"Hope And Healing: A Dialogue On Ways To Recover From Trumpism And Covid-19"

Rob Burton, Chico State Emeritus Professor of English, is sending a valentine to those who seek common ground in a contentious era. 

In his new book Burton, a baby boomer, imagines a series of conversations with a fictional guide, a millennial named Sophia Morales, humanities professor at Northern California's "Euphoria University." 

Her father is Costa Rican, raised Catholic; her mother Pakistani, brought up "in an Islamic culture"; Morales grew up in the States "in a progressive, medium-sized college town situated just a short drive away from the headquarters of the John Birch Society, an ultra conservative group with leanings towards the Ku Klux Klan."

For Morales, this diversity is a "tapestry" to be celebrated, not a "melting pot" to be boiled down into a "stew." She channels some of Burton's utopian sensibilities but offers practical suggestions for navigating a raft of hot-button topics.

"Hope And Healing: A Dialogue On Ways To Recover From Trumpism And Covid-19" ($9.99 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing) is a concerted effort to move the discussion away from a zero sum game (winners and losers) and into win-win territory. 

As the title indicates, the book is not politically neutral (for both Burton and Morales "good government" has an essential role to play) but insists on articulating a hopeful vision of the future, advocating a dynamic balance between group and individual identity.

Throughout the dialogues Burton raises objections and seeks clarifications. Though he's actually talking to himself, the model of civil discussion is refreshing. Issues include health care, gun control, and criminal justice; women's rights, inequality and poverty; climate change and technology; nationalism vs. globalism; religious tolerance; and immigration. 

"I believe that we can make immigration a win-win social and political issue," Morales says, "if all nations, particularly the United States, welcome immigrants that same way they welcome tourists or any other temporary visitors. They are welcomed with hospitality not treated suspiciously....; they still need their valid documentation."

For Morales, "the Coronavirus magnified and intensified the structural weakness and problems that were there to begin with." Can we make things better? Burton asks readers to dream a little about the possibilities.

"Spillway Emergency"

Oroville Dam, February 7, 2017. "As water releases from the flood control spillway ramped up to 54,500 CFS (cubic feet per second) in anticipation of inflows expected from rainfall, DWR (Department of Water Resources) employees noticed an unusual flow pattern; the bottom of the spillway appeared to have suffered partial collapse." 

As William Sager and Wayne Wilson note in a chilling, book-length account of what happened next, "the initial discovery of the problem was almost by accident." Two DWR electricians, making a routine check, saw concrete "flying through the air on the spillway," a piece described as "'about the size of a Volkswagen minibus.'"

Five days later, with the main spillway crumbling and water overtopping the dam's emergency spillway for the first time in its history, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea ordered the evacuation of 180,000 downstream residents. 

The hour-by-hour story, what journalists call a "tick-tock," is told in "Spillway Emergency: The Story Of The Failure Of The Oroville Dam Spillway And The Evacuation Of Oroville" ($20 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). Sager and Wilson, both fire service retirees and Oroville residents, were among those evacuated. 

They conducted interviews and scoured documents and have produced a superb account, fair to all sides, covering "triumphs" as well as "missteps" (especially by DWR). 

The book doesn't assess causes of the main spillway failure; after a survey of flooding incidents in Oroville since 1849, it focuses on how CAL FIRE (which provided emergency response mentoring), DWR (led by Acting DWR Director Bill Croyle), and local law enforcement had to set egos aside and work as a unified team. It did not come easy, but it happened.

February 12. "At 2:00 p.m., the emergency spillway was already eroding at the rate of thirty feet per hour." Structured as a series of connected "monoliths," at 3:15 it appeared monolith 3 might collapse. "At 3:50 p.m., a DWR geologist briefed the unified incident commanders in the DWR boardroom. 'Imminent failure of weir due to head cutting, one hour to go before that happens.'"

One hour before the unthinkable.

In the forward, Honea says the book "chronicles one of the most tense, uncertain, and frightening experiences of my career." 

“The Rise And Fall Of Our Youth”

Weldon Shaw spent twenty-five years with the Department of Corrections, twelve of them “as a Gang Investigator inside the prison walls and on the streets.” Now retired in Corning, he writes that in his interviews with gang members he always asked “what made them go down the criminal path in life.”

Though he maintains that “no matter what a person’s upbringing is, the path a person takes in life is solely determined by them,” he has identified negative social factors that make raising good kids especially difficult.

His thoughts are distilled in “The Rise And Fall Of Our Youth” ($17.99 in paperback from Library Tales Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle; more at weldonshawauthor.wordpress.com).

“I am just an old-fashioned guy,” Shaw writes, “I want you to have the feeling we are just two people sitting at the kitchen table having a conversation about what is wrong with society.” And he finds plenty wrong. The political system is corrupt (he praises Donald Trump), youth are “blinded by media illusions,” the education system isn’t teaching the basics, parents are over-protective, gang pressure is destructive.

“In my opinion racism has been all but wiped out in the United States. … Do not let vices like the term racism hold your child back. You as a parent should want more for your child than you had. Push them to achieve their goals in life. Do not let outside people influence their lives by giving them excuses to fall back on if they at first do not succeed.”

What about young adults “shacking up”? “I know as far as a religion goes, it is not acceptable, and I too was raised in religion. But if I was asked what I felt about it, I would say this: young adults of proper age should live together for at least six months before they enter into marriage.”

In the criminal justice system, he’d like to see misdemeanors “drop off a person’s record after so many years” and the abolishment of plea bargains which in some cases enable the District Attorney to “win” even if the case is not strong enough.

Plenty of controversy in these kitchen table musings.    

How to lessen government fraud

Chico-based consultant William Sims Curry specializes in creating clear and equitable processes for government grant acquisition. He’s seen too many cases of a dysfunctional system, where, for example, those in Congress favor certain defense contractors not because those contractors are offering the best deal, but the best deal for them.

The sad story is laid out in “Government Abuse: Fraud, Waste, And Incompetence In Awarding Contracts In The United States” ($54.95 in hardcover from Transaction Publishers; also for Amazon Kindle). In 11 chapters Curry focuses on contracting-gone-bad (think of Hurricane Katrina); one chapter is entitled “Government of the Corporations, by the Unions, and for the Special Interests.”

Yet the book is not to be taken as a breezy denunciation of government corruption; rather, it is a careful, technical analysis of the flaws in the contracting process, especially relating to the Department of Defense (DOD), and, more importantly, how that process could be fixed. In the midst of all the outrageous examples of FIWA (“fraud, incompetence, waste and abuse”) Curry shows it doesn’t have to be this way.

He singles out two contractor selection rules used by DOD and other agencies as problematic. One is the “prohibition against using numerical scoring to rate contractor proposals.” The other “requires government agencies to assign the relative importance of factor and subfactors used in the evaluation of contractor proposals ….”

If two contractors are color-coded “good,” not scored numerically (say, from 70-100), the award may go to the one that makes the most campaign contributions. And if factors such as timeliness and quality of service are merely relative, that leaves it open for the unscrupulous to “adjust” factor weights to favor a certain contractor. If factors are given numerical weights ahead of time, the process is transparent.

Curry singles out the good work of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), that, while not perfect, has sustained numerous protests from losing contractors. Many of these issues could be resolved using a scoring formula yielding a single number.

May this book be widely read in high places.

Visiting author on America's food crisis

Virginia-based Wenonah Hauter owns a family farm run by her husband as a "community supported agriculture program." The longtime activist is Executive Director of Food and Water Watch and recently was invited to Chico for a book signing at Lyon Books, with her appearance sponsored by the Northern California Regional Land Trust (landconservation.org) and their "Buy Fresh, Buy Local, North Valley" program.

For Hauter, the U.S. "food system is in a crisis because of the way that food is produced and the consolidation and organization of the industry itself. ... Today, twenty food corporations produce most of the food eaten by Americans, even organic brands. Four large chains, including Walmart, control more than half of all grocery store sales."

The implications are detailed in "Foodopoly: The Battle Over The Future Of Food And Farming In America" ($26.95 in hardcover from The New Press; also available in Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook e-book formats). Hauter explores how political clout from the big food companies has undermined safety standards, promoted factory farming and inhumane treatment of animals, and has unleashed genetic experimentation with inadequate safeguards. "The biotechnology industry," she maintains, "has become so powerful that it can literally buy public policy."

It's impossible, she says, to counter these influences by just buying local or ending farm subsidies (as if such subsidies were propping up only the biggest farming operations). Because USDA statistics inflate the number of small farms (counting operations where most of the income is non-farm), it appears that relatively few farms benefit from subsidies. The truth, Haunter says, is that "82 percent of midsize farmers depend on some support to stay afloat." End subsidies, and full-time family farms collapse, consolidating the food system even more.

Her solution is a "new paradigm" of political activism, based on seeing "the world as a global commons with collectively shared assets, from air, water, soil, and genetics to taxpayer-funded research, libraries, roads, and all of the other resources we share." The bottom line: "Our movement must deepen and expand the strategy for moving people to political action. It must join the broader progressive movement to organize across the country. ... There are no shortcuts to building the long-term political power to reclaim our food system, our democracy, our commons."