Month: June 2011

Zen Behind Bars

Post author By Louis Goggans
Post date June 30, 2011

CREDIT: © Maksym Gorpenyuk | Dreamstime.com

Some female inmates at the Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Center have a chance to escape — at least within their minds.

A select group of inmates housed there participate in monthly meditation classes offered by Memphis-based PremaHealing, an organization specializing in meditation, healing, and emotional processing.

Carol Crane, co-founder of PremaHealing, said the classes teach offenders how to avoid stress.

“We go in and teach them breathing exercises and ways to calm the mind. If they do have emotions arise as a response, they can use these techniques to process through those emotions, instead of having to react to them,” Crane said.

PremaHealing began providing the classes six months ago after partnering with the support group Families of Incarcerated Individuals.

The classes are part of the Families of Incarcerated Individuals’ “Doorways Reentry” program, which helps female offenders make a successful transition after their release. There are around 15 women in the class each month.

Marquetta Nebo, executive director of Families of Incarcerated Individuals, said the classes have helped many offenders vent personal anger.

“The emotional processes for meditation helps them release the anger they have bottled up in them,” Nebo said. “Instead of verbalizing everything, they can do these techniques.”

To qualify for the classes, offenders at Mark H. Luttrell have to be within 12 months of their release and recommended by correctional faculty.

PremaHealing and Families of Incarcerated Individuals are currently searching for additional funding to provide meditation classes for male prisoners at the Shelby County Jail.

“The literature seems to indicate this is worth doing,” said Rod Bowers, assistant chief jailer for the Shelby County Jail. “The benefits the classes could bring include inmates being better behaved, fewer disruptions, arguments and fights, and just day-to-day improvement with the management of the facility.”

Bowers said he didn’t know how much it would cost to institute the program at the men’s jail, but there would have to be long-term evidence that the meditation classes lower the rate of recidivism.

Crane said they decided to start the classes here after similar meditation classes at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, were shown to lower disruption and violence at the facility.

“We thought Memphis would be a perfect place to incorporate a meditation teaching in the prison system,” Crane said. “Memphis has a lot of people who have experienced trauma, and there’s a lower economic situation here, which causes a lot of people to end up incarcerated.”

Nebo said she hopes they can acquire more funding, so more inmates have the opportunity to release bottled-up emotions and stress.

“The more avenues of therapy, the better,” Nebo said. “We need to give [male and female offenders] as many options as possible if we’re really trying to … get to the root cause of their emotional problems or issues that cause them to do these crimes.”

News The Fly-By

Protect and Conserve

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date June 30, 2011

A portable toilet in the parking lot is the only relief in sight for families at Overton Park’s playground.

But real restrooms are just one change Overton Park advocates say could come about if Midtown’s largest park is managed by a nonprofit conservancy. Those advocates launched the “Speak Up for Our Park” campaign this week with two meetings to gather input from park users on a conservancy model proposal.

“The conservancy would be similar to the one that manages Shelby Farms,” said Naomi Van Tol of Citizens to Preserve Overton Park. “With the Shelby Farms model, the county owns the land and signs a management agreement with the nonprofit conservancy.”

Similar conservancy models have also been successful in managing Central Park in New York City and Piedmont Park in Atlanta.

The city’s parks department manages Overton Park, along with 159 other Memphis parks. Although the city currently pays for Overton Park maintenance, “Speak Up” co-chair George Cates said the department’s budget prevents it from doing anything beyond the most basic upkeep.

“The parks department has been leaned down so much, they don’t have the money to do the job for the entire park system,” Cates said. “The whole city should be concerned. They have an impossible challenge.”

Aside from keeping grass cut and trash picked up, Van Tol said a conservancy would allow for bigger park improvements, such as adding real restrooms and updating playground equipment. There are some restrooms in the golf course clubhouse, but they’re located a far distance from the playground and greensward areas.

Another major concern is Memphis Zoo overflow parking on the greensward, but Van Tol said the zoo is planning a parking garage for the northeast corner of their property.

“It would be a big, expensive project that the city would have to chip in on,” Van Tol said. “But the greensward should be for people. It creates a negative feeling when you’re surrounded by cars, and there’s dust and noise and pollution.”

The decision to push for a conservancy comes on the heels of Governor Bill Haslam signing legislation to designate 126 acres of the park’s old-growth forest as a state natural area, protecting it from future development.

“But the park is 342 acres, not just 126,” Van Tol said. “We all feel like the open, public spaces are really being neglected. The park doesn’t have a dedicated funding source.”

Cates said all the park’s properties — the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Memphis College of Art, the Levitt Shell, and the Memphis Zoo — support the conservancy plan as a solution to park funding issues.

At the public meeting on Saturday, more than 200 people showed up to fill out a survey. The survey also is offered online at overtonpark.org, and volunteers will be walking around the park with clipboards to gather opinions through early August.

If there’s enough support for a conservancy when the survey ends on August 8th, the group will have to take the proposal up with the Memphis City Council.

“If the conservancy is formed, our intent and plan is to work in close accord with the parks department,” Cates said, emphasizing that the city would still own the park’s land. “They will have a seat on the conservancy board.”

Music Music Features

Something Old, Something New

Post author By Stephen Deusner
Post date June 30, 2011

The Civil Wars are not Civil War buffs. Especially with the sesquicentennial of that bloody North-South conflagration, it’s natural to assume that Joy Williams and John Paul White chose their stage name as a nod to that tumultuous, brother-versus-brother period in American history. Their music, despite its modern-day production sheen, is certainly steeped in old traditions whose roots extend well into the 19th century — modest country laments, fervent gospel harmonies, elegant waltz-time hymns.

Williams, however, is quick to puncture that assumption. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the events of the Civil War,” she says. “It’s really about the battles that we have within ourselves or with other people. It doesn’t have to be the person standing next to you. It could be with someone you’ve known for years or somebody who’s long since passed, or it could be with addiction or God or lack of God. That conflict is in the fiber of our music.”

White and Williams met serendipitously at a songwriting session in Nashville when they were both struggling solo artists. They gelled naturally and immediately, although the idea of forming a duo didn’t occur to them until later. “I’ve never been a part of something that clicked like this musically, so we just followed it like moths to a flame,” White says. “It felt good to do it, so we tried it again to see if it still worked. It just grew from there to become the Civil Wars.”

Williams and White are married — but not to each other. Razzing each other in interviews and intertwining their vocals in a familial embrace, they act more like siblings, which Williams suggests is the key to their chemistry: “With John Paul and I not being in a romantic relationship, we’re able to bring the yin and the yang, the male and the female, and our own unique stories to the table and create out of that without any fear that the band might not be sustainable. It’s a benefit to us not being an actual couple.”

The gregarious Williams and the reserved White are something of a mismatched pair, especially in the musical influences. “I grew up in the Bay Area, so I was listening to the Beach Boys, San Francisco rock, and the Carpenters,” Williams says. “When I got my license, it was Top 40 and rap. John Paul grew up in Alabama listening to country and bluegrass, so I think we have a lot of varied influences that have seeped into our psyche and therefore into the way we write.”

Their songs thrive on contradiction and contrast: Their most popular song, “Poison & Wine,” hinges on the logic-puzzle chorus, “I don’t love you but I always will.”

“Writing together is one of the easiest and most organic things that I’ve ever experienced,” she says. “We walk away with songs that we’re really proud of, and I’m knocking on wood as I’m saying this now.”

Thanks to a Gray’s Anatomy placement and an endorsement from Taylor Swift, the Civil Wars have become one of the biggest acts in Nashville, their rise in popularity coinciding with the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, and other artists lumped into the New Americana movement.

“We’re more than happy to be mentioned in the same breath as those artists,” says White, who embraces rather than dismisses attempts to categorize the Civil Wars. “We don’t shy away from any sort of label — indie folk, folk rock, folk country. We’ve had it all tagged, and we’re happy about that because we would just as soon straddle genres than fit neatly into a box. We’re always surprised by the types of people who gravitate to what we do, from metalheads to country fans.”

The New Americana movement, however, is extremely suspect, as upstart bands like the Brits Mumford & Sons and Seattle’s the Head and the Heart tend to use old styles as easy shorthand for meaning. It’s superficial authenticity — something the Civil Wars skirt easily. Like the Felice Brothers and Abigail Washburn, two of the most adventurous acts associated with that trend, White and Williams integrate their time-tested influences into something new, a distinctive sound that ranges from the strident acoustic blues of “Barton Hollow” to the subdued carnival spiral of “The Girl with the Red Balloon” and the country strut of “Forget Me Not.”

Their range comes through in their live shows as well, which are even more barebones than their studio recordings. “We control every bit of sound that comes off the stage,” says White, who plays a variety of guitars while Williams plays keyboard, piano, and concertina. “We don’t want people to say that was good for one or two people. We want them to walk away feeling like they got the full experience.

“It’s an emotional thing to sing these songs, and I hope it will always be that way,” Williams says. “Being on stage and making music shouldn’t be a passive thing. You have to bleed a little when you create. There’s no greater joy than walking off stage feeling like you’ve connected with a lot of people. You have that after-Thanksgiving turkey-dinner feeling — tired but happy and content about it.”

The Civil Wars

Playhouse on the Square

Wednesday, July 6th, 8 p.m.

Tags Playhouse on the Square

Music Record Reviews

Local Music Review: Jerusalem and the Starbaskets

Post author By J.D. Reager
Post date June 30, 2011

Memphis native and local music scene veteran Jeremy Freeze recently moved back to the Bluff City after several years in Columbia, Missouri, bringing with him his latest musical project, the noise/psych-pop duo Jerusalem and the Starbaskets. Columbia’s loss is Memphis’ gain.

On DOST, the band explores a brand of loose, lo-fi, psychedelic indie rock that would feel like well-worn territory were it not for the strong Southern inflection that subtly creeps its way into Freeze’s melodic composition and vocal delivery and ultimately elevates the project to a much higher level. Songs like “First Cigarette in the Rain” and “What Other Flags?” simultaneously evoke the noisiness of early Pavement and the ragged Americana of Levon Helm/the Band. — JDR

Grade: A-

Art Art Feature

The Measure of a Man

Post author By Carol Knowles
Post date June 30, 2011

As a result of Dixon director Kevin Sharp’s far-reaching vision and collaboration with the Petit Palais art museum, “Jean-Louis Forain: La Comédie parisienne” — the blockbuster show that opened to long lines and rave reviews in Paris last March — now hangs in the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Social satirist, patriot, and visionary as well as one of France’s most respected Impressionists, Jean-Louis Forain paints not only luminous landscapes like Woman Walking on the Seashore, he records light in all its manifestations: from gas-lit brothels to the bright lights of Parisian opera houses, from artillery fire exploding in the night sky above French soldiers to the light of religious experience so rarified that contemporary critics compared the emotional power of Forain’s etchings The Prodigal Son and The Mocking of Christ to the works of Rembrandt.

The mix of satire and sympathy that characterizes many of the 130 paintings, pastels, watercolors, political cartoons, and etchings now filling the Dixon makes this retrospective a powerful chronicle of French culture from the belle epoque through World War I to the Roaring Twenties.

In Forain’s watercolor and gouache The Client, the patron of a 19th-century brothel straddles a chair in a brightly lit room so that he can carefully study the women lined up in front of him. The Renoir-esque prostitute, far left, is nude except for the black cross on her florid chest, white high heels, striped stockings fastened with garter belts just above her knees, and an open dressing gown that frames her overripe body. The youngest prostitute, head-down and still clothed, sits in the corner of the room not quite ready to suffer the male gaze.

Forain employs Impressionist techniques to explore every facet of the human condition. Lamplight turns the dress and body of The Debutante into a dazzling white mist. The facial features of this girl are indistinct, her character not yet formed. Like the young prostitute, she sits with head bowed. And like the prostitute, the debutante is being trained to be desirable, to be accommodating, to follow a carefully scripted role.

Executed close-up and with materials at-hand, Forain’s pastel and gouache on cardboard In the Wings is an unsettling portrait of sexual politics played out in 19th-century opera houses, where ballet dancers were pressured to accept the advances as well as the patronage of wealthy season ticket holders known as the abonnes. It is unlikely that the dancer in this piece will touch the emotions of the aging abonne with whom she flirts. After decades of assignations with his young charges, the wealthy gentleman’s haughty face looks as hard and gray as stone.

There are no empty hearts, no haughty expressions in Forain’s luminous pastel on paper In Front of the Set. An older dancer, face chiseled with character, sits in front of a stage set where a green lawn slopes down to deep-blue water topped by a pale teal sky. With a look of rue, even sadness, on his face, a portly abonne looks down at his potential conquest back-dropped by Forain’s stunning simulation of the natural world. In spite of a world layered with gamesmanship and illusion, both abonne and dancer have managed to salvage some of their humanity.

In the lovingly and carefully observed, stylish but not stylized portrait Madame Jean Forain in a Black Hat, Forain records his wife’s auburn hair, soft lemon dress, large feathered hat, and the subtle but unmistakably mischievous smile that plays across her arched brows, wide eyes, and relaxed lips. A capable painter as well as great beauty, Jean Forain proved to be a fine partner for her quick-witted, empathic husband. Artistic excellence and strength of family persist. Florence Valdes-Forain, the artist’s great-granddaughter and the leading authority on his work, has authored a full-color 250-page catalog for the show that explores more than 200 of Forain’s most accomplished artworks.

The paintings that fill the final gallery of the exhibit are a powerful last chapter on Forain’s art and life. After the war and until his death in 1931, Forain recorded night life in the Parisian dance halls where jazz flourished, cultural expectations and sexual mores dramatically changed, and flappers redefined womanhood. With brushstrokes by turns fluid and frenzied, blurred and bold, Forain adopts an increasingly abstract and modern palette as he captures the energy that roared through every aspect of life in Paris in the 1920s.

Through October 9th

Tags The Dixon Gallery & Gardens

News The Fly-By

Changing Course

Post author By Hannah Sayle
Post date June 30, 2011

After a push from the state, the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department will take on the full amount of Title X funding from the state — a reversal of the position Director Yvonne Madlock took this spring.

In a letter to the Tennessee Department of Health dated April 8th, Madlock stated, “Shelby County does not have the ability to take on the additional, substantial financial cost of operating a larger program or the administrative costs associated with sub-contracting these funds to other potential local providers.”

Now the health department will be the sole recipient of $1.3 million in Title X funding, cutting Planned Parenthood and other providers out of a direct funding relationship with the state.

Title X is a federal grant program that provides funding for family-planning services, such as medical exams, birth control, and HIV testing, for low-income and uninsured patients. No Title X money can be used to provide abortions.

In the past, the funding went to local health departments, but those agencies had the option of contracting with private organizations, like Planned Parenthood, to help provide services. Recently, the state health department began pushing county health departments to take on the full Title X funding. Once Nashville-Davidson County agreed to accept all the Title X funding, Madlock felt Memphis was an outlier.

“The last thing we wanted to see were the resources allocated to Shelby County reallocated to another part of the state,” Madlock said. “Given that, we decided to reconsider our position.”

Madlock said she does have some concerns about her choice.

“We still are not convinced, as a county, that we will be able to afford to be the sole recipient of that entire pile of money,” Madlock said. “Because the way in which Title X dollars are earned, the reimbursement level does not cover costs.”

In other words, Title X funding is not enough to cover the full cost of providing family-planning services in Shelby County. If the state requires the health department to take on the funding and maintain the current caseload (formerly a responsibility shared with Planned Parenthood, which leverages private funds to supplement Title X funding), the county would be unable to handle the influx of patients.

So why take on the funding in light of these hurdles?

“The state is not requiring the same level of caseload for those dollars,” Madlock said. “And it does look like the state is going to make an incremental increase to the fee structure so we’ll be able to bill more per service. Having the combination of both the caseload [requirement] removed and the opportunity for there to be more dollars in Shelby County, we can continue to provide services here through the Health Department.”

But reducing the caseload requirement could be bad news for women in Shelby County.

“The dilemma that this creates is that fewer women are ultimately offered services,” Madlock said. “It’s not a total win.”

Madlock said she probably won’t be able to hire more help to handle extra work created by taking on Title X funding.

Planned Parenthood and other family-planning providers will likely still be subcontracted — by the county, instead of the state — to take on some of the caseload commensurate with the funding.

“The state has simply made the process more cumbersome and more costly,” said Barry Chase, president of Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis. “The state could have issued a request for proposals the way they have done in the past, and then the county would not have to be assigning people to do something the state has done in the past. It’s passing the responsibility down.”

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Digging In

Post author By Hannah Sayle
Post date June 30, 2011

If you were sad to see Mary Phillips leave her post as manager of Urban Farms in Binghamton, you’ll be happy to know that she’s staying plenty busy and she certainly hasn’t left the urban farming behind.

“I left Urban Farms in April, and I knew I wanted to be growing things,” Phillips says. “It seemed natural that if I couldn’t find a garden or a farm to work at, then I would want to create them.”

So Phillips, along with Caitlin Dupuigrenet, Debbi La Rue, and Stephanie Rachelle, have started their own urban farming cottage industry: Farm Girl Food Gardens. You pay somewhere in the ballpark of $250, and they will build, install, and plant a 4-by-4-foot raised vegetable garden in your yard.

“I’m not a landscaper. I don’t do gardens. But I want to help people grow their own food,” Phillips says.

A 4-by-4 bed is the example Phillips uses for pricing purposes, but Farm Girl Food Gardens is open to custom garden projects of all sizes, in raised beds or tilled soil, on trellises, or behind chicken-wire fences. She’s even working with a client who is interested in building a chicken coop.

As for how much you can fit in your garden, Phillips says it depends on what you want to grow.

“I use the square-foot gardening method, so there are a certain number of vegetables you can fit in each square foot. It’s perfect for people with OCD tendencies who want everything to be in order,” Phillips says. “I have one tomato plant per two squares or four basil plants per one square, and I tell clients if they want tomato plants or squash, those take up more room and they won’t get as much variety.”

Although Phillips can offer them a variety of plants, clients are usually after a few items in particular.

“Everybody wants tomatoes,” Phillips says. “And herbs. I’ve gotten a lot of requests for perennial herbs. Things that would cost a lot to buy in a grocery store.”

Tomatoes and summer herbs are well and good, but Phillips is on a personal mission to disabuse Memphians of the notion that gardening is only a warm-weather pastime.

“I’m a huge fan of fall and winter gardening,” Phillips says. “We are lucky to live in a climate where we can grow all year-round. I am going to do a big push in the fall to encourage people to plant spinach and kale and lettuce and other things that do well in our winters here. It’s really hot outside right now, and it’s more pleasant to garden in the fall.”

But, she adds, if you’re interested in getting started this summer, there are still plenty of options for the rest of the season.

“I’m installing a garden today with winter squash transplants, sweet potatoes, some kind of mature tomato transplants, and a lot of perennial herbs,” she says.

Phillips is working on some other projects as well. For the summer, she’s market manager at the Cooper-Young Community Farmers Market. She’s also teaching at Green Leaf Learning Farm in South Memphis, a program run by Knowledge Quest to teach kids the merits and mechanics of urban farming. This fall, Phillips will take a position teaching farming and horticulture at Hutchison School.

For more information on pricing and availability, email farmgirlfoodgardens@gmail.com or go on Facebook at facebook.com/farmgirlfoodgardens. Prices vary from project to project.

Film Features Film/TV

Just Bad

Post author By Hannah Sayle
Post date June 30, 2011

With Adam Mansbach’s Go the F*** to Sleep making such a splash on the literary scene, Bad Teacher should take note of how candid, cynical humor about child care can succeed. Instead, the newest film from Jake Kasdan (Orange County and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) is more callous than amusing, more crude than clever.

Elizabeth, played by Cameron Diaz, is no Miss Crabtree: She comes to class hungover, she smokes weed on campus, she steals money from the class fund-raiser to put in her “new boobs” fund for breast augmentation. Her failures as a human, much more so than her failures as a teacher, make her equal parts an unbelievable and undeserving protagonist. Within the first 10 minutes of the film, she tries to hide the fact that she doesn’t know her own fiancé’s birthday, and by the time she has smeared poison ivy all over her school rival’s coffee mug, you’ll be wondering why you’re supposed to care whether she has the inevitable epiphany and character change the film demands.

But change she does, the mechanics of which are more than a little shoddy. After telling a sad-poetry-wielding preteen that he’s sensitive — “That’s not a compliment,” she adds — and that he’ll never get the girl he’s pining for, Elizabeth takes off her bra and gives it to him to show his buddies and bolster his rep. Harking back to Molly Ringwald’s similar benevolent gesture in Sixteen Candles, this might have been pitifully sweet if Elizabeth weren’t, well, his teacher. But we are to take this as a sign that Elizabeth is starting her transformation.

Bad Teacher‘s lack of restraint continually takes Elizabeth’s impudence to ridiculous new heights: dry humping to completion with her rival’s insufferable boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) or hosing herself down at the carwash fund-raiser, prompting a shot of one of her students with a hard-on. As if directed by the very pack of horny boys Elizabeth mishandles, the film frequently cannot control itself from toppling into an exercise in sex jokes and scatology. Each time a shot at genuine situational comedy emerges, the film opts for gross-out humor instead.

For instance, when the eager Miss Squirrel (Lucy Punch), Elizabeth’s diametric opposite, tracks down the principal as he, ahem, tends to some business in the men’s room, the awkward entrapment is funny enough. But the scene, unable to quit while it’s ahead, ends with — how to put it delicately? — gratuitous, unholy bathroom noises.

The film falters this way for the full 90-minute runtime, Elizabeth acting out of line in her uninspired, hardened cynic’s role. This is, of course, the premise. But unlike other tales of hilarious, jaded cranks finding their soft spot (Bad Santa comes to mind), Bad Teacher spends so much time making Elizabeth a one-dimensional miscreant, it leaves you rooting for anyone but her.

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Greek Tragedy

Post author By Steve Haley
Post date June 30, 2011

While leading a group of Southwest Tennessee Community College sociology students on a study-abroad program in Greece this spring, I happened to be in Athens at the start of the six weeks of continuous protests, which have been dubbed Aganaktismenoi (loosely, “the indignant”).

On the first morning, nearly 1,000 Greeks gathered at Sygmata Square. On cue, the riot police formed a line separating the crowd from the parliament building. The mood was friendly, with no violence that day. A “Greek Spring” it was. The powerful labor unions had not been a part of this “spontaneous” outpouring. Weeks later, however, more than 100,000 would crowd the square.

Much like our own Tea Party movement, the protests were an outgrowth of Greeks’ frustration with their government for getting them into economic difficulties. Unlike the Tea Partiers, these were hard-core socialists who were not in the mood to sacrifice the standard of living the government was threatening with its austerity program.

The crowd was quite diverse, with a scattering of Che-shirted older men as well as mothers and babies. Drums and whistles, banners denouncing the government, and the cries of “Kleftes!” (thieves) stirred up the crowd. The Greek equivalent of our middle finger is hands raised with the palm toward your target. In this case, hands were aimed at politicians inside the parliament building. Leaflets entitled “300” were passed out by stylishly bearded young men. Greeks are really into the movie 300, with its depiction of the outnumbered Greeks holding off the Persians — or, in this case, the politicians. In reality, they only held them off for a while, but why ruin a good story?

As I mingled, I attempted to get a sense of who the crowd blamed for their country’s troubles. After all, was it not Greece that brought it on itself after joining the European Union (EU) in 2001? With all the cheap money floating around then, the party had begun.

Greece already had a debt to gross domestic product ratio higher than 100 percent in 2000, before it joined the EU. After cooking the books, Greece convinced the EU to let them in and now the country has a debt of $500 billion.

After a bailout package of $155 billion from its international creditors, the Greeks are eagerly awaiting another installment of $17 billion in early July. There is a “but,” however. The government must show its intention to eliminate part of the debt with austerity measures. They have cut their deficit by 5 percent of GDP already this year, but it still stands at a whopping 9.6 percent. The package that will be presented to Parliament this week will cut $40 billion in debt by 2015, or 12 percent of Greece’s GDP. The equivalent cut for our government would be $1.75 trillion! Even the Tea Partiers wouldn’t go there.

I didn’t find a single person who blamed Greece for causing its own problems. No, it was the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the EU, and the Germans who were forcing these draconian cuts on the Greek people. No matter that Greece has several hundred closed crafts, such as taxi drivers, hairdressers, and pharmacists. No matter that if your union has enough pull, you can convince the government that your profession is so stressful that you should retire before age 60. Pastry chefs, for example, get 100 percent pensions, compared to 40 percent for Germany?

No problem, right?

Taxes? Who pays taxes? Only 5,000 Greeks admit to making over $144,000 a year! The government has taken to the air to photograph Athenians who have swimming pools to show the incidence of high income.

With 25 percent of the workforce employed by the government, there are rolling blackouts by workers for Genop, the state power company, in protest of the government’s plan to sell off its holdings from 51 percent down to 34 percent.

Unfortunately, the Greeks have few options. They can’t devalue their currency or lower interest rates, since they are wedded to the Euro and the European Central Bank. They must take their medicine and hope for another bailout.

The Greek parliament was scheduled to vote on the austerity program this week. A failure to pass it would mean that default is just around the corner. Steve Haley is a professor of sociology at Southwest Tennessee Community College.