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America's poverty "tax"

By Gary Rivlin

(Charging high fees has become a big business in America, with Wall Street financing the firms that make short-term, very high interest loans.)

It's expensive being poor, the writer James Baldwin famously said. Baldwin uttered those words fifty years ago, long before the working poor became a big business - long before the invention of the payday loan, rent-to-own, and a long list of diabolically clever ideas that entrepreneurs have devised to get hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars rich off those with thin wallets.

Call it a poverty tax. It's the hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, in extra fees people making $20,000 or $25,000 or $30,000 a year pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings.

Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the forty million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.

The corner check casher takes the biggest bite, at least from those fifteen million or so Americans who have no bank account - the so-called unbanked. In the main, these are people who've bounced too many checks or otherwise messed up their relationship with a bank.

How much does the average check-cashing customer fork over?

According to Matt Fellowes, who investigated the high price of being poor as a researcher with the Brookings Institution, the typical unbanked worker bringing home $22,000 a year spends roughly $800 to $900 a year in check-cashing fees. That figure tops $1,000 annually when you include the fees the unbanked pay for money orders and the additional fees check cashers charge (around $2 a check) when you need to pay your bills.

The payday lender - those in the business of making horrifically expensive loans against a person's next paycheck, her social security check, or, increasingly, an unemployment check - takes another big cut of the meager earnings of the working poor. The single mom struggling to get by on $20,000 a year is forever falling a few bucks short before payday, but that's the brilliance of the payday industry, which dates back to the early 1990s. In less than ten minutes, she'll have a few hundred dollars cash in her hands, no questions asked - and then be charged a fee that works out to an annual interest rate of 400 percent.

The average payday customer pays between $600 and $700 a year in fees. More than ten million people avail themselves of a payday lender each year.

The rent-to-own industry draws less than half that many customers but generates around the same revenues as the payday business. The genius of rent-to-own is that its proprietors have figured out how to collect $1,400 in weekly installments on the same child's bedroom set you could pick up for $600 with a credit card. Can't afford a computer for the kids? No problem. The corner rent-to-own store also carries laptops and PCs, along with flat screens, washers and dryers, and living room sets.

The rent-to-own customer, of course, could choose to set aside some money each week until she has saved enough to buy the item in a retail store. She could frequent a secondhand shop. But for essentials there's the risk of being dubbed a negligent parent by the authorities or family, and can you blame the security guard making $25,000 a year or home health aide bringing in $15,000 annually for wanting to come home to a comfortable easy chair and a large flat-screen TV? The point is that the rent-to-own customer is typically paying two and a half times as much as those who have the means to buy retail.

The average rent-to-own customer spends around $1,200 a year.

That means the typical rent-to-own customer pays an extra $700 annually because he or she doesn't have the cash or credit to buy it at a store.

Those living on the bottom of the economic pyramid pay more in a wide array of other ways. The subprime insurance market is its own racket, and even mainstream insurers charge more for auto insurance if you live in an unsafe neighborhood where robberies are more common. Select credit-card companies still cater to those with a subprime credit score of less than 620 - but you'll pay dearly for the privilege of carrying that plastic in your pocket. For instance, there's First Premier, which charges a $95 application fee and both a $45 annual fee and a $6.25 "monthly servicing fee" for a card carrying an APR of 36 percent, which at least is better than the 49.9 percent card it was peddling last year.

And then there's the steep cost of financing your car if you're one of the fifty million or so Americans suffering from a subprime credit score. Rather than a car loan carrying an annual interest rate of around 5 percent, the subprime customer pays interest rates of 18 or 20 or 25 percent a year, if not more.

The person paying 20 percent interest on a $10,000 car loan will pay $900 more each year on a five-year loan compared to the person paying an interest rate of 5 percent on that same loan amount.

Thankfully, a good portion of the working poor never resort to a payday loan. They avoid paying the steep rates charged by the local Rent-A-Center. Plenty of people earning less than $30,000 a year have a checking account and good credit. There's also help on the horizon as the new Consumer Financial Protection Board has singled out payday loans and subprime auto finance as two of its top priorities.

Yet don't underestimate the ingenuity or hunger for profits driving those who the author Mike Hudson dubbed "merchants of misery." A few years back, I attended the annual Check Cashers Convention, where I sat in on a ninety-minute presentation dubbed, "Effective Marketing Strategies to Dominate Your Market." Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd, a consultant named Jim Higgins shared his tips for turning the $l,000-a-year check cashing or payday customer into one worth "$2,000 to $4,000 a year." Pens scribbled furiously as he tossed out ideas: raffle off an iPod. Consider scratch 'n win contests. Institute the kind of customer reward programs that has worked so well for the airlines. And for those who are only semi-regulars, offer a "cash 3, get 1 free" deal. After all, Higgins told the crowd, "These are people not used to getting anything free. These are people not used to getting anything, really."

Adapted from Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.- How the Working Poor Became Big Business.


David Cay Johnston "Divided" (2014)

Reagan was shunning personnel issues, rarely engaging in discussions about congressional strategy, and routinely following his subordinates' advice on media plans. Instead, he mastered the ceremonial and symbolic functions of the office so that he could act presidential even when he wasn't, in the traditional sense, functioning like one.

Reagan's day generally began between 7:00 and 8:00 A. M., when the White House operator would put through a wake-up call. By nine o'clock, after a light breakfast and a glimpse at the morning papers and television news shows, Reagan would ride the elevator downstairs from the second floor of the 132-room residence to the State Floor. There, a cadre of Secret Service agents would escort him out across the flagstone colonnade bordering the Rose Garden, past a well-disguised emergency box containing an extra pistol, and on through the armored door of the Oval Office. His chief of staff would greet him, and they would sit down for his first meeting of the day. If it was cold, the stewards would have a fire blazing; in the summertime, they would have already plumped the pillows on the wrought-iron chaises that graced the patio outside.

By the time he arrived in the Oval Office, Reagan had usually memorized most of the lines he would deliver in his public appearances that day. His nearly photographic recall - sharpened by his training as an actor - was an enormous asset. The night before, at seven, the staff would have sent an usher to the residence with a packet of the next day's instructions - whom he'd be meeting, for how long, and what he was expected to say. On carefully typed index cards, the staff composed most of his remarks, down to the greetings and banter. They wrote out stage directions as well - where to turn and when. (One such cue card was accidentally released publicly, directing Reagan to greet a member of his own cabinet and identifying him as the gentleman sitting under Coolidge's portrait.)

Reagan carried the cards with him when he came into the office in the morning, informing the staff of any changes he thought should be made. The cards were coded by size and filed by color: green for unclassified action, yellow for unclassified information, red for classified information, white for his statements. He had one size for his breast pocket, another, always folded in two, for his outside pocket. Longer remarks were typed in large print on what he called "half sheets." The president used these cards, not only for large meetings, but also for small gatherings of regulars, such as the congressional leaders, whom he usually saw weekly. Frequently he used cards to introduce members of his own cabinet, and, in one instance, he relied on them during a ceremony honoring James Brady, the press secretary wounded beside him in the 1981 assassination attempt. He also had "phone memos," which spelled out what his end of telephone conversations should be and left space for him to jot down what the interlocutor said, so that the staff could keep track. As he moved from one event to another, his staff first gave him a briefing on every move he would make. Over the years, many advisers tried to convince Reagan to dispense with his cue cards, but, conceded Regan, for the president "they were sort of like Linus's blue blanket."

By the standards of most other presidents, Reagan's office hours weren't long. After a 9:00 A.M. meeting with his chief of staff, Reagan attended a nine-thirty national security briefing with his national security adviser, the chief of staff, and frequently the vice president. After that the schedule varied, though usually the staff tried to give the president some private time late in the morning for reading; after lunch, some aides like David Stockman learned to avoid scheduling important business because the president was prone to nodding. off He was often finished for the day by four o'clock, and he usually took both Wednesday and Friday afternoons off. But he was organized and orderly in his habits. He spent about an hour almost every day lifting weights in the private gym - a habit developed under doctor's orders after the 1981 assassination attempt. Where other presidents grew gray in office, Reagan managed to put an inch and a half of muscle on his chest, and he loved to have visitors feel the tone of his biceps. Inside the Oval Office, though, Reagan was formal. He felt awed enough to say "I couldn't take my jacket off in this office," and aides said he never did. They also said he never left at the end of the day without first straightening his desk - a great slab of dark wood as imposing as its donor, Queen Victoria, who had it made for Rutherford B. Hayes from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute.

At the end of the day, Reagan usually returned upstairs with paperwork and spent the evening with his wife - both in their pajamas, eating supper from trays in his study, reading, studying the next day's lines, and watching television. Nancy Reagan said her husband generally fell asleep within minutes of going to bed, usually around 11:00 P. M. Just before he did, he would alert the thirty-six-person domestic staff, one of whom would then quietly tum off any remaining lights in the family quarters.

But Reagan was more complicated than liberal caricatures would suggest. He liked to joke about his image, using such lines as: "I hear hard work's never killed anyone, but I figure, why take a chance?" Yet those around him found to their surprise that he could be diligent - even compulsive - in performing the tasks they gave him. He was always immaculately dressed, and he was so punctual that he could time a statement or an appearance down to the second. His delivery and stage presence were honed by years of training. He would follow his daily schedule meticulously, drawing a line through each completed event with an arrow pointing to the next, exactly the way screen actors mark off completed tasks.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

The rain forest bordering the Kasai River was rich in rubber, and William Sheppard and the other American Presbyterians there found themselves in the midst of a cataclysm. The Kasai was also the scene of some of the strongest resistance to Leopold's rule. Armed men of a chief allied with the regime rampaged through the region where Sheppard worked, plundering and burning more than a dozen villages. Floods of desperate refugees sought help at Sheppard's mission station.

In 1899 the reluctant Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the bush, at some risk to himself, to investigate the source of the fighting. There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting flesh. On the day he reached the marauders' camp, his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief "conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all," The chief told Sheppard, "See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed." He proudly showed Sheppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for his kills.

Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold's rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy, as even high officials would later admit. "During my time in the Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district," recalled Charles Lemaire after his retirement. "As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, 'To gather rubber in the district one must cut off hands, noses and ears.' "

If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not "wasted" in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. "Sometimes," said one officer to a missionary, soldiers "shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man." In some military units there was even a "keeper of the hands"; his job was the smoking.

Sheppard was not the first foreign witness to see severed hands in the Congo, nor would he be the last. But the articles he wrote for missionary magazines about his grisly find were reprinted and quoted widely, both in Europe and the United States, and it is partly due to him that people overseas began to associate the Congo with severed hands. A half-dozen years after Sheppard's stark discovery, while attacking the expensive public works Leopold was building with his Congo profits, the socialist leader Emile Vandervelde would speak in the Belgian Parliament of "monumental arches which one will someday call the Arches of the Severed Hands." William Sheppard's outspokenness would eventually bring down the wrath of the authorities and one day Vandervelde, an attorney, would find himself defending Sheppard in a Congo courtroom. But that is getting ahead of our story.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Miami, Fla., is not known for its winter season, but there can be some chilly days. Last night, the National Weather Service called for lows in the 30s and 40s with a chance of falling iguanas. Apparently, the lizards can fall into a deeper slumber in the cold, and it is not uncommon for them to tumble from trees. The advice for you is watch your heads, and don't bug the iguanas after they land. I mean, do you like being bothered when you're just getting up?

The more haste, the less speed
(Proverb)

It's animal week, this week, here on My Word. And it's answer to correspondence week as far as I'm concerned on this side of the house.

Now, as you can probably imagine we get a lot of correspondence in from overseas about this program.

Only about five weeks another air letter poured in. It was from a Mrs. McNamara in Perth, Australia. And Mrs. McNamara reminded me that well over a year ago, about eighteen months ago, I'd explained that our Afghan had had puppies and I'd kept one. And Mrs. McNamara said, "Can you give us a progress report on your puppy? How is it? Are they expensive to keep? How do you manage with the carpets bringing up Afghan puppies?"

So I thought I'd take the next thirty or forty minutes in answering that letter.

The puppy is doing well, two years old last week. Her name is Lady Otterling Mole. In keeping with a name like that, she's two inches taller than her mother. And weighs four and half stone.

She loves her little dog basket. Absolutely adores it. She eats about half an inch of it per night. And she's now completed the second. And we've got her onto a dog nest, which is a kind of bag filled with tiny plastic beads.

I don't know if you know, Mrs. McNamara, Afghans dig. They are diggers. For instance, you'll find no record of an Afghan being kept in Colditz, the reason being that no commandant could keep an Afghan in Colditz long enough to get its name and kennel number. I would give a lazy Afghan thirty-two minutes to dig out of Colditz.

This was borne home on us when the puppy was about a year. Couldn't see it in the garden. Didn't bother, probably harboring under a rose bush.

About late morning, a phone call, "Mr Muir?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "Are you the owner of a pale gold Afghan dark, mussel and ears?"

I said, "Yes."

"I am the signalman at Egham High level crossing."

I said, "Oh. Have you seen my dog?"

"Yes sir. I'm looking at it now"

I said, "Where is it?"

"Well, sir, it is preceding the 10:40 from Waterloo on the Downe Line."

But there you are. It's sheep-sized. She knows the difference between indoors and outdoors She knows that in one she can dance about, leap about, do whatever she needs to do in privacy. And in the other place, it's the place for being quiet and sleeping. The trouble is she doesn't know which is which.

So on the question of carpets we did have trouble initially. And then, whenever you turned your back there'd be a nine by five inch gray map of Corsica, silently sinking into the pile.

And the curious thing is that once the nine by five inch map of Corsica is there, it's a dog's fervent wish to keep it fresh. And replenish it every hour. And then start a reserve Sardinia by the radiator.

We have a lady who comes in and cleans for us called Mrs. Hays. And she's terrific. Goes through the house like a tornado twice a week.

And Mrs. Hays is particularly proud of the carpet. And when Mrs. Hays went away for three months to visit her son in Australia, there were maps of Corsica all over the carpet.

And when Mrs. Hays came back and started scrubbing and cleaning twice a week, again, the dog wasn't interested. This is quite logical actually, apparently this is sort of a smell thing. They like to return to the depository. It's happier on a previous smell.

So, really we've got it licked now, because Mrs. Hays is back and working away twice a week.

So the answer to your major question, Mrs. McNamara, what about the carpets bringing up an Afghan, as far as our carpets are concerned, the more Hays, the less pee.

Frank 159b

On another occasion, a movie with a stellar cast working at the top of their game was ruined by an illustrious veteran director, who one day openly admitted to me that he was only still directing to fund his very expensive hobby of deep-sea fishing off the coast of California. As soon as the filming was done and he had been paid, off he went. He was at sea and, sadly, so were editing and post-production without him.

The hardest directors to work with - and unfortunately you find them in every workplace, every family, every community of people - are the bullies. My approach with bullies has always been to make it clear from the start that I won't be their victim. When I worked with Otto Preminger on Hurry Sundown in 1966, I knew his reputation as a monstrous tyrant who was happiest when everyone else was miserable. I had heard that he liked to scream at actors and crew alike. So the first day I met him, I told him, "You need to know, Otto, that I'm very sensitive. You mustn't shout at me. If anyone shouts at me when I'm working I burst into tears and I can't work for the rest of the day." Otto stared back at me. He seemed genuinely puzzled. Or perhaps, I thought, he was getting ready for a particularly big scream.

"But why do you think I would do that?" he finally asked.

"Well," I said - I stayed calm, "I have friends who worked with you on Saint Joan and they said you shouted."

"You shouldn't make such friends," said Otto. "I only shout at bad actors. And I would never shout at Alfie."

Whether because he considered me a good actor, because he loved Alfie, or, more likely, because I had made things clear at the start, Otto never shouted at me. He did, though, give everyone else a terrible time, especially my young co-star Faye Dunaway. My little talk hadn't managed to change his personality, only to protect me personally from it. Otto tormented the inexperienced and sweet Faye, who ended up in tears most days. Of course everyone worked in a state of abject terror, which was not only deeply unpleasant, but also did nothing for the quality of the movie, since no one can give their best when they are frigid with fear of doing something wrong and being screamed at. And Faye ended up paying a lot of money to get out of her six-movie contract with Otto, going on to become an enormous star.

Disagreeing with a good director is very different from having to work with a bad one. I adopt a couple of approaches in this situation. If I am convinced the direction I want to take with a particular scene is the right one, I may suggest a compromise. I may propose we try it his way, and try it my way, and then he can decide when he sees the rushes. The director usually agrees - and usually turns out to be right. I've got my point of view, but he has the vision and is seeing the bigger picture. But at least this way I get the chance to see I'm wrong. Then again, sometimes I just tell the director he's right, then go my own way anyway. What I never do is have a stand-up row about it.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Ross Walsh has found a way to scam scammers. The Irish man received one
of those emails asking for money. He replied and said he was trying to
send it, but somehow, he said, his transfer was not going through. Mr.
Walsh convinced the scammer to send him money instead to verify the
account. He donated the resulting 25 pounds to charity. He told
Ireland's Limerick Leader he's done this before, and it won't be the
last time.

Players could get a Trump Card, become an Island Ambassador at the Sands, or join the Officer's Club at the Showboat.

These frequent-gambler cards carried a magnetic strip on the back, like those used to withdraw cash from bank teller machines. Inserted into a device on a slot machine, the card tracked play. It also triggered an electronic greeting welcoming the player by name. Often this would be followed by congratulations on a wedding anniversary or the arrival of a grandchild or recommending a new kind of slot machine that had been installed since the player last visited.

Simultaneously, a screen would light up just off the casino floor, announcing to the crew of casino hosts, as floor sales agents are called, the player's name, nickname, tidbits like a recent birthday or wedding anniversary, and the player's favorite beverage. A cocktail waitress could be sent to the player's machine with a drink even before the player asked. A casino host could also stroll by and strike up a conversation using her personal knowledge of the player or the information gleaned from the computer. New tidbits collected from these chats would then be added to the computer database so the casino would have fresh material to strengthen its bond with the player on future visits.

Frequent-gambler cards allowed Harrah's to keep a perfect record of how much each player bet, on what kinds of machines, how fast he or she played, the total amount wagered and how much the player had won or lost. In this way Harrah's could grade its players into profitability categories without the uncertainty and errors formerly made when casino hosts rated players by recording their guesstimates on slips of paper. These precise records allowed Harrah's to calculate exactly how much to reward each player with comps, which is gamblerese for complimentary meals, drinks and rooms and, for really big players, gifts of jewelry, cars, even trips around the world.

Comping was a huge factor in the Atlantic City casino business, unlike Las Vegas, where only the biggest players received comps. In 1991, Atlantic City gamblers collected $488.6 million in comps. The casinos gave away another $247.7 million in coins and coupons to bus riders, in all enough to pave the entire New Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway with quarters.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

He could forget whether the U.S nuclear advantage was on land or sea, but he remembered to take care of the White House squirrels, filling his pockets", with acorns collected for them at Camp David. He didn't like to impose. And he worried about the inconvenience his every move became for the staff. He once refused to go along with a stunt that called for him to dump confetti on a visiting athlete's head because he didn't want anyone to have to pick It up. (Aides settled on popcorn for the outdoor event, so that the birds could do the cleanup.)

The danger was that left to his own good intentions, the president would confuse the human interest with the national interest, mistaking gestures for policies, romantic themes for strategy, and immediate emotional gratification for long-term strategic gains. There was no clearer example of this danger than in his approach to the hostages. But those around him should have seen plenty of warnings in the unique way in which Reagan turned the presidency into a case-by-case philanthropic pursuit - seemingly disconnected from his own broad policies.

Reagan's view of himself as First Caseworker of the Land was institutionalized in the White House Correspondence Office, a little-known but extraordinary shop in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, a few hundred yards from the West Wing. It was a sprawling empire managed by an energtic blonde named Anne Higgins, who liked to turn up the volume on the office tape to the Simon and Garfunkel song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" which expressed how she saw her mission. As anyone who worked closely with the president must have realized, it was Reagan's sentimental view of his own role too.

In a rare lapse from good Samaritanism, Higgins once described the office as the Schlock Capital of the World, buried as it was in needlepoint inspirational sayings, stained-glass doodads, and other offerings Americans felt compelled to share with their commander in chief. During Reagan's tenure, it employed a staff of 130 people and 500 part-time volunteers to handle as many as twenty thousand letters and packages a day - much more mail than any other president had ever received. While most presidents had dismissed the public mail as a nuisance, Higgins said of Reagan, "It's hard to believe When you get that much mail, but he actually likes it."

Every week Higgins selected thirty representative letters for the president to read, many of them appeals for help or tales of heartache, and just about every Friday afternoon he took the time to answer them in longhand on sheets of yellow legal paper. It was a habit he had picked up in Hollywood, where he had often answered his own fan mail. Some aides snickered privately at the amount of time and energy Reagan gave to this epistolary pursuit. George Shultz had had to fight strenuously to get two half-hour meetings a week with the president, but if Reagan spent only five minutes on each letter, he was still devoting more than twice as much time to strangers' letters as to his secretary of state. When a program to adopt a school-aged pen pal was introduced, Reagan was the only senior official who took it seriously, corresponding through much of his tenure with Rudy Hines, a young black boy from Washington's Southeast slums. But Higgins observed, "I think it's one of the keys to his success as a man in public life: he doesn't take the average person lightly."

Frequently, though, this empathy seemed to place Reagan at odds with his own policies in the White House, just as it had in Sacramento. This conflict between the particular and the abstract was endemic to the correspondence unit, which was, after all, a central switching point between the presidential cocoon and the real world outside. Thus, while Reagan was moved by one letter to make a televised appeal for a liver donor for an eleven-month-old girl in Texas, his administration pushed to eliminate spending for a new national computer network designed to match organ donors with patients in need of transplants. In another such case found by Higgins's office, Reagan ensured that a young girl in Hawaii get a waiver from his administration's own toughened eligibility requirements for welfare benefits because she had won a new automobile, which put her family over the new $1,700 limit for possessions. (The White House helped the girl's family sell the car and place her prize money in a trust - thus resorting to the kind of dodge Reagan had accused "welfare cheats" of doing for so many years.) One member of the correspondence unit, Sally Kelley, said, "He loves having that stuff done, especially when it's a deserving youngster against the huge bureaucracy" - no matter that the bureaucracy was now his own.

Aides who knew Reagan well recognized that his episodic sentimentality left him open to manipulation. Some realized that if they could harness it, they could alter whole policies. In the summer of 1982, when Israel's air force was bombing residential neighborhoods in Beirut, killing hundreds of civilians, Reagan's deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, took action. Deaver had no experience or responsibility in the area of foreign affairs, but he didn't like the civilian casualties, and he knew that the Israeli attacks using U.S. weapons were potentially harmful to Reagan's image at home. Reagan, in contrast, hadn't reacted much to the air strikes, but he generally supported Menachem Begin's government.

In the middle of August, after an especially bloody raid, Deaver reached his limit. He stormed into the Oval Office by himself and declared emotionally, "I can't stay here any longer."

"What are you talking about?" the president asked.

"I don't want to be part of this," replied Deaver. "You sit here and listen to these guys, and you don't know what they're talking about. And you let Begin bomb Beirut every day, and they're your bombs. And the result of that is children without arms." Deaver was referring to a horrifying news photograph showing a Lebanese baby bound in gauze from the shoulders down, the caption explaining that both arms had been severed by an Israeli bomb.

"For what?" stormed Deaver. "Just to make the Israelis happy? It hasn't got anything to do with anything else. And you are sitting here, the only man on the face of the earth that can stop it, and you won't do it. I can't stay any longer and be part of it."

The president looked at his distraught aide for a moment and then asked bewilderedly, "How do I stop this?"

"You pick up the phone and call Menachem Begin," Deaver replied.

"And," Deaver said later, "he did." Within twenty minutes, Begin called back to say that a cease-fire had been imposed. Reagan then put down the phone and said, "It's over with." Two and a half years into his presidency, he then looked at his longtime aide and said, "Gosh! I didn't realize I had that kind of power."

It later turned out that the caption under the UPI photograph had been mistaken. Israeli authorities went to the trouble of finding the injured child, who had indeed been hurt, but not by Israeli bombs, and who under the bandages still had the use of both arms. Yet, as was so often true with Reagan, the facts didn't matter as much as the emotional impact.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Stanislas Lefranc, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prosecutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Early one Sunday morning in Leopoldville, he heard the sound of many children screaming desperately.

On tracing the howls to their source, Lefranc found "some thirty urchins, of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged. Most of the urchins, in a paroxysm of grief ... kicked so frightfully that the soldiers ordered to hold them by the hands and feet had to lift them off the ground ... 25 times the whip slashed down on each of the children." The evening before, Lefranc learned, several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.

Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold's Congo, which in the minds of the territory's people, soon became as closely identified with white rule as the steamboat or the rifle. It was the chicotte - a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim's bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more - not an uncommon punishment - were often fatal.

Lefranc was to see many more chicotte beatings, although his descriptions of them, in pamphlets and newspaper articles he published in Belgium, provoked little reaction.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

April in Paris
(Vernon Duke and E Y Harburg, 1932 song)

I'm not likely to forget it. I'd like to use the opportunity afforded by this quotation to make an urgent recommendation to the authorities responsible for running the London Zoo in Regents Park.

Gentlemen, did you happen to see a program that was on television called Animal Courtship?

There was one scene showing a couple of black cat yowls perpetuating their species. And the reason why that stuck in my mind, I never realized that they did while actually up in the air in flight.

It made me revise my whole opinion about a certain story that an Alitalia pilot I know tells about one of his air hostesses.

Anyway, Gentlemen of the London Zoo. Let me tell you the reason why I'm drawing this program to your attention. What happened was instead of the program being put out at its scheduled time of Sunday afternoon, its transmission was switched to 9:25 at night. Why? So that children wouldn't see all the goings-on among the animals.

Now , gentlemen of the London Zoo, does that give you food for thought. Because I can tell you this. It certainly should. And I speak as one who recently, fool that I am, thought I'd give my two twelve-year-old nephews an educational afternoon by taking them round your zoo on a warm spring day.

And I very quickly learned something. You know how films have to be labeled in categories ranging from suitable for all the family to no children allowed to see it under any circumstances? Well, so should those pages of yours and your animals.

If the giraffes and the penguins can be described as Mary Poppins, I'll tell you this. That monkey house is Last Tango in Paris.

I'm particularly thinking, or trying not to think, about those apes of yours. If apes ARE the species that Tarzan grew up with, it's no wonder he turned out to be a swinger.

I don't know what the spectacle did to those two twelve-year-old nephews of mine, but if their wisdom teeth aren't through now, they never will be.

So, gentlemen of the London Zoo, my recommendation is that at your entry gate, you henceforth issue a small booklet to any adult going in with children, a book that would categorize each group of your inhabitants according to their embarrassment quotient.

From my own experiences of the various species, I can make just three suggestions to start you off: giraffe will delight, penguin will enchant, and here I draw on Mr. Vernon's Duke's melody, ape will embarrass.

Dennis norden159a

At two hours long, The Other Man was ITV's longest ever TV play. There was a cast of two hundred, sixty of whom had speaking parts, a twenty-minute stop for the news and several commercial breaks. And, yes, again, to top it all off, the play was broadcast live.

The exposure was high-stakes and the circumstances could hardly have been tougher but my co-star Sian Phillips was a wonderful actress, which helped, and I swear I didn't forget one line. (A couple of people did, but fortunately for them we had a high-tech solution in the form of a lady with a button on a wire and a script, who followed whoever was speaking around the set. If someone dried up, she would push the button, sound transmission would be cut and she would read the actor the line. I imagined people all over Britain banging their silent TVs and cursing in unison.)

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

People in "Schitt's Creek" are stuck with an embarrassing town name. But it's TV. It's fictional. In Austria, though, there is a real village named [expletive] - rhymes with ducking. It's been the name for centuries. But they've had enough of the ridicule and having the village sign stolen. In 2021, they are renaming the village F-U-G-G-I-N-G. They will ring in the new year as Fuggingers. Are we still on the air

The next morning, bride and groom were joined in holy matrimony, and in total intoxication. Richard showed up drunk; Deboragh arrived an hour late and, according to Richard, "had to be revived after taking too many Quaaludes." One of Richard's daughters wore black to convey her thoughts on the union. The ceremony took place at his home, with little effort made to disguise the fact that it was a construction site. Richard and Deboragh recited their vows surrounded by unfaced cabinets, torn-up floors, and stacks of lumber. "Thank God you were drunk when I got there," Richard remembered Deboragh saying afterward, "because if you'd seen what I looked like."

For their wedding reception, Richard and Deboragh traveled to NBC studios in Burbank, where Richard was responsible for wrapping up the third episode of his TV show. Earlier, producer Rocco Urbisci had made preparations for a party with confetti and a cake; he'd assumed Pam Grier was the bride, so the cake carried the frosted message "Congratulations Richard and Pam." Apparently Grier, too, had thought she was in contention to be the bride: Urbisci recalled fielding, on the morning of the wedding, a phone call from an incensed Grier, in which she explained that she was going to visit a certain "motherfucker" and "shoot his ass." Urbisci notified security; Grier was kept at bay. But he forgot about the infelicitous inscription on the cake. When the bride and groom arrived at the studio and the cake was brought out, Urbisci had to grab some roses from a prop table and hurriedly scatter them over the cake to cover the name "Pam."

Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)

Late Tuesday afternoon, the NSC's security officers arrived to seal up North's office. As they came in the door, Fawn Hall suddenly remembered, to her horror, that she had failed to finish the job of replacing North's altered contra documents in her files. Both the incriminating originals and the new versions were still sitting on the desk next to her word processor.

As the security officers did their work in North's office, Hall coolly scooped up a stack of documents and took them upstairs. Standing outside Earl's office, she folded two bundles and stuffed them into her boots. The security officers were finishing up downstairs.

Hall dashed into Earl's office, a sheaf of PROFS notes in her hand. The marine grabbed the notes, folded them, and began putting them in the inside pocket of his jacket, but Hall stopped him. "No," she said. "You shouldn't have to do this."

She asked him to watch the door. As he turned around, she stuffed the notes into the back of her blouse. Then the former model did a hasty pirouette. "Can you see anything?" she asked. He couldn't.

They walked downstairs. North and Tom Green had just walked in.

"Can you see anything in my back?" she whispered to North nervously.

The security officers inspected their briefcases as they left the office, but was all. Halfway down the marble corridor, Hall reached for the back of her blouse.

"No." North muttered. "Wait until we get outside." On the sidewalk on Seventeenth Street, she reached for the papers again, but Tom Green, the lawyer, said, "Wait until we get inside the car"

Once she was in Green's car, Hall extracted the documents from her blouse and boots. Then her face fell. "I left the originals in the office," she confessed. In her haste, she had smuggled out the wrong documents. The ones she left behind would show clearly that North had tried to alter the records.

Green asked what she would say if the investigators asked her about shredding.

Hall thought for a moment. "We shred every day," she said.

"Good," said Green.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

One of the more forgettable of American presidents, Chester A. Arthur was an amiable man whose highest job, only a few years earlier, had been as collector of customs revenue for the port of New York - a position he had been forced to leave amid charges of corruption and mismanagement. Soon after this, Arthur's ties to the powerful New York State Republican machine won him nomination as candidate for vice president. To near-universal dismay, he had entered the White House when President James A. Garfield died from an assassin's bullet. A good storyteller and man about town, fond of whiskey, cigars, and expensive clothes, the dapper, side-burned Arthur is perhaps best remembered for saying, "I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business." On this trip to Florida, however, his private life fitted very nicely into someone else's business. The owner of the Belair orange plantation was General Henry Shelton Sanford, the man who had helped Leopold recruit Stanley.

Sanford did not bother to leave his home in Belgium to be in Florida for the president's visit. With the self-assurance of the very rich, he played host in absentia. He made sure that the president and his party were greeted by his personal agent, and that they got the best rooms at the Sanford House hotel, which stood on a lakeshore fringed with palm trees in the town of Sanford. When the president and his guests were not out catching bass, trout, and catfish, or shooting alligators, or exploring the area by steamboat, the Sanford House was where they stayed for the better part of a week. There is no record of who paid the hotel bill, but most likely, as with the rail journey south, it was not the president.

Ironically, the huge Sanford orange plantation the Washington visitors admired was proving as disastrous a venture as Sanford's other investments. Some Swedish contract laborers found the working conditions too harsh and tried to leave as stowaways on a steamboat. A slaughterhouse Sanford invested in had a capacity fifty times larger than what the local market could consume and went bankrupt. A 54o-foot wharf with a warehouse at the end of it that he ordered built was washed away by a flood. The manager of one of the hotels in Sanford absconded while owing him money. Foremen failed to put up fences, and wandering cattle nibbled at the orange trees. But if everything Sanford touched as a businessman turned to dust, as an accomplice of Leopold he was a grand success.

Sanford was a long-time supporter of President Arthur's Republican Party. For two years, he had been corresponding with Arthur and other high United States officials about Leopold's plans for the Congo. Now, after the president's trip to Florida, confident that Arthur would pay attention, he pressed his case with more letters. Seven months later, Leopold sent Sanford across the Atlantic to make use of his convenient connection to the White House. The man who had once been American minister to Belgium was now the Belgian king's personal envoy to Washington.

Sanford carried with him to Washington a special code for telegraphing news to Brussels: Constance meant "negotiations proceeding satisfactorily; success expected"; Achille referred to Stanley, Eugenie to France, Alice to the United States, Joseph to "sovereign rights," and Emile to the key target, the president. Bonheur (happiness) meant "agreement signed today." The agreement Leopold wanted was one that gave full American diplomatic recognition of his claim to the Congo.

Sanford also carried a letter to the president from the king, which he himself had carefully edited and translated. "Entire territories ceded by Sovereign Chiefs have been constituted by us into independent States," Leopold declared, a claim that would have startled Stanley, then finishing up his work on the Congo River. From Arthur, Leopold asked only "the official announcement that the Government of the United States [will] treat as a friendly flag the blue standard with the golden star which now floats over 17 stations, many territories, 7 steamers engaged in the civilizing work of the Association and over a population of several millions."

On November 29, 1883, only two days after his ship arrived in New York and he had boarded the overnight train for Washington, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. Leopold's great work of civilization, he told the president and everyone else he met in Washington, was much like the generous work the United States itself had done in Liberia, where, starting in 1820, freed American slaves had moved to what soon became an independent African country. This was a shrewdly chosen example, since it had not been the United States government that had resettled ex-slaves in Liberia, but a private society like Leopold's International Association of the Congo.

Like all the actors in Leopold's highly professional cast, Sanford relied on just the right props. He claimed, for example, that Leopold's treaties with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode Island in the 1600s - and Sanford just happened to have copies of those treaties with him. Furthermore, in his letter to President Arthur, Leopold promised that American citizens would be free to buy land in the Congo and that American goods would be free of customs duties there. In support of these promises, Sanford had with him a sample copy of one of Leopold's treaties with a Congo chief. The copy, however, had been altered in Brussels to omit all mention of the monopoly on trade ceded to Leopold, an alteration that deceived not only Arthur but also Sanford, an ardent free-trader who wanted the Congo open to American businessmen like himself.

In Washington, Sanford claimed that Leopold's civilizing influence would counter the practices of the dreadful "Arab" slave-traders. And weren't these "independent States" under the association's generous protection really a sort of United States of the Congo? Not to mention that, as Sanford wrote to Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (Stanley was still vigorously passing himself off as born and bred in the United States), the Congo "was discovered by an American." Only a week after Sanford arrived in Washington, the president cheerfully incorporated into his annual message to Congress, only slightly rewritten, text that Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold's high-minded work in the Congo:

The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.


Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

A decade ago, the World Health Organization called for the exclusion of the riskiest bovine tissues - cattle brains, eyes, spinal cord, and intestine - from the human food supply and from all animal feed. Unfortunately, the United States still feeds some of these potentially risky tissues to people, pigs, pets, poultry, and fish. Then pig remains can be fed back to cattle. Cattle remains are still fed to chickens, and poultry litter (the mixture of excrement, spilled feed, dirt, feathers, and other debris that is scooped from the floors of broiler sheds) is fed back to cows. In these ways, prions may continue to be cycled back into cattle feed and complete the cow "cannibalism" circuit.

Ecologists assert that animal fecal wastes pose public health risks "similar to those of human wastes and should be treated accordingly," yet in animal agriculture today, fecal wastes are fed to other animals. Although excrement from other species is fed to livestock in the United States, chicken droppings are considered more nutritious for cows than pig feces or cattle dung. Because poultry litter can be as much as eight times cheaper than foodstuffs like alfalfa, the U.S. cattle industry feeds poultry litter to cattle. A thousand chickens can make enough waste to feed a growing calf year round.

A single cow can eat as much as three tons of poultry waste a year, yet the manure does not seem to affect the taste of the subsequent milk or meat. Taste panels have found little difference in the tenderness, juiciness, and flavor of beef from steers fed up to 50% poultry litter. Beef from animals fed bird droppings may in fact even be more juicy and tender. Cows are typically not given feed containing more than 80% poultry litter, though, since it's not as palatable" and may not fully meet protein and energy needs.

The industry realizes that the practice of feeding poultry manure to cattle might not stand up to public scrutiny. They understand that the custom carries "certain stigmas," "presents special consumer issues," and poses "potential public relations problems." They seem puzzled as to why the public so "readily accepts organically grown vegetables" grown with composted manure, while there is "apparent reluctance on the part of the public" to accept the feeding of poultry litter to cattle. "We hope," says one industry executive, "common sense will prevail."

The editor of Beef magazine commented, "The public sees it as 'manure.' We can call it what we want and argue its safety, feed value, environmental attributes, etc., but outsiders still see it simply as 'chicken manure.' And, the most valid and convincing scientific argument isn't going to counteract a gag reflex." The industry's reaction, then, has been to silence the issue. According to Beef, public relations experts within the National Cattlemen's Beef Association warned beef producers that discussing the issue publicly would only "bring out more adverse publicity." When the Kansas Livestock Association dared to shine the spotlight on the issue by passing a resolution urging the discontinuation of the practice, irate producers in neighboring states threatened a boycott of Kansas feed-yards.

In compliance with World Health Organization guidelines, Europe has forbidden the feeding of all slaughterhouse and animal waste to livestock. The American Feed Industry Association called such a ban "a radical propositton." The American Meat Institute agreed, stating, "[N]o good is accomplished by ... prejudicing segments of society against the meat industry" As far back as 1993, Gary Weber, director of Beef Safety and Cattle Health for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, admitted that the industry could find economically feasible alternatives to feeding rendered animal protein to other animals, but that the Cattlemen's Association did not want to set a precedent of being ruled by "activists."


Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

There's no fire without some smoke
(Old Shropshire life by Catherine Milnes Gaskell)

I have a sad story to tell. I feel I owe it to the world to explain why there is no annual Christmas bazaar in Thorpe village hall this Christmas.

I think a word of explanation, a description, of this Christmas Fair is called for here

It's always the same every Christmas. As you go in there is table marked jumble. And on that are the following: There is one slightly rusty golf club with a string curling off the handle. There is a pair of bookends, one missing. About a useful as one sock. There is a biscuit barrel in pottery with the knob missing from the lid and the brass showing through the chromium. There was a paper knife in the shape of a Toledo sword, which could best be described as "an old rolled gold with the gold rolled off". There is an unused desk diary from 1947. And there are a number of books. There is always The Gorilla Hunters by R M Ballentine. And in the front was a bookplate from Strewed School saying "1924 presented to R. Thwaites for effort". There was a book called Rambles in New Zealand. There was a book called Hiawatha Rendered into Latin. And the last one was Hindustani self-taught by the Natural Method.

Now you may wonder why I know exactly what things were going to be on the jumble stall. They were there every year.

When I first went to the village twenty years ago, about the second year I bought the biscuit barrel and kept it, because I thought I'd keep tobacco in it. And Mrs. Rumbold came round to collect for the next jumble sale and explained to me the system.

She said, "Those things are for buying and passing on. They're not for using."

You're probably thinking, well, why do you go to the Thorpe Annual Christmas Fair.

We go because of one item which I haven't mentioned. Because the vicar always makes a speech to start with and makes his annual joke about none but the brave deserve the fair. And then he introduces the official opener, who is a donkey, Philomel the donkey.

And then comes in this absolutely marvelous thing. It's two chaps inside a donkey, Sam Baxter and his brother Ted. And they lollop in pretending to be the official opener. And they've been doing it for thirty-two years. And people have grown up and their sons have grown up with Philomel the Donkey.

It doesn't diverge its pattern by an inch. Year after year it lollops in to the door of the village hall and does a neigh at its front end. Then it waggles its tail. And then it does a tap dance to Mrs. Baxter on the piano.

And this is why the village fete continues.

And it can't. The tragedy this year was old Sam Baxter came in and see me and said, "Could I have a word wi' ye?"

He's about seventy. He said, "Philomel is no more. She's gone, the old . . . "

"SHE'S WHAT? WHAT'S WRONG? WHAT'S HAPPENED? WHAT WENT WRONG"

He said, "Well, I was rehearsing with young Ted." (His younger brother. He's sixty-four.) "We got started. I heard a very funny noise. And I got a premonition something was wrong. Ted. What are you doing now? He said, 'I was just lighting a fag.' And at that moment there was this blinding agony behind me. A terrible pain. I leapt forward and there was a tearing sound and the skin had come apart. The old Philomel had come in two. The conflagration was all right. I just sat in a basement and walked around and put that. The old skin is no more. The donkey is no more. I couldn't get rid of her myself. I took her along to the road sweeper. He was clearing the autumn leaves out of the drain. Just opposite the red line. I got him to put her down."

So there's no more Philomel world. And there will be no more Thorpe Christmas Fair. Because as sure as eggs are eggs, as the proverb said four hundred years ago, "There is no fair without Sam's moke."

Frank Muir 572b

If you danced at the Ad Lib club just behind the Empire Cinema on Leicester Square, as I did, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles might be grooving around next to you. David Bailey would be in the corner, romancing Jean Shrimpton. In another corner Roman Polanski was with Sharon Tate.

My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. My tailor was Douglas Hayward, the tailor to the 1960s and such a star in his field that he ended up making Ralph Lauren's suits. When I played a bit part in Dixon of Dock Green I was paired with an unknown actor called Donald Sutherland. When I understudied another unknown actor making his West End debut in one of the first British plays about ordinary soldiers, Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall it was Peter O'Toole. The play made him a star and I took it on tour while he went off to become T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the start of a towering theatrical and movie-making career.

Even the failed actors became household names. When the rest of us were still out of work and broke, we used to pass the time in the basement cafe of the Arts Theatre, just off Leicester Square. They would let you sit there all day over one cup of tea. One afternoon I was sitting in this warm haven for the destitute with two other broke actor friends. One of them, John, was particularly down. He had just been fired from a very low- standard repertory theatre and was humiliated and unhappy. He announced that he was going to give it all up and had already written a play instead. "What's it called?" I asked.

"Look Back in Anger," he replied.

"I'm writing a play as well," said our other friend, an actor called David Baron. "And you can be in it, Michael. Only I'm not going to write it under my acting name. I'm going to use my real name."

"What's that, David?"

"Harold Pinter."

"Well, good luck to both of you," I said. I didn't hold out much hope for either of them.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)