Back To Europe and the Basics of Liberal Foreign Policy

American overseas preoccupations of the last decade have centered on terrorism, the wars in south Asia, and the paper tiger of China, America's next great fall guy. Meanwhile our long, deep roots with Europe have centered around war aims, overt and covert and the bickering over climate change.

Together, the United States and the European Union together account for about $3 trillion in exports, and well over one third of the entire world's economic output despite having only 12% of its population. (China by contrast contains almost 20% of the world's population and accounts for 14% of world GDP. Japan has about 1/10th the population of China and has a larger share of world GDP.)

So, what are our priorities regarding Europe (and Japan, and other western style democracies)? Clearly, if we were to simply follow the money, we would be spending an enormous amount of time tightening our already firm bonds to Europe. We would play down the consternation over China's "rise," remembering always that it still has 1.1 billion people living at subsistence level with whom they will eventually have to engage.

Further, we would pay close attention, to use Lincoln's words, to "the mystic chords of memory," that bind Europe to America and we to them. While we have navigated the streams of democratization in parallel, we also share an intellectual and artistic history, a battlefield history, a religious commonality with Europe. We share the burdens of colonialism. And, although Europe has largely ignored its part in the tragedy, we share the legacy of slavery.

But our view of Europe remains calcified and simplistic. It is a very fine place to visit. The Brits will always be our friends. Inexplicably, the French are eternally annoying, if less so nowadays. The Germans still wear the mantle of militarism, even if they have been ultras pacific since the war. And what good workers! The Italians are amusing and unstable. The Spanish are unemployed. The Scandinavians are blond and very advanced considering their size. The Greeks profligate. The new, eastern EU members are enigmas and still viewed as a bulwark against the Russian bear.

So what should we be doing?

First, loosen economic ties with authoritarian China, which does not play fair and takes all criticism of its regime and its self-centered economic policies as "meddling." Establish new rules concerning "free trade," turning our bent with developing countries into "fair trade."

Second, together with the EU we should identify with and be by the side of rising democracies and do all we can to work with them. India comes to mind, as do certain African nations, Brazil, Argentina and other "second world" democratic economic powers. India, in particular, offers enormous opportunity for Europe and the United States.

While both the United States and Europe hamstring themselves through dependence on foreign energy sources, we need to switch focus from the oil states to the states of the southern Mediterranean basin: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. The West also must stay focused on a just settlement for Jews and Palestinians in Israel.

Regardless of the country the West deals with, we must insist on expansion of human rights, whether these concern religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Economic justice - still an issue at home - must be pursued worldwide.

Violations of established intellectual property rights laws must be enforced. Giving away our edge in technology, such as in computer science, space, robotics and the internet, is suicidal. Innovation is at the core of western success. And our spirit.

Through our communal technological prowess, the US, EU, Japan and the other westernized societies must solve the energy crisis. For a better environment, for a better life for the entire planet, but also to choke of the seemingly unending conflicts we find ourselves involved with in south Asia and northeast Africa.

The United States and the European Union need a large, common goal beyond prosperity in our friendly zones. It might be space, medicine, water and food purity, or transportation. But something larger and more transcendent than growing richer has to bind us together even more deeply.

This is where real liberalism counts.

Why Am I Reading The National Review?

Like the Hatfields and McCoys, it's best to look out across the holler and see what the other side is up to occasionally. I can report two things.

First, not much has changed regarding political philosophy. (The same tired critiques that hampered the left in the 30s, 50s, 60s and thence forward are still in NR's print and online versions.)

Second, the writing would have its well-spoken founder, William F. Buckley, not just turning over in his grave but doing an hysterical prairie chicken mating dance. (In fact I had a hard time following Kathryn Jean Lopez's thank you note to Senator Jim Bunning for truculently blocking relief for millions of unemployed workers. Click the link if you can bear it.)

The right doesn't yet get it when it comes to budget deficits in times of national need. Or they only define "need" as wartime spending. But, even as WWII was practically on our doorstep, the radical right wing fought FDR's deficit-financed expansion of military spending, lend lease to the Brits, aid to the Soviets, and ramping up defense production in 1940-41.

Somehow the radical right hews to the idea that not extending benefits affecting 7 million unemployed workers and their families - upwards of 20 million people all together - would force them to go get jobs instead of lolling about on the dole. Naturally, and cruelly, these jobs do not exist.

Bunning wanted to take the battle ax to the regular federal budget in order to pay for the extended benefits, hoping to find $15 billion in offsets that would force the new spending under the heroic category of PAYGO. (PAYGO [pay-as-you-go] is the practice of financing expenditures with funds that are currently available rather than borrowed.)

What Bunning and other knee-jerk conservatives cannot seem to grasp is that taking $15 billion from one section of the economy and putting it into another would have a net zero effect, practically speaking. Just at a time when we need as much stimulus as possible, he and his fellow mandarins would simply move one pile of cash to the spot where another pile once stood. Logic?

In Bunning's own words: “If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators support, how can we tell the American people with a straight face that we will ever pay for anything? That is what senators say they want, and that is what the American people want.” In other words, we the people will want it whether we like it or not.

100 Senators? What Twilight Zone episode is Bunning living in? It's doubtful the Senate could vote 100 to 0 on a resolution agreeing that the sun rises in the east. 

What the American people want are jobs, economic certainty and a loosening of credit for at least big-ticket items such as home and car buying. Removing $15 billion in purchasing power would only slow the already clotted financial flow further. 

Time out to give Lopez's elegant writing a moment to grip us:

That’s what Bunning wanted Congress to be held accountable for. That’s what he wanted Congress to make actual cuts in other spending in order to fund. (Yes, that's an actual quotation.)

And, of course, what ideological right wing rant, regardless of the loftiness of the forum, would be complete without a cheap shot at a president who was elected in a landslide? 

The writing-challenged Lopez feels compelled to call the President "the condescender-in-chief." (Spoiler alert: Obama triumphed by almost 10 million in the popular vote and by 190 electoral votes.) Perhaps she should change that to "Uppity-Negro-in-Chief"? That's what her epithet tells us she's thinking, anyway.

Finally, Lopez drags in centerfold-in-chief Scott Brown to make a point that can't be made because his proposals are so disconnected from reality. "The new senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, has introduced legislation that would return upwards of $80 billion in unused stimulus funds to taxpayers over six months, in the form of a payroll-tax cut," Lopez says.

There are a couple of problems with this idea.

The first is that the stimulus money isn't exactly sitting around somewhere waiting to be ladled out down at the corner bank. It's purely conceptual money until it actually is spent.

The second is that a tax cut will most likely go to either paying down personal debt or will be used randomly to purchase goods as likely as not produced in foreign countries, creating plenty of stimulus in those places. Targeted stimulus money creates jobs here, putting people back to work immediately and not waiting for the trickle down effect a tax cut promises. (Keep in mind that minutes after Brown was sworn in that he said the stimulus "hasn't created one new job." Not one? For spending $550 billion in direct aid plus a $275 billion tax cut - golly, Senator Brown, you really don't want to reconsider that statement?)

Third, let's mull over Lopez's touting of Brown's "Republican" proposal to cut taxes. It's as unfunded as the entire stimulus program is. So, the defense of Bunning's sclerotic stance via Scott Brown's muddled thinking is what? Just an exercise in liberal bashing, or a heartfelt "core value" of the party of No? You can't have it both ways, Lopez. Either you're for unfunded spending and tax cuts, or you're against them.

The NR describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for Republican/conservative news, commentary, and opinion."

Let the prairie chicken dance begin.

David Brooks Invents The History of The New Left. Thanks!

In today's New York Times, David Brooks, while conflating the Tea Party "tactics" with the "New Left's" mass movement activities, literally invents history. Makes it up. Creates facts from whole cloth and ignores the core of what the New Left was all about, where it came from. (Click for his opinion piece.)

The first thing that Brooks gets wrong (please let me keep my blood pressure in check) is the difference between an organic movement and an inorganic one, or in today's parlance "grass roots" vs. "astro-turf."

The New Left flowed from many, many previous currents in American political thought, while the Tea Party has been born of money provided by the likes of the Koch Energy Corporation and Exxon Mobil in the space of a few months, and is largely a racist response to America's first African American President.

The New Left finds its roots in the Progressive Movement of the 19th century, the Suffragette efforts of the early 20th century, is connected to New Deal philosophies, Ban the Bomb protests of the 1950s and early 60s, and the Anti-Segregation battles of the 60s.

The New Left began to flower politically out of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the mid 1960s, and came to full fruition during the Anti-Vietnam era. While they have since taken on a life of their own, parallel to New Left politics but not entirely apart from it, the Women's Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and the ongoing struggle for racial equality are part of the larger picture.

The New Left has also been a cultural movement through which entirely new modes of art, music, literature, architecture and cultural criticism came into being.

The New Left originally was largely a youth movement.

The New Left did not and does not despise government as a force in American society. What the New Left and its descendants and offshoots fight against are immoral, unjust or unfair features of society often created and perpetuated by government.

Unlike the right, the left does not want to dismantle government, it wants to improve it, even perfect it. Mr. Brooks must be bright enough to understand the distinction.

Were there excesses by factions associated with the New Left in its heyday? Certainly. Although significantly they were considered fringe elements by the mainstream New Left. The vast majority of protests were extremely peaceful. Some were disruptive, and a small handful were violent.

The reaction of authorities and of private citizens who were against the progressive ideas of the New Left were routinely violent and sometimes deadly. Whether it was the murder of children in a Birmingham church in 1963, the murder of innocent college students at Kent State and the murder of two students at Jackson State College in 1970, or the bloody police riots of 1968 in Chicago, the reaction was, to put it kindly, barbaric.

In retrospect, given that the Vietnam War, focal point of the New Left's outrage, ended up killing 3 to 4 million people needlessly, the efforts of the movement seem rather weak-kneed. 60,000 of our own soldiers were killed or left missing while 153,000 were wounded.

In 1967, 400,000 people marched against the war in New York. Two years later in 1969, millions of people in all parts of the country protested against the war. From 1967 through 1973, crowds of 100 to 200,000 routinely showed up in dozens of big cities, nationally and internationally. (Another point about the New Left is that it was actually the largest component of a movement that swept the whole of Western Civilization, particularly in 1968.)

The Tea Party gatherings routinely consist of crowds in the low thousands, and occasionally a crowd in the 20,000 to 25,000 range. It is not a mass movement, but a media phenomenon financed by corporate money that represents a fraction of a fraction of America's polity.

It has even gone so far as to phony up numbers and use "documentary" photos of other gatherings - most notably, ironically, of the Million Man March by African Americans in 1997 - to stretch their crowd counts, a sort of Hamburger Helper method for fringe movements. (See this analysis on PolitiFact.com.) Haven't they at least heard of Photoshop?

The Tea Party is composed mostly of older Americans. It is mostly white (another giveaway as to the racist nature of its thrust). It represents only the disgruntled middle to lower middle classes. (By contrast, the composition of the New Left is as diverse as a movement can grow.)

The Tea Party has no antecedents, unless one considers the John Birch Society and illegal citizen militias. It surely can't claim roots in Nixon's Silent Majority, which was indeed a majority and at the polling place not so silent after all. The Tea Party is more like a Vocal Mini-Minority.

The gravest distinction, which I rephrase from above, is that The Tea Party seeks to destroy government, whereas the New Left set out to eradicate genocidal policies in a pointless war, create true equal rights for all our citizens, and clean up the environment. (Sounds unsettlingly familiar to what the left seeks today, eh?)

The liberal/progressive agenda is, of course, both much broader and particularized now. At the heart of the movement lies a belief in government's potential for good, and the faith that the people can wring that good out of government.

The Tea Party gang, and much, if not the entire right wing, believes that all government is inherently evil and would return us to Thomas Hobbes's "war of all against all." You can see it in their faces. Read it in their foul posters. Hear it in the hoarse shouts of people who have stopped believing in their country.

The Kids Are So Alright - The Millennials, The New Liberals

Listen to: Teach Your Children by CSN&Y

The first "always connected" generation is also now officially the most liberal generation, according to Pew Research in a survey conducted at the end of 2009. This is the Millennial cadre born between 1980 and 1992; in other words, today's 18-29 year-olds, the young adults.

Millennials cast a wary eye on human nature. Two-thirds say "you can't be too careful" when dealing with people. This may be due to a host of factors, among them the subtler effects of 9/11. Although, as seen below, Millennials think more poorly of their peers than their elders when it comes to morality.

Yet they are less skeptical than their elders of government. More so than other generations, they believe government should do more to solve problems.

Millennials remain the most likely of any generation to self-identify as liberals, and are less supportive than their elders of an assertive national security policy and more supportive of a progressive domestic social agenda. 

Though they are still more likely than any other age group to identify as Democrats, by early 2010, their support for Obama and the Democrats has receded, as evidenced both by survey data and by their low level of participation in recent off-year and special elections.


This is a note of particular concern for liberal parents, grandparents and older siblings. Research we did did for a get-out-the-vote project in 2008 shows that if a person votes for the same party in his or her first three elections, they will most likely vote that way for their entire lives. Urge the young people to stay involved in the political process.


They are the least overtly religious American generation in modern times. One-in-four are unaffiliated with any religion, far more than the share of older adults when they were ages 18 to 29. Numerous church scandals, whether they be about child abuse or financial irregularities, seem to have left a lasting impression on the Millennials. Yet they pray about as often as previous generations.

Millennials are on course to become the most educated generation in American history.

This may be one of the happier effects of the Great Republican Recession (Not to be confused with the Great Republican Depression of the 1930s.) Millions of 20-somethings are enrolled in graduate schools, colleges or community colleges in part because they can't find a job. Among 18-to-24 year-olds 39.6% were enrolled in college as of 2008, according to census data.(This is up from 24% in 1973.)

Despite the higher costs of four-year institutions, their enrollments have not dropped during this recession. Rather, they have held steady - and have been able to do so despite tuition increases averaging 4.9% per year beyond general inflation from 1999-2000 to 2009-10 at public four-year colleges and universities (College Board, 2009).

A disturbing note is that college enrollment for men is actually falling in the Millennial group, and the decline is almost totally attributable to low enrollment rates of male Blacks and Hispanics.

Millennials report having had fewer spats with mom or dad than older adults say they had with their own parents when they were growing up.

A majority say that the older generation is superior to the younger generation when it comes to moral values and work ethic. (Perhaps they haven't been in the workforce long enough to see the truth about the latter!)

The generation is less white: 61% to be exact, versus 70% for the over 30 crowd. (Blacks account for 14% of Millennials, Hispanics 19%, Asian for 5% vs. 11, 13 and 5% for the over-30s.)

Eventually the Millennials, once the standard 18-year-long generation grows into adulthood, will represent the largest population cadre ever in the United States, larger than even the Baby Boomers by a few million souls.

These statistics, especially the education numbers, bode well for us as a nation. The attitudes and values the Millennials are embracing bodes particularly well for liberalism, although that liberalism still needs to be nursed into full maturity.

Food Fights and Political Philosophy

Misinformation followed us like a plague.

   - Paul Simon, Peace Like a River

Two seemingly distinct issues about the food we eat demonstrate how the radical, minimalist approach to government espoused by the dangerous rightists adrift in the land cause direct harm to us, the eating public.The radical right would like even less government involvement in food safety and purity just at a time when we need more. Much, much more.

The first issue concerns the soft drink sugar tax working its way through New York State's Legislature. The second is a report from Pew Charitable Research that totals up the economic impact of food-borne diseases, a shocking $152 billion per year.

I came across this article in Advertising Age on Wednesday (March3). It clearly stakes out the positions of the Alliance For A Healthier New York (pro) and the American Beverage Association (con, surprise).

"Sugar-sweetened beverages play a significant role in New York's obesity epidemic," Lisa Altshuler said in a statement from the alliance. "This campaign is about sending a message that by adding a small excise tax on soda and other sugary drinks, we can reduce consumption of these empty calories and make real progress towards making all New Yorkers healthier."

The penny-per-ounce tax will be put against threatened health care cuts on the table due to the recession. Makes sense.

"New Yorkers aren't buying at all that this tax has anything to do with public health, nor that a penny of it will go to health programs," said Kevin Keane, senior VP-public affairs at the American Beverage Association. He goes on to contend that "People view it as an overreach when government uses the tax code to tell them what to eat or drink."

But what Mr. Keane is really arguing for is the rights of the industry he represents to continue to slowly and sadistically poison our children with sugar. No one needs reminding that the childhood obesity rate in the country is of epidemic proportions. The general rate for kids is about 15% and for poor children an astronomical 40%. The beverage industry then is victimizing the least informed among us, and those who most need healthier foods in their diets.

If the beverage industry came out with self-governing rules mandating warnings broadcast in the media, or voluntarily placed warning labels on bottles, he might have a very small case. But they don't and he doesn't.

The fact is that the government - which means all of us - has a vested interest in better health.

The FDA is responsible for monitoring food safety. Its budget for 2010 is around $3 billion. Yet society incurs $152 billion yearly in costs related to tainted foods. (See US News Report on the Pew findings by clicking here.)

One would think that until the efficacy of the FDA increases enough to come close to eradicating tainted food, that its budget should increase. However, our old friends, the lobbyists, funded by agribusiness, supermarket chains, mass meat producers and fast food chains, lean hard on politicians, from the federal government on down to the most local level.

(Keep in mind that the FDA also monitors drug and supplement safety. So, we can factor in another enormous set of costs being passed onto society through egregiously poor oversight. There are fewer than 8,000 FDA inspectors on the job.)

Every year 76 million Americans are sickened by impurities in food. Thousands die. Hundreds of thousands miss work. Billions are spent on medical treatment.

During the past 35 years, the decrease in funding for inspection of our food supply has forced FDA to impose a 78 percent reduction in food inspections, at a time when the food industry has been rapidly expanding and food importation has exponentially increased. FDA estimates that, at most, it inspects food manufacturers once every 10 years.
      - 2007 Food and Drug Administration subcommittee report

This has been due to a radical ideological shift right from the 1970s when the FDA was one of the MOST trusted government departments (81%) to today when it is one of the least trusted (at 36%).

The most persistent line of attack was concisely expressed by Newt Gingrich, who dubbed the FDA the "number-one job killer in America." This is misinformation of the most despicable kind.

Let us say for a moment that the $152 billion in economic impact could somehow be translated directly into jobs. $152 billion would represent 2.5 million jobs per year at the above-average pay of $60,000 per year. I'm not enough of an economist to project what $152 billion dollars over ten years (a total of $1.5 trillion) would do if it were invested in infrastructure, research, green energy, or education, but I am sure the multiplier effect would be spectacular. 

There are some real consequences of right wing radicalism. But people keep voting for these most monstrous of human beings.

Guns and Judges

Link to LA Times Article Concerning The Supreme Court and the Lifting of Gun Control Nationally

There is a vast problem with the interpretation of law in our land and the current Supreme Court is leading the charge to the rear. Sometime in the next 6 weeks, they will vote to allow a revolutionary loosening of state and local gun carry laws. Some of these restrictions have been in place since the Civil War. Most date to the 1920s into mid 20th century America when guns became commodities in the eyes of the murder-mongering makers of firearms.

There is no commonsensical reason to allow this. And the fundamentalist law upon which you can be sure the Court will base its decision is shaky in the best of circumstances. In a nutshell, the 2nd Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights for a few understandable, if now outmoded, reasons.

First, to maintain a well-regulated (state) militia to countervail any future strength of the national government. Thus, keeping arms was a civic obligation rather than a "personal right." No attendant obligation adheres today, just the ghost of the Outlaw Josey Wales.

Second, guns legitimately used for hunting purposes.

Third, guns used in self-defense, which in the immediate post-colonial period usually meant against Native American Indians, highwaymen, or the specter of resurgent Tories based in Canada.

Fourth, there was an anti-royal, anti-establishment sentiment embedded in the 2nd Amendment. In England, and all of absolutist Europe, there was a fear of "the commoner" owning arms because revolution would be a constant threat. Paranoia - well-founded as it turned out in the case of the War of 1812 -  was rampant. American citizens knew it was much easier for all the king's men to deal with pitchforks and wooden staves than with muskets.

Moreover, the bearing of arms was seen as a professional right back in Europe, a guild if you will, and the tools of that trade were weapons. Other guilds and professions were just as jealous of their right to, say, keep and bear hammer and anvil, or grinding mills, or bread ovens, or amputation saws. The spirit of freedom in America was to be a leveler and keeping guns was part of this process.

Finally, even in America's biggest cities there was no effective police force until the late 19th century.

We live in a different age now than the one that spawned the 2nd Amendment.

You wouldn't think of strapping on a cutlass to go waltzing into the local Stop N Shop, would you? Or carrying a net and trident when picking the kids up from little league practice? Alas, if the central power of the federal government is the issue, we might expect that citizens should be permitted the flying of Stealth fighters above Scarsdale, or ownership of unmanned drones at their summer cottages on Lake Placid. You know, just in case health reform passes and the government has to be slapped down.

Hunting seems to be a settled issue. Humaneness and safety have to be kept by steady vigilance, but hunting is on the books as an accepted arena for guns.

So, that leaves crime prevention and self-protection.

The risk of being murdered is by far highest in the South (high gun ownership rates), moderately high in the Southwest (high gun ownership rates), and lowest in the North (low gun ownership rates). Poor Americans experience the highest murder rate, but even middle-class and affluent Americans run a much greater risk of being murdered than do people in other affluent democracies. Such high homicide numbers today make it hard to believe that America’s homicide rate was once the lowest in the Western world.

Ironically, although the Supreme Court can't seem to get it into their law-thickened puddings, the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest gun death rates.

These are, from lowest: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

The states with the highest gun death rates are: Alaska, Louisiana, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Mississippi.

An anomaly lies in two New England states, Vermont and New Hampshire, which have very loose gun control laws AND low gun death rates. However, it should be noted that neither has a major city within its borders. Similar anomalies lie in north central farm states such as North Dakota.

The Supreme Court, though, seems to ignore the very visceral effects of gun control laxness. New York City, after all, is not Rapid City. The idea that open carry permits could be issued to all 6 million adults in the 5 boroughs would be cause for knee slapping if the possibility weren't about to become reality through the reliance on effete theory the Court seems hellbent upon.

As Voltaire said, "Common sense isn't so common." The lack of horse sense is particularly irksome coming from men on the bench who actually believe they are well-educated when, in fact, they know next to nothing about the way real human beings live and want to live. They might as well be disputing the number of angels that can fit on the firing pin of a gun.

In case you want your meal in fact-filled bites, chew on this: gunshot wounds cost the American financial system about $6 billion per year. 67% of the cost is borne by either taxpayer money or private insurance, which is a cost spread among us. (About $4 billion per year, or $13 for every man, woman and child.)

I leave you with this thought from Oliver Twist, the core quote of which is well known:


“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.”

Don't Go Near The Water - Pollution and Natural Rights

Watch: Don't Go Near The Water by the Beach Boys (1971)

Think quickly: to whom do public waterways, lakes, wetlands, and ponds truly belong?

Nominally they belong to the famously elusive “We the people.” Federal, state, county and municipal governments own millions of square miles of waterways; that is to say, we own them collectively. Private individuals "own" hundreds of thousands more waterways. Corporations "own" yet others. But, only the people can truly own such a resource.

Some waters are useful for drinking, some for recreation, others for aesthetic reasons. But all fit into an overall ecosystem that provides each of us with a safe, “big picture” environment.

Healthful drinking, bathing, cooking, and swimming; safe fishing and hunting; visual delight, and overall good health are collective, natural rights of all human beings.

Currently, arguments that wended their way through the Supreme Court over 5 or more years ago quibble about the phrase “navigable waters,” and have left gaping holes in the EPA’s jurisdiction over polluters of various states.

For nigh unto 40 years, “navigable waters” was correctly interpreted by regulators and courts so as to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers, and thence to the oceans. Essentially all waters were covered throughout the country. Polluters, essentially misguided, greedy misers, challenged that idea.

The two Supreme Court decisions suggested that waterways entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes “unconnected” to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters” and are therefore not covered by the act — even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water well beyond artificial state borders. Everything is connected and the Earth is small.

If pollutants make their way into drinking water, you can bet your last dollar they are making their way into fish, animals, and crops, and thence into your and your children’s fatty tissue, creating the perfect medium for cancers and other illnesses.

By what right do polluters act in such irresponsible ways? Simple. They hold to property rights as described by antique thinkers from Locke and Madison to Hegel, and finally to today’s radical libertarians. The writings of these mindless property advocates has to be discarded now and forever, and the stronger notion of the common wealth has to replace their destructive philosophies.

Polluters may be industries that dump everything from radioactive materials to heavy metals like zinc, copper, chromium, cadmium, etc., into our collective waters. The polluters may be cities and towns that do not properly treat sewage and storm runoff from roads. Untreated insecticides, paint, solvents, spilled motor oil and gasoline, bacteria and pathogens wash into our ground water, into streams and rivers and eventually into drinking water supplies.

Farms, even “organic” farms, contribute mightily to the problem. Food factories – pig and chicken farming, in particular – discharge antibiotics and hormones. Manure fouls groundwater supplies and now washes 60 percent more nitrogen into waterways than it did in the '70s, creating 230 dead zones like those in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

But, because of the absurd theories offered by polluters, namely that ground water or waters contained within one state are not covered by the clean water efforts of the federal government, the EPA finds itself not able to mount costly counter arguments to establish prosecutorial jurisdiction against polluters in the individual states. 

The Supreme Court right wingers, stuck in backwards notions of 18^th and 19^th century property rights, acting fittingly like chickens with their heads cut off, ignore the intent of the clean water legislation of the last four decades and commit instead to polluters. 

Just who has the right to water? 

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”

Remains of Senator With Integrity Discovered In Washington Rubble

The unidentified Senator appears to be from another age altogether. Senate historians disagree as to whether the remains are those of Daniel Webster, Wayne Morse, Arthur Vandenburg, Thaddeus Stevens, Hubert Humphrey, Everett Dirkson, or even Robert La Follette.  

Listen to: Tales Of Brave Ulysses - hint as to who the face really belongs to.

So, What IS Terrorism?

When Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin and his manifesto was published, I admit my knee jerked and I said "terrorist" to myself. Well, truth be told, I said "right wing terrorist."

His political jeremiad aside, I now think Stack is not a terrorist at all as we understand the word in the 21st century. He sort of shared similar beliefs with some already identified terrorists and he acted a lot like terrorists generally do. In this case, though, Stack doesn't pass the smell test. 

Aside from the people who were victimized by him (and their family and friends) and the extensive property damage, does anyone feel exactly terrorized by his act? I would venture that the answer is a firm "maybe" verging toward a soft "no." There are good reasons for this.

First, we know that there will eternally be lone nuts out there ready to act horrifically who are motivated by a variety of beliefs and impulses, some political, some personal, occasionally a blend of the two as was the case with Stack. (There are, as well, psychopaths for whom reason is never in season. There is also the terror of organized crime and drug cartels, other castes altogether.)

Second, Stack's sense of personal victimization at the hands of government clearly shoved him into what he considered "political" beliefs. If the IRS had magically dropped its case against him, his plane would still be on a runway ready to whisk him to his next contract job. If Stack had remained relatively prosperous and still developed a theory of social inequity - a la Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and even Lenin and Trotsky - then we might be able to view his acts as political. 

Third, there is no Stackian Liberation Army lurking about, ready to strike again. Might there be other radical tax protesters willing to act? Possibly. These are very edgy times. But you can be sure such radicals didn't train with Stack, nor read polemics by Stack, or congregate in a radical, anti-tax madrassa established and funded by Stack or shadowy associates.

At least in my book terrorism has to have three components. There has to be a group. The group has to have an ideology or defined political goal, not just a set of personal gripes. The effort to terrorize has to be ongoing, concerted and somewhat consistent, if not constant. 

I think of our current battle with Islamist extremists as fitting the bill. And the OK City bombing. The French Reign of Terror. The terror that Japan inflicted on Korea and Manchuria. The Holocaust. Stalin's collectivization terror. Our own terrorism against Native Americans. The Killing Fields of Cambodia. The Algerian uprising against Franch colonialism. The Irish campaigns against the British (and vice versa). I cite these not because of the scale of terror, but rather because in each case they were performed by a cohesive group with a set ideology or goal and were carried out over some period of time.

People were terrified. 

As the old blues saying goes: "When Jesus gets you, that's a church song. When the Devil gets you, that's the blues."

And you know it.

The Cost of War Rolls On... and On

Since this blog was begun on January 22, 2010, America has spent another $10 billion on the twin wars in Asia. That's in just 32 days. Or $312,500,000 per DAY. One dollar a day from each of us. (Click here for the "War Cost Clock" and see how much your state and local contribution has been.)

SEE VIDEO BELOW:UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

Meanwhile, much ado is made of Scott Brown and a handful of other "moderate" Republicans voting for closure on a skimpy $15 billion jobs bill. This is the country we want? Say it ain't so.

Young men and women dying, our debt going through the ceiling, and a need to create 22 million jobs by 2013 just to get us back to the employment rate we enjoyed we late 2006...

Marketing Environmentalism 3 - The Pitfall of Apocalypticism

Even Sir Isaac Newton succumbed to end-of-the-world speculation. Based on biblical  research, he predicted it would come in the year 2060. Who can forget the weirdness of Y2K? Recently we have been exposed to the ruckus over the Mayan calendar's 2012 doomsday scenario. Global warming champions exemplify another, if subtler, form of this syndrome. 

We have met the enemy and he is our apocalyptic self.

Perfectly well-intentioned proponents of the Global Warming Theory have fallen prey to this pseudo-religious fervor that never seems to entirely disappear from human thinking. Whether global warming is real (which it is) is not material to our well being in the here and now. There are more concrete, existential threats on our doorstep at this very moment and apocalyptic thinking is destroying our chances to do something about them today, tomorrow, next week.

This morning the American Heart Association reaffirmed its stand on the correlation between excess deaths from heart and arterial disease and air pollution. Click for the statement. 

It says, among other things, that air pollution: "is a serious public health problem because an enormous number of people are exposed over an entire lifetime," and "epidemiological studies conducted worldwide have shown a consistent, increased risk for cardiovascular events, including heart and stroke deaths, in relation to short- and long-term exposure to present-day concentrations of pollution, especially particulate matter."

In April of 2009, Aruni Bhatnagar of the University of Louisville and Robert Brook of the University of Michigan organized a symposium, Environmental Factors in Heart Disease, at the Experimental Biology conference in New Orleans.

Among the deeply disturbing findings they and other participants in the conference presented:

• A study of six U.S. cities found that people died earlier when they lived in cities with higher pollution levels. A majority of these deaths were due to heart disease.
• A study of 250 metropolitan areas around the world found a spike in air pollution is followed by a spike in heart attacks. 
• A study in Salt Lake City found that when a nearby steel mill shut down for a period of months, there was a 4-6% drop in mortality. The mortality rose to previous levels when the steel mill reopened. 
• The risk of heart attack increases in parallel with time spent in traffic the previous day. 
• Within 15 minutes of inhaling pollutants, there is a very rapid increase in blood pressure.
• Aldehydes increase blood cholesterol levels and activate enzymes that cause plaque in the blood vessels to rupture. (Aldehydes are a toxic class of chemicals found in most forms of smoke, including cigarette smoke and car exhaust.)

Some epidemiologists believe that upwards of 1,000,000 excess deaths per year in the United States are caused by fine particulate matter alone.

We are also certain of the role that air borne pollution plays in the astronomical rise in contemporary asthma rates, especially in inner cities around the world. Direct yearly costs of asthma in the U.S. accounts for nearly $10 billion (hospitalizations the single largest portion of direct cost) and indirect costs of $8 billion (lost earnings due to illness or death).  

We are not certain of air pollution's effect on autism rates, depression due to circulatory and chemical issues, or the effect on those with pneumonia and otherwise relatively benign (in the developed world) pulmonary afflictions. Although the accusing epidemiological finger is pointing more directly at pollution.

So, we may battle over global warming, Left against Right, all we want. Meanwhile millions worldwide are dying prematurely, suffering with chronic conditions, or leading miserable material lives because of pollution. 

Focusing so much activist energy on global warming is a disaster. It allows us to say we MUST solve this enormous problem but "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," while in fact we do nothing. It allows the badly informed to indulge in thinking that leads them to dismiss the basically sound science of global warming. It allows those so inclined to pray to God, shrug their shoulders, and think of the afterlife. After all, life on earth is supposed to be a vail of tears, isn't it?

Think Local, Ummm… Think Narrow?

(See video at end of post)

On February 18, the New York Times published a profile of urban sociologist, Sharon Zukin, a professor at Brooklyn College. (link) As many of us do, Professor Zukin decries the passing of neighborhoods with special charm and character. But Zukin is wrong; they have not passed. They have moved to northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and countless neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

From what the Times says of Zukin, one would think that the entire swath of the five boroughs has descended into an 8 million person shopping mall more worthy of Phoenix than the Northeast. What seems closer to reality is that the likes of Zukin keep their middle-class binoculars focused on the old ethnic enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn that were made up largely of white ethnic groups. 

To cite one "colorful" ethnic group - Italian Americans - not very long ago, there were about 2 million people of Italian descent living in the 5 boroughs. Now there are about 625,000. (However, there are 3.3 million Italians living in the overall metro area.) To greater or lesser degrees, this holds true for the Jewish, Irish, German and Slavic populations. Of course their descendants are living in New York City, but they are more homogenized, less colorful and thus less able to lend their old neighborhoods ethnic flavor. As a coda, in the last census estimates, fewer than 100,000 people living in Manhattan identified themselves as Italian-American.

Yet we know that there are ethnic groups abounding in the great metropolis.

New Yorkers speak 170 languages in their homes and there are about 275 ethnic newspapers and magazines published here in 40 or so different languages. The striving, struggling and dreaming goes on, just not in the narrow confines of the Village, Soho or Noho, or formerly German/Slavic Yorkville on the Upper East Side. But, from what The Times says of Zukin's point of view, one would think that the entire swath of the five boroughs has descended into an 8 million person shopping mall more worthy of Phoenix than the Northeast. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

A visit to most of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and especially Queens - the most ethnically diverse county in the country - will confirm this. Ya want ethnic flavor? Get out of town!

Behind the picturesqueness or lack of same, however, comes a portrait of the new ethnic individual, however. A majority are working class, but they are not employed in manufacturing since New York's factory world has been disintegrating since World War II. Now there are less than 100,000 manufacturing jobs here, a loss of 1,000,000 since 1942.

The European-American, hearty lunch-pail image of the New York that we know so well from movies like On The Waterfront and The Naked City is gone for the foreseeable future. 

30% of people with less than a high school diploma who are employed at all, work in manufacturing. The remaining low skill workers toil in the food service industry, retail, and menial labor jobs. Since manufacturing jobs traditionally pay more than those other categories, this does not bode well for us. The difference, once upon a time, between a white collar professional and a skilled blue collar worker was largely a matter of luxury income. Now the chasms are gargantuan. (The blue collar workers of the building trades, and the light blue collar telecommunications and health care fields somewhat ameliorate the situation.)

Is the flavor of Manhattan below 110th Street becoming Walmarted? It surely is. Can that be governed? Probably not. The chaining of America is not a micro, but rather a macro trend.

To recreate the faded industrial era, one would have to bring back the garment industry that once made 70% of all women's and 40% of all men's clothing in the country. Or bring back the dozen and a half big breweries from Rupert's to Rhiengold's to Lion's. Or the slaughterhouse and meat packing business. And shipbuilding, brick making and railroad tie making.