NYLiberalStateOfMind

Sarah Palin On Inflation - Umm, Actually The Opposite Is True

2010-11-09T12:30:00.001-05:00

The UK Guardian reported this yesterday:

Palin [declared] that she was "deeply concerned" and would call on the US Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, to "cease and desist" buying up government debt.

"If it doesn't work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What's the end-game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? ... All this pump-priming will come at a serious price," Palin will say, according to snippets of the speech obtained by National Review.

"Everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump-priming would push them even higher," Palin adds, putting a populist slant on monetary policy.

Her remarks place her firmly, if awkwardly, in company with an international chorus of critics opposed to a US policy that many fear is not only designed to ward off deflation but to drive down the value of the dollar and of US debt.

In reality, in all of 2009, inflation was MINUS 0.4%. Prices DEFLATED. So, last year, if you were paying "significantly" more across a broad spectrum of purchases, you were getting rooked.

And thus far in the 10 months of statistics available for 2010, inflation is running at about 1.6% on an annualized basis.

Furthermore, inflation has NOT gone above 4% per year since 1991. That's almost 20 years of very low inflation.

One can see that the Tea Partiers and their accomplices in the Republican Party are still trading on fear.

In their ignorance of all things great and small, the beastie boys and girls have yet to discover that at this moment it is DEFLATION that is the danger to the national and world economies. A bit more inflation would actually help us.

Where are the Democrats who should be calling this gang of political hoods out on this hooey?
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Why Can't Obama Get Mad?

2010-11-08T13:22:00.000-05:00

I'm as in favor of "cool" as the next guy. I also like a good snide remark, a nuanced response, a snippy reply. But a little controlled anger can be an excellent political tool as well.

Being the battler-in-chief presiding over a nasty, ugly sport - politics - a sort of Beyond The Thunderdome played in business suits - does not confer on the President the right to persist in rising above the messy fray obsessively, pathologically. We want a leader, not a powder puff.

Mr. Obama wears white gloves when he needs to be wearing work gloves.

Or better yet, boxing gloves.

Obama clings to cool.

One suspects at first that he is reluctant drop the smoothness because he just really, really likes his ultra cool, jazz world sang-froid. We suspect him of a form of narcissism.

Or one can ascribe it to his upbringing in Hawaii, one of the epicenters of laid back behavior. (Honk your horn aggressively there and they're ready to call the men in the white coats. Jaywalk and citizens go into convulsions - politely, of course.)

Perhaps we suspect Obama's inner coil because, in his rise to the political heap, he didn't have to scrap for decades like a Nixon, fight a world war like Ike, endure speculation about his intellectual worth like Truman, nor overcome a devastating disease like FDR. Regardless, his is a hard soul to plumb.

This is not to say that Obama hasn't had obstacles to surmount. Lord knows that becoming the first black president is an accomplishment that took enormous effort and considerable elan. Overcoming the perverse reactions to the color of one's skin, poverty, and feelings of being an outsider are nothing to sneeze at.

Which brings us to the Angry Black Man of mythology and history, for I believe it is that burden that prevents Obama from lambasting his relentless, unscrupulous attackers.

The rage of Malcom X, the glorious in-your-face attitude of Muhammed Ali, the raised fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City seem relics of another day.

The 1960s were an angry time - far angrier than today - when war atrocities came with your bacon and eggs, when we regularly saw dogs and hoses turned on our fellow citizens, when women were regularly put down without a whiff of ramification, when an adolescent boy could catch a beating for having long hair, when children were treated as chattel, and the leaden hangover from World War II imbued society with a relentless conformity.

It was those social norms that led to rioting, massive demonstrations, bombings, and a left-right polarization the likes of which those under 45 can scarcely fathom.

Woven throughout this rebellion was the Anger of the Black Man. It was, and is, inescapable - unless you are President Obama, who seems intent on not indulging himself in this anger, on not using it to gain noble political ends.

He is terribly, terribly wrong to avoid doing so.

The caricaturing of him as everything from a monkey to a watermelon farmer to Adolph Hitler to Stalin should have been enough.

The attacks on everything from his birthplace to his clothing to his wife and girls to his "Muslim background" should have been enough.

The mindless attacks on his relatively mild policies should have been enough.

We are reminded of the righteous anger of FDR after Pearl Harbor. We are reminded of the battle cry that partisans shouted to Truman - "Give 'em hell, Harry!" Of Reagan's battle-horn blaring - "Tear down this wall." We are reminded of JFK's first inaugural address suffused with controlled anger - "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." (A word of warning to the truculent Soviets.)

Mr. Obama: you must be willing to pay any price, bear any burden, even if it means flirting with the stereotype of the Angry Black Man.

You must find it in your belly to rise up and strike down the radical right wing harshly, filled with piss and vinegar, with blood and guts. The left, and I believe the center and perhaps even the center right, aches to hear you fight back using righteous controlled anger. We all want you to succeed.

Other presidents - all white, obviously - have loosed their anger to work for them and the country. You need to find the meaningful core of your own anger and outrage - we know it's there, you're human after all - and express it full-throated and powerfully against the enemies of progress.
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What The Swing Really Means

2010-11-05T13:09:00.001-04:00

For the last two years, the right wing never acknowledged that the Democrats had won a series of truly resounding victories in Congressional and Senatorial elections, a creeping tide that crested in 2008. Indeed, the right seemed to repudiate fair and square elections using terms like "ramrodding" and "oppressive majority" to describe the Democratic uber majority's enacting of historical legislation.

Now, of course, the Republicans want everyone to acknowledge their own resounding victory this past Tuesday. But face it folks, a majority of 5 in the House, given how polarized the country is, would have been as good as the bloated one handed to the right wing. Having a 20 seat majority is meaningless in terms of putting the country - and world - on a firm economic growth trajectory.

The right wing seems to have immediately forgotten that they are in the minority in the Senate and do not occupy the White House. The House still has to reckon with the Senate and the veto power of the President, should the Senate falter in fear.

Leaving aside that logistical problem, the Republicans cannot rise to the occasion because their DNA will prohibit them from doing so.

This is my hunch. Given the ideological nature of both the Republican leadership and rank and file, I believe they will not be able to address the joblessness/growth problem, because, once facts are faced, the economic philosophy that needs to be utilized is a Keynesean model and not the tired supply side economics of Milton Friedman. The Keynesean approach was used, albeit timidly, during the short "summer" when Democrats owned the whole farm. But really, where $3 trillion in stimulus was needed, less than $500 billion was tossed into the hopper.

Let's say that all the current Republican proposals that are in the wind are enacted. Let the Bush tax cuts stand as they are today. Allow the health care reform to go unfunded or underfunded. (A Constitutional crisis in the making.) Cut out all earmark spending. (It accounts for between 1 and 2% of all Federal spending.) Trim entitlements or growth of entitlements by 10%. Even trimming the sacrosanct defense budget by 10% would only account for $80 billion per year.

[A further aside on earmarks: since 2006, while Democrats have controlled Congress, earmark expenditures have fallen by 40%. That is down off the high of $29.5 billion under the Republicans of the previous Congress. Do the math. Let's say we cut out ALL of the remaining $18 billion in earmarks. Over ten years that would equal $180 billion to be put against a debt of $12 trillion or thereabouts. Keep in mind that many earmarks - while often portrayed as a part of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - are directed to positive, necessary projects like safer drinking water systems, school construction, and rail and road improvements. Many earmarks are also part of the defense budget structure.]

It is clear that we cannot budget cut our way out of the Great Recession. This is neither ideological nor pedantic. Cutting roughly $250 billion per year from the budget would return less than the stimulus plan and it is a proven axiom that budget cuts, especially in times of recession, have about a $1.03 return on the dollar. Infrastructure spending, by contrast, returns over $1.60 on the dollar.

This is why a move like New Jersey Governor Christie's shut down of the second rail tunnel to Manhattan will prove to be so deleterious to the economy. 6,000 highly-skilled construction jobs were immediately lost. All of the service and maintenance jobs that would have been created because of the increased rail traffic are now lost. A further 70,000 jobs will not be created in all the various economic sectors in which New York and New Jersey have so long partnered: finance, tourism, retail, law, advertising. New Jersey's roads, already the most crowded in the country, will witness even more gridlock, wasted gasoline, increased pollution, and wasted time by the 45,000 commuters who would have availed themselves of the easier travel. On top of this, New Jersey will have to pay back $315 million already spent on the project.

Contrast this, as I have done before on this blog, with the building of the Erie Canal in the second and third decades of the 19th century. It was built entirely by the State of New York through public financing. In today's dollars, the canal would cost $125 billion. Christie's tunnel to nowhere would have cost about $10 billion. Just a quick reflection on that contrast reminds us of why we hold the early founders of prosperity in such high esteem. They had vision and guts.Christie has the gut part down, anyway.

We can be the world's leader in alternative energy products and generation. We can be the world's leader in high speed Internet access. We can be the world's leader in rail transportation of both goods and people. We can be the leader in clean automobiles and smart automobiles that practically drive themselves. We can be the world's leader in many, many fields, some that haven't even been imagined yet.

But, like the building of the Interstate Highway System over the past 60 years, it will take government leadership and business's willing participation.

Republicans have no plan to be the leaders of anything, except in keeping the struggling down, sending the super rich to even higher wealth accumulation levels, and ruining the American future.

While we need to acknowledge that Democrats have scarcely been better during the current crisis, we need to understand that at least the leftist, Keynesean economic model is the one that has far greater potential to take us into a better tomorrow. Plant the seeds now, reap the benefits later.

Why The Democrats Took A Beating And What Can Be Done Starting Today

2010-11-03T11:56:00.000-04:00

For Democrats of every stripe, from dedicated left-wingers to Blue Dogs who cozy up on the Republican right wing lap, it is clearly time to reappraise. The awkward phase.

To understand ourselves right now we need to look at the first false steps taken after we captured the House, Senate and Presidency by comfortable margins.

Surprisingly, I do not want to speak of which legislative opportunity slipped away, which job creation program worked or did not, whether TARP was a good idea, the compromises with the greedy devils of Wall Street, or which budget would have been better or worse.

I want to talk about what George Bush (I) described as "The Vision Thing."

We, the Democrats, had no over-arching vision beyond winning the 2008 election. None. Zero. We won because we could.

Can anyone reading this, young or old, retired or just beginning his or her life or somewhere in between, envision America in 2050?

Envision it in the way the dreamers of The Declaration of Independence did for their time, Lincoln for his, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson for theirs?

Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural speech, outlining the powers that had to be harnessed to end the Depression: "It is... the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer."

John F. Kennedy's visionary rhetoric is part of the national mythology. And, like his policies or not, so is the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan.

Curiously, President Obama, the candidate with the most soaring campaign rhetoric, gave us bones to pick on once he was elected.

While there is pencil-sharpening to be done, none of us should allow America to be turned into a nation of accountants, watching pennies while wondering what the hell to do with the dollars, or worse, doing nothing at all with them.

There are a half dozen urgent matters that must be resolved, everything from energy to our ill-conceived wars, from transportation to education.

Democrats did not hammer one of those problems during their brief ascendancy and we can be reasonably assured that Republicans have neither the wherewithal nor the urgency to solve them, either.

I reject the idea that health care reform was anything but a middle of the road palliative that swept structural problems under the rug.

So, what to do? What about vision?

Here is a short manifesto:

1) In order to lift up the whole nation, we have to lift up the income and security of the vast but shrinking middle class and perhaps more urgently, the upper middle class. Democrats must advance and support all efforts of unions to grow again, unions being the front line of defense against predatory practices by foreign economic interests. Unions must get to organizing white collar workers as their traditional blue collar base shrinks numerically. What the right wing has torn down, the left must build up again. Likewise, leaving aside the question of immigrants' legality and illegality, we have to stop the influx of cheap labor from undermining the aspirations of workers already in our country.

2) End the fruitless monopoly that has been given to the health care industry. It is the lack of competition that has brought us to the current pass. Legal monopoly in such a key sector is damaging to our country. If the market had been free, or almost free, we never would have gotten into the health care rhubarb in the first place. More insurance providers, more doctors, more hospitals, more primary care clinics. Stimulate and de-regulate. (The latter not something you hear often from the left.)

3) Choose a handful of regions in the country - one East or West Coast, one in the South (ideally New Orleans), and one in the upper Midwest - and make them the showcases for tomorrow's energy, environmental and transportation technologies. Not only those things that we already know, but the things that are still on the drawing board, in the imaginations of our best innovators. Make those regions something like uber World's Fairs that stretch for hundreds of miles. Call together the leaders of industries of today and tomorrow to the White House - not the money-changers but the money-makers - and get a plan together.

4) Create high speed wireless Internet connections for every single inch of the country. Just as electricity, the telephone and television have become universally accessible, the wireless Internet is a crucial key to tomorrow's economy.

5) Bring all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan within 6 months, the consequences be damned. End the left's pointless pacifism that brings us half measures leading to the deaths of our service people. At the same time, inform any and all countries who foster terrorism in any way that they are subject to devastating attack by air or sea. We should not be losing our young (and not so young) people to the violence of mindless barbarians. We have spent trillions in technologies that lay idle as we worry about alienating countries with whom there is no diplomatic future. They are nihilists and need to be dealt with accordingly. Make the problem of terrorism their problem.

6) Cut the defense budget in half.

7) Create a new Peace Corps with our best partners - Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Chile - and in conjunction with pivotal countries in different regions - Indonesia, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina - that will show the face of modernism and aspiring modernism to backward countries.

8) Engage India. Engage India. Engage India. Multicultural, English-speaking, democratic, forward-looking, a counterweight to China... where is our common sense here? Why continue to choose Pakistan as our lynch-pin ally in the region?

9) This may sound a tad off beat and Utopian at a time like this but - we need to reemphasize the liberal arts on all levels of education. The quantification of education has been an unmitigated disaster for the country. We have to buy out of the notion that, for instance, turning out more engineers like flapjacks is a great idea while our culture becomes debased, less literate, and more utilitarian.

10) Stay focused on imagining what tomorrow looks, feels, and sounds like.

We know that the right is tight, is scared and runs on fear. The only antidote is vision, clarity and hope.

The Tunnel To Nowhere, The Party To Nowhere

2010-10-08T09:27:00.000-04:00

If you were entertaining the cozy fireside notion that there is such a creature as a moderate Republican, slap yourself in the face and wake up. The Party of No Ideas, the Backward-Facing Party, the Anti-People and Anti-Future Party has struck again.

The decision by New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie to kill (for the moment) a new train tunnel that would allow for the doubling of rail commuters into Manhattan from 46,000 daily to 90,000 is both a tragedy and a window into the vision-less soul of the Republican Party.

Christie's pretense is that there would be unacceptable cost overruns, and that the state would have to pony up $3 billion it doesn't have. Both objections are worse than ludicrous whose real motives is supporting the gas, oil and car lobby in New Jersey.

Certainly some cost overruns - whether in the public or private spheres - are the result of corruption. The vast portion of overruns, however, are due to a) changes in engineering specs, b) unforeseen circumstances encountered during the actual build phase, and c) inflation.

Plus, a government doesn't reach into some Brobdingnagian pocket and slap $3 billion on an equally large table and ask for a receipt as if it were paying for a dinner out. It pays over multiple years. In this case, the tunnel project would be spread over a few decades, meaning it would cost the citizens of New Jersey about $20 each per year, about the cost of 7 cups of Starbucks latte.

On the drawing board for almost 20 years and recommended since 1957, the tunnel project, known as ARC (for Access to the Regional Core), has already been started and $600 million already been spent in the initial phases. The canceling of the project will cost 6,000 construction jobs within the year, most of which would have been filled by Jerseyans. It is also projected that over the course of the ten years that would have followed completion, 40,000 additional jobs will have been lost.

70,000 tons of carbon per year would have been removed from the atmosphere because 22,000 cars per day would have stayed in their garages.

The glee with which Steve Carellas, New Jersey's representative to the National Motorists Association, a group that promotes more driving and is against, among other things, DUI checkpoints and red light cameras, is illustrative of how drugged up the gas and auto lobby is. "Wow! Smart decision," Carrellas said after hearing the news. "We were upset that Port Authority and turnpike tolls went to support the tunnel. Here we have a governor doing exactly what he said he was going to do, and not being taken for a ride."

Neysa Pranger, a spokeswoman for the Regional Plan Association, said Christie’s decision "casts a dark shadow over the economic future of New Jersey." Canceling the project will effectively cost New Jersey homeowners $18 billion dollars. That’s how much home values would have increased as a result of the tunnel’s construction, according to a study by the planning association, based on the impact of three previous rail projects. The study found that the value of homes within a half mile of a rail station would have increased by $29,000, while homes within two miles would have appreciated by $19,000.

On a less dramatic note, the tunnel would have meant that the tens of thousands of people who have to stand during their 50-minute ride into the city would have had seats every morning.

Predictably, environmental and pro-rail groups have decried the Governor's ham-handed action.

But what is worse is this. Christie and his acolytes believe not in actually saving money, but putting it toward deleterious ideas - like more road building and smaller tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike and Port Authority tunnels and bridges. They will be asking that the original $3 billion federal contribution go toward replenishing the state's bankrupt Transportation Trust Fund. It is not as if they are saying, "Here, Federal Bad Government, take our $3 billion and put it toward paying down the deficit." They are saying, "Give it to us so we can keep more cars on the roads, pollution high, employment low, and retard the future, which everyone knows is going to be based on mass transit."

Why is the trust fund in the nation's most crowded and car-infested state bankrupt? The state government cannot locate the backbone to raise the gasoline tax by 1 penny per gallon. Never mind that New Jersey has the lowest gas prices ($2.63 per gallon as of today) in the northeast and is well below the national average ($2.80).

The tom-tom beats out the refrain: elections have consequences. In this case the election of one short-sighted, poorly-informed man is helping to undermine the most important economic region of the country.

Come November, we can vote for the future, as raggedy and sloppy as it may be under Democrats, or we can vote for the (lack of) right wing policies that have been tried and failed.

Mugwumps And Other Parties That Go Bump In The Night

2010-09-30T09:27:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time, third parties gave their associations some truly entertaining and descriptive names. As with the Tea Party, such names had nothing to do with the efforts associated with the mayfly groups.

In New York, the names of the parties have been quite entertaining up until recently when more pedestrian monickers have taken over, such as Liberal, Conservative, Working Families, and Right To Life. Zzzzzz.

Back in the day, as they say, party names such as Locofoco were the vogue. Locofoco? The Locofocos were a radical workingman's party in New York City in the 1830s whose slogan was "Bread, Meat, Rent, And Fuel! Their prices must come down!" Their actual name was the Equal Rights Party, and they attempted a kind of sit-in at the Democrats' Tammany Hall, upon which the main-streamer Democrats turned off the gas lights to clear the building. In turn, the radicals lit the newly-invented safety matches whose brand name was - Loco Foco. The Whig press in the city slapped the Locofoco label on them, which the splinter group eventually embraced.

The Soft Shells-Hard Shells - yes, as in crabs - denoted a rapprochement between two separate branches of the Democratic Party in New York. The Soft Shells were pro-slavery nationally in the 1850s and the Hard Shells anti. (New York State had abolished slavery in 1825.) Fernando wood won the city mayoralty in 1854 under the Soft Shell-Hard Shell banner, uniting the factions over local issues.

Wood, who had come to loggerheads with Tammany, won again in 1859, this time running on the Mozart Hall ticket, Mozart Hall being the rival clubhouse within the Democratic Party positioned against Tammany.

From the Civil War onward for about 60 years or so, the party name game slowed down. The Fusion Party, a nice musical, we-are-the-world party popped up, sure.

But nothing much happened until Fiorello LaGuardia, a hybrid Italian-Jewish Congessman, ran for re-election in 1937 on the City Fusion-Progressive-American Labor-Republican ticket. He ran against Jeremiah Mahoney who ran on the Democrat-Trades Union-Anti-Communist ticket.

In 1945, Newbold Morris, descended from the famous colonial Morrises and husband to the daughter of Judge Learned Hand, ran on the No Deal Party ticket and garnered almost one-quarter of the vote. And in 1950, Vincent Impelliteri won the mayor's office running for the Experience Party.

In 1961, Louis Lefkowitz lost while running on, among other party lines, the Non-Partisan ticket.

Perhaps the most entertaining and famous third party with New York roots is Teddy Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" party, really the Progressive Party. Sad to say, though, the over-the-top name was taken from T.R.'s running mate in 1912, California governor, Hiram Johnson who said, "I'm as strong as a bull moose!"

I have a letter in to the Tea Party leaders suggesting that, in New York State anyway, they strongly consider changing their name to the Crackpot Party. Truth in advertising, my friends. Truth in advertising.

They Call Them The Squanderers

2010-09-27T18:38:00.002-04:00

What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

- William Blake

There is a fearful symmetry when one compares the Bush presidency with the Obama presidency, regardless of where on the political spectrum you place yourself.

Bush first came into office amidst acrimony over Florida's hanging chads and the recounts. He and his coterie of right wing advisers were soon handed an unsought but nevertheless welcomed political gift in the form of the 9/11 attacks. Taking a righteous first step in Afghanistan, Bush was, just a few years later so far off course courtesy of the invasion of Iraq that he could never recover. Falling prey to a combination of blind anger, some sort of oedipal hangover, and shoddy or invented intelligence, his administration went on a war spending spree that was compounded by exhilaratingly unfair tax cuts for the wealthy.

The result? Trillions of dollars in public debt that a healthy financial system would have had trouble digesting, and which, as we know, an overheated, corrupt system simply could not cope with.

The lingering image of George W. Bush will be his look of surprised consternation as things began crumbling around him in 2006. He looked like someone who had just had a wet towel snapped at him in the boys' locker room. Everyone, including himself, knew he was out of his depth.

Very few people have doubted Obama's innate intelligence, his mental toughness or his high level of education. Yet, the President is turning out to be one of the most curious cases in American political history.

He, too, felt the sting of acid tongues during his campaign and immediately after. The gift-wrapped political present he and the Democrats received was, of course, the Great Recession.

He also received another present, sort of a cherry bomb in the mailbox - that is, the virulent, racist antipathy of the everyday right wing and that of the radical, shadowy Tea Party backers and its rank and file.

That kind of vitriol certainly has been of no help in helping the country recover economically. The Republicans have insulted while Rome burns.

But Obama missed a number of golden moments in the first year of his administration, as well. Instead of creating a seemingly technical "package" of health care reform measures, more urgently he needed to sell it to the nation as a way for individuals and small businesses to save money, save money, save money and be safe from the predations of big health and pharma.

The altruism of the bill is clear to clear-thinking people. But altruism wasn't a big sell to the middle and upper middle classes as they watched their home equity and savings erode before their eyes, and as they suddenly become horrified at the prospects looking their children in the eye.

For a person who was almost too absorbed in image building in 2008, Obama became absurdly aloof from such concerns once he was sworn in.

Piled on that has been a perceived lack of focus, occasionally in policy choices, and almost always in presentation of some excellent legislation and its benefits. A whistle stop tour of 50 stimulus projects in 50 states would have been a good common touch. Maybe he should have ruled from the road one week a month to personally oversee the reconstruction efforts. That goes double for the oil calamity in the Gulf.

In the cowardly new world of avalanches of web site info and solitary interaction with those data and images on a hyper-privatized screen, the political "consumer" was left on his and her own to make sense of what in god's name was happening. Imagine FDR only relying on fireside chats on radio to keep the American public's morale up in the 1930s.

Completely mystifying is what appears, to an average consumer of television news, a complete abandonment of the "youth market." While the President was on his tour of 50 projects in 50 states, he could have stopped at 50 college campuses to speak, not about our current travails, but about education and tomorrow's leaders and the Future as an American idea, which is sunnier than anyone can imagine right now.

18 to 23 year-olds would not have hammered him on his birth certificate, his faith, his family vacation choices. They would have been thirsty to have heard news about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Youth is innately narcissistic - tell them about their coming days. If nothing else, he could have shown a hearty thanks to one of the constituencies that put him in the White House.

Bush came to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with little political capital and when he accidentally found the entire world behind him ready to seek a multinational way to eradicate terrorism, he reverted to 19th century jingoism and go-it-alone policies that have killed hundreds of thousands and cost a trillion dollars. It's jaw dropping how much Bush and his cronies squandered.

Obama, who came into the White House with the whole country and most of the world ready to follow us into recovery, has stumbled not so much in a material way, but in what, in the final analysis, counts the most: leadership. He has squandered time and his substantial personal appeal as he has failed to take on the right wing in a consistently tough way. (Where's Joe Biden when you need him?)

Perhaps we are in a new country, like Alice Through The Looking Glass. We find ourselves, thanks to almost ten years of mis-management and wasted money and spirit, Americans in Squanderland.

The Contract On America 2.0 - The Radical Right's Plan For Completing The Destruction Of America

2010-09-23T07:57:00.001-04:00

Leave it to the morally and intellectually bankrupt Republicans to come up with a plan that proposes our country take a number of giant leaps backward. Meanwhile, they assert with a straight face that these proposals show they are not The Party of No. Interesting concept... NOT The Party of NO.

It reminds me of a lyric from the 1956 Broadway show, L'il Abner, whose song Jubilation T. Cornpone, mockingly portrayed a cowardly, incompetent Confederate General:

When we fought the Yankees and annihilation was near,

Who was there to lead the charge that took us safe to the rear?

Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone...

The first thing that these inhumane monsters on the right want to do is say NO to, to repeal, or at least hamstring health care reform enough so it limps along accomplishing nothing. So, people with pre-existing conditions, poorer children, marginal wage-earners, the almost-old and a host of others will find themselves tossed off the gurney and into the unknown.

The second thing the radicals want to do is to say NO to spending the rest of the stimulus package. This at the very time when the funds yet to be spent will be pumped into infrastructure, education, and towards mitigating the housing crisis.

The radicals are also saying NO to Social Security and Medicare at a time when millions and millions of Baby Boomers are reaching age 65. In the jolly spirit of their Know-Nothingism, though, Republicans have not made clear the specifics of how cuts would be carried out.

They also are saying NO to federal funding of abortions. NO to non-traditional marriage. NO to the rescission of the odious "Don't ask don't tell" policy in our armed forces. NO to a pathway to citizenship for aliens who serve in the armed forces. NO to a tax rise for the rich who are the only group to have achieved any personal economic growth in the last 15 years. NO to any legislation that the radicals believe is "unconstitutional," meaning anything they disagree with. NO to any sort of deficit spending, one of the pillars of modern state-interventionist economics.

What is absent from the New And Unimproved Contract On America?

Any mention of education funding whether for Head Start, English-As-A-Second-Language Programs, Anti-Drop-Out funding, or higher education funding. In other words, NO.
A mention, even in passing, of a coherent energy policy. Not even one that is pro-oil, which we might understandably expect. So, NO again.
Some sort of viewpoint on the continuing degradation of the environment? NO.
Proposals on how to deal with our increasingly at-risk food supply? NO.
Thoughts on how to deal with the continuing off-shoring of American jobs? NO.
Cutting out-of-control defense spending? NO.

The impulse to blame government for every ill in society is a strong one, and it occurs in equal measure on the left and right.

The chief difference is that the left generally believes in the perfectability of government, really an optimistic position that is about our own personal perfectability, and one that reflects the positive or "YES" nature of leftist politics through the centuries.

The right simply wants to burn the social contract and scatter its ashes, believing deep down that government per se is evil, that the individual is all that matters, that the accumulation of personal wealth at the expense of the commonweal is the preferable condition of society. In spasms of atavism, they wish to return to an existence in the "state of nature" that Hobbes so famously described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Let's see how they're doing.

Solitary - play each of us off against the other politically. Fear thy neighbor, especially if he or she has a different-color skin or religion. Check.

Poor - the decline of the middle and lower middle class over the last 30 years. Destroy unions, import cheap illegal labor, ship well-paying jobs overseas, allow under-priced imports into country. Check.

Nasty - prevent people of the same sex from choosing their marriage partners. Check.

Brutish - shouting down opponents at town hall meetings, toting guns to political rallies, portraying a President as a (take your pick) monkey, a dictator, a terrorist. Don't exactly wear a Brown Shirt, but, you know, like, um, act like you're a Brown Shirt. Check.

Short - those without health insurance die almost 6 years earlier than those with it. Check.
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100 Million Poor - And Continuing Tax Cuts For The Rich

2010-09-17T08:46:00.000-04:00

Anyone who came of age in the 1960s remembers, if not from direct reading than from media coverage and informal discussion, Michael Harrington's landmark work on poverty, The Other America.

In painstaking detail, Harrington detailed the effects of race, ethnicity, gender, education, vocation and geography upon the material well-being of 1/3rd of our population. There were, and are, two Americas.

As Barron Laycock said in a reconsideration and review of The Other America earlier this decade:

It is a sad truth that Harrington's book is as timely and as shocking today as it was some forty years ago. His account of the fate of millions of impoverished people of color and ethnicity remains as cogent and as relevant as it was then. Despite the long and tortured history of the social legislation that attempted to rework this problem in the decades since, the reality of the situation seems to be that nothing much has changed in terms of the life-chances and hopes of the members of the underclass.

The government announced yesterday that there are 44 million people living below the poverty line. Although the census data from which that number was drawn has yet to tease out the rest of the story, one can be reasonably certain that there is an equal number of people living in the next tier up from abject poverty. Further, we can add in the individuals and families who are struggling from the effects of the Great Recession and who, while perhaps not definitionally poverty-stricken, have found themselves staring into an abyss heretofore only populated by men, women and children very different from themselves.

So we can safely say that 100 million people in the United States live in poverty or are so close that for all intents and purposes they live in a psychological impoverishment that intensively affects their quality of life.

That's 1/3rd of our population, 40 million of whom are children under 18, few of whom will ever escape the poverty cycle if past history is any sign post.

The entire shadow hoard of poor, near poor and the poor-in-waiting is the bitter fruit of not only slavery, ethnic hate, and sexism, but today is also the product of the most despicably disingenuous government policies that favor the wealthy to an obscene extent.

Even more crazily, the most hopeless of the poor live but a few minutes or miles from the insatiable rich, like serfs prostrate at the gates of the barons' castles.

A perfect illustration of the two Americas exists in Fairfield County, Connecticut, a mostly suburban county outside New York City. Its largest city is Bridgeport.

Twenty-one per cent of Bridgeport's population lives below the poverty line; another 41% live in the next level just above the poverty line. Sixty-two per cent of a city of roughly 135,000 souls - or 84,000 - people live in poverty. Meanwhile in the town of Fairfield, 4 miles away from Bridgeport meaured downtown to downtown, a mere 4% of the population hovers in the two zones below or just above the poverty line.

In 2006 Fairfield was ranked as the ninth best place to live in America, and the second safest by Money Magazine. Its murder rate is less than one per year.

On the other hand, Bridgeport's violent crime rate is 1.6 times the national average.

"Coincidentally," Bridgeport is 30% African-American and 33% Hispanic while Fairfield town is more than 95% white.

Now the struggle rages in Congress about whether to allow the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire.

The argument for keeping those cuts in place is that those earning over $200,000 create jobs with the money that otherwise would be going to taxes. In Bridgeport proper, the unemployment rate is 19%. The percentage of people who have never worked (and thus are unaccounted for in such statistics) is 12%.

The Bush tax cuts have been in effect for the better part of 10 years. So much for the job creation theory.

To circle back to Michael Harrington and The Other America: deepening the travesty is the virtual blackout imposed upon this story by the (dreaded) mainstream media.

Where are the special segments, the documentaries, the 5 part articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, etc.?

The frivolous media - right and left leaning - collectively turns its head. Instead, they luxuriate inside their silly echo chamber whose compass points are The Beltway, Wall Street, angry white America, and Lindsay Lohan (or other suitably fashionable proxy). Unjust, immoral and irresponsible. The Fourth Estate not only doesn't mitigate the problem, but helps perpetuate it by turning the blind eye.

Thomas Carlyle wrote in his Heroes and Hero Worship in History (1841) that Edmund Burke once said:

"...There were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all."

But that was one upon a time, very long ago.

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Saudi Arms Deal And Burning The Koran

2010-09-14T17:17:00.001-04:00

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens...
- T.S Eliot (The Wasteland)

About two weeks ago a mutton-chopped nobody claiming to be a pastor - a perversion of the word and an abomination to all good people of the cloth - announced the now infamous Koran burning.

Never mind that the promised bonfires evoked the eternally painful Nazi book burnings of the 30s and 40s. Never mind that Brecht, Hemingway, Gide, Freud, Gorki, Kafka, Einstein, Helen Keller, Proust and a host of other cultural standard-bearers' works were burnt in town squares and in country fields all over Germany and the rest of the Reich. Never mind that many, probably most, of us have fathers or grandfathers who fought, were wounded and died in the war to stop such savage acts. Never mind we Americans are a people who pose and perch on the high diving board of tolerance and freedom.

All Islam is the enemy, said "Pastor" Terry Jones. All Islam is represented by the acts of a few hundred terrorists - so much so that an Islamic community center near Ground Zero faces bitter opposition.

So what happened just the other day? The State Department announced that the sale of $60 billion in advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia was approved.

Where is the caterwauling by Pastor Mutton Chops now? Where is the righteous indignation of the aggrieved families of the 9/11 victims? Where is the outpouring from the right wing radicals who so roundly denounced the Islamic center and stood silent as tombstones in the face of the threatened Koran burning?

Just to be clear, the reason we are arming the Saudis is to serve as a counterweight to Iran's Islamo-fascist regime. Makes sense, right? Take one Islamic absolute monarchy and play it off against the demagogue, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his merry band of nuke-makers. (Of course we are, now that our former comrade-in-arms, Saddam Hussein, is a footnote in history, and Iraq is an unholy mess. Beef up the Saudis and let them do the dirty work.)

The other reason the deal is going through is that the arms industry here and abroad has been reeling during the recession and, well, we all know who has the big bucks to spend on weapons. And why - our addiction to oil.

So, not only is there the unbearable hypocrisy of the home front spitting on American Muslims as we sell arms to the epicenter of anti-Western Islamic fervor, but we also get the chance to support a regime that is backwards, repressive, maltreats women and gays, and squashes any and all opposition.

Crown Prince Abdullah has often defended Saudi Arabia's position on human rights, going as far as to say in front of a human rights conference at the United Nations that, "It is absurd to impose on an individual or a society rights that are alien to its beliefs or principles."

He sounds like the kind of guy out of whose hands I would keep most advanced weapons, let alone weapons that make his country one of the most modern military presences in the world.

A Must Read, Speaking Loudly - The St. Louis Dispatch

2010-09-05T12:30:00.000-04:00

It's rare that we read anything radical in a mainstream newspaper anymore. Indeed, it is like seeing a pterodactyl perched on the local church steeple, so accustomed are we to reading the bland protests on the editorial pages of the New York Times or listening to the sweaty, drug-induced rages on FOX.

Radicalism from the left? A sighting:

Here is a link to a piece in the St. Louis Dispatch on September 3rd that hearkens back to the radicalism of the 1930s and other angry eras when the people who really make this country work last got riled up over economic issues.

Click: Labor Day 2010: Puppets of the plutocrats

There are echoes of another, long-ago America in the piece, one where the majority of people worked physically rather than at a desk. So, there is a bit of a disconnect between the exhausted worker at the metal speed press or on the railroad on one hand and the counter person at Wendy's or the "tech rep" on the other end of your call to your cell phone provider on the other hand.

But the spirit and the goals of labor today ought to be the same today.

Make no mistake, business is exploiting the latter today just as business exploited the industrial worker of the past. And the only way for those workers to get their just desserts is to organize themselves. (If you think that a disruption by labor in steel manufacturing had dire consequences 80 years ago, just imagine what a stoppage in wireless service today would do.)

Not only is labor not organized and not protesting, but their sinister nemeses - the Tea Partyers and the radical right wing marching in the name of some cryptic populist urge - are being financed by the very billionaires who want to further drive down wages and ruin the country. There is class warfare and those of us who are preparing to walk off the stage of our working life should not be leaving such a world to our children.

Workers of the new millennium, unite... you have nothing to lose because you've already lost most of it: your well-paying jobs, your homes, your dignity. What else would you like to turn over to your new masters?

The Ghost Of Barack Obama

2010-09-03T08:42:00.001-04:00

As we've witnessed in the last two years plus, politics is one very dirty game. Depressingly dirtier than most of the games the rest of us play to earn our daily bread.

Barack Obama is one of the more elegant, almost regal Presidents we've ever had. His high style and rhetorical mastery begs on bended knee comparison with John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

The President has mysteriously become a leader more in the mold of a Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge, and to many eyes and ears, appears cold, aloof, slightly supercilious and often tone deaf. The wisp of shallowness that appeared during the presidential campaign is now a full blown smoking stack.

Where are the ringing speeches, the great aspirations, the appeals to hope over fear? Gone, as far as we can tell. What happened?

There is no other place to lay the blame but to a kind of moral cowardice.

It seems Obama doesn't really believe in the Progressive vision. Was embracing it merely an election strategy? Either government is a constructive, positive force in our common life or it's a bystander.

No other developed country (and very few developing or so-called emerging countries) argue over this point. For instance, France is rated by the World Health Organization as having the best health care system in the entire world. Japan and even Brazil rank above us in the quality of their national mass transit systems. Our real literacy rate, which one approached 99% is now hovering around 85%.

Obama seems to forget that there are tangible problems that need government intervention and financing regardless of what any of the dangerous right wing fanatics shout. While he should be nailing his own 95 Theses to the door of Congress, he appears content to fiddle and adjust and essentially cower. Remember - he is the most powerful single person in the world, and even if a Progressive agenda doesn't pass legislative muster, simply using the bully pulpit will serve as a countervailing force against the reactionaries.

Presidents like FDR, Ronald Reagan, and the sadly sidetracked Lyndon Johnson had strong beliefs in a core set of values. Whether you agreed with them or not, one can easily summarize the three president's major stands, and we admire them for their courage if not the ultimate effects their beliefs had upon us.

So, advisory number one to the President: "Define your core principles, your ultimate philosophies, and sell them. Hard and often."

Another side of the President that is lacking is quite a bit more concrete.

He seems to consider himself above the ribbon cutting, baby kissing, the complimenting of the mayor's wife's new hat, walking the streets with a state senator who feels her district is slipping backward, or showing appreciation for the small business owner's dedication to achievement and her/his family. God is in the details, Mr. President. As the pundits put it, he gets an F in "the stagecraft of the Presidency."

His bumbling, half-baked touch was most evident during the oil catastrophe in the Gulf. He could not have plugged the leak himself, but he could have sent Joe Biden or a couple of Rear Admirals to set up a permanent base camp in New Orleans in order to "show the flag."

There have been literally thousands of stimulus bill projects around the country, yet we seem not to sense the President's, and therefore the Democrats', stamp on them. Everything seems theoretical under Obama's leadership. It keeps smelling as if he doesn't believe in his own actions.

But it goes beyond that. One of the most important accomplishments of his 20-month tenure thus far is the winding down of the war in Iraq. It will save lives and save trainloads of money. Yet the initial announcement and his nationally-televised speech seemed lethargic, lacking ardor. We should be dancing in the streets and the President should have been leading the band music. But we saw a ghost of passionate, intense candidate Obama.

As Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

Second advisory to Mr. Obama, coming from the left, for now a still-friendly if disquieted quarter: "Learn how to get your hands dirty." You can't glide above it all for much longer without completely losing the gains of the last few years.

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Pop Quiz For The Christian Nation Living Within America

2010-08-31T14:00:00.003-04:00

(Answers below) Four points for writing your name. Eight points each for correct answers.

High over the entrance to the Supreme Court is a frieze filled with statuary. Seated in the middle is Moses with two tablets.

1) The tablets represent:
a) The Ten Commandments
b) The Bill of Rights
c) Moses' endorsement of Tylenol
d) Not a stinkin' thing

2) On either side of Moses are the Greek law-giver Solon and:
a) Homer
b) Homer Simspon
c) Confucius
d) Cotton Mather

Inside, on the south and north walls of the courtroom itself are two other friezes.

3) There are how many Jews depicted?
a) None
b) 2
c) 5
d) 6, but they are reformed Jews so they don't really count

4) How many Catholics?
a) 5
b) 10
c) 100
d) Just St. Francis of Assisi to soften the tone of the joint

5) How many Muslims?
a) None, Muslims aren't really Americans
b) None, Muslims aren't really human beings
c) You're not allowed to depict Muslims in picture or sculpture
d) 1

6) There is one Babylonian, Hammurabi. How many pharaohs?
a) King Tut is up there and a couple of others who have pyramids and stuff
b) 1, but you'll never guess his name
c) Pharaoh's daughter is depicted because she was known as Little Lady Lawgiver
d) Steve Martin

7) How many famous ancient Greeks and Romans?
a) 2
b) 3
c) 5
d) none

8) How many Protestants?
a) 3
b) none - they refused to appear with members of other faiths on the frieze
c) 19
d) zillions, 'cause this is a Christian nation

Who said the following?

9) "The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion."
a) Billy Graham
b) Graham Nash
c) James Madison
d) Barack Hussein Obama

10) "Every other sect supposes itself in possession of the truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong. Like a man traveling in foggy weather they see those at a distance before them wrapped up in a fog, as well as those behind them, and also people in the fields on each side; but near them, all appears clear, though in truth they are as much in the fog as any of them."
a) Ben Cartwright
b) Diderot
c) Ben Franklin
d) Joe Don Baker

11) "Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world."
a) Newt Gingrich
b) Knute Rockne
c) Ben Franklin
d) Franklin Pierce

12) "There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

a) the Dalai Lama
b) Dolly Parton
c) Salvador Dali
d) Thomas Jefferson

Answers
1) b, Bill of Rights - according to the sculptor
2) c, Confucius
3) b, 2: Moses and Solomon
4) a, 5: Justinian, Charlemagne, King John, Louis IX and Napoleon
5) d, 1: Mohammed
6) b, Pharaoh Menes
7) c, 5: Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Octavian and Justinian
8) a, 3: Hugo Grotius, John Marshall and Sir William Blackstone
9) c, James Madison
10) c, Ben Franklin
11) c, Ben Franklin
12) a, the Dalai Lama. Astoundingly enough he said it to Dolly Parton...
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What Cicero Had To Say About Traitors - The Radical Right Wing Cashing In On Hatred And Fear

2010-08-30T13:51:00.001-04:00

Everyone should be angry, anxious and ready to counter any and all challenges from the extremist right wing after the fear and hatred extravaganza this weekend at the Lincoln Memorial.

The effrontery to the memory of Martin Luther King and all he stands for is self-evident. The insensitivity is beyond calculation. King had a dream. Beck offers America an Ayn Randian nightmare where radical individualism - the worst of Social Darwinism - will rule our lives.

Should the radical right seize much power, from cradle to grave even the well-educated let alone the poor and struggling, will struggle for a shirnking piece of a shrinking pie.

It sounds like hyperbole, but in all seriousness, this right wing is dangerously anti-American. They are the anti-patriots.

Cicero, in the late 1st century B.C. in one of his speeches, said of different traitors in different times:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.

But it cannot survive treason from within.

For the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague

Speaking of baseness, here are some thumbnail sketches of "Tea Party" type candidates:

There's health industry executive Rick Scott, the Republican nominee for Governor in Florida whose former company was forced to pay $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare fraud committed during his tenure and who led one of the most birulent anti-health reform groups last year. He's already spent $50 million of his own money to buy the race.

There's Joe Miller, running for Senate in Alaska. He's questioned the constitutionality of unemployment insurance and wants to phase out Social Security.

There's Dan Maes, Republican candidate for governor in Colorado, who asserted that efforts in Denver to promote bike riding could "threaten our personal freedoms." (Seriously, he said it.)

There's Sharron Angle, running for Senate in Nevada, who said she believes there are "domestic enemies" serving in Congress and has urged using "remedies" under the Second Amendment to change that. (Why use ballots when you can use bullets, eh?)

And then there's Rand Paul, the nominee for Senate in Kentucky, who has said he wouldn't have supported key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans With Disabilities Act. (Spoken like a true son of privilege.)

Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, sent an email that shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled "Obama Inauguration Rehearsal," while another depicts hardcore bestiality.

A leading Tea Party funded Republican candidate for Tennessee's 6th congressional district, Lou Ann Zelenik, condemned the plans for a mosque's expansion in Murfreesboro.

According to a University of Washington study, 46% of Tea Party'ers believe "if blacks would only try harder, they would be just as well off as whites." That racist sentiment, held by nearly half of all Tea Party supporters, had already been established by a USA Today poll, and WU study strongly confirmed their findings from July:

Nearly half say blacks lag in jobs, income and housing "because most African Americans just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty."

Over half of all Tea Party'ers believe that immigration (not illegal immigration, mind you) is "changing the culture in the U.S. for the worse" (54%), compared to 32% for everyone else.

When asked if we should single out Muslims or Middle Easterners for airport security stops, 63% of Tea Party supporters said we should, compared to 43% of all voters, a disturbing percentage of all Americans.

Over half of Tea Party'ers believe gays "have too much political power" compared to "the size of their group."

Dr. Pepper's Bad Prescription For People - More Union Busting

2010-08-18T12:34:00.004-04:00

The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then

raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.

- Samuel Gompers

Dr. Pepper-Snapple owns Mott's Apple Juice among its 50 brands. (7-Up, Hawaiian Punch, Sunkist, Stewart's Root Beer, etc. Go to their site and click "Our Brands" to see the others)

Stop buying and drinking their products.

The company, which saw record profits of $550 million in 2009, is hammering union workers in its Rochester, NY, area apple juice plant, asking for give backs and pay cuts, and hiring scab workers in the depressed, job-hungry upstate region. The union is the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union International (RWDSU, for short).

What is at issue here is whether people with 15 years experience who are making around $19 an hour in skilled jobs should give back $3 an hour to a corporate giant making more than a half billion dollar a year profit.

What is also at issue are livable wages for a dedicated, profit-producing group of UFCW workers with families, children, hopes and dreams. The mega-corporation wants to take back gains the workers have struggled for over decades, and throw them into the crocodile pit of cheap labor. Shamefully, the company has already begun replacing some of the workers who have been striking since May.

The $40,000 per year wage is a decent living for a Rochester area worker (the plant is located in Williamson, NY). But no one is getting rich on it and, if you calculate a working life of 25 years, you'll see that one can buy a modest house, 3 or 4 cars, take some non-luxury vacations but never save enough to send the kids to college. And probably a worker can go bankrupt in a flash if some unforeseen catastrophe should hit. So this is the kind of life that the barons who own Dr. Pepper-Snapple want for their workers - 16% less in pay and benefits, and no retirement fund.

The underlying issues concern corporate greed. Keep in mind that when that $550 million dollar profit is divvied up, it goes to shareholders of Dr. Pepper-Snapple, who we can rest assured are not generally of the blue collar class. The corporation's logic tells us that people in the ownership class need the money more than the workers at the Mott's plant.

And how much will it mean to the greedy shareholders?

By our calculations, this oppressive restructuring of wages would save about $1.5 million per year on the backs of the 300 workers who could be affected at the plant. This would redistribute about 6 cents per share to the owners, while it cuts back on worker earnings by about 16%.

6 lousy cents.

Meanwhile the Dr. Pepper-Snapple stock has gone up in value over 42% in the last 52 weeks.

This is the America we want to leave our children and grandchildren? Decline in earning power so someone can have a cheap, over-sweetened drink from Dr. Pepper?

According to the New York Times:

Tim Budd, a 24-year employee who belongs to the union’s bargaining team, said he was shocked by one thing the plant manager said during negotiations.

“He said we’re a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities go up and down,” Mr. Budd recalled. “He said there are thousands of people in this area out of jobs, and they could hire any one of them for $14 an hour. It made me sick to have someone sit across the table and say I’m not worth the money I make.”

Have a glass of water from your tap the next time you feel like reaching for one of Dr. Pepper's products.
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The Radical Right: The Great Dismantlers

2010-08-17T20:27:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is the 90th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It passed the Tennessee legislature by one vote, its approval ushering in the era of equality between the sexes in the voting booth. The amendment's journey was slow and painful and was thwarted for decades by reactionary, anti-social elements in America. These have not disappeared entirely as we know from the behavior of Palin, Gingrich, Kyl, et al. And they are as dangerous to the ture American way of life as ever.

Everywhere, in every way, the radical Republicans are intent on tearing things down. No wonder they are so fanatical about their handguns and assault rifles. They seek to dismantle so many things important to our social fabric that we will surely descend into anarchy if they get their way even on just one of them.

Let's start with the brouhaha du jour, the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan. Is there something actually wrong with the First Amendment? And is there something inherently unpatriotic about defending it? It's been around since 1791 and was written and shepherded by one our greatest Presidents and political philosophers, James Madison. Of all the amendments it is the most fundamental to our national identity.

Yet, like termites at the foundation of our 220 year-old spiritual and political house, the radical right gnaws and gnaws at. Their message? If you're white, Protestant and conservative, fear nothing. If you're anything else, be very afraid.

Next there's the attack on the Fourteenth Amendment, the one that confers automatic citizenship upon individuals born on American soil, with a few technical restrictions such as children of foreign ambassadors. The fourteenth is a mere stripling at 142 years old. And what is really awful about the reactionaries' attack is that it is just an attack - there's no new text for us to sit down and discuss, just raw and ugly emotion aimed at foreigners. The only thing we're left with is a contemplation of xenophobia.

But the Fourteenth Amendment is also known as the "equal protection" amendment because it states unequivocally that "no state shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Such as the right to marry whomever you want? Such as the right to go your way unhindered without fear of random stops by local police looking for undocumented people from south of the border? (The amendment's history is deeper and broader than today's controversies, so a full discussion would actually take a book to cover it all.)

Switching gears a bit, how about the propsed dismantling of Social Security? Sane, civilized people can surely understand the need to gradually raise the retirement age for benefits collection since people are now, and will be, living longer than when the program was first instituted.

To completely privatize the system, however, is the hope only of madmen and women. If the system had been private in 2008 when the crashing began, 40% of all value would have been wiped out and would still be wiped out. So, a person who was expecting $1400 per month would be receiving only $840 per month, IF there was still a decent yield on his or her principle to be had. Consider the chaos that might have ensued.

Let's talk about the Presidency. No one can make an argument that George W. Bush was attacked in a vociferous and occasionally virulent way. He was not, though, held to be any of the following: non-American, un-American, a member of a Muslim terrorist sect, a Socialist, a Communist, a monkey, the Joker, Mao, Che or Satan. George Bush was compared to Hitler quite a number of times, although not as many times as Obama. Bush was never depicted as either eating or growing watermelons on the White House lawns.

If a more centrist President had been elected - such as a Bill Clinton - the hue and cry would have hit different notes, but it would have been as ugly, because at bottom, the radical right, (which pretty much now runs the Republican Party), despises the Presidency most of all among government institutions. It's hated it since Abe Lincoln, whom the reactionaries murdered. They stepped it up when Theodore Roosevelt began forcing through sorely-needed reforms. FDR? Well, talk about the Great Satan! They killed Kennedy, whipsawed LBJ, laughed at Carter, and tried to depose Clinton. We shouldn't be surprised at how our first African-American progressive President has been treated.

What else has the radical right wing (and I include Republicans, Dixiecrats and Blue Dog Democrats under that banner) dismantled? The Glass-Steagall Act which kept banks and investment banks from speculating with deposits, mixing their functions. They've been hammering at Medicare and Medicaid since Richard Nixon's administration, an era that now seems moderate compared to the extremism his party now deploys. The right to a speedy trial guaranteed in the Sixth Amendment. And don't even get started with the Sixteenth Amendment, which allowed for the levy of an income tax.

They don't believe in government, which means they don't believe in society. They believe in an Ayn Rand steroidal nightmare of a viciously individualistic social order.

Out with all of this civilization stuff and nonsense says the right wing.

Shall we go on to campaign finance and the Citizens United case? Or how about removing environmental safeguards that might well have prevented the Gulf oil catastrophe?

What the radicals want is for all people without a huge income or super strong assets to begin a war against each other day in and day out. (Think of the dismantled unions which directly put workers to struggling against globalization and low wage illegal aliens.)

They welcome the disarray, the anarchy, the divisions among Americans because it will further drive down wages and distract us from the real inequalities running uncontrolled in our society. They seek nothing more than law and order and a complete dismantling of the middle class.

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.

The Manhattan Islamic Center, American Religions and the Presidency - Some Other Bigotry Worth Contemplating

2010-08-16T11:14:00.000-04:00

There has been but one Roman Catholic President of the United States: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Aside from JFK, there have been two other Roman Catholic candidates for President: Al Smith in 1928 and John Kerry in 2004.

There have been 3 Roman Catholic Vice-Presidential Candidates: William Miller (R-1964), Ed Muskie (D-1968), and Sargent Shriver (D-1972)

There has been one Greek Orthodox Catholic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis.

There have been no Jews nominated.

No Mormons. No Atheists (that we know of).

Certainly no Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims.

Thus far, the score is:

WASPs 42
Catholics 1
Black Protestants 1

A bit lopsided?

That it is primarily white Protestants leading the charge against the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan should speak volumes to the rest of us about the priorities of the (barely) majority Protestants. Of course many Protestants do not fall into this hysterically xenophobic group. And, sadly, there are many Catholics - led by the likes of xenophobe-in-chief, Pat Buchanan - who are lining up against the center.

If you fall outside the pale of mainline white Protestantism, however, recall that you, or your near ancestors, suffered this exact same kind of intolerance. Think long and hard about what your forebears suffered and poke around in the vast computer knowledge files to see how similarly they were portrayed in the press as are Muslims now.

Meanwhile, even with the election of a black President, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a Catholic or a Jew, among others, to move into the White House.

On The Matter Of The Islamic Center in Manhattan

2010-08-15T14:41:00.000-04:00

James Madison, known as the Father of the Constitution, made clear the difference between Liberty and toleration in religion. Toleration is a grant made by a majority to a minority, giving the minority some sort of permission to build, meet, worship, believe. Liberty, said Madison, is a self-evident, natural right. It cannot be denied by the majority because the right to so deny does not repose in the majority.

Writing from Montpelier, Vermont, in 1823 in a letter to Edward Everett he said: "...if new sects arise with absurd opinions or over-heated imaginations, the proper remedies lie in time, forbearance, and example..."

Note the words "forbearance" and "example." Forbearance encompasses patience and understanding. Example is an answer to those who argue that many - but not all - majority Islamic countries restrict the freedom of others. That argument says we should stoop to their intolerance, become not even better in our Western beliefs, but wallow in the mud of backwardness. Surely that is no argument at all.

Perhaps we should amend the First Amendment to read "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, except for Islam and other religions we might find somehow offensive at any time for any reason."

Among other things, the hysterical response to the Islamic center is a proxy for protest against the failed policies of two administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are a number of constituencies against the Islamic center. One has a barely valid claim - the families of victims of the attacks. Another constituency is the vehement new Nativist Movement that seems to despise anyone and anything that is not completely embraced by the myths of white Christian America. The third, and possibly the most despicable, is the cynical right wing of the radical Republican Party.

First, the families. While I appreciate their continuing anguish, a society cannot always take into account the ongoing feelings of all families of murder victims at all times. It is an impossible task. A better way to remember the dead beloved would be to recommit ourselves to the bedrock of American rights: freedom of choice in most important matters. Hard? Yes, of course. Our Founders had that courage, but apparently, we have so little faith in our way of life that some are looking to reform the 1st Amendment. But one certainly cannot believe that all 1.2 billion Muslims are evil, or even vaguely support terrorism. In reality, most Muslims are dead set against it, having witnessed first hand terrorist acts in their own countries. Would we as Americans want to be judged on the behavior of a William Calley who, along with his men, murdered 500 Vietnamese civilians? I think not. Would we want to be known as supporters of Timothy McVey? Of course not. How do we feel as a people about the ruination of Native American Indian peoples, or how about slavery? Are we collectively responsible? We know the answer because it is written in our traditions dating to ancient Greece, Rome and Medieval Europe and refined and set in stone by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. We are individually responsible for our own actions. Holding all of Islam responsible for 9/11 is absurd even if tens of thousands of their coreligionists are sadistic, nihilistic fiends. Each of the murderers and whoever provided support or comfort and those who continue to hide the masterminds are responsible. That might number thousands of people, but it surely is not ALL of Islam. And the huge majority of Islam deserve a place at the table in the same way most of our ancestors were given their place.

The next group against the Mosque - the people who are stirring every ethno-religious pot in sight since President Obama was elected - rest their arguments on hate and their strategy upon neutralization and possibly annihilation of their "enemies." In other circumstances and places today, illegal immigrants are their target, or poor black people. In the past, Know-Nothings and Klansmen targeted blacks, Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Mormons, and the Amish. (The largest mass-lynching in this country was in New Orleans in 1891 and its victims were Sicilian/Italian-American laborers and fruit merchants.) Eradicating this kind of hate thought and speech remains a challenge. The arguments of hate-mongers deserve no hearing in a democratic society and we would all do well to watch over their incitements to violence. They demean and debase our liberties in the most insidious ways.

Finally, and I say the worst, are the right wing politicians who hope to make electoral hay on this matter. The John Boehners and Sara Palins of this scurrilous gang of political hooligans use the arguments of both the survivors and the hate-mongers in order to further cripple what is currently a fragile national unity. Their motives are clear, their ends are contemptible. "Raise my party up swearing patriotism upon the graves of the honored dead," so the x-ray of their minds would show.

Illegal Workers And $600 Million More On "Border Security"

2010-08-13T14:22:00.002-04:00

The highway is alive tonight
But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light
Searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad

- Bruce Springsteen

Tom Joad: They're workin' away our spirits, tryin' to make us cringe and crawl, takin' away our decency.
- John Steinbeck

The problem of illegal workers in this country has one primary fount: the employers who hire them.

No jobs, no work. No work, no illegal workers. No illegal workers, better employment prospects among lower level American workers and legal immigrants.

Employers who hire illegal workers are by definition predatory, anti-American-worker, and cheat the system in many ways while exploiting people who are in dire need of work. Let it be remembered that, before and now especially during the Great Recession, many American workers have been shut out of low and middle-level jobs because of nefarious hiring practices.

Which workers suffer the most? African-Americans, legal immigrants, and poorly-trained whites.

Once unions had been castrated, the path was clear for this kind of anti-social economic predation. (And the following in no way is meant to denigrate the lives and efforts of the workers who come to the United States seeking jobs, leaving countries that offer little in the way of opportunities. While we are busy solving this problem, they must be treated humanely and with dignity. Developing Mexico and the rest of Latin America is a larger discussion.)

Let's choose a couple of industries to draw examples from - construction and light regional manufacturing.

The employer scam works this way:

1. Determine that the wages paid American workers can be halved or even cut by two-thirds by hiring illegal workers. Send word via the immigrant grapevine that such jobs are available. A laborer would earn $10 per hour versus his/her American counterpart's $15 to $30, while an unskilled assembly line worker without documentation would earn $8 versus $12 to $25 per hour.

2. Gloat that because the U.S. has relatively humane laws concerning free health care, the employer does not have to cover the item while the American taxpayer does. 62% of illegal immigrants have no health coverage at all. Another 30% have inadequate coverage.

3. Further off-loading of costs are accomplished through not paying disability insurances, unemployment insurance, and by not heeding workplace safety rules. Because, who can protest it? Certainly not the illegal worker.

4. Have a firm understanding that illegal workers not only have no right to organize, but, in fact, have almost no rights at all.

5. Work closely with smugglers who have a call on some portion of the illegal workers' pay, so the worker further is in thrall to the employer's rules of non-law. Numbers 4 and 5 are modern versions of some aspects of the padrone system that victimized Italian immigrants, and the Irish gang labor practices prevalent until banned in the early-middle part of the 20th century.

6. Learn how to cry out in great consternation over the clamping down on illegal workers because it would "hurt the economy."

7. Exploit Nativist sentiment that states, in a nut shell, that the illegal workers are really leeches and should be repressed even more. This spreads fear and cowardice not just in the illegal group but those legal workers seeking better pay and conditions. The fear factor.

8. Off load more expenses onto tax payers such as lost local, state and Federal revenues that go toward facilities that not only the illegal workers but their families use as well: roads, sewers, water, schools, recreational facilities, etc. If illegal workers had a state of their own, it would rank right behind Ohio. An entire state that doesn't pay taxes only to the benefit of rapacious employers.

9. Create and perpetuate the myth that American workers "don't want these jobs." Look at ANY hiring site, job fair, or any other place that offers positions and you will see hundreds of applicants for low and middle skill jobs.

10. Count profits that are partly the result of the savings on wages and benefits, partly on taxes and fees the employer would be liable for if they paid American workers.

11. Utilize local and state law enforcement agencies not to "send them back," but rather as instruments of fear. The illegal worker now has to become more of a phantom in our society due to state initiatives such as the one found in Arizona.

Today, the Obama administration announced the appropriation of $600 million to "secure the border." Troops, fences, electronic surveillance. So, once again, we are forced to subsidize employers who will continue to wave around the honey pot promise of good jobs to nationals from countries where there are none.

There are rather stringent penalties under existing law to put the hammer down on the employers. Yet disturbingly, the average penalty is roughly at 10% of the strength of the maximum allowable by law.

Sec. 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and 8 U.S.C. 1324a, makes it unlawful for any person knowingly to hire, recruit or refer for a fee any alien not authorized to work. An employer that violates these laws can face penalties of:

· $250 to $2,000 fine for each unauthorized individual;

· $2,000 to $5,000 for each employee if the employer has previously been in violation; or

· $3,000 - $10,000 for each individual if employer was subject to more than one cease and desist order.

The employer can also be fined $100 to $1,000 for each individual “paperwork” violation.

The criminal penalties for a pattern and practice violation can be up to $3,000 for each unauthorized alien, imprisonment up to six months, or both.

The rub is this - it is very hard to prove such allegations against an employer. Only about 1% of illegal employers are ever convicted.

Illegal workers benefit by the system on the macro level to some degree. The bigger winners are the employers.

If you own a construction company that employs 10 workers at $10 rather than $20 per hour, you are saving $800 per day. Over the course of a 10-week project, that's a savings of $40,000.

Meanwhile, taxpayers pick up that remaining difference that should be going toward taxes, health costs, and other costs.

Now multiply all that by thousands and thousands of illegal employers. How many billions does it make per year? How many trillions over 10 years?

And to put the cherry on top of this sinister sundae, stir in the impoverishment, demoralization and degradation of our fellow citizens who cannot get even those lower pay jobs.

Relax - It's Radio The Way It Was meant To Be

2010-08-09T13:34:00.000-04:00

Try it.
Click Here

Coked Up Winged Monkeys Fly In From The Right

2010-08-04T10:30:00.003-04:00

Rarely did the film version of The Wizard of Oz reach the level of real darkness. But when those bellboy-suited winged monkeys were unleashed by the Wicked Witch of the West, there was an undeniable creep factor. In L. Frank Baum's novel, the Winged Monkeys were incredibly destructive - shredding the Scarecrow and using his innards as bedding, dropping the Tinman into a craggy ravine, degrading and enslaving the Cowardly Lion as a dray animal. And let's not forget the kidnapping of Toto, too.

Enter the Republicans, authors of the 1 trillion dollars-worth of wars in southwest Asia and a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the super rich, with their critiques of stimulus spending. A sort of political version of winged monkeys themselves, the arch-conservatives, as we already know, have no regard for any of the following:

Science
Economic justice
History
Plain old facts
Civil rights beyond the 2nd Amendment
Normal politicial dialogue

The right-winged monkeys are led by the once quasi-honorable John McCain, embittered and mortified by his presidential election loss, as they seize upon a few sometimes bizarre-seeming awards under the huge stimulus plan. (McCain is ably assisted in his mindless lashing out by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.)

As one would expect, they are off base about almost every single project they buffoonishly criticize. The truth, indeed, is always the first casualty.

Let's start with an unhappy accident - no pun intended. BP America was awarded a $308 million grant for a clean energy project in California. That was before the ghastly Gulf disaster. But, the project has attracted 7x the amount in private investment that the goverment is investing and will directly create at least 1,600 jobs.

A pause here to note that the numbers bandied about when discussing employment impact almost exclusively discuss the direct creation of jobs, never minding the fact that there is a multiplier effect because materials, shipping, provisioning the workforce, taxes paid and consumer dollars spent spin off even more jobs.

Forward to the "exotic ants" study to be conducted by the California Academy of Sciences in the Indian Ocean. Of course, like a bunch of high school boys, the right wing thinks this is a waste of money. (Hey Charlie... how about them exotic ants, heh, heh? ) It appears that exotic insect species, because of brisk global trade and transportation, pose a particularly dangerous threat to agriculture. Studying the insects in their native habitat is crucial to understanding how they breed, behave, etc. California is the largest agricultural state in the Union.

There is also Fort Jefferson (1846) in the Dry Tortugas 70 miles west of the southernmost Florida Keys that has been deteriorating through lack of funding for the last 35 years. It is known as the Gibraltar of the Caribbean. The fort is the main tourism attraction on the little island that lives exclusively by tourist dollars and is served by a modern ferry that employs dozens of people. It is also one of the most magnificent pieces of military architecture in the country. Is their argument that we should just let this piece of history and prime tourist destination crumble into dust?

Then there is a $762,000 grant to design a computer program that can monitor and subsequently recreate on screen (and eventually on line) the movements of a particular choreography. Students and faculty will design and build the entire system from scratch. On the surface it sounds like an arts program - dreaded amongst the anti-cultural right wing - but in reality it is a computer project that will have applications far beyond dance - such as orthopedics, sports medicine and performance, gerontology and human-centric design of products. This is exactly the kind of basic research and application an intelligent government should be funding.

In Glassboro, New Jersey, $1.2 million will go for the restoration of a wooden train station that dates from the 1860s and operation of a museum within. The station will also make for a stop on a planned light rail system that would connect Delaware Valley towns with Camden and Philadelphia. Currently the only way to navigate to those places is by car. Moreover, the Delaware Valley is reliant on tourism to keep its economy humming. Glassboro - once the East Coast's center of glass-making, as one could have guessed - is in the process of an enormous rehabilitation of its downtown area focused on Rowan University's various constituencies. Finally, Glassboro was the site of President Johnson's historic meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967 - a key moment in Cold War detente, and was also the site of an American President's first address to a high school graduating class (by Ronald Reagan, 1986). What's history got to do with anything?

Know Nothing ignorance, the cynicism of the defeated, the lack of alternatives all further taint the right wing radicals. Make no mistake: they despise the America that most of us love and they want to turn it into a second-rate nation. They are destructive - the Winged Monkeys of a very dark movie.
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Moody's Analytics Becomes Low Down "Democrat" Tool - Gives Republicans Serious Agita

2010-07-30T16:49:00.002-04:00

Great video at the end of today's blog. Check it out.

Arguing with the Republicans is like arguing with the neighborhood drunk who sits at the end of the bar at the corner tavern. You say Williams, he says DiMaggio. You say Magic, he says Larry Bird. You says FDR, he says - Herbert Hoover?

And now, in spite of the fact that both the sober-as-a-judge Moody's Analytics and the bipartisan CBO pretty much agree on how best to stimulate the economy, the Republicans are crying, "It ain't necessarily so..."

What are they disputing? These little tidbits will illustrate, courtesy of Bob Cesca's marvelous website:

1. For every dollar of money spent on extending the Bush tax cuts, there's only a 32-cent return on investment in terms of pass along economic stimulus in the United States.

2. For every dollar spent on unemployment benefits, there's a $1.61 return in economic stimulus. You save people from untold suffering and blows to dignity AND stimulate the economy.

3. Cutting the corporate tax rate - also a 32-cent return in economic stimulus on the dollar here at home.

4. Infrastructure spending? $1.57 return on the buck. And you get bridges, tunnels and broadband in the bargain.

5. Capital gains tax cuts? 37-cents on the dollar.

6. Even a temporary increase in food stamps? $1.74 in return. No such thing as a free lunch? Well, pretty darn close.

So, what are the right wing's big beefs? (or is it beeves...)

Republican objection: we can't really be sure what infrastructure even is. (See italics below.)
Answer: if it's got a brick, a fiber optic, concrete, steel, etc., it's infrastructure. Imagine being a teacher and having these right wingers in your high school social studies class.

Republican objection: there is too much corruption in food stamp programs.
Answer: as opposed to... what Wall Street? The health care industry? Defense contracting? Big Oil?

Republican objection: not keeping capital gains taxes at current historically low levels will be a "jobs killer."
Answer: kinda sorta... it will be a jobs killer in India, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, etc. American corporations have created 8 times as many jobs in other countries in the last 20 years as they have in the United States. Keep that excess cash here at home and at least we'll have something to show for it rather than more lost jobs. (For instance, we can build infrastructure.)

(For the drunks at the Republican Club Bar avidly poring over this blog, click here for an article on the 8 public mega-projects going on right now in New York City. Then there's the rebuilding on the World Trade Center site, and about 160,000 new housing units in the works. Also, although it's hard to keep track, there are approximately 8 new 45-plus-story office towers that have just been completed in Manhattan. Oh, and two huge replacement bridges are being put up over two of our tidal estuaries. Now... right wingers, you have an elementary idea of what infrastructure is.)

On to the video. Who better than the Moody Blues?

The Boomer Solution To Our Intractable Reading And Math Proficiency Problems

2010-07-29T12:31:00.001-04:00

The strategy is - put people back to work and teach young children to read well. Below are some tactics to get there, at least in part.

Last week NPR reported that the unemployment rate among the 55-and-older set hit 7.2%, the highest since the end of World War II. And while that may be lower than the overall rate, older workers tend to stay unemployed longer, with the average length of the job search more than 35 weeks.

A Pew survey shows that 1 in 3 unemployed older workers hasn't had a paycheck in more than a year. As a result, in 2009, 3 million older workers have simply given up and declared early retirement and have begun drawing Social Security benefits.

Yet this is the best-educated, most highly-skilled cadre in our society as of this moment and it is being pulled from service.

Meanwhile, disadvantaged students in the first grade have a vocabulary that is approximately half that of the average advantaged student (2,900 and 5,800 words respectively). The first grade! For the underprivileged, the race is essentially lost before the starter's pistol has been sounded.

And, if you can't read well, the chances you will do well in math are next to nil.

The marriage of Boomers and needy preschool children is of urgent importance.

Almost anyone with a few years of college and beyond, or even those with a solid high school education, are capable of reading aloud to and giving basic reading, writing and math instruction to a 4, 5 or 6 year-old.

The Boomers who want to retire because of difficulty in finding new employment should be entered into a new program dedicated to transmitting these basic skills to deprived and neglected youngsters.

The Boomers would receive a stipend that would not be taxable and that would not affect their Social Security payment levels. The reading and math sessions could easily be conducted in schools before or after hours, in community centers, in the halls of religious institutions, libraries, even outdoors. The sessions could be for two hours per day, four days per week.

Let's say there were 1,000,000 of these "into-the-breach" senior tutors. And let's say they received $1,000 per month. That would cost $12 billion per year. The extra money added to the average retiree's $1,170 per month in SS money would help immensely, raising their monthly income to $2,170 per month. One can fairly assune that the extra money, like unemployment benefits, would immediately be recirculated into the economy in the form of consumer spending.

By contrast, we are spending over $100 billion per year on the two wars in southwest Asia, plus another 700 billion on defense in general. Corn subsidies cost us about $10 billion per year. Tax and other incentives to the petroleum industry cost us about $105 billion per year.

The benefits to the children who would be affected by such programs are not immeasurable, although the following statistics would serve to astound even the most skeptical among us.
(Stats are from http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp - there are plenty more at their site.)

It is estimated that the cost of illiteracy to business and the taxpayer is $20 billion per year.

It is estimated that more than $2 billion is spent each year on students who repeat a grade because they have reading problems.

The educational careers of 25 to 40 percent of American children are imperiled because they don't read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough.

Children who have not developed some basic literacy skills by the time they enter school are 3 - 4 times more likely to drop out in later years.

One-fifth of high school graduates cannot read their own diplomas.

Let's say of the 1,000,000 Boomers employed, they each affect 8 to 12 students per day. That is, obviously, 8 to 12 million students per day.

The children would receive the benefits of all the cumulative applied knowledge of the Boomers. They would stay in the school and learning environment for a longer amount of time each day. They would be sheltered from detrimental home situations, from excessive TV watching and video game playing.

The Boomers - with all their phenomenal skills coming back into play - would find a new sense of purpose plus a reasonable new source of income.

That income would help in a directly stimulative way to reinvigorate our struggling economy.

Volunteerism is all well and good, but the educational crisis is reaching high tide and it needs to be treated with early in a child's life. Volunteers are wonderful, but this is a different kind of predicament.

Maybe this is the new WPA or CCC. Spend money directly on things that are of dire importance to our future. And do something intrinsically good in the bargain.

Illegal Immigration, The Decline Of Unions And... Prohibition

2010-07-27T09:30:00.008-04:00

Yes, Prohibition. The mother of all unintended consequences spawned by modern social meddling.

Every quasi-educated individual knows the Prohibition Cliff Notes by heart:

A gaggle of reactionary, business-led, do-gooder blue-noses pushed to "dry out" America in a quest to stop rampant drunkenness, promote money-saving, stop domestic abuse and improve industrial man's work habits. What they didn't bargain for was Al Capone, mayhem on the streets, an enthusiastic disregard for Law with a capital "L," and not much of a rollback in drinking.

Now to the decline of unions. From 1948 to 1975, the percentage of people who belonged to unions was remarkably stable. The high water years were 1952 through 1955, participation averaging around 32%. The level stayed right around 29 to 31 per cent those 27 years.

Today's mark is the lowest ever at around 10%.

More shocking is the decline in real earning power.

As union membership has declined, so too have real wages across the board. Figures are given in 1982 dollars for easy comparison. In 1954, average weekly wages were about $319 for all workers. In 1983, they were about $277. Latest figures show that today they are about $272.

This trend accelerated beginning with Ronald Reagan's 8 years of union busting. He was the "Great Communicator" and the message he conveyed so clearly to American blue collar (mostly male, white and black) workers was this: "Go to hell."

Turns out it wasn't morning in America at all, but rather the beginning of a long, cold night that shows no signs of ending. Adding insult to injury, hours worked have risen during that same long period of wage decline.

A good part of the blame falls on so-called right-to-work states - AL, AZ, AR, FL, GA, ID, IO, KS, LA, MS, NE, NV, NC, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA and WY. (Notice a pattern here? Right-to-work equals right wing for the most part.) This backward kind of legislation began the scramble for ever-lower-wage workers.

Enter the illegal aliens, like stock characters in a depressing morality play.

Who wrote them into the script? Certainly not native-born American workers, who had much to lose, and indeed have lost out, to the imported low-wage workers.

Illegal aliens cannot organize, they cannot lobby, they cannot demand the humane benefits - good wages, health care, safety standards, payment for sick days, paid vacation, etc. - we once upon a time associated with the American way of life.

Who wrote illegal aliens into the script? Business interests and their right wing political handmaidens who think the once-proud and productive American worker has had it too good.

Depending on which traditionally typical union industries you examine, the wage differential between union and non-union pay is staggering. Overall, union jobs (including benefits) pay an astronomical 28% more than non-union jobs. There's the difference between the good life and the slave life.

While neither outright condemning nor fully supporting illegal aliens seeking better opportunities in the United States, it is clear that de-unionization has led to a labor free-for-all that has thrown more and more unskilled and semi-skilled workers into the same boiling cauldron. This has a natural spillover effect on even better paid white-collar, and stereotypical pink and light-blue collar wage-earners. The ever popular war of all against all is on. (To boot, many illegal workers are paid in cash, so they and their employers avoid paying taxes and Social Security and disability insurances.)

Further, these recently-arrived low-wage workers have children and grandchildren, so a new culture of low expectations in terms of pay and benefits settles in pretty quickly. Not to mention a certain docility when it comes to employer demands and a general sense that one's destiny is consistently in the hands of others.

Poured into the cauldron come the effects of "Free Trade" and "Globalization."

How much further can our real wages fall?

A lot. One little-heralded Congressional Budget Office report has said that real wages might fall as much as another 10% in the next 10 years. The forecast for unskilled and semi-skilled Americans-by-birth is even grimmer. The CBO predicts their wages will fall by 22% in real terms. There is a particularly ominous message in that for many African-Americans.

To circle back around to Prohibition... at least it ended through the efforts of F.D.R.'s administration and a general sense among the electorate that it was an almost entirely idiotic policy. Although its after-effects live on in the general lawlessness that we experience as Americans. (For instance, in the early 1900s, the United States had the lowest murder rate in the developed world. That rate become the highest by the mid-1920s and we take that dubious honor to this day.)

The decline of organized labor and the attendant rise in the number of low-wage workers shows no sign of abating.

Border fences and random stops are not the answer to the illegal immigrant problem; persuading, if not compelling, low wage workers - regardless of their origins - to join unions in order to feel empowered, to become part of the historic American Dream, is one large step toward solving the puzzle.
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Credit Cards: How The Poor Subsidize The Rich

2010-07-26T19:24:00.000-04:00

You know what happens when you swipe this or that card. You rack up miles or points, or receive a special discount, or any of the seemingly innocuous rewards that credit card companies pass out like lollipops at a kid's birthday party.

Guess who's actually paying for the party? Lower income America.

It's another manifestation of the way poor people subsidize the excesses of the rich according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Here's how it works: A credit card user goes to a store and buys what should be a $10 item. Tacked onto the price, however, are the fees and percentages that the credit card company charges. The item ends up costing $10.38. Fair enough for the credit card user who gains a number of advantages by charging: deferred payment, a computerized or hard-copy record, sometimes loss or damage insurance, and those little rewards spoken of above.

If you pay cash, you pay $10.38 just like the card user even though you don't receive the benefits of using a credit card.

The cash purchase's extra 38 cents goes mostly to keep down the cost of merchandise to credit card users at the point of sale because merchants generally do not (and mostly cannot) set differential prices for card users. (Some gas stations feature differential prices in order to build traffic.)

Simply put, this means that the price of the $10 item for cash users ought to be $10, and for credit card users it ought to be $10.76.

In general, disproportionately, the poor use cash and the better off use credit cards. The Boston Fed says:

Because credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general.

Credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general.

On average, and after accounting for rewards paid to households by banks [credit card issuers], the lowest-income household ($20,000 or less annually) pays $23 and the highest-income household ($150,000 or more annually) receives $756 every year.

This spreading of costs is imposed not by government mandate, but by credit card companies themselves. (So much for the right wing and business being against over-regulation.) The Boston Fed explains:

Merchants may want to recoup the merchant fee only from consumers who pay by credit card. In practice, however, credit card companies impose a "no surcharge rule" (NSR) that prohibits U.S. merchants from doing so, and most merchants are reluctant to give cash discounts.

Shamefully, the heaviest users of credit cards - that is, the very rich and rich - receive progressively the most in subsidies from the cash users, i.e., the lower middle class and underclass. As the Fed report puts it:

This regressive transfer is amplifi ed by the disproportionate distribution of rewards, which are proportional to credit card sales [of] high-income credit card users.

In other words, the higher you go, the higher you go yet again. On the backs of the poor.

When we consider that virtually every kind of store and service takes credit cards, this "tax" on the cash-paying poor is likewise virtually universal. And what does a person who makes $20,000 per year mostly buy in shops?

After housing expenditures are taken out, the poor spend about 90% of their income on food and other household items, clothing, transportation, and medicine. So, the poor pay about 4% more for everything they really really need in order to subsidize the vacations and other luxe items of the rich. (And this on top of the most regressive form of tax, the sales tax, which hurts the poor even further.)

In the wishy-washy financial reform just passed in Washington, debit cards attached to checking accounts will fall under increased regulation regarding fees and overdrafts. Credit card company practices such as the one described above will remain untouched.

Pop Quiz: Guess which Senators stripped enhanced credit card regulation out of the bill? "Moderate" Republican Senators Snow and Collins of Maine and Brown of Massachusetts. That was the cost of their crossing the aisle and joining the Dems on reform.

If you would like to see a copy of the full Boston Fed report, write to Liberalstateofmind@gmail.com
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A Different Take On Church and State

2010-07-25T08:19:00.004-04:00

There can be no better day than this Sunday in the midst of a hellishly hot July almost exactly 85 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial to give some honest advice to the religious institutions of America.

Lay off, ease up, back down on matters of sex, clean up your own backyard, and become more sympathetic, more caring, more specifically involved in the quotidian spiritual and economic needs of people while becoming less involved in the pointless abstractions that necessarily arise when church and state tango.

This goes for all established religions, although my take comes from a particular perspective.

I attended Catholic religious schools from kindergarten through college, so religion was a part of my everyday life. Hard as it may be to believe given that, religion informed my life without governing it.

What made me proudest was giving to charity on an almost daily basis - nickels, dimes and quarters - for other children, a lot like me but who lived in squalor in far off Africa and Asia. Or right here at home. Maybe down the block. Being suffused with the good feeling of having helped out someone, even from afar, inflected the long hours of kneeling, praying, singing and contemplation.

In April of 1966 Time Magazine published its famous edition that asked "Is God Dead?"

Not yet 16 years old, I was a sophomore in high school, and for two full weeks, in Theology, History and English classes the debate raged on. This in a Catholic prep school in suburban New York 45 years ago now.

Many of the conclusions are lost in the shrouds of time. But a summation would run something like this: God is not dead. We are dead to the possibilities of God. And to belief in "the good." And therefore to the action needed to bring about a better world.

Why we were open to such thoughts at 15 and 16, aside from the intellectual courage of our teachers, is a topic for a much longer thought piece.

It was heady stuff and best not discussed at the family dinner table lest our hidebound parents find themselves in the middle of a collective domestic thrombosis.

Later, in college, these thoughts would become one strand in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Inspired by the Berrigan brothers, both priests, and the likes of Thomas Merton, also a priest, we took aim at the heart of the radically anti-human activities of our government in its prosecution of the war.

On other fronts Catholic, as well as other Christian-minded activists, also inspired. Caesar Chavez in the farm labor movement, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Tom Cornell, a seminal anti-war activist of the early and mid-1960s.

Day, who died in 1980, was the foremost advocate of her time of the Roman Catholic economic philosophy of Distributism, a system considered to be a "third way," between rampant plutarchic capitalism and state socialism, then widely interpreted to be either Leninism/Stalinism or Maoism.

When we look at what is wrong with our American economic system at this very moment, we find a deeper appreciation of Distributism. In brief, it is pro-capitalistic but calls for greater participation by all members of society in "ownership" of property and - to use a phrase fraught with negative connotations - the means of production. Even further, it means a more thorough involvement in decision-making processes, such as the ones raging over health care reform, energy and the environment and race relations.

This political-economic philosophy is rooted in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, a masterwork on economic justice that eschews both Communism and unfettered capitalism, concerning itself with "the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class..."

Other encyclicals by subsequent popes followed and built upon Leo's legacy. In 1931, Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Anno, (meaning "Forty Years," i.e., after Rerum Novarum), a further discussion on the nature of private property and the intrinsic ethical responsibilities put upon the "haves" of society to the "have nots," or "have-not-enoughs."

We have come exactly to this pass at this moment, these same questions. The pressure on the vast middle class in America is palpable.

There is simply not enough participation by everyday people in their government or in the businesses that they serve, usually dutifully. The country has been run by experts for far too long, and the experts have run the big train into a huge ditch. Now the best they can do is to argue over how to pull the train out and re-start it. Meanwhile the train sits and rusts.

We live in a country with 80 million college-educated people. (Never mind the under-educated and chronically poor and underprivileged for the moment.) Yet, the plutarchy that actually runs things numbers no more than 25,000 individuals. The vast majority are white men. (Although white women as they gain a share of power seem to be acting no more responsibly than their male counterparts.) The majority of the plutarchs are radically conservative. Virtually all are rich.

G.K. Chesterton, perhaps England's greatest under-sung genius of the early 20th century, said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." That sums up Distributism's critique of modern industrial democracy. More people need to acquire a bigger stake in the society.

As we watch the dance between so-called liberals and the radical right in America today with increasing anxiety, we should be reminded of Chesterton's famous observation: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

Almost every great revolution of history began because the middle class had become disaffected. (The proletarian Chinese Revolution is one notable exception.) The English and French Revolutions, our own American War for Independence, those of South America in the 19th and 20th centuries, even the Russian Revolution, all were fomented by unhappy middle classes. What became of them later is a different question altogether.

We are at a crossroad. The middle way beckons.

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The Great Refudiator

2010-07-19T14:14:00.001-04:00

Lost in the mockery generated by the slip o' the Tweet that Sarah Palin made is her core message of racial and religious bigotry. It is this contaminated message we must keep in focus even as we are entertained by her claiming we must "refudiate" the Mosque to be built near Ground Zero.

The hate message goes like this: "Muslims are outsiders and let's be sure to keep them that way."

Too late in New York City. The Muslim population here is roughly 750,000, a little less than 10% of the overall count in the city. We all know that 99.99% of those people are normal, work-a-day, loyal Americans.

Take my friend (and local deli owner) Yahya, who is from Yemen and came to New York on money he had saved for 17 years starting from the time he was 12 years old.

He aspires for his children, male and female, to attend college. He has resisted pressure from his large extended family back in his homeland to betroth his 10 year old daughter, because, he says, "We are in America now and the traditions here are..." and he hesitates... "Better for everyone." He smiles uncomfortably. I know it pains him to critique his homeland, but he has embraced the American Dream with a bear hug.

Yahya likes the idea that he can attend the mosque he chooses. He likes that he can make his beliefs based on the Koran flexible enough to fit his new life. (He prays three times a day facing Mecca - once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening, at home or at his mosque but never at work.) He says that it is the Catholics who have taught him to love his religion again after 9/11, because they heartily criticize the Church but still love Jesus. Yahya says he loves Jesus, who is a much more sympathetic character than Mohammed. But Allah is Lord and Mohammed is his prophet. Yahya is open but he is bound to his better traditions. We talk about Jesus a lot. Jesus is and always will be mystical to him. Mohammed is a mystic turned pragmatist.

There is a simple acid test that can be applied concerning the building of a mosque near, but not at, Ground Zero. The small-minded should ask themselves if a Catholic or Protestant Church, a Hindu Temple, a Jewish Temple, a Buddhist Temple, or an Atheist Temple To Ethical Culture should be built upon the same spot. If the anti-mosque people say "Why sure, that would be all right" then they're biased against Muslims.

When Timothy McVeigh blew apart Oklahoma City, no one argued that all Christians should be held responsible. We know that would be ridiculous. The rational and truly spiritual among us know that all Muslims should not be held responsible for the acts of a handful of psychopaths.

The mosque is a genuine gesture of reconciliation and redemption. That so many Americans are using the politics of divisiveness to try to shout down this community-oriented building tells us that those people need to look more deeply into their (generally and supposedly) Christian consciences.

Palin, as one of their leaders, is not a mere buffoon, but someone who needs to be exposed as the vile person she is. We should stop laughing at this hockey mom on the fame drug because in fact she is trying to cut the heart out of our country. Literally and figuratively.

We have a process for deciding such things in New York; let the vox populi be heard through its elected representatives and not through the mob - most of whose members it seems have no understanding of New York's history, culture, and diversity.

Remember, it was the mob who shouted out "Give us Barabbas!" so its instincts aren't always exactly spot on.

And let The Great Refudiator cleanse her dark heart. Then, as we do with a Joe Biden or an Arnold Schwarzenegger, we might more easily forgive a very entertaining slip of the tongue.
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Looking To The 1920s For Insights

2010-07-17T13:15:00.002-04:00

We are left with entertaining icons of the 1920's that camouflage the realities that underlay the fascinating decade. Most of all those years appear frantic to us, we who live in a most frantic age.

The flapper, the mobster, the swell, the Babe, Dempsey, Lindbergh, jazz, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the birth of big time Hollywood, the sense of victory in the air, of an America no longer a frisky colt but a thoroughbred upon the world race track.

Underneath that benign anthropology, though, was a dark side of America that has never been fully repressed. The same dark side has surfaced recently under the tutelage of the extreme right wing and its marionettes in the Tea Party.

Notably, these expressions of America's dark side erupt during or immediately after times of severe stress, whether called forth by war or economic dislocation.

While many people, particularly those in big cities and industrial centers, enjoyed the boom, a huge minority were disaffected, angry and anti-everything. Real incomes fell among 70% of all Americans in the so-called Roaring Twenties.

Rural people hated Big Labor. Big Labor despised Big Capital. Big Capital hated regulation. Women were repulsed by drinking men. Protestants hated Catholics and Jews. Old line whites hated southern and eatern European immigrants. The city and country were at loggerheads as farm prices stayed depressed for years. Prices of everything were too high, or prices were too low, depending on whether you were a buyer or a seller.

In the 20's, the Ku-Klux Klan saw its revival blossom not just in the newly assertive South, but in places it is now unimaginable: Oregon, California, parts of the Mid-West, even having mobs in suburban New York and New Jersey.

New York State, which at the time had 6 Socialists in its legislature, tossed them out for being un-American. In fact, most northern and Mid-Western states had socialist members of their legislatures, all of whom were defeated or otherwise deprived of their seats in the 20's.

This was part of the anti-Bolshevik movement that was funded by business interests in order to undermine labor organizing and is commonly called the first "Red Scare." Directly under the outer skin of this conflict lay "buyer's remorse" over the nation's having fought in WWI. Nothing seemed to come of the war and soon enough the Europeans would be at each others' throats once more. So, anti-communism was really about anti-Europeanism to a large extent.

Piled into this swamp was an anti-immigration fervor that makes the goings-on in Arizona look like a cricket match. Responding to the fears of white America, Congress passed two bills in 1924. (Click link for wiki overview of these acts.) The first was the Immigration Act (or Johnson-Reed Bill) part of which was the National Origins Act, and the second, (can you imagine anything more bluntly named?), the Asian Exclusion Act. (Today's border fence, below.)

Finally, the 1920's was a time of enormous technological change, developments rivaling our own era. The automobile became available to the common person; telephone communication was perfected; talkies came into being; the rise of radio began; the phonograph replaced the player piano in homes; and big cities as well as small towns were well-lighted by electric bulbs. While airline companies fledged before WWI, it was in the 1920's that they became fixtures due to a surplus of army aviators and the planes they had flown during the war. Advanced surgery techniques also grew out of the war experience.

These advances unsettled people, especially the older generation and led to a vague anti-technology movement that expressed itself more through skepticism (the Scopes Trial in 1925) tha through direct actions such as sabotage.

History rarely provides us with direct, one-to-one comparisons. It does often provide us with parallels and examples.

The feeling of a battle between left and right today is a real feeling.

The sense of dislocation from what many people feel is fruitless war conflicts with our natural patriotism.

The decline of real income in the last decade among the lower middle, middle and even upper middle class is a fact. Until 2009, the United States had been in stasis regarding job creation since the year 2000.

The ridiculous bandying about of the term "Socialist" in critiques of the President recalls other Red Scares. (Although it hasn't and won't work this time.)

The anti-immigrant Dengue Fever gripping parts of the country now also has its clear antecedents as described above.

We know that we are in the midst of enormous technological change when we see technocrats like Steve Jobs discussing the up and downsides of the iPhone4 on the front page of the paper or as the third lead story of the evening news.

That big business sees all the disruption and dislocation as a good opportunity for them is also quite clear. Exxon Mobile and the Koch family (owners of the world's largest privately held energy company) fund right wing non-profits who in turn fund the Tea Parties. (See: The Price of Tea, NY Liberal State of Mind, Feb. 12, 2010 by clicking here.)

Business always funds anti-union, anti-environment and anti-people initiatives. Why should it be any different in 2010 than it was in the 1920's?

Income inequality is at its worst since the 1920's. And the rich still don't want to pay their fair share of taxes. That should tell you everything you need to know.
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Why Obama Should Embrace Teddy Roosevelt - Substance and Style

2010-07-14T13:20:00.002-04:00

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a letter today criticizing President Obama as being "anti-business." This to a president who rescued the auto and finance industries and set in motion an unprecedentedly enormous stimulus package for the overall economy. Unreason has knows no bounds.

Obama has much of the blame on his shoulders for not striking back at the fiendish money hounds who want George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich to be extended at the end of the year and want a rollback on crucial legislation such as health care reform, and a dead stop put on emissions restrictions. The President seems to have mislaid his trump card, his inspiring oratory,

If the status quo were so wonderful, why do we find ourselves in such a huge, seemingly unsolvable mess?

Just before the Panic of 1907, another point in our history when capital had been hyper-concentrated in the hands of a few, in a speech in Indianapolis on Memorial Day, Teddy Roosevelt skewered the "predatory man of wealth" who was increasingly using his power to manipulate labor, prices, and liquidity. (J. P. Morgan was the archetypal "man of wealth," but he was only one among the oligarchy, the cabal.)

Roosevelt said in full:

One great problem that we have before us is to preserve the rights of property, and these can only be preserved if we remember that they are in less jeopardy from the Socialist and the Anarchist than from the predatory man of wealth. There can be no halt in the course we have deliberately elected to pursue, that policy of asserting the right of the nation, so far as it has the power, to supervise and control the business use of wealth, especially in the corporate form.

Paralleling the unwarranted attacks in the business press on Obama, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle (click) began to refer to T.R. as "the irritant." (Fittingly, the monthly Chronicle, founded in 1839, went out of business immediately after the stock market crash of 1987.)

Roosevelt was anything but anti-business. Nor is Obama, of course. Both have a reasoned approach to regulation and taxation. What the big business community wants ultimately is to have all fetters removed so that they are free to prey on the stupidly greedy (as during the housing bubble), the sick, the poor, and the working classes. Today, most likely the term "working classes" includes you.

We need look no farther than the tempest over health care reform, the vulturous behavior of the financial sector, the outlandish prices for pharmaceuticals, the cost of our wars, and the wanton destruction caused by BP in the Gulf to see where the Republicans and corporatism have gotten us.

The Chamber of Commerce in its role as attack dog for corporations, wants deficits to be rolled back precipitously. Meanwhile, according to Reuters, "U.S. businesses are holding onto some $1.8 trillion in cash." So, if business won't spend, and government is basically out of cash or should not take on new debt, what exactly is the prescription for economic recovery?

When the Republicans were in charge of the country through the better part of the first decade of this century, real income for the average American declined over $2,000. George Bush's administration created exactly zero net private sector jobs.

The right wing agenda is no less frightening as the midterm elections approach. The mainstream Republican wants to do away with Medicare; privatize Social Security while raising the retirement age to 70; they are against extending unemployment benefits; against legislation that would forbid another Wall Street bailout; against the inevitable green economy; and for a return to offshore drilling at it was before the Gulf catastrophe. And that's the mainstream right!

Teddy Roosevelt called the unholy amalgam of purely self-interested corporations of his era the "malefactors of great wealth."

Right now, the top 1% of people in the United States own over 30% of the wealth in the country. The bottom 50% owns less than 20%.

The Republicans speak for the top 1% (and more).

Obama and the Democrats need to step up and start speaking for the rest of us. And hey, Mr. President, start shaking your fist and crying out for justice all around.

Death By 3,000 Gallons (Per Day). And (Shockingly) A Tip Of The Hat To Fox News!

2010-07-09T08:33:00.000-04:00

Sadly, by now, we are accustomed, if not inured, to the scenes of ecological disaster from the BP blow out in the Gulf. As we speed by the 85-day mark, we are stunned, depressed, and feel helpless.

But potentially worse, AP has reported that there may be as many as 27,000 abandoned wells, drill sites, and test holes in the Gulf alone.

Not all of them ever showed signs of black gold a-bubblin' up from the ground, but there are approximately 3,500 of these capped off wells that once produced oil, plus 11,000 more that may have produced. No one seems to have kept track of any of this including the federal and appropriate state governments. If the oil companies and their associates in drilling and transport have kept track, you can be sure they ain't tellin'. Environmental groups' estimates hover around an additional 3,500 that fall in the category for concern.

Needless to say, these holes and caps are not regularly or properly inspected.

Some of these wells date back to the 1940s and 50s, but most seem (again, records are so spotty no one actually knows) to date from the late 70s into the 80s and 90s. This all means that roughly 7,000 wells once were active enough to warrant capping. Further simplistic explanation: it means that there was not enough oil coming out of a given hole to militate further exploitation, but there was enough that the damned thing had to have a big metal sock put in it.

Let's be conservative and say that the average age of these 7,000 abandoned holes is 25 years old. And let's say slightly fewer than half of them - 3,000 - are leaking oil at the tiny rate of a gallon per day. Now the fun basic math part begins. 3,000 gallons x 365 days x 25 years / 55gallons (one barrel) = 497,727 barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf since 1985. Shrimp gumbo anyone?

This doesn't take into account leaks from ongoing operating rigs, spills during transfer while transporting the stuff, or natural leaks from fissures and openings in the sea bed. All told, we are talking about millions of barrels of oil that have been spilled into the Gulf in the last quarter century.

On to Fox News. I shudder to even have to say this, but the best article I have read was published on Fox's website, which summarized and expanded AP's investigation. Read their coverage by clicking here. Have to give the devil his due.

It says among other things:

Companies may be tempted to skimp on sealing jobs, which are expensive and slow offshore. It would cost the industry at least $3 billion to permanently plug the 10,500 now-active wells and the 3,500 temporarily abandoned ones in the Gulf, according to an AP analysis of MMS data. Many such jobs take more than $200,000 and 10 days. Difficult jobs in deep water can cost several million dollars, and some companies own hundreds of wells.

Fox can't start sandbagging me like this. My old liberal heart just can't take it. I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks...

The Actvisit Right Wing Court: Welcome Home, Girlfriend. You're Dead.

2010-07-01T11:05:00.002-04:00

In 2000, for every one time a woman used a handgun to kill a stranger in self-defense, 222 women were murdered in handgun homicides.

- Violence Policy Center.Org (click here for link)

Republican rightists are obsessed when it comes to labeling liberal justices "activists" while they dance about like sugarplum fairies on Xtasy when portraying right wing radical judges as "originalists," or "strict constructionists."

The radical originalists, really fundamentalists with serious deficiencies in common sense, have come down firmly on the side of the gun-peddling death merchants and their acolytes in Congress. (As for intelligence, I, for one, am tired of reading and hearing about the brilliance of Scalia's and Alito's opinions, both of whom hide behind needlessly complicated, dissembling, Jesuitical, sophomoric analysis of law better suited to dorm rooms than the halls of the highest court in the land. They may be bright boys, but boys nonetheless. Bachelors as Mr. Bumble said in Oliver Twist. See the closing of this post below.)

The gun nuts (and their marionettes on the Court) believe that keeping a loaded piece in the house protects them from gun violence. How much more wrong could they be?

Women, in particular, are subject to enormously high rates of gun violence in the home, exactly where the right wing court's recent ruling is aimed.

From 2000 to 2007, nearly approximately half of female homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner and of those, 3/4ths of those female victims of intimate partner homicide were killed with a gun. As an abused spouses advocate said to me, "You can at least run from a fist or a knife, but you can't outrun a bullet."

A 1997 study found that having one or more guns in the home made a woman 3.4 times more likely to be the victim of homicide perpetrated by anyone (stranger or acquaintance).

Additionally, when looking at whether a woman would be killed at the hands of a spouse, intimate acquaintance, or close relative, the authors found that having one or more guns in the home made a woman 7.2 times more likely to be the victim of such a homicide.

In March, NY Liberal State of Mind expressed fear about the impending ruling in a posting entitled "Guns and Judges." (click)

The post closed with a quote by Oliver Twist's Mr. Bumble that bears endless repeating:

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”
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Let's Talk Fracking

2010-06-28T08:45:00.005-04:00

The Delaware River in Autumn

As the Gulf catastrophe plays on, there is - if you can believe it - a slower-moving, much farther-reaching calamity emerging.

It is being caused by something called hydrofracturing, a process that uses a slurry of sand and toxic chemicals propelled at high pressure against layers of shale that hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under them. Called "fracking" for short, it is in use and growing in rural West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act, a direct outgrowth of the secret Cheney energy cabal, exempts hydraulic fracturing from federal water laws and relies on states to monitor and restrict water pollution. West Virginia and Pennsylvania have largely failed in efforts to stop the process. New York State has largely succeeded - so far.

The material polluting ground water and nearby streams is called "leakoff."

Aside from the actual toxics used in the process, fracking releases huge amounts of methane that finds its way into the water supply as do unwanted large concentrations of normally harmless elements such as iron and aluminum.

Already wells in central Pennsylvania have been closed and the drilling and gas companies have begun trucking in potable water by tanker truck to the affected areas.

Reports of people passing out during their morning showers and developing lesions on their skin have become too pervasive and persistent to ignore.

Most ominously for those in the Northeast, this Pennsylvania drilling is going on in the Delaware River watershed. The Delaware is one of the most pristine rivers in the United States, despite its proximity to the large population centers of metro New York and Philadelphia.

More drilling has been planned or been proposed much closer to New York City's main water supply.

According to a report in Vanity Fair:

"Volatile organic compounds (carbon-based gaseous substances with a variety of detrimental health effects) and other dangerous chemicals are burned off directly into the air during this on-site compression [liquefaction] process. Meanwhile, the returned fracking fluid, now called waste water, is either trucked off or stored in large, open-air, tarp-lined pits on site, where it is allowed to evaporate. The other portion of the fluid remains deep underground—no one really knows what happens to it."

Each well that is opened requires between 5 and 8 million gallons of water to operate. This is the equivalent of 650,000 5-minute showers. (It has to be trucked in, requiring 800 to 1,200 round trips by heavy trucks to each site. New York has forbidden the use of municipal water for this purpose, so if fracking ever goes ahead in the state it will require even longer-distance trucking tactics.) And what goes into the ground must come out, somewhere, sometime. In the case of fracking 1/3rd of the water used is returned as polluted waste water.

“There has never been any evidence of fracking ever causing direct contamination of fresh groundwater in Pennsylvania or anywhere else,” said Scott Perry, another Oil and Gas Management official, as recently as April 2010.

This is patently untrue, another instance of the lies that the energy industry has told the American public about oil, coal, and gas extraction, all the while dragging their feet on the way to a clean energy future.

In east-central Pennsylvania, whole towns have been affected by fracking, homes have been shuttered, schools have been tested and their air found to be polluted.

What chemicals are used in the process? Hold onto your gas masks:

They include such substances as benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, boric acid, monoethanolamine, xylene, diesel-range organics, methanol, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, ammonium bisulfite, 2-butoxyethanol, and 5-chloro-2-methyl-4-isothiazolin-3-one.

The last chemical is known as a "bad actor" in the field of toxin studies. It is an ingredient in pesticides and is deemed a highly acutely toxin, a cholinesterase inhibitor (endocrine system disrupter), a known/probable carcinogen, and known groundwater pollutant or known reproductive or developmental toxicant.

An intensive study conducted by New York City, concerned about the spread of hydro fracturing into the city’s 1,585-square-mile watershed in the Catskill Mountains and upper Delaware River basin concluded that “Intensive natural gas well development in the watershed brings an increased level of risk to the water supply: risk of degrading source water quality, risk to long-term watershed health... risk of damaging critical infrastructure, and the risk of exposing watershed residents and potentially New York City residents to chronic low levels of toxic chemicals.”

The city’s report went on to say that while a single well may be environmentally benign, the risks become unacceptable “when evaluated in the context of hundreds or thousands of other wells.”

Wes Gillingham, program director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, said of the report, “One of the reasons industry could get away with these incidents is that there was a lack of science. New York City used reputable geologists and came up with the science.”

Finally, the ineluctables.

As surprising as this may be to those unfamiliar with the Northeast woodlands and meadows, the rural areas of Pennsylvania and New York are relatively unspoiled. (New York State, for instance, has two of the country's roughly two dozen big city unfiltered water supplies: New York City's, the nation's biggest, and Syracuse's. Both would be put at extreme risk should fracking for "natural" gas be implemented wholesale.)

Moreover, the regions under the shadow of this threat have largely avoided industrialization and even extensive residential development. The old mixed farmlands and incidentally preserved lands and waters have been little changed over centuries. Second-growth forests in some areas are now close to 200 years old.

One gas industry spokesman, fighting his dark version of the good fight in Pennsylvania, proclaimed that the drilling and fracking had produced more than 300 jobs already in that state. That's about as many people as attend a large elementary school.

That is worth jeopardizing the water of tens of millions of people?

Put up the windmills now, build the solar panels. Use the car less. Drive at 55. Turn off the lights.
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Unhealthy Exceptionalism - The Class System and Health Care

2010-06-24T12:38:00.000-04:00

The right wing is fond of bragging up "American Exceptionalism," most of which is purely invented drivel. This is not to say that the United States as a country hasn't performed intelligently, admirably, even heroically, in many instances.

Health care is definitively not one of those instances. In fact, our record is shameful, immoral, and fixed upon the profits of corporations and not on the health of average Americans.

The Commonwealth Fund Commission looked at 7 countries of different sizes with different approaches. In 2007 to 2009, the years for which the study was completed, among the seven nations studied - Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States - the U.S. ranks last overall, as it did in the 2007, 2006 and 2004 survey.

The commission said, among other things, "the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last on dimensions of access, patient safety, coordination, efficiency, and equity. The Netherlands ranks first, followed closely by the U.K. and Australia."

The U.K.? You mean the bogeyman set up by the radical right wing every time we have a debate about health care in America? And how can the Dutch - pot-smoking, syringe-distributing sex fiends come in first among this clutch of western nations?

Adding insult to injury, in 2007, health spending was $7,290 per person in the United States, around double that of any other country in the survey. Australians spent $3,357, Canadians $3,895, Germans $3,588, the Netherlands $3,837 and Britons spent $2,992 per capita on health in 2007. New Zealand spent the least at $2,454.

And U.S. spending has gone up about 8% per year since 2005 while overall inflation hovered around 3.5%.

These general outcomes have to do with equity, (that is, distribution), of services. "The lower the performance score for equity, the lower the performance on other measures. This suggests that, when a country fails to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, it also fails to meet the needs of the average citizen," the report reads.

It may seem facile to compare the breakdown in the financial sector of '07 and '08 and the cavalier negligence of BP and Massey Energy's coal mining distaster earlier this year to the never-ending avalanche of health care problems in the U.S.

The financial, energy and health care sectors are huge components of our economy, however, and have been out of control for decades.

Each of the three sectors have lost what tiny moral compass they once may have had.

They are killing people and otherwise ruining lives, devastating our environment, happily shunning their duties as Americans, as human beings.

The right wingers - especially its most ardently radical pro-business sectarians - froth like mad animals if they whiff but a hint of push back from the left on such issues, labeling it disingenuously as "class warfare."

It is clear it is the right that has been waging class warfare. And many on the liberal left have stood by as long as it was the poor, the working class and the otherwise marginalized who were attacked.

Now the three-headed right wing dog has been greedily devouring the middle and even the upper middle classes.

Look at the littered landscape of the last 4 years, the results of Bush - and Clinton - policies.

Look at the zero growth of income among those in the middle and upper middle classes.

Look at the affordability of things we have long taken as sacred rights - a decent place to live, a firm retirement foundation, accessible higher education, solid health care, and viable transportation.

Exceptionalism? If you're exceptionally rich.

What The Right Wing Radicals Would Like To Do For You Now

2010-06-22T14:09:00.000-04:00

Let's start close to New York - right across the mighty Hudson in New Jersey - where the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing governor, Chris Christie, recently vetoed, (the N.J. legislature failed to override it) a renewal of a provision in the state tax code that calls for a 10.75% tax on income over $1 million per year. That means that if you earned $1 more than $1 million you would pay 10.75 cents in taxes on that dollar.

The poorly-described "millionaires' tax" would have raised $637 million for rebate checks of up to $1,295 for some 600,000 senior citizens who would otherwise face steep increases in their property taxes during fiscal 2011.

And this in a state where there is a budget shortfall of over 37% in relation to revenues.

All over the news: oil industry's darling Representative Joe Barton's comparison of the BP compensation fund with a "shakedown," comparing it to the worst in Chicago's checkered political payoff past. It is bad enough that Barton, the ranking minority member on the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, would say such a thing. But other Republicans have chimed in, particularly candidates in swing seats running for election against Democrats this fall. Two candidates to run against Russ Feingold in the Wisconsin Senate race have this to say.

Ron Johnson:

It is very troubling when we circumvent the rule of law. I think they would have been held liable, and that would be the way to do this.

Dave Westlake:

Shaking BP down for $20 billion doesn't do anything to further that end [stopping the leak] or to get the oil cleaned up faster.

In Colorado, an aide to former front-runner Jane Norton (Ken Buck now leads in some polls for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination) called the rescue cash a "slush fund."

They have all taken their lead from a Republican Party memo and from the unofficial head of the party, Rush Limbaugh, who has termed the extraction of the promise to compensate financial losses for the working class and small business entrepreneurial class in the Gulf region, "thuggery."

No mention of the negligent thuggery that created the explosion that essentially murdered 11 people and is creating environmental chaos throughout one of the world's most beautiful bodies of water.

If this weren't enough, conservative J.D. Hayworth who is challenging John McCain in the Senate primary in the Nut Bin State, Arizona, served as an infomercial shill for "National Grants Conference," one of those scam companies that promises people - desperate people - a chance to get "free money" from the government through grant money that happens to be lying around doing nothing. The cost of the seminars for information that is available free from many traditional sources - $1000.

So, J.D., what's this about the government being too big and wasting taxpayer money?

The Wall Street Journal reports today:

"Now the Florida-based firm that produced the infomercial, National Grants Conferences, is facing bankruptcy. The company racked up hundreds of consumer complaints that led many Better Business Bureau chapters around the country to give it an "F" rating."

Meanwhile, right wing Republicans are blocking an extender bill for unemployment benefits. The bill would extend benefits for 12 million people who have been out of work for over a year.

At the same time, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the most backward state in the Union, has been mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2012.

He has been a skeptic about the effects of the oil catastrophe in the Gulf states, except for Louisiana to which his heart goes out, and now blames the national press for economic hardships the fisheries and tourist industry are suffering. What's IN that gumbo in Mississippi? He also has blasted the President's moratorium on deep water drilling, claiming that the economic impact of that will be more devastating than the slump other business in the Gulf will experience.

Tim Scott, invariably described as a "charismatic black man," is poised to win the GOP nomination to run for a Congressional seat in South Carolina. Scott, however, is somewhere right of Clarence Thomas, and is "black" in skin tone only. He's more the kind of guy who would have been serving mint juleps at a lynching of his fellow African-Americans in the 1870s. Right wing is right wing, dangerous is dangerous, no matter what your skin color, gender, or religion.

Back up north, Scott Brown is lobbying furiously behind the scenes to give big banks a bye on trading of derivatives. Keep in mind that Brown received $450,000 from banks in the last 6 days of his successful Senate run. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Welcome to the Republican future.

The Oval Office Oil Speech: What's Ailing Barack Obama?

2010-06-16T10:31:00.001-04:00

I want very much to really like President Obama. I understood from the beginning of his quest that his politics and mine would not be in concord. He's far too centrist for me at a time when we need a heavy counterbalancing from the left. Our country has drifted dangerously to the right and it is destroying the national fabric, our prosperity, and threatening our future.

But, center left is better than center right or radical right, so like many more leftist liberals, I jumped on board the Obama love train.

Last night's oil speech failed on a number of levels and succeeded on a small handful. First, it failed because Obama made no real personal connection between himself and the people, especially the people of the Gulf.

Most adults have felt some form of loss in their lives. Loved ones, friends, a childhood home, a few acres of woods lost to development, a building demolished, a way of life vanished.

And it is there in the shadow-land between sympathy and empathy that the President stumbled. He came across as sympathetic, but certainly not a man who could empathize with the dark plight of the watermen, the fear in retirees, the worry in the Gulf's resort trade, the hand-wringing moms and pops waiting for business to pick up.

He violated the first rule of good writing: "Don't explain it, demonstrate it." He talked with shrimpers - good for him - but he didn't give us the feeling, the sense of dread and despair we all know lurks down there.

In short, the speech felt technocratic rather than visceral.

On the future, the President was even weaker:

"Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -- our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there. We know we'll get there."

If you're not sure, Mr. President, how can the rest of us be?

Contrast this with Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches speech."

"We shall fight them on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,

we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight them on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills..."

Or with John F. Kennedy's "Moon Speech."

"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

Or even the words of Theodore Roosevelt:

"The object of government is the welfare of the people. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us." The New Nationalism speech, Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910

These ringing speeches, like all great ones throughout history, relied upon bold affirmations that a certain thing WILL happen. There was no glimmer that fighting the Nazis to the last person, going to the moon, or conserving our shared natural patrimony would ever NOT happen.

If we were to take Kennedy's speech and plug in new goals for a new time, we can see how leaden President Obama's words were last night:

"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of achieving energy independence. No single technological project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range improvement of our economy and environment; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Further, in the next few days I will lay out for the Congress my vision for reaching such a difficult goal. We must begin now, we must reach the goal with no more delays or risk becoming a second-class nation whose dim future will be in marked contrast to our glorious past."

Even if we don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there? Nonsense. Tell us how we'll get there and we will surely get there.

Engineering Childhood

2010-06-14T14:26:00.002-04:00

A report in the New York Times on June 13 (click to read) should raise alarms with anyone interested in freedom of thought and action - especially in the lives of young children.(Note the skepticism among engineers as well as some educators who comment in the article.)

The article is titled "Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It," and examines kindergartners in Glen Rock, N.J. who solve "engineering problems" in their classes. The article says "Spurred by growing concerns that American students lack the skills to compete in a global economy, school districts nationwide are packing engineering lessons into already crowded schedules for even the youngest students..."

The trend toward earlier and earlier "education" is, naturally, not limited to a small, upscale town in New Jersey. It spans the country and "educational" toys, games, books and online activities are a major industry. (Green eggs and ham? Turn 'em in for a calculator.)

Somehow, this refrain seems all too familiar. In fact, it was heard as long ago as the 1880s when the United States began its meteoric rise to world supremacy. It resurfaces on an irregular but perennial basis. We heard the refrain immediately following Sputnik in 1957. We heard it again in the mid 1970s when Japan burst upon the scene as an industrial world power and we hear it again when we may be challenged by China, and possibly India.

Familiar lyrics go along with the tune. The school year is too short, the curriculum is too weak, teachers are either under-qualified or underpaid. American kids are - mix and match - lazy, under-informed, unmotivated, and studying the wrong subjects.

Science, math, engineering and related disciplines are the usual antidotes that will lead us into the salvation of the nation.

The counter current that should be put forth is that it is the very easy going nature of past American education logistics and strategies that has put and kept us in the forefront of almost every major scientific and engineering development of the last 100 plus years. How can that be if we are always behind or about to fall behind?

When we as a nation do fail - high speed rail comes instantly to mind - it is not for a lack of certain skill sets, but for lack of political leadership or failure of the investment community to step forward and take useful, as opposed to mindlessly dangerous, risks.

If, as a liberal democracy, we believe in freedom in its most basic incarnations, then teaching "engineering" in kindergarten needs a resounding condemnation. Teaching tots to begin serving the needs of the corporate/industrial complex smacks of another kind of engineering - social engineering.

What we should be encouraging is individual development based on the freedom of a child to explore, invent, innovate on his or her own level, and yes, fail, at his or her chosen play forms. Not all children are meant to be engineers anymore than they are meant to be doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers, farmers, Indian chiefs, etc.

When I was a child, my father arrived home one day with a little hand cranked printing press kit. You set rubber type and assorted cast rubber graphics onto a flexible template that was then attached to a cylinder; next the machine's reservoir was filled with ink, you cranked the handle and fed 5 x 8 inch sheets of paper into its mouth and voila... out came a tiny neighborhood newsletter authored by my 8 year-old self.

There was little guidance from my father, aside from the actual nuts and bolts part... here's how you do it, biff bam boom, now go knock yourself out, kiddo. It took me days and days to get it right on my own, but so I did. And The Gazette was born - and died all in the same hot, long summer in the cool of the basement.

The experience influenced me deeply. When I was in my late 30s, I started my own grown up magazine.

I wonder what my inclinations might have been had I been "taught" magazine-making in kindergarten.

Likewise, although there were many books, newspapers and magazines around our house, I can honestly say I only remember being read to sporadically. But, word play, jokes, word game books, a kids monthly named Jack and Jill, and tons of kiddie records surrounded me. It was all about playing, loafing, and relaxing with words and their myriad uses.

Kids learn through playing. And not the kind of ham-handed guided play that a fanatical hard core of educators seem intent upon foisting on our children.

Kids need free play much more than they need to learn engineering, math or reading at age 5. They need to let their little minds wander. They need to find, on their own, a path to what they do best and like best. The straitjacket of over-structuring will be our undoing, not the free form learning of yesteryear.

The marketplace will determine at some point in the kids' future lives how many engineers will be needed and where they will come from.

Dedication to one's life's "work" could not be taught to the tune of a hickory stick in days of yore, and won't be taught through an overwrought curriculum better suited to 12 year-olds than to 4, 5 and 6 year-olds.

Teach them to love exploring on their own, in their own time, in their own unique way. Allow them to make their own way.

Kindergarten should not be a junior trade school.
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The Gulf Spill: Maybe BP Will Blame It On Sikh Extremists

2010-06-07T11:03:00.001-04:00

According to Reuters, "A court Monday found the Indian unit of U.S. chemicals firm Union Carbide guilty of negligence and sentenced seven Indian former employees to two years in jail over one of the world's worst industrial accidents that killed thousands in 1984."

Twenty-six years later, these fiends have received just two years in the slammer. For killing as many as 25,000 people. (Official Indian government figures put the number at a "mere" 3,800.) Another 100,000 people have suffered the sickening effects of the release of 40 metric tons of the highly toxic methyl isocyanate [MIC].

Even better news for the world at large, methyl isocyanate is used in pesticides, as well as rubber and adhesives manufacturing. Check your labels carefully.

"Sicknesses included cancer, blindness, respiratory difficulties, immune and neurological disorders, and female reproductive disorders, as well as birth defects among children born to affected women," said Reuters.

Further, the Indian government claims that the chemical has NOT polluted groundwater, although every independent testing agency that has taken measurements says it has.

Righteously, "Hundreds of protesters, many waving placards saying 'hang the guilty' and 'they are traitors of the nation,' tried to force their way inside the court complex but were stopped by police."

According to an overview in 2005 created by Edward Broughton of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, "The specific site within the city was zoned for light industrial and commercial use, not for hazardous industry. The plant was initially approved only for formulation of pesticides from component chemicals, such as MIC imported from the parent company, in relatively small quantities. However, pressure from competition in the chemical industry led UCIL [the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide] to implement "backward integration" – the manufacture of raw materials and intermediate products for formulation of the final product within one facility. This was inherently a more sophisticated and hazardous process."

"The local government was aware of safety problems but was reticent to place heavy industrial safety and pollution control burdens on the struggling industry because it feared the economic effects of the loss of such a large employer.

"Immediately after the disaster, UCC [Union Carbide] began attempts to dissociate itself from responsibility for the gas leak. Its principal tactic was to shift culpability to UCIL, stating the plant was wholly built and operated by the Indian subsidiary. It also fabricated scenarios involving sabotage by previously unknown Sikh extremist groups and disgruntled employees but this theory was impugned by numerous independent sources.

"As further insult, UCC discontinued operation at its Bhopal plant following the disaster but failed to clean up the industrial site completely. The plant continues to leak several toxic chemicals and heavy metals that have found their way into local aquifers." [So, the gas leak of the manufactured gas actually caused the loss of the jobs it was supposed to save.]

Further, according to Broughton's work, "UCC has shrunk to one sixth of its size since the Bhopal disaster in an effort to restructure and divest itself. By doing so, the company avoided a hostile takeover, placed a significant portion of UCC's assets out of legal reach of the victims and gave its shareholder and top executives bountiful profits. The company [UCC] still operates under the ownership of Dow Chemicals and still states on its website that the Bhopal disaster was 'caused by deliberate sabotage.'"

And here is what a life is worth via the Indian government's assessment: "By the end of October 2003, according to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department, compensation had been awarded to 554,895 people for injuries received and 15,310 survivors of those killed. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200." [U.S. Courts decided that the suits could not be heard here.]

While we hope that the number of dead in the Gulf spill will be limited to those who died in the initial blast and fire, we have no way of knowing how many lives will be economically damaged, disrupted, or how much destruction will be caused to the natural environment. Nor do we know how long it will last.

Money will take away some of the sting - if there is enough in the BP insurance pot.

Potential financial loss, however, will not prevent the next big environmental catastrophe. The threat of hefty jail sentences will.

Executives and higher level industrial site workers, knowing they could do hard time for avoidable accidents - 10, 20, or 30 years, or perhaps for the rest of their lives - would certainly stop gambling with people's lives and the already endangered environment.

As the protesters over the Bhopal whitewash know and we should know well, they are traitors of the nation.
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What's In Store For The Gulf: GE's Battle To Leave PCB's In The Hudson River

2010-06-02T14:16:00.002-04:00

How old will you be in 35 years?

If the 80-Years War over cleaning up PCBs in the Hudson is any indication, that's how old you'll be when the entire clean up of the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe is finished. (If you want to use another environmental accident as yardstick, the 250,000 barrel Exxon Valdez spill has still not been completely ameliorated in the almost 21 years since it happened.)

Monsanto began manufacturing carcinogenic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in 1929. General Electric began using them almost immediately in the manufacturing of transformers, capacitors and other electrical equipment at their Hudson Falls plant for more than 40 years as insulating material.

The discovery of PCBs toxicity and subsequent government action began in 1977 when the manufacture and use of PCBs was outlawed. The Hudson is still not cleaned up almost 35 years later.

Because they are long-lived, semi-volatile and don’t dissolve in water, PCBs can travel long distances (the 200-mile stretch of the Hudson River below G.E.’s factories is considered the biggest Superfund site in the United States).

The potential impact doesn’t stop at the tip of Manhattan. Because of their stability and ability to travel long distances, PCBs can migrate around the planet. PCBs are part of a global class of chemicals known to migrate from warmer regions to colder regions. Inuit people living in the Arctic thousands of miles from any industrial source are known to carry some of the highest body burdens of PCBs on the planet.

PCBs are also fat-soluble, which means that they concentrate as they move up the food chain. Animals at the top of the food chain – especially marine mammals like polar bears and dolphins – have dangerously high levels of the chemical, which they lack the ability to detoxify.

Humans, too, are contaminated. PCBs regularly top the list of chemicals found in human tissue surveys.

As early as the 1930s, problems caused by PCB exposures of workers were widely known by G.E. executives who met with colleagues from Monsanto and other companies to share information on the “systemic effects” of PCBs and other chlorinated hydrocarbons, including chloracne, a disfiguring skin condition.

Dredging finally began in earnest in May of 2009, almost 25 years after the first lawsuits against G.E. were brought.

According to The New York Times, "G.E. is supervising and paying for the cleanup, which federal officials have estimated could cost more than $750 million. Industry experts say the ultimate cost could be many times than that, however. (G.E. declines to give an estimate.)"

The Times also says, "...G.E has reserved the right, after a review of the operation in 2010, to reject the project’s much larger second phase. Federal environmental officials have said that if it did that, they would most likely order the cleanup to proceed and levy enormous penalties against the company."

Chances are that a good proportion of us reading this will be long dead before the Gulf is cleaned up and restored. The rest of us will be well into middle age. If they're lucky, our grandchildren will know the Gulf as it stood on April 18, 2010.

If they are very lucky.

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The Failing Of The Left In The Face Of Corporatism

2010-06-01T11:13:00.002-04:00

Since this blog began in January, I have argued for criminal penalties to be imposed on directors and top executives of companies whose activities are so egregious that they amount to offenses against an entire society, and, in the case of the Gulf oil catastrophe, against humanity (as well as nature).

If we don't take this step, it is virtually guaranteed that the excesses will continue and surely grow more dangerous.

Four years on now from the mortgage-bond bundling scheme's hay day in '06 and '07, no one has been held criminally responsible. Executives from Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, and their co-conspirators in dismantling the financial stability of the entire world have faced some wrist-slapping. None has even lost his or her professional license. Perp walk? Maybe in Gucci loafers on the streets of the Hamptons.

BP knew for decades - as have other oil companies - that they had no emergency plan in place to deal with a huge accident on the ocean floor. It wasn't an oversight; it was purposeful. The purpose was saving money. Supposedly the Justice Department is investigating with an eye toward bringing criminal charges. (Stay tuned for more disappointment.) Imagine working above on a tall building (as so often happens here in New York) without a protective shed to shield pedestrians from falling debris? Oops... sorry that plummeting gargoyle killed your entire family.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the Tylenol manufacturing arm of Johnson & Johnson, accused of having dirty production facilities and shabby quality controls that allowed excessive amounts of acetaminophen to enter children's products, may be up for criminal prosecution.

At a Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, asked an FDA official whether there was criminal liability as a result of the recalls. "Well, it has been referred to the FDA's crime division," responded witness Deborah Autor, a director at the FDA's compliance office.

“I have become deeply concerned about your company,” Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-NY, who is chairman of the Oversight Committee, told the Johnson & Johnson executives who testified. “It paints a picture of a company that is deceptive, dishonest and willing to put the health of children at risk.”

Nice people, eh?

On the tainted food side of things, readers should be happy to know that the U.S. ranks 18th worldwide in the quality of its inspections and speed with which it handles issues such as e. coli contamination. Who's first? According to Meat Trade News Daily, it's Brazil. A headline in the June, 2010, issue of the trade pub shouts: "Brazil - Leading the world in meat traceability and rapid response."

In Brazil, it is a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years to distribute tainted food.

Where is the liberal left on this? Silent. Everyone knows that the roots of liberalism go back to the Progressive Era, to the busting of child labor practices, sweatshops, and filthy stockyards a la "The Jungle." We were raised on this stuff. But now... well, we should be ashamed of our lack of focus.

Strip them of their ill-gotten gains, put them in jail. The honor system doesn't work with dishonorable people.
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So We Can Figure This Out But Not Renewable Energy?

2010-05-27T12:28:00.000-04:00

Go For Launch! (Click - It's Spellbinding)

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The Gulf, Obama's Presidency, JFK, The Pilgrims, And "Answerable Courage."

2010-05-26T12:53:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago, the right wing chatter was that the rig explosion, pipe rupture and spill in the Gulf were going to be "Obama's Katrina." It seemed far-fetched, more politically-inspired Democrat-baiting than serious criticism.

I'd like to take up the same cudgel, that this very well could be "Obama's Katrina," but as viewed from the left wing, not the right.

This is the golden moment to launch the complete transformation of our society from one almost completely reliant upon expensive, dirty, dangerous carbon-based fuels to a society that will lead the world toward a high-technology-based energy Utopia.

When the expression "American Exceptionalism" is used, it is that kind of innovation leadership that people around the world grasp. The words of John F. Kennedy's challenged the country, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."

Earlier in the speech, given almost 50 years ago in 1962 in Houston, Texas, Kennedy quoted a Pilgrim father: William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

We yearn for President Obama and other leaders of the Democratic Party - for surely the right wing is completely incapable - to stir us not only with great words, but also to act with "answerable courage."

Each and every reasonably sentient American has seen the gushing wound on the sea-floor, heard the sailors' and fishermen's cries for help, watched the sludge violate the marshes, thought of the beautiful summer days on the water that will be ruined. Who hasn't thought of their children and grandchildren and what the planet we leave behind will be?

Toss aside the paralyzing global-warming arguments. Forget that we suffer untold hundreds of thousands of premature deaths because of our burning of fossil fuels. Even reject the notion of dirty water caused by road run-off.

Now is the real, concrete moment. This is a true crossroad in history for our country, maybe for the Western World as a whole.

That Obama has not stood upon this fulcrum in time worries many of us on the left who have secretly suspected him of being a lightweight. It is worse than disappointing.

It could quite well mean his administration is doomed, that his ringing rhetoric was just that, and that we can count on more business as usual with the energy oligarchs.

What the President says - or fails to say - on Friday in New Orleans will be the bell-weather for the fall 2010 elections and define, and perhaps shorten, the Obama era.

Change we can believe in? Time to deliver, Mr. Obama.

Oil In The Gulf And The Toxic Tort Lawyer As Folk Hero

2010-05-24T10:45:00.002-04:00

For decades now, the right wing has been ranting about "trial lawyers." The phrase is a code word for lawyers who sue large corporations on behalf of citizens, groups of citizens in class action suits, states and local governmental entities.

The rightist radicals draw a portrait of the lawyers as little more than highly paid ambulance chasers. Is there a seamy side, a parasitic side to "trial lawyers?" Of course. Just as there is a seamy side to practically every profession from the clergy to agriculture to unions.

On the whole, however, the "trial lawyer" is the last line of defense - often the ONLY defense - against the many predatory practices of corporations. Big pharma, agribusiness, energy producers, crib makers, transportation providers, the tobacco purveyors and a dozen others truly fear the "trial lawyers," because they know they are in for trouble once a suit is filed.

One of the most capable and relentless of these tort lawyers, the appropriate term for the job, is New Orleans native Stuart Smith, long a champion against big oil, big polluters in the Gulf. Just one day after the fire and explosion on the rig, Smith was on the case.

"On Thursday, I could smell the oil and, being a toxic tort lawyer, I realized that the fact that you're smelling something means that you're inhaling something," said Smith when breezes were carrying the scent of the oil slick toward his beloved city. Smith, who has sued major oil companies before, immediately contacted toxicologists and air monitors to start doing tests that could be used as evidence. (As reported in the Washington Post.)

Smith believes that if the leak lasts another 2 months or so, the fishing beds and coastline could be ruined for generations. The devastation could cost the Gulf fishing and tourism industries tens of billions of dollars, more money than BP or any half dozen big polluters could pony up.

In 1992, Smith was the first plaintiff’s attorney to take an oil company to trial for damages caused by radioactive oilfield waste. Street v. Chevron pitted the owners of a mom-and-pop pipe yard located in rural southeastern Mississippi against a multinational oil conglomerate. Chevron had sent radioactive oilfield pipe to Street, Inc., for cleaning – without informing the owners that the pipe contained radioactive material.

Investigators from the Mississippi state Division of Radiological Health found radiation on the Street property 500 times the natural-occurring level. The suit charged that 38 people, not only the owners and workers, but also children and other family members, had “suffered physical and psychological harm because of their exposure to low levels of radiation and that Shell and Chevron should have warned them about the ‘inherent dangers.’ ”

The suit sought $35 million in damages. Shell settled early in the process, but Chevron vigorously defended the case during six months of trial. The oil giant ultimately settled the case for an undisclosed amount of money in what remains one of the longest-running jury trials in Mississippi history. The ruling opened the door to further suits associated with damages from oilfield radiation.

In 2001, Smith and his law partner Michael Stag successfully prosecuted the widely publicized Grefer case. The Grefers sued an Exxon contractor for contaminating their 33-acre parcel of land in Louisiana with TERM (technologically enhanced radioactive materials). After a six-week trial, a Louisiana jury returned a verdict of $1.056 billion against a contractor of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, in favor of Mr. Smith’s client, retired judge Joseph Grefer.

The court ordered Exxon to pay the Grefers $56 million in compensatory damages, to clean up their land, and slapped the oil giant with $1 billion in punitive damages.

The most insidious side of the Grefer case is that it appears Exxon knew about the radioactive material and did nothing to alert either the Grefers or its contractor. The court stated that from June 1986 to March 1987, “Exxon officials intentionally withheld information,” and that the company “knew the [radioactive] scale [inside the pipes] posed a direct danger to the physical health of those workers.”

Has Smith made great money by bringing these suits? No doubt. But really, what he and others like him are doing is to function as an ad hoc branch of government. And mounting further suits is time-consuming and costly.

Polluters, who could easily be monitored and prevented from polluting, experience very little oversight by government agencies. They pollute, are usually caught, and the government slaps them on the wrist with a wet noodle.

It is left to Smith and other tort lawyers to "prosecute" the cases the government should have prevented in the first place. No one else is protecting innocent victims from the polluters' activities.

Is it any wonder that the right wing boot-lickers want to stringently limit the size of jury awards in cases involving many industries but especially energy? The right would leave us defenseless from the inception of a drilling or digging project through to the inevitable catastrophe created by polluters.

The right would gut current "strong" regulations, see to it there is no funding for policing under remaining flimsy laws often written by industry insiders, and finally do away with the tort lawyers' ability to find recourse for victims and/or the overall commonly held environment.

People like Stuart Smith may be be doing very well financially. Deservedly. Perhaps they are even rich, but they are folk heroes nonetheless.

Smith said: "Oil companies are the meanest, nastiest defendants in the country. They just don't care; they have so much money."

Rand Paul's New American Animal House

2010-05-21T10:55:00.004-04:00

Rand Paul's scurvy view of how the Federal Government should interact with private business on racial matters is not the only danger associated with the cruel, demented politics of Kentucky's Republican Senate candidate.

Dating back to the 1850s - almost 160 years ago now - progressive ideas entered mainstream American political currents. (In 1852 Massachusetts passed a law making it mandatory for children to attend school, the opening bell for a century and a half of government activism.)

The progressivist Abolitionist Movement of the 1840s and 50s culminated in the Civil War of course, which Libertarians, radicals all, would not have brooked.

And, the grand sweep of the 14th Amendment would be nothing but a ghostly promise in Paul's haunted American house. Due process? Forget about it.

Rand Paul and his war-of-all-against-all fellow-travelers would have none of this government activity if elected in 2010.

I wish this were an exaggeration, but everything from racial equality to women's rights to pure food and drug laws would be swept away by the Libertarian lunatic fringe. The Interstate Commerce Act, Sherman Anti-Trust Act, wildlife conservation and land preservation, unionization, the building of railroads and the interstate road system, public transportation, the space program, pollution control, regulation of dangerous narcotics, the prohibition against selling alcohol or tobacco products to children, and a thousand other activities our governments regulate - they too would be swept away.

One can see this philosophy virulently at work in the Libertarian Supreme Court's Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission decision this past January. It gives businesses license to buy elections, pure and simple. They can fly the flag of "Free Speech" all they want, but it's flying over a parade designed to work against the individual work-a-day citizen's true interests.

Rand Paul's is not the philosophy of a man running for high office but running for the position of top dog in the bull sessions of a right wing frat house.

His (lack of) thinking comes to us draped in the regal robes of fiscal responsibility and in expensive suits, when indeed such thinking is an impish child born on a beer-sticky floor during a farting contest.

Paul would thrust us all into an Animal House of ethnic hate, filthy air and water, child neglect, drug and alcohol abuse. Laws? Who needs 'em as long as the budget is balanced.

Here he comes, Rand Paul, selling his medicine show swill to the people of Kentucky, a poverty-stricken state sorely afflicted by environmental devastation created by the coal companies who have also had the good conscience to bust the people's unions as government stood aside in Libertarian glee.

Kentucky has the highest cancer rate in the country.

Kentucky is the state with the highest proportion of adults under 65 without teeth.

It has an adult illiteracy rate of about 40%.

Kentucky ranks 47th in the nation in percentage of residents with a bachelor's degree.

17% of the population lives in poverty, over 684,00 people, up from 14% in 1995.

Kentucky's ground water upon which a great majority of its citizens rely for drinking ranks last in the United States for purity.

All this Rand Paul and his non-compassionate cohorts vow to stand aside and watch.

Libertarian? Death merchants.

As the old bumper sticker said: The Moral Majority is Neither.
.

The "I-Served-Didn't-I?" Syndrome

2010-05-19T12:27:00.002-04:00

The arguments about the Vietnam War will be with us until the last of the Baby Boomers die off in the next 30 to 40 years or thereabouts.

Connecticut's Democratic senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal has clearly lied about his participation in the undeclared war. (We haven't had a declared war since WWII.)

The question remains, why would a person, almost 40 years after the end of a conflict that tarnished our moral standing in the world, feel compelled to lie about his service in it?

Pictured below is the 1968 My Lai massacre in which somewhere between 350 and 500 Vietnamese civilians were murdered led by William Calley-Charlie Company, of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.

The BBC described it this way:

Soldiers went berserk, gunning down unarmed men, women, children and babies. Families which huddled together for safety in huts or bunkers were shown no mercy. Those who emerged with hands held high were murdered. Elsewhere in the village, other atrocities were in progress. Women were gang raped; Vietnamese who had bowed to greet the Americans were beaten with fists and tortured, clubbed with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Some victims were mutilated with the signature "C Company" carved into the chest. By late morning word had got back to higher authorities and a cease-fire was ordered. My Lai was in a state of carnage. Bodies were strewn through the village.

In eyewitness testimony during an initial Peers Inquiry, one soldier testified:

He fired at it [the baby] with a .45. He missed. We all laughed. He got up three or four feet closer and missed again. We laughed. Then he got up right on top and plugged him.

The Vietnam War dehumanized two peoples, Vietnamese and American; for, while the United States had no rational reason for being in Vietnam and committed heinous crimes against humanity, neither the Vietcong nor the North Vietnamese behaved humanely either.

One can understand past generations wanting to wear the mantle of service in World Wars I & II. But Vietnam?

Exactly what part of the war does Blumenthal want to lay claim to? Something beyond the ribbons and medals - but what?

The burning of villages inhabited by peasants living in near Medieval conditions? The carpet bombing of huge swaths of Indochina? The virtually unopposed high level bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong?

Perhaps Blumenthal would like to embrace the use of Agent Orange and other defoliants. Or the secret war in Cambodia that tore America apart in disturbances that culminated in the murders of a dozen young students around the country? Could it be he wanted to join in a whole generation of kids who came home with drug and alcohol monkeys on their back?

Bodies of dead Vietcong pictured below. This is what you missed, Mr. Blumenthal. A death machine that had no purpose except the cynical exercise of power visited by a huge country upon a small, struggling one. Everyone was born of a revolution. Ours started in the 1770s, theirs in the 1940s.

I am proud to this day that my compatriots and I energetically opposed this madness.

I'm waiting for the Boomer politician who will have the guts to stand up and say he is as proud as we are to have been in patriotic opposition to the mass derangement that was the Vietnam Era.

David Brooks Swings and Misses Again

2010-05-18T12:33:00.003-04:00

In what might have been a terrific column yesterday about how New York groped its way back from the chaos of the 1960s, 70s and 80s that engulfed us, David Brooks relies on the simplisticism of John Podhoretz, the unerringly inaccurate neo-con, to launch an attack on everything and everyone from hippies to minorities.

Simultaneously, Brooks sanctifies in a backhanded way the old middle class who abandoned New York primarily for racist reasons after World War II while bemoaning the fact that slum clearance, the wholesale destruction of some of the most beautiful housing stock in the city, and the building of housing projects failed to stem the deterioration of conditions.

Babbling Brooks says, among other things, "The crime wave killed off the hippie movement. The hippies celebrated disorder, mayhem and the whole Dionysian personal agenda. By the 1970s, the menacing results of that agenda were all around."

In reality, judging simply by the calendar, the rising crime rate could not have been a result of "hippies," (whoever they were,) since the entrenchment of dangerous conditions began in the mid-1960s when the Baby Boom had not even emerged from adolescence.

Rather the vertiginous decline in manufacturing jobs in New York above all else contributed to the dwindling of employment opportunities for undereducated inner city youth. Secondly, the traditional gate for immigrant and emigrant success - civil service - remained slammed, locked and bolted in the collective face of minorities.

White flight initiated and exacerbated the situation. Cheap suburban housing and the construction of outer-borough projects like Co-Op City sucked the heart and soul of old Jewish and Italian New York away. (The Irish had been decamping since right after the war.)

If any group celebrated disorder and mayhem, it was the nihilistic, right wing and pro-war "Greatest Generation" that blundered into and stubbornly stayed in Vietnam; who saw any sign of protest as reason to act repressively; and whose self-medication through excessive alcohol use was transmogrified into drug experimentation and addiction in the 1950s and forward.

Further, the failed redevelopment projects, from warehousing the poor in what amounted to the permanent cell blocks of housing projects to the destruction of entire neighborhoods by superhighways championed by Robert Moses such as the Cross Bronx and Bruckner Expressways, created more havoc than any thousand things hippies ever might have done. (170,000 to 200,000 middle class people were displaced and relocated by those two roads alone.)

Atop of all that, beginning with the tail end of the Wagner administration into the two Lindsay administrations, roughly 1962 to 1970, the city entered a financial tailspin that the helmsmen were unable to stop. Hippies, as one might imagine, had very little to do with this. Inefficiency and corruption in practically every city undertaking had everything to do with it.

Eventually this led to a hiring freeze of public employees, including police and fire fighters, from 1976 to 1980. Neither department recovered to adequate levels until well into the 1990s. As the city recovered financially, policing improved dramatically.

Meanwhile, all those raving hippies turned 30, then 40, then 50 as the city recovered. Manhattan in particular experienced a reversal of white flight, although the city would become an almost indescribably diverse town. The "aging" hippies bought co-ops, had children, helped to better schools, and to demand better services - especially clean streets and public safety.

The liberal spirit of the former youth of the 60s welcomed and encouraged an enormous wave of new immigrants. So much for disorder and mayhem.

This cycle played out in many Manhattan neighborhoods, but especially the Upper West Side, which, along with the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Chelsea, had deteriorated most from white flight. By the 1970s, the Upper West had already seen the gentrification of a swath from the West 70s to lower 80s. (My brother, born in 1946, was among the pioneers on 74th between Columbus and Amsterdam, a neighborhood my mother literally cried over when she saw where he was going to live.)

By 1987, the change had pushed approximately to West 98th where it curiously stopped to take a breath then leaped a dozen blocks to Morningside, the neighborhood around Columbia University, from 110th north.

Why did it skip the intervening blocks? An unimaginably large housing project, the Frederick Douglass Houses, squats between 100th and 104th Streets, stretching from Amsterdam Avenue across Columbus to Manhattan Avenue. It incarcerates thousands upon thousands of people and has helped keep poverty and crime in the immediately surrounding area high, although that has changed, too.

Today the phantom hippies are of grand-parenting age. The Upper West Side is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan, and even though a depressing portion of it was destroyed by urban redevelopment, its architectural charms, park-like atmosphere, and overall ambiance are readily evident on a short stroll through its side streets.

Mr. Brooks' and Mr. Podhoretz's city view could not be any more false and corrupt. The hippies couldn't have brought down the West Side. At best, they were very young adults when the malaise began and most of us were no more than college students who, until 1971, couldn't even vote, thank you. (A person born in 1948, for instance, was only 21 in 1969.)

By moving back into Manhattan, the so-called hippies heartily began countervailing, as they did in so many respects, the destructive impulses of their parents toward the urban centers of America. I'm not sure what Brooks thinks we were doing en masse, but I can tell him that by 1973, when I was 23, I was married, working two jobs, saving for a co-op, and going to museums and concerts in my spare time, even though I was and am a hippie to the marrow. I cannot think of literally one of my friends for whom this was not also the case.

As my own college-age daughter said once regarding our Upper West Side home: "I can't imagine how growing up anyplace else could be as good."

Thanks, honey. We did it for you and your compatriots. And we invited people from every country on Earth to lend a hand.

A Ridiculous Comment On This Blog's Satirical Critique of Big Oil

2010-05-18T09:04:00.000-04:00

"Anonymous" has left a new comment on May 12th's post "Oil Hearings: Somebody Spoke And I Went Into A Dream."(click to read)

Is it really that difficult for you to understand the difference between your dream and reality? Your dream is about a dysfunctional person intentionally set upon destruction. Reality is about men and women working long hard hours in difficult conditions to bring you the cushy comforts you desire. After literally millions of barrels of your comfort brought to you cleanly through risk and hardship, an accident - yes accident -has catastrophic results. Not only is there no evil intent, there is death and destruction as a reward for risk and hard work. And you, on the sidelines, using the oil, have the temerity to assign blame.

Apparently the self-righteous know neither common sense nor do they own a modest sense of humor. The post on Big Oil's disruptive, polluting, profit-at-any-price - see link immediately above - was a SATIRE. It was meant to make a point that minor crimes committed by ordinary people are vigorously prosecuted while the criminals who devastate the environment or steal billions through the manipulation of financial instruments are almost never given prison time.

The apologist for the oil industry who sent the anonymous comment believes, idiotically, that the oil companies provide "comfort brought to you cleanly." Patently false. Simply a big lie from Big Oil. Oil and other fossil fuels are filthy, dangerous, and cause millions of premature deaths and serious illness globally through pollutants every year. Purchase of foreign oil hurts America's national security. Oil companies have long hampered development of alternative energy in order to keep their pockets stuffed with ill-gotten money. Its directors and managers are voracious pirates in business suits.

The commenter goes on to say that "there is no evil intent" in the corporate heart of Big Oil. Does skirting regulations for the sake of profit not count? Oil at any price, including human life, is not "evil?" Then what is it? It is an attack on all humanity. The Earth belongs to everyone.

Bob Dylan in All Along The Watchtower:

"Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

Elena Kagan, The Pernicious Vaudevillian, and Oedipus.

2010-05-13T12:36:00.001-04:00

If vipers had radio shows, Rush Limbaugh would be chief among them: Viperidae Vaudvilleana.

During the May 10th broadcast of his extravaganza of radio lies, Limbaugh attacked Kagan as a "liberal elitist theoretician" who has "no clue how real Americans live," citing her prior residency in cities including New York. Don Vito Limbaugh, puppet-master of the right wing, said in huffing-puffing detail:

This woman Kagan, she supposedly is there to make sure the court deals with the despised and the downtrodden, with the despised and the poor, and so forth. She doesn't know anything about it. She's lived at Harvard; she's lived at Hyde Park in Chicago, inside the Beltway, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As is the case with all liberal elitist theoreticians, they have no clue how real Americans live, they think they know how Americans ought to live. And that is what they want to use the judiciary for. They're totally animated by their prejudices and their biases.

Limbaugh's Elitist Roots

Yo. Who you callin' elitist? Come over here and say that.

Depending on how you draw its boundaries the Upper West Side is home to around 350,000 people, which, last I looked is about 10 times the size of Limbaugh's home town, that paradigm of Americanism, Cape Girardeau, MO - which that paradigm of young vehicular man-slaughterers, Laura Bush, recognized as a "Preserve America Community."

Americans also are one of the most urbanized countries on Earth. 81% of us live in cities or suburbs. Only 19% of us live in towns like Cape Girardeau. Hmmm.

I believe Cape Girardeau's town motto is "From the few, even fewer, and better make 'em white while you're at it."

Cape Girardeau is almost 90% white, around 8% African American and 1% each Hispanic and Asian. (The country at large is about 72% white, 14% Hispanic, and 11.5% African American.)

Limbaugh's family has many lawyers, including his grandfather, father and brother, David.

His uncle, Stephen Limbaugh is a Reagan-appointed federal judge in the U.S. District Court for Missouri's Eastern District.

His cousin, Stephen Limbaugh, Jr., is currently a judge in the same court, appointed by George W. Bush.

Limbaugh's grandfather, was a Missouri prosecutor, judge, special commissioner, and member of the Missouri House of Representatives in the 1930s and longtime president of the Missouri Historical Society. The Federal Courthouse in Cape Girardeau is named for grandpa Limbaugh.

Kagan's Non-Elitist Roots

On the very same day of the right wing vaudevillian's diatribe, the New York Daily News, in a display of excellent research journalism, printed this headline and story by Mike Daly (click for full article): "Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan grew up one block away from Murder Hotel hellhole."

I don't know about you, but that sounds quite real and distinctly non-elitist to me. (Anyone who remembers that little neighborhood from the 1970s will also remember it as "Needle Park," so bad was the heroin problem then. )

What is even more impressive is the contrast between Limbaugh's demonstrably elitist family and Kagan's folksy (in a New York way) activist father, Robert Kagan.

"We represented about 300 tenant groups who were fearful of [being forced to leave] their homes, suspicious of the bait being offered and angry at being forced into a co-oping process few of them knew anything about," his law partner, William Lubic, said in a eulogy at the elder Kagan's funeral in 1994. "Bob was inventive, skillful, a tough negotiator and an effective advocate."

Lubic added, "But always Bob Kagan had the human touch - the touch of a man who loved and respected his fellow human beings."

Elena Kagan's mother was a public school teacher as are her two brothers. Those are her elitist roots.

The only thing that marks Kagan as part of an elite is that she left Hunter College [public] High School for Princeton undergrad work, went to Oxford for her Masters, then Harvard for her J.D. (This seems like a good time to point out that Limbaugh dropped out of Southeastern Missouri State University because, as his own mother said, "He flunked everything.")

One has to wonder about a guy who couldn't fight his way out of what amounts to an academic paper bag then attacks great educational institutions and its alumni. What kind of weird, loose-screw, Freudian, Oedipal feelings does Limbaugh have toward his family circle of elitists, his failures early in life?

Lucky for him he can contemplate such complicated feelings in his home in salt-of-the-earth Greenwich, Connecticut - 90% white, average family income of $171,000 per year.
...

Oil Hearings: Somebody Spoke And I Went Into A Dream

2010-05-12T12:18:00.002-04:00

Although reverie is much too pleasant and lighthearted a word for it, I fell into one of those strange drifts of thought where anything can happen, where fantasy and logic meld effortlessly.

In the crazy daydream, in my arms I carried a few quarts of motor oil in garishly-colored plastic bottles when suddenly I was gripped by an uncontrollable, really an unconscious, impulse to twist off the caps and begin pouring it (take your pick):

1. into Bethesda Fountain in Central Park,
2. over the Channel Gardens that lead to the statue of Prometheus where the famous Christmas tree is sited in Rockefeller Center,
3. into the Hudson River,
4. over the floor of Grand Central's main concourse,
5. all over Fashion Avenue's "Walk of Fame,"
6. onto a Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum, or maybe one of the Egyptian sarcophagi, etc., and,
7. for good measure, I found a few frogs sitting in the Lake in Central Park and gave them a good dose of the poisonous goo.

Maybe a quart or two for each prime location. Places that represent the "ecology" of the great city. Not a lot of oil, mind you. Let's say two gallons total would do the trick.

I wondered what would happen to me. Certainly I would be arrested. Most likely, if the authorities didn't have me committed, I would do jail time, be forced to make restitution (in the case of the Rembrandt probably community service unto the seventh generation). Lord knows what the papers would make of my actions.

It's likely I wouldn't be brought up before a Congressional panel wearing a three-thousand-dollar suit while I blamed my subcontractors, associates, friends, neighbors and the little boy who lived down the lane. I certainly wouldn't be flying in and out of Washington on a private jet. I wouldn't get no stinkin' $200 lunch out of my anti-social behavior.

I'd be branded an outlaw. A lunatic. A miscreant. A sociopath. A scarlet O for oil would be blazed into my skin.

I'd be fined, jailed, shamed, and pretty much enjoined to keep my grubby hands off any and all oil products for the rest of my pathetic life.

We increasingly live in a two-tiered society. Everyone knows it. The Tea Parties in their off-kilter way express it. The divisions in American society are palpable and frightening. Which side of the divide will our children and grandchildren end up on?

To get off scot-free when dousing the world with oil, it's wiser to spill 200,000-plus gallons a day than just a gallon or two. Then you're a somebody. Then you'd make a multimillion dollar salary and be among those untouchable by the real law.

You remember that: the law of crime and punishment, not crime and lashes with a wet noodle.

No clean environment, no future. No justice, no peace.

Just What Good Are Experts? Why Are We Allowing Them To Ruin Us?

2010-05-11T13:30:00.001-04:00

The chitter-chatter that's been swirling around Solicitor General Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court is beginning to settle on this line of argument: she hasn't served on any other court.

My first reaction was, "So what?" It's not as if she is a retired squeegie man seeking entry to the nation's highest court. She's got plenty of creds.

This faux argument posed by the right wing, and in other contexts embraced by the center and left, is that only the most advanced experts can lead us. But, clearly the experts are leading us down dark and dangerous roads all over the place, whether the road to financial ruin, environmental blow-outs, safety, religion, hapless military strategies, or simple budget balancing on local, state and national levels.

What good are the experts? Really?

Did they govern the banking and finance industry properly? Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson and Geitner appear to be either corrupt or incompetent. Listen to them closely for 10 minutes at a Congressional hearing and they sound like very well-spoken carnival barkers.

Are the experts guarding the environment? EPA Secretary Lisa Jackson is at best a mixed bag, tackling greenhouse gases on one hand but issuing an unprecedented number of mountain top removal permits for mining on the other. Her predecessor was indeed corrupt and incompetent. “The Bush Administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules. I believe this is a better approach than if individual states were to act alone,” said Stephen Johnson, one of a handful of Bushy EPA directors. Anyone see any national standards?

How's the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) working out for the miners out there?

Joe Main, director of MSHA, said yesterday that his agency has had the power to seek federal injunctions for years, but has never tried to use it. "I can't speak for past administrations," Main said during the Senate's first hearing on the accident that killed 29 men. "We're going to use it." Well, Mr. Main, the Obama Administration is 15 months old now. It took 29 men dying before you thought it was a keen idea to use your injunction powers? After reading over Massey Energy's past safety record, a person with a GED would have been able to see an injunction was in order.

And Brownie? Hey... job well done. If you were intent on helping sustain the slough that New Orleans and the Gulf states descended into after Katrina. As a friend of this blog and a great aficionado of the great cultural gumbo of the Big Easy wrote to me last week as the oil slick came closer: "Just got back from New Orleans. God awful... those poor people have had just about all they can take. I ate three dozen oysters because there ain't gonna be anymore down there for a long long time."

As to our wars - some of the longest in our history - even leaving aside the failure or distortion of intelligence that drove us into them, how is it that a country that was preeminent in the defeat of Nazi Germany and hyper-militaristic Japan in less than four years can't seem to figure out how to corral and pacify two small, backward countries?

It's easy enough currently to bash the Pope over the child abuse scandal. It's much more important to condemn the morally bankrupt system that allowed countless priests to be saved from their just desserts, whether that was to be institutional expulsion or criminal prosecution. In the Middle Ages, during the scourge of the Black Death, thousands of priests shirked their duty in ministering to the sick and dying. One of the direct results of those failures was the Reformation. The Catholic Church - many other churches large and small, as well - are in sore need of reform. It seems that a sick obsession with sexual matters and reproduction has taken hold everywhere. Where are the true spiritual "experts," the ones who feed the hungry, succor the suffering, aid the sick, comfort the mourners? Where is a meek or humble priest, and where is his superior?

Finally, how difficult is it to take a budget and put it into a semblance of balance? Sure, it's OK to borrow modest amounts to shore up short term gaps, but when 90% of all governing entities find themselves in calamitous deficits, one can only look to the keepers of the keys and denounce them.

Experts? Failures up and down. Liars many the time. Men and women engaged in the most self-indulgently corrupt behavior - abandoning intellectual and spiritual rigor for the path of least resistance.

CADD (Calamity Attention Deficit Disorder)

2010-05-10T14:47:00.000-04:00

Click here to compare the oil spill's size to your area. You'll need the Google Earth Plug In for this cheery exercise It's GIGANTIC!

The theorem itself is simple (luckily):

As a society grows more complex, its problems grow bigger and more difficult to solve.

The corollary is:

The experts who now try to head off problems are less capable than ever of being effective.

To cite one aspect of our precariousness, the same kind of utter destruction and chaos stemming from the Hundred Years' War took less than a decade during World War II. The next big war catastrophe will take what? Less than an hour?

Everything grows more compressed as history "progresses."

There have been oil spills as long as there have been oil wells. But now, quantities being extracted are in the mega-million barrel range; the most advanced techniques are more inexact; and the goo is transported by pipeline, ship, truck and rail across ten thousand disparate routes.

(One can easily overlay the oil spill analogy onto the Wall Street mess. Or the medical care mess. Or the immigration mess. Each industry only needs some specificity in tweaking.)

The first reaction is that our government is failing us, both on the theoretical, regulatory side and even more so on the physical enforcement side. But it is failing us on another level all together - the organizational side.

The system of regulation and prevention needs deconstruction first, then some rebuilding. This brings to mind the legend that Henry Ford was inspired to build his mass assembly plants by watching cattle carcasses being butchered by boners, each of whom had a specialty that they cut as the sides of beef kept moving along a production line. Deconstruct a problem, then reconstruct the new edifice.

There are roughly a half dozen oil producing regions in the United States, and another dozen or so ports that handle the bulk of oil imports. Then there are pipelines, refineries and storage facilities.

Instead of each of these regions and types of facilities falling under the single banner of the EPA and/or Interior and/or Commerce, each should have a commissioner and a commission with inspection and prosecutorial powers, as well as emergency injunction powers. These commissioners (and their teams) would act independently and be associated only with Federal Courts NOT inside their geographical jurisdiction.(Theoretically, the Gulf of Mexico's issues would be heard in Boston.)

Moreover, such injunctions could have a predetermined length of time - say 30 or 60 days - in which operations dangerous to the environment or workers (listening, coal mine operators?) are closed down or severely curtailed.

The commissioners and the members of his/her commission could not have voting members who have ever worked in the industry they oversee. (It is the height of madness to have former oil executives and engineers oversee environmental and worker safety in the oil drilling industry, for instance.)

In fact, it is crucial that ordinary, well-educated people from outside affected industries are appointed as watchdogs and not insiders. Could we do any worse with fresh thinkers?

Possibly there should be a set of incentives for such commissions in the form of bonuses. There should no doubt be a set of disincentives for these out-of-control industries that have ruined our natural and financial environment, our health care delivery system, and sent our immigration approach into free fall.

Somehow, we need to find a way to focus our expensive watchdog agencies on their real long-term missions. The old way simply is not working. We need new ideas and new systems of doing business, particularly when it comes to the environment and catastrophes that could effect the rest of human history. Meaning forever.

What Does Being Liberal Mean To You?

2010-05-05T11:12:00.001-04:00

NY Liberal State of Mind has about 25 followers now, and not quite 50 people who have signed up for email notifications.

I'm curious what it means to people to be "liberal" in 2010. Not on specific issues, but the general political philosophy.

So, if you have a few minutes, can you give me a few sentences on what it means to you? I'd like to create a compendium of the thoughts.

liberalstateofmind@gmail.com

Your privacy, if you so desire, will be protected.

Kent State + 40: Still "Unnecessary, Unwarranted And Inexcusable."

2010-05-04T11:27:00.002-04:00

Three of the adjectives that the Presidential Commission that investigated the murders on an American college campus four decades ago.

"We're going to use every weapon possible to eradicate the problem." - James Allen Rhodes, Republican Governor of Ohio, speaking at a news conference on May 3, 1970.

I wanted to say something very new and trenchant about the Kent State University shootings 40 years ago that today we commemorate. I wanted to link the extremism now afoot in America with the right wing extremism that stalked our country in the 1960s and 70s.

Yet, when looking through the Internet photo archives of the murders, unexpectedly, two banal things struck me.

The first is that there are very few color photographs of Kent State that day - most of the iconic images are in black and white, lending an antique sheen to the day. The second observation seems even more ridiculous. 99% of the students were thin. Very thin.

Many people of a certain age when transported back to that murderous moment in time find that the memories still evoke surprisingly powerful emotions. Anyone of college age then, or a few years older or younger, had already had their "coming of age" marred by the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy. Even the assassinations of polar political personalities Malcom X and George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, had impressed their memories upon us. It was an decade of violence.

But the killing of everyday kids - people just like us - first at Kent in Ohio and then at Jackson State in Mississippi ten days later was shocking beyond belief. Nine others were wounded, one paralyzed for life. Worse, two of the dead victims were innocent bystanders, going to classes or milling about to watch the main event, when the Ohio National Guard reversed field, turned and fired 67 bullets into an unarmed crowd in the space of 13 seconds. A 1970 FBI investigation into the shootings found that the guardsmen were not in danger and that they "fabricated" this defense.

The demonstrations, the troops, the fresh, raw anger are all long gone. Where anti-war protests raged, today a granite plaza invites peaceful reflection. On the spots where four young people fell in a spray of National Guard bullets, lanterns stand in remembrance.

What kind of country shoots down its unarmed youth in cold blood? Is it the same country that spits on Congressmen or calls them by racial epithets? Or reviles the first President who isn't white? The strain of vile hatred by rightist, reactionary forces has a long and persistent presence in our nation's history.

Does not wisdom cry? (Proverbs 8:1)

You used to be a student.

You studied fine arts.
But other arts exist,

of blood and terror,
and headsmen with

a genius for the axe.

 - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

   Bullets and Flowers

   (written in memory of the massacred students)

The murdered students

The Guardsmen Killing Them

The "Dangerous" Students

A Wounded Student Attended To By His Contemporaries

The Tear Gas

The Side Show

The Color Photos

(Girl looking at bloodstain)

Dean Kahler, one of the wounded, has been in a wheelchair ever since

Memorial for Jeffrey Miller, one of the four students shot in 1970, photo taken September, 2009, in Kent, Ohio.

The dual granite memorial for the children murdered at Kent State

and 10 days later at the Jackson State

The Million Trees of New York City, The Billion Our Country Needs Now

2010-04-30T11:21:00.000-04:00

In New York City call 311 to have trees planted in your neighborhood FREE. Elsewhere, you can get 10 FREE trees shipped to you from the Arbor Day Foundation by clicking here.

Happy Arbor Day. In 2007, New York City started a modestly ambitious campaign to plant 1 million trees on streets and in parks. So far, about 350,000 have been planted.

The goal should have been about 2.5 million, which would have represented one tree for every family in the city. Why up the number?

If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion pounds annually. This is almost 5% of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.

Trees also reduce the greenhouse effect by shading our homes and office buildings. This cuts down on air conditioning needs up to 30%, thereby reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned to produce electricity. This combination of CO2 removal from the atmosphere, carbon storage in wood, and the cooling effect makes trees a very efficient tool in fighting the greenhouse effect.

A single mature tree can absorb carbon dioxide at a rate of 48 pounds per year and release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings.

Each person in the U.S. generates approximately 2.3 tons of CO2 each year. A healthy tree stores about 13 pounds of carbon annually - or 2.6 tons per acre each year. So in a country of 300,000,000 people we need 150,000,000 acres of forest, although getting those acres in the right place is key.

Over a 50-year lifetime, a tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen, provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control, recycles $37,500 worth of water, and controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion. (USDA pamphlet R1-92-100)

One sugar maple (12" diameter at waist height) along a roadway removes in one growing season 60mg cadmium, 140 mg chromium, 820 mg nickel, and 5200 mg lead from the environment.

Homeowners that properly place trees in their landscape can realize savings up to 58% on daytime air conditioning and as high as 65% for mobile homes. If applied nationwide to buildings not now benefiting from trees, the shade could reduce our nation’s consumption of oil by 500,000 barrels of oil per day. (American Forests Publication, “The Case For Greener Cities” 1999)

The maximum potential annual savings from energy conserving landscapes around a typical residence ranged from 13% in Madison up to 38% in Miami. Projections suggest that 100 million additional mature trees in US cities (3 trees for every unshaded single family home) could save over $2 billion in energy costs per year. (McAliney, Mike. Arguments for Land Conservation: Documentation and Information Sources for Land Resources Protection, Trust for Public Land, Sacramento, CA, December, 1993)

For the sake of discussion, let's say that we can plant 100 million trees for $15 each. That's $1.5 billion in outlay. After 20 years in non-inflated dollars we would have saved about $40 billion in energy costs. We also would have created useful jobs for the underemployed and unskilled, beautified our country, saved the wear and tear on air conditioners, captured run-off water, lowered overall pollution, raised oxygen levels in the atmosphere, cut health care costs and improve our spiritual well-being.

In 10 years, for a total outlay of $15 billion, we would have one billion more trees and would have saved $400 billion in energy costs. Can you think of a more inexpensive, efficient, non-controversial way to improve the environment?

Our Defense Department budget for 2010? $685.1 billion, which represents a 3% increase over 2009 or $22.5 billion. Just the increase over one year would more than cover the planting of 1 billion life-giving trees. What in God's name is wrong with us?

Fire In The Gulf, Wind Off The Cape

2010-04-29T13:06:00.003-04:00

Almost at the same time the Coast Guard was setting fire to the oil sludge erupting from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave the preliminary go-ahead to the giant 130-turbine, 420-megawatt Cape Wind project in Horseshoe Shoal, Nantucket Sound.

Forces aspiring to stop the wind farm, claiming that it will spoil views, upset some sort of tenuous Wampanoag tribal traditions, disrupt marine life, and kill seabirds are already indulging in some big-money grumbling and will no doubt fight the project in courts, perhaps for another decade. A word the right wing ceaselessly bandies about comes to mind. Elitists.

This NIMBY stance by the rich - liberal or conservative - is despicable. It is indicative of a larger, cancerous problem in the body politic, namely the inability of the elite to lead rather than simply control and manipulate public circumstances to suit private appetites. (Goldman Sachs anyone?)

The red herrings being tossed into the slumgullion of this argument are easily refuted:

Seabirds will suffer in the beginning surely and then they will adjust and adapt to the whirling blades capturing the wind. Is there any hope whatsoever that the same birds will ever adapt to rising planet temperatures, depleted or disrupted fish population, or the effects of oil spills as in the Gulf? Furthermore, according to a research paper by National University of Singapore professor Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool, “wind farms killed approximately seven thousand birds in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fueled power plants 14.5 million.” The biggest killers of birds in the United States today? House cats and plate glass windows. Weigh it for yourself.

The disruption of marine life argument should be read clearly as "the disruption of commercial and recreational fishing businesses," rather than being allowed to be draped in the clothing of environmental righteousness. (The Duke’s County/Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen Association plans to file suit against the federal Minerals Management Service for violations under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.) Navigation will be made somewhat more difficult certainly, but the men who pilot fishing boats in and around Cape Cod and its islands surely are no strangers to navigational difficulties. Rocky shoals, hard currents, storms and other heavy weather abound. Additionally, the Nantucket harbor entrance itself is already flanked by man-made jetties extending almost a mile into the sea, and the regular dredging of boating lanes has a significant, yet accepted, impact on sea life. There is no outcry over these intrusions.

The hypocrisy of the Wampanoags is also detestable. The tribe, which numbered about 6,000 people at the dawn of European settlement says that their traditional ways are going to be interrupted. In no way denigrating Native American claims of historical hardship, every single 21st century human has to embrace and correct what is happening to the larger ecosystem. The entire population of Wampanoags now numbers about 2,300 individuals of varying degree of purity of lineage. In spite of past deprivations, surely they have no claim on stopping what amounts to a clean-energy technological revolution. Ironically, while resting their standard upon fighting the Nantucket wind farm, the Wampanoags are simultaneously fighting to establish a state-sanctioned gambling casino. Clean, renewable energy vs. fleecing the desperate or mentally ill of their money? The Wampanoags should stop talking tradition trash.

The view is the real crux of the conflict. Are the enormous turbines really eyesores? Some with a grander sensibility might say the wind farms make the landscape more beautiful given the underlying assumption they are providing super-clean energy. The turbines are all over Scandinavia, Great Britain, Germany and Brazil, countries scarcely without tender sensibilities. And just because members of the political elite can't see them, it doesn't mean that large, unsightly generating plants with chimneys belching foul-smelling brown smoke into the sky don't exist.

Agitation against such progressive developments tells us just how self-absorbed and small-minded elites of any stripe can be. The liberal elite should be leading this charge, not hamstringing the efforts at establishing a new energy regimen.

...

ABCs of Financial Reform: Getting A Grip On What Derivatives Actually Are

2010-04-28T11:51:00.001-04:00

Watching and reading about financial reform and Goldman-Sachs recently I was struck by a recurrent theme: these exotic financial instruments are too danged hard for the layperson to understand. They never struck me as all that hard to understand once you grasp the fundamentals of a Ponzi scheme, for at bottom, all such schemes are the same with some specific flourishes to keep the appeal fresh.

I spoke to a friend of mine who has run and/or owned a mutual fund for decades, one run on the old-fashioned notion that you look at companies, analyze their prospects for profit, take a large position in the best companies and then persuade others to buy your mutual fund based on your analytical acumen and management skills you bring into those companies as a major shareholder. (It's actually the way capitalism ought to work.)

My friend convinced me that there was not that much to understand - not in retrospect, anyway. Once he walked me through the scheme, it set me to wondering why people actually don't want the derivatives market more-tightly regulated.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll issued Monday showed "that on the complicated topic of derivatives... 43 percent [of respondents] support federal regulation of the vast derivatives market; 41 percent are opposed; and 17 percent, nearly one in five people, expressed no opinion on the topic."

Something tells me that those who are either opposed to regulating derivatives or have no opinion essentially haven't a clue as to what a derivative is and therefore have no idea how fertile the derivative field is when it comes to the opportunity for creating fraud.

And fraud it was that melted down the American and world economy in the last few years. The lynchpin of the meltdown was the issuance of billions of what William K. Black, (a lawyer, professor and the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007), calls "liars loans," taking his lead from the term used by executives who ran "specialty" loan companies - companies that market loans to marginally risk-worthy people.) Yes, internally the executives actually used the term "liars loans." These corrupt executives knew much more than anyone is insisting upon, including members of both major political parties. We know these loans also as ninja loans, sub-prime mortgages, and adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).

A liars loan is a mortgage (or in some cases auto or commercial loan) whose sole criteria is based on the mortgagee's attesting to his or her creditworthiness without back up information. In an interview, Black said, "Liars loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets."

One company alone, IndyMac, generated more bad loans than were generated during the entire Savings and Loan Scandal of the 80s and 90s. Counterintuitively, these loan institutions listed such loans as "assets."

On the strength of those assets, loan institutions took such loans and "bundle" them, and "sell" them to other institutions, more likely than not an investment bank such as Goldman-Sachs. The loan institution is then able to take the new capital they have received from the investment banks for the old (liar) loans and lend more money to the non-creditworthy. You can practically see the pyramid a-building. In return, the investment bank draws off some portion of the interest paid on the mortgages in the bundle plus fat fees for the deal.

In the beginning, the Goldmans of the world knew that the bundles contained some unbelievably risky loans, but also some stable ones. They calculated the risk-reward ratio and ran with it. Why? Because they knew not that the loans would be paid off, but that the default ratio would be very, very high. Crazy, eh? Read on.

As the pool of truly creditworthy borrowers dwindled, opportunities for banks and other loan institutions to lend good money to good risks practically evaporated. (The creditworthy pool moves at its own relatively slow, steady pace; as one might assume, it is large but nevertheless limited.) More poor risk borrowers had to be found. And they were. People with $65,000 incomes were buying houses selling for $450,000 with $420,000 mortgages and $3,000-per-month payments on top of taxes, utilities, etc. (Of course, all this fraudulently issued credit also had the incidental effect of artificially driving up housing costs, costing good-risk home owners billions in equity in homes they purchased at peak price only to find the prices plummeting. This made ALL home prices fall. Many of the good-risk types also, based on this false inflation of prices, took out home equity loans, i.e., second mortgages, and found themselves now the proud owners of a total debt that outweighed the deteriorated value of their homes.)

Next the investment banks who took the bundles began using them as collateral to make other deals with other financial institutions that then used them to make more deals, down the line. Thus, the Ponzi aspect of it. But along the way, because of the sterling reputation of Goldman and its ilk, these junk status bundles, bathed in the reflective glory of grand institutions, rose to AAA ratings. Solid institutions like pension funds, college endowments, and municipalities with investment portfolios snapped them up at sky-high prices. Got it?

On top of all that, Goldman, in particular, engaged AIG to insure the bogus deals underlying the instruments that had been created out of whole cloth of the original liars loans.

Enter William Black again: "This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, 'the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined.'"

Meanwhile, back at Goldman, et al, the executives connived at an even more diabolical plot. These bundles - the derivatives - are traded like any other stock or commodity, meaning that their value can move up or down as the market honestly - in normal circumstances - dictates. Just as if he is buying shares in Ford Motors, the basics trader can buy shares in these bundles, hoping, of course, that they move up at which point he sells to make a profit.

In parallel, more sophisticated traders can also buy futures contracts, essentially bets on which way the value of the bundles will move. Goldman bet on their own deals to go down because they knew all along the value of the bundles would sink like a stone. And they made tens of billions when the deals went south.

Now we have junk loans bundled together then sold to investment banks who then repackaged and resold them while goosing the ratings on the bundles, all the while betting the value will go down. Makes your skin hurt, doesn't it? This is why there was guillotining during the French Revolution. Let them eat cake? Hah, let them eat bundles.

From 65 to 80% of the bundles were composed of bad loans. Terrible in a great economic climate, but cataclysmically toxic in even a mild downturn. As the bank/investment bank/insurance company beast grew hungrier and defaults occurred on the original liars loans, the rates on the surviving original mortgages were raised. The mortgagee paying the barely-affordable $3000 discussed above, now had to pay, $3600 per month and simply could not afford to. Thus began the foreclosure domino debacle. Everyone along the chain fell prey to the ravening, from borrower to specialty loan institutions, from building developers to banks that lent money to the loan institutions, from building supplies dealers to governments who had reckoned on tax revenues from the new home owners who now were in default.

All except... Goldman and its fellow fraudsters, all of whom made money every step of the way right down to and after the deep default period because, after all, they had bet on the value of the bundles going down.

The last word of this chapter goes to Mr. Black: "The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again... this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis."

Metro New York States' Budget Deficits Compared To Those States' Contribution To The Wars In Southwest Asia

2010-04-27T19:35:00.003-04:00

Source: National Priorities Project - Click link at left and go to your state (or city/town), then look up your state's deficit somewhere else - put your state's name and the word deficit into Google - and voila... it will tell you what your state is missing.

As we argue about what schools to close, which teachers to fire, what health programs we trim, which summer recreation activities to curtail, and when one city - Colorado Springs - is turning off its street lights, here's where a good chunk of our collective change is going.

Huffington Hysteria

2010-04-27T15:42:00.002-04:00

HuffPo has so much to offer us, but an article run in today's business section can only be described as hysterical. View it here. It describes the dire consequences of the decline of the industrial side of the U.S. economy.

In reality, there is no such decline except in relative terms. With less than 5% of the world's population, the U.S. accounts for almost 25% of the world's industrial output. China, with 24% of the world's population accounts for about 18% of the world's industrial output.

Additionally, U.S. industrial output has grown every year since 1990 (at least) even through the current recession.

SOURCE: http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2010/02/17/usa-china-and-japan-lead-manufacturing-output-in-2008/

Industry is not going away. What will go away are the number of jobs provided in the manufacturing sector. As advanced economies automate and robotize their industrial plants, fewer and fewer people will be needed to work in them. This is roughly analogous to the 19th and 20th century decline in the number of farm workers or number of deck hands needed to move a given amount of freight tonnage on a ship across an ocean. (Think labor intensive sailing ships versus the mega cargo ships of today that can be operated with a handful of crew members.)

And consider this from MSNBC: "Whereas a Chinese industrial worker produces $12,642 worth of output... in the United States, a manufacturing employee produced an unprecedented $104,606 of value in 2005."

China's growth has been meteoric, no doubt. But, with 1.6 billion people, it's output is relatively puny on a population basis, and by default much of what China produces is consumed at home. (Japan and Germany lead both America and China when it comes to this population-to-manufacturing ratio. Although it should be noted that the manufacturing fraction of the U.S. economy is much smaller than either China, Japan or Germany, which means our economy is much more diverse.)

The United States must stop looking at China's new-found, if narrowly distributed, prosperity not strictly in Yin terms, but in Yang terms as well. It is a new, vast market to conquer and we have many, many goods (and services) China wants and needs.

Obviously, our government needs to be more vigilant about China's unfair trade practices - the renminbi needs to float, for starters - and we must be vigilant about the constant influx of shabby products the Chinese send here.

Reciprocity is the key word and Washington has to step up on the trade issues, even in the midst of all the other wailing and gnashing of teeth rising above the Capitol.

While we certainly have room for expanding our manufacturing capabilities, now is not the time to be acting as if we're on an industrial-strength bad acid trip. Better to ask ourselves what new industries and markets lend opportunity for expansion. Green Tech? Transportation?

The latter is an interesting case and shows why we feel as if we're stumbling. The U.S. dominates aircraft manufacturing. But we are dead last in manufacturing of heavy and light rail components. Why? We have a thriving airline industry at home, but have little in the way of passenger rail service. That's the main reason we have so little in the way of a rail manufacturing sector. Other countries have put increasing importance on rail, creating new manufacturing opportunities in their home countries but abroad as well.

Lack of progressivism hurts us in business as well as social achievement.

Racial History of Arizona, Part One: The 19th and Early 20th Century

2010-04-26T09:45:00.003-04:00

The Arizona Rangers

The "Driving While Mexican" law enacted last week in Arizona is not some isolated incident, a case of good people gone bad over a frustrating circumstance.

Indeed, it is part of Arizona's long, complex racial history, dating back to shortly after the Civil war when copper and silver mines were opening in the Gila Mountains, among other places. At the time, the thinly populated region could have been aptly named Mex-Arizona, the border being legalized on paper, but for all intents and purposes fluid and porous.

The first white reaction came in the 1870s when, fresh off the completeion of the Transcontinental Railroad project, and after building a primary railroad network across the then-territory, Chinese laborers drifted into metals mining work. The Chinese men fell into competition with Mexican workers for whom the Arizona-Mexico border was imaginary at best.

As long as the Chinese remained in competition with Mexican workers only, their presence provoked little concern among news editors and representatives of vocal white groups. But it was not long before the Chinese began to drift from the railroads into mining work. Henry Lesinsky (pioneer of Arizona, a Prussian of Jewish descent) touched upon this matter publicly, announcing that if his Longfellow Copper Mines employed any Chinese at all, “it would be at work which neither white men nor Mexicans would accept.”

Lesinsky did not want to be responsible for starting a “Mongolian invasion of that territory.” Instead, the Chinese would be put to work in the hills burning and transporting charcoal for the furnaces over such rough country that “even Mexicans cannot be got to carry anything over it.” Not more than seventy would be hired, and these would work separately from the “225 to 275 white men and Mexicans, who got on very well together.” A week later the Silver City Herald reported that “some fifty Chinamen have arrived at Clifton, Arizona, and will be put to work in the mines and furnaces.”

"Vagabondage and crime" were said to be the direct result of this immigration, local politicians were challenged to define their positions on the issue publicly, and the Immigration Act of July 1, 1879, then being formulated, was cited as evidence of federal recognition of the seriousness of the Chinese question. “The Chinese must go!” became the symbolic cry that greeted Southern Pacific foremen when they arrived with their crews at Maricopa Station in January, 1880, after a six-months interruption of the work. The Chinese soon went, some 3/4ths of them into the copper camps.

By the early 1900s, Mexican laborers predominated in the mines, most of them brought by enganchadores, or "hookers," recruiters who preferred men from the interior of Mexico rather than border-men.

According to the editor of the Bisbee Daily Review, thousands of Mexicans were brought into Arizona during 1901 to work on the railroads and in the mines. The inflow was so great at this time that he questioned the accuracy of the 1900 census in setting Arizona’s total population at 122,212. “There is little doubt, despite these official figures,” he said, “that the territory has a bona fide [permanent] population of about 140,000.” No immigration statistics were kept at this time, but contemporary estimates claimed that between 60,000 and 100,000 Mexicans crossed the border annually.

This was the beginning of the trans-national labor issue we see now exploding in Arizona's profiling law today. (Of course, ranch and farming workers crossed easily in early days, but numbers were insignificant.)

Eventually, Mexican laborers ran smack up against unionized whites in the mines, the whites believing that low-wage Mexican workers dragged down the wages of their members, high-skill workers. In actuality, the price of copper had tumbled in the first decade of the 20th century.

On March 21, 1901, during Governor Nathan O. Murphy’s last year in office, the legislature passed a bill enabling the creation of a special body called the Arizona Rangers. Their personnel, whose identification was to be kept as secret as possible “for strategic purposes,” were authorized to command the services of cattlemen and law officers when necessary. Formed originally to patrol the border and prevent cattle rustling, they were often used by mine owners to suppress strikes. Having formed the body as one of his last official acts, Murphy, himself a mine owner, resigned to attend to business affairs, forcing his successor, Governor Alexander O. Brodie, to take office prematurely in July 1, 1902. The next year the union won a round. When the twenty-second legislature met on January 19, 1903, says historian James McClintock, they passed an act “directed against the companies employing Mexican and contract labor… prohibiting more than eight hours of labor on underground work in the mines.” While the eight-hour law constituted a major victory for [white] union men in their efforts toward better working conditions, their principal satisfaction came in seeing an effective blow delivered to mine operators who sought to employ alien Mexicans whenever possible because Mexicans would submit to working ten to twelve hours a day at a wage that undercut the union scale by almost fifty percent.

A strike, called the Clifton Strike, ensued and toward its latter stages, only Mexican laborers were left, and they insisted on organizing for better wages and shorter hours. The strike, which may have ended in bloodshed, (both sides were heavily armed), was instead ended by a catastrophic rainstorm that literally washed away the Mexican workers shantytowns.

The Clifton strike was the opening shot of a long series of skirmishes between labor and management with Mexican workers as a major issue. Because of increased cooperative efforts, the wages of Mexican workers began to rise as the years went on. By the end of the Territorial period, the momentum of economic necessity showed Anglo and Mexican workmen that cooperation was the better course. There was also a significant decline in anti-Mexicanism. The alien labor issue, however, continued to be a problem. In fact, really serious troubles were just beginning. Contract systems for alien Mexican labor were established during both World Wars and the government ultimately resigned itself to legalizing what it could not prohibit.

This sat well with white Arizonans as long as Mexican workers were the only ones willing or available to work mine, road and railroad-building, and other menial jobs. Mexican women were employed as household help, or as menials in laundries, food establishments and so forth.

As the white population of Arizona grew, however, from 1900 through the 1950s and the economy diversified, whites saw their right to seek employment as substantially more crucialt than the old, cross-border model.

The Financial Fire Next Time

2010-04-23T11:25:00.001-04:00

Limit leverage. Mandate transparency. Criminalize behavior and seize assets.

Everyone knows some version of the military maxim, "Don't prepare to fight the last war, prepare to fight the next war."

Congress is preparing us to fight the last financial war, the one based on the bundling, manipulating and trading of derivatives. But the next financial war will be about something very different.

What might it be? Look to the hottest and/or emerging sectors of the economy.

The Internet is still an under-ripe crop; the green economy is a nascent opportunity for the pirates; cap and trade scenarios are the perfect imaginary commodities; and don't forget our old "frenemy," oil. Maybe even water futures. How about bonds, the stodgy investment? I'd also keep an eye on Baby Boomer pensions and annuities; the biggest pot of gold in the private world is the $27 trillion dollars in assets held by American Boomers.

No one knows exactly what the next market bubble or grand maneuver will be. But we can be sure one will come as soon as regular companies, recovering now at a fevered pace, slow down and the big money looks for yields that can be conjured out of thin-air. (E.g., Ford stock has gone from roughly $1.50 to around $14 in the last 2 years. Chances are it's not going to $28 soon. Where can the hungry investor double his money now?)

And the crisis will absolutely, positively entail over-leveraging in some new, nefarious way.The mechanism is being assembled like a top secret rocket as you read.

Leverage was what the 1929 Crash was all about. In fact the entire Roaring 20's roared and vamped on cheap, unbridled credit. Big investors bid up the stocks of regular companies then colluded with banks to lend money so smaller and smaller investors could jump on the band wagon until corporate stock prices were in stratospheric ranges. At one point, AT&T was selling for $304 per share. That's about $6000 per share in 2010 money. And guess who bought at $290 or thereabouts per share? The johnny-come-latelys. Small time suckers, farmers, credit unions, and weak-economy foreign governments looking to cash in. Only a few weeks later, AT&T sold for $197, then eventually fell to the $60 range.

In the 20s, too, there was something called the Florida Land Boom. Again, some worthwhile but mostly worthless land in the Miami area was sold to investors up north with banks exhibiting nary a care about the buyers' financial positions. Parcels that went for $3000 in 1922 were selling for $60,000 in 1926. All on borrowed money, both buyers and their banks becoming overleveraged in the process. So when the music stopped... all fall down.

We've seen this before too many times. The Savings and Loan crisis, the Hunt Brothers' attempt to corner the silver market in the 80s, the Internet Bubble. Thousands of people saw it in the eyes of Bernie Madoff. Going back further, there were the South Sea Bubble in the early 1700s and Tulipmania in 1637. Everyone wants in on the big casino. And everyone gets their freak on when the casino slams them.

So, what can the government actually do? What laws can be passed?

1) Highly-leveraged paper has to be limited to some rational share of a financial company's investment portfolio. We know now that margin buying in the 20s was part of a larger delirium. But buying a purely speculative instrument for 10% down (margin buying) was utter madness.

Imagine a friend saying to you, "Lend me $5,000 so I can go to Vegas," when in fact she only had $500 to her name. You'd call an asylum. But in our public market speculations we lend that $5,000 all the time, the theory being that if I lend enough bundles of 5 grand, one of my friends will come home a millionaire and I cover my bad investments plus make a big belly profit. But when none of the friends come home, I'm in big trouble.

Our housing bubble was more complex, but it operated on the same principle. People with poor credit went to banks to borrow money to buy houses for which the banks didn't have money to underwrite mortgages so the banks went to "investment banks" or insurance companies which handed over money and then re-sold the bundled (worthless) paper. As the number of institutions upon which those bundles could be fobbed off on dwindled, the interest rates on the original mortgages had to climb so the banks could cover expenses. All well and good when the economy rode high, but once these marginal house buyers began losing their jobs their variable rates went up, and up and...

2) Absolute transparency has to be maintained, not just on the consumer level, but the institutional level. J.P. Morgan-Chase has to know that it shouldn't be underwriting some other institution that is leveraged to the max. If there is absolute transparency, no individual or institution can make the childish argument, "I wouldn't have done it if I could have helped it."

3) Criminalize certain behaviors in the world of finance. While what a charlatan like Madoff did clearly merits hard time in the slammer, how different is what he did from what the likes of Goldman's Blankfein, Citi's Charlie Prince, Stanley O’Neal of Merril-Lynch, et al?

The threat of 20 to 40 years behind bars and loss of all but subsistence assets for their families should scare almost anyone into honesty.

We don't get the three guarantees, we don't get protection.

Even now, time bombs are ticking that have been planted by the financial sector terrorists.

Which one will go off next time? Anyone have any ideas?
...

Happy Earth Day - Measuring 40 Years

2010-04-22T08:48:00.009-04:00

The swirl of history was in an uproar 40 years ago this month.

Earth Day was born out of a populist movement that articulated the burgeoning unease with the severe damage being done to the planet. The damage wouldn't stop merely because an enormous conglomeration of idealistic, mostly young people decided enough was enough. There is a lot of work to be done yet. But much positive change grew out of those first demonstrations of love for what, to this point, is the only home we have.

On April 22nd of 1970, something else was going on in the land. Republican President Richard Nixon's administration had been conducting a secret war in Cambodia that was finally coming to light. Twelve days later, 4 students - innocent bystanders it should be remembered - were murdered by members of the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus.

Lost in this toxic brew of anti-Vietnam War politics and enmity between young and old, were not just the warm and fuzzy emotions that the first Earth Day engendered but the tangible effects of the early environmental movement on legislative change:

The Clean Air Act of 1970, which, among other things allowed for citizen suits against polluters. (In 1970, cars emitted 20 x more pollutants than they do today!)

The 1973 Endangered Species Act which provides for the conservation of ecosystems upon which threatened and endangered species of fish, wildlife, and plants depend;

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 which gives the EPA authority to control the generation, transportation, treatment, storage and disposal of hazardous waste.

The 1984 Federal Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments to the above which focused on waste minimization and phased out land disposal of hazardous waste. Some of the other mandates of this law included increased enforcement authority for EPA, more stringent hazardous waste management standards, and a comprehensive underground storage tank program.

The 1986 amendments which enable the EPA to address environmental problems that could result from underground tanks storing petroleum and other hazardous substances.

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which mandate the elimination of lead from all U.S. motor fuel by 1996. This represented the final step in a gradual reduction of lead in gasoline that had started in the early 1970s.

Along with environmentally friendly legislation, recycling went from an occasional fund-raising event to municipally-provided pick-up.

The same people who struggled against the inhumanity of the Vietnam War, the mass psychopathy of segregation, and the oppression of women, also began the battle for planet earth. This is what they looked like on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the first Earth Day:

How did the kids get there? One can argue that it began with Rachel Carson's seminal work on the DDT poisoning of nature, Silent Spring, but you can also look back farther at the legendary efforts of Teddy Roosevelt to preserve the beauty of the American West; the 6 million acre amalgamation of land in New York State's Adirondack Park in the second half of the 19th century through the 20th; and you can also look even deeper into the 18th and early 19th century American Romantic notions of our continent as a sort of new Eden as typified in the Hudson River School of Painting.

Closer to the time of the first Earth Day there were eccentrics (and I use the word in its most complimentary sense) like Stewart Brand, impresario of The Whole Earth Catalog. (An electronic version its first edition can be viewed by clicking here.) The catalog is hard to describe, being part tools and alternative household living catalog, part work of art, and part philosophy anthology. One of its famous mottoes about the Earth was "We can't put it together... it is together," a semiotics-driven declaration that intimated that while we can't put the Earth together, we can certainly tear it apart.

Brand was emblematic of his time. In the mid 1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "The Merry Pranksters" and in San Francisco with his partner Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows, and one of the first venues in which the Grateful Dead performed. Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as "a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead too, and a whole necktie made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher's coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it."

"Time it was and what a time it was, a time of innocence, a time of confidences..."

- Paul Simon

Many of the founders of Earth Day wring their hands today at the corporatism that has crept into the celebrations. Pepsi, Google, all the usual suspects have their fork in the pie. “This ridiculous perverted marketing has cheapened the concept of what is really green,” said Hayes, who was national coordinator of the first Earth Day and is returning to organize this year’s activities in Washington. “It is tragic.”

I'm not so sure. When it comes to the most crucial decisions we have to make to save the Earth, we want everyone on board. Humans will always consume products. The big question remains, "How can we do so in a planet-friendly way?" Individuals, companies and goverment have to come to a solid understanding about what's best for all of us. Although there are many things an individual can do inependently.

Use less, use natural and organic products, re-use what you already have, recycle that which you can't re-use. Turn the lights out. Get out of the car and walk, ride, or use public transportation. Control your thermostat, insulate your house, buy local, start a garden if you can.

To return briefly to what this blog is all about: don't think for a moment that the right wing will embrace environmentalism in any way, shape or form. Theirs is to consume and leave the mess for subsequent times.

Coming up consistently with good, practicable solutions is the answer to their hysterically pro-business, pro-consumer posture. Someone who carries an automatic rifle to a political rally is not going gently into that good night.

Locally, I want to draw attention to New York City's Million Trees initiative. I was skeptical at first, but I decided to try it. The site tells you that if you want trees planted on your street or any street, all you have to do is call 311. It works!

Last year, I spied out about 80 empty tree pits in my Hamilton Heights neighborhood and called 311. They said it would take till this spring. Inside I was saying "Sure, sure."

Lo and behold, late in March the excavators were re-opening the holes and by early April the new trees - about 15 feet tall some of them - were in place. Now they are in full leaf.

The call took all of 5 minutes. Try it. 311.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.
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