Stephen Markley’s book, The Deluge

A history of our frightening future

 

The Deluge is both a fine novel and a frightening and convincing history of our future. At almost 900 pages long, the book is unlikely to reach the full audience that ought to absorb the lessons about climate change, climate-driven catastrophes, and climate activism that Markley is trying to convey. And the book could use a table of contents that would demonstrate up front both The Deluge's time and geographical sweep, and it's obsession with detailing a wide sample of the heat waves, droughts, dust storms, floods, wildfires, famines, political confrontations, climate denialism, capitalist opportunism, totalitarian actors, craven capitulations, terrorist attacks and grassroots activism that will dominate the next decade and a half of life in the United States and around the world.

 

There can be no succinct summary of The Deluge, but on page 639, in one character's attempt to capture what life had been like and why no one had been able to predict, in full, all that they had experienced, there's this:

 

"Little did we know the self-reinforcing crisis of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone."

 

The destruction and loss of life that dominate the news cycle in this book, and will materialize in similar forms in our own lives in the years to come, are horrifying. The destruction and loss of life as the book proceeds, and as we navigate our own future, will relentlessly and persistently bend the arc of the universe in the world of The Deluge, and in our own parallel universe, in unpredictable ways. And those "ways"will create conditions that some significant number of us will not survive, regardless of the extent of our personal privilege.

 

The Deluge is full of engaging and generally well-defined characters. But one colossus of a character stands astride them all. Kate Morris, both an obsessive-compulsive truth teller, and a devious hero with little interest in playing nice, seems like an amalgam of dozens of charismatic and relentless activists that dot the history of American resistance to power; take your pick of figures like, say, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Wilma Mankiller, or make your own list. Kate Morris stands on the shoulders of all those heroes that came before her and goes as hard and moves the needle as far as any of them were able to do. Kate is the founder of a wildly successful organization, the Fierce Blue Flame, that fights the giant fossil fuel corporations and all their lobbyists and political servants, to a virtual standstill. It is with the description of her musings on page 459, that I realized that I had better begin writing:

 

"Instead, she couldn't stop thinking of how the blood had roared in her ears as that armored vehicle rolled toward her, how the adrenaline felt like it might lift her off her feet and send her hurtling like a mortar round into its hull. Shock them, fuck them, grind them to the bone. Be fearless. Be Achilles, be Roland, be Joan of Arc. Have a mental disease. Follow your clit. Drive across the Dakotas and watch a storm sear the horizon, recognize herself in its peals of wind and each crack of lightning, her true fellow travelers. Don't change, don't learn, don't fall, don't flinch. All she'd ever feel was sorry for people who didn't know what it was to want something more from their own life. Conjure a tempest, spew rage from the heart, and make them stare into this city of Cassiterite dark she'd made with nothing but her ravaged voice."

 

All of Markley's true, live heroes have weaknesses. In some cases, staggering weaknesses that few could expect to survive through the decades of political, economic and climate storm und drang. But on page 634-635, there's this soliloquy from Keeper:

 

"'I've done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I've--I've hurt people. People I don't even know or couldn't even find again to tell 'em I'm sorry. Tell' em I'm sorry. Tell 'em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That'd just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.' Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. 'We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I'm crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there's slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But finally the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn't collapse, and she's shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then ...' Your voice cracks again and you let a small sob escape. 'As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she's staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up...'

 

“Now you can't help yourself. You start crying and it's embarrassing, how you're powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you're still cradling her.

 

“'I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.'

 

“Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you're surprised to see the reverend is also crying.

 

“'I carried her out and handed her off. I'll never know what happened to her.'"

 

Nearing the end of the book, one particularly cranky research scientist, who has been warning for decades about the severity of the coming climate catastrophe, finds himself afflicted with a metastasizing cancer that has escaped treatment because his own role in forcing climate legislation through Congress in one of the most dysfunctional moments in American government history means that he has no time to set aside for the medical procedures that will prolong his life. But he does have a final opportunity to share with a friend his feelings about his wife's death from cancer some twenty years earlier.

 

"'When I lost my wife,' said Tony, 'I decided that grief is actually always there. It's like it lives in you, dormant. Until somebody goes. And that person dying, it just wakes you up to it. Makes you aware of it. But it's always been there (page 830).'"

 

That moment comes just over 50 pages from the end. But it suddenly felt to me that I was hearing the author, Stephen Markley, expressing his own feelings through Tony. Feeling grief. Endless grief encountered in the course of writing this book and knowing how much suffering of all kinds lay ahead. 

 

But here's the thing, in Markley's book the activists never give up. And they are, by and large generous and stalwart and, most importantly, strategically and tactically agile. In The Deluge the struggle between the people and the power may take an unfamiliar form, but don't be deceived. The struggle for climate justice and more is the same old struggle. And the future always hangs in the balance.

Strategically speaking, it's time to rise up

The Left ought to aspire to relevance

With some awareness of the grandiosity of my ambition, I recently assigned myself the task of describing the way the U.S. Left has wandered through the wilderness these last 40 years or so and what, exactly, the Left ought to start doing about it besides acknowledging its own existence and finding ways to build unity. One critical requirement for writing about such topics is a bit of clarity about where the country is now, how it got that way, and what writers on the Left think about such things.

In "Strategic Thinking on the U.S. Six Party System," socialist and veteran peace and justice activist Carl Davidson puts it this way:

"Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, particularly gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture, of all the political and economic forces involved (Earth) and what they are thinking, about themselves and others, at any given time (Heaven). It's not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed and revised," Davidson wrote.

Davidson's "Heaven and Earth" metaphor might seem gimmicky, but it grows out of the very useful understanding that strategic thinking requires the broadest possible look at the variables affecting the universe under consideration and that universe is always changing. Davidson's piece wants to take a hard look at that part of the universe conventionally understood as the two-party system; in reality, he argues, "that we live under a six-party system with two labels [Democrat and Republican]."

In the process, Davidson also notes that many would argue "...that the US has only one party, a capitalist party, with two wings, the bad and the worse."

That is, more or less, the position that Chris Hedges, a journalist widely respected by many on the Left, takes in "Our Invisible Revolution." Hedges doesn't even deign to mention Republicans in his piece, but Democrats of all descriptions "are effective masks for corporate power," he writes.

I prefer Davidson's take: The notion that we are actually living under one-party rule "is reductionist to a fault," he writes, "and doesn't tell you much other than that we live in a capitalist society, which is rather trivial." Of course, the point isn't trivial, at all, but Davidson is focussed on describing a complex reality here that includes the Tea Party, the Republican Multinationalists, the Blue Dogs, the 'Third Way' New Democrats, the Old New Dealers and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (and the Progressive Democrats of America). The last grouping, PDA/Congressional Progressive Caucus, lies at the heart of Davidson's assertion that it is reductionist and misleading to claim that Republicans and Democrats are simply two wings of one party fronting for and managing on behalf of corporations and capitalism.

The PDA/CPC's "...policy views are Keynesian and, in some cases, social-democratic as well. Its recent 'Back-to-Work Budget' [would serve] as an excellent economic platform for a popular front against finance capital...it has opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," Davidson writes, using such slogans as "'Healthcare Not Warfare' and 'Windmills Not Weapons'." That congressional progressives haven't gotten very far with their agenda doesn't seem to be a function of their alleged role in one-party rule, but the result of political weakness on the Left, the absence of a movement of any sort that could force Congress to take such policy positions seriously.

And speaking of "a movement of any sort," a recent Nation article, by Greg Kaufmann warned about impending food stamp cuts that would adversely affect 48 million people receiving benefits. The piece, titled "This Week in Poverty: No Time to Wait on a Movement," argued that "...when it comes to responding to the struggles of the more than one in three Americans who are living below twice the poverty line—on less than about $36,600 annually for a family of three—we prefer to look the other way."

This is true, of course, but the problem here is that there wasn't anything that the Left could do about the cuts when Congress passed them and the President agreed to them, and there wasn't anything anybody could do to stop them last week, either. On Friday, the budgeted cuts became reality in the lives of millions of households around the country. But as a title for the piece, "No time to wait for a movement" is misleading. We can't just "wait" for a movement to come along, of course, but until we build one, we're going to see more safety net cuts, more government shutdowns and more healthcare debacles.

Hedges seems to feel that a movement is already on the way. "...once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt [against the corporate state] is coming." Hedges has more to say, but most of it raises a single set of questions in my head: How does he know this? And, where is the evidence?

As a journalist, Hedges has great skill, courage and instincts for the kind of news that the rest of us need to hear and read. But when he's merely sharing his opinion, he's rather like a lot of the rest of us on the Left, full of stories about how we're gathering strength, about how we stopped an American attack on Syria, about how we prevented the appointment of Larry Summers as head of the Fed, or about how Occupy was "...ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state."

But if anybody or anything stopped a Summers appointment, it was the Congressional Progressive Caucus' ability to swing at least a little weight against a possible Obama appointment before it became a certainty. There was a popular outcry on the Left against armed intervention in Syria, to be sure, but ordinary Republican resistance to anything Obama, as we have witnessed repeatedly for the last five years, would have been (and was) more than sufficient to force Obama into a different course of action. Further, if taking away Occupy's tents was, overall, about what it took to crush that movement, then, yes, the corporate state behaved ruthlessly.

It might be past time for a movement, but it ain't gonna happen in advance of a strategy to build it. At the end of his piece, Carl Davidson quotes Alvin Toffler: "If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."

For a long time now, what has happened to the Left in the U.S. has been part of someone else's strategy.

What Is To Be Done?

A blogger without a clue

Things are bad, very bad ...

1. Natural disaster in Japan could begin a series of cascading events that includes additional earthquakes on other (potentially more dangerous) faultlines near Japan, failure of Japanese infrastructure (e.g. explosions at nuclear reactors and dramatically diminished electrical supply), and severe damage to the Japanese economy with downstream damage to the already weakened global economy while

2. Gaddafi reasserts control in Libya, Libyans suffer mortal punishment and repression, and anxiety over the global oil supply causes another spike in oil prices delivering another blow to the national economies of oil importers while

3. Billionaire capitalists in the United States finance a reactionary populist attack on government and

4. Republicans in Congress block spending for economic recovery, deconstruct healthcare reform, defund social programs, whittle away at Social Security, investigate Muslim Americans, deny responsibility for climate change while

5. Republican governors Scott Walker and John Kasich win a perhaps temporary but decimating victory over unions in Wisconsin and Ohio, and

6. State legislatures with conservative majorities begin a systematic attack on women's reproductive rights, minority set-asides and Latinos born in the United States and

7. Democratic state legislators in Maryland, politically intimidated by socially conservative, church-going African Americans from Prince Georges County, defeat a bill to legalize same-sex marriage while

8. District of Columbia Mayor Vince Gray, elected as a reformer to a term that began in January, finds himself hobbled by nepotism, cronyism and corruption scandals, severely wounding optimism for a DC city government run by grownups while

9. "No HIV testing" signs pop up on storefront clinics in the District and homeless people burst into tears of gratitude for eye contact and

10. I couldn't sleep last night for thinking about the engorged deer tick I found on my back.

So, assuming other issues not mentioned in the foregoing list, like war and peace and military spending are included and leaving aside the deer tick, what is to be done? I suggest three possibilities: one, throw a massive end of the world party and/or legalize marijuana; two, choose denial, in general, or join the Tea Party and pretend none of this is actually happening; or, three, join a diverse, multi-racial multi-cultural organization in your community and live, work and organize like our lives together depend on doing so. Any preferences?

War As Profit Opportunity

Why we need a military draft, why we won't get one

On Monday, Fresh Air host Terry Gross introduced an interview (on-line here) about civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan by quoting a severely injured contractor who said, "It's almost like we are an invisible, discardable army."

This particular contractor got both legs blown off by a roadside bomb and subsequently discovered that he was not entitled to any sort of federal compensation for his loss or for his health care. He had to fight his private insurance company to get a shot at prosthetic legs. I didn't hear all of the interview with reporter T. Christian Miller, so I don't know if the conversation pursued the deeper point that while the US maintains both an all-volunteer army and a private mercenary army, war becomes a profit opportunity that is largely shielded from effective political opposition.

Here we are, involved in two of the longest wars in American history, at a cost to the federal government of over one trillion dollars and climbing, with minimal effective public and Congressional opposition to those wars. The Vietnam War, in its many phases--military advisers and trainers, CIA mercenary armies, the mobilization of a fighting force over 600,000 strong, and secret bombings and incursions in Cambodia and Laos--was longer and killed far more American soldiers than have been killed to date in Iraq and Afghanistan (more information here and here). The Vietnam War also killed more civilians than the current wars have killed so far, but the difference is not worth applauding.

But here's the thing: the Vietnam War was pursued by two presidents in the face of relentlessly increasing public opposition. Though that opposition did not end the war in a timely way, say, 1969 or '70, rather than 1975, active resistance and public disapproval forced both Presidents Johnson and Nixon to conduct portions of the war in secrecy and otherwise compromise war aims. Arguably, public and Congressional opposition is also forcing compromise on President Obama, but it seems more likely that weapons manufacturers and military contractors are currently forcing political compromises that will prolong those wars.

Indeed, the influence of the military-industrial complex might right now be at an all-time high, at least in proportion to the influence of the public and anti-war organizations. In each of the six complete election cycles since 1998, the contributions of corporations in the war business have climbed 10 to 20 percent, with the exception of the 2008 cycle when the increase was
more than 20 percent (go here to explore the ugly truth, note that the 2010 cycle promises to break all previous records). In a 1997 article, "Guns r' Us" in In These Times, a magazine I worked at for two years, writer Martha Honey recounts the many ways that weapons manufacturers seek to increase markets for their products. Ten+ years later, the situation is worse.

Of course, anti-war opposition has limited some of the options of those who would rather pursue the current wars more vigorously. But the practices of maintaining an all-volunteer army, and employing contractors to reduce the direct cost of war, have obvious roots in the lessons that political, military and corporate chiefs learned from the civil unrest and mass opposition that they confronted during the Vietnam War.

First, make sure that large numbers of people do not serve in the front-lines in a manner that is obviously against their will. This lesson was initially applied with the end of active conscription in December 1972. To ensure an adequate supply of volunteers, regular pay for members of the armed forces was increased significantly in 1971. By itself, the pay increase would not have been sufficient, but by the mid-'70s, the economy began to stagnate and the real value of workers pay began to drop; to drop far enough, in fact, that many women not in the workforce at the time, began to work in order to maintain household income. Thus began a cascade of economic changes (including relative reductions in unemployment compensation, financial aid for higher education, cuts in welfare payments and childcare) that has often made enlistment in the all-volunteer army an economically coerced decision. This state of affairs has made it much more difficult for many working people to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the use of private companies providing personnel for security and other non-military services (like transport, food prep and garbage services) has helped to reduce war visibility and exported some of the costs of the war onto the shoulders of those least able to afford it and powerless to do much about it. These are the individuals who work under contract with the Blackwaters and Brown & Roots who pull down tens of millions of dollars annually from the Pentagon. These individuals, like the man quoted at the beginning of Fresh Air, are among those coerced by economic conditions at home to serve in harm's way abroad. And they do so, largely at their own risk.

I started at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1965. The spring before I got to Ann Arbor, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first teach-in against the war. At the time, there was still very little public opposition to the war, and little need for the military to resort to an active draft to maintain the then relatively low force levels in Vietnam. But Ann Arbor and the U of M were a center of anti-war fever and it didn't take very long for me to succumb to the virus. In point of fact, focused as I was on what could be learned outside of class, I quickly lost interest in maintaining my student status. I opposed the war and, soon after, began active opposition to the draft.

Even then it was obvious that some companies would profit from the war. President Eisenhower, soon to leave office, had given a speech in 1961 warning the country of the existence of a "military industrial complex" with interests separate from a broader national interest. And, as the Vietnam War heated up and middle-class students enrolled at colleges and universities escaped service, it also became obvious that the brunt of war fighting and dying was falling largely on minorities and the white working class. In that context, maintaining a student deferment became a moral conundrum that troubled many young men who had such deferments, and troubled many working people who saw family members fighting and dying in Vietnam while others went to college.

The obvious solution to those who would prefer to fight wars less encumbered by controversy would be to reduce the flash points, and nothing flashes quite like being forced to leave home to fight and die. That is why there will be no draft. And the absence of a draft is also one of the reasons why obvious elements of economic justice, like a reasonable minimum wage, an adequate supply of affordable housing, and universal health care are not a part of this democracy.

American Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Jews are not the tail wagging the dog of American policy

"Support for Israel is another part of this worldview," writes Kevin Phillips. "In mid-2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, another survey taken for the Pew Center found 63 percent of white evangelical Protestants calling the state of Israel a fulfillment of the biblical policy of the second coming of Jesus, whereas only 21 percent of mainline Protestants did so. (pg. 364, Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century)"

Henry Herskovitz, a long-time friend from whom I am now estranged, leads a Saturday morning vigil at Temple Beth Israel in Ann Arbor, Mi., protesting Jewish support for Israel's theocratic state and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Years ago, Henry came to the conclusion that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was unjust and largely the result of scheming and manipulation by Jewish neo-cons in the Bush administration and Jewish organizations like AIPAC (the American-Israel Political Action Committee). Jewish communities in the United States were further implicated, in Henry's estimation, by the millions of dollars in annual aid to Israel raised by Jewish organizations around the country. Further, Henry saw analogies to the now defunct South African system of apartheid in Israel's denial of certain rights and privileges to its Arab citizens and its confinement of Palestinians behind roadblocks, checkpoints and walls. American Jews, Henry noted, were a significant presence in the American domestic opposition to apartheid. Why, Henry wondered were American Jews so absent from public opposition to the oppression of Palestinians?

After trips to Iraq and to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, Henry returned to the U.S. with photographs, stories and a fervent desire to speak to Jewish congregations about the injustices visited on Palestinians by the state of Israel, injustices occurring, at the very least, with the silent acquiescence of American Jews. His overtures to three Ann Arbor temples and synagogues were rebuffed, sometimes rudely, by the rabbis who maintained absolute control over access to their congregations. So Henry, supported by a few other reliable vigilers, began his Saturday morning silent protest (with signs), a protest that continues some four years later.

The vigil has provoked much debate in Ann Arbor. The City Council has condemned the vigils as an affront to religious freedom and Henry has found himself much reviled in a variety of forums, including the pages of the Ann Arbor News (RIP). Powerful disagreements over the vigil tactic and message have also divided the sizable peace community in town. From time to time, Henry and his allies extend the protests to major fundraising events within the Jewish community and to public events focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At every opportunity, Henry calls on high-profile visitors to Ann Arbor who support, or claim to support, Palestinian self-determination to express their support for a one-state solution in Palestine and their opposition to a Jewish theocratic state.

Henry seems to believe that his tactics work. Or, at the very least, believes that the dire state of the Palestinian people justifies his activism, even if he, himself, is demonized and neither he nor his colleagues seem able to engage local Jewish congregations in dialogue.

It seems to me that the basic problem with Henry's strategy is the assumption that without Jewish neo-cons and Jewish organizational support there would have been no invasion of Iraq and no significant and continuing American political support for Israel. But self-identified Jews make up only one percent of the population of the United States, while the evangelical Protestants cited in the Kevin Phillips quote that leads off this post make up as much as a third of the population--fifty times the Jewish population of the country. It may be an unhappy irony that American Christian fundamentalists, long indifferent to or unhappy with the presence of Jews in American society, are enthusiastic supporters of Jewish rule in Palestine, but only in places like Ann Arbor, where fundamentalists are less evident than Jews, could it look to an observer as though Jews are the whole problem.

Make no mistake, the attitudes of a sizable number of American Jews are an obstacle to a workable Middle East peace. And American military support for Israel has helped to build a garrison state in Israel that would have otherwise been bankrupted by its own military spending. That same support has allowed Israel to divert funding from other domestic needs to the construction, in violation of international law, of housing and settlements on Palestinian territory. The settlements, in turn, have become both the passion of increasingly fundamentalist Jews who see all of biblical Israel as territory promised to the Jews by God, and the anguish of Palestinians who see them as an obstacle to the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

It is a further irony that the polarization in Ann Arbor has come to resemble the deadlock in Palestine. But both situations seem a symptom of a larger problem in the politics of the US. Our inability to move toward reasonable and just outcomes in virtually all policy areas, health care, climate change, quality public education, market regulation, reliable public transit and reduced dependence on fossil fuels to name just a few, seems endemic. And ultimately traceable to the politically expedient marriage of religious fundamentalism and corporate interests. When oil companies, weapons manufacturers, Big Pharma, insurance interests, hospital corporations and the Southern Baptist Convention find themselves working together against broader social interests, we are all in trouble.

Under the circumstances, doing nothing seems profoundly dysfunctional. Doing something, even vigiling at a single Jewish temple in Ann Arbor must seem better than acquiescence. Certainly, relying on a Democratic president and a Democratic congress seems risky. So far, we have a possible shot at health care reform without a public option, a possible withdrawal from Afghanistan after a Bush-like surge, a near-trillion dollar bailout of unregulated banks, and a continuing and appallingly large military budget. But I continue to believe that in the Obama administration, at least, there is hope. Activism aimed at being heard, at repeating essential truths, at calling for less militarism and more justice, and at insisting on dialogue, is essential. I believe that through such activism we can reach this administration and slowly change policy. But activism that polarizes communities and eliminates any chance for dialogue is hopeless, and part of the problem. It is not enough to speak out. The will to dialogue must be present and powerful.

Obama's Nobel

The World Is Persuaded

Juan Lopez, the chair of the Communist Party in California wrote a nice piece about Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize in the Oct. 17 issue of People's World. In "Obama's peace prize is a wise and timely decision," Lopez says that the rest of the world perceives Obama as having already accomplished a great deal that goes well beyond the rhetorical.

"To be sure," Lopez writes, "[Obama's actions] understood in the context of the last 30 years and the dangers humanity faces in the near future ... represent a qualitative break with the past..." Several of Obama's initiatives, regarded as "just talk" by critics are perceived by much of the rest of the world as different from all U.S. foreign policy since Reagan and already fruitful. These include "... steps to stem proliferation of nuclear weapons leading to their eventual elimination; a commitment to policies to protect the environment and develop sustainable energy resources; diffusing hotbeds of international conflict more often than not provoked by the previous administration[s]; sitting down for talks with leaders of Iran and other nations previously listed as 'terrorist'; serious efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on a two-state solution; pledging to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and relaxing travel to the island nation."

Though Lopez is positive about Obama's accomplishments to date, he remains a critical observer who expects more, including a wish that the U.S. pull out of the war in Afghanistan. I would add, as well, that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not enough, though it might serve as a transition to a just solution, which must include the end of the Jewish theocratic state in Israel and the establishment of a truly democratic state that fully enfranchises Palestinians.

There are a whole host of progressive domestic policies that Obama should be pursuing, also, but Lopez is clear that the political climate makes many changes difficult to achieve. Maintaining "the left-center core of the multiclass coalition that elected Obama" is absolutely essential, he argues.

"Our strategic goal must be to consolidate the November 2008 victory against the far right in the 2010 and 2012 election cycle ... if the extreme right manages to significantly get its footing back in any significant way during the next election cycles, it will rebound on the nation and the world with a vengeance."

I agree. The bizarre coalition of corporate and fundamentalist religious interests that elected Bush and Cheney is still viable. Obama is not a progressive, but he is a thoughtful and well-intentioned moderate. He can be pushed to the left, but not if progressives who want more stand aside while the Republican right pursues its own restoration.

The Daily Paper Sets the Agenda

for today's blog

Health care (two stories) and the White House beer-sipping with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley made the front page of the Washington Post today. Elsewhere in the paper there are more stories on health care, a short piece on the approval of a $636 billion military budget by the House, a look at Israeli settlements and a lengthy piece about corporate banks, TARP money and generous employee bonuses.


Health Care
In "Industry Is Generous To Influential Bloc," reporter Dan Eggen's story begins with a focus on Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), leader of the Blue Dog opposition to important aspects of proposed health care reform. Ross has been the beneficiary of "at least seven fundraisers...held by health-care companies or their lobbyists this year," Eggen wrote. A reader of the story would be forgiven for concluding that the results of health care reform would be better if we also had public financing for political campaigns.

"Doctors Reap Benefits By Doing Own Tests" explores the corrosive effects that wealth and self-interest have on health care reform. "A host of studies and reports by academics and the federal government shows that physicians who own scanners order many more scans than those who do not," wrote Shankar Vedantam. Though Vedantam used multiple sources for the story and includes both pro and con opinions, the story ends with the conclusion "that eliminating incentives for needless care could reduce the nation's health-care bill by as much as a quarter." A further look at which key players in the current health care debate are getting the most money from medical PACs would have strengthened the story.
(Though it does not focus exclusively on campaign contributions by physicians' groups, this study tracks the flow of dollars to key members of Congress.)

Blue Dog Democrats show up again in "GOP Senators Try to Slow Health Talks," a story that takes a look at slow progress and difficult compromises in both houses of Congress. There are two health care columns on the Post's Opinion page. "Health Reform's Taboo Topic" outlines one way to control the tremendous amount of wasted dollars generated by "defensive medicine." The piece ends on a note of despair.

"The real crisis here is not that health care is broken; people of good will could come together and create the conditions for rebuilding the incentive structure of health-care delivery. The real crisis is that Congress is broken, and that it answers to special interests instead of the needs of all Americans."

Racism and White Skin Privilege

Yesterday's White House meeting (over beer and peanuts) between Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley moved the "national conversation on race" only the tiniest bit (Post stories here and here), but a series of halting starts on that conversation is way better than the usual silence on the matter.

There is no reason to be critical of the lameness with which that conversation is lurching forward, either. The burdens of race and racism are huge.

A significant portion of the great wealth of this country has been built out of the coerced labor of black people, which materialized as profit controlled by Southern slaveholders and their business partners in the North and which was subsequently reinvested in industrial development (notably railroads) and in westward expansion. African Americans have never been compensated for that exploitation, or for economic disadvantages and the social and cultural attacks that Black America has suffered since.

White skin privilege does not spread its benefits equally. The bounty has fallen preponderantly on the haves. Have nots get less, though almost all whites have more immunity from suspicion, detention and arrest than any African American, including Professor Gates.

Still, whether they choose to cop to it or not, whites approach conversations about race with their own version of the burden of history. Sgt. Crowley, an instructor on policing in black communities, is one of the Cambridge PD's go-to guys on race, and he couldn't handle the confrontation with Gates. For the average white person, showing up daily, perhaps, to a job that doesn't pay all the bills or feed the soul, maintaining a household wrestling with all the slings and arrows of life, facing up to the notion that black folks sacrificed blood and sweat to create your life of dubious privilege and entering in to a conversation about race must seem nothing short of dangerous.

Regardless, race remains a major variable in determining who gains and who loses and, not surprisingly, who lives and who dies. Focusing on a single African American on death row, Gary Younge's piece, "Beer and Sympathy," in the Nation suggests another subject area that a conversation on race should explore.


Military Spending Is Killing Us
Clearly, it's killing them (mostly Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis), but Americans die, too, as weapons and weapons systems seek relevance and justification, their own compelling raison d'etre. But the cost of buying weapons and maintaining a huge military establishment drains funds that could be invested in domestic infrastructure, job creation and health care. In a country which has the highest infant mortality rate and shortest life expectancy among Western democracies, not investing in those things kills people.

But, as the Post reports today in "House Backs $636 Billion Defense Bill," the enormous sum we are spending includes lots of things even the Obama administration doesn't want. And though it is not included in the story, the fact remains that our military has no equal worldwide, is equipped for wars that we will never fight and is supported by a budget that will almost certainly exceed one trillion dollars a year by 2020, if not sooner. And that does not include military and related spending that is buried in other budgets (including energy, homeland security, spying and classified spending).


Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
There are deep, reasonable and contentious questions about Israel's continued existence as a limited democracy and Jewish theocratic state that need far more discussion in the United States, though it is unclear when we will have the gumption, as a nation, to have that discussion. It isn't even completely clear to all parties to the conflict that Jewish settlements on land that has been part of the West bank since 1967 are continuing violations of international law. But "Settlement Foes Take Fight to Israel's High Court" reports on the work of Israeli "anti-settlement activist Dror Etkes," who has assembled a database that should simplify the challenge of proving that the settlements have been established on land owned by Palestinians. After years of apparent dormancy, the story of Etkes' efforts is one of many examples of a revived Israeli peace movement.


"Bankers Bonuses Beat Earnings as Industry Imploded"


The Post also carried an article about the spectacle of bank's, so recently on the government dole, turning around and paying more than $30 billion in bonuses during the same 12-month period in which they received billions in federal aid. (Read the story here.) The story talks about steps various banks have taken to blunt some of the public criticism of their pay practices. But the biggest problems here lie with the zealous belief in "free markets" that have allowed banks and other major corporations to go largely unregulated and grow "too big to fail." Here's an old post from Robert Reich on the subject and a more recent one from Joseph Stiglitz on why we ought to breakup the big banks.

Nonviolence: A Good Idea At The Time?

A devoted friend of this blog sent me a link to LivingNonviolence. Margaret has been doing that--living nonviolence--for years, all her adult life, probably, and more. She's taken her skills and shared them with people in Central America, and people in our own country. She is a child of Rosa Parks and Gandhi and (I, a Jew, blush to say it) Jesus. Like Sandy Dennis in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Margaret has a kind of "quiet, noisy intensity" that you can't miss and can't easily describe.

I've always, mostly, sort of aspired to living nonviolence. But I've never felt capable of living "in" it. Still, I can't imagine a set of human values superior to those that are central to the idea of nonviolence (though the concept itself does not require a notion like superiority).

So when Margaret sent the link, I followed it. Not right away, but I did it. This morning.

The site is great. A team of folks, diverse in perspective, background and circumstance, produces it. A variety of writers, videographers and other artists generate materials for the site. And the site conveys a sense to me that living nonviolence is a different sort of thing than living nonviolently, which seems to be a more passive stance.

I watched a beautiful video called "What If." It's a substantial piece, full of important information and perspective, and challenge to all of us. But as I watched, I couldn't stop thinking that maybe Nonviolence, despite its long history, will turn out to be, like Capitalism, nothing more than a good idea at the time.

Of course, nothing is written in stone. Even capitalism might have been saved, I suppose. But, maybe nonviolence has a central problem that it has not yet overcome.

I fear that people who love nonviolence do not know how to speak to those who have accommodated themselves to it. Violence is a terrible thing, yes. But it is also exciting. And in our DNA.

No strategy to save the world with nonviolence as a principle tool will succeed without acknowledging the appeal of violence. I don’t know this. I simply fear it. And if it is true, that violence is in our blood and in our bones, no appeal to violence that simply dwells on the beauty of the thought will work.

Blaming the sub-prime mortgagees for the sins of bankers

I keep trying to explain the current financial crisis to myself for two reasons. One, I believe there must be simpler explanations than the ones that seem to prevail in media reports and on op-ed pages. And two, I'm discovering that far too many people believe that one of the major causes of our current problems lays with homeowners who took mortgages that they couldn't afford.

There is of course, still a class of pundits who believe that too much regulation is a significant cause of the collapse of the financial markets, the freezing of credit, and the abysmal performance of American auto companies. We are going to have to agree to leave such people out of the conversation--they are market fundamentalists whose cultish practices are no doubt constitutionally protected however much they might frighten children and the simple-minded.

But to apply, at least minimally, the notion that it is markets that decide (rationally or otherwise) who gets what, when, where and why, it seems both wrong-headed and unkind to blame individual homeowners who have fallen behind or defaulted on their mortgages for our current financial difficulties. These homeowners must live with the decisions of markets. They are not the deciders, as our soon to be ex-president might say.

After all, a good many people who received sub-prime mortgages actually qualified for conventional mortgages at more favorable rates. They were channelled into the sub-prime market, which created huge difficulties for them when affordable adjustable rate mortgages suddenly climbed to much higher rates after the housing bubble popped. It is shoeing the wrong horse to ask such people to predict the end of the bubble when bankers themselves believed (or pretended to believe) that we were all going to profit from an endlessly inflating housing market.

Mortgage applicants are consumers, not financial experts. They rely, mistakenly as it happens, on the expertise of others.

It is arguable, of course, that it is the buyer who ought to beware. But historically, it is banks and mortgage companies who have decided who is eligible for their services and who is not. If we are to take reasonable steps toward resurrecting the housing market, it makes far more sense to examine the practices of bankers, mortgage brokers and the buyers and sellers of bundled mortgages than it does to swing away at people who are losing their homes.

Bailout and regulate

Not that Charles Krauthammer needs to acknowledge my existence, but I feel like he's here to nullify mine. I only wish I could swing enough weight to nullify him back. I would regard the fact of his nullification, second only to the existence of my children, as my greatest contribution to life and culture to come.

In "A Lemon of A Bailout," Washington Post, Nov. 14, Krauthammer claims that some sort of rescue of the banking industry makes sense because "...finance is a utility," like "...the electric companies." This observation comes on the way to his larger point that extending the federal bailout to include the auto companies is arbitrary and inefficient. After all, Krauthammer might claim, capitalism can't exist without a financial sector, but we could all muddle through with a shrunken and bankrupt auto industry.

If that were actually true, then exactly what would be the point of having a capitalist system? I mean, if capitalism offers nothing to the many, if jobs and products aren't the principal parts of that commitment, then 90 percent of us (at least) have no use for it, at all. Who agreed to this deal?

And, if Krauthammer's assertion that finance is integral to capitalism, but auto as a dominant industrial presence (at this point in time) is not necessary to capitalism, is not true, then it follows that not only should we rescue, but we should regulate with an eye to maximizing employment and making autos and jobs as people-friendly and earth-friendly as possible.

jde