another item on my NYC bucket list, a last swim at the neighborhood’s public pool followed by food from the ball park’s food vendors. How crazy is that, we agreed about Eytan being the only person in the world to want my couch; “It’s like Craigslist is better than OKCupid,” (...)

I guess that’s part of what it means to live in a place, too—to share a story with the other people who are there. In late spring, after I’d decided to move, when Marie said to me that she’d always need to live somewhere with the stimulation and stuff-to-do-ness of New York, I would mostly believe her—certainly she was someone capable of being busier, and more gracefully busy, than me, and I knew she’d once spent a summer being unhappily un-busy in Wisconsin—but I’d also wonder whether this wasn’t just one of those stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves where we are, sort of like how Didion says “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but in this case a story in order to die, to kill off the other lives we might lead, the same way that most people who give advice are forever saying Do exactly what I did. We have the conversations we want to have, say the things we want to be saying, and even as I write this, I am aware of how much it is the story I want to be telling: a story to shed my New York self, to leave it behind.

by Helen Rubenstein, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Criagslist (uncredited)

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House Republicans Pass Deep Cuts in Food Stamps

[ed. To be read as a companion piece to the post following this one.]

House Republicans narrowly pushed through a bill on Thursday that slashes billions of dollars from the food stamp program, over the objections of Democrats and a veto threat from President Obama.

The vote set up what promised to be a major clash with the Senate and dashed hopes for passage this year of a new five-year farm bill.

The vote was 217 to 210, largely along party lines.

Republican leaders, under pressure from Tea Party-backed conservatives, said the bill was needed because the food stamp program, which costs nearly $80 billion a year, had grown out of control. They said the program had expanded even as jobless rates had declined with the easing recession.

“This bill eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path,” said Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, who led efforts to split the food stamps program from the overall farm bill. “In the real world, we measure success by results. It’s time for Washington to measure success by how many families are lifted out of poverty and helped back on their feet, not by how much Washington bureaucrats spend year after year.”

But even with the cuts, the food stamp program would cost more than $700 billion over the next 10 years.

Republicans invoked former President Bill Clinton in their defense of the bill, saying that the changes were in the spirit of those that he signed into law in 1996 that set work requirements for those who receive welfare.

But Democrats, many of whom held up pictures of people they said would lose their benefits, called the cuts draconian and said they would plunge millions into poverty.

“It’s a sad day in the people’s House when the leadership brings to the floor one of the most heartless bills I have ever seen,” said Representative James McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “It’s terrible policy trapped in a terrible process.” (...)

Critics of the measure said the cuts would fall disproportionately on children.

“Yes, the federal government has budget problems, but children didn’t cause them, and cutting anti-hunger investments is the wrong way to solve them,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus Campaign for Children, a child advocacy group.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly 4 million people would be removed from the food stamp program under the House bill starting next year. The budget office said after that, about 3 million a year would be cut off from the program.

The budget office said that, left unchanged, the number of food stamp recipients would decline by about 14 million people — or 30 percent — over the next 10 years as the economy improves. A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday found that the program had kept about 4 million people above the poverty level and had prevented millions more from sinking further into poverty. The census data also showed nearly 47 million people living in poverty — close to the highest level in two decades.

by Ron Nixon, NY Times |  Read more:

Image via:

How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers

Last year was a busy one for public giveaways to the National Football League. In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4 million from taxpayers’ pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins, for the team to upgrade a workout facility. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, McDonnell approved the gift while the state legislature was out of session. The Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. But even billionaires like to receive expensive gifts.

Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.

In Minnesota, the Vikings wanted a new stadium, and were vaguely threatening to decamp to another state if they didn’t get it. The Minnesota legislature, facing a $1.1 billion budget deficit, extracted $506 million from taxpayers as a gift to the team, covering roughly half the cost of the new facility. Some legislators argued that the Vikings should reveal their finances: privately held, the team is not required to disclose operating data, despite the public subsidies it receives. In the end, the Minnesota legislature folded, giving away public money without the Vikings’ disclosing information in return. The team’s principal owner, Zygmunt Wilf, had a 2011 net worth estimated at $322 million; with the new stadium deal, the Vikings’ value rose about $200 million, by Forbes’s estimate, further enriching Wilf and his family. They will make a token annual payment of $13 million to use the stadium, keeping the lion’s share of all NFL ticket, concession, parking, and, most important, television revenues. (...)

In his office at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell must smile when Texas exempts the Cowboys’ stadium from taxes, or the governor of Minnesota bows low to kiss the feet of the NFL. The National Football League is about two things: producing high-quality sports entertainment, which it does very well, and exploiting taxpayers, which it also does very well. Goodell should know—his pay, about $30 million in 2011, flows from an organization that does not pay corporate taxes.

That’s right—extremely profitable and one of the most subsidized organizations in American history, the NFL also enjoys tax-exempt status. On paper, it is the Nonprofit Football League.

This situation came into being in the 1960s, when Congress granted antitrust waivers to what were then the National Football League and the American Football League, allowing them to merge, conduct a common draft, and jointly auction television rights. The merger was good for the sport, stabilizing pro football while ensuring quality of competition. But Congress gave away the store to the NFL while getting almost nothing for the public in return.

The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act was the first piece of gift-wrapped legislation, granting the leagues legal permission to conduct television-broadcast negotiations in a way that otherwise would have been price collusion. Then, in 1966, Congress enacted Public Law 89‑800, which broadened the limited antitrust exemptions of the 1961 law. Essentially, the 1966 statute said that if the two pro-football leagues of that era merged—they would complete such a merger four years later, forming the current NFL—the new entity could act as a monopoly regarding television rights. Apple or ExxonMobil can only dream of legal permission to function as a monopoly: the 1966 law was effectively a license for NFL owners to print money. Yet this sweetheart deal was offered to the NFL in exchange only for its promise not to schedule games on Friday nights or Saturdays in autumn, when many high schools and colleges play football.

Public Law 89-800 had no name—unlike, say, the catchy USA Patriot Act or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Congress presumably wanted the bill to be low-profile, given that its effect was to increase NFL owners’ wealth at the expense of average people.

While Public Law 89-800 was being negotiated with congressional leaders, NFL lobbyists tossed in the sort of obscure provision that is the essence of the lobbyist’s art. The phrase or professional football leagues was added to Section 501(c)6 of 26 U.S.C., the Internal Revenue Code. Previously, a sentence in Section 501(c)6 had granted not-for-profit status to “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, or boards of trade.” Since 1966, the code has read: “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues.”

The insertion of professional football leagues into the definition of not-for-profit organizations was a transparent sellout of public interest. This decision has saved the NFL uncounted millions in tax obligations, which means that ordinary people must pay higher taxes, public spending must decline, or the national debt must increase to make up for the shortfall. Nonprofit status applies to the NFL’s headquarters, which administers the league and its all-important television contracts. Individual teams are for-profit and presumably pay income taxes—though because all except the Green Bay Packers are privately held and do not disclose their finances, it’s impossible to be sure.

by Gregg Easterbrook, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Matt Lehman