Livin' what I write

For much of my life I’ve been intimately involved in one form of local baseball, or another. From my earliest experiences that I recall at the age of seven, going to Roberts 88’ers games, Lisbon Fall’s town team representative in the local Andy County League, baseball played a key role in forming a sense of who I am. Later, I played Little League, Senior Little League, High School ball and eventually, American Legion baseball. After a college career cut short by injury, I walked away from baseball in my early 20’s, only to return to the altar of the local game, with the birth of my own son.

Weaving its seemingly timeless thread around the relationship that would develop with my own son, baseball continues to occupy a central place for me with each passing summer. It is that thread that prompted me to reflect on the current state of local baseball and Portland’s Twilight League and the genesis of the seed that eventually became When Towns Had Teams.

This summer is my third season of being a head coach. As much as I grouse about my never-ending list of things to do regarding the league, I absolutely love to coach—always have. There’s something about pulling aside a 20-year-old pitcher and recommending some minor adjustment and seeing a light of understanding come on and observing him begin to have success. Or witnessing the personal development of players who you watched as skinny 15 year olds, blossom into 20 year old young men who you know are going to be successful as human beings. In a world where heroes and leaders are in short supply, trying to model respect for the game of baseball and being a mentor isn’t unimportant, even if I come up short of perfection more-times-than-not.

Having said all that, I’m concerned about how the brand of baseball I’m so firmly connected with continues to slide down society’s skewered list of priorities. While some of my friends aren’t as passionate about our nation’s pastime as I am, I stand by my frequent assertions that the loss of local baseball (and many other local, citizen-based activities) is not a good sign, and reflects our loss of community and our slide into the murky waters of the banal and boorish.

I could cite example-after-example of how our league (and not just our league but other types of locally-oriented activities) receive short shrift from our so-called local leaders and civic hierarchy, as well as fellow citizens (not to mention Portland's paper-of-record). A case in point was last night’s doubleheader that my club, Patriot Mutual Insurance, playing against Lewiston/Auburn. Due to our rainy summer, the league schedule over the next two weeks is rife with makeup games. Rather than play our usual nine inning single game, beginning at 7pm, we opted to play two seven inning games in order to makeup one of our rainouts with this club. We started a half our earlier than usual, beginning at 6:30pm.

Upon arriving at the St. Joseph’s College field in North Windham, we were told that we had to be off the field by 11pm. This meant that if both games had excessive hitting or other things that can prolong an amateur baseball game, we might be hindered by the clock. As it happened, we were done long before our imposed curfew, but once again, I looked into the face of a society that stumbles more-and-more into its “me-only” ghetto of self-absorption. When I asked the groundskeeper in charge as to why we had to be off the field, he told me that “the neighbors call the cops” if games go beyond that time. Call the cops? Give me a freakin’ break! This made me reflect on several things:

--With no houses within a half mile of the field, how does an evening baseball game between 30 college-age kids imperil their television programs, or their apparent need for peace and serenity?

--There was a time when folks in the community would have come out to watch local players play, rather than treat it as an impositition. What’s gone so wrong that they now resort to calling the police about the crack of leather on wood?

--Since when did the participation of members of the community in an All-American pastime as baseball warrant the involvement of local law enforcement?

I could certainly go on with this, but I think you get the picture. All of this forcefully validates the work that I’ve spent the last year doing—collecting the facts, stories and tracing local baseball’s rise to prominence and subsequent downward plunge into being associated with a criminal activity.

While sociologists might disagree with my assignment of town team baseball’s demise as a cause of social pathology, I think it’s a pretty good mirror to hold up for all of us to look into and ask, “Where the f*ck did we take the wrong turn?” In 30 years, we’ve gone from town team and semi-pro baseball being revered, attended by hundreds and yes, thousands of fans, to now running the risk of arrest and legal penalty for exceeding arbitrary curfews of short-sighted cranks.

I’m not sure where this will all end up. Maybe in the next three or four years, baseball leagues like the Twilight League will finally reach their endpoint—in my humble opinion, we’ve certainly reached our nadir. Then, we’ll only have the overpaid and narcissistic professionals to follow on our wide-screen televisions, brought to you by Nike, Wal-Mart and our other corporate raiders that run the show here in our plutocracy that we call America.

Gross inequality

A good article on the rich getting richer, while the rest of us go begging for crumbs.

Posted from The Huffington Post.

No Justice, No Peace
by, Charlie Cray
7.12.05

Corporate executives and directors have once again flunked the "acid test" of corporate reform (as Warren Buffett put it), continuing to pay themselves an average of 289 times what the average employee took home last year, according to recent figures.

No matter what they say, this gross inequality has nothing to do with job performance or general prosperity (e.g. job creation) and everything to do with the ongoing epidemic of shameless war profiteering, outsourcing, and tax dodging that have fueled festering resentments across the rest of society.

Though you'd hardly think so, judging from the media's overall neglect of the issue, that resentment is deep and well-founded. After all, while worker productivity rose 78 percent between 1973 and 2004, the average employee's paycheck today is more than $3,000 less than it was during the Nixon administration (1973), when it was $36,629 (adjusting for inflation).

In those days U.S. CEOs made about 45 times as much as workers, according to pay expert Graef Crystal. And after President Nixon urged everyone to begin to "move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation," America's CEOs have waged a fierce game of class warfare ever since, even using that phrase (with its not-so-subtle Marxist connotation) to "whack-a-mole" any protestations of tax cuts for the rich or (horrors) proposals to ban stock option compensation, the steroids of corporate greed that led to so much book-cooking.

(If the media giants themselves weren't so blind to the issue, maybe they'd have invented a new vocabulary for the unprecedented "corpiracy" and "corporruption" witnessed in recent years.)

Can anything be done or should we wallow in that feeling of futility and junk food commercials in between episodes of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"? (Even there the debate is warped. Maybe someone should remake that old Phil Silvers/Sgt. Bilko show, "You'll Never Get Rich.")

Of course, as is the case with just about every other issue having something to do with justice, Washington is usually the last place to look to for leadership on this issue. The living wage policies that have spread from city to city have, in fact, been the result of grassroots organizing led by groups like ACORN.

But there is one good idea that keeps coming up in Congress thanks to Rep. Martin Sabo. Today, Sabo re-introduced the Income Equity Act .

Sabo's 2005 bill would limit government subsidies of CEO excess by eliminating tax deductions for compensation that exceeds 25 times the company’s lowest paid full-time employee. (For example, if the lowest paid, full-time employee in a firm was paid $20,000, then the highest salary deduction that could be claimed by that firm would be $500,000.)

(To learn more about skyrocketing CEO pay and the effects it has had on the rest of American society, check out United for a Fair Economy, Greed and Good by Sam Pizigatti (the definitive book on CEO pay issues), The Corporate Library and Lucien Bebchuk's Pay Without Performance.

Oh, and to research a specific CEO's pay, check out AFL-CIO's Executive Paywatch page.


Charlie Cray the director of the Center for Corporate Policy in Washington, DC. He helped establish Halliburton Watch, and is co-author of The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler), and is a former associate editor of Multinational Monitor magazine.

RiverVision Press

As promised, I have an announcement to make regarding my book, When Towns Had Teams. After attempting the traditional publishing route, only to find that my book lacked the sameness and familiarity that many small presses are locked into, I have decided to form RiverVision Press, “Maine’s DIY small press.” Taking the best of what I’ve learned from the DIY ethic prevalent in much of 80’s punk rock, and blending it a vision to capture the history and what’s best about small town Maine and other New England locales, the time seemed right to begin my own small press venture.

RiverVision Press will be pre-releasing When Towns Had Teams via the website and mail order beginning August 1. The first 500 copies of the book that are ordered prior to November 1 will be hand-numbered as orders are received, and I will also be signing each copy. The book which will be in the neighborhood of 230 pages will be selling for $15.95 + S&H, plus Maine sales tax for Maine residents.

In addition to When Towns Had Teams, I’ve already begun plans for my next book. This next offering will also tackle a subject that has been shamefully neglected, but which is extremely popular throughout New England and elsewhere. Additionally, I hope to have a book which captures small town Maine, Moxie, as well as the town where I grew up—Lisbon Falls. I hope to be able to release that book during next year’s Moxie Festival. As if that isn’t enough, I’ve begun discussions with two other Maine writers who I think are adept at capturing the unique qualities and heritage of a state like Maine.

I also want to give a "shout out" and props to the work of Jonathan Braden. His creativity, skill, as well as diligence have made it possible to get the RiverVision Press site up and running quickly. I also have been extremely fortunate to have acquired the services of a talented copy editor. Her expertise has provided the necessary fine tuning that any quality manuscript requires. If all goes well, I’ll be sending it to the printer in about three weeks.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to visit the RiverVision Press website and see what Maine’s DIY small press is all about! Check back from time to time as I’ll be putting News and other events up as they become available.

Some sanity added to the mix

I cannot believe some of the inane (and insane) analyis coming from the right wing regarding this AM's attacks on commuters in London. Let's be fair about this; some on the left, like Jerry Springer weren't much better (although, he at least ended his broadcast by playing the British National Anthem). Fox and Friends were practically gloating about it, saying things like, "well it's good it happened with so many of the world's leaders nearby". WTF?? Then, there were the callers on C-Span saying we should basically bomb the Middle East back into whatever century. I'm too angry and running on adrenaline (and caffeine) to respond with anything that might be helpful. My sympathies go out to those in Great Britain, by-and-large working class, who are mourning this evening. If people have to suffer, why is it always the common people?

Fortunately, there are people like Nathan Newman. It is all about economics and he usually nails it, as he did today.

July 07, 2005
Don't Forget Aid for Africa

The terrorists want us to concentrate on them, as does the rightwing which is thrilled to see aid for the global poor put back on the backburner.

But let's get some perspective. Less than a hundred people died today in London, but 15,000 Africans die EVERY DAY from preventable diseases.

The best way to fight terrorism is to drain the pool of public support. Supporting the victims of the Tsunami in Indonesia was one of the best ways possible to improve the image of the US in that country. A serious commitment to aid in Africa, aside from being the right thing to do, is the best use of money to fight terrorism as well.

If we took the money wasted in Iraq, we could build global support and allies around the world through a crusade to end poverty, even as we'd have additional money to secure our vulnerable facilities against the crazies left over.

London shows our current strategy has failed. Let's try a new one build on global justice abroad and intelligent security at home.

The High Price of Oil

From Bloomberg (via Atrios):

July 4 (Bloomberg) -- Record oil prices may increase to $80 a barrel this year, options contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange show. Investors are speculating OPEC won't produce enough oil to compensate for any disruption to supplies.

New York Mercantile Exchange data show 6,900 options contracts outstanding that allow buyers to purchase oil for December delivery at $80 a barrel, compared with an average of 77 contracts in January. The probability that oil will top $75 a barrel when the December crude contract expires is 21 percent, according to Adam Sieminski and Michael Lewis, strategists at Deutsche Bank AG, up from 5 percent at the start of the year.

Oil has surged partly on concern that a dispute over Iran's nuclear program to generate electricity may lead to conflict with the U.S. and disrupt supplies from the Middle East. The cushion between output capacity and demand is narrowing as producers including most OPEC members pump at maximum.

``The perception is that the risk of higher prices now is higher than at the beginning of this year,'' Deutsche Bank's Sieminski said in an interview. ``The market is so tightly balanced that issues like a nuclear confrontation with Iran could add a great deal of worry'' about supplies.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the producer of about 40 percent of the world's oil, is pumping almost as much crude oil as it can to increase inventories before consumption peaks in the fourth quarter. Crude oil reached a record $60.95 in New York on June 27, deepening concern that the cost of energy would slow economic growth.

From JK at Clusterfuck Nation:

"Oil's remorseless up-ratcheting past $60 is as much a symptom of a weak dollar as a strained global energy allocation system, and the dollar is weakening because the way of life it represents is becoming more and more unreal. The harsh truth is that we've reached the limit of our ability to expand our suburban sprawl economy and there is no alternative US economy in the background ready to take its place. The world can't fail to notice this weakness. The inability to generate even fake wealth, in the form of ever more WalMarts, will take its toll on the consensus that the American Dream has enduring value."

From "High West" by Ed Dorn

"The hours spent recreational shopping...What will happen when/if the malls can no longer pay the electricity bill? Or the power just gets cut? What if the cine-plexes were to close? What if we could no longer be an ever expanding 24/7 consumer's paradise? What would folks do with themselves? The prospect is tantalizing. Twenty-five yard long strips of freezersfull ofStouffers, which should smell like cat-puke if the power gets cut. As in the Gulf War, when Iraqis had to throw thawed food to the dogs who soon got fat and ran in packs"

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