Health Care: The Four Week Countdown

Democrats have a month, reconciliation is the only way

On CNN this evening, James Carville had nice things to say about the way Lamar Alexander and Tom Coburn opened today's health care summit between Democrats and Republicans. He also said that he thought Barack Obama was the "smartest guy in the room." It was painful to watch the six hour discussion, Carville said, because he was an ADD sort of guy, but it seemed a good setting for Obama to show what he had.

Never mind. Win the discussion or lose it, Obama knows time is running out on health care and the Democrats, They must act before the Congressional recess for Easter, which begins four weeks from Friday. If they don't, Democratic senators and representatives will return from their districts cowed by voter anger and anxious to do something, anything about the economy. But the thing is, without passing a health care bill, nothing Democrats do after April will sway an electorate ready to abandon them in sufficient numbers to cost virtually every single swing seat they hold now. And Harry Reid will go down, too.

So here's the deal: There is going to be a bill passed by reconciliation. Now is the time for every one who gives a damn about what's in the bill to lobby to make it as good as it can be--the 51 votes are there. And if the bill passes before April, it will do very little downstream harm. The republic will not collapse before November and the economy, with a little more government action, will stagger forward; not in a way that fixes much, but well enough to reduce some of anti-government anger that so frightens the Dems. And with health care off the agenda temporarily, expect Congressional Democrats to do a little better with economic and environmental issues.

Khalil Gibran and the poetry that Is prayer...

...reminds us that art is also life.

In Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, I like especially that the singers and the dancers and the flute players come to town and belong because they, too, produce with the effort of farmers and fishers:

And a merchant said, Speak to us of Buying and Selling.

And he answered and said:

To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.

It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you will find abundance and be satisfied.

Yet unless the exchange be in love and in kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.

When in the marketplace you toilers of the sea and fields and vineyards meet the weavers and the potters and the gatherers of spices,--

Invoke then the master spirit of the earth, to come into your midst and sanctify the scales and the reckoning that weighs value against value.

And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labor.

To such men say,

"Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;

For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us."

And there shall come the singers and the dancers and the flute players,--buy of their gifts also.

For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.

And before you leave the marketplace, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.

For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the least of you are satisfied.

I read this at the right moment and every word rings like a bell tone in my ear. And, maybe a little bit, in the memory of my right hand, I can feel the weight of my favorite hammer.

My feelings at those times, I imagine, are like the openness and waiting that comes to people who believe more strongly and speak in rhythms and in chants to the fountainhead of their belief. Of course, prayerfulness and mindfulness do not automatically transform believers into justice activists; sometimes, and instead, into something that seems a good bit more diabolical.

But there is a lot to be gained in reminding oneself, privately or in community, of the gifts of the world and the joy in connection and the harmony in creative and productive effort. Gibran shares this with us over and over.

"And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain." This the Prophet proceeds to do, ending with this observation:

"And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned with the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears."

The potter is an artisan, of course, and a reminder of the time when there was hardly any distance between art and craft or art and prayer. Gibran does not describe the sacred, but the mundane, and sees no distance between producers of the tangible and artists weaving dreams into "raiment and food for your soul."

Against All Odds

America's futile campaign for military hegemony

Americans use almost five times as much energy per capita as does the average human inhabitant of the globe. Yes, the United States does produce much more per capita than the rest of the world, but not five times as much (US GDP per capita, about 32K; World GDP per capita, about 7K); and the country does not distribute its surpluses equitably, anyhow. The US also produces greenhouse gasses at a substantially higher rate per capita than the rest of the world, making it a principal culprit in climate change. (Readers can find the source for this data here.)

All of this means that a good portion of the world has no reason to be okay with the United State's disproportionate share of energy consumption, or its disproportionate contribution to environmental damage, or its lack of commitment to global equity. Of course, because the United States is also the globe's only military superpower most other countries only politely object to American greed or, even, curry favor by pretending not to notice. Only a very few countries and a few non-governmental organizations like, say al Qaeda or the Taliban, are openly hostile.

But for several reasons, the status quo is not sustainable. The U.S. is currently spending more than $1 trillion every year to maintain its mighty military machine. The country's annual budgeted spending (excluding wars and several other significant expenditures) is currently over $600 billion per year, almost 40% of budgeted global military spending, but because many national economies are industrializing and growing rapidly, the United States will find it increasingly expensive to maintain its current military advantage. And because military deficit spending is a huge contributor to the US national debt, the country will spend between $1.5 to $2 trillion over the next decade on interest payments attributable to that spending.

In decades to come more countries will become hostile to American appropriation of energy resources that need to be shared, and to American consumption habits and greenhouse gas production that have damaging environmental consequences, but the country will not be able to afford the escalations in military power and spending necessary to maintain the status quo.

Wouldn't it make more sense to recognize the inevitable, to concede that 400 million people will not be able to force 7 billion people to accept an unfair distribution of wealth and resources? Wouldn't it make more sense to reorganize our own economy to address inequity and inequality here at home and to prepare ourselves to be an equal partner in a world that will have no choice but to begin sharing both benefits and burdens equally?

Social Security Spending Helps the Economy

Military spending drives the deficit

I could have sworn that my 28th letter to the Washington Post, which follows here, would be the second one that they would publish. Alas, I was wrong, again, but it is the content that matters, not the quarrel. The letter focuses, once more, on how unhelpful it is to talk about the national debt and federal budget deficit without even acknowledging military spending. Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), also addressed the same opinion piece to which I'd responded. I've interspersed Baker's response, which ran in his weekly Beat the Press blog, in the text of my letter.

Editor,

So Robert Samuelson is calling on the Obama administration to be more open about future debt and deficit difficulties (“America’s Candor Gap,” Feb. 8), but his version of fiscal reality lacks some important details, as well. The federal government is projected to spend almost $46 trillion between 2011 and 2020, Samuelson writes, and $20 trillion will go to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Such a “…budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes,” he continues.

But as income transfers go, Samuelson’s example is relatively benign. Most of the transfer in this instance is from younger workers to older ones and most of the money transferred is spent immediately on goods and services—a reliable exchange that helps to keep the economy going. And, as economist Dean Baker and others have pointed out (see a list of CEPR's many reports about Social Security here), if the cap on Social Security and Medicare taxes is raised, higher income professionals will bear more of the tax burden, making the income transfer even more positive for the economy.

But there is a less benign income transfer that Samuelson does not even mention: military spending of more than $1 trillion annually (the sum of Defense Department spending + national security spending + military spending in other departmental budgets + supplemental war spending + interest on that portion of the national debt attributable to deficit spending on the military in previous years). In fact, 25 percent of the six to eight trillion dollars that will be spent on interest on the national debt during 2011-2020 will be attributable to previous military spending.

Discussing the country’s fiscal hemorrhage without discussing the military budget falls far short of full disclosure.

***************************************************


Readers of this blog may find Dean Baker's report, "The Social Security Shortfall and the National Defense Shortfall" of particular interest.

Baker's response to the same column by Samuelson is here. More about the rise in Pentagon spending compared to the increase in spending for Social Security is here. Finally, it is worth noting that, in the last cited piece, Baker does not use the $1 trillion+ figure for military spending that I use because he includes only budgeted spending for the Department of Defense and does not include the additional spending itemized in my letter to the Post.

The Force That Through the Green Fuse...

Nate muscles up a metaphor

I left our family home when Nate was 14 and Julie was nine. My separation from their mother ended in divorce about three years later, about the time that I moved down to Dayton to live with Marrianne. But working for the American Friends Service Committee I travelled a lot and being the noncustodial parent, I wasn't as present in Nate and Julie's life as I wanted to be. A frequently absent father is not a good thing, but kids do a lot of adapting and find ways to compensate. Nate certainly did, finding a number of different adult males to guide and mentor him.

One such man, Jack, the father of Nate's high school girlfriend, worked as a therapist. He took a real interest in Nate and they developed a friendship that outlasted Nate's relationship with his girlfriend. A couple of days ago, in a long phone call, Nate talked about Jack for a bit. In trying to describe aspects of Jack's outlook on life, Nate grasped for a line, the first line, from a Dylan Thomas poem. "I can't remember it exactly," he said, "but it's something about 'the power rushing through a green fuse.'"

Nate's comment excited me; I've been a Dylan Thomas fan since high school when I actually decoded, if only briefly, some of Thomas' complex metaphors. That experience of sudden comprehension thrilled me, and seeking to recreate the rush, I've frequently returned to Thomas' poems over the years. And then there's Thomas' voice (you can hear a recording of him here), for me the most sonorous and elegant and compelling (and Welsh) of all voices, with the possible exception of James Earl Jones (except for the Welsh part) in his prime.

So, forgetting for the moment that Nate was trying to make a point about Jack, I dug out my copy of Thomas' Collected Poems, while Nate lingered on the line. Though it is a digression of fairly significant dimensions, I cannot resist observing that my hardcover copy, published by New Directions and in its 23rd printing when I bought it, sold for $3.80, discounted by the now defunct University Cellar Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich. from its cover price of $4.25. The Cellar, a nonprofit bookstore established by the University of Michigan regents in response to student demands for cheaper text books, is a whole other story, but not for now. This digression must conclude.

At any rate, after the second scan through the table of contents, the poem, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," turned up. And as it did, I remembered that Nate was making a point about Jack and quickly understood that he was saying that Jack believed in a pervasive spiritual presence, a "god force," which inhabited all things. Though I had to look up the line to understand what Nate was trying to say, it turned out that he could hardly have been more economical or more vivid in characterizing Jack.

But here's the point: In paraphrasing Thomas, Nate connected two separate ideas that ended up illuminating each other and providing me with the rush of an "aha!" moment; one in which I suddenly understood a good bit of the poem and a whole lot more of it than I had been able to grasp previously.

I haven't been writing poetry much lately, confining myself most often to blogging about politics and the need for social change, And, when I do write poetry, I'm not in the same league as even ordinary Welsh poets, let alone Dylan Thomas. But sometimes reading poetry satisfies some of the same urges that motivate writing poetry. Either way, one frequently wrestles metaphors uphill and gets flattened by runaway tropes, if one's stores of energy run out before reaching a safe place to rest.

But here is the Thomas poem. Read it and see if a decent understanding of the first line doesn't help to unlock the meaning of much of the rest of the poem. And thanks to Nate, also, for somehow always finding a way to teach me something new.


The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

How do we go from individual acts of courage to a mass movement for peace and justice?

In 1971, when the first of the Johnson administration's major escalations of the war in Vietnam was already a decade old, the New York Times began publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers, a Rand Corporation study of the history of U.S. military and political involvement in Southeast Asia. Daniel Ellsberg, a high-ranking strategist at Rand, working under a contract with the Pentagon, copied and leaked the top secret report to the Times, the Washington Post, 17 other newspapers and several members of Congress.

The story of Ellsberg's evolution from elite war strategist to anti-war activist is told in The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, a documentary that premiered Friday night in D.C. and several other cities. Former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, who moderated a question and answer session after the showing, was also featured in the film for his role in inserting the whole of the Pentagon Papers into the official records of a Senate sub-committee he chaired. The Q and A, featuring Ellsberg, himself, and filmmaker Rick Goldsmith, highlighted a few key issues connected to the absence of a contemporary anti-war movement and apparent obstacles to movement-building; but passing through a sustained challenge to one's courage and integrity, as Ellsberg did on his journey to leaking the documents (and Gravel did, as well, in reading portions during a formal session of his sub-committee) does not automatically qualify one to speculate about how to build a movement.

Perhaps, it is uncharitable of me to carp about Ellsberg and Gravel, who deserve virtually any applause they get for their individual acts of moral courage and for their lifetime commitment to peace and justice, as well. But I have a churlish streak, so I will plunge ahead with the point that both Ellsberg and Gravel (and "The Most Dangerous Man...) seem essentially unaware that they were standing on the shoulders of a movement when they shared the secret papers with an apparently astounded public. Yes, the movie does acknowledge a certain measure of movement activity, of clashes between demonstrators and police, and of leadership from a select few politicians, but the nod is only cursory; the film goes so far as to claim that with his actions Ellsberg set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.

This strikes me as very bad and unhelpful history. By 1969, the year when Ellsberg made the decision to begin copying the Pentagon Papers, the anti-war movement had already made the war a political hot potato. By that time, the first of thousands of campus teach-ins against the war (at the University of Michigan) was already five years past. Also earlier, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon at the Riverside Church in New York City ("A Time to Break Silence") first linked the civil rights struggle to the war in Vietnam.

Soon, if not already, King said, our troops "must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated must surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor."

From that point forward King moved beyond his brief as a leader of the civil rights movement to become a leader of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. A year later, in a tragic moment that injected a fresh moral energy to both movements, but also added to a growing cultural and social division in the country, King was assassinated.

It was also the movement (and therefore a collective expression of a myriad of moments of individual courage) that forced President Johnson to give up the presidency at the end of his first full term in 1968. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard fired on a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding thirteen. Ten days after Kent State, the police in Jackson, Miss. fired on a crowd of students at Jackson State University. Two students were killed, another 15 were wounded. Though the series of demonstrations at Jackson State began as a civil rights protest incited by an incident in which a white motorist injured a black pedestrian, there was also a strong anti-war message infused in the demonstrations organized by students at the historically black university.

All of this and much more was part of the zeitgeist that inspired, shaped and affirmed Ellsberg and Gravel and others in their individual acts of conscience. And all this matters because in this history lie the lessons we must learn if a movement for peace and economic and environmental justice is to develop early in the 21st Century. The first person to speak during the Q&A following the film on Friday night was an older guy who spoke about his own despair over the absence of a viable popular movement in the U.S. Neither Ellsberg nor Gravel could speak to the question of how a movement develops though they both asserted that there is always hope; hope that is kindled in individual acts of resistance. This is reasonable and true, but we cannot mistake the moment in time when an otherwise collaborationist media publishes something like the Pentagon Papers as a pivotal moment in the development of a movement.

That moment comes when a mature movement has already forced people in positions of influence who have remained studiously neutral or have been complicit, as Ellsberg himself was, to confront their own consciences. In such a moment, some, like the editors at the New York Times and Washington Post, may finally make the decision to do the right thing and publish the truth, or a reasonable facsimile. The crowd at the premiere seemed to believe that the publication of the Pentagon Papers was an act of journalistic courage, but the comments of the Washington editor of the Times suggest something else. Once we had the documents in our possession, he said, we had to publish. If we had not, and the public had ever found out what we knew, it would have ruined the newspaper.

It is worth noting here, in the autumn of the newspaper publishing business, that journalists need not rue the fate of our great newspapers who have failed to relentlessly investigate and publish the truth about our war frauds in Iraq and Afghanistan. The end of the major urban dailies is at hand, in any case. By and large, the public has lost interest in their fate. So it should also be obvious that no strategy for building a movement can depend, in any part, on newspaper or, even, television news coverage. Audiences are too fragmented and have too many media choices for any message from any source to fall on millions at once with the same impact.

The good news here is not that I have any better idea how to build a movement than do Dan Ellsberg or Mike Gravel. The good news is that elements of that movement already exist. They exist in affinity groups and collectives focused on individual issues. Elements of the next movement exist in neighborhood collaborations aimed at improving local schools or reclaiming abandoned housing. Elements exist even here, in Washington, where some electeds, like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich keep fighting the good fight. There are also organizations fighting for economic and environmental justice on a global scale. Though labor unions are only a pale shadow of what they once were, some unions continue to organize low-wage workers and strategize ways to connect to a larger movement.

None of this is enough. What is missing here is a critical mass of young people who have not yet fully compromised with prevailing attitudes or who are not yet resigned to a comfortable cynicism. I do not know how to persuade people 30 or 40 years younger than me that their future, that the future of the world they will grow into is at risk; that to be 50- or 60-something in 2040 will be a lot more unpleasant than being that age now. I cannot even say persuasively how I know this to be true (though I will keep working on my argument that it is so). Nor can I say what exactly is required of me now. But I will say that I won't stop thinking or writing about these questions until I have better answers. And when I get to that happy point, I'll keep working on the same questions, anyway, because nothing less is required of each of us.

Media News That Fails Us

Collaborators in the news room

In 1967, I informed my draft board that I considered both the draft, in general, and student deferments from the draft, in particular, to be immoral and that I wished to be reclassified from 2S to 1A. Ignoring my larger moral argument, the board sent me a new card with a new classification making me immediately eligible to be drafted. I then notified them that I intended to burn my card in public at an appointed time and place. Though they did not show up for the event, they did draft me shortly thereafter, whereupon I departed for Canada, the location of further adventures only tangentially related to the focus of this post.

Since those halcyon days of antiwar protest, I have fervently believed that reducing military spending and ending militarism ought to be critically important to activists regardless of their issue focus. Since the news media, historically, has been the handmaiden of American military interventions, it follows that journalism, journalistic practice and media ought to be another point of strategic concern for all issues activists. A case in point is the major media's abject failure to investigate the full story of the Bush administration's duplicity in making the case for the invasion of Iraq and to tell that story early and often, with the result that the Iraq War has gone on for a tortuously long time at a cost of nearly $1 trillion.

Writer Sebastian Jones has produced a well-researched piece, "The Lobbying-Media Complex" that adds to the indictment of cable and network news media. The story, running in The Nation, gets right to the point in its first three paragraphs, detailing how ex-Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge and retired general Barry McCaffrey appeared recently on news shows as experts on energy and the Afghanistan war, respectively, without the relevant disclosures that the two men have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from energy companies and military contractors.

To end his piece, Jones quotes Arizona State University journalism professor Aaron Brown's observations following 2008 election coverage, which featured endless line-ups and roundtables of analysts sharing little of real value: "We live in a time when there are no shortages of opinions and an incredible deficit of facts."

The point needs augmenting, I think. Having and sharing opinions, after all, seems part of human DNA, but the constitutionally protected function of news media is to uncover and share relevant information that good citizenship requires. Otherwise media is nothing but a toady for the rich and powerful, collaborating with their policy goals.

What Can You Do With Three Feet of Snow?

Argue climate change, keep shovel ready

As landlords go, ours is a good one. She did raise our rent last year, which raised my level of ungenerous thoughts about her. But she called the other day to ask how we were making out during the series of snowstorms that have blasted D.C. and the rest of the mid-Atlantic. I told her we were fine and our conversation moved on to the statistical odds against having two Top Ten snowstorms hit the area in the same year (a subsequent 10" snow hit the area yesterday--not Top Ten, but big enough to be the largest storm in most Washington winters).

Good weather records for the area (at least regarding depth of snow deposited by storms) go back 100 years or so. So the likelihood of having a Top Ten storm happen in any given year is about 1 in 10. The likelihood of two Top Ten storms in any given year is 1 in 100. Add in a third 10" storm and consider that area weather data goes back more than 100 years, the likelihood of all three storms happening in the same year is probably somewhere around once every 150 to 200 years. Long odds, I think, but nowhere near rare enough to prove anything, least of all climate change, which will abound in very difficult to predict consequences (for the Daily Show's perspective on the difference between weather and climate, go here).

Still, whether or not the recent snows reinforce arguments for or against climate change, they are most certainly weather, which is, once again,something everyone likes to talk about. The thing about heavy snowfall is you don't just get to talk about it, you actually have to shovel it. And, let me note here that I'm going through my 62nd winter on this planet and spent 59 of those winters in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Boulder and Dayton, residing here in D.C., south of the Mason-Dixon line for the last three.

But it is only here in Washington that I have had to shovel snow every day for a week; that's what people do in North Dakota and Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and, I guess, in Buffalo. So, though isolated weather events do not prove climate change , rigorous scientific models that support the argument for global warming also predict increases in severe weather events (see a discussion of climate change and severe weather here). Personally, after moving around an estimated ton of snow in the past week, I'm going to invest in a back up snow shovel; my unsolicited advice to those living in the Deep South, the current bastion of Republicanism and center of the fundamentalist argument with science: Keep a snow shovel handy. The one you use for manure just won't do.

The $1 Trillion War Fraud

Feb. 10, 2003: Iraq agrees to U.S. surveillance overflights

Seven years ago today, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq was already thoroughly planned (and less than 40 days from actual launch), some 60 weapons inspectors from two international agencies were already in place there and, in a further gesture of surrender, Saddam Hussein agreed to regular U-2 spy plane missions throughout Iraqi air space (you could look it up at This Week in Peace History).

To be forced to agree to the presence of international weapons inspectors and reconnaisance overflights is an act of capitulation, but the U.S. (with cover from 40 other countries) invaded anyway. Though examples of corporate media failure to perform the basic function of investigating and exposing the activities and pretensions of government abound, the persistent and enduring journalistic failure to report the truth about the Iraq War is an act of collusion similar to the "yellow journalism" tactics of William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal, which diligently promoted the Spanish-American War.

In the upshot, the Iraq War, the third longest U.S. war ever (the Afghanistan War is longer, the Vietnam War longest), a product of the de facto alliance of duplicitous government, collaborating media and a rapacious military-industrial complex, has cost the country over $700 billion to date; that cost continues to rise at a rate exceeding $100,000 per minute (about the same rate as the Afghanistan War--to watch the cost of both wars rise, check out this web page of the National Priorities Project). Together, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds $1 trillion; about the amount an effective and urgently needed stimulus package would cost. It ought to be obvious that peace and economic justice are two sides of an ideal coin, but harder to arrive at when the media itself is not interested.

Manufacturing the News

Polls paid for by media become news stories

This is my 27th letter to the Washington Post. I generally do believe that the letters I write have a chance of being published, but I knew this one was a bigger stretch than usual. The letter accuses the Post of paying for polls on topical issues, then managing the way the results are released in their paper. That's actually not where the stretch lies; it's what they do. But it is also easy for editors and reporters to argue that the poll results they report actually examine public feeling to a depth that readers cannot. Still, polls generally report who is hot and who is not. Much of the additional detail organized in reports of polls as if it were factual is actually subject to both interpretation and statistical error.

My guess is that newspapers started polling as a defensive move; an attempt to protect their stories from the spin that owners of private poll results might introduce. After all, politicians were polling before newspapers, and leaking the results of polls to targeted journalists in an effort to influence coverage of elections. That doesn't happen so much now that everybody, politicians and journalists come armed with poll results. Campaigns don't try as hard to use their polls to spin stories, primarily because they more often use their polls to identify target audiences and develop messages aimed at groups of voters. Nor would spinning work as well in an environment where a newspaper can report their own, perhaps different, poll results. But the original defensive purpose for polling has changed--survey results are now news, and journalists no longer have to hit the streets to get the story.

Editor,

A quick look at the last two issues of the Post provides a clear example of how print media manages the news, rather than simply reporting it. The front-page over-the-fold story on Sunday, Jan. 31 (“Fenty’s approval ratings plummet”) says that a “new Washington Post poll” shows that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty’s popularity among residents has dropped dramatically since a 2008 poll.

A day later, in a metro story (“D.C. Schools Chancellor Rhee’s approval rating in deep slide”), we read that the same “new” poll reveals that the public perception of Chancellor Rhee is also much more negative now than it was two years ago. But the serial nature of the stories raises the question of exactly what journalistic criteria might have dictated reporting the two stories separately. Personally, I know of none. But I can imagine the business considerations that went into deciding that the stories would have more impact, if they ran separately on Sunday and Monday rather then running together on, say, a low-circulation Saturday.

Speculating in this manner raises further questions, I think. For example, if poll results are news, at all, then why wouldn’t the Post report the results when they first become available? But, perhaps more to the point, why would the Post bother to write about poll results, at all? Editors and reporters routinely assert that journalists investigate and report stories; they do not manufacture them. But news stories based on polls that newspapers pay for seem perilously close to product manufacturing.

Perhaps editors assume that none of us actually talk to each other. It is therefore a great service of the Fourth Estate to share the news with me that my neighbor to the east likes Fenty, while my neighbor to the west does not. If that is the assumption that editors are making, it may be helpful for me to share this fact: by and large, we do know what our neighbors are thinking.

How the Right, and the Rest of Us, Can Shrink Big Government

Musings of a Snow Shoveler

It was so quiet on DC streets yesterday, you could hear yourself thinking. The streets weren't completely impassable, but only a tiny number of vehicles drove by; the great majority of cars were stuck in snowdrifts and garages. High mounds of snow narrowed the roadways, absorbing much of the noise made by the mainly emergency vehicles and snowplows that did pass by. There were no trains running on the four lines of railroad track about a block away, and the blowers and fans that heat and cool the air for the hospital buildings nearby were, for once, inaudible. Humans were out and about, shoveling and talking and, somehow, the otherwise sound-deadening qualities of the snow facilitated the easy travel of conversational voices.

A neighbor two doors away shoveled vigorously east, so I shoveled vigorously west. We met halfway, a proud moment in the ongoing process of reclaiming the public right-of-way. Like the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railways, it was a moment deserving of celebration, so, though we've lived on the same block for three years, Scott and I introduced ourselves to each other for the first time in history. Sadly, the neighbor to our east has failed to shovel his sidewalk, so the full corner-to-corner pathway remains incomplete.

But before the historic meet up with Scott, I couldn't help reflecting that the economic output in the very big East Coast neighborhood, ranging from as far south as, say, North Carolina, north to New York state and west to Pittsburgh had dropped dramatically. In fact, probably the single most productive activity in the whole megalopolis was moving snow around, a lot of it volunteer activity. My own snow moving output for the weekend, about six hours worth at a conservative $25/hour (snowplow drivers contribute much more) ought to add about $150 to the Gross National Product.

This thought got me to the further notion that if people who are most particularly incensed by big government really wanted to advance their cause, they could go out and do an hour's worth of volunteer activity every week on behalf of someone less well off, sicker or older than they are. Cutting grass, building a wheelchair ramp, making dinner, picking up medicine on behalf of someone who would not be able to do those things themselves, might, in fact, leave them undone would add huge sums to the GNP. Moreover, doing them would be preventative. They would improve quality of life for the beneficiaries, increasing health and well-being, and reduce the cost of future government intervention.

Say, for argument's sake, that 10 million people, otherwise consumed by political frustration about Big Brother, did engage in this sort of volunteerism for an hour a week and 50 weeks a year. At a conservative labor value of $20/hr., these activities would add about $10 billion to GNP. If 10 million more progressives, wishing to encourage such volunteerism and desiring to share directly in the community-building process were to match the effort, we could add another $10 billion to GNP and dial down ambient political heat in favor of light. If the same 20 million were to also give away their spare change to the homeless twice a week, we could inject another $2 billion annually into local economies. If all of this were to happen on a yearly basis, the total would equal a modest stimulus package, and it wouldn't take 60 votes in the Senate to make it happen.

Military Spending Tsunami Threatens Social Programs

Let's discuss this, says the Left

In "No Defense for This Budget" Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel criticizes President Obama's proposal to impose a freeze on all federal discretionary spending except for core defense spending, which will be allowed to increase by two-plus percent. Specific spending for war in Afghanistan and Iraq will increase even more.

"Exempting all security-related expenditures from common sense cuts will have serious consequences for almost everything the government does--from job creation, poverty reduction and alternative energy development, to aid for cash-strapped state and local governments," Vanden Heuvel wrote. Since the freeze in all other discretionary spending means actual cuts in social programs, Obama's proposal means less funding will be available to address the social needs exacerbated by The Great Recession.

In January, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) wrote a piece that the rising federal deficit means that the U.S. cannot consistently fund social services without cutting the defense budget by 25 percent. That piece also ran in the Nation and can be found here.

Given the name-calling, general dissing and overall disrespect that characterizes a third to a half of the comments responding to Vanden Heuvel's piece, it is probably a very good thing that there is no comment chain following Frank's article; that chain would have been longer and much more vituperative. Frank, after all, is not only a New England liberal, he is also openly gay. The virtual venom coming from the libertarians. conservatives and troglodytes who police the Nation's website would probably have turned the magazine's server into a quivering shadow of its former self. But the thing is, Frank is calling for a large cut that would be phased in over time. Enough time to create good new jobs for workers who lose there's when weapons plants get shuttered.

Nor is Vanden Heuvel a raving left-winger. "Right now, for those who understand what's at stake with these budget priorities, it's high time to tell your legislators and the White House that if there is indeed going to be any freeze on spending, the exorbitant defense budget should be included in that," she concludes. That's pretty mild stuff in a country driving tanks toward bankruptcy.

One Day, A Non-militaristic Military

Adm. Mullen says let openly gay soldiers serve

No one wants to be regarded as a complete loon. Accordingly, despite my sweeping anti-militarist condemnations of U.S. militarism and our bloated military budget (and weapons industry), I wish to stipulate that, yes, we do need a military. Though the one we have is probably too large by half, it should also be stipulated that the one we need ought to be competitive--larger, for instance, than the Vatican's Swiss Guard, but smaller, say, than the combined military of all Europe.

Further, if we are going to have one, the more it looks like America, the more appropriate (and less militaristic) it will be. It's also worth noting that we may very well be moving toward that ideal. Yesterday, Armed Forces chief Mike Mullen told Congress that it's time to do away with "don't ask, don't tell" and allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Though Mullen's statement will certainly heat up one front in the culture wars, it is good news; progressives should hear it as a call to action. Though it may be premature, someone ought to begin taking nominations for the first female chair of the joint chiefs.

D-E-F-E-N-S-E Spells Predictable Assault on Better Budget Priorities

No progressive budget without cutting military spending

Winding up to blog about federal spending, in general, and military spending in particular. Two weeks ago, I was on Michael James' Saturday morning radio show, broadcasting from the Heartland Cafe, for about twenty minutes. It was fun, but not nearly long enough for big fun. Michael and I connected briefly on a couple of things. Most important, as the show wrapped up, I laid out my best "old man" advice for progressives working on specific causes. Paraphrased, it went something like this: "Whether activists are focused on health care, affordable housing, public education or anything else, everyone ought to include military spending on their priority list. It is difficult to make substantial progress on those other issues as long as militarism and military spending shape the budget to the tune of $1 trillion plus annually."

Here are some websites and posts I'm reading and will use as a source for a longer post on military spending:

The Security Spending Primer from the National Priorities Project. The primer was developed based on the 2009/2010 federal budget, so some of it is about a year old. But the principles and perspective are absolutely current and appropriate to any discussion of the US military budget.

A liberal, broad-brush perspective on the need for Congress and the President to exercise greater control over the relentless growth of tax expenditures, written by Len Burman, a former assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The article ran in today's Washington Post and is available here.

An article in today's Post (about the recent firing of the general in charge of "the Pentagon's most expensive weapons system."The story, "Defense secretary Gates fires general in charge of Joint Strike Fighter program," is here.

A good piece by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, is here.

The Politics of Healthcare Failure

Organized labor's unfortunate role

At this very moment in time, lots of people seem to be feeling that our country is ungovernable. Even a reasonable start at healthcare reform, which seemed so very doable just a year ago, appears out of the question. The anger and cynicism of ordinary working people who have morphed over the last 40 years from lunch pail Democrats to Reagan Republicans to foot soldiers in the tea-party movement, seen in the context of falling real wages, underwater mortgages and failing public institutions like mass transit and public schools, makes sense.

Ordinarily, I confine my j'accuse to militarism, capitalism and their corporate agents, but it might also make sense to take a look at what appears to be the recent tactical failure of organized labor and the role of unions like Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in this summer's missed opportunity for healthcare reform. It's true, of course, the union movement is a pale shadow of the powerful entity it became (despite occasional setbacks) during the middle 40 years of the last century. A strongly negative critique of unions, coming from a sometime union member and long-time ardent supporter may have a kind of "piling on" flavor, but so it goes.

Unions played a leading role in establishing the eight-hour day, the five-day week, Social Security, civil rights, Medicare and other socially and broadly important advances, but business unionism, the prevailing practice after World War II for all but a few unions (e.g., the UAW and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers) took the AFL-CIO out of the broader progressive movement for the last 30, or so, years. And, even before that, the AFL-CIO's internal red-hunting and collaboration with the U.S. Cold War-agenda undermined the entire American Left.

Five or six years ago, Andy Stern (president of SEIU) and his Change to Win initiative seemed to be leading labor back to the critical point position of a broader and growing progressive movement. The chief evidence for that has been the forceful union push for national healthcare. But, in the end, at the cost of a decent healthcare bill that never actually materialized but would, I think, already have passed the House and Senate, unions decided to come down on the side of the narrowly defined economic interests of their members by absolutely opposing a tax on "Cadillac" healthcare coverage. That union leaders would define and protect their members interests in the most parochial way has been obvious since the summer, even if it did not play a significant role in the public debate at the time. In that light, the behaviors of senators like Nelson and Lieberman, who decided that they, too, should, and could, get a little more for their own constituents makes perfect sense.

Had Stern and other leaders taken the long-term view that the eventual demise of employer-provided health coverage needs, in the interests of union members and everyone else, to be carefully managed to its extinction rather than bitterly defended to the last detail, several things might have happened:

One, Ted Kennedy would have gotten to vote to pass a better plan;

two, the House and Senate plans would have resembled each other more closely and differences might have been resolved in conference in a timely way;

three, unions could have expected more favorable treatment for the other items on their agenda, like a more sympathetic and effective National Labor Relations Board (though the Employee Free Choice Act never had a chance);

four, their own members would have suffered little or no actual economic loss (the details of which could have been negotiated) and, living in a world in which their own extended families and communities are deeply and adversely affected by the current healthcare system, likely would have applauded passage of a good bill;

five, the resulting effects would have begun to improve the global competitiveness of major manufacturing sectors (like auto);

and, six, it would have made Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts far less likely.

Unfortunately, Stern, the most pivotal union figure in this scenario, was busy visiting the White House (22 times in the past year, I heard), continuing to position himself in his own mind, I'd guess, as the most powerful and creative union leader of what turns out to be the most tediously long century (the 20th, about 110 years, or so), in American history.

The Healthcare Bullet That Wounds Us All

Mom scrapes by and yet...

I just spent a week in Chicago with my mom. She was diagnosed with cancer in December of 2006, about six months before Marrianne, Brendan and I completed our move from Chicago to DC. Mom will be 85 in May, but considering her age and her disease she's doing all right. She still has all her marbles and she is still living at home on her own.

Her cancer treatment hasn't been debilitating; all along it has been aimed at slowing the spread of the disease and maintaining her quality of life. A chemo assault on the cancer, aimed at eliminating it, might have shortened her life, and almost certainly would have had side effects severe enough to rob her of much of the energy she has invested in living the life she wanted these last three years.

But Mom's had a bad run for the last couple of months. She fell at home and hit her head once, suffered through spells of dizziness and nausea, and through periods of high blood pressure and high anxiety about what was happening to her. Thankfully, the last week was pretty good for her. I don't think that my presence had all that much to do with her gains in strength and appetite; my sisters Dale and Teri and brother Mark had already been on the spot during the more difficult time before I arrived.

Still, it is clear that Mom was still reeling and full of distress while I was there. Ordinarily, she's both a gregarious friend and an intensely private person. When she's feeling good, she's very clear about boundaries. The daytime is for chores and for socializing. The nighttime is private time, rest and recharge time. She likes to see her children, her grandchildren and her toddler great-grandchild, and she loves them all best when the visits are short. Most times when I come in from DC, she gives me a big hug when I arrive and, 48 hours later, begins wondering when I'm going to leave. But this visit I was still somewhat welcome a week after I got there; that's how bad she has been feeling.

There's no question aging is tough. So is being so sick that your life doesn't feel like your own anymore. Mom hates those feelings and hates being dependent, but she's luckier than most people her age and most people with her diagnosis. She's got her problems, but she's financially secure and she has first rate health insurance that doesn't cost her anything. As the widow of an Illinois state legislator who served in that role for 14 years, she has Cadillac healthcare coverage and a decent pension. Of course, she also has Social Security, Medicare (which pretty much guarantees that holes in her healthcare coverage are plugged), and what remains of an originally sizable payment from my dad's life insurance coverage. As a result, there are some things she simply doesn't have to worry about.

But most people her age have only Medicare coverage and, by itself, that has enormous holes. And many people with diagnoses as severe, or worse, live their lives with poor and inadequate healthcare. They may also live in substandard housing and have to scrape by making the choice to pay some bills and ignore others. Some are elderly, sick, homeless and hungry.

I suppose I could do a little research and come up with some estimate of how many millions of people are worse off, in many cases, much worse off than Mom, but I'm just going to say there are millions in that position. And in the best possible scenario, those millions of people are loved and cared for by millions more who undoubtedly are stretched financially, emotionally and physically in the process. These people, dependent on others for basics they cannot themselves provide, and their caregivers, live in communities and neighborhoods where still more millions are witnesses to their need and must themselves decide whether and how much to help.

The social ramifications of witnessing needs and being unable to respond adequately are huge. When such a story is repeated over and over again the social consequences of our collective helplessness in the face of injustice are almost too much to bear. I think those consequences include widespread alienation, shame and anger. We cannot bear to keep looking at what we cannot fix and so we look away. But though we may not acknowledge that we have looked away, we must do something.

One familiar option is blaming the victim. The social desperation around us is, for example, the fault of those who suffer. They were not prudent or wise or diligent or independent; they are or were lazy, unmotivated and otherwise undeserving. It is they who are bankrupting are healthcare system, creating trillion dollar deficits, weakening our country.

Never mind that our healthcare system is what it is, a disaster for some of us, a chronic problem for most of us, because it is a profit opportunity for a very few of us. U.S. healthcare is, currently, just another mechanism for concentrating wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of Americans. Our trillion dollar plus budget deficit is arguably as connected to rampant American militarism, to annual military spending that exceeds a trillion dollars (Pentagon spending plus spending by other departments plus off-budget spending plus interest on that portion of the debt attributable to past military spending), as it is to any other cause. Congressional leaders, most particularly Republicans, and tea party organizers alike, are better at finding ways to mask our shame and express our frustration at our helplessness than they are at addressing our fundamental problems. Democrats, who this past year have managed to squander every apparent political advantage, now appear ready to abandon healthcare reform altogether. This will not be a tragedy for my mom individually, who will address her own challenges with the relatively mighty set of tools at her disposal, but she will suffer her share of our collective failure, if we cannot pass even a sorry compromise of the separate bills that have already passed the House and Senate.

Passion and Optimism

No change without them

On Saturday morning (9 a.m. Chicago time) I will be on Michael James' radio show talking politics. The show can be heard on-line here. These things never go as planned, but as I have prepared by focusing on what I think people, especially young people, might do to define and develop an activism adequate to the 21st century's enormous political challenges, I find myself baffled by all the things I don't know.

Despite all the sturm un drang that seems endemic to our political culture, I'm under the impression that there are fewer people actively engaged in politics and more young adults convinced that they are powerless to address the issues that concern them most. Of course, as I set out to investigate this assumption further, I confront only more questions that I will have no time to answer by tomorrow morning:

1. I know, or know of, plenty of young people who are passionately engaged. The daughter of one friend is living in Central America and working as a volunteer on village development projects. Others have committed their working lives to investigating and writing about a wide range of issues, from climate change to how to use new media to build progressive political networks. Some of them do these things without much concern for career path or compensation. Still others have entirely rejected the more material aspects of our culture and focus their efforts on building community and pursuing their art. But it seems to me that there are nowhere near enough young people who are persuaded that their efforts will make a difference and are proceeding accordingly.

2. In a world where climate change will reach a tipping point before efforts to abate it begin to have an effect, and in a country where racism and discrimination still devastate lives and communities, and almost everyone must struggle with the Great Recession--the worst domestic economy in 70 years--how does one go about priortizing the targets for activism?

3. The Supreme Court's decision to throw out campaign finance restrictions on corporations has to be one of the most anti-democratic rulings in years. The notion that absolute limits on corporate contributions to campaigns violate the free speech provisions of the constitution is nonsensical. The whole point of the constitution and the bill of rights was to establish, protect and extend democracy. The court's use of the free speech principle to advance anti-democratic practices is a clear and present danger. The effects of this ruling will increase individual feelings of powerlessness and apathy, but by how much?

4. People I talk to are devastated by the Republican victory in Massachusetts on Tuesday. They want to know how such a thing could possibly happen. The how of it all isn't obvious, but some of the factors are clear. Thought the turnout was high for a special election, the fact is that many Obama voters, mobilized and enthusiastic just 13 months earlier, sat out the election (see a good analysis here). I suspect that the Right saw an opportunity to "steal" a Senate seat a month before Democrats recognized the seat was at risk. It seems likely that many of the people who voted for Brown have had little or no effect on previous statewide elections. But the election gave them an opportunity to convert their sideline cynicism into an angry and passionate rejection of the liberals and Democrats they have learned, these past 10 or 20 or 40 years, to fear. In an environment where Obama voters have learned to question their earlier passion, the quick special election created a huge opening for a loud "no". How much of this is because of what the Obama administration failed to accomplish in its first year?

5. How much of the Left's frustration with current politics are connected to unrealistic expectations for change? How much progressive change can be achieved without a larger and more vibrant Left? Where does political optimism and passion come from?

Peace and Justice the Hard Way Is the Only Way

The Right will fervently oppose even the smallest changes

There is this: that the Right opposes virtually every single small move to build a more democratic and humane future. This strategy is based on the understanding that each success, however small, makes the pressure for the succeeding step harder to resist. That is why the Right opposes the efforts of even the smallest community to sanctify gay marriage; that is why the Right mobilizes to stop every initiative aimed at legalizing private marijuana use even to relieve suffering; and that it is why it is not OK to pass even the most limited of health reform measures. And as long as the Right understands this, and proceeds accordingly, the Left must come to understand the same thing--that incremental change is the way most change happens in this country, slowly, slowly and arduously. The Left must make that understanding a strategic cornerstone.

King's Day...

and other things
on my mind

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, while I consider Dr. King the most effective, progressive leader of my lifetime, my thoughts are only briefly on him, focused instead on a radio show that I’m going to guest on in Chicago on Saturday, the 23rd. Host Michael James, whose business card identifies him as an activist and an entrepreneur, is a former SDS member and co-owner, with Katie Hogan, of Rogers Park’s legendary Heartland Café. It’s worth noting, as an aside here, that SDS was not only basically correct in its political analysis and righteous in its fury, but also entrepreneurial to the core. There was not a soul running or sympathizing with SDS who was not themselves capable of falling out of line at any given moment.

Anyway, Michael wants a little summary of what I want to talk about. He will, he says, do his homework on whatever subject I choose. But that won’t be necessary. There’s nothing I want to talk about that he hasn’t thought about himself. There’s a high probability that we will talk about Chicago’s 1983 mayoral race, because the show originates at the Heartland Café on the city’s Northside, and because I am Bernie Epton’s son and because there is always more to say about that election and the people who made it what it was..

Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to outline some other things to talk about. Here’s a list:

1. Politically, the real dangers of this moment are more compelling, lethal and closer to overwhelming, than were IMO the challenges of any other decade of my adult life.

2. Poverty and the failure of democratic institutions, like the public schools and mass transit, affect a larger number of people more severely than ever before.

3. Climate change, militarized agendas, market health care and the socialized liabilities of private capital are poised to sicken, maim, wound and kill more people in a single century than the total sickened and killed by similar means in the entire history of the world.

4. Inevitably, consider also the accuracy of the previous statements.

5. The people alive now, especially people under, say, forty years old, can not only stop the looming catastrophe, they can be the force that ushers in a global Golden Age.

6. What is there that we can offer from the perspective of those of us who once believed we would be the agents of some sort of similarly creative and humane epoch?

Also, time permitting, what might we say about the collapse of mainstream journalism enterprises, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the meaning of life?

From 1993 to very nearly the last day of 1999, Marrianne McMullen and I ran the Dayton Voice, aka Impact Weekly. In combining so much life and so much love, at least for me, the mini-decade of my life largely defined by my association with the Voice and my colleagues there and the whole city of Dayton, OH stands out in memory as seven fruitful and creative and satisfying years.

Every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Voice would run a graphic image of King on the front page and excerpt one of his speeches. Here’s a brief quote from one of those speeches:

“It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must admit that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon On Peace”
Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, December 1967

The Washington Post's Bad Example

Time to cover real news

Here's my 26th letter to the Washington Post over the last two and a half years (one published to date):

Editor,

The January 8 Post had no fewer than four opinion pieces and three news stories about intelligence failures related to the Christmas Day "underwear bomber, " who manages to somehow continue to terrorize journalists and politicians despite the fact that he actually failed to ignite his bomb, as did shoe bomber before him. That incident was also the occasion for much political handwringing about security failures and the need for reform. But the fact is, the US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on homeland security since 9/11. Though it is impossible to determine precisely the exact level of security necessary (and the commensurately appropriate expenditure), it seems likely that what has been both spent and reformed to date has something to do with the fact that there has been no successful attack on US soil by a foreign terrorist since 9/11.

Moreover, it is very likely that Osama bin Laden is as perplexed at the failure of his own operatives as we appear to be perplexed by the failure of ours, despite the fact that human beings working under extreme conditions in complex operations likely fail more often than they succeed. Simply put, to err is human.

In the meantime, we have spent much smaller sums to expand health coverage that might have saved thousands of actual American lives. And on January 8, the Post ran one story on a scientific study focussing on the environmental harms created by the common practice of coal mining by mountaintop removal ("Scientists in mining study ask for action"). There is nothing theoretical about the illnesses, deaths and environmental degradation that arise from that method of extraction. Would it be asking too much of the Post's editors that they back off from the hysteria about terrorism and that they assign and encourage reporters and columnists to follow up on the very real consequences of mountaintop removal?

Jeff Epton
807 Taylor St., NE
Washington, DC 20017

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.

Future Calendar

Next year, it says, we get much stronger

On this date in 1890, a woman assassinated Solotouchin, chief of the Moscow secret police (there are no web references to this guy that I can find, though there are references to the use, by Chris Brown, of the phrase 'solo touchin'). Also, 77 years ago today, 16 peasants and workers were murdered in Spain by the Guardia Civil. That event, my 2010 organizer tells me, is known as the Massacre of Casa Viljas. Just 12 years ago, 25,000 people occupied the construction site of a dam being built on the Narmada River. The proposed dam was part of a series of projects on the river that would wipe out the homes and livelihoods of millions. A people's organization, Narmada Bachao Andolan, organized opposition to the projects. At least three major literary figures were born on this day, as well: Eugenio Maria de Hostos, a philosopher, novelist and true citizen of the Americas (read about him here and here) in 1839, American author William James in 1842, and Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, in 1903.

I learned all these things from, variously, my Half Price Books 2010 calendar, the Peace Buttons on-line calendar, and, as noted, from my 2010 organizer, produced by the Slingshot Collective. I consider such little bits of historical data helpful. The political stuff provides a consistent reminder that people everywhere refuse to suffer indignity and injustice quietly, that the instinct to build community based on humane vision and opposition to authoritarianism is actually written into human DNA. And, though the births and deaths of revered historical figures often come to be celebrated at the expense of the memories of the mass of individuals who built the cultures from which individual achievement sprang, it is nice to be reminded that artistic and creative genius does exist, even if I am also reminded, in the process, that such genius does not dwell in me.

In these calendars there is a sort of half-baked genius. The calendars vaguely suggest stories. But they don't do any of the work of detailing specific stories. To accumulate detail we have to consult other sources, historians, teachers, books, songs, friends, imagination. In his book, 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed To Know, Mickey Z appears to have taken some left political calendar of some kind and lavished it with research and imagination. This he does, I am certain, because he believes that what each of us contributes toward progressive change is more important than we individually can ever imagine. To that effect, Mickey Z quotes Howard Zinn:

"[Revolution is] an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society."

I'm pretty sure that Mickey's z is a self-chosen last name, with plenty of possible references. Z standing alone, for instance, might suggest revolutionary resistance, as it does in the Costa-Gavras movie "Z." Or it might be that Mickey is simply announcing his own subversive intentions, identifying himself and others as a "zigzagger," the human embodiments of Zinn's revolutionary waves. Or, I suppose, it could be that Mickey's last name starts with z, is hard to spell and harder to pronounce. No matter. His book is an act of radical imagination.

Sitting next to "50 Revolutions" on our pile of bathroom books is The Future Dictionary of America(FDA). Let me say, as a person once convicted of malicious destruction primarily on the testimony of a self-described "unemployed lexicographer," that as dictionaries go, FDA is probably on the unreliable end of the spectrum. But FDA is also an act of radical imagination. Edited by a quartet of young (heartbreaking) geniuses, it includes numerous entries that try to imagination a richer, more humane future. One entry written by revered graphic novelist Art Spiegelman reads:

"Geneva Convention [jen-ee'-vah kon-ven'-shun] n. a large annual Spring gathering of cartoonists that takes place in Geneva, Switzerland...The highlight of this convocation is a drawing contest [in which] cartoonists compete to best capture [an] audience's shifting expressions of shock, awe, disgust, prurience, anger and anguish[in reaction to] pornographic video footage of early 21st century American soldiers performing atrocities on Moslem civilians..."

Well, OK, that definition is more of an inspired critique than a vision of a benign future, but I personally see the image of a bunch of cartoonists sitting in judgement of war crime as a bit of alternative futuring. And though FDA has far more critical and satirical definitions of the tired and corrupt normal, there are many definitions of a future world that are as inviting as a warm featherbed in winter.

But what I really want here is this, a calendar based on the good real people aspire to accomplish within the span of their own lives, a calendar that takes such personal visions and reports all the good things that will happen in the future. Like, say, the entry for January 11, 2034: writer Sylvia Waters transmits the completed manuscript of her biography of the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to her publisher.

And I know this happens how? I know this happens because SW told me that is her deadline for finishing the book. And, as we all know, individual aspirations are the tributaries of the rivers that flow to the oceans where the tidal waves of change are generated. Frankly, though I will be 88 by the time the book is finally available to me, I can hardly wait to read it. Further, if there are readers out there who aspire, openly or secretly, to move a certain change by a particular date, please share your dream with me, if you would. Personally, I feel a strong need to see visions, to feed on the nutritional richness of such a future calendar.

The Great Terrorism Scam

The Century's Biggest Boondoggle

On any given day, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack on the United States in the 21st century are vanishingly small, say, less than one chance out of 35 billion. Lower than that, actually, unless, you are living on a military base in Texas, which does get attacked (in the 21st century) about one day every 3,500 days, or so. But on a really bad day--September 11, 2001 comes to mind--your chances of being killed go up to something less than one in 100,000. There are plenty of likelier ways for each of us to die.

Nevertheless, we are fighting a War on Terror that has to qualify as one of the biggest wastes of national treasure and brainpower and collective energy in our history. We kill about 100 of our own with our cars and trucks every single day (about 37,000 deaths per year). A death toll that we tolerate and, even, encourage. After all, we encourage driving, spending tens of billions of state and federal dollars annually to repair and expand our system of streets, roads, highways and bridges. Daily risk of dying in a driving accident: still pretty low at less than one chance in 3 billion, though higher, of course, if you are actually out driving.

One of my favorite books is Jeffrey Reiman's The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice, now out in its eighth edition. In my experience, Reiman improves and updates the book with every new edition, but I am looking now at chapter two from the sixth edition, "A Crime by Any Other Name...". The chapter includes subheads like "Work may be dangerous to your health," "Health care may be dangerous to your health," "Waging chemical warfare against America," and "Poverty kills." As you might guess, in this chapter Reiman demonstrates his thesis that our criminal justice system goes to great expense to "punish" criminal harms while national policy essentially overlooks far greater risks to individuals that arise from poverty and from routine occupational, medical and environmental practices.

Using data from 1997, Reiman points out that the FBI's "crime clock" showed a murder happening once every 29 minutes. A similar "clock ticks for half of the population that is in the labor force--this clock would show an occupational death about every 17 minutes! In other words, in about the time it takes for two murders on the crime clock, three workers have died just from trying to make a living." He goes on:

"To say that some of these workers died from accidents due to their own carelessness is about as helpful as saying that some of those who died at the hands of murderers asked for it. It overlooks the fact that when workers are careless, it is not because they love to live dangerously."

Workers, Reiman says, have quotas to meet that they do not set, workplaces to work in that they did not design with an eye to their own safety, equipment that they did not purchase themselves and may not be empowered to maintain. The point, updated to 2010, when far fewer dangerous jobs exist because they have been moved to China or elsewhere, is that far more Americans die each year from workplace accidents and work-related illnesses than will die from terrorist attacks in the next decade, or, even, during the remainder of this century. Yet we spend billions more every year on protecting ourselves against attacks that rarely happen (and when they do, happen with consequences that don't compare to other more regular events) than we spend on improving workplace safety and protecting workers against occupational illness.

In his section on health care, Reiman leads off with a quote from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, released more than 35 years ago: "A recent study of emergency medical care found the quality, number, and distribution of ambulances and other emergency services severely deficient, and estimated that as many as 20,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year as a result of improper emergency care." Reiman demonstrates that little has changed since the report was released. Thousands of Americans still die from poor, inadequate and improper emergency care, while the number of deaths from terrorist attacks on American soil is, in most years, zero. And tens of thousands die annually in nonemergency situations from unnecessary, inadequate, improper and/or unavailable health care and from medical mistakes (malpractice). Yet we have spent perhaps a trillion dollars this decade on homeland security and "anti-terrorist" activities, while debating the appropriateness of improvements in national healthcare that would cost less and save and prolong and improve the lives of millions of Americans.

Washington National airport recently closed down for an hour in the middle of the day after someone entered a high security area by walking through an exit passage. Though the individual who did so was never found, thousands of airline customers waited in security lines and at gates while police combed the airport. That single incident may have cost several million dollars in lost productivity and further delays at other airports.

After a passenger on a Detroit-bound international flight was overpowered with a faulty bomb he had snuck onto the plane in his underwear, President Obama declared that the intelligence failures which permitted the man to fly in the first place would "not be tolerated." This is an interesting phrase.

Googling "will not be tolerated" reveals a vast range of things that someone somewhere stands ready to oppose. The list of intolerable things includes indiscipline in political parties, bleaching of hair and skin, homosexuality, terrorism, harassment of commuters, foul language, slandering the dead, foreign terrorists, mistreatment of fellow cannabis users, intolerance and something called "swine flu supplement fraud" to name just a few. Most of these things happen anyway, which suggests that nothing fails like a firm commitment to keep people from doing very human things, like failing to widely share information about suspected terrorists.

It would be far more helpful if President Obama were to say something like "hysteria about terrorism will not be tolerated," though it's quite clear that there is little that can be done to prevent that kind of hysteria, other than, perhaps, a return to form by the man once promoted as No-drama Obama. The truth is, there probably aren't very many people in the world, al Qaeda members, or otherwise, who are both capable of and willing to pull off a terrorist attack on American soil.

Sure there are regular suicide bombings in countries struggling with open conflict, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, to name three. But these are locations where people have been brutalized by acts of war and a variety of other assaults. They are also places where the line between combatants and noncombatants has been all but erased, and the possibility for vengeance, real or imagined, is high. But to travel to the US from one's homeland, or to immigrate here and subsequently evolve the mindset that might create a terrorist substantially reduces the number of possible attackers. Estimates available on the web puts the number of possible attackers somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand (see Ken Silverstein's 2006 piece, "The Al Qaeda Clubhouse: Members lacking" in Harper's Magazine here).

Further, you can bet that terrorist leaders, like Osama bin Laden "will not tolerate" failure by terrorist conspirators. That fact suggests that terrorists, like CIA agents and airport security personnel, fail frequently. So, yes, there will be more attacks (and many more failed attacks), but most of us, almost all of us, in fact, will survive. We may wait untold hours with our shoes and belts off, holding up our pants, waiting to be screened, and pay more to fly because somebody has to pay for the delays and the extra personnel, but we will survive. Meanwhile, people in power must want it to be this way, because they know, like we know, that lack of affordable healthcare and unsafe employment and climate change will kill (and sicken) more of us than terrorists ever will.

Confession

Once, when Nate and I were discussing the way I parented him, he said that he always thought of me as too self-centered to be a really good father. He seemed to think that often when I was around the house, around him, I wasn't really present. Except, maybe to get angry with him when he distracted me from the things I was focussed on.

I defended myself. I don't remember exactly what I said. Something about how much I thought about him all the time. I tried to make it sound like the way I thought about him was on an emotional level equal in some way to the power of my perceived absence. I don't think he bought it, but he had the mature grace to let me pretend that he was persuaded.

But--and this is why I'm actually blogging on the day after Christmas--Nate was right. I was quite self-centered (still am, I guess) and I wanted to get it written down here so that I couldn't take it back.

Still, let me try to extract something of value from this. Three things, really. I'm proud of Nate, of the adult he has become. I hope Nate knows that he is right in his understanding of how much more I could have done for him and with him. And, I hope all of us understand that every day is a chance to do better.

The Guaranteed Upside of Down

Closing one’s eyes,
a key to revelations,
shocking moments,
explosions

Rest, as well,
but in this case,
facing mid-winter
sun

Closing one’s eyes,
key to the déjà vu
experience of this
place


And to the never
before seen
experience of this
place

Closing one’s eyes,
ranging to remote
and to exotica and to
right here, right now

If you can withstand
the vibe, rhythm, shake,
rattle, roll, bangin’,
clangin’ and sweet singin’
of right here, right now

Long enough to be deep
in the remote, in the erotica
of this place, this right here,
right now

Bad Health Care Bill Is Better Than None

The hard road to a more perfect democracy

The health care bill that hopefully will pass in the Senate on Christmas Eve isn't final. The finalized legislation will be negotiated between House and Senate conferees early next year. But it seems safe at this point to make a few observations about what the Health Care Reform struggle 2009-2010 will do or has done.

• It has helped clarify just how dysfunctional Congress is (see Ruth Marcus' "The next decade from hell?" Washington Post, Dec. 23 here or Richard Cohen's "An imperfect ray of hope," Washington Post, Dec. 22 here).

• It exposed some members of the Senate, like Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) or Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as particularly repellant (see Michael Gerson's "For sale: One senator (D-Neb.). No principles, low price." Washington Post, Dec. 23 here or Eugene Robinson's "Health-care hardball," Washington Post,Dec. 18 here).

• It created opportunity for Republican members of the Senate to raise the bar for hypocrisy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader and his caucus did everything they could to keep health care reform in any form from passing, including forcing Democrats to get 92 year-old Sen. Byrd (D-W Va.) to haul himself and his wheelchair to the Senate for roll call votes three times in the last week. They relentlessly criticized every compromise Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brokered in an effort to get something passed. Hearing Sen. Lindsay Graham (D-SC) on NPR denounce the admittedly repugnant deal with Ben Nelson, as though Graham was a disappointed advocate for a better bill, seemed somewhat like we had all fallen down a large rabbit hole. Other Republicans seemed to be wishing for fate in the form of, say, a sudden illness that would prevent Democrats from rounding up 60 votes. It boggles the mind that Republicans have seemingly decided their obstructionist behavior and petty cruelties improve their chances of success in the 2010 mid-term elections.

• It will result in a bill that will dismay virtually every Democratic voter (see Harold Meyerson's "For unions, a messy bargain," Washington Post, Dec. 23, here), but it is a start; that fact will prove to be more important than many disappointed advocates are likely to believe (see Eugene Robinson's "Carpe health reform," Washington Post, Dec. 22, here or Henry J. Aaron's "Health-reform legislation would accomplish more than critics admit," Washington Post, Dec. 18, here).

• It confirmed that there is a senator for the rest of us. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont worked diligently to make a bad bill as promising as possible (see Katrina Vanden Heuvel's post on The Nation's website, Dec. 22, here).

It seems to be a general perception that if the US electorate were as sophisticated as the Western European demos, we would have a democracy that provided national healthcare, assumed international leadership on global warming and invaded fewer foreign countries, but that's probably not a helpful comparison. We should measure our democracy by the effort we put in to improving it, by the quality of our encounters with political opponents, and by the accumulated progress we make. As Eugene Robinson pointed out in "Carpe health reform," the US may continue for some time to come to use wealth and work as a means to ration health care, but with President Obama's signing of the health care reform bill early next year, we will, for the first time, "enshrine the principle that all Americans deserve access to medical care regardless of their ability to pay." We should celebrate that achievement while we are also working on the peace dividend, affordable housing, quality public education. and clean air and water.