Wishing for peace in the Middle East

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement aimed at Israel may not bring peace, but so far, nothing else is either

"Alanis Morissette, the Canadian American pop singer, is an unlikely ambassador to the Middle East, but in some ways, she is a good one," wrote Washington Post religion columnist Lisa Miller in her column, "Morissette did more good by not boycotting Israel," last Saturday (Dec. 8). This is so, Miller said, because "perhaps Morissette is a foreign policy savant and understands, as the British peace activist Hannah Weisfield explained in Haaretz in March, that a broad boycott of Israel conflates too much: its politicians with its people; its current policies with its legitimate history; its business in the occupied territories with those inside its 1949 borders."

So we are to understand that the only boycotts people like Morissette should honor are the ones that don't conflate people and their politicians, that focus exclusively on Israel's current policies and not the unfortunate circumstances of its unilateral creation on Palestinian territory, that focus on the occupied territories and not the longing of Palestinians for the parts of their homeland they likely will never retrieve. This matters especially, Miller wrote in her column, because the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement doesn't have any real plan to achieve a negotiated settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.

But if having a negotiated plan for peace between Israel and Palestinian was actually a precondition for action in this case, then Israelis ought to be barred from any action aimed at maintaining the Occupation or from establishing any more settlements on Palestinian territory. Likewise, Palestinians would be barred from launching rockets or suicide attacks. Miller, no doubt, is shocked that neither side is showing the kind of restraint she appears to prefer.

Oddly, Morissette,, the "foreign policy savant," apparently has no plan, either. Otherwise, why would Miller suggest that "Morissette might have served the cause of peace...better by clearly articulating her reasons for going to Israel." Since Morissette did not do so, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that Miller isn't really writing about the pop singer, at all, but is taking the opportunity to applaud her for not cooperating with the BDS movement. Miller very likely has no plans for peace, either, beyond a kind of Rodney King, can't-we-all-just-get-along plea.

Indeed, BDS, conceived on the model of the boycott of South African goods in the 1980s, which certainly helped in isolating South Africa and speeding the fall of apartheid in that country, may not be the key to building an enduring peace between Palestine and Israel. But it is an acknowledgement of the suffering of Palestinians since the Jewish state was created on Palestinian territory and of the fact that more than half a century later, Palestinians continue to suffer from the persistent application of Israeli power in the portion of Palestine that theoretically still belongs to them. The BDS initiative also reflects the opinion of many people that however much Jews might have suffered during the Holocaust, that experience did not confer on them the right to take land occupied by another people.

Best Case Scenario

or the silver lining at the end of the world

Stephen King says this:
at the end of all rationalism
the mass grave.
Science,

biology, physics, he says,
technology--
the deathtrip.
At the end of it all

the bomb, the plague--
something--
climate change
at the the end of it all.

The final genius
of our everloving, overstriding
brilliance.
He also holds this:

Technological collapse will reduce
the ambient noise that shrouds
our magic selves and
we will see

our dormant gifts awakened.
Manifest in all survivors
a certain wizardry more or less.
Hallelujah, anyway.

Cliff diving

Fiscally speaking, Obama's position only gets stronger

Why shouldn't President Obama demand Republican support for ending Bush-era tax cuts for the rich? Because if he doesn't find a way to compromise with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, we will all go over the fiscal cliff?

The truth is Republicans have stronger reasons to avoid the cliff than Obama does and, surprisingly, many more reasons to go over it, as well. Either way, they face political damnation.

If we do take a dive, Boehner and McConnell know that Republicans will get the major portion of the blame. Their refusal to compromise will be portrayed as protecting lower tax rates for the rich. No amount of explaining will change that perception.

Obama will be criticized, too, but not as harshly, and he doesn't have 2014 election worries, either. Republican incumbents (House or Senate) planning on running for reelection will begin their campaigns fearing that intransigence on the fiscal cliff (and the debt ceiling, if it comes to that) will cost them politically.

Theoretically, going over the cliff will position Republicans to reach a "grand bargain" in January that includes tax cuts. The new year will create incentives for both sides to reach a compromise that restores some of the Bush-era tax cuts (except for high-income earners) and maintains the payroll tax exemption that will disappear at year's end.

A January compromise will allow Republicans to claim that they remain the party of tax cuts. Unfortunately for them, to get the cuts that will help maintain their brand (even though Democrats will want them, too), Republicans will likely have to agree with healthcare reforms that they have always opposed, like allowing the government to require competitive bidding for medical equipment and other items purchased by federal health-care programs.

Medicare and Medicaid reforms outlined by the Center for American Progress and generally supported by Democrats are projected to save $385 billion over 10 years, without affecting eligibility or benefit levels. Republicans have their own proposals for saving billions more in healthcare spending, but most of them come from delaying eligibility and raising costs for recipients. The credit for such reforms will go to Obama, not to Boehner, Ryan, Cantor, McConnell, et al.

That same Republican leadership will want to restore some of the cuts to the military budget that will result from going over the fiscal cliff and Democrats will want to do some of that, also. But they won't want it worse than the Republicans will and will be able to bargain for other things they want more, like a little bit more stimulus spending and reduced cuts in education and human service spending.

All of that compromising is going to make Republicans look weak to their core constituencies. It's a painful prospect; agree to tax increases to avoid going over the fiscal cliff and tarnish their anti-tax, anti-government brand, or strengthen the perception that they are defending tax cuts for the rich and agree to a compromise afterward that makes them look like a junior partner in supporting handouts to Democratic constituencies.

The only possible basis for Democrats to oppose going over the cliff is the possibility that doing so will result in instant and significant damage to the economy. (Just three weeks ago in Compromise or Betrayal, I did advocate compromising with Republicans before going over the fiscal cliff. What can I say? Like Obama on gay marriage, my thinking has evolved.)But there are all sorts of ways the government can blunt the immediate effects of tax increases and sequestration, delaying the pain for long enough to pass a fix in January. Obama has lots of cards to play now. After the cliff dive is done, his hand will be even stronger.

Calamity Jeff speaks

The time for justice and peace is going up in a cloud of warming gasses

There is a notion—the idea of an ethical human race, a human race for which justice comes first—that I wish was understood and widely embraced. Further, I wish that we all lived by that ideal.

If we did there would be a whole laundry list of very important outcomes that would be realized in such a world. Indeed, where to start itemizing?

Here, in the United States, we would have an economy in which wealth, income and healthcare were more fairly distributed. People would be able to find jobs close to home that were satisfying, or perhaps a little further away, maybe a reasonable commute on public transportation, say, if they wished a particular job in their area of expertise or one that paid a bit more than those available closer to home. People would live in decent housing located in safe neighborhoods with good public schools. And college educations would be more affordable.

U.S. domestic policy would require that investments in communities be generally equal except where historic injustices required reparations in the form of additional investment in Native American and African American communities.

U.S. foreign policy, too, would be different, and the country would back off from its historic insistence that global resources be divided in the interests of Americans. The United States and China—by an overwhelming margin the biggest producers of carbon pollution—would join with other countries to vigorously pursue reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate change gasses, and invest in climate change mitigation projects domestically and internationally.

Elsewhere, Israelis would recognize the ongoing injuries suffered by Palestinians first as the state of Israel was established and later as the Occupation began and new settlements were established. In pursuit of a productive and just Israel-Palestinian peace process, Israelis would support both land and reparations for peace, and Palestinians would relinquish their justifiable claims in exchange for a viable homeland.

Israelis would also recognize that no theocracy, Muslim, Christian or Jewish, can guarantee equal rights and would take further steps toward true democracy. In such a world, terrorism, both the Middle Eastern kind and every other variant, the frequent recourse of the raging wounded, would wither away.

The list could be much longer, of course, and, regardless of the depth of commitment to equality and justice and a sustainable future, the devil would truly be in the details of how we get to such a utopian place. Even the process of defining the place would itself be devilish, but no matter. The real question is what might motivate us all to invest our hearts and minds into doing so much good.

The answer would have to lie in the fact that failing to do so, at this point in human history will result in a train wreck of apocalyptic proportions. Humans, after all, have become, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (or, even, since Columbus sailed into the Carrribean), so much more efficient at laying waste to populations and to planet.

Never in the previous ten thousand years of history could we kill or destroy so quickly and so epically. Our production of death and misery and desperation is at historic highs these last 150 years or so, outpacing production in previous centuries and millennia by orders of magnitude. The degree of that increase of destructive power could be hypothesized and investigated using scientific tools; we need no Mayan calendar to predict the famines and super storms and holocausts to come.

If Howard Zinn were alive, and were willing to read this essay, I can guess how he might respond to my thesis. Zinn, of course, was no Pollyanna. He was a historical revisionist who would gaze unflinchingly on the truth of American and world history in order to name the policies and people who have inflicted so much damage on working people and people of color and women and sexual minorities, in order to name the names and crimes of people, generals and corporate heads, celebrated by more conventional versions of history.

But in the face of such painful stories and depressing outcomes, Zinn insisted on fighting back. No matter the power that might be arrayed against activists, power organized in defense of the status quo, Zinn believed in the efficacy of collective human action.

“Surely history does not start anew with each decade. The roots of one era branch and flower in subsequent eras. Human beings, writings, invisible transmitters of all kinds, carry messages across the generations,” Zinn wrote in his essay, Failure to Quit (collected in a book by the same title).

“I try to be pessimistic, to keep up with some of my friends. But I think back over the decades, and look around. And then it seems to me that the future is not certain, but it is possible,” he concluded.

Zinn would not have argued that the future we are looking at now is anything but grim. “The word ‘optimism’ used [in The Optimism of Uncertainty], and in the subtitle of [Failure to Quit], makes me a little uneasy, because it suggests a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time,” he wrote. “But I use it anyway, not because I am totally confident that the world will get better, but because I am certain that only such confidence can prevent people from giving up the game before all the cards have been played.”

The point I am making here is based on my assumption that there are now so few cards remaining in the deck that a loss of all our fortunes seems almost inexorably close. Nevertheless, this essay of mine is no call to action. It is instead a call to agreement on certain truths that seem to me to be almost self-evident. Effective action requires such agreement.

We are on the cusp of a global catastrophe that will wound us all and kill many, and even that wounding and killing will fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable. The coming changes are the outcome of centuries of human activity and policies that encourage and result in the grievously unequal distribution of resources.  What we do in the near future depends on widespread agreement that what we have been doing for millennia brought us to this point, and must not be the model for what we do henceforward.

In the absence of such an understanding, some people will still forge ahead in the effort to change what can still be changed in the interests of greater justice. I do not believe that collective action on less than a global scale will win the future that Howard Zinn believed in, but perhaps it will and we will all of us reap the benefits of the fight that remains in stouter hearts.

But we must surely ask ourselves why it is pestilence, war, famine and death in the saddle, rather than justice, peace, equality and sustainability.

Compromise or Betrayal

The Politics of Gridlock

So, I wrote the Washington Post, again. Something like Letter to the Editor number lebenty-leben, I’m guessing. They didn’t get around to publishing it (quelle surprise!), but here it is:

Editor,

“Obama did not lead a U.S. retreat from the world,” Jackson Diehl writes in “Foreign policy red flags “(Post, Nov. 12). “Instead he sought to pursue the same interests without the same means.”

Obama has withdrawn ground troops from war zones, cut the defense budget, and backed away from nation-building projects and from U.S.-led interventions, Diehl tells us. That sounds to me like a decision to pursue distinctly different interests around the world and, more specifically, to make it clear that the U.S. will no longer police the world to secure all the advantages that once accrued under Pax America.

If my understanding is correct it might mean that U.S. corporations can no longer invest and operate globally backed by the threat of force. If my understanding is correct it might also mean that groups with historic grievances against the U.S. (real or imagined) will unfortunately have more space and freedom to plot anti-American violence. Indeed, that might make Americans a bit more vulnerable, a risk that we will have to figure out how to manage and reduce by other means. But if we can do this through a “lighter footprint” globally, we might become one of the principal architects of a more peaceful world.

Or is Diehl suggesting that a heavier footprint might get better results? Are we talking, say, the Bush footprint, which resulted in upwards of one million Iraqis and Afghanis dead or displaced, thousands of American fatalities, and a military budget that roughly doubled from the first Bush-year to the last? Is that the footprint Diehl is recommending?

Jeff Epton

That’s the letter, but there’s more to say, of course. Obama’s “lighter footprint” still includes drone attacks, Guantanamo and anything but a get-tough-with-Israel element, but at this time in history, and after almost 50 years of disappointment with American foreign policy, I’m more than willing to settle for half a loaf.

And, speaking of compromise, disgruntled leftist though I may be, I’m ready for more of it. If Barack Obama wants to trim a little around the edges of programs I support, including Medicare, in exchange for Republican votes for higher taxes on the wealthy, other revenue increases of various kinds, closing tax code loopholes or ending subsidies that supplement the profits of oil companies and hedge funds and other corporate actors, and continuing reductions in the military budget, I’m ready to sign on.

Some of those cuts likely will harm individuals and communities that need more, not less, government assistance or protection. But without Republican support for revenue increases the country will continue to be pummeled by the effects of political gridlock.

Of course, there are lots of possible compromises that will provide no long-term benefit. Any worthwhile deal with Republicans in Congress must be part of a strategic assessment that suggests that the Republicans who do compromise will be willing to do so more than once.

I don’t know what criteria to apply in reaching such a conclusion, but I’m fairly certain that there are Republican senators and representatives who believe that a deal of some sort would be better for the country than falling off the fiscal cliff and also believe that Republicans who continue on their present reactionary path might well be overwhelmed by an approaching demographic tsunami.

There will be plenty of folks who wish to argue with this approach. People who believe that compromise can easily convert to betrayal. Robert Borosage lays out that perspective in persuasive detail in “A ‘grand bargain’ on the fiscal cliff could be a grand betrayal.”

Borosage’s main argument is that going over the fiscal cliff will not immediately do the kind of damage that so many observers are predicting. Further, he says, the nation does not have a debt or deficit problem, but a jobs problem that needs to be addressed first. And, finally, that there is plenty of time next year, after going over the cliff that is not a cliff, to address the problems created by lapsed tax cuts and automatic budget cuts.

But I’m not persuaded. I agree with the proposition that getting more people back to work is more important than addressing the deficit. But what Borosage and I believe is not going to compel action. The end of the payroll tax cut is going to reduce household income for even the poorest working families by a meaningful amount. That’s not going to get anybody back to work. There are more layoffs coming, as well, as the fiscal cliff approaches.

Sorry I am that compromise is necessary, but January will not create a more flexible Congress or present new opportunities to pass another sorely needed stimulus bill. Stimulus items like spending for infrastructure, extending unemployment benefits, and preserving the payroll tax cut are going to take compromise, now or later. Election victories notwithstanding, coaxing the right number of Republicans to vote with Democrats is going to take giving up something.

Though Jackson Diehl’s Nov. 12 piece left something to be desired, two Post columnists wrote rather more interesting columns that ran on Nov. 14. Dana Milbank’s “The Confederacyof Takers” points out in substantial detail how well most red states do feeding at the public trough. “Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. It is the opposite in blue states,” Milbank wrote.

Also, check out Harold Meyerson’s “The GOP’s gerrymandered advantages,” which points out that in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania congressional races, Republicans won 30 more seats in the House of Representatives than Democrats, despite the fact that Obama won the popular vote in those states by margins that should have led to a 30-seat Democratic advantage. That did not happen, Meyerson wrote, because Republican gubernatorial and legislative control of those states after the 2010 census permitted significant gerrymandering of House districts. “…by suppressing competition, and crafting uncompetitive districts, [Republicans] maintained their hold on the House last week.”

 Obviously, it will take a while before the full effects of the coming demographic change will swamp intransigent Republicans. In some cases, it will take Democratic victories in tight elections in state legislative districts over the next six years before redistricting will permit Democrats to once more exercise all the prerogatives of the majority party in Congress. But legislative victories for working people and minorities should come a little easier in the future than they have over the last four years.

In the meantime, we should all keep in mind that working people in the red states are suffering, too. After all, capital and organized commercial interests in the south, like weapons manufacturers, oil companies and agribusiness, are siphoning off a huge share of the federal largess that heads that way.

Ordinary folks in the red states are pretty much getting the same shaft as working people elsewhere. They may even have been getting it longer. The fact that they don’t seem to vote their own interests is a measure of how long they’ve been exploited and of the absence of unions to organize and message an alternative. While we are compromising, and strategizing our way to future victories, we ought to figure out a way to talk plainly and supportively to folks in the red states. They are Americans and they are our sisters and brothers.

A meditation on the Romneys

comes to an improbable conclusion

Walking the dog a bit ago and musing, I came across something of a meditation about Ann Romney and about Mitt. I'm feeling pretty well-disposed right now (it turns out the defense of Obamacare is pretty damn good medicine), but I'm still not intending to write anything nice about the Romneys.

The meditation began with a focus on Ann's horse, which, we have been told, has been an important element in the treatment of Ann's multiple sclerosis. Really? And, so, are we to understand that we are to pay no attention to the wealth piled up in the corner, but focus instead on Ann's self, mortal like the rest of us?

I can manage a very little of that, but then the thought comes to mind: How incredibly privileged the Romney's are that they can afford such treatment. Yes, we will all shuffle off this mortal coil, but along the way some of us will suffer more.

None of this means that the Romney's are bad people (though wealth and cluelessness and the desire to lower taxes on the rich is the dangerous wish of a powerful person), but they do not a First Family make. According to media reports, Republicans are doing some serious investigation of their strategies and commitments and exploring options for the future. Let me suggest that they never run a person this rich for the presidency, again.

That wasn't a viable choice this time, and isn't going to be again, I'd wager (though I'm not willing to bet a Romney-style $10,000 on the proposition). Certainly, wealthy men and women are going to be the ones occupying the presidency for as far into the future as we can see, and will capitalize on their stature and our celebrity culture after they serve, but Romney was very likely a zero too far. His $250+ million fortune was less transparent than the fifty-times smaller fortune of the man he ran against and substantially larger than that of the Bush family.

But Obama made what he has on fame and book royalties, both things that have come to him fairly recently in life. And George W. Bush had a goofiness about him that persuaded lots of ordinary folks that Bush was a pretty ordinary guy, too. Lots of voters were okay with a goofy, rich man for president when times were good, but this time around, a rich man who has the same vibe as Thurston Howell III (on Gilligan's Island), would have been kicked to the curb sooner, and long before Obama sleepwalked through the first debate, if the economy had been only marginally better.

Thinking back on images of the campaign, I am struck by how often I recall pictures of Mitt looking befuddled or startled. Looking, in fact, like he has just run up against another manifestation of real life--like mere mortals questioning his judgement or his veracity--that he had never experienced before. Well, the only people I know of who are routinely protected from that sort of collision with reality are CEO's and the one percent. Don't kid yourself, you Republican deep thinkers, everyone was going to figure out that Mitt didn't have a clue, even if the Obama campaign had spent less money trying to convey that impression of Mitt.

I must say I don't envy Republican strategists right now. They must figure out a way to compromise on taxes and the deficit and Social Security and Medicare and the debt ceiling and immigration and infrastructure and climate change while maintaining strong connections to Tea Party supporters, half of whom will demobilize as the economy improves. For the Republican party as it is presently constituted, staying relevant in an age of adverse shifts in demographics and the electoral map  is like being up the creek without a paddle.

But the somewhat bizarre conclusion to my meditation is the thought that I really do wish the Republicans well. Democrats could use a hand governing the country at this very critical time. A Republican boost could be transformative.

First we reelect the president

Next we heal the world

Well, so much for my abilities at foreshadowing what I might do next. My last post ended with the hopeful observation that I might write next about "the Chicago Way (here or here, for example)," a concept intended to suggest that dirty tricks and corruption have been refined to an extraordinary degree by Chicago politicians, of which Barack Obama is one and whose campaign, as the story goes, is too slick and too malign for the honorable likes of Mitt Romney.

I intended to belittle the notion that Chicago was so exceptional in the way of corruption and cynicism, and to call on lessons from my own experience as a politician in Ann Arbor and as a journalist in Chicago and Dayton to support an opposite conclusion, namely that politicians are no more corrupt or venal than the rest of us. That's a point that I think needs elaborating and repeating, but I've lost interest in the idea as the topic for this post.

Instead I want to elaborate on a comment my friend "kpdriscoll," left responding to the previous post, a bit about October surprises and the unlikelihood that there are any secrets left about Barack that might come out at the end and damage his political position. I wrote that only Romney could be victimized by the sudden appearance or elaboration on one of his "secrets." I was thinking about, say, the release of previous years tax returns or some nasty story about Bain.

The piece was weak. I wrote what I did because at the time I was feeling a little puny myself. Hell, I've been feeling a little puny for the last month or so. And my lassitude, I am convinced, came from the dread I felt about this election. Obama will lose, Romney will win, I've been thinking for more than a month now, and what will follow will be more of the Republican attack on government, an attack that has already, in the 32 years since Reagan was first elected, significantly defunded the government with severe consequences for the poor, for public education, for college students, for consumers, for healthcare and for the environment, to select just a sample.

In réponse, KP cited Hurricane Sandy as really the only October surprise of this election cycle and expanded with the observation that Sandy injected climate change and the environment back into political debate, however belatedly. This is true, I guess, as far as it goes, but climate change has been injected back into a debate that has been substantially soured by the ongoing Republican project, aimed at deligitimatizing the notion that government can improve and advance our common interests.

The two-pronged attack, defunding and deligitimatizing government, have left the country in a perilous state, especially in regard to a challenge as enormous as global warming and seas rising. Of course, the complete collapse of the U.S. and the global economy would have go a long way toward slowing the increase in the average global temperature, but as George Lakoff points out in "Global Warming Systemically Caused Hurricane Sandy," burning the gas reserves of Exxon Mobil alone would raise the average global temperature high enough to threaten civilization as we experience it. "The oil stored by all the oil companies everywhere would, if burned, destroy civilization many times over," Lakoff continues.

Under such circumstances, it should be obvious that even worldwide economic collapse would not eliminate the threat of devastating climate change (devastating superstorms are already here). It will take a government-led project many times larger than the Marshall Plan, larger than all public and private space exploration to date, to back us away from the damage that has already been done and to do so in a way that maintains the livelihoods, aspirations and quality of life for billions worldwide. It may be that it cannot be done.

It may be that the damage done by Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Bush, Rove, Boehner, McConnell, Romney and others has already crippled the faith that Americans have in their own government to the point that any new Marshall Plan would sound like "Solyndra" in American ears. But taking on that lack of faith and restoring American belief in the power of government to transform the world we live in is the challenge before us.

Like I said, I've been feeling pretty puny. Keeping the faith in the face of the threat presented by Romney has been harder for me than the experience of living with 12 years of Reagan-Bush and another eight years of Bush the Younger. Of course, in this instance, the fact that Marrianne works in the Obama administration and brings home the lion's share of our bacon is a factor, too. Without Marrianne's earning power I'd just be an aging retiree on a fixed income with a 14-year old kid and a terribly spotty work record. I'd be toast. So, yes, I have a personal stake in the outcome.

But I have a personal stake in restoring faith in government. It will not be hearty individualism or capitalism or the right to carry firearms that will protect the lives of the people I love who will be here after I'm gone. It will be American faith in the grand possibilities of collective mission articulated and guided by a progressive, democratic government. Unfortunately, climate change is gonna' keep on comin' while the essential work of restoring faith gets done.

So, first, we need to reelect Obama. Then, at a minimum, we are going to need a President Obama ready to play rough with plutocrats and corporations that have been the principal beneficiaries of the widening wealth and income gap and the deregulation push of the last 30 years. Close that gap, restore justice in the marketplace, and lead.

Do that and billions of us will have a chance of living reasonable lives into the second half of the 20th Century. Fail that and watch the continuing march of reactionaries and worse leading us to a place we never dreamed was possible.

If there's an October Surprise...

...it will most certainly be Mitt's.

No way there's an October Surprise for Barack. He may very well be the most investigated man in history.

I base that conclusion on the sheer power and range of today's investigative tools wielded by the mostly right-wing zealots with a hard-on for Barack Obama. If there were any damaging secrets in Barack's past, we would know them already. City and country blocks around each location Barack has ever been have been excavated and sifted through by miners with the black-hearted souls of Dickensian villains and the eternal optimism of the '49ers.

One thing about which all Americans ought to be sure is this: Barack Obama is exactly who he appears to be--an ambitious, thoughtful family man with an abiding love for his wife and children and a desire to do right in the world.

In rather surprisingly stark contrast, Mitt Romney is the most opaque and guarded man to have run for president in my memory, which does run as far back as Ike and Adlai, both of whom, by the way, projected authenticity, itself a separate deficit plaguing Mitt. Together the lack of transparency and the lack of authenticity suggests that Mitt has secrets, some of which might be significant enough to assume "October Surprise" proportions.

Of course, for all I know, Mormonism and its sincere practice might somehow shore Mitt up in a way that makes his deficiencies less problematic. But I doubt it. We just might not ever know.

In any case, we do know this. Barack is a straight up, honest guy. Such secrets as he might have will be very much like the rest of us. Bad, embarrassing, pathetic, whatever, but the secrets of a man who might very well be an exemplar of honest. Rather like a previous president from Illinois.

Which all brings me to consideration of the Chicago Way a term currently being pounded by hard right columnists and bloggers, like Victor Hansen; a concept likely to be the jumping off point for my next post.

Obama's Wednesday Night Failure

We need more Grant, less McClellan

Just like everybody else, or like tens of millions of people, we watched the debate on Wednesday night. Obama was not okay.

I've always liked him as a person. We don't have the same style, but he seems authentic. And on Wednesday night his authentic self appeared too troubled, by far.

He's never seemed a courageous man to me. (I say that with no intention of portraying myself as his opposite. I'm more than a little ambivalent about the strength of my own heart.) But I haven't been expecting courage from Obama--or innovative and radical policymaking--though that is exactly what we need. What I have always liked about Obama is his thoughtfulness and intelligence.

As it turns out, for purposes of the debate, it was his habitual lack of courage that made the difference. Obama is just not in the habit of fighting back. For all the Republican insistence that he rammed the healthcare bill down America's collective throat, there simply wasn't (and isn't) anything hard to swallow about it. The Affordable Care Act (or whatever, call it ACA), will result in covering, what, 40 million more Americans.

And it won't raise the cost of health care very much. Its flaws are that it doesn't go far enough (among other deficiencies, it doesn't direct use of the government's purchasing power to lower health care costs). In short, Obama didn't "ram" ACA. He just didn't get any Republican votes for it.

The Republicans, some of them, know that ACA, in the form that actually passed, was not a truly progressive accomplishment. But it did edge closer to a slippery slope.

Some conservatives may be genuinely and honestly concerned about the direction ACA traveled toward more government control of health care, but the Republican ox that ACA (or, rather, what ACA might have been) threatened to gore is private profit and the income of the one-percent. Everybody, including Obama, knows this. Or should.

The trouble is that some Republicans are, in fact, successful (and generally cynical) communicators. They have made even liberals a little uncomfortable about "Obamacare." (Come on, Mr. President, don't embrace that term, don't 'kind of like' it.)

What I'm saying here is this: the missing element, in the whole first term of Barack Obama, was courage. Evasions, clarifications and constant compromise were not occasional tactics, they were the strategy. (A further, even uglier, truth is that liberals haven't been very brave for a long, long time, but that is another story.)

Look at the last four years. A timid stimulus package. A policy that included both a surge in Afghanistan and a timeline for withdrawal. Promises to bishops followed by broken promises to bishops. Letting Goldman, Sachs fail and then running away from the implications of that policy in favor of "too big to fail." Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Baby steps and half-way measures. And so on and so forth.

Never a strategy for the meaningful presidency we thought was possible. Only engaging in battles and then retreating to the nearest safe haven.

There is one (audacious) hope, here. That Wednesday night's debacle will be a wake-up call and that the next four years we will see a little more Grant and a little less McClellan.

The Indictment of Mitt Romney

This indictment of Mitt Romney, raising questions about his fitness to serve as president of the United States, is past due. Of course, the simple fact of one’s unfitness to serve, would not prevent Romney from serving—one need only review the case of George W. Bush or, for that matter, the hallowed Ronald Reagan, who napped away at least the last half of his presidency while functionaries like Ollie North got away with murder.

But I digress. This indictment will frame the case against Romney based on his political flip-flops and prevarications, his mid-twentieth century air (far too retro for the challenges of our time), and the devastating simple-mindedness of his political program, at least insofar as it can be determined.

To make this case, the indictment will call upon the recent opinion pieces of several knowledgeable journalists and economists. It should be noted that the likely response from the Romney campaign to this indictment, other than studied indifference, will be to disparage both journalists and economists in sweeping terms.

No matter. Those who investigate and judge the particulars as outlined in this indictment will recognize that ad hominem attacks on the individuals (and their professions) quoted here are in no way a merit-based refutation of their arguments.

There is “…an existing stereotype of Romney and Republicans as wealthy white businessmen, clinking wine glasses while bemoaning the irresponsibility of the help,” wrote Michael Gerson in a column in The Washington Post on Sept. 21. Gerson, who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and may very well be the person who coined the phrase “compassionate conservative,” centered his column, “Ideology without promise,” on what the video of Romney at a Boca Raton fundraiser in May revealed.

The problem, Gerson wrote, isn’t really its power to confirm the stereotype of Romney, after all, “few imagined Romney to be a closet populist.” The problem is what the video suggests about “Romney’s view of the nature of our [current] social crisis.” Gerson’s elaboration of that crisis delves into the ways that the decay of neighborhoods, widespread job losses, poverty and personal financial collapse devastate individual lives and whole communities, magnifying their vulnerability and make government activism and creative policymaking an absolute necessity.

The Romney revealed in the video, and the incessant Republican political assault on the federal government, makes them worse than irrelevant. “…a Republican ideology pitting the ‘makers’ against the ‘takers’ offers nothing. No sympathy for our fellow citizens. No insight into our social challenge. No hope of change. This approach involves a relentless reductionism. Human worth is reduced to economic production. Social problems are reduced to personal vices. Politics is reduced to class warfare on behalf of the upper class,” Gerson wrote, in what might be the most withering dismissal that will be written by a Republican about Romney and his campaign during this political season.

A day later the Post published a piece by Ezra Klein also focused on Romney and the 47-percent video. (Unfortunately, try that I might, I cannot locate a web version of this article available for free.) In his piece “Romney’s skewed view on personal responsibility,” Klein, formerly a business writer for the Post and now one of their most frankly liberal op-ed columnists, demolished Romney’s pay-no-income-tax dismissal of half of the country. “…more than 60 percent of [the 47 percent] were working and contributing payroll taxes—which means they paid a higher effective tax rate on their income than Romney does,” Klein wrote, adding that “an additional 20 percent were elderly.”

Worse than Romney’s dismissal of low-wage workers and retirees, Klein continued, was his description of who he needed to care about politically. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said.

The horror here is that the people Romney dismisses are the people who must take more, not less, responsibility for their lives, Klein wrote. The time spent commuting on public transportation and wrestling with the scheduling difficulties that result, the time spent worrying about how to get one’s children into decent, affordable schools, the energy spent deciding on what to pay or what to buy in any given week, managing a budget with no give and with holes in the safety net below, takes an enormous amount of responsibility and energy. Mistakes of judgment will be made, Klein wrote, citing studies that vividly demonstrate how fraught and consequential are the lives and decisions of the 47 percent.

“Romney, apparently, thinks it’s folks like him who’ve really had it hard. ‘I have inherited nothing,’ the son of a former auto executive and governor told the room of donors.’ Everything Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.’ This is a man blind to his own privilege,” Klein concluded.

Also applicable here might be former Texas Governor Ann Richard’s observation about Bush, the father. “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”

In another piece in the Post that ran the same day as Klein’s piece, Colbert King made the case that the most damning thing about what Romney said privately in Boca Raton in May is how dramatically it undercuts what he said to the NAACP in public at their July convention. (King’s column, titled in the print edition, “Not buying what Romney is selling,” King quoted Romney’s apparently sincere sympathy for African Americans who live in a country where equal opportunity is not “an accomplished fact.” Because that is the case, our bad economy is not “equally bad for everyone. Instead, it’s worse for African Americans in almost every way,” Romney told the audience.

King detailed Romney’s claims to understanding and empathy. “We don’t count anybody out,” Romney said, “Support is asked for and earned, and that’s why I’m here today."

But, King wrote, the stuff Romney told the NAACP audience in July doesn’t square with the stuff he said privately in May to wealthy supporters at the Boca Raton event. “Romney, of course, was slurring more than the members of the NAACP, wrote King. “He also insulted retirees, college students, Americans with disabilities and people who work for a living for not much pay.”

In speaking to the Boca Raton donors, “witness Romney, the Chameleon, telling that crowd what they wanted to hear,” King wrote, in the process raising the implicit question: Why would an audience of political donors want to hear a presidential candidate dismiss 47 percent of the country?

Though an important question in its own right, it is nevertheless a digression from this indictment and will therefore be left to another time. Instead we will move on with the observations of economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

In “Romney pledges a Fed that will screw workers” posted on the Truthout website on Aug. 27^th, Baker detailed the ways that a strong (read overvalued) dollar results in lost manufacturing jobs and depressed wages in the United States, and a huge international trade deficit. But the strong dollar also confers enormous benefits on corporations and the wealthy.

“The arithmetic on this is striking. Productivity is projected to grow by more than 25 percent in the next decade. If workers get their share of productivity growth, this would imply an increase in annual income for the typical family of approximately $12,000 by 2022. On the other hand, with a Fed following Romney's strong dollar policy, workers in 2022 will be lucky if their wages are as high as they are today,” Baker wrote.

In furthering the indictment of Romney, it should be noted that Baker does not confine his scorn to Republicans, identifying Robert (“Wall Street”) Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, as a principal architect of strong dollar policy. “While the strong dollar may be a loser for most people, it does offer large benefits for people like Mitt Romney, Robert Rubin, and other members of the 1 percent,” Baker added.

“These people are all heavily involved in global business and their money goes further when buying into China, India, and elsewhere when the dollar is stronger.

"In addition, there are retail companies like Walmart that have set up low-cost supply chains in the developing world that depend on an overvalued dollar. Do you think they want to see the price of the goods they purchase overseas rise by 20 percent when measured in dollars? The same applies to manufacturing companies like General Electric, which produce most of what they sell in the United States overseas,” Baker continued.

Itemizing Romney’s obvious disinterest in the fate of so many people should not be concluded without a look at his apparent position on women and health care. Notwithstanding his obvious affection for his wife, Ann, whom he makes use of in his efforts to reach autoworkers (“my wife Ann owns two Cadillacs”), he seems unaware of the need to make policy for the majority of American households led by single moms or with both parents working.

“… the Republican Party [has] just spent two full years using their power across the country to get involved in women's medical decisions and gay people's lives, and ... Mitt Romney [has] repeatedly vowed to do the same if elected,” wrote Marge Baker, an executive vice-president at People for the American Way.

In “Romney toWomen: Stop worrying about your bodies and just trust me,” posted on the Huffington Post website, Baker added “Yes, the economy and jobs are hugely important issues in this election (though ones in which Romney doesn't exactly have an advantage). So is foreign policy, which one Romney advisor dismissed this week as a 'shiny object.' But so are the personal attacks that Romney and his allies are lobbing at women.”

There is much additional testimony that could be brought to bear for this indictment, but brevity matters and is sometimes decisive. The election likely will come long before Mitt Romney is called into court to face these charges. And the outcome of the election will likely make further action against Mitt a substantial waste of time and energy.

In the meantime, does anyone care to defend the guy who led a gang of school boys in an assault on an effeminate classmate, who went on vacation with his dog in a crate on the roof of his car, who includes a number of NASCAR owners among his good friends, and who has said that he would not lift a finger on behalf of 47 percent of the country? If so, please respond on this site.

It's the European economy, stupid

In Obama vs. Romney, Merkel holds the key cards

So the Greek and Spanish economies are bleeding out all over the floor of the Eurozone. Blood drips from not-yet-fatal Italian wounds, as well.

A recently announced deal to bail out Spanish banks has put off the reckoning for now, but the next round of European panic is probably a few days away, at most. Bank failures or default on debt payments by one of the southern European countries seem all but inevitable, so does a deepening of the current Eurozone recession. When that happens it will be bad news for the increasingly fragile American economy, which appears unlikely to gather much strength between now and the November election.

Everyone knows what that means: Mitt Romney will defeat Barack Obama.

Though the race may be tight, if the global economic slowdown is big enough, Romney’s coattails may lengthen enough to protect arrogant and naïve Republican members of the House of Representatives from the election-day judgment they deserve. Spared from defeat, the Tea Party will plunge ahead with the deconstruction of the federal government’s capacity to initiate, maintain, protect, invest, underwrite and regulate. And aided and abetted by Tea Party populists, Romney will implement his own limited agenda deregulating corporations, privatizing benefits, socializing risk and subsidizing the wealthy.

By the time that’s done, Romney will have crashed whatever remains of the American economy and will be a one-term president, himself. But, afterward, it will take decades of progressive policies to restore a stable and fair economy that rewards effort rather than wealth.

Because the health of the American economy and the outcome of the election in the United States very likely rides on what happens to the Eurozone, Obama has been lobbying European leaders to save the Eurozone by bailing out and stimulating the economies of the southern tier. In this matter, with the English wandering around in their own economic funk and French socialists praying for relevance, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel swings the most weight. And Merkel’s instincts seem conservative. She has been a champion of tough love and bitter restraint for the Greeks. And although the recent deal with Spanish banks was more generous and forgiving, Merkel will err on the side of caution. She will prefer to avoid any further moves that rely on stimulus.

As the fifth biggest economy in the world and an industrial powerhouse, Germany likely can survive even a partial collapse of the Eurozone. But the German economy, too, is weakening, forcing Merkel to consider whether it is worth it to be the only European economy left standing after the dust settles. Ultimately, the policy math might lead to the conclusion that continued bailouts for weaker economies will be the best thing for Germany. If so, the American recovery will stagger ahead, possibly even gain steam in time for a few good job-creating months immediately preceding the November election.

Everyone knows what that means: Barack Obama will defeat Mitt Romney.

Whatever a second term for Obama might mean, it will not mean permanent tax cuts for the rich, new and large subsidies for dirty energy or a resurgent Tea Party. But the big question is this: If European failure will tank the American economy and, with it, Obama’s chances for re-election, what kind of advice might Mitt Romney’s campaign give Angela Merkel on the subject of medicating sick European economies? Before you answer that question, consider that the Reagan campaign in 1980 was alleged to have done something similar, completely undermining Jimmy Carter's re-election chances.

A Bishop Joke

Two bishops walk into a bar...

I haven't posted anything here since last November. I haven't posted on my other blog, Outdoor Poetry Season, since February. And didn't post on either blog all that much during the whole of 2011. On the one hand, about this morass of go-slow I've been in, I'm inclined to go easy on myself. I suspect long silences are a more frequent feature of the rhythms of my life than I've been inclined to recognize.

There is also this: For the last six months, I've focused my off-line efforts on creating, revising and finalizing the draft manuscript for the book of my poems that I intend to self-publish before my 65th birthday in August. The copy is now off to Ella Epton, my sister-in-law, for layout and design. By the time Ella is done with it, no amount of tiny revisions will save me from the embarrassments and mortifications that likely accompany publishing, self- or otherwise. Regardless, the book, to be titled Wild Once, and Captured, will be worth looking at if only to see the illustrations that Stacee Kalmanovsky, Ella's daughter, has produced to go with the poems.

Meanwhile, let me move on with an observation (or two) about the Catholic church and about American bishops by citing a recent article in the Wahington Post, "Nun's Vatican-condemned book shoots up on the bestseller list." According to the article, widespread news reports about official church hostility to Sister Margaret Farley's book drove it from approximately one hundred forty-two thousandth place on the Amazon best-seller list to 16th place in about 24 hours. I think it's safe to say that in resurrecting Sister Margaret's book, the Pope, and his agent, the Vatican-based Office for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, have performed a miracle.

[Interesting historical note: The Office for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith was originally established as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition in 1542. You could look it up here.]

Of course, this miracle amounts to almost nothing by comparison to the Catholic church's greatest single accomplishment, i.e., sustaining for two millennia, more or less, belief in the one god and spreading belief in the one god during that period to more than three billion people worldwide. We may debate the point--there are substantial faith differences between Christians, Moslems and Jews, but Jews, less than 10 million people at most times in history, would be no more than an idiosyncratic cult had Catholicism (the early Christian church) failed to spread and institutionalize the Word. Islam, which accounts for more than a billion believers, itself, required the spread of Christianity before Muhammad could rework its message in a way that would capture the imagination of desert people.

Which brings us to the American bishops, currently at war with Obama the Apostate (as I suppose he is fearsomely imagined in the bishop's very private--no women or uncloseted gay men--soirees). Bishops have been policing the boundaries of the faith, keeping a sharp eye out for heretics, since Irenaeus launched multiple attacks on the Gnostics in the second century CE. (Check out Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels for a detailed account of what was lost when a few men launched a movement that would secure church power in their hands and those of their designated successors over the next two thousand years).

The bishops have responded with an aggressive counterattack to the requirements in the new health care law that most faith-based organizations must provide access to a full range of reproductive services for women (e.g., abortion and contraception) if they provide health care to their employees, at all. The bishops are further exercised by Obama administration requirements that charitable organizations providing services to female victims of human trafficking must also provide them with access to a full range of reproductive services. The bishops claim that such requirements would force Catholics to violate their own consciences and that there are no acceptable work-arounds (such as partnering with other organizations that would be comfortable providing such services).

The political stance of the bishops may make a kind of sense in light of Catholicism's near-2000 year record of success in defining the basic worldview of billions of people, but in the modern world, where billions do not share the values and attitudes of this all-male cadre of celibates, it is nonsense. However they may elbow their way into the debate, ongoing success in narrowly defining and institutionalizing the beliefs of a few men who deliberately excluded women from the original club long before STDs, orbiting space junk, and human-caused climate change do not qualify club members for a political role in the high stakes world of the 21st Century. It should, perhaps, disqualify them.