A recovered bottle of seeds from a secret location. Twenty-one bottles were buried in 1847 and each contains 21 species of plant with 50 seeds per plant.  Credit…Derrick L. Turner/Michigan State University

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning on a seed viability experiment at Michigan State University that has been going on for 147 years.  It was started by a botanist, William James Beal, in 1847 to determine how long seeds can lie dormant in the soil without losing their ability to germinate. Every 20 years, the experiment’s caretakers go to a secret location to dig up a bottle of seeds and scatter them over a tray of sterile soil and see which ones grow.

It is quite possibly one of the world’s longest-running experiments.  I found the article and the project fascinating especially since today is “Earth” Day.  Below is an excerpt.

Tony

One of the World’s Oldest Science Experiments Comes Up From the Dirt

On Thursday morning, several hours before sunrise, Marjorie Weber arrived at a rendezvous spot on the campus of Michigan State University. Three of the school’s other plant scientists were already there, waiting in dribbling snow. As they stood around blowing on their hands, the fifth member of their crew, Frank Telewski, “emerged from the darkness with a shovel slung over his shoulder,” Dr. Weber said.

With everyone else crowded around, Dr. Telewski, the group’s leader, pulled out a copy of a map, drawn like an architectural blueprint. It would guide them to a botanist’s version of buried treasure: a bottle filled with sand and a bunch of really old seeds.

Dr. Weber and her colleagues are the latest custodians of the Beal seed viability experiment: a multicentury attempt to figure out how long seeds can lie dormant in the soil without losing their ability to germinate. Every 20 years, the experiment’s caretakers creep out to a secret location under cover of night, dig up a bottle, scatter its seeds over a tray of sterile soil and see which ones grow.

It’s one of the world’s longest-running experiments, having already gone on for 142 years. And the botanists in East Lansing hope that it will last for at least another 80.

What started out as a straightforward attempt to measure seed persistence has grown into a more interesting experiment as the decades pass. With technology improving and knowledge increasing, the keepers of the cache can do more than just count each bottle’s successful sprouts. They can look inside seeds to see how they tick, begin to determine what accounts for longevity — and even, in some cases, get species that seemed done for to spring up again. Lessons from their work could help with everything from restoring damaged ecosystems to storing crop seeds for the long-term.

But first, they had to find where to dig.

The bottle the team was looking for contains over a thousand seeds: 50 each of 21 different species, from black mustard to white clover to redroot amaranth.

In 1879, William James Beal, a botanist at Michigan State, filled 20 such bottles and buried them in a row somewhere on campus. He figured he — and later, his successors — could dig one up every five years and plant the preserved seeds inside.

When seeds are shed by their parents, they don’t always grow right away. Under any given patch of land, there’s a constellation of sleeping seeds, “biding their time,” Dr. Weber said. Often, they lie dormant — for a season, a few years or even longer — until they get the right set of cues to sprout.

This plant reserve is known as the seed bank. By experimentally recreating it, Dr. Beal hoped to better understand how long plants could last in the soil, and what triggers them to grow. He was likely trying to help local farmers — frustrated by endless weeding, and wondering how long it would take “before they might have some hope of seeing a decline in the seed bank, and their workload going down,” Dr. Telewski said.

For the first few rounds of the experiment, a number of species flourished, with seeds growing readily after 10, 15 or 20 years. As the decades passed, most dropped off one by one. Only one reliable sprouter is left: Verbascum blattaria, a splay-leaved, yellow-flowered herb. Nearly half the Verbascum seeds from 2000’s bottle bloomed, even though they’d been in stasis underground for over a century.

Today, farmers don’t really need the kind of help with weeds that motivated Beal to bury his bottles. But plant scientists have become invested in the question of which seeds last and how for other reasons.

The soil seed banks underlying different habitats are “great unknowns” in restoration ecology, as experts try to promote native species while fending off invasive ones, said Lars Brudvig, an assistant professor at Michigan State and another member of the Beal seed experiment team. In some cases, seeds of endangered or long-lost plants may even be hiding out in the soil.

Other researchers working on questions of longevity and germination might save seeds in climate-controlled environments, or study very old ones that they happen to find. But Dr. Beal’s is the longest-running seed experiment to mix natural conditions with carefully recorded data, said Carol Baskin, a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Kentucky who has used its results in her work.

“I think Professor Beal’s got the top experiment here,” Dr. Baskin said. “I wish he’d have buried more bottles.”

Armed with shovels, gloves and headlamps, the team followed their map to the dig site. The vibe was “very piratey,” Dr. Weber said. Dr. Telewski set to digging a neat, squared-off hole.

But as they carved deeper and wider, there were no bottles to be found. “The birds were starting to chirp,” Dr. Weber said, and the sun threatened to blow their cover. “Morale was low.”

When Dr. Beal first buried the seed bottles, he planned to have one dug up every 5 years, and for the experiment to last a century. But as time passed, those in charge extended the span between digs to 10 years, then 20. Two have been slightly delayed: 1919’s was moved to the spring of 1920 — which Dr. Telewski suspects may have been related to the 1918 flu; and 2020’s was moved to this year, because of Covid-19-related campus shutdowns.

To avoid losing the thread across these decades, a sort of ministry of seed-keepers has developed at Michigan State, with each generation of botanists passing the torch to younger colleagues.

Dr. Telewski — a professor of plant biology at the university, and the seventh person in charge of the experiment — dug up his first seed bottle in 2000 with his predecessor, Jan Zeevaart, who died in 2009. A couple of years ago, mulling his own mortality, he gave a copy of the map to David Lowry, an associate professor of plant biology who had expressed interest in joining up.

Just a couple of months later, Dr. Telewski suffered a stroke. While he has since recovered, “it just showed me how delicate it is to hand these things off while keeping them secret,” Dr. Lowry said. Soon after, Dr. Telewski invited Dr. Weber, who is an assistant professor at the university, and Dr. Brudvig to get involved as well.

Over the years, what were purely practical decisions by Dr. Beal have developed a patina of mystique. Dr. Beal excavated each new bottle under cover of darkness not to be dramatic, but simply to protect the other bottled seeds from sunlight, which might cause them to germinate before their time, Dr. Telewski said. (The team uses green bulbs in their headlamps for the same reason.)

The paper map was drawn after the landmarks that originally indicated the bottles’ location were moved. And the stealth is newly necessary because the older the experiment gets, the more interest it draws, he said.

These “cloaked, secretive” elements are now part of the experiment’s charm, Dr. Weber said. But it’s camaraderie and a desire to see the experiment through that keeps things going. The night before the dig, Dr. Telewski sent a pump-up email to the group. It included his own five-verse reimagining of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” A sample lyric: “Hello bottles my old friends / I’ve come to dig you up again

Dear Commons Community,

Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) blew up at Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) during a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday when her colleague interrupted her as she was discussing law enforcement.

The committee was discussing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, legislation that seeks to address the surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans. Demings was criticizing an amendment introduced by Republicans that would prevent the defunding of police departments, even though the legislation does not have any provision to strip funds from law enforcement.

Demings, a former police officer, said the amendment was “completely irrelevant.”

“I served as a law enforcement officer for 27 years,” she said. “It is a tough job, and good police officers deserve your support. You know, it’s interesting to see my colleagues on the other side of the aisle support the police when it is politically convenient to do so. Law enforcement officers risk their lives every day. They deserve better.”

At this point, Jordan tried to interject, earning a fierce rebuke from Demings, who shouted, “I have the floor, Mr. Jordan!”

“What, did I strike a nerve?” she added. “Law enforcement officers deserve better than to be utilized as pawns, and you and your colleagues should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Committee chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) tried to defuse the situation, but the two lawmakers continued to shout at one another.

Jordan, a staunch ally of Donald Trump, persistently pushed the former president’s lie that he won the 2020 election even after it led to the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol in which his supporters violently assaulted police officers.

Jim Jordan picked the wrong person to tangle with!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

After three weeks of testimony, the trial of the former police officer charged with killing George Floyd ended swiftly: barely over a day of jury deliberations, then just minutes for the verdicts to be read — guilty, guilty and guilty — and Derek Chauvin was handcuffed and taken away to prison.

Chauvin, 45, could be sent to prison for decades when he is sentenced in about two months in a case that triggered worldwide protests, violence and a furious reexamination of racism and policing in the U.S.

The verdict set off jubilation mixed with sorrow across the city and around the nation. Hundreds of people poured into the streets of Minneapolis, some running through traffic with banners. Drivers blared their horns in celebration.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“Today, we are able to breathe again,” Floyd’s younger brother Philonise said at a joyous family news conference where tears streamed down his face as he likened Floyd to the 1955 Mississippi lynching victim Emmett Till, except that this time there were cameras around to show the world what happened.

The jury of six whites and six Black or multiracial people came back with its verdict after about 10 hours of deliberations over two days. The now-fired white officer was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

Chauvin’s face was obscured by a COVID-19 mask, and little reaction could be seen beyond his eyes darting around the courtroom. His bail was immediately revoked. Sentencing will be in two months; the most serious charge carries up to 40 years in prison.

Defense attorney Eric Nelson followed Chauvin out of the courtroom without comment.

President Joe Biden welcomed the verdict, saying Floyd’s death was “a murder in full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world” to see systemic racism.

But he warned: “It’s not enough. We can’t stop here. We’re going to deliver real change and reform. We can and we must do more to reduce the likelihood that tragedies like this will ever happen again.”

The jury’s decision was hailed around the country as justice by other political and civic leaders and celebrities, including former President Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a white man, who said on Twitter that Floyd “would still be alive if he looked like me. That must change.”

At least for now, the entire nation is able to breathe again!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former Vice President Walter Mondale died yesterday at the age of 93.  Two days before his death, he sent a touching message to his staff (see above).

Dear Commons Community,

Brianna Keilar debuted yesterday taking over for Alison Camerota as co-anchor for CNN’s New Day morning show.  If you have seen her on CNN’s afternoon program, you know she generally has one segment where she does not hold back in her criticism of politicians, news makers, or the media.  During a segment yesterday morning,  she gave a blunt blistering assessment of how Fox News uses its on-screen graphics to spread misinformation.

Margaret Sanger – Founder of Planned Parenthood

Dear Commons Community,

Alexis McGill Johnson, President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times, coming out about whether Margaret Sanger, the Federation’s founder, was a racist. It is a candid piece that states we need to talk about Margaret Sanger and her legacy on race and “raise the question that we’ve tried to avoid, but we no longer can. We must reckon with it.”  Here is an excerpt.

“For the 11 years that I’ve been involved with Planned Parenthood, founded by Margaret Sanger, her legacy on race has been debated. Sanger, a nurse, opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916, and dedicated her life to promoting birth control to improve women’s lives. But was she, or was she not, racist?

…Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate “product of her time.” Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated.

Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge — a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century.

The first human trials of the birth control pill — a project that was Sanger’s passion later in her life — were conducted with her backing in Puerto Rico, where as many as 1,500 women were not told that the drug was experimental or that they might experience dangerous side effects.

We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices. What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly. Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question. Our reckoning is understanding her full legacy, and its impact. Our reckoning is the work that comes next.

And the first step is making Margaret Sanger less prominent in our present and future. The Planned Parent Federation of America has already renamed awards previously given in her honor, and Planned Parenthood of Greater New York renamed its Manhattan health center in 2020. Other independently managed affiliates may choose to follow.

Sanger remains an influential part of our history and will not be erased, but as we tell the history of Planned Parenthood’s founding, we must fully take responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people.

Sanger thought birth control would liberate women, and in so many ways it has. According to a University of Michigan study, the availability of the birth control pill is responsible for roughly a third of women’s wage gains since the 1960s. Reassessing Sanger’s history doesn’t negate her feminist fight, but it does tarnish it. In the name of political expedience, she chose to engage white supremacists to further her cause. In doing that, she devalued and dehumanized people of color.

We will no longer make excuses or apologize for Margaret Sanger’s actions. But we can’t simply call her racist, scrub her from our history, and move on. We must examine how we have perpetuated her harms over the last century — as an organization, an institution, and as individuals.

What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation. And then there are the organizational Karens. The groups who show up, assert themselves, and tell you where to march. Those who pursue freedom and fairness, but also leverage their privilege in ways that are dehumanizing.

And sometimes, that’s how Planned Parenthood has acted. By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color. And when we focus too narrowly on “women’s health,” we have excluded trans and nonbinary people.

As we face relentless attacks on our ability to keep providing sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion, we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights, to the exclusion of other causes that women of color and trans people cannot afford to ignore. And when we are rightfully called out by other leaders in the movement for reproductive justice who have pushed us for years to do better, we cry. In doing so, we’re failing in our mission to care for all the communities we serve.

We are committed to confronting any white supremacy in our own organization, and across the movement for reproductive freedom. We pledge to fight the many types of dehumanization we are seeing right now: the dehumanization of Black and Latino victims of police violence such as Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and too many others. The dehumanization of transgender people whose health care and rights are being denied in states across the country, and who face attacks not just from the right but also from trans-exclusionary radical “feminists.”

Some might see this as virtue signaling, but Planned Parenthood is taking this work seriously. Our senior leadership team is diverse. We have invested in training designed to give everyone, from the board room to the exam room, a foundational understanding of how race operates. And we are establishing new diversity, equity and inclusion standards for affiliates seeking to be a part of the Planned Parenthood Federation.

Achieving health equity requires fighting the systemic racism that creates barriers to sexual and reproductive health care. The pandemic has laid bare racial disparities in health care that we also see in who is most affected by increased abortion restrictions and in skyrocketing sexually transmitted disease rates.

As the nation’s leading provider of sexual and reproductive health care with a presence in 50 states, Planned Parenthood has an obligation to change how we operate. We must take up less space, and lend more support. And we must put our time, energy, and resources into fights that advance an agenda other than our own.

Margaret Sanger harmed generations with her beliefs. In our second century, Planned Parenthood has a chance to heal those harms. Reckoning with Margaret Sanger is one thing. We also need to reckon with ourselves.”

Well-done piece, Ms. Johnson!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her column yesterday commented on President Joe Biden’s decision to remove all American troops by September 11, 2021.  She is clear in her appraisal that our troops fought and died in a war that they never could have won.  Yet, despite the lessons the Soviets learned in 10 hard years there fighting ghostly warriors who disappeared into the mountains, American officials and generals never absorbed this simple fact: Even the battles we won, we lost in a way. As we grasped for our own revenge, what kind of revenge quest did we inspire in those who watched daisy cutter bombs rain hellfire or a wedding party disintegrate in a flash from an American airstrike? How many enemies have we spawned trying to help Afghanistan?

Taliban leaders say Americans have all the clocks, but they have all the time.

 I agree with her fully.  As I stated in an earlier post,  Afghanistan is a political and military quagmire that we cannot possibly win. This is no reflection on our military but it is not trained or capable of nation-building, at least not in this part of the world.

Ms. Dowd’s column is below in its entirety.

Tony

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New York Times

Biden Ditches the Generals, Finally

Maureen Dowd

April 19, 2021

WASHINGTON — Afghanistan has a complicated relationship with time. And America has a complicated relationship with revenge.

Between these two truths, tragedy blossomed.

Awash in grief and anger, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt down Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for letting him turn a maze of caves into a launching pad to attack America.

But, despite the lessons the Soviets learned in 10 hard years there fighting ghostly warriors who disappeared into the mountains, American officials and generals never absorbed this simple fact: Even the battles we won, we lost in a way. As we grasped for our own revenge, what kind of revenge quest did we inspire in those who watched daisy cutter bombs rain hellfire or a wedding party disintegrate in a flash from an American airstrike? How many enemies have we spawned trying to help Afghanistan?

Taliban leaders say Americans have all the clocks, but they have all the time.

The Bush administration was arrogant and ignorant about occupying this medieval moonscape. Officials thought they could bomb the bejesus out of the people who hated us, so that they would never look at us cross-eyed again. We would be the swaggering hyperpower. Even Barack Obama, once so prescient on the futility of invading Iraq, was suckered by the military into a pointless surge in Afghanistan, a near tripling of troops, in 2009.

I remember touring Afghanistan and Iraq with Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, at the time, flying over the snow-capped mountains that make Afghanistan a natural fortress and sinkhole for empires. I asked him if the president had been rolled by the generals. “That’s ridiculous,” Gates snapped, adding: “Anybody who reads history has to approach these things with some humility because you can’t know. Nobody knows what the last chapter ever looks like.”

Well, we seem to be at the last chapter, and it looks just as grim as all the other chapters of this misbegotten occupation.

Maureen Dowd: Get an email as soon as Maureen Dowd’s latest column is published.

Even then, it was clear that our attempt to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into model democracies was not going well. Touring those countries, Gates could barely leave the small secured zones.

At a joint news conference with Gates, our corrupt puppet Hamid Karzai needled his American sugar daddies, protesting that America was stuck because Afghanistan would not be able to get its own forces ready for 15 or 20 more years.

We attended a briefing where military leaders talked about “partnering” with and “mentoring” Afghan forces, but they acknowledged that before they could get to security training, they first they had to teach a vast majority of Afghan recruits to read and write.

Gates told reporters he had only just learned the “eye-opener” that the Taliban were attracting so many fighters because they paid more. Generals in Afghanistan said the Taliban were giving fighters $250 to $300 a month, while the Afghan Army was paying about $120. So Gates, employing the American way of throwing more money at a problem, got the recruits a raise to $240.

And this pathetic bidding war with the Taliban was eight years in.

We should have respected Afghanistan’s reputation as “the graveyard of empires” and Pakistan’s deserved reputation for double-dealing. The Time magazine cover in December 2001, “The Last Days of the Taliban,” mocks us.

We spent 20 years fighting in Afghanistan. But given our flat learning curve, every year there was like the first. So we were really on our first year for the 20th time, making the same mistakes over and over again.

As with Vietnam, many of those in charge knew for a long time that the war was unwinnable, but they hid the evidence, giving rosy forecasts while burning through $2.2 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives.

As Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who was the Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015 for the secret “Afghanistan Papers,” a project on how things went a cropper: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

Many top Bush officials and neocons who mired us so deeply in the first place were absurdly demanding this past week that President Biden not pull out. They are living cushy lives, enjoying big cable TV contracts and hosannas from liberals for trashing Donald Trump, while our troops have been dishonored by their half-baked and dishonest strategies.

Before we send our young people overseas to die, we need to learn from history and understand what we’re doing, not simply act out of vengeful emotions.

As vice president, Biden was a lone voice in the Oval Office objecting to the surge in Afghanistan. He told Obama, if you let them, the generals will box you in and string it out.

And that’s how you end up with a “forever war,” an endeavor that becomes a self-sustaining energy source, where the objectives are redefined to infinity.

Afghanistan will go down as another lesson in the folly of leaders whose egos simply do not allow them to think they are involved in a failure, so they contrive to paint it as a success.

The U.S. has built a stable of weapons that can kill people wherever it desires. Drones and bombs that can go and drop anywhere we want them to. But the U.S. never bothered to figure out the rest of the equation.

Trump was shooting from the hip but his instinct to withdraw was right. And Biden was right to ignore dire warnings about what will happen when we leave. The Taliban cannot be trusted; they’re true believers in a medieval ideology. A power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban was never going to work.

“The main argument for staying longer is what each of my three predecessors have grappled with: No one wants to say that we should be in Afghanistan forever, but they insist now is not the right moment to leave,” Biden said, adding: “So when will it be the right moment to leave? One more year? Two more years? Ten more years? Ten, 20, 30 billion dollars more above the trillion we’ve already spent? ‘Not now’ — that’s how we got here.”

He talked of how he has carried a card for the last 12 years with the exact number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spoke of his late son, Beau, his “North Star,” who was deployed to Iraq.

“I’m the first president in 40 years who knows what it means to have a child serving in a war zone,” he said.

Hopefully, our experience in Afghanistan will be the graveyard of America’s propensity to believe it can do whatever it wants with its military, without thinking through the consequences.

How could we justify another 20 years, one Afghanistan veteran asked me, poignantly noting that there’s nothing left of his friends who died in the war but names inscribed on park benches.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial this morning, entitled Make Tax-Dodging Companies Pay for Biden’s Infrastructure Plan, calls attention to how corporate America evades paying their fair share of taxes by taking advantage of loopholes such as those that allow them to shift profits earned in the United States to other countries. This type of tax reform is long overdue but would be especially appropriate now that President Biden is developing plans to invest in American infrastructure. 

The entire editorial is below.

Tony

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NY Times Editorial

Make Tax-Dodging Companies Pay for Biden’s Infrastructure Plan

By The Editorial Board

April 17, 2021

American companies and companies that make money in the United States are not paying enough money in taxes. Even as profits have soared, tax payments have declined. Fifty-five of the nation’s largest corporations — including FedEx, Nike and the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland — paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2020, despite collectively reporting more than $40 billion in profits, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The federal government lets companies avoid taxes by shifting profits earned in the United States to countries with lower tax rates. Every year, American firms, especially in the technology and pharmaceutical sectors, brazenly pretend to earn billions of dollars in microstates like Barbados, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, which are more than happy to play along. Companies and countries both profit, at the expense of the United States.

American policymakers have rewarded this naked legerdemain with rounds of tax cuts, most recently in 2017, partly justified as necessary to induce companies not to cheat. The tax cuts have also been sold as magic fertilizer that will cause the economy to grow faster.

This laissez-faire policy has crammed money into the pockets of wealthy shareholders while depriving the government of needed revenue. But it has failed to deliver its advertised benefits. Allowing corporations to keep a larger share of their profits has not catalyzed corporate investment, nor has it showered Americans with trickle-down prosperity.

There are few clearer examples of the failure of the ideology of reflexive market deference that has dominated economic policymaking in Washington over the last several decades.

In a welcome course correction, President Biden is proposing to increase corporate income taxation and to spend the money on infrastructure. His plan would raise the statutory tax rate on corporate income to 28 percent from 21 percent, still well below the pre-2017 level of 35 percent. The administration estimates it would raise $2.5 trillion over the next 15 years.

The American economy could use a healthy dose of tax-and-spend liberalism. As the Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, recently and rightly noted, “By choosing to compete on taxes, we’ve neglected to compete on the skill of our workers and the strength of our infrastructure.”

However, collecting more money is not as simple as ratcheting up the corporate tax rate.

In 2017 multinational corporations stashed 40 percent of their profits, or more than $700 billion, in tax havens like Luxembourg and Bermuda, according to research by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Copenhagen. Raising tax rates, in isolation, would encourage evasion. It would be like drawing water with a larger sieve.

The core of the Biden plan, therefore, is not the increase in the statutory rate. Rather, it’s a set of companion measures to tax the profits that American companies stash in other countries.

Under the plan, companies would be subject to a 21 percent tax on income reportedly earned in other countries, alongside the 28 percent tax on domestic profits. Companies would get credit for taxes paid to foreign governments; the United States would collect the rest. A company that reported $1 billion in earnings in a country with a 10 percent tax rate would pay $100 million in taxes in that country and an additional $110 million to the U.S. Treasury Department. This simple fix would sharply reduce the incentive to shift profits to low-tax countries.

Setting the tax rate on foreign profits at the same level as the rate on domestic profits would further reduce incentives for profit shifting. But among the developed democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average corporate tax rate is 23.5 percent. A higher tax rate on foreign profits could place some of the legitimate foreign activities of American firms at a competitive disadvantage.

The Biden administration also is pressing for an international agreement to establish a minimum corporate income tax rate, so foreign corporations could not continue to make use of tax havens. The benefits would extend beyond the United States. Developing nations are particularly reliant on corporate tax revenue. The International Monetary Fund estimates that profit shifting deprives them of $200 billion in annual revenue.

An international deal, however, is not a prerequisite for carrying out the balance of the Biden plan. The legitimate foreign business of American companies is mostly conducted in nations with relatively high corporate tax rates. And even without a deal, the United States could put pressure on tax havens.

The Biden plan would impose tax penalties on the American arms of foreign companies based in countries that maintain low rates. The Obama administration deployed a similar strategy in 2010 to crack down on tax evasion by wealthy individuals by penalizing foreign banks that did not give client information to the Internal Revenue Service.

Corporations and many economists caution that higher tax rates will discourage investment by increasing the return necessary for an investment to be profitable. They say workers will feel the pain of higher tax rates, too, in the form of slower wage growth.

But recent history belies such bleak predictions. After all, before the 2017 tax cuts, American corporations paid about 40 percent more in income taxes each year. A comparison with the rest of the developed world is also instructive. In the United States, the taxation of corporate profits amounted to just 0.96 percent of gross domestic product in 2018, compared with 3.14 percent in the average developed democracy, according to O.E.C.D. data.

It is also a mistake to assess economic policy solely on its contribution to overall economic growth. The distribution of prosperity matters, too; taxing corporations to pay for public services is a worthwhile trade-off. And there is good reason to think that the negative effect on corporate investment and on wages likely would remain relatively small.

The income tax is designed to protect investment. The government, for example, allows companies to deduct interest payments from taxable income. A company that borrows to build a factory pays taxes only on profits exceeding the cost of the loan. The money that gets taxed is mostly what economists call excess returns and what a Louisianian might call lagniappe — profits in excess of what is necessary to motivate investment.

The Biden administration is also proposing a final layer of reinforcement for the income tax: a requirement that companies with income exceeding $2 billion a year pay in taxes at least 15 percent of the income reported to investors. The average American multinational paid just 7.8 percent of its income in corporate income taxes in 2018, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, so imposing a higher minimum has obvious political appeal.

But companies paying less than 15 percent of income in taxes may be taking advantage of tax breaks that serve a legitimate public purpose, such as encouraging spending on research or investing in affordable housing developments. If the alternative minimum tax allows those breaks, it won’t raise much money. If it does not include those breaks, it will undermine those goals. In practice, it’s a choice between a meaningless gesture and a mistake.

Instead of using an alternative minimum tax to patch problems with the primary tax code, Congress can directly address the use of existing tax breaks. The necessary changes can and should be achieved under a single corporate income tax structure. Raise the statutory rate, crack down on the use of foreign tax havens and buy the nation something nice.

Countries with Most Recorded Deaths

Dear Commons Community,

The global death toll from the coronavirus topped 3 million people yesterday amid repeated setbacks in the worldwide vaccination campaign and a deepening crisis in places such as Brazil, India and France.  The true number is believed to be significantly higher because of possible government concealment and the many cases overlooked in the early stages of the outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“When the world back in January 2021 passed the bleak threshold of 2 million deaths, immunization drives had just started in Europe and the United States. Today, they are underway in more than 190 countries, though progress in bringing the virus under control varies widely.

While the campaigns in the U.S. and Britain have hit their stride and people and businesses there are beginning to contemplate life after the pandemic, other places, mostly poorer countries but some rich ones as well, are lagging behind in putting shots in arms and have imposed new lockdowns and other restrictions as virus cases soar.

Worldwide, deaths are on the rise again, running at around 12,000 per day on average, and new cases are climbing too, eclipsing 700,000 a day. 

“This is not the situation we want to be in 16 months into a pandemic, where we have proven control measures,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the World Health Organization’s leaders on COVID-19.

In Brazil, where deaths are running at about 3,000 per day, accounting for one-quarter of the lives lost worldwide in recent weeks, the crisis has been likened to a “raging inferno” by one WHO official. A more contagious variant of the virus has been rampaging across the country.

As cases surge, hospitals are running out of critical sedatives. As a result, there have been reports of some doctors diluting what supplies remain and even tying patients to their beds while breathing tubes are pushed down their throats.

The slow vaccine rollout has crushed Brazilians’ pride in their own history of carrying out huge immunization campaigns that were the envy of the developing world.

Taking cues from President Jair Bolsonaro, who has likened the virus to little more than a flu, his Health Ministry for months bet big on a single vaccine, ignoring other producers. When bottlenecks emerged, it was too late to get large quantities in time. 

Watching so many patients suffer and die alone at her Rio de Janeiro hospital impelled nurse Lidiane Melo to take desperate measures. 

In the early days of the pandemic, as sufferers were calling out for comfort that she was too busy to provide, Melo filled two rubber gloves with warm water, knotted them shut, and sandwiched them around a patient’s hand to simulate a loving touch.

Some have christened the practice the “hand of God,” and it is now the searing image of a nation roiled by a medical emergency with no end in sight.

“Patients can’t receive visitors. Sadly, there’s no way. So it’s a way to provide psychological support, to be there together with the patient holding their hand,” Melo said. She added: “And this year it’s worse, the seriousness of patients is 1,000 times greater.”

This situation is similarly dire in India, where cases spiked in February after weeks of steady decline, taking authorities by surprise. In a surge driven by variants of the virus, India saw over 180,000 new infections in one 24-hour span during the past week, bringing the total number of cases to over 13.9 million.

Problems that India had overcome last year are coming back to haunt health officials. Only 178 ventilators were free Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, a city of 29 million, where 13,000 new infections were reported the previous day. 

The challenges facing India reverberate beyond its borders since the country is the biggest supplier of shots to COVAX, the U.N.-sponsored program to distribute vaccines to poorer parts of the world. Last month, India said it would suspend vaccine exports until the virus’s spread inside the country slows. 

The WHO recently described the supply situation as precarious. Up to 60 countries might not receive any more shots until June, by one estimate. To date, COVAX has delivered about 40 million doses to more than 100 countries, enough to cover barely 0.25% of the world’s population. 

Globally, about 87% of the 700 million doses dispensed have been given out in rich countries. While 1 in 4 people in wealthy nations have received a vaccine, in poor countries the figure is 1 in more than 500.

In recent days, the U.S. and some European countries put the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine on hold while authorities investigate extremely rare but dangerous blood clots. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has likewise been hit with delays and restrictions because of a clotting scare.

Another concern: Poorer countries are relying on vaccines made by China and Russia, which some scientists believe provide less protection that those by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca.

Last week, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged the country’s vaccines offer low protection and said officials are considering mixing them with other shots to improve their effectiveness. 

In the U.S., where over 560,000 lives have been lost, accounting for more than 1 in 6 of the world’s COVID-19 deaths, hospitalizations and deaths have dropped, businesses are reopening, and life is beginning to return to something approaching normalcy in several states. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits tumbled last week to 576,000, a post-COVID-19 low.

But progress has been patchy, and new hot spots — most notably Michigan — have flared up in recent weeks. Still, deaths in the U.S. are down to about 700 per day on average, plummeting from a mid-January peak of about 3,400.

In Europe, countries are feeling the brunt of a more contagious variant that first ravaged Britain and has pushed the continent’s COVID-19-related death toll beyond 1 million.

Close to 6,000 gravely ill patients are being treated in French critical care units, numbers not seen since the first wave a year ago.

Dr. Marc Leone, head of intensive care at the North Hospital in Marseille, said exhausted front-line staff members who were feted as heroes at the start of the pandemic now feel alone and are clinging to hope that renewed school closings and other restrictions will help curb the virus in the coming weeks.”

Here in the United States, we should consider ourselves fortunate that the vaccine has been rolled out successfully in many parts of the country but it appears we will have to maintain caution for months to come yet so as not to slip back to pre-vaccine infection rates.

Tony

President George W. Bush congratulating Dr. Gregorian at the White House in 2004 after conferring on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.Credit…Doug Mills/ The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Vartan Gregorian, an Armenian immigrant who climbed to the pinnacles of academic and philanthropic achievement but took a detour in the 1980s to restore the New York Public Library to its place at the heart of American intellectual life, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 87.

The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Dareh Gregorian. No cause was given.

A scholar, a university leader and a believer in libraries, he almost single-handedly rescued the grand but broken New York Library during a time of fiscal austerity.  As reported in the New York Times.

Dr. Gregorian liked to tell the story of “the most painful experience of my entire life.” It happened in 1980, when he was provost of the University of Pennsylvania, its top academic official. Powerful trustees told him that he was a shoo-in to replace the outgoing president. He was so sure of the post that he withdrew his name from consideration as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.

He heard the bad news on his car radio. The Penn trustees had chosen another academic star. The next day, he resigned. The outgoing president tried to dissuade him, but it was no use.

“I told him that I could cope with rejection, but not insult and humiliation,” Dr. Gregorian said in a memoir, “The Road to Home: My Life and Times” (2003).

Indeed, Dr. Gregorian was a fighter: proud, shrewd, charming, a brilliant historian and educator who rose from humble origins to speak seven languages, win sheaves of honors and be offered the presidencies of Columbia University and the Universities of Michigan and Miami. He accepted the presidency of Brown University (1989-1997), transforming it into one of the Ivy League’s hottest schools, and since then had been president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a major benefactor of education.

But he was best known for resurrecting the New York Public Library from a fiscal and morale crisis. It was a radical, midcareer change from the pastoral academic realm, and a risky plunge into the high-profile social and political wars of New York City, where the budget-cutting knives were out after decades of profligacy, neglect and a brush with municipal bankruptcy in the 1970s.

By 1981, when the feelers went out to Dr. Gregorian, the library — the main research edifice at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and 83 branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island — was broke, a decaying Dickensian repository of 7.7 million books (the world’s sixth largest collection), many of them rare and valuable, gathering dust and crumbling on 88 linear miles of stacks.

The underpaid, overworked staff was demoralized. The beautiful Gottesman Exhibition Hall had been partitioned into cubicles for personnel and accounting. Tarnished chandeliers and lighting fixtures were missing bulbs. In the trustees’ board room, threadbare curtains fell apart at the touch. Outside, the imperious marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, and the portals they guarded, were dirt-streaked. Bryant Park in the back was infested with drug dealers and pimps and unsafe after dark.

But the main problems were not even visible. The library faced a $50 million deficit and had no political clout. Its constituencies were scholars, children and citizens who liked to read. The city had cut back so hard that the main branch was closed on Thursdays, and some branches were open only eight hours a week.

To Dr. Gregorian, the challenge was irresistible. The library was, like him, a victim of insult and humiliation. The problem, as he saw it, was that the institution, headquartered in the magnificent Carrère and Hastings Beaux-Arts pile dedicated by President William Howard Taft in 1911, had come to be seen by New York City’s leaders, and even its citizens, as a dispensable frivolity.

He seemed a dubious savior: a short, pudgy scholar who had spent his entire professional life in academic circles. On the day he met the board, he was a half-hour late, and the trustees were talking about selling prized collections, cutting hours of service and closing some branches. He asked only for time, and offered in return a new vision.

“The New York Public Library is a New York and national treasure,” he said. “The branch libraries have made lives and saved lives. The New York Public Library is not a luxury. It is an integral part of New York’s social fabric, its culture, its institutions, its media and its scholarly, artistic and ethnic communities. It deserves the city’s respect, appreciation and support. No, the library is not a cost center! It is an investment in the city’s past and future!”

His personality was so engaging, his fire for restoring the library so compelling, that the board endorsed him unanimously as its president and chief executive. So long as he succeeded, he would be given time. He needed money, too, but he was an experienced university fund-raiser.

More than money, he needed allies. He found them in Andrew Heiskell, the incoming library chairman, who had just retired as chairman and chief executive of Time Inc.; Richard B. Salomon, the library’s vice chairman, who had been chairman since 1977; and Brooke Astor, the widow of Vincent Astor and doyenne of society who was presiding over bequests of $195 million to charitable causes.

Dr. Gregorian wrote: “Richard Salomon paved the way for individual giving and business and Jewish philanthropy; Andrew Heiskell went after individuals and major corporations, his former pals; Mrs. Astor opened the doors of New York society and its philanthropy. They helped me make the case for the New York Public Library, making it a civic project that was both honorable and glamorous.”

Mrs. Astor gave a black tie party to introduce Dr. Gregorian and his wife, Clare Gregorian, to New York society. Weeks earlier, she had given a party for President Ronald Reagan and the first lady, Nancy Reagan. When Dr. Gregorian voiced surprise that the guest list for both dinners was substantially the same, Mrs. Astor told him, “The president of the New York Public Library is an important citizen of New York and the nation.”

“Literary Lions” dinners at $1,000 a plate were soon underway, attended by the likes of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Dr. Gregorian met corporate and foundation leaders to drum up support and spread good will. He gave and attended dinner parties, and with Mrs. Astor, who made the library her top philanthropic priority, organized charity balls and other functions.

In the news regularly with his appeals, Dr. Gregorian often sounded like a voice of conscience. He called the library “a sacred place,” telling The New Yorker: “Think of a lone person in one of our reading rooms, who has just read a book, a single book that has perhaps not been read in 20 years by another living soul, and from that reading comes an invention of incalculable importance to the human race. It makes a man tremble.”

Results began to show. The main library and many branches restored days of service. The card catalog was computerized. Temperature and humidity controls were installed, public rooms were air-conditioned, facades were cleaned, and a $45 million renovation was launched. Partitions and cubicles were removed, marble walls were restored, and carved wooden ceilings were refinished. Scores of projects began. One was a cleaning of the books and stacks, undusted for 75 years.

Tides of tourists and visitors returned. Exhibitions, lectures, concerts and other cultural events made the main library a beehive of intellectual life, day and night. Afternoon and evening activities in Bryant Park drew crowds that chased the ne’er do wells. Out front, Patience and Fortitude were bathed, and people of all ages lounged on the broad steps to bask in sunshine.

Dr. Gregorian campaigned as if running for election. Mayor Edward I. Koch, who knew a good thing when he saw one, climbed on the bandwagon, and former Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. said of Dr. Gregorian: “He reminded us that libraries were engines of hope that move people into the middle class and to worlds beyond themselves.”

He was masterful in dealing with the City Council and the Board of Estimate, which in those days held the purse strings. On the job less than two years, he told the council’s Finance Committee that it was demeaning for him to annually defend the library’s right to exist. He said he would no longer come hat-in-hand and would only present the library’s case for a fair share of the money.

By the end of his tenure, in 1989, Dr. Gregorian had raised $327 million in public and private funds for the library, placing it on a firm footing.

“What he did was put the library in the spotlight,” Mr. Heiskell told The New Yorker. “He had to change the mood of the city for the library, of the people in the city for the library, and of the people in the library for the library.

“In essence, he had to change the future.”

Vartan Gregorian was born on April 8, 1934, in the Armenian quarter of Tabriz, in northwest Iran, to Samuel and Shooshanik (Mirzaian) Gregorian. His father was an accountant for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Vartan’s older brother, Aram, died in infancy, and his mother died of pneumonia when he was 6. His father was drafted in World War II and later became an often-unemployed office worker.

Vartan and his younger sister, Ojik, were raised by their maternal grandmother, Voski Mirzaian, an illiterate but gracious storyteller whose allegorical fables instilled in the children lessons in morality: about telling the truth, possessing integrity, and the dignity to be found in stoicism and good deeds.

“She was my hero,” Dr. Gregorian said in an interview for this obituary in 2019. “I learned more about character from her than from anybody I ever met or any book I ever read.”

Vartan was a voracious reader and spent much time in the extensive library of his Armenian Church, where he had a part-time job in the stacks. “It was heaven,” he said. “There were translations of all the Western classics, and I read Russian literature, so I became familiar with Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Tolstoy, Dumas and Victor Hugo.”

Languages came to him easily. “We had Armenian at home, Russian at school, and we grew up with Turkish and Persian,” he said. He recalled that after his father remarried, he could not tolerate his stepmother and ran away from home at 15.

He landed in Beirut, Lebanon, with a teacher’s letter of introduction to the Collège Arménien, a lycée founded in 1928 to educate Armenian refugees. Simon Vratzian, the Armenian Republic’s last prime minister, was the school’s director. He enrolled the boy and became his mentor. Vartan learned French, Arabic and smatterings of English before graduating in 1955 with honors.

In 1956, he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Despite starting with shaky English, he became fluent and, majoring in history and humanities, earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in two years.

In 1960, he married Clare Russell, a fellow student at Stanford. In addition to Dareh, they had two more sons, Vahé and Raffi, all of whom survive Dr. Gregorian, along with his sister and five grandchildren. He lived in Midtown Manhattan.

A Ford Foundation fellowship took Dr. Gregorian to England, France, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. He earned a dual doctorate in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964. He taught European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State College, U.C.L.A. and the University of Texas before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1972.

At Penn, he was a professor of Armenian and South Asian history for eight years, the school’s first dean of what is now the College of Arts and Sciences, from 1974 to 1978, and then provost until his departure in 1980 after being passed over for the presidency.

After his acclaimed work to save the New York Public Library, Dr. Gregorian, as the president of Brown University, led a five-year campaign there that raised $534 million, the most ambitious in Brown’s history. He raised the endowment to $1 billion from $400 million, doubled undergraduate scholarships, hired 270 new faculty members, endowed 90 professorships and built a student residence that bears his name. In his last year, there were 15,000 applicants for 1,482 places in the freshman class.

It was in 1997 that Dr. Gregorian assumed the presidency of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote education and peace. After decades as a supplicant, raising $1 billion for universities and libraries, he became a benefactor, starting with an endowment of $1.5 billion that grew to $3.5 billion over his tenure.

His grants strengthened education, international security, democratic institutions and global development. Domestically, he emphasized reforms in teacher training and liberal arts education; abroad, he stressed scholarships for social sciences and humanities.

Dr. Gregorian also advised philanthropists, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Walter H. Annenberg and officials of the J. Paul Getty Trust. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and in 2004 President George W. Bush conferred on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Besides his memoir, he wrote “The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880-1946” (1969); “Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith” (2004) and many articles on history and global affairs.

Dr. Gregorian, who often recalled the kindness of strangers, said that after landing in New York in 1956 to start life in America, he lost his plane ticket to San Francisco. He was due to register the next day at Stanford. His future seemed to hang in the balance. In faltering English, he poured out his desperation to an airport ticket agent.

The man hesitated, saying something about regulations. Then he softened.

“I have never done what I am about to do,” the agent said. He stamped the young man’s empty ticket envelope and told him to stay on the plane — a four-stop, 14-hour flight — to avoid discovery.

“I never forgot that man,” Dr. Gregorian said in the 2019 interview. “He gave me my future. For years I wanted to thank him but couldn’t find him. I told the story in my book to thank him — and now my conscience is clear.”

I always had a special place in my heart for the New York Library and as a young boy growing up in the South Bronx borrowed my first books from its storefront branch on 156^th Street and Melrose Avenue.

I also had the pleasure of being in the company of Dr. Gregorian on several occasions in the 1980s when he would come to Hunter College and meet with his friend, Donna Shalala.  He was a larger than life figure who let his presence be felt.

May he rest on peace!

Tony