Assange invokes his rural upbringing as inspiration for WikiLeaks

Here's part of what Julian Assange said in defense of WikiLeaks, as presented in a New York Times story:

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, referred to his upbringing in a small Australian country town, where people "spoke their minds bluntly" and distrusted big government. "WikiLeaks was created around these core values," he wrote.

Hmmm.

Nebraska town marks its spot

Dan Barry reports from Hooper, Nebraska, population 827. Barry's excuse for the story is the fact that Hooper decided to erect a sign--or as Barry writes, a "SIGN"--after a new road bypassed the town. He writes of the consequences of the bypass:

No longer did travelers have to pass the Hooper ice cream parlor, or the Hooper grain elevator, or the ancient railroad cars sitting on discontinued tracks, or the decades-old neon marquee, long past glowing, that welcomed travelers to a downtown from the late 19th century.

* * *

The small green sign planted beside the new highway barely whispered their town’s name. And in the flat terrain of rural Nebraska, the eye can see far into the distance, yet miss so much.

The SIGN is "a tapered, 24-foot tower"that spells “'Hooper' in 18-inch-high letters down two of its three sides." It rises, Barry observes, above the "fertile flatness," proclaiming the presence of Hooper.

But Barry's real reason for writing about Hooper, I think, is not so much the sign as it is what is hinted at in that first sentence quoted above. Barry writes a little rural vignette, a glimpse of a town as it once was, as it now is, struggling with population loss, guided by civic leaders. The story is well worth a read for the little sentimental journey it provides--at least for those of who remain sentimental about small-town America.

But back to the SIGN: As much as I have written about lack of anonymity as a feature of rural communities, I find it interesting that, Hooper--like its residents--refused to be anonymous. It refused to be just another town, overlooked.

Grassroots audits of government programs benefit rural poor in India

Lydia Polgreen reports in today's New York Times on a program in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh that permits beneficiaries of government programs to audit them. Indeed, the law was written to require the "social audits," under which "villagers scour the records and look for fraud." Polgreen calls this "an experiment in grassroots democracy in rural India aimed at ensuring that the benefits of government programs for the poor actually go to the poor." Her story makes several other references to India's rural poor, including this one:

With the Indian government planning to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to help the rural poor over the next five years, such audits will be crucial to reducing waste and fraud.
Much of that cash will go to a program created in 2005 to provide people in the countryside with 100 days of work at minimum wage on small-scale village infrastructure projects. This year, the government has budgeted $9 billion for the program, potentially ripe pickings for corrupt businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats.

Rural-to-urban migration strains India's cities

A story in the New York Times a few days ago reported on the challenge that rapid rural-to-urban migration presents for India. One of the challenges is a lack of urban housing to accommodate the millions who arrive in Indian cities each year. One reason that housing is not being developed quickly enough, according to Lydia Polgreen's report, is that for many years, "Indian governments tried to discourage migration to cities by making city life unaffordable and unbearable for new arrivals. These policies were driven at least in part by a Gandhian belief that India should be a rural nation, and more broadly by a centrally planned, socialist approach to development." But, Polgreen observes, Indians have voted against such ideas "with their feet." One estimate indicates that, in every minute for the next four decades, 31 rural Indians will arrive in an Indian city. That's 700 million migrants over the course of 43 years.

Clearly, Indians migrate to cities because of lack of opportunity and hardship in the rural reaches of the country--what some have referred to as "hunger and desperation" in the countryside. Thus, India's response should include both rural development (to stem the flow) and urban planning (to accommodate it). In a forthcoming article about the challenges arising from rural-to-urban migration in the Indian context, Human Rights and Development for India's Rural Remnant: A Capabilities-Based Assessment (UC Davis Law Review 2011), I call for an end to the separation of "urban planning" from "rural development." I advocate instead joint government attention to development and planning along the rural-urban continuum in response to--and, I hope, in mitigation of--India's urban juggernaut.

The rural vote in Australia: A story of population and service loss

On my recent trip "down under," a front page story in the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, caught my eye. The headline for the Nov. 16, 2010 story was "Fields of Discontent." In the run up to the state parliamentary elections, it discussed the situation in a farming area called the Mallee, in the far northwestern part of the state of Victoria. The sub head on the front page was telling: "There might be only 50 people in Werrimull, but they do vote." A further subhead stated: "Unlike their city cousins, Werrimull locals such as Ron Hards, don't have to fret about the quality of the local hospital, or the punctuality of the trains. These services are long gone."

The story unfolds as the headline and subheads suggest: a rural place with an agricultural base suffering population loss and an attendant loss of services. The story focuses not only on Werrimull, but on the wider district in which it sits within the Mallee region, which is the Millewa. Werrimull has just one school, the P12, but the story discusses the town's kindergarten as the institution most at risk. With just 14 children, classes have been cut back to just one day a week, whereas it met twice a week just three years ago. This kinder is the only on in the Millewa, and one family travels 100 km round trip to reach it. To be open for two days now, journalist Darren Gray reports, each resident of Werrimull would have to donate $1000--on top of funding from the state. An organizer of the local kindergarten comments:

Our kids deserve the same opportunities that the children in town get and they deserve an education. ... They need to change the way they fund kinders. And instead of funding per child, fund for a teacher ... And at least have a look t the way they fund rural areas.

Gray observes, however, that "Politicians don't venture into the Millewa too often, and when they do, they don't bring a funding solution for the local kinder with them." He also lists other issues likely to influence how residents vote:

[T]he state of "The Millewa" road running east-west through the district and its lack of bitumen shoulder, the controversial $692 million north-south pipeline built to suck water from the Goulburn River but now sitting idle, the government's response to the expected locust plague and the lack of local health services.

Gray and those he quotes suggest that the current labor government in Victoria is unlikely to fare well with Millewa voters, in light of these issues.

Finally, the story touches on other rural themes, including attachment to place and population loss. About a century ago, the Millewa was part of a "closer resettlement scheme" which "carved up enormous pieces of land to lure settles to the bush." Early on, Werrimull had a population of 1000, and a "bush nursing hospital, three churches, government offices, a doctor, police station, local town hall and a bank." Now, many of those who remain are descendants of those who came to The Millewa nearly a hundred years ago--including Jess Hards, the woman quoted regarding the local kinder. She is the daughter in law of Ron Hards, the farmer featured in the story, whose family were among the region's pioneers.

Rural/Regional Law and Justice in Australia

I've not been blogging much for the past few weeks because I was in Australia to give a couple of lectures regarding my work on law and rural livelihoods. One of my talks was in Warrnambool, western Victoria, for the Rural/Regional Law and Justice Conference hosted by Deakin University, 19-21 November. I was a key note speaker, along with Professor Daniela Stehlik, Director of the Northern Institute of Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, and Alex Ward, President of the Law Council of Australia. The organizer of the event was Richard Coverdale, a lecturer in law at Deakin (which has campuses in Geelong, Melbourne, and Warrnambool). He has written a very interesting paper called Postcode Justice (about variations in access to justice from place to place and particularly along the rural-urban continuum), which he presented at the event. The conference included several dozen papers categorized according to three threads: Legal Practice, Social Justice, and Legal Service Systems.

I'll be writing more over the next few weeks about what I learned regarding law and justice in rural Australia and, more particularly, academic and policy attention to these issues in the Australian context. For now, here is a link to a press release issued by Deakin University in the wake of the event.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part LXXIII): Woman charged with assault, allowing abuse of her children

The November 17, 2010 issue of the Newton County Times reports that a 51-year-old woman has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault, two counts of permitting abuse of a minor and a single count of battery int he second degree. All are class De felonies. A hearing was set for October, but the female defendant failed to appear. The woman's 14-year-old son allegedly told her that he had engaged in sexual contact with his younger sisters, aged 13 and 11 and that he continued to have contact with the elder sister. The complaint alleged that the mother "recklessly failed to take action to protect" the female children "from further exposure." In addition, the 11-year-old also sent a letter to the defendant, detailing the brother's abuse of the girl. The defendant allegedly responded by "hitting the girl in the face, knocking out a tooth," which led to the battery charge. The aggravated assault charges stem from incidents when (1) the defendant sat on the 13-year-old child, holding her hands behind her back and striking her legs and buttocks with a board and (2) the defendant stuffed socks into the same child's mouth, then hit and punched her. The children's father also reportedly abused them--by shaking them.

The Department of Human Services has removed all four children from the home.

Other news regarding criminal charges involves failure to pay child support, possession of controlled substances (methamphetamine) with intent to deliver, and making and uttering hot checks.

Arguably, the common denominator is class

The premise of this story in the New York Times is that Barack Obama and John Boehner have nothing in common. What it fails to see is that both are from unprivileged economic backgrounds--which I see as significant common ground. To use the term coined by Joan Williams, they are both "class migrants."

If you read, Dreams from my Father, you get a good sense of President Obama's upbringing. The formative influences were not "upper class," although his parents were well educated, and his mother eventually earned a PhD. But Obama's maternal grandparents were solidly working class, and he spent many of his earliest years living under their roof and their supervision in Hawaii. They had a profound influence on him. (Some have suggested that if Obama got back in touch with this narrative and played it up, he would be a much more successful politician right now). The New York Times earlier told us more about John Boehner's upbringing than, perhaps, we ever wanted to know: Boehner grew up working in his father's bar in a suburb of Cincinnati and graduated from Xavier University in Cincinnati. He's a working class kid made good, while a couple of his 11 siblings are reportedly unemployed, and most are in blue-collar jobs.

The key difference between these two men, both from relatively unprivileged backgrounds, is that one ascended to power largely through elite education while the other did so by being a baron of commerce, by playing (and winning) the free-market game.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part LXXII): "New" jail now likely to be in "old" nursing home

The front page of the Nov. 3 issue of the Newton County Times is chock full of law and order news. First, it reports the arrests of four men for various thefts and burglaries. Three of the arrests were made by the Boone County Sheriff's Department action in cooperation with Newton County authorities. These three arrests involved residential and commercial burglaries in neighboring Boone County, and one suspect was also facing drug-related charges in Newton County.

The other arrest was of a 24-year-old Newton County resident, Shane Middleton. He allegedly broke into the Dollar General Store and the Jasper Farm Supply, both in Jasper. Middleton is charged with commercial burglary and theft of property and is being held without bond.

In other news, it appears that the county will move ahead with turning its old nursing home (currently an annex to the county courthouse) into the county jail. This is because the bids to build a new jail have come in substantially higher than earlier anticipated, primarily because the soil on proposed site of the new jail has proved unsuitable for a septic tank, and the site is too far from the city water system to feasibly link to it.

Parsing the rural mid-term vote

See this New York Times graphic showing how various demographic groups voted in the recent mid-term election. Most demographic groups, e.g., women, men, all voters aged 30 and over, Catholics, Protestants, Midwesterners and Southerners supported Republicans. Rural voters also supported Republicans--by a margin of 28%. This compares to suburban voters, who voted Republican by a 12% margin and those living in places with populations between 10,000 and 50,000, who voted Republican by a 14% margin. On the other hand, those living in urban clusters of 500,000 or more supported Democrats by a 32% margin, followed by those living in urban clusters between 50,000 and 500,000, who supported Democrats by a 6% margin.

A related NYT article is here. Another graphic, this one showing movement of various Demographic groups to the right or left (mostly to the right, in varying degrees) in the mid-term election, is here (click no. 10)

For more analysis of the rural vote, see the Daily Yonder's excellent coverage here.

Local, in Alaska

William Yardley's report on Lisa Murkowski's apparent success as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate seat she currently holds makes several references to Alaska's peculiarities--and to the local. Here's an excerpt:

For all the populist anger and legal wrangling in Alaska over federal oversight of its natural resources and protected species, from offshore oil to polar bears, many Alaskans long ago made a pragmatic peace with the arrangement, and they worry what will happen if things change significantly. A third of the state economy depends on federal spending. Many rural villages lack basic plumbing. Only a fraction of Alaska is reachable by road.

Murkowski reportedly said to crowds, “To hell with politics. Let’s do what’s right for Alaska.” She tapped what Yardley characterizes as "provincial pride" to shift the focus away from national concerns--and a Tea Party orientation--back to Alaska.