This Northwest Life

2012-02-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

It appears the Republican Party is making an all out, full frontal assault on women as we get into high gear this election season. The bullet points below were cut and pasted from various places around the net.

The Susan B. Komen Foundation decides to stop contribution to Planned Parenthood, then backs away and fires its vice-president, a former GOP candidate for Maryland governor running on an anti-Planned Parenthood platform.
Republican Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will convene a hearing (Thursday, 2/16), "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?" The lead witness is the Most Rev. William E. Lori, Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. Judging from Lori and the rest of the witness list, it's obvious that Issa has posed what he considers to be a rhetorical question and lined up nine like-minded rhetoricians to answer it anyway.

zero

Republican committee staffers rejected the choice

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum declares birth control is “harmful to women.”Every day three women in America are killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Yet, the Republican Party is opposing the extension of the Violence Against Women Act because it helps too many women. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is leading the charge against reauthorization over provisions that offer protections to domestic abuse victims that happen to be LGBT or undocumented immigrants. (In other words, straight white women only, please.)
Sen. Roy Blunt, (R-MO), has vowed to push for a vote on his legislation to overturn the new birth control requirement, possibly this week, despite Obama’s efforts to quiet the controversy on Friday by tweaking the rule. Blunt’s move, in turn, has sparked a fierce lobbying campaign by women’s health advocates, who say his legislation is a “radical” effort to block a gamut of women’s health services, not just contraception.
The GOP state legislative supermajority state in Virginia passed a law in which women are forced to be vaginally penetrated with an ultrasound probe to determine the age of the fetus before allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The bill passed over bitter yet futile objections from Democrats. And one GOP delegate caused the House to ripple when he said most abortions come as "matters of lifestyle convenience."

And these are just for openers! It's as if conservative leaders have taken leave of their frikkin' humanity.

“Chicks Up Front”

In the 1960's, when the San Francisco Bay Area was a giant, nine county fermentation tank of political and social change, there seemed to be a “protest du jour” going on all the time. There were huge rallies at San Francisco State, Berkeley, San Jose State, even snooty old Stanford, down in Palo Alto. The Yippies were at their height of fame (or infamy, perhaps, if you were an indignant working adult). At times it got out of hand, and the cops usually could be stoked up enough to react unpleasantly in order to break us up. They routinely banged kids over the head with batons and hauled them off for a few hours.

In 1969, then-Governor Ronald Reagan even sent in the National Guard when, in Berkeley, kids were protesting against the university taking over a local vacant lot called Peoples Park, near the UC campus, which served as a camp ground for street people. It got ugly as hell. One kid, sitting on a rooftop watching all the goings-on, was even shotgunned to death by the Berkeley cops.

That was when organizers created a tactic which they thought would keep the blue meanies from beating us all up by putting girls at the head of the demonstration to face off with the cops. “Chicks up front!” became almost a battle cry. (Along with “Don't trust anyone over 30!”) It was the women who were obviously the willing sacrificial lambs.

It's time to get the “chicks up front” once again. This time to the polls.

And filing for elective office, too. In the House there are 74 female Representatives (23%). The Senate has 16 females (16%). These are the highest numbers of women members in the history of the Congress! Of the 16 female Senators, 11 are Democrats and 5 are Republicans. Of the 74 female Representatives, 53 are Democrats and 21 are Republicans.

###

Obama Is Boxing In His Opposition

2012-02-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

Nothing could more obvious – and to a progressive, encouraging. Barack Obama has managed, particularly since the disaster of the 2010 midterm elections, to box in the GOP into narrower and narrower confines. And in doing so he has opened up a 15 point lead in some polls over his likely challenger, the erstwhile “severely conservative” Mitt Romney. Obama, by luck or design, is beginning to stand out as the only sane guy in the room.

On issue after issue, the GOP exposes itself with out-of-touch positions on nearly everything from a woman's sexual health, to extended payroll tax cuts, to foreign policy, to jobs creation, and darned near anything else of major or minor importance. Whatever position the President stakes out, the GOP can dependably be certain to not only disagree with, but press it home, bullhorn in hand (aided by Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh (along with a host of minor media “conservalebrities”) with the electorate.

And the electorate seems to be responding in ways in which the Grand Old Party may pay a significant price in November. Though 9 months is an eternity in politics, the trend is working for the President at this juncture, and may even work for the Democrats in general come November

Birth control: Not again!

The latest dust-up over whether or not a Catholic organization operating a medical or other business (not just a hospital) must abide by the same work rules as any other business hiring non-Catholic employees and treating non-Catholics is the latest installment of GOP polemics and the Catholic Church's totally out-of touch hierarchy. Once again, the subject of birth control seems to be being re-litigated in the public commons and it is clearly going the wrong way for the GOP and the bishops. (My God, this issue has so much dust on it that it's like the old Singer sewing machine in the attic.)

And once again, the likes of hyper-Catholics like Rick Santorum, a current pretender to the GOP nomination for the presidency, Newt Gingrich, recent convert to Catholicism (after having wandered in the desert trying out multiple wives and faith traditions), House Speaker John Boehner, the leader without a following, have declared the godless chief executive of the United States of America to be waging a war on faith itself.

Wrong voices, wrong messages

It was bad enough watching every Republican who can get in front of a TV camera or grab a microphone rail on about the coming culture war. But it was even worse to see Catholic bishops – a class which is so divorced from reality, so out-of-touch with its flock of self-described Catholics, 98% of whose couples have used birth control - call out the President for his policy of having religious-affiliated medical institutions and insurance companies provide full service coverage to anyone who asks for birth control pills, or even to carry condoms in its dispensaries. The fact that the average number of children in white Catholic families has dropped from between 4 and 7 a couple of generations ago to about the same as non-Catholic families now, somewhere slightly north of 2, would seem to lend credence to the notion that most Catholic couples are simply doing what they want to do. Somewhere along the way, Catholics figured out that sex is fun, and not just a way to make women have as many kids as they are biologically capable of producing.

I can't help but think that a television viewer who sees a bishop complain about Obama's health plan details sees not a shepherd to his flock but someone who has been part and parcel of the Catholic Church's continuous predations of children on the part of significant numbers of its clergy by simply hiding errant priests. There simply can be no traction with any pronouncements of a Catholic bishop anymore, not after a decade or more of continuously bad press and continuous refusal to flush out the bad apples among its clergy for decades. The tragedy of predatory priests is too fresh, too current, in the public's memory.

As with abortion (which, oddly, has taken a back seat to this discussion in recent days), the church believes that it can and should be the arbiter of morality not only for Catholics but for all Americans. Thus, it would deny certain services to non-Catholics as well as forbid any non-Catholic employee from providing them. The Catholic Church, like its evangelical counterparts among the Protestant traditions, conflates choice and freedom with moral imperatives based on the Christian bible.

The GOP blatts and mouthpieces have, as usual, grabbed the issue, caressed it and made it its own so they can show the world the callousness of this President. It will not work. Once again, as with the payroll tax deduction issue, the cessation of the war in Iraq and the removal of American troops from that sad country, the refusal to equalize the tax liability of the rich with that of the middle class, and the refusal to look at anything which might lend a helping hand to the jobless by actually creating jobs, they find themselves on the wrong side of both history and the politics of the issues.

Obama: lucky or brilliant?

It hard to imagine that Barack Obama could be so consistently lucky to have as his opposition a political party and slate of potential electoral opponents who are so outside mainstream American political thought. About a third of the electorate are doctrinaire, hard right-wing conservatives. The other two-thirds are hard core liberal/progressive types and independents. It is this last category of voter which, even though polling miserably last summer, is slowly but inevitably migrating over to the Democratic Party and its sitting chief executive.

By the same token, Obama has learned his lessons well, as must all first term presidents learn. He has learned to stand his ground, filling blocked high level jobs with recess appointments, taking his jobs program (and now his budget proposal) to the people and generally building his rapport with the electorate. He is finally drawing lines in the sand and daring the GOP to step over that line. (The word is out that the GOP House will vote to continue the payroll tax exemptions - and without asking for a thing in return! They know that it's a loser to oppose the President again. So much for deficit reduction, Mr Cantor.)

Has Obama resorted to “Rope-a-Dope” in the year of his running for a 2^nd term? It may be that the GOP - and even the Catholic hierarchy - is punching itself out. There is no groundswell for any of its current positions. The anger and discontent of 2010 has perhaps made them realize that they threw the baby out with the bathwater (with current congressional approval at around 9%). And while Mitt, Rick and Newt decree that the imminent destruction of America is at hand, there has never been a politician who has been elected without something positive to ask the voter to imagine.

So far, all they ask of us is to allow them and their obscenely rich friends to keep their hands in the cookie jar a while longer, while we all sing “America the Beautiful.”

###

The Persistence of Prejudice

2012-02-03T11:05:00.000-08:00

My great aunt, great grandmother, great grandfather and grandfather, about 1903

There is a city in eastern Turkey called Harput. It's not much more than a remnant of a middle sized city. It was from there that my grandfather, Ohannes Peshekerian, his brother, Avadis, and a sister, Araxi, immigrated to the United States. They came to the US sometime just before the outbreak of World War I, but they were not unfamiliar with violence. In the half century before that war, Armenians were a persecuted lot. My grandfather and his siblings have long since passed away and so I never knew in great detail what the circumstances of his arrival in the USA included. I was too young when he died to ask significant questions about his background. All I do know is that he was apprenticed to a shoe maker in the old country. Were his parents expected to make the trip later? Did they even have notions of leaving their home in Harput and try for a new life in a distant land? I don't knowand chances are I'll never know; nor will my own children.

What is certain, though, is that his parents died at the hands of the Ottoman Turks sometime during that war. According to my grandfather, they were murdered by the Turks. His brother, whom we all just called “Uncle” corroborated that event much later, when he was in his 90's. I never knew how they were murdered but the systematic destruction of Armenians throughout Anatolia for nearly a hundred years was accomplished by various means. Reports by western diplomats and missionaries which still exist are full of accounts of atrocities; atrocities later to be repeated in Europe itself just a couple of decades later.

I was the apple of my grandfather's eye - possibly because I was the only male born who carried his own blood. My sister certainly never had the relationship with him that I did. It wasn't a bad relationship, just not as full as mine was with our Grandfather. I spent hours with him in his later years, when he lived alone in downtown San Francisco.

He had a small, one man real estate office in North Beach, in the heart of the Italian community, and in those hours we spent alone, I learned about Armenians. I learned about the atrocities; about his parents – my great grandparents, being destroyed. I was taught the Armenian alphabet, a few words, and even some songs he took with him from the old country. My grandfather told me stories of Armenia. He described it as some kind of paradise of fruit orchards and vineyards – of lucious grapes; a place of bounty. He told me of the two great lakes, Van and Sevan, and of Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark finally came to rest. And he told me, ever so proudly, of how Armenia was the first nation to officially adopt Christianity in Roman times.

“The Turks,” he would tell me, “are animals! Beasts!” And he would go over the chapters and the verses of what has come to be know as The Armenian Genocide. Barely 10 years of age, I was held rapt with the stories. Sometimes, when he had work to do, he would sit me at his old Underwood typewriter - the kind where you could see all the moving parts beneath a heavy iron frame – and I would pound away names, words, and endless lines of XXXX's.

One day, probably in the early 1950's, while I was engrossed in a line of X's, a man come into the office, presumably to do some business with him. I noticed him coming in, but I quickly returned to my typing. I then heard my grandfather shriek, “Get out of here, you God damned Turk! GET OUT!” and he came out from behind the counter and practically kicked the poor guy out the door. I looked up, at once scared and shocked to see the scuffle. I had never seen my grandfather with such anger.

“He's a god damned Turk, Bobby! He's an ANIMAL! NO Turk comes into this office.”

To look at me, you'd never know I'm an Armenian. I don't have olive skin; nor did I, in my younger days, own a thick mop of dark brown hair. The recombining of my Armenian mother and my Irish-German father's DNA awarded me – for better or worse - a ruddy complexion, green eyes and blond/brown hair, and above-average height. A male version of the Kardashians I'm not, nor ever was, even on my best day.

Yet, as probably every human being who has Armenian blood flowing in his veins knows, learning “the story of the massacres” is part of growing up. There isn't a single person of any kind of Armenian background who has some story to tell of their ancestors, some distant relative who suffered at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in the late 1800's or during World War I. Even the newly created Republic of Turkey, in it's earliest days continued with the killings. To most Turkish people, Kemal Ataturk is credited with bringing a new nation into the 20^th century. To most older Armenians, though, he is certainly not. He was just another in a long line of powerful Muslim men who persecuted the Christian Armenians.

Under the house

When my grandfather died, I was around 18 or so years old. After he passed away, my father and I cleaned out his hotel room on Grant Avenue. There were stacks of books which we dutifully collected and then stored in the basement of the house we lived in down the peninsula in a suburban little town; and there they stayed for another 30 years or more, untouched, gathering dust and subjected to the ravages of damp winters, mold, and paper eating bugs of one kind or another.

One day, in my late 50s, as my mother's health began to fail, my curiosity about those books was somehow piqued enough to go under the house, among the spider webs and nails hammered through the sub-floor above and take look at them. They turned out to be a treasure trove of books long out of print but written by famous men of the day. And nearly all of them had some relationship to the Armenian genocide. There were eyewitness accounts of the killings by Viscount James Bryce, Henry Morgenthau, and Arnold Toynbee, as well as works about Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. It was, in fact, a literary snapshot of a particular time and event in history. I even found a copy of T.E. Lawrence's “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” (I later came to surmise that my grandfather was not so much interested in Lawrence of Arabia's war exploits as he was his accounting of his torture by the Turkish bey after having been captured.)

Paging through the bug-eaten and water damaged books, I found margin notes in nearly all of them, written in pencil by my grandfather. They either underlined or opposed some statement by the author. There was plenty of “god damned Turks” interspersed with his commentary. There was even some writing in Armenian (which I never learned to read or write). Clearly and understandably, for my grandfather, he was unable to rid himself of the demons of his youth. His anger and hatred for anything Turkish was as fresh and strong on the day he died as it must have been on the day that he learned his own parents were destroyed decades before. It was a complete hatred, absolutely devoid of reason. Though he escaped death, he was an emotionally damaged man for the rest of his life.

The legacy

For me, this instilling of what my grandfather's experiences were as a young boy, and certainly his own attitude about his oppressors, dripped inevitably into my own views. In some vague, hard to define way, the very word “Turk” carried with it the sad and angry remembrance of what had happened to my grandfather and his family. For most of my life, I'm sorry to say, I have carried a certain reservation about Turkish people and even the nation itself. I am intellectually very aware of this emotional hesitation to fully accept Turkish people. I understand that I am three generations removed from what happened to the Armenians, yet there is that nagging, cloying, emotional memory of my grandfather throwing that Turkish fellow out of his office.

The trip

My sister and I are all that is left of our own family. Mother and Father are both long gone, along with our grandparents. From time to time, we talk about our “Armenian-ness” to each other. Both of us still have unanswered questions. Many times, when the subject comes up, it is usually because our own kids are now asking questions about their great grandparents. They are wanting to complete their own circles of knowing who, exactly, they are.

And so we are planning a trip to Turkey and the modern republic of Armenia for the spring of 2013.We are taking our children to Istanbul (where our grandmother was from), to Harput (which still exists) and then on to Armenia. The kids are doing all kinds of research into putting the details together. They are excited. I am somewhat hesitant but my curiosity overrides any notion of not going along. This will not be a cruise on the Aegean by a long shot. We may be backpacking – or sub-backpacking – on this trek.

We will meet plenty of Turkish people, I'm sure. And maybe then, in doing so, I can drop the vestigial prejudice handed down to me. Honestly, it's really about time.

###

I Need a New Religion

2012-02-02T08:29:00.000-08:00

I need a new religion. I've come to the conclusion that American-style Christianity sucks. I've just recently realized that that the one I (pretty much) was a member of has decided that they really, really want to make everyone else think like they do - and if you don't, by God, you're going to jail, Bub!

My politics are just not aligned with conventional Christian belief systems, I guess. I'm really getting sick of organized religion getting so deep into the political muck. I'm sick of Mormons and Catholics throwing dollars into the political process to “protect marriage,” even when more than 50% of which wind up in Splitsville anyway. I'm tired of hearing them whine about having to dispense birth control from their hospitals to people who want it, on one hand, while with the other they gladly accept Medicare and Medicaid dollars. I get really worked up about both of these “strange bedfellow” religions wanting the human race to breed itself out of existence by having (married) women having as many kids as they biologically can.

All those Protestant preachers on TV railing about “family values,” and gay marriage, and godless, European-style socialists, and “lib'ruls” just give me a giant headache, and more than anything make me really mad that they have about as much regard for the message of Jesus as I have for the message of Hitler.

It all came home just a day or two ago when I noticed that a group I've actually given money to, and “marched” with a few years ago, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, decided to withdraw it's funding for Planned Parenthood – ostensibly on the basis that it is “under investigation” - by the Congress of the United States, an investigation begun by the far right wing Republican majority in the House of Representatives, largely because about 3% of the work PP does actually involves abortion.

Adding insult to injury, that porcine governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, decided to cut Planned Parenthood out of the state budget altogether. Now 7 states have placed some kind of restrictions on Panned Parenthood, an organization absolutely dedicated to women's health issues and whose clients are by a wide majority poor or at least of modest means.

I'm not wild about abortion, but I'll be damned if I'll impose my religion-based ethics on someone else, regardless of whether they're co-religionists or anti-religion, or whatever. Because that's what they're trying to do, I think.

They think, like all true believers, they have all the answers and anyone who disagrees with them are just full of it. Well, they don't, and so I'm out looking for a new religion, although I doubt I'll find one that really suits me.

Maybe I'll start my own. I'll call it Flylooperism. Has a nice ring to it. Just one commandment: Be nice.

I get a tax deduction, too, I think.

And Then There Were Two...

2012-01-23T10:26:00.000-08:00

In one of the strangest twists in American political history, the Republican party, after just two primary contests and a so-called caucus in Iowa has winnowed its presidential offerings to two of the unlikeliest persons imaginable. Neither of the two engender even a hint of enthusiasm among the party faithful, yet both are tied to a GOP dominated by its near-irrational hatred of the sitting president. GOP voters have been fed a steady diet of castor oil for what ails them. They swallow it and just hope they'll feel better.

In one corner, Mitt Romney, a bonafide “one-percenter” who has been trying for six years to present himself as just another working stiff - actually having once described himself as "unemployed" - despite being forced to admit he pays far less of his income in taxes than virtually every wage earning worker in America; who has given millions of dollars to his church (remember, it's deductible!), and who has millions more parked in some bank in the Grand Caymans – all quite legal - to avoid said taxes, and who proposes to altogether eliminate the capital gains tax which he pays in place of ordinary income taxes the non-invested public pays. With his mansions on California's gold coast, New Hampshire's lake district, the Caribbean and Massachusetts, Mitt appears about as normal as snow in the Amazon.

In the other corner we find a serial “issues” bomb thrower and proven moral, financial, and political hypocrite who changes his religious and carnal affiliation as it apparently fits his needs, spiritual and temporal.

Right now, Mr Gingrich, the anti-iconic child of the 60's who was written off as politically dead just 60 days ago seems poised for a resurgence in the aftermath of a massive primary victory in South Carolina. With a bunch of southern state primaries coming up he should be able to add to his viability as a candidate.

Romney, in fact, is being ”necklaced” by his refusal to admit to his astonishing wealth, how he got (and continues to get) it and how he preserves it. Romney the candidate is plagued with being of the class which has raped and pillaged the middle class for the last 30 years. His steady refusal to come clean in sharing his tax returns, particularly the returns during his years as a leveraged buyout tycoon, have provided the political gasoline for his necklace. He dares not talk about his work as the former governor of Massachusetts. Indeed he can not. His record as a successful, and even somewhat liked, governor of that state is a secret which he must hide from the radical right of his own party in order to garner votes in the primaries. His opponent, Mr. Gingrich, is only too happy to toss the match at the tire around Romney's neck.

For if there is anyone willing to immolate a political opponent, (just ask former Speaker Jim Wright) it's Newton LeRoy Gingrich, the maximally corpulent, former Speaker of the House. Putting aside his “big ideas” about putting children to work mopping floors, or attacking any country - preferably Islamic - which proves a problem for American interests, or doing away with Social Security and Medicare, even Mr. Gingrich, who built a highly remunerative career as a lobbyist, pundit, PAC creator, earning some $3 million in 2010 alone (Not chump change, as Tiffany's can attest), knows how to go for the throat as well as anyone.

What Newt can do that Mitt can't

As he has throughout his career, Newt Gingrich has mastered the ability to catch the mood of the public. The public, in both parties, really, is angry and disgusted with the ever widening maw of those who have done extraordinarily well at the expense of those who have lost their life saving, their homes, their jobs, their sense of worth even. They are angry at their elected representatives who no longer represent them in any way. And Newt, better than anyone, knows how to play that game. He, better than anyone knows how to appeal to anger and resentment, for he is an angry and resentful man.

Mitt Romney, in contrast, just cannot seem to even modestly affect an air of authenticity. His constant shifting and denial of his past positions on a host of issues makes his fellow Republicans suspicious as hell. Romney is - like Tom Dewey - the man on top of the wedding cake; who, even in jeans and a buttoned down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, looks as if he's incredibly uncomfortable. He is a man who, left to go off-script, is as likely to say “Corporations are people, too, my friend!” as he is to invoke jealousy and envy on the part of the the public for the fact that he's fabulously wealthy, never having made a thing with his hands, or sold a service. In short, Mitt often grounds out when it comes to trying to be “one of us.”

And there we have the likely two men, who will run as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States in a time of financial and economic uncertainty. The rules being what they are, one of the two is inevitably going to run as the Republican candidate for President.

Democrats and the end game: it could happen...

Given the mood of the country and given the fact that President Obama is seen as nothing more than, well, more of the same by much of his own party, “throwing the bums out” is a distinct possibility.

What is true for all voters, both the left and the right, is that thy are finally understanding that there isn't a nickel's worth of difference between one party and the other when the chips, as it were, are down. Both parties have been taken over by Big Money: the big bankers, the energy tycoons, the insurance industry, the securities dealers. Since the crash of 2007, not one change in the way we run our finance and economic engine has changed. Indeed, banks which were “too big to fail” have taken their government money and are still playing roulette with their money, rather than lending it out. Corporations have trillions stashed overseas to avoid paying taxes on earnings. Business, and the wealth it creates, continues to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. Business and political heavyweights live as large – and as ostentatiously - as they ever have, aggregating hundreds of times as much as their wage earning employees.

Indeed, the most important federal governmental positions in Washington DC are taken by members of the investment banking community. Obama elevated – in absolutely stunning contrast to his 2008 campaign rhetoric – the very people most responsible for the crash of 2007: Geithner, Summers, Bernanke among others, to trusted advisory jobs. In one of the strangest twists of all, Obama even brought in Jeffery Immelt, the head of General Electric, to be a “jobs czar."

The question that Obama and the Democratic leadership will be asking of their voters this election season is this: Are you so unhappy with this president that you would put either a double-speaking tycoon or a bomb thrower into the oval office?

It is a question loaded with risk. There are a lot of Democrats who will simply not answer that question and stay home in disgust. As goofy and as improbable that this GOP field is shaping up to be, the present climate does not ensure that the incumbent will necessarily keep his job. The hero of 2008 has shown he has feet of clay.

###

The Romney / GOP Dilemma

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

As he has been pursuing for the last 6 years, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney may finally be getting close to the the nomination he has, up to now, fruitlessly sought: to get himself elected the 45^th President of these United States. Yet, in an almost cruel hoax to the occupiers of the considerably large far right fringe of the GOP, the same group that gave the Republicans control over the money branch of the federal legislature, and which came within a hare's breath of taking over the Senate, too, a Romney candidacy comes with a degree of irony as both parties begin to seriously gear up for November. The choice for Republicans will be the guy with the least charisma and the most skepticism about his GOP bonafides. The right wing of the GOP is correctly wondering who Mitt Romney is, as they should.

Romney's forked tongue strategy

If one accepts that the GOP has moved distinctly to the political right, Mitt Romney has to be seen as trying too hard to be what in real life he never was: namely, an extremist. The truth is that Romney is about as plain vanilla a candidate as there ever was. To overcome that perception, Governor Mitt has tried to come across as the epitome of tea party-ism, to Iowans most recently, accusing the sitting President of everything from being the cause of an upcoming final deluge, while clumsily trying to explain away his nursing the Massachusetts Health Plan into existence – a plan Obamacare was modeled on. As a governor of a state known for its liberalism, Romney the governor was 180 degrees the opposite of Romney the presidential candidate – and therein lies the question about this man who is certain to be annointed the nominee in the fall. And his competitors will not release him from carrying on this what many see as a charade. Romney is so full of contradictions in his politics that he must sometimes ask himself what the hell he really stands for, anyway!

As he leaves Iowa with his extra 8 votes, Mitt Romney will have to continue his right-wing charade on to the early primary states and even beyond to overcome the fact of his center-left political past and, of course, his membership in the Mormon church. Some 20% of self -identified Republicans and 34% of Protestants have stated they would not support a Mormon for President.

The Iowa Circus: It's money that matters

Without question Romney is the better organized, better funded, would-be nominee. He is also the clear choice of the GOP corporate principes, a group with little or no use for the unwashed, socially conservative, Christianist rabble out in the nation's hinterlands. Upwards of $40 million - $15 million on broadcast media alone - was spent by various and sundry entities on behalf of one or another of the half dozen or so Republicans who jockeyed for the “follow spot” which would catapult one of them into New Hampshire and and South Carolina with fresh millions. Some of this Iowa money was spent by the hopefuls themselves, but the vast majority of it was spent by super-PACs operating nominally – but absolutely unbelievably - independent of the candidates.

When the dust cleared on January 3rd, Candidate Romney emerged victorious – by 8 votes – with Rick Santorum, the ex-senator from Pennsylvania (who was rejected by 18% of the voters in his home state just 2 years ago in his own bid for reelection) having tied Romney. Libertarian Ron Paul was not far behind that small pack. Romney and his super-PAC are estimated to have spent about $155.00 for each vote he secured while Santorum got off cheap with about $20 bucks per vote. Romney could not close the deal by shutting out the social conservatives and now faces a renewed effort by Santorum in New Hampshire and especially in South Carolina.

The split personality of the GOP

What we are seeing is the clear bifurcation of the Republican Party, which was something that everyone could see from the beginning. Romney will likely emerge as “the candidate no one really wanted,” for in the GOP Land of the Blind, Mitt Romney is the one-eyed king. Politically, Mitt Romney has almost nothing in common with the far right wing of his party yet must appear as “one of them” in order to appeal to the very segment which has put the GOP in the driver's seat on Capitol Hill. Not only does this come across as insincere to the doctrinaire social/evangelical conservatives in the Midwest and South, the strategy has implanted oodles of doubt in them. It is a sure bet that the President will make good use of Romney's attempts at stealth with the GOP true believers. Romney has not yet been fully vetted to the electorate and Obama – with possible help from members of Romney's own party - will be sure that he is. The GOP is a party of small government for their Wall St., banking and insurance benefactors; and the party of big, invasive government for their evangelicals, who would have G-men looking into bedroom nightstands for condoms and copies of the Koran.

With friends like them...

As Romney's less well financed competitors fade as the primary process lurches on – as they must - they will not take well to supporting him. We are seeing Newt Gingrich's new strategy of “payback” for the December blitzkrieg Romney visited upon Gingrich in Iowa emerge from the muck of what's left of Gingrich's effort. Perennial libertarian Ron Paul is more likely to hand off his movement to his son than issue a blanket endorsement of Mitt Romney. It is entirely conceivable that the rest of the current GOP field will hardly give ringing endorsements of Romney as they exit stage right. Though Romney currently enjoys a 43% favorable margin in New Hampshire it is a soft number and will likely come down when the voting is done, which for Mitt, who has a summer place on Lake Winnipesaukee and has practically lived in New Hampshire for the last six years, is another loss – a failure to close the deal. And so the circus will move on to South Carolina and Florida, states far more amenable to the evangelical and social right-wing of the GOP.

With enemies like him....

Yet, all is not lost for the GOP, for there is one overriding factor which could carry them to victory in November: hatred of the sitting incumbent President. Obama may be be the most despised President since Lincoln sneaked into Washington DC on a train in 1861 for fear of being knocked off by some Southern sympathizer. The degree and strength of Obamahass by conservatives is palpable; it is irrational; it is both race and xenophobia based. And this hatred will be well used to the advantage of Mr. Romney by him and his handlers as well as by the super-Pacs lining up with their millions of unidentified contributors to take back the White House.

It is possible that the GOP could win on that basis, for it is a fair bet that there will be a lot of nose holding by GOP voters come November. Their desire to oust Obama will override their political principles. Romney knows that and is banking on it.

Obama's Job No.1: Restoring enthusiasm

A GOP victory will happen only if the President cannot once again stir the factions which comprise the Democratic Party to act on Election Day. If the lefties are disgusted with the first three years of Obama's term they will need much TLC to bring them back into a voting mood; and there are signs that this is going on now. The recent recess appointments have served to let Democrats know that the President has abandoned his attempts at bipartisanship with a GOP bent on his destruction, no matter the cost. Democrats are certain to see more of the same in the weeks and months to come. Obama must demonstrate there is some steak behind the sizzle.

If one fact is now well established among the electorate it is that the GOP has been a party of obstruction whose only stated goal is to unseat Obama while protecting their monied interests. It is currently an open question as to whether or not the strategy will bear fruit in November. Obama has his work cut out for him. The battle lines are clearly drawn and he – though a politician of extraordinary power – is hardly guaranteed a second round.

###

Is John Boehner Toast?

2011-12-22T09:36:00.000-08:00

Is John Boehner (R-OH) long for his job as Speaker of the House? Is he an example of the Peter Principle in politics, which is to say that he's reached the point of being ineffective? This man, the 3rd in line to the Presidency may be on his last political legs.

If events of the last 6 or so months are any indicator, there's a darned good chance that he may be ousted by his own party. It's likely that Mr. Boehner's memory of being ingloriously tossed from his last leadership role, that of the House Republican Conference Committee chariman in 1998 for being Newt Gingrich's right-hand man when Gingrich was himself tossed out of Congress is weighing heavily on him - so much so that he has acquiesced to putting his party ahead of his country once again, in order to keep his job, rather than take a principled stand. The party which decries even the smallest tax increase on its source of political sustenance, Big Money, yesterday signaled that it's ready to hand one to the very people it depends on for votes – the declining middle class and the rapidly growing numbers of former members of it. Boehner, who is no neophyte at politics, is no doubt aware of this.

John Boehner has a long history in Republican politics. One of 11 children reared in what can be charitably called modest circumstances, his rise to the speakership was the culmination of over 20 years laboring in the Republican House vineyard. He has always been a dependable soldier for GOP causes and considers his work in getting George W. Bush's “No Child Left Behind” Act passed into law as his crowning achievement in politics.

Boehner's fortunes have risen, fallen and risen again as the GOP took over the House for the first item in 40 years in 1994, lost it a couple of times and then regained it spectacularly in 2010. When then-Majority Leader Tom Delay was forced to step down in 2006, Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Boehner both made a play for the job and Boehner won it handily, which of course positioned him for the Speaker job when the GOP took over the House of Representatives last November with the help of the Tea Party and folks like Dick Armey - and a sizable passel of corporate money men like, most notably, the Koch Brothers.

It ain't easy being red

Since becoming Speaker, however, Boehner has had an ongoing problem with rounding up his party and getting them to act as a single entity, something that can be called Job No. 1 of any Speaker of the House. The Tea Party wing of this House, bent on the destruction of the President, has continually been a thorn in the side for the GOP lifers in the House who, like Boehner, have learned and practiced the art of compromise.

Last summer, when the Republican-led House was unwilling to bend an inch on budget talks and came within a hare's whisker of once again shutting down the entire machinery of government, Boehner was unable to guide his caucus to a satisfactory deal in time to prevent sparking a downgrade of the credit rating of the United States of America for the first time in its history.

The most recent GOP House caucus's rejection of a Boehner sponsored 2-month extension of unemployment insurance and payroll tax relief for 160 million Americans literally blindsided the Speaker and the GOP Senate members, who thought that Boehner's word that he had the votes was golden. It wasn't. GOP Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell's well documented “high five-ing” with a senate colleague after having put the 2-month extension deal together with Boehner has turned into a “facepalm.”

And now the tittering is beginning. Is Boehner toast as Speaker? Waiting not-so-patiently in the wings is Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is no stranger to to political ambition and, even more interestingly, is aligned in almost every way with the stupid wing (read: Tea Party wing) of the GOP.

Ready, fire, aim!

Just as the President is stepping up the contrasting of himself and his party with the 3-year long obstinacy and obstructionism of the GOP, and which is beginning to pay off in the steady rise in his numbers, the Republicans seem to be choosing kamikaze tactics for 2012. Some have called the GOP strategy “overreaching.” Others believe Boehner has run his political gas tank down to empty in his inability to herd the cats in his party. Even if Boehner is ousted in January, his likely replacement, Cantor, will be orders of magnitude worse than the present Speaker in detaching the GOP from the majority of voters.

What is becoming increasingly obvious is that the GOP is hardly a unified whole and seems to be pulling itself apart like two continental plates. The larger of the two, the radical conservatives of the Tea Party movement seem to have center stage.

John Boehner may have become a victim of his own party once again.

###

An Quiet End to an Awful War

2011-12-20T06:21:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago President Obama, in keeping a 2008 campaign promise, declared the war in Iraq to be over. The last American soldier deployed to that sad country will be home for Christmas. The administration has stated that Iraq's time to become a working republic, to take responsibility for its own security has, at last, arrived. The Iraqis agree, most of whom were certain that we would never leave and that our purpose in being there was really to get at their oil. They must be stunned and perhaps more than a little apprehensive at the same time. But no matter: our boys and girls are coming home at last after the longest military engagement in American history.

More than a million service people were deployed to Iraq in nine years of war there. Of that million plus, more than 40,000 US casualties were suffered, of which 10% were fatal. This of course doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were injured or killed in that same period of time. (The English medical journal The Lancet estimates that more than 600,000 Iraqis died war related deaths, including from sickness, malnutrition, lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, and direct and indirect military and terrorists' actions.

Coming home, but to what?

I am overjoyed that the President has ended this war. And so, apparently, is 78% of the entire American public. A Congress which should be celebrating the end of this madness instead calls the President who ended the thing a traitor. Naïve. Weak. "We should leave at least 30,000 troops in Iraq," bloviate opposition members of Congress (and the former vice President who started the whole thing); members who gave absolutely nothing to the cause. The current traveling circus, one of whom will be the Republican nominee for the 2012 presidential elections, continually tries to make lemons from lemonade in this matter, so as to gain the votes of the stupid wing of their party. One wonders if they would have the federal government pay for a parade down Broadway for the troops without a corresponding cut in some hated government program. It is no wonder that fewer than 10% of the public view Congress with anything other than absolute disdain.

I am overjoyed that, as a senior citizen, I can welcome home soldiers, sailors and airmen who did everything they were asked to do during those terrible nine years, and I will tell any of them I ever meet “Well done!;” but I truly wonder at what kind of country they will discover. What kind of country those who have served and already returned home are experiencing as they attempt to return to civilian life. Will they find jobs? Will they find financial security for themselves and their families? Will they find - at last – peace? After the ticker tape parades – what?

Our soldiers come home to a nation in turmoil. They come home to a nation whose people never were asked to make the personal sacrifice historically required to engage in war. There were no bond drives as in World War II, there were no income tax surcharges, as during Vietnam, to pay the multi-trillion dollar bill this war will cost us over time. There was no pressing of young citizens into the military through the draft.

Indeed, we conducted this war on a credit card. As we spent billions dollars a day to either (a) take Saddam Hussein down or (b) bring democracy to the Middle East or (c )fight terrorism, we were told to go shopping; to go out and buy something. And we did. In spades. And we paid for whatever we bought with borrowed money, too. And while all this was going on, the middle class which arose after the greatest war this nation ever fought was destroyed as the monied class was given enormous tax breaks; as multinational corporations, banks, and Wall St. traders were paid to rape and pillage the American economy. And like a distance runner collapsing after a marathon, the American people are now spent out

This is what our troops return to. They return to a nation perhaps unable to govern itself anymore. They return to a society whose intelligentsia wonders if the great 200-year experiment with freedom, self-government and prosperity might have been a pipe dream whose bubble would someday burst with the inevitability of a sunset; whose people know nothing of shared ideals, of making common purpose, and doing things which have no direct personal benefit.

And many of those troops will wonder if their sacrifice - and the sacrifices of their fallen comrades - were worth it. They are not the sons and daughters of investment bankers and hedge fund speculators. They are people of common means and who come home with an ideal of what and who we are. And over time they will match their ideals with the reality of living in 21^st century America.

Will their parents get it right?

###

Real Estate Meltdown - v.2.0

2011-12-20T06:19:00.000-08:00

All you owners of real property which has a note attached to it, pay attention! And, if you're in foreclosure or about to be foreclosed on, pay close attention.

So far, it's been a pretty quiet but a potential – no, let us say here, inevitable – earth rattling cauldron is bubbling away 'neath the footings of the republic. It is the dirtiest, if not the newest, secret of them all. It seems that the entire American real estate credit structure, all those loans which have been sold, resold, monetized, bundled into securities to be sold yet again – finally – to us ordinary folk with 401(k)'s, and a little a little money in the stock market, and even maybe a little more in a bank money market savings account to cover your property taxes each year, is about to have its lid blown off.

Back in the go-go nineties, when all this business of bundling mortgages together to be sold on Wall St. started to really gather a head of steam, it turned out that the Banksters, rather than sell loans the old fashioned way to another lender by attaching a copy of the trust deed to be recorded with the county each time the loan was sold, decided to create a shortcut which would save them gazillions in fees, time and trouble.

They created an agency called the Mortgage Electronic Registering System (MERS) who would be “nominated” to be the owner of any trust deed which had a real estate loan associated to it. MERS would keep the files straight so that when the time came to satisfy the loan a clear title could be issued. Except that they didn't. And they couldn't. It turns out that around $6-$8 trilllion worth of loans have no record of who is supposed to own the collateral.

What has been happening is that as some poor schlemiel loses his job and the can't pay his mortgage, naturally the guy holding the note starts foreclosure proceedings against him. The problem is that if you're a lender or a holder of a real estate loan secured by the property in question, chances are that you can't prove you own the home whose paper you are carrying. You're also probably six or seven times removed from the entity who originated the loan and as it was sold and resold, no one passed a trust deed along to you; and you're probably a bank, or a Wall St. hedge fund. And MERS has no idea where loans went. And neither, of course, does the county.

Recent federal court cases have gone both for and against debtors who have asked In Oregon last May, a federal judge ruled in favor of a debtor, who wound up owning his home free and clear. Clearly the issue is traveling up the federal court system, but the betting seems to be in the debtor's favor. MERS cannot be a beneficiary of a property it may hold title to yet have no exposure to in a note. Similarly, a lender cannot foreclose on a property it has no deed of trust on. It is also entirely possible that the company you've been sending your loan check to isn't the legal owner of the property you're living in, and can't issue a clear deed if you somehow manage to satisfy the loan (after Aunt Millie left you a couple of hundred thouasand).

Banks are in full blown panic on this. If this goes down the way it very well could, the Banksters will be knocking on the doors of Congress looking for another bailout.

So, who can we point to as the real perps of this scam? Try both Bushes, Clinton and the Congress of the United States of America. It's all just a big party.

And you're not invited.

Read all about it!

###

Thoughts on a Dying Town

2011-12-20T06:16:00.000-08:00

The autumn fog is as thick as porridge. It is a mind numbing, disorienting vail of gray-white, so thick that one cannot see beyond 20 yards. In the hours before sunlight the quiet is almost deafening. I take my first cup of coffee outside to the patio to just look at it all. All I hear is the ringing in my ears, made permanent by too many hours with a chain saw in my hands, too many years of ear splitting rock music. I curse my misfortune and the stupidity of my youth. The fog isolates my senses, forcing me inside my head.
Soon enough, the paper will report some poor fellow who drove himself off the county road leading into town. It happens just about every year. A deer or possum out jumps out from the bushes just a few feet from the oncoming driver, he swerves and it’s all over.

Two or three times a day, a Union Pacific rolls across Main St. with its mile-long string of cars loaded with lumber, headed south for god-knows-where, its horn bellowing out two longs, a short and a final long. I think about that train, wondering who is buying all that wood. Surely, they’re not building houses anywhere. Is it going to Asia, I ask myself. Maybe it’s for some guy who goes down to his local Home Depot in San Diego to buy some studs or plywood to build another room. No, I decide it’s probably to China. The train will haul the wood to Oakland to be loaded on Chinese ships. We send them wood and they send us back pretty little Adirondack chairs for the gardens and backyards of a million homes across America. They’ll be on sale at Home Depot in the spring. The train rumbles through this town, leaving it to itself and its problems. Commerce is passing Jefferson by with two longs, a short and another final long.

I take another pull on my coffee, staring out into the big field behind the house – the field which Jim Meyer left fallow this past summer because grass seed prices fell too far to make a profitable crop. I can see the fog bubbling off the damp ground, even in the semi- dark of a full November moon. His daughter, Audrey, disked the field last June in anticipation of planting but it never happened. So now it’s just low lying weeds which flocks of Canada geese occasionally set down on to feed and rest for a while.

Jefferson had a heyday of sorts, about 10 years ago or so. There was a period when a few growers chucked their overalls and tractors and sold off their acres, which the city fathers then immediately annexed and permitted some developers and builders to grow a new crop: houses. Jefferson would be, they said, a bedroom community of affordable housing for workers who toiled at government jobs up in Salem or across the interstate in Albany. Every new house built would bring in four or five thousand dollars’ worth of fees to the city’s treasury. The burgers planned to build a new city hall, one more deserving of a town on the make. They expanded the water and sewer system to accommodate all the new housing. An investment in future growth.

Then it all collapsed like a messed up soufflé. The houses stopped selling and the fees for the new city hall and the sewer and water plant evaporated. Over in Millersburg, just down the road, International Paper shuttered a big newsprint plant which they had bought from Weyerhaeuser a couple of years ago. A few hundred people lost their jobs, which at first they thought would be temporary, but soon enough some executive somewhere decided that they didn’t need that plant at all. So now it sits, like a worn out Emerald City of dim lights in the night fog, slowly being taken apart, its machinery shipped to some other place. Soon it will be just a vacant lot along the interstate.

Emmett, my next door neighbor, worked at that plant for nearly 25 years as a foreman of some kind. It was a union job. We don’t talk much but I see him all the time, puttering around in his front yard, shoulders slouched, head down. He’s been out of real work for two years now. The best he can manage is part-time work as a custodian at some school, another neighbor tells me. Thank God his wife has a job in Salem somewhere. They’ve got a couple of teenagers. Good kids, really. I hear the daughter practicing the flute all the time and the son keeps pretty much to himself. Emmett’s a Vietnam vet. I know that because he has small Vietnam flag stickers on the rear windows of his cars.

My other neighbor, Mark, just completed his masters degree in environmental sciences last year at Oregon State over in Corvallis, not far from here. His wife Gina, put him through school. Mark worked in the construction trades while Gina was in school learning to be a registered nurse. Once she got to working the night shift in a hospital in Salem, Mark then returned to school. But their plans have been upset, too. Mark hoped to catch on in some administrative or research work for the state, but due to cutbacks in funding they’re not hiring. So now he works as a park ranger in a state park several miles into the mountains commuting 50 miles to the park every day. I think, My God, all that education and all he can do is empty garbage cans and prune brush. He tells me they might move him over to Bend, which means he and Gina, along with their two young children will probably have to sell out and move over there. I can only wonder at what their house, which they bought brand new just 5 years ago, will fetch in this non-existent market.
Since the crash, Jefferson has changed.

The small agricultural town which seemed to be transitioning into another “bedroom community” of cookie cutter homes has skidded into the reality of what is, for us, a depression. The wreckage is all around me. More than sixty homes – ten percent of the total single family dwellings in town – are in foreclosure, vacant and on the block; three on my block alone. And it’s a pretty good bet that there are dozens of others which are one missed mortgage payment away from being foreclosed on. A local and quite cocky young fellow who built houses on speculation, and who probably imagined himself has having “arrived” during the good times, expanded on borrowed money, got stuck with 40 unsold houses in two counties and lost his shirt. He’s sold off his equipment, his yard, his office, and now take remodels and painting jobs wherever he can find them.

There’s a food bank, now, in town which has been busier than ever. I read in the paper that even the local branch bank, which was an up and coming operation headquartered in Spokane, is hanging on by a thread because they got caught up in the Wall St. financial chicanery. The busiest places in town are the little store than sells discount cigarettes; Randy’s, the local bar, and a couple of tiny grocery stores which sell mostly beer and overpriced, lousy produce.

Nevertheless, they put up the string of American flags on the Fourth of July and Veterans Day on Main Street, as they always do. I catch my cynical self pursing my lips in utter disgust at the irony of it all.
The harmony of prior years in Jefferson is long since gone. When the city council, crying poor, put up a bond measure on the ballot to finance its city hall, it was soundly rejected by 78% of the voters. And the school board, deciding in 2010 that it needed a brand new middle school to replace the one built in the 1950’s proposed a $15 million dollar bond, citizens defeated it by an even wider margin. Not content with “No!” for an answer, the city council immediately raised water rates to get the money to do what it wanted. To say folks are angry is an understatement. A lot of people with kids – and jobs - were pitted against those without them. The people who are broke are screaming about the council’s and school board’s profligacy in a time when pulling in the reins is what’s called for, they say. I agree. The natives are restless, as they say.

I wonder, thinking in the approaching light of this morning, in this cold, stultifying fog, where we’re all headed here in this depressed – and depressing - place. We’re caught in an unreality of wanting progress and being too broke and down on our luck to make any.
It’ll be a while before anything gets better.

###

An Open Letter to the Democratic Campaign Commitees.

2011-10-12T05:34:00.000-07:00

October 7, 2011

Dear Senator Murray and Congresswoman Pelosi:

This morning in the mail I received a solicitation for money from the respective campaign committees which you each chair, along with a questionnaire asking for my opinion on a range of issues. (I get them every week, it seems, since I'm obviously known as a steady contributor.)

I didn’t bother to fill the questionnaire out, as I figured it was not much more than other mailings I have received from the Democratic Party. My votes over the years express my opinion better than questions whose answers you probably already know.

You forgot, intentionally or otherwise, to ask the key question: Is the Democratic Party representing my interests?

The short answer, of course is a resounding No!.

President Reagan liked to state as often as possible how, when he was a Democrat, the party had left him.
Well, that is how I feel. And because I feel the way I do, I’m not sending the party a dime until I see some backbone. If withholding my contribution, and those of other ordinary Democrats who feel similarly means that the party will suffer again at the polls, well, so be it.

For the last 30 years, the Democrats have abandoned the very people who have nothing approaching the kind of influence the Republicans, with their bottomless funds from the rich and corporate interests have and use to affect our politics for their personal benefit.

You stood by while Congress and successive presidents, from Reagan, to Clinton, to both Bushes, systematically took down or failed to enforce one regulation after another – of business, of telecommunications, of the environment, of banking, of finance.

My couple of bucks are nothing compared to the millions the Democratic Party takes from Wall St. and banking lobbyists, year in and year out. 135 former Congressmen and their senior staffers are now lobbyists for the banking and finance industry. (Michael Oxley, whose name is part of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley bill, for example, is now a lobbyists for the NASDAQ!) You are now more beholden to the "Big Six" of American finance (Goldman, Citi, B of A, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase) than you are to me and 300 million other Americans. These banks control assets equivalent of 60% of the American GDP. This revolving door of powerbrokers and the Democratic Party's taking of finance industry money has effectively blunted any chance of meaningful reform of the finance industry.

3 years after the financial meltdown there has been no change - none - in how banks conduct themselves. We are still at the mercy of a banking oligarchy, who continue their resistance to reform with all the money at their disposal.

You stood by, while every one of the plutocrats on Wall St. took taxpayer money - which you voted to hand over to them - to cover their excesses and returned absolutely nothing to those of us who have lost our jobs, our savings, our homes, our retirement funds, and whose children cannot afford college or, having graduated college, cannot find work.

You stood by, afraid, as we got entangled in an unneeded war in Iraq, costing the lives of thousands of our young and trillions in treasure.
You stood by as one American company after another has moved its manufacturing and service jobs to places where American workers simply cannot compete head to head, which has resulted in declining real wages at home for what jobs are left to us.

You stood by as appointments to the Supreme Court during the terms of both Bushes have resulted in a mockery of "equality before the law;" indeed recent events concerning Justice Scalia, Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas have demonstrated that all three should be impeached for lying under oath.

You have allowed cheap foreign goods into the country free of duties and tariffs with which to protect domestic manufactures, all in the interest of the “globalization” of worldwide trade. This has resulted in a hemorrhaging of dollars to cheap wage countries, and a continuing trade deficit and leaving the American manufacturing sector as nothing more than a pile of bleached bones of shuttered factories everywhere.
You have allowed your opposition, the Republican Party, to define yourselves and to define important issues up and down the line. You have allowed the Republican Party to divide and conquer the people. The Republican Party, since the Civil War, has always represented the monied and business class. I expect no less from it. But you are supposed to be my voice for fairness. You no longer are.

I could go on but I won’t.

You see, as leaders, you have an enormous bullhorn with which to influence public opinion; indeed to marshal it. Yet, the entire Democratic Party leadership and most of the congressional rank and file have been nearly mute in the face of one crisis after another. You have remained silent in the face of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression; the largest transfer of personal wealth in human history. I believe this silence is due to the Democratic Party’s fear of taking a principled stand.

And, in all honesty, I’ve had enough!

The current grassroots pushback being demonstrated in city after city is proof positive that I am not alone. I join with the thousands in the streets of a dozen cities in saying “a pox on both their houses” and, until I see some real signs of the Democratic Party returning to the traditional values of standing up for the 99% of us who suffer from the excesses of those with limitless money and influence with you - we, who are being reduced to a subsistence life - I will no longer participate.

"Either lead or get out of the way" is more apt a phrase than it's ever been. One way or another, real change is coming. It may take a while longer; it may take yet more pain being inflicted on us in the years to come. I promise you, though, that it will not go on forever. The people of this country - right, left and center - are fed up with the gridlock, the posturing, the demagoguery, the finger pointing, and the lack of action.
So, in closing, you show me some action and I'll show you some money. But not until then.

Respectfully,
Robert M. Burns (aka The Flylooper

Obama Is Still in the Driver's Seat.

2011-10-12T05:31:00.000-07:00

Call him lucky, call him smart, call him a consummate pol but whatever noun you choose to define him with, the potential for the current White House incumbent to face an opponent with broad appeal to the opposition party has not emerged and, with only 30 days left for someone to surface, the prospects for one appear dwindles. Mitch McConnell’s much ballyhooed statement that Job No. 1 for the GOP is to relegate President Obama to a single term – and the strategy that the Republicans have employed to achieve that goal – may nearly guarantee a second shot for Obama.

Indeed, it may even be too late for any dark horse GOP candidate to appear, given the incredible work of putting a nationwide campaign together: a 50-state staff, gobs of cash, and the need for a clearly defined set of planks on which to build viable campaign.
There are important signs - not the least of which is this current incredible national pushback at Wall St., the banksters and the richest 1% of Americans, whom the GOP leadership call “job creators,” (the folks who are enjoying the fruits of 30 years of business deregulation and unneeded tax breaks) - that a new grassroots movement may be emerging at precisely the right time. Indeed this may give definition to a movement which will appeal to conservative commoners as well as to Democrats across their own spectrum of opinions.

The current GOP lineup: a circular firing squad?

The biggest mistake the GOP national leadership made in the last three years was lining up with the Tea Party types. Yes, it got them the House back, the cost was certainly considerably higher than the return. Yet, not one of the bills initiated in the Boehner/Cantor House of Representatives has gotten anywhere other than to demonstrate the Republican Party’s willingness to fresh lower and middle class meat to the financial wolves. Moreover, the strategy has led to an explosion of goofball personalities who seek the nomination. Like roman candles, they have each all burned brightly for a while and then fizzled when they either opened their mouths too wide or when scandalous factoids, surfaced which exposed clay feet. And the factoids themselves seem to emanate from within the GOP itself.

It isn’t necessary to go into detail, other to note that current polling show the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney, commands just 25% of Republican voters nationwide, which could rise a bit with Christie’s final-final-final exit from any run for the presidency. And, to make matters worse, Romney’s voters are soft in their enthusiasm; which explains the now-expired love affair with Chris Christie. It isn’t exactly “anybody but Romney” but to this writer, it shows that the party is not coalescing at a time when the Republican primaries should be all but decided. (Palin’s declaration to not run was not even worth the airtime. She was never serious about running to begin with. This writer has been saying for three years that she’s just cashing in on her notoriety. Her 15 minutes has come and gone, but Sister Sarah certainly made good use of it!)

Romney will carry the GOP banner

Christie wisely chose not to run for the presidency. Like every one of the current GOP hopefuls, he carries a lot of baggage, in addition to his weight, which he simply didn’t want to deal with. And so, Romney, with his 25%, looks to be the nominee.

The irony of Romney, of course, is his flip-flopping on a range of issues near and dear to the hearts of the tea party mob: abortion (he was “pro-choice” as a candidate for the senate. Now he’s “pro-life”); health care, the role of government ("Corporations are people, too, my friend!"). In all the key issues by which Republicans define themselves, Romney has staked out more or less liberal positions as both a candidate for the senate and as governor of Massachusetts. He is viewed with more than a little suspicion by the true believers on the right and by what few moderates are left in the GOP. Mr. Romney is caught in the big squeeze because with the Republican Party, there is not such thing a staking out a centrist position.

The Progressives recovering their mojo?

The amorphous eruption of disgust for Wall St. and the banksters which has shown up on news shows and the front pages may be a sign of a coalescing of opinion of a much broader base of voters than anyone could have predicted just a few weeks ago. When 20,000 New Yorkers gather to register their disgust for the corporate takeover of government and the three decade takedown of the middle class while just 1 or 2 percent of the population have enjoyed spectacular increases in net wealth, Democratic politicians will have to pay attention. Moreover, in other cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago – similar demonstrations are going on. (There is new one today in my home turf of
Portland, OR!) The whole phenomenon is on the verge of becoming a pure movement for reform. Nobel Prize laureates like economist Joe Stieglitz and Paul Krugman have publicly joined in the marches, giving this ongoing event real legitimacy. The timing couldn’t be better for Democrats as we head into the campaign season. This groundswell could morph into a real movement for tax, finance and banking reform.

Despite the role and influence of money in the politics of both parties, it remains for Democratic politicians – including the President - to catch the wave rather than to sit out beyond the surf line, as they have been doing for the last three years. The President’s newfound populism in his current campaign to get his jobs bill passed may also signal that the Democrats finally may be willing to fight for their traditional values. The president will certainly remind voters how GOP obstructionism has kept him from achieving more than he has. It is time for him to be more like Harry Truman than as a college professor who talks about non-existent bipartisanship.

It is going to be a real catfight over some very basic issues. There is no question that Big Business and great wealth have achieved a level of governmental control unheard of since before Franklin Roosevelt, and this election will decide where we want to go as a nation, in terms of how we conduct ourselves. It remains for the voter to decide for himself whether 30 years of Republican stewardship have benefitted the country or hurt it.

###

A Personal Remembrance of the World Trade Center Tragedy

2011-09-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

This last weekend I spent at my sister’s summer home at Donner Lake in California’s Sierra Nevada. It was a wonderful weekend in terms of visiting with her and her husband, seeing a little bit of the Sierras, enjoying good food, wine and conversation. I’m typically a very early riser and on Sunday I got up about 5 AM and went downstairs to read from my book until the others - there were three couples in all - all got up.

Kathy, my sister, was up just a few minutes after me and flipped on the TV to watch all the network coverage of the 9/11 anniversary. Clearly I could see she was just engrossed in all the “stuff” going on in NYC. Friends and relatives of the victims called out the names of the thousands of people who lost their lives that day ten years ago. Some of them were very eloquent and some not so. One dignitary after another, some of them having built political careers out of 9/11 (Are you reading this, Rudy?), spoke to the crowd – and the country – about its meaning. Some were eloquent and some, again, not so.

I couldn’t help but think about the overkill of the programming. 9/11 was a enormous tragedy, to be sure, but I wondered if this thing wasn’t being exploited by the networks, all those politicians and dignitaries who gave those speeches, and all the gauzy shots of the hole in the ground that the used to be the World Trade Center. It just seemed like everyone, including my sister, was wallowing in the thing. Somehow, I just couldn’t get my arms around that kind of remembrance. (No one seems to realize, or maybe pay attention to the fact that we’ve lost more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than we did at the WTC. There are no memorials for those kids.) In any event, I just couldn’t watch it because I got somewhat angry at it all. I tried to refocus on my book but it was hard.

Soon, Ginny and I packed up and left, as we had planned, on schedule. We had a long drive back to Oregon ahead of us and we needed to leave early in the day. In the car we talked about the TV coverage and she had the same reaction: There was just too much self-pity, self-congratulation, self-I-don’t know-what to all that coverage…to the point that for us both it became somewhat maudlin and syrupy.

When I got home and settled in, I happened to turn on PBS and found that in a few minutes the New York Philharmonic was going to give Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony (“The Resurrection”) in remembrance of 9/11. The event was called “A Concert for New York” and Alice Tully Hall was packed, plus another several thousand sitting outside in the pavillion, watching on a giant screen.

I quickly hitched up my stereo to the TV and watched the thing. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, gave a short speech before the downbeat, saying that in times of such pain and grief, we inevitably turn to art for solace and for some way to understand these terrible things. It is in music, he said, that most mysterious of all the arts, that we can find some kind of healing. It was a short speech and it set the tone for what was to come beautifully.

It was an incredible giving of this work. The words (it calls for a soprano, and alto and a full chorus in the last two movements) were just right for the occasion. (Here they are)
It brought tears to my eyes and I realized that that was how I personally understood what the WTC tragedy means to me. The music spoke to me as no speech, no television picture, no incantory recital of names could. I also remembered Leonard Bernstein, when he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s 9^th (in which Schiller’s poem, the “Ode to Joy” is set to music) when the Berlin Wall came down. It is in music which allowed me to think – to reflect - on a different plane about these kinds of events in human history.

Needless to say, I contrasted what I was seeing that night with what I had seen on TV that morning at my sister’s place. It all seemed so empty to me, so inadequate. And truthfully, I questioned my own reaction. Was it cynical or was it okay to think these things? Should I have felt as she did? I still can’t answer that question to my satisfaction.

All I can say is that that concert helped me to reflect on not only 9/11 but on all the loss we humans perpetrate on one another and that, no matter how tragic and ugly and evil we can be towards one another, beauty and goodwill persist throughout all time.

I’m reminded of a phrase from a choral work I once sang in college, from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”: "The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."

There you have it. The first time I’ve thought about 9/11 in writing. Way too many words, but it sure helps me out!

###

Libya: The Hard Work Begins

2011-08-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

As most of the world breathes a sigh of relief that Muammar Gaddafi is now (nearly, but inevitably) history, the great question remains: Now what?

Libya, which has been repeatedly colonized for 2500 years, starting with the ancient Phoenicians, continued under Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Ottomans, Italians, Brits, and - in a final despotic synthesis – a drug-addled mad man, is about to embark on a voyage to some form of self-government. Or so the civilized world hopes.

But the business of building a nation from the ruins which Gaddafi leaves behind is not going to be a piece of cake by any means. There are two overriding realities facing this poor country which will be obstacles to a peaceful transition to enlightened self-government.

The first is structural. During his 40-year rule, Gaddafi destroyed any sort of bureaucratic infrastructure, the kind which does the grunt work of making a government work. "He aspired to create an ideal state," said North African analyst Saad Djebbar of Cambridge University. He ended up without any components of a normal state.” By the end, there was no form of speech or activity which was not directly governed by Gaddafi himself and a tiny cadre of trusted minions, including two of his sons. Indeed it is estimated that as much as 20% of the population was engaged in surveillance of the remaining 80% of the population. The slightest complaint could and did bring hundreds of people to suffer televised public executions and the lesson was not lost on the population, right up to the dawning of the “Arab Spring” early in 2011. By the end, the entire country was run by a series of “revolutionary committees” down to the local level which were overseen by Gaddafi. There were no trade unions, no businesses, no religious activity, no part of the economy which was not directly controlled by Muammar Gadaffi. The span of power was as narrow as any dictatorship cultivating a single personality as head of state. Above all, the “king of African kings” stood at the head of a military used to doing his personal bidding. After 40 years, there is no institutional memory of what it is to live in a functioning democracy. The same could be said of other Arab nations, like Iraq, which are trying to emerge from Saddam Hussein’s similar treatment of his own people. But the situation in Iraq differs from Libya considerably, which brings us to the 2^nd reality.

Libya is comprised factions within factions – fractals, if you will. Not only are there differences between Sufi, Shia’a and Sunni Muslims (as in Iraq) but the Libyan society is highly compartmentalized into five geographic regions highly suspicious of each other’s motives. And still deeper run any number of Bedouin, Berber and Arabic tribal loyalties down to the level of individual families. Gaddafi made good use of playing one faction off against another as it suited his needs at any given time. He blessed the Tripolitanians with his largesse and withheld the benefits of his bottomless oil wealth from Benghazi, where the revolt against his rule began and where, in Tripoli, resistance continues.

The inevitability of continued violence?

With such a situation it is hard to think that peacefully transitioning to some better form of governance is going to be the rule rather than the exception. The post-Gaddafi National Transitional Council, headed by former justice minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil, and now recognized by 48 nations as the de facto government of Libya will have a near impossible job of preventing the country from descending into outright civil war as it seeks to create a government of unity. The overriding question is whether or not all Libyans will accept the NTC. On one hand, history and culture will play an important role in what ultimately emerges, post-Gaddafi. On the other hand, the vast oil wealth of this country can mitigate the misery under which the people of Libya have lived for so many years. Moreover, the West is releasing frozen assets, which will aid in immediate relief for a long suffering people.

It may be that further bloodshed is a necessary prelude to a lasting, viable, and fair government; but it is also not an inevitable thing. Let us hope.

###

When Courage Fails: A lesson in Political Cowardice

2011-08-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

It didn’t have to be this way. No, it didn’t; but there are no more lions among the sheep. Reason and comity have taken leave of the body politik over the last 30 or so years, to the point where the elected leaders are now the followers. They are unwilling to speak truth, and at the same time will congratulate themselves on their ability to solve a crisis, the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen since The Great Depression of the 1930’s.

No. The lions have left. The Ted and Bob Kennedys are gone. The Mark Hatfields, the Everett Dirksons, the Jacob Javitses, the Sam Rayburns, the Mondales, the Weickers, the Johnsons (“I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.”)…all are gone. The voices of moderation, of principled speech, of collaboration among political opponents have given way to falsehoods, disinformation, sound bites, false outrage, personal accusations, and above all, an unwillingness to stake one’s reelection on stating the truth and standing up to the mob.

There is nothing to be proud of in what happened. The Congress of the United States of America, in passing HR 2480, and the nation’s chief executive have fashioned nothing which solves a problem other than to take a routine act – raising the debt limit to pay the country’s bills – and allowing a minority to hold it hostage in order to have its way. It was, in fact, the ultimate ear mark. In a remarkable series of events, insanity was the winner. No one is happy with the result and nearly every elected leader now runs for cover. The major issue of our time, nearly two of every ten able-bodied Americans being out of work and having no prospect of finding it, was shoved aside in favor of vitriol and claims of being an aggrieved party.

In an absolutely fantastic and cynical maneuver, both political parties in Congress abdicated their responsibility and created a “super Congress” of 12 members who will decide who gets money and who doesn’t. Its creation will give the sheep cover. For if one thing is certain, the super Congress will be unable to fashion how to trim government spending by $1.3 trillion and agree on how to do it, automatically gutting programs on which millions depend. Congressional constituencies will be told “I had nothing to do with it!” when their voters scream about the loss of their Medicare benefits, or a clipping of their Social Security checks. They will hear the yelping of those who want to cut government spending – but just not the spending on which they depend. And they will say, “Don’t look at me! I didn’t vote for it.” And they will be right. They left the hard choices to others. Above all, the fabulous gains of those who profited mightily by a 30 year binge of deregulated banking and financial excess will stand virtually untouched, their wealth intact, while those who suffer or those with marginal resources will pick up the tab.

Sitting on the sidelines is a chief executive who is unable or unwilling to scold, cojole, and threaten a bullying congressional minority of Know-Nothings and martial the political will of Americans who at their best are the most generous people on earth. It is said he is a realist, yet realism in this instance was absent from anything coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One principled stand after another was abandoned in order to get a bill out. One strategy after the other was given up in favor of mediocre paeans to “compromise.” There will be no invoking of the 14^th Amendment. There will be no signing statement (something the Bush Administration used with cynical abandon). Only a signing on to a “deal” which solved a routine problem and yet perpetuated the problems of a nation overspent and unwilling to pay the bills.

Today, ideological purity is the coin of the Republican political realm. It is the lingua franca with which to both win an election and retain one’s congressional job. For the mob, ever spurred on by multi-millionaire radio, internet and television pundits, will have it no other way. For the sake of power, the Republican Party made a Faustian bargain with the likes of Grover Norquist and his money. Democrats, for their part, are equally afraid of upsetting anyone and seek to hide behind programs kept in place long past their usefulness. And so our leaders are afraid; afraid to tell the mobs “I’ll will go this far and no further” because they, like most of us in our own small way, are afraid to risk their political lives. It was a governmental failure of epic consequences. This is what happened when small people were asked to do big jobs.

###

The Unwilling President: When Leadership Fails

2011-07-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

His campaign rhetoric stirred the nation - exhausted and broke from six years of war and in the throes of a financial collapse not seen in four generations - into electing, for the very first time, a non-white president of the republic. Young and old alike believed in him and his promise that a new day had arrived: a day in which the excesses of a financial community gone mad with greed would finally be reined in; a day where the role of government playing a positive role in the lives of the governed - rather than being a rubber stamp for the monied classes - would be restored; where new rules would be applied to bring jobs back home to a population starving for meaningful work.

And for the first several months of his term, the President had nearly a free rein as the opposition party lay in ruins, disorganized, unbalanced and trying to make sense out of one of those great swings in public opinion which invariably occur in uncertain, tumultuous times. The new president’s moment for strong, young leadership was there for the taking.

Warning Signs

For Obama’s most fanatical followers, there were immediate signs of weakness and inexperience. As he formed his cabinet he hired not Young Turks, as John Kennedy had in 1960, but the very same people who were from among the classes who overlooked, if not perpetrated, the greatest heist of wealth in American history: Benjamin Bernanke, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, restored to another term as chairman of the nation’s central bank; Timothy Geithner, who presided over the New York Federal Reserve Bank as Wall St. teetered and then collapsed, went to Treasury; Eric Holder, a cautious, risk averse prosecutor became the Attorney General; Hillary Clinton, a hard working, well intended junior senator from New York but who was from another time, became the nation’s chief diplomat.

Lost in the cabinet shuffle were the true prophets who in the beginning advised that strong, bold steps were not only necessary for an economic recovery but which steps, not taken, would lead to stagnation and prolonged agony for the nation. People like Paul Volcker, Robert Reich, and Paul Krugman admonished the new president that the time had come to do big things. And they were inevitably swept aside.

The Unraveling of Ideals: Health Care Forestalled

The first great missed opportunity was about to descend on the White House as it dithered incessantly about how to construct a new way to get health care to 45 million Americans without it. Over a period of nearly a year, Barack Obama conceded one important feature of the notion universal health care, adopted by every industrialized nation on the planet and a fair number of those in the under-developed world, until what emerged was a bill consisting of a web of sections, sub-sections, paragraphs and delay which, though a good start, was effectively unintelligible to the general public, leaving it vulnerable to the propaganda of the monied interests with most to lose in any kind of health care reform: the health insurance companies, hospital conglomerates, and pharmaceutical corporations. And most of all, it gave time for Obama’s political opposition to reorganize itself, with the aid of a generally conservative mass media, into an effective force to block change.

At precisely the time when Barack Obama should have been working the hustings, taking his case directly to the people, reassuring them that his ideas were solid and needed, using the enormous bully pulpit given the presidency itself, he sat quietly in the White House, pursuing a strategy of letting the Congress iron out policy; a strategy which was not only self-defeating but which allowed the opposition to define the issues in a way which frightened an already frightened public into believing that doing nothing was better than doing something. Even an ally and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the first woman ever elected to such a position, who proved to be one of the most effective leaders of the House since Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neil, begged the president to lead the charge. It was not to be.

Financial Reform: More of the Same

In the midst of the financial free fall of 2007-2008, it was generally understood that Wall St. and the banks - both retail and investment banks - had created strategies to take risks which paid off in ways not seen in a 125 years. The creation of “products” like collateralized debt obligations, mortgage backed securities; the use of “stated income” loans, missleading corporate financial reports; the entrance of retail banks into the insurance and equities business; all led to the greatest expansion of home building in the nation’s history. As more and more marginally qualified or under-qualified borrowers had access to homes by the use of adjustable rate mortgages whose interest rate would adjust upward after an affordable “introductory” rate, the conventional wisdom was that home values would rise continually to where such loans would convert to fixed rate, refinanced mortgages. All would be well. All was, in fact, lost.

Moreover, the nation’s guarantor of mortgages, Fanny May and Freddie Mac, long since reorganized into for-profit companies by Congress yet backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, routinely underwrote hundreds of thousands, millions, of bad loans, now bundled into investment instruments held by Wall St. investment banks and their clients. In one case, the largest investment bank in the nation, Goldman Sachs, not only sold sketchy securities to its customers, but actually bet on them to collapse, thereby collecting billions in insurance from Freddy and Fanny. Talk about win-win!

To date, little or nothing has been done to either prosecute those whose companies and their executives who moved their weaknesses and their money around in a expert game of financial Three-Card Monte, or to change the rules of the financial game. The investment banks continue unregulated, “Enron holes” continue unplugged, and the retail banks, sitting on thousands of abandoned and foreclosed houses, are sitting on their money, unable and unwilling to loan to small businesses and startups, other than those who least need their money. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department seems more interested in doing nothing than something, to at least to tell the nation that the great financial feeding frenzy was over. Rather than taking his case for systemic financial reform to the people, at the advice of his old-school financial advisors this new president has acquiesced and done nothing of significance. It is, in fact, business as usual.

War as Business

For nearly a decade this nation has been at war in the Middle East and South Asia. It is a war not started by Obama but certainly continues unabated under his administration. It is a war perpetrated and sold to the people who fight it, soldiers and citizens alike, first by the need to take down those who plot against us, then by the need to bring the blessings of democracy to people who have a two thousand years of being ruled by tribal and religious law. To call them civilized societies is a misnomer of the highest order. They are not.
In his campaign, Obama told us that we were focused not on the real problem, which is in Afghanistan. To date he has moved most of the military out of the Middle East and (and in fairness to what he said) has continued to spend, indeed augmented, our treasure and blood investment in Afghanistan.

We have exacted our retribution on Osama bin Laden and most of his lieutenants and it is arguable as to whether they remain any kind of effective terrorist organization. In the face of a perfect opportunity to declare “Mission accomplished” there is no sign coming from Obama that we are on our way out of that eternal quagmire of competing tribal conflict. Now, we are told, the issue is Pakistan, with its nuclear capability.

This nation spends 50% of its collected federal taxes on its war making capability. Nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars every year. It spends double what all other nations on earth collectively spend on their own defense. Still, there seems no intent on either the administration or the Congress to rein in defense spending. Indeed, Congress, in its new budget, added $17 billion to Obama’s upcoming defense budget; money that the Defense Department itself did not request, and even though Obama himself called for a record $708 billion in defense spending while sending the mixed signal to cut waste within the defense effort of the nation.

We have reached the point, it appears, where we simply cannot pull back on defense spending since it has entwined itself so thoroughly into the fabric of the economy itself. Too many jobs are at stake, too many people would be taken from the military rolls for the economy to accommodate with jobs. We have, in short, reached the point where an earlier president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us about the military-industrial complex being the core of the American economy.

A nation which has eschewed standing peacetime armies for most of its 235 years of existence now stands astride the world as the most militarily powerful nation in human history, with a thousand bases and installations in 63 countries – while 10% of its workforce is idle; 45 million of its people are without a doctor; its infrastructure crumbles; its dependence on imported energy a focal point of its foreign policy; and while its system of education, once the envy of the world in it reach and quality, deteriorates, and all the while its people fighting skirmishes amongst themselves over dozens of lesser issues.

Perhaps worst of all, Obama’s opposition, the Republican Party, has formed an alliance with both its Big Business benefactors and a large segment of a frightened and ignorant public in its determination to unseat him in a second term. It has catered to the worst of our angels in demonizing this president to a degree unknown in modern American history.

Had Obama been more decisive in his first year, it is doubtful whether his opponants would have been as effective as they have been in their opposition to him. The current Republican Party is nearly devoid of rational thought. The party of Javits, Rockefeller, Taft, Lodge, Eisenhower, Ford, Dole and dozens of other moderates has devolved into a Roman mob calling for Obama’s head. To hell with the country!

The Decisive Moment Lost?

All this cries for leadership and a vision of who we are and where we are going and how we’re going to get there; and what are we leaving to our posterity. We are at a juncture which calls for decisive leadership - leadership which was promised but has yet to be delivered. It is one of those moments in our history which will determine whether the drift will continue and the Great Experiment prove a failure at worst and marginal at best, or whether we can muster the courage for a renaissance.

Barack Obama captured these sentiments, this desire for a rebirth of national purpose beautifully in his 2008 campaign for the presidency. Yet, as we approach the end of his first term, he has let the moment come and go and the nation wonders whether the rhetoric was empty.

There is no doubt the President has his heart in the right place but the times demand action and leadership. The spontaneous combustion of “The People” in Wisconsin, who will shortly throw the rascals out who so blatantly stabbed them in the back was a perfect example of a group whose power Obama could have rallied to his own causes but on a far grander scale. These same people were there in 2008, and whose imaginations were there to be captured.

Unfortunately, the degradation of the political debate, largely of his own making by his inaction, leaves us unable to agree on anything meaningful for our future. He has allowed his opposition to define the issues to their liking and enabled it to stall, obfuscate and deride him and his campaign plans.

There may be something of a Greek tragedy at play in this President. This man, who rose to the most powerful office on earth from the humblest of beginnings; who achieved on a scale which would enthrall even the most jaded and dispossessed by pleasing people, is so averse to confrontation that he cannot move the political football one way or another. Over and over again, Obama has conceded, rather than take a principled stand. In the rough and tumble of Washington politics, this is a disaster.

For those of us who boarded the Obama train in 2008, it is hardly a satisfying moment. It seems the train has yet to chuff away from the station. And we are still patiently waiting.

###

What Rupert Murdoch Teaches Us

2011-07-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch’s current problems in the UK and - through a chain of chess piece executives who work for him on both sides of the Atlantic - the United States, point out just how tenuous and ephemeral our notions of a vigorous and healthy free press have become for both Americans and our British cousins.

It isn’t that the misdeeds of News Corporation companies, hacking into the private communications of subjects it considers newsworthy – like the royals, murder victims, politicians, sports celebrities, and the like – are not something that is not of major concern to us. They are, as they surely should be.

The scope and pervasiveness of Murdoch & Co.’s tactics in trying to generate “news” and their illegal efforts to cover them up by bribery and deception will be uncovered in days and weeks ahead, for they have rattled the cages of some very important people on both sides of the pond. And when you push those kinds of buttons, even if you’re Murdoch, you can expect a significant amount of pushback. The degree to which Murdoch’s willingness to act in flagrant disregard for ethical behavior, from his telephone hacking to his manufacturing of “facts” reflect his apparent assumption that there is nothing on earth which can rein him in. This should be an alarm to the citizens and politicians of both nations.

There is a larger point though, a “teachable moment, as they say, and it is this: Lax oversight on the part of regulatory agencies in both America and the UK, designed to prevent monopolies of information dispersal have severely restricted a free exchange of information and opinion in the mass media. News Corporation's overstepping of the law currently being investigated was not done by a small-town media outlet. They were done by a multinational, multi-media company which has evolved from a small Australian daily newspaper to the 4^th largest communications titan on the planet. News Corporation has its fingers in every form of information outlet, including book publishing, magazines, cable and satellite TV, newspapers, movies, sports, and broadcast. It owns local television stations and newspapers and dominates the entire media activities in some very important markets and segments. It’s most recent acquisition, Dow Jones & Co. and its flagship Wall St. Journal, makes News Corporation the major player in business information. His far right-wing Fox News Channel is the most viewed cable news (if it can be called such!) channel in the country. His local television broadcast stations alone reach 40% of the American population.

If the giant News Corporation pyramid was inverted, the flow of financial and political juice would flow to just one man, Rupert Murdoch, who has claimed for years that he is interested in being nothing more than a businessman but whose actions belie that claim. Over and over again, he has shown that he intends to become the ultimate kingmaker in the affairs of the English speaking world and beyond. His top employees are some of the most nefarious and politically savvy people found anywhere and it is their job to shape governments in Murdoch’s personal image.

Perhaps now, finally, the time has come for breaking up this enormous trust, just as we did to Standard Oil a hundred years ago. Democracies can only thrive on ideas freely and broadly expressed. When companies such as News Corporation can command the eyes and ears of a section of the electorate large enough to unduly influence the outcome of elections, as it did in the case of David Cameron in the UK and George W. Bush here in the States, the underpinnings of self-government are strained to the breaking point.
We have not seen such an accumulation of media since the days of the Hearst empire a hundred years ago. Indeed, the growth and complexity of how information gets gathered and disbursed, along with recent Supreme Court pronouncements giving citizenship to corporations, makes News Corporation orders of magnitude more dangerous than Mr. Hearst ever was. Murdoch not only creates news, he controls how it's doled out.

Politicians unwilling to take a hard look at how news is disseminated in this country will ultimately lose their own ability to act on behalf their constituents’ interests regardless of whether they are liberals or conservatives, for Murdoch can mobilize his enormous assets to take down just about anyone who doesn’t do his bidding. We have reached a near-critical mass, in which one man’s power may be greater than the American government’s ability to function in anyway resembling a democracy.

###

The 50-year Reunion

2011-06-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

A half century is a long time in a human life. In 1961, I graduated from high school, a fresh faced kid living in a suburban San Francisco home with nothing in particular on his mind in terms of a career. I had some vague notions of being a musician – teaching or performing in some capacity.

Attending college was the expected course after graduation and so I enrolled in the local community college. (In those days, they called it “junior college,” which carried a kind of pejorative label with it. One went to the “jaycee” because, as in my case, you left high school without the grades to get into a regular four year college like the state college or the University of California system. The running joke was that our local community college was nothing more than a high school with ashtrays, full of kids like myself, kind of aimless but not yet ready to give up on education altogether. Looking back on it, I had two of my greatest, life changing, teachers, one an English instructor and another who taught civics, in my time at the jaycee.

Money wasn’t much of an issue way back then because, years before, some politicians and citizens in California had the harebrained idea that college should be free of charge for students who chose to go, all the way from kindergarten through the awarding of one’s bachelor degree. The theory was that in addition to being more important to the society in general by virtue of being more highly educated, a college grad earned far more money than someone who hadn't gone to college, and over a lifetime of work, he repaid the cost of his education in the form of higher income taxes. Thus, one could even go to the to the top rated public university in the nation, the University of California, Berkeley – the jewel in the crown of an extensive system of California public higher education institutions – virtually free of charge. (Actually, one paid for one’s books and his room and board, but tuition was a virtual unknown.) Of course 6 years later, all this was to change radically, as a newly installed governor and ex-B-movie actor named Reagan decided that he’d had enough of “communistic” protesters and ingrates going to school on California’s nickel, and convinced the voters and legislature to start charging “fees” if you wanted to go to a publicly funded college. The rest is history, but to this day, there is no such thing as “tuition” in California public universities. Only fees. Lots of fees. (My son, for example, graduated from UC-Berkeley a year ago with a debt of $45,000 (room, board, and “fees”) for his last 2 years there. Though still a bargain by current standards, it’s hardly like it was when I left high school.

Nevertheless, our high school class, which probably numbered around 600 or so kids on that sunny, mid-June graduation in 1961, dispersed after the obligatory valedictories about our generation pointing the way to the future, throwing our ill-fitted mortar boards into the air and enjoying cake and ice cream afterward. The girls wore straight skirts and guys were usually uniformed in suits, starched white shirts and skinny, 1-inch neckties. Truthfully, it was a time of optimism, of innocence and a certain assurance that no matter where you were headed – to a job or to college – all would be well. Some of us held on to our girlfriends or boyfriends for a while longer but there was no doubt new ones were in the offing as we embarked on a new life. For me, it was off to the local jaycee and music school.

Fifty years later, someone had the bright idea to organize a 50-year reunion of our high school class and as I write this piece there is all kinds internet communication going back and forth among those of us on the mailing list. We are beginning to see biographies of people who were among my graduating class, even some recent pictures of them – some totally unrecognizable and others who look not much different than they looked in 1961 (well, at least you could pick them out in a crowd!). Some of us are now dead, dead from the wars, or accidents, or from one or another illness which invariably comes with age or bad luck. A couple of our classmates even took their own lives. But the pictures I’m seeing are of people who had lived a lifetime of work, of rearing their own kids, maybe had too much sun and whose skin is now wrinkled and thin, or whose hair, once as thick as a bristle brush, was now fine and sparse or missing altogether. Some of the guys I thought were at the top of the pecking order – I think we invented the word "clique" - look a little bent and bruised. There are 600-odd stories each of them have to tell and which we read about in these back and forth e-mails. Some are embellished and some are pretty revealing. All of them briefly account for the half century since we were together on that June day.

One of us became a very well-known musician in a rock band of the San Francisco psychedelic craze – one whose name any 6o's rock fan would instantly recognize; another became a jazz singer in the New York City cabaret scene; still another local girl, though not of our class and just a year younger became, for a while, a well know television actor and personality, in addition to being a local beauty queen; acquiring, along the way, the dubious encomium of "Motion Picture Sweater Girl of 1967," awarded by the National Knitted Outerwear Foundation. Some became quite wealthy in business and others lived considerably more mundane lives. We are now grandparents, too, most of us, I think.

I recently was able to contact the lady who was my senior year girlfriend way back then – really, my first-ever romance. She’s still strikingly pretty even in her own seniorhood, and still possessing of a marvelously dry sense of humor inherited from her now deceased parents, whom I truly loved as if they were mine, too. We caught each other up in a joyful conversation, recounting the “whatever-happened-to’s” and traded talk of each other’s life and career, marriages (both of us having made two trips to the altar) and of course bragging about our own kids, of whom we are justly proud. She wound up widowed here in the Northwest, in Bellingham, WA, and I am here, divorced and single, in Oregon. (How ironic, I thought, for if there w as anyone who should have lived an urban life, it was Linda. Instead she helped her daughter care for two horses they kept – in Bellingham!) All in all, it was a great conversation filled with wonderful memories and plenty of laughter. In fact, she told me her sister Carol, a couple of years our junior, was already planning a wedding - ours (Good Lord!), when she heard I had made contact with her big sister. Now that is dry humor.

I sense now, that this class of 1961, this group which has seen so much change in our society and whose, in many ways, best days are behind it, is in a kind of lifeboat of its own. We are seeking each other out perhaps to validate the half century of life we’ve enjoyed, that we’ve struggled through and with, in some cases. We are comparing their stories with our own and finding that the lives we’ve lived are good lives; that we’ve done the best we could; and that after all is said and done, we’ve managed, on one hand.

On the other, our kids, and even their kids, are facing daunting challenges we never could have imagined. When we graduated that bright June day in 1961, the world was our oyster. The fruit hung low on the tree. This is not the case 50 years later. As we, one by one, fade out; as we “shuffle off to Buffalo,” much of what we leave behind is a mess, some of it our own making but also some of it just part of the drift of history. Our children and grandchildren will grapple with problems we don’t have to grapple with now, for our future is now our past. They will deal with problems that until relatively recently were just not on most peoples' radar screen.

I sincerely believe that they are up to the task. Somehow they will sort it out.

###

What’s With Politicians These Days, Anyway?

2011-06-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

Briefly thyself remember: the sword is out
That must destroy thee. – King Lear

A conservative Florida congressman sends salacious emails to an underage congressional page.

An Idaho U.S. Senator who stakes his popularity on “family values” gets caught making homosexual advances in a public restroom in a Minneapolis airport and sticks out the rest of his term, hoping the public will just let it go. It doesn’t.

A married New York state governor gets nailed for using high priced hookers and resigns in disgrace. And becomes a TV pundit.

Another married senator from Louisiana big on “values” seems to have a predilection for pay-for-sex dalliances, admits to them publicly and promptly returns to the Senate chamber and a standing ovations from his party colleagues.

A North Carolina governor big on God, gays, and guns hightails it to Argentina to do the nasty with a girlfriend and has the sheet pulled off his extracurricular activities – which have nothing to do with hiking trails.

Another North Carolinian, this one a presidential candidate, carries on with a woman not his wife actually fathers a child with her and thinks he can hide this “unpleasantness” indefinitely but nonetheless is found out ten years later, and now stands accused of misuse of campaign money.

A Nevada senator elected on “values” gets caught boinking a staffer whose husband is also on his payroll and even arranges a payoff for them to keep quiet - with the help of another Senate colleague. (This one may wind up in criminal court, too.)

A multi-millionaire, California movie muscleman-turned-governor marries into one of the most iconic political families in America and winds up exposed for leading a double life as the father of a child born - of his maid! “Dad” heads to Hollywood and the wife for Hyannisport.

A Georgia ex-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who builds a business on conservative punditry (read: family values) dumps Wife No. 1 (who happened to be his high school math teacher) who gets cancer, for girlfriend / Wife No. 2 and, while leading the charge for impeach Bill Clinton for bounding, carries on with some young thing 23 years his junior, who eventually becomes Wife No. 3.

A New Jersey congressman noted for his liberalism “tweets” pictures of his bulging briefs and buff upper body to someone he doesn’t even know. (Stay tuned on this one!)

On and on. My guess is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. My further guess is that the old rules don’t apply anymore. What with an explosion in the ways to get into the private lives of notorious people (and who more notorious than the people who are elected to be our leaders?) these people are, like the Congress itself on almost everything, just a little late in understanding that they can’t permanently hide their private lives from the public anymore.

There’s another notion at play here, too. It’s that when you get to be someone really, really, important - especially if you’re a pol - you begin to think you can control your public image. That’s just insane. It’s one thing when my next door neighbor suddenly drags a U-Haul trailer to his house to fill up with his fishing rods and hand tools and drives away forever because he strayed. He won’t even make Page 3 of the local blatt; but if you’re in the public eye…..tread softly, dude, because you’re being watched! The rules of the Sexual Revolution don’t apply to you because you made a promise to be a model citizen. And when you actually legislate behavior or social rules and then violate them, well, don’t expect the voters to give you a pass.

In the old days, the press protected a pol from that sort of thing out of respect for the office a politician held. We’ll probably never know the extent of the carryings on of some of our political office holders of yore. Now and then we get glimmerings: JFK, of course; FDR’s Lucy Mercer; Ike’s Kay Summersby; Wilbur Mills his "Argentine Firecracker" or even Harding’s reputed wanderings which some have speculated wound up with him being poisoned to death by his wife in a San Francisco hotel room.

Nowadays, for every old school scribe who protects a politician, there are dozens of Andrew Breitbarts or Fox News Networks waiting for the next screwup. With oodles of dollars of internet and cable TV advertising staked on readership “hits” and viewership, scandalizing has become a big business unto itself, for there's nothing more juicy, it appears, than watching the powerful teeter and then fall. In 21st century America it's a bloodsport.

And lately, there seems to be no dearth of scandalous, bottom feeding reportage diverting the public from a little more serious issues. Why bother with a picture of Lloyd Blankfein endorsing his latest Goldman Sachs bonus check for a couple of billion bucks when we can look at Anthony Weiner's junk-filled BVD's?

###

The End of Marriage is Nigh!

2011-06-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

What we thought would never happen has, in fact, happened!

The latest shocker from the U.S. Census Bureau is that married couples now make up a minority of American households. You can argue either way for whether this is good or bad. It was bad enough when I was in was in college, when divorce was rapidly approaching 50% of all marriages. Now people aren’t even bothering to get married. And if they do, pre-nups and post-nups are the order of the day. Talk about hedging your bets! Why, even couples forge legal arrangements when they want to live together outside the confines of a traditional marriage! You can view this as either an indicator of the self-centeredness of the country or as a final example of the evolution of individual freedom in a pluralistic society. (On the other hand, they may have found it’s the only way to ensure hot and regular sex!)

It seems our world is going to hell in a hand basket. No matter where we turn, the tried and true is giving way to the new and unusual, causing anxiety attacks in anyone over the age of 50 and who probably lives anywhere outside a major coastal city. We live in uncertain times and most of us seem to think that, well, we might be going the way of the dodo if we don’t resurrect things like “family values,” “drill, baby, drill,” and get the socialists out of government and lock up anyone who snorts a line of coke or sparks up a tree.

The American Century, incarnated on the backs of a world ravished by 30 years of war and 90 million dead, unable to feed and clothe itself, afforded us the ability to nurture the illusion that two oceans, “Yankee ingenuity” and rock solid social values - such as the family being the most basic and most important social unit, will see the day through for the nation. An army of industrial leaders and a benevolent government would do what’s needed to ensure that the post-World War II America – the world of Jim Anderson in “Father Knows Best” - would continue uninterrupted. And we now-oldsters bought into the dream lock, stock and barrel.

Yet we see a continuing change in the values and truths we so dearly clung to for 200 years. The social fabric we built up based on abundant and cheap raw material and natural resources, a lifetime job from which we can retire and live quietly to the end of our lives; a stable family composed of Mom, Dad and 2.3 children; a pastor whom we can trust and a judge who rules his courtroom based as much on common sense as in law – all these things are changing and changing fast. Why, even women make up the majority of recipients of advanced college degrees now. (Ladies, your point is made. Why bother with supporting an out-of-work dolt who used to make ring gears for General Motors and now just burns the chicken on Saturday cookouts – and not much else?)

So, couple this new statistic you your worldview, gentle reader. Add it to the fact that the Chinese have now supplanted us as the factory to the world; to the fact that Glacier National Park is now effectively devoid of glaciers and the Sahara Desert is moving southward. Couple it to the fact that a gallon of gasoline, once an expense afterthought, is now a budget item in nearly every household in America; or to the willingness of some people to pay more for a bottle of water than the equivalent amount in gasoline. Consider that you or your kid is more likely to bunk in with someone than to legally commit to a life lived with someone else. The doctor, who for generations was a pillar of the community, is now shot to death in his office or church. The pastor is doing the nasty with the choir leader, and of course our politicians play both ends to the middle.

Somewhere in the country, probably in the center of it, some ignorant, half baked, nutcase went over the edge when he read this statistic. He’s setting up to blame the gays, the godless, the communists, “liberal” politicians and a cottled youth for all the troubles of the world he or she lives in.
My advice: Don’t go into the bridal shop business.

###

Remembrance: A Memorial Day for My Father

2011-05-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

My father was of "The Greatest Generation" before it was called one. He grew up on the side of Potrero Hill in San Francisco, in a heavily Irish and German neighborhood, went to St. Teresa’s Church and school, then on to Mission High School, graduating in 1936 (pictured, right) in the depths of The Great Depression.

Though he, like every kid then and since, had giant dreams of a life as an architect or a lawyer, college for my father was a non-issue. What was an issue was a job. He needed work. So he got a job with an architect as a draftsman. He met my mother, married her in 1940 and found he needed a better job that paid more money, so he went to work in a brewery, curtailing forever any notion of designing buildings.

When the war broke out after Pearl Harbor, Dad was sure to be drafted but in order to have some control over which branch of the services he would wind up in, he joined the Merchant Marine, trained in New York state for 90 days as a Pharmacist Mate (read: “doctor”) and Purser, and for the rest of the war sailed Liberty ships in both the European and Pacific theaters, hauling supplies to our fighting troops.

His scariest moment, he once told me years later, was when, in 1945, his ship, the S.S. Francisco Morazan, which was part of a small, four ship convoy sailing off the Philippines shortly after the Battle of Leyte Gulf, was attacked by kamikazes. All four ships were loaded with ordnance, including aerial bombs. Three of the ships were directly hit and when the smoke cleared, they were simply gone. His ship was the only one to get out of the ordeal without a hit and still afloat. Dad told me it was the only time he got down on his knees and begged God for his life.

Though merchant mariners were civilian employees of shipping companies, a little known fact is that they suffered the highest casualty rate of any of the services during World War II, with over 1600 merchant ships sunk or damaged and 1 in 26 merchant seaman having been killed in action – even more, as a percentage, than the Marine Corps or the Army. Had my dad known that, I’m sure that he and many of his shipmates might have chosen a different path to fight the war.

Because merchant seamen were civilians and received better pay than the other services, they were never given the G.I. Bill after the war, so when it ended in late 1945, my dad came ashore and went to work in the steamship business in a desk job and retired from it in 1988. Dad never got to college and had to save the money to get the 20% down payment for our first home, not to mention having to rear a family.
In all the years I knew my dad, he never talked much about his wartime experiences and when he did, it was only after my prying into what that life was like as a wartime sailor. He never complained about a college degree deferred. After he passed away, I found various mementos he had saved, like medals (a bronze star among them), campaign ribbons, seaman’s documents, notebooks he kept on treating various kinds of shipboard maladies, and even shipboard pay schedules.

In his later years some of my warmest moments were of having a scotch with him or casting for trout on some mountain lake, or uncontrollably laughing, to the point of tears, at some innocuous joke I told him. Dad introduced me to baseball, the sport I love most, and we often would go to the old Seals Stadium on Bryant St. to catch a Seals game. (This was long before the Giants moved out West from New York City.)

He’s been gone now for 23 years and I appreciate him for his quiet perseverance and for the sacrifices he made for us all in the Burns family and, well, by God, I miss you, Dad.

###

Ready...Fire...Aim!

2011-05-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

15 Ways to Blow Up a Political Party In America: A Lesson in the Arrogance of Power

It's not that the Democratic Party leadership is composed of visionaries who can bounce back after a huge defeat, but when your opposition hands you a loaded gun and puts up a target as big as, well, as big as an elephant, it's hard to miss it.

Looking backward is a GOP specialty. It doesn't take much thought to understand why Republicans are not only in a free fall but on the verge of becoming the minority once again. Why?

Here are 15 ways to "git 'er done," Republican style.

Lose your safest congressional seat in the entire country to an opponent who campaigned on keeping Medicare, a program favored virtually every member of the largest voting block around, seniors…

…and then, right after having lost the seat, have your Senate caucus vote almost to a man to destroy it;

not produce a single jobs bill on which you campaigned;

enact legislation in the House which effectively kills a program (Medicare) which 80% of all Americans want unchanged;

whine incessantly about government “bail outs” and then watch the American auto industry, which borrowed from the federal government to save jobs and entire businesses pay every nickel back - with interest - and post profits for the first time in years.

insist the President of the United States is not an American for 18 months only to have the President himself prove he is;

accuse the President of being “weak on defense” for months as he orders a military strike which kills the leader of the most murderous terrorist organization in history;

kill a bill which removes $40 billion in tax breaks to the most profitable businesses in the world (the energy business);

call the wealthy and Big Business “jobs creators” when they produce no jobs other then the ones they produce overseas;

produce a budget which guts everything from the National Parks, to NPR to the FAA and claim the problem isn’t revenue but spending;

have your state governors and legislatures attempt to kill labor unions by any means necessary;

insist that disaster relief to your most ardent voters be contingent on offsetting budget spending cuts;

have your most visible presidential contenders have personal and political flaws which will virtually eliminate the possibility of being elected;

stubbornly resist any attempt to create a rational energy policy that interferes with the production of fossil fuels in the face of doubled costs.

finally, insist the Earth is only 6,000 years old;

Enduring the Cruelty of an Unsettled Mind

2011-05-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

First let’s get something out on the table. I was a born, reared and educated a Roman Catholic. I came up, from grammar school through high school, in the arms of “Holy Mother the Church.” – a church with a 2,000 year-old faith tradition which, in those two millennia, has both condoned on one hand the persecution, torture and extermination of non-believers, blasphemers, heretics, and other assorted deviationists; and on the other proclaimed the sanctity of life – all life – in relatively recent years. That the church’s thinking has evolved, regardless of your particular bias toward it, is undeniable. But, kind reader, the Catholic Church is not the subject of this essay, which will be revealed to you in due course. I state the foregoing only to give you some contextual background.

My oldest friend, (let’s call him) Tim, and I went to high school together. We were around 17 or 18 when we became friends and as we progressed through the journey of our lives, we never lost touch with each other. Tim was better at just about everything than I was. He was a top student at our school. He scholarshipped his way into a top Catholic college and went on to Georgetown for his masters in Foreign Policy, which masters program was interrupted but not cancelled by a hitch in the Army and doing pacification work in the highlands of Vietnam.

We have had countless discussions on everything under the sun – and beyond it, too. We’ve sat in bars over scotch, lain quietly under the stars on a camping trip asking and discussing all the questions, large and small. Who is God? Why the persistence of evil? Roosevelt: politician or altruist?

In our 50 years of friendship, I have never known Tim to doubt his faith, at least to the point of abandoning it. The fact is that he never has. Just five or so years ago, Tim became a Catholic deacon, which is about as close to the priesthood as a married man can get. He spent several years in what is called a process of “formation” in order to one day prostrate himself before his bishop and take vows of obedience and loyalty to the church and its doctrines. Tim’s path to the cloth seems about as straight and unaltered as it could be. As he and I now approach our 70’s, I see in him a truly happy man in his constant good works toward his fellow man; a man full of optimism in spite of the rancor of the world in which we live, laboring in his particular vineyard with the satisfaction of knowing that if perfection is not achievable in this world, certainly we will have it in the next.

I, on the other hand, and in those same 50 years, have bounced from side to side, caroming off of one idea, one philosophy after the other like a billiard ball. My path through college was long, bumpy, uncertain, and an emotional roller coaster. I’ve experimented with everything from Buddhism to Judaism in search of answers which allow for a Supreme Being governing an ungovernable world. In the end I always wind up where I started, which is somewhere between “absolutely certain” and “pretty sure” that we’re all just stuck on this rock hurtling through space together, the beneficiaries of 12 billion years of random cosmological accidents.

The comedian Bob Newhart once had a routine in which he imagined scientists conducting an experiment to ascertain whether or not an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite number of days would someday produce something as profound as a Shakespeare soliloquy. One day, a scientist, checking the work of one such monkey is astonished to find at the bottom of a typed page, “To be or not to be. That is the….” and on a following page was the word “gzrnynplt.” Close, but no cigar. I once asked Tim what would happen if intelligent life was discovered on another planet. “Then we’re all in trouble!” he laughed.

There are just two ways to operate one’s life in this world. One way is to accept that what you don’t understand can’t be understood but in the end is understood by Someone. This is the faithful mind at work. It is believing something to be true in the absence of rational, empirical evidence. The other is to continually try to understand why we are. The cruelty is that one never comes to a reasonable understanding for there is nothing to understand. It simply is.

To me, this cruelty, this uncertainty is, well, almost like a lifetime of punishment for asking questions in the first place. I gave up on believing decades ago and I am haunted by the thought that I might be wrong; for if I am anything, I am humble. If, on my passing into the next state of being, I am asked for an accounting of my lack of faith, I will simply apologize, I guess, and leave my fate in His hands.

Tortured as I am by the unanswered question, at this point I am buoyed by the belief that grace comes from within and that our humanity itself dictates that we live a good life. As St. Ignatius Loyola himself said, 500 years ago, the good life is a purposeful life – to be “a man for others.” The motivation matters not.

###

GOP Sharpens the Choices for 2012

2011-05-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Astonishingly, and not content to lose New York’s 26^th congressional district to a Democrat for the first time since anyone can remember, the Republican leadership – in the person of House majority leader Eric Cantor - has poured salt an open wound by proposing to withhold aid to the states most hard hit by tornados in the last week unless there is an exchange with offsetting spending cuts by Congress. The Virginia Republican said “if there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental.”

To this writer at least, it appears Cantor handed the Democrats yet another issue on which to campaign in 2012: that of being about as coldhearted as, well, as the proverbial banker. It should be even more evident to any voter that Cantor’s statement comes just a few days after House Republicans voted not to close tax loopholes for the energy industry, protecting $40 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to Big Energy, which is enjoying record profits. In essence, it took Cantor less than a heartbeat to make a political issue out of a disaster which so far counts more than 300 American dead and as many as 1300 missing.

Moreover, the current GOP budget proposal calls for massive cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), which provides early warning information to localities when such weather related calamities are expected to hit, ripping 21% out of the president’s proposal to beef up NOAA responsibilities.

Needless to say, Cantor is getting plenty of pushback in the states most affected by tornado damage. This Republican reaction to a disaster from even no less a conservative than Tom DeLay, who advocated for immediate, no-questions-asked aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina will definitely be an issue in the upcoming campaign season.

Ron Paul, the muddle-headed Texas Tea Party presidential candidate, a party which constitutes a very healthy percentage of the GOP now, has said that tornado victims should not be given any at all, while his governor, Rick Perry, whines that FEMA isn’t giving Texas enough money in the wake of the recent wildfires devastating the Lone Star state..

The lesson is clear. On one level, Americans believe that in some way government is “too big,” yet, when asked whether or not spending reductions should affect those governmental agencies which protect their food, water, banking, transportation, financial policies, parks, medical needs, etc., and of course disaster relief, they are overwhelmingly for having the fed step into the breach.

The 2012 Democratic platform will be built in large measure on asking Americans to decide on what course to pursue. The weather disasters in the Midwest, in the heart of tea partyism, shine a bright light on that precise question. Will we swim together or sink individually?

###

GOP Getting Hammered on the Econony

2011-05-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

For 31 years now, the economic strategy of conservative Republican politics has been a two pronged attack on taxes and spending: that if the former were reduced, the latter would be, also. This is the old Reaganesque “starve the beast” strategy. In 2010, this strategy seemed to reach its zenith as the House of Representatives Republicans swung 63 seats to its side and it changed from Democratic to Republican control, the largest party changeover since 1938. In the Senate the Democrats lost 6 seats and barely preserved their majority (by just one seat). As in 1938, it was anger and fear among voters that allowed the GOP to capitalize on the opportunity

As we approach the 2012 presidential race, and we have the benefit of more than a year of Republican rule in the House. With their new majority, the GOP has become about as conservatively radicalized and more brazen in its aims than anyone (especially among a huge chunk of those that voted for them) would have thought. A series of bills and outspoken political positions stated by Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell has led to the country reexamining the GOP’s goals. There are strong signals that the GOP coalition of independents and radical/libertarian conservatives is unraveling and it’s entirely foreseeable that a reemergence of a Democratic majority in the House and gains in the Senate as well will occur in 2012.

“We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem”
The GOP message machine has repeated this since Paul Ryan, the widow's-peaked boy wonder of GOP House Budget Committee, submitted his budget plan which was immediately passed without discussion by a near unanimous Republican House vote. (All but 6 GOP members passed this bill, and no Democrats voted for it.). As Americans are now looking into the details of it - the proposed conversion of Medicare and Medicaid into a food stamp programs, changes in Social Security, further reductions in the corporate income tax marginal rates – they are pushing back like no one could have imagined just a few months ago.

During the Easter break, GOP House members were verbally assaulted in town hall meetings in their districts. Even Paul Ryan, in one instance, needed police security as he exited from a raucous town hall he conducted in which the participants accused him of directly lying to them. In nearly every Republican district, the constituency was adamant in their desire to keep Medicare/Medicaid unchanged.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should, if not actually will, make the Senate vote up or down on the Ryan bill as it was sent to the Senate, thereby shining a strong light on the GOP as the destroyer of health programs for the aged, the indigent and the disabled, education, veterans, environmental protection and dozens of other programs which the general public has come to accept and approve of.
What has emerged is that the electorate is coming to the conclusion that the main problem is not spending (although it is a problem indeed) but rather that the revenue side of the equation, something the GOP had successfully avoided discussing in the 2010 races, is the main problem. In essence, the Bush tax cuts have gutted federal revenues with which to pay for these popular programs and particularly the record low percentage of tax liability for the very rich.

The GOP circular firing squad
The GOP leadership, in their zeal to win back the House, made an unholy alliance with the Tea Party types, and its 2010 strategic success is self-evident. The bad news is that all the new seats are occupied by, well, Tea Party types, which have taken any semblance of bipartisanship out of the equation on the hill. The extremists among them are bent on playing “chicken” on issues which will have enormous repercussions for Americans and the entire planet. Yet, the grisly truth that they must act is dawning on a GOP which, so far, has refused to consider anything having to do with raising revenue. Thus far, standing on principle alone, the GOP refuses to look at the revenue side of the economic problem.

Some examples:
* No retreat on the debt ceiling. Yesterday, we reached the spending limit on the debt ceiling and the GOP has stiffened its back on any attempts to raise it in a stand alone vote. The federal government is now borrowing from the federal retirement fund to pay its bills. All the while the GOP insists on tens of billions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for their votes to raise the debt ceiling. Refusal to act quickly will result in the US repudiating its foreign debt for the first time in its history, which will set off a massive flight from the dollar and initiate World Wide Recession v.2.0 - worse than 2008.

* Refusal to remove tax credits for oil producers – At a time when the Big 4 oil producers are making more profit than any business in world history, the GOP has pledged not allow allow Congress to remove as much as $39 billion annually in tax credits to the oil and gas (not coal) industry.

* Refusal to remove the Bush tax credits – By the time they are supposed to sunset in 2013, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (who the GOP likes to call “job creators) will have cost the US some $2.8 trillion in lost revenue. Though Wall St. has recovered, the job creators seem to be absent when it comes to putting the country back to work.

Short of continuing the present gridlock to the point of national economic suicide, the truth that the GOP must return to rational policies is self-evident. To not do so will condemn the Republican Party to insignificance. So far, Republican leadership has acted as deer caught in the headlights as the nation grows more impatient with their behavior. They are at an intersection of having to admit they were wrong or simply allowing the whole economic structure of the country to collapse. It is the difference between being smart or stupid.

Either way, they will lose.

The Institutionaliztion of the War on Drugs

2011-05-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

– Sun Tsu, The Art of War

First, some statistics: This year (2011) alone:

We have spent $15 billion dollars on the War on Drugs so far this year. (The U.S. federal government spent over $15 billion dollars in 2010 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $500 per second.) The Budgetary Impact of Drug Prohibition

We have arrested 560,000 people for drug offenses. (Arrests for drug law violations this year are expected to exceed the 1,663,582 arrests of 2009. Law enforcement made more arrests for drug abuse violations (an estimated 1.6 million arrests, or 13.0 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense in 2009. Someone is arrested for violating a drug law every 19 seconds.) Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation

We have arrested almost 290,000 for marijuana related offenses. (Police arrested an estimated 858,408 persons for cannabis violations in 2009. Of those charged with cannabis violations, approximately 89 percent were charged with possession only. An American is arrested for violating cannabis laws every 30 seconds.) Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation

We have incarcerated more than 2600 people for drug offenses. (Since December 31, 1995, the U.S. prison population has grown an average of 43,266 inmates per year. About 25 per cent are sentenced for drug law violations.) U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics

Last month, in the Zócalo of Mexico City, the country’s main square, thousands of Mexicans gathered to demand an end to the “war on drugs” which has taken the lives of over 35,000 of their countrymen. And even as they chanted, some 59 bodies were discovered in a mass grave in Tamaulipas state.

Yet, in the face of the above, the current American field marshal in the war of drugs, Michele Leonhart, was astonishingly quoted as saying this: “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs.” In other words, 35,000 dead Mexicans is a sign of approaching victory because the narcotrafficantes are killing each other over their turf. (She failed to mention anything about the 994 Mexican children under the age of 18 killed in 2010.)

The numbers no one wants to know about

Well, then, let’s take a look at the consumption side of this grisly equation: According to the Center for Disease Control, the use of illicit drugs in the United States has stayed about the same, as a percentage of the population, between 2002 and 2008 – which is to say that in actual numbers, use of them has increased. These are the results after spending $15 billion last year and waging a continuous “war on drugs since 1971, when Richard Nixon declared it? Some war!

Alternately, cigarette smoking, (nicotine is among the most highly addictive of drugs) and which is entirely legal, has dropped from 50% of the U.S. population to around 25% today, among adults, thanks largely to a public campaign of education and restriction as to how and where cigarettes may be consumed. (The National Institutes of Health)

The bipolarity of the “War on Drugs” during the Cold War

Since the end of World War II, when the CIA enlisted the help of the Mafia in preventing leftists from taking control of Italy in exchange for allowing the illegal importation of heroin into the U.S., the war on drugs has been unevenly waged. When it has served official U.S. foreign policy objectives, the poor and dispossessed in the US have been used as pawns. The CIA was complicit in helping the Nationalist Chinese in the late 40’s by helping Chiang Kai-Chek export opium from China; in helping the Nicaraguan “contras” export cocaine to the United States. While Hollywood was producing movies like “Reefer Madness,” the CIA was allowing heroin into the United States because it helped in their fight against communism.

The efficacy of suppression

In short, all attempts to reduce consumption of illicit drugs by using interdiction in the importation of them into the U.S. have failed. As the Mexicans have stated to the U.S. repeatedly, the problem is not with supply; it is with demand. As long as the United States has a voracious appetite for illegal drugs, they will be available.
A basic understanding of economics tells us that reducing supply only increases the price; and increased prices lead to higher profits, which in turn lead to increased supply. Conversely, reducing demand leads to lower prices and reduced supply. Regardless of this economic truth, the policy of federal, state and local governments has resulted in the continuous failure of the use of suppression, rather than a more enlightened approach to the realities of drug use in this country. This war is a losing proposition which, in this economic climate, is made all the more stark, for we are conducting it on borrowed money now.

Will someone please pull the plug!

As in so many areas (such as the refusal to recognize of Cuba while recognizing, say, North Korea or Iran) governmental policies tend to get ossified. Policies becomes institutionalized. They accumulate a kind of inertial momentum of their own which even succeeding presidential administrations cannot change. It’s no secret that the “warriors” in the War on Drugs constitute a huge constituency of voters, from local police agencies receiving federal money, to correctional officers overseeing drug offenders (most of whom are users rather than traffickers in drugs), to lawyers and judges and courts, to federal agencies of course. All of them have an interest in preserving the status quo. They are not bad people but they are convinced that what they do actually works - or at least should continue uninterrupted - even in the face of statistics which belie those beliefs.

Furthermore, and just as importantly, our social, religious and cultural realities make it almost impossible to face the truth that legalizing drugs will lead to a reduction in their use. For most people, the notion is counterintuitive. However, during Prohibition, alcohol consumption didn’t decrease at all. Rather, the quality of alcoholic beverages went down, and the very illegality of alcohol gave rise to the mob. With alcohol, its consumption was an ongoing practice since the birth of the nation. Repeal of Prohibition through the constitutional amendment process was relatively easy to accomplish. This is not so with drugs and resistance to controlled use as a component of a therapy aimed at discontinuance, if not outright legalization, is very strong among conservatives.

What is missed, of course, is a consistent, uniform, and serious national effort to confront the demand for drugs. Rather than treat a drug abuser as having an illness, we declare them criminals and incarcerate them by the tens of thousands.

In a most despicable example, we tell our children to “Just say ‘No’” to illegal drugs when in fact they are confronted by them everywhere. They are easy to get and available anywhere, across all economic and social strata. (Even the abuse of prescription painkillers and other legal drugs is now on the rise.)
Finally, what are we to make of all those dead Mexicans? How are we to treat what is rapidly becoming a failed state in our neighbor to the south and with whom we share a 1200 mile border? In the Zócalo that day last month, people were shouting for the resignation of the president of the republic. They no longer believed the government can control the drug cartels of the north, whose money has bought off politicians from Mexico City to chiefs of police in Chihuahua and Sonora.

It’s time to reassess. No doubt about it. Ms. Leonhart needs to come clean. This is one war which we’ll never win if we continue waging it as we have for 40 years.

###

Article first published as The Institutionalization of the War on Drugs on Technorati.

The Myth of the Post-Racial Society

2011-04-28T14:38:00.000-07:00

When Barack Obama was finally declared the victor in 2008, I, along with millions of other Americans, scores of pundits, newspapers, magazines, TV personalities, pollsters, and other politics junkies seemed to take a giant, self-deserved, bow to the world. The working phrase for the literati in describing Obama’s convincing election was that a new, American, “post-racial” society had evolved in the United States. At long last, the stain of the original sin with which America was born - the sin of viewing African Americans as something considerably less than the whites who had once owned and enslaved them while bringing a completely new nation into being, based on the notion of equality among men – that stain had been erased with the election of Obama to the highest office in our land.

The election of Obama to the presidency of the United States recalled all the struggles that Americans of color underwent literally from the birth of the nation. It recalled images of Nat Turner, the rebellious slave; of Dred Scott and of Booker T. Washington, of the millions of American who bore the whip as they grew the food and fiber of a young nation; who baked the bread that the privileged class ate.

As the new president took his place in American history that cold January day in 2009, he also called up all the modern African-American leaders who fought for a place in the sun for their people either directly or who simply led by example: Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Louis Armstrong, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and hundreds of others. In short, that January day, for all Americans, no matter their shade of skin, all was well, it seemed. We had finally arrived; and as the television cameras panned the crowds of black Americans in the audience, seeing their tears of joy as the new young president began his inaugural address, the affirmation that anyone could be The president of the United States was made flesh in the person of Barack Obama. So I thought.

Two and a half years later, what began as almost a whisper has now risen to the level of a mob screaming for his blood among a very significant portion of the American public. Using both coded and not-so-subtle language; subjecting this president to near-humiliation by questioning his personal background, indeed his very right to be an American citizen, the latent racism of certain parts of this country – notably the so-called heartland and the traditional South - is bubbling to the surface once again, like the scum which rises in a broth pot. This self-described African-American president has been made to present his birth certificate to the nation - something no other president in American history has done - in an effort to re-focus the nation on problems so severe that they have not seen their equal in four generations. To many Americans, it appears, it is more important to get rid of this president not because he is a bad president, but because they believe he is an illegitimate president. Even his religious practice has been questioned.

The hope that Obama’s election engendered among enlightened Americans, the mental snapshot of that truly transformational moment as a black 44th American president spoke to the nation on the steps of its capitol, that snapshot has curled away to anger and disgust.

The Irony of Donald Trump

Leading the current charge for the racists who cannot stomach the thought of a non-white president of the United States is no less a person than a New York billionaire; a man who has made a career of self-promotion, a veritable modern P.T. Barnum, touting his own self-achieved greatness, conveniently omitting that began his career with a $400 million dollar inheritance; conveniently omitting that he has declared bankruptcy no less than four different time in his working life.

Donald Trump, for weeks, has railed that Obama is illegitimate; a non-citizen. And when confronted with Obama’s birth certificate, he now begins to question Obama’s academic achievements: he was a poor student who somehow got into one of the best universities in the nation, Columbia, and into the nation’s most prestigious law school, Harvard. Trump uses all the code words and phrases: that Obama was not really good enough for the Ivy League, which Trump evidently believes should be for whites only. Worst of all, Trump can stand in front of dozens of corporate media microphones and cameras and lie to the public with nary a blush. “His people” have discovered he was a lousy student at Occidental College, that he was the worst law student in the history of Harvard law while being elected to the presidency of the law review precisely because he is African-American. Obama is, he says, undeserving of his office.

Trump is, tactically, another Joe McCarthy 60 years later, but with lots of money and a swooning corporate media hanging on his every word. There has never been a microphone Trump hasn’t liked. It is hard to believe Trump is serious. On one hand, since he is so able a promoter of his television reality show it is possibly a masterstroke in getting the public to focus on him. On the other hand, the depths to which Trump has descended in doing so has fanned the embers of racial hatred once again in the American psyche. (A little known secret is that Trump, over the years, has donated more to Democratic causes than to Republican, which begs the question: Why is he picking on Obama?)

Trump’s behavior, to me, is cynical and treasonous. He proves how illusory the notion is of this country having gotten more than a little beyond the days of Jim Crow. Franklin Graham, the hand-me-down-preacher son of evangelist Billy Graham, stated last week the Trump was "probably right" and that Obama could be a “Muslim, because Islam descends from the seed of the father…Now, he has told me that he is a Christian. But the debate comes, what is a Christian?" Graham said of the president. Today’s racists are in fact more pernicious than those of pre-civil rights days.

The Nexus of Racism, Politics, and Corporatism

Throughout this reemergence of racism, the leaders of the two major political parties, most especially the party in opposition to the president, have been stunningly quiet in their obligation to lead, to set the record straight. The House Majority Leader, John Boehner, when asked if be thought Obama was a citizen once famously said that if Obama stated he was a citizen, he had “no reason to disbelieve him.” The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, when asked if he thought the president was a Christian said, “Well, he said he is, so I guess he is,” In both cases these gentlemen should have put the thing to rest by stating that all this business about Obama’s religion and citizenship is nothing more than hatred. But sensing an opportunity in the 2010 midterm elections, both men actively courted the crazy wing of the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and now the country reaps the whirlwind that they sowed.

And behind all this Republican leadership silence stand the suits with the bottomless pockets of the corporate world: the world of the Koch brothers; the world of Wall St., the insurance industry, the bankers and the mining industry, the energy industry, generously funding dozens of political action committees with millions of dollars to achieve their agenda of internalizing assets and externalizing liabilities.

It is entirely possible that Boehner and McConnell, two otherwise very savvy politicians, have mounted a tiger which will devour the Republican Party my father once so proudly voted for. I do not believe that this nation is so cross-threaded, so utterly devoid of rational thought as radical right wing Republicans are.

By the same token, just at a time when congressional Democrats should be shaming their counterparts for their acquiescence to their lunatic right wing, they are as lambs which, as we’ve seen, were led to the slaughter in the 2010 midterm elections.

The recurring nightmare

No matter how much is it to be desired to get beyond our racist past, it seems we are prisoners of it. And in the case of this president, this brighter than bright achiever of the all that Americans aspire to, he is sadly burdened with the greatest racist taboo of them all: being the product of a white woman and a black man. There are Americans who simply cannot stomach that truth. And they will do what they can to destroy Barack Obama..

Let us hope we regain our balance. Our sense of fair play.

###

Has the Radical Right Lost Its Mojo?

2011-04-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

During the Great Depression, a radically conservative Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, actually had a Chicago radio show for a pulpit. His message was a blend of old-fashioned populism and race baiting, very much akin to Hitler's anti-semitism. He founded a political party called The Social Justice Party, which basically called for the nationalization of key industries, and financial reform, which was dominated, he said, by international Jewish wealth.

Coughlin had a massive radio audience which grew as the country sank deeper into the Great Depression, in which fully 25% of the labor force was simply out of work. At his height in the late 30's Coughlin had as many as 45 million regular listeners. The fear among ordinary Americans was palpable as they saw farms abandoned and factory workers on the sidewalks of all the major cities in theater newsreels. Americans were looking for an explanation of what had happened to them and Coughlin and others gave them one.

FDR's contention that fear was the nation's biggest enemy rang far truer then than it does now. All through the 30's, Coughlin rode on his white horse tilting at Marxism, International Jewry, The Federal Reserve, leftists, and even Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite.

It took America's entrance into World War II to finally silence Coughlin. His bishop finally could no longer countenance his behavior and consigned him to a small Chicago parish, which he ministered to until his retirement in 1966. But interest in what he had to say had waned by 1942, when people got back to work and the prime national issue was defeating the Nazis and the Japanese. By the end of the war, Coughlin was a political backwater.

Fast forward 4 generations

In 2007, this country suffered the biggest financial collapse since 1929. The nation is slowly getting its legs back three years later as unemployment numbers look like they're finally headed south, but the parallels between people like Charles Coughlin and the likes of Glenn Back, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party are too obvious to discount, when one looks at the political climate since our own crash. Beck is out denouncing Jews like George Soros, socialists and communists (again!) in the government and, in a new wrinkle in American life, the browning on the national complexion.

Fox News Network has canned Beck, as both his audience and his polemicism are souring the public (and his ratings!). Palin's popularity numbers are in near-single digits; the Tea Party is losing its punch as its newly elected politicians expose the lunacy of its platform in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and elsewhere, as well as on Capital Hill. This political "attitude adjustment" is being helped by an economy which is slowly but surely picking up steam.

This is one instance where, though history is repeating itself, the end game, the light at the end of the radical right wing tunnel, is clearly visible.

And it couldn't come too soon.

###

Article first published as Has the Radical Right Tsunami Run Its Course? on Technorati.

Paying Attention: When local government breaks down from lack of oversight who should we blame?

2011-04-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

My town is small. Only 2300 souls live within the borders of this tiny little burg in the heart of Oregon's Willamette Valley. I settled here because I craved the peace and quiet of country living, having lived all my life in San Francisco.

I’ve been getting involved somewhat in city politics here….to the point that I’m probably the unofficial “Jerk of Jefferson” among the local solons and power structure; because I’ve called the city council out on a lot of stuff they do around here, and they don’t like it. I occasionally attend city council meetings, though frankly not enough of them, but this will change. And, since my children are all grown and have left the nest, I don’t attend school board meetings. But recently, I’ve been jolted out of my lethargy. Last November, I and two other citizens defeated a tax measure our city council put on the ballot which would have given the city $5.1 million over 5 years which was couched as a police protection measure but which really was a ploy to simply build the general fund up for undisclosed intentions.

We did it by walking the entire town and putting flyers in the doors of every house in Jefferson and writing to the local newspaper. It took three days but we did it. And we won with 78% of the vote. If it had passed my property taxes would rise by about $350 – about 12% - from one year to the next.

Well, I got myself elected to the budget committee which the law requires be made up of 7 private citizens and the city council. Of course, the seven private citizens are pretty much always the same year after year, since no one really participates in city government. (Our twice monthly council meetings are usually attended by no more than 4 or 5 private citizens. Though I applaud anyone who has the interesting in local government, there is a severe shortage of motivated citizens.) We are about to begin work on the 2011/2012 budget but going in, I am skeptical as to the degree of change the city fathers and the committee itself are willing to accept. I am hopeful, yes, but hardly confident in view of the present situation.

So, in preparation for this budget committee series of meetings which begin in late April, I secured a copy of the 2010 / 2011 budget to try to “understand” how they set their budget up. Scanning through it, and with a follow-up meeting with the city recorder, I found the following. (Keep in mind this city is composed of just 2300 people and has absolutely no tax base other than homeowners and a couple of small businesses. (Two bars, three tiny grocery stores, two restaurants, a barber, a Mexican bakery. Even the local farmers live outside the city limits.)

CITY EMPLOYEES ON A GRAVY TRAIN?

The city employees have been around for years. They homestead their jobs because they’re GOOD jobs. The city recorder currently makes $70,000 / year (including health benefits) and has a 10% city paid contribution to her PERS fund.

The Director of Public Services (who oversees the street lights, sewer and water plants) currently earns over $100,000/year (incl. health benefits) and the city kicks in another 10% to every salaried dollar to his PERS fund.

The city council froze employee salaries – for one year (2009/2010) as a response to the national and state economic crisis -- then reinstated raises for them all for 2010/2011. Some got 12% increases. Some wage freeze!

There are about 10 paid employees on city staff. They all have the following medical plan:

1. Choose your own doctor.

2. Everything is 90% covered

3. $100 yearly deductible

4. 10 dollar co-pay.

5. There is also an employee monthly contribution but the city picks it up for them.

How does that compare with your health plan? (If you have one!) There are certainly less expensive plans available but the city council voted to give them this one.

If this seems out of whack to you, it does because it is. When is the last time you had such a generous medical plan? The worst part of it is that the taxpayers who work in the private sector—that is, for entities that are actually accountable to their shareholders and creditors, and actually have to make a profit—no longer have defined benefit pensions or gold plated medical insurance for life. But apparently it is reasonable to expect the taxpayers to fund such benefits for public workers. In essence, public workers would be immunized from the huge economic changes taking place in this country. That is unfair and unsustainable. Public employees should not be a special entitled class, nor can the taxpayers afford to make them such.

OUR WATER/SEWER: THE PROJECT FOR GROWTH

The people of this community have very high water and rates. My monthly bill averages $60 / month in the best watered state in the country. Most of it goes to cover a big, new, sewage treatment plant designed for “future growth.” It was put up at a time when developers and builders were buying up tracts of land in town and putting houses up on them, and the existing plant simply ran out of capacity. The new plant has far too much capacity but it will be ready for the next real estate boom, for sure.

OUR POLICE

We have no police force. We contract with the county for sheriff deputies (2 full time deputies) for $275,000 per year. The Marion County Sheriff’s Department recently raised the rates to $290,000 for the coming year. This – it is said – provoked the city council to put the above mentioned $5 million dollar measure on the ballot. They said they were out of money. They really weren’t at all.

Looking for an alternative, I then contacted a private patrol service up in Gresham, OR who was looking for an opportunity to pick up some business by underbidding the sheriff (who are treating these kinds of contracts as profit centers). If 90% of crime deterrence is visibility of law enforcement, the private patrol could do much of the same work a sheriff can, including make an arrest in the commission of a crime. (They cannot write traffic tickets, though) The private patrol would work for a third of what the sheriff charges us.

I found myself, a confirmed believer in the notion of “the commons” and the public being a part of its protection, actually considering the privatization of parts of services traditionally given to public servants. I suggested to council that they consider using a private patrol during low crime hours, and I also suggested to the fellow who owns the patrol to contact the city himself, which he did. He sent each council member a packet of information. After 2 months the city recorder said they city has no interest at all, and would not allow him to make a public presentation to the city council. I was astonished at this news. After all, the city told taxpayers they had no more money!

OUR SCHOOLS

Although the school district is a separate entity from city government, it operates much the same way: an entrenched school board which works hand in glove with the superintendent. Now, the school district has placed a bond issue on the upcoming May election which will generate $15 million to build a new middle school. This, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in four generations.

We have about 290 kids in the local high school and 230 in the middle school. There is also a K-6 elementary school. Our middle school, built in the 50’s has a lot of repairs it needs. But the school board and superintendent thought it better to simply build a brand new school adjacent to the high school. At a cost of $15 million bucks! So the district put a bond issue on this May ballot, which will indebt every homeowner $2.30 per thousand dollars of assessed valuation for the next 21 years. Oh, and did I mention they would build brand, spanking, new district offices? All this for a school district with a population of 923 kids?

There are about 64 houses in foreclosure in Jefferson (about 10% of the total housing) and also a certain number in “pre-foreclosure.” Unemployment is in the teens. On the other hand, farmers (who are part of the school district) are making a killing on corn (think: biofuel. Isn’t it like Americans to make gasoline out of food?).

The biggest contributor to the proponents is the architectural firm who is designing the new school. They funded nearly 50% of the money the PAC has to spend on passage. The next biggest are the school district secretary and the largest landowner in town. One Jefferson resident tossed in $250 but thought it better to charge it off to his business in Albany.

I suggested to the school district that they should simply repair the school until the economy picks up and people have some money. I got the “fish eye” from them all.

At this point, it should be noted that the Jefferson School District is among the bottom feeders in terms of performance among Oregon School Districts. It ranks 146^th out of 150 districts in the state. The middle school, which is the one the district wants to replace, (along with its own district offices) ranks 328^th out of 330 middle schools measured. The high school ranks 222^nd out of 300. Yet, the elementary school, which ranks 58^th out of 708 ranked schools, is evidently sending well qualified kids into the middle and high schools, where they are getting the short shrift, educationally.

The school district is pulling out all the stops to get this measure passed, especially in view of our success on the recently defeated police measure. They are appealing to the heartstrings of voters. “It’s for the kids,” they tell us. Even their Political Action Committee is called “Jefferson4Kids” (which I find almost sardonically humorous in its lack of proper English spelling.)

THE LESSON:

There are lots of other, smaller examples of inefficiency and (what I call) entrenched cronyism here but the lesson is clear: When people don’t give a darn about local government, they get abused. We get the government we deserve, yes, even at the most local level. In our little community it seems as though we have totally dysfunctional civic institutions.

The lesson is that most of us pay much more attention to the goings on in Washington DC (and possibly the our state capital) then what’s going on right under out noses at the city and county level, which governmental entities have a greater daily impact on our lives than most anything in Washington. We would be well advised to know and participate in local civic affairs. Certainly it is where an individual can make a much higher impact on his own and his fellow citizens’ lives.

The sad thing is that people are so exhausted every day after work, the last thing they want to do is go to a city council or school board meeting. They also never run for political office. They trust that their elected officials are doing their fiduciary duty in civic and educational affairs, but if the same people are elected time and time again, and no one is “watching the watchers” the rot sets in. It’s like one of those old western movies where the guy who owns the local saloon also runs the town. Maybe one solution is to hold council meetings on the weekends.

Ordinarily, I consider myself a liberal. I truly believe that government can and should play a positive role in the daily lives of people. It should keep people from starving, promote planned growth, educate our children, build parks and schools and such – all the usual stuff. “Government” in the words of Barnie Frank, is what we choose to do together rather than individually, or in other words, we sink or swim together, not as individuals. But I also believe that government should be at least above board and efficient. But human nature being what it is, if left alone, “government” inevitably oversteps its mandate.

And if government fails us, who is fault is it? Us or it? In our democracy “We the People” are all that can keep government in check.

Next time you have a chance, drop in on a city council or school board meeting. Better yet, task yourself with the duty to attend three meetings in a row. Ask questions. Investigate. You might be very surprised!

What was it that Jefferson (Thomas, not the Oregon city on the banks of the Santiam River!) said about “eternal vigilance?”

"Realpolitik" and the Lessons of the Egyptian Revolution

2011-02-14T06:10:00.000-08:00

The events of the last several days in Egypt have taught – or should teach – some valuable lessons. We have witnessed a peaceful, popular coupe d’etat in the Middle East which most Americans - let alone Egyptians and Tunisians – believed could never happen in a region historically ruled by one or another kind of autocratic knave, and saddled with a religion which has been highjacked by both ruler and the violent radicals for their own purposes. The changes currently occurring in Egypt will force a review of American post-war foreign policy for years to come. For a half century standard American foreign policy has been dominated by a class of self-contained “experts” who have thought that our interests must at times be at odds with our ideals; that pragmatism forces sometimes ugly policy. Under George W. Bush that ugliness reached its zenith with the unprovoked attack on a sovereign Middle East power in 2003 under the guise of protecting “our interests.” Yet Bush’s behavior is nothing new in our history.

Where have all the ideals gone?

The ideals of the American experiment with self-government - ideals which were truly revolutionary at the time they were first expressed and codified into a constitution in the late 18^th century - have never been fully lived up to. That much is beyond argument, given the history of how the United States expanded from one coast to the other in its first half-century of existence.

President James Monroe’s famous 1823 doctrine, ostensively promulgated to keep European powers from getting their mitts on Western Hemisphere countries as Latin-America threw off Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, was declared off-limits to the European powers seeking to pick up where the Spanish left off. Nevertheless, just two decades later, the United States relieved Mexico of fully half of its land mass in a declared war, a war in which one of only 14 dissenters in the House was a freshman congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

Recounting atrocities committed against indigenous peoples, abrogated treaties, the persistence of chattel slavery, wars and threats of war against our neighbors south and north of the border and, of course, a war against ourselves in the middle of the 19th century need not be done to illustrate that truth that the gap between what we say and what we do is often quite wide.

Since our own civil war, shortly after which the US became a world power and a major player in the diplomatic affairs of the planet, we have been immersed in the game of power global politics, first described in the modern era as realpolitik by Otto von Bismarck and others. Realpolitik is based on pragmatism, power, and the material concerns of a nation-state as they relate to other states, and must therefore consider morality and idealism as subservient. It is basically Machiavelli on steroids.

In 1946, the United States officially adopted a foreign policy strategy which, in essence, declared, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That single sentence describes more than a half century of behavior not only antithetical to stated ideals embodied in our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but behavior which has earned this country the image of being among the most hypocritical of the major post WW II powers. The same nation which has sent idealistic Peace Corps members to the undeveloped world has pursued a near-consistent policy of not rocking the boat with “friendly” despots, tyrants, kings, caudillos, autocrats, murderers and strong men, who have imprisoned, tortured and murdered millions of unfortunates, all in the name of peace and, mostly, stabilit---and their being anti-communist.By the same token, we have unseated more than a few leftist dictators who showed the US any cheek.

The great foreign policy irony of post World War II America in the Middle East (and elsewhere) is that the nation which embodied the notion that a people who suffer the indignity of colonization and political powerlessness – like the United States - when it stated such people should “of Right ought to be free,” has accepted as normal the same indignities perpetrated the people of other countries; indeed, we have aided and abetted despots in suppressing any movement toward freedom for decades. It is realpolitik of the worst sort; a 50-year foreign policy which has embittered billions toward the United States and in the last few years, particularly since the fall of the USSR, has made a mockery of our ideals to the enchained world, and most particularly in the Islamic world.

The fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by America-hating, barely literate mullahs might well have been mitigated had we not overthrown an admitted socialist, Mohammed Mosaddegh, in the 50’s and replaced him with one of the cruelest of modern autocrats, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Until he became a kind of rogue elephant, Saddam Hussein was “our SOB” in Iraq, murdering countless thousands of his own people. Hosni Mubarak, likewise, was countenanced for 30 years, right up to just three weeks ago. King Abdullah, the son of King Hussein, is quaking in his Italian shoes, watching a political earthquake in Egypt, just 275 miles away, as is Col. Khadaffi, next door in Libya, and Tunisia, further west. The events in Egypt are putting all Middle Eastern autocrats on notice that the foundations of their own countries’ regimes are built on sand and in an earthquake, political or otherwise, such buildings rarely, if ever, remain standing.

Change in the wind

The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 is a bellweather; a sign that the old ways will no longer hold. More than half the Islamic world is under the age of 35 years, and the young: workers, peasants, farmers, professionals, the tiny middle class who made the Egyptian government fall with the speed of a sirocco roaring in from the desert – and without a shot fired - who are sick of the corruption, the favoritism, the disparity between the very wealthy and the very poor, will no longer be accepted as the status quo. You can bet that Islamic radicals like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his Egyptian No.2 man, noted that what they have been trying to accomplish with violence for decades was accomplished in Egypt with hardly a drop of shed blood in only 18 days.

The old guard strongmen can no longer isolate their people from the outside world. They are connected in ways they could never have imagined. The despots never saw the importance of the internet - the digital world as a means of observing and communicating to the outside world. The old guard were literally overrun by the truth. And this will be repeated all over the Middle East.

The lesson for America

President Obama, in his White House speech on the day of Egyptian liberation hit just the right note when he stated, “above all, we saw a new generation emerge -- a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears; a government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations. One Egyptian put it simply: 'Most people have discovered in the last few days…that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore, ever.'”
Obama may have pointed American foreign policy in a new direction, one where our ideals and our actions may be a beacon to a world which still remains a hostage to tyranny. Let us hope.

For even as he gave the speech, the echoes of Foggy Bottom “policy experts” were heard a few days previously, advising the President to hedge his bets with Mubarak: don’t be too hard on him, we need him. But once the regime fell, the president unequivocally gave his support and encouragement to the revolutionaries, but not without noting that the hard work of creating a free nation is yet to begin. But he assured Egyptians that we are there for them.

As if on cue, the American neo-conservatives are bleating, once again, that Egypt is what happens when we desert our “friends.” However, Egypt has taught us that neither the Cold War policy of containment nor the post-Soviet policy of neoconservatives - that the last standing major world power should fearlessly use its military power, simply work. Egypt has shown it that they don't.

One of the great technological benefits of the Egyptian Revolution was that Americans watched it happen. We saw the faces of tens of thousands of ordinary Egyptians as they peacefully demanded an end to the Mubarak kleptocracy. We didn’t see thousands of people screaming “God is great!” or wrap themselves in the green flag of Islam. Those were Egyptian flags we saw being waved by ordinary people like ourselves. And, when Mubarak hightailed it for Sharm El-Shiekh and the government fell, the jubilation we saw on the faces of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators could only bring a tear to the eye of any freedom loving American.
Will American support for 30 years of Mubarak leave a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of the Egyptian people? We shall see; but better we throw in fully with the change and Egyptians’ hopes and dreams for a better day. On one hand we should let them build their own democratic country while on the other offering our own support in whatever way we can.

The rest of the Middle Eastern tyrants be damned. It’s a new day!

###

Scientology: A Jonestown in the Making?

2011-02-11T05:40:00.000-08:00

I’ve seen it before. I watched it all unfold on television in 1978, when the Rev. Jim Jones relieved himself and 900 of his faithful followers, along with my congressman, Leo Ryan, of this earthly life, drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid in the jungles of Guiana. (Ryan was shot to death while trying to board a plane home to the states.)
I had watched Jones’s growth as a local San Francisco minister to the mostly black poor of the Fillmore District. In a few short years, Jones became local celebrity ministering from his “temple” located across Geary Blvd. from one of the then-great rock venues of the country, the Fillmore Auditorium. He was instrumental in getting George Moscone and Harvey Milk elected mayor and supervisor, respectively. (Both later to fall at the hand of a madman, Dan White).

Jones, who had drifted into San Francisco from Indiana and over a period of 15 years or so, grew to be one of the most influential personalities in a city known for them. To most people, he was a minster to the poor, giving them hope, food, family, and a sense of community. If anyone had something bad to say about the People's Temple – or Jones’s at times off-beat sermons from his pulpit – which got coverage in the newspapers, prominent politicians instantly came to his defense. He was, for a long time, bullet proof, thanks to his unrelenting public relations campaign and his spreading church money liberally among the politicos in town.

But by the mid-70’s there was an air of unease, almost imperceptible, among a growing segment of the community. Rumors of forced isolation from family and friends, physical beatings, the signing over of personal assets to the church, sexual misconduct, and demands for unquestioned obedience to the pastor began to surface. Jones himself was paranoid of the IRS and its investigating the church’s tax-exempt status as a result of his political activities. He declared himself the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Gandhi and Lenin. He later publicly rejected Christianity, the bible, and declared himself an atheist.

When the local pols and the police begin to get wind of some of his stranger doings, Jones took 900 of his people with him to what he promised would be a socialist paradise in the South American jungle, a plot of land he had bought for a so-called Agricultural Project. Jonestown turned out to be a living nightmare for the people who served Jones. As it turned out, Jones had a drug habit of enormous proportions and his mind had gone over the edge. It was then that Ryan, responding to persistent pleas for the federal government to investigate, flew to Jonestown and where he ultimately met his own end.

After the Jonestown tragedy, dozens of books were written on how cults gets started and how in many cases they come to a violent end. Since Jonestown, we’ve seen a few more such cults, like the Branch Davidians in Waco, come and go with tragic ends.

Cults: Hollywood Style

Everyone’s heard of Scientology, the self-styled religion which promises to heal everything from an Oedipus Complex to neuralgia. If your intelligence quota is lacking a few dozen much wanted points, it will raise you to unimagined of heights of cerebral brilliance.

In fact, my first brush with Scientology was when I once chased after a gorgeous young lady for a while, who drew me into Scientology – in exchange for what I hoped would be her favors. (my IQ not being of particular concern, high or low) Rather than favors, I was asked for a check to get started on the path to “clear,” a state in which all my cares and concerns would be happily dealt with - if not my libido. Being a congenital tightwad, I bailed out. I liked favors as much as anyone but I made the calculation that they could be easily had elsewhere for far less money, time and energy. Moreover, one religion was enough. Since then, I have been following, from a proper distance, this strange aggregation passing for the only path to American-style enlightenment, for I am inevitably drawn to the curious and off-beat.

In a stunning piece in The New Yorker (Feb. 14th & 21st) by Lawrence Wright titled “The Apostate” we learn of the defection of one of Scientology’s highest level members, well-known writer / director Paul Haggis (“Million Dollar Baby,” “Crash”) who revealed leaving – and why he left - his 35-year membership in Scientology. There have not been many disparaging articles about Scientology, mostly because it is the most litigious of “religions” and will go to great lengths to squash any negative publicity. A quote from the article:

During our conversations, we spoke about some events that had stained the reputation of the church while he [Haggis]was a member. For example, there was the death of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after a mental breakdown, in 1995. She had rear-ended a car in Clearwater, Florida—where Scientology has its spiritual headquarters—and then stripped off her clothes and wandered naked down the street. She was taken to a hospital, but, in the company of several other Scientologists, she checked out, against doctors’ advice. (The church considers psychiatry an evil profession.) McPherson spent the next seventeen days being subjected to church remedies, such as doses of vitamins and attempts to feed her with a turkey baster. She became comatose, and she died of a pulmonary embolism before church members finally brought her to the hospital. The medical examiner in the case, Joan Wood, initially ruled that the cause of death was undetermined, but she told a reporter, “This is the most severe case of dehydration I’ve ever seen.” The State of Florida filed charges against the church. In February, 2000, under withering questioning from experts hired by the church, Wood declared that the death was “accidental.” The charges were dropped and Wood resigned.

The signs, as I read the Haggis article, were astonishingly similar to those as they progressed with the Peoples Temple 35 years ago: the near-worship of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard; the unquestioned obedience demanded of followers to his successor, a man named David Miscavige; the forced disconnection with family and friends who disapproved of members’ joining the cult (for that’s what it is, no less). Haggis details beatings administered by Miscavige on members and the holding of many as 200 people in forced isolation “re-education “ camps scattered across California. And as scary as the Jonestown story itself, Scientology maintains its “Sea Organization,” a kind of religious order of 6,000 adherents within the larger organization, which do the grunt work for the larger cult itself for little or no pay, from cleaning the so-called Celebrity Centers to painting the numerous sea-going vessels Scientology owns and operates and attending to the needs of its hierarcy. It appears that some of the darker secrets of this cult are beginning to bubble to the surface.

There is a key difference, though. Scientology and Hubbard consciously pursued high profile, Hollywood personalities to lend itself authenticity: Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, Ann Archer, among many film stars, as well as people like Sky Dayton, the founder of Earthlink, are current members. (Confession: Though there are always exceptions, as a class, I’ve never considered actors among the intellectual elite, and it’s also possible that the inbred insecurity of the profession itself would make such a person ripe for the picking. ) In fact, it can be said that Hollywood is to Scientology what Salt Lake City is to Mormons. The celebrities present the public face of Scientology.

This has lead to a cult which is swimming in money both in donations from its prominent members as well as from the cost to a member to rise through the ranks to achieve a state known as “Operating Thetan VII,” or OT-7, in Scientology parlance. (Haggis admits to having spent upwards of $700 thousand to achieve that level.) The money has allowed this cult to spread all over the country and even to Europe with it promises of Nirvana to those who susceptible to snake oil promises. It also allows Scientology to muster legions of well paid attorneys to groom its image, as well as to threaten anyone who gets pushy with this group. (Wright stated in an interview Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that The New Yorker spent more time fact-checking his article than it ever has, in anticipation of legal pushback from the Church of Scientology)
But these recent and quite public recantations by people such as Haggis and Josh Brolin, the actor, have begun to shine a light on the inner workings of Scientology and it may be that the cult is beginning to hunker down for a siege. And when this happens, it is good to remember the lessons of Jonestown: Cults under scrutiny do not do well in acting responsibly. That much we have learned from experience.

###

Reagan at 100: My Version

2011-02-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

Some Background

In May of 1969, I was 25 years old and living in a duplex just a few miles south of San Francisco. Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King were dead not a year. The anti-war movement was taking hold like no one could have inmagined. To say that the Bay Area in the 60’s was a soup of competing counter-culture outrage at “the system” is an understatement.

In part of the city, the hippies were packed like sardines into a district adjacent to Golden Gate Park called the Haight-Ashbury (or simply “the Haight”), at least nominally dropping out of anything resembling a conventional lifestyle; but if one watched more carefully one saw that the Haight was morphing into a full-blown tourist mecca, complete with Grayline bus tours for visiting out-of-towners, tickets for which could be gotten by a simple call to the concierge at the tony St. Francis Hotel on Union Square downtown. From the safety of their buses, the folks from Des Moines or Peoria could see the dozens of ragged young kids peddling “street sheets” or just asking some bewildered gawker for “spare change.” For them, it was all quite sanitized, yet the pungent smell of patchouli oil, even from inside a bus, was pervasive along Haight St. all the way from Stanyan St. to Pierce St., where Haight dropped down Buena Vista hill into the Fillmore District. What had begun in the early 60’s as a new manifestation of the Beat Movement rejection of “the establishment" of the 1950’s had been transmogrified into a world of runaways, easy sex, cheap and abundant drugs; of teenagers and young adults sleeping in doorways or in the local parks while a string of local merchants tried to cash in on the phenomenon, as well as did local artists and musicians of dubious ability.

Across the bay, in Oakland and all along the East Bay shoreline, the Black Panthers were “doing their thing” letting the world know that they weren’t going to take white oppression, job and housing discrimination as a given, let alone the assasination of their leaders. Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and other Black Panther Party leaders regularly made the front page of the local newspapers, either for having been picked up by the Oakland cops or for engaging in street theatre of one kind or another. The Black Panthers regularly carried firearms openly around town as a highly effective symbol to the white majority not only in San Francisco, but all over the country.

Four years earlier, in 1965, a UC-Berkeley student and civil rights and student activist named Mario Savio had stunned the Berkeley community with a speech calling for shutting down the “machine” that the University of California, he thought, had become, sparking off a national movement of students everywhere in the country, from Harvard and Yale, to Kent State, to the state sponsored schools on the West Coast. The University of California at Berkeley, the jewel in the crown of a public university system which was the envy of the nation, had become identified as a place of radical “street people,” of ungrateful students who would as much howl in protest of the war in Vietnam or racial discrimination and slum lords as they would attend a chemistry class. Amidst all this, J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were keeping close tabs on anyone who was perceived as a leader of the counter-culture.

Enter Reagan

In 1964, Ronald Wilson Reagan gave the speech of his life shortly after the Republican Convention held, ironically, in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Reagan, a life-long Democrat, endorsed Barry Goldwater as the GOP candidate for the presidency. Born in 1911 in rural Illinois, schooled in a Church of Christ college there and a product of a Norman Rockwell-like America, Reagan was an avuncular, handsome, effective speech giver, serving for years as the television mouth piece for General Electric. He had lived the charmed life a of reasonably successful Hollywood actor for years in the 1930’s and 40’s.

The Goldwater endorsement was almost inconsequential. What was of consequence was the effect his October speech had on those who watched him on television. He told the country, it was “a time for choosing.” And the country responded.

Also among the responders were a powerful group of political business people in Southern California who, on watching Reagan’s speech, thought the wrong person had been nominated for President on the Republican ticket. California responded two years later by ousting a popular Democratic governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, and making Reagan, who and never held an elected political office, the governor of the largest state in the union.

Reagan the governor took a look at California and he didn’t like what he saw at all. He campaigned interminably against the excesses of state government, taxes, a university where a free education produced radicals, a welfare system of cheats, fat cat labor unions, and public discord. One of his first proposals was to cut the budget of the university by 25% and institute tuition to make up for the budget shortfall. The 100-year California tradition of cost-free kindergarten-to-bachelors degree education was to be dispensed with. Free education for any student, regardless of his means; a system in which it was thought and believed - and proven - that more highly educated workers would produce more tax revenue through higher earnings, as well as produce higher paying jobs as leaders of business and industry, was now eliminated.

The Gipper and I

Being a self-supporting student at the time, this hit me between the eyes and confirmed the fear I had of this man from the moment he appeared on the political scene. I would now be charged to go to college. Nevertheless, Reagan had tapped into a huge pool of resentment on the part of the taxpaying public which saw all California public colleges, particularly the University of California, as being hotbeds of liberalism.

In 1969, the Berkeley radicals – a few students and a lot of street people – protested over the taking of a patch of bare ground near the campus which had been dubbed “People’s Park.” The 2.8 acre plot was due to be made into a parking lot but the street people came out in droves to demonstrate against the university administration. Soon, the police were called in to quell the demonstrators. But when film clips of the demonstrations on local television hit, and the incident caught the ear of the press, the whole thing seemed to take on a life of its own. Young people from all over the Bay Area, including this writer, came to show support for keeping the park as open space for whomever wished to either live there or speak there, outside of Sproul Hall, the usual place to protest but which was controlled by the university administration.

The demonstrators quickly grew into the thousands over the next few days. Police from neighboring cities, and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department were called in, carrying shotguns loaded with “double aught” buckshot. The more the authorities tried to tamp the thing down, the more uncontrollable became what was now nearly a mob. Bricks, bottles, and stones were thrown; fences around the property ripped down and the atmosphere poisoned with tear gas to disperse the crowd. It was anti-establishment - and heavy handed police tactics - run amok. Reagan, who viewed Berkeley as "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants" now called out the National Guard, clearly upping the ante.

On a clear Sunday morning, somewhere on Bancroft Avenue, I found myself standing amidst the demonstrators, looking at a line of uniformed national guardsmen, bayonets fixed, more curious then committed. When a tear gas canister bounced its way in front of me, smoke pouring from it, I immediately ran from it, my eyes stinging and watering like nothing else I’ve ever experienced then or since. It was as if Reagan had personally thrown that canister at me, I felt. The next day, a young man named James Rector was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy as he sat on a roof observing what was going on below, his body riddled with buckshot. When the news got out about the killing, I was, like most people my age, simply outraged.

The Gipper’s Legacy

It was this atmosphere that defined the Reagan years for me, as California governors go. For most of his 8 years in Sacramento, there was everything short of a pitched battle in California between one segment of the population who believed in absolute freedom to do or say anything, and the far more numerous “establishment” whose champions were hard core conservatives reacting to what they saw as a societal breakdown. One such California conservative was Max Rafferty, who served two terms as Superintendent of Public Education and was against the teaching of evolution in elementary schools (which he called “secular humanist” thought), who espoused subsidizing private religious schools with public money, prayer in public schools and of course, tuition at any state run college or university. It was to me, at bottom, a reaction to intellectualism, not different organically from what had occurred in Germany in the 1930’s. It was a desire on the public’s part to return to something more understandable and less confrontational which swept Reagan and his party into office. It was a classic case of the medicine being worse than the disease.

This is what has always outlined my profile, my view, of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s lack of complexity was a blessing and a curse. He saw things in black and white. He interpreted his world by his Midwestern, middle class, measuring stick of simplicity in belief and values. And for the next 24 years both as governor and President, Reagan could rail incessantly at the loss of the things he saw as immutable “givens” on what it was to be an American: unquestioned patriotism, unfettered business, and minimal government and taxation. It was to me a total denial of our history as people who, in fact, had a long history of active protest, dating back to the Washington Adminstration and the Whiskey Rebellion.

This man who had never struggled in his life; who in his adult years was groomed by the rich and powerful to be a politician, believed that by hard work and trust in the system, anyone could rise out of poverty and dispossession. He saw the nation as being “a shining city on a hill,” all the while blinded to the realities of a war which half the nation was revolted by; at the inevitable demands of the 10% of Americans who were fed up with Jim Crow laws, inferior schools, and ghettoed neighborhoods, of farmworkers who picked our food crops for near starvation wages. He believed natural resources were limitless reservoirs of raw materials (“If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.”) for industrious Americans toiling in factories and going home to the wife and family. His was a world which, understandably, existed only in the movies he acted in.

Ronald Reagan’s legacy lives on in perhaps an even more pernicious way, as this nation is more divided than ever over core issues of who we are and where we’re headed as a people. The Reaganist deceptions of the Cadillac owning welfare mother, of slackers and miscreants who have sucked the system dry and abused our generosity, of socialist rabble rousers, persists as much now - even in our hour of economic adversity - as it ever has. We have divided ourselves into those who have much and want more, and those who have little and who are losing what little they have.

Reagan’s simplistic view of American governance belies the truth of his years in public office. He signed into law the largest tax increase in California history. As president, Reagan put through a income tax cut which caused a tripling of the national debt during his 8-year presidency, and unemployment rose to over 10.8%. He never submitted a balanced budget, as a president.

The man who has been tagged as “The Great Communicator” built a house of cards in which he quite innocently told his countrymen what they wanted to hear, rather than what they needed to hear.

In 2008, the house of cards predictably collapsed.

###

The Slow, Relentless Disintegration of Glenn Beck

2011-02-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Once Fox New's biggest ratings getter, Glenn Beck, like a car on its last few gallons of gasoline, may have reached theend of the line. As of this past January, his ratings suffered a 39% drop, year to year, averaging a paltry 1.8 million daily viewers last month. Even worse, in the key demographic of 25-54 year-olds, he captured only 397,000 on his daily Fox News Network show. He is in serious danger of being, to be charitable, marginalized. He is already inconsequential as an opinionator, and even among his own Fox colleagues, one senses a distancing, a certain pulling down of a gauzy curtain as his daily ranting about the impending end of America oozes, like stinky puss, from a gas filled, decomposing corpse. One wonders why his bosses, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, keep him around, as certainly he is not making much money for the network, at least not nearly as much as his prime time colleague, Bill O’Reilly. Mainstream brand advertisers have deserted him like he has the plague. Beck has reputed lost a third of them.

Beck’s decline is classic. A quick view of his career, if looked at from a proper distance, will quickly reveal that he is no different than the subjects of novels (like “Elmer Gantry”) and movies (like “A Face in the Crowd”) which recall Lincoln’s famous adage that “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And like the fictional subjects, Beck’s utterances have become increasingly outlandish and irrational as his show sinks in viewership.

One can only be reminded of the fortunes of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, who separated himself from the conservative herd by holding up a list of “known communists” in the State Department yet in a few years crashed and burned (after having destroyed the lives of some of our best artists and professionals) when he accused the United States Army command itself of being communists. Sooner or later even the most ignorant must abandon charlatans.

Beck’s rise to national prominence followed an age old media path.. His schtick was in shocking his audience. His ‘”Morning Zoo” partner in Phoenix, Tim Hatrick, described him thusly: “...he was great at being a grandstanding, pompous idiot and shaking the bushes for attention." By his own admission, from the age of 16 to 31 years old, Beck was high on alcohol, cocaine, or grass every day while broadcasting. Nevertheless, the formula worked. (He even got Sen. Joe Lieberman to write him a reference letter to gain admission into Yale as a divinity student. He lasted less than one semester.) He soon was the toast of talk radio in The Big Apple, from which he was catapulted into television, first with CNN and now with Fox. The rest is history.

A detailed recitation of Beck’s biography is not intended here; but Beck has gotten more ink, principally from the liberal blogosphere, print and television media (notably MSNBC, which company has boosted its own ratings largely due to exposing Beck’s outrageousness) and throughout most of 2008 and 2009 he was the subject of more commentary than perhaps even Sarah Palin. In early 2010 he reached his apex but since then his brand has faltered mightily. It is very possible, even likely, that he has seen his day.

In the 1930’s, in the depth of the Depression, the first of the great radio hate mongers Detroit’s own anti-Semitic priest, Father Charles E. Coughlin, ultimately withered away into unimportance as the economy picked up (though it took FDR and his bishop to shut him down). The one common thread Beck has with all of his populist predecessors is his need to generate shock and awe with his audience. The progressively more irrational content of Beck’s program shows that he is either becoming unhinged or is searching anywhere for a much needed ratings bounce. And, just like Coughlin, it is the economy which will push Beck aside. Americans’ inbred optimism will prevail as we dig our way out of the 2008 depression.

Among Beck’s more redoubtable recent pronouncements: he has admitted that he could shoot Michael Moore to death; that President Obama, who describes himself as a black man, is a racist; that philanthropist and liberal activist George Soros, a survivor of the Holocaust, profitted from sending Jews to their deaths; and just a couple of days ago he tagged the uprising in Egypt as the beginning of the restoration of the Medieval Caliphate in the Middle East.

Beck has seriously lost his way as a broadcaster, if he ever had one, and more likely as a sane human being. His daily chalk talks, which harken back to the televised religious tracts of the late Rev. Gene Scott in Los Angeles, have become nearly unintelligible, if not comedic, in their presentation. It may be that Beck, who has garnered a fortune for himself, may go off the deep end not for the potential loss of income, but because the hubris which seems to inevitably follow nothing-to-something fame, has made his loss of an audience more than he can handle.

###

Is Democracy Breaking Out in the Middle East?

2011-02-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

For days now, we’ve seen images of the rallies in Cairo’s famed

Tahrir Square. Today, a million Egyptians from all walks of life are

turning out to demand an end to the Mubarak autocracy and free

elections to form a new “people powered” government.

Certainly, all the usual radical Islamic suspects – Iran, most visibly - are throwing their weight into the equation as to where the thing will lead, but the numbers suggest that this is not an Islamic uprising, as the West seems to fear, but a throwing off of more than a half century of rule by strongmen, going all the way back to King Farouk, whom Gamel Abdul Nasser sent packing for Monte Carlo in the early 50‘s. One does not see a sea green flags and shouts of Allahu akbar! being shown and reported in the best sources of Middle East news currently accessible. Rather, one is struck by the thousands of Egyptian national flags being waved.

Farther to the west, a couple of weeks ago, Tunisia, long a French colony until it gained independence only to be ultimately taken over by another home grown despot, Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali - who ran the show for better than two decades - seems to be getting ready for the election and the formation of a democratic regime. Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of a formerly banned party, has returned to Tunisia after 21 years in exile. In the middle, Libya, now encircled by the instability of its two neighbors, one only imagines what Col. Ghaddafi must be wondering: Is he next?

In Jordan, King Abdullah II has just sacked his cabinet and asked an ex-army general to form a new government as Jordanians have taken to the streets in the wake of a deep recession, rising public debt and the ballooning of the prices for food and fuel. Taking their lead from the events in Egypt, Jordanians are demanding reform, as well they should.

Sudan, Egypt’s neighbor to the south, just split itself into two countries, one nominally Christian and animist and the other Islamic, after a protracted civil war in which millions were killed.

In Iran, enormous discontent still bubbles quietly below the surface as its current regime composed of ultra-conservative mullahs and one megalomaniac keep the lid on any hint of another post-electoral uprising.

The government of Turkey, the only Islamic democracy in the area, after a long silence, has officially thrown in with the Egyptian protest movement and called for Mubarak’s stepping down. This signals the death knell of one-man rule in this ancient nation. There can be no other result.

Since the end of the World Wars, when the nations of the Middle East threw off the Ottomans, and later European colonialism, the entire area has been ruled, one way or another, by despots, kings, mullahs, and an assortment of combinations of the same, which have denied political freedom to millions of Arabic (and Farsi) speaking people. It appears that a critical mass may have been achieved, which appears (at this point) to be unstoppable.

Meanwhile, President Obama, who gave what may have been an unwitting green flag to the Egyptian people in his 2009 Cairo speech praising the democratic process, has remained nearly tacit as events unfold in Cairo and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Once again, it is American “national interests” which may prove to be the silencer in allowing the United States to come out forthrightly in support of an outbreak of democracy. For since the end of World War II, the US has played house with a variety of these dictators in its relentless pursuit of crude oil, where about 20% of its imports originate. Political unrest isn’t good for business. The recent tumble in the stock market demonstrates that fact. If there is one thing that the US doesn’t need right now, it’s uncertainty – let alone an interruption – in its supplies of energy.

So the President once again is squarely on the horns of a dilemma: wholeheartedly support the changes which the Middle East is now definitely undergoing, come what may, or keeping his powder dry, and in doing so allow Arab radicals to paint the US into a neo-colonialist corner. He is torn between his natural tendency to support egalitarianism and the realities Middle Eastern realpolitik.

Finally, in an absolutely Kafka-esque side to this unfolding drama, the Bushian, neo-conservative rationale for picking a fight with Iraq, namely that restoring democracy to that poor country would force a breakout elsewhere in the region, may also be realized. Just not in the way they had hoped.

We are living in interesting times.

Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the GOP in 2012: My Take

2011-02-06T06:24:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin, as any kind of political figure, is toast. Her poll numbers are falling faster than a lead sinker. What is interesting is that Congressowman Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who seems to believe there’s enough of a following that she can make a run at the GOP nomination, is no less vitriolic than Palin. Both are self-described Tea Partiers and both will wither away as the time to look for nominees begins.

I’ve always thought Palin was about money, not elections. (A year ago I bet someone she will not even enter a primary in 2012. We’ll see.) She’s made a fortune selling books and doing speeches ($75,000 per copy, at her height) for the rabble. She is the most highly recognizable ex-vice presidential candidate since Thomas Jefferson - no small feat of public relations. So, as long as her inflammatory comments will generate interest, she isn’t going to stop. And as long as she and Bachmann don’t stop, 10-15% of the GOP base might just run their own guy, splitting the party, as did George Wallace and Ross Perot a few years ago. Disaster!

Bachmann is another populist demagogue (interestingly from the same state that gave us Hubert Humphrey, that great La Follette-style progressive) who has managed to co-opt Palin, which could mean a very interesting public “smack down” (to use Jimmy Zuma's description) between these two ladies. Both women, totally lacking in political gravitas, are incredibly ignorant and have no idea of American history. (For example, Bachmann, in her speech, credited the founding fathers with doing away with slavery. Now that was a "WTF moment" if ever there was one.) Furthermore, there seems to be a reaction to the extremism of Beck, Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, and the Fox New Channel rantings of late. Fox News has suffered a 21% year-to-year ratings drop as of October, 2010 with Glenn Beck leading the way down. Moreoever, Fox's viewership is no more than 3.5 million at any given time and most of them are 65 years or older in age. The rhetoric of the goofy birthers and the balloon heads calling Obama a socialist will be ebbing, I think.

This leaves the GOP with some interesting strategic choices. There’s no doubt the Tea Party was a huge part of their 2010 success but now the GOP leadership is running like hell from the pact with the devil they made for electoral success. The first Senate Tea Party caucus conference was conspicuously missing 3 of the 7 freshmen senators who ran on with Tea Party backing. Speaker Boehner was far less than enthusiastic in his comments about Palin and Bachmann’s “unofficial responses" to Obama’s SOTU message, possibly signaling an attempt to distance the leadershiip from the polemics of these two, if not the Tea Party itself.

Obama’s sustained bounce, currently in the mid 50''s, from the SOTU seems to be signaling a return of the indies to the Democratic column. Good economic news (Stock market up to 12,000 again, Ford posts it’s largest profit in 10 years, and a consensus among economists that the job market is on the verge of a significant uptick, etc.) should play well with centrists. Moreover, polls show that people have no interest in repealing Obamacare as they familiarize themselves with its benefits. (Brendan, my youngest son, is now on his mother’s health insurance plan, since he’s only 23 years old and has no job which gives him health care insurance.)

The GOP “cut spending” mantra is going nowhere when the chips are down. The GOP House leadership is already signaled no intention to tinker with Social Security, Medicare, and probably Medicaid. (They know old people VOTE!) So where are the deep spending cuts coming from? Agricultural subsidies? Business subsidies? (Yes, we have the highest marginal rate of corporate taxation in the industrialized world, yet multinational companies like G.E., Big Pharma and Big Energy paid ZERO in income tax, while Wal-Mart paid the full 34% amount. This needs to be corrected.) The military? Removal of the Bush tax cuts on über-wealth? A return of the Inheritance Tax? Don’t count on it.

Rather, it will be education, pure research programs, job training/poverty programs, infrastructure – precisely the areas we should be reinvesting in to remain competitive.

Democrats are no less faced with a progressive movement which has on one side a frustrated, left of center, reformist movement and sees Obama as having caved in to a Clintonist “triangulation” strategy. But he is betting that progressives have nowhere to go other than to him in 2012. This is a dangerous assumption as the progressives/young people stayed away from the polls in 2010 and donated little money to boot. Yet part of that is explainable by it being an off-year election. Obama’s success will absolutely be contingent on firing up the enthusiasm he got in 2008.

There's no arguing that the Republican Party of today has morphed into something which would be unrecognizeable just a generation ago. It has not only moved itself far more to the right but has changed the entire political paradigm. The GOP of my youth and of my father is gone with the wind. Eisenhower and Nixon would have been run out of town on a rail if they ran for office today. Eisenhower built the interstate highway system (after having seen the German autobahn) and gave California their federal water project, among other big ideas, and Nixon signed off on the creation of the EPA! The modern GOP is still the “Party of No!” and that won’t fly with voters. Until someone in that party comes up with a positive vision - negativity doesn't win presidential elections - it’s going to be a purely uphill battle for the GOP as, and IF, the economy continues to improve.

Similarly, Clinton's so called "triangulation" strategy of reaching the new center seems to have caught on with Mr. Obama, much to the chagrin of his most ardent progressive, Rooseveltian following.

A presidential campaign based entirely on "cut spending" and "no new taxes" denies the complexity of our economic problems. Our budget problems can’t be fixed with pulling in on discretionary spending. There isn’t enough fat in that area to fix anything. I look for tax reform, and possibly even increases (maybe a LBJ-type surtax?). There’s no other way. Our hole is too deep to get out of by simply “cutting spending.”

What gets little press at this point, is that fact that at least two more Supreme Court justices may retire. Their replacements could mean a marked change in the 30-year rightward march of the court, or a further erosion of settled law. The Roberts court has shown it has no intention of calling “balls and strikes,” as it said it would; but rather has handed down decisions which have changed long settled law. It's arguable that the federal courts have done more to change the look of the American political landscape than Congress itself.

The GOP seems to have no front runner who can win at this point. (My guess it’s going to be a dark horse candidate who emerges) and Obama has to hold the Democrats together and get back the indies. Nevertheless, the incumbent president always has a leg up on any challenger when facing reelection. He has the pulpit, all the trappings of power and prestige, no shortage of money, and a policy on which to campaign. Both Bush 43 and Reagan were both reelected with less than 50% approval ratings.

In any case, it’s going to be a case of either withdrawing into a shell or stepping out and facing the future.

So, in short, it’s going to be an interesting - and incredibly important - election in 2012.

The Toothless Justice Department

2011-01-21T07:32:00.000-08:00

For me, the caution flag went up when he was first announced as the next Attorney General of the United States. The new President-elect Obama had clearly signaled his intention to heal wounds, not open up new ones, or even pour salt into old ones. A large slice of the public and a not small segment of Obama’s base were disgusted with the political chicanery, the corruption, the outright selling of Congress to the highest bidder.

Eric Holder had all the right credentials, though. He grew up in Queens, graduated from Columbia Law, worked for while for the NAACP, was appointed a federal judge by Reagan, then stepped down to become the first black U.S. Attorney under Clinton. He had assisted in the prosecution of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) and was involved in the Abscam case in the early 80’s, in which 5 sitting Congressmen from both parties were convicted of corruption. Clinton later appointed Holder to Deputy AG under Janet Reno.

He was also involved in the Clinton decision to pardon Marc Rich.

His career path eventually led to a partnership with Covington & Burlington in 2001, the most prestigious A-list law firm in Washington DC, with offices all over the planet and which counted the NFL, Chiquita International Brands (aka United Fruit Co.), Halliburton, Phillip Morris and Blackwater among its clients. In short, Eric Holder had arrived. And now, he was Obama’s Attorney General-designate.

In the two years since taking office, it’s hard to see any evidence of reform; any indication of this administration and this Attorney General to begin the catharsis that the American people wanted in seeing that the stench of money and power so pervasive inside the Beltway cease. Indeed, it appears that the new guy is no different than the old guy.

To wit:

Bush and Cheney, who have admitted to the use of torture on detainees in Guantanamo Bay, have walked away from any hint of prosecution.

Tom DeLay, former House Majority Leader who was convicted in Texas of corruption, has not faced a single federal charge in connection with the Jack Abramoff case, in which his office took in tens of millions of dollars from Abramoff in exchange for “pay to play” favors.

Aside from Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who resigned and pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and violated campaign disclosure laws, not one congressman, Democrat or Republican, who was in the pocket of Jack Abramoff has faced charges of corruption. And there are many. Here are 26 of them.

Not one congressman or senator has faced corruption charges involved in the Marianas sweatshop scandal, where, in return for large campaign donations, they prevented any remedy for indentured workers imported to work in sewing shops for as little as $1.00 / hour and who were prevented from leaving the islands by their employers, who had given millions to Abramoff who, in turn, funneled millions into the pockets of congressmen to "fix" the sweatshop owners' problem.

The main “fixers” in the above scandals, Grover Norquist, Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove, and Ralph E. Reed continue as Republican power brokers to this day.

Though the list of Congressman, Senators, their relatives and staffers, who were at one time or another, in the pockets of one or another lobbyist, no one has been charged with corruption.

Most recently Holder stood by silently while the largest cable carrier in the country, Comcast, completed a deal with General Electric to purchase NBC-Universal, making them a huge player in not only how information gets to their subscribers, but what programming goes through their coaxial cables. (A stupendous development in the consolidation of the information flow to the nation.) Not a single opinion proffered.

Holder and Obama have continually cited the need for looking forward, not backward, as we enter the 3^rd year of the Administration. Yet, the odor remains, the cynicism persists, the rules of conduct remain unchanged, and no elected officials, save Ney, has faced federal scrutiny.

J. Gerald Hebert, a former acting Justice Department chief who served the government's enforcement wing in various capacities between 1973 and 1994, said in an exclusive interview with rawstory.com that the failure of federal prosecutors to charge former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) with even a single crime was indicative of a greater problem.

On the heels of the successful prosecution of DeLay for money laundering and conspiracy in Texas, Hebert said he hoped it was clear that the Department of Justice had nothing to do with that conviction.
And it appears that the department never will. That all these Bush-era officials are walking sets up a very dangerous precedent and virtually guarantees that as public memory fades, the excesses and corruption will continue.

The Justice Department, like my aged aunt, is toothless.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever." -- Thomas Jefferson

Of Douche Bags and Donuts

2011-01-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

I enjoy stand-up comedy. Comedy, at least the kind of comedy we see these days, seems to turn on pointing out the silliness of our culture: you know, pointing out the inconsistencies, the hypocrisy, the downright goofiness of some of the cultural, religious, and political icons a lot of us hold to. Lewis Black, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Robin Williams, the late George Carlin, Dennis Leary and quite a few others can break me up in a New York second watching them do their stuff on the tube. Each of them have perfected the art (?) of holding up a mirror to ourselves and laughing at what we see.

Leary is among my favorites. With his snearing, Boston Irish Catholic, street-talk sensibility he simply will gnaw on just about everything he sees as ripe for the picking when it comes to hypocrisy. I once saw him riff on smoking which had me in tears and falling out of my Lazy Boy. And whenever he’s on the night talk shows, I won’t miss him, thanks to Tivo. The guy, in a word, is just hilarious at what he does.

I caught his “Douche-bags and Donuts” special on The Comedy Channel last night. He opened the show with a song (presumably entitled “Bless Me Father, For I Have Sinned”) whose target was, for the most part, the pope. Talk about a target! He hit the poor guy with being a Nazi in Hitler’s Germany--just being a German to begin with--and of course touched on all the current problems the church itself is having to deal with. After which he proceeded to take shots at everything from old guys who wear earrings (I’m telling you, if you’re 50 years old and you wear an earring and you’re a guy… you better be a f*****g pirate!) to guys who wear socks with sandals.

He also gave the mike to a young, very attractive woman named Whitney Cummings who proceeded to riff on being married, and two other guys, Adam Ferrara and Lenny Clarke. Funny all. The show lasted an hour. Take out 15 minutes for commercials and another 15 minutes for the bleeping of the “7 words you can’t say on television,” and you were not left with a hell of a lot; but what you’re left with was indeed funny.
Nevertheless, after reflecting on it for a while, I wonder why such stand-up comedy, done in the way it currently is, is indeed so funny. Would it be as funny if so-called street language wasn’t used in its delivery?

“Working blue” in the comic business works, I think, but it is cheap comedy. It’s easy comedy, mostly because of the shock value of vulgar language. References to pubic hair (Cummings), “wide stance” defecation (Leary), vaginas, penises, anuses and the like, in fact, work in the current stand-up world. Clearly, from what I saw, the audience was having a roaring good time. And so, to an extent, was I; but I pause.
In the history of stand-up, the great Lenny Bruce, was the first of the iconoclastic comedians to take down the barriers in using salty language and blatantly sexual references. What followed from him doesn’t need to be traced out here.

Like everything else, there seems to be a evolutionary path even something like comedy undergoes. And so I wonder, where does it lead? When jokes about public hair and defecation become stale, where will stand-up go for laughs? Will we, sitting out in an audience, merely yawn at some point in the future about Larry Craig and vagina jokes? How far is too far?

Previous generations of stand-up comics like Newhart, Cosby, Diller, even the late Buddy Hackett, hilarious as they were, eschewed and continue to eschew “working blue” as a means to get laughs. I can laugh just as hard and from the gut reading a quote from Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, two of the giants of the Victorian Age, as I do when Leary mouths off about old guys with earrings.

My concern, if you will, is the crassness creeping into our language: the language we hear and the language we use in everyday speech. And the language we write right here on OS. It’s as common to hear the f-word among women in mixed company (forget about among themselves!) as it is among men. Most guys I know have no problem using vulgarity among women in social situations. It has come to be accepted in common discourse, it seems. To me, an admitted senior citizen, it’s disrespectful to women and men alike.

The average, college educated person, they say, has a vocabulary of some 80,000 English words. You would think that there are alternatives to saltiness in common speech, let alone in stand-up, which I admit is a considerably, and intentionally, heightened form of public speech, crafted to get laughs.

In any event, I won’t quit watching my favorite stand-up comics. I love comedy, to be sure. Maybe this is all just the ranting of a retro-grouch who happens to have a true love of our language and who believes that we’re headed down a path in which the coarseness of our language will have a lasting impact on the coarseness with which we treat each other.

Tucson Will Change Nothing

2011-01-12T07:57:00.000-08:00

Once again, the national breast beating continues uninterrupted after Americans read with horror about the actions of a deranged monster who decided to convert his rage into murder and mayhem. We again ask the same old questions: What is wrong with us? Why are we such a violent people? What can be done? What should be done? And with time, the present heat will dissipate and we will get back to “normal;” to calling our political opposition Nazis, or putting up maps with targets painted on certain congressman’s districts.
Correctly, we look to our national leaders for some understanding. Some way to soothe the wounds each of these acts of political violence inflict on the citizenry. Our leaders, from the President on down, promise to get to the bottom of a problem which no one seems to be able - or want - to describe. Two congressmen, Heath Schuler (D-NC) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), in a supreme act of puerile machismo, publicly announce they will pack their own handguns around town as their personal antidote to the nutcases among their constituents. Some solution: act like the murderous thugs they so publicly decry. Peter King (R-NY) introduced a bill which would make it illegal to bring a firearm within 1000 feet of a political event.
What, really, will change? What good came out of Columbine? In my own state of Oregon a few years ago, a mentally unhinged teenager named Kip Kinkel murdered his parents, then went to his high school with a rifle, opened fired and killed 2 students and wounded 22 others. What actions came out of the murders of the Kennedys, Dr. King, Dr. Tiller, Harvey Milk and George Moscone? What did we do after attempts on the lives of Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Nixon, Ford, Reagan. What happened in the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building?
We Americans cannot look the truth in the eye. We will not face the truth of our native, inbred violence simply because it is so antithetical to who we think we are. We allow the most heinous, polarizing speech to flow freely from the mouths of our elected and de facto leaders, our commentators, our candidates for office – even our movies. Presently, the debate blathers incessantly on right wing violence encoded into language, symbols, signs, and advertisements. But nothing, really, will make us face the fact that all those things have meaning; that they do, in fact, produce disastrous actions perpetrated by people who are incapable of deciphering the difference between words and deeds.
The only result from these events is an increasingly legalistic, repressive and, frankly, in many cases nothing more than symbolic, reaction by our government: The defining act of political violence in our time, 9/11, resulted in the Patriot Act, two wars, a TSA, repression, wiretapping, terror alerts, something called Homeland Security (the word itself so reminiscent of the Nazi “Fatherland” notion). We are made to practically disrobe before boarding an airplane. We are admonished to be suspicious of each other in public places. The horrific event in Tucson will inevitably distance us from our elected representatives. When I was young it was absolutely common for a constituent visiting Washington DC to “drop in” on his congressperson. To try that now will likely result in him being hauled off for questioning by the capitol police.
In every case, we wonder how violence happens; we berate ourselves; we blame these things on exceptional examples we have no control over in an open society. But the truth, the kernel of truth no one will face is that we manufacture the Loughners, the Kinkels, the Lee Harvey Oswalds, the Sarah Jane Moores and Squeaky Frommes as surely as we manufacture Coca-Cola. We imbue them with a sense of purpose; of righteousness in our increasingly toxic political discourse.
So, as we proceed to ask the questions whose answers we are unwilling to accept, those who should be held accountable hunker down and pull the American flag over themselves, claiming their freedom to say any damned thing they want or claiming that maps of congressional districts with targets painted on them are just “surveyor’s marks.”

This morning we learn that Sarah Palin, a virtual genius (with a little help from her friends at Fox News Network) at remaining in the headlines, in a well rehearsed speech makes no apology for her “don’t retreat, reload” remarks, or her above mentioned map. The National Rifle Association has gone into full “Condition Red” in fending off any discussion of the role of guns in political assassination attempts. Sharon Angle, she who intimated a “2^nd Amendment solution” to government she doesn’t like, claims it irresponsible to blame her for fomenting hatred. Congressman Gabby Gifford’s opponent in her recent campaign, Jesse Kelly, invited his supporters to a political event in which they would be allowed to shoot a fully automatic M-16 assault rifle.
Until we, as a whole people, are willing to face the fact that there are limits to what we can say and do in political speech, nothing will change. This episode in Tucson, like all the others, will fade from our national memory and in time another such tragedy will eventually occur.
It is, after all, the American way – whether we like it or not.

Speaking of Arizona

2011-01-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

Was anyone totally surprised? Frankly, you’d have to be asleep for 50 years in order to be shocked at the most recent demonstration of the American conservative psyche at work as a sitting congresswoman fights for her life and a federal judge has been murdered by some crazy who thinks shooting public servants is the answer to his delusionary view of his country being lost. Our political teapot has been simmering for years and every once in a while whatever is inside it simply boils up and out of the pot.

That’s what happened when Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed. It’s what happened when the Murrah Federal Building was blown to bits, along with 168 people. It’s what happened when civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi in 1964, a church full of kids was bombed in Alabama; and it is why Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were shot and killed within months of each other in 1968. Why, heck, we were shooting each other since Alexander Hamilton was shot dead in a duel over politics in 1804.

Hatred is, sadly, as American as a Fourth of July cookout. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists no less than 10 hate groups just in my small state of less than 4 million citizens, ranging from Nazis to white nationalists to black separatists. We are a fearful people. And we’re armed to the teeth. This is not a good combination.

What happened in Arizona yesterday is symptomatic of the country itself. When our political leaders pander to hatred, as they have for the last 30 years or so, they simply turn the gas up on the political tea kettle and crazies like Timothy McVeigh and the guy who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson and federal judge John M. Roll to death are given all they need to take matters into their own crazed hands.

We’ve practiced our politics as a blood sport from the very beginning. And maybe that’s the price we pay for what we call our democracy: for the unrestricted free speech to say whatever we want about someone who disagrees with a political point of view. Maybe it’s the price we pay for countenancing political ads with a picture of targets of certain members of congress’s districts on them, or a candidate for the senate suggesting we invoke “the 2^nd Amendment solution” to our political problems. Maybe we have to learn to live with these occasional murders in exchange for the likes of a Rush Limbaugh or a Michael Savage, the Sarah Palins, the Sharon Angles, and all the rest being able rail non-stop to millions of Americans about Communists, and Socialists, and blacks, and Mexicans, and the poor and disenfranchised; for suggesting the President of the United States is an illegal alien.

So, now we read that two prominent people (and 11 others) are gunned down in Tucson while two common folk die for lack of the Great State of Arizona having the money to give an organ transplant to its own citizens; (an ironic de facto “death panel” presided over by Governor Jan Brewer) while angry, armed white folks patrol the Mexican border looking for people jumping the border.

Here we are, a country of 300 million wildly diverse people, in our 235^th year of nationhood, still gunning each other down for holding to a political idea.

Should you be surprised?

Scalia: Working Both Sides of the Street

2011-01-06T05:20:00.000-08:00

In a fascinating article in California Lawyer Magazine, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he who regularly provides the most questions (as well as comic relief) during oral arguments before his court, argued, essentially, that “if it isn’t in the Constitution, it isn’t legal.” This is what has come to be known as the doctrine of Originalism. In essence, the Constitution means what it means, no more, no less; that the court’s one and only job is to “call balls and strikes.”
The Constitution, he maintains, is a doctrine which defines the limitations of government. Fair enough. For example, it limits the government in applying “cruel and unusual punishment” to anyone in its custody. The rub, of course is what, exactly, is cruel and unusual. In the late 18^th century, it might have meant perhaps drawing and quartering a person; or perhaps throwing him into a dungeon with nothing more than bread and water for some minor crime. (Not being old quite enough, I do not have the advantage of being more precise.) In Scalia’s world drawing and quartering are out but using an electrical prod to one’s gentalia to extract information, since it wasn’t being used in 1789, is okay.
Justice Scalia asserts that briefs which might come before the modern court arguing that, for example, imprisonment of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo is cruel and unusual punishment should have no standing in his court, because the framers had no knowledge that the government would imprison suspected terrorists:

Now if you give to those many provisions of the Constitution that are necessarily broad—such as due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments, equal protection of the laws—if you give them an evolving meaning so that they have whatever meaning the current society thinks they ought to have, they are no limitation on the current society at all. If the cruel and unusual punishments clause simply means that today's society should not do anything that it considers cruel and unusual, it means nothing except, “To thine own self be true."

Scalia maintains that the citizenry should not have recourse to the courts to interpret the meaning of an overbroad law such as, (for yet another example) the 14^th amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, and which has been the aegis under which such individuals and classes of people, such as women, have sought remedies for discrimination in the work place, or gays who were persecuted in Texas for engaging in consensual sexual activity. The superannuated justice maintains that legislatures - and the amendment process itself - is what should lay out what should and should not be lawful within the context of the Constitution.

I find it disingenuous that Scalia, in the above quote modified the adjective broad” with the adverb “necessarily.” Did not the framers intend to use broad language as a necessity for keeping their Constitution relevant to the times? If yes, then Chief Justice John Marshall’s court, in the seminal Marbury v. Madison decision of 1803 (which asserts the right to judicial review by the courts) was a correct decision. Marshall, in fact, interpreted the Constitution in Marbury. For more than 200 years, this has been an accepted role of the courts.

Marshall wrote:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department [the judicial branch] to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each.

Stare decisis, anyone? Yet, here we have Justice Scalia doing just the opposite of what he claims above.
To wit:

He joined with the majority in bestowing personhood to corporations in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), affording them the protections of the 14^th Amendment. There is no mention of corporations anywhere in the Constitution. There is, in fact, no mention of anything other than an individual as being entitled to equal protection.

He joined with the majority in Bush v. Gore (2000) injecting the Supreme Court directly into an ongoing tabulation of an election in Florida, an election in which the Constitution says is the province only of the states.

So much for “calling balls and strikes” and welcome to walking up and down the street at the same time!
So, what is the bottom line?

It is this: Even justices of the Supreme Court are no less prisoners of their own politics than We The People. There is no such thing as impartiality, much as we are wanting to believe – indeed are taught. It is an ephemeral notion at best. Some courts are better than others. This court, however, is surely one of the most transparently wily in terms of explaining its decisions.

The Chinese Repudiate Reaganomics

2010-12-29T11:25:00.000-08:00

Rate: 0In an almost astonshing departure from no-holds-barred capitalism, China has discovered that if they are to continue their 30 year, double digit economic growth they must have to have consumers other then foreign customers for their exports: consumers like their own people.

With that realization, the people who run the show there have mandated a 20% increase - for the 2nd time in 6 months - in the minimum wage throughout the entire country, thus stimulating a nation of more than a billion people to afford the goods and services that the "world's factory" now produces. At the same time, they have hiked interest rates, for the 2nd time in three months, and told banks to keep higher reserves, as a hedge against inflation.

All this has occurred amid a widening gap in China between those with money and those without it and the government's fear of a rising tide of discontent among tens of millions of poorly paid workers.
If there is any doubt that "The Chinese Century" has arrived, the Chinese government's new direction should put it to rest, for clearly they understand the importance of a strong and vibrant middle class.

This contrasts starkly with the predominant American preference, since the Reagan presidency, to let "the market" determine wages and prices. As the middle class has withered away due to decreasing real wages, the export of high wage jobs in manufacturing and the consequent softening of consumer demand with the collapse of easy credit, the American economy continues with its so-called jobless recovery. While Wall St. percolates, some 15% of the American workforce is simply out of work.

These events beg two important questions:

First, are capitalism and democracy incompatible? While the American body politick dithers and argues as to whether we should stop spending on ourselves to stimulate the economy or gets itself untracked while trying to decide who should and who shouldn't be able to marry, our competitors, by a simple mandate of a relatively small cadre of politburo oligarchs, can change the economic course, by several degrees, of the world's 2nd largest economy.

Second, should an unrestricted free market be the deciding voice in who wins and who loses? Clearly the Chinese have decided that the answer is no: the hand of the government is integral to the orderly expansion of a national economy. They have observed, and as Americans in large part seem to refuse to observe, that without consumers an economy cannot expand.

China's incredible taking of the economic center stage among the nations of the planet are also now translating into diplomatic, military, and political power. In other news, the Chinese have announced the deployment of a missile which can destroy the jewel in the crown of American naval power, the aircraft carrier. This has been described as a game changer in the balance of power in the Pacific basin. It is quite arguable that the day of the Pacific Ocean being an American mare nostrum, along with the military power it implies, may be closing.

We live in interesting times indeed.

2010-12-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

Like most Oregonians, I suppose, I’ve been following the trial of the Turnidges, father and son, with a bit more than ordinary interest. I say more than ordinary because I was one of 625 Marion County citizens who were summoned to serve on the jury for that trial. At the time I was probably the only Marion County resident who had absolutely no idea that the crime had even occurred. Somehow, in my admittedly sketchy perusals of the Salem Statesman-Journal, I had simply missed the report. Yet, it turned out this was to be the biggest, most sensational trial in Salem in years.

A few days before I showed up at the courthouse and took my place in the jury box among eleven other candidates to be questioned by the defense and prosecution teams, I had filled out a preliminary questionnaire in which the specific question was asked: “Do you have any reservations with the death penalty? I answered that no, I had no reservations but that that as a juror, I could not sentence anyone to death unless the crime were particularly heinous.

I thought a little more about my answer on the way home from the courthouse, still not having any idea of the trial for which I had been summoned. The law was the law, I thought. One either followed it or one didn’t. Pretty simple. If the law called for the death penalty, than one was obliged to apply it.

On the day of my courtroom appearance, I could see all the people who were to be the main players in this trial. I looked at the two defendants, Bruce Turnidge and his son, Joshua, with interest. They looked like any two fellows you might run into in a grocery store or maybe at a Little League game. As it turned out, one of them evidently lived in my home town of 2,500 citizens. I may indeed have run into one of them in our little grocery store in this small community.

The Marion County District Attorney, Courtland Geyer, sat with two assistants at a table on my near side and a couple of defense lawyers sat on the far side of the courtroom. (I remember thinking that these two defendants must have hocked their entire net worth, and then some, to defend themselves.) Judge Tom Hart, his glasses resting precariously on his nose, looking for all the world like one of those kindly judges you used to see in old movies, was some distance from me behind his elevated desk. A wise old owl, I thought, who had seen more than his share of the darker side of the human condition. In the audience, a couple of people, presumably members of one or another family who suffered a loss, sat military style, alert and attentive to everything going on in the room.

Judge Hart opened our proceedings with a description of the crimes the Turnidges were being accused of having committed. There were several counts of various felonies being brought against them, the worst being something called aggravated murder – which I took to be first degree murder; in other words, a murder committed with the intention of killing someone – by placing a bomb on the outside of a bank building which was subsequently discovered, brought into the bank by a bomb expert from the Sheriff’s Department whereupon it exploded, blowing the sheriff’s deputy and a nearby citizen to bits, and severely injuring others, including a chief of police, who lost his leg. The state was seeking the death penalty for the two defendants.

One by one, the lawyers questioned us about our ability to be impartial in our decision making process. Did we know anyone on either of side of the table? Did we know Judge Hart? Had we ever been involved in a felony trial, or even been the victim or the defendant in a felony? All the usual questions. But the key question which the DA asked was, of course, would we have any sort of problem in applying the death penalty to a defendant if found guilty in a trial involving a capital murder.

One by one, my fellow prospective jurors answered the questions, and one by one they stated than no, they had no problem with applying the death penalty. (Moreover, and perhaps thankfully, we would be given three choices if there was a penalty phase to this trial: we could execute them; we could sentence them to life in prison without parole; or we could give them a 30 year minimum sentence.)

I was the last of the twelve to be questioned, and that gave me a chance to further examine my own feelings. As I sat listening to them, a scenario crossed my mind. I imagined myself having to stand these two fellows up against a wall and shoot them to death, all with the imprimatur of the State of Oregon, as punishment for what they had done to two fellow citizens and their families. For, I thought, it seemed to me that the process of applying the death penalty to a criminal is sanitized by the citizenry. We hire executioners to do the deed, we don’t have to look anyone in the eye; we don’t have to aim a rifle, pull a switch or inject a needle. We don’t have to look on their children, their wives and other loved ones through a window as we take their lives in punishment - retribution really - for their taking of someone else’s life.

And so, District Attorney Geyer came to me. “Tell us, Mr. Burns, how to you feel about being a juror in this trial? Can you be impartial in your decision making, knowing what you’ve probably read and what Judge Hart just explained to you?”

“Well, sir, first of all, I confess that I didn’t even know about this case until this morning. It’s probably a sad commentary on my ability to stay abreast of local news but somehow I just missed this thing. But yes, I think I can be impartial.”

The DA smiled at me in a very friendly way. “Don’t feel badly about that. It’s a very common thing. A lot of people pay far more attention to national and world news than what going on in their backyard.”

“Indeed,” I smiled back at him, just a bit embarrassed.

“So how do you feel about the death penalty, as it relates to this case?” He was looking at me squarely in the eye.

“Well,” I said, “As I said on the questionnaire, the crime would have to be pretty darned bad. And the truth right this moment is that I’m just sort of unsure of my own feelings. I can’t be absolutely sure one way or the other. I’ve been sitting here listening to the others and honestly, it seems just a little too easy to tell you I wouldn’t have a problem with applying it but then, well, I just don’t know. If push came to shove, I just don’t know what I’d do. I truly believe that life without parole is even worse than death. I mean, spending decades behind bars deprived of anything resembling freedom must be a horrible punishment. But then…..” I cut myself off. Don't be preachy, I thought.

The DA was looking at me in a way which seemed to signal that he appreciated my honesty. After all, I was the first and only member in the box to admit to any kind of reservation. Was I, in fact, the only “wimp” in the box? I felt a little unnerved.

He stood silent for a second or two, as if thinking whether or not his next question was appropriate.

“Well, let me put the question to you another way: Suppose you were deliberating and the jury was locked eleven for sentencing a defendant to death, and you were the deciding vote. You are holding the defendant’s life in your hands. You would decide whether he would live or die. Would you be able to cast a vote in favor of executing the defendant? Even when eleven of your fellow jurors believed with all their hearts that executing the defendant was proper and just?” He obviously purposely avoided speaking about the Turnidges in particular but rather created a fictional defendant in whose trial I would be a juror.

As I heard his question, I could feel my stomach knot and I began to choke up. I had been taken into this imaginary trial by his question. It had taken me to another place. My eyes (unbelievably!) began to tear. I sat, for a good fifteen or twenty seconds, looking at Mr. Geyer, and then over at Judge Hart who, although I noticed had been sitting quietly in his chair looking at papers, seemingly disinterested in the goings on in his courtroom, was now drilling a hole in me.

“I…well….no. I just couldn’t. I….can’t. I just can’t take another man’s life. I just can’t. I…can’t.” My voice trailed off into silence, as though caught in a lie. But it wasn’t a lie. I shrugged my shoulders, looking at the DA as if to say, That’s all I’ve got! By now, my eyes were full of tears and someone handed me a tissue. I was embarrassed at my open emotionalism but my mind was somewhere else - in the imaginary juror’s room having to decide on an imaginary defendant’s life.

And so, I was excused immediately, with the sincere thanks of the DA.

I wasn’t especially proud of exposing my feelings in such an extreme way, but so, too, I was relieved. I had answered the question to myself, too. I knew where I stood and in some strange way I was thankful for my own honesty with myself.

As the trial proceeded and was covered in the newspapers in Portland and up and down the Willamette Valley the evidence and testimony became public, I had my own doubts about how the thing would go. The one thing that kept bothering me about this thing was the issue of intent. Did the Turnidges intend to kill someone? It seemed to me that to be guilty of “Murder 1” the intent to kill must be proved. Did the defendants, who admitted the intent to rob the bank, place that bomb on the outside of the building to kill someone? I don’t know. I didn’t attend the trial. But the jury came back after just four and a half hours of thought. They found the Turnidges guilty of all charges.

As I write these words, the jury is deliberating on the punishment. Will it be death? Will it be life? Who knows? But one thing is certain in my mind now: I cannot put someone to death, legally or otherwise. The death penalty is nothing if not the supreme act of retribution. It has nothing to do with deterrence; nothing to do with even punishment if you believe, as I do, that punishment implies paying one’s debt to society and being given another chance at being a productive human being, if even behind bars. Death brings no victims back to life; brings no true consolation to the victims’ families left behind in abject sorrow. The death penalty is from another age: the Old Testament, biblical age of “an eye for an eye;” a holdover from a time when life was harder, shorter, and tribal.

Most of us profess some sort of allegiance to the teachings of Jesus Christ who said, “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me” yet we persist in a kind of ritualized, rationalized belief, buried somewhere in the deepest, most primitive part of our brain that payback – is there a more truthful word? – is okay.

To me, it isn’t okay.

###

Obama is Just Being Obama

2010-12-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

So-called "liberals and progressives," which I take to mean Democrats who stand a little more to the left than, say, the Clintonistas of the 90's, have been pulling their hair out by the hank with this most recent "caving in " on the part of the Administration in order to get a tax bill through the Congress. (I include this writer, who cheerfully - even perhaps, fanatically - voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)

The new tax bill which cleared the Senate by a vote of 81-19 on its face smells to the high heavens to most rightie conservatives and leftie progressives alike. Tea Party types are incensed about this bill adding hundreds of billions to the national debt. Lefties are disgusted with the fact that the GOP senate caucus withheld the continued support for the long term unemployed, the consideration of repeal of "Don't Ask Don’t' Tell," the ratification of the new START treaty until they got the Bush tax breaks continued for very wealthy Americans. To a lot of Democrats, the hypocrisy of the GOP Senate shouting" No!" on every spending bill which added to the debt rang loudly as they simlutaneously took a rock hard, immovable position on maintaining incredibly favorable treatment to just 2.25% of Americans on income and estates taxes, adding hundreds of billions to the debt. It was an astonishing double deal to many.

Yes, I watched Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a personal hero of mine, take the well of the Senate and speak for 8 hours on the duplicity and the cynicism of the GOP in using the kinds of tactics they used to get virtually 100% of their loaf of desired tax breaks. I watched him point out repeatedly that the 50% of the increase to the national debt will be caused by tax breaks to the very wealthy. And yes, I watched Mitch McConnell and John Boehner piously insist on continuation of the Bush tax cuts for “all Americans” (read: the really rich guys) and not just a nearly prostrate American middle and lower class.

It's always a good thing to step away from the sturm und drang of daily headlines and talking / shouting heads on the tube, and reflect a little on the political debate now and then.

It's worth thinking about what would have happened had not the Administration “caved.” [the word which this writer used in a previous piece on Obama] The chances are highly likely that the gridlock in the Congress would have continued well into 2011 as we approach a presidential election year. Millions of unemployed Americans would literally go a-begging for lack of financial assistance; the festering debate on allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve in the armed forces would continue unresolved and finally, it’s a good bet that the federal government itself would be shut down for lack of a spending bill to finance the government through the 2011 fiscal year.
In my own reflections, I wonder whether the Obama voted for was the Obama I thought I voted for. Those of us who have been distressed about his seeming willingness to look for almost any way to get a bill through Congress, including his evident willingness to give almost the entire store away might take another look at this President.

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama made it quite clear where he stood. He chastised extremists on both the right and the left of holding to unalterable demands in their politics; to insisting that politics is a zero sum game: for every winner there’s a loser (and the loser better not be me!). Speaking to Democrats he wrote:

I believe an attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It’s what keeps us locked in “either / or” thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the notion that we must tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace “socialized medicine.” (The Audacity of Hope, p.40)

There are two facts which may ultimately prove the worth of this tax bill just passed by the Senate and now currently being debated in the House. First, that both the hard-nosed right and the hard nosed-left are upset is telling. It is Obama’s use of Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy to get legislation passed which may not be bold and precedent setting, but which is needed, modest, and allows for future discussion. This strategy has led to an opening up of the legislative logjam in the Congress. Expect DADT to pass. Expect the Fed to gets its financing. Expect the START treaty to be ratified. That’s a lot of “get” for the “give.” Whether or not jobs materialize in significant numbers as a result of this bill is debatable at this point. We shall see but if past is prologue……

Second, polls show that a vast majority of Americans, up to 63%, approve of the Bush tax cut extension. Most queried Americans are saying they’re happy to see Congress get something done. That alone is a significant achievement. And it is a reminder that Americans, if dealt with truthfully, are remarkably middle-of-the-road in their political stance.

Obama has accomplished much in his first two years. We have a gotten a workable form of health care to 99% of Americans, all of which will kick in by 2014. (As it stands, millions of young people under the age of 26 – many of them in college – can immediately continue their coverage on their parents’ policy.) This is an incredibly important achievement, particularly in light of the fact that every president for the last 100 years has failed to achieve anything at all.

It is quite possible that GOP polemics, which garner the headlines on cable channels and all over the blogoshere, may turn out to be their undoing in 2012. It’s quite possible that Americans, at the end of the day, are fed up with the politics of “heads I win, tails you lose.” Furthermore, it is interesting that Obama, in a year he got thumped in the midterms, retains high personal and job approval positives in every poll, as high as 48%. The GOP itself polls lower (36%) than the president. This is also an important “tell” about whether the strategy of “either / or” is working. Obama’s approvals are actually higher than either Truman or Clinton or Bush II after each lost their congressional majority.

Slowly but surely, Obama is building a résumé of achievement on which to be reelected in two years. And he is doing it not by pointing a finger of accusation at his political opponents but by trying to find the common thread amongst all Americans on every issue; something on which a majority can agree in order to progress.
Obama knows, as most of us and all politicians should know, that the constant throwing of brickbats in the House and Senate chambers as Congress deals with incredibly important issues, will only serve to gum up the machinery of government.

THe GOP Is Drinking Poisoned Tea

2010-12-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

If you accept that that Tea Party (which is not a legitimate political party but an amorphous accumulation of frustrated, radical Know-Nothings who can’t feel whose hand is in their wallet pocket) isn’t a force to be reckoned with, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Republican Party leadership and its corporate benefactors, which shamelessly courted TP voters in the midterm elections, have now run smack into the reality of governing in a two party system of government, while a faction in its midst insists that the best government is no government and screams like banshees about things like taking up “a 2^nd Amendment solution” to clean up the mess in Washington. People like Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, Michelle Bachman, Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell, and Greg Holloway, whose voices are heard by millions, are having a field day with the GOP leadership.

Events of the last week have furnished us a vision of the next two years. The GOP signed on to the Obama Administration tax “deal,” which the President sought to prevent millions of the unemployed from being cut off from assistance and which agreed to GOP insistence on preserving the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of income earners. The deal was worth – though no one seems to know precisely – more than a trillion in additional debt.

Needless to say, the TPers went ballistic. If nothing else, the Tea Party doesn’t do “debt” very quietly. Though the deal is now done and due to be signed into law tomorrow, there is a bitterness in the mouths of members of both the GOP and the Democrats in Congress. But the realities of governing left little choice to either party as the Christmas break ending the 110^th Congress approached. Both parties stood to lose something near and dear to their hearts had not the deal been made.

But something even more telling, as all this bargaining proceeded, was afoot. A bill to fund the government for next year, called the Omnibus Spending Bill, was also on the table, which was due to be also part of the last minute dealings. Although it was a Democratic bill, seven Republican members had agreed to sign on to it, which would allow floor debate and, presumably, assured passage, by a Democratic majority in the Senate.
Within the bill were some $8 billion dollars’ worth of earmarks, half of which were quietly inserted by 23 GOP members of Congress – even after having pledged to their Tea Party backers to cease the use of earmarks immediately after the election. Once this fact was made publicly known, though, the 7 GOP members of the Senate reversed their agreement to back the OSB, which then forced Majority Leader Reid to pull the bill, since he now didn’t have the votes to get it through the Senate.

To assuage the anger of his Tea Party backers, and in an incredible display of hypocrisy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, John Kyl, “Cryin’ John” Boehner, Eric Kantor, John Thune, and John Cornyn publicly railed against the bill for its earmarks, into which they themselves had inserted millions for their constituencies. (Old habits die hard.)

On the eve of its takeover of the House and with a stronger voice in the Senate, it appears the GOP cup is being filled with tea which, if nothing else, will be bitter to the taste, if not outright poisonous, for it cannot have it both ways. It cannot shut down government spending while trying to deal with a Democratic Party which insists that the last refuge of the commonfolk is, in fact, the federal government.

The 111^th Congress portends to filled with more twists and turns than a John LeCarré novel.
Stock up on popcorn – if you can afford it.

Why 2012 Counts: The Quiet Battle for the Courts

2010-12-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

It is a fair bet that sometime in the next 6 years - likely starting in 2012 - one or more of the Supreme Court Justices will retire. Ruth Badar Ginsburg will be 79 in 2012; Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy both will be 76; Steven Breyer will be 74. Assuming that one or more of them decide to retire because of age or health, the President and Senate who appoint their replacements will most likely appoint a jurist who is young and likely to stay on the bench for years - even decades - to come.
Bush v. Gore and Citizens United give the lie to any notion of one side or the other being so-called judicial activists. They both are. In study after study, it is a fact that a judge's or justice's politics follow him to the bench. One person's judicial activism is another's strict constructionism or originalist view of The Constitution.
Inasmuch as the Supreme Court hears only about 75 cases a year, a no less important battle for control of the courts rages at the district and appellate level within the federal court system between liberals, moderates and conservatives. There are 678 federal courts and 179 appellate courts which dispose of some 60,000 cases a year. The President and Senate are reponsible for appointments to those courts as well.
Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Clinton appointees to federal courts ruled conservatively in about 52% of the cases they heard. Appointees by Reagan and both Bushes, conservative outcomes jumped to 62%, according to Cass Sunstein, a professor of Law at the University of Chicago.
A 2006 study of thousands of federal cases by Robert Carp, a political scientist at the University of Houston, found the George W. Bush's appointees to federal benches came to conservative opinions a full 5 % more often than appointees made under Bush I and Ronald Reagan and that the "judges appointed by President George W. Bush are the most conservative on record when it comes to civil rights and liberties." The signature Supreme Court case of Hamdan, in which the court denied a civil trial to a suspected terrorist sparked off much debate among the legal community as to where the War on Terror was taking civil liberties.
Moreoever, a four-month investigation of Bush-appointed judges by the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that six appellate court judges and 18 district court judges contributed a total of more than $44,000 to politicians who were influential in their appointments. Some gave money directly to Bush after he officially nominated them.
In short, the justice system is under attack by a quiet movement of hard right conservatives. And it is the battle for the makeup of the courts, whose decisions will affect Americans as much or more directly as any bill emanating from the halls of Congress.
All the major issues confronting Americans: Roe and abortion, religion in public schools, civil rights, the right to appeal, the death penalty, gay marriage, and others, will at some point be addressed by future federal district courts and slowly move up the ladder to circuit courts of appeal and the Supreme Courts itself.
The election of 2012 will have as much to do with our legal system as it will the ideological direction of future congresses and presidents. And for that reason alone, if no other, it is more than time to think about the consequences of how we cast our votes two years hence. The stakes couldn't be higher.

Pack your bags, Marge, we're going to Qatar.

2010-12-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

Can you believe it? FIFA, the governing body of international soccer has just awarded tiny little Qatar, a million and a half strong spec in the Persian Gulf, the World Cup Games in 2022 after no fewer personages than Bill Clinton, Morgan Freeman and US soccer star Landon Donovan made a presentation for the US to host the games. Why, even the President of the United States weighed in on behalf of America as the ideal site for the games.
"But," as Belushi liked to say, "Nooooo!" They give them to Qatar. (Which country's name I almost always misspell due to an autonomic reaction of my fingers to insert a "u" after the "Q")
So, why Qatar? Well, let's go over the physical requirements: Infrastructure? Qatar has only 3 of the 12 required stadiums to host the games. The US has 18 stadiums with seating for 75,000 or more, with roads, lodging, restaurants and security to handle the games. In the spirit of fairness, though, oil-rich Qatar has promised to spend 50 BILLION dollars in new stadiums.
Qatar has 3 airports with paved runways and only one which can handle large jets. The US has, well, a lot! Access to Qatar is via air, dhow, or camel caravan, since there are only 7700 km of anything resembling roads.
Qatar has 1.4 million people, 60% of whom is imported labor from South and Southeast Asia. The US has 300 million and, okay, a few folks from Latin America, nearly everyone of which is soccer mad.

Qatar has 1 national team, made up of foreigners. The US has professional and amateur soccer leagues, not to mention youth leagues in every city in the nation.
You get the idea. Other than to "bring soccer to new lands," as FIFA president Sepp Blatter proudly proclaimed, there is no earthly reason to hold them in a place which forbids public consumption of alcohol (thus totally eliminating most Europeans - especially the Brits), and whose average daily temperature and humidity in summer would make a Turkish bath seem tepid; which has no soccer tradition at all; which has a human rights record bordering on feudal; a place where bringing pork (as in barbecue) into the country will get you a jail sentence.
Well, there is one rather mundane reason. Qatar paid $15 million to French soccer star Zinedine Zidane to tout Qatar to the 22 member voting panel in Zurich (two of whom were tossed for corruption) as well as Pep Guardiola, Argentina’s Gabriel Batistuta and Dutchman Ronald de Boer.
No, Marge. I said Qatar. Q-A-T-A-R. There's no "u" in Qatar. Waddaya mean, you're not going?

Fear and the Bait Ball Instinct

2010-11-24T09:38:00.000-08:00

There is an odd similarity between one of those marine bait balls you've undoubtedly (?) seen on one or another television natural history show and, most especially, what passes for American conservatism You know: those monster schools of herring or sardines that gather in tight clusters as a defense against predators, only to be gobbled up by whales, porpoises, sharks and tuna from below, and screeching gulls from above. It's the herd instinct gone lethal, for the very thing which forces those hapless fish to seek refuge as individuals by subsuming themselves to become one of tens of thousands of other individuals virtually guarantees their own misfortune.

American conservatives are like bait balls in our current political discourse. And their manipulators are those that have learned to use power to gobble them up to achieve their ends.
Here's an example. All through the first decade of this century, only around 31% of Americans believed warnings about human caused global warming were an exaggeration. Today, according to Gallup, after the concentrated efforts of corporations who think they have something to lose (the fossil fuel industry, primarily) in addressing something which the entire climate science community agrees is real (and at least partially human caused) just about 50% of Americans think GW is an exaggeration.

From 2005 to 2008 Exxon shoveled out $9 million and Koch Industries another $25 million to create the bait ball of Americans who will influence collective efforts (read: government policy) to mitigate something which will affect the entire planet adversely, not least the United States. Conveniently, it was only after Al Gore called attention to this problem in his now infamous film "An Inconvenient Truth" that the energy industry and its minions like Sen. James Imhofe and dozens of other Republican power brokers mobilized to discredit not only Gore, but the entire, worldwide scientific community as well. And, if the polls are to be believed, they have done a masterful job of discrediting critical scientific evidence, causing American conservatives to gather together tightly in fear: fear of loss of sovereignty in cooperating with other nations, fear of the loss of a hundred year love affair with gasoline powered vehicles, and a more vague but highly paradoxical fear of the loss of individual choice.

Another example: George W. Bush's popularity prior to 9/11 was falling and by August of 2001 hit 49%. When the tragedy of the World Trade Center hit, the Bush Administration over the next 18 months actively hyped the fear of another such attack, calling on a military expedition to Afghanistan, announcing a "Global War on Terrorism," invaded another sovereign nation and dispensed with essential civil liberties - all with the willing approval of more than a colossal 90% of all Americans. It was only when Americans had come up for air, as it were, that misgivings and questions about the rationale for his war began to emerge but by then the damage - to Iraq and Afghanistan; to America's reputation; the loss of American lives and treasure - had been done.

Fear, as Adolph Hitler and Josef Goebbels quite overtly noted, is a wonderful concentrator of public opinion. People will do a lot of very un-human things in order to preserve themselves against a perceived threat, not the least of which is to gather themselves into bait balls for manipulators to chow down on. When in a state of heightened fear, people will dispense with reason willingly and, more often than not, to their ultimate chagrin or worse.

Most Americans probably think that Americans "get it right" in the end; that some magical filter in the body politick - some mechanism in the workings of a democratic system will inevitably lead people to collectively make good decisions in how they govern themselves. But recent (and even not so recent) history debunks that myth. The tendency to become bait balls for those who hunger for power is ever present and of late, has never been more obvious to even the most casual observer.

"I Am Lost to the World"

2010-11-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song! - Friedrich Rückert

In this cynical age, it is hard to imagine an artist who was willing to sacrifice virtually everything to his art, but such a man was Gustav Mahler. Had Mahler not been as singularly focused on writing what has become some of the most beautiful music ever concieved in the mind of mankind, our world would be less understandable, less human to us who, a hundred years later, are the direct beneficiaries of this man's contribution to the world of serious music.

Mahler was an Austrian Jew, born in 1860, who lived in an age in which anti-Semitism was as accepted in fin de siècle Middle and Eastern Europe as Jim Crow was in the American South at roughly the same period in history. Though not religious (indeed he took up Catholicism in order to achieve the most prestigious musical post in Vienna, the directorship of the Hofoper, the imperial opera), he was keenly aware of his European Jewish culture, particularly its music, some of which found its way into his greatest symphonic works. But to classify him as a "Jewish composer," as he was at the turn of the 20th century by most of his critics, misses him be a mile.

Any serious study of Gustav Mahler, who composed at a time when the Romantic movement in music had pretty much run its course and the dawn of the so-called Modernist movement could be seen, leads one to the conclusion that some things are universally worth sacrificing all for. In Mahler's case, it was his absolute devotion to music - not just his own but all great music (he was considered one of the greatest conductors of his time) - even at the risk of scorn and personal abuse; for the comtemporary critics of Mahler's works were nearly universally dripping with hatred for his music, principally his symphonic works.

The above cited Rückert poem which was put to music by Mahler in 1901 reminds us that even in our age, there remains beauty and truth; that there are still some things which can raise us to understand what it is to be fully human.

The Strange Tale of Dr. Andy Harris

2010-11-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

Andy Harris, until his election as a Republican member of the House of Representatives this fall, was a practicing anesthesiologist in Maryland and he was mad. He was so mad at the Democrats and Barack Obama at passing the Health Care Reform Act, one provision of which gives health care insurance to those previously unable to obtain it, that he decided he would run for congressional office himself. And so he put together a campaign almost singularly based on taking down what has become derisively known as Obamacare.

But Andy Harris didn't just drop out of the blue and into national politics. He was a known entity in Maryland, having served 12 years as a state senator and he had a proven track record of very conservative political stances. He voted against the creation of a state childcare tax credit; against a bill to reduce class sizes in public schools; and against a bill to create a cancer screening, prevention and treatment program. In other words, Andy Harris was against government action in health care, even at the state level. People, he advocated, should be responsible for themselves, not the government. No one, he said repeatedly, should be given government paid health care insurance. And so, sensing an opportunity, he ran for Congress in Maryland's 1st Congressional District in 2010. And Andy Harris won handily.

At an orientation meeting for incoming freshmen congresspeople shortly after the election, it was explained to him that his very generous, government furnished, health care plan for members of the House would not become effective until February 1st, 2011 - 28 days after taking office; and Andy Harris was incensed at that news. He stood up and told the lady who was conducting the orientation that the 28 day wait was ridiculous; that this was the only employer he had ever worked for didn't provide health care from Day One. How, he asked, would he protect himself and his family for a whole month, waiting for his health care plan to kick in?

And so Dr. Andy Harris goes to Congress without, presumably, health care insurance for himself and his family for 28 days, as he begins his quest to deny any kind of health care insurance to millions of people of lesser means, the same people who as taxpayers give him what he seems to think is his personal entitlement. The irony couldn't be more striking.

Dr. Andy, we weep for your misfortune.

It's a Kid's Game

2010-11-04T08:07:00.000-07:00


Tim Linsecum pitches for the SF Giants in the 2010 World Series

Major League Baseball is the sport most like life itself. Success or failure is determined over a 162 game season and requires a daily effort of doing something you're good at very well; something for which one trains to do from childhood and which is a passion on the part of a player to reach perfection - or least get as close to it as possible. And in life it's the same, only success is measured in years rather than a single summer.

One of the reasons baseball has remained the nation's favorite sport is that fans can identify immediately with most professional baseball players. Though they are superb athletes, they come in all sizes and shapes and colors. Some of the greatest ballplayers were not men of any special size, as is required in professional basketball or football. They are kind of "everyman" for most fans. The Baseball Hall of Fame includes 5'10", 160 lb Pee Wee Reese (of the Brooklyn Dodgers) as well as 6'4", 200 lb Willie McCovey. Even more interestingly, baseball players are known for being generally down-to-earth, unpretentious, ordinary people who excel at what they do. There aren't any professional baseball players that have won a Nobel or a Pulitzer Prize. They are us - but better at baseball than most fans can ever hope to be.

And, as in life, a good deal of luck is necessary. A team must stay healthy; the right combination of players is required for a successful team; and a single fluke on the field can sometimes spell outright disaster after a whole summer of work to reach a championship: an errant pitch, a mistake fielding or running the bases - really, a hundred things - can spell the difference between elation or despair for a major league ballplayer and, of course, the fans. When the San Francisco Giants played their first West Coast World Series in 1962 against the New York Yankees, they lost the entire 7-game contest by a single, absolutely impossible catch by Bobby Richardson, made off of a red hot line drive to right center field hit by the aforementioned Willie McCovey, and in an instant it ended the Giants' season. The record books are full of such turns of luck. Moreover, in baseball there are no ties. One's team either wins or loses, just like in life itself.

Baseball is such a part of the fabric of American life that we use baseball terms all the time to describe our own mundane world. One "hits a home run" at work. We "can't get to 1st base" in persuading someone of a point of view. We "round 3rd and head for home" as we anticipate a success. We pass "3 Strikes" laws for offenders.

San Francisco is a big baseball town and always has been. Their first team, the San Francisco Seals, dated back to 1903 and the Pacific Coast League. It is also a town which has given Major League Baseball a wealth of talented players: the DiMaggio brothers from North Beach; "Lefty" Gomez from Rodeo, just across the bay; "Dink" O'Brien; Tony Lazzeri and Bob Meusel of "Murderers' Row" fame; Eddie Joost; Frank "Lefty" O'Doul; the list of San Franciscans who made it to the bigs is huge.

My father took me to my first Seals ballgame when I was 8 or 9 years old. Seals Stadium was located in the Mission District, a part of the city made up of blue collar workers from the shipyards and warehouses which made up the bulk of the local economy in those days. The Seals were my team. I was a fanatical follower of the sports pages, checking the standings each day to see how they were doing, or listening to their games on the radio with my father. Baseball was as much a part of my life back then as roller skating around the neighborhood. Pickup ballgames were always being played in the park across the street from my house on Niantic Avenue in Daly City, a working-class town butted up against the southern city limits of San Francisco.

In 1951, a young fellow from my neighborhood, Eddie Cereghino, was a star pitcher for Jefferson High School and he became a local celebrity when he was signed by the Yankees and broke into professional baseball as a Seal. I used to sit on the curb at his house and watch him practice with his father, throwing blazing fast balls into his garage where his father would catch him. And when Ed pitched his first game at Seals Stadium, my dad and I were there. It was all a very heady thing for a young boy of 8 years, and I got about as close the baseball gods as I would ever get, watching Eddie Cereghino.

In their last year as a San Francisco team, the Seals won the Pacific Coast League pennant in 1957. The New York Giants had decided to move to San Francisco, and that was the end of an era in The City. At first, it was hard for me to transfer loyalty to the Giants, but it didn't take too long for it to happen.

From 1958, when they played their first season in San Francisco (at Seals Stadium, no less!) to last week, when they finally won it all, the Giants had never won a World Series in San Francisco, despite getting to the Series three times. For the fans it was one season of varying frustration after another. Some years were good ones and others, well, were disastrous. At one point the team was so bad that the fans stopped coming to games at all - and the park they played in at Candlestick Point was so unfriendly to fan and player alike that the Giants nearly pulled up stakes again to go to Toronto to play on one occasion, and in the early 90's it looked like they would depart for Tampa. But soon enough, local investors saved the team from moving, a spanking new ballpark was built and the Giants became a settled, permanent fixture of local life.

All of which brings me to last Saturday, when the San Francisco Giants won their first World Series after a drought of no fewer than 56 years. As in life, this boy's game, this teacher of persistence and constant effort to persevere, this microcosm of life itself, suddenly galvanized a whole city as never before.

When they came home in triumph from Texas as champions, some 20,000 people welcomed them them back home. The new heroes were people with names like Uribe, Linsecum, Renteria, and Wilson. And as the fans cheered, they remembered Mays and Davenport and McCovey and Snow and Montefusco and all the Giants on whose shoulders the new champs now stood. And some of us remembered those days at Seals Stadium, too, sitting in the stands cheering our boys on, a 25-cent "redhot" in hand.

For some of us who remember, the day was filled with remembrance of a city filled with a colorful baseball past. And of fathers taking their sons to see a ballgame.

A Hiroshima of the Mind

2010-10-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

It is sometimes easier to catch stardust than it is for a parent to guide a straying child away from disaster. It can be futile. It’s like a mother elephant I once saw on one of those natural history shows on television. You know: that heart wrenching picture of the mother standing over the body of her dead calf trying to lift the thing back to its feet as the rest of the herd moves on. She is torn between staying with her dead offspring and the natural urge to be with others. To stay will not resurrect her baby, but persisting also puts her own life in jeopardy since she would be without the protection of the herd. Finally, after hours, she abandons her lifeless baby and runs off to join the others. The vultures and other scavengers waiting nearby, swoop down and strip the carcass to its bones.

There is no one-size-fits-all manual on parenthood. All the books ever written on the topic never seem to quite guide the parent to a seamless, happy upbringing of their own children. I’ve had four shots at it. Three came out just fine, but there was one who just didn’t seem to “get it.”

At the tender age of 8, Brendan showed signs of being a contrarian. Though he was reared in a home where classical music was almost always playing on the radio, he became fascinated with so-called Gangsta Rap. At 13, he smoked his first joint. He took to wearing "do-rags" and baseball caps backwards. He picked up on the clothing and language of the sub-culture: his jeans were always hanging perilously low, exposing his boxer shorts as though they were swimming trunks. By 15, he got picked up for shoplifting and at 16 he dropped out of high school, having failed at nearly every class and falling with a crowd of troubled friends just like himself. In his late teens he was playing with all manner of drugs, then alcohol and pot settled in as his constant drugs of choice. From then on his life was a constant series of brushes with the law, an occasional beating - either given or received - from some person whom he had wronged or who had wronged him in some way, usually involving something stolen from someone. His hatred of convention, of society, and mostly of the police, was the one unalterable trait etched into his brain by the acid of a hardscrabble life outside a shamelessly middle-class home.

Brendan's life had entered the netherworld of non-achievers; the people who simply existed on the fringes of society, living from hand to mouth, unable to squarely face their circumstances. To him, having a twenty dollar bill in his pocket was a successful day. By his early 20's, Brendan's mind was as barren as those pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb. He had no marketable skills and any step in a forward direction was quickly followed by two or three in reverse. He had never even read a book, something I, as his father, could never understand. And worst of all, Brendan saw himself as a victim, the most convenient excuse for unchanging behavior ever invented.

Meanwhile his older brother and his parents worked like sled dogs to guide him to the path of righteousness. Countless intersections of his aberrant behavior with the values of his family would cause frustration and sadness in no one being able to get through to Brendan. It wasn't that he didn't know he was on the wrong road but clearly he was unwilling to change course and, in time, he saw through the prism of lenses misshapen by years of drugs and alcohol that he was now unable to change course.

In time, the family fell apart, unable to deal with three distinct children, each with their own set of circumstances which were as different from each other as night from day. The oldest son, 5 years Brendan's senior, gifted in every conceivable way but a distinct underachiever until he had an epiphany at 20 which thrust him into college, graduating from one of the country's most prestigious universities and on to a career in business. A middle son, Kevin, was born with severe mental and physical underdevelopment and settled into an assisted living home in a nearby city.

After the divorce, Brendan came to live with me and for 10 years life was difficult for us both. As his father, I simply could not walk away from him, advised as I was by everyone I knew that "enabling" him to persist in his by now criminal behavior, furnishing him with a bed and a roof, was simply not helping him. At times, he attended one or another 12-step program but he simply wasn't convinced of its need in his life. Father and son cohabited in an up and down world of crisis, followed by a short period of peace and then another crisis. On one level Brendan came to see me as not much more than a source of food, money (either given or stolen) and shelter. On another, there were obvious cris du coeur when we butted heads in the middle of one or another alcoholic rage, all of which gave me some hope that in the recesses of the wreckage of his mind, the truth would stun him to do something for himself. I believed that if I could actually keep him alive, his own epiphany would surely occur; that time was all that was needed. But it never happened, to my enduring grief.

One day, after another bout of abuse from him, I finally came to the realization that I was now in the last years of the 7th decade of my own life and that if I continued my present arrangement with him, Brendan would surely shorten it, one way or another.

And so I asked him for a divorce. I would no longer be his father and he my son. He now had to face the music on his own. I realized, perhaps rightly or wrongly, that I was no longer able to protect him. I had to come to the understanding that his life was his own and that whatever happened would happen regardless of my being a part of it. I had decided to save myself.

On a Friday afternoon, Brendan gathered up his few belongings and departed.

I don't know where he went, nor do I want to know. I will create for myself a recovered son who, without my involvement, will survive and be a happy man, comfortable in a healthy body. I will try to smother the sadness and the feelings of failure with the hope that time will heal what must be a devastatingly difficult existence, for I know my son knows there is another way to live, if only he had the courage to choose it. For me, to dwell on the other, the real, is more than I can accept. Like the mother elephant, I choose to rejoin my own herd.

I Married a Corporation!

2010-10-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

       It's true. I did! One of my best friends, Ben, heads up a noted Fortune 500 corporation. From time to time we break some bread together in Midtown and catch each other up on our lives. So, usually over a couple of iced Stolis and maybe some calamari fritti, we share opinions of every imaginable subject: our families (Ben lives out in the Hamptons and I'm still in Queens, where we were both born and reared.), work, politics, all of it.
      Ben and I both went to the same schools, from elementary all the way through college. But after college our lives took different paths. I wound up a beat writer for a newspaper and Ben went to work at an investment bank. Thirty years later, Ben winds up with more money than God's lawyer, running a company of 8,000 people worldwide, and I'm still covering everything from Ivan Boesky to accidents on the Long Island Railroad.
       Somehow, a couple of weeks ago Ben and I got on to the topic of the Citizens United decision and what it meant to each of us. Of course, I was whining about losing whatever clout my individual vote for a candidate seeking my vote had and Ben, as he listened, has this wry smile on his face. Suddenly, I had this crazy idea and I stopped in mid-sentence and just blurted out, "Ben, will you marry me?"
      The wry smile immediately changed to one of What?
      "What?"
      "Yeah, let's get married!" Now I was the one with the smile on my face, knowing I had confounded my lifelong friend.
      A somewhat guarded look came over Ben. He lifted his vodka, took a little sip of it and said, "Sure! Where? When?," going along with the joke I was obviously playing on him. Ben was married to his wife for almost 30 years. They had put one son through four years at Fordham and the other was just getting ready to graduate from Colgate.
      "Oh, great! And what do I do with Sarah? Kick her out of the house? And what'll the damned neighbors think?
      I laughed with him at the notion I had just put forward across the table.
      "Okay, I'm kidding. People will talk. But what about the possibility of marrying your company?" I took another bite of the fried squid and just waited for his reaction.
      "I'm sorry, Bob, we're not Catholic! And giving instructions to eight thousand people might be a little difficult."
      "Touché," I replied. "But you see my point. don't you? The Supreme Court just awarded you the right to free speech in the form of money contributions. You're going to give to this politician or that one, this election season. If your company is now considered a person worthy of the protection of speech, let's get married, too. That way I have financial security, and you have me to take out the garbage. And since you're the guy who calls the shots, from political donations to salary compensation, you can contract with me for a marriage, just on the strength of your signature."
      Ben smiled again. "Bob, look: that decision was perfectly sound. We pay taxes, we employ thousands of people with an interest in how government interacts with us. And as their boss, my responsibility is to them. They are the company - and they are people. And people have rights."
       "Really?" I could feel the tension in my stomach. "I can't imagine the framers of the Constitution surmising such a notion. If, as you think, a corporation is a person, even some kind of non-physical person, then the obvious conclusion is that corporations such as yours should be able to all the other things that people do, right? Like, for instance, marry. Or serve in the armed forces. Or vote. Or serve on a jury. And that's where the court really missed the mark. They gave you freedom of speech, without a single duty to go along with it. And that pisses me off, Ben.
      "Not only that, corporations can live forever. How old is Sears? Or Goodyear Tire? At least when I kick the bucket you won't have me to oppose you at election time anymore. But you guys will go on forever, influencing elections with your money. Not only that, you can do it without my even knowing how and where you're spending that political money. Do you think that's fair, Ben? You, a single corporate 'person' with you're millions, in which you alone make the decisions as to whether or not to contribute to a candidate or an issue - and me with my twenty five bucks? Who has the most clout, here?"
      Ben swallowed another bite, wiped his face delicately and looked me straight in the eye. He wasn't angry. (Forty years of friendship allow for candor, if nothing else.) Just somewhat bemused with my argument.
      "So," he cleared his throat, "can you find a preacher?" I began to grin. "You're a little old, but you're still good looking."

Obama and Political Reality

2010-10-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

Like millions of others, I thought the new man, Barack Hussein Obama, is indeed a fresh-faced idealist with a vision of the possibilities of the country. For two years, now, I've been anguishing over whether or not to hold out hope for this new young president. His background and pre-Senate work seems to be always in the forefront of my mind, reminding me that his wholly middle-class background and extraordinary accomplishments as a student and community organizer must have shaped his political views in some way which gives some credibility to his campaign and presidential speeches.

Perhaps, had he assumed office at any other time in our recent history the story, as it has unfolded thus far, things would have been different. But, like the fellow who shot a craps on his come-out roll, Obama came to the presidency at a time which perhaps he never imagined when he decided to run for the office. And perhaps he never took into his calculus the latent racism which still lives in the hearts of many Americans. And finally, perhaps he never could conceive of how deeply entrenched corporations and the social conservatives were, not only in the halls of national government, but in the statehouses as well.

Yet, that said, he has managed to accomplish much despite unrelenting opposition from the Republican Party. I don't need to go into them here, but suffice it to say that getting what should amount to a start on universal health care for all Americans through to signature is more than any previous president since Teddy Roosevelt has managed to accomplish. Yes, it gives up much of what many people wanted to the medical care providers and insurance industry, but it is still a start and the journey to national health care will be long and arduous for succeeding administrations; but I truly believe a kind of medical Rubicon has now been crossed. We have started down a path previously all but blocked by the people who have a vested interest in the status quo ante.

But health care reform cost Obama much of his political capital. Strategically, leaving Congress to hammer something out while effectively not getting into the game; by not using the bully pulpit to sell reform, he wasted much needed time and allowed his opposition to define him.

For these first two years of his administration he has been hit by every imaginable national catastrophe - again, no need to go into detail here - and rather than controlling the battlefield aggressively, he has been forced into reacting to one crisis after another, rather than to put forward the vision he had for the country in his campaign. This had led to the rise of what my good friend Jimmy Zuma calls the "Stupid Wing" of the GOP.

I can't remember any president, not even FDR, who had such an array of economic and social problems facing him upon entering the White House. Whether this new president will be up to the task in the next two years, of making progress and implementing the kinds of changes he envisioned as he campaigned - at least enough so to garner a second term, is yet to be decided but I have not quite given up on this man.

It is entirely reasonably to say that his first two years in office may have forced Obama into a more aggressive posture toward his GOP opposition in his last two years. The Senate Majority Leader, just two days ago said something which everyone knew but which remained un-admitted to by the GOP: The Job No.1 for the GOP was to remove Barack Obama from office. Foreign wars, terrorism, a sick economy, joblessness, the decline of the middle class, illegal immigration was of no consequence compared to their mission to defeat Obama in 2012. All the talk about "a seat at the table" or considering GOP alternatives to Administration and Democratic congressional leadership policy proposals were, at the end of the day, a subterfuge. It is, for them, all about regaining the White House and the Congress.

But for now, I'm still of the belief that Obama wants to make a major difference in the catastrophic direction in which we've been headed for the last 30 years. A course change is still possible. In any event, we shall see.

Extremism Comes to Oregon in Spades...

2010-10-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Bruce and Joshua Turbridge

I think most people think of my state, Oregon, as "quaint." Oregon's image to the rest of the country is as a place of somewhat unusual but well meaning characters. A state of forests and fish, of cowboys and aging hippies; of microbrewed beer and lattes. Ken Kesey, one of Oregon's more interesting personalities, certainly was one such "typical" Oregonian to many outside the state. Our federal congressional delegation, for the most part, has had a centrist to liberal bent and after all, they are the ones who project Oregon's political personality. Sure, there are exceptions, the former GOP Senator Gordon Smith being one such. But he was replaced in 2008 after two terms by a fellow named Jeff Merkley, a solid Democrat. But all is not what it seems.

Right here in the Willlamette Valley, a father and son, Bruce and Joshua Turbridge, one of whom who lives in my home town of Jefferson, Oregon are on trial for their lives in what can only be termed the logical extreme of the kind of politics infecting the entire country. In fact, I was summoned by the courts as a possible juror in that trial. I was thankfully excused from serving on that jury because the state is seeking the death penalty in this case and I am not completely sold on the idea that I could sentence a man - any man - to death, which is what I would be asked to do if I had helped convict them. And so, I'm following the trial as it unfolds in court through my local newspaper.

Bruce and Joshua are examples of what happens when hatred for government of any kind is translated into action. In their case, they had tried to start a business in 2008 making biodiesel fuel and it was failing. They had exhausted their personal resources and the end of their dream was clearly in sight.

At the same time father and son had an absolute belief that "the government" was taking over their freedom. Bruce mentioned to many people who testified in court that he hated police officers; when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, Bruce Turbridge cheered. It was, he said, payback for Ruby Ridge and Waco. Any form of authority, he believed, was out to take something away from them.

When Barack Obama was elected, it seemed as though they had snapped. In December, 2008, the month after Obama's election, they planted a bomb alongside a bank in a neighboring town, Woodburn, intending to blow a hole in it, take the money and run. The bomb was thought to be a fake and so a police bomb expert brought it into the bank building intending to inspect it, whereupon it blew up, killing two police officers and severely wounding a third. A few days later, the Turbridges were taken into custody and charged with, among others, two counts of 1st degree murder.

What's coming to light in this trial is the degree of hatred for authority they had, particularly the father, Bruce. (I know neither of them but very well may have seen them in the local barbershop or grocery store.) As witnesses testified, their hatred was palpable. They were Tea Party members before the Tea Party even existed. They spoke all the current language about "taking government back," about creeping Socialism, onerous taxation and all the rest.

The prosecution is trying to connect their politics with their decision to bomb a bank. Whether they can make that case is still to be decided at this writing but I'm inclined to think that at the very least, their hatred for authority made it easy for them to plant that bomb. They were poking their thumbs in the eye of entities which were oppressing them and along the way, had money they desperately needed.

It seems that right here in my town, we seem to have our own homegrown Timothy McVeighs. It is a sad thing. Two policemen are dead, their families now deprived of husbands and fathers; and as these two men stand before a court of law, the hatred, the invective, the vitriol in even Oregon politics continues unabated by this tragedy.

Will we never learn?

Michael Steele Was Right (Heavens!)

2010-07-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Michael Steele, current chairman of the Republican National Committee, was castigated last week by members of his own party for once again inserting his considerable foot into his mouth in stating that the war in Afghanistan was "a war of Obama's choosing;" that the conflict was now "Obama's war."

The usual Republican warhawks (and I might add, the so-called chickenhawks) in Congress uniformly trashed him for being anti-American, for politicizing the war, not to mention a spattering of Democrats who just seemed to collectively roll their eyes at the sight of Steele getting himself into deep doo-doo yet again. They of course reminded the public that the conflict started just weeks after 9/11/01 when George W. Bush authorized American soldiers to throw out the ruling Taliban and establish a functioning national government in Afghanistan, all with the end goal of dismantling the Al Qaeda terrorists who had found sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Part I, the defeat of the Taliban, and flushing out the Al Qaeda members, was easily accomplished. They were soon sent running and taking up refuge in the Pakistani hinterland; and Part II, instituting a national government, began with bringing in Hamid Karzai as the first president of the newly founded national government.

But what had really happened was that the Taliban had simply moved into Pakistan, a weak, near-failed state which was dealing with its own problem with tribalism in its remote northwestern provinces, one of which tribes, the Pashtuns, gave succor to their Afghan brothers. After nine years of war, Afghanistan is still as messy a place such as any European, starting with Alexander the Great, could ever imagine. American progress is stopped and it has assumed a defensive, rather than an offensive stance in that sad place. American soldiers fight and die to protect the legitimacy of Karzai'a government, notoriously corrupt, and who effectively governs not much more than the city of Kabul after nine years on the job. Opium growing, once totally stopped under the Taliban, is now once again the number one crop in this sad country.

Since his inauguration, President Obama has had no fewer than two opportunities to bring that war, started by his predecessor, to a close. And each time he chose not to do so; rather, he sent in more troops, 17,000 and 30,000, respectively, in an attempt to fix what Bush could not. 18 months after taking office, Obama is still trying to protect Karzai, still trying to keep the Taliban from re-taking the country, still trying to "nation build" in a place where the concept of modern nationhood as as foreign as the American soldiers who fight to establish it. The US has become a full participant in a civil war there, as it was in Iraq, and as it was in Vietnam. In December, 2010 there will be yet another review of our policy toward Afghanistan and the betting is that Obama will choose again to continue to fight.

And so, Steele is far closer to the truth than most beltway voices will give him credit for. Obama persists in prosecuting a demonstrably unwinnable war half a globe away. I am no fan of Michael Steele by a long shot. But he is right on this one. This has become Obama's war of choice. And the odds are that it will be an albatross around his neck for the rest of his administration.

And so I acknowledge that even someone as reckless in his leadership of the opposition party as Michale Steele is, he got it right this time. And his critics got it wrong.