This op-ed, requested by Oxfam, will run in the Rutland Herald on Sunday, September 16:
It’s been a summer of bounty in Vermont. Milk prices are up, the strawberries were spectacular, and the apple trees are groaning with a fine crop. Vermont farmers are meeting the energy crisis in creative ways that actually combat pollution of air and water. And Vermont and California dairy producers are working together to develop a sustainable pricing system not dependent on government help.
But across the country, and around the world, the picture is not so positive. Earlier this summer I was in Minnesota and heard small farmers talk about how the 2002 Farm Bill, now up for revision, has been hurting them. In July, I made a personal visit to Washington, D.C. to ask our Senators and Congressman to support reform of the bill, to shift money from harmful commodity subsidies to conservation, energy, and rural development programs—the kinds of things Vermont farmers need to sustain their creative work and grow their incomes. Congressman Welch did vote for an important amendment that would have moved our farm programs in that direction, but it was defeated. Now, as Congress reassembles after the August break, it’s the Senate’s turn at the Farm Bill and I hope they will muster the political will to enact meaningful reform that was lacking in the House of Representatives.
Commodity subsidies are the biggest problem. Originally, in the days of the Great Depression, they were meant to provide a safety net for all farmers when prices were too low. But now they have the opposite effect: These aren’t price supports; they’re price depressors! In a crazy cycle, bloated subsidies for just a few crops, flowing almost entirely to just a few farmers, actually drive down crop prices by encouraging overproduction. To be clear, it’s not a small pot of money. We’re talking $20 billion a year but only one-quarter of U.S. farmers receive these subsidies, and of that one-quarter, the top 10 percent get 75 percent of the payments. The bigger the crop production, the higher the check the producer receives. This drives up the price of land by encouraging large scale producers to gobble up smaller farms and expand production. That, in turn, drives farmers off the land and prices beginning farmers out of the market for farmland. Food production is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and in fewer and fewer crops. It’s no wonder the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota called the 2002 “Freedom to Farm” bill really “Freedom to Fail”!
Such policies discourage conservation and good farming practices. They instead promote excessive production of corn, sending thousands of tons of fertilizer and other pollutants down the Mississippi, resulting in an expanding “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Subsidies aren’t good for our health either, as they push cheap high-fructose corn syrup into our diet, helping to cause obesity. Worse yet, our agricultural subsidies keep farmers poor in other countries. And don’t think there’s no direct connection between our overproduction of corn and the migration of Mexican farmers into the United States in search of work!
Cotton is the starkest example. Subsidized overproduction here means low prices for farmers everywhere, and in areas like West Africa that depend heavily on cotton exports, those low prices are deadly. A typical cotton-producing household of ten persons in West Africa earns about $200 per person per year. That includes cash from cotton sales plus the value of food and other goods the household produces for itself. There are 365 days in a year. Clearly, people earning $200 a year are living on less than a dollar a day. And we’re helping to keep them in poverty with our tax dollars.
Meaningful reform of cotton subsidies would raise the world price of cotton enough to increase household incomes in West Africa by $46 to $114 a year for the whole family. Sound like nothing? To us, it might not mean all that much, but for a West African family, it could mean enough food for one child for an entire year, in a region where 40 percent of children under 5 are malnourished. Or it could mean that all the children in the household could attend school. After all, nothing fights poverty like education. Or it could mean that the household could have health care.
We now have the opportunity to make change happen, an opportunity that won’t come around for another five years.. If we love life, if we love the earth, we need to act now. We must call and write our Senators, urging them to reform the commodity title, shifting money away from subsidies and into clean energy, conservation, and rural development initiatives that will help our farmers at home and at the same time make life better for farmers around the world. Let’s do it now. Five years from now will be too late.
©Linda M. Maloney
Friday, September 14, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
National service -- why not now?
The following is a position paper I prepared independently on the need for a genuine national service program, and presented to Congressman Peter Welch for his consideration. Many people have asked to see it, so I publish it here.
Day by day the faces of the dead flash past on the screen: the youngest “adult” Americans, almost all of them from small towns, from minority groups: As in the Vietnam war, these are the faces of Americans with no other way out of poverty, the young, ambitious, and striving, selling their lives for the hope of something better. And, safely insulated from actually having to do what they are doing, the rest of America lionizes them: “our troops” has become a sacred phrase. We give the same lip service to the cult of warfare that we do, most of us, to the cult of Jesus: It’s a wonderful thing they are doing, but I wouldn’t—don’t have to—do it myself.
These are the young people I see passing my kitchen window every day, going to and coming from the high school next door. We have “Junior ROTC” now; it teaches them leadership, we are told; it is “not a military program,” but it teaches them to drill, to shoot, and to idolize military service. It tracks them toward ROTC scholarships (a few of them), and toward enlistment in one of the services, or in the National Guard, where they join their fathers and uncles. They are promised that they will learn trade skills, money for college . . . but never enough, and in wartime the hurried-up training prepares them to kill and be killed, not much else.
To withdraw the lifeline—too often a deathline, or a route to serious maiming—would be cruel, it is said. This is their chance to serve their country, and to make something of themselves. Their only chance. And that is immoral. We used to think we were purchasing security by using our young people this way, just as we purchase our affluence by exploiting low-wage workers in America and abroad. The Iraq war has shown what a disastrous mistake it is to confuse bullying with security.
We can do better. We can turn that youthful energy and idealism to a benefit for our own country and the rest of the world if we will call them to serve their country in constructive ways, and make them as proud of that kind of service as they are supposed to be of serving in war.
If we can’t have compulsory national service (and that might be a hard sell right now!), we will have to make service so attractive that young people will jump at the chance, at least as readily as they now jump at the chance to be warriors.
A renewed program of national service should include:
• A variety of opportunities and entry points.
• Genuine training for skills that are marketable and socially beneficial.
• Adequate pay and benefits so that the program will be genuinely accessible to the poor.
• A guarantee that no one will be forced to serve in unacceptable ways—transferred into overseas military service, let us say, the way our National Guard has been.
Some details:
1. People should be able to enter the program out of high school, with a guarantee of full college or trade-school benefits (not the measly aid that military service now provides) after two or three years of service. This would be helpful to young adults whose interests are not yet determined and who want to try a few avenues before settling on one. Or students could go directly from high school to college or vocational training on a widely-expanded “ROTC” degree program to prepare for careers, provided they serve two or three years after college or school. Each such program should include foreign language training to enable the graduates to work overseas or in underserved parts of American society. Third, the program should be open to displaced workers who need retraining and are willing to spend some service time. The program should include some hours of specialized training each week (in lieu of “drill”) to prepare the individual for service placement.
2. The training and re-training and/or educational program must be genuine, and not the kind of thing offered to displaced manufacturing workers presently. There should be a thorough analysis of skills and directions needed for a healthy American society, and a healthy world society, in the twenty-first century, and opportunities should be provided that will help to fill those needs. The private sector should be enlisted as well. (Example: in Germany, industrial firms participate in the educational/vocational program of the schools, providing training for the workers they will one day hire. The following win-win example comes to mind for our own purposes: There is a firm in Vermont that manufactures solar panels and installations; it is now one of the major producers in the U.S. Suppose that firm were to train a certain number of technicians, engineers, etc. each year to install, maintain, and teach the use of small-scale solar power stations in Third World countries—or, indeed, in parts of the United States that need them. On the model of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. could purchase the installations from the manufacturer, thereby compensating them for their share in the training costs, and pay the service volunteers during their service time overseas or in country; this would be a major aspect of U.S. foreign aid.)
In a different example, many public agencies could benefit by extra man- and womanpower for such relatively simple, but time-consuming tasks as helping poor people obtain the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled. (See David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America [New York: Knopf, 2004] 226–30.) Interns working with lawyers, doctors, nurse practitioners, social workers, and public health officials would get a first-hand look at the burdens of poverty, the kinds of laws now in place, and what needs to be done; they might be moved to pursue these much-needed professions.
American educational institutions would benefit from the additional funding for scholarships, and young people would no longer embark on their careers under a crushing load of debt.
3. At the present time, volunteering for the Peace Corps or a variety of private volunteer organizations is mainly a middle-class luxury (this seems to be less true for Americorps-VISTA, but the quality of training offered is likewise different). I have never forgotten the Senate hearings on Americorps when it was established. (I had a special interest, because my son participated in the Summer of Service that inaugurated the program.) Senator Grassley of Iowa offered the dictum that “people should not be paid for volunteering.” That means, in effect, that poor people need not apply. To enter a service program that pays only a subsistence requires a lot of backup: a family to bail you out, to maintain your medical benefits, to pay the tuition and fees you won’t be saving for in your volunteer placement. You can’t afford it if you have a backlog of student loans.
People must not be driven into service, either military or social, by economic need, nor should they be denied the opportunity to serve, and to learn while serving, by economic need. Volunteering may, and often does, inspire, but poor people need more than that. This program should pay a living wage, should provide full educational benefits (like the G.I. Bill, the engine of America’s postwar prosperity), AND full medical benefits: an enhanced V.A. or “Medicare for all who serve” would be a good vehicle for introducing truly universal medical benefits, since the initial pool would consist mainly of those least expensive to insure. And, like the V.A., it should be a lifetime benefit (and not restricted to “service-connected” injuries or illnesses!).
4. This must not become a backdoor military draft. That should be a clear and irrevocable commitment.
But, as many people have told me, it could never work! Here are the major objections I have heard:
• The military establishment won’t let it. They are having a hard enough time recruiting; they can’t afford for people to have other choices. I don’t think I need elaborate on the cynical immorality of that statement. There may in fact be fewer young people who will choose military service if they are not coerced into it by poverty or propaganda, but in all likelihood it will take several generations for a service corps to develop the kind of esprit, comradeship, and pride that even the younger branches of the military services have. That will always be the more attractive option for some.
• It will cost too much. True, it will cost a lot. But whether a thing is “expensive” or has high “costs” depends on what one regards as the true cost of that thing. What is the cost of having thousands of young people killed before they have begun to realize their potential? What is the cost of throwing away millions of lives, here and abroad, by condemning them to extreme poverty? What is the cost of destroying the environment because we lack the means or the will to apply our skills and ingenuity where they need to be placed, because at the moment it is not “cost-effective” and does not enhance the corporate bottom line? I needn’t go on. The examples of the Marshall Plan and the G.I. Bill both point to the ways in which this program will profit the American economy and advance the peace of the world, as those two programs did. I doubt that anyone, looking back on those, would say they were “too expensive.”
• Not enough people will sign up to make it work. This is potentially the most serious objection and the most likely to prove true. After so many years of incredible prosperity (much of it purchased by borrowing and by transferring the burden to the backs of impoverished people all over the world), after being told even in time of crisis that no sacrifice is necessary, the zeal for change that marked the Vietnam generation has evidently waned. This program will need to be sold with at least the same enthusiasm (and investment) given to military recruitment, and as I have stressed above, the incentives will have to be real, and so will the service: real work, not make-work. It must not be perceived as a handout, but as a genuine avenue for—to begin with—less-advantaged people to do good and do well, until such time as it becomes an attraction, and almost a given that the first leg up in life is to be earned through service to one’s country and to the needs of the world.
One way to introduce this program would be to start with a pilot in a single state (Vermont?). With federal dollar matching (the proportion to be determined), it could be put in place as an expansion of the National Guard, state by state, with scholarships to UVM and other state colleges and training centers (and in private enterprises, as above), and service projects located in Vermont or in other regions or countries with which Vermont partners.
“Some . . . see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.” (RFK). Why not, indeed? And why not now?
©Linda M. Maloney+
April 2007
Ending the Economic Draft: National Service
Day by day the faces of the dead flash past on the screen: the youngest “adult” Americans, almost all of them from small towns, from minority groups: As in the Vietnam war, these are the faces of Americans with no other way out of poverty, the young, ambitious, and striving, selling their lives for the hope of something better. And, safely insulated from actually having to do what they are doing, the rest of America lionizes them: “our troops” has become a sacred phrase. We give the same lip service to the cult of warfare that we do, most of us, to the cult of Jesus: It’s a wonderful thing they are doing, but I wouldn’t—don’t have to—do it myself.
These are the young people I see passing my kitchen window every day, going to and coming from the high school next door. We have “Junior ROTC” now; it teaches them leadership, we are told; it is “not a military program,” but it teaches them to drill, to shoot, and to idolize military service. It tracks them toward ROTC scholarships (a few of them), and toward enlistment in one of the services, or in the National Guard, where they join their fathers and uncles. They are promised that they will learn trade skills, money for college . . . but never enough, and in wartime the hurried-up training prepares them to kill and be killed, not much else.
To withdraw the lifeline—too often a deathline, or a route to serious maiming—would be cruel, it is said. This is their chance to serve their country, and to make something of themselves. Their only chance. And that is immoral. We used to think we were purchasing security by using our young people this way, just as we purchase our affluence by exploiting low-wage workers in America and abroad. The Iraq war has shown what a disastrous mistake it is to confuse bullying with security.
We can do better. We can turn that youthful energy and idealism to a benefit for our own country and the rest of the world if we will call them to serve their country in constructive ways, and make them as proud of that kind of service as they are supposed to be of serving in war.
If we can’t have compulsory national service (and that might be a hard sell right now!), we will have to make service so attractive that young people will jump at the chance, at least as readily as they now jump at the chance to be warriors.
A renewed program of national service should include:
• A variety of opportunities and entry points.
• Genuine training for skills that are marketable and socially beneficial.
• Adequate pay and benefits so that the program will be genuinely accessible to the poor.
• A guarantee that no one will be forced to serve in unacceptable ways—transferred into overseas military service, let us say, the way our National Guard has been.
Some details:
1. People should be able to enter the program out of high school, with a guarantee of full college or trade-school benefits (not the measly aid that military service now provides) after two or three years of service. This would be helpful to young adults whose interests are not yet determined and who want to try a few avenues before settling on one. Or students could go directly from high school to college or vocational training on a widely-expanded “ROTC” degree program to prepare for careers, provided they serve two or three years after college or school. Each such program should include foreign language training to enable the graduates to work overseas or in underserved parts of American society. Third, the program should be open to displaced workers who need retraining and are willing to spend some service time. The program should include some hours of specialized training each week (in lieu of “drill”) to prepare the individual for service placement.
2. The training and re-training and/or educational program must be genuine, and not the kind of thing offered to displaced manufacturing workers presently. There should be a thorough analysis of skills and directions needed for a healthy American society, and a healthy world society, in the twenty-first century, and opportunities should be provided that will help to fill those needs. The private sector should be enlisted as well. (Example: in Germany, industrial firms participate in the educational/vocational program of the schools, providing training for the workers they will one day hire. The following win-win example comes to mind for our own purposes: There is a firm in Vermont that manufactures solar panels and installations; it is now one of the major producers in the U.S. Suppose that firm were to train a certain number of technicians, engineers, etc. each year to install, maintain, and teach the use of small-scale solar power stations in Third World countries—or, indeed, in parts of the United States that need them. On the model of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. could purchase the installations from the manufacturer, thereby compensating them for their share in the training costs, and pay the service volunteers during their service time overseas or in country; this would be a major aspect of U.S. foreign aid.)
In a different example, many public agencies could benefit by extra man- and womanpower for such relatively simple, but time-consuming tasks as helping poor people obtain the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled. (See David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America [New York: Knopf, 2004] 226–30.) Interns working with lawyers, doctors, nurse practitioners, social workers, and public health officials would get a first-hand look at the burdens of poverty, the kinds of laws now in place, and what needs to be done; they might be moved to pursue these much-needed professions.
American educational institutions would benefit from the additional funding for scholarships, and young people would no longer embark on their careers under a crushing load of debt.
3. At the present time, volunteering for the Peace Corps or a variety of private volunteer organizations is mainly a middle-class luxury (this seems to be less true for Americorps-VISTA, but the quality of training offered is likewise different). I have never forgotten the Senate hearings on Americorps when it was established. (I had a special interest, because my son participated in the Summer of Service that inaugurated the program.) Senator Grassley of Iowa offered the dictum that “people should not be paid for volunteering.” That means, in effect, that poor people need not apply. To enter a service program that pays only a subsistence requires a lot of backup: a family to bail you out, to maintain your medical benefits, to pay the tuition and fees you won’t be saving for in your volunteer placement. You can’t afford it if you have a backlog of student loans.
People must not be driven into service, either military or social, by economic need, nor should they be denied the opportunity to serve, and to learn while serving, by economic need. Volunteering may, and often does, inspire, but poor people need more than that. This program should pay a living wage, should provide full educational benefits (like the G.I. Bill, the engine of America’s postwar prosperity), AND full medical benefits: an enhanced V.A. or “Medicare for all who serve” would be a good vehicle for introducing truly universal medical benefits, since the initial pool would consist mainly of those least expensive to insure. And, like the V.A., it should be a lifetime benefit (and not restricted to “service-connected” injuries or illnesses!).
4. This must not become a backdoor military draft. That should be a clear and irrevocable commitment.
But, as many people have told me, it could never work! Here are the major objections I have heard:
• The military establishment won’t let it. They are having a hard enough time recruiting; they can’t afford for people to have other choices. I don’t think I need elaborate on the cynical immorality of that statement. There may in fact be fewer young people who will choose military service if they are not coerced into it by poverty or propaganda, but in all likelihood it will take several generations for a service corps to develop the kind of esprit, comradeship, and pride that even the younger branches of the military services have. That will always be the more attractive option for some.
• It will cost too much. True, it will cost a lot. But whether a thing is “expensive” or has high “costs” depends on what one regards as the true cost of that thing. What is the cost of having thousands of young people killed before they have begun to realize their potential? What is the cost of throwing away millions of lives, here and abroad, by condemning them to extreme poverty? What is the cost of destroying the environment because we lack the means or the will to apply our skills and ingenuity where they need to be placed, because at the moment it is not “cost-effective” and does not enhance the corporate bottom line? I needn’t go on. The examples of the Marshall Plan and the G.I. Bill both point to the ways in which this program will profit the American economy and advance the peace of the world, as those two programs did. I doubt that anyone, looking back on those, would say they were “too expensive.”
• Not enough people will sign up to make it work. This is potentially the most serious objection and the most likely to prove true. After so many years of incredible prosperity (much of it purchased by borrowing and by transferring the burden to the backs of impoverished people all over the world), after being told even in time of crisis that no sacrifice is necessary, the zeal for change that marked the Vietnam generation has evidently waned. This program will need to be sold with at least the same enthusiasm (and investment) given to military recruitment, and as I have stressed above, the incentives will have to be real, and so will the service: real work, not make-work. It must not be perceived as a handout, but as a genuine avenue for—to begin with—less-advantaged people to do good and do well, until such time as it becomes an attraction, and almost a given that the first leg up in life is to be earned through service to one’s country and to the needs of the world.
One way to introduce this program would be to start with a pilot in a single state (Vermont?). With federal dollar matching (the proportion to be determined), it could be put in place as an expansion of the National Guard, state by state, with scholarships to UVM and other state colleges and training centers (and in private enterprises, as above), and service projects located in Vermont or in other regions or countries with which Vermont partners.
“Some . . . see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.” (RFK). Why not, indeed? And why not now?
©Linda M. Maloney+
April 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
The good ones go . . .
On Sunday, June 3, the Episcopal Church suffered a grievous loss with the death, in a car accident, of Bishop Jim Kelsey of Northern Michigan. Early in his ministry he was rector of Holy Trinity Church in Swanton, VT, and there will be a memorial service for him there on Friday, at the same time as his memorial in Marquette.
I never met +Jim, but I certainly knew OF him, because I was involved with Total Ministry in Minnesota, and +Jim was the most intensely committed bishop in the movement. The report was that he did not invite seminary-trained priests to Northern Michigan at all; rather, his parishes all raised up their own clergy and educated them locally as part of parish ministry teams.
I'm moved to wonder why these great, forward-looking young men and women are so often snatched from us before their time, while the wicked go on forever (I'm with the psalmist here). George Bush, smirking his way through life while he condemns thousands to death daily; Dick Cheney, lying to children in Wyoming about the origins of the war in Iraq and plotting to force a war with Iran. The most depressing thought -- or is it the only hope? -- is that perhaps these people will be with us until we learn to love them as intensely as we love the ones, like +Jim Kelsey, whom we so deeply mourn.
I never met +Jim, but I certainly knew OF him, because I was involved with Total Ministry in Minnesota, and +Jim was the most intensely committed bishop in the movement. The report was that he did not invite seminary-trained priests to Northern Michigan at all; rather, his parishes all raised up their own clergy and educated them locally as part of parish ministry teams.
I'm moved to wonder why these great, forward-looking young men and women are so often snatched from us before their time, while the wicked go on forever (I'm with the psalmist here). George Bush, smirking his way through life while he condemns thousands to death daily; Dick Cheney, lying to children in Wyoming about the origins of the war in Iraq and plotting to force a war with Iran. The most depressing thought -- or is it the only hope? -- is that perhaps these people will be with us until we learn to love them as intensely as we love the ones, like +Jim Kelsey, whom we so deeply mourn.
Friday, March 02, 2007
It's about bodies, not bones
Here we go again. Last year DaVinci, the year before that Mel Gibson, this year the "bones" of Jesus. Only not bones, just ossuaries, that supposedly contained bones until, in 1980, they were reburied somewhere unmarked. But still, enough DNA here, they say, to "prove" that these were the bones of Jesus, and his wife Mary Magdalene, and their son Judah, and his mother Mary, and some other guys named Matthew and Joses. And they're going to compare the DNA to what? Oh, I forgot -- the descendants of the Merovingians, of course.
But preachers should be glad, because this is ripe Lenten material, a teachable moment in which to remind Christians that resurrection is not about resuscitation of corpses. The notion of the empty tomb was undoubtedly useful as a graphic way of saying that Jesus is not dead, but risen. It may even have been historically true. But it's not the point. The "resurrection body," as Paul is at pains to point out, is not like "the body of this death." Better, almost, if Jesus' bones did turn up, because mine will certainly be present for some time to come, unless incinerated, and yet I hope to rise with him.
What is seizing me more importantly this Lent is the poetry of Galway Kinnell, in which, as one reviewer wrote, the poet's "ambition all along has been to hold death up to life, as if he had it by the scruff of the neck, and to keep it there until he has extracted a blessing from it." That was thirty-five years ago. In the latest book, "Strong Is Your Hold," his deep tenderness toward the flesh, the earth, and the spirit are all on display. And lately he was "heard" in the pages of Vermont papers pleading that we not plague our peaks with wind turbines for commercial use.
At present I am myself campaigning to have groundwater declared a public trust resource, off limits to commodification. This was meant to be a statewide campaign, but I find that I somehow got ahead of the pack. Here's hoping it passes our Town Meeting so we can be the pioneers for all who will come after us next year.
'
But preachers should be glad, because this is ripe Lenten material, a teachable moment in which to remind Christians that resurrection is not about resuscitation of corpses. The notion of the empty tomb was undoubtedly useful as a graphic way of saying that Jesus is not dead, but risen. It may even have been historically true. But it's not the point. The "resurrection body," as Paul is at pains to point out, is not like "the body of this death." Better, almost, if Jesus' bones did turn up, because mine will certainly be present for some time to come, unless incinerated, and yet I hope to rise with him.
What is seizing me more importantly this Lent is the poetry of Galway Kinnell, in which, as one reviewer wrote, the poet's "ambition all along has been to hold death up to life, as if he had it by the scruff of the neck, and to keep it there until he has extracted a blessing from it." That was thirty-five years ago. In the latest book, "Strong Is Your Hold," his deep tenderness toward the flesh, the earth, and the spirit are all on display. And lately he was "heard" in the pages of Vermont papers pleading that we not plague our peaks with wind turbines for commercial use.
At present I am myself campaigning to have groundwater declared a public trust resource, off limits to commodification. This was meant to be a statewide campaign, but I find that I somehow got ahead of the pack. Here's hoping it passes our Town Meeting so we can be the pioneers for all who will come after us next year.
'
Friday, February 02, 2007
Molly, we miss you already
What will it be like to face Bushworld every day without Molly Ivins? Like her friend Ann Richards, also sorely missed, Molly could be counted on to put her finger on the very weak spot in any blowhard's balloon. She spoke Texan in a way that was music to our ears, those of us who grew up in that time and place. I'll always have extra love and respect for my son Vince who, when he was a teenager, bought me Molly's book for my birthday, knowing how much I wanted it, and knowing too, with dread, that I would read most of it out loud to him. I did.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
