Can it happen here?

Redistricting San Francisco: hyper-local politics

2012-02-02T06:48:00.000-08:00

It's redistricting season at every level of government. To conform to the legal principle of "one person, one vote," all legislative districts have to be rebalanced so that changes in population density since the last census are taken into account. On the one hand, it's only elementary fairness that all of us should elect representatives who are responsible to roughly the same number of constituents. On the other hand, every time political boundaries are redrawn, there's an opportunity for politicians and political operatives to try to draw districts that favor their interests.

The Bay Guardian alternative newsweekly sponsored a meeting last week designed to educate progressive activists about how the process will work to draw local Supervisor's districts and what new maps could mean. The local Redistricting Task Force charged with drawing new boundaries is already working on new maps, holding public hearings. According to the Guardian (and I concur):

While it's difficult to draw 11 bad districts in San Francisco, it's entirely possible to shift the lines to make it more difficult to elect progressives -- something many groups out there are anxious to do.

Community activist Calvin Welsh points to a map of the current districts. Those in red and pink have lost people in the last ten years, while the center-city District 6 has seen massive development and population gains.

The Guardian's meeting sounded a warning that if people don't involve themselves, the prospects for progressive governance might be seriously hurt. A panel included Fernando Marti, who has worked on a draft progressive map; Quentin Mecke, who served on the last redistricting committee; Terry Valen from the Filipino Community Center; and Eileen Hansen, a former Supervisor candidate who later served on the city's Ethics Commission (that's where campaign regulations are enforced.)

This week, the Guardian has posted a link to a proposed progressive community-drawn map. You can see it here.

Having been involved in the last round of this, I'm glad to see community groups trying to engage with the process, although if we have been a little slow to get going. The district boundaries set in the last round helped progressives contest the board of supervisors for most of the decade, balancing citywide administrations that were more friendly to (and funded by) developers and big business interests. Boundaries that corral most of the city's most progressive voters in a few districts would enforce a political balance in which the interests of the very rich sweep aside those of everyone else.

But I was struck by what the two Supervisors who dropped in, John Avalos and David Campos, had to say about the process. Each repeated some version of the statement "we can run in whatever lines they come up with."

Now that's not strictly true; neither man would get far with the voters of Pacific Heights. But the sentiment has to be part of the mindset of progressives who want to influence city politics. We have to present a vision of what life might be like in this city that attracts a majority across its divisions. That's tough in a city where the middle class is being priced out, leaving the rich, the menial workers who serve them, and a sprinkling of short term residents -- young artists, techies and slackers.

Yes, we lose citywide elections because our candidates get buried under an avalanche of cash. But we also lose because we have a hard time projecting a vision that attracts a majority across economic, racial and identity lines. Favorable supervisorial boundaries can to some extent mask a weakness. And the progressive boards elected in the 00s certainly had great accomplishments -- I think particularly of the local universal health plan, Healthy San Francisco. But in addition to good boundaries, we also need that vision thing and the community institutional capacity to spread it.

Unexpected ... but not necessarily unwarranted

2012-02-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

Even amid the granite canyons of San Francisco's financial district, alongside the pseudo-Doric capitals, there it is ...

an almost wistful claim that here, too, are the 99 percent.

Warming Wednesdays: A windy future

2012-02-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

To minimize harm to birds, future wind farms may consist of a "forest" of stalks. Discovery News. H/t Time Goes By.
In the Anthropocene, even renewable technologies may have unsettling climate effects. That's what happens when we use our human technological capacity to alter the planet's balance -- something we are doing and will continue to do whether we want to or not, barring a massive human die-off.

Think adoption of wind power couldn't possibly mess with the climate? Not so according to New Scientist.

In 2010, Somnath Baidya Roy at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign reported that wind farms affect their local climate. Long-term data from a wind farm at San Gorgonio, California, confirmed his earlier model predictions: surface temperatures behind the wind turbines were higher than in front during the night, but as much as 4 °C lower by day.

Roy thinks the turbulence created by the turbines sucks air down from above. During the day, when the hottest air is usually near the surface, this has a cooling effect. At night, when the air near the ground may be colder than that above, it can have a warming effect.

These effects could be minimised by placing wind farms in areas where there's already a lot of turbulence. But we might not want to minimise them. "Some of these effects are actually welcome for agricultural reasons," says Cristina Archer at the University of Delaware in Newark, who studies wind power. Strategically placed wind farms might keep crops cool in summer and reduce the risk of frost in other seasons. Farmers in California and Florida already use wind machines to fight frost by pulling down warmer air.

Do offshore wind farms affect sea surface temperatures and evaporation rates? Could these local effects add up to produce significant regional or even global effects? Perhaps. Winds obviously play a major role in climate. Slowing or altering wind patterns will alter the movement of heat and water around the planet, and thus temperature and rainfall.

It might seem inconceivable that humans could have a significant effect on the wind, but we may already be doing so. While wind speeds over the oceans are increasing, surface winds over Europe, Asia and North America have slowed by up to 15 per cent on average since 1979.

Go read it all.

An autobiographical argument for the rule of law

2012-01-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

What if the United States had treated the challenge posed by terrorism that aimed to kill its citizens indiscriminately as a criminal problem rather than an occasion for fear-mongering, chest thumping, war-making, and expansion of executive power? FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, along with Daniel Freedman, has published a professional counter-terrorism specialist's account of how bureaucrats, jealous spooks, and ultimately our highest authorities chose courses that continue to subvert our best interests and ideals in The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War against al-Qaeda.

Soufan is an Arab American born in Lebanon who applied to become an FBI agent on a bet with college friends. None of them imagined the Bureau would want a foreign born native Arabic speaker. But in the mid-1990s, it did and the new special agent was assigned to the New York office. Like many immigrants, he especially valued our historic freedoms:

While the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance may perhaps seem largely symbolic to many Americans, to those of us who have have lived with alternatives, they are filled with meaning. I know that the protections offered therein are very necessary.

He also was fascinated by exotic figures he had learned about from reading Arabic language newspapers; while still in college he made a sort of hobby following the activities of a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden. While still an FBI trainee he wrote a memo about bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and was transferred into the New York taskforce that had worked on the 1993 bombing in the World Trade Center underground garage. When al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Nigeria and Tanzania in 1998, he was among the New York team that digested the work of on-the-ground investigators. Later he was sent to Yemen to investigate the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole. That investigation led to the FBI becoming aware that a clandestine meeting had taken place in Malaysia involving only partially known persons and possible plots. Despite repeated requests, they were unable to get the CIA to share what they knew of this; in hindsight Souffan claims that if bureaucratic rivalries and suspicions had been overcome, the 9/11 plot probably would have been foiled. When he first learned, while still in Yemen, of the 9/11 attacks, his reaction was to sit in the lavatory and vomit, so sure was he that if information had been shared, all those people would have lived.

After 9/ll, as one of the U.S. government's few Arabic speakers, an experienced interrogator, and an expert on al-Qaeda, Souffan was a busy guy indeed, debriefing the numerous men seized in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the hunt for terrorist plotters. Because he understood the intricacies of their organization and could imagine the mindset of those prisoners who turned out to be members of the group (many were just innocents who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time), Souffan reports he repeatedly won admissions and genuine information. He always sought practical intelligence that would enable the U.S. government to foil any plans and also built legally viable cases again conspirators that could be used to convict them in court.

This kind of legal case-building rapidly came to be treated as foot-dragging by the higher ups in the Bush administration who became enamored of crack-pot ideas spun by contract psychologists of breaking the captives through coercion. Holding suspects in freezing cold rooms, led to locking them in stress positions while bombarding them with noise, led to water-boarding -- and the prisoners stopped providing any meaningful information, no matter how much they jabbered. Souffan maintains that al-Qaeda prepared its adherents to expect truly grotesque tortures from Middle Eastern dictatorships: rape by dogs for example. No wonder the modulated torments so favored by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld only led them to lie and/or clam up. And the torture "techniques" rapidly spread from Guantanamo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib, helping to ensure the failure of our rulers' Mesopotamian adventure. Souffan and the bureau eventually walked out, refusing to adopt the new torture practices, and thus depriving the anti-terrorism effort of the people who had the most knowledge of and experience with actual threats. The book makes it abundantly clear that some in the CIA and the Bush Administration hated Souffan for blowing the whistle on intelligence failures -- and for having been better at protecting U.S. citizens than they were.

The story of all this drama as Souffan tells it is actually pretty dry. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of unfamiliar names and their complex connections. He's building a case here in this book and that object determines its structure, even when he shares memories of the anger and frustration he felt over his own government's many missteps and misdeeds.

As the book was ready to go to press, already cleared of classified and confidential information by the FBI, the CIA weighed in with demands for Souffan to excise additional material. Rather than hold up publication, his publisher went ahead and released the book with the contested bits printed but blacked out. Souffan claims that the material the CIA forbade is either already in the public domain, unclassified, or improperly classified to prevent Agency embarrassment. Some of the redactions are transparently absurd. For example, they made him black out one sentence of a nationally televised exchange with Senator Lindsay Graham. If complaints through FBI channels don't relieve him of these CIA requirements, he knows his preferred remedy.

…if they fail in their duty, I plan to compel disclosure of the redacted information through legal means.

Once again Souffan is painstakingly building his case, placing his faith in the law.

This book is not light or even gripping reading. Rather it is a very dry, detailed, and workmanlike narrative of one man's experience in the United States' shameful lost decade post 9/11. That's probably what we should hope for from a law enforcement officer, not bombast, speculation, or posturing.

Upside down goose on the loose?

2012-01-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

No, this photo is not a clever use of Photoshop. Geese and other birds really do sometimes fly upside down in order to brake when landing.

Here's a slow motion video of such a flight:

During flight, geese can twist their necks to flip their bodies upside down, while keeping their heads upright.

Now amateur videographers Hans de Koning and Lodewijk van Eekhout have captured the first slow-mo video of the manoeuvre, winning a prize in a competition organised by the Flight Artists group at Wageningen University. Known as whiffling, the move is often performed before landing as a means of braking. Upside down wings generate more drag causing a goose to slow down quickly, just like what happens when a plane is inverted during flight.
New Scientist

Ain't reality grand?***I'm pooped today. More thoughtful blogging will resume tomorrow, I hope.

Is this any way to run an empire?

2012-01-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

It's gotten harder and harder for even its advocates to explain a purpose or rationale for the continuing U.S. war in Afghanistan. As with the festering sore of our gulag-that-can't-be-closed at Guantanamo, it seems one reason U.S. troops are still mired over there is that we have a lot of prisoners we can't figure out what to do with.

Under George W. Bush, the prison at Bagram was a central node in the network of "black sites" where U.S. intelligence personnel held suspected terrorists. Obama came into office calling for closure of such secret prisons where both the local Afghan authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross were excluded -- and where abuse, murder and torture have been documented. NATO allies with forces in Afghanistan also called for the closing of Bagram. And Afghans demanded that they should take over the prisoners. But the Afghan prison system is notoriously corrupt and also itself a site of torture. So U.S. hold on the Bagram prison and the prisoners continues.

The Obama administration did proscribe a procedure -- it can hardly be called a hearing or a court-- for determining which prisoners should remain locked away.

Candace Rondeaux of the International Crisis Group described actual workings of this legal mirage recently.

As part of its new detainee policy, the Obama administration launched a process in which a review board of three military officers hears evidence to determine whether a Bagram detainee is a supporter or member of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or another insurgent group. Detainees are allowed to attend unclassified portions of their hearings. They are also assigned personal representatives, U.S. military officials who are responsible for assisting detainees with presenting their cases.

When I visited Bagram last November, Colonel Peter Masciola, head of the legal operations directorate there, described this to me as a “meaningful opportunity to counter claims in an administrative procedure.” The hearings, however, fall far short of international legal standards. Detainees are still barred from reviewing classified evidence or from listening to classified testimony in their cases, which largely consists of hearsay evidence of the detainee’s alleged terrorist connections. Personal representatives assigned to detainees are allowed to see the classified evidence but not share it, and since these representatives are not lawyers, there is no way for detainees to challenge their inability to review classified evidence. This is a clear violation of international law on fair trial standards. But by providing a hearing that mimics a regular court procedure, the White House has been able to airbrush these concerns out of the picture.

In the classification-obsessed culture of the U.S. military, the simplest details about a detainee’s capture are often classified. Since the U.S. military also limits the information it shares with the Afghan government, Afghan judges and prosecutors are also barred from reviewing all the evidence in cases that are transferred to them under the Bagram transition agreement.

[The military] has generally solved this problem by either delaying the transfer of detainee cases or, sometimes, by handing over virtually empty case files to Afghan authorities. As a result, Afghan judges have thrown out dozens of cases because of a lack of evidence.

That's not satisfactory to the U.S. Therefore our military won't hand over many of the prisoners to the Afghans. Therefore Bagram must remain a U.S.-run prison for the foreseeable future. Therefore the war must go on. And therefore proud Afghans fume and individual prisoners are denied any resolution of their status.

Is this any way to run an empire?

Spring must be on its way

2012-01-28T12:45:00.000-08:00

The heath is blooming on San Bruno Mountain.

Saturday scenes and scenery: from the SAFE California campaign

2012-01-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm off to Los Angeles today for my work, organizing to put an initiative to end death sentences in California on the November 2012 ballot.

These pictures show some of the people I have the privilege to work with. Many are from the Dr. Martin Luther King day holiday when volunteers attended over 30 events statewide and collected thousands of signatures to qualify our measure.

Californians: we need help, lots of it. Visit SAFE California today and sign up.

Seen in the 'hood ... a laughing matter

2012-01-27T09:36:00.000-08:00

Somehow I don't think this would have been parked happily on a foggy Mission District street in the early years of the last decade. But apparently some of us have regained our sense of humor post 9/11.

At the Bomb Truck website, I found this:

Organic Vegan Handmade Pops. We are like the Willy Wonkas of gourmet pops. Inspired by mom and pop shops,hole in the walls, neighborhood ice cream trucks, and childhood memories.

Our comparative equanimity is not universal.

A FedEx driver was delivering a package to an Army base in Utah when someone asked what it was. The driver replied it was probably a bomb. Military police evacuated more than 2,200 people, and prosecutors have charged the driver with making a threat of terrorism.
NPR

And a federal court still thinks is within the law for security authorities to order a citizen locked up as an "enemy combatant," drive the guy crazy, and only then put him into the federal court system on vague charges. That would be Jose Padilla. Padilla's lawyer, Ben Wizner, said of the decision

the appeals court “handed the government a blank check to commit any abuse in the name of national security, even the brutal torture of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.

“This immunity is not only anathema to a democracy governed by laws, but contrary to history’s lesson that in times of fear our values are a strength, not a hindrance,” said Wizner, litigation director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

Appropriately, there's not a lot of humor in that conclusion.

Not their grandmothers' electorate

2012-01-27T05:30:00.000-08:00

Apparently tonight the participants in the latest Republican clown show debate bumbled and stumbled around over which presidential hopeful would be more eager to deport undocumented grandmothers. No kidding.

It's not surprising that the essential futility of these guys comes out in Florida over immigration issues. The Republican party has had a good long run since Richard Nixon at being the bastion of frustrated white resentment, but their country is not the country we live in, in many places today and everywhere going forward. The country is changing.

Florida is one of the places where demographic shift is happening fast. According to the 2010 census, Florida's is about 58 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic/Latino of any race, and 16 percent Black. Unlike any other group of Latinos in the United States, Florida's Cuban immigrants tend to be Republicans, but these days they are more and more balanced out by Democratic-leaning Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and others from countries to the south.

Contemporary Republicans have nothing much to say to Latinos, aside from anti-Castro Cubans. Their white base won't let them deal sensibly with the fact of 11 million people who live here without papers. So we get the kind of nonsense Mitt and Newt traded tonight.

In the Boston Review, Stephen Ansolabehere pointed out some less obvious ways the electorate is changing that bode ill for Republicans:

Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, and other states have recently enacted measures calling for stricter enforcement of existing immigration laws. Some of these measures even aim to deny birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. These initiatives, overwhelmingly supported by Republicans, drive Hispanics to vote increasingly for the Democratic Party.

… Most of the demographic change in the American electorate today comes not from waves of new immigration but from the echoes of past immigration: the children of immigrants and their children. Nationwide roughly 21 percent of white citizens are under eighteen years old, compared to 44 percent of Hispanic citizens. Over the coming decade, aging alone will increase the number of Hispanics who are eligible to vote by 25 percent.

Hispanic voters will continue to emerge in Texas, California, and other states where Hispanics have long been gaining in numbers. But the tide of Hispanic citizens is rising in some surprising places as well. The states with the highest percentage of Hispanic citizens under eighteen years old are North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, and South Carolina.

And closing the borders will not appreciably affect the increasing numbers of Hispanics and Hispanic voters in the United States for a simple reason: the Hispanic population is already sizable and has a much higher birth rate than the white population. The policies that the parties pursue now on immigration, education, and other matters that particularly affect Hispanics will define electoral politics for generations to come.

Today Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, himself of Greek-Salvadoran ancestry and so quintessentially a modern citizen of the U.S., mocked the idea that Republicans were going to pick up Latino votes.

Latinos may be disappointed in the lack of progress on immigration reform the last few years. But they saw who voted against the DREAM Act in Congress, and they see who is still campaigning against the DREAM Act. They see who is demagoguing Mexico and kowtowing to the notorious Latino-hating Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and they see who is passing anti-immigrant laws in places like Arizona and Alabama. They know that Romney wants to make things so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they "self-deport."

There may be disappointment in Obama and the Democratic Party among Latinos, but … there is zero opening for Republicans with this key, growing, demographic.

Note to discouraged white progressives: people of color have a lot of experience with making disheartening lesser evil choices. For most of U.S. history, that's all that was on offer -- none of the available politicians really represented them. Grown ups make the best of bad choices -- and then know that political participation doesn't end when the election is over. Why sometimes, people have to go on to Occupy ...

Gay marriage is coming to Washington State

2012-01-26T05:30:00.000-08:00

It looks as if Washington State is going to win marriage equality by legislative enactment. They've counted the votes and the governor says she'll sign the bill. Of course there are naysayers:

"It's not done. In fact, it's just started," said Joseph Backholm, executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, vowing that legalization of same-sex marriage would end in a referendum challenge.

LGBT people haven't done so well at winning these kind of state ballot measures; in both Maine and California, marriage victories were overturned by voters. But I wouldn't be surprised if Washington voters turn back marriage opponents in a November vote; among other strengths, they can count major state businesses like Starbucks and Microsoft in the pro-marriage equality camp. And the northwest has an honorable history of winning electoral fights over gay rights

A Washington vote to uphold a gay marriage law would repeat one of the great early successes of the LGBT rights movement. Thanks to the movie Milk, there's some historical memory of the 1978 defeat of a California initiative that would have fired out lesbian and gay teachers and silenced their supporters. But the same year, Seattle voters rejected an attempt to repeal their local ordinance that protected lesbians and gays against employment and housing discrimination. History Link tells the story.

On November 7, 1978, Seattle voters rejected Initiative 13 decisively, by nearly two to one. Initiative 13 would have repealed city ordinances protecting employment and housing rights for gays and lesbians. Also, it would have dissolved the City of Seattle's Office of Women's Rights.

The initiative was sponsored by Save Our Moral Ethics (SOME) and by Seattle Police Officers Dennis Falk and David Estes. Opposition was led by the Committee to Retain Fair Employment (CRFE) chaired by Charles Brydon and directed by Jill Shropp. Other groups opposed the measure as well.
Seattle was one of the first large American cities to enact specific civil rights protections prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Employment rights of sexual minorities were affirmed in 1973, and the City broadened its housing laws in 1975. [The reforms] ... generated little controversy at the time of their adoption.

…CRFE was organized as a broad coalition of civil rights groups, religious moderates, and political liberals. Initiative 13 was also vocally opposed by more radical gay and lesbian groups, but CRFE raised the largest war chest and was able to broadcast radio and television messages. Its campaign focused on the theme "Your Privacy is at Stake," arguing that Initiative 13 exposed all citizens, straight and otherwise, to intrusive background checks by employers and landlords.

Early, unofficial vote counts showed Initiative 13 defeated, with a vote of 59,797 (37 percent) in favor to 101,809 (63 percent) opposed. Also on November 8, 1978, California voters rejected the "Briggs Initiative," which sought to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians in that state. …

Good friends of mine lived through the campaign adhering to "more radical" opposing positions; in fact two poured donated blood on the office of proponents and served local jail time for this act of uncivil though nonviolent disobedience.

As a political campaigner, I'm interested in lessons collected in oral histories of the victory. The Seattle Committee Against Thirteen and Women against Thirteen (SCAT/WAT) was a "more radical" group that wanted to talk about a lot more than generic privacy rights. Jan Denali explained

What I was mostly involved with was the canvassing project, which was a joint project of SCAT/WAT. ... That was the door-to-door stuff. We were big on education. ... We prioritized the city by precinct, you know, going for the swing precincts: who do you have a prayer of convincing? And running amazing orientation sessions to go out and canvass the city on the issue and being very educational about it. So that was what I did. ...

To be addressing the issue straightforward ... to be able to stand there in front of somebody and have a conversation ... and we had all this stuff about de-briefing and teamwork because you’d get icky stuff too and how to deflect that, and it was all just so completely empowering.

In the struggle for full gay rights, there simply is no doubt that repeated exposure to the humanity of ordinary gay people -- those face to face meetings that may begin in ignorance and prejudice but lead to mutual tolerance -- are what has turned the tide in our favor. We are everywhere and the end of the world (or of the family or heterosexual marriage or whatever) hasn't come. That approach worked on a citywide basis (alongside a more conventional electoral effort) as far back as 1978. It obviously works better in smaller settings and when the heat behind the issue hasn't been driven up too high by demagoguery. It probably takes a mix of campaign styles to win, but I have little doubt that victories that push back bigotry that are won with a strong component of public education are durable, in fact likely to be permanent. That 1978 campaign, super-heated and fraught as it was, laid the groundwork for marriage equality in Washington State this year.

"No on 13" from Out History.

Warming Wednesdays: How about that State of the Union speech?

2012-01-25T06:34:00.000-08:00

I was working last night, so not paying attention in real time to the Prez' big annual visit to Congress. Later I scanned the text for what he had to say about global warming. As I try to remind myself every Wednesday amid all the political noise and flapdoodle, none of this is going to matter much if we allow our economic system to make the planet unsurvivable.

A search on "climate" reveals that Obama did mention it.

The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change.

I guess saying that gridlock rules is better than saying nothing. But I think I've got a right to be disappointed in the people who rule us and in the ordinary people (too many of us) who put them in office.

Every year around the time of these speeches, pundits bloviate about whether what a president comes up with matters. This year it has been fashionable to say the President Obama was delivering the long form of his re-election stump speech or that nothing ever changed because of what was in a presidential speech. Presidential jawboning runs into the checks and balances in the system and we shouldn't expect anything to come of it ...

But did anything ever change because of what was not in a presidential speech? If our more rational political figures never speak honestly about human-induced global warming and our less rational ones denounce the concept and scientific understanding itself, is it any wonder that a huge fraction of the U.S. population denies climate change is happening?

The most intriguing bit of pre-speech punditry I ran across was from Steve Benen:

… if you want to know what Obama’s prepared to fight for, look no further than what he has to say tonight.

Really? Only time will tell.

Culture of death on the way out?

2012-01-24T05:30:00.000-08:00

Tis the season when opposing marchers mark the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. People who want to re-criminalize abortion marched in Washington -- USA Today reported their story:

We live in a culture of death," said [Ryan] Phillips, a high school senior who says he has attended the march 10 years in a row. "We'd like that to end."

This assumption is exactly the sort of thinking professor Steven Pinker tries to dispel in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The data say we emphatically do not live in a culture of death, says Pinker. In fact, all over the world, people are expanding our solicitude for lives that would once have been socially discounted.

Many opponents of legalized abortion predicted that acceptance of the practice would cheapen human life and put society on a slippery slope toward infanticide, euthanasia of the handicapped, a devaluation of the lives of children, and eventually widespread murder and genocide. Today we can say with confidence that that has not happened. Though abortion has been available in most of the Northern Hemisphere for decades, no country has allowed the deadline for abortions during pregnancy to creep steadily forward into legal infanticide, nor has the availability of abortion prepared the ground for euthanasia of disabled children. Between the time when abortion was made widely available and today, the rate of every category of violence has gone down, and, as we shall see, the valuation of the lives of children has shot up.

Opponents of abortion may see the decline in every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness, particularly the ability to suffer and flourish, and have identified consciousness with the activity of the brain. ... The change is a part of the turning away from religion and custom and toward science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination. ... The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.

At the same time, we might expect a general distaste for the destruction of any kind of living thing to turn people away from abortion even when they don't equate it with murder. And that indeed has happened. It's a little-known fact that rates of abortion are falling throughout the world. ...abortions have also become less common in China, the United States, and the Asian and Islamic countries in which they are legal. Only in India and Western Europe did abortion rates fail to decline, and those are the regions where the rates were lowest to begin with.

Meanwhile, people more fixated on the flourishing of living women and families than on the fetus point out hard facts about abortion in the United States today. This video clip is unusually straight forward in explaining why some women continue to need legal abortion and how society could affirm women's humanity and autonomy, if we really wanted living women and children to thrive.

Well worth watching.

Adam Smith, Romney's taxes, and Republican rage

2012-01-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote a small note about Newt winning South Carolina by stoking racial resentment -- and my friend Rain left a comment to the effect that Mitt Romney disturbed her the most of the lot.

… I've come to see Romney [as] the scariest …His economic record for what he has helped do to our country is part of the total destruction they have plotted on the Middle Class. …Think about Romney and his taxes where he is trying to not reveal what he has been paying which is probably considerably under 15%. What kind of human being would run for the highest office in the land, would be doing such things probably up until recently, and still say he could be for the every guy. I think I'd rather have my sleaze up front and visible so at least we are forewarned.

There's something to that.

I have my own mantra along those lines: I'd rather have my fascists -- power-hungry stokers of hate -- be greedy and venal rather than charismatic true believers. And though all these guys are appealing to the worst in a section of U.S. citizens -- the section that fears and hates gays, uppity women, people of color and civilizing restraint in human life -- so far at least they all seem just self-seeking liars, not ideologues of hate.

In the wake of his South Carolina defeat, Mitt says he is going to release some abbreviated set of his tax returns. Somehow I don't expect this will appear to most of us as full disclosure; the whole point of rich people's tax returns is to make them seem less rich and hence less liable to taxes. They have armies of accountants and lawyers to make stuff up for that purpose.

The Romney tax return furor reminded me of some fascinating quotes from the oft-cited 18th century father of modern "free market" economics Adam Smith that I grabbed along with commentary from Berkeley professor Bradford DeLong. In the era of the founding of modern economies, economists had to be psychologists as well as numbers and stats guys. Smith mused on why the great masses of people don't feel more resentment of the rich. Here's DeLong's explanation with Smith's words inset.

The first reason applies to the idle rich. According to Smith:
A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the regret and indignation which they feel for the misfortunes and sufferings of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain must be more agonizing, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations...
We feel this, Smith believes, because we naturally sympathize with others (if he were writing today, he would surely invoke “mirror neurons”). And the more pleasant our thoughts about individuals or groups are, the more we tend to sympathize with them. The fact that the lifestyles of the rich and famous “seem almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state” leads us to “pity…that anything should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! We could even wish them immortal...”

The second reason applies to the hard-working rich, the type of person who:
… devotes himself forever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness....With the most unrelenting industry he labors night and day....serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises....[I]n the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments....he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.... Power and riches....keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death...
In short, on the one hand, we don’t wish to disrupt the perfect felicity of the lifestyles of the rich and famous; on the other hand, we don’t wish to add to the burdens of those who have spent their most precious possession – their time and energy – pursuing baubles. These two arguments are not consistent, but that does not matter. They both have a purchase on our thinking.

Mitt is appealing to the enduring hold of these attitudes -- to whatever residue of (mostly unearned) sympathy for and respect for the work (also usually unmerited) attaches to the rich. But he's finding unexpected resistance in a era in which rawer, uglier resentments are trumping such civil emotions. So he has to simulate a hater and though he can mouth the words, he comes across as inauthentic, a rich boy playing a brawler's game. Newt is more the real thing: vicious, grandiose and ready to kick his opponent when when he's down. And that's what a section of the electorate wants against President Obama, someone who can strike out against the Black usurper with the smooth tongue.

Adam Smith's observations seem to derive from a more civilized context than our current election.

Newt and South Carolinians show Steven Pinker wrong ...

2012-01-22T06:30:00.000-08:00

These days I'm immersed in Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker's enormous and fascinating The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I'm nowhere near ready to write anything thoughtful about the book as whole; getting there may take several weeks more digestion.

But yesterday was not the best day to read the section on what Pinker calls "the rights revolution," to assimilate in his assertion that most racism in contemporary U.S. culture is a a thing of the past. Here's a sample:

The stigmatizing of any attitude that smacks of the dehumanization or demonization of minority groups extends well beyond the polling numbers. It has transformed Western culture, government, sports, and everyday life. … Derogatory racial and ethnic jokes, offensive terms for minority groups, and naive musings about innate racial differences have become taboo in mainstream forums and have ended the careers of several politicians and media figures. Of course, plenty of vicious racism can still be found in the cesspools of the Internet and at the fringes of the political right, but a sharp line divides it from mainstream culture and politics. … The campaign to extirpate any precursor to attitudes that could lead to racial violence has defined the bounds of the thinkable and sayable. …

Apparently not if you are Newt Gingrich and the place is South Carolina.

Beating up on Black reporter Juan Williams for challenging him to disavow the racism embedded in his attacks Barack Obama -- a Kenyan socialist food stamp president according to Newt -- and trumpeting the attacks just won the former House Speaker a nice popular vote victory. And this came even at the end of a week in which one of his ex-wive's claimed he'd demanded an open marriage while already carrying on an affair with wife number three. Newt is riding high. Apparently in his victory speech, he announced

I articulate the deepest held values of the American people.

Let's hope not.

Bathrooms are where our evolutionary ancestry shows

2012-01-21T07:38:00.000-08:00

This clip starts slowly, but it is worth watching.

It's a big privilege if you never have to think about the bathroom.

I'm nearly 65 years old -- and white -- and it still happens to me.

We seem driven to instantly categorize the gender of people we meet. I guess that once had a sort of evolutionary value, having the question "can I make babies with this one?" at the top of our consciousness. And for women, it also had (sometimes has) safety implications -- unknown males are more likely to be dangerous than other females.

Please, if you are a woman and perceive a person whose gender seems in doubt in a women's bathroom, look again before you shriek. You might simply be seeing a person whose way of presenting herself is different from your expectations.

Friday cat blogging: in which an unexpected visitor moves in

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

It began last Tuesday morning, as I began to gather up my things to go to work. I had the sense of a presence at my feet. Odd that -- our last, much loved, cat had left this world in November -- was this a ghost?

It was not. She wandered about, marking the doors and furniture, as if she owned the place. We had never seen her before. We think she'd slipped in when I brought in laundry.

Not wishing to be inhospitable, we accepted her right to be with us, though we were concerned that her regular humans might miss her. We put up flyers around the neighborhood. For two days, no one called.

She showed herself a discerning feline. Like Turtle (pictured at the link), she took to sleeping on my SAFE California Act petitions. Apparently cats want to end death sentences by ballot initiative -- or just like all the paper the campaign generates.

On Thursday, we had our visitor checked for an implanted microchip and learned that her people had filed a "Lost Cat" report. We took her home, sad to see her go. Her name is Pune and she's a well traveled beast, having previously lived in India, Namibia and Germany. We enjoyed her visit.

The United States' internal migrants

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

I loved this book. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration makes the case that Southern black migrants from the rural U.S. South to the urban North between 1914 and the late 1960s should be seen as following an immigrant path just as much as various Europeans or Latinos from south of the border. They were escaping privation and oppression in the Jim Crow states of the old Confederacy; they flocked to hard and sometimes humiliating conditions in their new homes; and they gradually made their peace and their places in their new homes.

Of course they were also different from other migrants to this new world, since their slave ancestors had often arrived before most of their white neighbors and even been the first builders of cities that became their new homes.

Wilkerson follows the story of three individuals: Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster who escaped rural Louisiana, first to join the Black bourgeoisie in Atlanta as a Morehouse man, then to Los Angeles to play the part of the jaunty high roller he'd aspired to be; George Swanson Starling who escaped lynching in the Florida orange groves to become a railway porter who raised a family in New York City; and Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who left sharecropping in Mississippi to raise a family in industrial segregated slums in Chicago. Wilkerson's telling of the life stories of these representative figures is vivid, personal, and utterly gripping. ***A few years back I was hired to write a paper for a think tank that was interested in how new immigrant populations might come into their own as participants in the political process in their new country. I wish I'd had Wilkerson's book then -- her description of how Ida Mae Brandon Gladney became a voter in Chicago is exactly what my research and experience tells me is needed to get newcomers involved.

Ida Mae didn't know what was at stake, but suddenly everyone around her was talking about something she'd never heard of back in Mississippi. The precinct captain for her area, a Mr. Tibbs, had been out in the neighborhood rousing the people to register for the upcoming election. She had seen him and gotten the slip his workers handed out and was curious about all the commotion.

Back home, no one dared talk about such things. She couldn't vote in Mississippi. She never knew where the polls were in Chickasaw County. … Nobody she knew had even tried to vote. Nobody made note of election day whenever it came. It was as if there were an invisible world of voting and elections going on about its business without her.

Now it was 1940, and she was in Chicago. All around her were new arrivals like herself who had never voted before and were just getting the hang of elections after a lifetime of being excluded. Suddenly, the very party and the very apparatus that was ready to kill them if they tried to vote in the South was searching them out and all but carrying them to the polls. To the Democrats in the North, each new arrival from the South was a potential new vote in their column. …

Chicago was a Democratic town, and the Democrats had the means to make the most of this gift to the party. They were counting on the goodwill Roosevelt had engendered among colored people with his New Deal initiatives. Still, the precinct captains took no chances. They went door-to-door to talk up the New Deal and to register the people. They asked them about their kids and jobs and convinced them that the Democrats in the North were different from those in the South. They printed up party slates and passed out palm cards- --political crib notes that would fit in the palm of the hand -- so the people would know whom to vote for when they got inside the booth.

On election day, Ida Mae walked up to the fire station around the corner from her flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash to vote for the first time in her life. The sidewalks were teeming with volunteers to usher neophytes into the station and to the correct sign-in tables. Inside, election judges, clerks, a policeman or two monitored the proceedings.

Ida Mae was not certain what to do. She had never touched an election ballot. She walked in, and a lady came over and directed her to where she should go. Ida Mae stepped inside a polling booth for the first time in her life and drew the curtain behind her. She unfolded the palm card she had been given and tried to remember what the lady had told her about how to punch in her choices for president of the United States and other political offices. It was the first time she would ever have a say in such things.

…What was unthinkable in Mississippi would eventually become so much a part of life in Chicago that Mr. Tibbs would ask Ida Mae to volunteer at the polls the next time. She had a pleasant disposition, and Mr. Tibbs put her to work helping other people learn how to vote. She would stand outside the firehouse, directing newcomers who were clutching their palm cards and looking as puzzled as she had been her first time at the polls.

…'The ballots cast by Ida Mae and other colored migrants up from the South were enough to help give Roosevelt the two percent margin of victory he needed to carry the state of Illinois and, by extension, the United States -- to return him to the White House.

That's still how coming into the process works today, now with new arrivals more than internal migrants. I've organized voter registration at new citizen swearing in ceremonies, sent multilingual canvassers out to immigrant neighborhoods, tried to establish the habits of participation that make for full incorporation in our electoral system. I find that older African Americans, the children of the Great Migration that Wilkerson chronicles, still place a special value on their right and duty to vote.***I did come away from this wonderful book with one quibble. Wilkerson does a good job at making clear the differences between the experience of white southern and eastern European newcomers and blacks who were part of the Great Migration.

On the face of it, they were sociologically alike, mostly landless rural people, put upon by the landed upper classes or harsh autocratic regimes, seeking freedom and autonomy in the northern factory cities of the United States.

But as they made their way into the economies of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other receiving cities, their fortunes diverged. Both groups found themselves ridiculed for their folk ways and accents and suffered backward assumptions about their abilities and intelligence. But with the stroke of a pen, many eastern and southern Europeans and their children could wipe away their ethnicities -- and those limiting assumptions -- by adopting Anglo-Saxon surnames and melting into the world of the more privileged native-born whites. … A name change would have had no effect in masking the ethnicity of black migrants like Ida Mae, George, and Robert. It would have been superfluous, given that their surnames, often inherited from the masters of their forebears, were already Anglo-Saxon. They did not have the option of choosing for themselves a more favored identity. …

And so their experiences came to seem unrecognizable to too many of each set of people.

Wilkerson repeats several times that, because the war prevented cross-ocean travel, World War I (1914-18) opened industrial jobs to black migrants that previously would have been filled with Europeans. But she never discusses the fact that opportunities in factory labor for poor Europeans might have revived after that war if the United States had not adopted extremely restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s. The demand for industrial labor continued as industries expanded -- the hardest and dirtiest of the new jobs became the domain of southern black migrants. The shape of the Great Migration almost certainly was influenced by restrictionist and nativist policies that (probably inadvertently) benefited African Americans.***Isabel Wilkerson has written a book that should be read in every school in this country if we are to aspire to know who we are. It probably won't be. In our "post-racial" era, we mostly don't want to know.

But I suspect generations of African Americans will periodically rediscover this book and see in it their own almost forgotten family histories. I certainly hope that is true.

It's the free web against SOPA today

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

According to Gizmodo, the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act means

If the government decides any part of [your] site infringes on copyright and proves it in court? Poof. Your digital life is gone, and you can't get it back.

Yes, just the sort of thing that invites abuse.

Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic and Craigslist are blacked out today in protest. Let your Congresscritters know that you care ...

Annals of the anthropocene: Putting us in our place

2012-01-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

The History of Earth As A Clock

Via Do Humans Matter.

Mitt Romney: straightest straight man to run for president recently

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

Lee Siegel's opinion piece on how Mitt Rommey "is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory" has been rattling around in my brain for several days now. Time to get some thoughts out.

Siegel explains his observation:

I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

… he offers to [some] people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate.

This rings true, but I think there is even more going on there. Romney feels to me like the straightest candidate for president we're had in a long time. I mean straightest not in the contemporary sense of heterosexual, but in the old 60s youth culture sense, as not "with it," a fuddy-duddy, out of touch with the animating currents in the country's life.

It takes some doing to think back to a candidate who was as straight in this sense as Romney. John McCain's sole attractive attribute, his POW history, set him apart from such ordinariness. George W.'s drinking history as well as his cowboy pose also cut him off from the storybook conventionality of the truly straight. Recent Democrats have tried to avoid being labelled straight: John Kerry to escape being held elite and effete; Bill Clinton because seeming a charming scoundrel offered his best path to the country's heart. Tipper Gore's crusade against pop music lyrics might have carried Al Gore far into straightness if he hadn't insisted on embracing science, whether in climate studies or through the internet.

The last set of passably straight presidential candidates we've had were Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush, though the latter was running a con to disguise a complex establishment pedigree more substantial than John Kerry's. And Dukakis was a Greek, after all ...

Part of Romney's straightness involves living aloof from simple fact that this is not a white people's country anymore -- we come in many colors and the country works best when all of us (including white folks) value some historic traditions while being enriched by our neighbor's differences. Romney thinks he can stigmatize blacks as dependent on food stamps and Spanish speakers as mere illegals and not alienate all those of us including whites who live in a more culturally rich environment. He's got many of us wrong in that.

Romney is also straight in that he implicitly presents himself as the embodiment of perfect patriarchy and hetero-normativity. No deviations here from the fairy tale image of this perfect 50s family.

The Siegel piece was illustrated with this:

It reminded me of this from Chief Justice John Roberts' introduction to the nation:

Evidently there's some part of our population which revels in images of Barbie and Ken doll-like perfection in their rulers.

But really, the 50s are so over. They weren't really so wonderful as Romney-ites remember them being. They were a lousy time for people of color, until folks got uppity and started demanding respect and even sitting in. Many women felt themselves trapped in suburban nuclear family tableaux and ran for the exits when birth control, access to more jobs, and no fault divorce finally gave them an out.Why even queers first organized in that dreary decade!

Earth to Mitt: that world is gone. We certainly miss the prosperity that being the only power left standing at the end of World War II gave us, but that's gone for good. This has to be a more complicated, more subtle, and more diverse country. Nostalgia just won't serve though we've got a political party devoted to little else, plus a dose of free-floating resentment and envy of those of their fellow citizens who've managed to make peace with changes. Even in a recession, it is hard to believe a majority of us want to remain chained to a world that never was. The 2012 election may tell.

Vets for Peace counter hate at home

2012-01-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

On the holiday celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it seems appropriate to highlight citizens of the United States standing up for our better natures. Here's a story from Lowell, Massachusetts reported by MSNBC.

A group of veterans held an “eat-in” at an immigrant-owned restaurant to show support for the eatery after a man threw a 20-pound building stone through the front window, frightening the family and raising fears that they were the target of a hate crime.

Some 40 to 50 vets -- from World War II, Vietnam, the Korean war and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq -- turned up at the Babylon Restaurant in downtown Lowell, Mass., on Tuesday night.

The Al-Zubaydi family, who came to the U.S. in October 2010 from Uzbekistan, opened Babylon about seven months ago. Like other immigrants, they were simply trying to make their way in their new American home, said Patrick Scanlon, a Vietnam veteran and local coordinator of Veterans for Peace.

…About 50 Iraqi families live in Lowell, said Scanlon. He noted other attacks on Iraqis, including a man who had two rocks thrown through his windows and a woman wearing a head covering being called "terrorist" by a man as she walked home from a supermarket.

…Leyla Al-Zubaydi said the family also doesn't believe it was a random attack. She said the family was trying to recover after such a scary episode, but the outpouring of support from the veterans renewed their confidence in the local community.

Read the whole thing.

How about those 49ers?

2012-01-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

You probably have to have been a long time fan to appreciate what the local gladiators' return to respectability means to many in this city. For about 20 years we could count on knowing, however dreary or wrong-headed the nation's direction seemed, the boys would make the playoffs, have a strong showing, even go on to the Super Bowl. The team had an enthusiastic, if legally compromised, owner who made sure they got what they needed. Then, after a Louisiana bribery and gambling scandal, Eddie DeBartolo had to cede control to his respectable corporate sister -- and the 49ers sank into mediocrity.

Now they seem to be back. Fans will remain anxious for a long time -- will the current young DeBartolo screw it up again? Can Coach Harbaugh continue to get miracles out of a quarterback that everyone else had given up on? Only time will tell, but for this week, it's a great time to be a fan.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Mono Lake park saved

2012-01-14T07:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes good things happen. I've written previously about the folly and shame of chipping away at California's tax shortfall by closing state parks.

In December, the Mono Lake Tufa State Nature Reserve received a reprieve. Mono Lake is a vast volcanic basin east of the Sierras whose alkaline waters "grow" the strange calcium-carbonate castles named "tufas."

Seeing them makes you wonder if you've landed on the moon. Good for California and the lake's local champions for stopping the drive to close the park and let this unique environment decay.

Friday cat blogging: a feline campaign contribution

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

Turtle is guarding a stack of petitions for the SAFE California Act, a proposed initiative which will shut down death row and replace the death penalty with life without parole. We are currently collecting 750000 signatures to put it on the ballot. Her person toils on the campaign; Turtle superintends. Since I too am working on the campaign and we are coming down to crunch time, I see a lot of Turtle's person, maybe sometimes more than Turtle does.

This weekend we'll be honoring Dr. King by collecting signatures at holiday events. Californians, click this SAFE California link to find out more or get involved.

Another point about drifting toward a visible war on Iran …

2012-01-12T10:17:00.000-08:00

If President Obama wants to get re-elected, preventing such a war will do him a lot more good than kowtowing to the Israel lobby. Consider this from Jared Bernstein.

* A $10 increase in the cost of oil leads to about 25 cents more per gallon at the pump.
*Every extra penny at the pump takes around a billion dollars from disposable income for other consumption.
*That same $10 increase, if sustained for a year, shaves about 0.25 basis points (one-quarter of a percentage point) off of real GDP growth.
*Adding rules of thumb, for each percentage point that real GDP grows below trend, with trend around 2.5%, the unemployment rate goes up a half a percentage point.

How would Iran respond to further threats on its economy or attacks on its facilities? Most likely by disrupting or cutting back on the availability of the most valuable resource it has controls. This isn't highbrow game theory; it is just common sense.

A cutback in world oil supply would raise prices which would stall or crash the U.S. economy. That would probably get us Mitt Romney as President and he has pretty much vowed that he'll attack Iran rather let that country develop a nuclear weapon. Not a good result for either the United States or Iran, but one which the power players seem determined to edge up to.

Is war on Iran the next course?

2012-01-12T05:30:00.000-08:00

Has anyone noticed that the U.S. seems to be drifting toward an open war on Iran? It seems that any such thing should be getting a little more public discussion than we've seen recently -- instead we have the Mitt, Newt and Ron show to distract us.

Today's news was that someone had blown up (yet another) Iranian nuclear scientist in his home city. Iran blames Israel and the United States. The U.S. State Department says the equivalent of "not us." But it's an open secret that we're involved, along with Israel, in secret hostilities, trying to force Iran's rulers to back off nuclear development.

Like the drone strikes that the Obama administration has embraced as a core tactic against Al Qaeda, the multifaceted covert campaign against Iran has appeared to offer an alternative to war. But at most it has slowed, not halted, Iran’s enrichment of uranium, a potential fuel for a nuclear weapon. And some skeptics believe that it may harden Iran’s resolve or set a dangerous precedent for a strategy that could be used against the United States and its allies.

Well, yeah -- how would we like it if a foreign government was assassinating U.S. scientists with only the most minimal pretense of denial? Somehow I think we'd scream bloody murder about "terrorism" -- and most likely retaliate.

It's seldom mentioned that our own spooks don't believe that Iran is committed to a bomb. Just last week the Secretary of Defense said as much.

In saying that the United States did not have any evidence that Iran was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, Mr. Panetta was hewing closely to the conclusions the often fractious American intelligence agencies agreed upon in 2007 and again in 2010. Two National Intelligence Estimates, designed to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community, concluded that Iranian leaders had made no political decision yet to build an actual weapon. Instead, they described a series of steps that would take Iran right up to that line — and position it to assemble a weapon fairly quickly if a decision to do so were made.

Iran's rulers believe, realistically, that they are under permanent threat from aggressive enemies who employ terrorism against them. It shouldn't be surprising that they want the option of building a weapon that seemingly automatically makes the impoverished and dysfunctional (think North Korea and Pakistan) able to thumb their noses at real powers. Here's Tony Karon blogging for Time on what drives Iranian decisions:

For a relatively weak state (Fareed Zakaria once noted in response to the ”its 1938 and Iran is Nazi Germany” hysteria touted by some, that by measure of the global military balance of 1938 Iran would be the equivalent of Rumania) and a state ideologically at odds with far more powerful enemies, nuclear weapons … provide a gold-plated insurance policy. … [T]he fate of leaders like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi who gave up their own nuclear programs speaks for itself.

Yet our rulers slouch toward war. Republicans posture, ignoring the lessons of their last set of failed Middle Eastern adventures and trying to force the administration into an ever more bellicose posture. The administration seems to have allowed itself to be boxed in by its domestic enemies and the Israel lobby into proving, again, that it can be tough. A couple of seasoned diplomats, William H. Luers and Thomas R. Pickering, recently described what passes for "thinking" in Washington.

Military action is becoming the seemingly fail-safe solution for the United States to deal with real and imagined security problems. The uncertain and intellectually demanding ways of diplomacy are seen as “unmanly” and tedious — likely to involve compromise or even “appeasement.” President Obama made efforts to engage Iranian leaders his first year in office but, when rebuffed, turned in a different direction. …

The slow, elusive diplomatic process to achieve U.S. objectives does not provide the sound-bite satisfaction of military threats or action. Multiple, creative efforts to engage Iran’s leaders and provide a dignified exit from the corner in which the world community has placed them could achieve more durable solutions at a far lower cost. It is a lesson that those urging military action against Iran have failed to learn.

This failure of insight would be pathetic if it weren't literally murderous. Our rulers seem to believe they can play at bluster but risk no actual consequences. But do they really have that sort of control over their adversary's reactions? Do they share their "allies" objectives? (They may not entirely; see Atlantic editor Robert Wright on why Israel wants a war.)

Do the people of the U.S. get any say in all this or will our military rain destruction on another country without any meaningful input from us? Once again, will we have to pay for our rulers' misjudgements? It's time for some citizen input on war, peace and where we are going.

Warming Wednesdays: autos arrive

2012-01-11T06:57:00.000-08:00

Apparently we don't crave fuel efficient cars, recession or no. From the big Detroit auto show:

Hybrid sales waned as gasoline prices ebbed in 2011, declining to 2.2 percent of the market from 2.4 percent a year earlier, according to the research firm LMC Automotive. Meanwhile, sales of the Nissan Leaf electric car and the Chevrolet Volt plug-in each fell short of expectations.

Analysts do not expect the segment to grow significantly this year: the combination of gas prices below $4 a gallon and higher upfront costs for the cars is not attracting consumers.
New York Times, January 9, 2012

I find this surprising -- I see scads of hybrids here in northern California. Many people I know drive various hybrid models and love them.

And, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, new fuel economy standards that the Obama administration has negotiated with automakers will make a real dent in our climate changing carbon emissions.

Once fully implemented, the new standards will require automakers to produce vehicles that emit roughly half the global warming emissions produced by today’s new automobiles. In 2030 alone, that will keep 290 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released into our atmosphere annually—equivalent to taking more than 40 million of today's cars and trucks off the road for an entire year. In terms of fuel economy, the standards will cut U.S. oil consumption in 2030 by 1.5 million barrels of oil per day.

This is apparently significant. (The linked article also explains one of the life's minor mysteries: why the miles per gallon stickers on new cars bear so little relation to the kind of real life gas mileage a model gets.)

And my state of California has issued rules that go the federal rules one better. Of necessity, we've always led on trying to reduce smog. Every time I go to Los Angeles, I fantasize about how beautiful the setting would be if you could reliably see the adjacent mountains.

Amid all this auto news, a sad note: Ford is apparently discontinuing my much loved Escape Hybrid. Damn. I finally found a car that meets my main criteria: reasonably clean and efficient and something you step up into. I loathe trying to bend into a pretzel to crawl into a car. Oh well, I only bought Wowser last year and I usually drive cars for a decade or more, so who knows what they'll be offering by the time I have to replace her. All I feel sure of is that I'll still live in a society in which some kind of car is a necessity, sadly for the planet.

One more note about New Hampshire

2012-01-10T05:30:00.000-08:00

I love the state, but it is not much like the United States I live in. This makes it an odd place to have accreted so much influence in Presidential politics.

H/t The Monkey Cage.

New Hampshire time

2012-01-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

If it's primary season, it's Red Arrow Diner time in Manchester, NH. In primary season, a stop here is mandatory for the contenders.

It was here, in 2010, that I first understood that President Barack Obama might be in big trouble.

When I had passed through Manchester in the winter of 2008, weeks after the "first in the nation" primary, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama's smiling mugs were among the many photos of passing politicians on the walls.

By the summer of 2010, there were only Republicans pictured -- uh oh, recession and unemployment were taking their toll. Today, Mitt Romney appears prominently on the clip on the diner's website.

TPM created one of their 100 second video campaign summaries around Republican candidates' visits to New Hampshire diners.

Happily, the Red Arrow actually serves a very tasty and carefully cooked breakfast. This is no greasy spoon. I doubt the candidates have the energy left to enjoy eating by now.

Supremes rush toward right-wing precipice

2012-01-09T06:52:00.000-08:00

The line in the news article was matter of fact:

… the high court ruled 5 to 4 along ideological lines …
New York Times, January 7

We live in a country in which we take for granted that judges simply implement their political views and call the result law. We once mocked countries unfortunately enough to have "judicial systems" that were routinely available for sale to the highest bidder (usually foreign companies) --we called them "Banana Republics." It gets harder and harder to see much difference between what happens in our Supreme Court and in those unfortunate environs.

Some instances from the Supreme Court::

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have openly participated in political strategy conferences sponsored by right wing billionaires.

Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Samuel Alito have lent themselves to fundraisers for right wing causes.

Perhaps most egregiously, Justice Thomas' wife was a paid lobbyist against the health care reform on which he will rule in the spring.

And we have a Chief Justice who says this is all hunky dory -- Supreme Court justices don't need to adhere to the same code of ethics that governs lesser beings on lower courts. If lower court justices engaged in such naked politicking, they'd be subject to charges under the federal judicial Code of Conduct -- though with a court like the one we have, it's hard to know whether anything would come of bringing charges.

The Alliance for Justice has produced a strong video about these issues available here.

As we advance into the 2012 political horserace season, progressives are going to be bombarded with messages that we have to get behind President Obama and other Democrats who seem hardly less bought-and-paid-for servants of the 1 percent than the Republican alternative. Exhibit A will be Justice Ruth Bader Ginzberg's upcoming 79th birthday and the danger that a court already friendly to plutocrats will become irrevocably so. Those warnings are something we probably have to heed if we want to live to fight another day. It will be nose-holding time again.

The Washington Monthly has jumped the gun on the genre with a terrific six part feature on "What if Obama loses? Imagining the consequences of a GOP victory." It's properly scary, nowhere more so than in the article about the courts. Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick chronicles "the rise of a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state." The long Republican effort to make the judiciary an instrument to implement right wing policy preferences is nearly complete -- Democrats have been unfocused or just absent when it came to appointing judges who might be open to more equitable legal outcomes.

If you care about the future of abortion rights, stem cell research, worker protections, the death penalty, environmental regulation, torture, presidential power, warrantless surveillance, or any number of other issues, it’s worth recalling that the last stop on the answer to each of those matters will probably be before someone in a black robe.

Go read the whole thing. It is short and cogent.

One year ago today ...

2012-01-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

You too can work against crazy gun violence. Learn how here. This is a very powerful video.

You can also look in on events created by Beyond Tucson as the community strives to heal in the wake of the shootings of their Congresswoman and her constituents.

Saturday scenes and scenery: you never know what you'll see on the street

2012-01-07T07:16:00.000-08:00

There it is, parked as if it were the most normal sight in the world.

But where do you stand to launch the ball?

I must capture this moment ...

Beyond spacious skies …

2012-01-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

I'm always loved knowing that one of the country's iconic patriotic songs, "America the Beautiful," was written by a 19th century lesbian and feminist, Katharine Lee Bates.

Now Paul Krugman passes on that there is a forgotten third verse that denounced the Robber Barons of Bate's day.

America! America! 
God shed his grace on thee 
Till selfish gain no longer stain
 The banner of the free!

Take that Mitt Romney -- apparently the mergers and acquisitions candidate is fond of the song.

Maybe some of the Occupiers should try singing that at many contemporary pols when they go all patriotic on us.

Photo is of the view from the summit of Bunsen Peak in Yellowstone National Park, looking northeast toward the Absarokas mountain range.

Friday critter blogging

2012-01-06T07:03:00.000-08:00

No tempest here, just lovely tea at lunch with colleagues yesterday. Busy today ... perhaps more later.

L A is a great big freeway ...

2012-01-05T17:26:00.000-08:00

But at 9:30 am today, an accident had blocked the north bound lanes of the 5 and slowed the south bound lanes to a crawl.

The result was novel emptiness.

Republican clown show

2012-01-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

This is a political blog. Therefore I'm supposed to have an opinion about the Republican clown show just concluded in Iowa. Here's all I can manage: the clown show must eventually end in the nomination of Mitt Romney, even though no one but Mitt Romney really wants Mitt Romney. Its hard to even muster a serious opinion about people and a process so utterly without responsible content.

On the horse race level, Romney's "victory" with no more votes than he recieved in 2008 which seems properly considered a humiliation. I mean, the guy has been running for President for over 4 years and he can't do any better?

But dammit, I'm not interested in the horserace; I'm interested in the future of my country and the world. And these people are clowns at their best. At their worst, they are self-seeking liars, bigots, and proud ignoramuses. Among the Republicans, the only semi-plausible candidate is a

dishonest flip-flopper who only discovered his right-wing beliefs when pollsters told him it would advance his ambitions.
Steve Benen

This is what a political party becomes when it collects all the people who hate government (and sometimes others and even each other.) No wonder the nitwits who seek to lead it into battle don't seem remotely plausible candidates to lead the nation.

Warming Wednesdays: are we (am I) ready for the electric car?

2012-01-04T07:05:00.000-08:00

It's not a gas pump. It may soon become ubiquitous. You can find the nearest one here.

San Francisco has quite a few; I think their installation may have been assisted by Federal stimulus money.

When I noticed this one, a city owned car was hooked up to it.

People who know about this kind of thing maintain that electric cars really are less polluting and that wide adoption would push less carbon into the atmosphere. I have to wonder about that last, given our dependence on burning coal for electricity production, but I'll take it on faith. Here are Jay Tankersley and Ben Holland from the Rocky Mountain Institute:

If widely adopted, electric vehicles could improve air quality, reduce dependence on oil, and spur domestic economic development. …

… traditional hybrid cars account for only about 2.0 percent of 2011 sales in the U.S. through October. For electric vehicles to have their full impact, the adoption of this technology must leapfrog that figure.

“History tells us it took hybrid sales over six years to reach a mass market tipping point,” says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan Americas. “We see customer demand reach the same level for electric vehicles in half the time.”

The advantage of an electric vehicle over another alternatively fueled vehicle, such as a hydrogen fuel cell or natural gas vehicle, is that the infrastructure necessary to power them is largely available. Drivers can plug their cars into their home, or in a charging station at their apartment complex, and leave for work with a fully “fueled” vehicle every morning. And for most trips, publicly available charging stations will not be vital.

So maybe it's not whether we have enough charging stations that will determine whether we move to electric cars.

These authors name other obstacles:

Although the vast majority of U.S. drivers travel less than 40 miles a day (a statistic mirrored by recent Nissan Leaf driver data), many car buyers want the option to drive across the country.

I had to cringe when I read that. That's exactly how I feel: access to a roadtrip-suitable car is a fantasy of freedom for me. When I was young, I drove back and forth across the country, soaking in its wonders and pain. The idea that I might be confined to 40 miles between plugs feels like forced confinement. But what if that attitude is unsustainably anti-social? Or can industrial designers find compromises that satisfy both individual freedom and the unquestionable need for less polluting, less congesting transportation, especially in cities? Or does my "see the USA" generation simply need to die off?

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

On the powers of government

2012-01-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

Here's a story usually published in some form at the beginning of each year:

Eight states will ring in the New Year with a higher minimum wage, under state laws that require wage floors to keep apace with inflation. San Francisco, one of the few cities that sets its own minimum wage above the federal level, is also raising wages for the lowest-paid workers in the new year. It will become the first big city in the country to require companies to pay their workers more than $10 an hour.

That sign in the picture above is now obsolete.

I imagine most people reading this blog don't think much about minimum wages. I remain grateful that the Feds, states and cities try to set a floor. There needs to be some generally recognized level below which workers' compensation can be named as exploitative and just plain wrong. Perhaps surprisingly, I've observed that, however difficult efforts to raise minimum wages are in legislative settings, they pass pretty easily once put on the ballot. I suspect that the class of persons who vote can't imagine living on the pittance that is the "minimum" -- and few of them own restaurants or run employment services for home health aides trying to pay as little as possible.

In a year in which we are facing a Supreme Court decision on whether the Federal government can create a mandatory system of (semi-) universal health care provision, it might be instructive to look back at how minimum wages came to be. I'm drawing here on Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, a volume I recently wrote about here.

During the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the question of whether governments, state and federal, could mandate minimum wages repeatedly reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled a resounding "no" -- neither level of government was to be allowed the legal authority to tell business owners what to pay their workers. These decisions were emblematic of the great conflict of the era: could government use its powers to try to create a stable and sustainable economy or was it barred from meddling with property? FDR responded to these decisions with what he called a plan for "court reform" -- he would add judges to the Supreme Court, presumably judges who would approve the New Deal's economic agenda. Opponents won the war of political spin -- the plan is remembered as "court-packing" and was repudiated even by Roosevelt's friends. But then something surprising happened. David M. Kennedy's volume takes up the story:

Congress, including large elements of the president's own party, was by now in open rebellion against the Court-reform plan. The Court itself delivered the killing blows, though in laying Roosevelt's plan to rest it also opened a new constitutional era. On Easter Monday, March 29, the Court handed down an opinion in a case that at once tolled the knell for Roosevelt's proposal, even as it heralded the dawn of a judicial revolution. Like many great cases, this one had its origins in the commonest grit of everyday life. Elsie Parrish was a chambermaid who had swept rugs and cleaned toilets for nearly two years in the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, a dusty farm town on the Columbia River plateau. Upon her discharge in 1935, she asked for $216.19 in back pay, which she was owed under the terms of a Washington State minimum wage aw enacted in 1913. West Coast Hotel Corporation, the Cascadian's parent company, offered to settle for seventeen dollars. Elsie Parrish sued for the full amount. The corporation thereupon challenged the constitutionality of the Washington law.

Chief Justice Hughes himself delivered the majority opinion in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. The Court had decided in favor of Elsie Parrish, Hughes declared, speaking with Olympian authority in language that signaled a new willingness to defer to legislatures on economic matters. Slowly, the significance of Hughes's pronouncement sank in. Astonishingly, the justices had voted by a five-to-four majority to uphold the Washington State minimum wage law -- a statute effectively identical to the New York law that the same Court had invalidated by the same margin in Tipaldo only a year earlier!

The decision in Parrish amounted to "the greatest constitutional somersault in history," declared one commentator. "On Easter Sunday," said another, "state minimum wage laws were unconstitutional, but about noon on Easter Monday, these laws were constitutional." …Parrish dealt with a state law, not a federal one, but it proved a fateful harbinger. …The Wagner Act's [labor relations act] constitutionality depended on a broad construction of the commerce power, which the Court had been unwilling to recognize in its Schechter and Guffey Coal Act decisions. Now Hughes ignored those precedents, enunciated just months earlier by the same Court, and ruled that the Wagner Act fell within a constitutionally legitimate definition of the commerce power. …Just six weeks later, the same majority … voted to uphold the unemployment insurance features of the Social Security Act, and the even more comfortable majority of seven to two sustained the act's old-age pension provisions.

Roosevelt didn't have to pack the Court; the justices changed their minds. I find it improbable that our contemporary, oh-so-political, Supreme Court will put aside anti-government shibboleths in order to understand the Constitution is a way that allows government intervention in health care. But I could be wrong. Linda Greenhouse who knows more about the Supreme Court than most anyone after covering it for the New York Times for decades, dares predict that the justices will not narrow the government's powers in order to strike out against Obamacare. We'll see, won't we?

UPDATE: Here's this year's San Francisco Minimum Wage announcement:

How about those 49ers?

2012-01-02T14:25:00.000-08:00

Muralists pose in front of their new creation at 23rd Street and Mission.

I often tell people that San Francisco progressives survived the Reagan-Bush I era by cheering for the 49ers. Perhaps we can recapture some of that meaningless delight watching our gladiators in this decade.

Besides the '9ers' playoff berth, we can also celebrate that the Dallas Cowboys no longer can claim to be "America's team." These days, more of us choose the publicly owned Green Bay Packers over Jerry Jones' prize 'Boys.

One last day of college football …

2012-01-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

Oh, I know, "BCS bowls" and a hypothetical "national championship" drag on for another week -- but I'm a traditionalist. New Years Day marks the end of the college season, whatever the TV networks and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) may be selling.

Before I go couch-potato myself in front of super-sized young men beating each other up gracefully, I wanted to share some of the many links I've collected this year about the "sport." (And no, none of them are about pedophilia hiding in the showers of prestigious institutions -- that's a "sick men meet self-satisfied institutions" problem, not a football problem.)

Historian Taylor Branch started the season off truthfully with "The Shame of College Sports" in The Atlantic. His charges against the system are explosive:

... after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.

The NCAA today is in many ways a classic cartel. Efforts to reform it—most notably by the three Knight Commissions over the course of 20 years—have, while making changes around the edges, been largely fruitless. The time has come for a major overhaul. And whether the powers that be like it or not, big changes are coming. Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust. Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.

My emphasis. Read it all.

And yes, the system has a racial component that is obvious on every TV screen. Watching the other day, a friend commented "there are a lot more old white guy coaches in the colleges than in the pros, right?" I don't have the figures, but it sure looks that way. Professional teams have to at least interview Black coaches and sometimes hire them; colleges look to be led most often by professional "good old boys."

At the end of the season, in the New York Times, business columnist Joe Nocera tried to envision how college football could be organized more equitably.

There are five elements to my plan. The first is a modified free-market approach to recruiting college players. Instead of sweet-talking recruits, college coaches will instead offer athletes real contracts, just as professional teams do. …

The second element is a salary cap for every team, along with a minimum annual salary for every scholarship athlete. The salary caps I have in mind are pretty low, all things considered: $3 million for the salaries for the football team. …

Every player who stays in school for four years would also get an additional two-year scholarship, which he could use either to complete his bachelor’s or get a master’s degree. That’s the third element. …

The fourth: Each player would have lifetime health insurance.

And the fifth: An organization would be created to represent both current and former college athletes. It may well turn out to be that this body takes on the form of a players’ union, since a salary cap is illegal under antitrust law unless it is part of a collective-bargaining agreement.

That's right: college football players need an institutional voice of their own as well as (probably) legislation that limits the exploitation that institutions of "higher learning" may engage in.

I consider myself knowledgeable about the game and its structures, but until this year I'd suppressed consciousness of the central fact college athletes' lives: "scholarships" are granted in one-year increments. A dissatisfied coach can throw a kid out of college at any time, if, in the coach's opinion, he slacks off on training, or doesn't develop as expected, or even gets too absorbed in scholastics. Athletic scholarships are given to win prestige and money for the institutions, not to help athletes prepare for life. The system is more than a little disgusting.***Yet like so many, I love to watch college football. The athletes are capable of such amazing and graceful feats of controlled savagery; in the best games, they appear to care so much about winning and losing. It's grand spectacle. But pay the athletes!

Occupy the new year

2012-01-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

As we walked dark streets from the train station toward our friends' New Years gathering, there was this:Seeing it, I was reminded of this:

TERRY GROSS: I wonder what your reaction is to seeing the Occupy movement in the United States take hold, inspired in part by the Arab uprisings.

[NEW YORK TIMES CORRESPONDENT] ANTHONY SHADID [on a brief U.S. holiday from his base in Lebanon]: I tell you, this - again, this is something I haven't reported so I'm probably not going to sound - I'm probably not going to offer anything all that insightful, but you know, it does strike me - I think when you look across the Arab world, absolutely, but even elsewhere, this idea of old kind of paradigms coming to an end and that people are searching for something that can represent them better, that's more meaningful to their lives, that somehow maybe transcends these older institutions that have held sway over so many places for so long - interestingly, I mean just as a kind of footnote here, or even, you know, a side note here, is that you often hear this from Islamists. When I was talking to Rashid al-Ghannushi, a very prominent Tunisian Islamist leader, he made the very same point to me, that what he was seeing going on with Occupy Wall Street, with the Arab Spring, was that, you know, people were looking for ideologies that were different.

Of course he was volunteering his ideology as a replacement, but I think that sense of things coming to an end is very powerfully felt in a lot of places right now. And I think that adds to this, you know, the anticipation and anxiety, you know, of what's so often pronounced and what you hear so often in so many places.

Something, many things, aren't working. We want something new. Directions are not yet discernible. After a long patch when institutions seemed immutable -- a season when we tried to manipulate institutions or tinker with their margins -- we want something new. But what that new something will look like, we'll only find out in the living of its birth.

2012 could be an exciting year. Despite the vast inertia of all that is, the year is not likely to bring only what we now imagine.

New year arrives

2011-12-31T07:24:00.000-08:00

Goodbye 2011 and good riddance; hello 2012, what's next?

One down, mostly. One to go, dismally slowly. Future wars to avoid and avert; part of our human condition.

This is what a political opening seized looks like: New Deal history

2011-12-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, I'm always tempted to announce the book I've enjoyed, or admired, or learned most from over the past year. Some years, I resist this silly temptation, but today I won't. My "Best Book" for 2011 was Stanford historian David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.

Thinking about possible choices, I was a little surprised to realize that several grand historical surveys had made the greatest impression on me. This is not how history is supposed to be written by "serious" historians; most academic history digs into a niche in past time, striving for accurate description of details we can never fully know, often getting lost in minutia. Grand sweeping tomes seem excessively ambitious, a dangerously pretentious over-reach. One of the attractions of Kennedy's book is that he dared to chronicle such a long and episodically diverging period and got away with it. At the very least, it would have been possible to envision quite separate volumes about domestic concerns from 1929-39 and the World War II years that followed. But he makes them feel a single epoch, just as they were lived. I was often awed by how gracefully he wove in all the themes that a contemporary historian wants to be sure to include -- women's experience, the implications on events of the country's historic racism, the tiny gay minority who occasionally stuck their heads up in this period. This is not easy as the records were created and left by others. ***Over time I'll pull other tidbits from Kennedy's opus to try to get perspective on our own times, but right now I want to share the most significant insight I took away from this volume: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal program was not only an effort to restore employment to pre-Depression levels; he was out to change and stabilize the country's economic and political realities much more broadly. Here's Kennedy explaining:

Why did [Roosevelt] reject Roy Howard's [a newspaper chain owner] counsel that "there can be no real recovery until the fears of business have been allayed" and instead insist on gratuitously provoking business and thickening its anxiety? Those questions elude easy answers if… one assumes that economic recovery was Roosevelt's highest priority. But if one recognizes that lasting social reform and durable political realignment were at least equally important items on Roosevelt's agenda, then some of the mystery lifts.

I report that and think -- well, isn't that obvious? No it is not. Neither Barack Obama nor his critics seem to be responding to the Lesser Depression with this level of ambition. The 2009 stimulus and subsequent muddled economic pump-priming are aimed at restoring the status quo from before the bubble of the 00s, not rebuilding something stronger, fairer and better. Pressures -- the 99 percent movement and acknowledgment of rising inequality -- are mounting, but there's no sign that elites yet feel they have no choice but to encourage a new plateau of stability.

It's worth following Kennedy's description of how Roosevelt moved from plugging holes as banks collapsed in the first days of his administration to pushing through a program for long term economic stability. A significant feature was something we're not even considering these day: there was a great mass of people for whom the Depression was nothing new, just as the Lesser Depression is today, though since Bill Clinton we've learned not to even mention the perennially poor. Eleanor Roosevelt's reporter friend was sent out to chronicle life in the country outside the bright lights of the big cities -- Washington could do with some of that today.

As Lorena Hickok's travels progressed, she gradually came to acknowledge the sobering reality that for many Americans the Great Depression brought times only a little harder than usual. … The "old poor" were among the Depression's most ravaged victims, but it was not the Depression that had impoverished them. They were the "one-third of a nation" that Franklin Roosevelt would describe in 1937 as chronically "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." By suddenly threatening to push millions of other Americans into their wretched condition, the Depression pried open a narrow window of political opportunity to do something at last on behalf of that long-suffering one third, and in the process to redefine the very character of America.

It took elites awhile, as it has since the financial panic of 2009, to understand that this wasn't just a temporary economic hiccup.

[The President's advisor Harry] Hopkins himself was soon speaking of workers who had passed into "an occupational oblivion from which they will never be rescued by private industry. . . . Until the time comes, if it ever comes," he argued, "when industry and business can absorb all able-bodied workers -- and that time seems to grow more distant with improvements in management and technology -- we shall have with us large numbers of the unemployed. Intelligent people have long since left behind them," Hopkins continued, "the notion that. . . the unemployed will disappear as dramatically as they made their appearance after 1929. . . . For them a security program is the only answer."

In response to gathering pressure from the left (LaFollete, Sinclair Lewis, unions and Communists) and the right (Father Coughlin and Huey Long) Roosevelt pushed through what we think of as the New Deal in the second two years of his first term.

The unifying design of that program took different forms in different sectors of the nation's life, but the overall pattern of the Second New Deal taking shape in 1935 was becoming clear. In the social realm, the dominant motif was security; in the economic realm, regulation (which was security by another name); and in the physical realm, planned development. In all those domains the common objective was stability. No other aspiration more deeply informed the Second New Deal, and no other achievement better represented the New Deal's lasting legacy. Roosevelt now sought not simply recovery, nor merely relief, nor even the perpetual economic growth that would constitute a later generation's social and political holy grail. Roosevelt sought instead a new framework for American life, something "totally other" than what had gone before…, something that would permit the steadying hand of "that organized control we call government" to sustain balance and equity and orderliness throughout American society. Roosevelt's dream was the old progressive dream of wringing order out of chaos, seeking mastery rather than accepting drift, imparting to ordinary Americans at least some measure of the kind of predictability to their lives that was the birthright of the Roosevelts and the class of patrician squires to which they belonged. …It was a dream now brought within reach of realization by that same Depression and by the sense of possibility and the political fluidity it induced.

Will the country ever get there again?***
"Honorable mentions" for 2011's "best book":
Paris 1919
Empire of Liberty
In hard times, history comforts. Somehow our forbears muddled through; we might too.

Keeping on, keeping on

2011-12-29T11:21:00.000-08:00

I'm sure no one cares but me -- yesterday I passed the 1000 running mile mark for the year.

There were costs, but I'll willingly take them.

That missing ad for Lowe's

2011-12-29T05:00:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the big-box hardware chain Lowe's had bowed to an Islamophobic pressure group and pulled its ads from a reality TV show that featured a U.S. Muslim family.

Here's suggested replacement ad, directed by Gregory Bonsignore and starring Rizwan Manji and Parvesh Cheena, both of whom starred in the NBC sitcom Outsourced. Enjoy.

H/t Religion Dispatches.

Line drawings in the 'hood

2011-12-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

He struts about, taking the space.

He pokes his head up to take a look around.

Who is he? I don't know, but the city is more interesting for the adornment.

Laws we could do without

2011-12-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

This week John G. Lawrence, who involuntarily lent his name the Supreme Court decision that legalized consensual, private gay sex in 2003, died privately as he had lived. Lawrence and his friend Tyron Garner had their bedroom invaded by Texas police and were dragged off to the station in their underwear to be convicted of the misdemeanor sodomy in 1998. According the Lawrence's obituary, Lawrence was not an activist, just pissed off at how he was treated. His name ended up on the decision that legalized the ordinary lives of LGBT people.

A significant fact about this landmark case seldom mentioned then or even now is obvious in this picture of Garner and Lawrence celebrating the Supreme Court decision with a supporter. Would Texas police have invoked the sodomy law if the couple had been of the same race? There's no way to know, but in 1998 prosecutions for "sodomy" were already few and far between.

The obituary quotes Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the case:

The U.S. Constitution's framers "knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress," Kennedy wrote.

That got me to thinking -- what current laws will look to future generations as no longer "necessary and proper," but instead wrong-headed and oppressive? Naturally my nominations reflect my politics and I may be oblivious to some possibilities, but here's what came to mind:

Criminalization of small quantities of recreational drugs. Legalizing marijuana is not my cause, but prohibition has failed. There must be a better approach to the reality that some people don't seem to be able to use drugs responsibly than a bloated prison system and enriching illegal drug dealers.

Powerful guns in the hands of private citizens. Target shooting and hunting are sports, but no ordinary individual needs to own automatic weapons whose only function is to kill other humans. Law enforcement would have less justification for its heavy armament and tank vehicles if there were less high-powered weaponry floating around. A New York Times article this morning points out that "typical permit holder — middle-age white men — are not usually major drivers of violent crime." Did they ask any women who they feared with guns? I wouldn't be surprised if "middle-age white men" weren't right up there among those feared.

The many private property rights that currently trump protection of the environment. Our cavalier attitude -- if we own it, we can do what we like with it -- is an artifact of a resource rich and sparsely inhabited planet that no longer exists. Law is going to have to enforce responsibility on individuals to protect the commons. If we can't find a way to do that, our societies will perish.

The death penalty. People who commit horrendous offenses must suffer punishment to make society whole, but we can stop ordering their deaths as retribution. State killing fails in its objectives; few find closure, no good thing is created, at great cost and social trauma. Let's stop doing it.

What suggestions for conventional yet wrong-headed laws come to mind for readers?

In praise of public defenders

2011-12-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

Since I'm working these days on the initiative to end death sentences in California, I'm more than usually aware of the inequities in our criminal justice system. Despite the earnest efforts of courts and lawyers (at least most of them, most of the time), the legal system is neither efficient or reliably fair.

A New York Times editorial reports on a study of one aspect of this that confirmed everything I've observed.

[A Philadelphia] study examined murder cases of indigent defendants with similar profiles in the city from 1994 to 2005. The conviction rate of clients represented by staff lawyers working for the public defender association, a nonprofit organization that the city pays for its services, was 19 percent lower than those represented by court-appointed lawyers working alone. Their expected time served in prison was 24 percent lower, and they were far less likely to get a life sentence.

Philadelphia’s public defenders, who are randomly assigned to represent one out of every five indigent defendants accused of murder, are paid decent salaries, have money to hire expert witnesses and work in experienced teams. Court-appointed lawyers, representing the rest, are poorly paid, tend to take on more cases than they can handle and generally practice without feedback from other lawyers. As a result, the study concludes, defendants with court-appointed lawyers often get inadequate counsel, in violation of the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, and are vulnerable to greater punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

It's as if the city of Philadelphia had set up a scientific experiment to discern what method of providing lawyers to the poor achieved better results -- and the results are in.

But wouldn't providing better legal representation cost a lot of money? Well perhaps, but we are talking about depriving people of their freedom, so we ought to get it right. And the same study suggests the cost may not be so large as we intuitively think.

... if the state helped to improve the quality of counsel, it would achieve fairer outcomes, and possibly reduce prison costs by over $200 million. The citizens of Pennsylvania would benefit, as well as the indigent defendants.

All this accords with what I've seen when friends ended up before the courts; see a longer description here. Overworked public defenders do a very professional job of representing people who've tumbled into the junkyard of society; we need more, not less, of them.

If animals could talk ...

2011-12-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

There's an enduring and endearing legend in European folklore that on Christmas Eve, in commemoration of the Event in the stable, animals for one night possess human speech.

It is said that humans do not want to actually hear what the animals are saying because, even though they have the gift of speech just one day a year, they usually don’t have many kind things to say about their human masters.

Temple Grandin, writing with Catherine Johnson, in Animals in Translation offers a different window into what animals might be saying if they could speak and we could understand.

Temple Grandin is a scientific student of animal behavior whose prescriptions have become the standard for large scale animal farming in the United States -- she credits being autistic with helping her make sense of what she observes in animal behavior. Here's how she explains:

Animals in Translation comes out of the forty years I've spent with animals. It's different from any other book I've read about animals, mostly because I'm different from every other professional who works with animals. Autistic people can think the way animals think. Of course, we also think the way people think -- we aren't that different from normal humans. Autism is a kind of way station on the road from animals to humans, which puts autistic people like me in a perfect position to translate "animal talk" into English. I can tell people why their animals are doing the things they do.

Grandin has a lot to tell us. Anyone at all interested in animal behavior will be interested in this book, though she seems to me more attuned to dogs and large animals than the critters I see more of in my life that is, domestic cats. Don't I wish I knw what they were thinking. And Grandin sure can make us think. Consider this:

With dolphins, researchers have pretty much reached the conclusion that much of the killing they do serves no evolutionary purpose. Dolphins will slaughter hundreds of porpoises at a time. The only imaginable evolutionary reason for this would be if porpoises compete with dolphins for the same scarce resources, like food. But they don't. Porpoises eat different food than dolphins do. Killing a porpoise doesn't increase a dolphin's chances of surviving and reproducing in any way. The only conclusion is that dolphins kill porpoises because they want to.

I don't know why animal violence happens, but when I read through the research literature I'm struck by the fact that the animals with the most complex brains are also the ones who engage in some of the nastiest behavior. I suspect people and animals probably pay a price for having a complex brain. For one thing, in a complex brain there may be more opportunities for wiring mistakes that will lead to vicious behavior. Another possibility is that since a more complex brain provides greater flexibility of behavior, animals with complex brains become free to develop new behaviors that will be good, bad, or in between. Human beings are capable of great love and sacrifice, but they are also capable of profound cruelty. Maybe animals are, too.

Grandin is so insightful and refreshing for a quality of observation well-exemplified in that passage: she treats human and animal behavior as very similar -- and equal -- mysteries. It's a stance that yields some very thought provoking moments. For example, she tries to answer the human question: are animals as smart as people?

Grandin starts with the observation that humans think smarts equate with language. But there are people who grow to adulthood and function without language -- they are born deaf and live in places where they have no exposure to the language of signs. So she plumbs accounts of the human language-less.

There are probably lots of language-less people in the world. Usually they are people who were born deaf into communities too small to have anyone who spoke sign language, and too poor to have schools for the deaf. But there are also some language-less people who were born into middle-class American homes but were never taught sign. Their brains are normal, and they had normal parents with normal incomes who loved them. They weren't poor and they weren't abused. The only reason they don't have language is that they were never exposed to language.

Susan [Schaller] became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children. A Man Without Words is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. ...

The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn't have the categories of real and fake. … He also didn't have just and unjust as abstract categories. It's not that he didn't have morals or a conscience. Susan doesn't say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, "God. Friend. Burrito buy I."

"He connected God and friend and placed them above burrito buying," Susan writes. "His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial." Later on he asked her what "God" meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word "God" stood for "unseen greatness, apart from and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us."

Although Ildefonso had the idea that there was something greater than the material world, he didn't seem to have any concept of human justice. He had no idea whether it was just or unjust for the green men [immigration police] to catch him and take him back to Mexico; he just knew that's what the green men did, so he needed to stay away from the green men. He was trying to understand the rules, without realizing there were principles behind the rules.

Ildefonso was an innocent. He didn't see all the good and bad that people do, and he didn't know there could be good and bad rules, either. After he learned language, he was sad to learn of the terrible things people do. Animals are innocents, too. Even when animals are treated badly by humans, or see other animals treated badly by humans, they don't seem to develop the abstract categories of just and unjust. Like Ildefonso, animals try to learn the rules without seeming to realize there are principles behind the rules. Since they don't know there are principles underlying the rules they don't realize that the rule itself can be just or unjust, or that a person could be breaking abstract principles of justice. Animals live much closer to the plain facts of the situation.
But the important thing to realize is that Ildefonso's innocence was not the same thing as being stupid, or unable to think. Ildefonso wasn't stupid, and he functioned as a person of normal intelligence and reasoning ability or even above-average intelligence, given that he had been able to immigrate to a foreign country, find work, and manage his life while struggling with a huge disability.

This means that when it comes to animals, we should not equate innocence with lack of intelligence. The fact that a dog never rejects a nasty owner doesn't make him stupid. …

… The lesson from Ildefonso is that although language does make thought more abstract, without language you can think more abstract thoughts than probably anyone has believed possible.

I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don't have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do, too. The details never go away, either. If I think of the word "bowl," I instantly see many different bowls in my imagination, such as a ceramic bowl on my desk, the soup bowl at a restaurant I ate at last Sunday, my aunt's salad bowl with her cat sleeping in it, and the Super Bowl football game. I think that probably happens to animals, too, and 1 wonder what Ildefonso's visual memory was like while he was still a language-less person.

There's a picture: most humans as creatures who constantly filter and organize an onrushing flood of signals, largely unconsciously and apparently effortlessly. I sometimes wonder whether, because we can, we are predisposed to multiply the layers of complexity and and number of stimuli until we either train our faculties to deal with them or our brains and societies frizzle in the attempt. Temple Grandin makes me think about things like that.

San Francisco Christmas Eve: sights of the season

2011-12-24T06:13:00.000-08:00

Joy to all!

Friday cat blogging: Christmas tree edition

2011-12-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

Cats and Christmas trees don't always mix well. I have a vivid recollection of the year in my childhood when our black cat decided the six foot high, tinsel-draped addition to the living room was something to be climbed. Forever after my parents wired trees to nearby window frames. The cat was not ousted; rather the tree was restrained.

Via Ronni Bennett here's Oskar the Blind Kitten discovering the joys of Christmas. Apparently Oskar is a bit of a web phenomenon. There are many clips of his antics.

A Christmas present from the New York Times

2011-12-22T13:55:00.000-08:00

The "paper of record" editorialized in favor of the campaign I'm working on!

[A judge's rejection of the state's execution procedure] exemplifies California’s capital-punishment system — badly broken and in need of being permanently shut down.

… An exhaustive study released last summer found that since 1978 capital punishment has cost California about $4 billion. The state could save billions without the death penalty, as many citizens grasp: They are well on the way toward gathering the half-million signatures required to put an initiative on the ballot in 2012 that would replace the punishment with life without parole.

California’s system of government-hobbled-by-referendum means only the state’s voters can abolish the death penalty. They should stop this madness of attempting to fix something that is immoral and simply cannot be fixed.

My emphasis. We're going to put it on the November 2012 ballot and replace it with a maximum sentence of life without parole.

To learn more or help out, visit SAFE California.

Digital Christmas

2011-12-22T06:56:00.000-08:00

There's a very good chance you've seen this. If not and you are frequenting this blog, you'll probably enjoy it.

Ending California's death penalty and preparing for the holiday are keeping me too busy to blog more today.

No hope for some of the desperate even in the season of sharing

2011-12-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday at church, a friend asked our prayers for "Antonio" who will soon die because he has been denied a heart transplant. The friend is a medical doctor and an ethics official at a local hospital. She has worked feverishly and successfully with Antonio's cardiologist to round up doctors and the facilities to carry out the operation.

Antonio is only marginally a paying patient, because he is an undocumented immigrant. But he's exactly the sort of patient who does well with a donated heart: he's relatively young (40ish), employed, and shows every sign being able to comply with aftercare protocols. There's really only one thing standing between him and a good place on the transplant list: no part of the "health safety net" will pay for the anti-rejection drugs that would keep his new heart beating. It would be irresponsible to place him on a transplant list if the heart might not survive for lack of follow up care. So Antonio's doctors are now scrambling to make visa arrangements so that some of his family can visit him before he dies.

A story by ace reporter Nina Bernstein in the New York Times makes it clear the Antonio's plight is not unique.

Without treatment to replace his failing kidneys, doctors knew, the man in Bellevue hospital would die. He was a waiter in his early 30s, a husband and father of two, so well liked at the Manhattan restaurant where he had worked for a decade that everyone from the customers to the dishwasher was donating money to help his family.

He was also an illegal immigrant. So when his younger brother volunteered to donate a kidney to restore him to normal life, they encountered a health care paradox: the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 a year, but not for the $100,000 transplant that would make it unnecessary.

Go read it all.

We hear a lot about how the U.S. medical system is inefficient and excessively costly. We could do with more awareness that this jerry-built edifice is also simply insane -- and deadly.

Warming Wednesdays: Enjoy that latte while you can

2011-12-21T06:41:00.000-08:00

Our warming world apparently is on the way to devastating the business of growing high quality coffees.

You can see [this] clearly in a place like Costa Rica. This Central American nation began exporting coffee in the 1830s, and coffee has played a central role in the nation’s history and economic development ever since. In 2008, coffee was Costa Rica’s third-largest export, valued at more than $300 million annually. Since 2000, however, warming temperatures, a growing number of extreme rainfall events, and volatility in world coffee prices have contributed to a 44 percent plunge in Costa Rican coffee production.

Scientists know that average temperatures in Costa Rica have been rising over the past century. They also know that the Arabica coffee plant’s preferred temperature range is fairly narrow: between 64 and 71° F (18 to 22° C). Both yield and quality decline above that range. Above 93° F (34° C), little photosynthesis takes place within the coffee plant. In Costa Rica, since the 1970s, however, the number of warm days has risen about 2.5 percent per decade. Arabica coffee plants are also highly sensitive to intense rainfall. Scientists know that extreme rainfall events have become more common in Costa Rica, and have been accounting for more of the nation’s total rainfall since the 1960s.

Another devastating factor is that warmer temperatures foster the expansion of the range of one of the most destructive coffee pests in the world: the coffee berry borer. These beetles bore into coffee berries to lay their eggs. The hatched larvae feed on the berry seeds, reducing the yield and quality of the crops. Before 2000, the coffee berry borer was not present in Costa Rica. But, over the past decade as temperatures have risen, pest has come to infest a growing proportion of the nation’s coffee plantations.
Union of Concerned Scientists, Nov. 2011

Having seen the importance of coffee to the peasant economies of Central America, this makes me wonder what happens to all the rural families whose annual cash earnings are dependent on the coffee harvest. Yet more trouble ahead, felt most by the poorest among us.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Too busy to blog today

2011-12-20T06:24:00.000-08:00

We're drowning in the petitions that volunteers are collecting to end death sentences in California. That's as it should be. By February 24, we need 750000 signatures from California voters.

See for yourself what we're doing at our newly enhanced SAFE California website. Hey, you can even sign up to help or donate!

Newt's people: perhaps reliving their own hope and change moment?

2011-12-19T09:22:00.000-08:00

It looks as if the Newt Gingrich balloon is leaking hot air. Apparently attack ads from the Romney and Ron Paul campaigns are doing their job in Iowa. Good riddance. The nation has real problems. We don't need an egomaniac blowhard dominating the national stage for even two weeks.

I mean the guy is a crackpot. If he were elected President, he claims he'd send the sheriff for judges whose decisions crossed him, put poor kids to work as janitors in their schools, and blow up Iran's mosques which he describes as hiding tunnels for a nuclear bomb project.

Who were the people whose enthusiasms fueled the Newt balloon? Okay, so he is not Mitt Romney and that's enough to attract a lot of Republican voters. Understandable, sort of. Mitt's another ambitious slick talker, who lacks any discernible principles or personal appeal.

Polling showed Newt's demographic base was old people:

Gingrich is attracting a disproportionate share of the senior vote across the board. And given that Iowa and Florida are two of the five oldest states, there’s plenty to recommend the strategy. Indeed, the most dramatic movement for Gingrich so far is in Florida, where one PPP poll showed him with a 47-17 lead over Romney.

Why would some fraction of my age peers and their elders have such fondness for the former Speaker?

I'm terribly afraid these are folks for whom Newt Gingrich was once Mr. Hope and Change. Conservatives had many victories in the era between 1954 and 1994. Their permanent Cold War against the Soviet Union became the unquestioned national stance. Richard Nixon stoked the culture wars that still divide us. And at the end of that time, Ronald Reagan and Bush the First chipped away at the national safety net. But they faced an obstacle: for four solid decades, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and hence retained a voice in national policies even under Republican presidents.

The reasons for that long dominance were not mostly anything that would thrill current progressives: Democrats held the House thanks to state gerrymandering, incumbency and the near life tenure of a mass of Southern white Democrats who resisted racial and other social changes. But hang on they did.

For conservatives of a certain age, Newt was the guy who broke the Democratic stranglehold on Congress. He was the guy who would bring a new era of conservative power that would do away with taxes, regulations and any international restraint on U.S. imperial dominance. I imagine that 1994 election that gave him the Speaker's gavel felt to them something like 2008 felt to many Obama voters who were desperate for a new direction after the squalor and shame of the Bush years.

Newt's enthusiasts didn't get all they wanted, though the one percent made out like the bandits they are from the new political configuration. Newt crashed and burned within a few years, victim of personal overreach and personal sleaze -- I mean the guy tried to impeach a sitting President for a blow job while having an affair with an aide unbeknownst to his second wife.

But Newt's people remember the rush when it seemed, for a minute, they'd overturned the political universe. They want that feeling again.

It's all enough to make me even more dubious than Obama has done about political evangelists of hope and change.

Why would I want to live anywhere else?

2011-12-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

The other day I panned the view above Gerbode Valley in Marin Headlands in the midst of a trail run. How much better could life be than have access to this?

"War is U.S."

2011-12-18T14:24:00.000-08:00

The last American military convoy crossed over the border from Iraq into Kuwait on Sunday. Mario Tama/Getty Images/New York Times
If anyone doubted that the United States is leaving Iraq like an embarrassed dog hiding its tail between its legs, check out this:

For security reasons, the last soldiers made no time for goodbyes to Iraqis with whom they had become acquainted. To keep details of the final trip secret from insurgents, interpreters for the last unit to leave the base called local tribal sheiks and government leaders on Saturday morning and conveyed that business would go on as usual, not letting on that all the Americans would soon be gone.

Many troops wondered how the Iraqis, whom they had worked closely with and trained over the past year, would react when they awoke on Sunday to find that the remaining American troops on the base had left without saying anything.

“The Iraqis are going to wake up in the morning and nobody will be there,” said a soldier who only identified himself as Specialist Joseph. He said he had immigrated to the United States from Iraq in 2009 and enlisted a year later, and refused to give his full name because he worried for his family’s safety.

Somehow I doubt these Iraqis were quite as surprised as their unwelcome guests thought. We always did underestimate this ancient people.
***Andrew J. Bacevich, now Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University and formerly a U.S. Army Colonel, contributed to a Council on Foreign Relations roundtable on the question Was the Iraq War Worth It?

The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is U.S.

One senses that this was what the likes of [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, and [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz (urged on by militarists cheering from the sidelines and with George W. Bush serving as their enabler) intended all along. By leaving intact and even enlarging the policies that his predecessor had inaugurated, President Barack Obama has handed these militarists an unearned victory. As they drag themselves from one "overseas contingency operation" to the next, American soldiers must reckon with the consequences. So too will the somnolent American people be obliged to do, perhaps sooner than they think.

I think he has aptly summarized the meaning of our Iraq adventure for those not so unfortunate to have had to live it.

Bishop busted; crowd crunched

2011-12-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: on the confrontation between Occupy Wall Street and Trinity Church that yesterday's post touched upon. At the left is the Rt. Rev. George Packard in a paddy wagon after he peacefully climbed the fence into the forbidden property.

Perhaps more representative of the day than this carefully orchestrated symbolic act was what happened outside, as recorded by Brook Packard, the bishop's wife. She was at the front of a crowd of protesters next to the fence when someone tried to snip some of the chain links. She writes at Occupied Bishop.

I stood there in my orange LL Bean jacket, a post-middle aged mom from the suburbs, trying to film my husband. First a line of police started to push the fence on all of us and they were determined. We sat watching the 10-foot chain link fence fall and descend closer and closer to our noses. All coming down on our sitting bodies. At this point, I think I stood up. I was forced close to the fence and turned to face Officer Teague. His knee came up and hit me in the chest. I was grateful for the chained fence – the barrier softened the jolt. I looked him in the eye saying "Please don't knee me." He looked back at me and did again. Did he smile? Then he did it again. I fell backward into the crowd below me feeling the crush behind, in front, and from the fence which the NYPD was still single-mindedly trying to push onto those outside the fence. Then I felt someone pick me up and throw me onto a pile of people. I looked up and it was a police officer; using my own body as a weapon against other peaceful protesters. Who knew the NYPD could be so clever?

There were no commands or advice to us, no higher order of thinking. The collective snake brain was in charge. There was no indication that the crowd should be dispersed as fellow human beings. No discernible objective of justice, peace making, or serving the public. This was "Bloomberg's Army" protecting the private property rights of an Episcopal church with over 10 billion in real estate holdings. ...

Big rich institution meets small vulnerable human beings; crunch.

I'm a long way from these events and have no special knowledge of them, but am moved and riveted by their poignancy and drama.

Occupy, fear, and finding peace this Advent season

2011-12-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

Several hundred low wage workers, immigrants mostly, marched through the granite canyons of San Francisco's financial district on Thursday. Organized by Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW), they were joined by folks from OccupySF still gathered in front of the Federal Reserve offices despite being evicted from their tents. Local community organizing groups brought strong contingents. The marchers made stops at Wells Fargo Bank and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. Longer account here.

They carried what seems to me the essential message of this season of protest. The eruption of the 99 percent has been an announcement that we will not let fear will not rule us any longer.

Shrinking away in the vain hope that the one percent will let us keep some crumbs from the whole loaf they aim to monopolize has not worked. All that remains is to move beyond our fear.

***I've been following with fascination developments on the other side of the country, in New York City, where Occupy Wall Street is challenging the sympathetic, but oh-so-wealthy, Trinity (Episcopal) Church Wall Street to open a patch of unused land to their encampment. So far, the church has given in to fear -- fear of disorder, fear of the unruly poor who are are their neighbors. Trinity is saying "no way."

A retired Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. George E. Packard, has engaged with the movement of the 99 percent and finds himself at something like home. He is blogging his encounter at Occupied Bishop. Here's what he wrote this morning as he and his wife set off to join the crowd at the disputed land, Duarte Park:

Brook and I travel down to Duarte in a few minutes and what awaits us I do not know. I do know that for me and the OWS I know no violence is intended, only peaceful disobedience if it comes to that. …

And speaking of "coming to that" I am still baffled that the Episcopal Church of which I have been a member all my life could not--through Trinity--find some way to embrace these thousands of young people in our very diminishing ranks. (Every year for the last five years we have lost 14,000 members.) Just as we pioneered an awareness of the full membership for the LBGT community what's happening here? How hard would it have been for Trinity to convene legal counsel and say, "Give us some options so that a charter could be granted over the winter months?"

Can a rich institution squeeze through the eye of a needle?***Across the country, another priest put himself alongside Occupy protesters and ended up looking like this when the Seattle police got through with him.
The Rev. John Helmiere recounts his attempt to keep the peace in a frightening confrontation and what happened next here.

Utterly terrified, I made my way to the line between the occupiers and the police, held my arms out, and began shouting to my occupation brothers and sisters: “Peaceful Protest Everyone,” “Keep the Peace,” “Do not respond with violence.” My brothers and sisters on the police force began advancing behind a wall of horses and heavy bicycles. …

As I walked through the metal detector at the jail, a fellow occupier I hadn’t spoken with yet looked at me in my collar and said, “You’ve just been baptized.” …

Father John's entire account is very much worth reading.***In this season of Advent, Christians wait in hope for the coming of the light (literally in the northern hemisphere) and/or the coming of the Light (the child-human in whom we believe Godself joined us for a wonder-filled, tumultuous season). At my church we often sing an Advent refrain that expresses the mix of longing and hope that attend this time:

Come oh come Emanuel [the awaited Messiah],
With your captive children dwell,
Let all our sad divisions cease,
Here on earth, heavenly peace

Our friends who have been inspirited by the movement of the 99 percent are showing those of us who are comfortable -- again -- that the essence of the peace we so value comes with abandoning fear. Peace is not about avoiding conflict, but about giving up fear. Without fear, violence becomes unnecessary. We can get through our conflicts together. When we are afraid, we kill each other.

This is so simple it seems impossible. But really living means finding our courage.

Social Security at risk: now and then

2011-12-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the New York Times published an unusually lucid description of the danger to the Social Security program that lurks in the plan to extend last year's emergency cut in the payroll tax. People who care about old people having enough to eat need to understand what's going on.

Critics predict one extension will lead to another as politicians balk at raising taxes to their former level, especially if unemployment remains high.

“Imagine that next December the unemployment rate is 8 percent and a year later it’s 7.4 percent,” said Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is one of two public trustees for Social Security. “We’ll still be trying to stimulate employment and terminating the payroll tax holiday will be a big hit on most families, one that will hurt job growth.”

Democrats fear that repeated extensions would disrupt the link that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forged to lock in support for Social Security: with workers taxed for their benefits, politicians would not cut them. And Republicans object that transferring general revenues to Social Security to offset the tax cut makes the program more like welfare, and worsens the federal budget deficit.

Politics aside, the bottom line is that a temporary tax cut is inconsequential to Social Security’s long-term health, from an accounting perspective. The threat remains the financial pressure of an aging population.

Social Security is essentially a pay-as-you-go system, with payroll taxes from workers flowing back out to retirees, survivors and the disabled. Last year, before the tax cut, the system for the first time since 1983 collected less in taxes than it paid out to 55 million beneficiaries — $49 billion less.

The program’s operating deficits will grow as more of the 78 million baby boomers become eligible. But trust fund reserves built up over years of annual surpluses will not run out until 2036, when tax revenues will cover three-quarters of benefits, trustees project.

***David M. Kennedy's monumental history of our country in the middle of the last century, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, makes it all too clear that winning and keeping a Social Security program for elders has always been a struggle. His description of the legislative history put me in mind of the contemporary fight over Obamacare.

No other New Deal measure proved more lastingly consequential or more emblematic of the very meaning of the New Deal. Nor did any other better reveal the tangled skein of human needs, economic calculations, idealistic visions, political pressures, partisan maneuverings, actuarial projections, and constitutional constraints out of which Roosevelt was obliged to weave his reform program. Tortuously threading each of those filaments through the needle of the legislative process, Roosevelt began with the Social Security Act to knit the fabric of the modern welfare state. It would in the end be a peculiar garment, one that could have been fashioned only in America and perhaps only in the circumstances of the Depression era.

If we weren't watching Republicans challenge what looks like an inadequate, jerry-built new health insurance reform law in the Supreme Court, we wouldn't be able to imagine how much the shape of the 1935 law was set by trying to avoid having the plan declared unconstitutional.

Taking his own measure of "the prejudices of our people," Roosevelt clearly intended to establish his social security system not as a civil right but as a property right. That was the American way. The contributory requirement enormously complicated the planners' task. "What in the world," [Thomas] Eliot [the staff attorney writing the bill] asked himself, "could be devised to carry out the president's wish for a contributory old age insurance program that would pass judicial muster?" The president's insistence that workers themselves should contribute to their own individual old-age pension accounts through a payroll tax seemed to offer an open invitation to judicial nullification.

The result was intrinsically regressive: for the people who could least afford it, those with the lowest wages, Social Security taxes amounted to the highest percentage bite out of their take home pay. That discrepancy lingers today in the cap on the amount of income taxed for Social Security; people earning over about $108000 annually stop paying into the fund at that amount. The rest of us pay on every dollar of wages. Roosevelt understood he was creating a less than fair system.

"No dole," Roosevelt emphasized, "mustn't have a dole." "No money out of the Treasury," he declared on another occasion. He understood as clearly as any the inequity and economic dysfunctionality of the contributory payroll tax, but he understood equally those "legislative habits" and "prejudices" about which [Labor Secretary Frances] Perkins had reminded the CES. "I guess you're right on the economics," Roosevelt explained to another critic some years later, "but those taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

The political history of Social Security is instructive and fascinating. The issue of maintaining our legal, moral and political right to old age assistance from the federal government is still alive today as Republicans repeatedly float plans to hand our security over the Wall Street.

An ignominious end to a war that never should have been

2011-12-15T07:21:00.000-08:00

This just went up on the New York Times digital front page. ***The Times reported yesterday on recently uncovered (left behind to be burned!) interviews with Marines about the Haditha massacre in which our soldiers apparently murdered over 20 unarmed civilians. Not surprisingly, the event became symbolic of why Iraq refused to allow U.S. troops, who would not have been subject to Iraqi law, to remain in their country after the war's official end.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.
The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.
Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.

***One of the most succinct summations of the Iraq war's conclusion that I've seen appeared in the magazine Christian Century.

The Iraq war ends without a peace treaty or victory march. This misadventure has cost over $800 billion so far and taken the lives of more than 4,000 American soldiers and as many as 600,000 Iraqis. It represents a defeat for the neoconservative dream of bringing liberty and American dominance to the Middle East by a military invasion. Ironically, the war decreased American influence in the region and put Iran in a stronger position relative to its neighbors. Al-Qaeda is alive and well in Iraq, where it continues to be a menace, attacking and killing civilians, police officers and soldiers.

That paragraph introduces an editorial calling for an end to our Afghanistan war as well.

Roald Amundsen would have made a great electoral organizer

2011-12-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's completion of his trek to be first to reach the South Pole. Amundsen outraced the British explorer Robert Scott who arrived at that notional geographical location a month later and died while returning to base across Antarctica. Among English speakers, Scott's doomed quest to be the first to the pole became the stuff of romantic adventure tales. Amundsen's efficient expedition was less heralded.

I knew next to nothing about Amundsen until I happened across an anniversary article by Mark Jenkins in Outside that provided fascinating food for thought. Old Amundsen knew a thing or two.

“Adventure is just bad planning,” [Roald Amundsen] would famously say.

I like that. I try to put it in practice in my work on progressive campaigns. “Angst and drama just reveal bad planning,” I say.

Attractively, Amundsen modeled overcoming difficulties and impediments by paying attention to the people who knew how to traverse the unfamiliar terrain at the poles, the native inhabitants of these forbidding environments.

Amundsen learned about dogsledding and igloo building from the Netsilik Inuits. What he saw impressed upon him the hard facts of polar travel: fresh meat could prevent scurvy (a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C), dogs and sleds were perfect for the poles, skis were fast and efficient over great distances.

…Amundsen was far ahead of his time, having the genius and openness to master the indigenous culture’s ancient survival skills—an ability not simply ignored but often disdained by other explorers of the day.

Who knows better than the people who live in a place how to survive and thrive in it? I try to remember this when working to bring message and mobilization to diverse groups within the population of California. If we want to talk with people who often live at the margins of the mainstream, we need to find who they already listen to and bring those leaders into the core of our efforts. We need to speak their native languages, often literally in a state where 43 percent of us speak a language other than English at home.

Amundsen was obviously a competitive, driven man. He misled and even taunted Scott about the progress of his plans when they were both still within range of communications. But when it came to the crunch, he was about accomplishment, not heroics.

After reaching the South Pole, Amundsen and his team easily cruised back to base camp, covering 700 miles in just six weeks. In all, they had skied 1,400 miles in 99 days. No one had died; hardly anyone had been sick. There was some frostbite, but no one lost fingers or toes. Amundsen had done everything possible to remove drama and danger from his expeditions, and for that he was, in a strange but tangible way, punished. Despite the fact that his South Pole expedition was the apotheosis of elegance and efficiency, arguably the finest expedition ever accomplished by man, he would be all but forgotten outside of Norway …

You know, for good political organizers, working so successfully that victory seems as natural as the sun rising is the highest success. The political consultants you hear about -- the Scotts -- the ones who make themselves the story instead of the cause or candidate, they may suck up a lot of oxygen, but they are not necessarily the brightest, the best or even the most successful.***The photo is of a monument to Amundsen in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I never knew why we had such a thing adjacent to the Beach Chalet until I researched this article. Apparently Amundsen's head is looking toward where his sloop, the Gjøa, was on display from 1909 until 1972. In this vessel, the explorer had been the first to navigate a Northwest Passage through the Arctic Sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of North America. The old wooden ship decayed badly in San Francisco and during the middle of the last century became a refuge for LSD-dropping hippies. The Norwegians reclaimed the vessel and it is now on display, restored, in a museum in Oslo. But we still have the head of Amundsen, gazing north.

Warming Wednesdays: listen to the young people

2011-12-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban, Anjali Appadurai, a student at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, spoke for youth delegates from non-governmental organizations (that's non-profits in U.S. parlance.)

You've been negotiating all my life …

The science tells us we have five years maximum -- but you are saying, give us ten … in the long run, these will be seen as the defining moments of an era in which narrow self interest prevailed over science, reason and common compassion ...

It always seems impossible until it's done. So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world: Deep cuts now. Get it done.

It's easy for those of us who are older. We can hope the worse results of global warming won't be something we'll see. We can hope that the world as we've known it -- a world with plenty of water that falls in season, with enough food, with unimaginable material wealth and natural beauty -- will last out our life times.

And if we don't make the powers-that-be act NOW, our descendants will curse us.

Health care reform shorts: taxing the one percent

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Good news about the 2010 health insurance reform I didn't know -- and I thought I was paying close attention. Despite being far too solicitous to the interests of insurers and of pharmaceutical, hospital and medical entrepreneurs, Obamacare pays for providing insurance to larger fraction of us by breaking one of our currents taboos. It raises taxes on rich people. Yes, though its sponsors didn't trumpet this in any way that most of us would notice, that's part of how the reform works. No wonder Republicans are so opposed; the health reform gores their sacred bulls.

Here's the exchange from one of Terry Gross' Fresh Air interviews on NPR that clued me in.

TERRY GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Tim Dickinson. He's the national political correspondent for Rolling Stone and his article in the current edition is about Republican tax strategy and what the effect has been on Americans of tax cuts over the years.

You write that one of the reasons Republicans don't like Obamacare is that the top 400 taxpayers would be contributing an average of $11 million each and that, you know, the Obama health care plan is financed in part by increasing Medicare taxes on the wealthy, including new taxes on investment income. So can you elaborate on the Republican concerns about the funding of Obama's health care reform plan?

DICKINSON: This is not something that received a great deal of attention when the Obamacare was put through. But the primary funding mechanism is these new Medicare taxes. And for the first time there's going to be a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for the wealthiest. And so this has the effect of raising capital gains taxes starting in 2014 from 15 percent to 18.8 percent, I guess. And then if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, you'll have an effective tax rate of above 23 percent on capital gains, which will be a higher rate on capital gains than at any time since 1997 when these - when sort of the initial campaign of cutting taxes on investment income began. And so this is obviously a matter of great consternation to the nation's investor class, and the Republicans are quite responsive to those concerns.

You'd think Democrats would want the 99 percent to know they'd done something so sensible. It will be interesting to see whether, as we enter an electoral season in which overcoming economic inequality is supposed to be a Democratic campaign theme, they'll be willing to cop to this accomplishment. You get the sense they tried to sneak it through under the radar. A lot of us might approve of getting the money we need from those who have it, if only we knew.

Sorry Lowe's, I rather liked you

2011-12-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

But I will no longer be shopping at this home improvement retailer in view of their decision to sign on with anti-Muslim bigotry. The newscast below tells the story of how the big company caved in to demands that they pull their ads from an innocuous reality TV show about a U.S. Muslim family.

You can speak out against prejudice by signing the petition here.

Are we drifting toward war with Iran?

2011-12-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

Quite few smart commentators fear that the lunacy of a political season in which completely irresponsible Republicans push a weakened President Obama to prove his warlike bonafides toward the government in Tehran has the United States drifting toward just such a folly.

Writing at the Middle East Research and Information Project, Farideh Farhi carefully describes how both the United States and the Iranian government have taken to whining "we tried" when questioned about the drift toward open conflict. The article is an informed, balanced look at the behavior of both governments

And, in addition to trying to force the rest of the world to adopt more and more stringent economic sanctions in response to an effort to build a nuclear weapon that our own spooks don't think is taking place, the United States is already engaging in covert operations that target Iran. Here goes another fantasy of war on the cheap. On December 6 Al Jazeera reported on a U.S. drone aircraft shot down over Iran.

Harvard Professor of International Relations Stephen Walt is worried about where this kind of adventure leads.

It appears that we have gone beyond just talking about military action to actually engaging in it, albeit at a low level. In addition to waging cyberwar via Stuxnet, the United States and/or Israel appear to be engaged in covert efforts to blow up Iranian facilities and murder Iranian scientists. ...

... waging a covert, low-level war is not without risks, including the risk of undesirable escalation. No matter how carefully we try to control the level of force, there's always the danger that matters spiral out of control. Iran can't do much to us militarily, but it can cause trouble in limited ways and it could certainly take steps that would jack up oil prices and possibly derail the fragile global economic recovery.
Moreover, if some U.S. operation misfired and a couple of hundred Iranians died, wouldn't the revolutionary government feel compelled to respond? If U.S. or Israeli operatives are captured on Iranian soil, will pressure mount on us to do more? (Just imagine what all the GOP candidates would start saying!) Such developments may not be likely, of course, but it would be foolhardy to ignore such possibilities entirely. Nor should we ignore the possibility that others will learn from this sort of "unconventional" campaign and one day use similar tactics against U.S. allies or the United States itself.
Foreign Policy

In Time World, Tony Karon focuses on how the Israel lobby -- AIPAC -- has successfully egged on both Republicans and Democrats to demand that the U.S. use its banking clout for what amounts to economic war on Iran. When AIPAC says "jump", politicians of both parties are conditioned by years of political threats to respond: "how high"? Karon is worried.

The Administration has warned that using the banking system to block Iran from selling oil could trigger a sharp increase in global oil prices, threatening the U.S. and world economy’s fragile recovery — even without such measures, tensions with Iran are already steadily pushing the price up. And Iran has previously warned that it would treat any attempt to bar its ability to sell oil as an act of war. But the legislators are hanging tough. ”The goal … is to inflict crippling, unendurable economic pain over there,” explained New York Democrat Representative Gary Ackerman. “Iran’s banking sector — especially its central bank — needs to become the financial equivalent of Chernobyl: radioactive, dangerous and most of all, empty.”

But it’s not only Iran that could be antagonized by the new legislation. The U.S. and its partners do very little business with the Islamic Republic today; the purpose of the new measures is to punish those who do. The Western powers have failed to persuade many of Iran’s key trading partners — China, Russia, Turkey and India, among others — to voluntarily support new sanctions, which they believe are neither justified nor likely to produce a positive outcome. The new measures envisioned by Congress use the centrality of the U.S. banking system in the world economy to strong-arm reluctant partners into complying with Western sanctions. ...

There may also be a deeper, unspoken concern, behind the Administration’s hesitation over putting Iran’s economy in a chokehold at this point: it could prove to be a not easily reversible step on the path to confrontation. If such sanctions are adopted as the only alternative to war, as the current debate frames them, their (likely) failure to bring Iran to heel renders armed conflict inevitable — at least as long as the logic that “the only thing worse than bombing Iran is Iran getting the bomb” prevails in the Washington conversation.

Escalation could even happen relatively quickly. Most states would treat an effective economic blockade that imposed “crippling, unendurable pain” as an act of war, and if Iran responds militarily, directly or via proxy forces or terror attacks, the two sides could find themselves quickly locked into potentially disastrous war. Yet, the domestic political dynamic in both Washington and Tehran raises the cost for leaders in both capitals of restraining the momentum towards confrontation.

Once upon a time, we had a notion in the United States that citizens ought to have a say when their leaders led them into war. These days, the country seems to be drifting closer and closer to yet another futile failed adventure in south central Asia after no sensible public discussion at all.

Seasonal cheer on 24th Street

2011-12-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

Rebecca was just taking a walk and came across this. What a lovely reminder that we live in a beautiful city!

A walk through #OccupySanDiego

2011-12-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

I was in San Diego yesterday working to end death sentences (see sidebar at right) and was able to take a walk through the civic plaza where OccupySanDiego is still getting out the message of the 99 percent.

These people's tents and encampment were pulled down by police in early October, but they haven't gone away. "A First Amendment right is not an unlawful assembly" says the banner. They are still speaking out.

Some of the signage reflects their ongoing struggle with hostile authorities.

Some of what they assert seems almost wistful.

Not that they haven't caused a stir. In an episode that warms my political activist heart, a local politician dropped by to set up a voter registration table -- and was hauled off by the cops for trespassing on private property.

He doesn't look very scary to me.

All over the country there are determined and desperate people keeping on … what will it take to make the system work for the 99 percent?

Southern Californian big heads

2011-12-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

I keep running across big heads sticking out of the ground. There was a purple one that lived for a season in Golden Gate Park. And there were the grand stone Olmec heads in Mexico.

And then there was this: Mack Robinson looking over the civic center of Pasadena.

Mr. Robinson was an athlete. He won the silver medal in the 200 meters at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, just a hair behind Jesse Owen. These two gave the lie to Hitler's boast that the contests must prove Aryan superiority.

This Robinson was the brother of Jackie Robinson who integrated Major League Baseball.

A small tree, deprived of its leaves by winter, casts a morning shadow over the head of Jackie Robinson.

I'm not sure that a couple of monster heads make a particularly inspiring monument to a couple of local men who made good, but clearly some Pasadenans do.

Coming or going?

2011-12-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

Those legs sticking out of the plane were attached to a baggage handler who was priming the chute to disgorge our luggage.

I'm on the road today.

Reflections on the "day that will live in infamy" -- and today

2011-12-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

Seventy years ago today, my parents' generation lived their 9/11 moment. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor decimated the U.S. Pacific fleet, killed thousands, and served notice that the United States was not safe from all enemies.

I find it interesting to compare two themes from post-Pearl Harbor life that both live on in the post-9/11 USA.

Here's how Eleanor Roosevelt greeted the outbreak of a war she had long feared in her newspaper column of December 8, 1941.

Now we know where we are. The work for those who are at home seems to be obvious. First, to do our own job, whatever it is, as well as we can possibly do it. Second, to add to it everything we can do in the way of civilian defense. Now, at last, every community must go to work to build up protections from attack.
We must build up the best possible community services, so that all of our people may feel secure because they know we are standing together and that whatever problems have to be met, will be met by the community and not one lone individual. There is no weakness and insecurity when once this is understood.

That all-in-this- together spirit of shared sacrifice is certainly a part of why World War II is still remembered as "the Good War."

Yet, as historian David M. Kennedy points out in Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 there are good material reasons that horrible war acquired a rosy glow in retrospect.

Thanks to the government's cost-plus contracting practices and the ubiquitous availability of overtime, wartime jobs paid fabulously well, especially for Americans who had suffered through the cramped years of the 1930s.
… Most Americans had never had it so good. They started half a million new businesses. They went to movies and restaurants with unhabitual frequency. They bought books, recordings, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, jewelry, and liquor in record volumes.
… Retail sales ascended to a record high in 1943 and then went higher still in 1944· On a poignantly symbolic date, December 7, 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the thousands of cash registers in the Macy's department store chain rang up the highest volume of sales in the giant retailer's history.

There's nothing new in the national enthusiasm for reports of the wonders of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping.

Kennedy goes on to explain that the orientation among U.S. engineers and industrialists to choose quantity over quality, in contrast to the Germans, was a key factor in winning the "war of machines" and also in fully utilizing an undereducated and wildly diverse U.S. workforce. These enduring traits of U.S. capitalism served most of us well in the post-war decades, but clearly don't serve the common good today.

Today, there simply aren't as many routinized, simplified jobs as workers who need them. I learned from reading Kennedy about war production just how great a cultural transformation in historic U.S. capitalist practice may be required to return to the 99 percent to a decent share of the nation's wealth. Our economy, even in its best moments, has never been set up to serve the common good.***

People are passing around this wonderful photo from the day, wondering whether any of these women are still alive. More here.

Solidarity: LGBT issues in our broken immigration system

2011-12-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

Rachel Tiven from Immigration Equality listens to Father Richard Smith.

On Monday Out4Immigration, a Bay Area organization that champions of the inclusion of LGBT issues within immigration reform efforts, held a panel at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church. I think of myself as fairly well-versed immigration issues, but I took away some new and reinforced insights.

Erik Schnabel pointed out that, under the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), LGBT families, however enduring and including those recognized by their states, remain effectively "illegal" just as are unauthorized immigrants. U.S. citizen gays still have less ordinary rights than other citizens since we cannot sponsor our non-citizen partners for immigration.

Chris Barnett reminded the group that until this year, a positive HIV status was a bar to entrance into the country.

Blanca is a 28 year old Latina who was brought to this country at age 6 without papers. She pointed out that she has never been to any other country -- this is her only home. She shared some interesting perspectives on DREAM activists -- campaigners for a path to legalization for the hundreds of thousands of young people like her who find themselves through no action of their own growing up "out of status." Lawyers always tell them "just get married to a U.S. citizen." Since Blanca is heterosexual, that could work for her, but she proves her absorption of the national core values by protesting that she doesn't want the government telling her who to share her life with! This makes her understanding of LGBT people who aren't allowed by the state to marry.

Blanca reported that working on the not-yet-successful campaign for the DREAM ACT made her aware of the brave leadership of LGBT and women of color among her own cohort. Risking deportation for speaking up as an undocumented person is a kind of coming out; gay undocumented persons often have to take a double risk, effectively coming out twice amid fears that their communities might not stand alongside them.

Blanca's account of the joint lobbying efforts of LGBT folks working to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the DREAM group were heartening. We do better when we stick together.

The Rev. Richard Smith shared both optimism and distress. The latter comes from the persistent attempts of the Roman Catholic bishops and some evangelical Protestants to exclude gay concerns from programs for immigration reform. But he noted that, at least among the Catholics, their people are not listening.

Rachel Tiven of Immigration Equality was generally upbeat. Despite the strains, there is a growing religious coalition advocating for comprehensive immigration reform - and all versions of the program do include equalizing LGBT rights in a system that is based on family ties. This is a huge step.

Moreover the Obama administration is beginning to recognize that its practice of mass random detentions and deportations is arbitrary and unsuccessful. If recent regulation changes really come into force, the administration aims to focus deportation only on immigrants who pose some danger to communities. Peaceful people living productive lives should not face a dragnet.

With the administration's effort to modulate its immigration enforcement should come some concrete benefits. Transpeople in immigration detention have experienced horrible mistreatment; orders have gone out to end this abuse.

Advocates are pressing the administration to allow non-citizen partners of married gay people to apply legal status, for "green cards"; though the feds cannot actually issue the green cards because forbidden by DOMA, they could create a protected "hold" for partners who had applied. Tiven is cautiously optimistic that the growing political clout of the gay community nationally will win this concession from the Obama administration.

As in so many areas of gay civil rights, I marvel at the progress we have made and the dedication to the brave people who keep pushing for full equality.

The fire and my neighbor's art

2011-12-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

Just a short follow up on that apartment fire on 24th Street: the burned building was the home of a local artist, one of whose street creations is pictured above. CBSSanFrancisco talked to him at the scene:

... local artist Elliott C. Nathan, 26, stood outside the building with his roommates, who were wearing pajama bottoms.

He said he was asleep in his ground-floor apartment around 4:30 a.m. when his roommate started screaming for everyone to wake up and get out.

Nathan said his roommates grabbed their laptops and left the building, but that he made five or six trips back and forth to save his artwork. He said he has a show coming up at the Incline Gallery on Valencia Street, and pointed out a mural he had painted on several garage doors at 295 Bartlett St.

This guy's work has been popping up all over, one of the pleasures of living in this corner of the city.

Another concealed victory for democracy

2011-12-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

Once again Washington insiders are beginning to catch up with the people. For several years now, the peace movement has been pointing out there's a ready source of cash for available for overcoming and healing the economic damage from Wall Street's collapsed bubble and the grinding unemployment it has left us with. We can take the money from our two failed and unpopular wars and use it where it belongs, on getting people back to work and supporting the general welfare.

Now an establishment pillar is saying the same thing. Democrats in Congress are jousting with Republicans over extending and perhaps enhancing the payroll tax cut that has helped prop up ordinary people's budgets for the last year. This will almost certainly go through much posturing before it gets done. Republicans insist it can't be done unless the lost revenue is paid for somewhere else in the budget.

Now House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, an establishment Democrat all the way, is pointing out what we've known for years: the money is there when we decide to take it from the wars.

Pelosi attacked the GOP for demanding that renewing the temporary payroll tax cut be offset, while insisting on large, permanent, unpaid for income tax cuts for wealthy Americans. But that is their demand. And in that context, Pelosi became the first member of Democratic leadership to propose paying for the cuts with funds that were previously expected to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

“We can easily go get this money out of the Overseas Contingency Fund [war savings]. Easily. Pay for that, pay for [the Medicare doc fix]. We shouldn’t pay for unemployment insurance — it’s an emergency. Money’s been paid into it. As money is continued to be paid into it, it evens out. So we shouldn’t have to offset that. But the other two, we can just go to [war savings] and get it done. If you insist on paying for that.”
Talking Points Memo

And Pelosi isn't the only Dem talking this way. They are all getting it.

…On MSNBC today, conservative Democratic Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania outlined a way for the Republicans to take the issue off the table with minimal fuss: if they agree to use the war savings to pay for renewing the payroll tax cut, Democrats will soft pedal their demand to deepen it.
“If you want to go into this overseas contingency fund which some people view as an accounting gimmick but it’s going to be used for something we can look at that,” Altmire said. “[I]t’s $120 billion cost just to extend the current payroll tax which is why I say if you extend it beyond that you get into big numbers [and] I think that’s where we’re going to end up.”

Raiding the war funding for domestic use is getting to be Washington orthodoxy.

They are never going to tell the majority of us who are peaceniks that we've wrenched elite policies around to our preferred direction. But our consistent, longterm efforts are changing the definitions of the possible and necessary. That's what victory for the 99 percent in the economic arena will look like as well.

For our viewing distraction ...

2011-12-03T05:37:00.000-08:00

In case you can't read the small print and aren't able to place the picture because our media hasn't shown it to you, the worldwide cover image is from Egypt in the aftermath of the dictator Mubarak's overthrow where a military junta the U.S. approves was challenged by protests in the run-up to elections that many Egyptians believe are corrupt and rigged.

Common Dreams labels these contrasting covers: "And Some Wonder Why Americans Are So Dumbed Down?"

In partial defense of Time, most people in the U.S. probably see the protester as aggressive and dangerous; he and his cohorts more likely think of themselves, accurately, as oppressed and betrayed by armed authorities who have dashed their hopes. People get angry when their dreams seem crushed; we have little experience of that sort of political passion, though perhaps we are acquiring a bit these days. Time is probably not entirely wrong to imagine that their U.S. readers are more likely to identify with the forces shooting the tear gas than with the protester.

Meanwhile to the U.S. cover: what a perfect reinforcement for the belief system that props up our inequitable economic system! If you aren't a nervous, obsessed striver, you must be a useless lazy lump. I bet Mitt and Newt and their followers believe that. All those unemployed shirkers must have brought their pain on themselves by being too contented. What a shrunken vision of human flourishing we live with.

Friday cat blogging: Frisker is no longer with us

2011-12-02T07:01:00.000-08:00

In the morning, after I stepped over her, I'd say "You are a good cat."

She'd say something that I interpreted as "the service is awful slow around here. Can't you learn I need my food set out by this time?"

We had that kind of relationship. She seemed never confident that she'd gotten me properly trained.

In the last few years, she became willing to share her body heat a little, to allow a little fur patting (but never brushing), to sit on a lap if you occupied just the right chair and held your legs at just the proper angle.

Last May a vet said she had a week to live. Out of sheer orneriness she slogged on for nearly six months. But when she could no longer walk and stopped eating, it was her time to go.

She worked to teach me that it is a privilege to offer hospitality to a cat, to an animal never quite domesticated, however apparently dependent. I hope she felt I'd begun to get it.

Fire at 24th and Bartlett in the San Francisco Mission District

2011-12-01T05:47:00.000-08:00

This is not what you want to see outside at 4:30 am when awakened by wailing sirens.

San Francisco's characteristic wood back porches and stairs can go up like a torch.

Fire trucks filled the intersection.

Firefighters massed to go in.

Some climbed over the top.

Neighbors huddled on the street could just make out the firefighters' lights as they searched the building and broke out windows to release the smoke.

Not all residents came out under their own power.

I do not know yet how many were injured, burned and made homeless tonight in my corner of the world. I am sobered and sombre this morning.***
UPDATE: The Chronicle reports 4 people were seriously injured in the fire. They say the building housed 20 people.

Senate votes for Afghanistan exit

2011-12-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

Hey peaceniks, listen up! We're winning but the major media aren't likely to trumpet our victories. Yesterday the Senate -- on a voice vote (!) -- let President Obama know that it was time to speed up bringing the troops home from Afghanistan. Though John McCain still wants us to stay 100 years (oops, that was Iraq), most Senators think we're done in both misguided wars.

The Senate on Wednesday quietly approved a measure requiring President Obama to more swiftly withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

The amendment from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was attached to a broader defense bill making its way through the Senate. It was approved by a voice vote, without dissent.

“It is time to bring our men and women home,” Merkley said. “The U.S. Senate sent that message to the president today in unequivocal terms.”

The Afghanistan amendment requires the president to develop an accelerated plan to withdraw troops ahead of the planned December 2014 deadline and transition security operations to the government of Afghanistan and submit that proposal to Congress within 90 days of the bill’s passage.
LA Times, 11/30/11

Does this mean the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan soon? Probably not. But the vote is a milestone on the long slog to make public opinion against the wars effectual. Celebrate a little; this is a victory.***Meanwhile the U.S. relationship with Pakistan becomes more convoluted and supplies can't be moved to Afghanistan ... Sure looks like time to depart.

Annals of the Anthropocene: oysters, kelp and climate

2011-11-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

The concept behind some geological scientists labeling of the current era as the "Anthropocene" is that, having used, abused, and bred in vast abundance on the planet, now it is up to humans to make and keep the place habitable.

My friend Brendan Smith is an oysterman; he lives by harvesting and marketing these mollusks.

He's written a piece for The Atlantic, The Coming Green Wave: Ocean Farming to Fight Climate Change, that suggests we can find hope for a sustainable balance in ocean farming,

… Rather than relying on mono-aquaculture operations, these new ocean farms are pioneering muti-tropic and sea-vegetable aquaculture, whereby ocean farmers grow abundant, high-quality seafood while improving, rather than damaging, the environment.
One example is Ocean Approved in Maine, which cultivates seaweed that doubles as a nutrient-rich food source and a sponge for organic pollutants. Farmers in Long Island Sound are exploring diversifying small-scale organic shellfish farms with various species of seaweed to filter out the pollutants, mitigate oxygen depletion, and develop a sustainable source for fertilizer and fish meal. In southern Spain Veta La Palma designed its farm to restore wetlands, and in the process created the largest bird sanctuary in Spain, with over 220 species of birds.
Seaweed farms alone have the capacity to grow massive amounts of nutrient-rich food. Professor Ronald Osinga at Wageningen University in the Netherlands has calculated that a global network of "sea-vegetable" farms totaling 180,000 square kilometers -- roughly the size of Washington state -- could provide enough protein for the entire world population.
The goal, according to chef Dan Barber -- named one of the world's most influential people by Time and a hero of the organic food movement -- is to create a world where "farms restore instead of deplete" and allow "every community to feed itself."
But here is the real kicker: Because they require no fresh water, no deforestation, and no fertilizer -- all significant downsides to land-based farming -- these ocean farms promise to be more sustainable than even the most environmentally-sensitive traditional farms. …

Smith explains that sea weed and shellfish can absorb and filter out huge quantities of the excess carbon dioxide and nitrogen that unthinking human exploitation of the planet has let loose. Sea weed can be used for biofuels without the pollution and cost in human foods that goes with using corn to make ethanol.

Smith is well aware that what he is proposing is controversial.

We face a bitter new reality: Mitigating the effects of climate change may force us to develop our seas to save them -- and the planet. This re-imaging of the oceans will be heart-wrenching and controversial. Our waters are revered as some of the last wild spaces on Earth -- ungoverned and untouched by human hands. If we develop our oceans, farms will some day dot coastlines, mirroring our agricultural landscape. But in the face of the escalating climate crisis, we have little choice but to explore new ways of sustaining humanity while protecting the planet.

Welcome to the Anthropocene. We broke it and it is up to us to fix it. Go read the whole article.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" and/or "Annals of the Anthropocene -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Good changes coming: time to end the death penalty

2011-11-29T05:00:00.000-08:00

Changes are coming at this blog. For the first time in a long time, I've taken a demanding job that will thrust me into the thick of a serious electoral fight. While I doubt that the blog will go silent (I never lack for running commentary on our politics and society, not to mention photos), there may be days when nothing new comes along. Or perhaps other days when content here is a few lines and a link pointing of some piece of writing that interested me.

I've taken the position of field director for the SAFE California campaign. We seek to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole. That is, if a criminal act so harms individuals and/or California society that our hunger for justice makes us long to kill the perpetrator, instead we'll ensure that person gets locked up for the rest of his/her life, no exceptions and no fooling.

The initiative measure will be on the 2012 ballot. We put in death sentences by popular vote in 1978, so we can only end them in the same way.

It's not as if a law enforcement environment including the death penalty has done the state any good. According to U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Arthur L. Alarcon, the near bankrupt state of California has spent $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978 -- and executed all of 13 people. Meanwhile, 46% of murders and 56% of rapes go unsolved. Maybe if we were putting more resources into solving crimes than into failing to execute people we'd be safer? We have hundreds of people already locked up on "death row" who are absorbing our money while our cops seem unable to investigate violent "cold cases."

And, of course, the risk that we might execute an innocent person never goes away. There's entirely too much evidence that Texas recently put to death Cameron Todd Willingham for setting a fire that killed his children. But the convincing "expert" testimony leading to his conviction had no scientific basis; he was almost certainly innocent. Mistakes can happen: in March 2011, a man named Franky Carrillo was released from prison in California after 20 years of incarceration for a murder he did not commit.There's no correcting a "mistake" when the death penalty is carried out.

When I tell people that I am working on a California campaign to end legal executions, they usually ask something like: "but don't California voters believe in the death penalty?" And if the questions is asked like that, many people agree. But we like a lot of other things as well: public safety, low taxes, good use of state resources, a legal system that delivers prompt and reliable justice for all. A majority of the electorate is well on the way to understanding that the death penalty actually impedes these other goods that they value. The campaign's job is to help people solidify that emerging understanding; when they do, a majority are willing to go with a system that ensures that really dangerous criminals never come back on the streets.

I won't be writing about the campaign much, though I am sure that I'll occasionally share vignettes from the process. The death penalty is a deeply emotional subject; the thought of executing another human being forces most of us to ponder what we believe and value. Occasionally I may have experiences to share, but mostly campaigns are to be lived (and survived) first and analyzed only later.

Wacky "improvement" proposed to ranked choice voting:how to make a bad system worse

2011-11-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

There is nothing to celebrate in how ranked choice voting worked in San Francisco's mayoral election this year. I continue to believe this scheme is anti-democratic, undermining informed participation and commitment to the civic process. Progressive enthusiasm for it comes out of our least attractive delusion: we wish we could make politics harmonious, all sweetness and light. But since politics is about how we adjudicate the nasty clashes of interests that pervade any society, our gimmicks never deliver that utopian dream. There are real contests between opposing interests and in a working democracy these are clarified and decided by elections. Ranked choice voting is a "good government reform" meant to encourage us to pretend otherwise.

Now a couple of (right-leaning) Supervisors are threatening to try to upset this apple cart by repealing ranked choice; I wish them well.

Meanwhile, ranked choice voting enthusiasts are rallying to make things worse. From Beyond Chron:

… RCV must be expanded – especially in elections with multiple viable candidates – to include more than three choices. Portland, Maine just had their first mayoral election with Ranked Choice Voting – where voters got to “rank” all fifteen candidates. If San Francisco had such a system this year, we would not have seen 16% of all ballots “exhausted” [cast for three candidates who didn't make the top two] – because voters could have likewise ranked all the candidates.

This is nuts. He's generously advocating to give voters an opportunity to vote for 10 or so candidates they don't want to elect and that is somehow an improvement? It you want to make elections even less appealing and more of a laughing stock, expand this silly system.

Elections are about figuring out what candidates stand for, deciding who is closest to in-sync with what you want in government, often having to make lesser evil choices to pick someone to support, and electing that person. They are not about Rube Goldberg schemes to game complicated ballots -- they are fights over policies and perceived fit for a particular office.

San Francisco's ranked choice voting apparently discourages voting: this author neglects to mention that our recent 12 mayoral candidate race merely got 42 percent of us out to vote. The large number of implausible candidates conveyed an impression to the casual observer that little could be at stake; who could take such a process seriously? So many voters didn't bother. A runoff boils the field down to candidates who must take a stand on the chronic San Francisco issue -- is the city to be playground for the financial barons of the one percent or a livable environment for its citizens and families? In a run off, issues get clarified and fought out. In our current Mickey Mouse system, it is impossible to discern the issues and contrasts amid the noise and foolishness.

We've given ourselves a flashy "modern" anti-democratic process that only a math nerd could love; we've deprived ourselves of our most valuable arena in which citizens have an opportunity to decide the city's direction. Instant run-off voting gives voters a false sense that somehow they are not forced to make a hard choice about who gets to be in power; they can just play this cute little popularity (and name recognition) game and that passes for citizenship. Expanding RCV should stay in kindergarden where we are socialized to make nice; politics ain't bean bag. Elections should present hard choices and people need to be encouraged to know that, not have it hidden in a silly muddle.

On the road home ...

2011-11-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

It's a long trip from Martha's Vineyard to San Francisco -- over 12 hours when all works smoothly as planned. Any additional blogging today will have to wait until we pass through one of several well-connected temporary stopping points along the way.

Tom Wicker, R.I.P.

2011-11-27T06:08:00.000-08:00

Tom Wicker at center outside Attica Prison.

I read Saturday's obituary in the New York Times for columnist and reporter Tom Wicker -- and wondered. The focus was on his reporting from the midst of the chaos in Dallas the day John F. Kennedy was murdered and on his various subsequent positions with the paper.

That's not how I remember Wicker -- a writer I read regularly for several decades. For me, he was the voice of white establishment anti-racism. His was not a cutting edge position, but it was a vitally necessary contribution to the changes our society has accomplished over the years.

Above all, he was the voice of responsible understanding of how New York State authorities came to murder nine prison guard hostages and allow police forces to brutally assault hundreds of prisoners after suppressing the Attica prison rebellion of 1971. Black and brown prisoners trusted Wicker to be among the luminaries they invited to the prison to attempt negotiations with the state. Fellow Times columnist Anthony Lewis in an oped describes Wicker at Attica:

His view of the 1971 Attica prison uprising was a natural extension of his passion against racial discrimination. The prisoners — who famously called on Tom to inspect conditions and monitor negotiations with the authorities — were there for a reason; they were not the same as the innocent victims of racism. But here, as in the South, the men of power — Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, and others — abused that power mercilessly. Tom wrote a powerful book about this experience: “A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt.”

Hearing of Wicker's death, I thought to reread this book. Sadly, it seems no longer available from the San Francisco Public Library. That is not a good thing.

Saturday scenes and scenery: a New England Thanksgiving Day walk

2011-11-26T04:39:00.000-08:00

They speak of this land as grey and harsh -- and so it would be without the sun.

It's true the sun is not warm ...

but what light!

We provide distraction.

The rock and trees have seen it all.

Friday cat blogging

2011-11-25T06:12:00.000-08:00

Don't tell Frisker (she's home, mostly alone) but I'm getting to spend Thanksgiving weekend with Emerson. Despite what one might gather from this apparently dignified pose, he's a bundle of youthful energy, charging about and trying to sneak outside to chase blowing leaves.

Eagle's flight loses some loft

2011-11-25T05:24:00.000-08:00

Power and human purposes around the globe are shifting toward new patterns, new aims and new necessities. Stephen Walt offers a reflection:

... More broadly, if you compare the era in which most of us have lived to the previous fifty years (1900-1950), there's little question that we've enjoyed a period of comparative benevolence. The first half of the 20th century witnessed two enormously destructive world wars, the worst economic depression in history, and several brutal genocides. The past sixty years has its own share of tragedies, to be sure, but the overall level of violence was much lower, economic growth was fairly steady (until recently), and many of us never had to endure the insecurities, travesties, and sacrifices that earlier generations experienced or that were still common in other parts of the world.

Most Americans ought to be especially grateful for their extraordinary good fortune, and Thanksgiving is an appropriate time for us to reflect upon it. And as I watch Europe teeter on the brink of financial collapse, observe the violent political contestation that is sweeping the Middle East, note the rapidly shifting balance of power in Asia, and contemplate the tragicomic follies of our so-called leaders in Washington, I do wonder how long it will last, and whether I will look back with regret at the tranquility we have lost.

By the end of the year, U.S. troops will have left Iraq. Egypt continues the struggle to define what follows tyranny. Despite the Libyan adventure, U.S. power continues to wane in what we call the "Middle East." Tony Karon at Time summarizes caustically.

It's just as well, perhaps, that the Administration has begun talking of a "Pacific century," moving troops to Australia even as it withdraws from Iraq. Because for better or worse, 2011 will be remembered as the year the Middle East, as a region, declared its independence from U.S. influence.

We aren't good at noticing when long established human arrangements finally begin to crack open. We have a hard time assimilating that the planet itself is changing under stress. But looking away doesn't calm the storms; we're in for unfamiliar seas.

Turkey day thoughts

2011-11-24T06:11:00.000-08:00

A wild turkey, sighted at California's China Camp State Park in the fall of 2011; this too is one of the many parks California is closing or privatizing to balance its budget.

A least one of the founding fathers thought this native bird would have made a better national symbol than the one chosen.

"For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

"With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country...

"... For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."
Benjamin Franklin

The birds Franklin knew would have been smaller than the one many of us eat today, and if slaughtered, the meat would have mostly dark, unlike modern commercially farmed breeds who are all white breast.

I am not particularly a fan of the tradition of eating turkey on the Thanksgiving holiday, so I am glad to report that we're having duck. I don't know what Franklin thought of the duck. Best wishes to all on this most pleasant of holidays.

Warming Wednesdays; get your extreme weather updates

2011-11-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

If you are like me, you often turn to the net to answer such mundane questions as "will it be hot today?" or "will I need a raincoat when I travel to the east coast?" My usual source for weather information is The Weather Underground. Now, in cooperation with Green TV, they are offering new videos every two weeks about extreme weather events that seem to signal global warming.

Here's Episode I:

Living in a more dramatically changeable climate doesn't look like fun.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- unpleasant reminders of an inconvenient truth.

When constitutions stand, and fail, as bulwarks of freedoms

2011-11-22T09:49:00.000-08:00

When Susan N. Herman set out to write a book about abuses by the U.S. government since 9/11, friends told her they didn't want to hear any more about renditions or Guantanamo. The prison in Cuba is not what Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy is about. It's about us: about what the government has done and what we've allowed to be done at home.

If you've been paying attention -- or just passing through airports, or entering the New York City subway, or maybe even taking books from the library -- you know that since 9/11 the government has decided we need to be watched, recorded and prodded to ensure our "security." Herman calls this the "Just Trust Us" society, since they dispensed with our Constitutional protections against searches and unwarranted surveillance -- and consistently refused to give courts or anyone else enough information to determine whether all this snooping is providing any safety or just covering the asses of an ever-enlarging bureaucracy.

... the last ten years have inculcated in many Americans a sense that we cannot know enough to make the policy decisions about how much surveillance is too much or whether particular security programs work. While it is certainly true that the rigors of secrecy make it difficult for us to assess what benefits we may be getting from broad material support laws, wholesale surveillance, or massive data banking, for example, there is no good reason why the American people cannot be included in the decision-making process to a greater degree than we have been so far. …

Herman is also clear on a significant reason that both Bush II and Obama have been able to get away with running roughshod over fundamental freedoms:

…the brunt of the impact of our post-9/11 program has fallen on Muslims, a minority in the United States practicing a widely misunderstood religion and easily stereotyped as resembling the 9/11 hijackers. …The milder impact felt by non-Muslim Americans -- loss of privacy, occasional co-optation as government agents, and embarrassing experiences at the airport -- may seem to many like an acceptable bargain. This view, of course, discounts the deeper and less visible damage the New Normal is doing to our constitutional principles, to our democracy, and to our way of life. …

We stand indicted as a people that cling to a "childish" expectation that presidents can guarantee our safety. Since this is delusional, we have submitted to delusional measures -- and thereby voluntarily given up much of our inheritance of liberty.

Herman, the national president of the American Civil Liberties Union, does a good job of cataloging the court proceedings that have followed on current government encroachments on freedoms. Her book is certainly worth reading. So is David K. Shipler's more journalistic survey of much of the same terrain, The Rights of the People.***

While writing about the erosion of democracy and liberty in the United States, I also need to pass on that the ruling African National Congress in South Africa has passed a press law that newspapers fear will mark the death of open speech and free inquiry in that emerging democracy. Such luminaries of the anti-apartheid struggle as Bishop Desmond Tutu and former South African president Nelson Mandela urged the party not to press ahead, but their legislative members have done so. Editors of newspapers across the country joined in an impassioned statement denouncing the new law. Some bits:

Every member of Parliament who presses the green button to vote "yes" for the Protection of State Information Bill will at that moment take personal responsibility for the first piece of legislation since the end of apartheid that dismantles an aspect of our democracy -- a betrayal that will haunt them forever.

… this vote comes amidst escalating attacks by the ANC on reporters, newspapers and the freedom of the press. Adoption of the Bill could be the first step in a series of attacks, including the creation of the media appeals tribunal mooted by the ANC, that slowly strangle our freedom to know what is being done in our name.

The spreading culture of self-enrichment, either corrupt or merely inappropriate, makes scrutiny by a free media which is fuelled by whistle blowers who have the public interest at heart more essential than ever since 1994.

If members of the ANC cannot muster the courage to defy their party's leaders and repudiate the Bill, it will again -- as it was under apartheid -- be up to those willing to go to jail for a very long time to expose the abuse of state power.

The newspapers will go to court, appealing to the higher authority of the country's post apartheid democratic constitution against the legislative attempt to criminalize speech. The country has a long and noble history of struggle for the rule of law; before he was the apartheid regime's most famous political prisoner, founding President Nelson Mandela was a lawyer. The nation's highest court has shown great bravery in defense of liberty, for example by affirming gay marriage rights in 2006. But free speech and civil liberties in South Africa are clearly under threat, just as they are in the United States. Can written constitutional guarantees save them?

Not clear on the concept @occupy

2011-11-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

According to Steve Clemons, that semi-embalmed fossil John McCain told an audience of international imperial warlords and spooks in Halifax that

"this Arab Spring is a virus that will attack Moscow and Beijing."

Hmmm -- I wonder if any of them have noticed that the same democratic outpouring is breaking free in locations from Boston to Oakland to Los Angeles to Austin to Miami and beyond. Who knows, the virus of liberation might one day even infect Washington as readily as Moscow or Beijing? Maybe even more readily ...

A little life-saving would be something to be thankful for

2011-11-21T11:17:00.000-08:00

U.S. Army Spc. Lester Aldana, Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team security force provides security during a dismounted patrol in Sub-District 10 of Kandahar City Nov. 16. ISAF Media Flickr

At a moment when all progressive eyes are fixed on Occupy protests and police brutality at home and Egyptian citizens' renewed demands for greater democracy abroad, it's hard to find attention for yet another fight in the U.S. Congress about our war in Afghanistan, but we should. As Robert Naiman explains:

If Senator Jeff Merkley's "expedite the drawdown from Afghanistan" amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act makes a strong showing, that could tip the Obama administration towards a faster drawdown.
That would likely save hundreds of American and Afghan lives -- not to mention all the people who wouldn't be physically and psychologically maimed -- and could easily save the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars, at a time when the alleged need for fiscal austerity is being touted as a reason to cut Social Security benefits and raise the Medicare retirement age.
HuffPo

He thoughtfully provides a list of Senators who could make a difference by voting for this thing. If one of these is your Congresscritter, a holler to their office might help.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD)
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY)
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)

On owning a contemporary car

2011-11-21T06:00:00.001-08:00

If, like me, you hold on to a car for ten years and only replace it when various parts begin to fall off, the accoutrements and amenities in new models are something of a shock.

The last one, acquired new in 1999, introduced me to the cup holder, an invaluable feature of modern American life.

This one, a 2011 model, tells me when she wants maintenance.

Presumably the next one, if there ever is such a thing, will drive itself.

Still going, one step outside her comfort zone

2011-11-20T07:31:00.000-08:00

This horrible picture is from the aftermath of a police charge on a group of Occupiers in Seattle on November 15. Law enforcement is being awfully liberal with pepper spray these days.

Here Dorli Rainey tells the story her own way. This is all over the web, but if you haven't watched it, it is totally worth your time. (I grabbed it from Ronni Bennett.) ***Now to a doctor to try to get some relief from this awful cold that has felled me.

Yes, you can train a cat!

2011-11-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

Feline agility events began about a decade ago when two couples who met on the cat show circuit went out to dinner and started talking about the tricks their cats did. They modified some dog agility obstacles and showed them to their cats; from there, a group called the International Cat Agility Tournaments — or ICAT — was born.

“When we first started it, everybody said, ‘Train a cat? Impossible!’ ” said Shirley Piper, left, one of the four founding members. She and her partner, Kathy Krysta, right, live in Riverside, Calif., with their 20 cats, which they train regularly.

The New York Times offers a photo slide show on serous cat training. Go take a look at the whole thing.***I'm fighting a rhinovirus today. Nothing deeper than this will come from me.

An end to the internet as we have known it?

2011-11-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

Those of us for whom using the Net is a staple of our work and our lives need to be aware that, like previous "revolutionary" citizen-participation technological innovations such as radio, there are forces that want to shut us down.

The owners of intellectual property want to get paid for their products. They are threatened by the creative use we make of their artifacts on blogs, on YouTube, via Twitter and will make in environments only imagined today. Note I said "the owners" -- those complaining about our vigorous free use are less the creative artists whose products we share and build upon, more the corporations who buy the artists' work and want to control reselling it to the rest of us. (There's that 1% problem again …)

Rebecca MacKinnon, in an oped article in the New York Times, explains how the proposed "Stop Online Piracy Act" would be as dangerous to free speech in the United States as is China's Great Internet Firewall.

The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted. This in turn would create daunting financial burdens and legal risks for start-up companies, making it much harder for brilliant young entrepreneurs with limited resources to create small and innovative Internet companies that empower citizens and change the world.

Creators need to be paid for their creations, but our society needs robust free speech. The money barons are closing in and we know they do own Congress …***
Meanwhile, there are other threats to our use of the internet that may be even more serious. In the guise of helping us find the results we want or would like, based on our past internet behavior, search engines and web sites are tailoring what we see when we visit them. Think about it: my Google search results for any particular term do not look like yours; the same goes for the suggested articles the New York Times offers me: you get different ones. In many ways, the personalized commercial internet will be more constraining than a government-censored one.

Eli Pariser calls this living in "The Filter Bubble." He explains clearly in less than 10 minutes here.

The internet is showing us what we want to see, not what we need to see. … you don't decide what gets in … and you don't decide what gets left out. … We're seeing a passing of the torch from human gate keepers to algorithmic ones. … We need to make sure these algorithms have encoded within them a sense of civic responsibility … we need [the authors of these filter rules] to give us some control so we can decide what gets through and what doesn't.

You can also read Pariser's The Filter Bubble for more. Hint: I found it in an old fashioned information channel -- the public library. Recommended.***
This seems an appropriate place to serve notice that Facebook has announced that as of November 22 it will no longer allow import of blog posts.

"You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you'll still be able to write individual notes."

Apparently they want me to have to visit their useless site daily. Ferget it … I had friends before Facebook and expect to have them after.