Friends, Allies, Mentors
Press Coverage and Such
- "Planting Change: Growing a Healthy City." Directed and produced by James Monahan and Dena Seidel, focused on Prof. Kathe Newman's Community Development Studio course at Rutgers.
- The Voorhees Center Launch, January 2012 (Kathe Newman, Director). I'm inspired. So is Alinsky. So is Gramsci.
- Read about the acronym "JSA," and the John S. Adams Scholarship at the University of Minnesota. I think of all the integrity of Borchert, of Lukermann. And I try to remind John, from time to time, that he's not angry enough about the right-wing corporate takeover of universities today. Lukermann did outsanding work. But if he had been required to engage with all the neoliberal form-filling surveillance systems faced by today's Assistant Professor, he never would have become the advisor who worked so patiently, so carefully, with his students. Fred would be two standard deviations below the mean devised by some administrator or staff planner. But of course that investment of public resources -- the time Fred had to just read, and read, and think ... has pretty much been driven out of most parts of the contemporary academy. At very few units of very few universities are academics allowed to do anything resembling what Fred did.
...and the world is a less enlightened place without Fred -- and without the latter-day Fred Lukermann who could be so central to geography if we had one today!
- From the archives: Norman J. Glickman in 1968 (courtesy of Norm). Look at that shag carpet! Norm hired me in my first academic job after the Ph.D., as a postdoc at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers. I had read The Urban Impacts of Federal Policy in grad school, so it was quite a privilege to work with him and learn from him at CUPR.
- Kathe Newman's foreclosure response work is showcased in Neighborworks (2011). "Building Stable Communities: Joining Forces to Fight Foreclosure in Essex County, NJ." Washington, DC: Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation.
- Rob VanWynsberghe's leadership on the study of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games makes the UBC Annual Report on Giving to alumni. UBC Development and Alumni Engagement (2011). 2010 Report on Giving. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. For a sample of Rob's work, see Bjoern Surborg, Rob VanWynesberghe, and Elvin Wyly (2008). "Mapping the Olympic Growth Machine: Transnational Urbanism and the Growth Machine Diaspora." City 12(3), 2008, 341-355.
- Clay Westfall Mering establishes the Rollins Black Studies Slavery Atonement Endowment, January 2008
- Terry Haverluk's Gleneagle Institute of Geopolitical Information. They specialize in facts! It takes a certain distance from Washington, DC, for think tanks to think like this. Haverluk also posts animated lectures of his world travels here.
- ""107, 114, 127, 126..." It's not real-estate bingo, it's ground-truthing foreclosure mapping, part of Kathe Newman and Norm Glickman's work in the Newark-Essex County Foreclosure Task Force, February 2008.
- Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, Professor of Geography at the State University of New York - Cortland, is honored with the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, May 2010.
- Marie Cieri's collaboration and commentary on the issues of slavery, work, romance, and food, in Robbie McCauley's Sugar.
Promotional Cartography
I used to do a bit of sketching, calligraphy, and cartography. Graduate school at Minnesota presented a few opportunities to design brochures for the annual departmental celebration (Ralph H. Brown Day). Names of faculty members on staff at the time appear as lakes on the statewide map for the 1992 event, and as railroad stations on the Twin Cities map for 1993. With each passing year, I look at these maps with ever-increasing measures of reverence, respect, and memories of John R. Borchert, Ward Barrett, John G. Rice, and Fred Lukermann.
Friendly Cartographic Mischief
Doctoral defenses and other milestones for friends and colleagues presented irresistible opportunities for various forms of mischief. The easiest approach was to find some way to distill the years of blood, sweat, and tears of a doctoral dissertation into the unforgiving eight-by-ten window that can be silk-screened on a t-shirt. Somehow, I learned to achieve summaries that were both brutal and friendly. Jae-Heon Choi is a distinguished economic and industrial geographer at Konkuk University. Terry Haverluk is an extraordinarily creative scholar and teacher at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs; they don't have individual faculty web sites like most institutions of higher education, but they do have a Commandant, and the students (cadets) stand at attention for the beginning of each class. Hmm. Derek Shanahan is a charismatic cultural geographer at Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and in the ebullient words of one of his many enthusiastic students at RateMyProfessor, "He's the Man! Awesome Professor!" Dan Hammel is a clever urban-economic analyst who practices the highest form of the geographer's art at the University of Toledo, but whose heart remains split between Minnesota and Kansas; Dan's annual Kansas Day cards documented the political transformation of that strange place long before Thomas Franks' 2004 political bestseller (What's the Matter With Kansas?). Kansas Day, you ask? As Dave Barry would say, I am Not Making This Up.
Below are the satirical t-shirt designs, along with serious references to the very serious scholarship that I was so guilty of caricaturing.
- "The Urban Geographer's View of the United States." Daniel J. Hammel (1994). Land Rent Changes in a Gentrifying Area of Minneapolis. Ph.D. Dissertation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Department of Geography.
- "Take Me Back to Mex-America." Terrence W. Haverluk (1993). Mex-America: The Maintenance and Expansion of an American Cultural Region. Ph.D. Dissertation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Department of Geography.
- "Choi International." Jae-Heon Choi (1993). The Geography of Financial Institutions: Finance, Corporations, and Urban Settlement in Korea. Ph.D. Dissertation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Department of Geography.
- "I Am Geographic Thought." Derek P. Shanahan (1992). South Asian Immigration to Luton, 1960-1980. Ph.D. Dissertation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Department of Geography. The quote comes from Fred Lukermann, a prominent faculty member at Minnesota who reflected on three decades of sustained reading of the voluminous literatures on history, philosophy, and geography. As I recall his closing remarks at a retirement symposium we dubbed FredFest, he said something like this: "My thinking has been so shaped by this literature that in many ways one might conclude that I have become this literature. Perhaps I am geographic thought." The quote struck me as just the right way of summarizing all the work Derek had invested in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and cultural-historical geography.
A Welfare Legacy of Family Values
For many years, I have viewed my employment and my salary as akin to being on welfare. I am very well paid, and I have been supported for many years by the generosity of millions of taxpayers in the jurisdictions where I have worked for public institutions of higher education. I find this language especially valuable and provocative when speaking to Americans with conservative political views on taxation, because it opens the door to wonderful conversations about wealth, personal responsibility, subsidy, and other taken-for-granted concepts that have been defined in such polarizing ways in the U.S. over the last quarter century. When I had the chance to serve on an advisory board for a study to 'welfare recipients' who were facing the newly restrictive post-1996 welfare reform rules, I found it helpful to describe how the right-wing political discourse over "family values" was leading to terribly tortured bureaucratic ways of dealing with real people in difficult circumstances. Meanwhile, middle-class and wealthy folks continue to line up at the trough for their welfare checks, although of course in America these recipients have convinced themselves that they worked for these handouts, that they deserve them. I tried to point out some of these contradictions in an essay on family values and valued families, juxtaposing the difficulties of poor mothers trying to find money in the budget for clothes and food with the ever-rising expenditures on luxury automobiles and McMansions of the upper middle class.
But then I discovered that the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Commitee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs was also studying the explosive growth of Welfare for Millionaires. And it involved the Wyly name. I've known for several years that Sam and Charles Wyly, Texas-based entrepreneurs and brothers, had quite a bit of money, and had been using it quite creatively. Sam Wyly got a lot of press coverage in a series of shareholder battles over the company Computer Associates, leading a group of CA employees to pay for a full-page ad in the Times under the banner, "Mr. Wyly, Please Leave Our Company Alone." I also read press reports that the secret source of a last-minute infusion of several hundred thousand dollars to pay for a nasty attack ad against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary came from one of the Wyly brothers. I think they are both Pioneers for Bush.
For a short and colorful account of the Wyly/CA shareholder battles, see:
James Surowiecki (2001). "The Financial Page: Gadfly, Inc." The New Yorker, September 10, p. 42.
This was all quite distressing for me, because when I asked my father, he told me, "yes, I think they are distant relatives." I don't remember the geneaological details, but the bottom line for me was clear: part of the Wyly legacy involves support at a crucial moment for the man who has given us the Imperial Presidency, disastrous wars, torture, warrantless surveillance, mounting deficits as far as the eye can see, right-wing ideological court-packing that will last a generation ... need I go on? In some distant way, I felt responsible. I still feel some responsibility for the injustices that are taking place in these days of Homeland Insecurity, because as a U.S. citizen, I still pay U.S. federal taxes -- although, once again, I must emphasize that these taxes are inappropriately low, because the Republicans are committed to making life good for wealthy people, and hard for the poor and the working classes. I much prefer paying Canadian taxes, and hope to see them increased in order to pay to strengthen the frayed social safety net.
But apparently not all Wylys like to pay their taxes. In late 2006, I was horrified to discover the name "Wyly" mentioned no fewer than 1,580 times in the investigative report issued by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. I assure you this is a record: it's pretty rare to see the name with that spelling. It turns out that Sam and Charles Wyly, and their families are not just wealthy Dubya supporters. They're also savvy members of the transnational capitalist class, who have their own "armada of attorneys, brokers, and other professionals" working the circuits of legal and not-so-legal money laundering between Texas, Wall Street, the Cayman Islands, and the Ilse of Man. I've never met Sam or Charles Wyly, or had any contact with them. But I'd like to take this opportunity to confess any personal responsibility I may have for their terrible behavior on the basis of my family heritage, and to declare that their attempt to evade responsibility is fundamentally at odds with the Wyly famly values I believe in. The Senate report, a rare bipartisan product signed by Republican Norm Coleman (Minnesota) and Democrat Carl Levin (Michigan) months before the November 2006 elections forced the Republicans to be a bit more bipartisan, is shocking. The most horrifying details of fancy ways to avoid paying taxes, after earning millions of dollars using systems and infrastructures created by the inescapably collective nature of economic growth and innovation. The preview of the Senate Subcommmittee staff's investigation -- based on extensive interviews, subpoenas, and reviews of some 1.5 million corporate documents, internal memoranda, SEC filings, and emails, is a decisive indictment:
"The following case history shows how, over a thirteen-year period from 1992 to 2005, two U.S. citizens, Sam and Charles Wyly, guided by an armada of attorneys, brokers, and other professionals, transferred at least $190 million in stock options and warrants to a complex array of 58 offshore trusts and shell corporations. It shows how the Wylys and their advisers directed the exercise of those stock options and warrants, used the shares to generate investment gains, and used at least $600 million in untaxed offshore dollars to provide substantial loans to Wyly interests, finance business ventures, acquire U.S. real estate, and purchase furnishings, art, and jewelry for the personal use of Wyly family members."
"This case history illustrates the roles played by legal, financial, and other professionals, as well as offshore service providers, to build and manage the Wyly-related offshore network and conceal the Wylys’ continued direction and enjoyment of the offshore assets. It also illustrates the use of a number of offshore mechanisms that raise policy concerns, including stock option-annuity swaps; pass-through loans using an offshore vehicle; securities traded by offshore entities associated with corporate insiders; and the use of hedge funds and other investment vehicles to control use of funds placed offshore."
'The Wyly Case History' goes on for more than two hundred pages, and then into five separate detailed appendices. For me, it's a truly frightening and detailed view of the sausage factory of today's globalized Welfare Mothers (to use the term as it was intended by Michael Moore in Stupid White Men). It's embarrassing. Because Sam and Charles apparently won't apologize, I will. I'm sorry.
The full report is:
Update, July 2010:
The wheels of regulatory and legal scrutiny turn slowly, but they seem to be turning nonetheless. See:
Edward Wyatt (2010). "Wyly Brothers Charged with $550 Million Fraud." New York Times, July 29.
The Saga Continues, May 2011:
When I think of Jeb Hensarling, the first thing that comes to mind is his famous quote in the depths of the global financial crisis in late 2008. Hank Paulson had sent up a three-page bailout proposal for what would eventually be known as TARP, and Hensarling angrily denounced his Republican friends in the Bush Administration, saying that the GOP caucus in the House didn't like having to choose between "Armageddon and the road to socialism," and having to do so in twenty-four hours. The first bill went down in flames, thanks to Republican resistance; the stock market promptly nosedived by 777 points, and shortly thereafter a revised bill finally passed.
It turns out that Hensarling's supporters include the billionaire Wyly brothers. Hensarling is doing his best to avoid the fallout of the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit. Meanwhile, the Wyly's attorney says that while the Wylys "have long supported the causes and candidates in which they believe" -- including Hensarling -- but they have been "less politically active" lately; part of the reason? "...an 'increasing focus' on other issues, including the environment." Including the environment? Can you imagine what the environment would look like in the worldview of Sam and Charles Wyly?
T.W. Farnam (2011). "The Influence Industry: A Leading Republican's Longtime Ties to 2 Men Accused of Financial Fraud." Washington Post, May 11.
A Sincere Clarification, August 2011:
None of the critical commentary above means I have any ill will on a personal basis. All persons deserve respect and dignity in a genuinely universal understanding of humanity and human rights. I am thus sincerely saddened to learn of this:
Charles Duhigg (2011). "Entrepreneur Charles Wyly, 77, Dies; Amassed Fortune with Brother." New York Times, August 8.