Painless, isn’t it, when corporate tentacles reach out gently and silently to suck up little pieces of our life for company use? It’s data death by a thousand cuts. We don’t even know we’re being bled.
As if data mining for profit weren’t bad enough, last week we learned with certainty that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is putting on a full-court press to track our every online move. They admitted it in public, and they have state police agencies joining the assault.
Alas, we have known for at least five years that corporations won’t stand up for individual citizens when government spooks demand to spy on us without a warrant, or even a valid cause.
So this well-done, three-minute movie offers some big, honkin’ elbow nudges about what we might be giving up . . .
Painless, isn’t it, when corporate tentacles reach out gently and silently to suck up little pieces of our life for company use? It’s data death by a thousand cuts. We don’t even know we’re being bled.
As if data mining for profit weren’t bad enough, last week we learned with certainty that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is putting on a full-court press to track our every online move. They admitted it in public, and they have state police agencies joining the assault.
Alas, we have known for at least five years that corporations won’t stand up for individual citizens when government spooks demand to spy on us without a warrant, or even a valid cause.
So this well-done, three-minute movie offers some big, honkin’ elbow nudges about what we might be giving up when we put our lives online.
Beyond that, ask yourself how much of your life is now recorded in a Beijing database after the Chinese government's theft of Google's data and source code and the cracking of at least 20 other American information companies?
China's repressive regime does not just rely on sneak attacks to compile personal information, thanks to the willingness of some American corporations to make a profit by selling the Chinese government hardware and software to implement its secret data collection.
To fully participate in the Information Age, we the people need protection. We won’t get it from the U.S. Congress, most of which is controlled by money from corporations. We won’t get it from the courts, with five current members of the Supreme Court ruling time after time that the demands of institutions trump the rights of individuals.
For now, our only protection is ourselves. Here is a place to start.
Have we Americans ever been plagued by so many sacred cow elephants at one time?
The elephant in the room, you know, is the hulking topic which no one wants to mention. The sacred cow roams free, because it would be blasphemy to corral her. And a sacred cow elephant is that which neither can be discussed nor brought to heel.
One American sacred cow elephant is the endemic waste and corruption in the so-called “war on drugs”. Another American sacred cow elephant is the rampant collusion among top management and brass in the Pentagon and its corporate vendors. Another American sacred cow elephant is the cruelty and denial of humanity so integral to free-market capitalism.
On Friday evening’s PBS Newshour, something very gratifying occurred: Light was shined on an American sacred cow elephant, and a lasso was tossed at her neck.
This particular sacred cow elephant was tax increases. and the mentioner with a rope in his hand was a Reagan Republican . . .
Have we Americans ever been plagued by so many sacred cow elephants at one time?
The elephant in the room, you know, is the hulking topic which no one wants to mention. The sacred cow roams free, because it would be blasphemy to corral her. And a sacred cow elephant is that which neither can be discussed nor brought to heel.
One American sacred cow elephant is the endemic waste and corruption in the so-called “war on drugs”. Another American sacred cow elephant is the rampant collusion among top management and brass in the Pentagon and its corporate vendors. Another American sacred cow elephant is the cruelty and denial of humanity so integral to free-market capitalism.
On Friday evening’s PBS Newshour, something very gratifying occurred: Light was shined on an American sacred cow elephant, and a lasso was tossed at her neck.
This particular sacred cow elephant was tax increases. and the mentioner with a rope in his hand was a Reagan Republican — none other than the first Director of the Budget in the Court of St. Ronald.
David Stockman declared that federal taxes must be increased.
“I think the lesson of the last 25 years is that (cutting taxes to force spending reductions) doesn’t work. You can keep cutting taxes until you reach the point where this year — or the year just ended — we spent $3.6 trillion and we only collected $2.2 trillion.
“So, we are now so far out of kilter that it’s irrelevant. Taxes are going to have to be raised. And the beast needs to be trimmed back. But it can’t be starved enough to even begin to cope with our fiscal problem. And this is where I think all the politicians are faking in both parties, but the Republicans especially.
“The Republicans think their mission in life is to cut taxes. Sorry . . . game over. We’re now in the tax-raising business. And we’re going to be in the tax-raising business for the next decade.”
Americans without their heads in a dark place have known the truth of this for a long time. We will not maintain anything close to our accustomed standard of living unless we start paying enough taxes to support that standard. Americans have been living on credit for decades.
Our per-person tax burden ranks somewhere between 10th and 13th among the world's industrialized nations. But reactionary brutes like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers and their inbred Wall Street accomplices like the Peterson Foundation would have us believe we are crushed under the yoke of oppressive taxation. They use their multi-million-dollar propaganda budgets to drown out the voices of reason — and to bribe legislators with campaign cash.
Few people want to hear painful truth. Joe Six-Pack does not want to hear that he has been getting off cheaply, that he has been living on government credit for most of his life, and that the time has come to pay the bill.
Thanks, David Stockman, for the candor. Now we need more truth about taxation from the people who can actually make it happen — if they have the guts.
Even when he is not running for president, one of the most dangerous spots in Washington is anyplace between John McCain and a TV camera. That has not changed since his drubbing in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Since inauguration day a year ago, the Arizona Republican’s face has been on the tube almost as much as President Obama’s. McCain pops up on the card again this weekend, appearing on Sunday morning’s Face the Nation for the fifth time in 12 months.
Since the president's inauguration, McCain has been on Meet the Press three times (December 6, July 12, and March 29), This Week three times (September 27, August 23, and May 10), Fox News Sunday four times (December 20, July 2, March 8, and January 25), and CNN's State of the Union four times (January 10, October 11, August 2, and February 15). His appearance on Face the Nation will be his fifth in the last year (January 24, October 25, August 30, April 26, and February 8).
Pretty remarkable, considering that he is not in the Republican Party leadership, has no key legislation before the Senate and is not involved in any important legislative negotiations.
Ignoring the hand of collegiality extended by President Obama, McCain has voted the straight Party-of-No obstructionist line in the Senate and has opposed all of the administration’s initiatives. He has buried forever the “maverick” label and wasted an opportunity to become one of his country's respected senior statesmen. John McCain now is just another right-wing troll.
His frequent TV invitations are the more puzzling because some of the senator’s public utterances have cast doubt on his mental acuity.
This week, Sen. McCain’s confusion and misunderstanding of facts in the Underpants Bomb investigation was only the latest example of his decline.
22 January 2010
Our Dying Democracy
For a few days, while obsessing over the warped and unseemly process by which the United States Senate arrived at its version of health-insurance reform legislation, I have been glancing frequently at an unused bumper sticker lying atop a chest of drawers in our living room. The sticker, which you see here, is stacked with some others I stockpiled a couple of years ago in a fit of frustration.
Now, one day after the Supreme Court ruled that free speech shall be apportioned according to the heft of a corporate bank account, I cannot stop thinking about the message on that bumper sticker.
Last night, still feeling queasy from the brutal beating . . .
For a few days, while obsessing over the warped and unseemly process by which the United States Senate arrived at its version of health-insurance reform legislation, I have been glancing frequently at an unused bumper sticker lying atop a chest of drawers in our living room. The sticker, which you see here, is stacked with some others I stockpiled a couple of years ago in a fit of frustration.
Now, one day after the Supreme Court ruled that free speech shall be apportioned according to the heft of a corporate bank account, I cannot stop thinking about the message on that bumper sticker.
Last night, still feeling queasy from the brutal beating administered to our democracy by Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Roberts, I came across this passage in a book about writing:
The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion — not to look around and say, “Look at yourselves, you idiots!”, but to say, “This is what we are.”
That passage, from Anne Lamott'sBird By Bird, was written in 1993 — well before the corrupt excesses of our latest generation of business moguls and the prostitution of our current crop of political leaders. But she nailed it.
Yes, my fellow Americans, this is what we are, this is what we have become. We are not a democracy; we are an auction house, where the people’s rights and privileges are gaveled down to the bully with the biggest bankroll.
Bruce Schneier is a security expert whose reasoned approach to the subject of terrorism is refreshing. I am a regular reader of his blog and a regular listener to the podcasts of his monthly newsletter. If you are weary of the Chicken Little din from the fear lobby, give Mr. Schneier a try.
After the underwear bomb attempt on Northwest 253 burst into the headlines December 25, Schneier was in demand as an analyst for both print and broadcast media.
For a long time, he has been strongly critical of what he calls "security theater" — particularly the knee-jerk expenditure of huge sums of our money on high-profile busy work in response to the last attack. These theatrics, he says, are a form of "magical thinking."
"It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time," Schneier wrote in an opinion column for CNN.
Bruce Schneier is a security expert whose reasoned approach to the subject of terrorism is refreshing. I am a regular reader of his blog and a regular listener to the podcasts of his monthly newsletter. If you are weary of the Chicken Little din from the fear lobby, give Mr. Schneier a try.
After the underwear bomb attempt on Northwest 253 burst into the headlines December 25, Schneier was in demand as an analyst for both print and broadcast media.
For a long time, he has been strongly critical of what he calls "security theater" — particularly the knee-jerk expenditure of huge sums of our money on high-profile busy work in response to the last attack. These theatrics, he says, are a form of "magical thinking."
"It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time," Schneier wrote in an opinion column for CNN.
“Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible,” Schneier declared, pointing to the British arrest of five plotters even before they got their hands on the means to do damage.
“Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities — both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur — and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare.”
That's not the way we do things in our humongous bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. We close gates after the horses have departed the corral. Within hours of the Detroit attack, the Transportation Security Administration issued more of their usual foil-the-last-plot restrictions that will make airline travel even more unpleasant for everyone.
While the pants-on-fire story unfolded in Detroit, President Obama did the right thing: He went on with his schedule, maintained an orderly governance and allowed his people to do their jobs without the war-room crisis atmosphere the previous administration so dearly embraced and fostered.
The foxoids reached for their bullhorns:
"Why is he vacationing in Hawaii while our nation is under attack? Why isn't he flying back to Washington to take charge? Obama doesn't care about America! He'd rather play golf than protect our country! Waaah, waaah, blah, blah . . . !"
This is what the wingnuts love to hear, and what competent security people deplore.
“By not overreacting,” said Schneier, “by not responding to movie-plot threats and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms.
“There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant ‘bring-’em-on’ rhetoric. There’s a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.”
If Stan McChrystal wants the president to ship 40,000 more Americans to Afghanistan, I have a suggestion for Mr. Obama: Send the general the 40,000 U.S. schoolteachers who lost their jobs this past summer because our state and local school districts couldn’t pay them.
Under my plan, let’s pay the teachers $100,000 bonuses to sign up for two one-year tours teaching Afghan school children. Pay the teachers $100,000 a year. That would be a stimulus plan guaranteed to take people off the U.S. unemployment lines and put them directly to work at a decent wage.
By my calculations, this would cost America a measly $12 billion spread across two years. That investment would be only about 5% of what it will cost taxpayers if Gen. McChrystal gets 40,000 people in military uniforms, with tanks and planes and guns and ammunition pouring through a 10,000-mile-long supply line.
Conservatives who obsess about budget deficits should love the idea of a 95% cut in expenditures.
Time and time again, we are told that the way to win in Afghanistan . . .
If Stan McChrystal wants the president to ship 40,000 more Americans to Afghanistan, I have a suggestion for Mr. Obama: Send the general the 40,000 U.S. schoolteachers who lost their jobs this past summer because our state and local school districts couldn’t pay them.
Under my plan, let’s pay the teachers $100,000 bonuses to sign up for two one-year tours teaching Afghan school children. Pay the teachers $100,000 a year. That would be a stimulus plan guaranteed to take people off the U.S. unemployment lines and put them directly to work at a decent wage.
By my calculations, this would cost America a measly $12 billion spread across two years. That investment would be only about 5% of what it will cost taxpayers if Gen. McChrystal gets 40,000 people in military uniforms, with tanks and planes and guns and ammunition pouring through a 10,000-mile-long supply line.
Conservatives who obsess about budget deficits should love the idea of a 95% cut in expenditures.
Time and time again, we are told that the way to win in Afghanistan is to give the Afghan people a better life and greater opportunities than they had under the Taliban. So what would be wrong with sending the Afghans teachers instead of expanding the occupying army they are coming to despise?
The video below shows a piece of a recent conversation between Daniel Ellsberg and Matthew Hoh, the ex-Marine officer and ex-State Department employee who recently resigned in protest of our muddled and wrong-headed Afghanistan operation.
Pay special attention to what Hoh has to say about the Soviet Union’s experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the records of senior-level military and Politburo deliberations uncovered in Soviet archives after the Cold War.
My natural tendency, and my emotional preference, has been to perceive homo sapiens as a rational species — or at least a species evolving toward rationality by applying our special abilities of reasoning and abstract thought. But Halloween seems an appropriate time to admit that we are still a long, long way from rationality.
As individuals, so many of us still cling passionately to the supernatural. We embrace phantasmic tales and illusions, apparently to shield ourselves from the harsh evidence of reality. We might smile knowingly at the ghosts and goblins of Halloween, yet the next day embrace a far-fetched fantasy peddled by charlatans playing to our insecurities, our passions, our prejudices.
To realize the breadth of irrationality among us, we need only spend an hour browsing the Internet . . .
My natural tendency, and my emotional preference, has been to perceive homo sapiens as a rational species — or at least a species evolving toward rationality by applying our special abilities of reasoning and abstract thought. But Halloween seems an appropriate time to admit that we are still a long, long way from rationality.
As individuals, so many of us still cling passionately to the supernatural. We embrace phantasmic tales and illusions, apparently to shield ourselves from the harsh evidence of reality. We might smile knowingly at the ghosts and goblins of Halloween, yet the next day embrace a far-fetched fantasy peddled by charlatans playing to our insecurities, our passions, our prejudices.
To realize the breadth of irrationality among us, we need only spend an hour browsing the Internet. Jaw-dropping ignorance — even willful, mulish obliviousness — abounds.
The latest issue of Wired magazine has an article about parents who reject vaccines for their children, some claiming the vaccines represent a conspiracy that will inflict some ailment worse than the diseases they prevent. The magazine piece includes these two paragraphs.
The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense.
The acronym FUD is well known in online forum discussions and blogs. It means Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. FUD is a favored weapon in the advertising and propaganda arsenals of business, politics and, of course, religion. We are willing to console ourselves with illusion rather than dig for truth. Thus, we grant the illusionists power over our lives.
Evolution is a long and convoluted process. Given enough time, human reason might ultimately prevail over superstition, might banish illusion forever.
On the other hand, evolution sometimes leads to dead ends.
The Nobel Committee's selection of Barack Obama for the 2009 Peace Prize has flummoxed the wiseguys who think the core energy of the Cosmos flows exclusively in a circuit between Manhattan and a few prestige addresses in Washington, DC.
These oracles read tea leaves, test the wind, study their navels and report their analyses to powerful insiders and to the public. They need to look smart and aware. They don't like surprises. When the Nobel selection of President Obama was announced, their knee-jerk reaction was to gasp indignantly and ask, "What has he done to deserve it?"
Republican hypocrites whined about his winning the prize despite a shortage of accomplishments. These are the same saboteurs who in the nine months of the Obama Administration have done everything in their power to derail the president’s initiatives while openly praying for his failure.
Even liberal columnists and commentators questioned the Nobel decision. Pundits out on the right wing gagged and spluttered, nearly incoherent in their ideological rage.
The Nobel Committee's selection of Barack Obama for the 2009 Peace Prize has flummoxed the wiseguys who think the core energy of the Universe flows in a circuit between lower Manhattan and a few prestige addresses in Washington, DC.
These oracles read tea leaves, test the wind, study their navels and report their analyses to powerful insiders and to the public. They need to look smart and aware. They don't like surprises. When the Nobel selection of President Obama was announced, their knee-jerk reaction was to gasp indignantly and ask, "What has he done to deserve it?"
Republican hypocrites whined about his winning the prize despite a shortage of accomplishments. These are the very saboteurs who in the first nine months of the Obama Administration did everything in their power to derail the president’s initiatives while openly praying for his failure.
Even liberal columnists and commentators questioned the Nobel decision. Pundits out on the right wing gagged and spluttered, nearly incoherent in their ideological rage.
David Brooks of the New York Times called the selection “a joke” perpetrated by “five lefty Norwegians”. I can only imagine (because I will not listen to them) what venom spewed from the right-wing broadcast demagoons.
They don’t get it.
The Nobel Committee was performing the same act of faith that 69 million Americans demonstrated last November when we chose a young man with a fresh face and inspiring ideas to move into the White House and clean up the wreckage.
January 20 brought immense relief to those of us who felt we had lived half a lifetime in fear and loathing of the demented, brutal, lawless Bush regime. On that first day of a new era America smiled and sighed and cried out exuberant aspirations. We shouted our joyful encouragement to this intelligent new leader and told him of our hopes, our wishes that he restore integrity to our government and liberties to our people and dignity to our countenance around the world. At long last, hope.
This young man with an inspiring life story, a remarkable career track and an admirably mature approach to challenges — but a political portfolio of little more than high-minded promises — was our messiah, of a sort. The snide scoffers on the right use that term sarcastically, but that is what Barack Obama represents to most Americans.
He represents that to much of the rest of the world, too. A messiah of hope. Hope that America will begin to restore its own democratic ideals and begin to behave again as a moral and responsible citizen in the community of nations, instead of a reckless, unilateral thug serving only selfish, short-term capitalism and the political oligarchy.
On the morning he was informed of the honor, the president said this:
“I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee. Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.
“To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize — men and women who have inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.
“But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st Century.”
We Americans had our opportunity to cast a vote for hope last November. The Nobel Committee finally got its chance the other day.
Somewhere in the DNA of many politicians, particularly Democratic politicians who sit in Congress, is something we might call the Silly Gene. Every so often, it causes them to act like a flock of panicked chickens in a windstorm.
The latest evidence of the Silly Gene was last week’s wing-flapping squawkfest over AIG’s bonuses. The House of Representatives flew into a tizzy, eventually voting 328-93 to confiscate most of the executive bonuses paid to AIG employes within reach of the IRS.
The loudest cacklers cried for a list of names of bonus recipients. They were no better than rabble-rousers working up the passions of a street mob.
Just six Democrats kept their sanity and voted against this clearly unconstitutional bill. (I am pleased that Vic Snyder of Little Rock, the best legislator in my state's delegation, was one of the six.)
The whole thing reeked of the brain-dead kerfuffle (pun intended) to overturn Terri Schiavo’s right to die . . .
Somewhere in the DNA of many politicians, particularly Democratic politicians who sit in Congress, is something we might call the Silly Gene. Every so often, it causes them to act like a flock of panicked chickens in a windstorm.
The latest evidence of the Silly Gene was last week’s wing-flapping squawkfest over AIG’s bonuses. The House of Representatives flew into a tizzy, eventually voting 328-93 to confiscate most of the executive bonuses paid to AIG employes within reach of the IRS.
The loudest cacklers cried for a list of names of bonus recipients. They were no better than rabble-rousers working up the passions of a street mob.
Just six Democrats kept their sanity and voted against this clearly unconstitutional bill. (I am pleased that Vic Snyder of Little Rock, the best legislator in my state's delegation, was one of the six.)
The whole thing reeked of the brain-dead kerfuffle (pun intended) to overturn Terri Schiavo’s right to die. That storm, in March of 2005, was led by Republicans. Last week’s AIG tempest was whipped up by Democrats.
While obsessing over this piece of tomfoolery, the House of Representatives has wasted valuable time that might have been spent formulating legislation to address the urgent needs of our country — education, health care, the environment, the still-weakening economy.
The Gallup Poll did a one-night quickie survey last week: 59% of respondents considered themselves outraged by the AIG bonuses, 26% were “bothered” and 11% were not particularly concerned.
Had Gallup called me, they could have added a digit to the unconcerned group. Hell, $165 million would not even pay for the New York Yankees infield. How am I supposed to be outraged at such a relative dribble of money while the Treasury and the Federal Reserve firehose trillions into the pockets of reckless banks and other greedy financial entities?
Here is a graphic illustrating, to scale, the insignificance of the AIG bonuses relative to the massive wad of federal bailout cash already funneled to the insurance company.
The identities of a few AIG bonus recipients have become public. The New York Times reported:
“ . . . for the handful of executives whose names and addresses have slipped out, life is no longer the same: Guards watch over their homes, reporters seek interviews in their long driveways, and, on Saturday afternoon, a bus and a caravan of other vehicles invaded their neighborhoods.”
Fortunately, the 40 or so caravanners were civil folk, armed with nothing but righteous indignation and a letter of protest for the AIG executives they were stalking. The execs stayed hidden and the letters went into mailboxes.
New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo is normally a level-headed fellow who has apparently slipped over the edge of irrationality in this instance. He is threatening to publicly name bonus recipients, even though some of them have already received death threats. Cuomo’s venting is just plain reckless and stupid. Congressman Barney Frank, a brilliant slayer of corporate dragons, also lost his head and demanded names.
Personally, I hope the bonus babies never are revealed. The public is so deranged by the Bush Bust and the subsequent Wall Street bailouts, there is no telling what might happen if caravans of angry citizens start rolling after dark.
The reported $165 million in AIG bonuses — paid for work that was legal and legitimately earned according to legal employment contracts — have already consumed far too much of the time and attention of our congressional representatives. The total of the bonuses is a pittance in comparison with the bailout money already committed to AIG, almost all of which is being passed on through to institutions like Goldman Sachs, who made risky bets on rotten debt instruments and are now being made whole with taxpayer money.
Let us not forget that the Bush Administration started the AIG bailout avalanche with the first $80 billion installment delivered in October of 2008 by Treasury chief Hank Paulson, the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs. And we are left to wonder why Paulson, just one day after he stood aside and allowed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, chose — along with Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, New York Fed official Tim Geithner (now President Obama’s Treasury secretary) and Goldman boss Lloyd Blankfein — to play savior in the case of AIG, which had insured Goldman’s debt.
Only last September the majority congressional Democrats were terrorized by Paulson and the Bush Administration into a voting stampede for the godawful $700 billion Wall Street bailout now known as TARP. That panic, totally unnecessary (because Paulson was clueless about how to use the TARP money to restart credit flow), resulted in all but a handful of Democrats meekly following the Republican White House into the bottomless pit.
Events happen ever faster in our world. Today I wonder: Does that include mass hysteria?
Two of the planet’s inveterate twisters of fact — the Wall Street Journal editorial page and broadcast blowhard Rush Limbaugh — continue to spread the lie that American corporations bear unfair tax burdens.
These extremist voices, as usual, are repeating misinformation from the anti-government core of the Republican Party, to whom the only good tax is a repealed tax.
All we have to do, these pundits trumpet, is cut corporate taxes and just stand back and watch the private sector carry the American economy to paradise.
Like most right-wing theories, this canard rests on simplistic arguments. The theory fails to acknowledge that when we reduce corporate taxes, typically only a portion of the company’s extra profit is reinvested for domestic growth. The rest goes into the owners’ pockets or is moved offshore. Meanwhile, 100% of the lost tax revenues must be absorbed by individual taxpayers like you and me. (That is, unless we follow the Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush model and just add the cost of tax cuts to the federal deficit for our grandkids to deal with).
U.S. corporate income taxes are well below average among the biggest industrialized nations. Yet Republican politicians and their echo chamber — the WSJ editorial page, Limbaugh, American Enterprise Institute . . .
Two of the planet’s inveterate twisters of fact — the Wall Street Journal editorial page and broadcast blowhard Rush Limbaugh — continue to spread the falsehood that American corporations bear unfair tax burdens.
These extremist voices, as usual, are parroting misinformation from the anti-government core of the Republican Party, to whom the only good tax is a repealed tax.
All we have to do, these pundits trumpet, is cut corporate taxes and just stand back and watch the private sector carry the American economy to paradise.
Like most right-wing theories, this canard rests on simplistic arguments. The theory fails to acknowledge that when we reduce corporate taxes, typically only a portion of the company’s extra profit is reinvested for domestic growth. The rest goes into the owners’ pockets or is moved offshore. Meanwhile, 100% of the lost tax revenues must be absorbed by individual taxpayers like you and me. (That is, unless we follow the Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush model and just add the cost of tax cuts to the federal deficit for our grandkids to deal with).
U.S. corporate income taxes are well below average among the biggest industrialized nations. Yet Republican politicians and their echo chamber — the WSJ editorial page, Limbaugh, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Forbes, National Review and their ilk — keep claiming otherwise. They base their complaints on the statutory corporate tax rate while conveniently ignoring the fact that the real-world tax load for U.S. companies is greatly reduced by a cornucopia of deductions, writeoffs, credits and other legal loopholes.
A World Bank project called doingbusiness.org does extensive international comparisons of taxes and other business regulations. Their findings on corporate taxes clearly expose the right-wing mythology.
Among the 12 industrialized nations of the G-8 and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), American corporations are taxed at the fourth-lowest rate. Only Russian, French and British companies pay lower effective tax rates on corporate earnings. Corporations in Germany and Canada have slightly higher actual corporate taxes than American firms (see the chart), and companies in India, China, Brazil, Japan and Italy are carrying a much greater tax burden.
The fact-twisters still cling to the discredited trickle-down theory they fell in love with 30 years ago. But riches at the top are always soaked up, and never trickle down in any meaningful volume. Cutting corporate income taxes always benefits owners and shareholders, leaving working stiffs to pick up the slack. This is the economic class warfare the conservative bloc of the Republican Party has been waging for more than a century.
Remember those Bush Administration tax cuts of which all the Republicans in Congress were, and are, so proud? As a result of those cuts a few years ago, well-off people in the top 20% annual income bracket gained 16% in after-tax income. Those in the top 10% of income enjoyed a 21% gain in take-home cash.
Jet-setters in the top 5% bracket celebrated a windfall of 28%. And the super-rich folks in the top 1% of annual income saw their after-tax largesse grow by more than 43% as a result of the Republican generosity.
And the working-class brackets, how have they fared with the Bush tax cuts?
After all the political puffery from Republicans about helping the middle class, the middle 60% of American wage earners eked out less than a 4% take-home increase from the tax cuts. Folks in the bottom 20% income racket scratched out a 2% gain.
What a remarkable anniversary this is. Two hundred years ago today Abraham Lincoln was born dirt poor in a cabin in Kentucky. On the same day, in a mansion in Shropshire, England, Charles Darwin was born to a wealthy doctor and financier.
Lincoln’s most notable lifetime achievements were preserving the United States and ending slavery. Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was working out the natural selection of species, and thus an explanation of evolution, through his prodigious and painstaking studies of the plant and animal worlds.
Lincoln’s work seems to have stuck, for the most part, maybe because the benefits of his projects are easier to understand. We cannot say racial equality has been reached in America 144 years after Lincoln’s death, but the realization surely has moved closer with the Obama family in the White House.
Meanwhile, Darwin’s explanations of natural selection, divergence of species and adaptation are apparently disquieting and unacceptable . . .
What a remarkable anniversary this is. Two hundred years ago today Abraham Lincoln was born dirt poor in a cabin in Kentucky. On the same day, in a mansion in Shropshire, England, Charles Darwin was born to a wealthy doctor and financier.
Lincoln’s most notable lifetime achievements were preserving the United States and ending slavery. Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was working out the natural selection of species, and thus an explanation of evolution, through his prodigious and painstaking studies of the plant and animal worlds.
Lincoln’s work seems to have stuck, for the most part, maybe because the benefits of his projects are easier to understand. We cannot say racial equality has been reached in America 144 years after Lincoln’s death, but the realization surely has moved closer with the Obama family in the White House.
Meanwhile, Darwin’s explanations of natural selection, divergence of species and adaptation are apparently disquieting and unacceptable to a large segment of American society. His work is still mired in the swamps of religious superstition and ignorance.
Darwin worked out his theory of evolution at a time when very little was known about the mechanism of hereditary characteristics. When that knowledge — genes, chromosomes, DNA etc. — came along in the 20th Century, Darwin’s theory had its foundation stone.
Natural selection works, we have learned, even at the level of genes. More recent advancements in microbiology have given us even stronger proofs of the validity of Darwin’s work.
But some among us, including many with a vested interest in maintaining ignorance and mystery, prefer to keep their eyes (and minds) tightly closed.
From the time I was a little boy, my dad encouraged me in critical thinking, logic and the scientific method. That is the way my mind has always worked, which is, I suppose, why I despise the charlatans, the propagandists, the fact-twisters, the demagogues, the fear-mongers, the hate-spreaders who depend for their power on maintaining a chronic ignorance among their acolytes.
That is also why I was disheartened earlier this month to see the result of a Gallup Poll concerning Americans' regard for evolution. Only about two of every five poll respondents said they accept Darwin’s findings. One-fourth said they reject the idea of evolution , and more than one-third said they have no opinion.
So distressing that such ignorance and apathy persist in our Information Age.
Gallip did a similar poll almost two years ago, focusing questions on “creationism” instead of evolution. The results were an even harder slap in the face of reason:
• 41% said they believed that a “god created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years” and did not believe that ”human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.”
• 24% said they felt both ”creationism” and evolution were probably or definitely true. (Think about that for a moment.)
In that poll, Gallup cross-matched the results with a survey of political party affiliation. It turned out that evolution was accepted by 57% of Democrats and 61% of independents but just 30% of Republicans.
Get this: Dipstick Motors in Troy, Michigan, where I bought my last new pickup truck several years ago, sends me a letter claiming the dealership didn’t make enough profit from my purchase, therefore it will invoice me for an additional amount above what I paid for the truck.
How about this?: The accountant for El Zocalo, my favorite Mexican restaurant, calls to say he has decided what the restaurant billed me for dinner two weeks ago did not generate enough profit, therefore he will send through an additional debit against my charge card.
What is wrong with this picture? Even in the cutthroat world of capitalism, “a deal is a deal” is supposed to have some meaning, is it not? These guys can’t do this, can they?
Okay, I confess, these two examples are fictional. They did not happen. Retail merchants don’t get away with this kind of extortion and double-dipping.
But banks do. The U.S. Congress has given them permission to behave as loan sharks.
The rest of this story is true.
Get this: Dipstick Motors in Troy, Michigan, where I bought my last new pickup truck several years ago, sends me a letter claiming the dealership didn’t make enough profit from my purchase, therefore it will invoice me for an additional amount above what I paid for the truck.
How about this?: The accountant for El Zocalo, my favorite Mexican restaurant, calls to say he has decided what the restaurant billed me for dinner two weeks ago did not generate enough profit, therefore he will send through an additional debit against my charge card.
What is wrong with this picture? Even in the cutthroat world of capitalism, “a deal is a deal” is supposed to have some meaning, is it not? These guys can’t do this, can they?
Okay, I confess, these two examples are fictional. They did not happen. Retail merchants don’t get away with this kind of extortion and double-dipping.
But banks do. The U.S. Congress has given them permission to behave as loan sharks.
The rest of this story is true.
Last week I received from Chase Bank USA N.A. a little tri-fold pamphlet entitled “IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING CHANGES TO YOUR ACCOUNT.”
Inside the pamphlet, there were only two changes noted:
(1) The annual percentage rate (APR) for purchases and balance transfers will change to the Prime Rate plus 8.99%, which means a current rate of 12.99%. (2) The APR for cash advances will be Prime plus 15.99%, which makes the current rate 19.99%.
This was Chase Bank's only explanation: “The principal factor we considered in amending your account is maintaining profitability on your account.”
It had nothing to do with my credit rating or my payment history or the way I use the credit card account. The bank's only excuse was its desire for more profit.
I was given the option of doing nothing, and therefore accepting the increased charges, or writing a letter refusing to accept the changes. Naturally, I chose the latter option. I know how much Chase is paying for money (practically nothing, as the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury are handing out billions at near-zero interest in order to stimulate lending) and I am not about to allow Chase Bank to charge me 13% for the use of this almost-free cash.
Here is the letter I sent:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I have received your notice regarding changes to my Chase credit card account ending in XXXX. This is to inform you that I will not accept the APR changes you have specified.
By your own admission, these changes are being imposed not because of any action or failure on my part, but solely because of your desire to “maintain profitability on your account.”
Please do not expect me to pay for your poor business decisions. I am not the U.S. Congress.
If you have not been able to maintain profitability on this account with the existing APR, there is some major failure in your operation for which I will not be held hostage.
Even though existing commercial law might allow you to violate the original credit agreement by changing the terms at your whim and pleasure, I believe there is a moral law that you break when you attempt to do so.
You are breaking that moral law, and I will not be your accomplice.
Actions like these only hasten the day when your institution is nationalized, and your operations are turned to the benefit of the American people and the common good instead of a favored few financial oligarchs.
Do what you will, but I will not accept ex post facto price gouging.
My letter means Chase Bank will close the account to prevent any further use of the card. Since I wasn't using it, I do not care. Meanwhile, I will continue to make regular payments on the balance, which was a low-interest balance transfer promotion I used to pay off a high-rate balance on another card. Chase Bank is not getting much juice on this account, and now they never will.
My only satisfaction is the assumption that, unlike their mentors in the Mafia loan-sharking business, the Chase Bank accountants will not send a crew with baseball bats to kneecap me.
Congress has not granted them persission to do that. Yet.
Did you think about Colin Powell today? I did, just as I have every February 5 for the last five years. My thoughts, as usual, were not pleasant.
Six years ago today Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, went before the United Nations Security Council and laid out a package of distortions, exaggerations and outright lies in support of action against Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.
Whether or not the general knew how false his words were, the net result was a wave of media activism (hysteria, actually) and public opinion which all but assured the unilateral attack on Iraq six weeks later.
To date, more than 4,220 American military personnel have been killed in the disastrous war that Powell helped promote. Permanent disabling injuries number more than 10,000. Other serious wounds exceed 20,000. Total Iraqi deaths are believed to exceed 200,000. More than four million Iraqi citizens have been driven from their homes as refugees, half of them to foreign lands.
The Bush Administration lied, and Colin Powell went to the United Nations to transmit those lies around the globe . . .
Did you think about Colin Powell today? I did, just as I have every February 5 for the last five years. My thoughts, as usual, were not pleasant.
Six years ago today Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, went before the United Nations Security Council and laid out a package of distortions, exaggerations and outright lies in support of action against Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.
Whether or not the general knew how false his words were, the net result was a wave of media activism (hysteria, actually) and public opinion which all but assured the unilateral attack on Iraq six weeks later.
To date, more than 4,220 American military personnel have been killed in the disastrous war that Powell helped promote. Permanent disabling injuries number more than 10,000. Other serious wounds exceed 20,000. Total Iraqi deaths are believed to exceed 200,000. More than four million Iraqi citizens have been driven from their homes as refugees, half of them to foreign lands.
The Bush Administration lied, and Colin Powell went to the United Nations to transmit those lies around the globe. Powell knows his performance six years ago is a permanent blot on his long record of public service. The stain of it has canceled out the positive aspects of his career.
"I'm the one who presented it to the world, and (it) will always be a part of my record,“ he said. “It was painful. It is painful now.”
If one wishes to be generous, one could say Powell was duped by the slavering Bush Administration dogs who lusted for war — Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith — and egged on by George W. Bush himself.
But Powell had plenty of warning that the case for Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” was weak and flawed, and rested on specious intelligence. A group of former CIA officers headed by Ray McGovern warned Powell and the White House the day before the U.N. presentation that the speech was full of unsubstantiated claims. They were brushed aside, and the war drums boomed.
In the weeks before the Powell show, about two-thirds of the nation's newspapers editorially had been calling for better evidence and stronger diplomatic efforts, according to a survey by Editor & Publisher. After Powell's U.N. appearance, most doubting voices went quiet and the media stampede — led by the likes of Fox News — was on.
After Powell's speech, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward was asked by CNN’s Larry King what would result from going to war and finding no WMD. Woodward replied: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.”
Conservative columnist George Will said Powell's speech would “change all minds open to evidence.”
Liberal columnist Richard Cohen of the WaPo wrote that Powell’s dog and pony show “had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman— could conclude otherwise.”
Of course, there were no WMD. There was no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. Saddam, bottled up by U.S. and British air cover and under constant scrutiny by U.N. weapons inspectors, was no threat.
So why, with so many administration malefactors and accomplices to share guilt, should Colin Powell bear the brunt of the blame and the shame for this war? Because he was the only honest man in the entire Bush syndicate with enough clout to have stopped the juggernaut before it dragged us into disaster.
Colin Powell could have stood up to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gang, and he would have been listened to — not by them, of course, but by the people and by the Congress and possibly even by the president. Here was a man who had been on a short list of potential presidential candidates, among the most respected public figures in America. The political fight would have been bloody, but Powell could have beaten the neo-con hoodlums.
Instead, he allowed himself to be rolled.
When the general closes his eyes, I wonder if he sees the faces of the young men and women who died for the lie. I hope so.
The harmonized whining came from the passenger cabin, not the engines, of the B-747. The whine began somewhere in the sky above Elkins, West Virginia, and continued westward in the key of B-flat all the way to Midland, Texas.
George W. Bush, who has lived his entire life inside a bubble of wealth, privilege and fawning sycophants, was winging home to Texas, to party with his oil-country pals and toast the end of his presidency. On the airplane with him, safely surrounding him still as he sailed away home, was The Bubble.
Inside The Bubble there was no sober reflection on what opportunities were wasted in the last eight years, what jobs were botched, what legal and ethical transgressions were committed. Nothing of what resources were squandered, how many Americans were left measurably poorer, what indelible stains were left on American ideals, how many Americans died because of the administration’s errors or neglect. There was no talk of such things on that airplane, because inside The Bubble such things do not exist.
The presidency of George W. Bush had been a success. Period. Just ask any of the more than 100 relatives, employes, admirers, contributors and hangers-on aboard that airplane.
The whiners were wondering why President Barack Obama . . .
The harmonized whining came from the passenger cabin, not the engines, of the B-747. The whine began somewhere in the sky above Elkins, West Virginia, and continued westward in the key of B-flat all the way to Midland, Texas.
George W. Bush, who has lived his entire life inside a bubble of wealth, privilege and fawning sycophants, was winging home to Texas, to party with his oil-country pals and toast the end of his presidency. On the airplane with him, safely surrounding him still as he sailed away home, was The Bubble.
Inside The Bubble there was no sober reflection on what opportunities were wasted in the last eight years, what jobs were botched, what legal and ethical transgressions were committed. Nothing of what resources were squandered, how many Americans were left measurably poorer, what indelible stains were left on American ideals, how many Americans died because of the administration’s errors or neglect. There was no talk of such things on that airplane, because inside The Bubble such things do not exist.
The presidency of George W. Bush had been a success. Period. Just ask any of the more than 100 relatives, employes, admirers, contributors and hangers-on aboard that airplane.
The whiners were wondering why President Barack Obama, in his inaugural address, had chosen to mention negative things. The Bush transition team had worked to make the changeover smooth for the incoming president, and — oh, woe — this is the thanks they get?
“We will restore science to its rightful place,” Obama said.
“We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” the new president said.
“We come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas,” he said.
“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” said President Obama.
“America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more,” he said.
“We can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders,” he said.
“Nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect,” the president said. “For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”
Couched in non-specific language, these were criticisms of the Bush Administration’s policies and processes. The whiners had hoped to get out of town and back to their comfortable country club lives without hearing any more about failures.
Because, truly, the crowd aboard that airplane regarded the Bush tenure as a successful presidency. Even though the man left office with the second-lowest public approbation in history (22%, above only Nixon), the Bush Administration accomplished many goals. It set out to do these things, and made no secret of them:
It successfully swung the U.S. Supreme Court hard to the right with the appointments of John Roberts and Sam Alito.
It successfully consolidated corporate power by suppressing the activities of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division. No monopolistic merger was ever thwarted on Bush’s watch, and the investment bankers raked in billions stitching together these grotesque deals.
It successfully created the largest, most expensive and wasteful bureaucracy in history with the amalgamation of Homeland Security. HSD became a wonderful vehicle for sending taxpayer money through no-bid contracts to Republican Party donors.
It successfully cut the tax bills of the wealthiest Americans by billions of dollars, while leaving 90% of working Americans with less purchasing power than they had when Bush took the oath of office in 2001.
It successfully removed Saddam Hussein from power. The ends justified the means, which included killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, forcing millions to leave everything behind and flee to neighboring countries, wrecking the country’s infrastructure and culture, creating a festering cesspool of hatred for America throughout the region and encouraging the recruitment of jihadists who will spend the rest of their lives dreaming of destroying us. But the regime is changed and Saddam is dead, so count it a success.
It successfully gave corporations free rein to use public lands and natural resources for private profit.
It successfully quashed or declined to enforce environmental protections that would have benefited mankind long-term but would have cost the administration’s corporate friends money in the short run.
It successfully suppressed working people’s efforts to bargain with employers for a living wage.
It successfully removed government oversight and regulation in almost every industry, encouraging risky and unethical schemes to maximize profits. When the schemes collapsed, the private profiteers were bailed out with taxpayer money because the enterprises were deemed too big to fail. The Reagan free-marketeers worked this same “moral hazard” play with the S&Ls in the 1980s; it clicked again 20 years later.
I find it incongrous that many Bush supporters proudly claim their hero “prevented another attack on American soil.” If that were true — and there is no way to prove or disprove it — it would surely be a proud feather in President Bush’s cap. Even so, what does their use of the word “another” say to us? Is Bush to be absolved for 11 September 2001?
I do not absolve him. The hijackers struck on his watch, and he cannot escape the terrible judgment of history for ignoring the 6 August 2001 intelligence brief which warned him that Al Qaeda would use airliners to attack the United States. It is absurdly disingenuous to credit the man with preventing a second attack when he and his administration did nothing to prevent the first.
But The Bubble remains intact. Karl Rove writes glowingly of his old boss’s management of the U.S. economy through tax cuts, which he credits with “52 months of growth and the strongest economy of any developed country.” As Rove does not mention the last two years of economic disaster under Bush, his assessment is comparable to boasting that RMS Titanic was making excellent speed on the night of 14 April 1912.
Inside the Bubble, on it goes: “Heckuva job, Georgie!”
I just ordered a book, Unjust Deserts. Published a couple of months ago, it is said to take a fresh look at the creation of wealth in our modern economy.
When Barack Obama suggested in a campaign appearance to “spread the wealth around” would be a good thing, the din from free-market maniacs and other capitalist hard-liners was deafening. They cried that Obama was advocating the “redistribution of wealth.”
My response was: It’s about damn time someone did. Obama was merely verbalizing what many had been thinking long before we heard Gordon Gekko's “greed is good” credo.
Massive redistribution of wealth has been occurring in our society for the last 25 years, ever since Reaganomics legitimized selfishness. For more than a generation, America’s wealth has been relentlessly redistributed upward through the warped economic policies and governing practices of the right. Net worth and purchasing power has leached from the working classes . . .
I just ordered a book, Unjust Deserts. Published a couple of months ago, it is said to take a fresh look at the creation of wealth in our modern economy.
When Barack Obama suggested in a campaign appearance to “spread the wealth around” would be a good thing, the din from free-market maniacs and other capitalist hard-liners was deafening. They cried that Obama was advocating the “redistribution of wealth.”
My response was: It’s about damn time someone did. Obama was merely verbalizing what many had been thinking long before we heard Gordon Gekko's “greed is good” credo.
Massive redistribution of wealth has been occurring in our society for the last 25 years, ever since Reaganomics legitimized selfishness. For more than a generation, America’s wealth has been relentlessly redistributed upward through the warped economic policies and governing practices of the right. Net worth and purchasing power has leached from the working classes into a pipeline flowing to the top of the heirarchy. The inequality of income and wealth today is unprecedented. Redistribution back to the people is long overdue.
That is why Unjust Deserts caught my interest: “The stock of knowledge is a social inheritance,” the authors say, “nurtured by governments, institutions and culture, and created by many generations of people. And yet even as our economic growth has become so highly socialized through the impact of expanding knowledge, the fruits of knowledge — the wealth being generated by knowledge-based growth — flows increasingly to the top. A new aristocracy is reaping huge unearned gains from our collective intellectual wealth.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, no stranger to writing about America’s economic imbalance, says:
“Unjust Deserts reveals the untold story of wealth creation in our time. Our celebrated entrepreneurs and money men are hoisting a cherry to the top of an already existing sundae, and then laying claim to the entire ice cream parlor. There may be individual effort and even genius involved with the cherry placement, but their individual rewards fail to recognize the contributions of other actors — workers, nature, taxpayers, community infrastructure and our technological inheritance — as the real stars of the show.”
Okay, so this book won’t reach any bestseller lists. But its topic is more important than vampires.
I expect to have some extra down time suitable for reading in the next several weeks. I will let you know how it comes out.
Democrats in the U.S. Senate have shot themselves. It remains to be seen how much blood will be lost.
In the last two years under Harry Reid's erratic leadership, the Democratic majority frequently has been outmaneuvered and frustrated by the Republican minority. Now the Dems are about to sabotage their own interests in the flap over Barack Obama's vacant seat.
Just when we thought racial politics was behind us for this season, Reid has opened the door and invited the monster inside once more.
Three weeks ago, Reid convinced all the rest of the Democratic caucus to publicly declare their resistance to seating anyone appointed to the vacancy by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. At the time, it appeared Blago — newly out on bail from an arrest on corruption charges — might be on the verge of resigning his office or being removed by the Illinois supreme court or state legislature.
Never mind that refusing to seat a legally appointed and qualified . . .
Democrats in the U.S. Senate have shot themselves. It remains to be seen how much blood will be lost.
In the last two years under Harry Reid's erratic leadership, the Democratic majority frequently has been outmaneuvered and frustrated by the Republican minority. Now the Dems are about to sabotage their own interests in the flap over Barack Obama's vacant seat.
Just when we thought racial politics was tucked away for this season, Reid opened the bottle and let the evil genie fly once more.
Three weeks ago, Reid convinced all the rest of the Democratic caucus to publicly declare their resistance to seating anyone appointed to the vacancy by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. At the time, it appeared Blago — newly out on bail from an arrest on corruption charges — might be on the verge of resigning his office or being removed by the Illinois supreme court or state legislature.
Never mind that refusing to seat a legally appointed and qualified member would almost certainly land Reid and his colleagues in court, their declaration was an act of self-righteous grandstanding. It was premature, and it was foolish.
Update — Reid contacted Blagojevich not long after the election, before the governor had been charged with anything, to give Blago a list of desired and undesired potential appointees. The desired candidates were popular Illinois state officials Tammy Duckworth (woman of Asian and American parents) and Lisa Madigan (white woman), both of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention last summer. The undesired candidates were congressmen Jesse Jackson Jr. (black man) and Danny Davis (black man) and state legislator Emil Jones (black man).
The Democrats did not actually say they would refuse to seat a Blago appointee. Their letter to him said they “would be forced to exercise our Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 5, to determine whether such a person should be seated.”
Typical U.S. Congress weasel words, to be sure, but the threat was clear.
Maybe the letter was intended to put more public pressure on Blagojevich to resign. Whatever the aim, it accomplished nothing positive. All it did was invite Blago to hang tough and use the biggest weapons in his arsenal: the presumption of innocence, the continuing power of his office and his legal authority to appoint the interim senator.
The Illinois governor is still the governor, and he is found guilty of nothing at this point. Why do U.S. senators need to be reminded that allegations are not proof, that a charge is not a conviction? Nobody threw Ted Stevens out of the Senate three months ago when he was charged with seven felonies. Nobody ousted him two months ago after he was convicted on all counts, and no Senate action has been taken against him since.
Now, if the Democrats stubbornly insist on a fight against seating Roland Burris, they will be denying a black man his legal right to join their exclusive club — which has no black members now that Obama has departed for the White House.
If the Senate Democrats don't come to their senses, if they push Illinois to a special election, black voters will be outraged. Any living, breathing Republican body will win the seat, and the loss will be laid directly at Reid's feet.
Recall, if you will, that Reid and his colleagues graciously allowed turncoat Joe Lieberman back into their midst after he spent the better part of a year campaigning for Republican John McCain. They not only admitted the treacherous Lieberman into their caucus, they allowed him to keep the chairmanship of the important Homeland Security Committee.
But now, it seems, they are ready to deny a loyal and qualified black Democrat his due. One marvels at the stupidity . . .
Sometimes I feel as if I seldom leave home — meaning I sleep in my own bed almost every night. That would not necessarily be an oddity, except that during the last half of my life in most years I have logged frequent long trips, both air and ground, and spent many nights as a guest of relatives, friends or hoteliers.
Last year was different. In 2008, for the first time in at least 15 years I did not pass through a Canadian border checkpoint. Susan and I made only one trip to the Midwest to visit the sons and daughters and grandkids, and we combined that round-robin journey with our annual trip to the Thompson family reunion in Indiana.
Even so, I can count 14 different away-from-home locations . . .
Sometimes I feel as if I seldom leave home — meaning I sleep in my own bed almost every night. That would not necessarily be an oddity, except that during the last half of my life in most years I have logged frequent long trips, both air and ground, and spent many nights as a guest of relatives, friends or hoteliers.
Last year was different. In 2008, for the first time in at least 15 years I did not pass through a Canadian border checkpoint. Susan and I made only one trip to the Midwest to visit the sons and daughters and grandkids, and we combined that round-robin journey with our annual trip to the Thompson family reunion in Indiana.
Even so, I can count 14 different away-from-home locations where I spent at least one night in 2008:
Zimmerman, Minnesota
South Lyon, Michigan
Marion, Indiana
Danville, Alabama
Bluffton, South Carolina
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Mayfield, Kentucky
Maysville, Kentucky
Rogersville, Tennessee
Asheville, North Carolina
Hilton Head, South Carolina
Tallahassee, Florida
Mobile, Alabama
Vicksburg, Mississippi
For us, that schedule seems tame. Here in rural Arkansas, though, most of our neighbors would consider it frenetic.
Last year our friend Jim, owner of the service station in the small town up the road, was excited to be taking a rare vacation trip. His station is a one-man operation, open 310 days a year, closed only on Sundays, Independence Day, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Last summer Jim and his wife drove to Branson, Missouri, about three hours north, and spent a long weekend celebrating their wedding anniversary. It was a gift from their family. When he returned, Jim told me it was the first time he had not slept in his own bed in more than 20 years.
“The durn hotel doors don’t even have keys,” he reported. “They use a credit card thing.”
Among the lessons 2008 has offered us, one of the most apparent on this final day of the year is that a newly elected U.S. president should take office as soon as the ballot result is confirmed. The ceremony and the parties can come later (like maybe, say, January 20 of the new year). The president should own the keys to the Oval Office within a few hours after the election.
In the 21st Century, our chosen leader needs to be on the job as soon as the airplane can get to Washington.
This is not 1820, so we do not wait weeks for the ballot count from the frontier states to arrive by courier on horseback. This is not 1876, so we do not depend on broken telegraph lines to tell us of a possible uprising in the Dakota Territory — or maybe it was just a windstorm. This is not 1938, and we do not wait for the deciphering of tomorrow's cable from the embassy to let us know when the bad guys are marching across frontiers.
In our time, we know instantly. The communications revolution began decades ago; in the last 10 years the Internet has enabled a stupendous global transfer of instant information . . .
Among the lessons 2008 has offered us, one of the most apparent on this final day of the year is that a newly elected U.S. president should take office as soon as the ballot result is confirmed. The ceremony and the parties can come later (like maybe, say, January 20 of the new year). The president should own the keys to the Oval Office within a few hours after the election.
In the 21st Century, our chosen leader needs to be on the job as soon as the airplane can get to Washington.
This is not 1820, so we do not wait weeks for the ballot count from the frontier states to arrive by courier on horseback. This is not 1876, so we do not depend on broken telegraph lines to tell us of a possible uprising in the Dakota Territory — or maybe it was just a windstorm. This is not 1938, and we do not wait for the deciphering of tomorrow's cable from the embassy to let us know when the bad guys are marching across frontiers.
In our time, we know instantly. The communications revolution began decades ago; in the last 10 years the Internet has enabled a stupendous global transfer of instant information to and from nearly all areas and all people.
Yet we conduct our leisurely presidential transition about the same way we did in Harry Truman's time. After the 1948 election it was two and a half months to the inauguration. Before that, we waited four months for a president to be sworn in. That was a bad thing in 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt waited months for Herbert Hoover's free-marketeers to hit the road.
Obviously, it does not have to be like that. Gerry Ford was sworn in on one day's notice after Dick Nixon quit. Lyndon Johnson took the oath on an airplane just a couple of hours after Jack Kennedy was pronounced dead. Democrat Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency just hours after Republican Abe Lincoln expired.
We don't need a long transition. This year, the delay is costly. George W. Bush is just mailing it in while domestic and foreign crises erupt almost daily. The lame duck cannot wait to get out of town, while the new guy is limited to weekly radio talks and press conferences. Barack Obama's team is working feverishly behind the scenes, but our laws ought to have him running the show right now, taking action to prevent or mitigate the growing problems, stepping out as the new face of America.
We see the Gaza Strip painted with blood and smoke, and the dream of Middle East peace fades again. Is Bush talking about his wonderful “road map” now?
We have a Secretary of State who has shown herself to be — despite her advertised intellectual brilliance — consistently ineffective in her dealings with friend and foe alike.
Pakistan is sliding into instability. India is wobbling onto dangerous ground. Parts of Africa are festering, with societies dying, dictators laughing at civility and defying the U.S. and the U.N., militias marauding and murdering at will, seagoing pirates hijacking while the world's strongest navy is nowhere in sight.
We witness a Secretary of the Treasury who seemingly ran out of ideas once he took care of his Wall Street pals with a $300 billion handout party that did nothing to stop the collapse on Main Street. We observe a Secretary of the Interior who is feverishly giving to corporate clients as much of the public's land and resources as he can before he is run out of town. We watch a Secretary of Labor doggedly pursue the suppression of American labor even while hundreds of thousands of working men and women lose their incomes and careers every month.
The Cold War with Russia is resuming, as neo-cons rub salt into the raw spots and the oligarchs in the military-industrial cartel reach for new trillions of tribute from us taxpayers.
With a transition in November instead of January 20, we would have been two months nearer to getting our armies the hell out of Iraq.
We would have been two months nearer to dealing effectively with the implosion of our consumer economy.
We would have been nearer to getting collars around the throats of the FIRE dogs (finance, insurance, real estate) and yanking them back into the kennel after their 30-year rampage of voracious wilding.
We would have been nearer to stanching the job-loss bloodbath on Main Street.
By now, if the transition had occurred right after the election, the shameful concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay would be closed and bulldozed into oblivion, removing a bloody stain on our country's reputation.
By now, the U.S. government would have declared its unequivocal opposition to the torture of human beings and would have begun to try to make amends for the heinous conduct of the Bush regime and its accomplices.
By now we would be rebuilding credibility among both allies and challengers.
But this lamest of ducks waddles on. Bush and Cheney are focused on spinning and polishing their entries in the history books. In exit interviews we learn that nothing is Bush's fault. Others let him down, he says. As for Cheney, his parting words are, "What fault? Nothing is wrong. You'll thank us."
Shredding records, erasing disk drives and burying other evidence surely consumes most of the West Wing's daily energies now. What measure of thoughtful and wise government administration can take place when Operation CYA is in full gallop? (As if this outfit has ever achieved anything thoughtful and wise in the 2,903 days since it arrived.)
Governments with a parliamentary system are able to change leaders almost overnight when the electorate votes the bums out. Why can't we?
Robert Reich is one of the smartest people still walking upright. I need regularly to partake of his writings and his podcasts. His thoughts help me maintain perspective lest I be swept along in the constant flood of irrational ideas and analyses that pours from the mouths and keyboards of nitwits, both elected and otherwise.
Like most Americans approaching this new year, I feel the exhilarating tug of January 20, 2009, when we will be unshackled from an astonishingly bad presidency and will welcome to our White House an inspiring leader who has promised us — given us — much hope.
One problem with advancing age, though, is that an ever-burgeoning inventory of disappointments presses on the heart, occasionally squeezing out a trickle of skepticism.
Have we not been this way before? Hope? Ah, yes, the man from Hope, Arkansas . . .
Robert Reich is one of the smartest people still walking upright. I need regularly to partake of his writings and his podcasts. His thoughts help me maintain perspective lest I be swept along in the constant flood of irrational ideas and analyses that pours from the mouths and keyboards of nitwits, both elected and otherwise.
Like most Americans approaching this new year, I feel the exhilarating tug of January 20, 2009, when we will be unshackled from an astonishingly bad presidency and will welcome to our White House an inspiring leader who has promised us — given us — much hope.
One problem with advancing age, though, is that an ever-burgeoning inventory of disappointments presses on the heart, occasionally squeezing out a trickle of skepticism.
Have we not been this way before? Hope? Ah, yes, the man from Hope, Arkansas, 16 years ago. And how did that turn out?
Prof. Reich, who became Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, helps us recall, with these words from his blog entry posted 12 months ago, on the last day of 2007:
Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, in part to reverse what Reagan had wrought. Clinton promised to provide all Americans with the health care, education, job training and other supports they needed in order to adapt to a fast-changing economy, as well as repair the nation’s roads, bridges and ports, which had been neglected for many years.
Yet by the time Clinton came to office, the federal budget deficit had grown so large he had to trim his ambitions. Ironically, that deficit had ballooned largely because Ronald Reagan had cut taxes and increased spending, mostly on the military.
Something feels too familiar here.
Barack Obama would have been gratified to inherit only the list of problems that faced Clinton. The domestic and global economic outlook today is very much darker than at the beginning of 1993. A river of red ink flows from the federal budget and off-balance-sheet expenditures have swollen, floating the national debt out of sight. State and local governments are sinking toward bankruptcy. Our foreign and domestic to-do lists have stretched to the horizon during the last eight years under an irresponsible fool of a president who has waged socioeconomic war on ordinary Americans while running badly planned, enormously costly military adventures abroad.
Yet, our spirits are high, as they were when The Man fom Hope went to Washington in 1993. But we must be honest with ourselves and recall how our dreams were dashed two years later when Newt Gingrich and his ugly trolls gained control of Congress and developed their vitriolic style of class warfare and polarizing politics.
Many, maybe most, of the Republicans in Congress now (the ones who survived the November balloting) are unchastened by the national results. They hunker down and clutch their discredited ideology to their cold bosoms. Under the eye of Newt, they gather to hone their obstructionist strategies. To hell with the will of the people, they say, because we’re right, and it’s our way or the highway.
Please excuse me for again tasting the juices of skepticism, even as I drink from the cup of hope.
The creative process is a solo endeavor. In spite of all the excitement over cloud computing, Web 2.0 and collaborative development projects in the business world, creative thinking is achieved only by individuals.
When something is pieced together by group effort, it often emerges looking like it was designed by a committee — because it was. Not always, but often, it is a bloated parody of the original idea.
On the other hand, solo creation has its pitfalls, too. Sometimes the lone practitioner will be captivated by an idea and will follow it with such narrow focus that obvious flaws become invisible. In the field of visual design, I think, the tunnel-vision trap is particularly insidious. Before going public, the designer is advised to enlist a second pair of eyes, and a third, and more, to avoid embarrassment.
Not enough eyes had access to the logo of a new iPhone app, Wine Enthusiast Guide, before it was listed on Apple's iTunes app store. The program itself, which taps a huge online database of facts, prices and reviews of wine labels and vintages, appears to be a quality item. But
the logo has techie bloggers snickering.
Maybe the software company, mobileAge, does not mind the laughter. Pre-Christmas buzz helped push Wine Enthusiast Guide to near the top of the iPhone app sales charts in the “lifestyle” category.
23 December 2008
Sweet Caroline
By the time New York Gov. David Paterson announces his choice to replace Hillary Clinton as the state’s junior senator, the selection will be almost automatic. And that will be a good thing.
The longer the process is drawn out — accompanied by constant chatter on the blogs, deafening blather on cable, exhaustive analyses in the op-eds and breathless play-by-play on the front pages — the more apparent it will become that Caroline Kennedy is a cinch for the job.
And she will be brilliant as a United States Senator.
Gov. Paterson, an intelligent and experienced politician, probably knows already what he will say when he steps to the microphone next month. In the meantime, he is seeing to it that all the ducks are lined up nicely before he pulls the trigger.
Update — On January 21, less than 24 hours before the announcement was to have been made, Caroline Kennedy stunned Paterson and the world by declining the appointment for “personal reasons.” What followed was a slapstick circus of political and personal blunders that damaged Paterson's credibility and assured Democratic Party primary election challenges in 2010 for both Paterson and his last-minute substitute choice for the Senate seat, congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, a conservative Blue Dog.
By the time New York Gov. David Paterson announces his choice to replace Hillary Clinton as the state’s junior senator, the selection will be almost automatic. And that will be a good thing.
The longer the process is drawn out — accompanied by constant chatter on the blogs, deafening blather on cable, exhaustive analyses in the op-eds and breathless play-by-play on the front pages — the more apparent it will become that Caroline Kennedy is a cinch for the job.
And she will be brilliant as a United States Senator.
Gov. Paterson, an intelligent and experienced politician, probably knows already what he will say when he steps to the microphone next month. In the meantime, he is seeing to it that all the ducks are lined up nicely before he pulls the trigger.
Update — On January 21, less than 24 hours before the announcement was to have been made, Caroline Kennedy stunned Paterson and the world by declining the appointment for “personal reasons.” What followed was a slapstick circus of political and personal blunders that damaged Paterson's credibility and assured Democratic Party primary election challenges in 2010 for both Paterson and his last-minute substitute choice for the Senate seat, congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, a conservative Blue Dog.
Caroline Kennedy will not be a star in her first years in the Senate. That club has many giant egos and experienced power-grabbers. But she already has a better political network, more grassroots support and a more potent fundraising engine than most of the veteran camera hogs on Capitol Hill.
She will be tested. Because she is a Kennedy, she will encounter more friction than your basic run-of-the-Hill freshman lawmaker. And she will face stiff opposition in the 2010 special election when voters get their say. She might even draw Democratic challengers in the primary; the line of pols lusting after the seat stretches around the block.
But she will win, and she will win again in 2012 in the run for a full six-year term.
Resentment of her obvious advantages (her money and her name) surfaced as soon as her interest in the Senate seat became known. Broadcast blowhards have tried to spin her interest into a sense of entitlement; they claim we should be insulted by her initiative in telling Paterson she wanted to be considered.
That is bogus. Caroline Kennedy has paid dues. Her interest in competing for a U.S. Senate seat is not presumptuous. Caroline Kennedy — attorney, writer and editor, advocate and organizer, fundraiser, public speaker — has more credentials in the public arena than most candidates. Though she has avoided the spotlight until recently, political skills are in her DNA.
Read Al Giordano’s thorough analysis at his blog, The Field. He accurately points out that Caroline’s views on current public policy questions and the challenges facing America are in line with what we can expect from a Kennedy: populist and progressive.
Her uncle Ted (the Massachusetts liberal who drives the wing-nuts wild) is one of Caroline’s main mentors and at times a surrogate father.
Caroline Kennedy has guts. She did not hesitate to speak out against the invasion of Iraq when most of her fellow Democrats were swept up in the Bush/Republican warmongering in 2002 — including Sen. Clinton and New York’s senior Sen. Chuck Schumer. Despite Caroline’s support of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaigns, she did not hesitate to endorse and support Barack Obama’s run for the presidency. More recently, she did not shrink from a request for her views on legal rights for homosexuals, replying to the hot-button question that she supports “full equality and marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.”
She backs the rights of workers to organize for collective bargaining, a dogfight issue that will be high on the congressional agenda in 2009.
Caroline Kennedy is a determined advocate for civil liberties who has written and edited several books, including In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights In Action (1991) and The Right to Privacy (1995), and A Patriot’s Handbook (2003), a response to the warped neo-con approach to national security.
Perhaps above all else, she is an experienced force and spokeswoman for rebuilding our country’s educational resources and standards. We need more of those if America is to halt its slide into mediocrity.
This woman has my vote any time she wants to run for any office, if they’ll let me mail a ballot from my remote location. Otherwise, she’ll have to settle for a page of ideas and a check.
At last, after seven years and 11 months, we have a domestic action by the Bush White House for which to say, “Thank you, Mr. President.” This administration temporarily put aside its party doctrine and did something of enormous benefit to the American people.
By funding a four-month bridge loan to keep the U.S. auto industry alive, George W. Bush averted what I believe would have been the worst economic catastrophe ever to hit this nation. He does not want to supplant Herbert Hoover as the man who twiddled the country into its Greatest Depression.
We can understand why the White House announcement was delayed so many days: The administration stretched out the suspense while it placated the bloodthirsty Republicans in Congress who wanted to let the auto industry crash and burn for the sake of party ideology.
These congressional brutes — intent on smashing the United Auto Workers union — were willing to watch from the sidelines as two million, maybe three million Americans lost their jobs. The costs of unemployment and health care . . .
At last, after seven years and 11 months, we have a domestic action by the Bush White House for which to say, “Thank you, Mr. President.” This administration temporarily put aside its party doctrine and did something of enormous benefit to the American people.
By funding a four-month bridge loan to keep the U.S. auto industry alive, George W. Bush averted what I believe would have been the worst economic catastrophe ever to hit this nation. He does not want to supplant Herbert Hoover as the man who twiddled the country into its Greatest Depression.
We can understand why the White House announcement was delayed so many days: The administration stretched out the suspense while it placated the bloodthirsty Republicans in Congress who wanted to let the auto industry crash and burn for the sake of party ideology.
These congressional brutes — intent on smashing the United Auto Workers union — were willing to watch from the sidelines as two million, maybe three million Americans lost their jobs. The costs of unemployment and health care benefits would have immediately crushed budgets in every state government. The federal pension guaranty fund would have plunged into the red and cried for replenishment with taxpayer money to meet its obligations. On the revenue side, an auto manufacturer’s failure would cost U.S. taxpayers well over $100 billion next year just in lost federal income tax receipts. The massive decline in state and local sales taxes would be incalculable.
These Republican congressmen would have idly watched not only a collapse of auto and auto parts manufacturing, but also the devastation of our nation’s base in plastics, in textiles, in semiconductors, in steel, in glass, in rubber. Hundreds of independently owned local tool and die and machine shops would go dark, along with local design shops. Business-to-business industries from accounting to waste management would be left dead or bleeding badly. The layoffs from car dealerships alone would be painful enough — already there are showooms standing vacant throughout the country — but the ancillary job losses in retail and consumer service businesses would devastate local economies.
Local school closings would number in the thousands.
Many of these free-market zealots are hypocrites who a few years ago were campaigning for office on the phony “family values” ticket. What family value is it to stand in a huddle chanting party dogma while millions of men and women who have sweated for years to build up equity and experience suddenly lose their incomes, their pensions, their health insurance, their homes and their family’s future?
The Rigid Rethuglicans reply, “That’s the way free markets work. Suck it up.”
Few in this country would escape the human misery these vandals risk by their obsession with union-busting. Bankruptcies, already climbing, would explode. The avalanche of foreclosures would accelerate. Draconian cuts in local government payrolls would spare no one, including police and fire departments. Urgent infrastructure work would be canceled. Construction jobs, already slumping because of the housing depression, would plummet.
Those who cry, “Why should we bail out Detroit?” are utter fools if they think the auto industry’s crisis is confined to Detroit, to Michigan, or even to the Great Lakes manufacturing corridor. No region of the country, and very few states, would escape intense pain. Across three decades of researching and writing about business matters I saw that the auto industry is the sector that most represents the core of our economic life in this country.
That remains true even in today’s high-tech Information Age.
The housing industry? Without car manufacturing there is no demand for housing. Jobs are the single most important driver of new home construction — not interest rates, not demographic trends, not immigration. When new home construction sags, workers in that industry switch to repair and remodeling, or commercial building or public works projects. Many construction trades are mobile, moving to parts of the country where housing activity is not so bad until they can return to their home areas when building picks up again.
But autoworkers cannot return to a shuttered plant. When their workplace closes, it is gone, and so are the supplier companies and the entire chain of businesses dependent on that plant and those workers’ incomes. Gone forever.
Even the burger-flipping jobs disappear. Cities are ruined. No thinking person with an iota of humanity wants to see this happen, not ever for any reason — certainly not for the sake of clinging to a failed ideology.
The six presidential electors of my state have made their 2008 choice official, I am sorry to report. Was it too much to hope that these half-dozen men and women of Arkansas would be overtaken, in their 15 minutes of fame, by the spirit of change?
Was it unrealistic to think that perhaps, as they gathered in Little Rock on Monday, the weight of dark history might press upon them and steer them toward a brighter legacy?
Of course; that was a silly fantasy. There is a name for an Electoral College member who resists the will of the majority. That elector is not called a “maverick” (which surely would appeal to some). No, that person is officially branded a “faithless elector”, and there are laws . . .
The six presidential electors of my state have made their 2008 choice official, I am sorry to report. Was it too much to hope that these half-dozen men and women of Arkansas would be overtaken, in their 15 minutes of fame, by the spirit of change?
Was it unrealistic to think that perhaps, as they gathered in Little Rock on Monday, the weight of dark history might press upon them and steer them toward a brighter legacy?
Of course; that was a silly fantasy. There is a name for an Electoral College member who resists the will of the majority. That elector is not called a “maverick” (which surely would appeal to some). No, that person is officially branded a “faithless elector”, and there are laws to deal with such transgressors.
So the Little Rock six — Rose Bryant Jones of North Little Rock, Phyllis Kincannon of Maumelle, Steve Lux of Pine Bluff, Jim Burnett of Clinton, Kermit Parks of El Dorado and Reta Hamilton of Bella Vista — trooped into the capitol building on Monday, took the oath from the secretary of state, then dutifully voted for the candidates to whom they had been pledged, John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Thus, on January 6 in a joint session of Congress, it will be recorded that Arkansas has voted for a losing presidential candidate for only the second time in the last 52 years.
Not coincidentally, that is approximately the interval since Arkansas dug in its heels against the mandates of Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, that is about the interval since President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to enforce racial integration at Central High.
So, foreswearing the bellwether mantle, we Arkansans instead must wear these two murky blots on our presidential voting record:
In 1968, our electoral votes were cast for George C. Wallace, the racist ex-governor of Alabama, who prevailed in four southern states in his third-party run against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
In 2008, our votes went overwhelmingly to the white opponent of the only person of color ever nominated for president.
Just twice in half a century we have ridden a loser here, and both times for the same sorry mindset. Shall we overcome, someday?
The bankruptcy of a U.S. automaker would bring the worst economic calamity any of us has ever known. Yet, the leaders of the Republican Party would like nothing better.
Regardless of the prospect of unprecedented pain, destruction and even death raining down on America from the collapse of a Big Three automaker, Republicans in Congress are doing their utmost to bring it about by denying emergency loans.
Why do they stoop so low? Why do they play a saboteur's game?
Here is the answer: Because an automaker's failure, with America's economy already in freefall, would play right into their dirty hands. It would accomplish three Republican Party objectives:
The bankruptcy of a U.S. automaker would bring the worst economic calamity any of us has ever known. Yet, the leaders of the Republican Party would like nothing better.
Regardless of the prospect of unprecedented pain, destruction and even death raining down on America from the collapse of a Big Three automaker, Republicans in Congress are doing their utmost to bring it about by denying emergency loans.
Why do they stoop so low? Why do they play a saboteur's game?
Here is the answer: Because an automaker's failure, with America's economy already in freefall, would play right into their dirty hands. It would accomplish three Republican Party objectives:
It would crush the UAW and score a major union-busting victory in the obsessive Republican war on the working class.
It would impoverish the Obama Administration, wrecking the new president's plans before he can even begin to implement them.
It would aggravate and prolong America's economic distress so that voters might grow impatient and angry with the Democratic majority in time for the 2010 mid-term elections.
A right-wing trifecta.
But, you might ask, would Republican senators deliberately put millions of Americans out of work in order to achieve their ideological aims? Would they actually turn middle-class communities into scorched earth just to score political points over the Democrats?
Have no doubt of it. Karl Rove, their political prince, has taught them well.
This is the same bunch — or their successors — who chanted "Better dead than Red!" while swaggering along the brink of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. They didn't ask the rest of us then if we wanted to die for their ideas; they just rattled their bombs, chanted their chants and played their dirty international games.
Now they are playing brinksmanship on the edge of an economic abyss, and taking the rest of us along on their dangerous stroll.
Are these fat-cat politicians any better than the Greek anarchists throwing bombs into the shops of downtown Athens, trying to bring down a government they oppose?
The Republican firebombers in Congress make various excuses. They claim to be concerned about the money. That's $15 billion over four months (a loan, to be repaid) to save an entire industry and at least two million jobs, versus $10 billion a month being spent in Iraq (never to be repaid) because of a war the Republicans relentlessly instigated, enabled, pursued and have continued to spend our money on to this day.
A $15 billion expenditure is as nothing when we consider the alternative. If General Motors goes down, costs in the hundreds of billions would fall on the U.S. taxpayer for unfunded pension obligations, unfunded health care costs, unfunded unemployment insurance coverage and at least $100 billion a year in lost income tax revenues by the failure of this industry.
Plus the unimaginable anguish in millions of households across this land.
Something is wrong with Republican accounting.
But, yes, having suffered through many years of their reckless disregard for human values, we already knew that.
Two days before the big election early this month, we were rolling down Highway 170 in Beaufort County, South Carolina, a few miles west of Bluffton, when I saw the sign — a billboard, actually. Brightly painted and neatly lettered, it glared at us from the corner of a piney woods next to a dirt road.
As the 2008 presidential campaign dragged on, I had been thinking for many weeks about the very message this billboard conveyed, so my eye locked on, hard. The sign, about 10 feet high by 15 wide, was a riveting sight.
It was selling nothing but an idea.
The panel was filled with a representation of the Confederate battle flag — the familiar Stars and Bars. Across its middle, in large black letters, were two words: Never Forget.
I often thought of that billboard in the days immediately after the election, especially when the national county-by-county vote . . .
Two days before the big election early this month, we were rolling down Highway 170 in Beaufort County, South Carolina, a few miles west of Bluffton, when I saw the sign — a billboard, actually. Brightly painted and neatly lettered, it glared at us from the corner of a piney woods next to a dirt road.
As the 2008 presidential campaign dragged on, I had been thinking for many weeks about the very message this billboard conveyed, so my eye locked on, hard. The sign, about 10 feet high by 15 wide, was a riveting sight.
It was selling nothing but an idea.
The panel was filled with a representation of the Confederate battle flag — the familiar Stars and Bars. Across its middle, in large black letters, were two words: Never Forget.
I often thought of that billboard in the days immediately after the election, especially when the national county-by-county vote tallies became available. When I saw the 2008 vote compared graphically to the 2004 presidential balloting in a large USA Today map, my stomach tightened. I felt slightly nauseated, and a little mad.
Flash back to early October, to our county Democratic Party’s biennial fish fry fundraiser. Susan and I always attend, to chat with the local and state candidates, hear the speeches and enjoy a spirit of civic activism — plus catfish, slaw and hushpuppies — along with a couple hundred neighbors.
This year’s Democratic Party fish fry was, sadly, a dud. When we sat down to eat, fewer than 20% of the seats were filled. The local candidates and their spouses comprised half of the unenthusiastic crowd. So, we comforted ourselves with the encouraging news from national polls. We assumed the election day turnout for Barack Obama in our part of Arkansas would not excite us, but we did not expect the embarrassment we felt when the vote count was reported.
In our county in 2004, George Bush outpolled John Kerry by 5,076 to 3,361 (59% to 39%). This year, the count was 5,331 for McCain (68%) to 2,277 for Obama (29%). About a thousand of our county’s Democrats silently boycotted. They didn’t vote for other offices, like sheriff or judge. They just stayed home.
Our county's populace, by the way, is 94% white.
The national map comparing the 2008 presidential vote to 2004 painted a ragged swath of Republican gains across the mid-South and up into the Appalachians. Just 22% of U.S. counties gave McCain a bigger portion of their votes than Bush received four years ago, but the vast majority of those counties were concentrated in that corridor from Oklahoma through Arkansas. Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. And the biggest, reddest splotch in that bloody band of counties was smeared angrily across my state. Look at the map.
What to make of this? I suppose we can consider more than one rationale for this remarkably well-defined picture of voting patterns. To my mind, however, one factor overshadows all others. That factor is rural white racism.
Democrats this year had a stronger candidate than four years ago. The blunders and scandals of eight years of Republican rule were evident to all. The Bush economic collapse was crushing working-class society and the Republican president had earned the public’s lowest rating in history, with McCain unable to explain convincingly how he would be any different.
Yet the voters in this swath of mostly rural America gave Barack Obama a smaller share of their support than they gave John Kerry in 2004.
Some have tried to explain the pattern by saying it was influenced by a reverence for the military and McCain’s service. If that were true, why is the pattern absent in so many well-defined military-oriented areas — North Carolina, for example, whose governor once extolled it as the nation’s “most military-friendly state”?
Some tried to say Arkansas was anti-Obama because Hillary Clinton carried this state big in the primary and voters held a grudge when Obama later beat her out for the nomination. That doesn’t wash. Look at New York, where Sen. Clinton also whipped Obama in the primary. Voters there held no grudge. That theory also fails to explain the red blotches across Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kentucky, which aren’t exactly Clinton-friendly environs.
Newspaper columnist John Brummett, the best political writer in Arkansas, offered this:
“There is this theory that Obama’s problem in Arkansas wasn’t skin color so much as what’s being called “otherness,” having to do with his background and name and style, that kept provincial people from getting comfortable with him. It’s still prejudice, though.”
Author William Least Heat Moon says he traveled extensively in the South while researching his latest book, and in six years he only heard “that word” one time. I can only surmise that his status as a stranger kept him sheltered from the coarser language of the working man’s environment, where I have heard “that word” more times than I can count in the dozen years I have lived here.
Perhaps the author might like to visit Huntsville, Arkansas, up in the Ozarks about an hour’s drive north of my home. On the night of the election, the owners of the Faubus Motel in Huntsville lowered the American flag and ran the Confederate Stars and Bars up their flagpole. It is still there. They did it, they say, because Obama is “a Marxist”.
Right.
Huntsville is not many miles from the spot where I was greeted, on my first drive into Arkansas in 1996, by a roadside sign (erected by the state highway commission) which read: “Next mile of roadside maintained by Boone County chapter, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Obama’s election was a giant step for America. We have many steps to go.
Pirates have hit more than 90 merchant vessels in the Indian Ocean this year, including eight in the last week. They suddenly have become the highest-profile terrorists in the world, pushing aside bombings in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the TV newscasts.
Now, wouldn't one expect George W. Bush to jump on this with both feet? Wouldn't one expect our dress-up Flyboy in Chief to eagerly seize the opportunity to play with his fleets of ships and planes in a high-profile, seagoing showdown with the Evil Doers? It would be another chance to use that tough-guy twang announcing military action . . .
Pirates have hit more than 90 merchant vessels in the Indian Ocean this year, including eight in the last week. They suddenly have become the highest-profile terrorists in the world, pushing aside bombings in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the TV newscasts.
Now, wouldn't one expect George W. Bush to jump on this with both feet? Wouldn't one expect our dress-up Flyboy in Chief to eagerly seize the opportunity to play with his fleets of ships and planes in a high-profile, seagoing showdown with the Evil Doers? It would be another chance to use that tough-guy twang announcing military action, with excellent visuals of U.S. destroyers maneuvering on the high seas! Another chance to use the phrase "Global War On Terror"!
Often in the past Bush has reflexively sent Navy warships steaming all over the planet whenever he heard something he didn't like — into the Arabian Gulf to respond to Ahmadinejad's trash talk, into the North Pacific to rattle nuclear sabers in the face of Krazy Kim, even to the Arctic Ocean when the Russians began planting too many flags.
So why no action against these pirates? Why no apparent concern for "vital oil supplies" being hijacked on the way to our shores? The Bushites say they are "conferring with U.N. officials," and how uncharacteristic is that? A regime that will invade and occupy a sovereign nation against the wishes of the United Nations suddenly grows circumspect and diplomatic when faced with a raggedy-ass bunch of pirates?
Then it all became clear to me when I saw a headline:
Blackwater Says ‘We'll Fight Somalia's Pirates’
Ah, Blackwater. Bush-Cheney's private guns for hire. A major Republican campaign donor. Private enterprise, praise be!
"Blackwater Worldwide today announced that its 183-foot ship, the McArthur, stands ready to assist the shipping industry as it struggles with the increasing problem of piracy . . . As a company founded and run by former Navy SEALs, with a 50,000-person database of former military and law enforcement professionals, Blackwater is uniquely positioned to assist the shipping industry."
Of course. Now it all makes sense. Here is another privatizing moment for the Bush Syndicate. Never let government do work that might otherwise profit a corporate pal.
But the Indian Navy screwed up the other day. They sank a pirate gang's mother ship without even offering Blackwater a no-bid contract. That, of course, is dirty pool, and clearly socialist behavior. Condi Rice will surely lecture the Indian ambassador.
I filled out my general election ballot the other day and slipped it through the slot in the blue metal box in the county clerk's office. Early voting in my state began two weeks ahead of Election Day. I usually like to vote at my own precinct on the actual day, just to say howdy to the neighbors and sip the elixir of democracy. But I will be 800 miles away on Election Day, so I voted early.
No one challenged me at the polling place (no intimidating Republican Jugend in sight). Four of us occupied the small courthouse office: the clerk and her assistant and one fellow voter, who also requested a paper ballot.
There is an odd — and somewhat sad — tone to this election campaign in Arkansas. It hardly deserves to be called a campaign. Few give a damn how I voted.
I filled out my general election ballot the other day and slipped it through the slot in the blue metal box in the county clerk's office. Early voting in my state began two weeks ahead of Election Day. I usually like to vote at my own precinct on the actual day, just to say howdy to the neighbors and sip the elixir of democracy. But I will be 800 miles away on Election Day, so I voted early.
No one challenged me at the polling place (no intimidating Republican Jugend in sight). Four of us occupied the small courthouse office: the clerk and her assistant and one fellow voter, who also requested a paper ballot.
There is an odd — and somewhat sad — tone to this election campaign in Arkansas. It hardly deserves to be called a campaign. Few give a damn how I voted.
Get this: We have four congressmen and one U.S. senator up for re-election, and not one of them had a major-party challenger. Not one! There were exactly two contested races on the local ballot: county sheriff and circuit judge. All other county offices had no contests. The state legislature offices were uncontested. All candidates for office in my little town and every other little crossroads municipality in our county ran unopposed.
Generating the most heat in Arkansas this election year is a proposed constitutional amendment to allow a state lottery. Every state bordering Arkansas has a lottery or casinos or both. We have no such thing, so we Arkansans pour our potential gambling tax revenues across state lines to pay for schools elsewhere. A few years ago this state, governed then by preacher man Mike Huckabee, even blocked non-profit groups from holding raffles or bingo games. Last year a new attorney general slapped down that puritanical nonsense. The latest polls show the Arkansas lottery proposal likely to pass. It's about time.
Update — The polls were right. The proposal passed by almost 2-to-1.
As usual, there is another Bible Belt culture war proposal on the ballot. This one would bar unmarried couples from becoming foster parents. No, we are not talking only about same-sex couples, we're talking about any unmarried couple. This piece of priggery is going down to defeat, the polls say.
Update — The polls were wrong. The hounds of holiness won’t let homeless kids through the door until the householder produces a marriage license.
Let's see . . . what else was on the Arkansas ballot? Oh, yes, the nominees for President of the United States. Seven names — the most crowded field of all, yet as non-competitive as the rest.
In this election of all elections, after eight unkind Republican years, the map of Arkansas should be turning blue. All seven Arkansas constitutional officers — governor, lieutenant-governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer etc. — are Democrats. The legislature is controlled by Democrats. Both U.S. senators are Democrats. Three of the state's four congressmen are Democrats.
Yet Barack Obama will not win our six electoral votes. He has no chance here, and everyone has known it from the first day. John McCain showed his face here once, early in the campaign, to solicit campaign contributions up in rock-solid Republican territory in the WalMart corner of the state. Obama has not visited. Neither campaign has advertised much. No billboards, few yard signs and bumper stickers. Spending serious money in Arkansas would have been foolish for either organization, because this outcome was never in doubt.
There are only three Obama for President offices in the state, and one of those is the Democratic Party headquarters building near the capitol in Little Rock.
Hillary Clinton would have carried Arkansas for the Democrats. Barack Obama will not.
When I vote for President of the United States, probably tomorrow at the county clerk's office, I will not be voting for a commander in chief. I do not want a commander in chief. It is much too late for that. I want and need a president.
At one time, I desired to place myself under the orders of a commander in chief. I tried to make myself a servant in his armed forces. But Dwight D. Eisenhower wouldn't have me. Well, actually, one of his minions gave me the virtual rejection slip.
I wanted to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, to go to Officer Candidate School and become a pilot. I wanted to fly . . .
When I vote for President of the United States, probably tomorrow at the county clerk's office, I will not be voting for a commander in chief. I do not want a commander in chief. It is much too late for that. I want and need a president.
At one time, I desired to place myself under the orders of a commander in chief. I tried to make myself a servant in his armed forces. But Dwight D. Eisenhower wouldn't have me. Well, actually, one of his minions gave me the virtual rejection slip.
I wanted to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, to go to Officer Candidate School and become a pilot. I wanted to fly multi-engine planes. It was peacetime. The only ongoing war was called the Cold War.
The conversation with the recruiter came to a sudden and disappointing end after he asked me about my eyesight. I told him I had 20/20 vision using both eyes, 20/18 vision in my left eye and 20/30 vision in my right eye.
"Well, you can't be a pilot," he said. "We require 20/20 vision in each eye, uncorrected. But you could be a navigator or a flight engineer."
The Air Force in 1958 had more than enough pilots to fly its transports and the fleet of B-52s which constantly circled the North Pole carrying atomic bombs built to incinerate Leningrad, Kiev, Moscow.
Downcast, I left the recruiting office. Later that summer I began pilot training on my own with instructor George M. Davis at Marion Municipal Airport. After I soloed and put a few hours in my logbook, I bought his Piper Cub. I commanded 65 horsepower all by myself, with no commander in chief to tell me where to go.
The U.S. military came calling a few years later. They were looking for warm bodies as Vietnam heated up, 20/30 eyesight being no problem at all. But I told them no thanks. By that time I had a wife and a daughter, and another career that didn't involve flying or high explosives.
So I have had no commander in chief, not ever, and I don't want one now.
The Constitution says this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”
About one American in a hundred has a commander in chief. The other 99% of us will do just fine with a president we don't salute.
This, I expect, is the last quote from George W. Bush you will ever read here. This one, from last weekend, was too apropos of the man to be ignored:
“This thaw took a long time to thaw, and it will take a long time to unthaw.”
In one brief sentence, again he demonstrated (1) his unfamiliarity with the English language and (2) his undisguised yearning for the day he can flee back to his Texas chain saw and not have to explain to us ignorant citizens why another Bushite scheme is putrefying.
At a Camp David photo-op with Europeans Nicolas Sarkozy and Jose Manuel Barroso, our unlettered oaf of a president was attempting (laughable though this might seem) to explain the global economic crackup and credit market constipation. His technical lexicon surely impressed his visitors with the Bush mastery of complex problems.
As a world leader, our president makes one hell of a brush cutter.
14 September 2008
Look in the mirror
Have you noticed that U.S. State Department press officer Sean McCormack and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino sound like clones of each other? They have the same way of delivering excuses and spinning their bosses’ failures into tangled webs of obfuscation — the same phrasing, the same alternately smarmy-snarky air about them, the same tone of condescension when questioned.
Both have hopeless jobs, of course. Working to cover up the felonies of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice cannot be fun.
McCormack’s statement the other day about the diplomatic squabble with Venezuela and Bolivia . . .
Have you noticed that U.S. State Department press officer Sean McCormack and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino sound like clones of each other? They have the same way of delivering excuses and spinning their bosses’ failures into tangled webs of obfuscation — the same phrasing, the same alternately smarmy-snarky air about them, the same tone of condescension when questioned.
Both have hopeless jobs, of course. Working to cover up the felonies of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice cannot be fun.
McCormack’s statement the other day about the diplomatic squabble with Venezuela and Bolivia was particularly precious. After those countries evicted the U.S. ambassadors, and the U.S. did the same to theirs, McCormack sniffed with righteous indignation:
“This reflects the weakness and desperation of these leaders as they face serious internal challenges and an inability to communicate effectively internationally in order to build international support.”
Did McCormack realize that his words perfectly describe the Republican administration he works for, and the mantle of disrespect that now covers America internationally?
Gated communities rank high on the poison chart of U.S. society. The very term “gated community” is an oxymoron. Gates and walls do not create a community, they divide one.
Gates create subsets of people who are tricked, bribed or frightened into believing they differ from the rest of humanity. Gates and walls block out the light and create illusions. They prevent us from seeing that we are all in this thing together.
Which is why Microsoft turns my stomach.
While you puzzle over that abrupt segue (no, “gates” does not refer to Bill), let me clap one hand for Google, which has released a new browser . . .
Gated communities rank high on the poison chart of U.S. society. The very term “gated community” is an oxymoron. Gates and walls do not create a community, they divide one.
Gates create subsets of people who are tricked, bribed or frightened into believing they differ from the rest of humanity. Gates and walls block out the light and create illusions. They prevent us from seeing that we are all in this thing together.
Which is why Microsoft turns my stomach.
While you puzzle over that abrupt segue (no, “gates” does not refer to Bill), let me clap one hand for Google, which has released a new browser to run under Windows. I have not seen the new browser (named Chrome), and I won’t use it until it is released for Mac in a few weeks or months — or never.
Q. Why does the world need another browser?
A. Because Microsoft has a slimy way of doing business.
Microsoft has worked up a new trial version (#8) of Internet Explorer. Early reports have it up to Microsoft’s usual standards; i.e., crap.
“Browsers should render pages accurately, and the JavaScript engine in the browser should be fast, efficient and bug free,” said one highly regarded software development guru. “On both counts, IE8 is an abomination. JScript just doesn’t behave very well and is buggy. And IE’s page-rendering engine simply does not follow the standard.”
So what? you might ask. If Windows users are too dumb or too lazy to switch to another browser (Firefox or Opera, perhaps) or another operating system altogether (Linux or Mac) that will give them a better experience, well, tough tamales. Let them suffer while the rest of us enjoy.
But the problem is that Microsoft will do what it has always done: use its market muscle to build walls. The company is already using some of the content providers it owns to present web pages that are only accessible to users of Windows and IE. Websites that depend on their content being openly accessible to all, in the spirit of Net Neutrality, are justifiably nervous, since 75% of the world’s browsing is done with Windows IE.
Some think that Google, by developing a completely open and unrestricted browser that conforms to recognized world standards and practices, is making sure that the Windows-using crowd will have access to every bit of content on the Web, as programmed and presented by the site’s developers.
I happen to think otherwise. Google has already invested millions in helping Firefox achieve that. Besides Firefox, there are Opera and Safari and a dozen other lesser-known browsers to compete with IE, and almost all of them do a better job, too.
I think the Chrome browser is aimed at the mobile market. Apple’s iPhone has a vise grip on this market right now. The 3G iPhone is flying off shelves, and Apple has done a great job of making the elegant little device seem indispensible to its owners. Hundreds of cool applications are available for iPhone, many of them free and most others for a buck or two.
I think Chrome will be developed into an interface tailored to run Google’s own online applications plus those developed by third-party programmers, including those running on iPhone.
Google makes no money from Chrome, which is a free download like most other browsers. Google’s money comes from people using a web browser — any browser — that shows its searches and its advertising to good advantage.
Apple is a hardware company. Apple’s only aim in developing good software is to give users a compelling reason to buy and use its premium-grade, premium-priced hardware. Google wants to make sure the Apple hardware will run Google’s software to its satisfaction. And Google does not want to sit back and wait while Microsoft creates a browser that does as lousy a job in the mobile market as IE does on desktops and laptops.
Never forget that Steve Jobs and Apple are every bit as capable of establishing a monopoly position as Bill Gates and Microsoft have been. Just look at iTunes and the iPod. Google will do what it can to avoid an iPhone squeeze; indeed, a Google Phone rumor has been out there for some time.
So much for rapacious software companies. We will look at rapacious land developers some other time.
A few weeks ago, Susan put a cartoon from The New Yorker magazine on my desk. Without comment or note, she placed it where I would find it amid the piles of books, scraps of notepaper and outrageous fuel bills that litter the horizontal surfaces around my keyboard.
At the time, I had not written any new blog entries for about a month. Several beginnings had languished on the storage drive, uncompleted and awaiting further input. Something was wrong, but I was unable to diagnose the problem until I saw the Frank Cotham drawing . . .
A few weeks ago, Susan put a cartoon from The New Yorker magazine on my desk. Without comment or note, she placed it where I would find it amid the piles of books, scraps of notepaper and outrageous fuel bills that litter the horizontal surfaces around my keyboard.
At the time, I had not written any new blog entries for about a month. Several beginnings had languished on the storage drive, uncompleted and awaiting further input. Something was wrong, but I was unable to diagnose the problem until I saw the Frank Cotham drawing and its caption.
Then I knew. It was not a case of writer's block. It was a case of digestive malfunction, although gastroenterology was not involved, except metapohorically.
I had a bellyful.
The unpunished crimes of the Bush Syndicate, the incompetence and endemic cowardice of the Congress and the useless prattle of most news media had finally overwhelmed my ability to absorb and process it all. My system was clogged.
At some point, the futility of bellowing at the TV screen and cursing at headlines on my news browser became obvious. So I took a break from the outer sphere and tended to the inner.
The timeout was not supposed to last this long. Let us just say the words we might utter to one who staggers out of bed at noon, sleepy-eyed and apologetic: “Well, you must have needed the rest.”
Last night I watched Burning The Future, a documentary film about the ongoing desecration of West Virginia by coal companies, and the uphill battle by some of Appalachia’s people to change the way these corporations do their dirty work.
Pictures of the destruction are gut-wrenching. The coal companies are allowed to convert some of America’s most natural and lovely lands into scabrous mesas and lifeless slurry pits. In the name of profit, they deface irreplacable beauty. As a by-product, they poison the people’s water supply and inflict havoc on the streams and habitat in this garden of natural delights.
Mountaintop removal, it is called. The phrase reeks of utilitarian efficiency. Like a doctor performing debridement. Like a Warthog . . .
Last night I watched Burning The Future, a documentary film about the ongoing desecration of West Virginia by coal companies, and the uphill battle by some of Appalachia’s people to change the way these corporations do their dirty work.
Pictures of the destruction are gut-wrenching. The coal companies are allowed to convert some of America’s most natural and lovely lands into scabrous mesas and lifeless slurry pits. In the name of profit, they deface irreplacable beauty. As a by-product, they poison the people’s water supply and inflict havoc on the streams and habitat in this garden of natural delights.
Mountaintop removal, it is called. The phrase reeks of utilitarian efficiency. Like a doctor performing debridement. Like a Warthog deploying stores. Like a repo man's replevin of a mobile home.
Coal is king in West Virginia. Coal companies own the legislature and have purchased the levers of power, all in the name of jobs.
David Novick’s documentary film traces the efforts of a group of West Virginians to resist the business-as-usual mindset of their communities. But in a poverty-afflicted region like Appalachia, their voices of reason are not enough to overcome the economic fears of their neighbors. West Virginia is still a company store and the people live on the company plantation.
Yes, coal provides a big part of the electrical energy on our grid. But only a fraction (7% to 10%) of America's total coal tonnage comes from the West Virginia mountaintop removers. The state supplies high-quality coal, yes, but the most productive mine of any kind in West Virginia ranks just No. 15 nationally in annual tonnage in the latest federal government statistics. The next-biggest West Virginia mine is No. 30.
Whereas coal mining once provided jobs for 125,000 workers in southern West Virginia, with limited damage to the human environment, the corporations now employ 35,000 miners and use extraction techniques that are criminally destructive. In the name of great profits, increased production and reduced expenses, they devastate the future of a unique and precious land and its people.
The writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen said not very long ago, “There’s an elegiac quality in watching (American wilderness) go, because it is our own myth, the American frontier, that is deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I have seen, and their kids will see nothing. There’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.”
To the greed-obsessed free-marketeers who infest the halls of our state and federal governments, the splendor of North America’s natural environment — indeed, the environment of our whole planet — is only a bargaining chip in their amoral ideology of power. If it does not increase the bottom line, right now, this fiscal quarter, it is of no value to them.
This morning I stood at the doorway and breathed the sweet scent of my work down on the meadow yesterday: the smell of new-mown hay. Researchers say olfactory sensations are more deeply linked to memory and emotions than any of the other human senses, even sight. Seems right to me.
I startled the paranoid Indoor Cat when I burst into the opening lines of my native state’s song:
Oh, the moonlight’s fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay.
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the banks of the Wabash, far away.
So far away, in a cleaner, sweeter time so long ago . . .
Yes, it is Caitlin's 14th birthday, which certainly is something to warm the cockles of a grandfather's heart. It is also the anniversary of the first day of the greatest presidential tenure in American history.
Seventy-five years ago today, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd U.S. president, on which occasion he uttered one of the most famous and inspiring sentences in our nation's lexicon of leadership.
Less than a minute into his inaugural speech on the east portico of the Capitol Building, speaking to a nation cowering helpless in the face of unprecedented economic disaster, the new president laid it on the line:
The calendar shows us a date held dear.
Yes, it is Caitlin's 14th birthday, which certainly is something to warm the cockles of a grandfather's heart. It is also the anniversary of the first day of the greatest presidential tenure in American history.
Seventy-five years ago today, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd U.S. president, on which occasion he uttered one of the most famous and inspiring sentences in our nation's lexicon of leadership.
Less than a minute into his inaugural speech on the east portico of the Capitol Building, speaking to a nation cowering helpless in the face of unprecedented economic disaster, the new president laid it on the line:
“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance . . .”
To most of our parents and grandparents who lived through the first half of the 20th Century, these words would become a beacon in the darkness. One day at a time, one week, one month — they shook off the paralysis of economic terror, got behind a new government and its new policies and agencies, and slowly brought themselves and this country back into the light. The greatest generation took inspiration from those famous words from the very first hour of FDR's administration.
I have always marveled at our people's struggle through the dreadful 1930s, how working-class Americans lived with their backs to the abyss and no safety net. They austerely denied themselves many of life's basic pleasures as they dug in to build a better future — a future enjoyed by you, by me. They gave us our lives.
And I have admired the boldness and skill of FDR and his talented thinkers and administrators. Still today, generations later, we can be grateful for their tenacious adherence to the principles of community and government for the common good.
Sadly, remembering this anniversary today almost demands a comparison with our current feckless leadership. Whereas Roosevelt's New Deal was dedicated to lifting the people out of hard times, Bush's Private Deal was designed to lift only the rich. Roosevelt's New Deal put the nation to work. Bush's Private Deal put the nation into poverty. Roosevelt's New Deal added magnificently to America's physical, cultural and social infrastructure. Bush's Private Deal has built prisons instead of bridges, erected walls instead of communities, created foreign chaos instead of domestic tranquility.
Roosevelt told a nation to have courage, to reject fear. But the Bush Syndicate's loudest sales pitch is terror.
The Roosevelt years started me toward a life of wondrous opportunity. But what will be the legacy of the Bush years for my little Caitlin, 14 today?
A few hours after the polls closed on yesterday's so-called Potomac presidential primary elections, I called up the online Washington Post for progress of the vote counts in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. By that time, the vote tally was well advanced and the winners were settled.
On my screen were two photographs so strikingly expressive that their elegant narrative needed no words.
The two photos evoked the essence of what this massive national political exercise is all about. I had no need to read the headlines: The faces in the photos defined the core of this 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign. The two choices spotlighted in these photos were so starkly different that no captions, no text, no headlines were necessary.
Click on this thumbnail, study the two photos and meditate for a moment on the backstory. Look at them, and dwell on what they represent.
There you have it, America's future in a screenshot. Your choice.
6 February 2008
Am I empowered . . . or disfranchised?
Yesterday morning I drove to the local American Legion hall, my precinct voting venue in the Arkansas presidential preference primary. During the three-mile trip, I contemplated whether my vote represented empowerment or just another personal disfranchisement.
It was a historic day, of course, with a woman and a man of color contending atop the field on the Democratic Party primary ballot. As I drove down Highway 109, I reflected on my first-ever vote for President of the United States (which happened to be my first-ever vote for any political candidate after reaching legal voting age). I expect I will always recall the warm feeling when I placed my “X” in the box at the top of the ballot headed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Unfortunately, that was one of the few times the presidential candidate of my heart’s desire . . .
Yesterday morning I drove to the local American Legion hall, my precinct’ voting venue in the Arkansas presidential preference primary. During the three-mile trip, I contemplated whether my vote represented empowerment or just another personal disfranchisement.
It was a historic day, of course, with a woman and a man of color contending atop the field on the Democratic Party primary ballot. As I drove down Highway 109, I reflected on my first-ever vote for President of the United States (which happened to be my first-ever vote for any political candidate after reaching legal voting age). I expect I will always recall the warm feeling when I placed my “X” in the box at the top of the ballot headed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Unfortunately, that was one of the few times the presidential candidate of my heart’s desire has appeared on a November ballot. Again this year, as so many times in the past, my vote will default to a “best-of-the-rest” candidate. My preferred choices are long gone. I have been thwarted again by this peculiar process we call democracy.
Inasmuch as I cast my lot with Ed Muskie in 1972, John Glenn in 1984, Gary Hart in 1988, Tom Harkin in 1992, Bill Bradley in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004, this whole thing feels too familiar.
More than a year ago, I sent a check to my preferred 2008 presidential “candidate”, who was at that time only reported to be mulling a run. I wanted to urge him on. Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin had voted against the Stalinist manifesto that the Bushites call the Patriot Act. He had long been at the barricades against corporate lobbyists and other bribers who have turned our Capitol Building into a marble whorehouse. Feingold had vigorously opposed the neo-con plot to invade Iraq. He angrily and loudly fought in vain against the Republicans’ unconstitutional elimination of habeas corpus.
Not long after I sent him money, Feingold announced he would not run for president. Maybe he got wind of my lousy record and figured I had jinxed him.
So two other names bubbled to the top of my 2008 short list. I waited for the obvious best choice — a state governor whose former jobs included congressman, U.S. Cabinet secretary, Ambassador to the United Nations and global crisis troubleshooter. He is a man of Hispanic blood who has deftly handled the immigration challenge in his border state. But Bill Richardson dilly-dallied and watched Hillary Clinton vacuum up most of the mainstream party millions he might have attracted earlier. Susan and I sent Richardson some money, but he was heavily outgunned and never had a reasonable chance.
Our true favorite in the campaign was and always had been Dennis Kucinich. His views were most closely aligned with ours on almost every issue. But we both knew he had no real chance in a system where victory wears a nine-figure price tag and the voting public prefers fantasy to uncomfortable truths.
So, while waiting for Richardson, we jumped on the John Edwards bandwagon. Most of our financial support went to his campaign, which promised to fight the widening income gap and the economic devastation of America’s working households. Edwards was willing to call the Republican class war by its name. He worried about the poisoning of our environment and the destructive forces of global capitalism. Most important, Edwards put forth a workable plan for universal health care coverage for all Americans, and he told us the inescapable truth: There is a bill to be paid to rebuild our society’s crumbling foundations, and we will be asked to pay it. That is a self-evident fact that most politicians do not have the guts to mention aloud during a political campaign.
The American appetite for style instead of substance eventually prevailed. The mainstream media fed us an overload of Clinton-Obama gossip-column crumbs, horse-race noises, golly-gee charisma glitter, he-said-she-said chatter and useless sound-bite clichés. Pitifully few vital issues were ever dissected in prime time. News show interlocutors asked more questions about UFOs and haircuts than about global warming. When the Clinton campaign swiped the Edwards health-care plan and pronounced it hers, the media uncritically swallowed the sleight-of-hand. Celebrity-style news coverage led us to conclude only two candidates were in the Democratic race.
The outspoken foes of corporate greed — Edwards, Kucinich, Gravel — were invisible to the corporate news media.
A week before the Arkansas presidential primary, I stubbornly intended to mark my ballot for Edwards. Then he suddenly withdrew, a decision I understand but do not agree with nor appreciate.
So yesterday I was left to vote for my Number 5 choice in this campaign.
Why am I not surprised at this turn of events? And why will I not be surprised if I am down to Number 6 in November?
If you were, let us say, a player of the ponies, would you buy your tout sheet from a fellow with a lousy track record, a guy whose selections consistently finish out of the money?
If you were a stock trader, would you rely on the analysis of an advisor whose investment recommendations generally rank somewhere between mediocre and bankrupt?
And if you were a newspaper publisher, would you hire a writer with a resumé built around solemn pronouncements such as the following?:
18 Sep 2002 — A U.S. invasion of Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”
If you were, let us say, a player of the ponies, would you buy your tout sheet from a fellow with a lousy track record, a guy whose selections consistently finish out of the money?
If you were a stock trader, would you rely on the analysis of an advisor whose investment recommendations generally rank somewhere between mediocre and bankrupt?
And if you were a newspaper publisher, would you hire a writer with a resumé built around solemn pronouncements such as the following?:
18 Sep 2002 — A U.S. invasion of Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”
21 Nov 2002 — Removing Saddam Hussein from power “would start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.”
10 Feb 2003 — “If we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world . . . and I think we will be respected around the world.”
1 Mar 2003 — “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.”
5 Mar 2003 — “I think we’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq.”
4 Apr 2003 — “There has been a certain amount of pop sociology . . . that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunni . . . There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”
28 Apr 2003 — “The first two battles of this era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably.”
22 March 2004 — There are “hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath. The perpetually sour American media focus on the tensions between Shiites and Kurds . . . (but) the continuing debates over the terms of a final constitution have in fact demonstrated something remarkable in Iraq: a willingness on the part of the diverse ethnic and religious groups to disagree — peacefully — and then to compromise. This willingness is the product of what appears to be a broad Iraqi consensus favoring the idea of pluralism.”
7 March 2005 — “The Iraqi elections of January 30, 2005 . . . could be a key moment — perhaps the key moment so far — in vindicating the Bush Doctrine as the right response to 9/11.”
30 Nov 2005 — “It is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same, or improve. In either case, Republicans will benefit from being the party of victory.”
14 July 2006 — The Bush Administration should launch a “military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later.”
13 Aug 2007 — Invading Iran is “not a bad idea.”
The New York Times, the Old Gray Lady of U.S. newspapering, apparently has contracted Alzheimer's disease, having forgotten all about these ridiculous opinions floated by right-wing tub-thumper Bill Kristol during the last five years. The Times, stunningly, has hired Kristol as a once-a-week columnist.
Kristol edits the magazine Weekly Standard. That is a pretentious rag whose lack of profitability has perennially been papered over with Zionist money (yes, Virginia, there is an Israel Lobby) and subsidies from warmongering propagandists such as Rupert Murdoch.
So Kristol, who once urged the criminal prosecution of The Times for disclosing the Bush administration's secret interception of bank transactions, is now taking money from the organization he accused of malfeasance.
Journalistically, The Times in recent years falls short of its performance standards of the past. Consider its compliant selling of Bush war through the flawed reporting of Judith Miller in 2002-2003; its deliberate refusal to break the story of Bush's illegal domestic wiretapping program until after the 2004 election; its ignoring the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys and other unethical and illegal machinations of the Bush Department of Justice; and its relentless quashing of stories about growing momentum of impeachment talk in Washington.
Back in May of 2003, Kristol said “a great democracy like ours deserves a first-rate newspaper of record. And The New York Times isn’t it.”
I'd say his new byline at The Times makes that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Like about 110 million other people around the planet, I enjoy my iPod.
Some iPod owners never leave home without it. Conversely, many people would have no use for an iPod even if Apple were handing out these brilliant little devices for free. Some folks cannot tolerate background music or chatter when they are engaged in mental tasks, and others simply do not like the intrusion at any time. A former boss was like this; silence was king in our office. He didn’t even play his car radio.
The iTunes music list on my Mac reports 2,642 songs in its database, more than 2,500 of them imported from dusty stacks of CDs and almost 100 purchased from the iTunes store. But I have transferred only a couple hundred songs to my iPod.
My addiction is podcasts. I currently have over 700 . . .
Like about 110 million other people around the planet, I enjoy my iPod.
Some iPod owners never leave home without it. Conversely, many people would have no use for an iPod even if Apple were handing out these brilliant little devices for free. Some folks cannot tolerate background music or chatter when they are engaged in mental tasks, and others simply do not like the intrusion at any time. A former boss was like this; silence was king in our office. He didn’t even play his car radio.
The iTunes music list on my Mac reports 2,642 songs in its database, more than 2,500 of them imported from dusty stacks of CDs and almost 100 purchased from the iTunes store. But I have transferred only a couple hundred songs to my iPod.
My addiction is podcasts. I currently have over 700 podcasts waiting to be heard — more hours than I will ever have available for listening. Yet I keep downloading more, either through the iTunes store or with a free open-source program called Juice. The variety of free podcasts is amazing.
My iPod, one of the "third-generation" models with video, goes with me in my truck, to the health club for my workouts, sometimes to the bedroom for a nap, occasionally outside for yard work and other chores. The iPod will accompany me when I go fishing, but that has not happened yet.
But I cannot imagine I would ever take an iPod swimming.
Apple sent an e-mail today promoting some iPod accessories. The marketers call it gear; I suppose that sounds cooler. Most of the stuff is made by third-party developers, who are riding the wave of Apple’s ingenuity. Two featured items in today’s mail were a waterproof case and underwater headphones. Eighty bucks for the case, fifty for the headphones.
Someone might want to use these things in the bathtub, or perhaps the shower. Even that seems a stretch. Maybe, just maybe, the hot tub. But, swimming?
That is so California. And I am so not California.
Besides, who says “submerse”?
Apple has enriched its shareholders, developers and retailers by driving the revolution in personal audio and video consumption. But now they want me to submerse my iPod? I think the revolution has reached the margins. Next they will want to sell me the pressurized iPod helmet to be used on my space walks.
In the Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 2008 seems a good year for some overlooked candidates to gain support. The freshman class of candidates is unspectacular, and they number only 11.
I think Goose Gossage is almost a certainty to finally gain election to the hall this year, his ninth on the ballot. Just maybe — in this year of political change — we voters might overcome the bias that has long denied Jim Rice baseball’s highest honor. Rice has been eligible 14 years, and I have named him on my ballot every time.
Those are probably the only two candidates with a good chance to go in this year, but this weak crop of first-time nominees might make room . . .
In the Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 2008 seems a good year for some overlooked candidates to gain support. The freshman class of candidates is unspectacular, and they number only 11.
I think Goose Gossage is almost a certainty to finally gain election to the hall this year, his ninth on the ballot. Just maybe — in this year of political change — we voters might overcome the bias that has long denied Jim Rice baseball’s highest honor. Rice has been eligible 14 years, and I have named him on my ballot every time.
Those are probably the only two candidates with a good chance to go in this year, but this weak crop of first-time nominees might make room for others to build their vote totals closer to the required 75% level for election. Specifically, I am thinking of Andre Dawson, Don Mattingly, Lee Smith and Jack Morris. They still have enough eligibility time to draw attention from the members of Baseball Writers Association of America, who do the voting.
The time for building such support probably has run out on the likes of Tommy John, Bert Blyleven, Dave Parker and Dale Murphy. I consider that a shame, because those men belong in the Hall for — if nothing else — their combination of consistency and longevity.
Goose Gossage in his prime
These athletes were stalwarts, and winners, but have been passed over by too many of the younger crop of sportswriters who came to the game in what I will call The ESPN Era. This is the period of the 1980s and 1990s when, as I see it, the marketers substituted glitz and spectacle for competence and reliability. It happened in many industries, including newspapers, but it was most apparent, I think, in television sports.
In the days when I earned my living writing about major league baseball, I recall night after night, clip after clip, when ESPN’s baseball report featured an interminable string of home runs. Nothing but video clips of home runs, home runs, home runs. None of the fine points of the game, the strategies, the little things that win pennants. Just the longball. The ESPN talking heads would exclaim, "Boom!" or "Downtown!" or "Outta Here!" and that would pass for the evening’s baseball report. "Here are the scores — 8 to 1, 5 to 3 and 4 to nothing — but man, look at this monster clout by Jones!"
Many of the home runs had little to do with the outcomes of the games. They were easy eye candy, cheap TV tricks around which producers could build a skin-deep façade and call it reportage. This kind of sports coverage, this shallow sensationalism, exploited our society’s celebrity sickness. It set the stage for the corruption of the game by amoral and avaricious club owners, spineless see-no-evil middle management and athletes willing to poison their bodies and forfeit their sportsmanship for money and fame.
Maybe the TV coverage is still that way. I no longer watch, so I do not know.
I do know that television’s money has corrupted sports beyond recall — which is exactly why I no longer watch.
What is the difference between the mobster money that despoiled professional baseball 90 years ago, leading to the fixing of World Series games, and the TV money that has corrupted the game now to the point that baseball’s biggest event of 2007 was the publication of a report on clubhouse drug pushers and users?
The only difference is the denomination of the folding money used and how it was paid. The corrupt players in 1919 received a few hundred or a few thousand dollars under the table. Today’s drug-swollen freaks receive millions in salaries and endorsements, all paid legally and proudly.
So that is why I sincerely hope that Mark McGwire’s vote total in the Hall of Fame balloting this year will drop below the 5% level required for his name to stay on the ballot. Last year he drew votes from 23.5% of the 545 ballots cast, a level of support which astonished me.
Of the 11 new names on the ballot this year, I would give Tim Raines the best chance to gain solid support in the voting, but the other newcomers probably will disappear from the list.
Update — The Goose is in. With no Ripkens and Gwynns in the freshman crop of candidates, voters pushed Gossage’s total easily over the threshhold. As Gossage pointed out after falling short a year ago, “I ain’t saving any more ballgames.” It was not saves, but a less formidable slate of candidates that convinced 466 writers to vote for him this time, versus 388 a year ago. Rice picked up 46 more votes this year, but that still was not enough to put him over the top. Rice drew 392 votes, shy of the 408 needed. Next year will be his 15th and last on the ballot, one way or the other. I was hasty in deprecating Blyleven's chances. His year-to-year increase in votes (76) was impressive, so he cannot be counted out yet. Personally, I was sorry to see that McGwire drew 128 votes, the same as last year. Apparently, about 23% of my fellow BBWAA members have little regard for a player’s respect for the game — or lack of it. It disgusts me that McGwire outpolled men like Trammell, Mattingly, Parker and Murphy. So McGwire will occupy a spot on the ballot again next year, barring unforeseen regulatory action.
Another year ends, and what comes unbidden to mind but the losses? Never the gains, not without some serious concentration. Sometimes not even then. Maybe this is why New Year’s Eve is no longer fun.
Gone in 2007, nevermore to grace us with their wit, their creativity, their unique charm, their strength:
The losses, always the losses . . .
Another year ends, and what comes unbidden to mind but the losses? Never the gains, not without some serious concentration. Sometimes not even then. Maybe this is why New Year’s Eve is no longer fun.
Gone in 2007, nevermore to grace us with their wit, their creativity, their unique charm, their strength:
Molly Ivins — A major thorn in the side of George W. Bush when he was only afflicting Texas. She warned us about “Shrub”, and she was so eminently correct. She was a smart, tough writer with a wonderful ability to see through phonies of all denominations, not just Texans.
Oscar Peterson — Matchless speed and power at the keyboard, a god of jazz piano. It was a privilege to attend one of his performances at Ravinia more than 15 years ago. I have not lost the glow of that evening, nor will I ever forget this Canadian-born genius’s unique musical gifts. One of a kind. Listen for a few seconds.
Kurt Vonnegut — His uncle’s hardware store in Indianapolis had a flood of ads on local TV in the 1950s, and the signals reached my hometown. So Vonnegut’s distinctive last name caught my eye at the book rack the first time I saw one his novels. For a half-century his clear mind and merciless writing exposed folly and hypocrisy, and he continued to lacerate the warmongers, liars and thieves right up to his final days.
Michael Brecker — A bright star in the musical firmament, gone too soon at 57. His tenor sax offered us a jazz treat whether upbeat, downbeat, bluesy, melodic, avant garde. A strong soloist who toured and performed with giants.
David Halberstam — Writing and reporting as well as ever at 73, he was taken from us by a car crash. His newspaper reporting exposed the corruption and falsehoods underlying the Vietnam War and won him a Pulitzer. More than 20 non-fiction books gave us a rich picture of the last half of the 20th Century.
Doug Marlette — Another Pulitzer winner falls victim to our highway slaughterhouse. We might have had at least another decade of Marlette's pull-no-punches editorial cartoons like this one.
Rev. Robert Drinan — Just imagine, an honest-to-God Christian man of the cloth who was not beating the drums, waving the flag and urging the faithful to support a war-obsessed president. Fr. Drinan took a courageous stand at great personal risk to oppose the power in Washington and help end a bloody military misadventure in Vietnam. Where are the righteous voices like his today?
Butch Van Breda Kolff — A personal favorite and one-time drinking partner during his stay in Detroit as coach of the Pistons. What an iconoclast he was, and a winner, too, in his sometimes-controversial trip through the college and NBA circuits. Nobody but VBK would have had the guts to discipline Wilt Chamberlain by keeping the giant on the bench in the final minutes of a championship game, which his team lost by two points. About his up-and-down career, VBK said: “People are always asking me if you had the chance to do it all over again, would you do anything different? I say, not a bit. I wouldn’t change one thing. You do what you’re going to do and make the best of it.”
Bernard Gordon — A screenwriter blacklisted by the cowardly Hollywood studios during the McCarthy reign of terror in the 1950s. Gordon led a 1999 protest (good for him!) against the awarding of an honorary Oscar to stool-pigeon director Elia Kazan, who cravenly named names when called to the McCarthyite star chamber.
Porter Wagoner — He went for hillbilly rhinestone clothing, but stayed true to his music. The man was country grits, ham and red-eye gravy, and he never sold out to a mainstream diet. The great Waylon Jennings once said of Porter Wagoner, “He couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.” This legend of the Opry stands forever on center stage at old Ryman with Hank, Johnny, Willie and Minnie Pearl.
John Backus — The man who developed FORTRAN, the first almost-sort-of-human programming language for computers. Before his creation, programming a computer for even simple tasks took near-lifetimes, and commands to the machines were written like this: 1100 0110 1001 1000 1101 0111 1010 0001
Theodore Maiman — He built the world’s first working laser.
Herb Carneal, Phil Rizzuto, Joe Nuxhall — It was a rotten year for major league baseball, and worse for these veteran play-by-play men. Carneal was the voice of the Twins for 45 years, Rizzuto must have cried, “Holy cow!” a million times in Yankee Stadium and Nuxhall flashed his distinctive, 50,000-watt style in the Cincinnati booth.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — A voice of sanity throughout the last four decades as American society turned increasingly greedy and short-sighted. He was a scout on the New Frontier, and he never let us forget the promise that was — and still could be again — ours to fulfill.
901 — Their names are tolled off nightly. Nine hundred one American men and women killed in 2007 in this travesty of an occupation in Iraq. The commanders and politicians say things are getting better. Tell that to the 901 families. Tell that to the 822 families who lost their husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters the year before. Better is relative, is it not?
You could say I feel smug right now as Iowa voters and candidates grind toward the conclusion of their quadrennial presidential scrum. Because Susan and I were Arkansas residents through most of Mike Huckabee’s terms as governor, he was not the stranger to us that he was until recently to the rest of the country.
I think I know Huckabee’s style and his skills. Family and work connections through the years taught me much about small-town Iowa and its people and its culture, so I felt I had a good handle on how Mike Huckabee’s show would play there. Last summer — even as he was polling 3% — I told Susan I believed Huckabee would come in no worse than third in the Republican caucus voting.
I sit at the keyboard this morning saying, "I told you so."
It took the mainstream media a long time to catch on and catch up to Rev. Mike and his appeal to a certain segment of the Midwest populace. And it is no surprise that once the MSM caught on, it stampeded over the top as it does with most personal stories in our celebrity-sodden society. This, right now, is The Huckster’s 15 minutes.
Friends and family lately have asked about the former governor of our state, and this is what I have been telling them:
You could say I feel smug right now as Iowa voters and candidates grind toward the conclusion of their quadrennial presidential scrum. Because Susan and I were Arkansas residents through most of Mike Huckabee’s terms as governor, he was not the stranger to us that he was until recently to the rest of the country.
I think I know Huckabee’s style and his skills. Family and work connections through the years taught me much about small-town Iowa and its people and its culture, so I felt I had a good handle on how Mike Huckabee’s show would play there. Last summer — even as he was polling 3% — I told Susan I believed Huckabee would come in no worse than third in the Republican caucus voting.
I sit at the keyboard this morning saying, "I told you so."
It took the mainstream media a long time to catch on and catch up to Rev. Mike and his appeal to a certain segment of the Midwest populace. And it is no surprise that once the MSM caught on, it stampeded over the top as it does with most personal stories in our celebrity-sodden society. This, right now, is The Huckster’s 15 minutes.
Friends and family lately have asked about the former governor of our state, and this is what I have been telling them:
I like the guy — not as a politician or a preacher, but as an interesting person. I think I would have fun sharing Friday breakfast with him at Lazy Earl’s greasy spoon down the road. Unlike the present White House occupant, Mike Huckabee has a reasonably nimble brain, a degree of intellectual curiosity and an ability to formulate cogent ideas on his own. Susan does not like him much; she sees a fundamentalist nutball, a grifter and a charlatan. But I think Huck is pretty much a regular guy. Because he is a minister, I might have to watch my foul mouth, but the give-and-take over our biscuits and gravy would not be strained and would not be limited to the weather and football scores. The good reverend can be irreverent in a wise-ass way, like me. But Huckabee’s smart-offs usually are not the snotty insults favored by the smirking frat boy from Yale.
Huckabee was not a bad governor. I would not say he was a superior governor, but on balance Arkansas society was better at the end of his tenure than when he took office. With some exceptions, he mostly did not lead; he oversaw. But this Republican showed a very un-Republican-like ability to work with a Democratic-controlled state legislature. How rare is that among the Grand Old Polarizer party?
Mike Huckabee has some weird rocks in his knapsack. He truly and literally believes the mythologies and phantasmagoria of the Christian religion. He is not just spouting the company line; he actually believes that stuff. And maybe that is the source of his apparent mistrust and resistance to understanding people different from himself.
He has a huge ego and an overweening self-confidence that comes from being bosom pals with a deity. That sometimes puts him in over his head.
Huckabee has a fire in his belly that burns far brighter for personal enrichment and self-aggrandisement than for public service. His wife, Janet, is similarly afflicted — maybe more.
The Huckabees cannot accept criticism; they turn feral when publicly scolded.
Huckabee has a weak grasp of the principles of appropriate financial conduct for a public official. He treats public office like a pastorship, with regular tithes expected and openly requested. And he seems to feel such conduct is nobody's business. Like the Bush crowd, he resists transparency and does not believe in our right to know how our government representatives are conducting our business.
If Mike Huckabee becomes president of the United States, I will leave the country.
President Mike Huckabee would try, I believe, to implement a much more benevolent domestic policy than that of our present corporate-kissing, wealth-worshipping, people-dissing White House crowd. Huckabee would try to help our failing education system, unlike the phony "edgykayshun preznit" we last heard from in 2001. Americans would probably be presented a better system of financing health care, and a better safety net for the working poor and near-poor. Huckabee doesn't have the typical Republican blind spot for the day-to-day economic problems of ordinary people.
At least for a while, until the K Street bribers came calling, Huckabee might do more than pay lip service to our environment and the damage caused by an oil-burning, coal-burning energy base. But Huckabee's inexperience in foreign affairs, and an apparent personal inclination toward xenophobia, would make him an easy mark for the tax-sucking American war industry and the Republican Party's network of fear-mongering neo-con subversives and propagandists. We might wake up one morning to find our military invading Vancouver.
But the real victim of a Mike Huckabee presidency would be America’s ideals of liberty and tolerance. If we were to roll out of bed November 5 and find him as our president-elect, that would surely mean that Republicans were swept back into control of our Congress. We would have a new crop of Rick Santorums, Conrad Burnses, George Allens, Jim Talents and Tom DeLays. They would finish the work of shredding the U.S. Constitution — the job begun by the Bushites and their despicable Patriot Act, their plague of outrageous presidential "signing statements", their unilateral elimination of habeas corpus and the American system of justice, their illegal spying and wiretapping, their corrupting of elections, their shameless sponsorship of cruelty and torture.
President Mike would become Emperor Michael I. The U.S. Justice Department would morph into the Gestapo. One or two liberal or moderate Supreme Court justices would die or retire and be replaced by Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich. The people would have no more lifestyle choices, no more freedom from religion, no protection from a police state. Our very words would be prescribed and proscribed.
We would suffer a wave of draconian constitutional amendment proposals — the usual hot-button garbage like flag-burning, homosexual repression, school prayer, abortion, English-only. We could kiss the Bill of Rights goodbye, except for Number 2, where "cold, dead hands" would be added to the language of Jefferson and Madison.
However, I take comfort in my belief that this will not happen. Some of Huckabee’s shortcomings have already been exposed. He remains the media darling, because TV's talking heads love to call the horse race but do not like the hard work of mucking out the stables. Nevertheless, the electorate is beginning to detect some embarrassments floating in the Huckabee punch bowl.
His opponents have caught on, too, and are airing out some of the Huckabee dirty laundry. The Republican Swift Boat Smear flotilla has launched against Huckabee, who falls short of their standard for brutality.
Except for the religious nuts, Republicans in Iowa will cool a bit on the Huckabee candidacy before caucus night. The reverend will make a good showing, but the phenom patina is off him now. Steely-eyed Republicans in New Hampshire — and the establishment money players in the smoke-filled rooms of the Republican National Committee — will stuff Huckabee’s campaign in the deep freeze before the snow melts.
What and where would the human race be without acts of personal will, acts of courage, both great and small? What would our world be if all of us always obeyed instincts for self-preservation and comfort? What if we never exercised our freedom to think and act contrary to the herd?
Today is the 52nd anniversary of one of those individual acts that propelled a great change in American society. It was the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. She broke the law that day in December, 1955. She did so knowingly and resolutely.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks threw off the yoke of custom, of disapproval, of subjugation, stared into the ugly face of intimidation and even physical terror and climbed over the wall to enjoy the liberty to which she was entitled as a human being.
Two things about the Rosa Parks story always nag at me:
What and where would the human race be without acts of personal will, acts of courage, both great and small? What would our world be if all of us always obeyed instincts for self-preservation and comfort? What if we never exercised our freedom to think and act contrary to the herd?
Today is the 52nd anniversary of one of those individual acts that propelled a great change in American society. It was the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. She broke the law that day in December, 1955. She did so knowingly and resolutely.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks threw off the yoke of custom, of disapproval, of subjugation, stared into the ugly face of intimidation and even physical terror and climbed over the wall to enjoy the liberty to which she was entitled as a human being.
Two things about the Rosa Parks story always nag at me:
• On an intellectual level, I wonder how Rosa Parks arrived at her decision in that moment that Thursday afternoon. What was the process in her mind? Was there an instant when her brain and body instinctively gathered the familiar impulse to go along with the man’s request, according to custom and law, as she had done so many times before? What was the factor that tipped her, in that moment, to a refusal? Was it, as she said, her tired body and aching feet that outweighed thoughts of confrontation and trouble and pushed her, in that briefest blink of time, to defiance? History turns on such instants.
• I regret not availing myself of the opportunity to meet and talk with Rosa Parks when I lived and worked in Detroit just a few blocks from her home. Access would have been no problem, and I periodically thought of requesting an interview. But I never did, and that is my loss. Because I am semi-obsessed with the human brain and its processes and how they shape us as individuals and as a society, I would have asked her about that moment on the Montgomery bus. I would have asked her to recall what thoughts and feelings passed through her, both before and after she told that white man no. But I passed up the chance for that conversation, so I am left to wonder.
As 2007 limps toward its place in ignominy, I wonder about something else: Why does America not have more like Rosa Parks?
The Constitution is publicly and defiantly torn to bits by shysters and psychotic tyrants in the White House. Our elected legislators meekly rubber-stamp the removal of our liberties, the plunder of our human and material resources and the ruination of our country’s moral standing among nations. The wealthy oligarchs buy whatever government favors they want while the crying needs of the people are ignored by those in power who pocket the corporate largesse.
Yes, master, that’s all right, we say. Here, take my seat on the bus. Take my children’s future. Take my democracy. I don’t want any trouble.
My friend and I had just met the businessman in the lobby of his workplace in southeast Michigan. As we followed him upstairs to his shop/office, my friend made an innocuous remark — something about the weather, maybe. The businessman came back with a wisecrack about “what Hillary would do.” It was such a non-sequitur, no meaningful retort came to mind. I just grunted and kept climbing.
We were there to pick up an expensive piece of aircraft avionics, which the shop owner’s technician had repaired for me. In business, my father always recommended the middle ground in transacting with strangers, leaving religion and politics to other venues. But this businessman apparently was having a political spasm.
We reached his office and took places at his desk. Then he brought up “Hillary” again for no apparent reason . . .
My friend and I had just met the businessman in the lobby of his workplace in southeast Michigan. As we followed him upstairs to his shop/office, my friend made an innocuous remark — something about the weather, maybe. The man came back with a wisecrack about “what Hillary would do.” It was such a non-sequitur, no meaningful retort came to mind. I just grunted and kept climbing.
We were there to pick up an expensive piece of aircraft avionics, which the shop owner’s technician had repaired for me. In business, my father always recommended the middle ground in transacting with strangers, leaving religion and politics to other venues. But this businessman apparently was having a political spasm.
We reached his office and took places at his desk. Then he brought up “Hillary” again for no apparent reason, and added: “I don’t know what you guys think about her, maybe, uh . . . ” His voice trailed off as he seemed to be fishing for a cue from myself or my friend.
“Well, it’s the right party . . . .” I began, but the shop owner was not listening, shuffling though a stack of invoices. He plunged ahead.
“Obama, he won’t hold his hand over his heart when they say the Pledge. What’s that telling you? Expect him to be commander? Huh! And Hillary, what’s she gonna do if she’s having her period or something?”
Mercifully, he found my invoice then, and the conversation shifted to the repair and testing of my radio unit and the accompanying paperwork. I paid, and we left without any more political jabber.
The episode did not surprise me. It only reinforced some long-held gut feelings about the 2008 presidential campaign: We face a year of warped, dirty and corrupt words and deeds that will bloody the democratic process (again), bring shame to American self-government (again) and misdirect public attention from the real problems our country and our civilization urgently need to confront.
Hillary is a lightning rod for Republican hatred of the Clintons. Sexually repressed right-wing males swoon at the sight of her, overcome by their woman-dread. (Click on the thumbnail picture for a sample of their toys.)
Obama is targeted by Kloset Klansmen appealing to the desperate prejudices of pitiful white male underachievers and the considerable body of Americans raised with racism and still carrying the “Us vs. Them” mindset.
Knuckle-draggers telephone call-in shows to snarl about flagless lapels, as if decorative jewelry could comfort the grieving families of 4,000 U.S. troops who have died and 10,000 who have been permanently crippled carrying out a weak president’s personal vendetta. The broadcast blowhards babble about pretty hair, as if 47 million Americans without health insurance could be cured for the price of a salon haircut. The words “Whitewater” and “Vince Foster” again are dredged from the deep by the keepers of Swift Boat Swamp.
At a time when our country needs intelligent and reasoned selection of a courageous leader — needs it more desperately than at any time in the last 150 years — we will be given filth, irrational fear and hatred, false and misleading claims, campaign smokescreens.
The hard truths about our crumbling national economy, about our wounded middle class, about our disappearing civil rights and liberties, about our weakened influence on societies around the world, about our increasingly perilous health care, about the tightening grip of corporate oligarchs and international capitalists, about our money-poisoned elections and governance processes — these things will be buried in the slime of smear campaigns.
How bad was the U.S. Senate’s performance this week? Did these wise solons move us toward an end to the disastrous involvement in Iraq? Did they throttle down the open-ended war policy of our delusional lame duck? Did they give our troops a break by legislating more free time at home?
No. Republicans voted down all those efforts. Instead, they mired in a childish propaganda scuffle over a newspaper ad which tastelessly used “betray us” to rhyme with an Army general’s name.
Thus, the only measure the U.S. Senate managed to pass this week was a resolution condemning our freedom to express negative opinions about members of the military.
How bad was the U.S. Senate’s performance this week? Did these wise solons move us toward an end to the disastrous involvement in Iraq? Did they throttle down the open-ended war policy of our delusional lame duck? Did they give our troops a break by legislating more free time at home?
No. Republicans voted down all those efforts. Instead, they mired in a childish propaganda scuffle over a newspaper ad which tastelessly used “betray us” to rhyme with an Army general’s name.
Thus, the only measure the U.S. Senate managed to pass this week was a resolution condemning our freedom to express negative opinions about members of the military. Specifically, a handful of Republicans led by Texas gruppenführer John Cornyn hoisted “support the troops” to a new level of demagoguery and hypocrisy. Cornyn whipped out a resolution condemning “personal attacks on the honor and integrity of Gen. Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces”.
This disgusting piece of political theater got the vote of every Republican in the Senate along with 22 of the 46 Democrats who voted. Only 25 senators stood up for our right to freely express negative opinions about a person in the armed forces. A wide majority of the U.S. Senate claims that I am forbidden to impugn the judgment or motives of someone in military uniform.
I beg to differ. Every American has the right to state obvious truth, and state it publicly and loudly:
General David Petraeus works for George Bush and Bob Gates, and he intends to please his bosses.
Bush has put Gen. Petraeus on the hot seat by making him the de facto Iraq policymaker — the "surge" is the general's baby. Gen. Petraeus knows his reputation as a military tactician is on the line, and he has no motivation to declare the escalation a failure.
The general's cautiously hopeful September report was a foregone conclusion from the day Congress first requested it. With Bush-Cheney hooting all summer about invisible "progress", did any realist expect Gen. Petraeus to report otherwise?
So now the Republican demagogues have ripped off another corner of the Constitution in their desperate denial of the reality of Iraq. We must not speak ill of the generals, they say.
Have these senators never heard of Gen. William ("Light At The End Of The Tunnel") Westmoreland? His rose-colored tales of impending victory in Vietnam delayed withdrawal for years and cost thousands of lives until public attacks on his credibility helped pull us out of that horrible quagmire.
Have they heard of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a self-aggrandizing colossus of World War II whose delusions of Caesarian empire in 1951 threatened to start a nuclear World War III until Harry Truman sacked him?
Throughout our history, we have been free to criticize the military, beginning with our earliest days as a nation. George Washington was bitterly excoriated for his tactics and his personal shortcomings during the Revolutionary War. We can speak out against anyone, uniformed or not, because this is America, not Burma, not North Korea, not Sudan. We do not live in Stalin's Russia, nor Mao's China.
The flag-waving demagogues on the right never quit trying. But where were they with their gags three years ago when John Kerry's military record was being falsely and viciously impugned by the Swift Boat Liars? Where were the right-wing protectors of the uniform in 2003 when Gen. Eric Shinseki warned us about lousy Pentagon planning for Iraq, and a senior administration official snarled that this was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars"? Gen. Shinseki was relieved of his job, and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal installed compliant military henchmen to create their disaster.
“Americans should watch what they say,” said Bush mouthpiece Ari Fleischer six years ago. Now the U.S. Senate has made it official.
full-court press to track our every online move. They admitted it in public, and they have state police agencies joining the assault.
and to the public. They need to look smart and aware. They don't like surprises. When the Nobel selection of President Obama was announced, their knee-jerk reaction was to gasp indignantly and ask, "What has he done to deserve it?"
acknowledge that when we reduce corporate taxes, typically only a portion of the company’s extra profit is reinvested for domestic growth. The rest goes into the owners’ pockets or is moved offshore. Meanwhile, 100% of the lost tax revenues must be absorbed by individual taxpayers like you and me. (That is, unless we follow the Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush model and just add the cost of tax cuts to the federal deficit for our grandkids to deal with).
was a wave of media activism (hysteria, actually) and public opinion which all but assured the unilateral attack on Iraq six weeks later.
what jobs were botched, what legal and ethical transgressions were committed. Nothing of what resources were squandered, how many Americans were left measurably poorer, what indelible stains were left on American ideals, how many Americans died because of the administration’s errors or neglect. There was no talk of such things on that airplane, because inside The Bubble such things do not exist.
a good thing, the din from free-market maniacs and other capitalist hard-liners was deafening. They cried that Obama was advocating the “redistribution of wealth.”
and breathless play-by-play on the front pages — the more apparent it will become that Caroline Kennedy is a cinch for the job.
want to supplant Herbert Hoover as the man who twiddled the country into its Greatest Depression.
sign, about 10 feet high by 15 wide, was a riveting sight.
means a current rate of 12.99%. (2) The APR for cash advances will be Prime plus 15.99%, which makes the current rate 19.99%.
my ballot
to a “best-of-the-rest” candidate. My preferred choices are long gone. I have been thwarted again by this peculiar process we call democracy.
ever have available for listening. Yet I keep downloading more, either through the iTunes store or with a free open-source program called 
the familiar impulse to go along with the man’s request, according to custom and law, as she had done so many times before? What was the factor that tipped her, in that moment, to a refusal? Was it, as she said, her tired body and aching feet that outweighed thoughts of confrontation and trouble and pushed her, in that briefest blink of time, to defiance? History turns on such instants.