Privates Exposed

The Colbert Report Feb 21, 2013

The GEO Group naming of a public-university stadium is a true story that exceeds the kinkiest fantasies of Grover Norquist's twin fetishes of low taxes and privatization.

A public university is underfunded, so it turns to a private company for funds. It allows it to put the private company's name on a public building in return for providing funds that should have come from tax revenues in the first place. And where does the private company get all this money? From tax revenues that now add a layer of private profit to the public expenditure that would normally go to fund prisons directly.

The myth of privatization is that it creates efficiencies. The opposite is true, of course, since both services and profits must be funded, with money once used only for the services. In this case, so much profit was taken that it flowed into an increasingly common form of corruption -- the private naming of public properties.

I am usually pleased to see references to geography,
but in this case it is creepy.

Lagniappe

July 23, 2015: The GEO group is in the news again. Alexandra Starr reports on Morning Edition that GEO Group is the largest employer of undocumented workers in the United States. It pays them to operate the prisons in which they are held, maximizing the profits it makes from their detention..

Google In Google Out

GIGO is a term that goes back to the earliest lessons of life with computers: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It is a warning not to trust computers too much, and it is as true now as it was when Hal nearly did in the crew of the S.S. Discovery.

I am a big fan and avid user of Google Maps, but when I look at places I know, I sometimes find either a lack of detail or outright errors. In Matagalpa, Nicaragua, for instance, many of the places I visit each January are nearly impossible to find, so that I am working with a student -- and a GPS unit -- to map our most recent journey.

And as I wrote in September, a routing error puts the town of San Ignacio, Belize (where I will be teaching a course on chocolate in June 2013) many hours farther from neighboring towns (and potential tourists) than it really is. The problem seems to relate to a bridge that was washed out on the main highway but subsequently repaired. The map (as shown above in a screen capture just taken) continues to include an unneeded diversion, but it an improvement from the time of my original report.

Click to expand

I was reminded of this while preparing for a possible return to Cape Verde next year. During my 2006 study tour, I had visited only two islands, and plan to visit more on my second study tour. Looking at the northern islands, I was confused, because sites I planned to visit seemed to be on an island that was not in our preliminary plans. I worked for about a half hour in this confused state before consulting another map. Of course two of the three islands shown above do not have the same name! The middle of these three islands is actually São Vicente, and does not share its name with Santa Luzia.


View Larger Map

I have advised Google of this error, but I am not optimistic of a rapid response. When the problem is resolved, the dynamic map above will show three islands with three names. Meanwhile, the NationMaster map is far more reliable than Google, when it comes to planning a tour of Cape Verde. The islands in question are in the northwest corner of this map.

Vertical Katrina

Thanks to my favorite librarian for sharing the Occupy Sandy video, which comes from Bill Moyers (whom I recently described as one of my favorite Baptists) by way of Upworthy contributor Carolyn Silveira. This rich video documents the community-based responses of Occupy participants to the ongoing calamity of Super Storm Sandy. This video is eight minutes well spent, as it is full of lessons about environmental geography and the political ecology of disaster.


Occupy Sandy from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

The first geographic lesson occurs early in the segment, when a group of Occupy Wall Street participants use geographic skills to decide where to focus their efforts to help people who might still be suffering the affects of Sandy after the initial recovery period had ended. Since the question of where to reach out was a geographic question, they used a geographic strategy to answer it. Overlaying a map of storm surges with a map of relative wealth, they chose Coney Island as a place where high water and low income meet.

This methodology led them to a surprise -- beyond the carnival rides and boardwalk, Coney Island is home to many high-rise apartment complex in which thousands of people experiencing poverty live in great numbers. And since these neighborhoods had been low on the priority list for governments and utilities, the discomfort and suffering were as severe as the resources were limited. In fact, one of the volunteers declared the disaster to be a "vertical Katrina" and a reminder that the lessons of that travesty have not yet really been learned.

The volunteers exhibit all that has been most positive about the Occupy movement. Among these is a recognition that economic privilege or lack thereof is fleeting, and is contingent on circumstances beyond the control of individuals. Still, privilege does insulate some of us against hardship more than others, and those with privilege -- even modest privilege -- should share those benefits. The horizontal nature of the the movement is also exemplified by this effort, as is the ability to match rhetoric and ideology with tangible action for the good of an entire community. One of the political ecology observations in the video is that the Coney Island neighborhood in which it takes place is a food desert, where the "free market" does not provide the range of foods to which more affluent communities in the United States are now accustomed.

Epilogue: This video was made when people were still wearing sweaters and light jackets. When winter storms began to strike the region in subsequent months, some homes were still without power. It goes without saying that these were not the homes of the wealthy or even the middle class.

Further epilogue: I saw this video as news included not only the recovery of my own neighborhood from a winter storm that left us without power for almost four days (some shorter, some longer), and as the Carnival Cruise ship Triumph ended its ordeal at sea with 4,200 people with limited power. Both of these events have many middle-class people -- myself included -- thinking carefully about both our vulnerabilities and the resilience that is afforded by financial resources and social connections that are not be available to all.

Some have critical of the Triumph passengers for complaining and the media for covering their plight. (And some of them -- such as Ben Vogelzang -- actually did not complain.) I would not go that far, as I do think that so many people on a disabled ship is a genuine humanitarian concern, even if the people involved are relatively wealthy and the discomforts are short-lived. It was a worthwhile reminder, however, that not all such crises come to a happy conclusion, as this one eventually did.

Fluvial Geography of Whiskey

In the second hour (wisely chosen) of today's program, Tom Ashbrook and his guests explored the many tributaries that comprise the great river of whiskey so celebrated by Professor Willie Nelson. Although the word "history" was used several times during the discussion, this was a great example of the importance of geography behind history of all kinds.

Michael Veach, Joy Richard, and a slew of interesting callers discuss the revival of interest in fine whiskeys as well as the geographic differences in such things as the use of barrels. Trade along a literal river -- the Mississippi -- helps to explain the distinctive use of charred barrels in Kentucky. Some mention was made, of course, of Scotch, the history and geography of which I discussed in some detail on this blog last year.

I highly recommend the On Point discussion in its entirety, as well as the many interesting comments posted by users. Among them is a hint that my ambitions of distilling my own whiskey (or whisky) might be harder to attain than I had imagined.

Nicaragua Memories 2013

I have not blogged much in the past few weeks, as I was quite busy during my seventh Geography of Coffee study tour in Nicaragua, and have been very busy with a new semester since then. My photographs from the trip are on Flickr, and I expect to be able to share more from my students soon.

Learn about GPS

Meanwhile, a student has posted the first of several video montages I expect to see from this group of very engaged students. This is really a mood piece of a memorable journey.

Nick was also carrying a GPS unit throughout the tour, partly to do some benchmark research on climate change at various farms and also to help document the journey.

He has started to put the data together in a very artful way, focused on the first half of our travels, in and around Matagalpa. Enjoy.

Holguín Son

Revised January 2020

During my 2003 visit to Cuba, the entire group quickly grew tired of the catchy, ubiquitous song "Guantanamara," to the point that we considered implementing a fine for involuntary humming of the song by group members. I might have felt differently had I understood the political significance of the song, but probably not: it is the ultimate earworm.

The opening chords of "Chan Chan" evoked no such response. We heard it almost as often, and I certainly never tired of it. A decade later, it always takes me on a brief mental journey back to Havana. The song is a romantic -- even somewhat ribald -- example of Cuban son, a style introduced to many North American audiences (including me) by Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club project.

As much as I associate the song with Havana -- because it was recorded there -- the song itself is set in the eastern province of Holguín, coincidentally home to Fidel and Raul Castro. It evokes a day of traveling from three small towns in the hills down to the beach town of Mayari.


View Chan Chan in a larger map

Lagniappe

Enjoy more music and landscapes in this video set to "El Carretero" -- another song in the Buena Vista Social Club repertoire. I enjoy it because it captures parts of the ride I took from Havana to Trinidad in 2003.

Crossroads Conversation

Yesterday I noticed that Bill Moyers -- one of my favorite Baptists -- had interviewed Junot Díaz -- the only Pulitzer-prize winner I have met. I was immediately drawn to the conversation, both by the great integrity and intellectual rigor that these public intellectuals share and by the sharply different style they each bring to conversation.

Even before the interview itself, I was rewarded in the opening snippet by a reference to libraries and librarians. As I was reminded later in the interview, Díaz remembers an early childhood in the Dominican Republic without libraries, where a Bible might be seen, but where he had never seen two books together. For this future writer, one of the greatest gifts of coming to America was his immediate introduction to the local library. (It is appropriate that it was my wife the librarian who made it possible for my students and me to meet Professor Díaz a couple of years ago.)


Moyers & Company Show 151: Rewriting the Story of America from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Speaking for a full hour, six weeks after the re-election of Barack Obama, Díaz and Moyers have had time to think carefully about what the election might mean as a marker of a country undergoing profound change.

“There is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself, and the reality of this country,” Díaz tells Moyers. “Whether we're talking about the Latino community in North Carolina, a whole new progressive generation of Cuban Americans in Florida, a very out queer community across the United States, or an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or pandered to, I think we're having a new country emerging that's been in the making for a long time, and that I think for the first time is revealing itself more fully to the entire country.”

He shares with me an reluctance to apply the word "conservative" to the Republican party as it currently operates at the national level. He explains the difficulty more deftly than I could and more brazenly than I would. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a real conservative party in this country for once?” he asks. Instead, what the GOP currently offers is a “shelter for a lot of messed-up and toxic paradigms.”

What needs to happen is not easy, he admits, but needs to be done. He tells Moyers that it is "much harder than we ever gave it credit for to really embrace a country like this one, a country that is so dynamic and so diverse at all different levels.”

What is needed, he insists, is genuine conversation, and he and Moyers provide a rich example, and one that is not limited to the election itself. The conversation ranges from surprising differences in the racial dynamics of Hollywood and Wall Street, for example, to the importance of reading Moby Dick and the travesty of student-loan debt.

Those who find this conversation as compelling as I did may wish to hear his conversation with another great interviewer, as he spoke with Tom Ashbrook about the profound lessons of disaster in Haiti.

Alt-dot-musica

See Alt.Latino main page to search stories or to listen live

I have been interested in the music of Latin America for more than a decade, and have incorporated some of the rich variety of the region's music in my teaching and outreach.

My very first exposure to the musical traditions of Brazil and Cuba was even earlier, through the production work of David Byrne at Luaka Bop. My interest really grew through  friends and colleagues who shared their favorite music during my visits to Latin America, Once I started listening to these songs (mainly on CDs), I started to make connections. I must confess, though, that my seven years in the border area were wasted, musically speaking, as I did not even attempt to understand Tejano or Conjunto music until I moved north.

I continue to appreciate the incredible variety of music from Latin America, but must admit that my pursuit of coffee, tea, and now chocolate have distracted me a bit in recent years, so that my Musica web pages have experienced a bit of neglect.

This is where Alt.Latino comes in. I first started hearing about it a few months ago, around the edges of my habitual NPR listening and reading. When I decided to fluff up my pages this week, I decided to have a look around, and I was richly rewarded. Hosts Jasmine Garsd and Felix Contreras have put a name to a pattern I had started to notice but could not articulate: From them I have realized that Latin Alternative is a way to describe many of the musics to which I was being drawn.

Like the music, the program seems to be evolving, from its chance beginnings near the NPR vending machines, into a major force with several different manifestations, including hour-long produced shows, blog posts, various social-media and spots on other NPR programs. It also has a continues internet radio stream. As I browsed through the weekly shows, the first I found was an interview with Manu Chao, whose Clandestino CD each member of my family has memorized to varying degrees.

The wide-ranging interview is a genuine treat, mixing insights about politics and art with samples of his work and the work of others whose music he enjoys. It was my first encounter with the song "Me gustas tu," a silly and catchy tune that is as close to pop as I've heard him. As with many of his songs, the "VIDEO OFFICIAL" version is a visual feast, and the best way to enjoy the music. This track is from the Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (Next Station: Hope) CD. On my first perusal, I noticed many songs that sample his own earlier works.



On YouTube, it was not difficult to find an unofficial version of the song with printed lyrics (albeit with a few typos). For those learning a language, such videos are a real blessing.



More about my own thoughts on Manu Chao and some similar artists is on my Musica - Eclectic page.

Muertos

¡Que Miedo! was the Halloween 2012 episode of the program, which explored the intersection of folklore and contemporary Latin music, including sexy horror that predates Twilight. The discussion includes, of course, both the chupacabras and various versions of the La Llorona tale. The Chavela Vargas version they play is used in a popular Frida Kahlo tribute video; my 2010 La Llorona post includes two other variations -- a spoken-word reading and television advertisement.

(In addition to the musica web page, this blog includes a number of posts with a musica label. I am available for presentations on this topic at high school and college campuses, as I am for presentations on the geography of coffee, tea, or chocolate. )

Queen Lisa?

Political geography often finds its way onto The Simpsons. In connection with Queen Elizabeth's annual Christmas greetings, Philip Reeves explains how the most political of the Simpsons characters -- Lisa -- is herself now a factor in British politics. She is something of a celebrity among separatists in the English county of Cornwall, where tourism officials are now prohibited from using the words England or county.

This story requires some understanding of the distinctions among such terms as England, Great Britain, and United Kingdom. Although he twice makes a false distinction between politics and geography -- and online commentators object to some of his claims, CGP Grey offers some clarifying remarks on the differences.

A Line in the Water

Photographer John  Legge posted this image on the Visit Derby
web site in honor of Samuel Plimsoll's life-saving contribution.

Early this morning, I heard a story on the 99% Invisible design program, in which Roman Mars expressed his admiration for the elegant design of the Plimsoll Line. In looking for the program online, I also found a very nice 2008 BBC story about Samuel Plimsoll's political struggle to get a simple line painted on ships.

The simple line is a triumph of design and -- to be honest -- of the triumph of good over evil.

Honored in Bristol England
Photo by Mike Smith
via Roman Mars 

Now taken for granted on ships throughout the world, the 450mm-long line marks the maximum depth to which a ship can be safely loaded. If the line is not visible at or above the water line, the ship is too low in the water and subject to sinking. The lines to the sides of the basic Plimsoll Line indicate adjustments for the density of water by salinity and season.

The Plimsoll story piqued my interest because of my general pursuit of all things nautical these days. It is also relevant to my teaching about environmental and safety regulations, as it is an unusually clear case of greed (and evil) blocking an obvious need for reform.

I am currently reading Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, which describes many of the ways in which indifferent ship owners put the lives of their crews in danger. I purchased the book at the Bookworks on Nantucket, where most of the wealth generated by whaling accumulated. As cavalier as ship owners were with the lives of their sailors in 1819, they had become even more likely to take risks by the middle of the century, when insurance made ships worth more at the bottom of the sea.

As a member of parliament, Samuel Plimsoll found this unacceptable. It may be that the insurance companies would have eventually ended the practice of overloading ships (known as "coffins" by wary sailors), but by 1873 they had not acted, so Parliament did. The mandate to include Plimsoll's simple mark was a compromise -- he wanted stricter regulations -- but the intervening years it has saved many thousands of sailors from a watery grave.

Related Non-News
Readers of this post are very unlikely to have heard of the wreck of the Stena Primorsk, an oil tanker that ran aground on the Hudson River on December 20, 2012. The reason the wreck is little-known it is a double-hulled ship. Most tankers have been double-hulled since the 1989 Exxon Valdez wreck (a DUI of catastrophic proportions on the part of Captain Hazelwood). It has been against considerable industry resistance that most countries in the world have pledged to ban single-hull tankers by 2015. Although Exxon does continue to use them, they are now rare because regulators imposed restrictions over industry objections.

Lagniappe:
Roman Mars (in the story above) explains why these shoes are still sometimes called Plimsolls in the UK: