Melissa del Bosque, whose phenomenal reports for The Texas Observer are always worth reading, spent some quality time with a couple of cantankerous lawmen for her latest assignment, “Boots on the Ground: A Day in the Life of a Border Sheriff.” She even traveled into the barren desert on an ATV with Arvin West, sheriff of Hudspeth County and chairman of the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, in an effort to get to the root of the fear-mongering, sensationalist “battle zone” rhetoric that dominates cable news coverage of the Texas-Mexico border.

At times it’s like watching a game of telephone: Sheriff tells exaggerated story to Texas congressman, congressman appears on Sean Hannity’s show, Sean Hannity concludes that al-Qaeda terrorists are streaming unchecked across the border. Luckily, del Bosque also meets Lupe Treviño, also a Texas sheriff, who’s working to dispel some of the outrageous myths about border violence. “Treviño created an hour-long PowerPoint presentation called ‘Border Violence: Rhetoric vs. Reality,’ ” del Bosque writes. “He makes his case at luncheons and to any audience who will listen.”

Source: The Texas Observer

The nation’s unemployment topped 10 percent in last month, but for young people, that number is much higher. The unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds is almost double the national average, according to The Nation, up near 18.1 percent for September. Since December of 2007, those young people have lost some 2.5 million jobs, the most of any age group. And even though the stock market seems to be looking up, the employment picture for young people still looks bleak.

“I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it's hurting the weakest," Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good told The Nation. Low-income and people of color have been the hardest hit, according to Muhammad’s research. For unemployment white people in their early 20s is less than half (13.1 percent) of African Americans (27.1 percent). At the same time, college tuition and health care costs have been steadily rising.

The bright spot midst the crisis is the political engagement that young people continually display. According to The Nation, “many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy.” They’re fighting for better health care, education, jobs, and to make sure this kind of recession doesn’t happen again.

Source: The Nation 

Update: For more on the charge to keep young people politically engaged and create more opportunities for the millennial generation, read about Maya Enista, one of Utne Reader’s visionaries who are changing your world.

People with progressive politics shouldn’t reflexively shun sports, says sportswriter and Utne Reader visionary Dave Zirin.

He should know. Zirin is the rare sports journalist who dares to promote left-field politics. In his Edge of Sports columns, his XM Sirius radio show of the same name, his stories for The Nation, and numerous other outlets, he has championed Title IX for advancing women’s sports, taken on the corporatocracy that runs the big leagues, criticized big stadium subsidies from the public till, and addressed issues of race, gender, and sexuality like few other sports personalities.

I recently spoke with Zirin in a lively and enlightening conversation that covered the left’s sports-phobia, the value of the alternative press, and his physical resemblance (or lack thereof) to Muhammad Ali. Here it is:

You’ve staked out a unique niche, exploring the social, cultural, and political issues that swirl around sports. How did you come to define this turf, and what are you trying to accomplish?

“There’s this deeply mistaken idea in our culture that politics is just what people do on Capitol Hill, when in fact politics is in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and in the games we play. And oftentimes, in our society, some of most honest discussions that we have—about racism, about sexism, about homophobia, about corporate power—happen on sports radio and in the world of sports. We can say that we wish this wasn’t so, but as the expression goes, you don’t have to believe in gravity to fall out of an airplane. I mean, it is what it is.

“But unfortunately, people who see themselves as progressives or on the left have completely ceded this very dynamic political space to the right wing. I know so many people on the left who on general principle shun sports. They say, oh, it’s too corporate, it’s too racist, it’s too sexist. And there may be truth in that—but sports is also part of the human experience: It’s physical expression, it’s beauty, and it’s been the site of some of the most electric struggles of the 20th century.

“I mean, there is no denying from a historical perspective that Muhammad Ali is the most famous draft resister in the history of the United States. There is no denying that Title IX is perhaps one of if not the most important reform of the women’s liberation movement. There is no denying that the earliest public LGBT people were people in the world of sports like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova.

“So this is very real—and yet we on the left are oftentimes very dismissive of it in a way that we shouldn’t be, because issues like everything from the name of the team in my hometown, the Washington Redskins, to whether or not teenage girls have access to play, to whether or not a gay athlete feels like he or she can come out of closet on a team, to whether or not taxpayer money goes to a new stadium—these are all issues which are dynamically political, and it’s about time we had our say.

“I did a book talk for my first book, What’s My Name, Fool!, which has this big picture of Muhammad Ali on the cover. And I did it at a very left wing, anarchist bookstore with tons of antiwar stuff everywhere. And I go into the bookstore to do the talk, and the manager of the store comes up to me and asks, ‘Can I help you?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I’m Dave Zirin.’ And they say, ‘What? But you’re white.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m white, last I checked.’ And they say, ‘But your picture on the cover of the book . . .’ And I say, ‘No, that’s not me. That’s Muhammad Ali.’ ‘Ohhhhh!’ Later, in that same event, someone asked me—remember, the book is called What’s My Name, Fool!—why I decided to write about Mr. T.

“I raise this not to take a potshot at some well-meaning lefties, but at this bookstore there’s antiwar stuff everywhere, they’re selling Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky—and they don’t know the history of Muhammad Ali. This to me is an act of political masochism. We’re amputating one of the most dynamic parts of our own history as activists.

“That’s why I write what I write, and that’s why I do what I do. I also like traveling around and talking to people. There are so many people in this country who love sports but hate what sports have become. That’s an opening for us to actually have an honest discussion about reclaiming sports from those who would use it to pump messages of militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed. We can go out there with a strong message that says we want to take our sports back, and we would be surprised at the audience we would find.”

You’re in so many media, from TV to print to talk radio to your website. Where is the most exciting media territory in sports right now?

“Two areas, I’d say, and they’re very different areas. The first is sports radio, because it’s like walking into the lion’s den and just taking these ideas down. And the thing that’s interesting about sports radio is that our political media landscape is very segregated. You’ve got your Pacifica Radio and you’ve got your Fox News. But sports radio is a place where a lot of it comes together. Unfortunately, the commentators don’t really reflect the diversity of the listenership, but it is the only kind of place where I’ve been able to go on and get in really hardcore political arguments with the host and then get a whole diversity of calls from people calling in—who agree, disagree. It’s a great place to actually reach people and to actually test what I’m saying in practice. My argument is that there are tons of sports fans who don’t get touched by progressive politics who we can reach through sports. And when I get to do sports radio, it doesn’t always work, but it’s a chance to really put that into practice and test it.

“Also, when I had thought of writing about the politics of sports, every publisher turned me down except an independent press called Haymarket Books. They took a chance on it. And the only reason I get to do like ESPN and MSNBC is because an independent publisher took a chance that the ideas would have a hearing. It’s so critical. Magazines like the Utne Reader, book publishers like Haymarket—it’s so important that they survive and thrive and that we support them. Because otherwise, the bottleneck of ideas in our society becomes so narrow without the independent press. I really owe Haymarket just about everything, really, for just taking a chance on independent thought, which you don’t get in the mainstream media.”

So if there’s this great hunger in the sports world for intelligent discussion, do you think there are going to be more commentators like you, more people who are willing to shake things up?

“I hope so, because we need more. You’re definitely starting to see it on the Internet, and you’re definitely starting to see it on Internet radio as well, and I think we need more of it. I meet people all the time who are really good progressives, and they talk about being sports fans as if it’s their dirty little secret. They’re practically whispering it to me, like, ‘Hey, I’m a sports fan, too,’ as if they watch highlights at 3 a.m. in their closet or something.

“And I want to tell all the progressive sports fans, get out of the closet and into the streets, get out of the closet and onto the blogs, get out of the closet and onto the Web, because this is just space that’s there for us to claim. And the more of us that are out there pushing our ideas about what sports could be, the more opening there’s going to be for the very kind of shake-it-up mainstream sports journalism that I think we so desperately need. It’ll come from below, and I think we can do it.”

Image courtesy of Dave Zirin.

American citizens and state legislators are looking to marijuana for some relief from the ongoing economic crisis. Writing for Miller McCune, Susan Kuchinskas profiles a few entrepreneurial Californians who are growing pot to supplement their dwindling incomes. One source in the piece reportedly, “doesn't know anyone in Sonoma County who isn't growing pot.”

The state of California, too, is looking to cash in on pot to bolster its ailing budget by levying taxes on still-illegal drug. The Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act (pdf) could add an estimated $1.38 billion per year to the state’s depleted coffers.

Small pot farmers, like the ones profiled by Kuchinskas, received some good news recently when the federal government announced that it was loosening its drug policy. The Justice Department will now defer to local drug laws, instead of arresting medical marijuana users and growers who comply with state regulations.

Some see this move as a step toward “full legalization of marijuana use and distribution,” according to the Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board. That legalization could be a mixed blessing for the small pot farmers, Kuchinskas writes, as it would allow them to operate more openly, while opening the door to competition with large, industrial farms. Kuchinskas’s subject “Sarah” welcomes the competition, however. She’s quoted in the piece as saying, “I'll be like a boutique winery. You'll come to my farm to get your primo flavors.”

Source: Miller McCune 

The U.S. dairy system has shifted westward, and often it doesn’t look pretty: Instead of bucolic heartland pastures dotted with grazing cows, picture huge pens or sprawling open-air sheds where the animals are fed a high-protein, shipped-in diet and milked through metal crossbars. Conditions for workers in these big dairies are often little better than they are for the cows, as Rebecca Clarren makes chillingly clear in “The Dark Side of Dairies” in the August 31, 2009, High Country News.

Eighteen Western dairy workers died from 2003 to 2009, Clarren writes, “killed in tractor accidents, suffocated by falling hay bales, crushed by charging cows and bulls and asphyxiated by gases from manure lagoons and corn silage. Others survived but lost limbs or received concussions and spent days in the hospital.”

The majority of the West’s 50,000 dairy workers are immigrants, many of them living illegally in the United States. Dairy labor laws are lax to start with, and the workers’ tenuous status makes them especially vulnerable to egregious labor abuses, which Clarren vividly documents.

The story is enough to make you want to go organic and local, buying dairy products that come from a family-scale farm instead of a distant megadairy. If you do, check out the Cornucopia Institute’s Organic Dairy Report and Scorecard to find one that treats its cows, its workers, and its land with respect.

Sources: High Country News, The Cornucopia Institute

If people knew how bad fast food is, they’d eat less, right? Not according to a new study highlighted by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. New York City recently enacted a law that forces chain restaurants to post the calorie counts on menus. Data published in Health Affairs journal found that about half of the people they interviewed hadn’t noticed the calorie counts (pdf), and only 15 percent took the labels into consideration when making choices. What’s worse, after inspecting the respondents food receipts, the researchers found that overall, people were actually buying more calories than before the law was put into place. Drum reports, “The results aren't statistically significant, though, so basically all the researchers can really say is that the law (so far) hasn't had any effect.” For advocates fighting obesity and fast food, the study seems to say activists should find different tack.

Source: Mother Jones 

Working for a successful company isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Self-employed workers in the United States are more satisfied with their jobs than other people, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. They’re also more likely to work for intrinsic reasons, like improving society or “because they want to,” rather than for money.

Working for yourself has plenty of benefits, but money isn’t one of them. The same satisfied workers also reported feeling more financial stressed, possibly due to the lack of health care and pension plans provided by self-employment.

If governments change the health care structure, and provide more benefits for self-employed people, we could experience a self-sufficiency revival, according to Phillip Longman in Foreign Policy. In the current financial crisis, people are increasingly working for themselves, growing vegetables for local consumption or developing open-sourced software in their basements. This has the potential to restructure the entire economy for the better.

Working for reasons other than money can make people more productive, too. In a speech to TED, Dan Pink proposes a radical “rethinking how we run our businesses,” based on aspects other than money. In creative work, according to Pink, motivating people with money can actually lead to worse performance. Pink proposes a system where people are motivated more by intrinsic qualities, like “mastery,” “autonomy,” and “purpose,” rather than money. If the Pew Center survey is any indication, people will be a lot more satisfied, too.

You can watch a video of Pink’s talk below:

Source: Pew Research, TED, Foreign Policy 

Image by  Tim Patterson , licensed under  Creative Commons .