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Bananas As A Parable

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon — in five, 10 or 30 years — the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are leading us.

Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas were quite consciously created. Until 150 ago, a vast array of bananas grew in the world’s jungles and they were invariably consumed nearby. Some were sweet; some were sour. They were green or purple or yellow.

A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type — the Gros Michael — out of the jungle and decided to mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and creamy and handy for your lunchbox.

There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there — but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, it worked like this. Find a poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it won’t, topple it and replace it with one that will.

Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn’t work, move on to the next country. Begin again.

This sounds like hyperbole until you study what actually happened.

continue reading Johann Hari's piece at Thomas Paine's Corner

Can Mushrooms Save the World?

Having watched this remarkable presentation by Paul Stamets, I wouldn't rule it out.

More stimulating talks at TED

I’m so bored. I hate my life.

– Britney Spears

Ethanol vs. Solar

One acre of good corn growing land in America will produce about 140 bushels of corn during a one year growing season. As a matter of interest the all time record harvest is over 260 bushels per acre but we also have to remember that more often the all time low has been zero bushels per acre. A bushel is considered to be about 56 lbs.

The current corn harvest is only possible due to the artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides that are routinely applied to America’s corn crop. A little over 2 lbs of fertilizer and chemicals are used for each bushel of corn grown. This averages about 1 lb of nitrogen, 0.4 lbs of phosphate and 0.5 lbs of potassium. The herbicides and pesticides amount to about 0.22 lbs of active ingredients per bushel. This might not sound like much but on Kentucky corn alone, pesticides and herbicides equal about 3 million lbs per year. Corn is responsible for a hell of a lot of toxic chemicals that have created untold difficulties.

The USDA estimates that it takes 53,000 BTU’s of energy to convert 1 bushel of corn to 2.8 gallons of ethanol and most of the new ethanol plants are using coal for this energy. The USDA vigorously supports corn based ethanol production; unfortunately they are using accounting methods that completely ignore any environmental impacts from the entire process. These are the same accounting methods that are currently wrecking the planet.

[snip]

...to keep this simple, 140 bushels of corn grown on one acre in one year can be converted to 392 gallons of ethanol. At 76,000 BTU’s per gallon this equals 30 million BTU’s per acre, per year, from corn, when it is converted to the liquid fuel ethanol. Some folks say that it takes more than 30 million BTU’s to produce this much ethanol, in which case this huge effort is a waste of time but the USDA ethanol guys say it takes just over 20 million. Nobody says you end up with a net 30 million BTU’s from an acre of corn, less than 10 million BTU’s actually produced is tops. All this means that the energy equivalent to at least 3 gallons of ethanol is burned to produce 4 gallons of ethanol. Therefore, we ultimately end up burning 7 gallons of fossil fuels to produce the equivalent of 3 gallons of gasoline (3 instead of 4 due to the greater BTU’s in gas and diesel than ethanol). Due to the similar amount of pollution created burning ethanol compared to gasoline,3 the production and use of ethanol represents a massive increase in global warming gases, pollution and expense. Aside from the relative efficiency of the process, which will be argued over until the cows come home, this increased pollution has been ignored and the increased costs are being picked up by the good old taxpayer. Tragically many vested interests have supported this process for the same reason that vested interests have denied global warming.

Of course, there is a more important issue here that the West has been happy to ignore while it spends billions to create fuel from food. It must be considered reprehensible to convert huge quantities of food to fuel on a planet where 26,500 children die each and every day due to not having enough,4 while the West wastes so much.

Fortunately, there is an eminently reasonable solution, which the fossil fuel gangs have rejected, simply because they have put their greed ahead of everything else. Governments have also rejected this solution because they seldom lead the way and they are also obsessed with short term gain and votes.

Let’s have a look at what 1 acre of land can produce using photovoltaic (PV) panels that are now up to 20% efficient...

more from Bob Fearn at Dissident Voice

Tea and Opium

"The British East India Company discovered that there was a market for tea in England, and soon it began importing chests of it back home. ... By 1800, textile workers and coal miners were spending 5 percent of their income just on tea (10 percent if sugar is added). ... As tea consumption in England increased, and as the ability of the British to command New World silver shrank, in part because of the American Revolution, mercantilist fears of what the continued outflow of silver to China would mean for British power prompted the British to find substitutes for silver that the Chinese would accept for tea. ... The British colonialists were [finally] able to produce another commodity to finance British tea: the addictive drug opium.

"Many societies, China included, had long used opium for medicinal purposes, and so there was a small market there. In 1773, the British governor- general of India established an opium monopoly in Bengal, charged with increasing production of the drug there and pushing its sale in China. Finding some success even though the Chinese had prohibited opium smoking, the British expanded their market in China by distributing free pipes and selling the drug to new users at very low prices. ... Americans too had been bringing opium from Turkey to China, adding yet another source of supply. ... Huge numbers of Chinese became addicted to the drug....

"The [Chinese] Emperor appointed Lin Zexu special commissioner with the power to do whatever it took to end the opium traffic ... [and] Lin dissolved 21,000 chests of opium in irrigation ditches. ... Thus was launched the Opium War of 1839-1842 between Great Britain and China. ... [With the superior weapons of the Industrial Revolution, Britain won and] China ceded territory to the British (Hong Kong), and paid a $21 million indemnity in Mexican silver to cover the losses of the British drug traffickers. ...

"British trading companies imported about 50,000 chests of opium annually (6.5 million pounds) for sale to Chinese customers ... and great fortunes were built, not just in England but in the United States as well. ... Profits from the American opium trade added to the endowments of prominent East Coast universities, padded the fortunes of ... the Roosevelt family of New York, and provided capital for Alexander Graham Bell's development of the telephone. ... By the late 1800s, so much opium was entering China or being produced there that 10 percent of China's population, or forty million people, were users, with as many as half of those 'heavy smokers.' At the turn of the twentieth century, China was consuming 95 percent of the world's opium supply, with predictable social, economic, and political effects."

Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, pp. 113-128

From Richard Vague's excellent delancyplace

Worldwide Fallout

When coal is burned in power plants in the U.S., China and elsewhere, mercury is released into the atmosphere. Airborne, mercury can travel great distances before settling to the ground, or into lakes, rivers and oceans. Air and ocean currents, propelled by weather patterns and storm systems, sweep the mercury north. But the recent increases in Arctic mercury outpace and cannot be explained by smokestack emissions alone, says Gary A. Stern, a senior scientist with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, professor at the University of Manitoba and co-leader of the Amundsen expedition. Rather, signs point to global warming and other disruptive impacts of climate change.

As temperatures rise, causing sea ice, permafrost and snow to melt, the mercury that had been frozen in place is now being released, causing exposure up and down the food web. "Climate change alters exposure in the north and increases the system's vulnerability," says Robie Macdonald, a research scientist with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Yet the Arctic researchers are routinely recording a lot more than mercury. They are seeing synthetic chemicals such as the brominated flame retardants known as PBDE's (used in upholstery, textiles and plastics), as well as perfluorinated and chlorine compounds. And while long banned in many countries, lingering amounts of DDT and PCBs continue to turn up in people and animals in the Far North. Of concern due to their persistence and ability to accumulate in plant and animal tissue -- particularly the fat prevalent in Arctic animals -- these chemicals are also known to disrupt the endocrine hormones that regulate reproduction and metabolism. Some are considered carcinogens.

Alaskan polar bears, for instance, have some of the highest levels yet found in Arctic mammals of hexachlorohexane (HCH), a pesticide used to kill fungi on food crops. Carrie's ice samples, collected hundreds of miles from any agricultural sites, contain HCH. Polar bears also have some of the highest recorded levels of perfluorinated compounds, chemicals used in waterproofing and in fire and stain retardants. Indigenous people in both the Canadian and Greenland Arctic have some of the world's highest exposures to these persistent pollutants.

more from Elizabeth Grossman at Salon.com

Learning From History, or Not

Do you recognize these quotes?

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour...They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . .We are today not far from a disaster.

They were written by T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, in a piece in the Sunday Times (U.K.) in 1920. Nineteen twenty! And that's not all. Robert Fisk pens a fascinating piece on the prescience of Lawrence, and the utter disregard for historical warnings shown by Bush, Blair, and their administrations.

You can – and should – access it at The New Statesman

More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

– Woody Allen

Letting Go

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.

I recall seeing ashtrays in movie theatres and grocery stores, but they didn’t make me want to smoke. In fact, it was just the opposite. Once, I drove an embroidery needle into my mother’s carton of Winstons, over and over, as if it were a voodoo doll. She then beat me for twenty seconds, at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting, “That’s . . . not . . . funny.”

A few years later, we were sitting around the breakfast table and she invited me to take a puff. I did. Then I ran to the kitchen and drained a carton of orange juice, drinking so furiously that half of it ran down my chin and onto my shirt. How could she, or anyone, really, make a habit of something so fundamentally unpleasant? When my sister Lisa started smoking, I forbade her to enter my bedroom with a lit cigarette. She could talk to me, but only from the other side of the threshold, and she had to avert her head when she exhaled. I did the same when my sister Gretchen started.

It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of it that bothered me. In later years, I didn’t care so much, but at the time I found it depressing: the scent of neglect. It wasn’t so noticeable in the rest of the house, but then again the rest of the house was neglected. My room was clean and orderly, and if I’d had my way it would have smelled like an album jacket the moment you remove the plastic. That is to say, it would have smelled like anticipation.

When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?” someone might ask. And what could you say?

Read the full, typically superb David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker

Operation Pastorius

There's a blog called Damn Interesting, on which the authors post a wide variety of unusual, mostly little known, true stories which often have historical significance. And they almost always live up to the name of the blog. This recent one is a good example...

Just after midnight on the morning of June 13, 1942, twenty-one-year-old coastguardsman John Cullen was beginning his foot patrol along the coast of Long Island, New York. Although this particular stretch of beach was considered a likely target for enemy landing parties, the young Seaman was the sole line of defense on that foggy night; and his only weapon, a trusty flashlight, was proving ineffective against the smothering haze. As Cullen approached a dune on the beach, the shape of a man suddenly appeared before him. Momentarily startled, he called out for the shape to identify itself.

"We’re fishermen from Southampton," a voice responded. A middle-aged man emerged from the soupy fog, and continued, "We’ve run ashore." This sounded plausible to Cullen, so he invited the fisherman and his crew to stay the night at the nearby Coast Guard station. The offer appeared to agitate the man, and he refused. “We don’t have a fishing license,” he explained.

Just as Cullen's suspicions began to grow, a second figure appeared over the dune and shouted something in German. The man in front of Cullen spun around, yelling, “You damn fool! Go back to the others!” Then he turned back to Cullen with an intensity in his expression that left the Seaman paralyzed—for he was now almost certain that he was alone on the beach with a party of Nazi spies.

The German agent stood close, and hissed, "Do you have a mother? A father?" As Cullen nodded, he continued, "Well, I wouldn’t want to have to kill you." He held out a wad of cash. "Forget about this, take this money, and go have a good time." Cullen, realizing this might be his only chance to walk away alive, decided to accept. As he reached for the roll of bills, the man suddenly lunged forward and seized Cullen’s flashlight. He then pointed the light toward his own face. “Do you know me?” he asked.

“No sir, I never saw you before in my life.”

“My name is George John Davis. Take a good look at me. You’ll be meeting me in East Hampton sometime.” With that, he released his grip on the flashlight and the money, and disappeared back into the fog. The shocked coastguardsman took a few hesitant paces backward, then whirled around and set off at a run for the Coast Guard station to inform his superiors that their fears had been realized.

Read on at Damn Interesting

Everything You Need To Know About...

the film Expelled, which is Ben Stein's attempt to raise questions about the science of evolution. This is a classic smackdown...

Stevie Laughs

Tom Sutpen has a very interesting blog on which he regularly posts excellent, vintage images. The one above is of a young Stevie Wonder.

Tom's site

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.

Thich Nhat Hanh

World-Class Broadband? Simple...

There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. Its being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being 3rd world by international broadband standards, to top of the charts and exemplary.

Make this change and Net Neutrality becomes a non issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone.

What is the dirty little secret ?

That your cable company still delivers basic cable networks in analog. Why is this such an important issue ? Because each of those cable networks takes up 6mhz. That translates into about 38mbs per second. Thats 38mbs PER NETWORK.

USA Network, 38mbs. ESPN, 38mbs. MTV 38mbs. VH1 38mbs.etc, etc, etc.

If we want to truly change the course of broadband in this country, the solution is simple. Just as we had an analog shutdown date for over the air TV signals, we need the same resolution for analog delivered cable networks.

Transition basic cable networks from analog to digital over the next 3 years and all of the sudden there will be hundreds of megabits available on the smallest cable systems and more than a gigabit of bandwidth available on the largest.

Of course the cable networks themselves would fight this. It could reduce their subscriber counts. God forbid that USA Network and other basic cable nets do not reach every household that doesn't have a digital set top box. That is of course far more important than the upside to our entire country that plentiful bandwidth creates. Right ?

So for all of you netizens out there, drop all the Net Neutrality efforts and focus on pushing analog cable networks to digital and you kill two birds with one stone. You eliminate any issue of Net Neutrality with bandwidth a plenty, and you immediately make our nation bandwidth competitive with every nation in the world. In fact, done right, we become the envy of every nation in the world. All without a single backhoe or blade of grass in a yard harmed.

via Mark Cuban

The Cheese Shop

One my favorite Monty Python sketches ever.

VoiCe of Reason

"The United States is facing both a recession and a flight from the dollar. The decline in housing prices, the weight of accumulated household debt, and the losses and uncertainties in the banking system threaten to push the economy into a self-reinforcing decline.

Measures to combat this threat increase the supply of dollars. At the same time, the flight from the dollar has set up inflationary pressures through higher energy, commodity, and food prices.

The European Central Bank, whose mission is to maintain price stability, is reluctant to lower interest rates. This has created a discord between U.S. and E.U. monetary policy and put upward pressure on the euro. The euro has appreciated more than the renminbi, creating trade tension between Europe and China.

The renminbi can be expected to catch up with the euro both to avoid prote ctionism in the United States and increasingly in Europe, and to contain imported price inflation in China. This will, in turn, increase prices at Wal-Mart and put additional pressure on the already beleaguered U.S. consumer.

Unfortunately this administration shows no understanding of the predicament in which it finds itself."

– George Soros

From Soros' recently published book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means (link)

The Cookie Monster Engages in Self-Analysis

Me know. Me have problem.

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn't normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can't stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don't think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

Me was thinking and me just don't get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn't really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?

Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?

Read on at the almost invariably amusing McSweeneys

A Graphic History Lesson

Brought to us by a corporation, of all things.

The U.S.-Mexico border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 when California, as we now know it, was Mexican territory and known as Alta California.

Following the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fé de Nuevo México ceded to the United States to become modern-day California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona. (Texas actually split from Mexico several years earlier to form a breakaway republic, and was voluntarily annexed by the United States in 1846.)

via the LA Times

Wally Solves The Secret of StoneheNge

via 3 Quarks Daily

Are You Sure About Your Bank's Solvency?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal bank regulators plan to increase staffing 60 percent in coming months to handle an anticipated surge in troubled financial institutions.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. wants to add 140 workers to bring staff levels to 360 workers in the division that handles bank failures, John Bovenzi, the agency's chief operating officer, said Tuesday.

"We want to make sure that we're prepared," Bovenzi said, adding that most of the hires will be temporary and based in Dallas.

more from the NY Times

Cell Phone Risks: Mounting Evidence

Like many others, I have been using cell phones for a number of years. However, I have never been comfortable with, or confident in manufactures' assurances of their safety, especially given that it was impossible for any medium to long-term studies to have been taken into account. Because of my wariness, I rarely hold a cell phone directly up against my head, and have even resisted the lure of wireless (bluetooth) connections. I have used the wired headsets which, according to scientists who have also been wary of this issue, greatly reduces exposure to radiation.

Now, Dr. Vini Khurana, who is described as being "a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, [and] has published more than three dozen scientific papers", has reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones, and arrived at this rather scary conclusion:

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation.

[snip]

Noting that malignant brain tumours represent "a life-ending diagnosis", he adds: "We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation." He fears that "unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps", the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

"It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking," says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.

via The Independent (U.K.)

Brilliant and ConScienTious

If you haven't heard or read anything by John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group and author of (among other titles) THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM, you really should. You can get a good feel for Bogle's acuity and moral sensibilities from a recent interview with Bill Moyers. Here's a long, illustrative excerpt from the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: These private equity firms that own these nursing homes wouldn't even talk to THE NEW YORK TIMES. They won't talk to reporters. I mean, there's no accountability to the public.

JOHN BOGLE: There's no accountability. And it's wrong. It's fundamentally a blight on our society.

BILL MOYERS:What does it say that big private money can operate so secretly, with so little accountability, that the people who are hurt by it, the residents in the nursing home have no recourse?

JOHN BOGLE:It says something very bad about American society. And you wonder — the first question anybody would have after reading the article — how in God's name do they get away with that? Well, we have all these attorneys that are capable of devising complex instruments, and money managers who are capable of devising highly complex financial schemes. And there's kind of no one to answer to the call of duty at the end of it.

BILL MOYERS: And we're talking about some of the most powerful names in the business. I mean, these are formidable forces, right?

JOHN BOGLE: They're formidable forces. But, I'm afraid--

BILL MOYERS: Respectable citizens, right?

JOHN BOGLE: Well, I mean, I don't know about that. But, it's certainly -- it's easy to say that greed is taking — playing a part — greed has a role in a capitalistic society. But, not the dominant role and--

BILL MOYERS: What should be the dominant? What is the job of capitalism?

JOHN BOGLE:Well, ultimately, the job of capitalism is to serve the consumer. Serve the citizenry. You're allowed to make a profit for that. But, you've got to provide good products and services at fair prices. And that's the long term, that's what businesses do in the long term. The businesses that have endured in America have done that and done that successfully.

But, in the short term, there's all these financial machinations in which people can get very rich in a very short period of time by creating highly complex financial instruments, providing services that can be cut back easily as in the hospital article, not measuring up to basically their duty.

We all know that in professions, the idea has been service to the client before service to self. That's what a profession is. That's what medicine was. That's what accountancy was. That's what attorneys used to be. That's what trusteeship used to be inside the mutual fund industry. But, we've moved from that to a big capital accumulation — self interest — creating wealth for the providers of these services when the providers of these services are in fact subtracting value from society. So, it doesn't work.

BILL MOYERS:So, the private equity nursing homes have added to their wealth. But, they've subtracted from society the care for people who need it.

JOHN BOGLE: That is exactly correct. Not good.

BILL MOYERS:THE WALL STREET JOURNAL editorial page celebrates what it called the animal spirits of business. And as if that's the heart of capitalism. What do you think about that?

JOHN BOGLE:Well, I like the animal spirits of business. I mean Lord Keynes told us about animal spirits. And it comes out of a part of his work that says, "You know, all the precise numbers and the perspectives mean nothing. What determines the future of a business is its animal spirits." You know, the desire for progress, the desire to create something new. That's all good. But, it's gotten misshapen. Badly--

BILL MOYERS: How so?

JOHN BOGLE: --misshapen.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

JOHN BOGLE: Well, it's gotten misshapen because the financial side of the economy is dominating the productive side of the economy

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

JOHN BOGLE: Well, let me say it very simply. The rewards of the growth in our economy comes from corporate, largely - from corporations who are a very important measure, from corporations that are providing goods and services at a fair price innovating and bringing in new technology — providing a higher quality of life for our society and they make money doing it. I mean, and the returns in business in the long run are 100 percent the dividends a corporation pays and the rate at which its earnings grow.

That still exists. But, it's been overwhelmed by a financial economy. The financial economy, which is the way you package all these ways of financing corporations, more and more complex, more and more expensive. The financial sector of our economy is the largest profit-making sector in America. Our financial services companies make more money than our energy companies — no mean profitable business in this day and age. Plus, our healthcare companies. They make almost twice as much as our technology companies, twice as much as our manufacturing companies. We've become a financial economy which has overwhelmed the productive economy to the detriment of investors and the detriment ultimately of our society.

Read the full transcript at PBS.org

More other? click here!

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