jazzoLOG

Living On The Streets

2011-04-27T05:21:00.004-04:00

Rembrandt van Rijn
Beggar Man and Woman, pen and ink, ca.1630-31

Strike your own evening drum, morning bell, then shut the door.
Lamp burning low by a solitary pillow;
gray ashes where just now you stirred the stove to red.
Lie and listen to raindrops splattering the window.

---Su Tung-P'o

Simple people see God as if He stood on that side and we on this side. It is not so. God and I are one in the act of perceiving Him.

---Meister Eckhart

Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brainwave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment.

---Brad Warner

These days people plan for emergencies. The climate is uncertain. There may be invasions---from other countries or just down the road. What about radiation? We have canned foods, bags of rice, extra water, duct tape. What if the electricity goes off---for days?

But are you ready for homelessness? I mean if suddenly you can't make the payments. Your job is gone. Your pension is devoured. No insurance. No roof over your head. How many missed paychecks or Social Security direct deposits before this is you...and maybe your whole family? Can you all fit into your nephew's trailer?

Can you have an emergency plan for living on the streets? Should you? This article appeared in the August 3, 2009 edition of The Nation.

Picture the Homeless, a social justice organization founded and led by homeless people in New York City, has joined The Nation to come up with a list of things you need to know to live on the street--and ways we can all build movements to challenge the stigma of homelessness and put forward an alternative vision of community.

1
Be prepared to be blamed for your circumstances, no matter how much they may be beyond your control. Think of ways to disabuse the public of common misconceptions. Don't internalize cruelty or condescension. Let go of your pride--but hold on to your dignity.

2
There is no private space to which you may retreat. You are on display 24/7. Learn to travel light. Store valuables in a safe place, only carrying around what you really need: ID and documents for accessing services, a pen, etc. You can check e-mail and read at the library. You can get a post office box for a fee or use general delivery (free).

3
Learn the best bathroom options, where you won't be rushed, turned away or harassed. Find restrooms where it's clean enough to put your stuff down, the stalls are big enough to change in and there's hot water so you can wash up. If you're in New York City go to Restrooms in New York.

4
It's difficult to have much control over when, where and what you eat, so learn soup kitchen schedules and menus. Carry with you nuts, peanut butter or other foods high in protein. Click here to find a list of soup kitchens by state.

5
Food and clothing are easier to find than a safe place to sleep--the first truth of homelessness is sleep deprivation. Always have a blanket. Whenever possible, sleep in groups with staggered schedules, so you can look out for one another, prioritizing children's needs over those of adults.

6
Know your rights! Knowing constitutional amendments, legal precedents and human rights provisions can help you, even if they're routinely violated. In New York, for example, a 2003 court-ordered settlement strictly forbids selective enforcement of the law against the homeless. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement offers another resource, and the ACLU has cards, brochures, fact sheets and films.

7
Learn police patterns and practices. Be polite and calm to cops, even when they don't give the same respect. Support initiatives demanding independent police accountability. Link with groups from overlapping populations of nonhomeless and homeless people (i.e., black, Latino, LGBT groups) that are fighting police brutality and building nonpolice safety projects, like the Audre Lorde Project's Safe OUTside the System in Brooklyn. Organize your own CopWatch--and photograph, videotape and publicize instances of police abuse. Consider and support models like the Los Angeles Community Action Network or the People's Self Defense Campaign of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Brooklyn.

8
The First Amendment protects your right to solicit aid (panhandling), especially if your pitch or sign is a statement rather than a request. To succeed, be creative, funny, engaging ("I didn't get a bailout!"). Find good, high-traffic spots where the police won't bother you.

9
Housing is a human right! Squat. Forge coalitions with nonhomeless but potentially displaced people in this era of mass foreclosures. Support United Workers in Baltimore, the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, the Nashville Homeless Power Project. Learn about campaigns against homelessness in other nations, including the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil and the Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa.

10
Don't go it alone! Always be part of an informal network of trust and mutual aid. Start your own organization, with homeless people themselves shaping the fight for a better life and world. Check out the Picture the Homeless Blog for news, updates and reports on homelessness in NY.

CONCEIVED by WALTER MOSLEY with research by Rae Gomes
http://www.thenation.com/article/ten-things-you-need-know-live-streets

Light In Dark Places

2011-04-04T04:41:00.008-04:00

"He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see."

---The Gospel of John, Chapter 9

An inspired Father Bill Carroll shared the Lenten message with us yesterday at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio~~~

Some of you have probably heard me quote lyrics from the Indigo Girls. As you may know, the they are a duo of activist singer-songwriters who were very popular when I was in college and are still recording today. They've been especially active in movements for peace and environmental justice, women's and LGBT equality, and the rights and concerns of indigenous peoples. What is often not known is that Emily Saliers, one of the group's two members, is the daughter of Don Saliers, a United Methodist Pastor who until recently was the William R. Cannon Professor of Theology and Christian Worship at Emory University. Several years ago, Don and Emily wrote a book together on "music as a spiritual practice" and gave a joint presentation about it at the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta.

One of the songs that Emily talked about that day was "Strange Fire," which deals with some biblical themes we ignore at our peril. The part that always gets me is the following:

Mercenaries of the shrine, who are you to speak for God?
With haughty eyes and lying tongues and hands that shed innocent blood.
Who delivered you the power to interpret Calvary?
You gamble away our freedom to gain your own authority.

What an indictment this is of what passes for religion among us. It is a good reminder to all of us, lay and clergy alike, who are called to represent God in word and deed.

This points us in the direction of some rather central themes in today's Gospel. For, in the presence of Jesus, the man born blind gets more than just his sight back. He gets his life back as he begins to break free of a religious system that asks the kind of question we see the disciples asking Jesus, namely "Who sinned, Rabbi, this man or his parents that he was born blind?"

The disciples should know better. After all, they are Jews. They know the story of Job, whose false comforters gave the very same kinds of explanation they now offer for the man's blindness. They have the testimony of Job, who refuses to curse God, even as he protests his innocence and cries out for justice from the ash heaps of history. Job, who in the end is brought to silence only by the hidden Wisdom who creates the world in love--the living God whose gratuitous, beneficent goodness defies the cruel, tit-for tat logic of our religious landscape, filled as it is with harsh monuments to our fear of the stranger and desire for control.

No, in the presence of the Son of God, the man gets his dignity back and is restored to human community. No longer is he an object of pity, a beggar by the side of the road. Now he is a person who can testify on his own behalf. "Ask him," his parents tell the Pharisees, "He is of age and will speak for himself."

But let's back up a bit. The initial answer of Jesus to his disciples would be troubling, if we took it to mean that God is somehow glorified by the man's suffering. That's not what's at stake. As we'll see next week with Lazarus, illness and suffering and even death are but the occasion of the manifestation of God's glory--a glory consummated on the Cross, where Jesus casts out the prince of darkness and offers himself up for life of the world. God is glorified, not by suffering itself, but by the victory of God's mercy and love in the midst of it.

The debate that breaks out among the Pharisees is a sign of our differing reactions to the light that exposes the sin and violence at the root of the earthly city and its religions. It is the chosen sin of self-justifying ideologies that counts as true blindness for Jesus. The Pharisees find themselves divided between those who accept the works of God for what they are and those who find fault with Jesus for breaking the Sabbath.

In the end, even the man's parents are frightened by the escalating recriminations and threat of expulsion from the synagogue. When the Pharisees ask them whether this is their son and whether he was born blind, they defer to their son's own testimony, partly out of fear. In the dialogue that ensues, the Pharisees try again and again to convince the man to speak against Jesus, but he steadfastly refuses. On the basis of his own experience, he has come to trust the One who opened his eyes. "One thing I know," he says. "I was blind, but now I see. If this man were not from God he could do nothing."

The reaction of the mercenaries of the shrine is as swift as it is predictable. They drive him out. Only his expulsion can secure their righteousness, their position, and their authority.

Needless to say, we're on dangerous ground here. The Gospel of John was written in the immediate aftermath of the expulsion of the Christians from the synagogue. And its treatment of the Jews is polemical in ways that might have been understandable when Christians were a persecuted minority but have led to further persecution ever since. After the Emperor Constantine, we began control the keys to the shrine ourselves and have needed to look more and more critically at our own use of power. One of the unsought blessings of a post-Christian age may be a return to the margins, where we Christians can rediscover our true home and voice.

As we prepare for Holy Week, however, a traditional time for anti-Jewish violence among us, we ought to underscore our history of complicity in oppressive violence, especially against our Jewish brothers and sisters. Even though it is now rejected by all responsible Christian bodies, the theory of a genetic guilt on the part of the Jews persists in its ugly and deadly power, amounting as it does to an evasion of the shared responsibility of the human race for all forms of sin and violence.

A religion centered around a tortured and crucified Savior ought to be able to come to a place of honesty about that. We ought also to be able to admit the Church's role in propping up other forms of injustice. In the clear light of the Gospel, we ought to be able to see those whom we ourselves exclude and oppress. We ought also to be able to see those nearest to us in a new light. We ought to be able to see our fellow parishioners, our co-workers, our family and friends in new ways. Whom do we hold at arm's length? Whom do we avoid or ignore? From whom do we withhold the passing of the peace? We must learn to seek these people out and turn to them for justice and mercy. For our salvation is bound up with theirs.

It is by exposing the works of darkness among us that we draw closer to Jesus, the light of the world. And it is when we pretend, contrary to all experience, that we see clearly or completely, that we risk staying in darkness and finding ourselves judged accordingly.

We are called to something better, brothers and sisters.

For once we walked in darkness, but now we are light in the Lord.

Ohio Senate Bill 5 At A Glance

2011-03-21T05:02:00.004-04:00

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

---George Santayana

In rain during a dark night, enter that darkness.

---Shiva

An Englishman and an Indian were sitting in a garden together, and the Hindu was trying to explain basic Indian philosophy to the Englishman. "Look," he said, "there is a hedge at the end of the garden---against what do you see the hedge?"
"Against the hills," said the Englishman.
"And what do you see the hills against?"
"Against the sky."
"And what do you see the sky against?"
The Englishman had no answer, so the Hindu said: "You see it against consciousness."

---Indian mondo

Ohio Senate Bill 5, having passed our Senate by 1 vote, currently has moved to the Ohio House where testimony is taking place before the Commerce and Labor Committee. Hundreds of citizens have signed up to testify, but only the first dozen or so who manage to arrive at the Statehouse each day get in. Unlike other committee sessions of the Legislature, Ohio Government Television is not broadcasting these public hearings...nor can more than a couple dozen people get in the room. The Committee has promised to finish its work on the bill by the end of March. Upon passage Governor Kasich will sign it and, unless there is a referendum, it becomes law. The deadline for petition application for a referendum in November 2011 is April 6th.

Senate Bill 5 would affect all employees whose wages, health, safety, pension benefits and vacation and sick time are compensated in any way by the State of Ohio. The bill is 500 pages long. An attorney for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association told a group on Saturday it took him 2 days to read it. I spent an afternoon on it just to see what's in it besides union negotiation. There's a lot! If you want to get an idea of what I mean, take a look~~~ http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/BillText129/129_SB_5_PSC_N.html

Here is a quick summary, as provided by OCSEA and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, who are opposed to the bill~~~

1) Bargaining unit state employees do NOT have the right to bargain about the following:
* Privatization of a public employer's services or contracting out of work
* Staffing
* Joint Health Care Committee
* Layoff by seniority
* Promotional Qualifications
* Starting and Quitting times
* Number of hours worked by employees
* Shift assignments
* Assignment of Overtime (and any payment beyond 1 1/2 times rate)
* Pick-a-Post
* Labor Management Committees about any prohibited topics
* Following the Work when Contracted Out
* Past Practices

2) Healthcare
* Employee share of health care premium MUST be at least 15%
* No ability to bargain health care plan design

3) Equipment & Safety
* Cannot bargain minimum staffing requirements
* May only bargain equipment (including personal protective equipment) if management chooses to do so

4) Fiscal Emergency
* Governor can declare a fiscal emergency and void ANY and EVERY provision of the contract

5) Reduces Benefits
* Vacation Accrual is reduced to 7.7 hours at 19 years of service
* Sick Leave cashout at retirement is reduced to a 1000 hour cap at 50%
* No longevity or step increases
* Maximum sick leave accrual is reduced to 3.1 hours
* Personal Leave is limited to 3 days per year
* Merit pay increases only

6) Fact-finding/Dispute Settlement/Strike
* All Strikes are ILLEGAL with possible jail time and fine for violations
* If Fact-Finder's report is rejected, parties appeal to legislative body (same body that voted on Fact-Finder Report) to pick which last offer to choose (management or union)
* No Conciliation
* No informational Pickets

Unlike Wisconsin, in Ohio there is referendum but not recall. Therefore, the issue of SB5 can be put to a statewide vote, and a petition for that action is being planned~~~

What is a Statewide Referendum? It is:
* A challenge to a bill recently passed by the Ohio General Assembly (Senate and House) and signed into law by the Governor
* A citizen-initiated request that the law in question be the subject of a statewide vote
* A referendum "stays" the bill until the people have voted, so that the bill cannot be implemented

Process (limited to 90 days, which begins when the Governor signs the bill):
1. The initial petition application must be approved by both the Secretary of State (Husted-R) and the Attorney General (DeWine-R)
2. Then, petition signatures are gathered. Number of signatures needed:
a) 6% of the total number of votes cast for the Office of Governor in the last gubernatorial election, including
b) out of the total number, signatures from 3% of the votes cast in at least 44 of the 88 counties
3. Consequently, more than 450,000 signatures will be needed to ensure the requirements are met

Between now and April 6th, information will become available widely on how interested citizens, on either side of the controversy, can help. If the Governor does not sign by that day, a referendum would be held in November 2012, a presidential election year. The law still would not go into effect, pending results of that referendum. We believe Mr. Kasich will sign within the next 2 1/2 weeks. Comments and replies of course are welcome.

Who Will Save Us?

2011-02-28T03:38:00.006-05:00

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.

---Jalal-ad Din Rumi

Would that life were like the shadow cast by a wall or a tree, but it is like the shadow of a bird in flight.

---Haggadah

We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

---W.H. Auden

Those of my generation, in our seventh decade, were raised by a mom who was home and a dad who worked. They were assisted by watchful relatives and neighbors, a school you could walk to...and come home for lunch...our church and community organizations. But alone in our rooms---and many of us had rooms of our own---all of those were assisted, however dubiously, by comic books and radio drama. We had real heroes, like baseball players, but for the tough jobs like saving the world from power-hungry bad guys or a family in trouble in the Wild West we needed our imaginations.

There weren't many special effects yet in the movies of the 1940s. Bogie lighting a cigarette was good enough for us. Flash Gordon's spaceship had sparks that came out the back and then fell down onto a table or something. Even we knew there was no gravity in outer space. The real effects were from superheroes in the comics or from the voices and sound effects on the radio. Mom and Dad worried all that stuff was a waste of time and maybe worse. Were they right? How do the Lone Ranger and Tonto help me face Ohio Senate Bill 5?

Superheroes worked best in comic books. Superman on the radio just didn't cut it. A single frame in a comic could show Superman flying around the earth to turn the clock back to an earlier time. You couldn't do that on the radio and we had to wait for Christopher Reeve to show us in the movies. The Green Hornet and the Shadow were great on radio, but they weren't true superheroes. Batman and Robin had to be comics, and the Joker on the page still transcends even Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger. (Joker may be working for FoxNews though.)

What we liked about superheroes was that most of the time they were regular people. Sometimes they even were disabled people...but when duty called or ultimate danger was in the air for all humankind, they changed into beings who could fly or have incredible machines or impenetrable suits and superhuman strength. They could and did save us with these powers.

OK, we knew all that stuff was fantasy and just pretend. But Westerns were different. Here we could go to the movies...and we did every Saturday afternoon. But the most popular Western on radio never worked in the movies. Jay Silverheels WAS Tonto, but you couldn't get a Long Ranger except on the radio. He had been a lawman whose unit was ambushed and wiped out by bad guys. He wore a mask so no one would know he had survived, saved by Tonto in fact. Why Tonto was a lone Indian never was explained I think, but today we can imagine perhaps his tribe had been rubbed out or driven away.

So here were these two individuals riding around trying to right wrongs and help the Wild West become safe and peaceful. The Lone Ranger's mask made people think he was an outlaw, no matter how famous he became. Tonto was feared because of the heritage of his race, so the whole project of doing good was an uphill battle. They had a secret silver mine where they made their ammunition. His horse was named Silver and his calling card was a silver bullet. All of these aspects enriched the saga that every kid knew probably until more recent times.

Now as I hobble into our present day, what have these stories brought me? We have an overcrowded planet and countless more babies born every minute. The earth's ability to sustain life as we experience it may be in peril. Air, water, and resources are increasingly dear. Employment soon may return precisely to what the boss thinks of you rather than how you can prove you do the job well. Governments, that we set up originally as a kind of fortress against the wilds of Nature, no longer may protect us. Disasters of health and finances will be a death sentence, unless you personally can find help somewhere.

I cannot hope for the Lone Ranger to arrive in a cloud of dust and a hearty HiYo Silver! I must take the lessons he and Tonto taught me and use them to support my friends and family. I don't have the riches of Bruce Wayne or a ward who can become Robin the Boy Wonder. I have no superpowers. I can write this essay though. My imagination from all those old radio shows remains keen and sharp. Is there a way out of this mess? Is there something I can do besides cower before those who already own so much and are buying more and more? I have published my values and they may know who I am. Soon I may be completely vulnerable, exposed, captured. In that event, may I have the courage I learned in my youth!

Strangers In The Land

2010-10-21T04:38:00.002-04:00

Stranger in the Village #13, 1998
Enamel, oil and acrylic paint, gesso, and coal dust on canvas by Glenn Ligon (1960- )
The nearly illegible text is from James Baldwin's 1953 essay of the same title, passages from which follow~~~

…I say that the culture of these people controls me — but they can scarcely be held responsible for European culture. America comes out of Europe, but these people have never seen America, nor have most of them seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain. Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly , not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have — however unconsciously — inherited.

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it.…

The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. This is a fact which ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk, having never felt this rage and being unable to imagine, quite fail to understand.

---James Baldwin
"Stranger in the Village" is the concluding essay of his Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955.

A few Sundays ago, our Episcopal rector gave us a sermon I promised to post when I had the chance. As usual he was glad to hear that, but said it might be a while because he already had offered it online and wanted to be sure that site got credited. Father Bill Carroll's piece now is available and I urge you to take a moment to reflect on it~~~

On immigration: Are we heeding Moses and the prophets?
Not long ago, we asked people how they preached on the difficult gospel passage below. The Rev. Bill Carroll responded.

By Bill Carroll

Jesus said, "There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, `Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.' But Abraham said, `Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.' He said, `Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house-- for I have five brothers-- that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, `They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, `No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, `If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
(Luke 16:19-31)

I wrote this sermon for one of the women who cleaned my parents' house when I was growing up. Her name is Gilda, and she took over the job from her mother Lupe, whom my mother hired not long after we moved to San Diego when I was ten. Gilda spoke very little English. She was a Mexican citizen with documentation to work in this country. Twice a week she worked at our house, and I assume she had other jobs during the week. She came by public transit from Tijuana, Mexico, some twenty-five miles away.

I remember my mother's efforts to be fair. She paid Gilda more than the going rate. She made or bought lunch for her every day, and she tried to give her a ride to and from the bus stop, which was about a mile from our house. At the same time, however, even as a child, I was aware that Gilda was living on the edge. She must have been bone tired, emotionally and physically weary. Nearly every day, she was harassed and shaken down for bribes by officials on both sides of the border. Despite the fact that she needed the job and seemed to appreciate kindnesses that her other employers did not extend, nothing can really change the brute, social facts surrounding our relationship.

I was thinking about Gilda when the House of Bishops met in Arizona recently. There was some controversy about whether they should meet there at all, in light of recent events in that state. One of the positive things to come out of that decision was a delegation of thirty bishops, who spent two days on both sides of the border, meeting with everyone from immigrants to ranchers to border patrol agents to clergy ministering along the border. The bishops also adopted a pastoral letter, drafted by a committee chaired by our own bishop (Bishop Tom Breidenthal of Southern Ohio), on comprehensive immigration reform.

The letter is available here. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Pastoral_Letter_9-21-10.pdf It is addressed to "the People of God." As is true of any letter written by committee for a diverse audience, the letter strives for balance. The legitimate concerns of ranchers, law enforcement, and border security advocates are acknowledged. Nevertheless, our bishops do manage to say something clear and substantive. More importantly, they put front and center the needs of poor people crossing the border for work, whether documented or not. Here is the meat of what the bishops had to say:

(1) Ours is a migratory world in which many people move across borders to escape poverty, hunger, injustice and violence. We categorically reject efforts to criminalize undocumented migrants and immigrants, and deplore the separation of families and the unnecessary incarceration of undocumented workers. Since, as we are convinced, it is natural to seek gainful employment to sustain oneself and one’s family, we cannot agree that the efforts of undocumented workers to feed and shelter their households through honest labor are criminal.

(2) We profess that inhumane policies directed against undocumented persons (raids, separation of families, denial of health services) are intolerable on religious and humanitarian grounds, as is attested by the consensus of a wide range of religious bodies on this matter.

(3) We call on the government of the United States and all governments to create fair and
humane immigration policies...

In taking this stand, which will not be popular in every corner of the Church, our bishops have done what they promised at their ordination. Among the vows that bishops take is a particular promise to "be merciful to all, show compassion to the poor and strangers, and defend those who have no helper."

But the bishops, seeking to encourage us all, appeal not primarily to this promise of theirs but instead to the baptismal covenant they share with all of us, wherein we promise to "strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being."

In their role as teachers of the Word of God, the bishops also cite the Scriptures. In particular, they mention the law given to Moses on Sinai, as recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Numbers: There shall be for you and the resident alien a single statute, a perpetual statute throughout your generations; you and the alien shall be alike before the Lord. And they refer to a glorious passage from Ephesians, chapter two, which speaks of how in Christ, we are no longer "strangers and aliens" but "citizens with the saints and...members of the household of God."

The bishops might just have well referred to the story of Lazarus and the rich man, appointed for Sunday right after their letter came out. This Gospel is one of several passages in the New Testament, the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew also comes to mind, where it is made clear to us that our decisions about how to respond to brothers and sisters in need, particularly when they are poor and vulnerable, are decisions for or against God and God's Kingdom.

In this life, the rich man ignored the cries of poor Lazarus, who lay wounded and hungry at his gate. Perhaps he could scarcely see him for who he was. Even if he did see him, he averted his gaze, ignored him, and tried to pretend he wasn't there. He certainly didn't respond to his needs, get to know him, or find out what gifts he had to offer.

I believe that for Christians living in the United States, which despite our recent difficulties is still the richest country on earth, this parable provides a challenge and a warning. Do we see the poor of the world? Do we see the poor who are already among us, both immigrant and "native-born"? Do we see the growing underclass among us, as poverty and extreme poverty rates continue to climb?

How do we respond when we notice these children of God lying at our gates? Do we cover our eyes? Do we call the cops? Or do we invite them in, offer them a seat at the table, and find ways for them to contribute and belong? We dare not turn a blind eye to the fundamental realities already on the ground. Immigrants are already contributing mightily to the economy, to the communities they live in, and to the society as a whole. There are law enforcement challenges to be sure and no one has all the answers, but the existing laws are out of touch with reality. And the climate of fear and scapegoating is dangerous. It runs contrary to both our best instincts as a nation and the Gospel mandate to tear down every wall that divides human beings.

This commandment from God is rooted in Israel's history as a nation of migrant workers, who came to Egypt to avoid famine and were mistreated by Pharaoh, until GOD came and set them free. This is why, again and again, the prophets remind us of our obligation to create justice for the poor and vulnerable among us: remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

In the story from Luke 16, when the rich man asks father Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers, Abraham tells him that they already have Moses and the prophets and should listen to them. Truly, brothers and sisters, if WE will not heed Moses and the prophets, and respond to our brothers and sisters in need, there is perhaps no hope for us. No, not even if someone rises from the dead.

The Rev. Dr. R. William Carroll is rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His sermons appear on his parish blog. http://gsathens.blogspot.com/ He also blogs at Living the Gospel. http://evangeliumobservare.blogspot.com/ He is a member of the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis.
Posted by Jim Naughton on October 19, 2010 4:17 AM

You may access the original and reply directly to Father Carroll at this site http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/immigration/by_bill_carroll_jesus_said.php where there already are a few fine comments.

A Sincere Heart

2010-09-04T01:53:00.006-04:00

Cindy Yeager pictures herself.

What are we waiting for? A woman? Two trees? Three flags? Nothing. What are we waiting for?

---Andre Breton

Whenever I catch a frog's eye I am aware of this, but I do not find it depressing. I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

---Loren Eiseley

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

---Jalal-ad-Din Rumi

Once in a rare while, someone you've never seen before walks into a room and rivets your attention. It may be the flair, it may be the grace, it may be the bravado...and sometimes it is angelic humility. It is with the last quality that Cindy Yeager entered my consciousness. She came in the room almost as if she wanted to be invisible. It wasn't because she felt ashamed of how she looked. She was beautiful...in a most natural, windy wheatfield kind of way. It was because she didn't like how she felt, but knew this was the place to be.

It was a room where people talk about very basic feelings...or attempt to...and practice doing. For many of us talking about our feelings is not easy...at least to do it with complete honesty. She knew she would have to do that here...and so she sort of curled up in a chair, ran her graceful hand through shocks of hair every shade of blonde imaginable, and took for granted the hair would stay the way her hand had passed through. And it did for a while. Then she continued with lowered head and eyes to sit contemplatively until it was her turn to try to put it into words.

Cindy was in the midst of a painful divorce. Her relationship with her husband had been deteriorating for some time, as apparently was his mental health. A diagnosis finally revealed the cause, and Cindy wondered what to do. Should she now shift to caring for this man, who perhaps could no longer care for her, plus continue to mother their 2 teen-aged sons as well? Would she not also have to provide for this family with some kind of job? It was overwhelming and she had wept every day about it. And as she told us, she began to weep right then. Her tears, her honest emotion, her humility was such that everybody in the place started weeping. It was a catharsis.

But Cindy didn't even notice that. This wasn't for audience reaction. This wasn't for pity. She was working. She was working hard. To work it out. It was tragic for her to divorce because she loved him...and, for a Catholic, it also was wrong. But a friend had told her convincingly, "Cindy, you have suffered so much. Now you deserve to be happy." She believed her friend. She knew the suffering was eating her alive...and she felt the pain she now endured through the divorce was more worthwhile than fighting perhaps a hopeless battle of her husband's condition.

And for the next several months Cindy would come into these rooms and suffer, and try to put it into words, and get it out. And she would cry...and we would cry. And we all went through it together. And as we did everyone developed a love for Cindy...and for each other too. Because a group can't go through something like this and not end up in love. And Cindy loves us. And so everybody hugs everybody else when Cindy is around. That in itself is a successful life.

Now I'm telling you all this because it certainly is worth telling. But there's more. Cindy writes and even teaches poetry. Unlike most of us, she even has found a way to make sort of a living at it. That's not all she does to support herself and the boys, but it is what we're looking at today. Last week Cindy walked into a room again, and over to me, and handed me three poems. With customary humility, she asked, "Would you take a look at these when you have a chance?"

A group of us were having a huge breakfast, and I didn't want to spill syrup on poems...but carefully I couldn't wait to read the first one, which is called "To My Odysseus." I got halfway through and realized I was reading an intensely personal love poem. I shifted gears...and then I began to utter little noises as I read on. The three poems that are posted here are Cindy's effort to put the ache into poetry. I don't know when I've read such personal expression as these works. Rest assured, the gentleman under discussion, her ex-, knows this is happening. They're going online and he's OK with it.

I think you'll find these are magnificent poems, whether you know Cindy personally or not. And of course after you've read them, you will know Cindy personally. That is what poetry is for.

To My Odysseus

Our sons have told me that Sasquatch
has been found, in a northern Canadian cabin,
DNA evidence on a nail
protruding from a floorboard.
It may happen. Mythical creatures,
whose very existence we thought a
fabrication of human longing, manifest.
Isn't that was longing does?

Yesterday I returned
overdue magazines to the library. They
get caught up in the landscape of belongings,
take residence in the bathroom or
at the foot of the bed,
the Rolling Stone in the former, the
Natural Home, the latter, a testament
to my ridiculous aspiration to
neatness, every cover
a perfect, orderly dream.

The circulation manager told me
I had a credit on my account. "That's
impossible," I said, but we agreed,
miracles should not be ignored.
And so, just now,

I thought of you telling me
how you dream you hear me breathing
next to you in the night
though I haven't been there
on the left side, my side, of the bed
for months. You tell me this,
your breath warm on my naked shoulder,
my arms around your back like
a sea creature, a siren,
this moment
both mythical, and real.

These nights when I gaze the sky alone
I easily find Orion
who's marked the passing decades
like blood reinvents us,
every seven years, the person I am now
completely different from the one
that you married
all those years ago.

From the corner of my eye, Orion
in the eastern sky, me, here
in the front yard, far from the sea, you,
sleeping in the bed inside, not a ship,
though you toss and turn
like its waves that move you.

Outside, I am singing,
like a woman who cannot stop herself,
singing, singing,
the sound, hope
to the sailor
long absent from his home,
from the sound of someone breathing,
his wife's familiar taste, the salty
tendril of her hair,
gone so long
her very existence
now the thing of stories.

~~~

The Gift

This morning I am giving you my body
for the last time. These breasts
which fed your sons so well, now
older, soft, a safe and restful place,
hide the beating heart beneath
a steady drum, the measure
of my one true self. These hips

which held those babies up
above the fray of absence
and resentment, the ones
you pulled to your own
each morning before light;
they are taking up their journey
now; these hips are leaving.

The legs you first noticed
and desired, long as yours and strong
as steel, these legs are longing
for another place to fold themselves
underneath themselves.

The skin we all agree
has aged with grace.
Your face upon my shoulder,
your fingertips along
my arm, remember these
because they will
not brush this skin again.

This body has been my only answer
to your questions of despair.
I gave it willfully; you took it
every time. It bought a home,
allowed a dog, made a fence--
the fence I wanted--raised a family
but it's leaving now. The mind,
the heart have called it back
to be with me in stillness
which is not death, but life, again,
though you doubt it so.

~~~

Pill Bug

The poem begins with a sock curled in
upon itself, the way they do when boys
pull them off and leave them where they fall.
The ball of white so different from the nearly
feathered bird, still upon the concrete
where I found him dead tonight, skin,
translucent, gentle neck, eyes blue
pearls of sleep. The fragile shift we all
could make when no one holds us back.

And then the image of that not quite formed
baby boy, the one at fifteen weeks
the nurse held in her palm, the one
my body pushed away, a bloody mess
of hemorrhage, and you across the room
sickened, now, I understand, afraid
you'd lose me in the bleeding though I knew
I'd stay if I survived. You were my family now.
You and I and sons who'd later come
to fill the gap of emptiness, began that day
in March, the first hard tug of gut
as painful as the last. I said DON'T LOOK
our thumb-sized son already named,
but we looked, you and I, at what we had
become, two lonely souls, two tired angels,
briefly clinging to a bedrail,
the knowledge of aloneness
like a new book's broken spine, permission granted
to read on, the story had to write itself.

And then,
the pill bug that I find
curled in fright beneath the last
of ash and oak, a nesting place
for such small things, and now
I curl upon myself, the memory
of your sweet tongue
drawing me to come to you,
in a ball, protected
by the outer shell of nothing,
the illusion that I can
live like this and so
I just let go, accept the pulse,
the blood, the heart, the wound
of sex that brought us back
to our beginning, the loneliness,
the gripping hands, the death
of someone you're expecting
but who never will arrive.

Freedom At Facebook

2010-07-14T10:36:00.002-04:00

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

---Peter Matthiessen

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.

---Shunryu Suzuki

When sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.

---Yun-men

I have an online friend whom I met about 10 years ago. We've never met in person. She has a position at a major university. Yesterday morning on Facebook she posted a comment about a funeral home in her town, and the way obituaries customarily are handled. She was critical and a few people posted in agreement. In the afternoon she was summoned into the office of her supervisor for a little talk.

It seems the owner had caught wind of the comment and thread, who my friend is, and phoned the university. I suppose the exact content of that conversation is confidential, but the upshot was my friend had to take down the post and publish an apology. What she apologized for was not the content of her opinion exactly, but rather that she had made the content "in such a public forum."

I have a lot of empathy for what my friend just went through, and I mentioned it this morning to my wife. She asked, "How are you supposed to complain about something if not in a public forum?" I said, "In Free Market America, you're supposed to take your hat in hand and privately write the enterprise a polite letter stating your views. They will reply either that they are taking your comment into consideration or else shove it in your hat."

Apparently public forums are for criticizing elected representatives only. Banks, insurance companies, big box stores, local attorneys? You better watch out. It's never been easier to replace you at your job. And if you have seniority, they save money too. My friend's experience is one more example of the kind of fear that grips America today. Why didn't anybody blow the whistle on BP and Wall Street? I rest my case.

As for Facebook, I must say it's refreshing when somebody states a serious thought in there. It is to me anyway. A survey about whether a friend should open a window or turn on the air conditioner doesn't really entertain me all that much...to say nothing of fulfilling my life. Well, actually I guess turning on the air conditioner is pretty serious business in this---er---Climate. Which reminds me, it's starting to get too warm outside to get hot under the collar.

"Find A Bee And Foller Him Home"

2010-07-01T05:30:00.003-04:00

Ivan Kramskoy. Bee-Keeper. 1872

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

---Krishnamurti

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

---Carl Gustav Jung

Pain in the legs is the taste of Zen.

---Yamada Roshi

About 65 years Walt Disney put to live action and animation a film depicting Uncle Remus and the Joel Chandler Harris Brer Rabbit stories. It was called Song of the South and was withdrawn by Disney because of protests in the 1960s over the Remus character and the way the script had him talking. I understand the problem, but regret terribly the loss of easy access to the film and the wondrous animation in it. A friend of mine smuggled a VCR copy of it in from Canada a little while ago, and so I got to see it again.

The quotation in my title is advice Uncle Remus gave to a little boy who was trying to find some honey. Well, the advice worked...but you can imagine the difficulty of doing such a thing. This past full moon is called the Mead Moon in Europe because I guess beekeepers use the light of the moon to collect spring honey easily while the bees are asleep---or whatever state they're in at night. Then the people make mead to celebrate the quiet, lazy summer afternoons. Maybe something involved in all that is why our bees came back.

It's hard to believe 6 years ago this month I wrote an essay describing the sad destruction of a honeybee colony in the wall of our house. Attacked by creatures known as wax moths, our bees slowly were decimated as we watched helplessly. http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v63/__show_article/_a000063-000251.htm When the bees had arrived---in a swarm that produced one of the most unforgettable natural events in the lives of my family---we had been warned by friends that we needed to smoke 'em or tear the wall out to get rid of them. They gave us visions of a whole wall soaked in leaking honey. But a bee guy told us such a catastrophe was highly unlikely because they're too smart to make that much more than what they need. And indeed after the colony was killed, the remaining honey dripped from a single spot in a windowsill which I captured easily in a dish.

So we had lived with them for a few years, our daughter being raised to the constant, faint buzzing hum of a queen and her colony in the wall next to Ilona's bed. Beware, gentleman callers! Who knows what that did to her...but she seems to enjoy success in her studies. We all grieved the loss of the hive.

So imagine how dumbfounded I was a couple days ago, the morning after the moon had become full, to walk into her room and hear that hum again. We had observed no swarm this time...and it must just have stopped raining heavily. Maybe a beekeeper nearby had taken honey, and some of the hive had decided Enough is enough! I don't know and am not going to advertise, other than this posting...but they're here and must know there was a hive here before. The remains of the battle must still be in the wall. But this is where they want to be, so it must be a very special, select site and here we go again.

You notice I'm using words like "smart," "decide," and "thinking" to describe what many people talk about as just bugs. Over the last couple years, science has investigated more thoroughly the process by which bees select a new site for a colony and I find it all fascinating. Last week Psychology Today produced a column comparing the process to how we humans make decisions. Of course it's all simplified here but it might get you interested. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-wisdom-bees/201006/why-bees-dont-make-stupid-decisions-and-we-do I guess they know what they're doing. Anyway, welcome back...and we have a whole garden awaiting pollination!

Here's Laughing At You

2010-06-23T02:04:00.002-04:00

As a man is, so he sees.

---William Blake

To be a proper abode for God and fit for God to act in, a man should be free from all things and actions, both inwardly and outwardly.

---Meister Eckhart

Enlightenment is for sissies. Living ethically and morally is what really matters.

---Brad Warner

As America moved into the decade of the 1960s, a writer, lecturer, and eventual TV personality named William Buckley declared conservatives see reality in an entirely different way. He declared a Culture War upon the so-called "liberal" arts. Fifty years later we read Internet complaints from liberals that Texas textbook publishers are distorting American history beyond recognition. Maybe liberals didn't "realize" conservatives weren't kidding about that war.

The war has become so serious that legislation proposed by the Executive just sits in the Congress, blocked by opposing parties. "Obstructionist gridlock!" shouts one side. "Do-nothing president!" shouts the other. The "mainstream media" presents a version and FoxNews presents another. If people in a civilization become so alienated from each other as to resemble different species, what can the future look like?

I've been wondering about these things for some time, particularly in a work situation. One wants to be sensitive to the views of co-workers, particularly in the realms of politics, religion, sexual preference, but it seems to me as the decades have passed simple conversation has become more and more tricky. Must only the most mundane topics be the rule of the day? Even talk about the weather can lead to a fight...if global warming ever is mentioned. Sports and the latest sale at the mall may be all you can talk about that won't get you in trouble. Can we still be called an educated public?

Now I read a statistic that truly is worrisome. Researchers estimate that 11% of the US population cannot tell whether a remark made is a joke or an attack! The American sense of humor has been a major characteristic of our culture since the Quakers left Puritantown. But now, is the threat of nastiness so great that only boring moderation is safe in a group? Who can one trust in the workplace? If I kid that guy over there, might he come in tomorrow with a gun? Please glance over this incredible report in Science News, and see what you think~~~

When Humor Humiliates
For gelotophobes, even good-natured laughter can sound a lot like ridicule
By Susan Gaidos
August 1st, 2009; Vol.176 #3 (p. 18)

It started as a quiet dinner conversation, punctuated with laughter. Soon, the rapid-fire “ha-ha-has” took on the tone of gunfire. Convinced it was directed at him, the young man got up to confront the noisy diners.

Naturally, the guests at the next table had no idea what the problem was. They were simply enjoying themselves and … laughing. Embarrassed by his outburst, the young man left the restaurant and never returned.

By most accounts, laughter is good medicine, the best even. But for some, such as the embarrassed diner, a good-natured chuckle isn’t funny at all. Morbidly averse to being the butt of a joke, these folks will go out of their way to avoid certain people or situations for fear of being ridiculed. For them, merely being around others who are talking and laughing can cause tension and apprehension.

Until recently, such people might have been written off as spoilsports. But in the mid-1990s, an astute German psychologist recognized the problem for what it is: a debilitating fear of being laughed at. Over the past decade, psychologists, sociologists, linguists and humor experts have examined this trait, technically known as gelotophobia. Though it sounds like an ailment involving Italian ice cream, scientists worldwide now recognize it as a distinct social phobia. Studies of causes and consequences of gelotophobia were among the topics presented in June in Long Beach, Calif., at a meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies.

Most people fear being laughed at to some degree and do their best to avoid embarrassment. One thing that sets gelotophobes apart is their inability to distinguish ridicule from playful teasing. For them, all laughter is aggressive, and a harmless joke may come across as a mean-spirited assault.

“They seem to have problems interpreting humor correctly,” says psychologist Willibald Ruch of the University of Zurich. “They probably do not understand the positive side of humor, and cannot experience it in a warm way but rather as a means to put others down.”

Ruch and colleagues have developed assessment tools to help clinicians demarcate the merely flustered from the truly fearful. In recent years, his team has surveyed more than 23,000 people in 73 countries and found gelotophobia present to some degree in every nation, affecting from 2 to 30 percent of the population. In the United States, the incidence is about 11 percent, researchers said at the meeting in California.

When asked about recent occasions where they were laughed at, gelotophobes don’t list more occurrences than others do. They do, however, experience such events as more painful.

“The gelotophobes reported a much higher intensity of being laughed at, and for a longer duration,” says Ruch. “Also, it takes them much longer to calm down.”

Studies using cartoons to illustrate people laughing in various situations show that those with a fear of being laughed at are more likely to assume that the laughter is directed at them. Other studies using laugh tracks show that gelotophobes have problems distinguishing a happy har-de-har from a scornful snicker.

Scientists studying the negative effects of being the target of others’ laughter say such studies may help psychologists and psychiatrists treat patients with various types of social anxieties. The findings may also be used to better assess incidents of bullying at school and work, where nonphysical belittling and intimidation are commonplace.

“It’s not yet studied how many impulsive violent acts were carried out in response to ridicule,” Ruch says. Similarly, acts of revenge are often based on sensitivity to mocking and ridicule, he adds, pointing to a number of tragic school shootings where the gunmen left notes indicating that their classmates had laughed at them.

“Obviously, those experiences were so salient for them that they put it into their last letter,” he says.

It’s a shame

The funny thing about laughter is, it’s seldom about what’s funny. When Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County took to the streets and coffee shops to record instances of laughter, he found that most laughter has little to do with humor. People laugh when they’re nervous, hesitant or just making polite conversation. Most smiles and laughs occur when other people are around. In his 2000 book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Provine says laughter serves as a way to form alliances and make connections with others. For most, laughter serves as a signal for mutual liking and well-being.

But, like the young man whose dinner was ruined, not everyone feels the joy of laughter. Psychologist Tracey Platt, who ran across that man’s case in her studies at the University of Zurich, says gelotophobes tend to have a fear and shame response to laughter, even in the best circumstances.

“While most people feel joy and surprise during playful teasing, gelotophobes feel the same anger, shame and fear that they would feel during ridicule,” she says. “In fact, shame is at the forefront of their emotions.”

The fact that shame is a predominant emotion in gelotophobia explains, in part, why the affliction received little scrutiny from scientists for so long. Burning shame can create more feelings of shame and is rarely acknowledged to others. In the late 1990s, a patient of German psychologist Michael Titze revealed how a series of childhood humiliations led to a morbid fear of being laughed at and a life of inhibition. In her report, the patient acknowledged that she had waited more than a year to tell the therapist about it.

Upon reading an account of this patient, Ruch set out to see if gelotophobia exists in the real world, where day-to-day mishaps, blunders and bloopers provide innumerable opportunities for mockery, both real and imagined. He developed a 46-item questionnaire and later a modified 15-item version called the GELOPH, which could be used to score people’s fear of laughter on a scale from slightly fearful to extremely fearful. The questionnaires were also designed to identify those with shame-based fear.

Ruch’s team also created a pictorial assessment tool similar to the GELOPH, with cartoons showing people laughing in various circumstances. One picture, for example, shows someone observing two other people laughing. Participants were then asked what the observer might be saying or thinking. While those with no fear might say something like, “Look at those youngsters, they know how to have fun,” a typical response from a gelotophobe would be, “Why are they laughing at me?”

GELOPH testing in dozens of countries shows that the fear of being laughed at is everywhere, says University of Zurich psychologist René Proyer, who directed a multinational study on the subject. Though scientists are still sifting through the data, preliminary findings show that the incidence of gelotophobia is especially high in Asia, where the concept of “saving face” is important. The results were published in the February issue of the journal Humor.

Based on the findings of the multinational study, the scientists now view gelotophobia as a personality trait, not as an illness.

“Everyone has a fear of being laughed at to a certain degree,” Proyer says, ranging from nearly no fear to an exceedingly high, or pathological, fear.

Realizing that there’s often a gap between what people say in a self-report and what they actually do in real life, the scientists also collected questionnaires from friends and family members. In addition, the team designed studies to look for behavioral evidence of people’s symptoms.

In one study, Proyer and his colleagues hired an actor to record 20 different laughs — from playful peals and embarrassed giggles to belly laughs and jeers. The researchers then played the sound tracks for 40 people who had scored extremely high or low on the GELOPH and asked them to rate the laughter as pleasant or unpleasant, domineering or less domineering.

To scientists’ surprise, those that scored high for fear of being laughed at didn’t react more strongly to the sounds of negative laughter than did those with no fear. The gelotophobes did, however, perceive positive laughter, such as hearty or cheerful laughter, as unpleasant or spiteful.

The scientists also measured participants’ moods before and after the experiment. Those with no fear of laughter reported feeling more cheerful after hearing the sound tracks, while gelotophobes reported no change in mood, the researchers reported in the February Humor.

Ruch says those findings agree with Titze’s theory that those with a high fear probably have a history of being laughed at. “If someone has always experienced laughter as a weapon, not as something you share, then all laughter will sound like negatively motivated laughter,” Ruch says.

But findings from recent studies show that additional factors may be at play. When W. Larry Ventis, professor of psychology at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., reviewed information collected from the GELOPH studies, he found that repeated traumatic experiences during childhood and youth may exert some influence but don’t tell the whole story.

“Those types of experiences don’t clearly account for differentiating people who would be identified as gelotophobic from those who are not,” Ventis says. “This suggests that there are other significant variables which we need to flesh out.”

At the International Society for Humor Studies conference, Ventis discussed several other possible influences. People with a more reactive autonomic nervous system, for example, may respond with fear more readily than do others. And those who have witnessed instances where laughter was used to put people down may more readily believe that laughter translates into insult.

Taking a cue from laughter

Platt’s studies of gelotophobes’ emotions show that they may also have problems picking up on the social cues related to smiling and laughter. Fake laughs, belly laughs, malicious laughs and chuckles all come with their own set of cues — such as vocal tones and facial expressions — that signal whether you’re being laughed at or laughed with.

Not picking up on these cues may lead some people with gelotophobia to misinterpret playful laughter as something much more menacing, Platt says.

“If all the cues are all there, the over-exaggeration and the facial mannerisms, to say ‘I’m only playing with you and this is fun,’ then it may be fine,” Platt says. “But there’s a danger that those cues might be misunderstood by someone who fears being ridiculed, and they will say that they’re being bullied when they’re just being teased.”

In a recent study, Platt created different scenarios to simulate teasing and bullying situations where laughter frequently occurs. The results, published in the June Psychology Science Quarterly, found that gelotophobes had problems discriminating between the two.

“Teasing is ambiguous at best,” she says. “It’s play, and it’s quite sophisticated, and some people aren’t going to get that.”

While teasing is about group cohesion and being included, ridicule and bullying are about social exclusion, Platt says.

“Teasing would be dying your hair a lighter color and having your friends call you a dumb blonde,” she explains. “They know that you’re not dumb. They have a trust element in the relationship. The people in the group are saying, ‘We’re so close we can have fun with some element.’”

If someone misinterprets playful banter at work or school and then overreacts, it could make everything worse, she adds. “Then they would be reacting inappropriately, and that could make them the target of ridicule if they weren’t before.”

Platt is now developing a program based on the “mental toughness” coaching techniques that sports psychologists use to help athletes succeed and take control of situations. Once in place, the program may be used to help gelotophobes better deal with laughter.

“Avoiding laughter situations is only going to make them feel worse, so we want to set up challenges to help them recognize the appropriate cues and take control of their fear,” she says.

To provide a more complete picture of how people deal with laughter, Ruch and his colleagues have recently expanded their studies to describe two other humor-related concepts: The joy of being laughed at — or gelotophilia — and the joy of laughing at others, or katagelasticism.

“Humor and mockery are part of a complex interaction —namely, someone does something wrong and gets laughed at,” Ruch says. “But there’s also someone who laughs, and likely a bystander who maybe doesn’t do the ridiculing but approves of it. If we want to understand the phenomenon of gelotophobia in a broader sense, we need to study these different roles.”

While recent studies provide a basis for understanding gelotophobia, scientists say the research is still in its infancy.

Some scientists are now investigating how gelotophobia relates to other types of social anxiety and phobias. Others are initiating work to peer inside the brains of gelotophobes using functional MRI to see if those who fear being laughed at show neural activity more typical for “fear” rather than laughter or enjoyment.

Still others are studying the relationships of gelotophobes to see how their fears play out with friends and families or change with age.

Platt says preliminary data with young adults suggest that people might be more susceptible to being laughed at during puberty. To better understand how, and when, such fears take hold in children, she is working to complete a version of the GELOPH that can be administered to children as young as 3 to 5 years old. The studies may help teachers and administrators sort out accusations of bullying and teasing. Other researchers are studying whether gelotophobia runs in families by checking to see if gelotophobic parents have gelotophobic children.

Ruch says that recognizing that humor is not necessarily contagious is especially important for teachers and others who work with groups of people. “We need to know why is it that something so human, which brings enjoyment to most everyone, is actually experienced so negatively by a few.”

Susan Gaidos is a freelance science writer in Maine.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/45581/title/When_Humor_Humiliates

The Bad Guys Get Away

2010-05-20T05:00:00.002-04:00

I am an artist...It's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, "I know all about it. I've already found it." As far as I'm concerned, the word means, "I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved."

---Vincent Van Gogh

I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness---I look not for it if it be not in the present hour---nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights---or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.

---John Keats

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the woodrose, and left it on its stalk?

---Ralph Waldo Emerson

I guess our political system is based on Britain's history, with both of us taking our model from Rome's experiment in Greek democracy. But toward the end, before the so-called barbarians just walked into town and took over, Rome's system had fallen apart. The senate bickered and accomplished nothing. The executive could speak but had to get into the emperor's pocket for funding. The military was intervening everywhere. The courts sentenced questioners to crucifixion. And the emperors were mad with greed and lust.

My teaching career was spent largely celebrating our republic's ways of doing things politically. And just yesterday, I urged a friend to write her federal congressperson for help with a local post office. I guess I'm still a believer. But those primary results and all the conversation I hear---if anybody even bothers to talk about it---demonstrate America has lost faith dramatically in Washington, DC.

Two articles this morning explain to me how and why this has happened. The first is by Glenn Greenwald, previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. In one dynamic paragraph he sums up our disillusion~~~

"It makes perfect sense that the country loathes the political establishment. Just look at its rancid fruits over the past decade: a devastating war justified by weapons that did not exist; a financial crisis that our Nation's Genuises failed to detect and which its elites caused with lawless and piggish greed; elections that seem increasingly irrelevant in terms of how the Government functions; grotesquely lavish rewards for the worst culprits juxtaposed with miserable unemployment and serious risks of having basic entitlements (Social Security) cut for ordinary Americans; and a Congress that continues to be owned, right out in the open, by the very interests that have caused so much damage. The political establishment is rotten to its core, and the only thing that's surprising is that the citizenry's contempt isn't even more intense than it is. But precisely because that dynamic so clearly transcends Left/Right or Democratic/GOP dichotomies, little effort is expended to understand or explain it."

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/19/establishment/index.html

I recommend the article as well because he points out the United States free press repeats and repeats "anti-incumbency," but doesn't explain WHY. Is this the time the truth came out? Is that what we want?

On Tuesday reporter Amy Goodman published an article at TruthDig that describes step by step how the "leak" in the Gulf happened. If you didn't happen to see "60 Minutes" last week, have you heard of anyone else covering this?

"The gulf oil eruption (for that is what it is, not a 'spill' and not merely a 'leak,' but the unleashing of a hugely powerful jet of oil and gas under enormous pressure, a mile beneath the ocean surface) is likely to become the worst environmental disaster in United States history.

"Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician of the Transocean oil rig, detailed on '60 Minutes' the negligence of both Transocean and BP in the lead-up to the blowout. Williams said a mistake was made during a pressure test, which damaged a critical safety gasket, or annular. Later, a crew member reported finding chunks of the rubber gasket in the effluent that surfaces during the drilling process. This annular is part of the blowout preventer, which is the device on the ocean floor, atop the well, that is supposed to serve as the fail-safe, to prevent exactly the type of catastrophe that is unfolding now. There also was a known electrical failure on the blowout preventer.

"Williams also detailed an argument aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig between the Transocean manager and the BP manager. Transocean had been hired to drill the hole and to plug it until BP returned to begin oil extraction. The argument involved how best to plug the hole.

"Transocean, Williams recounted, wanted to leave a heavy mudlike substance in the well shaft, to help the concrete plugs (installed by Halliburton) stay in place. BP wanted the substance removed, ostensibly to expedite the later extraction. 'BP won,' Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley engineering professor, told '60 Minutes,' and the concrete plugs failed. The damaged blowout preventer failed as well, and the disaster soon followed."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/law_order_corporate_crime_unit_20100518/

Can anything be done? Will anything be done? Or, as one guy remarked, does BP actually stand for Beyond Prosecution? Is it too late?

Wild Day On Wall Street

2010-05-08T03:39:00.003-04:00

Journalist Matt Taibbi on Colbert Nation

If you were to put aside what you know because of what other people told you, how much of what you know do you truly know for yourself? If you look for the origin of your thoughts, of your life, of your universe, can you find it? Can you find where this moment comes from or where it goes home to?

---John Tarrant

Learn the changes and then forget them.

---Charlie Parker

I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself, things like clean air, green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one's abilities, plain tasty food...

---Paul Goodman

The rest of the headline, that I'm using for a title, went like this in yesterday's Washington Post: Wild day on Wall Street leaves electronic exchanges under scrutiny
By David Cho and Jia Lynn Yang. Then the report starts out, "Stock markets went haywire on Thursday. Shares were already falling over fears of fiscal problems in Europe when something, perhaps a structural flaw in U.S. markets, dragged prices into a historic and breathtaking plunge. In the span of minutes, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted nearly 1,000 points from its previous close -- a record -- and whipsawed back up, creating one of the wildest trading days ever." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/06/AR2010050601464.html The lead story in the New York Times this morning says nobody can figure out yet what happened.

Attempts were made a couple of times to teach me about economics during my schooling. Once was in high school I think, maybe for social studies. We had to choose a stock or 2 and follow them in the newspaper for a week or something. I guess we hoped it went up, but if that's supposed to be exciting it didn't get to me. Then in college there was a required Introduction to Economics, by which was meant US capitalism. I don't remember a single word of the course, but I don't think "hedge fund" or "derivative" was covered.

Nobody ever taught me about socialism, except maybe my great uncle by example. He was mayor of Jamestown, New York, my hometown, for about a zillion years, and was declared Mayor Emeritus because back in the 1930s he thought it was a good idea to have municipal light plants and things like that. He believed citizens should have direct input into how much utilities cost and how things are run. I suppose he was a socialist of some kind. You know how we Swedes are.

I get along with business majors and the like. They seem to have a good sense of humor. But I can't stand any of them once they become executives. They seem to get mean and ugly somewhere along the way. And I don't understand the stock market or much about how capitalism works...and it doesn't interest me. When Reagan was elected I thought probably it was the time to make a lot of money. My wife and I talked it over and we decided we didn't want to get on board...and we didn't. It was sort of a vow, not of poverty exactly, but of middle class contentment.

Well, it turns out contentment being middle class is more and more like being poor. How did that happen? And now we hear about necessary "financial reform." I find nowdays I can't leave my doctor or my insurance company or my union or political representatives to take care of things for me. I have to do the legwork and let them know I'm watching what they do. Life in America didn't used to be like that. My parents trusted those people and it worked out pretty well...until they voted for Reagan anyway.

So, if like most Americans, I don't know anything about financial reform, what am I supposed to do? What happened anyway? What place does Goldman Sachs have in my middle class life? I saw a bumper sticker or something the other days that said, "If America is going down the drain, Goldman Sachs has figured out a way to be that drain." The other day those pirates from Somalia said they're a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. I suppose that's a joke, but there's a cutting edge to it. How does a guy who doesn't know the language find out what needs to be reformed and why?

Matt Taibbi's been writing about this stuff in Rolling Stone for over a year now. In some ways he's writing the same story over and over again in hope that eventually we're going to understand what he's talking about. Matt was a wonderful political correspondent during the presidential election. He was on the campaign trails of both candidates and wrote candidly about the problems and the hopes. But does he know economics?

A year ago April he wrote a long and involved piece called The Big Takeover. The article was about the bailout...but Taibbi's view of it is that "Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution." And he isn't kidding. What was wrong with Wall Street before the bailout got even wronger afterwards and now. I'm having trouble this morning finding the original article at Rolling Stone, but Common Dreams has maintained it (alas, without Victor Juhasz' brilliant illustrations) and I'll give you a few excerpts to convince you to read the whole thing~~~

"The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history - some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year (2008), the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses)...

"The problem was, none of this was based on reality. 'The banks knew they were selling crap,' says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs (Collateralized-Debt Obligation) relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. 'They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years,' says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. 'It was nuts...'

"In its simplest form, a CDS (Credit-Default Swap) is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job...

"(Robert) Cassano (the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP) was selling so-called 'naked' CDS deals. In a 'naked' CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope - it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

"In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come...

"Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm - a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas - had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks - those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses - had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

"But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more 'business-friendly.' Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?..

"The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and - with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson - made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

"Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one...

"There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs - a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression - was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

"The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word 'zero coupon bond' in a sentence without sounding stupid - well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them...

"The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

"In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called 'bad bank' that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets - the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits."

Even with Matt Taibbi's regular-guy style of writing, this is hard stuff to understand. But it's a start...and it's necessary. You don't want to be fooled again, do you?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/22-6

Besieged

2010-05-05T04:08:00.004-04:00

When you finally collapse somewhere, this robot will read your vitals and call 911.
http://www.geekologie.com/2008/04/ubot_5_robot_designed_to_help.php

Life is too short to be in a hurry.

---Henry David Thoreau

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

---Jack Kerouac

The artist must summon all his energy, his sincerity, and the greatest modesty in order to shatter the old cliches that come to easily to hand while working, which can suffocate the little flower that doesn not come, ever, the way one expects.

---Henri Matisse

I understand Google's got a war on. Hacked and attacked from all sides, and probably especially from China whose American-made spy devices keep an eye on everyone wherever. Well, maybe Times Square was saved because of all those cameras watching everything, but still what if I want to hide away somewhere? Get lost. Find some solitude. A Google Earth satellite can find me, hone in on my whereabouts, and cybercast me taking a bath. Hello YouTube. Sign in with your Google account.

I know a Libertarian at work, who's always telling me the government wants to put a computer chip in our brains. I have a friend, currently being checked out, who believes the government already did that to him. Well get this: people are sick and tired of trying to use their cellphones in places where there's no antenna close enough to give them service. Now a computer chip has been invented that is a portable antenna, and you can have it installed your head so your cellphone will work anywhere. There's a market for it. The government won't have to force it on us at all.

Here's the deal, however you feel. I finally put in that stupid word verification thing for comments. I hate doing it. I am so for freedom to come, speak your mind, and go. Dutifully I've log in to jazzoLOG everyday to remove the robot spam and porn comments. I'm content to do that work because Blogger is free and I figure it's the price I pay. I also blog at a paysite and if it happens there, I complain and the webmaster takes care of it. I'd pay for that service here too.

But a few weeks ago, something got into my Gmail, accessed my contact list, and sent out a ridiculous message to everyone...from me. People replied and said they couldn't believe I really wanted them to do these things. One person actually did them. I complained, and got a robot message urging me to change my password. I did so. A week later another message went out. Then my whole account went down.

When that happens, you've really got trouble. You try to log in at any Google-run feature or site and a screen comes up telling you you're Temporarily Disabled. Links lead you from screen to screen, and finally a Contact Us option. YES! Perhaps a human is at the other end. No such luck. A robot form shows up, and last week there were questions like What was the date you registered for your blog? Oh yeah, it was such a treasured moment I wrote it right down in my diary. What are the email addresses of the people you most send messages to? I tried answering all these, and messages came each time to the alternative Yahoo addy I provided that my answers weren't good enough. The robot couldn't verify my existence.

I wondered why the questionnaire didn't ask me something like the titles of various articles at this blog...a blog readers couldn't access, so only I would remember such stuff. But no, it asked questions nobody would know the answer to. I gave up on it, and started searching Help Forum sites. I found tons of people complaining from the same boat. Blogs were detected by robots and suspected of spamming. Down they went, disappeared they were. Was I under such suspicion? No charges had been leveled at me. I couldn't figure it out.

Finally I found a Google page that offered human review of my situation. I jumped at the chance. Alas, I read, all I can do now is wait. There's a massive backlog. I'm imagining one guy in Pakistan having the job of looking us over. A week goes by. Meanwhile everyday the robot pornographer in Japan continues to comment at my blog that isn't there. How is this possible? I fill out more robot forms telling the robots about this. No reply. I continue trying to log in.

Finally just before midnight, the veil was lifted. I got the screen to change my password again, and when I did here I am. I don't know how stable this is. I don't know how long this will last. Maybe I'll change my password everyday. For the moment I'm out of my Google cellblock and walking free. It feels good. Fragrance of locust in bloom. It's spring. It's rained. Frogs and turtles in bliss. I'll appreciate the moment...in case the darkness descends again.

The Following Is A Public Service Announcement

2010-04-12T08:31:00.003-04:00

Searching for the Truth through words and speech is like sticking your head in a bowl of glue.

---Yuan-wu

Just watch children playing.
Eat vegetable soup instead of duck stew.

---Basho's advice to poets

After evening rainfall at Pa-shang,
the flying "V" of wild geese,
the leaves hanging limp and dripping,
A single lantern's pale gleam,
and empty garden wet with dew,
the crumbling walls of the monastery
...enough, I think, long enough:
what am I waiting for?

---Ma Tai

We used to have to say that on the radio in the 1950s. There was a piece of copy taped near the microphone with a statement to be read before any public service announcement. Partly it was to identify what you would hear as being something in "the public interest." The remainder of the reason was to give the station credit for the amount of public service we provided. The media was required to contribute to the common good back then. The new TV stations had to put up a screen momentarily identifying public service too. If you merely were a crass commercial entity, you could lose your broadcasting license.

The original idea about broadcasting involved the airwaves. They belonged to the People. It's a bit like you can own a house and the land it's on. But how far down and how far up does your ownership extend? To China? To the moon? No, there's something called the Social Contract that describes and limits your omnipotence, according to the advantages you receive by banding together like this. At the moment, we still sorta think of the moon as nobody's property...but probably eventually an attorney will figure out how to carve it up. By Reagan's era it had been decided that if you could get control of enough stations and networks, you could do whatever you want with them. If his first act in office was to bust a union, his second must have been to get rid of the Fairness Doctrine. That piece of policy required radio and television to be fair and balanced in presentation of conflicting ideas...and to be willing and eager to prove it. A warning from the Federal Communications Commission on this was serious stuff.

Around the time Fairness disappeared, mining and drilling interests figured out how to own the land under your house. They could dig around so close to the top that your floor might cave in. That's OK. Now those guys were doing stuff for the common good. Reagan had the solar array ripped off the White House roof. After all, an oil man (among other things) was his vice president.

So here we are today, with the Tea Parties. Rupert Murdoch owns a lot of media. Last Tuesday evening I guess he appeared before the National Press Club. He pretty much owns that too. He allowed some questions. One of them came from an executive at Media Matters. Ari Rabin-Hvat wanted to know Murdoch's views on the promotion of Tea Party membership and events by Fox News Channel/Fox Nation, its staff and commentators. Murdoch said the commentators are identified clearly and can say whatever they want, but the news reporting is objective journalism. Rabin-Hvat replied the news anchors promote Tea Parties all the time, and the network itself appears to sponsor the events. Murdoch said that couldn't be true, and that he personally would investigate the situation "before condemning anyone."

On Thursday, to assist Mr. Murdoch's courageous investigative journalism, Media Matters posted some examples. We await Rupert's further findings.

From Media Matters' Open Letter To Rupert Murdoch~~~

"Join Your Local Tea Party": Fox News' history of promoting the tea party movement

Anchor: "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" During the April 13, 2009, edition of Your World, Fox Business anchor and "business journalist" Stuart Varney plugged Fox News' presence at the April 15, 2009, tea parties, saying: "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!"

Fox News aired more than 100 commercial promotions for tea party protests in less than two weeks. From April 6 to April 15, Fox News aired at least 107 commercial promotions for their coverage of the April 15, 2009, tea party protests.

Beck encouraged viewers to "please go" to "FNC (Fox News Channel-Fox Nation) Tax Day Tea Parties." Fox News aired graphics on repeated occasions in which they dubbed the April 15, 2009, Tax Day Tea Parties, "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." Host Glenn Beck told viewers they could "[c]elebrate with Fox News" at any of four Fox News-described "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties," saying: "If you can't make the one in San Antonio" -- which Beck himself attended -- "please go to the one with Neil or with Sean in Atlanta, that's supposed to be great, Greta is in Washington, D.C. Just get out and let your face be seen."

"Can't get to a tea party? Fox Nation hosts a virtual tea party." On the April 11, 2009, edition of Fox News Watch, Fox News host Bill Hemmer said:

HEMMER: While the mainstream media's ignored the tea party movement, here at the Fox News Channel, we're gearing up to bring you special coverage of the events all across the country. Sean Hannity is in Atlanta; Glenn Beck's at the Alamo -- where else would he be? -- San Antonio; Neil Cavuto is live in Sacramento; and Greta is in Washington, D.C.

Can't get to a tea party? Fox Nation hosts a virtual tea party. You can check it out on the site for the location of a tea party in your area. Again, that is Wednesday, the 15th of April.

On April 15, 2009, news anchor Megyn Kelly said, "you can join the tea party action from your home if you go to the FoxNation.com ... a virtual tax day tea party." On April 16, 2009, Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson told viewers that they "can still have a virtual tea party" at Fox Nation

Fox News host: "[H]opefully millions of people" will participate. While reporting live at a protest on April 15, 2009, former Big Story host John Gibson, a Fox News Radio host, remarked that "hopefully millions of people" will participate in the protests.

Anchor to viewers: You "need to go" to tea party merchandise site. On April 15, 2009, Fox Business anchor David Asman told viewers they "need to go" to a tea party merchandise site "no matter what side of the issue you're on."

News anchor on list of nationwide tea party events: "Check it out online right now." On March 24, 2009, Hemmer noted protests in Florida and Ohio and directed viewers to the program's website to learn more about the protests:

HEMMER: It's called the tea party. And check out the scene in Orlando, Florida. More than 4,000 turned out over the weekend protesting government spending and a big thumbs-down to the policies currently in Washington. Radio host Bud Hedinger hosted that event. Protesters, well, they waved flags and signs and with slogans like "Repeal the Pork" and "Our Bacon is Cooked." I say, our bacon is cooked.

They're popping up literally all across the country now. They had about 5,000 in Cincinnati last weekend. If you go to our website, you will find a growing list of these events, hundreds of photos, and a new tea-party anthem that you will hear from the man who wrote it and recorded it next hour. And there's a list of the nationwide Tax Day tea party events coming up on the 15th of April, which will be a huge deal for those organizations. So check it out online right now.

News anchor: To find "one happening near you, head to our website." On April 6, 2009, Hemmer again directed viewers to Fox News' website to find a tea party "happening near you"

HEMMER: If you want to know more about the tea-party movement, if there is one happening near you, head to our website FoxNews.com/americasnewsroom. We have an entire section devoted to the growing tea-party movement. That's our America's Newsroom website online. All the information you need to know. Check it out right now.

Hannity: "We hope you'll join us." On April 3, 2009, Fox News host Sean Hannity said: "And also log on to our Web site to get all the details about our special 'Tax Day Tea Party.' We're going to be live in Atlanta, April 15th. Governor [and Fox News host Mike] Huckabee, by the way, will be on that show." Hannity also said during the program: "And then it's April 15, it's our tea party tax day show. And I'll be hosting the show from Atlanta, where one of dozens of tea party protests are going to be going on that evening. So we hope you'll join us."

Reporter: "We want to let folks know" tea party schedule so "they can be a part" of events. The August 23, 2009, edition of Fox News' America's News HQ hosted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams to promote the tour. During the segment, anchor and reporter Shannon Bream said of the tour's schedule:

BREAM: You do have a bit of a cohesive, at least organized schedule. We want to let folks know you're going to be making --

WILLIAMS: Yes.

BREAM: -- 34, 35 stops, I believe it is, all across the country, so if they want to come out and take part, they certainly can be a part of what you're doing. And, you know, this has definitely struck a chord with people.

Reporter: "[H]opefully Washington will listen to their concerns." During the August 28, 2009, edition of Fox & Friends, William La Jeunesse reported live from Sacramento on the kickoff of the Tea Party Express. At the conclusion of his report, La Jeunesse said of the tour's concerns: "[T]hey believe, collectively, that they at least have a voice, and hopefully Washington will listen to their concerns."

Host: "How you can join, next." On its August 19, 2009, broadcast, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade told viewers "how you can join" the Tea Party Express:

KILMEADE: Straight ahead, citizens take their concerns about health care on the road to -- on the road. The organizer of a cross-country tea party tour, and how you can join, next.

[...]

KILMEADE: The Tea Party Express will make 35 stops across the country, giving Americans a constructive outlet in which to share their concerns on health care, and I imagine more.

During the segment, Fox News helped viewers find out "how you can join" the Tea Party Express by displaying the dates and locations of 22 stops.

"To sign up for Tea Party 2.0 Go to ..." On May 13, 2009, On the Record host Greta Van Susteren did a segment on the "Tea Party 2.0," saying: "If you wanted to go to a tea party on April 15 but could not make it or there was none in your hometown, tomorrow's your big chance." She later asked Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), "What do they do, do they log on a particular place? And will they be able to interact with you? I mean, how's this gonna work?" and later, "[W]hen is this tea party? When does it begin? Is there a Web address or a phone number?"

Cavuto on protestors: "God bless these folks." On March 27, while showing footage of tea party protestors gathering for a tea party rally "four and a half hours from now," Fox Business senior vice president Neil Cavuto commented, "I don't do that [gather to protest] for anything. ... God bless these folks."

Reporter endorsed tea partier's call to "get these liberal communists out of our government." While covering a tea party protest for FoxNews.com on September 4, 2009, reporter Griff Jenkins interviewed a tea partier who said he wanted to "get these liberal communists out of our government." Jenkins replied: "How about that. I couldn't have said anything better than that." On the September 12, 2009, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Dave Briggs said of Tea Party Express-embedded Jenkins: "You might call him a tea party groupie."

Fox News employee: Some members of Fox "cheerlead for rallies and tea parties." Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg stated on September 29, 2009: "There are some programs on Fox that are not only not 'Fair and Balanced' -- they're commentary shows, they don't have to be -- but they brag about how 'Fair and Balanced' they are. They don't cover rallies and tea parties; they cheerlead for rallies and tea parties. And as a journalist, I am totally against that."

http://mediamatters.org/press/releases/483110

Practice Your Hallelujah

2010-04-04T05:25:00.002-04:00

An angel sitting by the tomb is reported to have asked Mary of Magdala: "Why search for the living among the dead?" In her puzzlement she tells someone who she thought to be the gardener: "If you have taken him away, tell me and I will take him away myself." It was when the 'gardener' pronounced her name "Mary" that she recognized Him and exclaimed in uncontrollable joy, "Master."
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/100404/Plus/plus_25.html

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

---Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

We're members of the Episcopal Church whose Presiding Bishop is The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori. Bishop Schori's Easter Message this morning encourages us to continue "practicing that joyful shout" of Alleluia. She wisely reminds us that even grasping Resurrection is a lifelong challenge, to say nothing of seeing its realization in the world. She understands if, upon looking around, we may not feel that confident and happy. That's helpful to me today.

There have been a number of news items recently reporting that Easter ain't what it used to be in the minds of Americans. Maybe a lot of doubt and gloom has affected this mood. Some articles are going to the heart of the matter by challenging the whole notion of Jesus rising from the dead. It's impossible, they say! I'm kind of glad for this opinion to get right out there in the light of day, because it's made me do a lot of thinking. I've tried to get beyond any old notion that Christ's Resurrection is a symbol for the continuation of his teachings in the birth of the church. I've thought maybe Jesus was a realized yogi, who wasn't nailed to the cross or pierced with a spear. After all, the usual practice was to drape the convicts up there with ropes and leave them to die slowly of exposure. Maybe he went into a trance and survived that. Then there's the electric impression on the Shroud of Turin.

Whatever the result of all this cogitation, minus any revelation of the Miracle, I feel closer personally to Jesus...and that's a good thing. I need it, when I also confront this morning reminders of this nation's last 50 years of history. The first thing I ran into was a Libertarian's post of the excerpt from Milton Mayer's book which I've printed above. He describes the slow, seemingly inevitable descent of an average German citizen while Nazis solidified power. If you'd prefer to watch it acted out on film, nothing depicts it so well as Bertolucci's 1900...and especially Donald Sutherland's chilling bully-become-gestapo. It can't happen here.

Next, Bill Moyers reminded me that Martin Luther King was murdered on this day 42 years ago by at least one of our homegrown terrorists. I'm sure had Fox News and its many personalities been around, they would have assured us the assassin acted alone and was only a bad apple in the barrel. But of course in this Dream Deferred opinion piece, Moyers and Winship are just getting warmed up~~~

The nonpartisan group United for a Fair Economy has issued a report that features Martin Luther King Jr. on the cover with the title, "State of the Dream 2010: Drained." Dr. King's dream is in jeopardy, the report's authors write, "The Great Recession has pulled the plug on communities of color, draining jobs and homes at alarming rates while exacerbating persistent inequalities of wealth and income."

Nor will a recovery ameliorate the crisis. "A rising tide does not lift all boats," United for a Fair Economy's report goes on to say, "because the public policies, economic structures and unwritten rules of racism form mountains and ridgelines, and hills and valleys that shape our economic landscape. As a result, a rising economic tide fills the rivers and reservoirs of some, while leaving others dry and parched."

This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted our system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity - its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist.

It is hard to overstate the consequences of choosing more of the same - the very policies that have sundered our social contract. But hear the judgment of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and martyrdom. "The vast inequalities of income weaken a society's sense of mutual concern," Arrow said. "... The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the meaning of civilization."
http://www.truthout.org/dr-kings-economic-dream-deferred58258

Next, TruthOut deemed it essential I meet Davidson Loehr, another social justice minister whose writing is new to me. This is a strong piece about the continuing American policy of torture~~~

Naomi Klein's 2007 book "The Shock Doctrine" took 466 pages to flesh out the worldview that can even be proud of torture, as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have confessed to be....

Human history confirms Klein's research: the combined forces of greed and violence usually win. History also offers the testimony of General Smedley Butler (1881-1940), who wrote "War Is a Racket". One of only two Americans to win the Medal of Honor on two separate occasions, his words were as courageous as his actions, especially when he spoke about the real purpose of war:

"The flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.... I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.... I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

In the United States of 2010, the greediest corporations have won, and are consolidating their strength for a long reign. We need to understand how they can employ a degree of violence, torture and murder that simply paralyzes most of us.
http://www.truthout.org/why-torture-necessary58259

The upside of meeting Mr. Loehr this morning has been to Google him and find he's on Facebook. A graduate of a military academy for his high school years, he went to the University of Michigan in that very dangerous course of study, music theory. Naturally he caved in entirely after that, and ended up at the notorious University of Chicago with his Phd in theology and the philosophy of science. What was left for the poor man but to become a Unitarian Universalist? And that's where you can find him today, down in Austin with a congregation of "very liberal 700+," he says at Facebook.

So maybe it turns out that despite the horrors of the front page and the editorial columns, I may be able to mutter a Hallelujah today after all. With champions like Moyers and Loehr leading my way, the sun will rise on Glory after all! Thank you Bishop, I'll keep practicing.

Personal Danger

2010-03-29T02:33:00.002-04:00

How many Problems of American Democracy can you identify in this cartoon?
http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff182/darleenclick/blog%20images/liberty_sml.jpg

If I can get out of the way, if I can be pure enough, if I can be selfless enough, and if I can be generous and loving and caring enough to abandon what I have and my own preconceived, silly notions of what I think I am---and become truly who in fact I am, which is really just another child of God---then the music can really use me. And therein lies my fulfillment. That's when the music starts to happen.

---John McLaughlin

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

---Soren Kierkegaard

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what's right.

---Isaac Asimov

I was walking past a church in my town last evening, getting ready to go inside for a meeting. A time in our history suddenly crossed my mind in which church meetings were firebombed. I was not going to a political or social change meeting, so why would I think of such a thing? Nor have I heard of meetings being attacked like that in America now---yet. I haven't been personally confronted by a Teabagger, but I'm starting to hear stories from friends and relatives. It's getting close.

On Saturday, a friend of mine told a story about his daughter, who like my Ilona also is in her first year of college. She had traveled to Washington, DC, with other students earlier in the month to attend her first demonstration, which was in favor of healthcare legislation. There were people there in opposition. The DC police had separated the 2 groups, and were standing between. The people opposed were shouting at the students, calling them names. The young women were called whores. She telephoned her dad to tell him what was happening. She said a cop had come over to her to ask how she was doing. She replied she hadn't expected it would be so hard to stand up for what you believe. The policeman said people need a lot of courage now to do what's right.

On Friday my wife was listening to the Stephanie Miller talk radio program. A woman had called in to say she had been concerned about a local Republican representative whose office had had a brick thrown through a window or been shot at or something. Although a Democrat herself, she phoned the office to ask if there were anything she could do to help. The person suggested she call John Boehner's office, the House Minority Leader, for any directions there might be about party policy. She did that, but when asked decided to identify herself as a Republican in case that made a difference. She told the receptionist she was disturbed by the lack of civil discourse in politics now, and requested advice. The receptionist said, "You're disturbed by the lack of civil discourse? Then the Republican Party has no need for your participation," and hung up. (See blog comment #137 http://www.stephaniemiller.com/2010/03/23/liveblog-for-the-week-of-march-22-26-2010/#comments )

My son posted a reminder on Saturday about Earth Hour at his Facebook page. A longtime Internet friend did so too. I guess people were supposed to turn off their lights and electric sometime that evening. I hadn't heard about it and we weren't home anyway, but we had participated in such an event a year or so ago. It was supposed to be an observance in appreciation both of the convenience of such power and the importance of conservation. Yesterday I saw on Google News that a group had been formed in opposition to Earth Hour. Maybe the brainstorm of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, their observance was called the Human Achievement Hour---or HAH! They urged people to turn ON all their lights and electric to honor American ingenuity. They said there's darkness every night in Communist North Korea, so why don't the Earth Hour people go over there and sit around in the dark with the other Communists? Another response took it a step further, remarking Earth Hour was connected with the Spring Equinox and represented the Demonic Power of Darkness worshipped by the Pagans. Should my son be more careful at Facebook?

The Christian Science Monitor this morning has a story titled "Sarah Palin's gun-imagery takes aim at political targets," and shows her receiving a custom Henry rifle on behalf of the Republican Party of Arkansas. The article talks about an image at Palin's Facebook page of 20 Democrat opponents she encourages her followers to defeat in November: "In the battle, set your sights on next season’s targets! From the shot across the bow – the first second’s tip-off – your leaders will be in the enemy’s crosshairs, so you must execute strong defensive tactics. You won’t win only playing defense, so get on offense! The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win." Each Democrat is pictured on the map with the district in a rifle's crosshairs. There's a hyperlink at the Monitor story. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0327/Sarah-Palin-s-gun-imagery-takes-aim-at-political-targets

Yesterday it was no holds barred at Frank Rich's New York Times column. He expressed some heat I'm not used to feeling so intensely from him. It was upsetting...and maybe partially responsible for my thought of a firebombing later in the day. I'm not sure what is happening to my country, but I'm positive I am not alone in alarm. I'll post his whole article here for posterity~~~

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New York Times
March 28, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Rage Is Not About Health Care
By FRANK RICH

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?th&emc=th

Springtime On Coal Sludge Pond

2010-03-19T05:21:00.003-04:00

Children play in a playground in Racine, Ohio, across the Ohio River from American Electric Power's (AEP) Mountaineer coal power plant in New Haven, West Virginia, October 30, 2009.
Photo: Loeb/AFP/Getty

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

---Rumi

A general may establish peace, but it is not for the general to seek peace.

---Zen saying

This matter is like a great mass of fire; when you approach it your face is sure to be scorched. It is again like a sword about to be drawn; when it is once out of the scabbard, someone is sure to lose his life. But if you neither fling away the scabbard nor approach the fire, you are no better than a piece of rock or wood. Coming to this pass one has to be quite a resolute character full of spirit.

---Tai-hui

Type "coal sludge" into a Google Image Search, and see the photos that come up. If you live in the humanly created ugliness known as Coal Country, you know these images well. You may not have seen a sludge pond or strip mine up close because the corporations hide them...but you know they're there. If you don't live in Coal Country but only flip switches and push buttons all day, then we need to remind you. That coal-fired electricity comes from where we live, and this is the mess.

In Southeast Ohio we're getting---er---fired up for a public hearing in Belmont County about the creation of a new and huge sludge pond. The biggest coal company around here is Murray...and sludge also is called slurry, so this is Murray Slurry. Sierra Club in these parts is encouraging openly as many folks as possible to turn out for the hearing on March 30th. We already know there'll be tons of coal people there, and hearings around here on this subject can get pretty intense. Nachy Kanfer, out of Columbus, is Sierra's point man in its Beyond Coal campaign, and here's a message he sent out last week~~~

Tell Governor Strickland and Ohio's EPA Director You Want Clean Water, Not Toxic Coal Slurry for Ohio

Several years ago, Ohio's biggest coal mining company asked for permission to drain a pristine stream and fill it instead with coal slurry, a mixture of water, chemicals, and coal mining waste. In 2008, Ohio EPA rightly told Murray Energy to go back to the drawing board. http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/01/24/CaseyRun.ART_ART_01-24-10_B1_84GCPDS.html?sid=101

So what's Murray Energy's "new" plan for 2010? Drain a pristine stream and fill it with dirty coal slurry -- again. And this time, the company threatens to start firing people if it doesn't get its way.

Tell Governor Strickland and Ohio EPA Director Chris Korleski that job creation and environmental protection aren't competing issues -- they're the SAME issue.

We can't allow corporations to bully our elected officials who are trying to do the right thing. The Ohio EPA stood strong in 2008. Now, Ohio EPA must stand strong again.

Thank the Governor for his courage back in 2008 -- and urge him not to abandon that courage now.

The choice between decent jobs and clean water is false; in order to regain its economic edge, Ohio must move beyond coal to clean energy in the coming years and decades. Turning a pure freshwater stream into a huge toxic coal slurry impoundment is a giant step in the wrong direction.

As always, thanks for everything that you do to protect the environment and create new clean energy jobs in Ohio.

Sincerely,
Nachy Kanfer
Sierra Club

P.S. There's an important public hearing in St. Clairsville on March 30, 6 p.m. on this issue. Find more information and RSVP here! http://action.sierraclub.org/site/PageServer?pagename=20100330_OH_Hearing&autologin=true

People who think of Appalachia as a sleepy, even lazy, pile of poverty may be surprised by the energy of conflict here. People are desperate for jobs, but cling to the old ways. "Dig a new mine" rings more bells in memory than "Learn to install a solar panel," and that's what the shouting's about. Coal yells louder than solar, and has lots of money for megaphones...so people are surprised when they learn there are jobs just waiting for trained people in renewable energy.

Yesterday Jeff Goodell posted a new article on Coal's Toxic Sludge to Rolling Stone online. It's also in the new issue, dated April 1st, on the stands now. Plunk down $4.99 to support the magazine if you're not a subscriber already. The piece starts like this~~~

Big coal has spent millions of dollars over the past year touting the virtues of what the industry calls "clean coal," but it's no secret that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When you burn it, coal releases monstrous quantities of deadly compounds and gases — and it all has to go somewhere. The worst of the waste — heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium and mercury, all of which are highly toxic — are concentrated in the ash that's left over after coal is burned or in the dirty sludge that's scrubbed from smokestacks. Each year, coal plants in the U.S. churn out nearly 140 million tons of coal ash — more than 900 pounds for every American — generating the country's second-largest stream of industrial waste, surpassed only by mining. If you piled all the coal ash on a single football field, it would create a toxic mountain more than 20 miles high.

For decades, the industry has gotten away with dumping coal ash pretty much wherever it wants. It poured the stuff into vast lagoons, dumped it into mines, used it to pave roads, spread it on crops as fertilizer, even mixed it into everyday items like concrete, wallboard, vinyl flooring, bowling balls, potting soil and toothpaste. There are no federal regulations to speak of. Many states have minimal restrictions on where and how coal ash can be dumped, but the coal industry has a long history of buying off state regulators with a junket to Vegas and a few rounds of golf. In short, the industry had it made. Nearly 300 billion pounds of coal ash simply vanished from view each year, with less oversight than household garbage.

But all that changed just before 1 a.m. on December 22nd, 2008, when an earthen dam collapsed at a storage pond brimming with coal waste near Kingston, Tennessee. Within hours, a billion gallons of gray-black sludge had oozed into the once-lovely Emory River, destroying nearby homes and poisoning the water. It was the largest industrial disaster in American history, a flood of waste 100 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. The cleanup of the river, which will take years to complete, is expected to cost as much as $1 billion.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32742962/coals_toxic_sludge/

Jeff's new book is called "How To Cool The Planet: Geoengineering And The Audacious Quest To Fix Earth's Climate." The Columbus Dispatch has a news story today about Ohio's coal-fired electric plants and how they rank in pumping out mercury into the nation's polluted air. Gavin, just down the River from the plant pictured above, ranks #12, and there's a photo of it. http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/03/18/copy/ohio-plants-still-pumping-out-mercury.html?adsec=politics&sid=101

Wind Powering America

2010-02-21T05:09:00.004-05:00

A new map from the Department of Energy shows Ohio's potential for wind energy at a height of 80 meters. You can check out other states at http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp

Everything we do is in the service of the self---and there is no self.

---Zen saying

Since everything is but an apparition
perfect in being what it is,
having nothing to do with good or bad,
acceptance or rejection,
one may as well burst out in laughter.

---Long Chen Pa

Frost across the river...
all I'd hope for lost
in the gathering autumn night.
Among the reeds and flowers,
a thousand miles alone.
But moonlight fills the boat.

---Ching An

My education is in what are known as the "arts." I studied only the required courses in science. Toward the end of my college days I became interested by a professor who taught the Philosophy of Science. In graduate school I tried to study Phenomenology, but I was lost. (Phenomenologists, to say nothing of Logical Positivists, probably would laugh at that sentence.) So when it comes to alternative energy, engineers currently allow me at a discussion table with them...but the voice of a poet isn't seen much as advancing the cause.

I decided Bush was right about calling it Climate Change instead of global warming, but probably for different reasons. People chop through this winter's ice and make cynical remarks about the warming. The fact is the warming of Pacific Ocean temperatures produces more moisture in the air, which proceeds to blow over us and come down as a delightful wintry mix. But here again, I'm not a science guy---and certainly neither are most of the conservatives I have to tangle with...so it's not for me to argue. When the weather is weird, Climate Change may be a term that explains it better.

But anyway, whether it's Climate Change or not, oil and coal have their limits, and what can it hurt to look at sun and wind? Union miners find themselves screaming the company line at EPA hearings, but the jobs-jobs-jobs are disappearing for them for lots of reasons. AFL-CIO leadership is wising up that training for energy conservation retrofit is the way to go.

The box office movie smash Avatar makes a point that our nation's younger generation had begun to understand even before those kids put on the 3D glasses. They're getting it that when a privileged American flicks a switch for his personal energy use, someone somewhere sacrifices something to provide it. A few people rake in big profits and some others have jobs, but for the most part a lifestyle suffers to enhance mine. And if we with the privilege look around deeply enough, we may see our luxury days are numbered too.

So as I still drive my car 10 miles into town, I do what I can to support supplemental energy plans that are being discussed at town meetings and Ohio University---which burns coal for the power it needs but is looking seriously at other possibilities. As a result I'm excited with the release on Friday of a new map of the contiguous United States that shows our nation's potential for wind energy. Here's the story from Wired~~~

America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate
By Alexis Madrigal February 19, 2010 | 1:31 pm |

The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources.

Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year. Wind turbines generated just 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2008, the last year for which annual statistics are available.

Though new and better data was used to create the assessment, the big jump in potential generation reflects technological change in wind machines more than fundamental new knowledge about our nation’s windscape.

Wind speed generally increases with height, and most wind turbines are taller than they used to be, standing at about 250 feet (80 meters) instead of 165 feet (50 meters). Turbines are now larger, more powerful and better than the old designs that were used to calculate previous estimates.

“Now we can develop areas that in [previous decades] wouldn’t have been deemed developable,” said Michael Brower, chief technology offier with AWS Truewind, which carried out the assessment. “It’s like oil reserves. They tend to go up not because there is more oil in the ground but because the technology for accessing the oil gets better.”

The new maps, at the DOE link, are useful for would-be wind-farm developers who need to find promising sites on which to place their turbines. They want locations with high wind speeds, access to transmission lines, cheap land and a host of other smaller logistical concerns. If you purchase the best versions, the Truewind maps have a resolution of 650 feet (200 meters), which is less than the spacing between modern machines. That means they can be used to provisionally site individual machines on the ground.

Many estimates have been made of the wind energy potential of the United States and the Earth. John Etzler made one of the first way back in the 1830s. He used loose numerical analogies to sailing ships to calculate that “the whole extent of the wind’s power over the globe amounts to about … 40,000,000,000,000 men’s power.”

The water-pumping windmill industry flourished in latter half of the 19th century, but wind energy potential calculations did not advance past the back-of-the-envelope until after World War II. When Palmer Putnam attempted to find the best site in Vermont for the first-megawatt sized wind turbine in the early 1940s, his first line of analysis was to look at how bent the trees were.

The 1980s saw a boom in wind energy in the state of California, driven by a number of federal and state incentives as well as an active environmental culture. Back then, the only way to really know how hard and often the wind blew was to put up a tower covered in sensors and measure. So, wind-farm developers concentrated their efforts on three areas — Tehachapi, Altamont Pass and San Gorgonio — and covered the places with towers to measure the wind.

“I still have some databases from back then and you look at them and say, ‘Oh my, they had 120 towers up,’ or something crazy,” Brower said. “That’s not how it’s done anymore.”

Even low-resolution regional maps did not exist until the early 1980s and the first national map was only published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (née Solar Energy Research Institute) in 1986. As you can see from the map at Wired, it was more of a general guide than a series of detailed local estimates.

The real boom in wind data came with the availability of cheap computational power in the late 1990s. It was then that Brower’s company began being able to marry large-scale weather models with small-scale topographic models. They created a parallel process for crunching wind data and ran it on small, fast PCs to get supercomputer-level power at low cost. Then, they refined their estimates with data from 1,600 wind measurement towers.

The result is a much more accurate forecast. Truewind’s estimates of wind speed at a location have an uncertainty margin of 0.35 meters a second. Good wind sites have average wind speeds of between 6.5 and 10 m/s, though most onshore areas don’t get above 9. Perhaps more importantly, their estimates for how many kilowatt-hours a turbine in a location will produce are accurate to within 10 percent, Brower stated.

The newest models are now sufficiently good that developers don’t need as much on-site data. They do still use towers to check the maps and models produced by companies like Truewind, but not nearly as many, which reduces the expense and time that it takes to execute a project.

“You might see 10 or 15 towers over an area that would have had 50 or 100 towers before,” he said.

The new data, including these maps and forecasting models, may not directly make wind farms cheaper, but the advances certainly makes them easier to plan for, develop and operate.

“I think of it more as greasing the wheels of the process more than producing a really big cost savings,” Brower said. “You reduce the friction, the transaction costs, and that enables you to get where you’re going faster.”

The better processes, along with state renewable-energy mandates, seem to be helping. In 2009, 10 gigawatts of wind capacity was installed in the United States to bring the nation’s total to 35 gigawatts.

The data plays a more subtle role, too. In helping make the case that wind energy can play a very substantial role in supplying electricity, the new maps and estimates could help convince industrial and political leaders to support renewable energy, particularly in windy heartland states like Kansas, Montana and Nebraska.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/better-wind-resource-maps/

The Founding Fathers: Were They Even Christians?

2010-02-15T05:19:00.006-05:00

Montage by Carin Goldberg, based upon “Declaration of Independence” by John Trumbull (1756-1843) and used to illustrate the NY Times article mentioned in the Wasserman essay.

There is a man who eats sparingly, but is never hungry.
There is a man who always is eating, but is never full.

---Zen riddle

Your inside is out and your outside is in.

---John Lennon

God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board.

---Mark Twain

The downfall of the evangelicals...or Pentecostals or fundamentalists---whatever it is we call them---must be their pushiness. The difficulty we have naming them is because they call themselves Christians. When they say, "I'm a Christian," they mean something different than other denominations when we say I'm Christian. In fact, they disparage "denominations" altogether. They mean they're "born again," and that means they're at a different, higher level than the rest of us. There are privileges and obligations with such a stunning resurrection. The Truth has been engraved into their psyches, and now life is but a matter of spreading the word. When the End comes, they will go and we will be left behind. When Christ returns, they will be in his arms, but we will burn.

Bring this philosophy into politics and the schools and what do we have? Well, we seem to have the United States in 2010, that's what. This showdown has been coming for a long time, most of my lifetime anyway. I was 13, I think, when somehow (legislative? executive order by Ike?) the Pledge of Allegiance got "under God" added to it. In my upstate New York hometown, I didn't even know a Democrat. I wasn't a normal kid, but I surely wasn't politically radical---yet. I hated the addition. I refused to say it...and still do. The Pledge is ruined for me. At that time it was instinct, something about how I understood the country. But now, all these years later, finally historians are standing up to teach us about the Founding Fathers (and mothers...although we may have to wait a week or 2 for those monographs).

Yesterday The New York Times magazine carried a major article about the current spiritual "revolution time." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?ref=magazine Anticipating its publication, Harvey Wasserman wrote an op-ed with his own version of who were the Founding Fathers. In his inimitable style he may go a bit over the top, but it's a concise list and I think it's useful. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org~~~

Our founders were NOT fundamentalists
February 14, 2010

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazine highlights yet another mob of extremists using the Texas School Board to baptize our children's textbooks.

This endless, ever-angry escalating assault on our Constitution by crusading theocrats could be obliterated with the effective incantation of two names: Benjamin Franklin, and Deganawidah.

But first, let's do some history:

1) Actual Founder-Presidents #2 through #6---John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams---were all freethinking Deists and Unitarians; what Christian precepts they embraced were moderate, tolerant and open-minded.

2) Actual Founder-President #1, George Washington, became an Anglican as required for original military service under the British, and occasionally quoted scripture. But he vehemently opposed any church-state union. In a 1790 letter to the Jews of Truro, he wrote: The "Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistances, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens." A 1796 treaty he signed says "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Washington rarely went to church and by some accounts refused last religious rites.

3) Washington was also the nation's leading brewer, and since most Americans drank much beer (water could be lethal in the cities) they regularly trembled before the keg, not the altar. Like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, virtually all American farmers raised hemp and its variations.

4) Jefferson produced a personal Bible from which he edited out all reference to the "miraculous" from the life of Jesus, whom he considered both an activist and a mortal.

5) Tom Paine's COMMON SENSE sparked the Revolution with nary a mention of Jesus or Christianity. His Deist Creator established the laws of Nature, endowed humans with Free Will, then left.

6) The Constitution never mentions the words "Christian" or "Jesus" or "Christ."

7) Revolutionary America was filled with Christians whose commitment to toleration and diversity was completely adverse to the violent, racist, misogynist, anti-sex theocratic Puritans whose "City on the Hill" meant a totalitarian state. Inspirational preachers like Rhode Island's Roger Williams and religious groups like the Quakers envisioned a nation built on tolerance and love for all.

8) The US was founded less on Judeo-Christian beliefs than on the Greco-Roman love for dialog and reason. There are no contemporary portraits of any Founder wearing a crucifix or church garb. But Washington was famously painted half-naked in the buff toga of the Roman Republic, which continues to inspire much of our official architecture.

9) The great guerilla fighter (and furniture maker) Ethan Allen was an aggressive atheist; his beliefs were common among the farmers, sailors and artisans who were the backbone of Revolutionary America.

10) America's most influential statesman, thinker, writer, agitator, publisher, citizen-scientist and proud liberal libertine was---and remains---Benjamin Franklin. He was at the heart of the Declaration, Constitution and Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution. The ultimate Enlightenment icon, Franklin's Deism embraced a pragmatic love of diversity. As early America's dominant publisher he, Paine and Jefferson printed the intellectual soul of the new nation.

11) Franklin deeply admired the Ho-de-no-sau-nee (Iroquois) Confederacy of what's now upstate New York. Inspired by the legendary peacemaker Deganawidah, this democratic congress of five tribes had worked "better than the British Parliament" for more than two centuries. It gave us the model for our federal structure and the images of freedom and equality that inspired both the French and American Revolutions.

It's no accident today's fundamentalist crusaders and media bloviators (Rev. Limbaugh, St. Beck) seek to purge our children's texts of all native images except as they are being forceably converted or killed.

Today's fundamentalists would have DESPISED the actual Founders. Franklin's joyous, amply reciprocated love of women would evoke their limitless rage. Jefferson's paternities with his slave mistress Sally Hemings, Paine's attacks on the priesthood, Hamilton's bastardly philandering, the grassroots scorn for organized religion---all would draw howls of righteous right-wing rage.

Which may be why theocratic fundamentalists are so desperate to sanitize and fictionalize what's real about our history.

God forbid our children should know of American Christians who embraced the Sermon on the Mount and renounced the Book of Revelations…or natives who established democracy on American soil long before they saw the first European…or actual Founders who got drunk, high and laid on their way to writing the Constitution.

Faith-based tyranny is anti-American. So are dishonest textbooks. It's time to fight them both.

--
HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with PASSIONS OF THE POTSMOKING PATRIOTS by "Thomas Paine." This article is written in honor of the spirit of Howard Zinn.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2010/1807

The Warming? Har Har Har!

2010-02-14T04:56:00.003-05:00

Photos from Winter Olympics sites last week.
"After unusually warm conditions in January 2010, snow remained scarce on Cypress Mountain. The Los Angeles Times reported that snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations, and Vancouver Now reported that organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down. A surprise snowstorm struck on February 10, just two days before the games opened, boosting the snowpack. The snowstorm did not, however, change the short-term forecast for rain."
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42629

The fact is, the universe has chosen you as the vehicle through which to experience the uncanny thrill of cutting up cabbage for dinner, the wonder that is inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, the fabulous spectacle of watching your clothes dry at a coin-op laundromat where the radio is stuck on an E-Z listening station and an old lady keeps staring at you for no discernible reason. The universe has demanded that you be you. Ain't no avoidin' it.

---Brad Warner

My boat and I...enter the lake,
turn as night falls toward the west
where I watch the south star over the mountain,
and the rising mist, hovering over the water,
and the low moon slanting through the trees:
And there I choose to forget every worldly matter
and be only an old man out fishing.

---Chi-wu Ch'ien

The wind drops, but the flowers still fall;
A bird sings, and the mountain is more full of mystery.

---Zen saying

Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. This is his op-ed piece for Truthout yesterday. The comments that follow on the link provide an excellent debate of the climate change issue~~~

There's a vintage Bob and Ray radio sketch in which Bob plays "Mr. Science," a parody of TV's "Mr. Wizard." He's trying to explain to his young protégé Sandy "the miracle of gas refrigeration."

"Doesn't it seem paradoxical to you that a refrigerator is made cold by a flame?" Mr. Science asks.

Sandy exclaims, "Holy cats! Wait 'til I tell the gang at school that! I thought it was made cold by the ice cubes, Mr. Science!"

Sandy's slippery grasp of physics and Mr. Science's increasingly convoluted explanations characterize the debate over climate change that was taking place in Washington and the media this week. As the capital and much of the Eastern seaboard were digging themselves out from two big snow events, climate change deniers were pointing to the frozen tundra on the Potomac as evidence that global warming is a fraud.

Virginia's Republican Party used the blizzards to put out a snarky ad attacking two of the state's Democratic congressmen who voted for the cap-and-trade bill last year: "Tell them how much global warming you get this weekend," the spot chortled. "Maybe they'll come help you shovel."

Right-wing Sen. Jim DeMint sent out a Twitter tweet: "It's going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries 'Uncle!'" And the daughter and grandkids of Republican Sen. James Inhofe built a six-foot igloo on Capitol Hill with signs announcing "Al Gore's New Home" and "Honk if you [heart] Global Warming." Once again, the GOP mines comedy gold.

Granted, debating global warming while stuck in a snowdrift can seem a little counterintuitive, especially if you tend to willfully deny scientific evidence and prefer to limit your knowledge of the cold to such things as sticking your tongue on the schoolyard flagpole and enjoying the occasional Sno-Cone. And scientists didn't do themselves any favors when the phrase "global warming" was coined. Compared to "climate change," it's much too easy to misinterpret, intentionally or not. (As some have suggested, "global weirding" might be more accurate and helpful.)

In truth, and to get way too basic, warmer air holds more moisture, and when temperatures get colder it falls from the sky as a lot of snow. Not to mention that short-term weather phenomena, like blizzards, don't necessarily reflect overall climate trends, which are measured over decades and more.

And by the way, as the progressive Web site Media Matters reports, if we can momentarily shift our East Coast-centric eyes from our own icy weather, note that they're having trouble getting enough snow at the Olympics in Vancouver and Rio de Janeiro is wilting from its worst heat wave in half a century.

One big fact that convinces me of the reality of climate change is the seriousness with which America's defense and intelligence agencies are taking it as a worldwide threat. The American Security Project, a Washington think tank, reported last month that the Central Intelligence Agency has relaunched a program "to share surveillance and other data with scientists monitoring climate change," including satellite photos. And in September, the CIA announced it was creating a Center on Climate Change and National Security that will study "the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic, and social stability overseas."

The Chief of Naval Operations has established "Task Force Climate Change" to "assess the Navy's preparedness to respond to emerging requirements, and to develop a science-based timeline for future Navy actions regarding climate change." Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has set the year 2020 as a deadline for the Navy cutting its use of fossil fuels by half.

On February 1, the Pentagon issued its Quadrennial Defense Review, which establishes defense strategy and priorities and evaluates potential international risks. It cites intelligence assessments that "climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.

"While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world," the review added.

Among its other findings, the review cites a 2008 National Intelligence Council report that more than 30 US military installations were "already facing elevated levels of risk from rising sea levels. DoD's operational readiness hinges on continued access to land, air, and sea training and test space. Consequently, the department must complete a comprehensive assessment of all installations to assess the potential impacts of climate change on its missions and adapt as required."

Consider yourself warned and, one hopes, suitably chastened. As Sandy tells Mr. Science, "I'm never going to throw an ice cube from a moving car again. Boy, Smokey the Bear's got enough trouble as it is!"

Precisely.

http://www.truthout.org/from-annals-sno-cone-science56877%20

Why America Is Depressed

2010-02-08T04:56:00.010-05:00

Paul Krugman receiving his Prize from His Majesty King Karl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at the Stockholm Concert Hall, December 10, 2008
Photo by Hans Mehlin for The Nobel Foundation

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

---Arthur Conan Doyle

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of their minds.

---W.B. Yeats

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

---Taoist saying

I don't mean economic depression. Let the scholars argue about the difference between recession and depression. Do there have to be bread lines and dustbowl photos before we all get grim? The title is about emotional depression. Sarah may smile at her Tea Party and Saints fans may shout in New Orleans streets, but that doesn't mean something still isn't eating away at them.

Dr. Harriet Fraad is a practicing psychotherapist-hypnotherapist in Manhattan. Currently an article she published last month in Tikkun is being cross-posted all over the Internet. It's called American Depressions and can be read here http://www.tikkun.org/article.php?story=jan10_depressions . If it impresses or moves you, it may be of interest that you can talk or just listen to Dr. Fraad about her article in a phone forum this very evening, January 8, 2010. At 6 pm Pacific time, 9 pm Eastern time, call 1 888 346 3950 and ENTER CODE 11978#. There is no phone charge to you, but someone will ask you to subscribe or contribute.

So what does all this have to do with the picture of Paul Krugman up there? Just prior to being notified he was being presented with a Nobel in economics, Princeton Professor Krugman had agreed to write an open letter to Barack Obama for Rolling Stone. As the deadline was drawing near, the editors called Krugman to remind him...and that's when they found out he was sorry but he had to fly to Stockholm. He ended up writing most of it on the plane during the flight. The open letter appeared in Issue 1070 a little over a year ago, pretty much as Bush was leaving and Obama was inaugurated. Midst all the excitement, do you suppose Obama ever read it?

A year later, Barack Obama would be flying to Stockholm too. It would have been nice if he had spent the flight time writing a reply to Paul Krugman, listing the advice he had taken and what he hadn't and why. But instead he had to polish a controversial acceptance address for his Peace Prize. Too bad. Some of us get depressed when the elected representatives of this republic don't do what they promised they would and don't listen to our views.

I agree America is emotionally depressed. I think the reasons Dr. Fraad describes are correct. Many therapists believe the way to get over it, short of electroshock, is to pave a highway into the future and move forward. I'm more from the school of understanding the past so I don't repeat it. As a result I invite you to read Paul Krugman's letter to President Obama and see if it helps. Sometimes a cure involves pain, but it's probably worth it.

What Obama Must Do
A Letter to the New President
PAUL KRUGMAN

Posted Jan 14, 2009 12:17 PM

Dear Mr. President:

Like FDR three-quarters of a century ago, you're taking charge at a moment when all the old certainties have vanished, all the conventional wisdom been proved wrong. We're not living in a world you or anyone else expected to see. Many presidents have to deal with crises, but very few have been forced to deal from Day One with a crisis on the scale America now faces.

So, what should you do?

In this letter I won't try to offer advice about everything. For the most part I'll stick to economics, or matters that bear on economics. I'll also focus on things I think you can or should achieve in your first year in office. The extent to which your administration succeeds or fails will depend, to a large extent, on what happens in the first year — and above all, on whether you manage to get a grip on the current economic crisis.

The Economic Crisis

How bad is the economic outlook? Worse than almost anyone imagined.

The economic growth of the Bush years, such as it was, was fueled by an explosion of private debt; now credit markets are in disarray, businesses and consumers are pulling back and the economy is in free-fall. What we're facing, in essence, is a yawning job gap. The U.S. economy needs to add more than a million jobs a year just to keep up with a growing population. Even before the crisis, job growth under Bush averaged only 800,000 a year — and over the past year, instead of gaining a million-plus jobs, we lost 2 million. Today we're continuing to lose jobs at the rate of a half million a month.

There's nothing in either the data or the underlying situation to suggest that the plunge in employment will slow anytime soon, which means that by late this year we could be 10 million or more jobs short of where we should be. This, in turn, would mean an unemployment rate of more than nine percent. Add in those who aren't counted in the standard rate because they've given up looking for work, plus those forced to take part-time jobs when they want to work full-time, and we're probably looking at a real-world unemployment rate of around 15 percent — more than 20 million Americans frustrated in their efforts to find work.

The human cost of a slump that severe would be enormous. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group that analyzes government programs, recently estimated the effects of a rise in the unemployment rate to nine percent — a worst-case scenario that now seems all too likely. So what will happen if unemployment rises to nine percent or more? As many as 10 million middle-class Americans would be pushed into poverty, and another 6 million would be pushed into "deep poverty," the severe deprivation that happens when your income is less than half the poverty level. Many of the Americans losing their jobs would lose their health insurance too, worsening the already grim state of U.S. health care and crowding emergency rooms with those who have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, millions more Americans would lose their homes. State and local governments, deprived of much of their revenue, would have to cut back on even the most essential services.

If things continue on their current trajectory, Mr. President, we will soon be facing a great national catastrophe. And it's your job — a job no other president has had to do since World War II — to head off that catastrophe.

Wait a second, you may say. Didn't other presidents also face troubled economies? Yes, they did — but when it came to economic policy, your predecessors weren't actually running the show. For the past half century the Federal Reserve — a more or less independent institution, run by technocrats and deliberately designed to be independent of whoever happens to occupy the White House — has been taking care of day-to-day, and even year-to-year, economic management. Your fellow presidents were just along for the ride.

Remember the economic boom of 1984, which let Ronald Reagan run on the slogan "It's morning again in America"? Well, Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with that boom. It was, instead, the work of Paul Volcker, whom Jimmy Carter appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979 (and who's now the head of your economic advisory panel). First Volcker broke the back of inflation, at the cost of a recession that probably doomed Carter's re-election chances in 1980. Then Volcker engineered an economic bounce-back. In effect, Reagan dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to be a hotshot economic pilot, but Volcker was the guy who actually flew the plane and landed it safely.

You, on the other hand, have to pull this plane out of its nose dive yourself, because the Fed has lost its mojo.

Compare the situation right now with the one back in the 1980s, when Volcker turned the economy around. All the Fed had to do back then was print a bunch of dollars (OK, it actually credited the money to the accounts of private banks, but it amounts to the same thing) and then use those dollars to buy up U.S. government debt. This drove interest rates down: When Volcker decided that the economy needed a pick-me-up, he was quickly able to drive the interest rate on Treasury bills from 13 percent down to eight percent. Lower interest rates on government debt, in turn, quickly drove down rates on mortgages and business borrowing. People started spending again, and within a few months the economy had gone from slump to boom. Economists call this process — from the Fed's decision to print more money to the resulting pickup in spending, jobs and incomes — the "monetary transmission mechanism." And in the 1980s that mechanism worked just fine.

This time, however, the transmission mechanism is broken.

First of all, while the Fed can still print money, it can't drive interest rates down. Why? Because those interest rates are already about as low as they can go. As I write this letter, the interest rate on Treasury bills is 0.005 percent — that is, zero. And you can't push rates lower than that. Now, you might think that zero interest rates would lead to an orgy of borrowing. But while the U.S. government can borrow money for free, the rest of us can't. Fear rules the financial markets, so over the past year and a half, as the interest rates on government debt have plunged, the interest rates that Main Street has to pay have mostly gone up. In particular, many businesses are paying much higher interest rates now than they were a year and a half ago, before the Fed started cutting. And they're lucky compared to the many businesses that can't get credit at all.

Besides, even if more people could borrow, would they really want to spend? There's a glut of unsold homes on the market, so there's very little incentive to build more houses, no matter how low mortgage rates go. The same goes for business investment: With office buildings standing empty, shopping malls begging for tenants and factories sitting idle, who wants to spend on new capacity? And with workers everywhere worried about job security, people trying to save a few dollars may stampede into stores that offer deep discounts, but not many people want to buy the big-ticket items, like cars, that normally fuel an economic recovery.

So as I said, the Fed has lost its mojo. Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are trying everything they can think of to unfreeze the credit markets — the alphabet soup of new "lending facilities," with acronyms nobody can remember, is growing by the hour. Any day now, the joke goes, everyone will have a Visa card bearing the Fed logo. But at best, all this activity only serves to limit the damage. There's no realistic prospect that the Fed can pull the economy out of its nose dive.

So it's up to you.

Rescuing The Economy

The last president to face a similar mess was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can learn a lot from his example. That doesn't mean, however, that you should do everything FDR did. On the contrary, you have to take care to emulate his successes, but avoid repeating his mistakes.

About those successes: The way FDR dealt with his own era's financial mess offers a very good model. Then, as now, the government had to deploy taxpayer money in order to rescue the financial system. In particular, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation initially played a role similar to that of the Bush administration's Troubled Assets Relief Program (the $700 billion program everyone knows about). Like the TARP, the RFC bulked up the cash position of troubled banks by using public funds to buy up stock in those banks.

There was, however, a big difference between FDR's approach to taxpayer-subsidized financial rescue and that of the Bush administration: Namely, FDR wasn't shy about demanding that the public's money be used to serve the public good. By 1935 the U.S. government owned about a third of the banking system, and the Roosevelt administration used that ownership stake to insist that banks actually help the economy, pressuring them to lend out the money they were getting from Washington. Beyond that, the New Deal went out and lent a lot of money directly to businesses, to home buyers and to people who already owned homes, helping them restructure their mortgages so they could stay in their houses.

Can you do anything like that today? Yes, you can. The Bush administration may have refused to attach any strings to the aid it has provided to financial firms, but you can change all that. If banks need federal funds to survive, provide them — but demand that the banks do their part by lending those funds out to the rest of the economy. Provide more help to homeowners. Use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the home-lending agencies, to pass the government's low borrowing costs on to qualified home buyers. (Fannie and Freddie were seized by federal regulators in September, but the Bush administration, bizarrely, has kept their borrowing costs high by refusing to declare that their bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the taxpayer.)

Conservatives will accuse you of nationalizing the financial system, and some will call you a Marxist. (It happens to me all the time.) And the truth is that you will, in a way, be engaging in temporary nationalization. But that's OK: In the long run we don't want the government running financial institutions, but for now we need to do whatever it takes to get credit flowing again.

All of this will help — but not enough. By all means you should try to fix the problems of banks and other financial institutions. But to pull the economy out of its slide, you need to go beyond funneling money to banks and other financial institutions. You need to give the real economy of work and wages a boost. In other words, you have to get job creation right — which FDR never did.

This may sound like a strange thing to say. After all, what we remember from the 1930s is the Works Progress Administration, which at its peak employed millions of Americans building roads, schools and dams. But the New Deal's job-creation programs, while they certainly helped, were neither big enough nor sustained enough to end the Great Depression. When the economy is deeply depressed, you have to put normal concerns about budget deficits aside; FDR never managed to do that. As a result, he was too cautious: The boost he gave the economy between 1933 and 1936 was enough to get unemployment down, but not back to pre-Depression levels. And in 1937 he let the deficit worriers get to him: Even though the economy was still weak, he let himself be talked into slashing spending while raising taxes. This led to a severe recession that undid much of the progress the economy had made to that point. It took the giant public works project known as World War II — a project that finally silenced the penny pinchers — to bring the Depression to an end.

The lesson from FDR's limited success on the employment front, then, is that you have to be really bold in your job-creation plans. Basically, businesses and consumers are cutting way back on spending, leaving the economy with a huge shortfall in demand, which will lead to a huge fall in employment — unless you stop it. To stop it, however, you have to spend enough to fill the hole left by the private sector's retrenchment.

How much spending are we talking about? You might want to be seated before you read this. OK, here goes: "Full employment" means a jobless rate of five percent at most, and probably less. Meanwhile, we're currently on a trajectory that will push the unemployment rate to nine percent or more. Even the most optimistic estimates suggest that it takes at least $200 billion a year in government spending to cut the unemployment rate by one percentage point. Do the math: You probably have to spend $800 billion a year to achieve a full economic recovery. Anything less than $500 billion a year will be much too little to produce an economic turnaround.

Spending on that scale, at a time when the weakening economy is driving down tax collection, will produce some really scary deficit numbers. But the consequences of too much caution — of a failure on your part to do enough to stop the economy's nose dive — will be even scarier than the coming ocean of red ink.

In fact, the biggest problem you're going to face as you try to rescue the economy will be finding enough job-creation projects that can be started quickly. Traditional WPA-type programs — spending on roads, government buildings, ports and other infrastructure — are a very effective tool for creating employment. But America probably has less than $150 billion worth of such projects that are "shovel-ready" right now, projects that can be started in six months or less. So you'll have to be creative: You'll have to find lots of other ways to push funds into the economy.

As much as possible, you should spend on things of lasting value, things that, like roads and bridges, will make us a richer nation. Upgrade the infrastructure behind the Internet; upgrade the electrical grid; improve information technology in the health care sector, a crucial part of any health care reform. Provide aid to state and local governments, to prevent them from cutting investment spending at precisely the wrong moment. And remember, as you do this, that all this spending does double duty: It serves the future, but it also helps in the present, by providing jobs and income to offset the slump.

You can also do well by doing good. The Americans hit hardest by the slump — the long-term unemployed, families without health insurance — are also the Americans most likely to spend any aid they receive, and thereby help sustain the economy as a whole. So aid to the distressed — enhanced unemployment insurance, food stamps, health-insurance subsidies — is both the fair thing to do and a desirable part of your short-term economic plan.

Even if you do all this, however, it won't be enough to offset the awesome slump in private spending. So yes, it also makes sense to cut taxes on a temporary basis. The tax cuts should go primarily to lower- and middle-income Americans — again, both because that's the fair thing to do, and because they're more likely to spend their windfall than the affluent. The tax break for working families you outlined in your campaign plan looks like a reasonable vehicle.

But let's be clear: Tax cuts are not the tool of choice for fighting an economic slump. For one thing, they deliver less bang for the buck than infrastructure spending, because there's no guarantee that consumers will spend their tax cuts or rebates. As a result, it probably takes more than $300 billion of tax cuts, compared with $200 billion of public works, to shave a point off the unemployment rate. Furthermore, in the long run you're going to need more tax revenue, not less, to pay for health care reform. So tax cuts shouldn't be the core of your economic recovery program. They should, instead, be a way to "bulk up" your job-creation program, which otherwise won't be big enough.

Now my honest opinion is that even with all this, you won't be able to prevent 2009 from being a very bad year. If you manage to keep the unemployment rate from going above eight percent, I'll consider that a major success. But by 2010 you should be able to have the economy on the road to recovery. What should you do to prepare for that recovery?

Beyond the Crisis

Crisis management is one thing, but America needs much more than that. FDR rebuilt America not just by getting us through depression and war, but by making us a more just and secure society. On one side, he created social-insurance programs, above all Social Security, that protect working Americans to this day. On the other, he oversaw the creation of a much more equal economy, creating a middle-class society that lasted for decades, until conservative economic policies ushered in the new age of inequality that prevails today. You have a chance to emulate FDR's achievements, and the ultimate judgment on your presidency will rest on whether you seize that chance.

The biggest, most important legacy you can leave to the nation will be to give us, finally, what every other advanced nation already has: guaranteed health care for all our citizens. The current crisis has given us an object lesson in the need for universal health care, in two ways. It has highlighted the vulnerability of Americans whose health insurance is tied to jobs that can so easily disappear. And it has made it clear that our current system is bad for business, too — the Big Three automakers wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble if they weren't trying to pay the medical bills of their former employees as well as their current workers. You have a mandate for change; the economic crisis has shown just how much the system needs change. So now is the time to pass legislation establishing a system that covers everyone.

What should this system look like? Some progressives insist that we should move immediately to a single-payer system — Medicare for all. Although this would be both the fairest and most efficient way to ensure that all Americans get the health care they need, let's be frank: Single-payer probably isn't politically achievable right now, simply because it would represent too great a change. At least at first, Americans who have good private health insurance will be reluctant to trade that insurance for a public program, even if that program will ultimately prove better.

So the thing to do in your first year in office is pass a compromise plan — one that establishes, for the first time, the principle of universal access to care. Your campaign proposals provide the blueprint. Let people keep their private insurance if they choose, subsidize insurance for lower-income families, require that all children be covered, and give everyone the option to buy into a public plan — one that will probably end up being cheaper and better than private insurance. Pass legislation doing all that, and we'll have universal health coverage up and running by the end of your first term. And that will be an achievement that, like FDR's creation of Social Security, will permanently change America for the better.

All this will cost money, mainly to pay for those insurance subsidies, and some people will tell you that the nation can't afford major health care reform given the costs of the economic recovery program. Let's talk about why you should ignore the naysayers.

First, let's put the costs of the economic-recovery program in perspective. It's possible that reviving the economy might cost as much as a trillion dollars over the course of your first term. But the Bush administration wasted at least twice that much on an unnecessary war and tax cuts for the wealthiest; the recovery plan will be intense but temporary, and won't place all that much burden on future budgets. Put it this way: With long-term federal debt paying the lowest interest rates in half a century, the interest costs on a trillion dollars in new debt will amount to only $30 billion a year, about 1.2 percent of the current federal budget.

Second, there's good reason to believe that health care reform will save money in the long run. Our system isn't just full of holes in coverage, it's also grossly inefficient, with huge bureaucratic costs — such as the immense resources that insurance companies devote to making sure they don't cover the people who need health care the most. And under a universal system it will be much easier to use our health care dollars wisely, to spend money only on medical procedures that work and not on those that don't. Since rising health care costs are the main source of the grim, long-run projections for the federal budget, the truth is that we can't afford not to move forward on health care reform.

And let's not ignore the long-term political effects. Back in 1993, when the Clintons tried and failed to create a universal health care system, Republican strategists like William Kristol (now my colleague at The New York Times) urged their party to oppose any reform on political grounds; they argued that a successful health care program, by conveying the message that government can actually serve the public interest, would fundamentally shift American politics in a progressive direction. They were right — and the same considerations that made conservatives so opposed to health care reform should make you determined to make it happen.

Universal health care, then, should be your biggest priority after rescuing the economy. Providing coverage for all Americans can be for your administration what Social Security was for the New Deal. But the New Deal achieved something else: It made America a middle-class society. Under FDR, America went through what labor historians call the Great Compression, a dramatic rise in wages for ordinary workers that greatly reduced income inequality. Before the Great Compression, America was a society of rich and poor; afterward it was a society in which most people, rightly, considered themselves middle class. It may be hard to match that achievement today, but you can, at least, move the country in the right direction.

What caused the Great Compression? That's a complicated story, but one important factor was the rise of organized labor: Union membership tripled between 1935 and 1945. Unions not only negotiated better wages for their own members, they also enhanced the bargaining power of workers throughout the economy. At the time, conservatives warned that wage gains would have disastrous economic effects — that the rise of unions would cripple employment and economic growth. But in fact, the Great Compression was followed by the great postwar boom, which doubled American living standards over the course of a generation.

Unfortunately, the Great Compression was reversed starting in the 1970s, as American workers once again lost much of their bargaining power. This loss was partly due to changes in the world economy, as major U.S. manufacturing corporations started facing more international competition. But it also had a lot to do with politics, as first the Reagan administration, then the Bush administration, did all they could to undermine the ability of workers to organize.

You can make a start on reversing that process. Clearly, you won't be able to oversee a tripling of union membership anytime soon. But you can do a lot to enhance workers' rights. One is to start laying the groundwork to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to join a union. I know it probably won't happen in your first year, but if and when it does, the legislation will enable America to take a huge step toward recapturing the middle-class society we've lost.

Truth & Reconciliation

There are many other issues you'll need to deal with, of course. In particular, I haven't said a word about environmental policy, which is ultimately the most important issue of all. That's because I suspect that it won't be possible to pass a comprehensive plan for dealing with climate change in your first year. By all means, put as much environmentally friendly investment as possible — such as spending to enhance energy efficiency — into the initial recovery plan. But I'm guessing that 2009 won't be the year to introduce cap-and-trade measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If I'm wrong, that's great — but I'm not counting on big environmental policy moves right away.

I also haven't said anything about foreign policy. Your team is well aware of the need to wind down the war in Iraq — which is, by the way, costing about as much each year as the insurance subsidies we need to implement universal health care. You're also aware of the need to find the least bad solution for the mess in Afghanistan. And I don't even want to think about Pakistan — but you have to. Good luck.

There is, however, one area where I feel the need to break discipline. I'm an economist, but I'm also an American citizen — and like many citizens, I spent the past eight years watching in horror as the Bush administration betrayed the nation's ideals. And I don't believe we can put those terrible years behind us unless we have a full accounting of what really happened. I know that most of the inside-the-Beltway crowd is urging you to let bygones be bygones, just as they urged Bill Clinton to let the truth about scandals from the Reagan-Bush years, in particular the Iran-Contra affair, remain hidden. But we know how that turned out: The same people who abused power in the name of national security 20 years ago returned as part of the team that, under the second George Bush, did it all over again, on a much larger scale. It was an object lesson in the truth of George Santayana's dictum: Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

That's why this time we need a full accounting. Not a witch hunt, maybe not even prosecutions, but something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped South Africa come to terms with what happened under apartheid. We need to know how America ended up fighting a war to eliminate nonexistent weapons, how torture became a routine instrument of U.S. policy, how the Justice Department became an instrument of political persecution, how brazen corruption flourished not only in Iraq, but throughout Congress and the administration. We know that these evils were not, whatever the apologists say, the result of honest error or a few bad apples: The White House created a climate in which abuse became commonplace, and in many cases probably took the lead in instigating these abuses. But it's not enough to leave this reality in the realm of things "everybody knows" — because soon enough they'll be denied or forgotten, and the cycle of abuse will begin again. The whole sordid tale needs to be brought out into the sunlight.

It's probably best if Congress takes the lead in investigations of the Bush years, but your administration can do its part, both by not using its influence to discourage the investigations and by bringing an end to the Bush administration's stonewalling. Let Congress have access to records and witnesses, and let the truth be told.

That said, the future is what matters most. This month we celebrate your arrival in the White House; at a time of great national crisis, you bring the hope of a better future. It's now up to you to deliver on that hope. By enacting a recovery plan even bolder and more comprehensive than the New Deal, you can not only turn the economy around — you can put America on a path toward greater equality for generations to come.

Respectfully,

Paul Krugman

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/25456948/what_obama_must_do

Renewable Energy: China's Plan

2010-01-30T06:24:00.004-05:00

Roscoe Wind Farm, West Texas, U.S.

The butterfly sleeps well
perched on the temple bell...
until it rings.

---Buson

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit....People wish to be settled; but only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

---Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yang-uan's assistant was constantly thrown off balance by his master's words. Finally he commented that he never knew whether he was in an ordinary conversation or not.
"All our conversations are ordinary," Yang-uan said.
"Then why is it so hard for me to stay on my feet?" the assistant asked.
"No need to stay on your feet," Yang-uan replied.

---Zen mondo

From Forbes, yesterday~~~

The World's Biggest Green Energy Projects
Jonathan Fahey, 01.29.10, 1:30 PM ET

The U.S. government, desperate to add jobs to a feeble economy, is looking skyward for help: to the wind and the sun.

"We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities," Obama said to applause during his State of the Union address Wednesday. Solar and wind power projects tend to appeal to politicians on both sides of the aisle. They are clean and domestic sources of power, and thanks to this government largesse, they are growing fast.

The American Wind Energy Association reported last week that in 2009 the nation's wind power grew 39%, and that it has grown by 39% annually for the past five years. It's a similar story with other technologies, like solar power, and abroad, where generous government subsidies in Europe and huge government-backed projects in India and China are fueling growth.

Of the top 10 largest renewable energy projects in the world, five were completed in the last two years.

That's the good news for renewable advocates. The bad news: Renewable energy remains a stubbornly small percentage of both the United States' and the world's energy portfolio. In the U.S., renewable power is about 10% of the electricity mix--subtract hydroelectric power and we're down to just 3%. Worldwide, the share of energy from renewables is closer to 20%, with just 3% from non-hydro.

The reason, of course, is that renewable power is expensive. Even a stiff breeze or blazing sunshine doesn't pack the same energy punch as a lump of coal or a nuclear fuel rod, and it isn't always sunny or windy. While a nuclear reactor will produce nearly 95% of its peak capacity, a wind farm's output will typically be 20% to 40% of its peak and a solar farm about 10% to 20%, depending on location.

The world's biggest wind farm, the Roscoe Wind Farm in Texas, has a maximum capacity of 782 megawatts. A nuclear plant with the same capacity would power 600,000 homes; given the fickle nature of wind, Roscoe will only produce enough to power 200,000 typical American homes.

But renewable plants are getting ever bigger, especially in China, where plans are on a scale far beyond anything contemplated in the rest of the world. The U.S. now has three of the 10 biggest projects in the world, but it will very soon lose the crown for largest wind project and largest solar project to China.

This month China announced it would build a 2,000 MW solar thermal project, five times bigger than the current largest one, California's Solar Energy Generating System. China is in the midst of building a wind corridor that could grow to a staggering 20,000MW, 25 times the size of Texas' Roscoe Wind Farm. And last fall China announced a plan to build a 2,000 MW solar photovoltaic farm, 33 times bigger than the world's largest today, a 60 MW farm in Spain.

Big projects can be tricky to navigate in the U.S. Though economies of scale help to reduce the cost per watt of bigger projects, bigger projects are riskier. "From the developer's perspective, bigger is better," says Ethan Zindler, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "But from the utility's perspective and the financier's perspective, that's not always the case."

Another problem in the U.S. right now is that projects need to get up and running before government subsidies run out, and smaller projects are easier to complete. For example, at the end of this year a provision that allows developers to get a cash grant for 30% of the construction cost of certain projects is scheduled to expire.

Also, permitting and licensing bigger projects can be more difficult. There's a rash of proposals for geothermal power plants rated at a relatively modest 49.9 MW, says Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, because permitting is easier for plants under 50 MW.

This kind of thing irks Obama. "They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs," he said of countries like Germany, which have more generous and stable renewable energy subsidies that make projects easier to finance. "Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America."

He may have no choice, but maybe Obama can take heart in the fact that China's two big solar farms will use U.S. technology. The big photovoltaic farm will use panels built by Arizona's First Solar and the solar thermal farm will use technology developed by California's eSolar.

Additional reporting by Jhelum Bagchi
2010 Forbes.com LLC™

Don't miss the slide show of green energy projects at the story's link~~~
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/29/solar-wind-biomass-business-energy-green-projects.html?boxes=businesschannelsections

Who Has The Key To Unlock Our Grid?

2010-01-04T02:49:00.003-05:00

A herd of sheep graze amongst sun-tracing photovoltaic panels installed at Solarpark in Rodenas, North Friesland. Photograph: Bert Bostelmann/Getty Images

Year after year
on the monkey's face
a monkey face.

---Basho

Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.

---The Diamond Sutra

When Abbot Pambo was asked to say a few words to the very important Bishop of Alexandria, who was visiting some of the Desert Fathers, the elder replied: "If he is not edified by my silence, there is no hope that he will be edified by my words."

---Thomas Merton

guardian.co.uk

Sun, wind and wave-powered: Europe unites to build renewable energy 'supergrid'
• North Sea countries plan vast clean energy project
• €30bn scheme could offer weather-proof supply

Alok Jha
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 January 2010 22.30 GMT

It would connect turbines off the wind-lashed north coast of Scotland with Germany's vast arrays of solar panels, and join the power of waves crashing on to the Belgian and Danish coasts with the hydro-electric dams nestled in Norway's fjords: Europe's first electricity grid dedicated to renewable power will become a political reality this month, as nine countries formally draw up plans to link their clean energy projects around the North Sea.

The network, made up of thousands of kilometres of highly efficient undersea cables that could cost up to €30bn (£26.5bn), would solve one of the biggest criticisms faced by renewable power – that unpredictable weather means it is unreliable.

With a renewables supergrid, electricity can be supplied across the continent from wherever the wind is blowing, the sun is shining or the waves are crashing.

Connected to Norway's many hydro-electric power stations, it could act as a giant 30GW battery for Europe's clean energy, storing electricity when demand is low and be a major step towards a continent-wide supergrid that could link into the vast potential of solar power farms in North Africa.

By autumn, the nine governments involved – Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland and the UK – hope to have a plan to begin building a high-voltage direct current network within the next decade. It will be an important step in achieving the European Union's pledge that, by 2020, 20% of its energy will come from renewable sources.

"We recognise that the North Sea has huge resources, we are exploiting those in the UK quite intensively at the moment," said the UK's energy and climate change minister, Lord Hunt. "But there are projects where it might make sense to join up with other countries, so this comes at a very good time for us."

More than 100GW of offshore wind projects are under development in Europe, around 10% of the EU's electricity demand, and equivalent to about 100 large coal-fired plants. The surge in wind power means the continent's grid needs to be adapted, according to Justin Wilkes of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An EWEA study last year outlined where these cables might be built and this is likely to be a starting point for the discussions by the nine countries.

Renewable energy is much more decentralised and is often built in inhospitable places, far from cities. A supergrid in the North Sea would enable a secure and reliable energy supply from renewables by balancing power across the continent.

Norway's hydro plants – equivalent to about 30 large coal-fired power stations – could use excess power to pump water uphill, ready to let it rush down again, generating electricity, when demand is high. "The benefits of an offshore supergrid are not simply to allow offshore wind farms to connect; if you have additional capacity, which you will do within these lines, it will allow power trading between countries and that improves EU competitiveness," said Wilkes.

The European Commission has also been studying proposals for a renewable-electricity grid in the North Sea. A working group in the EC's energy department, led by Georg Wilhelm Adamowitsch, will produce a plan by the end of 2010. He has warned that without additional transmission infrastructure, the EU will not be able to meet its ambitious targets. Hunt said the EC working group's findings would be fed into the nine-country grid plan.

The cost of a North Sea grid has not yet been calculated, but a study by Greenpeace in 2008 put the price of building a similar grid by 2025 at €15bn-€20bn. This would provide more than 6,000km of cable around the region. The EWEA's 2009 study suggested the costs of connecting the proposed 100GW wind farms and building interconnectors, into which further wind and wave power farms could be plugged in future, would probably push the bill closer to €30bn. The technical, planning, legal and environmental issues will be discussed at the meeting of the nine this month.

"The first thing we're aiming for is a common vision," said Hunt. "We will hopefully sign a memorandum of understanding in the autumn with ministers setting out what we're trying to do and how we plan to do it."

All those involved also have an eye on the future, said Wilkes. "The North Sea grid would be the backbone of the future European electricity supergrid," he said. This supergrid, which has support from scientists at the commission's Institute for Energy (IE), and political backing from both the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, would link huge solar farms in southern Europe – producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun's heat to boil water and drive turbines – with marine, geothermal and wind projects elsewhere on the continent. Scientists at the IE have estimated it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and the deserts of the Middle East to meet all Europe's energy needs.

In this grid, electricity would be transmitted along high voltage direct current cables. These are more expensive than traditional alternating-current cables, but they lose less energy over long distances.

Hunt agreed that the European supergrid was a long-term dream, but one worth making a reality. The UK, like other countries, faced "huge challenges with our renewables targets," he said. "The 2020 target is just the beginning and then we've got to aim for 2050 with a decarbonised electricity supply – so we need all the renewables we can get."

A North Sea grid could link into grids proposed for a much larger German-led plan for renewables called the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII). This aims to provide 15% of Europe's electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across desert and the Mediterranean. The plan was launched last November with partners including Munich Re, the world's biggest reinsurer, and some of Germany's biggest engineering and power companies, including Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank. DII is a $400bn (£240bn) plan to use concentrated solar power (CSP) in southern Europe and northern Africa. This technology uses mirrors to concentrate the sun's rays on a fluid container, the super-heated liquid then drives turbines to generate electricity. The technology itself is nothing new – CSP plants have been running in the United States for decades and Spain is building many – but the scale of the DII project would be its biggest deployment ever.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/03/european-unites-renewable-energy-supergrid

All For Naught

2009-12-30T03:17:00.003-05:00

In this Getty image, U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement at the Marine Corps Base in Kaneohe Bay Monday on a failed bid to blow up a US-bound transatlantic airliner on Christmas Day.

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands,
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing
or next to nothing.
If they do not enclose everything they are next to
nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle
they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are different
they are nothing.

---Walt Whitman

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes, and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.

---Hokusai

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

---The Red Queen

It's the time of summing up, and everybody wants to call it The 0 Decade. Zero. But as frustrating and maddening as these first 9 years of the millenium have been, mathematicians and meteorologists agree it takes 10 years to make a decade. So what's a group of 9 called? A nonet. None. Nine. Bah.

Alexander Cockburn's chilly summary at Truthout goes all the way back to 1970, and considers most jarringly what America would NOT be had Hinckley succeeded in killing Reagan. http://www.truthout.org/topstories/1228093 Other reviewers are content to tally up the social nothingness of the Bush 8 out of 9. But Obama is a major target of scrutiny...and that transparency must be getting the full X-ray treatment.

A week ago Sunday, Frank Rich declared Time Magazine's selection of Ben Bernanke as Man (in the sense of huMAN) of the Year was completely off the beam. His choice was Tiger Woods. Why? Because Tiger emerged absolutely as the best conman...and 2009 definitely was the Year of the Con. From Bernie Madoff to John Edwards, everybody was out to pick your pocket. And Obama? You betcha! "Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it)." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opinion/20rich.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

This morning Maureen Dowd may as well be working for Fox News as she refers to Barack Obama as an emotionless, "disembodied" Mister Spock. The current administration seems to share with the previous that it has the intelligence but doesn't have the intelligence. "If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/opinion/30dowd.html?ref=opinion

I've had similar concerns about President Obama's performance this year...and I've posted them online. Yesterday morning on the radio, those of us with such doubts got a substantial scolding. It happened on the Stephanie Miller program, a radical piece of broadcasting even by morning show standards. We hear an hour of it every weekday morning, from 10 to 11, on the unlikely WAIS, 770 AM, in the Athens area. http://www.stephaniemiller.com I feel an affinity for Stephanie because she also is from the Buffalo area, and has a quality of outrageous zaniness one acquires looking for excitement in Western New York on a Saturday night. I also remember her father fondly, US Representative William E. Miller, a moderate-to-liberal Republican, which was a rarity in Upstate politics. Mr. Miller ran for the vice presidency on Barry Goldwater's ticket in 1964, and Stephanie jokingly ran for president in 2008, with Goldwater's granddaughter as her running mate.

But Stephanie Miller and her whole crew are on holiday this week, so it was a guy subbing for her who took us Obama doubters to task yesterday. His name is Hal Sparks and he seems to show up a lot on her show. He has a rather odd resume so far http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hal-sparks but I thought his comments were right on. He challenged us grass rooters, who worked so hard last year and then went home after the election and put our feet up. Now we're moaning that after 11 months we haven't gotten what we want yet from Obama, and vowing to vote for Nader next time. Sparks reminds us it's a lot harder to build up after something has been torn down, and the President still needs grass roots support. That doesn't just mean arguing with the rednecks at work. It means encouraging congresspeople who still are in there pitching for the program. It means active engagement with those who aren't. He said the Democratic Party and Barack Obama need even more help from us now than before.

Well, I hadn't thought about it enough that way I guess. So my summary is more along the lines of checking out what campaign promises Obama really made in the summer and fall of 2008. Has he kept to those promises or not? Does he deserve my continued support? To find out I picked up issue 1064 of Rolling Stone which contained an excellent interview with the candidate on the very eve of the election. Interviewing was Eric Bates, one of the many editors of the magazine. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/23589412 I have to confess surprise that Barack Obama has been consistent in setting about to do exactly what he said he would. There isn't sharp focus in the banking area I must say, but clearly the administration now realizes any bailout money has got to go to smaller hometown banks to lend to small business. Americans have got to have jobs and the opening for creation is in the area of renewable energy. Gore has been saying this for a long time, but now we're hearing it from the White House...and such talk has got to be encouraged.

There are things we can do around our towns. Everywhere people are learning about energy audits and how to save money on changing lifestyles and retrofitting buildings and homes. Local schools and churches need community involvement in learning how to do this. People are wondering about sustainability and if you look around, you'll find meetings being held. Attend them. Get involved. That spirit of enthusiasm and optimism we had during the campaign is going on there. Young people are at work and they're spreading the word among peers who still are learning the basics.

The Naughts are gone, and Twenty-Ten is the start of the Teens. It's a time of vigorous growth and development. It's a time of risk. It's the time for dedication to lasting values. It's time to fall in love. It's a wonderful time to be alive. Let's get busy!

Christmas '09

2009-12-21T10:46:00.005-05:00

Red morning sky---
snail,
are you glad of it?

---Issa

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

---Joseph Campbell

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing---to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

---John Keats

Of course, Keats died young. Good grief, by the time he was my age he had been dead about 45 years! Does that idea of letting thoughts rush through one's mind sound like a young man? I think I can remember being like that. Joseph Campbell lived into old age and he sounds it. I suppose we elders treasure moments when we feel especially alive.

I don't wish to belittle those ideas by bringing up age, but I was thinking of the relativity of one's eagerness for new things as I tried to come up with something to say about the passing year. It feels like only yesterday Dana looked over at me and said she was ready to have grandchildren now. Actually it was a couple years ago, and I remember sort of blinking at her and wondering where that came from. Ilona was still in high school and Jeroch showed no signs of settling down. I guess being settled isn't a requirement for getting married and having children, but I tend to associate permanence with those conditions. Why was Dana rushing us into grandparenthood?

She just was ready, that's all. Maybe women know about these things. Nesting instincts or something. It all remains very mysterious to me and other men I know---which may be why we invented the garage and hunting and activities like that. Dana has been a wonderful grandmother I think...and I hope our daughter-in-law Karen agrees. Because shortly after Dana was thinking about becoming a grandmother, Jeroch up and married this perfectly perfect person for him, and out have come two beautiful and fascinating daughters, Nina and Sophia. Jeroch hasn't settled down, and in fact has established a philosophy that young people shouldn't try to settle down in these tumultuous times. We need to prepare for a return to the life of nomadic tribes.

This year they've continued testing their hypothesis by house-sitting for numerous sabbaticalizing professors around here. Low rent, and you don't get bogged down accumulating a lot of stuff. Jeroch has been working at Fur Peace Ranch, the music camp and concert area rock and blues musician Jorma Kaukonen set up in the area. Jeroch has a number of skills in baking, cooking, gardening he puts to use, not only for Jorma but in freelance work too. Karen has trained for years in some intense yogas, and is adapting these forms into midwifery. Now as Nina celebrates her 2nd birthday, it is clear she loves her little sister very much---in English and Spanish. (They are a bilingual family.)

Ilona's scholarship made her a candidate for just about any university experience she wanted. We traveled around to a few normal schools, but all the time she kept talking about this place in the Smoky Mountains called Warren Wilson. I kept pointing her to New England, betraying my chauvanism about where you get an education in this country. Nope, finally she got me to go down to Asheville, North Carolina, and those people romanced me right into signing on the dotted line.

The college is very oriented toward environmental approaches to things, and that's what Ilona wanted. The school has the first Leeds accredited dorm in the nation, and the other residences are competing with each other to catch up. The college grows its own food and raises livestock. Each student has a job at the school, for which payment reduces tuition. Ilona has had training in energy auditing, and that's what she does there. Besides academic studies, students are expected to perform community service as well in areas of Appalachia where the need is great. Here she is, home for winter break and when I hinted that OU really is making progress in environmental concerns, she saw I was opening up an alternative just in case and affirmed she's in the school where she wants to be.

As for Dana and me, we had a little empty nest time...but then I guess we were reminded that it's been a long while since we were just getting to know each other. It might be refreshing to pick up where we left off with that. We don't have to argue about who's making what mistakes with the kids anymore, and we just can go out on dates and watch old movies if we want to. That's not a bad deal...I mean, when we're not babysitting.

Found Tagliabue

2009-11-30T05:20:00.003-05:00

A Tagliabue poem, maybe shaped like a boat, sails into your life.
Published in Poetry, August 1960

Where people of today dwell, I do not dwell. What people of today do, I do not do.
If you clearly understand what this really means, you must be able to enter a pit of fire with your whole body.

---Huang-long

People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe---but usually no one else notices.

---Brad Warner

The first question I ask when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

---John Cage

The other day I was crawling around on the floor underneath our garage-saled computer desk...from which I've embarked upon years of cyberspace adventures and exploration. Occasionally there have been stormy seas. Always the used desk requires on-hands-and-knees maintenance, because a joint wiggles loose and I have to get down there and set it secure again. This time though I happened to look down to my right, and there was a corner of a piece of paper sticking out from who knows how long ago. I pulled at it carefully and produced a page of 2 poems mailed to me by John Tagliabue, poems I don't think I'd ever read before.

John was my favorite professor 50 years ago at Bates, my eventual thesis advisor, and somehow blessed me with his friendship the rest of his life. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer on the last day of May 2006, just short of his 83rd birthday. In between he would mail envelopes full of typewritten poems to his friends, always encouraging us to share them freely. He liked the image of the Chinese poet who would ride along on a stream in a little boat, writing things on leaves and dropping them over the side. He wasn't published as much as he should have been (and should be) but he had very little patience with the "industry." He mailed poems out to little journals constantly though, and much of that work did see the light of day...but the journals themselves flickered out quickly. The big one always was Poetry, but the poem above is one of the relatively few times John showed up in those esteemed pages. You can see the artful way he arranged his words.

I have a whole closet full of Tagliabue poems, almost all of them unpublished. I wish I could say they're arranged in careful chronological order...but they're not. My life, my travels, my chaos are such that almost nothing is arranged anymore...except my collection of jazz records. Even that has gotten sloppy. I'm not alone in having saved all the Tagliabue correspondence I'm sure. There are others of us who have these great stacks of poems and reminiscences, and we should all get together soon and collate everything into a gigantic volume. Time is growing short...and then, what would we do with it? And some of us know the magical secret of the Puppet Plays too. Ah John, how you haunt us still!

But back to these 2 poems from under the computer desk. John identifies the day of writing the second as July 2nd, 2005, and therefore they are among the final poems of his life. The page is titled 82nd Year. John had fallen onto a sidewalk in Providence, where he and his wondrous wife Grace decided to retire, leaving their beloved Maine. He never said what caused the fall, just a stumble. He didn't indicate a twinge of pain that might have brought the stumble...but in the next year the diagnosis came, and suggestion of urgent surgery which didn't work out. Tagliabue did not write about his final months of life as Updike did. I've been reading Endpoint from the death bed just published this year. Tagliabue continued celebration and dance, taking it all in stride---with nary a stumble. Here they are~~~

1. A breathing in time saves millions

So many inspirations, expirations
repeated original respirations, mouth to mouth
resuscitations;
words, the varieties of the Holy Spirit, came out of our
resourcefulness,
one enlivened another ! the breath of life Escapes
from where?
escapes also from us ? all these daily escapades
proliferate
and Brazil and India and Elsewhere are crowded. The
colorful
populations with their different beliefs, songs,
help us
somewhat realize that letting ourselves go with
ecstasy
is propitious, is more or less appropriate
propaganda for
the divine.

2. WPA and/or
A can be for Applause of freedom's Activity

Don't TRY
to write a poem unless that is a game
you really want
to play, often it doesn't pay, and as Gertrude Stein
said "To try
is to die." But don't disrespect or neglect a
lovely urge or
a necessary dirge or delight. Sure, try IF
you FEEL like
it. Ah, feelings at any age can be made
operatic.
This is the 2nd day of my 82nd age and I'm
giving this
page the continuing works. As for form what
works works.

I was looking this morning to see if there's more information on the Internet about Tagliabue now, and there is. In fact, he's catching up with his more famous cousin, also named John Tagliabue. I thought maybe I could give you a link, in case you're interested. What I can't resist is an incredible display of John's life and work put together by somebody at IBM. It's arranged like one of John's poems! but with techie twists and turns. Tagliabue would have loved it. Thankfully I can hear his eternal laughter in my mind's ear.

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/files/thumbnails/aec36a26-be4f-11de-85f4-000255111976.wm.png

Declaration Of An Independent

2009-11-15T05:17:00.004-05:00

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

We accept the graceful falling
of mountain cherry blossoms,
but it is much harder for us
to fall away from our own
attachment to the world.

---Rengetsu

We were approached by the lobbyist, who asked if we would be willing to enter a statement in the Congressional Record. I asked him for a draft. I tweaked a couple of words. There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.

---Stanley V. White, chief of staff for Representative Robert A. Brady of Pennsylvania, one of dozens of lawmakers who used speeches ghostwritten by a biotechnology company during the health-care debate in the House. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Prig offered Pig the first chance at dessert,
So Pig reached out and speared the bigger part.

"Now that," cried Prig, "is extremely rude of you!"
Pig, with his mouth full, said, "Wha, wha' wou' 'ou do?"

"I would have taken the littler bit," said Prig.
"Stop kvetching, then it's what you've got," said Pig.

So virtue is its own reward, you see.
And that is all it's ever going to be.

---"Manners" by Howard Nemerov

I'm not a Democrat, although that's how I've been registered for years. The reason is I want to vote in their primaries. After Reagan through Bush, I can't imagine voting for a Republican in this lifetime. People think of me as a liberal, but I'm actually pretty far to the left of that position. When I say that, no one comprehends what I'm talking about. There never seems to be a candidate I really want to vote for.

The history of the radical left seems to most people as crazy as the radical right, but I think there is much to be proud of. The problem with the radical left is the same as for liberals and Democrats: we can't seem to organize anything. All the elections we lose are basically because of that. The right can issue marching orders, but my god where are they going off to? To me that's American's politics in a nutshell.

According to the polls and midterm election analyses, I'm not alone. It looks like most Americans consider themselves independents. I worked harder for Obama than during any election, but it wasn't because I was committed totally to him. I was working against the certain horror of a McCain-Palin victory.

The midterms revealed tens of thousands of Obama grassrooters stayed home, especially the young. I got to the polls late in the afternoon on November 3rd, and in my district fewer than 50 people had voted by that time. I keep hoping Obama has some brilliant strategy that will be revealed over the next year to prevent disaster in 2010. Every once in a while he seems to flash a hint, but essentially this man wants consensus. He doesn't knock heads together. Republicans will label it appeasement.

Has it been a mistake thus far to have left so much of the Bush program intact? If nothing works out, is it Obama's plan to blame the Republicans in his own administration? Shifting the war activities from Iraq back to Afghanistan seems to have been his own idea. But now he's bogged down, and the Sunday talking heads will tear away at him this morning.

The insurance companies, some of whom have monopolies in individual states, appear to be writing the healthcare bill. What about those stump speeches decrying unethical lobbyists? Did Obama miscalculate how powerful those people are? Does he fear not only for his political agenda, but for his life?

Then there's the Wall Street bailout. I just was reading an article by Naomi Klein, written a bit over a year ago, and published in the Rolling Stone issue predated November 13th, but before Obama was elected. In it she predicts with unerring accuracy exactly what has happened, namely that the banks didn't loan out any money but instead gave themselves bonuses and got bigger. Without the loans, which would affect small business, there are no new jobs. And she told us why that would happen.

What Ms. Klein wrote and the fact her prophecy has had absolutely no effect upon subsequent developments is the best argument I know for remaining in the great unwashed independent blob out here. But we have to keep writing, we have to keep trying. Perhaps there's some progress. Maybe stuff we didn't know about or merely suspected (in an insane conspiracy plot) is out in the open now. We have to shine a light on it, we have to protest...else all is lost.

Here's the beginning of Naomi's article and the link to the rest. The editor has a note saying the online version has been updated since the print edition, but I have the magazine in my hand and the only change I see is regarding the Jeffery appointment, which just maybe the original article sabotaged~~~

On October 13th, (2008), when the U.S. Treasury Department announced the team of "seasoned financial veterans" that will be handling the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, one name jumped out: Reuben Jeffery III, who was initially tapped to serve as chief investment officer for the massive new program.

On the surface, Jeffery looks like a classic Bush appointment. Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he's an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years. And as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2005 to 2007, he proudly advocated "flexibility" in regulation — a laissez-faire approach that failed to rein in the high-risk trading at the heart of the meltdown.

Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don't believe in regulating — that's all standard fare for the Bush crew. What's most striking about Jeffery's résumé, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced: He served as executive director of Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War. Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the partisan machine that filled the Green Zone with Young Republicans, investment bankers and Dick Cheney interns. Qualifications weren't a big issue back then, because the staff's main function was to hand over stacks of taxpayer money to private contractors, who were the ones actually running the occupation. It was this nonstop cash conveyor belt that earned the Green Zone a reputation, in the words of one CPA official, as "a free-fraud zone." During Senate hearings last year, when Jeffery was asked what he had learned from his experience at the CPA, he said he thought that contracts should be handed out with more "speed and flexibility" — the same philosophy he cited back when he was in charge of regulating Wall Street traders.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24012700/the_new_trough

Bad Day At Blue Rock

2009-11-05T17:45:00.003-05:00

Annie with Llamas

A monk traveled a long way to visit the master, Nansen. The monk found him by the side of the road, cutting grass.
"What is the way to Nansen?" asked the monk.
Nansen answered: "I bought this sickle for thirty cents."
The monk said: "I did not ask about the sickle. I ask the way to Nansen."
Nansen answered: "I use it in full enjoyment."

---Zen koan

I would like to beg you, dear sir, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day in the far future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

---Rainer Maria Rilke

From the temple deep in a bamboo grove
comes the sound of the evening bell,
while the pilgrim's straw hat carries sunset
farther and farther down the green mountain.

---Liu Chiang-ch'ing

I'm fascinated with friends. At some points in my life I have neglected family completely to be involved with friends. They don't need to be 2 separate groups I guess, but there seem to be significant differences. That would need to be a different essay.

I don't think I've had a lot of friends since junior high school, although I don't count or usually compare myself to other people in this regard. I'm not very good at making friends or keeping them...but the ones who have hung around I really treasure. I hope I tell them so enough...but I'm sure I should do more. And I should tell my family I treasure them too.

Sometimes people have shown up in my life who are so incredible, and even famous, that I can't believe we even know each other. I don't understand how that happens, and I don't want to tempt the fates by asking. I just tiptoe along in gratitude. I hope you know people like that too.

Such people are Annie and Jay Warmke, who live at Blue Rock Station up near Philo, Ohio, which is close to Zanesville. That's Annie in the picture...and I can just hear her saying, Oh that picture is a few years old! (I think 2005.) I could write for days about their amazing journey, about their achievements in sustainability long before most of us even heard the term, about their lovely grandchild Catlyn (soon to be sweet 16), and all their chickens and cats and dogs and goats...and llamas, all of whom have names and are talked to and treated almost the same as the rest of us people. You can know more about them by visiting here http://www.bluerockstation.com/ or just email to tell them you're coming and go see for yourself.

I don't know how we found out about each other. It may have been on the Internet some way, through common interests. But I remember the moment we all met in person as if it were this morning. It started with instant recognition and hugs. And we've just stayed that way. Two families traveling through life as friends. We're all different ages and have had extraordinarily different individual lives...but none of that matters. It only makes things more interesting. Both Ilona and Cat have lived in France...and share certain consternations about boys, so there's that. Otherwise, we're unique except that we laugh a lot when we're together. That's not often because we live about 2 hours apart, which is a bit far just to drop by after supper.

They're not the first people I've known who've kept llamas. My cousin Janet and her husband did. They ran a recreation camp on Lake Chautauqua, and I thought maybe the animals were there as kind of a novelty zoo or something. Apparently llamas are very handy creatures though, a kind of combination of a cow, a horse, and a sheep all in one. I still don't know much about them, but I suppose I know them better because they're part of Jay and Annie's family. Herding them from pasture to pasture needs to be a public event, with neighbor help. When a baby llama is born there is great celebration.

Mostly the Warmkes keep to themselves up there in Muskingum County. It's not known as a particularly progressive area, and some folks may wonder about the strange house Annie and Jay built themselves out of old tires, bottles, wire mesh and mud. They've got 38 acres and what they do isn't visible from the road, and you'd think more conservative people would let them mind their own business. But people do come and go at Blue Rock Station. They come for workshops and tours and for one of Annie's high tea ceremonies. There's a sign at the gate and they advertise. People find out and I suppose the old word "hippie" might occur to them. Too bad.

The last couple years Jay has taken an interest in standing for public office. Folks may not know or guess that in his background is a startling business career of great accomplishment. He doesn't unfurl his credentials readily or even willingly, but they're there and he makes a formidable candidate. Cat's reports of her school experience in Muskingum inspired Jay to run for the school board. That's all. It's not like he wants to be county executive or anything. Just a contributing school board member. He tried it once before but didn't get elected. This year he tried again.

Last month we drove up for Annie's unique birthday party. It was for women only and involved swapping stuff from around our houses that we don't use much but that other people might like. No presents. We guys had to leave the grounds and go somewhere else. Jay and I got to talk about the school board and the election. He showed me the big house his opponent lives in and his big SUVs out front, and told me a bit of what he does for a living and how he operates. It was a tight race, and I guess it got rather nasty. At one point Annie wrote me that maybe if Jay lost, it would be better.

Just now I checked the WHIZ website for election results. It looks like the school levy got turned down again, but it appears Jay actually won...and now is a member of the Franklin Local Schools School Board. Yay! Congratulations buddy!

But at what cost? Late at night, election night...someone expressed an opinion. Annie wrote me early yesterday morning. Here it is~~~

"Yesterday was one of the worst days of my life. In the night someone or
maybe more then one person came into the field. They shot Michelle
Belle with a 22, and then as she lay dying they cut off her ear as a
trophy of some sort. I found her when I went to milk this morning.
This is the final act in a tough campaign for school board. I couldn't
have imagined this is how it would all end.

"We spent 3.5 years socializing her so that she was a good llama. Then I
spent the better part of August and September saving her life - hand
feeding her, pulling her up with a tow strap to force her to keep
moving, and massaging her to keep her from stiffening up. She had the
loveliest velvety chocolate face with huge eyes and long lashes. I
loved her.

"There is nothing else to say until I figure out what this all means to
my life, and what I need to do to protect the rest of the animals.Today
I am able to think again. We refuse to live in fear. I only want good
energy here so in spite of the fact that I will not stop looking for the
person or people who did this to Michelle. I am planning a blessing
day. We are going to light sage and bless the place where she died, and
where we buried her. Then we will walk the property line where we know
they crossed to do this horrible thing. The only protection we can have
for the other animals is a constant good energy. I am also sending
blessings and healing the those who did this, and the constant mantra
that they will come forward.

"I couldn't think of this yesterday - I was just mourning. It is still
not clear to me what all of this means to our lives, but this will be
revealed as time passes."

Later yesterday she added~~~

"I think the thing we have to do is to talk about how to react to these
types of hate crimes. I needed today to think this through and I see
that we need to think about how to raise awareness in the community that
involves talking to each other and not just thinking the law will take
care of this. We need to have a plan with steps that involve the
community. We need to ask for mental health assistance if the person is
caught and not press for jail time....jail will not help. We need to
share how we have mourned this type of invasion in our lives. I don't
know all of the answers yet, but I am determined to figure out how to
fit this into my walk of peace in my life. Annie"

I asked her if blogging and sharing this news would be helpful, or did they need to be quiet about this. She said she has written to the Zanesville Times-Recorder, and perhaps a reporter will contact them today. Annie said any publicity of this monstrous behavior could help and would be welcome. There's not much more I can say, but I thought the Warmkes might like this poem that showed up the other day~~~

Gravity
by Louis Jenkins

It turns out that the drain pipe from the sink is attached to
nothing and water just runs right onto the ground in the
crawl space underneath the house and then trickles out
into the stream that passes through the backyard. It turns
out that the house is not really attached to the ground but
sits atop a few loose concrete blocks all held in place by
gravity, which, as I understand it, means "seriousness." Well,
this is serious enough. If you look into it further you will
discover that the water is not attached to anything either
and that perhaps the rocks and the trees are not all that
firmly in place. The world is a stage. But don't try to move
anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for
the stagehands and union rules are strict. You are merely a
player about to deliver a soliloquy on the septic system to a
couple dozen popple trees and a patch of pale blue sky.

"Gravity" by Louis Jenkins from Just Above Water.

Weekend In Afghanistan

2009-11-02T05:30:00.002-05:00

Dr Abdullah after announcing that he would not be standing in the election run-off

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

---Howard Zinn

To maintain this position of disparity (U.S. economic-military supremacy)... we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming.... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standard and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.... The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

---George Kennan
Director of Policy Planning U.S. State Department 1948

We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

---Martin Luther King, Jr.
"A Time to Break the Silence" speech given at Riverside Church New York City April 4, 1967

So a romantic weekend in Afghanistan doesn't fit into your idea of attractive vacation plans? Me neither, but the weekend has been filled with strong consideration of what the mission is...and why. The headlines this morning lead off with this war, and there's no more time to avoid it.

Of chief interest to me however is an article posted by Ray McGovern at 3 or 4 sites, including TruthOut and Consortium News. Mr. McGovern, who graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many of them. His weekend with Afghanistan began Thursday with a RAND-sponsored meeting in the Russell Senate Office Building. His article in full is reprinted following these opening comments.

What we heard more about is the withdrawal of Dr. Abdullah Abdullah from the Afghan runoff election at the week's end. Reports of what actually happened in the original election are surfacing all over the Internet, but not in the mainstream media. No one is denying a corrupt, invalid original election...but no one is demanding Karzai clean up his act either. The US is saying we'll deal with Mr. Karzai later. That's the mission?

Reports lead off this morning's New York Times and also the London Times~~~

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world/asia/02afghan.html?th&emc=th

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6898396.ece

On a similar topic, Friday afternoon yielded typical releases by the government of matters we hope won't be noticed. This time the Justice Department let out pages and pages of information about US secret interrogations. If you prefer that kind of start to your week, look here~~~

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01justice.html

and here~~~

http://www.thesundaily.com/article.cfm?id=39620

Now on to Mr. McGovern~~~

Kipling Haunts Obama's Afghan War

By Ray McGovern

November 1. 2009 -- The White Man’s Burden, a phrase immortalized by English poet Rudyard Kipling as an excuse for European-American imperialism, was front and center Thursday morning at a RAND-sponsored discussion of Afghanistan in the Russell Senate Office Building.

The agenda was top-heavy with RAND speakers, and the thinking was decidedly “inside the box” — so much so, that I found myself repeating a verse from Kipling, who recognized the dangers of imperialism, to remind me of the real world:

It is not wise for the Christian white
To hustle the Asian brown;
For the Christian riles
And the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.

At the end of the fight
Lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;

And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.

With a few notable exceptions, the RAND event offered conventional wisdom to a fare-thee-well. There was a certain poetic justice that President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has chaired RAND’s Middle East Advisory Board, was chosen to keynote the proceedings.

As national security adviser under President Carter, Brzezinski thought it a good idea to mousetrap the Soviets into their own Vietnam debacle by baiting them into invading Afghanistan in 1979, the war that was the precursor to the great-power quagmire in Afghanistan now, three decades later.

On Thursday, Brzezinski disclosed that he had advised the Bush/Cheney administration to invade Afghanistan in 2001, but insisted that he told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the U.S. military should not stay “as an alien force” once American objectives were achieved.

Exuding his customary confidence, Brzezinski first addressed — and ruled out — several “No’s,” the things that the U.S. must not do:

-Withdrawal is “not in the range of policy options.”
-The U.S. must not repeat the Soviet experience in going it alone, but rather must “use all our leverage” to make NATO’s commitment stick.
-The U.S. should not neglect the need to include “Islamic” groups in the coalition.

Brzezinski offered a much longer litany of “Yeses” — but his list was disappointingly bereft of new ideas. Indeed, it was notable only for his insistence that the U.S. ought to be more actively engaged in promoting a north-south pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. He said, for example, that India needs access to the resources of central Asia, an area especially rich in natural gas, as well as oil.

Without batting an eyelash, Brzezinski noted that within three months the war in Afghanistan will be the “longest war in U.S. history,” and warned that the United States could be “bogged down there for another decade or so.” At the same time, he argued, the world impact of an early U.S. departure “would be utterly devastating.”

Quagmire, anyone?

Questioned about growing opposition to the war, he conceded condescendingly that “public fatigue” is understandable, but expressed confidence that adoption of his recommended policies would be “persuasive” enough to turn public opinion around.

Outsiders Impinge

One must give RAND credit for inviting a few outsiders whose remarks came closer to reflecting reality. Former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Paul Pillar, and Harvard professor Stephen Walt offered observations that, though eminently sensible, somehow seemed oddly out of step — “out of the box,” as we say in Washington.

Pillar asked if what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan is enhancing the security of the American people. Are the costs justified, given the amount of change and the “direction of change” that U.S. policies can be realistically expected to produce?

Even if the U.S. and NATO effort is, as they say, “properly resourced,” large parts of Afghanistan will remain open to the Taliban, and perhaps al Qaeda — not to mention alternative locales like Somalia and Yemen.

And then there are the counterproductive consequences.

It is a given, said Pillar, that sending more troops perceived as occupation forces will — more than any other step — bring more and more recruits to the Taliban. As for the cost, Pillar cited the recent congressional testimony by Stephen Biddle, a defense policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Biddle, though supportive of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency approach, said it would incur “Iraq-war-scale cost for three to five years.” Pillar asked if that kind of anticipated cost was worth what he suggested would be “at best, a slight reduction in the danger from terrorism.” Whether the game is worth the candle is, he said, the calculation that the President has to make.

No Alternative?

Stephen Walt picked up on Pillar’s themes, pleading for a realistic assessment of benefits against cost. As for U.S. troop casualties, 850 have already been killed. At a rate of 50 deaths a month, five more years would bring 3,000 dead — not to mention the many thousands more who have been wounded.

And the longer the United States stays, the more it looks like a foreign occupier and the more various Afghan factions are pushed together by giving them a common enemy. Plus, al Qaeda will have a safe haven — in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, even Europe — no matter the degree of “success” the U.S. achieves in Afghanistan.

Walt opined that it is the epitome of hubris for the U.S. to take on the monumental task of “social engineering” the 200 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that the chances of succeeding are “not great.” He questioned the disproportionate attention in resources directed toward Afghanistan when there is little reason to send more U.S. troops, except for the fact that there are already U.S. troops there with too much to handle.

Walt pointed also to a significant “opportunity cost” in the drain on President Barack Obama’s time, noting there are lots of other problems — domestic as well as foreign — that crave his attention.

Remarkably, among virtually all the speakers there was broad consensus that Brzezinski’s first No-No would prevail — that is, that no U.S. troop withdrawal will be in the cards. Walt put it bluntly, saying the President “painted himself into a corner” last spring and would probably not be able to change course to address “one of the world’s most intractable problems” in a sensible way. The Harvard professor predicted that in just a few years the Obama administration will look back with huge regret on how badly it erred.

The Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble took strong issue with the notion that “a country like ours would have no alternative” to escalation. He, too, asked if adding to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is essential to U.S. national security. Or, Preble wondered, has the conflict there simply become an interest in itself — “that we must win this war because it is the war we are in?” He, too, gave U.S. policy makers a failing grade on “the cost-benefit test.”

RAND and the Establishment

The biggest surprise for me came in the remarks of well-respected diplomat James Dobbins, director of RAND’s International Security and Defense Policy Center. Dobbins provided no supporting data or reasoning to support what seemed — to me, at least — to be scare tactics. His words were the kind that a diplomat would use in selling a policy aimed at avoiding the worst.

Addressing the possibility of U.S. departure from Afghanistan, Dobbins predicted a long list of calamities: civil war (as if one isn’t already under way), the involvement not only of Pakistan but of Iran, Russia and China; millions of refugees, widespread disease, negative economic growth, increased extremism and use of Afghanistan for more terrorism.

As for the administration’s public posture, Dobbins pointed to a need to “expand the explanation for our presence in Afghanistan,” so that the rationale will appear more commensurate with an increased commitment” — read, more troops justified by more rhetorical flourishes.

Although Dobbins performed yeoman service, for example, in securing Iranian cooperation in setting up the Karzai government in Kabul, his experience with Asian insurgencies appears paper-thin. I was painfully reminded of this by his gratuitous remark that “in Vietnam we had neutralized the Viet Cong” (sic), and only when the North Vietnamese came into the fray, and the U.S. commitment slackened, did we lose that war.

With that faux history as background, it is less surprising that Dobbins would tout, as he did, the “Powell doctrine” of overwhelming force and advocate for a still deeper U.S. commitment in Afghanistan, to be accompanied by a more persuasive rationale to explain it.

Professor Walt pointed out that, applying the insurgent-to-population ratio Dobbins has used for Bosnia, 600,000 troops would be needed to defeat the insurgents in Afghanistan.

RAND veteran and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, addressed the public perception problem regarding the Afghan war with unusual candor: “People don’t believe we know what we’re doing.” Still, endorsing the Brzezinski No-No dictum, Khalilzad said that “no serious person” would contemplate U.S. withdrawal thus enabling “extremism” to prevail.

Khalilzad argued for playing to U.S. strengths with a “purchasing power” approach — the United States comes up with the money to pay potential or actual insurgents more than they earn fighting for the Taliban. And he stressed that the U.S. needs to expand Afghan forces.

Speaking last, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Michigan, also emphasized the need for building up Afghan forces, as the administration considers increasing the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. Levin spoke of the need for a 400,000-strong Afghan army and police force by 2012, trained by U.S. and NATO specialists.

Training the Indigenous: Panacea or Mirage?

I am reminded of what former CENTCOM commander, General John Abizaid, described to the Senate Armed Services Committee three years ago as a “major change” in the Iraq war — namely, new emphasis on training Iraqis.

The final returns are not yet in for Iraq, but in my experience this is almost always an unfruitful exercise, as many of us learned from Vietnam. Been there; done that; should have known that.

Three months after John Kennedy's death, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a draft of a major speech McNamara planned to give on defense policy. What follows is a segment of an audiotape of a conversation between the two on Feb. 25, 1964:

Johnson: Your speech is good, but I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.

McNamara: The problem is what to say about it.

Johnson: I'll tell you what to say about it. I would say we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We could pull out there; the dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Communists. ... Nobody really understands what is out there. ... Our purpose is to train [the South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good.

McNamara: All right, sir.

But the Vietnamese training wasn't "going good.” Before long, half a million American troops were in Vietnam trying to save South Vietnam’s government.

It is a forlorn hope that unwelcome occupation troops can train indigenous soldiers and police to fight against their own brothers and sisters. That the British also seem to have forgotten these lessons, along with some of Kipling’s cautionary poetry about the risks of imperialism, is really no excuse.

If President Obama is depending on the RAND folks and embedded neo-con pundits like the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, we are in trouble. In Friday’s column Ignatius appeals for more troops “to continue the mission,” as the President and his advisers attempt to figure out what the mission should be.

As I sat at the RAND event on Thursday, I could not help wondering what would be the judgments of my former colleagues in the intelligence community on these key issues? Specifically, what might a National Intelligence Estimate on Prospects for Afghanistan say?

NIEs are the most authoritative genre of analytical product, embodying key judgments on important national security issues. They are coordinated throughout the 16-agency intelligence community and then signed by the Director of National Intelligence in his statutory capacity as chief intelligence adviser to the President.

An NIE can, and should, play an important role. An estimate on Iran’s nuclear program, for example, given to President George W. Bush in November 2007, helped derail plans by Vice President Dick Cheney and White House adviser Elliott Abrams for war on Iran. The most senior U.S. military officers had realized what a debacle that would be and insisted that this NIE’s key judgments be made public.

They anticipated, correctly, that public knowledge that Iran had stopped working on developing a nuclear warhead in 2003 (and had not resumed such work) would take the wind out of Cheney’s, Abrams’, and Israel’s sails. Bush and Cheney were not pleased; but the NIE helped stop the juggernaut toward war with Iran.

There’s Always an NIE, Right?

As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war. All too many bore this title: “Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam.”

Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing it? If the U.S. were to introduce x thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about xx thousand?

Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being “good team players.” But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that. And — truth be told — we often took a perverse delight in being the only show in town without a policy agenda.

Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were pooh-poohed as negativism; and policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account. The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson, nor Richard Nixon, would be likely to decide on a significant escalation without seeking the best guess of the intelligence community as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step.

Wrong: No NIE

Here’s the thing. Would you believe there is no current National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan? Rather, Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal are running the show, allowing professional intelligence analysts to be mostly straphangers at planning and strategy meetings.

CIA Director Panetta, a self-described “creature of Congress,” is not going to risk putting any senior military noses out of joint by objecting, and neither is his nominal boss, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. And, sad to say, National Security Adviser James Jones, in deferring to the military, is serving President Obama just as poorly as Bush apparatchik Condoleezza Rice served President Bush.

How many “militants” are there in Afghanistan? How may “insurgents?” How do you draw a distinction between a militant and an insurgent? Could it be that these combatants are widely regarded, in many areas of Afghanistan, as resistance fighters? What would be the implications of that?

When the Military Does the Packaging

Forty-two years ago, my CIA analyst colleague Sam Adams was sent to Saigon to have it out with the Army intelligence officers working there for Gen. William Westmoreland. After several months of exhaustive analysis, Adams had connected a whole bunch of dots, so to speak, and concluded that there were more than twice as many Vietnamese Communists under arms as the Army would carry on its books.

Bewildered at first, Adams quickly learned that Westmoreland had instructed his intelligence staff to falsify intelligence on enemy strength, keeping the numbers low enough to promote an illusion of progress in the war. After a prolonged knock-down-drag-out fight, then-CIA Director Richard Helms decided to acquiesce in the Army’s arbitrary exclusion from its enemy aggregate total paramilitary and other armed elements numbering up to 300,000.

These categories had been included in previous estimates because they were a key part of the combat force of the Communists. The Adams/CIA best estimate was total Communist strength of 500,000. However, it was the doctored estimate that went to the President and his advisers in November 1967. That was just two months before the countrywide Communist Tet offensive in late January/early February 1968 proved — at great cost — that Adams figures were far more accurate than the Army’s.

Years later, when Adams and CBS told the story of this internal battle on “60 Minutes,” Westmoreland sued, giving Adams his day in court, literally. Subpoenaed documents and the testimony of Westmoreland’s own staff in Saigon established the accuracy of Adams’ charges, and Westmoreland withdrew his suit.

Yet, right up until his premature death at age 55, Sam Adams could not dispel the remorse he felt at not having gone public with his findings much earlier. He felt that, had he done so, the entire left half of the Vietnam memorial would not be there, because there would be no names to carve into the granite for those later years of the war.

Ellsberg’s Regret

In recent years, former Defense Department and RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg also has expressed deep regret that he waited too long; that he did not give the press the “Pentagon Papers” history of the Vietnam War and its many deceptions until 1971.

What few people know is that a couple of patriotic truth-tellers, including Ellsberg, did reveal key facts about the war in the late Sixties, when they learned that the Johnson administration was working on plans to expand the ground war into Cambodia, Laos and right up to the Chinese border — perhaps even beyond.

In 1967, the beribboned, bemedaled Petraeus — sorry, I mean Westmoreland — addressed a joint session of Congress during which he congratulated himself on the “great progress” being made in the war. Congress was unaware that Westmoreland was on the verge of getting President Johnson to agree to sending 206,000 more troops for a widening of the war that threatened to bring China in as an active combatant.

Two key leaks to the New York Times helped put the kibosh on that escalation. The first, on March 10, 1968, revealed the 206,000 escalation figure; and the second, on March 19—by Ellsberg himself—disclosed the suppression of the CIA’s higher, accurate count of Vietnamese Communists under arms. On March 25, Johnson complained to a small gathering of confidants:

“The leaks to the New York Times hurt us. ... We have no support for the war. ... I would have given Westy the 206,000 men.”

I believe that President Obama wants to make the right decision regarding Afghanistan. For me, his poignant visit Thursday night to the U.S. Air Force Base at Dover, Delaware, to receive the coffins of 18 Americans recently killed in Afghanistan bespeaks an authentic desire to do the right thing and face into any political repercussions.

It is clear, at the same time, that he is under great military and political pressure to send more troops on what those of us who experienced Vietnam are convinced is a fool’s errand. And, sadly, his national security adviser and his intelligence chiefs seem to have gone AWOL.

For Intelligence Analyst Colleagues:

One clear lesson from what Ellsberg did in March 1968—not to mention the November 2007 NIE on Iran—is that patriotic truth telling, official or unofficial, can prevent wider wars. And so I address you all—both my erstwhile colleagues and newer analysts in the intelligence community:

Those of you working on Afghanistan and Pakistan have your own educated estimates of the prospects for success of various U.S. courses of action. If you have not been asked by now to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate, wait no longer. Keeping silent is not a responsible option.

The President should not be deprived of your views.

Perhaps it was serendipity (or maybe a reward for sitting through the entire RAND event Thursday morning), but that evening I was privileged to attend the Washington premier of an excellent documentary on Dan Ellsberg — “The Most Dangerous Man in America” — the sobriquet he earned from Henry Kissinger when Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers.

The film contained hard-to-watch footage of the war that took the lives of two-to-three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans—a very painful reminder. I was happy to see, though, that the film did pick up, from Ellsberg’s book Secrets, his decision to begin revealing important facts to the New York Times in early 1968 and help prevent a still more dangerous escalation and widening of the war in Vietnam.

Think about it, friends. And don’t look just at one another. Visualize instead all those young people from our country’s inner cities and small towns who form the pool for the de facto poverty draft that provides the bulk of U.S. troops sent off to bear the present-day White Man’s Burden.

You may be in a position to help give the President the wherewithal to resist pressure to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Let’s stop the Dover deliveries of the dead headed to tombstones white, with the names of the late deceased.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/103009a.html

http://www.truthout.org/1101091

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23858.htm

Grandpa At The PawPaw

2009-09-21T04:20:00.004-04:00

Photo taken Saturday of a "Carlson totem pole," possibly so titled by my son whose older daughter Nina sits upon his shoulders as he holds his newborn Sophia

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.

---Theodore Rubin

At last I do not know how to draw!

---Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Between our two lives
there is also the life of the
cherry blossom.

---Basho

I had written an empty-nest letter upon the occasion of my daughter's 18th birthday, celebrated with a boyfriend from OU but not us, in faraway Swannanoa, North Carolina. A much loved and slightly older friend here in town said it seemed intended to invoke a few tears but hopefully not sobs. Ilona herself concurred and sent us a laughing snapshot of herself with boyfriend. Dana's uncle saw us Saturday and joked with me about the "tear-stained letter." Richard Thompson's song played in my head the rest of the afternoon.

Friday evening brought us 3 or 4 calls from Ilona, and got the tone of the weekend rolling. The cake she had ordered from us actually was a Christmas plum pudding, complete with the necessary container of brandy. What rules did we break smuggling THAT into the school? Anyway, she knew she was supposed to get the stuff onto the cake somehow and light it---but how? So Dana was instructing her over the phone, cautioning that if it went wrong the whole place might blow up. The entire dorm had assembled to observe. She sent a teeny photo of the experiment and it looks as if they decided to take the thing outside. There are no charred remains or ashes in the picture, and she said there were oooohs and ahhhhs---which of course is what you want.

The rest of the weekend our son was to the rescue. With a subtlety with which is endowed and properly renowned, he got us to show up at the 11th Annual PawPaw Festival at Lake Snowden, just outside Athens. Everybody has heard about the "pawpaw patch," but few ever saw or tasted one. Since they grow around here, an enterprising fellow decided we needed a festival---and maybe eventually somebody could make some money with this fruit. If you look it up in the dictionary, you'll be sent to "papaw," where you'll find it next to papaya---and that's sorta what it is.

One of the features of the day is a cook-off, where people from everywhere try to figure out ways to use the thing. Everything from bottles of drunkenness to main courses to lots of desserts were offered to 3 food critics from Columbus and New York, and the chief chef from Ohio University. The leftovers were distributed to the audience. Jeroch had invented a pawpaw fudge concoction, using a bitter dark chocolate and cocoanut. It took all afternoon for the judges to get through the myriad of entries. The chef said afterwards it had been fun...at first. Jeroch took the loss graciously, with only a tinge of disappointment visible only to the trained eye.

The festival was packed with people this time, lots of terrific music---including a dance band whose version of Choo Choo Baby I liked a lot, and featuring my friend, former Interim Dean of the OU College of Music Professor Allyn Reilly blowing sax---every kind of food from a rack of ribs to Philippine noodles, medieval jousting, and tables and tables of folks presenting the latest in sustainable living. Our friends from Dovetail Solar And Wind were particularly impressive, with their booth's lovely fountain and the soundstage all powered by sunshine. Parked next to our car was a Civic sporting a North Carolina plate and identification that its owner was Warren Wilson alumni, which is where Ilona is going to school. What's the chance of THAT happening?

Sunday Jeroch didn't let up for a minute, making sure we had no time for moping around. We had sung John Tavener's The Lamb at church, which is satisfying to a choir even to make it through...and especially wonderful if it comes off, moving a congregation to pure and wondrous silence. Rain at last, so Jeroch's plan to crank up our new chainsaw didn't pan out...but in slickers down he and his mom went to the garden to harvest the chard, collard, and kale for a massive cook, package and freeze project. Those greens go in our soups all winter.

I had cleaned off the desk, prepared the weekly bills for paying and had turned into Scrooge when the computer decided to freeze along with the chopped leaves. While I sat cursing technology, I cleaned out a shelf of stuff on the table here...and there was a copy of Poetry from July-August 2006 that I thought I had recycled. Inside is a poem by John Updike that I considered classic---especially for men, and women too I guess, who are over 50. Updike was an absolutely clinical observer of American humanity, a trait he credited to a Pennsylvania Lutheran upbringing. When it came to his own mortality at the end, including the lung cancer that took him, he viewed his failing parts with the same wry wit---or as one reviewer termed it, "with the reaction of a man learning his car needs a new tire." As you'll see this poem is not depressing: poignant maybe, but still funny~~~

Colonoscopy

Talk about intimacy! I'd almost rather not.
The day before, a tussle with nausea
(DRINK ME: a liter of sickly-sweet liquid)
and diarrhea, so as to present oneself
pristine as a bride to the groom with his tools,
his probe and tiny TV camera
and honeyed words. He has a tan,
just back from a deserved vacation
from his accustomed nether regions.

Begowned, recumbent on one's side,
one views through uprolled eyes the screen whereon
one's big intestine snakes sedately by,
its segments marked by tidy annular
construction-seams as in a prefab tunnel
slapped up by the mayor's son-in-law.
A sudden wash of sparkling liquid shines
in the inserted light, and hairpin turns
loom far ahead and soon are vaulted past
impalpably; we float, we fall, we veer
in these soft, pliant passages spelunked
by everything one eats.

Then all goes dark,
as God intended it whenever He
sealed shut in Adam's abdomen
life's slimy, twisting, smelly miracle.
The bridegroom's voice, below the edge of sight
like buried treasure, announces,
"Perfect. Not a ployp. See you in
five years." Five years? The funhouse may have folded.

---from the Updike collection "Endpoint." Ah yes.

At Eighteen

2009-09-15T05:20:00.007-04:00

Old Age And Youth, 1878
Sir John Gilbert

Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share, and sought advantage over no one.

---Robert Brault

The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties in your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

---Robert Lewis Stevenson

Yes, spring has come---
this morning, a nameless hill
is shrouded in mist.

---Basho

Dear Ilona,

By coincidence lately, I've been reading and hearing that once a young adult leaves home, the communication with Dad suddenly changes. The transition didn't happen in my own exodus, so I'm a bit inexperienced as it seems to occur now. My telephone conversations with my father tended more toward the Garrison Keillor Scandinavian model in which Mom hands the phone to Dad, who mutters, "Hullo...so you're OK? Well, here's your mother again."

With son and daughter, once you both were out there, magically the old man is revealed a sage, loved and respected. This isn't new exactly. My father quoted Mark Twain to me often: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.” Well, Twain may never have said it, but there's a mysterious truth to it. Today I see there is much more I have to learn, and my children have taken on the responsibility to teach me. Now I have to be paying the attention I should have all along. I have to learn to say "I love you" more often...and I acknowledge that and am trying.

Fifteen years ago we had you registered in public school. We had discussed it because we knew you would be entering while still 4, and this probably would make you the youngest kid in the class the rest of your education. The alternative was to wait a year...and then you always would be the oldest. We took the first option because we figured you could handle it. What we hadn't considered is now you are turning 18 away from home already. It turns out this is hard on us.

Eighteen is coming of age, although 21 continues to be the big one. At 18, boys had to register for the draft. I don't know if there's anything like that you have to do now. In New York, I could walk into a bar and get served. I didn't do it much but I came to appreciate the experience, because I never was tempted to act up on weekends the way kids from states with older age limits did. We New Yorkers didn't need to break the law. We were too cool. You can vote now. That's new. I had to wait til 21 to do that. In between, a generation came along that said, "If I have to go off to your expensive wars and get killed, I should be able to vote on the people who want to send me." Students became vocal and involved as my generation, at 18, never was.

You're a young woman today...and no longer the girl who liked to rearrange the furniture and desktops without asking. When we can't find something today, we have to take responsibility for it...and I'm sure our abilities to remember aren't going to improve. The silence in the house sometimes is deafening...and of course we have to swallow hard when, by habit, we still wonder what time you're coming home. The reminder that you aren't brings tears.

I guess it's human nature not to really appreciate someone until they're gone. Maybe that's a common emotion that is uniting us now. We're sending a birthday cake by courier. We won't be singing and watching you always blow out every candle. Maybe we'll sing here anyway...and pretend. Maybe Mom and I will hold hands, sing the song, and have ourselves a hug and kiss in your honor. That sounds like a good plan...until we're together again.

Love,
Dad

The Race Question

2009-09-14T05:26:00.004-04:00

At what she calls the Million Mob March in Washington on Saturday, Daezy (I presume) poses in front of a FoxNews truck before posting the picture and many more of the event at her blog, US Liberty Journal http://uslibertyjournal.blogspot.com/2009/09/million-mob-march.html .

How many things do you say just to make an impression on others? What are you really achieving when you try to make an impression? If you didn't do things for merit or advancement, or if you didn't act with motives at all, what would life be like? At work? In bed? Alone in a room. Even alone in a room you can be consumed with wanting other people to see you in a good light.

---John Tarrant

How shall I grasp it? Do not grasp it. That which remains when there is no grasping is the Self.

---Panchadasi

The mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

---Yuan-sou

Since I "joined" the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s, I've been caught making racist remarks many times. Like everybody, I wasn't prejudiced of course. Hadn't I protested the plight of black jazz artists since I was a little boy? Or Negro jazz artists...or Afro-American jazz artists... Well anyway, whatever it is, hadn't I been against it? With my white friends, I picketed Woolworth's in Lewiston, Maine. But it wasn't until nearly 10 years later, after some backlash, that I got close enough to other races to get really taken apart. There were things I said and things I did that I had no idea offended other people. These behaviors were in my upbringing and needed to be rooted out. It was not easy. It was painful.

Yes, my dream too is to live in an America that is "post-racial." But I doubt that, after 40 or 50 years of working on it, my cleansing is finished yet. For others of all races, it may not take as long. For those who think about racial prejudice in this country at least, the work is obvious. But what of those who don't think about it? What about people who believe with all their hearts they aren't prejudiced...but have not gone through the real fire of being the only one of their own race in a group of another race? What then? The presidency of Barack Obama, whom I never have considered a "black man," is providing an opportunity I have tried to avoid. I've wanted us to be post-racial...but I'm afraid I've been on cloud 9.

Naomi Klein hasn't written anything for Harper's in a couple years. In 2007 she published an essay called "Disaster Capitalism" in there. The book that came out at the same time was a thunderbolt and best-seller. Last month another article by her turned up in Harper's, this time titled "Minority Death Match." I have a feeling another book is going to show up too. The article is about the United Nations Durban Review Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Since the October issue now is on the stands, you can read Ms. Klein's thoughts on the subject online. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/0082642

Over the weekend though, she updated a very edited version of the article in the UK Guardian. She takes on the Summer of '09 and zeroes in on the Obama presidency and all this opposition. As usual with Naomi, you get it full in the face~~~

"Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a 'post-racial' era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, was 'racist' against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped 'the Gates controversy', the furore over the president's response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama's remark that the police had acted 'stupidly' was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president 'has a deep-seated hatred for white people'.

"Obama's supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as 'a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist', Jones resigned last Sunday.

"The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to 'take our country back'. Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of 'massive resistance' launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today's 'new era of "massive resistance",' writes Rose, 'is also a white racial project.'

"There is at least one significant difference, however. In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today's mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/12/barack-obama-the-race-question-naomi-klein

Reflecting on this, I suggest, is best done alone, in a quiet room. Then go out in humility and try it.

Preparedness

2009-08-05T06:13:00.004-04:00

An undated photo of sagging power lines from the National Historic Weather Service Collection.

The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suspect.

---Thomas More

Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied VEIL which partially conceals the world.

---Iris Murdoch

Walking along a mountain path
I find a sandal-print in the moss,
a billowy cloud low on the lake,
grasses growing up to a door,
a pine tree shimmering green,
a brook gurgling along from the mountain,
and as I mingle with Truth among the flowers,
I have forgotten what to say.

---Liu Chiang-ch'ing

Last winter we had a severe ice storm here. Electricity went out for large portions of the states affected, in some areas and for some "customers," as we are called, lasting days and even weeks. Our home continues to use well water, powered by a pump nearly a quarter mile down a hill. No electricity means no water.

Somehow telephones still work---although the lines coming up to the house look exactly the same to me. But who is there to call besides each other? If you can get a human being at the electric company, she'll tell you the crews are all out working day and night...and maybe an estimate for restoration. To be told it won't be until tomorrow, or days into the future, is alarming. Do you have your own generator or backup heat?

Years ago you could call a radio station if so much as a hard wind began to blow. They'd get the information for you and onto the air within minutes. In those days the media were considered a public service, and their broadcasting licenses could be withdrawn by the FCC if they failed to meet their responsibilities. We have about a dozen radio and TV stations in town---if you count all the digital this-and-that---including a few connected with a university that boasts an award-winning journalism school. But try to get local news out of them. I can count on 2 commercial AM radio stations to tell me about severe weather conditions...and only one for sure.

I was in the New Haven area for the big ice storm in Connecticut in the early 1970s. Fortunately there was a fireplace in the house and we were able to cook Thanksgiving dinner. In fact it was one of the most delicious Thanksgivings in my memory. The front yard had been full of American chestnut trees, all loaded with bulging nuts and all destroyed by the storm. We crept out on the ice and harvested all we could find---and had chestnut stuffing and chestnut gravy and anything else we could think of to make with them. It was like being on another planet to walk outside. If you've been in an ice storm you know what I mean.

That storm in New Haven is famous, and I guess I wasn't frightened because I was a lot younger then obviously...but also because I was among friends. That's the key. Last winter it was my family in our house alone against a suddenly alien environment. What have I done since to prepare for the possibility of more uncertain weather? We're stockpiling dry goods and canning more, because we know the fridge and freezer can become pretty useless fast. But all that is for ourselves. What have we done to prepare with neighbors...who really should be our friends, but maybe aren't?

When I was a kid, the neighborhood community was really important...even after the necessities of World War II. We tended to know most of the people, sitting out on the front porch or taking walks after supper. The men liked to mow their lawns at the same time, talking to each other as they went. No gasoline-powered monsters back then. Of course this was in a small town, and things tended to be more isolated out on the farms---but not that much. People visited each other more, maybe bringing along a pie or some preserves.

I've lived in apartment buildings where I didn't know anybody at all. I've lived in town here where the turnover of student and faculty tenants is so tumultuous, it's futile to get to know many people at all before they move on. We've lived where we live now for over 10 years, and I guess we're finally acquainted with most people along this stretch of our road. But I never tire of telling the story of how I worked alongside a woman, often eating lunch with her, for a year before I learned she lives across the road. We move out in the country often to get away from people and to be alone.

But what can happen in an emergency? How many emergencies can we think of that could happen these days? I just read the morning news and came up with a half dozen that could occur today and affect my home and family. I'm not going to list them...and of course there are more I'm not even thinking about. Clearly we don't want to think about it. I was scared during the ice storm last winter, but what have I done to network with neighbors in case it happens again and we can help each other? I've done nothing. I've even forgotten the storm. I've put it behind me, in order to move forward.

Everytime I hear a politician say we have to put it behind us and move forward, I feel sick. Sometimes you're standing on the brink of an abyss, and then it's important to know what's behind you and to NOT keep moving in the same direction. How many areas of abyss can you count this morning?

Here's my problem and my confession. Over the years I too have become more isolated than I used to be. I have a lot of entertainments and toys around me and I value as much privacy as I can get to play with them. And during this period, I think I've become even more awkward and cautious with social interactions than I was before. Am I the person who should initiate a network of helping neighbors? Should I telephone those people? Going door to door would be more effective. But would I face rejection and humiliation?

I think it would be very wise for the people on our road to have an emergency plan of some kind. Maybe we could share in the stockpiling of food and supplies. Perhaps each family could undertake a different area of responsibility. Somebody could volunteer to keep extra fresh water available, and someone else could get gasoline. Not only would it be wise, it could be fun. Planning for emergency with friends is certainly more endurable than doing it alone. I'm sure there are people who are doing all this already, but some of us shy persons aren't even started. I wonder if we're on an endangered species list yet.

Do You Still Seek Justice?

2009-07-13T12:07:00.004-04:00

From The New Yorker last week

Winter solitude.
In a world of one color
the sound of wind.

---Basho

Mountain after mountain without a bird,
a thousand paths without a footprint,
a simple boat, a cloak of bamboo,
an old man fishing in the falling snow.

---Liu Tsung-yuan

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

---Thomas Wolfe

In February Nation Magazine started up a discussion message board, which attracted me and a whole bunch of other lefties, some pretty well-known. http://nationdiscussion.ning.com/ At first interaction was vigorous and exciting. My first comment attracted disagreement from none other than Katha Pollitt. I thought it all was going to be different. But eventually my Internet habits took over, and I grew as weary of endless, wandering threads there as I do at other sites. I stopped clicking in.

Last week a message came from the moderator reporting only 5 people were posting. He wanted to know why no one was bothering with it anymore. He also started sending messages about what topics were getting posted, and eventually some of us have come back in. But it got me to thinking. Everywhere in the States there seems to be some kind of lethargy setting in---or something.

People I know have the same concerns they did before the US presidential election...and some have decided Obama's had enough time now to communicate the directions his administration is taking. Supporters who gave his campaign lots of time and money came to believe he really meant his message of Change. Where is that grassroots spirit now that brought the man into office? Are we disillusioned? What are our real feelings? Are we just too tired to bother? Did we pay our money, and now we want the show? What is going on in America? I'm not alone in wondering. The columns this weekend were brimming over with such questions.

But before I start siting where I think some of the best ones are, let me share with you an email I received just a couple of hours ago. It's from someone who is very much awake and still on the front lines. Here's a report from Elisa Young on the world premiere in Charleston of the new documentary Coal Country. As you may know, the film was made by Mari-Lynn Evans who also created the recent 3-part Appalachia series that showed on PBS~~~

"The premier was kind of a bipolar experiencing - extremely good things jaggedly contrasted against extremely hard things.

"I don't know how MariLynn dealt with everything that happened from Wednesday to Saturday. I think you know the Labelle cancelled. Then the hotel we were in canceled our rooms!! Then they scheduled to show the film at the cultural center in the state capitol complex. The next e-mail I got after that was that the coal industry was calling in so many threats to the cultural center that there would be police in riot gear!!

"I got there about a half an hour into the reception because the rain was so heavy we could barely see to drive down 77. Once we got there, saw lots people I've worked with over the years but have not had time to stay in touch. It felt like a reunion. Larry Gibson, Maria Lambert, Chuck Nelson, Maria Gunnoe, Judy Bonds, Matt Noerpel, Terri Blanton, on and on. Many of the students who have been actively involved turned out. I met some people fighting coal that I'd heard of or corresponded with, but had never met face to face. Me and Kathy Selvage ended up sitting together - had not met before - she is fighting MTR (mountaintop removal) and the Wise power plant in Virginia.

"Matt Peters and Corey Frost (a young man I met at Power Shift who decided to move here and work on a farm) made the trek down from Athens. Amanda Comstock who is fighting coal in Dover Ohio (AMP contracts coal mining and prep plant) caught up with us at the Blue Grass Cafe where people were visiting afterwards.

"People said there'd been some arguments/fights before I got there - miners getting mouthy and trying to start fights. State police were present - Riot gear wasn't.

"Most of the miners and coal industry people were up in the balcony during the screening, and they kept getting really loud, hurling insults, jeers, at times could not hear the movie, but I was proud of the people in our camp - they did not respond by telling them to shut up or throwing insults back over the fence, sat there respectfully. If we had responded in kind to them, it could have gotten really ugly.

"Overall I think MariLynn tried her best to tell both sides of the story, which was difficult because not many from the coal industry were willing to talk with her or go on record....

"The way I see it unless we successfully stop the industries that are fueling the demand for coal, MTR and all the other methods of coal mining will continue. Most of the underground mining in WV is mined out, the coal that's left is in the mountains and for the most part unminable by other means. As long as there is a demand for coal, the best we'll get for MTR-threatened communities is a temporary cease fire - like we just went through with Obama after all the promises he made..

"I think the greatest value of Coal Country is was done in a way that both sides of the story are told - pro-coalers can't dismiss it as propaganda - and it will to raise awareness about the injustice because people will actually see and hear it - hopefully to drive home that we need to invest, right now, in healthier ways of generating our electricity.

"The movie was great, concentrated mostly on MTR. When we were talking the next day, MariLynn told me that their family farm in WV that was lost to the coal industry years ago recently had the coal beneath it $680 million. They are getting ready to go after it.

"Here is one review written on coal country: http://climategroundzero.org/2009/07/coal-country-premieres-in-charleston-wva/ "

There are photos at that blog, and Elisa wrote the third comment. Another review, with a photo of the film crew interviewing Ms. Selvedge, is here~~~
http://www.tricities.com/tri/news/local/article/demolishing_appalachia/28620/

Around these parts, coal is probably a bigger issue than elsewhere in the world...but people everywhere are getting the message that when you flick an electrical switch, you're involved with coal. The news also is out that oil, gas, and coal are deeply invested in the legislative battle over environmental change. (I notice we're using that phrase now, as more effectively descriptive than "global warming" or "climate change.") But what of that...and other issues?

Paul Krugman this morning describes an apparent lack of response in the nation to that of a frog in an increasingly heated bowl. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13krugman.html?th&emc=th On Saturday Ralph Nader's column questioned elected Democrats' answers to the demands of their constituents~~~

"These lawmakers---Democrats all, who are the majority in Congress and who agree with these questioners---keep saying 'It's not going to happen' or 'It's not practical.'

"'It's just not practical' to provide a federal minimum wage equal to that in 1968, inflation adjusted, which would be $10 an hour.

"'It's not going to happen' to get comprehensive corporate reform at a time when a corporate crime wave and the Wall Street multi-trillion dollar collapse on Washington, on taxpayers and on the economy is tearing this country apart. A little regulatory tinkering is all citizens are told to expect.

"'It's just not practical' to give workers, consumers and taxpayers simple facilities for banding together in associations with their own voluntary dues to defend these interests in the corporate occupied territory known as Washington, D.C."

Then he lets loose~~~
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/11

One of Bill Moyers most critical concerns is the "select few" who seem to run our republic. On Saturdayas well, he and his main Journal partner, Michael Winship, discuss how things really get done in the nation's capitol~~~
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/11-1

And then there's the Bush administration, and what actions should follow what those people did to us. Here there seem to be stirrings, especially over the weekend after the news was divulged regarding Cheney. There are many reports on this today but here is one from Raw Story on Friday, about Cheney's "assassination ring"~~~
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/10/lawmaker-wont-deny-cia-program-was-cheney-assassination-ring/
and another at Politico, where the story first broke about keeping information away from Congress. This update was yesterday~~~
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24821.html

We all know about the importance of vigilance in a democracy. We learned it in school, yes? May we awaken the responsibilities of our citizenship in this great country!

Wandering

2009-07-10T05:06:00.003-04:00

My mother Rhea, her older sister Leora, and their father Edward Johnson harvesting the family potatoes, possibly around 1923.

Just think of the trees: They let the birds perch and fly, with no intention to call them when they come and no longing for their return when they fly away. If people's hearts can be like the trees, they will not be off the Way.

---Langya

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

---Leonardo Da Vinci

When you've got it, there's no place for it but a poem.

---Wu Pen

Mom used to say just, "Go wander." It was advice to me on fine, long July days, sunny, not too hot. It didn't push up into the 90s often in the 1940s. It wasn't dangerous for a boy to hike somewhere alone in those days. That's what she meant: to take a long walk or bike ride, past the city limits and out into the country. To find a field or patch of woodlands, and just explore around, see what I could see.

It wasn't there was nothing for a boy to do around town during summer vacation. There were supervised activities at every school playground, sponsored by the city Recreation Department. My elementary school was just down the block, and usually I was there every day. There was Little League baseball, although I wasn't very good---and at first had a glove so cheap my coach called it "that damn mitt." Pretty shocking language for a kid to hear back then...as my fundamentalist mother couldn't help reminding me a lot. There was the YMCA and its swimming pool, where we paddled around until we were old enough for Brownie to lead us down to the deep end---to, though scared witless, jump in. The Boy Scouts had a summer camp at Lake Chautauqua, with Bugs Sundell up there, one of the finest naturalists anywhere, from my hometown that gave the world Roger Tory Peterson. There were neighborhood kids to play softball, kick-the-can in the street, or just hide 'n seek---with some limits about how many people's yards away you could hide in.

But some days a kid didn't feel like doing anything. There I'd be, up in my room or in the glider out on the front porch, looking glum. And that's when Mom might give me that idea. To just get out in Nature and wander. Was it peculiar eccentric advice, I'm wondering today? I've never asked friends if their mothers encouraged them to enrich their lives that way. Enrichment it turned out to be, although I didn't realize it then. I knew she wasn't just trying to get rid of me, because I wasn't bothering her---although I did sometimes, teasing for an activity. It would come out of the blue. "Why don't you get on your bike and just go wander?"

My mother was a country girl, growing up on a family farm halfway up Oak Hill Road, just outside Frewsburg, a small village 5 miles south of Jamestown, New York. Dairy country. Edward and Dora had 3 girls, the eldest named Lucille who probably took that photograph out in the big garden behind the barn. The family was United Brethren, and they held to the old ways...but with all girls, at least one of them had to help Dad. Mom, the youngest, got the job. Outdoors a lot, there was time for her to discover wandering. She learned some birds and wildflowers...and to fear snakes, even more than most girls. She named all the cows and kittens...but not the chickens I guess, one of which might be Sunday dinner. They were Rhode Island Reds and the cows she always called "Jersey Guernseys," which maybe was a mixed breed, I don't know. Even in the city many springtimes later, she could look at a quart of milk in the fridge and know if the cows had been turned out to pasture from winter in the barn.

She knew the plowhorses intimately, the names of which I've forgotten, but I'll bet my sister remembers because Mom talked about them often. Those horses would be hitched up to a buckboard sometimes, at harvest or when they needed supplies. Her dad would be gone to the "Burg" all day when there were crops left over he could sell. Rhea would wait for him in the late afternoon, standing in the meadow looking down the road, down the hill...until she'd see the horses and her dad coming home. You have no idea how long it takes for a horsedrawn vehicle to get from there to where you are, unless you've waited yourself and sensed the passing minutes.

There's a whole different dimension to time when you've done that, a dimension we moderns don't discover unless we meditate or sit in a hospital waiting room. Mom learned it and probably inadvertently passed it on to me. Space is different too, when you just wander. For one thing, you do it alone. For another, there's no destination...except to find your way back. Mom didn't "take" me wandering, she sent me. But I got to see her wandering one time.

We used to take Sunday drives in the family car, after church and chicken dinner at Anderson's Restaurant in Falconer. My father was from town, a city Swede compared to the Johnson Swedes. He danced, loved popular songs, played card games, was on the radio and appeared in plays with community theater. All that was forbidden in United Brethren families, so obviously this was a radical marriage. Dad honored my mother's history though, getting her out into the country at least once a week if he could. Ann and I didn't like these rides particularly, sitting in the back seat---no seatbelts then---fighting over how far half of the seat was. In my teen years I thought the rides would drive me crazy.

But once, Dad stopped the car on Oak Hill Road near the old farm. Mom's dad had died when she still was a girl, and the family had to sell the farm and move into the village. She never got over it really, and sometimes craved to see a bluebird in the apple orchard. Maybe she thought she saw one that afternoon, and so Dad pulled over. Bluebirds had all but disappeared from Western New York in the 1950s. DDT on those apples. She got out of the car by herself, crossed the road, and walked up the rise into the meadow toward the orchard. She stood a moment looking toward the trees...and for that moment, to me, she was 13 again. A breeze blew her dress and hair, and she leaned into it slightly, smiling, faced raised, breathing deep. She was home in that meadow, the same meadow where she'd waited for her father years before.

She didn't see a bluebird that day, but she gave me a memory of her I treasure forever. I'm more thankful for that picture in my mind than ever I could write here. She was wandering for a few moments to find a bluebird. She passed on to me a love of Nature that it may be impossible to get any other way. With it came a quality of observation so keen that my grade school teachers commented on it. Not to leave Dad out, those long Sunday drives probably had something to do with that skill too. Together this unlikely couple taught my sister and me to appreciate things in life that may be a rarity these days. I don't know, maybe it's not so rare. I think we all must have memories of childhood like that, when we learned to see things, to see them in a distinctly family way. It's a way you don't teach exactly. It's the Way you show.

Independence

2009-07-04T05:50:00.004-04:00

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

---Samuel Harrington

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

---Robert Frost

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

---Pablo Casals

I guess I need to begin this with a couple of explanations. First, allow me to assure you I had planned to use this photograph and caption for a couple of days before Alaska's governor dropped her bomb upon the nation yesterday. The illustration is from the Sarah Palin 2008 calendar for the month of July. Therefore the photo of a possibly naked (but probably bikini-suited, also flag-designed) body wrapped in Old Glory is not something dug up from beauty pageant days by a frothing liberal. Either she or her staff did it for her own commercial calendar.

Second, the caption by Sinclair Lewis was not on the calendar---but added by a blogger, possibly frothing at the time. Maybe Sinclair Lewis was agitated when he wrote that in his last major work, It Can't Happen Here, but our first Nobel Prize winner for literature was a pretty in-control guy...except for alcohol. Author of Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth, Sinclair Lewis offered insight into American behavior and values that probably would benefit us to read again today.

I use the illustration because of clothing we're bound to see worn on this day at parades and celebrations. Over the past 8 or 9 years, I've noticed conservatives and particularly Evangelicals decorate themselves with the United States flag at work and at play. Sarah Palin does too, and I'm sure wanted to identify herself with such people in her calendar. But I remember a time when you could be scorned by the very same conservatives and Evangelicals, and maybe land in jail, for wearing the flag.

Abbie Hoffman was a co-founder back in the early 1960s of a group called the Youth International Party...usually referred to as the Yippies. Abbie used to wear a shirt made from a flag that would be completely in conservative style today, but which caused outrage just 40 years ago. You can see it here http://panderwatch.com/2008/05/15/obamas-flag-pin-flip-flop-pander-or-potent-symbol/ in a discussion about the Obama flag pin controversy. Hoffman, and I believe Jerry Rubin, the other co-founder and also member of the Chicago Seven, were accused of desecrating the flag by wearing it. How did things get so turned around in just 40 years?

Well, many things have gotten turned around in those same 40 years. We might want to ponder some of these changes in style---economic, political, diplomatic---on this 4th. Maybe it would be good to read the Declaration of Independence aloud at the picnic table. Conservative talk show hosts are recommending it, and it seems like good advice. However, they also are flirting with gatherings and demonstrations today to encourage revolution against our elected government. These same people would have shouted treason at anyone suggesting that 5 years ago. Even disagreement was cause for questioning one's patriotism and loyalty.

These are strange times, and we appear to be staggering under the load of 9/11. We've never been very good at accepting tragedy. We're a comedy nation...and we know only to lash out when challenged. The Greeks thought tragedy was a more important teacher than comedy, but we disagree. Sinclair Lewis introduced "boosters" in Babbitt, and I guess we didn't catch the satire long enough to avoid a trade of citizenship for consumerism.

I'm going to be marching in a 4th of July parade in a couple of hours here in Athens, Ohio. I won't be in the military contigents, but rather a group of theater folk celebrating a new production of Oliver that somehow I've gotten myself into. Charles Dickens, who wrote Oliver Twist when he was in his 20s, had been dead for 15 years before Sinclair Lewis was born. Wouldn't it be wonderful to imagine a conversation between the two? Someone want to write a play? Time to go, but if you want a witty view of Governor Palin's appearance yesterday, I suggest Gail Collins' column in the New York Times this morning. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04collins.html?_r=1&th&emc=th Have a safe and sane Fourth!

The Loyal Opposition

2009-06-24T08:03:00.005-04:00

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e164/bobgeiger/bush_gop_leaders.gif

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

---Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without a place and with a place to rest---living darkly with no ray of light---I burn myself away.

---St. John Of The Cross, whose birthday (1542) it happens to be today

The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountains and me, until only the mountain remains.

---Li Po

I grew up in 1940s, 1950s America. Eventually I discovered I was in a Republican household, in a Republican stronghold, in Republican upstate New York. One of my first distinct memories as a child was the bulletin on the car radio that Franklin Roosevelt was dead. I remember exactly where I was at that moment. I was in the backseat (no seatbelts then), and the car was proceeding south, nearing the crest of Main Street hill at the intersection of 5th Street in Jamestown, New York. It was my mother's cry of alarm that drilled the moment into my subconscious I'm sure. I just had turned 5.

On April 12, 1945, we still were at war, rationing was severe, but FDR somehow had guided us out of the Depression, which meant little to me but was enormous to my parents. What could this little Harry Truman do? In 1948, Truman won election over Thomas Dewey, who had been Republican governor of New York. My father was a radioman, had interviewed Dewey on the air, and whether he was Republican before he was one now. In keeping with the times, my mother now was one too. Truman's election was an upset. Some claimed his defeat was the work of publisher Bennett Cerf, who said Dewey resembled the tiny man on the top of a wedding cake. Could a personal wisecrack win an election?

I was unaware totally of party politics until 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson. Approaching my teen years, I was becoming aware vaguely of the world around me. I liked Stevenson, particularly a photo of him that must have appeared in Life magazine, exhausted on the campaign trail, with his feet up, and a hole in the bottom of one of his shoes. But Republicans had "framed" him as an egghead---which meant he was intellectual---and again people said that label cost him the election.

My Republican household continued even more strongly through the Ike years. Mom said she felt safe when she saw a photograph of lights on in the White House late at night. Ike was up and taking care of things. The Iron Curtain had "descended," and now the Cold War was fueling our climb into undreamed of prosperity. Once I entered college I developed a political consciousness that took me light years away from how my parents saw things. I thought I was aware and critical now, but a newly born right wing called me a "dupe" of the Communists.

My parents continued Republican quite possibly until the day they died. The inflation during the Carter years, which I'll always believe was engineered skillfully by corporate and banking interests, left retired people nearly in ruins. Their comparatively modest wages produced savings and social security too small to thrive in inflated lifestyles. They voted for Reagan and began to become embittered. On it went, the Republicans leading their way. They didn't live into the Bush43 years, but I wonder if my father would have held on to the GOP. I wonder if even we could have talked about it.

I never considered myself a Democrat particularly. I had opposed Kennedy's policy of sending "advisers" to IndoChina, and I picketed his White House over nuclear testing. Eventually I registered Democrat because I wanted a vote in primaries. Last year I was convinced I'd find some candidate out there who wasn't representing either major party, but I couldn't. I ended up voting for Obama with both reluctance and hope. My hopes soared at Inauguration...but now...but now...

I want 3 things politically these days. I want a clear history of what has happened to the United States as result of our own actions, and where the Constitution has been breached and laws broken I want justice done. I want President Obama to emerge with crisp consistency to what he pledged (dubious) and from one end of his policies to the other (essential). I want a sane, rational opposition to him and the Democrats.

I found a clear history I think in a lengthy article by historian Sean Wilentz. It was written a few months before the election of 2008, and strangely appeared in Rolling Stone. No one was more surprised than I that this rock 'n roll magazine and a fashion/design publication for the fabulously rich, called Vanity Fair, became the journals for me of the most concise and relentless reporting and analysis of the shift in American political power. The Wilentz article was titled "How Bush Destroyed The Republican Party," and can be read in its entirety beginning here~~~ http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/22665562

Sean Wilentz, who professes at Princeton, previously had put his cards on the table in 2006, with a shocker in the same magazine titled "The Worst President In History?" The ax he grinds is not against Bush or Republicans. He went after the Obama campaign too, claiming liberals were giving this untested, cloudy, problematic candidate a free pass. What he opposes is political manipulation, and 6 months before the Bush Destruction article, he accused Obama of illusion and distortion---for which Wilentz was soundly thumped. http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=aa0cd21b-0ff2-4329-88a1-69c6c268b304 Well, it's always good to see historians in the thick of contemporary battle.

This President is in the news everyday across the spectrum of critical issues facing us. One cannot discount the energy in and scope of what this administration is doing. For me about half the Obama news is good, and the other half very disturbing. I don't get this war policy---and I'm tired of being told I can't understand because it's all classified. We're not going to show you the pictures and we're not going to release the prisoners and we're not going to prosecute war crimes. OK, somebody else can do all that stuff---but there's one Commander in Chief, and I'm not sure what the mission is. And then there are the bailouts. I'm sure he's got a timetable for everything, but when does he talk to the base and explain how it all goes together?

As for the opposition, it gets worse and worse. Last Friday a Washington Post blog discussed the most recent poll~~~

"Lost in the news yesterday about the polls showing eroding support for Obama’s policies was a funny detail in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: The overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped below even the abysmal level of approval enjoyed by Dick Cheney.
"The poll found that 26% of respondents have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Cheney, up eight points from April. Meanwhile, it found that the GOP overall is viewed very or somewhat positively by only 25%, down four points from April.
"Okay, the difference is within the margin of error, making this a statistical tie. But still, this is pretty awful for the GOP, given that for a long time Cheney’s historic unpopularity seemed to define a kind of low-water mark among Republicans.
"There a couple of takeaways here. First, it appears that Cheney is doing a better job of making his own case than the current crop of GOP leaders are doing on behalf of the party as a whole, even though he’s no longer in office. And second, it gives the lie to the notion that Cheney’s ongoing media tour is helpful to the GOP overall, as some party leaders have publicly claimed to think. In reality, he only seems to be helping himself." http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republican-party/poll-republican-party-now-less-popular-than-dick-cheney/

Speaking of "helping himself," hasn't that become the motto of the current Republican Party? William Rivers Pitt tallied up the cash from book deals doled to the Bush administration yesterday, and the total rivals the bailouts. See for yourself---and also catch a glimpse of the ex-President giving his speech in Erie last week. http://www.truthout.org/062309A?n

If the Republicans are in complete, but wealthy, disarray, there's always Ron Paul and the Libertarians. I've been saying if the Repubs can't pull themselves together in the next several months and IF the Libertarians can find a worthy successor to Paul, Obama is going to have a run for the money in 2012. (The congressional elections next year will tell much more of the story.) Here's Ron Paul getting after Barack Obama yesterday...and as usual with Libertarians it's a precarious ride. http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22890.htm Information Clearing House is a Libertarian news site, and it's well worth watching on a daily basis.

Spare Some Change I Can Believe In?

2009-06-11T07:33:00.002-04:00

Illustration for Rolling Stone last August by Victor Juhasz

We invent nothing, truly. We borrow and re-create. We uncover and discover. All has been given, as the mystics say. We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is.

---Henry Miller

Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths.

---Adrienne Rich

Deep in the mountains,
In a tree on a farm,
A single dove sings out,
Searching: lonely voice of evening.

---Saigyo

Since Barack Obama’s inauguration, many who campaigned hard for him down here in the grassroots have been surprised. I won’t say disappointed yet. Yes, he’s tackled many of the issues his supporters hoped for. But the wars rage on. Gitmo’s still open and torturing. Sure, he’s working on corporations and executive pay, but what’s all this with banks and Wall Street?

Many of us who ended up voting for him, and even knocking on doors to get people out on Election Day, did not have hopes as high as those on his bandwagon from the start. We had supported other candidates…and people like me, somewhere to the left of socialists, had had to settle for them. A visit to Athens by Michelle Obama had stirred me up, but her husband came within spitting distance of our town just before Primary Day, appeared at an exclusive, roped-off, invitation-only occasion at Hocking College, and didn’t take 5 minutes to swing around to Democratic Headquarters down here to cheer on hundreds of teen-age volunteers out on bicycles distributing his literature. When finally we traveled down to Portsmouth to see him, he was over an hour late but the speech was OK, promising CHANGE. I felt a distinct elite streak.

A year ago this summer, I looked forward to each new issue of Rolling Stone for an update by Matt Taibbi on Campaign ‘08. No one was more surprised than I that publications like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair were becoming the journals of radical record in American politics. And this Taibbi guy, not yet 40, was turning out to be the most dynamic, original, and uncompromising reporter anywhere. Often peppered with obscenities, his dispatches were profoundly researched but overall revealed none of the candidates actually were showing him anything. Once it got down to Obama and McCain, Matt Taibbi just settled back to watch the Wall Street sharks move in.

On August 21st, his article Candidates For Sale appeared. I found, unfortunately, that reading it now is like a prophetic explanation of why the banks and brokers are untouched. They even had to ask permission apparently to pay back some of their bailout! How does that work? And just how detailed was that bank report card? How long does it take to audit banks as big as those thoroughly? Who are these guys running the Treasury Department? Is the fox guarding the henhouse again? Let me share a bit of Taibbi’s analysis back then with you~~~

"The truth is that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are being inundated with cash from more or less exactly the same gorgons of the corporate scene. From Wall Street to the Big Oil powerhouses to the military-industrial complex, America's fat-cat business leaders know that the Animal House-style party of the last eight years that made almost all of them rich with bonuses, government contracts and bubble profits is about to come to an end, and someone is going to have to pay to clean up the mess. They want that someone to be you, not them, and they've spared no expense to make sure both presidential candidates will be there to bail them out next year.

"They're succeeding. Both would-be presidents have already sold us out. They've taken the money and run — completing the cyclical transformation of the American political narrative from one of monopolistic Republican iniquity to an even more depressing tale about the overweening power of corporate money and the essentially fictitious nature of our two-party system...

"Who knows — maybe Barack Obama will surprise us if he wins the election. But if you look at the money, it doesn't look good....

"Overall, Obama is flat-out kicking McCain's ass when it comes to Wall Street contributions, raking in nearly $9 million from securities and investment executives, compared to $6.2 million for McCain. Obama has received more contributions from Goldman Sachs than from any other employer — more than $627,000 at this writing — not to mention $398,021 from JP Morgan Chase, $353,922 from Lehman Brothers and $291,388 from Morgan Stanley. Even among hedge-fund executives, who have an unequivocal interest in electing McCain, Obama is whipping the Republican, collecting $500,000 more than McCain. All of which begs the question: Why would corporate giants like these throw so much weight behind a man who promises to strip them of billions in tax breaks?

"Sadly, the answer to that question increasingly appears to be that Obama is, well, full of shit. He has made no bones about his plans to raise income by soaking the rich, promising to roll back the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000, increase the top tax rate on capital gains to 25 percent and raise the top rate on qualified dividends. He has also pledged to deliver a real stomach punch to hedge-fund managers, raising the tax rate on most of their income from 15 percent to 35 percent.

"These populist pledges sound good, but many business moguls appear to be betting that the tax policies, like Obama himself, are only that: something that sounds good. 'I think we don't want to make too much of his promises on taxes,' says Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. 'Not all of these things will happen.' Noting the overwhelming amount of Wall Street money pouring into Obama's campaign, even elitist fuckwad David Brooks was recently moved to write, 'Once the Republicans are vanquished, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that capital-gains tax hike.'

"Those worried that Obama might be all talk when it comes to needed reform had a real scare in July, when the senator failed to show up to vote for the Stop Excessive Speculation Act, a bill designed to curb rampant oil speculation. Oil speculators provide the perfect microcosm of what happened to the economy under Bush. Back in 2001, investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan got together and created an online exchange called the ICE for trading energy commodities. The ICE ended up buying the British-regulated International Petroleum Exchange; it then opened trading windows in the U.S., allowing Wall Street investment banks to make oil-futures trades on American soil, on their very own commodities exchange, without any federal regulation whatsoever.

"'In financial terms, they were playing blackjack at tables where they themselves were the dealers, in casinos they themselves owned,' says Warren Gunnels, a senior policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders. 'It was crazy.' Trading on the ICE had a massive impact on U.S. gasoline prices, and more than one legislator wondered if energy speculators were manipulating the market, as energy traders like Enron had been before. The speculation bill was designed to regulate the ICE and place limits on trades. But on the day before Obama returned from his eight-day, eight-country, megadazzling international photo op, Democrats failed by a vote of 50-43 to force a vote on the bill, as heavy lobbying by investment banks like Goldman Sachs torpedoed the effort.

"Not only did Obama not show up to vote, he appeared at a public forum three days later flanked by Jon Corzine and Robert Rubin, two former Goldman executives, to discuss how to revive the economy. Here you have the basic formula of campaign contributions in a nutshell: Powerful investment bank gives big money to candidate, needed reform requires candidate to cross said investment bank, candidate pussies out and finds way to be gone at the moment of truth, candidate resurfaces later in arms of aforementioned investment bankers.

"Obama's absence on oil speculation was eerily reminiscent of his previous decision to change his mind about giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies for spying on Americans. Obama withdrew his pledge to filibuster the immunity bill right around the time the Democrats announced that AT&T would be sponsoring the Democratic convention. So no filibuster on retroactive immunity from the top Democrat — but conventiongoers in Denver will get tote bags emblazoned with the AT&T logo. So that's something.

"Look, we all knew this was coming. Once Obama vanquished Hillary Clinton, it was inevitable that his campaign would start roping in the Clinton moneymen for the fall confrontation with McCain. Among those snagged by Obama were Iranian millionaire and former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman Hassan Nemazee, venture capitalist Alan Patricof and the touchingly plugged-in Wall Street power couple Maureen White (First Boston) and Steven Rattner (Morgan Stanley). Rattner and White, the former chief fundraiser for the DNC, are longtime friends of the Clintons; she quit the DNC in 2006 to build Hillary's war chest, while he backed Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont and flirted with a Mike Bloomberg presidential run. Such are the people who are now whispering in Obama's ear.

"Over the summer, the Obama camp has relentlessly pushed the notion that its record fundraising is mainly the result of small online donations. The first presidential candidate to raise so much money that he could afford to eschew the spending limits that would be imposed if he accepted federal matching funds, Obama claims that he opted out of public funding so that he could have a campaign 'truly funded by the American people.' And indeed, he has a record number of small donors, with some 45 percent of his campaign cash coming from contributions smaller than $200.

"Which is a great percentage — but it's only eight points better than John Kerry in 2004 and only 14 points better than George Bush that same year. In truth, Obama is still raising tons of money from big corporate donors. In June alone, as Obama was raking in more than $30 million from small donors, he also bagged $6 million in a single fundraiser at Ethel Kennedy's home in Virginia and another $5 million at an event in Hollywood. But time and time again, you see Obama aides boasting about how the day of the big-dollar donor is over. 'More people are involved, and I think that necessarily dilutes the impact of any individual — which is probably a good thing,' one prominent Obama supporter recently declared. This staunch champion of the small donor happened to be none other than James Rubin, son of former Goldman Sachs co-chairman Bob Rubin.

"Obama's decision to embrace Clinton's moneymen coincided with his decision to attend a public forum on economic policy with an A list of Clinton-era economic advisors, including Rubin and Corzine. 'The message is that he's going to be a friend to Wall Street, just as Bill Clinton was a friend to Wall Street,' says Pollin. 'Wall Street will want to be at the head of the table.'

"By now it should be clear what type of service Wall Street will demand. The financial disaster dumped on us by eight years of Bush's mismanagement has left America with the prospect of short-term solutions in the form of massive government bailouts, and long-term solutions in the form of reform and regulation. A big chunk of the $1 billion in cash that will be spent on the presidential race this year represents Wall Street's desire to make sure that both candidates can be counted on to make the short-term bailouts large and passionate, and the reforms gentle and halfhearted. 'They want to make sure there's socialism when they need it — bailouts — and capitalism when they need that,' says Pollin....

"The point is that politicians are intensely loyal to the people who give them money — and not anywhere near as loyal to the promises they've made to suckers like us. No matter who's in the White House, the direction of the government has remained remarkably stable. Clinton's treasury secretary, Rubin, was a Goldman Sachs man; Henry Paulson, the current secretary under Bush, is also a Goldman Sachs man. It'll probably be a Goldman man again next year. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In sickness or in health, the faces may change, but the money remains. 'It's not an accident that both administrations picked for leading economic advisers people from Goldman Sachs,' says Pollin."

I should interject here that while William Geithner is not strictly a "Goldman Sachs man," his mentors all were and his top aides are. Robert Scheer's comments on the Geithner-Goldman Connection can be read here~~~
http://www.goldmansachs666.com/2009/05/geithner-goldman-connection.html
But back to Taibbi~~~

"The really distressing thing about all of this is the signal it sends to Americans. Goldman Sachs posted a record profit of $11 billion last year, much of it from betting against the subprime mortgage market they themselves helped to fuck up. That little energy exchange Goldman set up, the ICE, made a profit of $240 million last year, as gas prices skyrocketed. It may suck to be you right now, but all that pain isn't so bad if you are a big oil speculator.

"When you live in million-dollar Manhattan townhouses and make billions in profits betting on the pain of the ordinary foreclosed homeowner, you shouldn't get to run around on TV with the prospective president on your arm. You should be hung by your balls. But that's not the way it works, and despite what you might have heard about 'change,' it probably never will be.

"For all the excitement that Barack Obama has garnered, and all the talk about a new day in Washington, it would be tragic if the real legacy of his election victory was to finally expose the essentially unchanging, oligarchic nature of our political system. It's the same old story: Money talks, and bullshit walks. And don't be surprised if we're the ones still walking after November."

The entire article still can be accessed here~~~
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/22210615/candidates_for_sale

I hope you noticed mention of ICE in Taibbi’s research. Tuesday night, on NPR’s Fresh Air, the New York Times’ economic analyst Gretchen Morgenson mentioned that ICE probably will be Treasury’s choice to be central to regulation of derivatives. In her column on June 1st, she wrote,

"Analysts say that because major banks that deal derivatives are so closely affiliated with ICE, they could seek to have many of the products classified as 'customized' — the only category that would keep them off regulators’ radar screens under Mr. Geithner’s proposal.

"This worries Mr. (Tom) Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, whose constituents include agricultural concerns that want better oversight of trading.

"This is needed, he said, to 'add openness, transparency and integrity in futures trading to rebuild the financial system.' Letting 'customized' derivatives — like many credit-default swaps — trade without detailed disclosure is a way to keep regulators in the dark, he said.

"Mr. Harkin said Mr. Geithner visited the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill three weeks ago. At that meeting, Mr. Harkin said, he challenged Mr. Geithner to 'define customized swaps.' Mr. Harkin said the Treasury secretary told him he would have to get back to him."

http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/pol/1204843550.html (scroll down to the column just above Krugman’s)

If you’re interested in what Taibbi is up to these days, given that his Campaign series concluded (with him exhausted) you can check out a number of blogs and online writings that he continues, along with TV appearances now. Chief among his blogs is at Smirking Chimp, and take a look especially at his entry for Monday in response to a proposal in the Wall Street Journal to "enshrine" Henry Paulson as a "national hero." http://www.smirkingchimp.com/author/matt_taibbi

Brother, can you spare some change I can believe in?

A Memorial Day Poem 2009

2009-05-26T03:33:00.002-04:00

A warrior at prayer.

You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.

---Rwandan proverb

As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.

---Jules Renard

No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
no cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.

---Tilopa

Many members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives supported Barack Obama in the primaries because they thought he would be more likely to end the war than Hillary Clinton. Imagine their shock to now discover that Obama has backed away from his promised time-table of withdrawal, and is meanwhile escalating the war in Åfghanistan and Pakistan.

As our religious and spiritual traditions teach: The path to peace is a path of peace. Meanwhile, the killing continues. Sometimes poets become soldiers too, and write about the killing. Brian Turner served as a sergeant in the US Army's Third Stryker Brigade, Iraq. This is slightly edited by me. The full text can be found at http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/20090524203700451 .

Requiem for the Last American Soldier to Die in Iraq

By BRIAN TURNER

At some point in the future, soldiers will pack up their rucks, equipment will be loaded into huge shipping containers, C-130s will rise wheels-up off the tarmac, and Navy transport ships will cross the high seas to return home once again. At some point - the timing of which I don't have the slightest guess at - the war in Iraq will end. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately - I've been thinking about the last American soldier to die in Iraq.

Tonight, at 3 a.m., a hunter's moon shines down into the misty ravines of Vermont's Green Mountains. I'm standing out on the back deck of a friend's house, listening to the quiet of the woods. At the Fairbanks Museum in nearby St. Johnsbury, the lights have been turned off for hours and all is dark inside the glass display cases, filled with Civil War memorabilia. The checkerboard of Jefferson Davis. Smoothbore rifles. Canteens. Reading glasses. Letters written home...

Who can say where that last soldier is now, at this very moment? Kettlemen City. Turlock. Wichita. Fredricksburg. Omaha. Duluth. She may be in the truck idling beside us in traffic as we wait for the light to turn green. He may be ordering a slice of key lime pie at Denny's, sitting at a booth with his friends after bowling all night. What name waits to be etched on a stone not yet erected in America? Somewhere out in the vast stretches of our country, somewhere out in Whitman's America, out among the wide expanse of grasses, somewhere here among us the last soldier may lie dreaming in bed before the dawn as the sun sets over Iraq.

***

At the Spar in Tacoma, Wash., the bartender - Jolene - is about to flip the lights for last call. Let her wait a moment longer. If she can wait a few minutes more, the young woman at the end of the bar will finally do what she's been wanting to do for hours. And it will surprise the young man she's been talking with - she'll kiss him. It will never be seen on a movie screen or written down in a book for people to enjoy centuries later. No one at the bar will even notice it taking place. But they should, because it's one of the all-time best kisses ever. As cheesy and hyper-romantic as it sounds, this is a kiss for the ages, and it's as good as they get.

***

Let the quiet moments of a life be recognized and not glossed over with thoughts of the past or thoughts of the future. For a rare, brief moment - let this moment be savored and fully lived. Maybe that soldier will drive a thresher in the Kansas sun today. Maybe she'll cheer at a Red Sox game as her husband laments the fate of his Yankees. Maybe he's in Hollister, Calif., thinking of the 100 things he'd written as a child - the list he titled "Things To Do Before I Die..." How many items will he have crossed off that list before he must put it away again?

***

Could that last soldier be in front of a video camera in Hollister right now, recording a final message in case she doesn't make it back, making a videotape for a child who will never know its own mother?

"If you're watching this then it means I'm not around anymore. I imagine you're probably in your late teens now. Maybe Mt. Kilimanjaro no longer has snow on its peak. Maybe the ice shelves on the northern coasts of Alaska have melted back and polar bears are dwindling in number. I always wanted to get up there and see Alaska. Maybe you'll make it up there one day yourself. I wonder if it's somehow possible for you to buy a plane ticket to Baghdad, to visit Iraq as a tourist. Will you visit the places where I've been? Will you talk to the people there? Will you tell them my name?"

***

What will the name be? Anthony. Lynette. Fernando. Paula. Joshua. Letitia. Roger… Who will carve it in stone and who will leave flowers there as the years pass by? Who will remember this soldier and what will those memories be? Does he have brothers and sisters? Will his father sink into the grass in the backyard when he is told the news? Will his mother stare into the street with eyes gone hollow and vacant, the cars passing each day with their polished enamel reflecting the sunlight? What will the officer say when he knocks on that door?

***

The next time I'm waiting for a transfer flight in Dallas, or in Denver, or in Chicago, I'm going to make a point to watch for soldiers in uniform. If one of them is eating alone and watching football on a wall-mounted television, I'll anonymously pick up the check for them, like someone did for me once when I was in my desert fatigues and preparing to deploy overseas.

***

Maybe, just maybe, as I stand here in the quiet moonlight of Vermont, the American who will one day be the very last American soldier to die in Iraq - maybe that soldier is doing a night jump in Ft. Bragg, N.C. Each parachute opens its canopy over the darkness below - the wind an exhilaration, a cold rush of adrenaline, the jump an exercise in being fully alive and in the moment, a way of learning how it feels to fall within the rain, the way rain itself falls, to be a part of it all, the earth's gravity pulling with its inexorable embrace.

2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200

Berkeley, CA 94704

510-644-1200

Fax 510-644-1255

The Human Cost

2009-05-18T03:59:00.003-04:00

US Senator Patty Murray presented the Purple Heart at a ceremony in 2005 for Rory Dunn who was injured in Fallujah, Iraq while on duty.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

---Rumi

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it until it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

---Henry David Thoreau

Cutting off the root directly,
this is the mark of Buddhahood;
if you go on plucking leaves and seeking branches,
I can do nothing for you.

---Yung-chia

I never was in the military. Unlike most of the hawks of the Bush 2 regime however, this dove didn't manipulate the system or just dodge it. There was relative peacetime during my draft age eligibility. Some readers never may have experienced peacetime, so you have no idea what I'm talking about. I think it was my senior year in college I got a letter to report for a physical. I was in Lewiston, Maine, and traveled to Portland for the ordeal. I was a member of Fair Play For Cuba at the time, and I thought that might be enough to disqualify me. But when I sat down for that "loyalty" interview, the sergeant never had heard of it---and since I wasn't part of the Silver Shirts To Liberate Albania, and everything else went well, I was classified 1-A. I was among only a handful in the hundred or so of us to make that grade. There were many guys from Maine there who wanted to enlist, but they didn't make 1-A. That's peacetime.

As it turned out, the Cuba thing was what heated up, and one night just beginning graduate school in Cambridge, I stayed awake and glued to a Boston radio station that had sent a DJ out to an airport where Air Force jets were lined up ready to go. This was the Missile Crisis in '62, and I knew if those jets fired off, I was drafted. John Kennedy stared down the USSR ships, and I went back to my studies. That's as close as I got. Briefly there was the lottery for Viet Nam, but I was married then with a son and a teaching job. Maybe I didn't qualify, but I had opposed even our helping the French when it was their problem. I don't know what I would have done had my number been called. People tend to forget that lottery system...which made everyone even more anxious than the draft.

I mention all this to let you know I have no ax to grind. I'm not a veteran...and have been so freaked out by the so-called wars America has chosen to fight since the Second, that I must confess veteran affairs haven't concerned me. I heard the GI Bill was a good thing, and people got to go to college. I heard if an old soldier went to the VFW Saturday night, got drunk and fell down the stairs, taxpayers would foot the bill. In other words, I didn't think there were problems because the US always is having a holiday and parade to honor the heroes. And anybody who goes is a hero---which isn't the kind of patriotism we celebrated in the '40s. But recently I've been hearing more and more alarming things---especially during the Bush Dark Ages. I heard the very dodgers who had to have a war or 2 going on were failing to care for the soldiers who got hurt and had to come home. But nothing I had heard prepared me for the AARP article which is to follow. The situation is horrific!

When Wounded Vets Come Home
By Barry Yeoman, July & August 2008

Cynthia Lefever didn't get a chance to see her son Army Specialist Rory Dunn before he shipped out to Iraq on 24 hours’ notice in March 2004. The strapping, gregarious athlete—six feet three and broad shouldered, with mischievous brown eyes—had enlisted two years earlier, when construction jobs started drying up in the Seattle area. “I was really upset,” says Cynthia, 57. She knew the war in Afghanistan was escalating and an invasion of Iraq seemed imminent. “Naturally, as a mother, I was afraid for his safety and welfare,” she says. “But he was making an adult decision. I supported it.”

Three months after Rory’s deployment, on his 22nd birthday, Cynthia was sitting in her family room in Renton, Washington, composing an e-mail to him that included birthday greetings from his friends and relatives, when the phone rang. It was Rory’s captain, calling from Fort Drum, New York. The officer delivered his news with a shaky voice: a pair of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) had blown up Rory’s Humvee while he and his unit were on escort duty near the city of Fallujah. Shrapnel from the simultaneous blasts had pierced the unarmored vehicle. The captain offered few details about the incident, which killed Rory’s best friend and another soldier with them in the Humvee. But he did explain that Rory had suffered an open-head injury and was “critically wounded.”

Cynthia went into emergency mode. She held her emotions in check while she went looking for a pencil and paper, then returned to ask more questions: Where was he now? What exactly were his injuries? What does “critical” mean? Upstairs she could hear Rory’s stepfather, Stan Lefever, 48, arriving home from work. By the time he set down his briefcase and came downstairs, Cynthia was off the phone. She still didn’t know exactly how bad Rory’s injuries were. Crying, she turned to her husband. “Our boy,” she said. “He’s hurt.”

The next day Cynthia and Stan were on their way to a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, along with Rory’s three siblings and his biological father, Patrick Dunn, to wait for Rory to arrive from Iraq. Five days later, after doctors had stabilized Rory enough to move him, he was carried into the Landstuhl hospital on a stretcher. The only thing Cynthia recognized was the bottoms of his size-12 feet. His right eye was gone, and the left one was swollen. Sixty staples held his scalp together. A surgeon told Cynthia, who is Catholic, that Rory probably wouldn’t survive. Despite this, she refused to let a priest administer last rites. Instead, knowing the blast had rendered him nearly deaf, she bent over the bedside with her lips near his ear. “This is your mother,” she shouted. “You will not die. Don’t you dare die.”

At that moment, Cynthia became one of a growing number of parents who are, by necessity, stepping back into the role of caregiver for their children who are returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating and often long-term injuries. According to officials from three national organizations—the Wounded Warrior Project, The Military Family Network, and the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes— an estimated 10,000 recent veterans of these conflicts now depend on their parents for their care. Working unheralded, these parents have quit jobs, shelved retirement plans, and relocated so they can be with their injured sons and daughters. Many have become warriors themselves, fighting to make sure this new wave of injured veterans gets the medical care and rehabilitation it needs.

These parent caregivers, many of them boomers and some older, face a 21st-century challenge: their children are coming home in unprecedented numbers with injuries that would have been fatal during earlier conflicts. “This is a war of disability, not a war of deaths,” says former Army physician Ronald Glasser, M.D., author of Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq (George Braziller, 2006). “Its legacy is the orthopedics and neurology wards, not the cemetery.” Not only have better helmets and body armor saved lives, but battlefield medicine now borders on miraculous. Someone arriving at the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, Iraq, has a 96 percent chance of survival. He or she can sometimes be stateside within 36 hours of the injury. As a result, there are just 6 deaths for every 100 injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 28 deaths per 100 in Vietnam, and 38 in World War II, according to Linda Bilmes, a researcher at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

If this survival rate is heartening, the flip side is that many of these injuries are fearsome and require extended and complicated care. Part of the reason is that the nature of warfare has changed: today’s troops face a constant threat of IEDs. When these makeshift bombs detonate, they throw off pressure waves so intense that bystanders’ brains literally bang around in their skulls. “These are enormous explosions,” says Glasser. “The physics are astonishing—they will turn over a 70-ton tank. Anyone caught in the blast wave is going to be in trouble.” Sometimes injured brain tissue swells so dramatically that part of the skull must be removed to let the brain expand.

As of April 29, 2008, the Pentagon counted 31,848 wounded service members in the current conflicts. Independent experts say that is a conservative figure. They estimate the number of brain injuries alone might total 320,000, or 20 percent of the 1.64 million who have served so far—a number that S. Ward Casscells, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, calls “plausible.” In addition to the physical injuries, there are thousands of cases of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Last year military screeners detected psychological symptoms in 31 percent of Marines, 38 percent of soldiers, and 49 percent of National Guardsmen returning from war.

For many of the newly injured, most in their late teens and 20s, the logical direction to turn for care is toward Mom and Dad. Many of the wounded are still single. Others are married to partners who can’t or don’t want to care for gravely injured spouses. As a result, across the nation, parents end up scrubbing burn wounds, suctioning tracheostomy tubes, and bathing their adult children. They assist with physical and occupational therapy. They fight for benefits. They deal with mental health crises and help children who have brain injuries to relearn skills. They drive back and forth to Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals for outpatient appointments. In short, they put their own lives on hold.

Patty and Bob Harvey, both 58, for example, were looking forward to retiring early and moving from the Los Angeles area to northern California’s Humboldt County. But their son, Private First Class Nick Harvey, returned from Iraq in April 2005 with a mental illness that requires him to live at home, under his parents’ constant supervision. With 27-year-old Nick’s health their top priority, relocating is now not an option. “We can’t take him away from his comfort zone,” Patty says. “We don’t know what might cause a psychotic break.”
Veterans’ groups say the Harveys’ story is not unusual. “I know many parents who are entering late middle age, some in their 50s and 60s, who are now full-time caregivers,” says John Melia, executive director of the Jacksonville, Florida-based Wounded Warrior Project, which assists severely injured service members and their families. “Lifelong dreams have been shattered. The things that you do in your golden years—they’re not getting to do that kind of stuff because they’ve now got another job: full-time caregiver.”

Back in Landstuhl, Germany, Cynthia Lefever’s pleas to her son not to die paid off. Despite the doctor’s grim prognosis, Rory Dunn did survive. One day after he arrived in Germany, he was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., still in a coma. “We were told he’s not gonna wake up,” Cynthia recalls. “Then we were told if he does wake up, he’s gonna be pretty much a vegetable.” But when he did regain consciousness six weeks later, Rory knew his name. When he said, through the speaking valve of his tracheostomy tube, “I’m all right,” one of the doctors lifted Cynthia and twirled her around in an impromptu dance of celebration.

Rory wasn’t all right, though. He was missing his right eye. He was blind in his left. He couldn’t walk, and he could barely hear. He needed surgery to repair his shattered skull. And the frontal lobe of his brain was damaged, which left him unmotivated to leave his bed and uninhibited about expressing anger. He threatened suicide, declaring, “I don’t want to live this way.”

Cynthia, who had packed just one bag before she left her home in Washington State, moved into a hotel near the hospital and remained there for ten months. Her husband, Stan, shifted his work schedule so he could visit her. As doctors worked to restore Rory’s body—rebuilding his forehead, transplanting a cornea, teaching him to walk again—Cynthia worked to restore his independence. She played games with him to exercise his brain. She corrected him when he made inappropriate comments. When Rory finally became an outpatient and moved into his mother’s hotel room, she pushed him to wash his own clothes and handle his own money. “I know you’re blind,” she told him, “but you know your way to the laundry room.”

It was a challenging time, emotionally and financially. Cynthia had given up her job, and Stan was missing overtime opportunities. Travel was expensive. When the couple talked by phone, “he’d have to listen to me moan and groan about the system and the Army and my frustrations,” Cynthia says. Even their biweekly visits grew strained. “We could hold each other, but Rory was in the room with us,” Cynthia says. “There was no lovemaking for a long time. That was very difficult.”

Equally challenging was Cynthia’s belief that the Army was trying to rush Rory’s discharge before he was ready. If he officially left active duty, Rory would be transferred from Walter Reed, which the military runs, to the VA medical system, which falls under a different branch of government. He would, therefore, be under the jurisdiction of a different health system. Cynthia was convinced her son still needed the care of Reed’s top-notch surgeons, but the Army wanted him to sign a form initiating the discharge process. “Within days of his coming out of his coma, the colonel at Walter Reed was at Rory’s bedside, putting a pen in Rory’s hand,” she says. “Rory had no forehead. No eyesight. No hearing. Couldn’t walk. He was doped on fentanyl.” Cynthia walked over and took the pen out of the soldier’s hand. “Rory’s not signing anything today,” she recalls saying.

Thus began a nine-month campaign to keep Rory at Walter Reed, with its depth of expertise in treating battlefield injuries. “You have to present a case, and it’s almost like being an attorney,” Cynthia says. “When I wasn’t with Rory, I was on the Internet researching. I was in the library. I was writing letters.” She attended meetings with hospital administrators. She sought the support of Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who became a friend and an ally. And she collared politicians who visited Walter Reed for what she calls photo ops with the wounded. “They would come to Rory’s door, and I would say, ‘Who are you? Give me your business card. What can you do for my son today?’” All that “badgering,” as she calls it, paid off: Rory was not discharged until he felt well enough to enter an inpatient VA rehab program in Palo Alto, California.

Assistant Defense Secretary Casscells says he’s aware of early-discharge complaints, which he concedes are “legitimate for some people.” But he says he doesn’t know how widespread the problem is. “There’s a tendency of people to send good news up the chain,” he says. “Some of the bad news doesn’t reach me.” Casscells says the Defense Department does try to transfer service members from the military system to the VA system “as soon as it’s in [the patient’s] interest,” because many VA hospitals “are more modern than Army hospitals.” But he adds that parents need to speak up when they feel their children are being ill served. “On your team you need a champion,” he says. “You need a nag, a hysteric, someone with computer skills, and someone who can read the legal fine print. It’s daunting,” he admits.

Parents of injured combatants agree that advocating for their wounded children is one of the hardest—and most essential—parts of what they do. “I’m not badmouthing the armed forces,” says Colorado Springs resident Jerima King, 50, whose daughter, Army First Lieutenant Anna King-McCrillis, 26, suffered a brain injury in Iraq. “But a soldier can fall through the cracks if there is not somebody there whose only purpose is to make sure that they’re safe.

Certainly, Cynthia went to extraordinary lengths to make sure her son Rory was safe. While he was awaiting surgery at Walter Reed, he was temporarily admitted to Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, for special brain rehabilitation. There, Cynthia says, he was confined, without a call button, to an enclosed bed (she calls it a “caged bed”). One time, Cynthia says, after Rory wet the sheets, a nurse called him a “dirty boy” and made him sit naked while she changed the bedding. As the month wore on, Rory grew increasingly demoralized. “I raised my hand to protect the U.S. Constitution,” he says. “They locked me in a cage.” After seeing her son in such distress, Cynthia would sign herself out, then sneak back to Rory’s room to make sure he wasn’t being mistreated. VA officials insist Rory received proper care while at McGuire. They say he was restrained for his own safety and provided with a call button, and nurses monitored him regularly. “To our knowledge,” the agency said in a memo, Rory was never treated “in a condescending manner.”

But military families and their advocates say Cynthia’s dissatisfaction with her son’s treatment is all too common. “For too many, the initials VA stand for ‘Veterans’ Adversary,’” says Representative Bob Filner (D-CA), who chairs the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. Patients can wait weeks or even months for appointments. Case managers often seem overloaded. Mental health treatment is inconsistent: in 2006 a VA deputy undersecretary, Frances Murphy, called it “virtually inaccessible.” And in many cases those who request specialized therapies at civilian hospitals are denied. For many parents, dealing with the VA becomes the most frustrating part of their child’s recovery. “You have to fight every single day to get your soldier what he needs,” says Valerie Wallace, 46, who lives in Odessa, Florida. Her son, Sergeant John Barnes, 24, suffered a brain injury in Iraq.

Michael Kussman, the VA’s undersecretary for health, says the department is striving to improve its care—cutting the waiting time for appointments to 30 days, hiring “transition advocates” to help patients through the system, and adding almost 4,000 additional mental health specialists. VA hospitals are equipped to handle the needs of most returning service members, Kussman says, but the agency will occasionally outsource care to civilian hospitals if it’s “the best thing for the patient.”

Rory Dunn’s mother, Cynthia, didn’t know what his life—or her own—would look like once they returned home to Washington State. His recovery, though, has exceeded doctors’ expectations. At 26, he lives on his own, 15 minutes from his mother and stepfather, and he spends much of his time traveling and meeting with other wounded soldiers. His cognitive skills have returned, but some of the brain damage from the blast remains. “My fuse is a lot shorter,” he says. “I don’t have much patience for stupid people. I get irritated.” He’s not having as many nightmares and flashbacks. He can watch fireworks without being spooked. But in other situations Rory remains vigilant. He can’t ride buses because of the strangers, and in restaurants he sits with his back to the wall. He has limited vision and hearing. Still, Rory says, he remains positive about his future.

Though Cynthia no longer needs to care for Rory 24-7, “the whole experience has made us closer and stronger,” she says. And it has given her a new cause. Cynthia now spends her time advocating for wounded veterans. She speaks at conferences, meets with families and government officials, and in 2007 spoke before a Defense Department task force studying the military’s mental health care system. “We need to get our priorities straight,” she testified. That includes setting up a more ambitious and responsive system for treating and rehabilitating warriors with brain injuries and PTSD. “There are many veterans falling through the cracks,” she says.

Cynthia knows she’s lucky because of the way things turned out with Rory. Not all veterans have families who can work the system as she did. Some don’t have families at all. And what happens when severely disabled veterans outlive the parents who are caring for them? “During the year we spent at Walter Reed, and our time in the rehab centers, we saw so many families who didn’t know what to do,” she says. “We’re all responsible now for this new generation of vets. And it’s not just the service members we have to be concerned about. There has to be care and support for their caregivers, too.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Barry Yeoman is an investigative journalist who often writes about the intersection of science and social policy. His work has appeard in Discover, AARP The Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine. He lives in North Carolina.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Price of War
Troops returning with PTSD: 13.8 percent, or 226,000
Troops returning with major depression: 13.7 percent, or 225,000
Two-year cost of treating PTSD and major depression: $4 billion to $6.2 billion

The Facts of War
Percentage of active-duty forces between 17 and 24 years of age: 47
Percentage of military personnel who are unmarried: 48
Percentage of returning troops reporting the death or serious injury of a friend: 49

Source: “Invisible Wounds of War,” Rand Center for Military Health Policy Research, 2008

http://www.aarpmagazine.org/family/when_wounded_vets_come_home.html

Here's To Your Health(care)

2009-05-11T07:21:00.003-04:00

The photo was taken by Elisa Young from her yard and is referred to in the second comment below.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

---Erich Fromm

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "look under foot." You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is of the world.

---John Burroughs

A single atom of the sweetness of wisdom in a man's heart is better than a thousand pavilions in Paradise.

---Abu Yazid al-Bistami

I'm trying to learn about health care, attempts to reform, single payer and other alternatives. I'm not very good at figuring things like this out, and I've put it off hoping smarter people would get it right for me. Currently I'm catching up with an article by Shannon Brownlee from an AARP magazine last summer that's been laying around. Ms. Brownlee's article turns out to be online too, and I recommend it. Just read the first paragraph and I think you'll want to continue. http://www.aarpmagazine.org/health/health_care_costs.html Her book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, apparently has caught on, at least with policymakers.

I hadn't planned to write anything about this now...but I guess I can't wait---even until I finish that article. Obama's getting after it today, and this president moves fast. After living under the last administration that did nothing fast, except go on vacation and get us into wars, this new one is a real culture shock. During his hilarious speech the other night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama said his first 100 days went so well that he plans for his second 100 to be completed in 73 days.

From what I can gather, Obama's plan this afternoon will follow the same lines that Shannon Brownlee has been developing. We need to trim the current system and practices before moving into some more radical approach. He thinks savings of 2 trillion dollars is a realistic goal. http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-BarackObama/idUSTRE54A01P20090511 If this is the direction the country will move in health care reform, we need to be paying attention right now.

This morning Paul Krugman has a column in the NY Times anticipating this precise development. To save us all time and preserve it, here it is~~~

The New York Times
May 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Harry, Louise and Barack
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Is this the end for Harry and Louise?
Harry and Louise were the fictional couple who appeared in advertisements run by the insurance industry in 1993, fretting about what would happen if “government bureaucrats” started making health care decisions. The ads helped kill the Clinton health care plan, and have stood, ever since, as a symbol of the ability of powerful special interests to block health care reform.
But on Saturday, excited administration officials called me to say that this time the medical-industrial complex (their term, not mine) is offering to be helpful.
Six major industry players — including America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a descendant of the lobbying group that spawned Harry and Louise — have sent a letter to President Obama sketching out a plan to control health care costs. What’s more, the letter implicitly endorses much of what administration officials have been saying about health economics.
Are there reasons to be suspicious about this gift? You bet — and I’ll get to that in a bit. But first things first: on the face of it, this is tremendously good news.
The signatories of the letter say that they’re developing proposals to help the administration achieve its goal of shaving 1.5 percentage points off the growth rate of health care spending. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually huge: achieving that goal would save $2 trillion over the next decade.
How are costs to be contained? There are few details, but the industry has clearly been reading Peter Orszag, the budget director.
In his previous job, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Orszag argued that America spends far too much on some types of health care with little or no medical benefit, even as it spends too little on other types of care, like prevention and treatment of chronic conditions. Putting these together, he concluded that “substantial opportunities exist to reduce costs without harming health over all.”
Sure enough, the health industry letter talks of “reducing over-use and under-use of health care by aligning quality and efficiency incentives.” It also picks up a related favorite Orszag theme, calling for “adherence to evidence-based best practices and therapies.” All in all, it’s just what the doctor, er, budget director ordered.
Before we start celebrating, however, we have to ask the obvious question. Is this gift a Trojan horse? After all, several of the organizations that sent that letter have in the past been major villains when it comes to health care policy.
I’ve already mentioned AHIP. There’s also the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobbying group that helped push through the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 — a bill that both prevented Medicare from bargaining over drug prices and locked in huge overpayments to private insurers. Indeed, one of the new letter’s signatories is former Representative Billy Tauzin, who shepherded that bill through Congress then immediately left public office to become PhRMA’s lavishly paid president.
The point is that there’s every reason to be cynical about these players’ motives. Remember that what the rest of us call health care costs, they call income.
What’s presumably going on here is that key interest groups have realized that health care reform is going to happen no matter what they do, and that aligning themselves with the Party of No will just deny them a seat at the table. (Republicans, after all, still denounce research into which medical procedures are effective and which are not as a dastardly plot to deprive Americans of their freedom to choose.)
I would strongly urge the Obama administration to hang tough in the bargaining ahead. In particular, AHIP will surely try to use the good will created by its stance on cost control to kill an important part of health reform: giving Americans the choice of buying into a public insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers. The administration should not give in on this point.
But let me not be too negative. The fact that the medical-industrial complex is trying to shape health care reform rather than block it is a tremendously good omen. It looks as if America may finally get what every other advanced country already has: a system that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens.
And serious cost control would change everything, not just for health care, but for America’s fiscal future. As Mr. Orszag has emphasized, rising health care costs are the main reason long-run budget projections look so grim. Slow the rate at which those costs rise, and the future will look far brighter.
I still won’t count my health care chickens until they’re hatched. But this is some of the best policy news I’ve heard in a long time.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Chairman Of The Board

2009-04-29T05:54:00.004-04:00

Which one of these people do you suppose is Chairman?

A religious person ought, in respect to all the things that he uses, be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your clothes, your books, your cell and everything else you make use of.

---St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will: be like a mass of matter which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please anyone;like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to his needs and places it wherever it suits him.

---St. Ignatius Loyola

Zen is a matter of character, not a matter of intellect.

---D.T. Suzuki

Sometime in the last several years, I came to realize that my sturdy education in representational government wasn't doing me much good in the contemporary United States. My generation had been taught that there may be the occasional corrupt politician, but overall our federal system of checks and balances is the best there is...and the bad apples get discovered and thrown out. They have to be...or the whole barrel rots.

But a quarter of a century or so ago a faded Hollywood actor, who had ended up selling 20 Mule Team Boraxo on TV before General Electric gave him his big commercial break, convinced us that government is the enemy. The marketplace is a better governor and the corporate businessperson always will provide for our families with jobs and trickling wealth. Government legislation and contracts were best devised through the work of specially trained experts, known rather cheaply as lobbyists. Maybe they did make their contacts at first in lobbies, but eventually luxury resorts became the normal scene. There was nothing wrong with a congressperson bought and paid for, as long as he provided treats for his constituency.

I decided those few years ago that reform in Congress was hopeless. Now our only chance would have to be at stockholder meetings. There the average citizen still could get to his feet and speak his mind about what companies should be doing. The boards of directors would have to listen to those average citizens, because it was hard-earned savings that bought those shares of stock. And of course the directors would tell management what had to be done.

I don't own stock myself, so I've never been to one of the meetings I dreamed existed. And I never bothered to research them. So it was with eagerness that I read a newspaper column in our local Athens Messenger the other day about this very thing. Its author is no less than a cultural treasure around here. Guido H. Stempel III is a distinguished professor emeritus in the E. W. Scripps School of journalism at Ohio University, and we are privileged that sometimes he still writes a letter or column. I say "privileged" even though the writing you are about to read completely dashed my hopes for corporate reform through the boardroom. Through Professor Stempel's kind permission, here is his view~~~

It's Spring, and all over America stockholders are being reminded how little control they have over the companies in which they have invested and how little say they over over the compensation of CEOs.

The enlightenment comes from the annual reports issued by companies inpreparation for their annual meetings of stockholders.

If you work your way through the report you eventually will come to the information on the CEO's compensation. You probably have learned that the company's revenue and profits are down, and you know that the stock price is down. It hasn't been a good year, so you are surprised to see the CEO is getting a bonus and some other incidental compensation besides his salary.

Do the stockholders decide what the CEO's compensation will be? Don'tbe silly. What do stockholders know? It's the board of directors who decide.

And what do the members of the board of directors know? Most know they are getting paid more than $100,000 a year to attend a few meetings and give a little advice. Naturally they want the CEO to be well paid.

It is also the board of directors that devises the wonderful goldenparachutes you read about--that payment of millions of dollars in retirement or termination benefits. You probably will be amazed, as I have been, when your read of an apparently unsuccessful CEO getting $20 million in exchange for his or her resignation.

Members of the board supposedly are elected by the stockholders, but you are in for a surprise there. There are no contests. If there are 12 positions on the board, then there are 12 candidates.

Of course, you are free to vote against any or all candidates.However, if you have been paying attention as you have read through thereport you have come to the statement of share owned by the officers and board members. The total is well in the millions, and voting is not oneperson one vote but one share one vote. If you own 100 shares, will yourvote matter?

You have one other matter to vote on. You can vote for or against the auditing firm the CEO and the board recommends. This is no small matter--audits can easily cost a million dollars. Your vote, however, is a small matter.

You may also get to vote on proposals presented by stockholders.Whatever the proposal is, you can count on the board of directors being unanimously and strongly opposed.

There is also a cover letter from the CEO urging you to vote because the company values your vote.

Some companies respect shareholders more than this scenario suggests.Some, for example, inform stockholders of what CEOs are being paid this year and ask stockholders whether or not they think the compensation isappropriate. This is a fairly recently development, and a majority of companies oppose this. Furthermore, those that do it do not promise tochange the compensation if the stockholders don't like it.

When you take all this in, you understand part of the reason for our current recession. It's not all because of bankers and Wall Street. Boardsof directors are part of the problem, and stockholders are virtually powerless to stop them.

The original article can be found here http://www.athensmessenger.com/articles/2009/04/27/opinion/doc49f44fb1c6f24249440292.txt but it is necessary to be a paid subscriber to read it in this format.

Regulating The Money Changers

2009-04-05T08:00:00.003-04:00

Regulate this! Albert J. Dunlap, also known as Chainsaw Al, graduated from West Point before becoming CEO of Lily Tulip Cup and Scott Paper. By firing thousands of employees at once and closing plants and factories, he forced up the share price of his companies and made billions. When shareholders were left holding an empty cup, he sometimes got fined a few million. Overall, toxicity's been profitable.

To be able to spit in their eye and do what you think is right and report the news and have enough readers to make some impact is such a pleasure that you forget, you forget what you are writing about. It becomes, you know, it like, you are like a journalistic Nero fiddling while Rome burns and having a hell of a good time or like a small boy covering a hell of a big fire. It's just wonderful and exciting. You are a cub reporter and God has given you big fire to cover. And you forget, you forget it is really burning.

---I.F. Stone

And when I was brought into the convention center to tell this story (of her arrest) to the networks, one of the reporters for the network said, "How come I didn't get arrested?" And I said, "Oh, were you out covering the protests?" And he said, "No."... You got to get out there. And if the problem with this... It's not just a violation of freedom of the press... It's a violation of the public's right to know. If they're just inside the convention, they get one message. The orchestrated message. And that's important to cover. You got to get into the corporate suites. Who's funding all of this? And you have to get into the streets. Democracy's a messy thing. And all of these voices must be heard.

---Amy Goodman

Watching the news over the over the last two days, while Obama, President Obama, is in London. Watching all of the demonstrators there, some of them violent and militant, but thousands of them not. Marching to a bank, and protesting. I thought of something you wrote recently. You said that for the magnitude of this financial crisis, there should be a lot more popular rage in this country. Why do you think there isn't? Because the taxi driver this morning, coming down here, to me, was angry as hell.

---Bill Moyers, on his PBS Journal, April 3, 2009

Obama's financial policy is coming under closer scrutiny in the media and on the Internet. The suspicion and anger on Main Street, to which supposedly this President listens and responds, is getting louder. Not a day goes by that some American doesn't walk into an office or factory somewhere and just start shooting. Are they all just nutcases, or is there a war starting? Are we going postal? It's time to take a closer look.

Who are these bankers and bosses who have emerged since Reagan? What is the free market like since Poppy Bush declared globalization, and Junior encouraged credit cards without limit and told us all to go shopping. It's your patriotic duty to go shopping. Under Obama, apparently it still is. The same guy seems to be running the show.

The 3 quotations above are from the transcript of Friday's Moyers Journal. I don't know about you, but here in Athens I can't find the show anymore. Our PBS station, with dozens of digital channels and one remaining analog, seems to broadcast it sometime...but between pledge drives and shifting schedules I have no idea where it is. Fortunately I still can go to http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript3.html and find out what happened. Apparently Friday's show was all about journalism and economic regulation. Since Amy Goodman is on a 70 city tour, promoting a new book, and coming here Thursday (broadcasting from a station that doesn't carry Democracy Now!), maybe we need a crash course in cash meltdown.

The first part of the Journal was given over to an interview with William J. Black, author of a book titled The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One. You get the idea. Mr. Black was a government regulator during the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s. Moyers introduced him thus~~~

"The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called 'Keating Five' were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, 'get Black — kill him dead.' Metaphorically, of course. Of course.

"Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname 'banksters.'"
You need to see or read the whole interview, but here's an excerpt~~~

WILLIAM K. BLACK: AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.
BILL MOYERS: What did AIG contribute? What did they do wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They made bad loans. Their type of loan was to sell a guarantee, right? And they charged a lot of fees up front. So, they booked a lot of income. Paid enormous bonuses. The bonuses we're thinking about now, they're much smaller than these bonuses that were also the product of accounting fraud. And they got very, very rich. But, of course, then they had guaranteed this toxic waste. These liars' loans. Well, we've just gone through why those toxic waste, those liars' loans, are going to have enormous losses. And so, you have to pay the guarantee on those enormous losses. And you go bankrupt. Except that you don't in the modern world, because you've come to the United States, and the taxpayers play the fool. Under Secretary Geithner and under Secretary Paulson before him... we took $5 billion dollars, for example, in U.S. taxpayer money. And sent it to a huge Swiss Bank called UBS. At the same time that that bank was defrauding the taxpayers of America. And we were bringing a criminal case against them. We eventually get them to pay a $780 million fine, but wait, we gave them $5 billion. So, the taxpayers of America paid the fine of a Swiss Bank. And why are we bailing out somebody who that is defrauding us?
BILL MOYERS: And why...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: How mad is this?
BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's... it's scandalous.
BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, â€˜contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.
BILL MOYERS: The cover up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.
BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.
BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.
These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.

Frank Rich comes at it from a different angle this morning, but essentially he's covering the same story. Like Moyers, he's wondering why Rick Wagoner got singled out...but the bankers and brokers still are under cover~~~

"Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution from devolving into a government charity case. He embraced the Hummer. G.M.’s share price fell from above $70 to under $3 on his watch. Yet few disputed the judgment of the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, that Wagoner was a 'sacrificial lamb,' a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.

"On this point even the left and the right could agree. The union leader Andy Stern publicly wondered why the administration didn’t also dethrone Ken Lewis of Bank of America. Thaddeus McCotter, a conservative Republican congressman from suburban Detroit, asked, 'When will the Wall Street C.E.O.’s receiving TARP funds summon the honor to resign? Will this White House ever bother to raise the issue?'

"When reporters did raise the issue of a double standard to the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, they got double talk: 'I don’t have anything specific on Bank of America.'
"But even as that unanswered question hangs in the air, a more revealing inquiry might be this: Why is there any sympathy whatsoever for a Detroit C.E.O. who helped wreck his company, ruined investors and cost thousands of hard-working underlings their jobs, when there is no mercy for those who did the same on Wall Street? Might we, too, have a double standard? Could we still be in denial of the reality that greed and irresponsibility were not an exclusive Wall Street franchise during our national bender?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/opinion/05rich.html?th&emc=th

But the most devastating writing I came across on this whole mess is at the Forum section of---sorry, folks---Playboy.com. The writer is named Mark Ames, and I guess he maintains a column there called Backstabber. This article is called "Class War 101," and sets forth they hypothesis that the "economic elite" are not the same kind of human like you and me. Their reptilian brains work differently...and so do the hormones that create their hunger. Sound too cynical for you? Maybe. Born in California in 1965, Ames went to a private Episcopalian school, then the University of California. During the Reagan, both Bushes, and the Clinton years, he became more and more disillusioned with the United States. So why didn't he move to Russia if he didn't like it here. He did. He started a newspaper there called The Exiled, but the government shut him down when he was critical of the Georgian invasion. He's written a book with Rolling Stones' Matt Taibbi, if that gives you an idea of his flavor. See if any of this makes sense to you~~~

"If we’d cared to look around us at any time since the Reagan Revolution, we’d realize that the CEOs, billionaires and finance stars are behaving no differently today than they have been for nearly three decades. When we look back, what will pain us most is the way we admired the billionaires even as they brought about our ruin, turning them into TV celebrities and magazine-cover heroes, worshipping them like rock stars right up to the end.

"A perfect example of the kind of person who benefited from the Reagan Revolution is Al 'Chainsaw' Dunlap, a corporate superstar during the peak Clinton years, when Reaganomics accelerated under the guiding hands of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. It was during Clinton’s centrist pro-business presidency that innovations like the like mass-layoff (rebranded as 'downsizing') became a regular feature of economic booms, rather than of economic busts, as they had been in the past. Layoffs expanded right with the economy for the simple reason that each mass firing freed up millions or billions of dollars that had gone to workers, but now could be divided up between executives and major shareholders. The problem was finding people cold-blooded enough to do the job—which is to say, there was no problem whatsoever. As Dunlap himself boasted in a 1998 interview with Fortune magazine, 'Mickey Mouse could do the cost cutting.'...

"This same arc has been repeated all over the American economy—what we once thought were isolated cases turned out to be a pattern, and the pattern repeated so much up down corporate America that it finally became clear: These things are the rule. No wonder the SEC never came down hard on anyone: it would have meant shutting down the entire economy and starting from scratch. "In the past, when downsizings and payouts happened, they were seen as a necessary evil in the overall march to a free-market utopia. Now we understand that what really happened wasn’t as complicated or theoretical as it was made out to be. It was a straight-forward transfer of wealth out of the pockets of, say, 11,200 employees at Scott Paper into the pockets of Wall Street bankers and their CEO henchmen. No matter how many words like 'efficiency' and 'restructuring' you gloss it with, it’s still taking money that formerly went into one group’s pocket, and giving to another, much smaller group.

"What’s so strange, looking back, isn’t just the blatant, shameless plundering of thousands of American families for a few individual’s excessive profit, but the way we all adored them while they were in mid-plunder. They didn’t even try to pretend to be likeable or even human, and we still licked their boots."

Like Taibbi, Mark Ames writes graphically. Visits to the sites of Rolling Stone and Playboy, like purchasing the magazines, can be risky business if you seek to avoid cussing and the sight of flesh. But this is muckraking time...and it's not pretty.

http://www.playboy.com/articles/class-war-101/index.html?page=1

During the Obama campaign there were the same concerns, from Left and Right, about his Chicago connections, and beyond, to wealthy backers and financial interests. Is he just another front man? Except for this area...and maybe Afghanistan...he has stepped forward with answers when questions were raised. Hello Grassroots, do you have any questions?