WHAT BASEBALL, POKER AND THE STOCK MARKET CAN TEACH US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Sam Smith 

One thing is clear as the climate change debate chugs along: we need to teach math better in our schools. And it wouldn't hurt if journalism schools taught some math as well. 

For example, it is apparent that those who argue that one good snow storm destroys the case for climate change never got a good introduction to odds and averages.

An exception seems to be baseball. I have never heard a critic of ecological theory argue that a good hitter's failure to get to base in a particular game  indicates that he should be immediately traded. Sometimes it's because he swings badly and sometimes because the pitch is low and outside, but nobody says that's proof he's a bad hitter.

Yet, have one cold winter and they want to dump climate change.

I'm mystified by this. How can a culture that understand formulas like

have such a hard time with temperature variations?

My only explanation is that sports writers have done a far better job getting people to understand (or just accept) things like odds and averages than scientists or journalists. The unfortunate thing is that too many seem to think they only apply to sports.

Maybe we should forget about Copenhagen and have a Monday Night Climate Countdown.

There are some other people good at figuring out odds and averages, such as poker players.

Over a decade ago, I offered a poker player's guide to environmental risk assessment. Key points included:

1. Figure the stakes as well as the odds.

2. The odds of something happening at any moment are not the same as the odds of something ever happening. In ecological calculations - especially ones in which the downside could ruin your whole millennium - it is the latter odds that are important.

3. When confronted with conflicting odds, ask what happens if each projection is wrong. Temporary job loss because of environmental restrictions may come and go, but the loss of the ozone layer is something you can have forever.

4. When confronted with conflicting odds, remember that you don't have to play the game. There are other things to do with your time - or with the economy or with the environment - that may produce better results. Thus, instead of playing poker you could be making love. Or instead of getting jobs from some air or water degrading activity, the same jobs could come from more benign industry such as retrofitting a whole city for solar energy.

5. Don't let anyone - in industry, government, or the media - define an "acceptable level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do.

6. If the stakes are too high, the game is not worth it. If you can't stand the pain, don't attempt the gain.

Lately I've been wondering how a successful stock market investor might figure out whether global warming was a good investment.

Most stock market charts look much like climate records kept by NASA - an awful lot of detail in a small space that is hard for the impatient or untrained to figure out.

But there is one kind of chart that addresses the key issue: which way a stock really headed. It's called a point and figure chart. It consists of columns of Xs and Os - the former indicating a rising stock, the latter a falling one.

The neat trick is that you only change directions if the stock moves a certain amount - typically three points. What this does is to eliminate minor fluctuations and emphasizes the important stuff.

For example, let's say you bought a stock for 20 and it went up to 22. You would do nothing, but when it hit 23 you would show three Xs in a column.

Now let's say the stock goes down to 21 and then back to 23. You would do nothing because it hasn't moved three points. But let's say it goes down to 18. Then you would show five Os.

A normal chart of such things shows change in neatly divided time frames. Point & figure charts don't care much about time - mostly about movement.

I tried this approach on global temperatures since 1880 as reported by NASA. Using as the basis the average temperature for 1951-1980, here's what resulted:

Note the consistency in the patterns until 1981. Then suddenly there is a breakout combined with rising peaks. This is known as an ascending triple top breakout - and in the stock market it's a really good thing. The stock continues to rise and fall but the peaks keep getting higher. If this is a stock you may well want to buy it, but if it's climate change you don't want it at all.

Note also that the temperature has bounced up and down 3-6 points about a dozen times since 1880 just like the stock market. And just like the rest of life, come to think of it.

Of course, to those who think climate change is a purely ideological or theological issue, none of this means much.

Still, if someone tells you that the snow outside proves there's no global warming, remind them that in 2009 Albert Pujols only got a hit 33% of the time. 

GROWING UP PART JEWISH

I grew up part Jewish. It was hard not to if you lived in a New Deal family where your father was involved in things like starting Americans for Democratic Action. My own introduction to politics came as a pre-teen stuffing envelopes for the local ADA director Leon Shull as he helped organize the removal of Philadelphia's 69-year-old Republican machine. Shull was one of those who early convinced me that there were three branches of Judaism: your Orthodox, your Reform and your Liberal Democratic, with the last clearly the most powerful. I was certain that Jews were put on this earth to run labor unions and win elections for the good guys.

If you think I'm kidding, consider this: for many years we lived across the street from a prominent activist couple - she black, he Jewish. One day one of their sons came over and slumped at our kitchen table. "What's the matter?" asked my wife. "I had a terrible night," the boy explained. "I dreamt I was Jacob Javits." He had already learned to fear becoming a Jewish Republican.

Although I knew Jews went to synagogue, I wasn't all that impressed. After all, as my friend Peter Temin was going to Hebrew school on Saturdays, I got to go to the Henry Glass music store and take drum lessons, clearly the better deal. During the week we went to a Quaker school where perhaps a quarter of the students were Jewish and nobody thought it odd. The tradition continues. The joke about Washington's Sidwell Friends School is that it is a place where Episcopalians teach Jews how to act like Quakers.

Much later I would figure out what Quakerism and Judaism had in common: a blend of individualism, pragmatism, and responsibility, with a particular emphasis on the last. You didn't come into the world pre-ordained and your primary goal wasn't to leave it saved; what really mattered is what you did in the meantime.

For much of my life, what I have done and what I have thought have been deeply influenced by existential Judaism and its practitioners. I can't even begin to count the number of times I have come across Jews in the lonely corners of hope trying to do what others, through lack of interest or courage, would not.

But a number of things have happened since I was first introduced to Judaism. The direct ties to the often radical Jewish immigrant tradition began to fade. The offspring of the immigrants became wealthier and less involved. America of whatever ethnicity began paying less attention to others and more to itself.

As I put it once, "The great 20th century social movements [were] successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind. The minority elites had joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history. But as the best and brightest drove around town in their Range Rovers, who would speak for those who were still, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, fugitives from the law of averages? The work of witness remained."

A whole history began to disappear. A part of the story was told by journalist Paul S. Green in his memoir, From the Streets of Brooklyn to the War in Europe. He notes that by the dawn of the 20th century

"Jewish youth in Poland grew more and more impatient with the narrow focus of their lives. They were determined to take part in the opportunities opening up around them - exciting new developments in science, the arts, in social relationships. This brought them into conflict with their parents and grandparents. In seeking a different way of life, they began to do the unthinkable - to reject the strict age-old Orthodoxy of their ancestors. "
Out of this grew several new movements, one of which, Zionism, looked towards retrieving a Jewish nation. Others were socialist, ranging from hard-core Bolshevik to the Bund, which Green describes as

"An organization of free-thinking Jewish youth who whole-heartedly embraced Yiddish culture and a Yiddish life that completely rejected traditional religion. The Bundists believed that only a socialist government - evolutionary rather than revolutionary - could hope to bring together all peoples of whatever origin and outlaw racial and religious conflict, with all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing an end to anti-Semitism and pogroms."

And so we find, not too many years later, the New York City Jewish cigar-makers each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. And the leader of the New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, became the first president of the American Federation of Labor.

Green's own family joined the rebellion:

"In embracing the principles of free-thinking non-religious belief, my parents had made a profound break with the past. The generation gap with their own parents was unbelievably deep. They had been born and brought up in a world that brooked no deviation. . . They were turning their backs on the fearsome God of their forefathers who had ruled Jewish lives for thousands of years. . . They realized that maintaining their beliefs set them apart from the mainstream of Jewish life, but the fact that they were a small minority did not bother them. "

They became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values that built this country's social democracy. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists, heavily Jewish.

It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious, conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on 20th century modern American politics.

Sadly, however, social and economic progress inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change not just among Jews but within the entire post-liberal elite. And, in many ways, Israel became the icon that replaced the cause of social justice. This is not to say that the two are antithetical. That certainly wasn't the case when I was younger. But as Jewish rhetoric and politics became increasingly in the hands of powerful conservative interests, an iconic, unexamined Israel began to serve Jews much as an absurdly trivialized Jesus has been used by the powerful conservative Christian interests to serve their ends. And other things just got forgotten.

Just as it is important for Americans not to define their country's past by the tragic distortions of the past quarter century, it is important for Jews not to be misled by a powerful right wing's reduction of Judaism to the goals of a deeply misguided and militaristic nation.

The fact is both America and Israel have badly damaged themselves through grandiosity, arrogance and narcissism. Beyond that is a truth few want to admit: no culture, no ethnicity, no value system can exist in a vacuum any more. This is not the fault of terrorists or anti-Semites. It's the result of television and multinational corporations that have usurped the role of culture, values and ethnicities. Add to that Israel's demographic trends and you've got a problem that AIPAC and Abe Foxman can't help you with in the slightest.

The answer, to the extent there still is one for the human species, is to be found in honest, personal witness. You can't save Christianity with hypocrisy and you can't save Judaism with missiles. What might work, however, is to reach back into the past of one's own culture or ethnicity and find examples of actions and behaviors that produced positive change. Neither Christians nor Jews have always been as absurdly self-destructive as they are today. And before they offer any more dangerous directions for dealing with today's problems, they need to rediscover their own good paths.

It is along such paths - and not on battlefields - that faith is solidified, admiration is encouraged, and loyalty is attracted. And along the way you may even pick up some unorthodox stragglers like me.

THE FIGHT THAT DOESN'T MATTER

ThLast night, browsing through Sartre before bedtime, I came across this:

"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God does not exist. Rather it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. . . Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue."
It struck me as I read this that here was the key to the currently inflated battle between church and state: in the end it doesn't matter. The moral Christian, Jew or Muslim and the moral rationalist will follow much the same path. Keep them away from the pulpit and you may not be able to tell them apart.

The difference lies not in their actual life but in what they believe about it. The existentialist, for example, believes that existence - and behavior in it - precedes and defines essence. The religious true believer thinks it's faith, or what is known in science as speculation and, in gambling, a bet.

Now one can have an interesting debate about this, but the point here is that as far as politics and social policy are concerned the difference should make no difference once it moves to the level of actually doing something rather than just talking about, celebrating or praising why you're doing it.

Of course, politically, it does make a difference. One reason is that there are a hell of a lot more registered practicing Christians than there are registered practicing existentialists. Another is that politicians, aware of this demographic, find it much easier to pander to the faith that drives these voters rather than to the works the faith demands.

Thus, whether in the White House or in Selma, you never hear politicians described themselves as "works-based Christians," because it is much easier to associate oneself with unchallengeable holiness than with intended products too simple to observe and assess.
There was a time when there are a lot more works-based Christians around to serve as models. At one point, for example, we had Father Drinan in Congress, Father Baroni in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Father Kemp on the DC school board. During the war on poverty I found myself constantly in the company of preachers, some of whom became close friends. When I asked myself why, my answer was in part that while the engines driving us were different, our intended routes were the same. We accepted uncertainty, honored inquiry and persisted in the hope that what we did that day might make a difference.

Today's obsession with faith is driven by a number of causes, among them the deterioration of American culture and democracy, a desperate searching for certainty, evangelical abuse and heresy, political cynicism and deceit, as well as a media that perpetuates the illusion that it is better to raise one's hands in prayer than to use them for good in this life and on this day.

Of these forces, it is the media that often wields the greatest clout - a media that pretends to be fact-based and objective yet all but writhes in the aisle, screams Hallelujah and shouts Jesus' name when a fraudulent pol mounts the pulpit or a president declares some carefully concocted connection with the Almighty for his war or budget policy. This adulation of false faith and the indifference to true works is not only cynical but is helping to destroy America.

It has also helped turn the press from being reporters to being mere acolytes at the holy communion of America's powerful. If, on the other hand, the media followed the lead of Sartre, it would do us all a great service. Instead of telling us what politicians pretended to believe it would report on what they actually did. . . moving, one might say, from faith-based to fact-based reporting

MOVING ON WITHOUT OBAMA

Sam Smith

With his expansion of the Af-Pak war, Barack Obama has now fully established himself as the Bernie Madoff of change and hope. He had been well on his way, what with all those billions for banks and so little for troubled homeowners and small businesses; his continuation of Bushic unconstitutional assaults on civil liberties; and the convoluted corruption of the health care issue. But a war that he can not explain or defend with any modicum of logic pretty well seals the deal.

While those of us who thought he was a con man from the start no longer find ourselves so lonely, there remains the problem of what to do about it.

My sense is that the infatuation over Obama was based on much larger problems including the iconization of politics, an excessive infatuation with words over deeds, as well as naive assumptions of what having the first black president would be like. Few recognized that true equality among ethnicities includes a balanced dispersal of sins and weakness as well as virtues.

Most of all, however, Obama represented a triumph of a generation of liberals dramatically different from their predecessors, most markedly in their general indifference to issues of economic as well as ethnic equality.

This heavily professional liberal class never once - in the manner of their predecessors of the New Deal and Great Society - took the lead in pressing for economic reforms. It wasn’t that they opposed them; they just never seemed to occur to them.

They, after all, had risen in status even as much of the rest of the country was slipping. Over a quarter of a century passed and the best the liberal Democrats could come up with was to slash welfare and raise the age for Social Security.

Obama was the epitome of this new generation: well educated, well connected and well toned in rhetoric. But far distant from the concerns of so many.

So it is small wonder that the O'Reilly, Becks and Palins rose to the fore. They simply hijacked the populist tradition of the Democrats and turned it into a rhetorical toy with which they could play in any manner they desired.

It wasn't the first time it had happened. Germany's willingness to accept Hitler was the product of many cultural characteristics specific to that country, to the anger and frustrations in the wake of the World War I defeat, to extraordinary inflation and particular dumb reactions to it, and, of course, to the appeal of anti-Semitism. But, bearing in mind all the foregoing, there was also:

- A collapse of conventional liberal and conservative politics that bears uncomfortable similarities to what we are now experiencing.

- The gross mismanagement of the economy and of such key worker concerns as wages, inflation, pensions, layoffs, and rising property taxes. Many of the actions were taken in the name of efficiency, an improved economy and the "rationalization of production." There were also bankruptcies, negative trade balance, major decline in national production, large national debt rise compensated for by foreign investment. In other words, a hyped version of what America and its workers are experiencing today.

- The collapse of the country's self image. Thomas Childers points out that Germany had been a world leader in education, industry, science, and literacy. Much of the madness that we see today stems from attempts to compensate for our own battered self-image.

This is only a caution, not a prediction. But without a strong populist progressive movement, based on the economic and social well being of all Americans, we run a serious risk of further disintegration.

The first thing that needs to happen is for there to be a clear distinction between smug, self-serving liberalism contemptuous of so many Americans and a populist progressive movement that seeks unity with those many liberals prefer simply to condemn.

The magnets for this unity are such obvious yet ignored issues as the creation of jobs, the preservation of pensions, decent treatment of endangered homeowners, an end to credit card usury, respect for local decision-making, and, yes, a healthcare plan based on providing financial assistance, not bureaucratic nightmares.

Such a movement would have to be formed issue by issue. It can not rely on empty icons or over-packed ideology. If one agrees on how to handle foreclosures but disagrees on abortion, leave the latter for another day. It is by working together on the things upon which we agree that both respect and power are gained.

Such principles were almost a given in much of the best organizing of the 1960s and 70s, but they have become obscured in a time when one's political identity is so tied to the ego and so indifferent to real progress.

We need to return to issue politics. To get out of the comfortable church of our own ideology and on the street with reality and real people. In the words of one populist of long ago, "we need to raise less corn and more hell."

Obama has had his chance. He blew it. It's our turn now. If we don't take it, we'll have far more than Afghanistan to worry about.

HEALTH CARE: OF LIVES AND PRINCIPLE

Sam Smith

The pending health care legislation is as corrupt, cynical and contemptuous of simple decency as any bill I've seen in over a half century of covering national politics. Which still leaves the question of what to do about it.

After all, living in the Mafia neighborhood that contemporary America has become, survival can easily, and wisely, take precedence over principle.

For example the Institute of Medicine estimates that around 18,000 Americans die because of a lack of health insurance. A study in the December issue of American Journal of Public Health puts the figure for those 18-64 at 45,000 lives lost a year. Does one ignore such numbers in order to stand on principle against an indefensible payoff to the health insurance industry?

Or consider these assets of the pending legislation as outlined by Joshua Holland for Alternet:

[] According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicaid expansion alone would offer public insurance to more than 10 million low-income Americans who would otherwise be without. . . More than nine in ten people who lack insurance in America fall beneath 400 percent of the poverty line, and every one of them will get some help getting coverage. . .

"The House legislation is a watered-down bill that would do little to contain America's overall health-care costs, but would help contain the family health-care expenses of tens of millions of real working people, while covering 36 million who would otherwise be uninsured." []

But now look at another side of the story. How many people will die or become ill because of provisions in the measure?

For example, the Medicare cost-cutting raises a serious threat to elderly. How big a threat one can't tell right now, but you can get a sense of the problem by considering the recent report favoring a drastic reduction in mammograms. Thanks to the strength of the women's movement, this suggestion was quickly squashed, but what about similar cuts in examinations or services to those under Medicare who are less likely to cause a fuss?

Further, we are looking at a system in which the standards for care will be judged for both health benefit and budgetary efficiency by the same government agencies. The conflict of interest is enormous and will especially affect those whose illnesses and response do not match the government-approved average. How many people will die or suffer continued bad health as a result? To what degree is there a submerged bias in the bills against older patients suffering what might be called statistical deficit disorder? What will be the death rate as a result of seniors giving up Medicare Advantage? What will be the health effects of the mandatory mandate on a family that is about to have their house foreclosed and simultaneously faces criminal charges for not paying protection money to the insurance industry? We seem to have forgotten that beyond the poor are a huge number who need only be slightly pushed to go over the edge.

It is useful to recall that Obama's original point man in this sick game was Tom Daschle who said that health care reform "will not be pain free" and that seniors should accept more of that pain rather than treating it.

Daschle pushed for a federal review body modeled after the one in Britain that distinguished itself by such things as a rule that elderly patients couldn't get an expensive eye drug until one of their eyes went blind. It took three years of protest to reverse that decision.

Now, quietly snuck into the stimulus package, we have something called the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, which consists of 15 government officials and no outside experts. This body will be making purportedly unbiased evaluations of treatments but every official on it will be actually serving two gods: health and the budget.

In short, we are moving from a de facto triage system based on income to one based on appropriations.

And on age.

The silent and widespread acceptance of huge cuts in Medicare as part of "health reform" is an indicator of where the elderly really stand in current political priorities. As Cecil Connolly of the Washington Post noted last summer, "It appears seniors are the net losers under bills" then pending in the House.

No small part of the reason for this is that our health "reform" is being designed on an economic rather than a medical or moral basis. Since seniors are less productive than younger people, their lifespan simply isn't that important to a government so fiscally obsessed.

You can get a sense of how this works from an article in the Boston Globe by Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School and Rosemarie Day of Massaschusetts' health insurance authority:

"The premature death of thousands of Americans can be translated into monetary terms using the economic "value of a statistical life.'' . . . A recent study by Stanford economists has demonstrated that the average economic value of a year of human life is about $129,000. Most insurance companies, and many countries around the world, already use a variant of this concept. They implicitly ascribe the value of an additional year of human life at $50,000 by setting that as the threshold for approving treatments. (Any treatment that costs $50,000 will be reimbursed if it is predicted to add another year of life for the patient)."

Significantly, no figures were given for the elderly, retired or infirm but it is clear from the subtext of the current debate that those in charge know whose lives they want to save and it ain't your grandmother.

There are other problems lurking behind the teleprompters. For example, the National Committee to Preserve Medicare and Social Security notes:

[] The health care reform bills now before Congress contain an unpleasant surprise for older Americans: Age-based increases in health insurance premiums for those under 65. This is nothing more than a giveaway to the private insurance industry.

At first blush, it might appear that this is justified assuming that as we age, we cost the health care system more. In fact, age is far from an entirely reliable predictor of health care costs, accounting for less than 20% of the variation in costs across age groups. A healthy 55-year-old may well consume fewer health care dollars than a 35-year-old who is obese or has diabetes.

Both the House and Senate bills include provisions to eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions, which clearly serves the public interest.

Permitting premiums to rise with age contradicts the intent, if not the letter, of that regulation as aging can reasonably be considered an immutable, pre-existing condition. Moreover, the new regulation disproportionately affects Americans between 55 and 64, who already shoulder a financial burden for health care that is higher than any other age group, regardless of insurance status. . .

Here's a question for policymakers and the public to consider: Will the proposed age-rating of premiums, coupled with the absence of a robust, affordable public option, push more older Americans into the pool of people unable to afford health coverage?. . .

A recent Harvard study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that American adults under 65 who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage. Ailing and uninsured people in their 50s and 60s will likely add to the strain on Medicare's budget as they seek care for neglected health problems as soon as they become eligible for this entitlement.

The private insurance industry stands to make big profits from the millions of new customers it will pick up through health care reform. Adding to its bounty by putting the squeeze on the finances of older Americans is not only unjust, it is poor economic policy. []

Add to this the efforts by a powerful coalition that wishes to gut both Social Security and Medicare, epitomized by the insidious Concord Coalition and Peterson Foundation, as well as a development reported recently by Chris Bowers in Open Left:

"Of all the various blocs and gangs that have been formed in Congress this year, Senators Bayh, Conrad, Feinstein, Lieberman and Warner have managed to form the most regressive one yet. Currently, these five Democrats are demanding that Speaker Pelosi hand over all relevant Congressional power to an independent commission that will be allowed to slash and partially privatize Social Security and Medicare, or else they will allow the United States to default on its debt."

Writing in Global Research, Shamus Cooke gives rare attention to still other hidden ills of the healthcare legislation:

[] And although the final bill has yet to be crafted, there exists general agreements as to what the end version will look like. Americans will be forced to buy shoddy corporate insurance with no limit to the cost, no guarantee of quality, with large premiums and other tricks to further gouge consumers. If a public option emerges in the final bill - by no means a guarantee - it will be shrunken enough to insure very few people (2 percent of the U.S. population).

But it gets worse. How this health care "reform" will be paid for has implications that dwarf the above atrocities. . .

The two biggest cost saving schemes are the most damaging. The first is the enormous attack on Medicare. Since its inception, the corporate elite wanted this program struck down. Now they have their man for the job - a Republican could never get away with such obvious treachery. . .

One way that both Congressional health care bills will gut Medicare is referred to as "forced productivity gains" - cost saving measures essentially; trimming the fat.

What are these savings? The most mentioned device - by politicians and media alike - is the reduction of "wasteful tests" and procedures that doctors routinely perform, an idea that the health care mega-corporations love. It will save them billions, while having catastrophic effects on the health care of millions of people. . .

Another piece of Medicare that's being trimmed is Medicare Advantage, a favorite program of the elderly because of its comprehensive services. . .

Finally, The Senate health care bill attacks Medicare by reducing payments to doctors by 25 percent. If doctors receive such a drastic reduction in pay, they will simply refuse to see Medicare or Medicaid patients; people will thus be insured only on paper. The newly insured Medicaid patients under any new congressional bill will be sorely disappointed.

Once Medicare is undermined in the above ways, the corporate sponsored right-wing will make a very convincing argument that "Medicare doesn't work", leading to future cuts that will further destroy the program.

The second hidden disaster in financing a congressional health care bill is the tax on so-called "gold-plated" or "Cadillac" health insurance policies that some employers offer their workers. This tax is supposedly meant to apply to the health care policies that "elite" employees receive. . .

As it turns out, many, if not most workers in unions will be included in this tax, which, under the Senate version, will include any plan worth more than $8,000 for individuals and $21,000 for families. Hardly elite, considering the still-soaring costs for health care.

If this provision were to pass - and it's very popular in Congress - the immediate reaction would be very predictable: employers would immediately drop their health care plans, forcing workers into the now-forced purchasing of inadequate health care. . . []

But facts have never been important in this debate. For example, the Democrats have done their best to conceal how long it will be before provisions actually go into effect - such as the much touted ban on denial due to preexisting provisions. Nor will anyone admit the truth that a real advantage of the mandatory mandate is that the administration can claim - dishonestly to be sure - that it is not raising taxes. It is. The affected are just sending their checks to an insurance company rather than to the IRS.

In the end, the legislation will save lives while simultaneously causing other deaths. Not only does no one know the real numbers, but no one that I can find has even tried to come up with such figures. How do the saved uninsured match up against those driven out of existing plans (such as Medicare Advantage and so-called "Cadillac" programs) and how many seniors will die prematurely because of added costs or efficiency measures that claim their tests to treatment aren't worth it? I suspect there will be a net saving of life but that's not what all of us being created equal and with inalienable rights was meant to be about. None of our founders mentioned cost effectiveness as a precondition of human decency.

It's all a sad example of America's cultural and political collapse. This crowd - from Obama on down - could never have gotten Social Security, a minimum wage or Medicare passed. And it probably wouldn't have bothered them all that much, since today's politics has no higher goal than next quarter's campaign contributions.

Still, in reacting to it, this is a different situation than, say, being a conscientious objector in which one refuses to join in the killing and where virtue and effect are in sync. If, as I suppose, more lives will be saved than lost under the healthcare bill, then it is worth backing however cruel the choice - because you can't stand on principle in this instance without contributing to the damage. It seem that we have to pay the protection money to the insurance mob, save some lives and then turn to fighting the struggle on better ground.

A BRIEF GUIDE TO AVOIDING SOCIALISM

Sam Smith

Last May, the Republican National Committee condemned Obama and the Democratic Congress for leading America towards socialism. Since then the line has been picked up by numerous others on the right including the tea baggers, a group that believes it is standing for true American rights by invoking memories of a fight that was actually about merely getting Americans some representation in the British Parliament and not about full independence.

That's not the only mistake made by those complaining about the threat of socialism. If Obama is leading America anywhere, it is - like his immediate predecessors - towards fascism. Socialism is about the state running things on behalf of the public; fascism is about the state running things on behalf of corporations. Adrian Lyttelton in his book on Mussolini wrote that "fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly." It was a point that Orwell noted when he described fascism as being but an extension of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Italian Nationalist theorist Affredo Rocco: "The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy. It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the State."

This is the way we have been heading for some time and Obama has merely joined the club.

Still, all the talk got me thinking about what avoiding socialism in America would truly be about. What if we set out to rid ourselves of all intrusions of this purported political curse? Here are a few things we might do:

- Return to the old system of fire fighting in which blazes were handled by private fire brigades hired by private insurance companies. Brooke Harrington described the practice in Economic Sociology: "If you wanted a fire brigade to come to your aid in . . . emergencies, you had to join a kind of club with private membership fees. It worked like this: you ponied up the fees, the club gave you a plaque to put over your front door, and then if fire swept through the neighborhood, the club dispatched help, but they only assisted paying members. So if you didn't have that plaque over your door, the fire rescue teams would pass you right on by. It would not be uncommon to find that your house burned down while the one next door would be saved." Sounds a little like our health insurance system.

- End public education. Public schools - which strongly aided the growth of America - are about as socialistic as you can get. Obama, it should be noted, is trying to help reduce this deleterious influence by converting public schools into profit-making charter operations.

- Close down all federal highways or sell them off to the highest bidder so they can turn them into profit-making roads using tolls.

- Abolish Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and all other such welfare programs.

- End all government interference with the banking and financial industries. This would have recently saved us hundred of billions in bailout funds.

- End all veterans programs including closing veterans' hospitals.

- Sell off all public transportation to unregulated private interests.

- Close all public hospitals, end public subsidies to other hospitals and privatize all ambulance service.

- End all government regulation of food or health products.

- End the practice of government plowing streets after a snow storm. As Boston mayor James Curly put it, "The Lord brought it; let the Lord take it away."

There.

Feeling better yet?

Bet you never realized what a bunch of closet socialists we are.

We got there, though, because - instead of hurling theories and cliches at each other - we decided on a case by case basis who could do a particular job best. And the funny thing is, it's worked pretty well.

People who complain about the threat of socialism remind me of the man from Virginia who went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal deposit insurance laws. When he retired he went on Social Security and Medicare. The other day he got into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station, parked in the public lot, took Amtrak to Washington and went to Capitol Hill to ask his congressman to get the government off his back.

POLITICS IN THE TIME OF MYTH

Sam Smith

Although America's politics is increasingly being driven by myth - witness the stunning decline in those who believe that global temperatures are rising - the media, academia and political activists tend to act primarily with dismay and disgust or to satisfy themselves by labeling the myth followers wing nuts. Serious consideration of this huge factor in American life is largely absent.

Little time is spent on how to educate people on a complex or scientific matter, to help them deal with probabilities as well as certainties, or how best to convince rather than merely to condemn.

Here's a thought for starters: Bring together journalists, philosophers, pollsters, historians, anthropologists and activists to put the matter on the table. Begin with the premise that myth is normal in any culture; it even has important healthy functions. But what happens when, as now, myth gets out of hand? What causes this? How do we stop myth from being self destructive? How, metaphorically, do we return safely from Jonestown to the First Baptist Church down the street?

If there were such a conference - or, better, a series of conferences - here are some of potential topics:

What causes myth to change its role in the same culture?

How important are different segments of the culture in this: education, religion, media, political campaigns etc?

How does this shift reflect a failure to understand basic things like the variations in a multi-year chart of global temperatures? What can be done about this?

How do we raise the understanding of probability in dealing with such matters? For example, I often use the poker analogy in dealing with the environment, emphasizing such points as considering the stakes as well as the odds.

What is the best response to cynically created mythology such as the idea in the recent Maine campaign that gay marriage would damage heterosexual marriage or endanger children?

What is the media's responsibility in handling such issues and how could it do it better?

What are effective ways to move someone from myth to reality?

To what extent does the over-complexity of solutions (or of their administration) - i.e. the healthcare bills - contribute to mythology? Is the lesson that we should more often break such solutions into smaller, more comprehensible parts?

To what extent does burying questionable items in a complex solution - i.e again the healthcare bills - contribute to mythology and undermine support?

To what extent does the establishment's tendency to say "Case closed" on matters with continuing doubt work against reality and spur myth? For example, the World Trade Center attack was certainly not likely the creation of George Bush, but that doesn't eliminate unanswered questions about what happened in government before the attack or about the construction of the towers. To act as though it does seems to encourage, rather than eliminate, myth. This happens over and over, often because the government wants to put a matter aside and the media is too willing to help.

How can we teach honor for unanswered questions without embellishing them with unsupported theoretical conclusions?

The government often has a two track goal: solve a problem and appear that it is solving it. Often, the latter effort - as in the case of swine flu - can work against the former. You can test this out by trying to discover precisely how many people have died after taking the vaccine. I could find only one report, a minute number in a Chinese sample. But government public relations types don't think like that. The want everything to appear far more rosy and far more certain than it may actually be. How do we deal with this?

What do history and anthropology tell us about myth and how it helps and damages a culture?

And that's just for starters. The important thing is to start, to recognize that myth is not something you change by name calling but by dealing with it as a force as real and important in its own way as climate change. And something that may severely damage our approach to such issues as climate change because we forget in this scientific and technological age that not everything that matters can be easily measured.

CONFESSIONS OF A VISION IMPAIRED STAKEHOLDER WITH DUBIOUS MANAGEMENT PRACTICES EMBARKING ON AN ILL-DEFINED MISSION

Sam Smith

Have pity on me. Say a prayer. Drop a penny in the pond on my behalf. In a few days I have to go to a non-profit's strategic planning meeting. It's a great organization that does great things, but - like so many non-profits - it periodically seeks to cleanse and refresh itself by turning what it does into indecipherable abstractions. I'll survive and maybe there'll be some good food, but, as a general rule, I don't do strategic visions.

Still it's happening all over America. "Strategic plan" and its semantic variations have appeared on Google seven million times just in the past month. On the Review's list of cliches that's right between "empower" and that ultimate expression of corporate insincerity - "any inconvenience" - you know, the one for which everyone apologizes.

Strategic planning, in its non-military sense, got its start at the Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Not long after we had the Great Depression. The concept had a revival in the 1980s and contributed to the philosophy and practices that have left us with the Penultimate Great Depression.

Coincidence, perhaps, but bear in mind that in the 1950s - when the economy was booming - we were turning out only 5,000 MBAs a year. The number of people in business who had any idea of about strategic planning was minute. By 2005, we were churning out 142,000 MBAs a year and we had huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly and disastrous wars, a growing gap between rich and poor, and a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly.

Worse, everyone in the country had been infected by corporate verbiage and values. And, often unconsciously, much of America had bought into the rightwing and absurdly simplistic Reaganesque view of life and the very voices that should have been among the loudest in opposition - non-profits - signed up as well.

Non-profits found that it helped to adopt the language of business. It made them seem responsible rather than just over-idealistic do-gooders. It also reflected one of the most misguided assumptions of the educated elite: if one can understand, identify, manipulate and be loyal to abstract principles, the specifics will obediently follow.

Editors and reporters, among others, know better. Reporters run into this sort of language constantly at news conferences and elsewhere. They have a professional term for it: bullshit.

And editors know that a reporter may come up with a great idea for a story and even have a strategy for carrying it out, but if the journalist doesn't know how find the right sources, or ask the right questions and write it all down, the strategy won't work.

Over the past three decades corporations have done an incredibly effective job of turning Americans into just so many more corporate employees desperate for a strategic vision that will foster formulations of actions and processes to be taken to attain the vision in accordance with agreed upon procedures in order to achieve a hierarchy of goals. It has - with bombast, bullying and baloney - convinced an extraordinary number of Americans that its childishly verbose and coldly abstract culture is transferable to every human activity from running a church to driving a tractor across a field.

Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. You need to look no farther than the military to see this. During the post-war period when the US military devoted more effort to strategic planning that at any time in its history, it has also had the sorriest record. Over and over, the problem has been an attractive general principle overwhelmed or sabotaged by reality and facts.

Now bounce back 150 years to a war in which general strategy was more than balanced by specific generals. At one point a White House aide complained of General Grant's drinking and Lincoln invoked his best management practices - which was to tell the aide to find out what Grant was drinking and give it to all his other generals. Put that in your vision statement.

And the key battle at Little Round Top was won by a general named Joshua Chamberlain who had studied theology, taught ever subject except science and math and was fluent in nine languages. He had, however, never study military strategy.

In any specific situation, a general strategy can quickly lose value without supporting virtues like wisdom, sufficient staff, adequate budget, imagination, energy and good fortune.

But of course, if all else fails, you can always fall back on your mission statement.

Like most people, I never read mission statements except under duress or when I have nothing better to do, like standing in the lobby of a pretentious restaurant waiting to be seated.

Gordon Luk said it well: "The easy and fun way to test whether a mission statement. . . is garbage is to negate it and see whether it still holds up. If a mission statement does not make sense for a company not to do, then why even bother stating the obvious?

"Striving to be a leader in a field? Of course you are – you better not be trying to come in dead last…

"Trying to connect people to passions or interests? Hell, why not disconnect them instead!. . .

"Douglas Adams wrote frequently about the human penchant for continuously stating the very, very obvious. Mission statements take that principle to the extreme, to the point where we even believe that we're going to persuade people about something or other by making an official public statement about what we are going to do that would be insane to negate."

Occasionally a mission statement rises to the occasion. The alternative newspaper Eat the State had one that read: "Missions were created by the Catholic Church to subjugate Native Americans in California. We oppose them." And a small computer consultancy business in West London posted a sign: 'We are not ruled by a mission statement, we are smarter than that'. But when you start to count the number of organizations - from religious to non-profit to social to political - that feel they can't get along without some gobbledygook on the inside cover of whatever they're publishing, you know the corporate cultural invasion is complete.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't have plans, think about where you're going, discuss alternatives and figure out what you do best. But the better model should be the pragmatism, inventiveness and realism of small business culture which still provides most of America's new jobs - as many as 75 percent in some experts' view. Most small business people don't have time to sit around a table coming up with empty adjectives to describe their efforts. And they tend to call the people who buy their stuff customers rather than stakeholders, which makes sense, given that the pre-corporate definition of stakeholder was someone who held the bet during a gambling match and handed it over to the winner. Not a particularly exciting or profitable role in life.

Here's how David Weinberger put in back in 1999:

"Mission statements are vapid because they think of business as a march to a goal or a war of conquest. Businesses are far more complex than that. . . Further, missions are things you accomplish and are done with. Businesses, on the other hand, generally aim for long-term existence. The board doesn't get together and say, "Well, we've accomplished our mission of being the world's leading supplier of high quality wombats to blind gombricks, so I guess we can just shut it all down now. Good job, lads!"

"Businesses often are more like farming than like making war. How can we get maximum sustainable yield from this ground? And what happens when the ground changes radically? Are we going to keep trying to grow potatoes in the layer of ash, or are we going to see this as a splendid opportunity to succeed with ash-loving radishes?

"So, yes, write up something about your commitment to treating your customers well, building great products, and contributing to the lives of your employees and your community. Heck, even admit that you're in it for the money. But one thing is certain: if your mission statement achieves the usual goal of fitting on the back of a business card, then it's just about guaranteed to be empty of anything worth saying."

Which is why I don't look forward to my afternoon of strategic planning. We will declare, no doubt, some fine principles, but life is controlled not by the glories of the grand but by the uncertainties, blessings and perversities of the specific. It is in organizing the latter in some rational, useful, imaginative and, yes, enjoyable fashion that life becomes better. As Benjamin Franklin noted, happiness is not the result of great strokes of good fortune, but of the "little felicities" of every day.

Meanwhile, if you are still curious about my personal vision statement, please consult my optometrist.

INDIVIDUAL & INSTITUTIONAL MADNESS

Sam Smith

The recent murders at Ft. Hood recall Pascal's observation that "Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction."

Of course, the assumption in this country at the moment is that only Muslims are evil, which ignores Christians doing evil to Muslims in Afghanistan or Jews threatening to nuke Iran in the name of civilization.

In the end, it doesn't make much difference whether your husband or son is killed by a Muslim major in Ft. Hood, an American drone in Pakistan, or a Israeli soldier in Gaza. In each case the dead are victims of violent religious and cultural hubris.

The media, though, was quick to smell the bait. Even before Fox News had corroborated the suspect's name, Shepard Smith asked Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, "The names tells us a lot, does it not, senator?"

Replied Hutchison, "It does. It does, Shepard."

And the White House, joint chiefs and national security advisors treated it all as another wartime crisis rather than a solitary case of madness.

Which is logical, perhaps, because it is getting harder and harder to separate individual and mass insanity.

We assume there are people who are crazy and those who are rational but when your government reacts to those that brought down the World Trade Towers with an eight year futile war in Iraq that has killed, by the most conservative estimates, over 40 times as many innocent people, that line disappears.

Or consider that the war, along with that in Afghanistan, was the creation of politicians blithely willing to cause that many deaths to win reelection and supported by generals and admirals who thought it was a good idea and who then ordered Major Hasan and tens of thousands of others to engage in battle as an absolutely indisputable act of responsibility.

Or think about one little symbol of all this. Pull up a photo of the Joint Chiefs, those responsible for conducting wars like Iraq and Afghanistan and sending people to fight in them. Notice their chests bedizened by ribbons.

Now ask yourself: in what other field of human endeavor could one wear ribbons indicating areas of service, major campaigns, training, unit achievement, and personal accomplishment without people regarding you as completely mad?

And in what other job can you wantonly kill so many people and be treated as a normal human being?

None of this excuses Major Hasan but it puts his acts in perspective: a uncontrolled act of madness in a deliberately insane system.

We don't think about such things much, because most of us don't have to. The business of war has been outsourced to the weakest parts of our economy, to victims of our pathological economic system among others.

This is one reason there are so many suicides amongst soldiers. War is no longer a one time misery; troops are being recycled through it because there are too few to take their place.

One of the reasons, although we don't talk about it, is that an increasing number of people see war as a crazy idea of which they want no part. For the better off, that's a choice, but for others madness is simply the best job they can find.

The good news is that while perhaps a third or more of history's major wars (in terms of fatalities) have occurred in the 20th century, since WWII the death rates have gone down. We seem to be tiring of war but don't yet know it.

Which is good, all morality aside, since the only war America has won since the 1940s has been the invasion of Grenada and no government has surrendered to us since Japan.

There is a parallel madness to be found in other aspects of our uberculture - our approach to the environment, economy and education for example. This can lead one to an alternative subculture, depression or violent acts. The more we tend to the first course, the more haven we offer to those who might otherwise slip into the latter.

It's not easy to do but it helps to bear in mind when something like the recent killings occur that it is only a small outward and visible sign of a massive inner and invisible madness that can drive us crazy as well.

LOCAL DEMOCRACY AS WELL AS LOCAL LETTUCE

Sam Smith

Voting for the first time in Maine, I have had the pleasure of another first: an election in which 50-70 percent of voters in my town agreed with me on six out of seven referenda (including supporting gay marriage). There was one city council member running unopposed and I haven't heard yet about the three slots on the sewer district, but I took the advice of an old friend (and a Republican) on that one so it doesn't really count.

The fact that I got to vote for who was on the sewer district, however, does count. After all I spent some four decades in Washington DC, trying to convince people that we should have an elected attorney general and comptroller and only now has a bill for the former been submitted to Congress. Submitted to Congress because DC is still a colony of the U.S. and the world's greatest democracy doesn't want its capital deciding for itself whether to have an elected attorney general.

The other evening I got another taste for what local democracy felt like. I attended a meeting concerning an alternative agricultural center whose manure runoff during the wettest summer in Maine history had helped cause the nearby clam flats to be closed.

The farm (with which I've been long involved) quickly removed cattle from the area and took other corrective steps; the meeting was about where to go from here. There were representatives from three state agencies, the local shellfish commission, the local clamming and oyster trade, the farm, not to mention the clam warden. It was all chaired by the head of the town council.

I calculated that attendance - around 50 - represented approximately six percent of the population of the town. In DC this would have meant a crowd of 3500, something I never saw. Secondly, in my former home the issue would have likely become highly controversial and full of superfluous rhetoric. I had been a neighborhood commissioner there and worked my way through problems like this and it wasn't fun.

But the participants at the Freeport meeting made rational arguments and proposals, listened to the others present, were clearly interested in facts, and sought to find a solution that worked for everyone, both clammers and coastal farm. It was an extremely complicated issue including when and how the water sampling is done, identifying the cause of variations, relative fecal contamination of wild and domesticated animals, shifts in animal location, length of stay in that location, and geography of location.

By the end of the evening, both interests had joined to pressure the Department of Marine Resources to open the flats sooner than they had planned.

I mentioned to a friend afterwards that maybe we should send the whole lot down to Washington to work out a solution on the healthcare bill.

It was also nice, I thought, to be talking sensibly about real manure rather than, as during most of my life, ranting about the fake stuff that is spread so wantonly in Washington.

On election day, the one issue where I was in the minority concerned school consolidation. The state, inspired by the bureaucratic obsessives at the Brookings Institution, had required school districts to consolidate. A number didn't like it for good reason: for example, it would cost money or the districts were too far apart. For more than fifty years, America has been consolidating school districts and the main effect has been to replace educators with bureaucrats and wardens,

But while Freeport voters supported the consolidation with a 62% majority, 79% of Pownal voters, the next town over - and ordered to consolidate with us at a considerable increase in expense - rejected the plan. Since the plan survived statewide, Freeport won and Pownal lost. It's a hell of a way to start a relationship.

But it is part of the bureaucratic myth that we are all the same as long as the data says so.

The clamflat meeting - arranged within the community - and the school consolidation - imposed from outside - reflect the difference between what John McKnight called associations vs. institutions:

"The structure of institutions is a design established to create control of people. On the other hand, the structure of associations is the result of people acting through consent."

Here are some of the characteristics McKnight found among associations in contrast to institutions:

- Interdependency. "If the local newspaper closes, the garden club and the township meeting will each diminish as they lose a voice."

- Community is built around a recognition of fallibility rather than the ideal.

- Community groups are better at finding a place for everyone.

- Associations can respond quickly since they lack the bureaucracy of large institutions.

- Associations engage in non-hierarchical creativity.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about the importance of localizing food. It makes excellent sense but a question keeps coming to mind: why lettuce and not democracy?

One of my big disappointments in politics has been the indifference of liberals - the sort who boost local food - with keeping democracy close to home as well. They often talk about it as though it was some sort of holdover from the states' rights days of segregation.

A growing number of people who identify with new liberalism see themselves as experts and take it for granted that the wisest decisions will be made at the top and then passed down as regulations.

These decisions - like school consolidation - tend to rely on data that wipes out the normal variations of human existence. This data turns judgment into an indentured servant instead of just informing it.

Thus we have a stimulus package that creates innumerable obstacles for state and local government, an education plan that wipes out the very system that taught America to be what it became, and a healthcare plan that absolutely no one understands.

Until we rediscover the value of community, it will only get worse. We will find ourselves increasingly, as Bill Mauldin once put it, fugitives from the law of averages.

Propelled by the rapacious ambitions of their members, neither national party cares about this. But then they don't care about local food either and that didn't stop that movement from coming to life. Our goal should be to bring democracy, as well as our lettuce, as close to home as possible.

THE GAY MARRIAGE DEFEAT

Sam Smith, Progressive Review - Having lived most of my life in the gay friendly city of Washington, I wasn't prepared from some of the nastiness involved in the Maine gay marriage debate. Especially the sick video that claimed that the state's schools would be teaching gay marriage in class.

And while I knew the Pope was the George Wallace of gender, I had never been this close to the repulsive cruelty of the Catholic church on the issue, not to mention hypocritical - given the behavior of more than a few of its priests.

Finally, I realized too late how easy it was to slip into the media's assumption that this was just another issue - and not a major test of morality. It was only after the returns came in that it occurred to me how little the difference was between denying gays entry into marriage and denying a black kid's entry into a school or that kid's parent's entry into a restaurant. It was not just gay marriage being judged, but the rest of us as well. A minority's rights is not a gift to be bestowed but a strong reflection of our own honor and decency. And we failed.

A vote for the establishment of religion

Among other reasons, the banning of gay marriage is illegal because its purpose and origin is based almost entirely on the principles of certain religions. To ban gay marriage is to establish some religions' beliefs as superior to those of others. Specifically, the Maine gay marriage vote makes the following lesser religions compared, say, to the Catholic Church:

The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, Ecumenical Catholic Church, Church of God Anonymous, Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Reconstructionist Judaism, Reform Judaism, and Unitarian Universalist Association, which all approve of same sex marriage

The United Church of Christ, Episcopal and various Quaker groups leave the decision to clergy, congregations or local governing bodies. And, adds the Interfaith Workig Group, the Presbyterian Church (USA) allows the blessings of same-gender unions with terminology restrictions.

So the result was not just a repeal of gay marriage but a totally unconstitutional vote to restrict the rights of the aforementioned religion http://www.iwgonline.org/s

TIME FOR A LITTLE MODERATION

Sam Smith

After nine months of political extremism - bankrolling huge banks, escalating the Afghan war, treating local public schools like they were just another federal agency and finding new ways to subsidize the health insurance industry - it may finally be time for a little moderation. There's an awful lot of talk about moderation and bipartisanship in Washington, but not much evidence of it. So here is a political program that would be both more moderate and more popular than that of our bipartited president and Congress:

WARS

Just stop them. They're not doing us any good. We don't win them, they cost a lot of money, make a lot of people mad at us, and kill people who in no way deserve it. And if you can't stop them, at least stop escalating them. Remember: every new soldier sent to Afghanistan is one more problem you'll have to add to your exit strategy.

A major reason we have so many wars is because of pressure from former schoolyard bullies now at the Pentagon and from presidential advisers and journalists feeling insecure about their testosterone level. Stop pandering to these types and you not only save a lot of lives, but hundreds of billions of dollars as well.

HEALTH CARE

The Democrats have blown it. So why not drop the whole thing and come up with a moderate health reform bill. One that would do some of the things that everyone would like - like barring denial of insurance for preexisting conditions. Then expand Medicare to those 55 and older and to children 5 and under. Expand Medicaid. You can get your money from TARP and from the Pentagon. There's lots of it floating around these days for bankers and Afghanis. Why not use it for a good purpose instead? Sure the insurance companies will be furious, but who cares? Mike Huckabee has already come within spitting distance of Obama in two polls and sucking up to Blue Cross won't help Obama a bit.

PUBLIC WORKS

One difference between Washington politicians and real people is that the latter like to see public works; the former settle for infrastructure. Further, the stimulus bill was so full of verbal infrastructure that people didn't notice how little public works there was in it. We don't need a second stimulus package; we need a real first one. For a model, look at Roosevelt's administration, whose Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,100 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,000 bridges, and 125,100 public buildings. Harry Hopkins got the same number of people working in four weeks as Obama promised he would in two years. In fact, Hopkins got about the same number of people working in four weeks as Obama has lost so far this year.

ECONOMIC PROGRAMS

The Democrats have done hardly anything to put a dent in the foreclosure crisis. One reason is because they like banks too much. The other is that they're afraid that helping those in foreclosure or in danger of it will annoy others who say, "I've paid my mortgage; why haven't they?" Two ways to deal with this: decentralize foreclosure adjustment decisions to local courts and start a shared equity program in which financial aid would be paid for by a percentage of government ownership. Get this going now, and by the time most of these homes are sold, the government will have actually made money.

Some other things that would help:

Reduce credit card interest rates. End rampant usury.

Expand unemployment benefits

Limit rate increases on adjustable rate mortgages

Create state owned banks like the one that has worked well in North Dakota.

Support the creation of more credit unions and co-ops.

Expand our rail system and rail service - with the emphasis not on business class high speed rail but on everyday service for real people. The expansion of transportation has historically been one of America's great economic spurs.

DRUGS

The war on drugs has been the most deadly conflict for Americans since Vietnam. It has greatly increased criminal drug activity and sends people to prison for using something milder than vodka and less dangerous than cigarettes. If we were to decriminalize the possession of marijuana and cancel all existing marijuana possession charges, we would be starting on the path towards sanity.

RESTORE THE CONSTITUTION

There are at least five amendments that are in deep trouble.

The First Amendment: This is in trouble because it has fewer and fewer powerful advocates. Police intimidate demonstrators, principals harass student newspapers, and liberals pass hate crime bills. Ordinary folks still like the idea, however, and it's a wonderfully moderate concept.

The Second Amendment: Contrary to liberal mythology, gun laws are pretty ineffective. When DC passed the toughest gun law in the country, its murderers failed to notice and the death rate soared. This is partly because if you're about to kill someone, the threat of ancillary gun charges are of minimal significance. There are, on the other hand, places like Alaska and Maine that have high gun ownership and low crime rates. Further, there are Americans who like to hunt, like to feel safe in their house, and believe in their constitutional right to bear arms. Even if you don't agree with them, you're not doing anyone (including yourself) a favor by hassling them. Support their rights and you've may find yourself with allies on actual important issues.

The Fourth Amendment: There is a varied and broad constituency that has been subjected to illegal searches by the government, from wiretaps to warrantless raids.

The Tenth Amendment: This amendment, which leaves to the states and the people those powers not specified in the Constitution, is routinely abused by the feds. Arne Duncan's unconstitutional interference with local public education is but one example. Washington officials of both parties have increasingly sought to secure more power for themselves at the expense of state and local government. Liberals are repeat offenders, some even giving the impression that they hold lower branches of government with contempt. This doesn't win votes. It annoys people, makes their lives more difficult, and leads them to think of you as arrogant.

The Fourteenth Amendment: This amendment, designed after the Civil War to give personhood to former slaves and their descendants, was kidnapped by business interests to include corporations as persons. This is why corporations can get away with buying elections. As Al Gore explained, after an 1886 decision by the Supreme Court, "the 'monopolies in commerce' that Jefferson had wanted to prohibit in the Bill of Rights were full-blown monsters, crushing competition from smaller businesses, bleeding farmers with extortionate shipping costs, and buying politicians at every level of government." Corporations need to lose their personhood.

Five ways to preserve and restore the Constitution. There's nothing more moderate than that.

In fact, all the aforementioned are much closer to the American consensus than much of what is being proposed in Washington, or has been for the past few decades. And there isn't a obfuscating trigger, mandate, option or TARP in the lot.

FUNNY BOOKS

Sam Smith

Most Washington journalists graduated with degrees in the humanities or social sciences. As a result they are easily conned by the numbers that buzz like mosquitoes around the capital or just don't bother to question them.

For example, some time ago, Washington pols discovered the decade. You take whatever figure you like or don't like and multiply by ten. If you're lucky you can turn tens of millions into hundreds of millions or hundreds of millions into trillions. The decade figure is misleading in a number of regards including the fact that the people using it aren't likely to be around to answer for any error in their calculations and, further, the accuracy of predicting something ten years from now is inevitably far less precise than estimating next year's budget.

Another major scam might be called the public-private option. Both parties use it. Take healthcare for example. The GOP gives frightening estimates of what public healthcare expenditures will be without ever subtracting the parallel reduction in private healthcare costs. The Democrats, pushing for a mandatory purchase of health insurance for many, simultaneously claim not to be raising taxes. Of course, to the individual involved, whether you write the check to Aetna or the Treasury doesn't make all that much difference.

THE END OF POLITICS

THE END OF POLITICS

Sam Smith

As I tried, for about the seventeenth time, to make sense of the healthcare negotiations, I suddenly realized that I wasn't watching a political debate at all; rather it was one of those conflicts you read about in other countries that are so hard to understand from afar - the sort in which militant and/or religious sects with hard to remember names and unpronounceable leaders engage in struggles usually reduced by the press to simple goals such as "power" or "strengthening their position."

But instead of Shiek Wahoodie Marzapan or the Terratus Mozaki faction, we have Max Baucus, Olympia Snow and the Blue Dogs. And it all makes about as much sense.

That is, until you stop framing it as a political division and recognize that we are really dealing with quasi-religious fundamentalists engaged in a simple turf battle in which the goal is not healthcare or the lack thereof, but relative standing at the end of the conflict. In domestic terms, it is much more like a mob dispute than a traditional political debate. To be sure, some of the language seems political - talk of a public option, mandates and so forth - but this is mostly just part of the Muzak accompanying the mayhem - symbols that help make the whole thing appear rational.

In fact, politics is pretty much dead in America and has been for some time.

Of course, politics has never been just about such high minded things as goals, ideas and reforms. Such causes have always had to struggle for air against the forces described by Walt Whitman as including "the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth."

But - whether promoted out convenience or noble purpose - such causes did at least exist and everyone argued about them - albeit often futilely.

For example, here is one such statement of goals:
"This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights -- among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
"We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. . . People who are hungry, people who are (and) out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of station, or race or creed.
"Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; . . . The right of every business man, large and small , to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, and sickness, and accident and unemployment; And finally, the right to a good education.
"America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens."
Now, if you were to clip the foregoing and wander around the White House and Capitol Hill looking for someone to advocate such a program, you would be lucky if you came up with anyone other than, say, Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders and perhaps a bare majority of the Black Caucus. . . .

The others - from the president on down - would regard such a program as naive claptrap not even worthy of discussion. And not a single mainstream reporter or TV show would give it the slightest attention.

Which will give you some sense of what has happened in the 65 years since these words were broadcast nationally during a fireside chat by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We like to think of ourselves as so much more sophisticated than those crazy Muslims with their innumerable and indecipherable sects, yet that is precisely what our politics has become as well.

It is not about great issues but about minor factions. It is not about causes to be advocated but subcultures to be preserved. It is not about mass politics but about atomized preferences. And, of course, it is no longer about votes because they have become almost superfluous - symbolic reflections of the dollars that really matter.

If we toss out our traditional political paradigm and start to look at America as if it were one of those countries we like to occupy, destabilize or develop an exit strategy for, it all begins to make more sense.

We find ourselves in a country in which at least three major fundamentalist mujahideens are struggling for power: the conservative, liberal and establishment. Each share such characteristics as absolute confidence in their righteousness, absolute certainty in their beliefs, absolute contempt for doubt, reduction of their opponents to the status of devils, and the acceptance of warfare as a noble exercise as long as they get to pick the target.

In a healthy democracy, two or more parties propose specific programs to better, in their view, the state of the nation. But not one of the contemporary American mujahideens has shown any serious interest in such matters for the past several decades. It has been left to minor sects like the Greens and Libertarians to still worry about issues.

Conservatives, for example, have seemingly forgotten their erstwhile concern for small government and lower spending and have chosen to define themselves instead by what they oppose: primarily abortion and gay marriage. There are about 1.2 million abortions a year and about 150,000 gay marriages or similar unions. In other words, conservatives have established as a primary goal changing the annual behavior of less than one half of one percent of the American public.

About the only major policies that establishment fundamentalists have pursued during this same period has been to find new ways to transfer wealth from the many to the few and to periodically change the identity of their major enemy - i.e. the devil incarnate - and thus periodically redefine themselves. Over these three decades the devil has been serially located in El Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Honduras, Iraq, Panama, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. And the most deadly horned beast of all has been the one selling drugs, the war on which having cost more American lives than any conflict since Vietnam.

But the only clear victory in all of this was in Grenada and, as Ted Turner recently noted, the last country to actually surrender to us was Japan. Yet not one significant member of the establishment mujahideen has apologized for the futility and cost of their warrior fantasies and, as of this morning, not one leader of the establishment has apologized for their near disastrous financial policies and misdeeds from which we are now desperately attempting to recover.

But then, the enemy was never there to be defeated but as a constant threat enforcing the loyalty of one's constituency. As Ernest Becker put it, "war is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies." With it you need no progress, no policies, and no change in the system at all.

All you need is an enemy, with the greatest threat not being the enemy itself but that it might disappear. Constatine Cavafy put it well a century ago:

Night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
And said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Few in public office have said it so bluntly, a remarkable exception being the State Department's director of policy planning in 1948, George Kennan, who argued, "We should cease to talk about vague and. . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. . . We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts."

While an establishment or conservative movement obsessed with power certainly has plenty of precedents in history, this tendency was mitigated in the United States during its first two centuries because, for better or worse, Americans of all stripes believed in things and their politics reflected this.

But what is rare enough to be deeply disturbing has been the transformation of the American liberal constituency into a similar sect - one searching for power without the necessity of purpose. Certainly since its cynical acceptance of Bill Clinton, mainstream liberal Democratic politics has not displayed more than a passing interest in any major policy - sharing with the right a reliance on things like gay marriage and abortion while ignoring massive economic, environmental and civil liberties issues. To be sure, there are progressives and groups that have tried to take up the slack, but they have been uniformly ignored, or even dissed, such as the refusal to invite single payer advocates to White House discussions on health care, which mainstream liberals barely noticed.

Further, liberals have increasingly taken to acting like conservatives. They are defining themselves by their enemies rather than by their own beliefs and programs. For example, their obsession with the faults of Fox News argues that true virtue lies in not being Sean Hannity. There was a time when liberals had higher standards than that.

Worse, the liberal paradigm has assigned to much of America the sins of Rush Limbaugh, condemning the very people who should be converted, disparaging much of our land as mere "fly over country," and showing no respect for the problems of those who live in such places. These are the characteristics of a snotty private club, not a political movement.

There are a couple of reasons why all this is deeply disturbing. The first is that almost without exception, the best political ideas - from democracy itself to a minimum wage or ecological preservation - have come from the left. For liberalism to go into sleep mode or retreat into a cocoon of smug self identity endangers the whole nation.

The second is that one of the hidden dangers of politics without purpose is that it becomes increasingly corrupt and supportive of aggressively narcissistic and anti-democratic abuse. This is what happened in Nazi Germany as the disintegration of liberalism became an important part of the cultural rubble upon which Hitler climbed.

There is nothing, however, that prevents the rediscovery of real politics in America. Admittedly, it would be difficult given the almost total bias of the media towards the personality rather than the substance of power. But there could still be a progressive populist movement that would promote a real economic reform movement, defend the weak against the powerful, the local against the centralized and rediscover the sort of rights of which Roosevelt spoke 65 years ago.

Since the media is a key part of the establishment mujahideen, it will not voluntarily admit this to its viewers and readers, but we are living in a nation of increasingly angry, restless, confused folk and if they are not offered decent and realistic answers they will become increasingly susceptible to the worst kind of lies.

Yet for it to happen, we must first accept the degree to which the system we were taught we lived under simply no longer exists. That our politics have lost honor and soul, with conscious programs and polices replaced by the transactions of mobs, exemplified by healthcare negotiations in which the major winners will inevitably be the healthcare industry and the biggest losers those in whose name a final measure will be passed.

And we must also view that part of unempowered America with which we find disagreement not as irreparable rightwing junkies but as fellow citizens who have been deceived, misled and screwed. And then, issue by issue, turn them into allies as together we rediscover what politics was meant to be - and still can be - about.