Coked Up Winged Monkeys Fly In From The Right

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

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...

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

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?

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.

The Failing Of The Left In The Face Of Corporatism

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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