Sam Smith
In part because the media has misleadingly written endlessly about global warming rather than climate change, there are going to more than a few people in mid-Atlantic cities who think the recent snows prove it's all not a problem.
In fact, as a reader recently pointed out, change is just that. It is hard to predict. We know past data definitely indicates a shift but we can't define the precise nature of that shift because we haven't experienced it yet.
Just before the current blizzard, the National Wildlife Federation issued a report that suggested that we shouldn't be surprised by such things:
"Global warming is having a seemingly peculiar effect on winter weather in the northern United States. Winter is becoming milder and shorter on average; spring arrives 10 to 14 days earlier than it did just 20 years ago. But most snow belt areas are still experiencing extremely heavy snowstorms. . . Even as global warming slowly changes the character of winter, we will still experience significant year-to-year variability in snowfall and temperature because many different factors are at play."
Washington, DC, well illustrates the uncertain quality of change. The storm last weekend dropped the fourth largest amount of snow on the city in recorded history. But you need only to go back two years to February 6, 2008, and you'll find the city setting a warmth record for that date of 74 degrees. The coldest February 6 was back in 1895, when the thermometer fell to one degree.
It may help to keep in mind two principles:
- Change is change and doesn't fully define itself until it's happened.
- An average is only an average.
Having recently moved from DC to Maine, I gaze out my window at the remains of 22 inches of snow that hardly slowed things down at all in these parts and recall the number of my friends who said something like, "How are you going to survive those Maine winters?" and I think how grateful I am I wasn't back in DC this weekend.
In fact, Maine has two mre typical advantages over the capital in winter. We have a lot of sun and the cold is dry. Twenty-five degrees on a sunny Down East day is infinitely preferable to a 35 degree cloudy day in DC with the humid cold cutting through any protection you might be wearing.
Here's how I described it back the 1970s:
"The city lived for spring and fall, periods separated by muggy summer and by an unpredictable yet dull winter. In the fall, the gauze of noxious gas that stretched over DC all summer was peeled away, permitting the sun a rare chance to lounge unimpeded against the sides of buildings or ricochet off spires. The air conditioner's monotone was finally silenced and the hint of chill repulsed by a friendly jacket. But the spring was even better; you quickly forgot the snow that didn't come, or that did come but all in one blizzard, and you luxuriated in a few months of unadulterated color and life. Summer was awful and in winter it was best to heed the words of Mark Twain:
"'When you arrived it was snowing. When you reached the hotel it was sleeting. When you went to bed it was raining. During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you got up in the morning it was foggy. When you finished your breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all pervading. You will like the climate-when you get used to it. . . . Take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and so forth.'"
As for Maine, I don't have to check any data to confirm that the climate has changed. All I have to do is remember the Farm Bureau supper I attended as a kid where I overheard the straw hatted Harold Mann telling a companion, "Ayah. I remembah that wintah of ought eight. We had our first snow the middle of Octobah and come May 1st we were still on runnahs."
Sam Smith, Washington Post, 1987 - Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about one percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.
Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.
How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.
To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. Since it is clear our trucks are outmoded and not properly equipped, let's look at it another way: 25 good snow plows could, using the Maine standard, run through every street in the city in nine hours. . .
Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours.
I asked if he could explain the logic of a not-uncommon Washington scene: two snow plows working directly behind each other, sometimes with a Department of Public Works pickup truck in the lead. He just laughed and said, "No." Al Thompson agrees: "Doesn't do any good to plow over ice. Got to use salt."
And you don't wait until four inches have piled up before you start plowing. You start when you've got an inch and a half, and you stay ahead of the storm. And you don't leave it to the Almighty once ice-covered streets become mushy. You run the plows through and get the stuff off. Here, even downtown, we let the streets freeze again so the morning traffic reporters will have something to talk about.
"As soon as the storm starts, we salt all our major arterials," Flaherty says. In cases of major storms, "we will salt our critical areas just before it begins to snow.". . .
It will be argued that northern cities are willing to pay a high premium for clearing their streets because they get so much snow. But this year Portland budgeted, like most cities, for the best of all possible worlds: 25 inches, a winter roughly comparable to ours so far. With one-third the street mileage of D.C., Portland still planned to spend one-third more.
Why? Maybe because they know what bringing a city to a halt really costs. Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.
February 07, 2010
January 26, 2010
THE SWAMPOODLE REPORT: DEALING WITH THE OBAMA FREEZE WARNING
Josiah Swampoodle
I understand that President Obama will be proposing a freeze on all expenditures that don't have something to do with preventing dying (Medicare) or encouraging it (the Pentagon). It's a strange choice of exceptions and in the interest of bipartisanship - i.e. bringing Obama together with the people who voted for him - I'd like to propose in the alternative that some of these frozen items, like the winter's snow, be considered shovel ready, which is to say, we push them away from the budget until spring comes along and melts them. This would cause an unprecedented drop in the deficit. Here are some suggestions for items that are shovel ready:
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
The war against drugs
Any education funding that requires more testing
Any bank bailouts or more aid to the Wall Street criminal class
Aid to Israel
Contracts with Blackwater
Guantanamo
Wiretapping American citizens without a warrant
Torture
Government subsidy of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry
Peter Orzag, Rahm Emannual and Arne Duncan, just to name a few
To put this in terms that even Arne Duncan might understand: indiscriminately freezing most domestic budget items is like checking all the answers on a multiple choice test. You can do it, but if you do, you flunk.
I understand that President Obama will be proposing a freeze on all expenditures that don't have something to do with preventing dying (Medicare) or encouraging it (the Pentagon). It's a strange choice of exceptions and in the interest of bipartisanship - i.e. bringing Obama together with the people who voted for him - I'd like to propose in the alternative that some of these frozen items, like the winter's snow, be considered shovel ready, which is to say, we push them away from the budget until spring comes along and melts them. This would cause an unprecedented drop in the deficit. Here are some suggestions for items that are shovel ready:
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
The war against drugs
Any education funding that requires more testing
Any bank bailouts or more aid to the Wall Street criminal class
Aid to Israel
Contracts with Blackwater
Guantanamo
Wiretapping American citizens without a warrant
Torture
Government subsidy of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry
Peter Orzag, Rahm Emannual and Arne Duncan, just to name a few
To put this in terms that even Arne Duncan might understand: indiscriminately freezing most domestic budget items is like checking all the answers on a multiple choice test. You can do it, but if you do, you flunk.
January 21, 2010
WHEN BRIBERY IS CALLED FREE SPEECH
From a speech by San Smith at a US Capitol rally, 1999:
I have three objections to our current system of campaign financing.
The first is literary. Being a writer I try to show respect for words, to leave their meanings untwisted and unobscured.
This is alien to much of official Washington which daily engages in an activity well described by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe said, "By ringing small changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip. . . I could 'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, a leg-of-mutton."
For example, for centuries ordinary people have known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary described it in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.
In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise.
But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time not so many months ago when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt.
The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or the phrase which brings us here today: "campaign contribution."
Another example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it.
My second objection to our system of campaign financing is economic. It's just too damn expensive for the taxpayer. The real cost is not the campaign contributions themselves. The real cost is what is paid in return out of public funds.
A case in point: Public Campaign recently reported that in 1996, when Congress voted to lift the minimum wage 90 cents an hour, business interests extracted $21 billion in custom-designed tax benefits. These business interests gave only about $36 million in campaign contributions so they got out of the public treasury nearly 600 times what they put in. And you helped pay for it.
Looked at another way, that was enough money to give 11 million workers a 90 cent an hour wage increase for a whole year -- or, to be more 1990s about it, to give 21,000 CEOs a million dollar bonus.
This is repeated over and over. For example, the oil industry in one recent year gave $23 million in campaign contributions and got nearly $9 billion in tax breaks.
The bottom line is this: if you want to save public money, support public campaign financing.
My final objection is biologic. Elections are for and between human beings. How do you tell when you're dealing with a person? Well, they bleed, burp, wiggle their toes and have sex. They register for the draft. They register to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they have babies and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.
Now this may seem obvious to you, but there are tens of thousands of lawyers and judges and politicians who simply don't believe it. They will tell you that a corporation is a person, based on a corrupt Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment from back in the robber baron era of the late 19th century -- a time in many ways not unlike our own.
Before this ruling, everyone knew what a person was just as everyone knew what a bribe was. States regulated corporations because they were legal fictions lacking not only blood and bones, but conscience, morality, and free will. But then the leg of mutton became a turnip in the eyes of the law.
Corporations say they just want to be treated like people, but that's not true. Test it out. Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation just like they exercise theirs in your election. You'll find out quickly who is more of a person. We can take care of this biologic problem by applying a simple literary solution: tell the truth. A corporation is not a person and should not be allowed to be called one under the law.
I close with this thought. The people who work in the building behind us have learned to count money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the money changers out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress to adopt publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would suggest that while fighting this difficult battle there is something we can do starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent organization and individual in communities all over America -- the churches, activist organizations, social service groups, moral business people, concerned citizens -- and begin drafting a code of conduct for politicians. We do not have to wait for any legislature.
If we do this right, if we form true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians will ignore us only at their peril.
At root, dear friends, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.
I have three objections to our current system of campaign financing.
The first is literary. Being a writer I try to show respect for words, to leave their meanings untwisted and unobscured.
This is alien to much of official Washington which daily engages in an activity well described by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe said, "By ringing small changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip. . . I could 'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, a leg-of-mutton."
For example, for centuries ordinary people have known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary described it in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.
In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise.
But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time not so many months ago when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt.
The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or the phrase which brings us here today: "campaign contribution."
Another example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it.
My second objection to our system of campaign financing is economic. It's just too damn expensive for the taxpayer. The real cost is not the campaign contributions themselves. The real cost is what is paid in return out of public funds.
A case in point: Public Campaign recently reported that in 1996, when Congress voted to lift the minimum wage 90 cents an hour, business interests extracted $21 billion in custom-designed tax benefits. These business interests gave only about $36 million in campaign contributions so they got out of the public treasury nearly 600 times what they put in. And you helped pay for it.
Looked at another way, that was enough money to give 11 million workers a 90 cent an hour wage increase for a whole year -- or, to be more 1990s about it, to give 21,000 CEOs a million dollar bonus.
This is repeated over and over. For example, the oil industry in one recent year gave $23 million in campaign contributions and got nearly $9 billion in tax breaks.
The bottom line is this: if you want to save public money, support public campaign financing.
My final objection is biologic. Elections are for and between human beings. How do you tell when you're dealing with a person? Well, they bleed, burp, wiggle their toes and have sex. They register for the draft. They register to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they have babies and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.
Now this may seem obvious to you, but there are tens of thousands of lawyers and judges and politicians who simply don't believe it. They will tell you that a corporation is a person, based on a corrupt Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment from back in the robber baron era of the late 19th century -- a time in many ways not unlike our own.
Before this ruling, everyone knew what a person was just as everyone knew what a bribe was. States regulated corporations because they were legal fictions lacking not only blood and bones, but conscience, morality, and free will. But then the leg of mutton became a turnip in the eyes of the law.
Corporations say they just want to be treated like people, but that's not true. Test it out. Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation just like they exercise theirs in your election. You'll find out quickly who is more of a person. We can take care of this biologic problem by applying a simple literary solution: tell the truth. A corporation is not a person and should not be allowed to be called one under the law.
I close with this thought. The people who work in the building behind us have learned to count money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the money changers out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress to adopt publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would suggest that while fighting this difficult battle there is something we can do starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent organization and individual in communities all over America -- the churches, activist organizations, social service groups, moral business people, concerned citizens -- and begin drafting a code of conduct for politicians. We do not have to wait for any legislature.
If we do this right, if we form true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians will ignore us only at their peril.
At root, dear friends, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.
January 19, 2010
HOW TO JUMP START THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT
Sam Smith
Define your politics issue by issue, not icon by icon. One reason progressive politics fares so poorly is because we spend too much time on individual campaigns and not enough on issues. While the former tend to drive away the independent, the skeptical and those who don't like a particular a candidate, the latter can attract all sorts to join with others who may agree only one issue.
Define your politics by issue by issue, not by ideology. It's a lot easier to get a cross section of people backing a particular issue than it is for them to buy into your whole philosophy of life. Use the former approach on the streets and save the latter for the bar. You don't need common ideology if you have common causes.
Use fewer experts from the Ivy League and more from Iowa.
Remember that most minority voters don't get to even look at a glass ceiling. But many of them run into locked doors every day. Pay much more attention to the latter.
Don't dis' those whose votes you need. Convert them with policies that actually help them. Do a good enough job and they'll forget about abortions and gay marriage.
The red states are not your enemy; they are an undeveloped market.
Remember that minorities have diversity, too. Just because a black politician talks about hope and change doesn't mean he's Martin Luther King. Especially if he's from Chicago.
Support small business. Nobody else does.
Support labor unions. Nobody else does.
Go after credit card usury. Nobody else does and everyone else would love it
Move economic issues back to the top of the list. Since the 1980s, liberals have forgotten this basic part of their heritage, which brought us things like an end to the depression, Social Security, a minimum wage and Medicare. Besides, economic issues are ones that best cut across geographic, cultural and ethnic lines.
Sing about it. Just about every successful great movement has moved along to the sound of its own music.
Stop harping on Glenn Beck. You're only helping to build his base. Follow Samuel Goldwyn's advice and "don't even ignore him." The more he becomes the issue the less important real issues become.
Personal to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Madow: A progressive movement can't be built on the mirror image of Bill O'Reilly or with endless sarcastic comments about your opponents. It can be built by people understanding and becoming enthusiastic about the policies you support.
No more stimulus packages for grad school liberals. One of the things many people don't like about traditional liberals is how federally oriented they are. This is due in no small part to an elite class that longs for jobs in Washington. Let them get these jobs on their own. Stop constantly designing stimulus packages for them with new federocentric legislation.
Rediscover subsidiarity: All national legislation with state and local impact should meet the standards of what the Catholic Church used to call the principle of subsidiarity: government power should exercised at the lowest practical level. There lots of ways to do this in federal legislation. Here are a few:
- Revenue sharing
- Giving money instead of orders for public education and other programs.
- Decentralizing government agencies like some of the best existing ones such at the National Park Service, Coast Guard and US Attorney - all highly decentralized and involved with local governments and communities.
- Not making too many decisions at the federal level.
- Supporting the 9th and 10th amendments that clearly limit the federal government's role but which traditional liberals routinely ignore.
Support the Second Amendment for three good reasons: it works, gun prohibition laws don't and you'll make all sorts of new friends. If you really want to change American politics, start a group called Gays for Guns.
Change the rules as well as the game. Support instant runoff voting, public campaign financing, more states, a larger House of Representatives with mixed proportional and district representation like Germany, state banks, and a constitutional amendment to end corporations' legal status as "persons."
Distinguish between good regulation and good jobs for regulators. New laws often favor the latter which is why we keep adding regulators but can't bring the Glass-Steagall Act back.
Sleep with the devil and your offspring may be crooks. Stop selling out so cheaply.
Support a shorter work week. It sure helped progressive populists in the past.
Don't forget the forgotten. Everyone talks about having a black president, but hardly anyone does anything about the huge number of young black and white males to whom we offer two main futures: incarceration or pain if not death on the battlefield. It is similar with the poor in general. They have not only been deserted by conservatives and centrists but by liberals as well.
Ditch the war on drugs. A great recession is a wonderful time to get rid America's most unsuccessful and expensive policy this side of foreign wars. It will save money, reduce the police state, limit prosecutorial discrimination against the poor, lower the crime rate and attract a lot of young voters who didn't even known they were progressives.
Don't be afraid to lead: When your movement is pretty much down to Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich at the national level, you know there's plenty of room for you. Most great movements have been led by those most hadn't even heard of a few years earlier. You could be one of them.
Don't be afraid to follow. One of the most useful techniques in organizing is to support the work of others. A mass movement is built by groups alternately leading and following each other. And one of the best ways to get respect is to give it.
Go local for both your lettuce and your democracy: One of the great failures of liberalism has been its great disinterest in local power. The closer government is to the people the more they like it and the more responsive it tends to be. Besides, if you can't be an effective progressive in the 'hood, then you'll be a pretty lousy one in Washington.
Turn public schools back to their communities. It worked for some 200 years until we decided to turn them into human drone development and detention centers where the young are taught to pass tests rather than to learn things.
Try to do the most for the most. If your politics clearly help the most, then they won't mind so much when you also help smaller groups within our society. But if you help minorities while ignoring the majority you're in trouble. Remember, everyone wants to be in show business.
Don't let anal retentives, turf protectors, budget bullies, ambitious lawyers and CYA bureaucrats kill good ideas. Given the state of contemporary political culture, it would be unlikely that Social Security, Medicare or a minimum wage could be passed today. That's not so much a reflection of our politics as it is of our culture. We have mainly learned how to say no. Progressives need to reintroduce the concept of yes.
Keep in mind the great 1960s saying: Our goal is not to overthrow the system but to make it irrelevant.
The history of our country has involved repeated conflict between the specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between people and places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession of systems desiring to exploit, subjugate or supplant them. We need to oppose not only the bad systems of the moment but unnatural systems in general - all those that revoke, replace or restrain the natural rights of human beings and the natural assets of their habitats.
The first rule of staying free is to act free. The number of liberals and progressives that follow this rule is sadly small. Everyone these days seems to prefer to talk about balancing rights instead of exercising them. But the rights outlined in the Constitution weren't bargaining chips; they were permanent guarantees.
Don’t surrender the Bible to the right. Progressives leave the right's phony theological arguments largely unchallenged, but even an atheist can point out that the Ten Commandments doesn't say anything about abortion or gay marriage but sure as hell is down on adultery, stealing (even on Wall Street), bearing false witness (even in political ads) and coveting anything that belongs to your neighbor (even in the name of capitalism). The Bible also doesn't like usury and strongly suggests that the earth is the lord's and not the property of multinational corporations. The ultimate irony of right wingers is that that they are comprised in no small part of despoilers, usurers, war-mongers, hypocrites, idolaters and groupies of false prophets - all of whom are frowned upon by the book it pretends to follow. And its opponents, who are more faithful to the words that the conservatives only quote, are often such good Christians that they never say a mumblin' word about it all.
One of the best ways to revive democracy is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.
Use the word 'progressive" and not 'liberal.' There are still a lot of nice liberals around with whom to make common cause, but the word itself carries too much baggage. Progressives are activists; liberals are a demographic. Progressives emphasize economic change; liberals in recent years have largely ignored it. Progressives convert their opponents; liberals rant about them. Progressives are grassroots; liberals are federocentric.
Encourage citizens to practice reciprocal liberty. No, we don't all agree on how things should be done, but we can all understand that we can't have our liberty unless others do as well. Both right and left spend far too much time trying to stop others from doing things their way. The trick is how as many as possible can do things their way as long as it doesn't hurt others.
Value tolerance. It's a word that isn't heard much any more but could ease a lot of our pain. Tolerance is often a necessary waypoint for people on the way to accepting new ideas. It's the trial period before full acceptance.
Create an alternative culture - Part of the misery of today's America is that there are too many people unhappy with the system who have live their misery alone. Part of the beauty of the 1960s was in varied alternative communities. Put down your Ipod and join with others who agree with you.
Educate more and scold less. Issues like climate change are complicated for many and hard to grasp, especially since our schools have devoted more time to teaching driving and creating drug free zones than they have to science. Help people understand issues and don't blame them for not.
Make change from the bottom up - Part of the illusion of mass media is that change can be organized like a TV series. Try it and typically one of two things happen: it fails or it becomes just more political mush. Too many web-based liberal organizations are simply more lobbying groups. They don't change politics, souls, or history. Despite TV and the Internet, change still comes from the bottom. Build from up there.
Be tough on leaders, not on followers. Those with tightly defined ideas about how we should behave often make little distinction between people who merely accept the values of their culture and those who market and manipulate them. It helps to remember that we are all creatures of our cultures and often speak in their voice. This may not be an admirable characteristic but it certainly is a human one. After all, if it weren't for Rush, dittoheads would have nothing to ditto.
Forget the capitalist-socialist conflict obsession. Two questions help understand the futility:
- Do capitalists ever ride the public subway?
- Who will run the restaurants in the Marxist utopia?
Mix and match based on the reality of the situation and not on somebody's theory. And learn about co-ops, credit unions and community banks.
Define America. If you don't like the way the right does it, come up with your own description, stories and role models.
Speak United States. Most Americans don't talk about stimuli, transparency or infrastructure. But you'd never know it listening to typical Democratic politicians. Avoid the language of the corporate executive, pompous academic, hustling preacher, or boring lawyer.
Have fun. If you don't enjoy your cause, how can you expect others to?
Define your politics issue by issue, not icon by icon. One reason progressive politics fares so poorly is because we spend too much time on individual campaigns and not enough on issues. While the former tend to drive away the independent, the skeptical and those who don't like a particular a candidate, the latter can attract all sorts to join with others who may agree only one issue.
Define your politics by issue by issue, not by ideology. It's a lot easier to get a cross section of people backing a particular issue than it is for them to buy into your whole philosophy of life. Use the former approach on the streets and save the latter for the bar. You don't need common ideology if you have common causes.
Use fewer experts from the Ivy League and more from Iowa.
Remember that most minority voters don't get to even look at a glass ceiling. But many of them run into locked doors every day. Pay much more attention to the latter.
Don't dis' those whose votes you need. Convert them with policies that actually help them. Do a good enough job and they'll forget about abortions and gay marriage.
The red states are not your enemy; they are an undeveloped market.
Remember that minorities have diversity, too. Just because a black politician talks about hope and change doesn't mean he's Martin Luther King. Especially if he's from Chicago.
Support small business. Nobody else does.
Support labor unions. Nobody else does.
Go after credit card usury. Nobody else does and everyone else would love it
Move economic issues back to the top of the list. Since the 1980s, liberals have forgotten this basic part of their heritage, which brought us things like an end to the depression, Social Security, a minimum wage and Medicare. Besides, economic issues are ones that best cut across geographic, cultural and ethnic lines.
Sing about it. Just about every successful great movement has moved along to the sound of its own music.
Stop harping on Glenn Beck. You're only helping to build his base. Follow Samuel Goldwyn's advice and "don't even ignore him." The more he becomes the issue the less important real issues become.
Personal to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Madow: A progressive movement can't be built on the mirror image of Bill O'Reilly or with endless sarcastic comments about your opponents. It can be built by people understanding and becoming enthusiastic about the policies you support.
No more stimulus packages for grad school liberals. One of the things many people don't like about traditional liberals is how federally oriented they are. This is due in no small part to an elite class that longs for jobs in Washington. Let them get these jobs on their own. Stop constantly designing stimulus packages for them with new federocentric legislation.
Rediscover subsidiarity: All national legislation with state and local impact should meet the standards of what the Catholic Church used to call the principle of subsidiarity: government power should exercised at the lowest practical level. There lots of ways to do this in federal legislation. Here are a few:
- Revenue sharing
- Giving money instead of orders for public education and other programs.
- Decentralizing government agencies like some of the best existing ones such at the National Park Service, Coast Guard and US Attorney - all highly decentralized and involved with local governments and communities.
- Not making too many decisions at the federal level.
- Supporting the 9th and 10th amendments that clearly limit the federal government's role but which traditional liberals routinely ignore.
Support the Second Amendment for three good reasons: it works, gun prohibition laws don't and you'll make all sorts of new friends. If you really want to change American politics, start a group called Gays for Guns.
Change the rules as well as the game. Support instant runoff voting, public campaign financing, more states, a larger House of Representatives with mixed proportional and district representation like Germany, state banks, and a constitutional amendment to end corporations' legal status as "persons."
Distinguish between good regulation and good jobs for regulators. New laws often favor the latter which is why we keep adding regulators but can't bring the Glass-Steagall Act back.
Sleep with the devil and your offspring may be crooks. Stop selling out so cheaply.
Support a shorter work week. It sure helped progressive populists in the past.
Don't forget the forgotten. Everyone talks about having a black president, but hardly anyone does anything about the huge number of young black and white males to whom we offer two main futures: incarceration or pain if not death on the battlefield. It is similar with the poor in general. They have not only been deserted by conservatives and centrists but by liberals as well.
Ditch the war on drugs. A great recession is a wonderful time to get rid America's most unsuccessful and expensive policy this side of foreign wars. It will save money, reduce the police state, limit prosecutorial discrimination against the poor, lower the crime rate and attract a lot of young voters who didn't even known they were progressives.
Don't be afraid to lead: When your movement is pretty much down to Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich at the national level, you know there's plenty of room for you. Most great movements have been led by those most hadn't even heard of a few years earlier. You could be one of them.
Don't be afraid to follow. One of the most useful techniques in organizing is to support the work of others. A mass movement is built by groups alternately leading and following each other. And one of the best ways to get respect is to give it.
Go local for both your lettuce and your democracy: One of the great failures of liberalism has been its great disinterest in local power. The closer government is to the people the more they like it and the more responsive it tends to be. Besides, if you can't be an effective progressive in the 'hood, then you'll be a pretty lousy one in Washington.
Turn public schools back to their communities. It worked for some 200 years until we decided to turn them into human drone development and detention centers where the young are taught to pass tests rather than to learn things.
Try to do the most for the most. If your politics clearly help the most, then they won't mind so much when you also help smaller groups within our society. But if you help minorities while ignoring the majority you're in trouble. Remember, everyone wants to be in show business.
Don't let anal retentives, turf protectors, budget bullies, ambitious lawyers and CYA bureaucrats kill good ideas. Given the state of contemporary political culture, it would be unlikely that Social Security, Medicare or a minimum wage could be passed today. That's not so much a reflection of our politics as it is of our culture. We have mainly learned how to say no. Progressives need to reintroduce the concept of yes.
Keep in mind the great 1960s saying: Our goal is not to overthrow the system but to make it irrelevant.
The history of our country has involved repeated conflict between the specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between people and places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession of systems desiring to exploit, subjugate or supplant them. We need to oppose not only the bad systems of the moment but unnatural systems in general - all those that revoke, replace or restrain the natural rights of human beings and the natural assets of their habitats.
The first rule of staying free is to act free. The number of liberals and progressives that follow this rule is sadly small. Everyone these days seems to prefer to talk about balancing rights instead of exercising them. But the rights outlined in the Constitution weren't bargaining chips; they were permanent guarantees.
Don’t surrender the Bible to the right. Progressives leave the right's phony theological arguments largely unchallenged, but even an atheist can point out that the Ten Commandments doesn't say anything about abortion or gay marriage but sure as hell is down on adultery, stealing (even on Wall Street), bearing false witness (even in political ads) and coveting anything that belongs to your neighbor (even in the name of capitalism). The Bible also doesn't like usury and strongly suggests that the earth is the lord's and not the property of multinational corporations. The ultimate irony of right wingers is that that they are comprised in no small part of despoilers, usurers, war-mongers, hypocrites, idolaters and groupies of false prophets - all of whom are frowned upon by the book it pretends to follow. And its opponents, who are more faithful to the words that the conservatives only quote, are often such good Christians that they never say a mumblin' word about it all.
One of the best ways to revive democracy is to make sure that every organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.
Use the word 'progressive" and not 'liberal.' There are still a lot of nice liberals around with whom to make common cause, but the word itself carries too much baggage. Progressives are activists; liberals are a demographic. Progressives emphasize economic change; liberals in recent years have largely ignored it. Progressives convert their opponents; liberals rant about them. Progressives are grassroots; liberals are federocentric.
Encourage citizens to practice reciprocal liberty. No, we don't all agree on how things should be done, but we can all understand that we can't have our liberty unless others do as well. Both right and left spend far too much time trying to stop others from doing things their way. The trick is how as many as possible can do things their way as long as it doesn't hurt others.
Value tolerance. It's a word that isn't heard much any more but could ease a lot of our pain. Tolerance is often a necessary waypoint for people on the way to accepting new ideas. It's the trial period before full acceptance.
Create an alternative culture - Part of the misery of today's America is that there are too many people unhappy with the system who have live their misery alone. Part of the beauty of the 1960s was in varied alternative communities. Put down your Ipod and join with others who agree with you.
Educate more and scold less. Issues like climate change are complicated for many and hard to grasp, especially since our schools have devoted more time to teaching driving and creating drug free zones than they have to science. Help people understand issues and don't blame them for not.
Make change from the bottom up - Part of the illusion of mass media is that change can be organized like a TV series. Try it and typically one of two things happen: it fails or it becomes just more political mush. Too many web-based liberal organizations are simply more lobbying groups. They don't change politics, souls, or history. Despite TV and the Internet, change still comes from the bottom. Build from up there.
Be tough on leaders, not on followers. Those with tightly defined ideas about how we should behave often make little distinction between people who merely accept the values of their culture and those who market and manipulate them. It helps to remember that we are all creatures of our cultures and often speak in their voice. This may not be an admirable characteristic but it certainly is a human one. After all, if it weren't for Rush, dittoheads would have nothing to ditto.
Forget the capitalist-socialist conflict obsession. Two questions help understand the futility:
- Do capitalists ever ride the public subway?
- Who will run the restaurants in the Marxist utopia?
Mix and match based on the reality of the situation and not on somebody's theory. And learn about co-ops, credit unions and community banks.
Define America. If you don't like the way the right does it, come up with your own description, stories and role models.
Speak United States. Most Americans don't talk about stimuli, transparency or infrastructure. But you'd never know it listening to typical Democratic politicians. Avoid the language of the corporate executive, pompous academic, hustling preacher, or boring lawyer.
Have fun. If you don't enjoy your cause, how can you expect others to?
DIGITAL DEFICIT DISORDER
Sam Smith - Thanks to the work I do, I'm constantly looking at percentages and other such figures developed after much, and often expensive, research. And as I do so, the ghost of Alice Darnell repeatedly arises, reminding me - as she did teaching my 12th grade math class - that a result can be no more accurate than the least accurate figures used to derive it.
Yet polling firms, government agencies, and others trying to prove a point to justify their existence, repeatedly tell us things like, "Candidate A received 46.7% in our latest survey." Further down, however, you learn that the poll is accurate only within 3-4 percentage points.
In the notoriously inadequate world of school testing, it can get even worse. The DC school system tells us, for example that 47.62% of fourth graders are "proficient or advanced in reading," a number that doesn't reflect how many students were sick on the day of the test or to what degree questions with multiple choice answers reflect actual reading skill or how many students read better than they take tests. But the score certainly reflects a test company's ability to con its clients and the lack of math skills of those running the DC school system.
My own research has found that 98.12% of the percentages I come across in news stories don't deserve their extra decimal points and journalists should round them up or down in a well-deserved attack on digital deficit disorder.
Yet polling firms, government agencies, and others trying to prove a point to justify their existence, repeatedly tell us things like, "Candidate A received 46.7% in our latest survey." Further down, however, you learn that the poll is accurate only within 3-4 percentage points.
In the notoriously inadequate world of school testing, it can get even worse. The DC school system tells us, for example that 47.62% of fourth graders are "proficient or advanced in reading," a number that doesn't reflect how many students were sick on the day of the test or to what degree questions with multiple choice answers reflect actual reading skill or how many students read better than they take tests. But the score certainly reflects a test company's ability to con its clients and the lack of math skills of those running the DC school system.
My own research has found that 98.12% of the percentages I come across in news stories don't deserve their extra decimal points and journalists should round them up or down in a well-deserved attack on digital deficit disorder.
January 08, 2010
A FEW QUESTIONS FOR BARACK OBAMA
Sam Smith
You said we are in a war against Al Qaeda. When did Congress declare it?
Most estimates of Al Qaeda's size are in the thousands, or roughly the size of one American army brigade. Can you cite a previous time when so much of the American military did so badly against such a small force for so long?
Michael Doran, who served as Bush's NSC Middle East director, wrote after 9/11: "The script was obvious: America, cast as the villain, was supposed to use its military might like a cartoon character trying to kill a fly with a shotgun." . . . In a Foreign Affairs article in 1975, David Fromkin wrote: "Terrorism is violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else - not the terrorist - to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires." To what extent do you think America is doing just what the terrorists want?
Since 2000, according to your State Department, Al Qaeda has killed an average of 480 people globally each year or roughly the same number as are murdered annually in New York City. How do you think our military would do against a larger and more deadly enemy?
In the wake of the attempted bombing of the plane headed for Detroit, you have announced plans for greatly increased virtual strip and search of passengers. How many more attempted bombings will be necessary before you order the torture of air passengers to determine their danger?
Given that you and your predecessor have been unable to deter - by military force and intelligence agencies - several thousand guerillas from their activities, and given that this effort has effectively destroyed constitutional government in our country, might it not be time to experiment with a different course, such as ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, establishing civil relations with the Muslim world, and strongly opposing Israeli apartheid?
You and your predecessor have been responsible for more unnecessary American deaths since 2001 than has Al Qaeda. Is it not time, perhaps, to try something different?
You said we are in a war against Al Qaeda. When did Congress declare it?
Most estimates of Al Qaeda's size are in the thousands, or roughly the size of one American army brigade. Can you cite a previous time when so much of the American military did so badly against such a small force for so long?
Michael Doran, who served as Bush's NSC Middle East director, wrote after 9/11: "The script was obvious: America, cast as the villain, was supposed to use its military might like a cartoon character trying to kill a fly with a shotgun." . . . In a Foreign Affairs article in 1975, David Fromkin wrote: "Terrorism is violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else - not the terrorist - to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires." To what extent do you think America is doing just what the terrorists want?
Since 2000, according to your State Department, Al Qaeda has killed an average of 480 people globally each year or roughly the same number as are murdered annually in New York City. How do you think our military would do against a larger and more deadly enemy?
In the wake of the attempted bombing of the plane headed for Detroit, you have announced plans for greatly increased virtual strip and search of passengers. How many more attempted bombings will be necessary before you order the torture of air passengers to determine their danger?
Given that you and your predecessor have been unable to deter - by military force and intelligence agencies - several thousand guerillas from their activities, and given that this effort has effectively destroyed constitutional government in our country, might it not be time to experiment with a different course, such as ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, establishing civil relations with the Muslim world, and strongly opposing Israeli apartheid?
You and your predecessor have been responsible for more unnecessary American deaths since 2001 than has Al Qaeda. Is it not time, perhaps, to try something different?
January 04, 2010
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: OBAMA AND THE AMERICAN OLIGARCHY
Sam Smith
"An oligarchy," says Wikipedia, "is a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royal, wealth, intellectual, family, military, or religious hegemony. The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for 'few' and 'rule.' Such states are often controlled by politically powerful families whose children are heavily conditioned and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy."
Go back more than two decades and you find politicians like Nixon, Carter and Reagan who built their own political base; politicians such as Truman, Johnson, and Ford deeply rooted in conventional politics; Kennedy, whose family's oligarchic inclinations were cut brutally short and FDR, who was hated by many of the elites. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, national American politics became almost universally a game of inside ball in which the public had little role.
Those of both parties who get to the top have done so primarily because of their ability to satisfy an elite with the money to overcome the obstacles of traditional politics. Given the huge increase in private campaign financing and consequent mass media manipulation, ordinary democratic politics at the national level has virtually disappeared.
A chart by Open Secrets tells part of the story. The figures are in millions of dollars:
Between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, albeit not corrected for inflation, presidential campaign spending increased ten times. Between 2004 and 2008 it almost doubled. Note also the huge increase in the percent of funds raised during primaries, as candidates auditioned for the presidential role.
And the intrinsic ability of the elite to buy politicians has also increased. The top one percent share of the wealth went from 36% to 29% between the 1930s and the 1970s. Since than it has more than reversed, reaching 39% in 2008.
One of the beneficiaries of this shift has been Michael Bloomberg, who spent more of his own money on his past two New York mayoral campaigns than all the presidential candidates did in 1980 and almost as they did in 1984.
Other beneficiaries have been George W. H. Bush, his heir George W, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each one got to the top primarily thanks to an elite that bought and called most of the major political decisions. This was, of course, far easier for the Bushes, born into high places, than it was for a Clinton or Obama who had to audition for the job. But the end result was much the same.
All this has occurred during a period when America was also suffering an unprecedented economic, constitutional, political, cultural, diplomatic and social decline. Barack Obama's first year indicates the trends continue and are clearly joined at the hip.
Some readers are undoubtedly already mumbling about conspiracy theories. That's not surprising in a country where the educated are taught to believe that history is primarily the work of great and evil individuals. The idea that a culture or constitution can fall apart without a specific plan or plot seems alien, but, in fact, history is far more the result of choices by important subcultures than we generally realize.
Where would religion, sports teams or pop music be without the unprescribed (albeit heavily manipulated) preferences of the many? Why should Yale alumni be exempt from the law of averages any more than Michael Jackson fans or an extended family of Orthodox Jews? If we presume Muslims to hold certain views and behave in certain ways, why not Harvard grads as well?
To be sure there are Ivy Leaguers, myself for one, who become, as Bill Mauldin put it, fugitives from the law of averages, but then you can't have a bell curve without thin edges as well as a big hump.
Each of our four oligarchic presidents attended Harvard or Yale and the least competent, George W, actually went to both. Here's another interesting similarity: George the Elder was head of the CIA with connections far preceding that post, George W was his son, and both Clinton and Obama fell within the CIA penumbra early in their adult life.
Now consider the interconnections of some of the lesser players.
George the Elder named Robert Gates as director of Central Intelligence and George W asked him to be director of national intelligence, a post he declined. He then became Secretary of Defense for both George W and Barack Obama, serving three out of the four oligarchic presidents.
Paul Volker, who chairs Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, was head of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan and under secretary of the Treasury under Nixon.
Tim Geithner worked for Henry Kissinger's consulting firm before joining the Treasury Department under George W Bush. He was under secretary of the Treasury under Clinton. His maternal grandfather worked for Dwight Eisenhower and his father, Peter Geithner, was head of the Ford Foundation's microfinance programs in Indonesia being created by Barack Obama's mother. The Ford Foundation, incidentally, has long had ties to the CIA. Joan Roelofs writes of John McCloy, its chair in the 1950s, as thinking of the foundation as "a quasi-extension of the U.S. government. It was his habit, for instance, to drop by the National Security Council in Washington every couple of months and casually ask whether there were any overseas projects the NSC would like to see funded." Roelofs also writes that the Ford Foundation financed counter-insurgency programs in Indonesia and other countries.
Even ex-Skull & Boner Dana Milbank, in a 2005 Washington Post story, took note of the closed culture at the top: "With at least 18 senators, dozens of House members and several administration officials boosted by family legacies, modern-day Washington sometimes resembles the court of Louis XIV without the powdered wigs. . . At least seven of the 41 new House members are relatives of prominent politicians. These legacies take office along with the newly reelected president, who is the grandson of a senator, son of a president and brother of a governor. . . According to the Center for American Women and Politics, 45 women have been elected to Congress to fill vacancies created by their husbands' death."
None of this comprises a conspiracy, but definitely sketches a culture. Fifteen years ago, in a book on Bill Clinton, "Shadows of Hope," I tried to explain how the system worked in the capital:
Obama rose to the top in record speed in no small part because - as with Clinton - it was clear that he would fit into this ecology extremely well and, besides, he was the first charismatic black politician that the elite had come across who lent some shade to white male hegemony without endangering it. Like Bill Clinton, he projected the image of an outsider, yet had adapted to the ways of capital insiders.
And he was willing, in a phrase a Washingtonian once used to describe how ethnic hiring worked at DC law firms, to be "the Negro at the front door."
But while the party elite - led by the smug Democratic Leadership Council - was in a braggadocio mood during the rise of Clinton, things subsequently became more complicated. For example, Ari Berman wrote in the Nation that "Al Gore's promising New Democratic candidacy turned sour for the DLC when Gore, a DLC founder, switched to a populist strategy after trailing in the polls."
And after journalists Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford revealed in 2003 that Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama had been named by the DLC as one of its "100 to Watch" that year, Obama asked to be taken off the list.
As Dixon noted, "DLC endorsement is the gold standard of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma, insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement, Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat since Michael Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama's campaign has adopted the classic right wing DLC strategy."
In other words, whether Obama had asked to be vetted by the DLC or not, he was acting as though he had. He simply understood that the DLC's image conflicted with his own myth-making and didn't want to bear the burden of its logo.
Bits and pieces of the truth would come through, however. Paul Street of Z Magazine wrote: "Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party. . . Obama was recently hailed as a Hamiltonian believer in limited government and free trade by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having 'a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS.'"
Even after disassociating himself publicly from the Democratic Leadership Council, Obama still had as his major economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, who was also chief economist of the conservative organization. Noted Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, "Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures."
Henwood also reported during the presidential campaign, "Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for [Obama] at his Greenwich house last spring, 'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth."
And then there were the numbers. Obama raised substantially more funds from the financial and health industries than did John McCain. And his top ten campaign fund sources included those working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase & Co. All of this, of course, was hardly mentioned by the larger media.
The most fascinating thing about Obama's rise was that it involved moving from a state senate seat to the White House in just four years. Other than a military hero soaring on public enthusiasm, the most logical explanation for such a rapid elevation was that the candidate had been chosen by those able to make it happen. After all, Obama was not only no hero, he had been an undistinguished state senator and an equally uninteresting member of the US Senate. If you go back and read his vaunted 2004 convention address, you'll find nothing exceptional about it, provided you want something more than safe cliches from a safe black candidate. Obama's campaign addresses would be similarly unimpressive, yet hailed in the elite media for their rhetoric despite the fact that if you asked anyone to quote Obama, the best they could come up with was "hope" and "change."
What really mattered was described by Ken Silverstein of Harper's in 2006, "If the [convention] speech was his debut to the wider American public, he had already undergone an equally successful but much quieter audition with Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without whose support he would surely never have been chosen for such a prominent role at the convention."
In October 2003, five years before Obama's presidential election, "Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate board-member who chaired Bill Clinton's presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home. That event marked [Obama's] entry into a well-established Washington ritual-the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists."
Jordan had also been among those - including Robert Rubin and Katherine Graham, who were called to Washington's F Street Club in 1991 as part of a similar effort by Pamela Harriman on behalf of Bill Clinton. C. David Heyman in the 'Georgetown Ladies' Social Club,' writes that Harriman was seeking to get Rubin's Goldman Sachs involved. She succeeded: Goldman Sachs became Clinton's largest source of funding. (It was only in second place for Obama but brought in nearly twice as much money).
Another account of Obama's vetting came from Paul Street in 2008:
Early in life, Obama had hints that he was among the chosen. David Mendell recounts that "His mother really built up his ego when he was a child. I think she felt like, here's this African American child, growing up in a white family, whose father has left him. He may suffer from some self-esteem issues. So she built his character up from the very beginning. She told him he was from almost a superior race of people and that he had this extraordinary intellect, that he was someone very special. And he was taught from the time he was a small child that he was a special person, to the point that he seems to still believe that today. He would tell people, 'I'm descended from kings,' and stuff when he was a kid."
Yet one of the interesting things about Obama is the number of times the carefully prepared fairy tale goes astray.
For example, Bill Blum recounted, "In his autobiography, 'Dreams From My Fathers', Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as 'a consulting house to multinational corporations' in New York City, and his functions as a 'research assistant' and 'financial writer.' The odd part of Obama's story is that he doesn't mention the name of his employer.
"However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960. . . .
"In his book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left -- including Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world."
Obama would not have been the first or last young Ivy League type seconded to the agency. As Lyndon Johnson said to an aide, "Just remember, the CIA is filled with the Yale and Princeton graduates whose daddies wouldn't let them into their brokerage firm." Some of these relationships would turn into a career, some were only a passing experience - but even the latter added to one's credibility in dealing with those in high places.
And once again Obama had a good precedent. Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, worked as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he traveled around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government was using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft.
While Clinton got a free trip to Moscow complete with an expensive hotel room, the similarly fiscally strapped Obama - shortly before working for BIC - took a three week jaunt to Pakistan, again a fact almost totally obscured during his campaign. As ABC's Jake Tapper remarked in April 2008, late into the campaign, Obama's sudden incidental reference to the trip to Pakistan "was news to many of us who have been following the race closely. And it was odd that we hadn't hear about it before, given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign."
Questions have been raised about Obama's time at Columbia as well. Politico noted that "There's not a whole lot of information available about Obama's time at Columbia University in New York, which he attended for three years after attending Occidental College in Los Angeles for one year and from which he graduated in 1983."
Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the time Obama was there and none could recall him. Wayne Allyn Root, who ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket, also graduated in 1983 and says, "I don't know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me. . . The guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange?" Root added that, like Obama, he was "Class of '83 political science, pre-law. . . You don't get more exact or closer than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him."
The NY Sun noted another anomaly: "Contributing to the mystery is the fact that nobody knows just how well Mr. Obama, unlike Senator McCain and most other major candidates for the past two elections, performed as a student.
"The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript, despite an academic career that led him to Harvard Law School and, later, to a lecturing position at the University of Chicago. The shroud surrounding his experience at Columbia contrasts with that of other major party nominees since 2000, all whom have eventually released information about their college performance or seen it leaked to the public. . .
"In contrast with the rest of Mr. Obama's life story, little is known about his college experience. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia in 1981. The move receives only a mention in Mr. Obama's 1995 memoir, 'Dreams from My Father,' which instead devotes that chapter to his impressions of race and class struggles in New York."
In any case, Obama moved on to Harvard Law School.
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker described the Obama of the time: "Before [Obama] went off [to Harvard], he said to some of his community-organizing buddies he needed that credential, that Harvard Law degree, to access the corridors of power and to have that credential because he wasn't going to get that as a community organizer in Chicago."
He had already made some headway along those lines, as Mendell told PBS: "Folks like [former judge, U.S. representative and University of Chicago professor] Abner Mikva and [lawyer and former Federal Communications Commission chairman] Newton Minow had taken him under their wing and really thought a lot of this guy. They saw the potential that he had. . .
"Harvard Law, I think in his own mind, really helped him establish himself as an elite person in our society. It taught him that he could manage various worlds. . . "
And Obama played the card well. Professors and fellow students at the time he was at Harvard Law remember Obama rising above mere human conflict to a purportedly higher level of bipartisanship and avoidance of cultural conflict.
Keith Boykin recalled, "Barack was always supportive and sympathetic to our campaign for faculty diversity. He spoke about it at one of our rallies. But he was not actively involved in the protest movement. Nor did he need to be. His presence alone made the case. And even if he agreed with the cause of the movement, he didn't need to be involved in the more radical protests we launched because our tactics were controversial on campus."
A Boston Globe article in 2007 reported:
"While other students were determined to prove the merits of their beliefs through logic and determination, Obama preferred to listen, seek others' views, and find a middle way.
"Classmates recall an especially emotional debate in the spring of 1990 over affirmative action, which conservative students wanted to abolish.
Presiding over an assembly of 60 mostly white editors in a law school classroom, Obama listened to impassioned pleas and pressed conservatives to explain their reasoning and liberals to sharpen their thinking. But he never spoke about his own point of view or mentioned that he believed he had benefit ed from affirmative action.
"Obama was so evenhanded and solicitous in his interactions that fellow students would do impressions of his Socratic chin-stroking approach to everything, even seeking a consensus on popcorn preferences at the movies. 'Do you want salt on your popcorn?' one classmate, Nancy L. McCullough, recalled, mimicking his sensitive bass voice. 'Do you even want popcorn?'"
But what works for the editor of a university law review impressing a bunch of powerful professors and fellow future lawyers seldom adds up to leadership in politics. It's a style that has been called OTOH BOTOH - on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand. It is a politics of endless safety valves and of constantly adjusting to the crowd. But OTOH BOTOH Obama wasn't elected president to represent both sides of an argument, especially not by those of his black and white liberal constituency that worked so hard on his behalf. If his campaign rhetoric had been a label on a food package, the product would have been removed from the shelves by the FDA.
The remembrances of Harvard Law School days seem a perfect prelude to Obama's handling of the healthcare legislation, one of the worst examples of leadership on behalf of a major positive issue of any president in the past 50 years.
And here is one of the big problems with the elite club approach to selecting future leaders. The insiders pick people who won't cause any trouble and can be counted to find positions where nothing much happens so the pickers can continue with their game. But because truth and wisdom are rarely to be found in the mushy middle, you often end up with one more seemingly competent chosen one actually botching things up. And the public, having been sold a bill of goods, ends up wondering what the hell happened, with some of them getting quite mad.
Some will deny that an oligarchy exists. But consider a few more examples. The Vietnam war was escalated and mangled with an extraordinary degree of help from members of the Harvard faculty. The current fiscal crisis and subsequent sweetheart deal with the banks owes much to people like Robert Rubin, who went to Harvard and Yale; Ben Bernanke, who went to Harvard; Larry Summers who not only went to Harvard grad school but became president of the university; Austan Goolsbee who went to Yale and was a member of Skull & Bones; Peter Orzag, ex of Princeton; and Paul Volker who went to Harvard grad school.
And once again, Clinton provides a model. Parked at Little Rock's Central Flying Service during Clinton's first big economic meeting had been more than 50 corporate jets. This amounted to about one corporate jet for every seven participants, not including those company planes waiting at other airports around town. It would also turn out that Clinton's cabinet, while diverse in color and sex, was remarkably uniform in other respects. In the fall of 1993, Knight-Ridder published an analysis that found that 80% of Clinton's first 518 appointees were from the Washington-Boston corridor or the west coast. More than half came from DC or its suburbs.
In my book on Clinton I wrote
We could change all this if we got mad enough. We could demand public campaign financing. We treat any contributions over a certain amount as the criminal bribe that they are. We could favor candidates with histories we know and who have actually helped us rather than those who just suddenly appear in our lives like a new American Idol contestant. We could do things to strengthen third parties and make major parties more responsive - such as instant runoff voting. We could emphasize - as the right has done - issue politics, forcing pols to pay attention to things they would rather ignore. We could help Congress become an equal member of government again and give more power to state and local government where the influence of ordinary citizens is far greater.
But as long as we submit willingly to the icon con - tying our future to a fantasy candidate instead of engaging in a real politics of issues and ideas - the oligarchs will keep arranging political marriages between the public and candidates about whom we know little and to whom we owe nothing, and we will keep on losing every major election
"An oligarchy," says Wikipedia, "is a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royal, wealth, intellectual, family, military, or religious hegemony. The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for 'few' and 'rule.' Such states are often controlled by politically powerful families whose children are heavily conditioned and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy."
Go back more than two decades and you find politicians like Nixon, Carter and Reagan who built their own political base; politicians such as Truman, Johnson, and Ford deeply rooted in conventional politics; Kennedy, whose family's oligarchic inclinations were cut brutally short and FDR, who was hated by many of the elites. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, national American politics became almost universally a game of inside ball in which the public had little role.
Those of both parties who get to the top have done so primarily because of their ability to satisfy an elite with the money to overcome the obstacles of traditional politics. Given the huge increase in private campaign financing and consequent mass media manipulation, ordinary democratic politics at the national level has virtually disappeared.
A chart by Open Secrets tells part of the story. The figures are in millions of dollars:
Between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, albeit not corrected for inflation, presidential campaign spending increased ten times. Between 2004 and 2008 it almost doubled. Note also the huge increase in the percent of funds raised during primaries, as candidates auditioned for the presidential role.
And the intrinsic ability of the elite to buy politicians has also increased. The top one percent share of the wealth went from 36% to 29% between the 1930s and the 1970s. Since than it has more than reversed, reaching 39% in 2008.
One of the beneficiaries of this shift has been Michael Bloomberg, who spent more of his own money on his past two New York mayoral campaigns than all the presidential candidates did in 1980 and almost as they did in 1984.
Other beneficiaries have been George W. H. Bush, his heir George W, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each one got to the top primarily thanks to an elite that bought and called most of the major political decisions. This was, of course, far easier for the Bushes, born into high places, than it was for a Clinton or Obama who had to audition for the job. But the end result was much the same.
All this has occurred during a period when America was also suffering an unprecedented economic, constitutional, political, cultural, diplomatic and social decline. Barack Obama's first year indicates the trends continue and are clearly joined at the hip.
Some readers are undoubtedly already mumbling about conspiracy theories. That's not surprising in a country where the educated are taught to believe that history is primarily the work of great and evil individuals. The idea that a culture or constitution can fall apart without a specific plan or plot seems alien, but, in fact, history is far more the result of choices by important subcultures than we generally realize.
Where would religion, sports teams or pop music be without the unprescribed (albeit heavily manipulated) preferences of the many? Why should Yale alumni be exempt from the law of averages any more than Michael Jackson fans or an extended family of Orthodox Jews? If we presume Muslims to hold certain views and behave in certain ways, why not Harvard grads as well?
To be sure there are Ivy Leaguers, myself for one, who become, as Bill Mauldin put it, fugitives from the law of averages, but then you can't have a bell curve without thin edges as well as a big hump.
Each of our four oligarchic presidents attended Harvard or Yale and the least competent, George W, actually went to both. Here's another interesting similarity: George the Elder was head of the CIA with connections far preceding that post, George W was his son, and both Clinton and Obama fell within the CIA penumbra early in their adult life.
Now consider the interconnections of some of the lesser players.
George the Elder named Robert Gates as director of Central Intelligence and George W asked him to be director of national intelligence, a post he declined. He then became Secretary of Defense for both George W and Barack Obama, serving three out of the four oligarchic presidents.
Paul Volker, who chairs Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, was head of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan and under secretary of the Treasury under Nixon.
Tim Geithner worked for Henry Kissinger's consulting firm before joining the Treasury Department under George W Bush. He was under secretary of the Treasury under Clinton. His maternal grandfather worked for Dwight Eisenhower and his father, Peter Geithner, was head of the Ford Foundation's microfinance programs in Indonesia being created by Barack Obama's mother. The Ford Foundation, incidentally, has long had ties to the CIA. Joan Roelofs writes of John McCloy, its chair in the 1950s, as thinking of the foundation as "a quasi-extension of the U.S. government. It was his habit, for instance, to drop by the National Security Council in Washington every couple of months and casually ask whether there were any overseas projects the NSC would like to see funded." Roelofs also writes that the Ford Foundation financed counter-insurgency programs in Indonesia and other countries.
Even ex-Skull & Boner Dana Milbank, in a 2005 Washington Post story, took note of the closed culture at the top: "With at least 18 senators, dozens of House members and several administration officials boosted by family legacies, modern-day Washington sometimes resembles the court of Louis XIV without the powdered wigs. . . At least seven of the 41 new House members are relatives of prominent politicians. These legacies take office along with the newly reelected president, who is the grandson of a senator, son of a president and brother of a governor. . . According to the Center for American Women and Politics, 45 women have been elected to Congress to fill vacancies created by their husbands' death."
None of this comprises a conspiracy, but definitely sketches a culture. Fifteen years ago, in a book on Bill Clinton, "Shadows of Hope," I tried to explain how the system worked in the capital:
[][][] How one comes to matter in Washington politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents; behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just more money and the few who control it.
Thus coming to matter has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than it once did. Today, other things count: the patronage of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There are still machines in American politics; they just dress and talk better.
There is another rule. The public plays no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast the play. In 1988, the 1992 play was already being cast. Conservative Democrats were holding strategy meetings at the home of party fund-raiser Pamela Harriman. The meetings -- eventually nearly a hundred of them -- were aimed at ending years of populist insurrection within the party. They were regularly moderated by Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss, the Mr. Fixits of the Democratic mainstream. Democratic donors paid $1000 to take part in the sessions and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised about $12 million for her kind of Democrats. . .
The appeal of Clinton to these matchmakers went beyond mere political calculations. Clinton was not only politically realistic, he was culturally comfortable. He projected the image of an outsider, yet had adapted to the ways of capital insiders.
Official Washington -- including government, media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.
The Yale law degree, the Rhodes scholarship, the familiarity with the rhetoric of the policy pushers all helped Clinton fit into the club. But perhaps most of all, Clinton knew when to stop thinking.
Just as the Soviets tolerated free thought only within the limits of "socialist dialogue," so debate in Washington is circumscribed by the limits of what might be called Beltway discourse. Ideas that adjust or advance the conventional wisdom are valued. Those that challenge it are ignored or treated with contempt. [][][]
Obama rose to the top in record speed in no small part because - as with Clinton - it was clear that he would fit into this ecology extremely well and, besides, he was the first charismatic black politician that the elite had come across who lent some shade to white male hegemony without endangering it. Like Bill Clinton, he projected the image of an outsider, yet had adapted to the ways of capital insiders.
And he was willing, in a phrase a Washingtonian once used to describe how ethnic hiring worked at DC law firms, to be "the Negro at the front door."
But while the party elite - led by the smug Democratic Leadership Council - was in a braggadocio mood during the rise of Clinton, things subsequently became more complicated. For example, Ari Berman wrote in the Nation that "Al Gore's promising New Democratic candidacy turned sour for the DLC when Gore, a DLC founder, switched to a populist strategy after trailing in the polls."
And after journalists Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford revealed in 2003 that Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama had been named by the DLC as one of its "100 to Watch" that year, Obama asked to be taken off the list.
As Dixon noted, "DLC endorsement is the gold standard of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma, insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement, Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat since Michael Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama's campaign has adopted the classic right wing DLC strategy."
In other words, whether Obama had asked to be vetted by the DLC or not, he was acting as though he had. He simply understood that the DLC's image conflicted with his own myth-making and didn't want to bear the burden of its logo.
Bits and pieces of the truth would come through, however. Paul Street of Z Magazine wrote: "Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party. . . Obama was recently hailed as a Hamiltonian believer in limited government and free trade by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having 'a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS.'"
Even after disassociating himself publicly from the Democratic Leadership Council, Obama still had as his major economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, who was also chief economist of the conservative organization. Noted Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, "Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures."
Henwood also reported during the presidential campaign, "Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for [Obama] at his Greenwich house last spring, 'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth."
And then there were the numbers. Obama raised substantially more funds from the financial and health industries than did John McCain. And his top ten campaign fund sources included those working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase & Co. All of this, of course, was hardly mentioned by the larger media.
The most fascinating thing about Obama's rise was that it involved moving from a state senate seat to the White House in just four years. Other than a military hero soaring on public enthusiasm, the most logical explanation for such a rapid elevation was that the candidate had been chosen by those able to make it happen. After all, Obama was not only no hero, he had been an undistinguished state senator and an equally uninteresting member of the US Senate. If you go back and read his vaunted 2004 convention address, you'll find nothing exceptional about it, provided you want something more than safe cliches from a safe black candidate. Obama's campaign addresses would be similarly unimpressive, yet hailed in the elite media for their rhetoric despite the fact that if you asked anyone to quote Obama, the best they could come up with was "hope" and "change."
What really mattered was described by Ken Silverstein of Harper's in 2006, "If the [convention] speech was his debut to the wider American public, he had already undergone an equally successful but much quieter audition with Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without whose support he would surely never have been chosen for such a prominent role at the convention."
In October 2003, five years before Obama's presidential election, "Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate board-member who chaired Bill Clinton's presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home. That event marked [Obama's] entry into a well-established Washington ritual-the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists."
Jordan had also been among those - including Robert Rubin and Katherine Graham, who were called to Washington's F Street Club in 1991 as part of a similar effort by Pamela Harriman on behalf of Bill Clinton. C. David Heyman in the 'Georgetown Ladies' Social Club,' writes that Harriman was seeking to get Rubin's Goldman Sachs involved. She succeeded: Goldman Sachs became Clinton's largest source of funding. (It was only in second place for Obama but brought in nearly twice as much money).
Another account of Obama's vetting came from Paul Street in 2008:
[][][] Drawing on his undoubted charm, wit, intelligence, and Harvard credentials, Obama passed this trial with shining colors. At a series of social meetings with assorted big 'players' from the financial, legal and lobbyist sectors, Obama impressed key establishment figures like Gregory Craig (a longtime leading attorney and former special counsel to the White House), Mike Williams (the legislative director of the Bond Market Association), Tom Quinn (a partner at the top corporate law firm Venable and a leading Democratic Party "power broker"), and Robert Harmala, another Venable partner and "a big player in Democratic circles."
Craig liked the fact that Obama was not a racial "polarizer" on the model of past African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Williams was soothed by Obama's reassurances that he was not "anti-business" and became "convinced. . . that the two could work together."
"There's a reasonableness about him," Harmala told Silverstein. "I don't see him as being on the liberal fringe."
By Silverstein's account, the good "word about Obama spread through Washington's blue-chip law firms, lobby shops, and political offices, and this accelerated after his win in the March [2004] Democratic primary." Elite financial, legal, and lobbyists contributions came into Obama's coffers at a rapid and accelerating pace.
The "good news" for Washington and Wall Street insiders was that Obama's "star quality" would not be directed against the elite segments of the business class. The interesting black legislator from the South Side of Chicago was "someone the rich and powerful could work with."
According to Obama biographer and Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, in late 2003 and early 2004:
"Word of Obama's rising star was now spreading beyond Illinois, especially through influential Washington political circles like blue chip law firms, party insiders, lobbying houses. They were all hearing about this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African American who unbelievably could win votes across color lines. . . [His handlers and] influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers all vigorously worked their D.C. contacts to help Obama make the rounds with the Democrats' set of power brokers. . .
According to Mendell, Obama now cultivated the support of the privileged few by "advocat[ing] fiscal restraint" and "calling for pay-as-you-go government" and "extol[ling] the merits of free trade and charter schools." He "moved beyond being an obscure good-government reformer to being a candidate more than palatable to the moneyed and political establishment.
"On condition of anonymity," Silverstein reported two years ago, "one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a 'player.' [][][][]
Early in life, Obama had hints that he was among the chosen. David Mendell recounts that "His mother really built up his ego when he was a child. I think she felt like, here's this African American child, growing up in a white family, whose father has left him. He may suffer from some self-esteem issues. So she built his character up from the very beginning. She told him he was from almost a superior race of people and that he had this extraordinary intellect, that he was someone very special. And he was taught from the time he was a small child that he was a special person, to the point that he seems to still believe that today. He would tell people, 'I'm descended from kings,' and stuff when he was a kid."
Yet one of the interesting things about Obama is the number of times the carefully prepared fairy tale goes astray.
For example, Bill Blum recounted, "In his autobiography, 'Dreams From My Fathers', Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as 'a consulting house to multinational corporations' in New York City, and his functions as a 'research assistant' and 'financial writer.' The odd part of Obama's story is that he doesn't mention the name of his employer.
"However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960. . . .
"In his book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left -- including Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world."
Obama would not have been the first or last young Ivy League type seconded to the agency. As Lyndon Johnson said to an aide, "Just remember, the CIA is filled with the Yale and Princeton graduates whose daddies wouldn't let them into their brokerage firm." Some of these relationships would turn into a career, some were only a passing experience - but even the latter added to one's credibility in dealing with those in high places.
And once again Obama had a good precedent. Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, worked as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he traveled around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government was using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft.
While Clinton got a free trip to Moscow complete with an expensive hotel room, the similarly fiscally strapped Obama - shortly before working for BIC - took a three week jaunt to Pakistan, again a fact almost totally obscured during his campaign. As ABC's Jake Tapper remarked in April 2008, late into the campaign, Obama's sudden incidental reference to the trip to Pakistan "was news to many of us who have been following the race closely. And it was odd that we hadn't hear about it before, given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign."
Questions have been raised about Obama's time at Columbia as well. Politico noted that "There's not a whole lot of information available about Obama's time at Columbia University in New York, which he attended for three years after attending Occidental College in Los Angeles for one year and from which he graduated in 1983."
Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the time Obama was there and none could recall him. Wayne Allyn Root, who ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket, also graduated in 1983 and says, "I don't know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me. . . The guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange?" Root added that, like Obama, he was "Class of '83 political science, pre-law. . . You don't get more exact or closer than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him."
The NY Sun noted another anomaly: "Contributing to the mystery is the fact that nobody knows just how well Mr. Obama, unlike Senator McCain and most other major candidates for the past two elections, performed as a student.
"The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript, despite an academic career that led him to Harvard Law School and, later, to a lecturing position at the University of Chicago. The shroud surrounding his experience at Columbia contrasts with that of other major party nominees since 2000, all whom have eventually released information about their college performance or seen it leaked to the public. . .
"In contrast with the rest of Mr. Obama's life story, little is known about his college experience. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia in 1981. The move receives only a mention in Mr. Obama's 1995 memoir, 'Dreams from My Father,' which instead devotes that chapter to his impressions of race and class struggles in New York."
In any case, Obama moved on to Harvard Law School.
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker described the Obama of the time: "Before [Obama] went off [to Harvard], he said to some of his community-organizing buddies he needed that credential, that Harvard Law degree, to access the corridors of power and to have that credential because he wasn't going to get that as a community organizer in Chicago."
He had already made some headway along those lines, as Mendell told PBS: "Folks like [former judge, U.S. representative and University of Chicago professor] Abner Mikva and [lawyer and former Federal Communications Commission chairman] Newton Minow had taken him under their wing and really thought a lot of this guy. They saw the potential that he had. . .
"Harvard Law, I think in his own mind, really helped him establish himself as an elite person in our society. It taught him that he could manage various worlds. . . "
And Obama played the card well. Professors and fellow students at the time he was at Harvard Law remember Obama rising above mere human conflict to a purportedly higher level of bipartisanship and avoidance of cultural conflict.
Keith Boykin recalled, "Barack was always supportive and sympathetic to our campaign for faculty diversity. He spoke about it at one of our rallies. But he was not actively involved in the protest movement. Nor did he need to be. His presence alone made the case. And even if he agreed with the cause of the movement, he didn't need to be involved in the more radical protests we launched because our tactics were controversial on campus."
A Boston Globe article in 2007 reported:
"While other students were determined to prove the merits of their beliefs through logic and determination, Obama preferred to listen, seek others' views, and find a middle way.
"Classmates recall an especially emotional debate in the spring of 1990 over affirmative action, which conservative students wanted to abolish.
Presiding over an assembly of 60 mostly white editors in a law school classroom, Obama listened to impassioned pleas and pressed conservatives to explain their reasoning and liberals to sharpen their thinking. But he never spoke about his own point of view or mentioned that he believed he had benefit ed from affirmative action.
"Obama was so evenhanded and solicitous in his interactions that fellow students would do impressions of his Socratic chin-stroking approach to everything, even seeking a consensus on popcorn preferences at the movies. 'Do you want salt on your popcorn?' one classmate, Nancy L. McCullough, recalled, mimicking his sensitive bass voice. 'Do you even want popcorn?'"
But what works for the editor of a university law review impressing a bunch of powerful professors and fellow future lawyers seldom adds up to leadership in politics. It's a style that has been called OTOH BOTOH - on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand. It is a politics of endless safety valves and of constantly adjusting to the crowd. But OTOH BOTOH Obama wasn't elected president to represent both sides of an argument, especially not by those of his black and white liberal constituency that worked so hard on his behalf. If his campaign rhetoric had been a label on a food package, the product would have been removed from the shelves by the FDA.
The remembrances of Harvard Law School days seem a perfect prelude to Obama's handling of the healthcare legislation, one of the worst examples of leadership on behalf of a major positive issue of any president in the past 50 years.
And here is one of the big problems with the elite club approach to selecting future leaders. The insiders pick people who won't cause any trouble and can be counted to find positions where nothing much happens so the pickers can continue with their game. But because truth and wisdom are rarely to be found in the mushy middle, you often end up with one more seemingly competent chosen one actually botching things up. And the public, having been sold a bill of goods, ends up wondering what the hell happened, with some of them getting quite mad.
Some will deny that an oligarchy exists. But consider a few more examples. The Vietnam war was escalated and mangled with an extraordinary degree of help from members of the Harvard faculty. The current fiscal crisis and subsequent sweetheart deal with the banks owes much to people like Robert Rubin, who went to Harvard and Yale; Ben Bernanke, who went to Harvard; Larry Summers who not only went to Harvard grad school but became president of the university; Austan Goolsbee who went to Yale and was a member of Skull & Bones; Peter Orzag, ex of Princeton; and Paul Volker who went to Harvard grad school.
And once again, Clinton provides a model. Parked at Little Rock's Central Flying Service during Clinton's first big economic meeting had been more than 50 corporate jets. This amounted to about one corporate jet for every seven participants, not including those company planes waiting at other airports around town. It would also turn out that Clinton's cabinet, while diverse in color and sex, was remarkably uniform in other respects. In the fall of 1993, Knight-Ridder published an analysis that found that 80% of Clinton's first 518 appointees were from the Washington-Boston corridor or the west coast. More than half came from DC or its suburbs.
In my book on Clinton I wrote
[][][] Politics used to be about remembrance. The best politicians were those who remembered and were remembered the most -- the most people, the littlest favors, the smallest slights, the best anecdotes tying one's politics to the common memory of the constituency.
Politics was also about gratitude. Politicians were always thanking people, "without whom" whatever under discussion could not have happened. . .
Above all, politics was about relationships. The politician grew organically out of a constituency and remained rooted to it as long as incumbency lasted.
Today, we increasingly elect people about whom we have little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude and with whom we have no relationship except that formed during the great carnie show we call a campaign. [][][]
We could change all this if we got mad enough. We could demand public campaign financing. We treat any contributions over a certain amount as the criminal bribe that they are. We could favor candidates with histories we know and who have actually helped us rather than those who just suddenly appear in our lives like a new American Idol contestant. We could do things to strengthen third parties and make major parties more responsive - such as instant runoff voting. We could emphasize - as the right has done - issue politics, forcing pols to pay attention to things they would rather ignore. We could help Congress become an equal member of government again and give more power to state and local government where the influence of ordinary citizens is far greater.
But as long as we submit willingly to the icon con - tying our future to a fantasy candidate instead of engaging in a real politics of issues and ideas - the oligarchs will keep arranging political marriages between the public and candidates about whom we know little and to whom we owe nothing, and we will keep on losing every major election
December 21, 2009
A SUBVERSIVE FOR OUR TIMES
Sam Smith
In the movie Invictus, Nelson Mandela proposes the outrageous notion that one of the best ways to deal with ethnic conflict is to get both sides doing something they mutually find more important than disliking each other. This is not a popular idea among liberals, black or white, too many of whom prefer to scold, outlaw or regulate, as if all respect, decency and friendship required was enough frowns or the proper legal terminology.
Nelson Mandela knew better and used rugby, rather than rules, as an early tool for remaking South Africa. In doing so, he had to overcome not only the resistance of whites but of blacks who saw rugby as an evil symbol of the land under apartheid. Mandela managed, nonetheless, to turn the game into pride that was mutually shared.
Although we seldom notice it, we have more than a little evidence in this country that Mandela's approach works. Consider that sports teams are among the most integrated institutions in the land or that a shared search for goods at a shopping mall does a better job of bringing ethnicities together than many law firms or the US Senate have managed. Or how we take cross cultural experience for granted when eating at an ethnic restaurant.
But as with so many things these days, when we think about such matters we tend to impose institutional and regulatory solutions even though the conflict is based on beliefs and assumptions as personal as one can find.
Mandela's approach was subversive of prevailing values but not unique. After all, Saul Alinsky's organizing efforts were based in part on bringing normally separated or antagonistic groups together to take on the establishment. Earl Long's power in Louisiana was based in part on his success in getting blacks registered in one of the most segregated states in the union. And Martin Luther King Jr. said that "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right." He told his colleagues that among their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.
Two years after the riots in DC, when the gap between blacks and whites in the city was enormous, a small biracial group of us formed the DC Statehood Party. It was years before I realized how strange that was because, at the time, we thought nothing of it. Political equality just seemed far more important than ethnic divisions. Besides, our leader had shown us how. Julius Hobson lived a life beyond such divisions. As a Marxist he knew he knew money was the driving cultural force. And he was a black man married to a white woman who was also a mentor to black nationalist Stokley Carmichael. Like Mandela, he refused to live by the cliches.
Mandela was subversive in another way. He was an existentialist. While even intellectuals tend to trivialize existentialism as simply an obsession with angst and despair, that is gross misreading.
Existentialism is the idea, as Sartre put it, that one's existence precedes and defines one's essence. We are what we do. This is the obverse of predestination and original sin with their presumption of an innate essence. It is also at greatly at odds with the assumption of ethnic or cultural impermeability.
In fact, some existentialists argue that we are not fully us until we die because until that moment we are still making decisions and taking actions that define ourselves. Even the condemned person, one said, has a choice of how to approach the gallows.
Wrote Sartre: "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism . . . Man is condemned to be free. . . From the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."
In a world dominated by dichotomies, debate, definition and deconstruction, existentialism suggests not a result but a way, not a solution but an approach, not goal but a far and misty horizon. It is, says Robert Solomon, "a sensibility . . . an attitude towards oneself, an attitude towards one's world, an attitude towards one's behavior."
Mississippi writer Tom Lowe put it this way, "The truth lies neither in the left or the right or in some middle-of-the-road position that borrows from both sides. The truth is that we are responsible for everything we do and for everyone and everything our behavior affects, and that responsibility extends to our collective, as well as our individual, behavior. Responsibility is like a seamless web -- we are all connected with each other and ultimately with the entire world. It encompasses the choices we make in our capacity as spouses, as parents, as voters, as stockholders, as corporate officers, as employers, as public officials, and as purchasers of goods, but it extends to the entire planet."
This sense of being individually responsible yet part of a seamless web of others produces neither certainty nor excuses. One can, one must, be responsible without the comfort of being sure. Camus once admitted that he would be unwilling to die for his beliefs. He was asked why. "What if I'm wrong?" And when he spoke of rebellion, like Mandela, he also spoke of moderation:
"There does exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and thinking which is possible on the level of moderation which he belongs. Every undertaking that is more ambitious than this proves to be contradictory. The absolute is not attained nor, above all, created through history . . . Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests. . . The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas of optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue."
This existential combination of what Alfie Rohl described as "both affirmation and rebellion" goes to the heart what Mandela was about.
As the poem Invictus was being recited in the film, I found myself mouthing the words to myself. I was suddenly taken back to the table where, as a young boy, my father used to make us recite poems at Sunday lunch. Invictus had been one of my favorites.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The same poem Mandela gave rugby team captain Francois Pienaar, my father had given me. And I suddenly realized why I had always liked Mandela. It was not just for what he had done but because of a poem we had both read that had helped us grasp the still subversive idea that the best way to overcome overbearing negative cultural forces is by the personal witness of individuals demonstrating another way.
In the movie Invictus, Nelson Mandela proposes the outrageous notion that one of the best ways to deal with ethnic conflict is to get both sides doing something they mutually find more important than disliking each other. This is not a popular idea among liberals, black or white, too many of whom prefer to scold, outlaw or regulate, as if all respect, decency and friendship required was enough frowns or the proper legal terminology.
Nelson Mandela knew better and used rugby, rather than rules, as an early tool for remaking South Africa. In doing so, he had to overcome not only the resistance of whites but of blacks who saw rugby as an evil symbol of the land under apartheid. Mandela managed, nonetheless, to turn the game into pride that was mutually shared.
Although we seldom notice it, we have more than a little evidence in this country that Mandela's approach works. Consider that sports teams are among the most integrated institutions in the land or that a shared search for goods at a shopping mall does a better job of bringing ethnicities together than many law firms or the US Senate have managed. Or how we take cross cultural experience for granted when eating at an ethnic restaurant.
But as with so many things these days, when we think about such matters we tend to impose institutional and regulatory solutions even though the conflict is based on beliefs and assumptions as personal as one can find.
Mandela's approach was subversive of prevailing values but not unique. After all, Saul Alinsky's organizing efforts were based in part on bringing normally separated or antagonistic groups together to take on the establishment. Earl Long's power in Louisiana was based in part on his success in getting blacks registered in one of the most segregated states in the union. And Martin Luther King Jr. said that "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right." He told his colleagues that among their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.
Two years after the riots in DC, when the gap between blacks and whites in the city was enormous, a small biracial group of us formed the DC Statehood Party. It was years before I realized how strange that was because, at the time, we thought nothing of it. Political equality just seemed far more important than ethnic divisions. Besides, our leader had shown us how. Julius Hobson lived a life beyond such divisions. As a Marxist he knew he knew money was the driving cultural force. And he was a black man married to a white woman who was also a mentor to black nationalist Stokley Carmichael. Like Mandela, he refused to live by the cliches.
Mandela was subversive in another way. He was an existentialist. While even intellectuals tend to trivialize existentialism as simply an obsession with angst and despair, that is gross misreading.
Existentialism is the idea, as Sartre put it, that one's existence precedes and defines one's essence. We are what we do. This is the obverse of predestination and original sin with their presumption of an innate essence. It is also at greatly at odds with the assumption of ethnic or cultural impermeability.
In fact, some existentialists argue that we are not fully us until we die because until that moment we are still making decisions and taking actions that define ourselves. Even the condemned person, one said, has a choice of how to approach the gallows.
Wrote Sartre: "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism . . . Man is condemned to be free. . . From the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."
In a world dominated by dichotomies, debate, definition and deconstruction, existentialism suggests not a result but a way, not a solution but an approach, not goal but a far and misty horizon. It is, says Robert Solomon, "a sensibility . . . an attitude towards oneself, an attitude towards one's world, an attitude towards one's behavior."
Mississippi writer Tom Lowe put it this way, "The truth lies neither in the left or the right or in some middle-of-the-road position that borrows from both sides. The truth is that we are responsible for everything we do and for everyone and everything our behavior affects, and that responsibility extends to our collective, as well as our individual, behavior. Responsibility is like a seamless web -- we are all connected with each other and ultimately with the entire world. It encompasses the choices we make in our capacity as spouses, as parents, as voters, as stockholders, as corporate officers, as employers, as public officials, and as purchasers of goods, but it extends to the entire planet."
This sense of being individually responsible yet part of a seamless web of others produces neither certainty nor excuses. One can, one must, be responsible without the comfort of being sure. Camus once admitted that he would be unwilling to die for his beliefs. He was asked why. "What if I'm wrong?" And when he spoke of rebellion, like Mandela, he also spoke of moderation:
"There does exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and thinking which is possible on the level of moderation which he belongs. Every undertaking that is more ambitious than this proves to be contradictory. The absolute is not attained nor, above all, created through history . . . Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests. . . The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas of optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue."
This existential combination of what Alfie Rohl described as "both affirmation and rebellion" goes to the heart what Mandela was about.
As the poem Invictus was being recited in the film, I found myself mouthing the words to myself. I was suddenly taken back to the table where, as a young boy, my father used to make us recite poems at Sunday lunch. Invictus had been one of my favorites.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The same poem Mandela gave rugby team captain Francois Pienaar, my father had given me. And I suddenly realized why I had always liked Mandela. It was not just for what he had done but because of a poem we had both read that had helped us grasp the still subversive idea that the best way to overcome overbearing negative cultural forces is by the personal witness of individuals demonstrating another way.
December 17, 2009
HEALTHCARE SOLUTION: PASS A BILL. . . THEN GET THE BASTARDS
Sam Smith - On a number of occasions I have noted the lack of real numbers in the healthcare debate. This is somewhat corrected in what follows, bearing in mind that the enumerators have a vested interest in the bill's passage. Nonetheless, much as the bill is one of the worst contrived social measures ever to come this close to passage, it also seems that the measure helps a large number of people if at extraordinary and corrupt cost.
I think the problem in part is that these days the politically active - liberals in this case - tend to pay too much attention to the game and not enough about what the game is about. You shouldn't play games with people's lives and health.
The arguments against the bill rightfully point out the insidious subsidies to the insurance industry and the costs, but fail to provide any substantial proof that there are not significant positive benefits buried in the slime. Absent that proof the balance is in the bill's favor.
If this is true, then voting the bill down will hurt many people and deny many others needed progress. That doesn't however, mean that progressives are without power to make their point.
The easiest way is to openly help make Harry Reid history. He's headed for defeat anyway, and aggressive progressive assistance would wake up a few other Democrats.
The other way, even it seems a little wild, would be to start a drive to run Howard Dean for president in 2012. Dean, after all, is the guy who got the Democratic Party in good enough shape to elect Obama who then treated him like dirt. Obama is in far worse condition than the Democrats or the sycophantic media want to admit. The mere existence of a Draft Dean movement could shake things up substantially and positively. And that's from a guy who doesn't even agree with Dean on what to with the Senate health bill.
The point is that defeating legislation to make a point is not always the best strategy, especially if a lot people will blame you for their continued problems with health insurance. It may sometimes be better to live with the bad deal and get your political justice elsewhere.
Some stats
Families USA - 707,000 people in Virginia will gain coverage by 2019 under the Senate health reform bill. Based on Congressional Budget Office data, also shows that, without health reform, a Famlies USA report finds that 182,000 people in Virginia will lose health coverage by 2019. In 2007 and 2008, the average number of uninsured people in Virginia was 1,049,000, but that total will rise to 1,231,000 if the bill fails to pass.
Nationally, the number of uninsured will reach 54 million in 2019 in the absence of comprehensive health reform.
The Senate bill requires insurers to offer coverage to every person who applies, regardless of health status, age, or gender.
The Senate bill will help millions of middle-class families who simply cannot afford health coverage by creating a new health insurance marketplace where they will be able to purchase quality coverage, regardless of gender or health status. In addition, the bill will make premium subsidies available to families with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($88,200 in annual income for a family of four in 2009).
Currently, in 42 states, adults without dependent children are not eligible for Medicaid at all-even if they are penniless. The Senate bill will make all individuals who have incomes below 133 percent of poverty (about $29,330 for a family of four in 2009) eligible for Medicaid regardless of whether they have dependent children or not, substantially increasing the number of very low-income people with health coverage.
Progress Report - The Senate bill has a number of provisions to contain costs and "ensure that working class Americans will no longer go without basic health care coverage," says American Progress Action Fund President John Podesta. It would lower insurance premiums by an average of 8.4 percent, provide subsidies for people who cannot afford insurance and "represents the largest single expansion of Medicaid since its inception." According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill covers 31 million currently uninsured Americans, extending coverage to 98 percent of legal residents. And according to the CBO, the amount that subsidized individuals would pay for insurance coverage "would be roughly 56 percent to 59 percent lower on average than the non-group premiums charged under current law."
Also, "the bill also ends insurer discrimination against women -- who currently pay as much as 48% more for coverage than men -- and gives them access preventive services with no cost sharing."
I think the problem in part is that these days the politically active - liberals in this case - tend to pay too much attention to the game and not enough about what the game is about. You shouldn't play games with people's lives and health.
The arguments against the bill rightfully point out the insidious subsidies to the insurance industry and the costs, but fail to provide any substantial proof that there are not significant positive benefits buried in the slime. Absent that proof the balance is in the bill's favor.
If this is true, then voting the bill down will hurt many people and deny many others needed progress. That doesn't however, mean that progressives are without power to make their point.
The easiest way is to openly help make Harry Reid history. He's headed for defeat anyway, and aggressive progressive assistance would wake up a few other Democrats.
The other way, even it seems a little wild, would be to start a drive to run Howard Dean for president in 2012. Dean, after all, is the guy who got the Democratic Party in good enough shape to elect Obama who then treated him like dirt. Obama is in far worse condition than the Democrats or the sycophantic media want to admit. The mere existence of a Draft Dean movement could shake things up substantially and positively. And that's from a guy who doesn't even agree with Dean on what to with the Senate health bill.
The point is that defeating legislation to make a point is not always the best strategy, especially if a lot people will blame you for their continued problems with health insurance. It may sometimes be better to live with the bad deal and get your political justice elsewhere.
Some stats
Families USA - 707,000 people in Virginia will gain coverage by 2019 under the Senate health reform bill. Based on Congressional Budget Office data, also shows that, without health reform, a Famlies USA report finds that 182,000 people in Virginia will lose health coverage by 2019. In 2007 and 2008, the average number of uninsured people in Virginia was 1,049,000, but that total will rise to 1,231,000 if the bill fails to pass.
Nationally, the number of uninsured will reach 54 million in 2019 in the absence of comprehensive health reform.
The Senate bill requires insurers to offer coverage to every person who applies, regardless of health status, age, or gender.
The Senate bill will help millions of middle-class families who simply cannot afford health coverage by creating a new health insurance marketplace where they will be able to purchase quality coverage, regardless of gender or health status. In addition, the bill will make premium subsidies available to families with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($88,200 in annual income for a family of four in 2009).
Currently, in 42 states, adults without dependent children are not eligible for Medicaid at all-even if they are penniless. The Senate bill will make all individuals who have incomes below 133 percent of poverty (about $29,330 for a family of four in 2009) eligible for Medicaid regardless of whether they have dependent children or not, substantially increasing the number of very low-income people with health coverage.
Progress Report - The Senate bill has a number of provisions to contain costs and "ensure that working class Americans will no longer go without basic health care coverage," says American Progress Action Fund President John Podesta. It would lower insurance premiums by an average of 8.4 percent, provide subsidies for people who cannot afford insurance and "represents the largest single expansion of Medicaid since its inception." According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill covers 31 million currently uninsured Americans, extending coverage to 98 percent of legal residents. And according to the CBO, the amount that subsidized individuals would pay for insurance coverage "would be roughly 56 percent to 59 percent lower on average than the non-group premiums charged under current law."
Also, "the bill also ends insurer discrimination against women -- who currently pay as much as 48% more for coverage than men -- and gives them access preventive services with no cost sharing."
December 15, 2009
NOTES FROM A LOUSY TIME
Sam Smith
This is a lousy time. We're in the worst economic collapse since the 1930s depression. We can't get out of one war we were never able to justify. We are escalating another war we can't even explain, let alone justify. The environment is deteriorating. Nobody around the globe seems to respect America any more, including many of our own politicians. Our manufacturing economy caved, and so did the hedge fund economy that replaced it. Our Constitution is gaining the feel of a long out of print book. Our politics have never been more corrupt. And the president who was meant to be our messiah has turned out to be only the first syllable of that dream.
We've been in a lousy time for some time. What's happening is not new, only worse. We're finally reaping the full harvest of thirty years of greed, corruption, intellectual dissembling, political intrigue, environmental contempt, and journalistic adultery in which the media deserts its readers and viewers to have endless affairs with its sources.
Basically, America as a nation is in a state of collapse. The First American Republic is over. We don't talk about it that way because it's too shocking and embarrassing, but our politics, economy social values, and culture seem to be in free fall and there doesn't seem anyone who is both interested and powerful enough to do anything about it.This does not, however, mean our communities or even our states are in a similar state of distress.
This is a crisis shared by conservatives, liberals, the middle and the indifferent. The conservatives react with anger, the liberals with delusion or depression, the middle by remaining muddled, and the indifferent by clinging to their detachment.
This happens to cultures. Which is why we use Timex watches instead of Mayan calendars to tell what day it is. And while it is happening, other strange and gratuitously disruptive things happen as well.
For example, widespread myths arise that attempt to explain it all. Here are several examples:
The Indian ghost dance
A ceremonial religious dance connected with the messiah doctrine, which originated among the Paviotso in Nevada about 1888, and spread rapidly among other tribes until it numbered among its adherents nearly all the Indians . . . from Missouri river to or beyond the Rockies. The prophet of the religion was a young Paiute Indian, at that time not yet 35 years of age, known among his own people as Wovoka, and 'commonly called by the whites Jack Wilson, from having worked in the family of a ranchman named Wilson.
About the close of 1888, he was attacked by a dangerous fever. While he was ill an eclipse spread excitement among the Indians, with the result that Wovoka became delirious and imagined that he had been taken into the spirit world, and there received a direct revelation from the God of the Indians. Briefly stated, the revelation was to the effect that a new dispensation was close at hand by which the Indians would be restored to their inheritance and reunited with their departed friends, and that they must prepare for the event by practicing the songs and dance ceremonies which the prophet gave them.
Within a very short time the dance spread to the tribes east of the mountains, where it became known commonly only as the Spirit or Ghost dance. . . - Access Geneology
Cargo Cults
The most widely known period of cargo cult activity occurred amongst Pacific islanders in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war materiel that was airdropped (or airlifted to airstrips) onto these islands during the Pacific campaign between the Allies and the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Easterners before.
Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. . .
With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer dropped. In response, cults developed within remote Melanesian populations that promised to bestow the followers with deliveries of food, arms, jeeps, etc., from their own ancestors, or other sources, as had happened to the outsider armies. In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use.
Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day to day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and created new military-style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches. - Wikipedia
The Sarah Palin Cult
As in the aforementioned examples, the Sarah Palin Cult has arisen during a time in which traditional culture and values were breaking down. The Indians were reacting to the invasion of the whites and the Melanesians to the aerial invasions by U.S. and Japanese forces. The Palin Cult can perhaps best be seen as a reaction not to Democrats or to a black president, but to modernity itself. Life has moved on and left it behind.
It is not unusual in these situations for the mythology to be driven by a relatively few manipulators and con artists.
This does not mean, however, that the believers are con artists. The believers are trying to maintain their traditional values and culture and have been given little help in moving into a new time. Liberals excoriate them, the media doesn't explain things well, and the politicians take advantage of them.
In a recent interview with Wired, Whitman College sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard, discussed the problem as it relates to climate change:
"Climate change is disturbing. It's something we don't want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it's not there, and keep it distant. For relatively privileged people like myself, we don't have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that's not my life. We have a vast capacity for this. . .
"In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we're constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant. . .
"Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there's no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.
"Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.
"Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it's very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That's why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.
"That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public."
And there is another aspect that psychologist Bruce E. Levine noted:
"When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
"In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal. . .
"U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. . .
"The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) . . .
"Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.. . .
"When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a 'passive-aggressive revolution' by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug 'treatments' have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution."
A good politics would recognize the problems and help people do something about them. For example, recycling has moved into our culture with little fuss; natural foods are prominently featured in supermarkets and buying locally makes both liberals and conservatives happy. But our politicians and media, from Obama on down, are tone deaf when it comes to climate change. They don't know how to sing the song. And so they talk endlessly about cap and trade when most Americans don't know what the hell it's about. And so the right has a field day.
It's the same way with healthcare. The healthcare bills have good parts but they are buried in payoffs to insurance companies, policies that raise unnecessary issues such as mandated purchase of insurance, and a massive indifference to the individual costs of some of the programs. So, again, the right has a field day. An earlier generation of Democratic politicians would have come up with something simpler and much more weighted toward what real people wanted. This crowd could never have gotten Social Security, a minimum wage or Medicare passed. They are too technocratic and autocratic. And they don't know how to listen.
Many liberals think everyone opposed to them is just another Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly. But Noam Chomsky described it much better:
"If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, 'I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted.'
"And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well - Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you-they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
"The reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else.
"The liberal Democrats aren't going to tell the average American, 'Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the years that we're maintaining now.' That's not going to be an answer. And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything-a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer. . . "
And Levine notes:
"When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
"What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
"An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. . . An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale."
Where is the morale for these people coming from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party? It's a rare commodity. Just consider how little attention liberals have paid of late to foreclosures, job loss, credit card interest rates and so forth? It's so much easier just to dump on Glenn Beck and his viewers and feel superior about it.
So if the liberals won't help the way they did in the New Deal and the Great Society, where is the help going to come from?
When politics fail, you need movements, movements formed around issues, not a political institution. Movements that deal with things people really care about - like where they are going to find a job or how they are going to keep their house - not things that are, at best, 23rd on their list like that "transparency" the Obamites never stop talking about.
It's happened before. The abolition movement, union organizing, the civil rights movement, the 1960s. . . All you need is a big enough space - like the one the two parties have created - for someone else to fill.
And it doesn't initially have to happen on a national level. In fact, it seldom does. The sit-ins of the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement are examples of local action transforming a whole county. We are not limited by either Sarah Palin or Obama. We can create oases of environmental, economic and political decency wherever we live and with the aid of the Internet share what we've learned and learn what others have discovered. Along the way we may find allies we never expected, even ones who own guns and don't like abortion.
If Obama can't save you, as appears to be the case, maybe you're part of a real answer. Why not give it a try?
This is a lousy time. We're in the worst economic collapse since the 1930s depression. We can't get out of one war we were never able to justify. We are escalating another war we can't even explain, let alone justify. The environment is deteriorating. Nobody around the globe seems to respect America any more, including many of our own politicians. Our manufacturing economy caved, and so did the hedge fund economy that replaced it. Our Constitution is gaining the feel of a long out of print book. Our politics have never been more corrupt. And the president who was meant to be our messiah has turned out to be only the first syllable of that dream.
We've been in a lousy time for some time. What's happening is not new, only worse. We're finally reaping the full harvest of thirty years of greed, corruption, intellectual dissembling, political intrigue, environmental contempt, and journalistic adultery in which the media deserts its readers and viewers to have endless affairs with its sources.
Basically, America as a nation is in a state of collapse. The First American Republic is over. We don't talk about it that way because it's too shocking and embarrassing, but our politics, economy social values, and culture seem to be in free fall and there doesn't seem anyone who is both interested and powerful enough to do anything about it.This does not, however, mean our communities or even our states are in a similar state of distress.
This is a crisis shared by conservatives, liberals, the middle and the indifferent. The conservatives react with anger, the liberals with delusion or depression, the middle by remaining muddled, and the indifferent by clinging to their detachment.
This happens to cultures. Which is why we use Timex watches instead of Mayan calendars to tell what day it is. And while it is happening, other strange and gratuitously disruptive things happen as well.
For example, widespread myths arise that attempt to explain it all. Here are several examples:
The Indian ghost dance
A ceremonial religious dance connected with the messiah doctrine, which originated among the Paviotso in Nevada about 1888, and spread rapidly among other tribes until it numbered among its adherents nearly all the Indians . . . from Missouri river to or beyond the Rockies. The prophet of the religion was a young Paiute Indian, at that time not yet 35 years of age, known among his own people as Wovoka, and 'commonly called by the whites Jack Wilson, from having worked in the family of a ranchman named Wilson.
About the close of 1888, he was attacked by a dangerous fever. While he was ill an eclipse spread excitement among the Indians, with the result that Wovoka became delirious and imagined that he had been taken into the spirit world, and there received a direct revelation from the God of the Indians. Briefly stated, the revelation was to the effect that a new dispensation was close at hand by which the Indians would be restored to their inheritance and reunited with their departed friends, and that they must prepare for the event by practicing the songs and dance ceremonies which the prophet gave them.
Within a very short time the dance spread to the tribes east of the mountains, where it became known commonly only as the Spirit or Ghost dance. . . - Access Geneology
Cargo Cults
The most widely known period of cargo cult activity occurred amongst Pacific islanders in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war materiel that was airdropped (or airlifted to airstrips) onto these islands during the Pacific campaign between the Allies and the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Easterners before.
Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. . .
With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer dropped. In response, cults developed within remote Melanesian populations that promised to bestow the followers with deliveries of food, arms, jeeps, etc., from their own ancestors, or other sources, as had happened to the outsider armies. In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use.
Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day to day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and created new military-style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches. - Wikipedia
The Sarah Palin Cult
As in the aforementioned examples, the Sarah Palin Cult has arisen during a time in which traditional culture and values were breaking down. The Indians were reacting to the invasion of the whites and the Melanesians to the aerial invasions by U.S. and Japanese forces. The Palin Cult can perhaps best be seen as a reaction not to Democrats or to a black president, but to modernity itself. Life has moved on and left it behind.
It is not unusual in these situations for the mythology to be driven by a relatively few manipulators and con artists.
This does not mean, however, that the believers are con artists. The believers are trying to maintain their traditional values and culture and have been given little help in moving into a new time. Liberals excoriate them, the media doesn't explain things well, and the politicians take advantage of them.
In a recent interview with Wired, Whitman College sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard, discussed the problem as it relates to climate change:
"Climate change is disturbing. It's something we don't want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it's not there, and keep it distant. For relatively privileged people like myself, we don't have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that's not my life. We have a vast capacity for this. . .
"In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we're constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant. . .
"Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there's no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.
"Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.
"Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it's very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That's why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.
"That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public."
And there is another aspect that psychologist Bruce E. Levine noted:
"When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
"In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal. . .
"U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. . .
"The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) . . .
"Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.. . .
"When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a 'passive-aggressive revolution' by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug 'treatments' have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution."
A good politics would recognize the problems and help people do something about them. For example, recycling has moved into our culture with little fuss; natural foods are prominently featured in supermarkets and buying locally makes both liberals and conservatives happy. But our politicians and media, from Obama on down, are tone deaf when it comes to climate change. They don't know how to sing the song. And so they talk endlessly about cap and trade when most Americans don't know what the hell it's about. And so the right has a field day.
It's the same way with healthcare. The healthcare bills have good parts but they are buried in payoffs to insurance companies, policies that raise unnecessary issues such as mandated purchase of insurance, and a massive indifference to the individual costs of some of the programs. So, again, the right has a field day. An earlier generation of Democratic politicians would have come up with something simpler and much more weighted toward what real people wanted. This crowd could never have gotten Social Security, a minimum wage or Medicare passed. They are too technocratic and autocratic. And they don't know how to listen.
Many liberals think everyone opposed to them is just another Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly. But Noam Chomsky described it much better:
"If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, 'I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted.'
"And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well - Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you-they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
"The reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else.
"The liberal Democrats aren't going to tell the average American, 'Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the years that we're maintaining now.' That's not going to be an answer. And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything-a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer. . . "
And Levine notes:
"When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
"What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
"An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. . . An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale."
Where is the morale for these people coming from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party? It's a rare commodity. Just consider how little attention liberals have paid of late to foreclosures, job loss, credit card interest rates and so forth? It's so much easier just to dump on Glenn Beck and his viewers and feel superior about it.
So if the liberals won't help the way they did in the New Deal and the Great Society, where is the help going to come from?
When politics fail, you need movements, movements formed around issues, not a political institution. Movements that deal with things people really care about - like where they are going to find a job or how they are going to keep their house - not things that are, at best, 23rd on their list like that "transparency" the Obamites never stop talking about.
It's happened before. The abolition movement, union organizing, the civil rights movement, the 1960s. . . All you need is a big enough space - like the one the two parties have created - for someone else to fill.
And it doesn't initially have to happen on a national level. In fact, it seldom does. The sit-ins of the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement are examples of local action transforming a whole county. We are not limited by either Sarah Palin or Obama. We can create oases of environmental, economic and political decency wherever we live and with the aid of the Internet share what we've learned and learn what others have discovered. Along the way we may find allies we never expected, even ones who own guns and don't like abortion.
If Obama can't save you, as appears to be the case, maybe you're part of a real answer. Why not give it a try?
THE SENATE'S IATROGENIC HEALTHCARE PLAN
Sam Smith
While no one that we can find has produced a comprehensive, factual summary of who and how many will be helped or hurt by pending healthcare legislation, it is clear that the measure will cut both ways - and to an uncertain degree will prove iatrogenic, i.e. the procedures will create new disease.
It may not be so obvious. Consider, for example, a comment by Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Plan: "In our studies, we found that 62 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States are due at least in part to medical illness or medical bills and that the majority of folks in medical bankruptcy started that illness with private health insurance."
The pending healthcare bill greatly increases the chances of bankruptcy in two ways:
- By mandating purchase of health insurance by many currently uncovered Americans, which the legislation's authors think they can afford, but which their checking account may say they can't.
- By subsidizing to an inadequate degree private health insurance plans - with the same effect.
I've not seen one article that addressed this issue.
And while there have been pieces about the potential loss of coverage under Medicare, many of these have been disingenuously dismissive. This is a serious question, all the more so because of the strong effort on the part of some Democratic senators and the nefarious Peterson Foundation to undermine both Medicare and Social Security.
Further, much of the statistical arguments and review have centered around budgets rather than human life. There is no Congressional Humanity Office to detail what effect a measure like this will have on our lives.
There is no doubt that the pending legislation is one of the greatest subsidies ever granted to a private industry. There is no doubt that much of the legislation is indefensible both morally and pragmatically. There is no doubt that some people will be helped and others hurt, but no seems interested in determining how many of each and in what ways.
Oddly, the Democrats promoting this legislation may be digging their own graves. It is predictable that after any such a complicated bill is approved, unfortunate details of the measure will trickle out, especially around election time. There are few things worse for politicians than for it to be discovered that they voted for some bad policy they didn't even know they were approving. In 2010 and 2012, the healthcare bill could easily be as risky as a highway around Baghdad.
Still, just as there are strong arguments for handing your wallet to a robber, so there are strong arguments for voting for this measure. If it saves tens of thousands of lives, the fact that it also unconsciously subsidizes the health insurance industry is a problem we may want to put on hold.
But it would help if some of the honest players in the battle could give us some of the basic facts such as how many people will be positively or negatively affected.
One thing is sure. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have left us feeling far more ill than before. And we don't need iatrogenic politicians on top of all our other problems.
While no one that we can find has produced a comprehensive, factual summary of who and how many will be helped or hurt by pending healthcare legislation, it is clear that the measure will cut both ways - and to an uncertain degree will prove iatrogenic, i.e. the procedures will create new disease.
It may not be so obvious. Consider, for example, a comment by Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Plan: "In our studies, we found that 62 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States are due at least in part to medical illness or medical bills and that the majority of folks in medical bankruptcy started that illness with private health insurance."
The pending healthcare bill greatly increases the chances of bankruptcy in two ways:
- By mandating purchase of health insurance by many currently uncovered Americans, which the legislation's authors think they can afford, but which their checking account may say they can't.
- By subsidizing to an inadequate degree private health insurance plans - with the same effect.
I've not seen one article that addressed this issue.
And while there have been pieces about the potential loss of coverage under Medicare, many of these have been disingenuously dismissive. This is a serious question, all the more so because of the strong effort on the part of some Democratic senators and the nefarious Peterson Foundation to undermine both Medicare and Social Security.
Further, much of the statistical arguments and review have centered around budgets rather than human life. There is no Congressional Humanity Office to detail what effect a measure like this will have on our lives.
There is no doubt that the pending legislation is one of the greatest subsidies ever granted to a private industry. There is no doubt that much of the legislation is indefensible both morally and pragmatically. There is no doubt that some people will be helped and others hurt, but no seems interested in determining how many of each and in what ways.
Oddly, the Democrats promoting this legislation may be digging their own graves. It is predictable that after any such a complicated bill is approved, unfortunate details of the measure will trickle out, especially around election time. There are few things worse for politicians than for it to be discovered that they voted for some bad policy they didn't even know they were approving. In 2010 and 2012, the healthcare bill could easily be as risky as a highway around Baghdad.
Still, just as there are strong arguments for handing your wallet to a robber, so there are strong arguments for voting for this measure. If it saves tens of thousands of lives, the fact that it also unconsciously subsidizes the health insurance industry is a problem we may want to put on hold.
But it would help if some of the honest players in the battle could give us some of the basic facts such as how many people will be positively or negatively affected.
One thing is sure. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have left us feeling far more ill than before. And we don't need iatrogenic politicians on top of all our other problems.
December 06, 2009
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 aboutCopenhagen
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.
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
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
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 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.
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