Final Thoughts for Now

This is the final installment of this blog for now. I found the process of writing it very helpful in terms of reaching a new place in my thinking. Other commitments, unfortunately, do not leave me the time to continue. I do hope to get back to it some day. Here are two final thoughts.

1) The fundamental problem with our democracy is that the citizens have allowed paid operatives to speak for them. These paid operatives are motivated by their need to make a living, not by the needs of the citizens they pretend to serve. They buy and sell anger and mistrust. We can't sit back and allow them to dominate our conversations. 

I'll give my favorite example: Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council. He happens to be part of the right-wing propaganda machine, but I'm sure my Republican friends can provide examples of left-wing operatives. Tony Perkins spent four years representing Louisiana in the U.S. House of Representatives. From there he moved on to lobbying, by getting hired to head the Family Research Council.  He now makes a handsome living recruiting conservative Christians for the Republican Party. He totally mis-represents the positions of those, like me, who disagree with him. He is a person with whom I can have no political conversation. Neither can I have a conversation with anybody who makes use of his talking points. 

I attended two family reunions this summer where individuals of very diverse political orientations were represented. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that we could have constituted an effective congress. We may not have been able to reach agreement, but we would have ended the conversation respecting each other's opinions.

2) Global warming is taking place. The struggle against it will be the great struggle of the generations immediately following the baby boom generation. The situation today vis-a-vis the pending catastrophe of global warming is similar to that of the late 1930s vis-a-vis the pending catastrophe of World War II.  Like WWII, it seems that it will require a Pearl Harbor type incident to bring the Americans into the war. And like World War II, the future climate war has the potential to heal our economy. The sorrow is that our political system is incapable of engaging that struggle now, before the great turmoil begins.

Renewable Energy Means Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

The following is taken from an editorial published by the Plain Dealer written by Myles Murray, a doctoral candidate at Case Western Reserve University's Solar Durability Lifetime Extension Center:

"Recently, a world record was broken during two unseasonably sunny days in Germany when solar power generation provided as much electricity as 20 nuclear power plants running at full capacity. This remarkable event has been generally over-looked by both regional and national media and policy-makers. This solar-power generation accounted for 30 percent of total German electricity consumption on May 26 and 50 percent on the following day. This is a truly remarkable feat, especially considering that Germany gets 30 percent less sunshine than we do here in Cleveland, and less than half of that in many places in our country."

I'll take this opportunity to recommend a book: The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, by Jeremy Rifkin. To be honest, this was not a fascinating read.  But the fundamental idea is vital to understanding where we are in terms of energy policy.  1) Carbon based fuels are in the process of being phased out.  It is already happening and not because of the environmental movement. It is happening because a billion Chinese and a billion Indians are becoming part of the industrial world. I heard a gentleman on the radio telling how 10 or 20 years ago, the Chinese built an 8-lane outer-ring highway around one of their major cities. The first few years there was only a trickle of cars. Today, the highway is bustling. The rural masses of China and India are getting industrial jobs and buying cars and using electricity. The cost of carbon-based fuel will inevitably become more expensive than the cost of renewables. 2) The transformation to renewables will bring about a return to full employment. One of the arguments now against renewables is that the infrastructure is lacking. But if you look at it differently, this problem is our great opportunity. The building of the lacking infrastructure will bring about full employment. Today our government and our country are investing in expensive, and very dirty forms of carbon fuels: digging up forests to get at the tar sands, blasting to pieces the underground shale to release natural gas, blowing mountains apart to access coal. The number of new jobs created is minimal, since the goal of those industries is to make big profits while minimizing investment. The Tar Sands of Alberta are a typical example. The forest is destroyed and the tar sands turned into a sludge. Then the sludge is piped to already existing refineries in places like Louisiana. When petroleum was a new concept, in the 1920s, its development created jobs across the economy. Refineries were being built. Scientists were employed developing new products based on petroleum. The car industry was developed, which in turn spurred the growth of the steel industry. The same will happen when we finally move our investment to renewables. New industries will spring up everywhere, and if it is managed right many of those industries can be new family businesses. Imagine companies installing solar panels on homes. Electricians working on the electric grid. Scientists and technicians perfecting the solar panel technology.
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Secret Campaign Spending in Wisconsin

The June 5 Wisconsin Recall Election was a sobering illustration of the role of money under the current election regime. I’ve copied an interesting excerpt from Democracy Now, June 27, 2012, featuring two contributors to Mother Goose Magazine: Andy Kroll and Monika Bauerlein.


The major issues of interest to me: 1) State politics has increasingly given way to national politics. Most of the money pouring into the Wisconsin election came from outside of the state. This is a national pattern of grave consequence. 2.) Almost all of the money is spent on television, which requires us to consider what it means when the role of the citizen is reduced to evaluating television. 3) The money being spent by the extremely wealthy is not, in general, very much for them. In 2011, Koch industries is said to have had an annual revenue of just under $100,000,000,000.  If they give .1% of that to a political campaign, that would be 100 milliion, more than was spent on the entire Wisconsin recall election by both sides. If the average American citizen has a revenue of $50,000 and gives .1%, that would be $50.

The interview below can be seen online at: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/27/dark_money_inside_the_final_frontier

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s stick with the Wisconsin recall election earlier this month, the most expensive in the state’s history, with more than $63 million spent. Governor Walker, who survived the recall, outspent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett seven to one, close to eight to one. I want to turn to an ad that was bankrolled by this secretive Virginia-based organization called the Coalition for American Values.

KAREN: I didn’t vote for Governor Walker.
LINDA: I did not vote for Scott Walker.
TIM: I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, Joel, but I’m definitely against this recall.
JIM: Recall isn’t the Wisconsin way.
KAREN: There’s a right way. There’s a wrong way. And I just—I think this is the wrong way.
JIM: I elected him to do a job.
BOB: Let him serve it out.
BOB: Living in a democracy, you have to have faith in who the people elect.
CHAD: I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, but I’m against the recall.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is an ingenious ad, because I’m sure they did some kind of focus groups or polling, and they saw that Walker was not popular in Wisconsin. But they realized they could raise the issue of the recall being undemocratic. You know, there was an election, someone was elected, let him serve out his time. Andy Kroll, talk about who it was that bankrolled this.
ANDY KROLL: I wish I could tell you exactly who it was, because I—but I still don’t know. The group behind it was called the Coalition of American Values, which it does really not get more generic than, I guess, Americans for a Better America. What I found—so this ad comes out. As you mentioned, it really does have a potent message. And in retrospect, you know, or in hindsight, we now know that it was incredibly potent, because exit polls showed that a lot of the people who voted for Walker were really voting—you know, were voting on discontent over the recall itself. So, I start digging into this group, find that their address in Milwaukee, in the state, is a mailbox, essentially, and that their office—they have another office in Virginia, and that’s a UPS store box. And so, there is no home address or home office. The treasurer, as far as I could tell, and we could never actually pin this down, was a gentleman named Brent Downs, who appeared to be a recent graduate of a university in Milwaukee, didn’t answer phone calls, didn’t reply to emails.
And what brought them to my attention was not only were they running this ad and spending six figures on this ad around the state, they had not filed a single report with a state disclosing their spending. I mean, it’s one thing to just funnel money through an incorporation—an incorporated entity in Virginia into Milwaukee, into Wisconsin, and not tell us where your money came from, and they can legally do that with the weird way that campaign finance law works in Wisconsin post-Citizens United, but we also had no idea what they were spending. And I raised this with the elections watchdog in Wisconsin. And not only had this group not disclosed its donors, but they had not even filed a report on their spending, as required. This is what brought them to my attention before the election. They said they were going to fix it. They still hadn’t.
And so, what you—you know, the takeaway here is you have Wisconsinites who are completely in the dark about a group called the Coalition for American Values, running ads in their state, telling them that this recall is bad; not only do they not know who the donors are, based on our tattered campaign finance system, but they also don’t know how much this group is spending, really, and where, as the group is required to disclose. And so, it was just a—it was a really, really disturbing glimpse into how dark money can come into a state election and put out this message, and surely have an impact on voters, and keep those same voters entirely in the dark about how much is being spent, who’s spending it, and just who the heck is behind this group in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, reporter for Mother Jones magazine, and co-editor Monika Bauerlein. Andy’s new cover story is called "Follow the [Dark] Money." We’ll continue our conversation after break.

There is presently an act in congress, the Disclose Act, that would require that the the true and complete identity of the authors of political ads be made readily available to the public.  Our congress has so far refused to pass it.

Can We Compare the U.S. Government to the Catholic Church?

At the City Club of Cleveland, Peter Borre, Co-Chairman of the Council of Parishes, discussed how the Catholic Church responded to its financial crisis with austerity.

The Catholic Church’s financial crisis originated with the clergy sex abuse scandal. It is estimated that over the past 15 years, the Church has paid out between 3 and 4 billion dollars. This has devastated the dioceses of Boston, Cleveland, and appears currently to be hitting Philadelphia.

Given a major cash shortage, there are two logical ways to respond. The first alternative is to engage in austerity. You can reduce your expenses by downsizing. The second alternative is make up the cash shortage in some way: taxes can be raised, donations solicited or loans taken out. The American Church, under its American leadership, has chosen austerity. In Cleveland, the Church leadership chose to close 12 local parishes.

The United States government has also chosen austerity, as has Great Britain and the European Union. Responding to a financial crisis by reducing expenditures leads to the reduction of income, which leads to more reduction of expenditures. It’s a downward spiral. As the old saying goes: "You have to spend money to make money."

Why did the Church choose austerity? Here we must distinguish between the truth and the propaganda of the leadership.  The leadership pointed to demographics, the shortage of priests and the shortage of cash. According to Borre, however, the demographic argument is simply false. There has not been a decrease in the population served by the 12 parishes. As for the inability to recruit new priests and the shortage of cash, they are both the result of the corruption of the current leadership.

What could we expect from an assertive, positive, talented leadership, responsive to the needs and wishes of its membership?  Instead of seeing decline as inevitable, it would see that the demographics are positive and that the replacement of the current leadership with a new leadership committed to growth would bring about a dramatic influx of donations and a dramatic improvement in its ability to recruit priests.

Can we compare the U.S. government to the Catholic Church? Yes and no. Today, the United States, and much of the world, are suffering from a financial crisis brought about by the mismanagement of its leaders. Our political leaders have sided with the corporate power brokers of our political and financial systems and present austerity as a moral positive. In the same way that the Catholic Bishops put their religious careers ahead of the interests of the Church, we have a political leadership which puts the winning of elections ahead of the needs of the country. What is needed in both cases is a new leadership, responsive to the needs of its members and citizens.

The case of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland provides some grounds for optimism.  The Vatican has responded to the outrage of the people by ordering that the 12 closed Cleveland parishes be reopened. According to Borre, this response is unprecedented in the history of the American Catholic Church and is clearly meant to send a message condemning the American Church leadership. So chalk one up for the citizens, in opposition to corrupt leadership.

Unfortunately, passion for political change in America seems limited to the fringes: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The great majority of Americans are watching politics on television, rooting for their team, disappointed in how poorly they are playing, but a win is a win.

Beyond the Two Political Parties

Since it began a little over a year ago, the perspective of this blog has changed.  In the beginning, it was motivated by a very belated, sudden realization of how bad the Republican Party had become. Before I first realized it, this had already been the case for a number of years. It was like I had been asleep, thinking the Republicans were still a political party which independent, fair-minded people could and should consider voting for. Even if I didn’t agree with many of his policies, Ronald Reagan deserved my respect as a citizen and a patriot. George W. Bush, on the other hand, and the entire Republican Party today, are not citizens, but political operatives guided by an agenda which has proven to be extremely marketable, but which their own voters would not support if they truly understood it. This is still my conclusion and a very important part of what I do in this blog. What has changed, however, is that I no longer believe that the Democratic Party can be counted on to defend us against that agenda.

Republican propaganda is based on a simple notion: “government” is bad. Their use of the word “government” is intentionally vague, but I think it fair to say that what is being attacked is the modern welfare state: the notion that the state should “assume primary responsibility for the welfare of citizens” (American Heritage Dictionary).  The major achievements of the welfare state include such things as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but it also includes unemployment insurance, public education, firemen, policemen, disaster relief, protection for the environment, public works, assistance to certain key industries and, of course, direct assistance to the destitute, which is only a very tiny fraction of what the government does. Republican propaganda puts forth a plethora of theories, which my Republican friends espouse, supporting the notion that the people would be better off with greatly reduced government. Underlying it all is the idea that the welfare state is wasteful and that it transfers money from those who work towards those who don’t. Anger over this is what drives their voters to the polls.

Like the Republicans, the Democrats are political operatives, but they do not meet the anti-government passion with pro-government passion. It’s like the modern corporation which buys a traditional product label hoping to retain the customers of the old product while appealing to new customers unfamiliar with it. The Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama makes use of the Democratic label of the Progressives, FDR and LBJ, but it doesn’t seem to believe the old product is marketable. Indeed, it frequently reaches across the aisle to integrate Republican propaganda into its messaging. Someone has told them that “reaching across the aisle” contrasts nicely with the anger driving the Republican voters and is therefore, itself, very marketable.

In his autobiographical book on his years in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich tells how Clinton used political marketing experts to decide whether to sign welfare reform and to support an increase in the minimum wage. Similarly, we see Obama waffling around issues such as approving the Keystone XL pipeline until it becomes clear which position will be the easiest to sell. For passionate liberals, the Keystone XL pipeline debate is whether we should be exploiting the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels in the history of the world. For Obama, it is about distancing himself from any discussion of global warming, without losing the support of his base.

If you want to read a powerful, and passionate defense of liberalism and the welfare state, I recommend Jimmy Carter’s indictment of the George W. Bush administration: Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (2006). When he was elected in 1976, I considered Jimmy Carter to be only moderately liberal, but the contrast between the passion of Carter and the embarrassment of Clinton/Obama is remarkable.

So, today my blogs tend to be of two types. In the first type, I explain why no one in their right mind would ever vote for a Republican. But in the second type, I leave that completely aside, because many people who are passionate Republicans suddenly start passionately agreeing with me when I say that both parties have betrayed the American people. The future lies in a movement of the people which will reform the political system.

Taking Care of My Garden

In Candide, Voltaire, French eighteenth-century author, tells of a naive young man who is required to travel the world due to unfortunate circumstances.  He was raised with the optimistic premise that human beings are governed by their common sense. But as he travels the world he constantly sees things that just make no sense.  Principles, which proclaim to serve the good of all, obviously serve only the few, or in some cases lead to the doom of all. When he asks why people would behave in a manner which is causing pain and sorrow for all to see, they explain to him the necessity of adhering to principles. 

I relate to Voltaire in a couple of ways.  First, I share the commitment to rejecting principles when they are contradicted by reality.  Secondly, I share the frustration with people, and it often seems to be most people, who seem so oblivious to the reality which seems so obvious to me.

In the end, when the character named Candide, arrives back home, he resolves not to concern himself with fixing the world, and to just focus on his garden. The peace one gets from working in the garden is the ultimate contrast with the nerve-wrecking frustration of a political conversation. Of course, the garden is a metaphor for family, friends and the things intimate to you. 

Obama, Drones and the Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy

It was reported this week that Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, is going to purchase, for defensive purposes, drones from Iran.  I’m not going to discuss the coherence of Chavez’ statement or policy.  What interests me is a continued pattern by which American foreign policy has turned into an international tragedy.

We fought two world wars against the Prussians, the Nazis and the imperial Japanese, in which it was generally recognized throughout the world that the U.S. entered the war in defense of the sovereignty of all nations. The U.S. said “no” to the Nazi idea that it was the prerogative of the most powerful to shape the lesser world to its own vision. The beauty of it was that the U.S. was the most powerful, but used that power in defense of the less powerful.  (I intentionally avoid the use of “international law” language, which would be entirely appropriate, except that all kinds of ideologues have infested that language with notions that are entirely alien to me.)

With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States became the world’s only super power.  There was reason to hope that the ideal of respect for the sovereignty of other nations would enter in to a golden era. That hope was clearly on display in the days following 9/11. The bombing of the world trade center was  seen throughout the world as a criminal assault on the very notion of international respect.

No need to belabor the topic of W Bush’s Iraq war.  The world was very nearly unanimous in judging the U.S. invasion to be counter to the notion of international sovereignty. Bush’s own apologists did not argue the point, articulating the concept of a “just” “pre-emptive war.”  Basically, they argue that it is ok to unilaterally attack a foreign country, even if nobody agrees with you, as long as you know in your own heart that it is right.  The trouble here is that nothing any longer distinguishes us from the Prussians and Nazis when they attacked France in 1914 and again in 1940.

The Bush administration went on to articulate a number of policies based on the idea that the relation between nations is not or should not be based on moral considerations. Our Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence spoke in terms of “all men,” yet the Bush administration repeatedly acted on the belief that American power protects Americans, and that nothing should prevent Americans from torturing foreigners or holding them in prison for a decade without granting them any of the rights embodied in our Constitution.

This gets me back to the fact of Cesar Chavez investing in drones. Under Obama, the U.S. has engaged in a policy of using armed drones to assassinate political opponents residing in foreign countries.  There is no legal process by which these people have been convicted of any crimes. And it is clear that no American would accept Iranian or Syrian drones flying over New York City to assassinate Syrians living in the U.S. or American opponents of Syria.  The U.S. is engaged in a policy that it would accept from no one else. This has also been the case with regard to the development of nuclear weaponry and weaponry to be used in outer space.

And this is the tragedy of American foreign policy since 9/11. Instead of using our power to support norms of conduct between nations, we are using it in  away which undermines those norms. The end result is a more violent and unpredictable world.