Overall, eleven participants are still in the program and have avoided further issues with law enforcement. Here’s how they break out:

• Two are currently in drug treatment to work on addiction issues that they previously supported through drug dealing
• One has agreed to enter the GOTS program, which will give them housing stability, group support, and further drug treatment if they need it
• One man is now enrolled in Bellevue Community College
• One man wanted to go into fashion design, so a case worker found him a sewing machine to help him get started

There’s more at the link. We’ll return to this on a later podcast, but what really strikes me is this: how do you deal with the poverty of imagination? What happens when someone has spent a life in poverty simply can’t visualize what a new life might look like?

Driven largely by the surge in foreclosures and an unsettled housing market, Americans are renting apartments and houses at the highest level since President Bush started a campaign to expand homeownership in 2002.

It is embarrassing to note that, from 1995 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of cotton growers received more than 80 percent of total subsidies. The wealthiest 1 percent of American cotton farmers continues to receive over 25 percent of payouts for cotton, while more than half of America’s cotton farmers receive no subsidies at all. American farmers are not dependent on the global market because they are guaranteed a minimum selling price by the federal government. American producers of cotton received more than $18 billion in subsidies between 1999 and 2005, while market value of the cotton was $23 billion. That’s a subsidy of 86 percent!

Read on for how our current farm bill screws over Africa. He hedges a bit at the end on cotton subsidies, but the recommendations in the piece are well worth reading.

The most important step toward ending the tragic cycles of violence and poverty among African-Americans also happens to be the heaviest lift — reconnecting black fathers to their children.

In an interview yesterday, Dr. Poussaint said: “You go into whole neighborhoods and there are no fathers there. What you find is apathy in a lot of the males who don’t even know that they are supposed to be a father.”

On a related note, I was surprised during the interview by how frank Tim Russert was about the discrepency between crack and cocaine sentencing laws, which are often considered racist for disporportionately punishing blacks.

It’s too bad that Russert never has the opportunity to interview, say, important politicians and ask them about this injustice.

These days it’s about all we can do to get a little attention for “business critical” things like health care and retirement issues. And that’s not nearly enough. While we’ve been fixated on Iraq, with precious little headspace for much else, the world’s continued to evolve. Unfortunately, because we’ve been so distracted, America hasn’t.

One issue area where this is the case is farm subsidies. As an OpEd in today’s NYT points out, it’s high time for reform.

Today, it’s obvious that we need to transform our public support for farmers. Many of our current subsidies inhibit trade because of their link to commodity prices. By promising to cover losses, the government insulates farmers from market signals that normally would encourage sensible, long-term decisions about what to grow and where to grow it. There’s something fundamentally perverse about a system that has farmers hoping for low prices at harvest time — it’s like praying for bad weather. But that’s precisely what happens, because those low prices mean bigger checks from Washington.

Moreover, these practices hurt poor farmers in the developing world who find themselves struggling to compete. It’s one of the reasons that the World Trade Organization won’t let these practices stand.

Now would be a particularly opportune time to change the system. Food commodity prices are high, so a transition away from subsidies will hurt farmers less. Today’s farmers enjoy much better marketing tools, crop protection and technology than they did only a decade ago.

Now, I’m no expert on farm policy.  But I do know two things:

1) Farm subsidies are inherently anticompetitive.  They prop up inefficient farmers at the expense of more efficient ones, whether at home or abroad.  Farmers without subsidies would be forced to become more efficient, or to diversify into higher quality or niche-type products that command a higher price.  And that would be a good thing for consumers (probably for the environment, too).

2) Farm subsidies delay the continuing migration of rural Americans to urban areas, and thus become a de facto means of support for the American wahabbism so rampant in rural, red counties.

I suppose there’s more … subsidies also encourage the use of non-citizen labor, foster a whole range of perverse incentives, keep lawmakers beholden to farm interests, probably do more for the bottom line of ADM, etc. than they do for small farmers, etc.

The main point I want to make is that there are dozens of issue areas — including farm policy — that are crying out for attention and leadership for our elected officials.  Yet another reason why we need to get out of Iraq as soon as possible.

I’ve been blessfully out of cell phone, email, and blog range for the last three days, celebrating the Declaration of Independence in a way that I think its author Thomas Jefferson would have approved of: exploring his Louisiana Purchase.

The above picture is from North Cascades National Park.

Blogging will now resume forthwith.

Currently, Seattle’s Open Choice system allows students to choose their schools. Several popular — and mostly white — high schools have waiting lists while high schools that serve mostly students of color are losing enrollment.

School districts should now “think about other factors,” said Gary Orfield, a professor in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “They need to think about geography, language, poverty and test scores, and combine those with race, and figure out how to increase diversity in that way.”

Seattle School Board President Cheryl Chow said family income is a better arbiter of success in school than race, anyway

I’m generally pretty sympathetic to the idea of replacing race-based affirmitive action with a more class-based system (so is Barack Obama, btw). After all, you get most of the same kids anyway, and you sidestep the race issue. But I’m not totally convinced it’s going to be successful in the long term. If there’s anything that’s more of an entitlement than being white in America, it’s being rich in America. How long until the rich parents sue because they’ve been crowded out by poor kids? Not long! In fact, the lawyer who brought the original suit is already thinking about it:

Instead of looking for a replacement for the racial tiebreaker, the district should focus on improving schools, said Harry Korrell, the attorney for the parents who sued the district.

“If what they’re trying to accomplish is the same racial balancing that the court rejected here, and they want to use that [socioeconomic] mechanism instead of race, then they may have trouble,” he said.

He has a point. The Open Choice program starts in high school. By high school, the achievement gap between poor students and rich ones is almost irreversible. In fact, if you recall Paul Tough’s article in the NYT Magazine last fall, it may start as early as 3 years old. Tough’s argument, which seems reasonable to me, is that you have to get the poor kids early, and actually give them a better education than the rich kids to make up for ineffective parenting* and put them on the same playing field as their wealthier counterparts.

So let’s make for some kick-ass elementary and middle schools — ones where the low-income neighborhoods have smaller classes and better teachers — and the high school issue should take care of itself. It’s a hard sell, but that’s what it would take.

* Lower-income parents, according to Tough, expose their kids to fewer words, which hinders their early brain development vis-a-vis rich kids.

Read Michael Pollan article in last month’s NYT Magazine for a full dissection of how the farm bill is literally killing us.

* which will continue to endlessly replay the pre-Iraq War debate until Tim Russert feels like he’s absolved himself of his guilt for not grilling Cheney harder about WMD.

Looks like Mickey Kaus is right: if the bill goes down it will be because the support from the left erodes.

The late 1920s had been wet years, and people assumed that the climate had changed permanently for the better. In that decade, an additional 5.2 million acres — greater than two Yellowstone Parks — were added to the 20 million acres in cultivation. Before the rains stopped, 50,000 acres a day were being stripped of grasses that held the soil when the winds came sweeping down the plain.

In 1931, the national harvest was 250 million bushels, perhaps the greatest agricultural accomplishment in history. But Egan notes that it was accomplished by removing prairie grass, “a web of perennial species evolved over 20,000 years or more.” Americans were about to see how an inch of topsoil produced over millennia could be blown away in an hour.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Harper’s articles of the past few years, which I never tire of recommending to people:

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow.

The author’s conclusions are pretty daft and unsustainable, but the story he tells along the way is unforgettable.

The administration is seeking to eliminate farm payments for wealthy producers, limiting subsidy payments to those making less than $200,000 in adjusted gross income annually. The current income cap is $2.5 million.

Farm subsidies are on the order of $20B/year, and they’re largely a handout to rich agribusiness, or else some kind of weird tax shelter. So cutting the program by $18B over 5 years isn’t huge, but it isn’t a drop in the bucket, either. For a point of reference, when the Pentagon recommended closing over 30 military bases last year, the savings were calculated at somewhere between $2.5B/year and less than $1B/year, depending on what math you use.

So if the President supports it, and it’s a relatively easy way for the Dems to free up some money without offending any major constituents, it should be a no-brainer, right? We’ll see. Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but I have a feeling a few annoying Senators are going to try and block it for no good reason.

In another sign that healthcare will return as a major issue when Democrats take over Congress next month, a prominent Democratic senator unveiled an ambitious proposal Wednesday to provide medical insurance for all Americans while reining in costs.

The plan by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon came a month after the health insurance industry offered its comprehensive proposal as politicians and the business community show new willingness to tackle a subject that has been off-limits since the mid-1990s collapse of President Clinton’s sweeping healthcare reform package.

Wyden, considered liberal on social issues and moderate on economic policy, combined elements of Democratic and Republican ideas in his plan. It would guarantee coverage for all, including nearly 47 million uninsured — a Democratic objective. But it would also limit employers’ exposure to relentless cost increases and encourage workers to shop for cost-effective insurance plans — GOP goals.

. . .

Employers have traditionally provided coverage for workers and their families as part of overall compensation. Although most workers are still insured through their jobs, corporate leaders are increasingly questioning whether the system can be sustained in an era of global competition and steadily rising costs.

“Without some dramatic change, not only will the uninsured population continue to grow, but the American worker will become less competitive,” said Safeway supermarkets Chief Executive Steve Burd, who joined Wyden at a news conference.

Wyden’s plan would require employers to continue contributing toward the cost of health coverage, but it would get them out the business of directly providing insurance and limit their exposure to double-digit annual inflation in healthcare costs.

In the first two years of the plan, employers who now provide coverage would be required to directly pay workers what they were spending on insurance. Thereafter, most companies would pay the government a healthcare contribution that resembles a payroll tax.

Using the money from their employers, individuals would be required to purchase private insurance policies through state purchasing pools. Benefits would be keyed to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Plan available to federal workers. Workers would not have to pay higher income taxes because of the employer contribution.

The uninsured would also have to buy coverage, but premiums for the poor would be fully subsidized by the government, and middle-class families with incomes up to $80,000 for a family of four would be eligible for help on a sliding scale.

*Then again, I’m probably not the best person to ask about this since I think a lot of things — including, for example, democracy in the Middle East — are “worth trying.”

Entrepreneurs have plenty of things to keep them awake at night worrying: payroll, inventory, pricing, competition. For Jere Smith and her husband, Don Lueders, the main thing is health insurance.

Many small-business owners struggle with the high cost of health insurance, but it is even more critical for entrepreneurs with ventures less than five years old, the time when a business tries to build its clientele and profits. And because many start-ups typically include few employees, if any, they cannot always take advantage of discounted insurance rates that groups enjoy.

The cost of buying health insurance, experts say, is increasingly rattling start-ups that never anticipated the escalating price tag, and in some cases the expense keeps would-be entrepreneurs on the sidelines, especially those with pre-existing medical conditions.

“If Bill Gates had to worry about health insurance would he have started Microsoft? Who knows,” said Katherine Swartz, an economist at the Harvard School of Public Health and the author of “Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do.”

“I worry about whether these small businesses will be able to survive, and I worry about what the U.S. economy is going to produce, the types of products and services small businesses will be able to produce in the next decade or so,” Ms. Swartz said.

Once upon a time, Ms. Smith and Mr. Lueders had generous benefits from their employers and gave little thought to how medical care would be paid. But today, as owners of a consulting firm in Liberty, Mo., and a transmission franchise in North Kansas City, it is a constant struggle.

“When we worked for someone else, life was good,” she said. “We had plenty of money and health care. Now we live with the constant fear of something. You never know, you just hold your breath. We will probably have one of us go back and get a full-time job at some point.”

Then there are the skeptics:

Not everyone thinks the trend is keeping people from taking the entrepreneurial plunge. “I’m not buying that it is a true barrier. It’s a hurdle not a wall,” says Bill Coleman, senior vice president for compensation at Salary.com, the compensation and benefits data site. If the higher price of health insurance keeps you out of the self-employed game, he said, then you might not be cut out to be an entrepreneur.

Go Cheney yourself, you glib piece of turd. Not being able to afford health care is a totally retarded reason not to bring wonderful new ideas or services to the marketplace. Very lame.

Like I was getting at yesterday (and I think even David Brooks would agree, based on today’s column), if you give Americans the tools to succeed, they’ll do quite nicely. Policy above principle!

Mayor Bloomberg criticized the legislation to crack down on illegal immigration being considered by the Republican-led Congress yesterday and called on federal lawmakers to concentrate on the “future rather than pander to rabble-rousers and parochial fears.”

Mr. Bloomberg said the economy would collapse if the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in America were deported. He also said beefing up border security would not, on its own, stop people from flooding into the country without documentation. He called that goal, which is being pushed in the House, “either naive and short-sighted, or cynical and duplicitous.”

“It’s as if we expect border control agents to do what a century of communism could not: defeat the natural forces of supply and demand and defeat the natural desire for freedom and opportunity,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.

You might be wondering why New York City needs immigrants when something like 50% of its African-American male population is unemployed. You also might be wondering whether the increased flow of low-skilled immigrants is “the economic and moral equivalent of a regressive tax”.

You might wonder about these things, but then you’d be avoiding New York’s dirty little secret — that immigrants are the best, most efficient way to revitalize blighted areas, raise property values and raise school test scores. What urban leaders probably don’t want to acknowledge too loudly is that they need immigrants more than you think.

Immigrants, for example, have singlehandedly saved previously blighted Brooklyn neighborhoods like East New York:

Perhaps no neighborhood demonstrates the city’s reversal of fortune more palpably than East New York, a low-rise neighborhood in Brooklyn near the Queens border. Its run-down or ruined brick and wood-frame, two-family homes, poor schools, drug markets and soaring crime made it notorious as one of the city’s worst places to live. In some corners more than half the lots were flattened by arson, abandonment, neglect and two riots. Even five years ago developers were skittish about investing.

But today nearly every vacant lot is spoken for, with spanking new two- and three-family row houses, and older homes being spruced up by longtime residents awakening to their new value.

“We’re one of the last frontiers,” said William S. Wilkins, the Empire Zones coordinator for the Local Development Corporation of East New York. “It’s the cheapest game in town. Where else are you going to find houses for $200,000 to $300,000 in Brooklyn?”

But African-American and Latino police officers, nurses, firefighters and civil servants are not the only ones snapping up houses in a neighborhood that has been largely black and Latino since the 1960’s. So are newcomers to these parts — Bangladeshis — whose community is spilling over the border from Queens. The Millennium Homes company has built or is building 32 two- and three-family homes, many of which are being bought by Bangladeshis, according to Shariar Uddin, Millennium’s sales director. Women in burkas are now a common sight along Pitkin Avenue in the heart of East New York. Several mosques have opened and groceries now sell Bangladeshi vegetables, spices, and halal meats.

And if you think any city or federal housing program could have revitalized East New York, you’re crazy. What’s more, HUD wouldn’t have been able to pump thousands of high-achieving best-and-brightest South Asian students into the school system! And at what cost? Some overcrowding, some more school seats to fill . . . a small, small price to pay for the long-term payoff. Which makes it a no-brainer.

It’s not just New York, either. Northeast Philadelphia had stagnating or declining property values. Now Russian immigrants are moving in and South Asians from the New York City area — priced out of places like Richmond Hill, Queens — are pushing up home prices in this neighborhood. Philadelphia needs immigration.

Are there other examples? I’m sure there are. And I’m guessing that those mayors — knowing full well what immigrants mean to the health of their cities — wouldn’t be caught dead railing against immigration.

And in the political calculus, you can either alienate the future best and brightest or you sell out a native-born underclass that’s going nowhere and which probably never voted anyway. Is it any wonder why Karl Rove is doing what he’s doing?