Democrats' Massachusetts debacle

Boston Globe

With Scott Brown having won, Democrats will have the same Senate margin they had this time last year, 59 votes. We all now know that the Senate has chosen to adopt procedures that hamstring it. So Democrats will have to get tougher and smarter if they want to get anything done. I don't believe even the Senate can be tied up forever by a minority IF the majority actually wants to do anything. The Dems problem is that it is not clear they'd rather do anything more than posturing in divergent directions. No wonder there is an enthusiasm gap.***
Losing a Massachusetts statewide election to a Republican wouldn't be quite such a shock if folks remembered more of the state's political history. Though Kennedys owned the turf, the state elected Republican governors from 1991 through 2007. Obviously there is a Republican base there.

I haven't worked politically in Massachusetts since walking precincts for Fr. Robert Drinan in 1970, but a contentious post from Al Giordano today rings true for me as a political junkie who observes the Commonwealth frequently.

Truth is, Massachusetts' reputation as a progressive electoral bastion – dating back to 1972 when it was the only state to support Democrat George McGovern against President Richard Nixon (leading to a plethora of bumper-stickers that said, "Don’t Blame Me, I’m from Massachusetts") – is undeserved. ... Its capital city of Boston is the most segregated major city, racially speaking, perhaps in the United States. (And it was the Far North bastion of opposition to public school integration long after the Deep South had stepped into the future.)

Which is why Governor Deval Patrick's 2006 gubernatorial triumph was a big step forward for the Bay State electorate.

But the Massachusetts Democratic primary [base] electorate is one inordinately influenced by State House hacks in one corner and politically-correct practitioners of "identity politics" activism and such in the other, and regularly in the dysfunctional push-and-shove between the two, the Massachusetts Democratic Party falls so out of touch with the public that it takes a big electoral hit.

I might put that a little more generously: Massachusetts often feels as if it had two Democratic parties. One is traditional, white, Catholic, and working class, at least culturally. These folks gave Hilary Clinton her huge victory in the 2008 primary in the state. The other Democratic party is more urban, black and brown, gay and also catches up the mostly white "cultural creatives" who tend cluster in educational centers and technology hubs. Neither set much likes "dumb wars," the former because their kids get killed in them, the latter because they reject U.S. imperial over-reach. Sometimes these folks get going in the same direction; then they overwhelm the exurban, mostly white, mostly libertarian-oriented Republicans.

Though Barack Obama had no trouble blasting to victory in Massachusetts in November 2008, the state's configuration of Democratic factions is not his essential coalition. Bush's dismal record of failure, the economic implosion, and a national yearning for change made his big win possible for Obama -- as I wrote two years ago --

... to birth a national coalition ... which doesn't quite have a secure demographic base, though such a base seems visible on the horizon.

Today in Massachusetts the stress points in that coalition showed themselves again. Coakley won in Boston and the parts of Western Mass where she should have won, but not by as much as she needed. Very likely the fissures in the Democratic coalition will show up again nationally next November unless the White House political operation can figure out how to put Humpty Dumpy together again. It's a tough job, since Humpty Dumpty is only barely out of the fetal stage.***Coakley seems to have been lousy at the business of running for office -- but much as they'd like it, that shouldn't get the President and Democratic leaders off the hook for this loss. Coakley's pollster, Celinda Lake is almost certainly right about the underlying dynamic:

"If Scott Brown wins tonight he'll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it. And right now they think they've got economic policies for Washington that are delivering more for banks than Main Street."

... Lake said that the problem for Democrats is that voters are blaming them for the nation's poor economic conditions. "2010 is fast turning out to be a blame election and I think that either we are going to characterize who deserves the blame - whether that's banks and lobbyists and people who still want to hold on to national Republican economic strategies - or we're going to get the blame. And that's a very different tone than, often, the administration is comfortable with," she said.

The feeling among voters, said Lake, is that Washington prioritizes Wall Street over Main Street and that, despite Coakley's credentials as a state attorney general who has taken on and beaten Wall Street banks, sending her to Washington would not make a difference. "On the eve of the election, Martha Coakley had a 21-point advantage over Scott Brown on who would fight Wall Street and deliver for Main Street. But it didn't predict to the vote, because voters thought, even if they sent her down here that it wouldn't happen. ...Voters are voting for change and we have to go back to that change message. And we have to deliver on change, especially an economic policy that serves working people."

If the White House decides to understand its weakness as pushing too hard too fast (as mainstream media and the Republicans will push them to) expect a blood bath for Democrats in November. Obama got to office by selling a vision of dynamic movement forward; his coalition is fragile when mired in inactivity. It just barely exists on its best days. It's still trying to be born, to come into its own. It withers when left to lie around, waiting for politicians and political fights formed in a different U.S. era to get themselves moving.

Winter wildlife

The seasonal rains have finally come to San Francisco. During a break in the drenching torents, I took a run around Lake Merced. The native fauna had come out.





After jumping over the slow moving slugs, I came upon this fellow.





The bird was remarkably calm about being approached by a human with a camera phone.

Mass. Senate election: how long is the winner's term?

Since it took me some time to find an answer to this, I figure others might be interested. The winner of tomorrow's election will be in office through 2012, completing Ted Kennedy's term that began in 2006. So think of this as close to a three-year Senate term.

I hope Martha Coakley wins. Her weakness reminds me of California Democratic party leaders, ineffectual and insipid. Andrew Sullivan speaks for me on this:

The Republican party right now is largely bonkers. The Democratic party is a lily-livered hackfest of mediocrity.

And I'm no independent. I work politically as a Democrat, believing progressives have to work through what avenues are available to us. But a politics that fails either to engage ordinary people's pains or to inspire their hopes kills democracy.

Should Coakley lose, expect the Democrats in the Senate to become more interested in breaking down the anti-majoritarian features of that body a year sooner than they would have otherwise.

We need a revolution of values ...

Dr. King speaking to some DFHs (dirty f--king hippies) in California 42 years ago [10:42]:

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but he is a molder of consensus.

And on some positions
cowardice asks the question is it safe
expediency asks the question is it politic
vanity asks the question is it popular
but conscience asks the question is it right?

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.

Can human society live with such people? Can it live without them?

MARTIN LUTHER KING AT SANTA RITA produced by Colin Edwards.
RECORDED: Santa Rita, California, 14 Jan. 1968.
BROADCAST: KPFA, 15 Jan. 1968. (23 min.)BB1460 Pacifica Radio Archives.

Woodfin workers still keeping on ... and on

Supporters of workers denied their lawful pay were outside the Emeryville Woodfin Suites Hotel again Saturday morning delivering a "wake-up call" from a colorful picket line. Inside, members of the Institute of Management Consultants were holding a conference.

The hotel has been ordered by Superior Court Judge Steven Brick to pay some $200,000 in back wages to workers to bring the hotel into line with the East Bay city's living wage ordinance passed by referendum in 2005. Instead of complying, the hotel has tried to sic immigration authorities on the housekeepers it refuses to pay, tried and failed to overturn the law in the courts, and just days ago presented the city of Emeryville with a preposterous bill for $500,000 in legal fees for the litigation it has repeatedly lost.



The East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy which was instrumental in passing the original wage ordinance has organized a boycott in supporter the workers.

The ongoing struggle at the Woodfin points up again two reforms that the 2008 Democratic campaign seemed to promise -- and which so far have gotten no action from Obama and the Congress:

• Labor law reform that would put some teeth into worker's theoretical right to form a union to bargain for them. As it stands, existing labor law is so weak that companies can simply treat any costs of violating standards or firing labor sympathizers as a minor cost of doing a profitable business.

• Fair immigration reform that would bring undocumented workers out of the anxious shadows via a formal path to legalization. Huge numbers of the low wage work force are currently undocumented and employers find that a benefit as most dare not complain about any abuses they suffer in the workplace. The whole society suffers when millions of workers cannot complain when mistreated by their bosses.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Patagonian flora & fauna

In general, the close-ups of small things were taken by my partner who loves her camera's micro capacity. I shoot the more distant shots. The guanacos at the end of the show were several hundred feet away.

Should the slideshow fail on your browser, you can see the set here.

U.S. Marines winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan

Western (U.S. and European?) troops and Afghan security forces were accused of desecrating a Koran during a night raid. There was a protest in Garmsir, in southern Afghanistan and apparently local Taliban leaders whipped the crowd into a frenzy, and some say they started throwing rocks at troops. Troops opened fire, killing 8 or so civilians. [2:32]

Two days later Marines and Afghan troops fired on a protesting crowd of civilians in the same area, killing five.

The Taliban may be instigating these incidents, but the dead people are Afghans and we can assume U.S. troops aren't making a lot of friends. Our government has dropped them in a hostile place where they don't begin to know how to cope. So they do what they are trained to do: blow away the hostiles.

This war is nuts and will end badly.

A Senator who believed we can

Bumping along in a public bus over the pampas in Chile and Argentina over Christmas (a great form of travel; very comfortable), I read Senator Edward Kennedy's posthumously published memoir True Compass as an audiobook. It was a good way to encounter Kennedy's story -- and my idea of easy travel reading.

I should preface this by admitting that I've never been much of a Kennedy fan -- or even someone who thought of Ted Kennedy as a progressive champion. Despite my own last name and long-gone forbears, I don't like the dynasties in U.S. politics. And in comparison to his brothers whose times I do recall, "Teddy" never seemed more than the young pretender. Add to that, he kept getting into woman trouble. My lack of much sense of Kennedy probably had a good deal to do with being in California -- perhaps if I'd been an Easterner I'd have had a more nuanced sense of him.

Anyway, in consequence, True Compass contained a lot that was new to me. His childhood sounded, by turns, wonderfully supportive and just utterly awful for the last little boy in that enormous, hyperactive, striving family. It was a revelation that young Teddy was molested as a schoolboy; notably, he specifically describes the cruel acts a teacher inflicted on other students, but not what was done to him. Some details were too awful to reveal, even at the end.

I was very struck that, writing last year, Kennedy still presented 1963 -- the year President Jack Kennedy was killed, as a kind of fulcrum in his life. It took many further years, another murdered brother, a failed presidential run in 1980, a broken marriage, and standing up against Ronald Reagan's disdain for using government to improve ordinary life, before he came into his own.

In True Compass, Kennedy movingly records how, as late as 1994, the family legacy of achievement and tragedy inhibited him from claiming his own successes. In that year, he defeated the most serous challenge he ever faced for the Massachusetts Senate seat, one from Mitt Romney (these guys recur). In a spirited campaign he overcame voters' feelings that he had left their concerns to become a remote, liberal Washington pooh-bah, no longer a good Irish Catholic boy from white Boston. It took his second wife, Vicki, forcefully reminding him that he had won the campaign himself, not his family, for him to be able to feel the fullness of a difficult achievement.

Through a long career, he was there for a series of causes that needed a supportive Senator who was good at moving things through that dysfunctional legislative body. He was solid on civil rights, Native American concerns, women's rights (including choice) and gay rights long before it was commonplace for Democrats to say all the right things. Because he scarcely had to campaign to hold his seat, he had the opportunity to learn how policy works -- how to govern. That's more of a rarity than we realize in politicians; many never get the chance to dig into the jobs they scrap so hard to win.

Kennedy seems to have been a "yes we can" sort of person throughout, even when his personal life was a mess. He believed the duty of people in office was to inspire. In this respect, his assessment of Ronald Reagan expressed his deepest beliefs. Though he acknowledges that many revered him, Reagan "did not meet the ultimate criteria of greatness. .. he led the country in the wrong direction, sensing and playing to its worse impulses ..." He cites Reagan's kow-towing to Southern white racism and his scolding "phantom welfare-queens." Kennedy believed there was a better way to lead:

Experience has taught me that genuine, principled leadership can persuade our people that their enlightened self-interest lies to the left. The historic gains of the New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society attest to that. I maintained my conviction that the working class majority forged by Roosevelt remained our best hope for justice and progress.

I have to admit, I wish I could hear a much better communicator, Barack Obama, say that so forthrightly. Maybe it took the assurance of a Massachusetts patrician to speak so clearly about class.

True Compass is too long, too detailed in places. I don't know if I would have got through it in print; there's more in it than I really wanted to know about Edward Kennedy's personal insecurities, especially as recounted with a mature distance from them. It is self-indulgent in places. Maybe if Kennedy had been more healthy, it could have been edited more tightly.

But I'm glad to have read the book. Kennedy was a better, more complicated man and politician than I ever realized. We already miss him in the dreadful Senate.

Season creep again

This was in the email this morning.


It seems a bit premature when much of the country still looks like this.

Haiti

The BBC is reporting that as many as half a million 50000 people may have been killed by the magnitude 7 earthquake that struck the capital of the impoverished Caribbean island. Because of longstanding pre-existing connections, this is an emergency in which donating through Episcopal Relief and Development will be as good an option as is possible in the context of horror and chaos.

2009 retrospective: Why did the Obama administration blow the politics so badly?

I never expected the new administration to be unreservedly progressive in its domestic agenda. Way back during the primaries, I wrote:

Once in office, any of [the Democratic hopefuls] would require frequent kicks in the pants from progressives to keep them marginally on our side. You see, I think there are sides. Does Obama believe in his heart that there are sides?

Unhappily it looks like the answer to that is more straightforward than I hoped. In office, Obama's "bi-partisan" inclinations have turned out to mean that he has not fought for any of his potentially progressive initiatives if there was a whisper of corporate or conservative pushback. As a result, we have an economic stimulus too small to save state budgets or get people back to work, a Treasury Department that rolls over and plays dead while the banks it just bailed out pay exorbitant bonuses to the crooks who did the dirty deeds, and a health care "reform" that omits elements that might have made it popular but that does delight insurers and medical profiteers.

This is not the stuff of winning politics. Pissing off your base is no way to cement your power. Looking like you are not doing the job is sure to frustrate "independents" who may have supported you in the past.

And that is what I find so surprising about the Obama administration's 2009 performance. I think the particular flavor of dissonance I'm feeling may be strongest for those of us who have a genuinely left-leaning view of U.S. politics. We saw the 2008 campaign as an unimaginable triumph against the country's original sin, its pervasive and apparently permanent need to define African-Americans as unequal, lesser beings. We saw Obama as an amazingly deft, even dazzling, politician, successfully trekking through a minefield never before traversed.

And so we are simply astonished that the administration has not managed to mollify its friends while it made the compromises that enable it to govern. Maybe they had to cut lousy deals with insurers and the pharmaceutical industry in order to get most people covered by some kind of insurance, however poorly. But if Obama could sell himself to the nation as an unthreatening Black man, why couldn't he have found some way to sell policy compromises as steps on the road to progress, even if he also had to reassure corporations he wouldn't take them down?

I guess he really isn't a political magician, any more than he is really a progressive. Too bad, the country needed both.***
I have to speculate whether some of the apparent political tone-deafness of the Obama administration might derive from the man's experience as a community organizer. While the world at large thinks his organizing experience means that he has a progressive past, those of us who have been there also understand that he very likely has an instrumental slant on popular mobilization.

Community organizers out of the Alinsky school (that is Obama's background) know very well that people in disenfranchised communities have a welter of resentments and also survival strategies that make them ripe to be molded into a political force -- but they also have very little information about how to aim that force. That's where the organizer comes in, "assisting" communities in "cutting an issue," choosing what policy objective to focus their wrath and vigor upon. An organizer has enormous leeway in where to point his/her troops; most people are pretty open to taking direction on how to confront issues until they've accumulated some real wins. After that they may get independent and feisty, but if organizing succeeds, by then they've moved from outsiders to ordinary local politics.

Presumably Obama and his people took from the extraordinary success of the 2008 that they merely had to point and their organized people would go. But once the election was accomplished, the politically active class receded to encompass only the already active -- and such folks don't take policy direction very easily. So now Obama has a base feeling badly neglected.

The new year brings suggestions that the Obama people have begun to appreciate how demobilized the folks in their potential grassroots have become. Today brought email from Obama-confidant Valerie Jarrett inviting the list to presentations on administration accomplishments. But if you have to convince your friends you've done something, you are already behind the eight ball. They need to show, not tell. That will be hard after this disappointing year in office.

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

2009 retrospective: Obama disappointment. "Dumb wars" and security fears make for a law-free executive.

Displays like this are still common in San Francisco.

Like most progressives, I hoped for a lot from the new administration. And we evidently aren't going to get it, especially in the realm of our country's continued efforts to control rather than live in the world.

As everyone knows, the President who once opposed "dumb wars" has endorsed the dumb Afghan adventure where he cannot convincingly assert he has allies (Europeans? -- they want out), or a local partner (Karzai? -- who couldn't survive election without fraud and can't get his cabinet through his own Afghan parliament?) to go after al Qaida, a formless collection of angry religious nuts who aren't even located in Afghanistan. The inertia of empire is a strong force indeed. Confronted with it, the best the new prez can do is is try to limit over-reach while feeding the beast.

I never really thought the guy was going to be able to turn empire around on a dime. Eventually this country will bankrupt itself in these idiot adventures and may be able to take back the blank check from the bloated military and its contractors.

But I did hope that an Obama presidency would restore some confidence that we have a government of laws, not men. This was not to be. Utilizing the same rationale as his predecessor -- the demands of a non-existent perfect "security" -- this president has continued to govern from the fiction that the threat of terrorist outrages means we are "at war" and consequently the executive should exercise unconstrained powers.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate offers a recent rundown of the slippery slope we're embarked upon. Current powers the president claims, especially continuing to hold Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release, amount to a repudiation of both rule of law and common sense. She concludes that

We have come so far from taking and holding prisoners, based on their own alleged bad acts, that we are justifying holding them forever based on imagined connections to the bad acts of others. ...

...If one accepts the claim that Guantanamo itself, in the words of the president on Tuesday, "has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda," every last prisoner at the camp becomes a walking argument against his own release. Not just because of what he may someday do to harm the United States, but because of what he may say to someone else who may in turn someday do something to harm the United States.

Go read this entire article -- it is clear and devastating.

Sadly, the excellent talking dog who has done a magnificent job since 2002 of chronicling the legal ins and out of the emerging dictatorial system has concluded about his former college classmate that

... the Obama approach to counter-terrorism is the same as George W. Bush's. Period.

Okay, so why should we care? This law-free regime has largely been used on poor and dopey foreign Muslim men. Abuse of the poor, the black and the brown by law enforcement is hardly a new feature of the U.S. system.

The current form of executive over-reach matters desperately because it undercuts the myth of an ever-improving, more free, more inclusive, more equal democracy that is Obama's own necessary mytho-history. The story goes: progress toward freedom is steady; the United States never goes backward. Oh sure, there are obvious hiccups along this blissful route -- Southern reconstruction and segregation beginning in the 1870s, Japanese internment during World War II -- but the basic trajectory is always upward toward freedom.

The Bush-Obama security program says no -- we can't afford to maintain the rule of law when confronted with a threat of terrorism. That's the horror of Obama's backsliding on the rule of law; it is a deep affront to the very essence of the hope he claims to represent.

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

Health care reform shorts: AFL-CIO's Trumka spells out what's up

Speaking at the National Press Club, President Richard Trumka had this to say (I quote at length because I don't trust most media to bother to tell us what a union leader says.) After a running through a litany of progressive efforts supported by labor, he continued:

...these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor. But today, as I speak to you, something different is happening with health care.

On the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the small part of our country that has prospered in the last decade--the richest of the rich--to pay a little bit more in taxes so that most Americans can have health insurance. And the House bill reins in the power of health insurers and employers by having an employer mandate and a strong public option.

But thanks to the Senate rules, the appalling irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power of the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill instead drives a wedge between the middle class and the poor. The bill rightly seeks to ensure that most Americans have health insurance. But instead of taxing the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by taxing workers' health plans--not just union members' health care; most of the 31 million insured employees who would be hit by the excise tax are not union members.

The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families. This is a policy designed to benefit elites--in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public.

Transcript at TPM

My emphasis. Sad to see a Democratic President siding with the elites and dividing his "friends."

More on those Okinawa military bases

In response to the previous post Linda Hoaglund emailed:

I am an American filmmaker, born and raised in Japan and I'm currently finishing editing a film about Japanese resistance to U.S. military bases. ... Most Americans, even progressive people of good will, have no idea there are still bases in Japan nor that they are deeply resented.

She offered this YouTube [3:22] about the struggle of Okinawans against the continuing U.S. military presence on their island 65 years after the war that first brought the troops.


You can view the complete trailer for Hoaglund's forthcoming film about Japanese resistance to U.S. war preparations and bases at ANPO: the movie. Some of the scenes from the YouTube are repeated in this, set among works from celebrated Japanese artists. The trailer is a haunting, graceful combination of angry and beautiful. Do check it out. (ANPO is the Japanese acronym for the treaty under which the U.S. maintains its bases.)

For a straightforward list of crimes committed by U.S. forces on supposedly "friendly" Okinawa since 1948, check out this exhaustive list.

Imperial sickness

Last week the New York Times published an op-ed about U.S.-Japanese relations. In a patronizing tone, Joseph Nye, an assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, warns that the newly elected Japanese government is upsetting the Pentagon. The election of this Japanese government is, in its own society, as much a break from the past as President Obama's election was here. The Japanese Democratic Party overcame the Liberal Democratic Party's 50-year lock on governing. And the new party won its victory on a promise of "change."

What distresses Nye, and the Pentagon, is that the new prime minister, Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, has begun to insist that previously settled agreements about the status of U.S. military forces in Japan, especially the Futenma base on the island of Okinawa, should be revisited. Nye complains that Hatoyama leads a

government that is inexperienced, divided and still in the thrall of campaign promises to move the base off the island or out of Japan completely.

... Sometimes Japanese officials quietly welcome "gaiatsu," or foreign pressure, to help resolve their own bureaucratic deadlocks. But that is not the case here: if the United States undercuts the new Japanese government and creates resentment among the Japanese public, then a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic.

Nye certainly knows more about this than I do. But I can't believe that Japanese readers of these words don't resent Nye's apparent assumption that they are children to be led and manipulated.



This op-ed reminded me of Chalmers Johnson's account of U.S. bases in Okinawa in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. According to Johnson, Okinawans have good reason to be furious about the U.S. bases that since 1945 have occupied much of their 454 square mile territory, an area about the size of Los Angeles. In 2000 Johnson wrote that the island housed 39 bases occupying 20 percent of agricultural land, as well as adjacent seas and the airspace overhead.

With a population density amounting to 2198 persons per square kilometer, it is one of the most densely populated areas on the world. Neither Japanese nor Okinawan courts or police have any jurisdiction over these American-occupied lands, seas, or air spaces.

This lack of jurisdiction matters. Again, from Blowback,

At about eight pm on September 4, 1995. two American marines and a sailor seized a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping, bound and gagged her, drove her in a rented car to a remote location, and raped her. Marine Pfc. Rodrico Harp and Seaman Marcus Gill confessed they violently beat her and that Marina Pfc. Kenneth Leder bound her mouth, eyes, hands and legs with duct tape. Described in court by an acquaintance as a "tank, " Gill was six feet tall and weighed 270 pounds. He confessed to raping the girl, while the other two claimed they had merely abducted and beaten her. ...

...A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press, "I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl."

And this was just one case among many of abuse of the "native" population by the supposedly friendly occupiers. In a 2003 article available online, Johnson concluded that

the rape of local women by American soldiers has been the dominant metaphor of America's imperial presence.

Blowback is the first volume of Johnson's monumental trilogy on U.S. empire; it was followed by Sorrows of Empire (in which, in passing, Johnson explains how learning about the Okinawa saga put him onto the project) and Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic.

As the United States becomes ever more deeply mired in wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and wherever our politicians and generals take us next, Johnson's deeply researched, painful, and wise three volume opus remains completely relevant. He never lets his readers escape awareness that empire abroad encroaches ever more deeply on popular sovereignty at home, new faces in office notwithstanding.

What is the Mission watching?

Via Kevin Drum, the New York Times, Google and Netflix. If you live in a major city, you too can see what your neighbors are renting.

We didn't rent one of these.

Saturday scenes and scenery:Patagonian lakes and mountains

The show begins in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, moves on to the Fitzroy Massif east of El Chalten, Argentina and ends with shots from the shores of Lake Argentina near El Calafate.

After the first few days in Patagonia, we decided that the constant weather changes demonstrated the truth of Donovan's '60s era ditty:

First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.

I never understood that until I hiked in Patagonia. One day in less than 6 hours we experienced rain, snow, sleet, fog and sun.

If the slideshow doesn't work, you can see the set here.

"Saturday scenes and scenery" will be a frequent feature here in the future.

Saturday scenes and scenery:Patagonian glaciers

Here are a few of the hundreds of glacier photos we took on our Christmas trip to Patagonia. The very blue photos of a huge glacier running into a lake are of the Perito Moreno ice flow in Argentine. The rocky, snowy flows are on the Fitzroy Massif, also in Argentina.

If the slideshow fails for you, you can see the photo set here.

"Saturday scenes and scenery" will be a frequent feature here in the future.

Death threats for this?

Cartoonist Mark Fiore is getting death threats for this one [1:31]. I can't think of a better way to support his creativity than by putting it up. Take a look.

2009 retrospective: Constitutional decay. Senate category.

If you thought democratic (small d) government meant majority rule, 2009 revealed all too painfully how very far our Constitutional system strays from that hope. James Fallows describes the problem gracefully and dispassionately:

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries -- long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation.

I could point to all sorts cracks in the branches -- legislative, executive and judicial -- and in the federal scheme itself, but for today, let's deal with the Senate where the health care "reform" process has made two faults of that body all too visible.

• The distribution of Senate power is strongly tilted against most of us. I'm old enough to remember when the principle of "one person, one vote" was imposed on state legislatures and the House of Representatives by Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s. Racists and entrenched political elites howled. Previously, all too often, legislative districts gave disproportionate representation to large rural areas while slighting geographically compact cities with far larger populations. In that era, outside the South, those cities were often much more black and brown than the rest of states, compounding the inequity in who got represented among lawmakers. The new rule, gradually over decades, changed the balance racially and economically. The Senate was immune from "one person, one vote" because it is written right in the Constitution that each state gets two Senators. As a result, we are living with a situation in which states that include 12 percent of the national population can elect 41 Senators, enough because of the other presenting dysfunction in the body to dictate to the rest of us.

• A requirement for a 60 vote majority has become the norm in Senate procedure.This undemocratic development is not a constitutional bug; it is a feature that Senators have given themselves by choosing and hanging on to rules and customs of procedure. The filibuster rule did not always constrain all Senate business; it was a rarely used, oppositional last resort. But Senators have let this tactic and their accustomed "courtesies" dictate their entire current process. As a result we are seeing a determined minority hamstring an unusually large majority and empower the outliers within that majority to make outrageous demands on most of us. It's ugly.

Can anything be done to make the Senate more democratic?

Maybe. It's certainly worth understanding the need and working toward it. Twice in the history of this intentionally undemocratic body, popular pressures have forced some reforms.
In the original version of the Constitution, Senators weren't even elected by the people. State legislators had the job. According to even the Senate's own history,the set-up led to an obviously corrupt result; state-level big business competed to buy enough legislators to buy a compliant Senator. Political conflicts in state legislatures sometimes meant that no Senator was sent to Washington for long periods. Pressure for reform began in earnest in the 1870s, though Senators and the political parties treated direct election as a fringe idea. At the beginning of the 20th Century, portraying Senators as bought and paid for shills for fat cats became common. Media of the day made being a Senator synonymous with being a crook, an exploiter of ordinary people. In 1913, states ratified the 17th amendment which provides for the direct election of Senators. A bad arrangement got a little more democratic.
The filibuster -- originally the right to talk against a measure forever, now a simple threat to use 41 votes to prevent legislative action -- has been a procedural rule in the Senate from the get-go. But it is not law -- it's constraints are a choice that Senators put into their rules every two years. Whoever is "in" (the majority) goes along because they fear someday they might be "out." For many years, the filibuster and the inability of other Senators to "impose cloture" (limit debate) mostly attracted attention as the means by which Southern segregationists prevented national civil rights legislation. This country never passed an anti-lynching law because of the Senate filibuster. Until 1975 when a post-Watergate Democratic majority changed the rules, ending a filibuster required two-thirds for closing off debate (66 votes); in that year the number was cut to three-fifths (60) votes. How did this get done? The filibuster had become synonymous with racist stonewalling and with the discredited Nixon's political trickery, so a long-sought reform, though not abolition, became possible.

What can we take from this history?

Several lessons seem apparent:

• Reform takes time. Better get going on it.

• Because reform takes time, there will probably be a lot of ideas about how to make the Senate more democratic. That's okay. I lean toward supporting what look like tweaks rather than grand schemes of constitutional renewal, but I might be argued into more.

• Reforms followed periods of populist unrest (among 19th century workers and farmers; the civil rights and anti-Vietnam eras) even when the Senate was not the focus of alienation. We may need another such period and if this Recession is a double dip event, we could get one.

• Historically, the Senate's anti-democratic aspects have been vulnerable when brought into the light. Mostly people don't know or want to know what their elected representatives are doing. But when popular understanding has built that Senators are crooks, up-for-sale, racists, obstructionists, they have moved in the past. Contemporary communications technology offers highly democratic opportunities to shine the light on this bunch of anti-democratic, egotistical elitists. Let's go for it (and applaud any that will work for reform, of course.)

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

Found object

This hangs in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I have trouble imagining how it got out of the city sign shop and how it then came to hung. Actually there are several of them.

On the other hand, I've probably passed this 100 times without noticing.

I assume they meant to point to this.

Hotel workers march and sit-in for health benefits

Under their last contract, members of Local 2 UNITE-HERE enjoyed full health benefits with low copays. The management of the Hilton San Francisco Union Square, the Grand Hyatt, the Palace, the Westin St. Francis, and the W Hotel want any new contract to require workers pay for their insurance.


The workers -- roomcleaners, cooks, dishwashers, bussers, bellpersons, servers, and bartenders -- claim they can't afford any takeaways. They turned out on Tuesday to urge a boycott of the Hilton. About 160 volunteers were arrested in a peaceful sit-in.


Labor's big guns were on hand. That's AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on the left alongside UNITE-HERE President John Wilhelm.


Many labor stalwarts turned out in support as did health care activists.


There were at least 1000 marchers.


In this tourist town, these folks are what a large fraction of our stable working class looks like. Trumka and Wilhelm seem in this context a throwback to a union movement that was very different in race, ethnicity and gender from the core of today's. But on Tuesday, they were there in solidarity where they were needed.

2009 revisited: two heros for LGBT rights

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

On Monday the New York Times ran a major article about how right wing evangelical Christians from the U.S. have stoked an anti-gay panic in Uganda that is putting the lives of LGBT people there at risk. Today the same paper ran an editorial denouncing Uganda's proposed death penalty for homosexual conduct as

barbarism [that] is intolerable and will make [Uganda] an international pariah.

I believe this horrible news has clawed its way into the mainstream in great part because of the self-sacrificing efforts of two women I had the privilege of working with over the last two years. Their initiative also teaches lessons about how campaigns for justice move from fringe efforts to common knowledge.

Uganda probably has its own indigenous flavors of homophobia, but the shape of the beast there has way too much to do with efforts by right wingers to export our culture wars in order to undermine the witness of mainline Protestant churches to a compassionate justice agenda in both the U.S, and abroad. Journalist Jim Naughton documented this complicated story several years ago in Follow the Money. A key aspect has been conservative U.S. Anglicans encouraging (supporting financially) evangelical African Anglican bishops to denounce the (non-existent) threat of gays undermining their independent cultures. Some African bishops, especially those from Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Uganda, have thundered that homosexuality was an imperialist import: they didn't have any queers til the European colonizers came. That's bunk of course, but not uncommon bunk from people who have foreign domination their history.



In 2008 the international Anglican bishops' meeting at Lambeth in the U.K. was bringing together about 800 princes of the church from around the world -- and was expected to be a place where intra-Anglican conflict over homosexuality would figure heavily. Independent TV journalist and writer Katie Sherrod of Forth Worth, TX and Episcopal priest the Rev. Cynthia Black of Kalamazoo, MI knew how to refute the lie that African churches had no LGBT members: they would go talk with African gays on film. This would get around U.K. immigration restrictions that make it exceptionally hard for gay Africans to visit even briefly because they are suspected of seeking permanent political asylum. It was tough to get the project funded and deadlines slipped, but they managed to create a 20 minute preview.

This early effort was a tremendous hit with the relatively small number of people at Lambeth who saw it. Here were African LGBT Christians speaking for themselves. Katie and Cynthia determined they would finish the film in time for the massive General Convention of the Episcopal Church held in Anaheim last July. Groups advocating for full inclusion of LGBT people in the church, Integrity and the Chicago Consultation, put enough institutional muscle behind the project to enable another round of filming and some professional editing.

And so, last summer, Voices of Witness Africa played over and over to the 10,000 or so Episcopalians who passed through General Convention. Thanks to Katie and Cynthia's determination, probably 80 percent of them became aware of these articulate African LGBT people.

Meanwhile, the anti-homosexual bill was being cooked up in Uganda. In decades past, such a draconian law would have drawn opposition from significant gay groups, such as the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Such organizations have labored tirelessly for justice for gays, but they have always struggled to reach outside of a gay advocacy ghetto.

Showings of Voices of Witness Africa to all those nice, mostly middle class, mostly fairly entitled, U.S. Episcopalians last summer created a new base of people who had learned to recognize African homosexuals as sister and brother humans. Many concluded they had some responsibility for the wellbeing of these strangers. They lobbied their church and other churches to speak out against the Ugandan legislation. I have no doubt that when LGBT and other human rights voices sought to raise the alarm about the Ugandan bill, their ability to enlist straight church folks for the cause was greatly helped by Katie and Cynthia's bright idea. That's good campaigning and a kind of heroism for humanity in my opinion.

Here's the trailer for Voices of Witness Africa. [3:00]

I still don't see a distribution plan on the website, but interested readers can email the filmmakers at voicesofwitnessafrica (at) gmail.com. And all of us can continue to try to push whatever influential groups we may belong to into denouncing the proposed Ugandan legislation.

Many retrospectives judged 2009 discouraging in various ways; I intend to get to some of my own disappointments in future posts. But unsung work to increase the reach of justice and compassion such as that Katie and Cynthia undertook in creating their film deserves a lot more notice than it gets. Good developments usually don't just pop up without hard efforts to create the ground work. There are good folks toiling away at such projects, everyday, and we all owe them gratitude.

More security theater; more stupidity

Here we go again. The sponsors of the underpants bomber must be giggling in their caves. Under pressure from the 'fraidy-cat contingent (right wing Republican sub-set), TSA has decided to subject ALL airline passengers originating from or passing through 14 countries to special search procedures. The list:

Flights from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria (countries classified by US as state sponsors of terror)

Also, flights from Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen

BBC

The 'fraidy-cat contingent screams DO SOMETHING; we must NOT apply common sense to keeping ourselves safe.

Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has some sensible thoughts on the measures we really need.

Attacks such as the failed plot to bomb the airliner on Christmas Day cannot possibly have a real impact on our nation in military terms. These attacks are a form of psychological warfare designed to impact public opinion -- the very definition of terrorism -- and make us do things we would normally reject, such as profiling.

Profiling sends the message to millions of Muslim travelers that it is their faith, not terrorism, that is the problem. This is precisely the talking point put forward by the religious extremists of Al-Qaeda who say the West is at war with Islam and all Muslims, and that everyone had better choose sides.

Religious profiling is a recruiting and public relations tool for terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. Let’s not do Al-Qaeda’s work for them.

If not profiling, what action can we take to boost airline safety and security?

First look at behavior, not at faith or skin color. Then spend what it takes to obtain more bomb-sniffing dogs, to install more sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and to train security personnel in identifying the behavior of real terror suspects.

Along with boosting training and detection equipment, clean up the inaccurate terror watch lists that have ballooned in the post-9/11 era and work the kinks out of an intelligence system that would let a person get on a plane to America even after his own father had notified security services about his disturbing behavior.

Emphasis is mine.

Such thoughtful responses are not allowed. We must have more theater and massive over-reaction. The national character seems to be lurching closer to timid and feeble-minded by the day.

Photo by way of Atul's Blog.

2009 revisited: Gaza: last year ... and still today

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

Health care reform shorts: Of "fairness" and community

With the Senate's passage of something or other on Dec. 24, it looks like Democrats will pass some kind of "reform" of the insurance non-system. It will make abortion less available to women in need and will line insurance executives' already bulging pockets, but just maybe, more people will at least be able to get in the door to see doctors. Or maybe not. We won't really know until 2013 or 2014 or so. It all seems like a lot of sound and fury with a very uncertain result.

But it also still seems worth understanding the terms in which the thing has gone down. And in that respect, Princeton economics professor Uwe E. Reinhardt's discussion of "community rating" in a New York Times blog post casts an interesting light on the premises behind the "reform."

Reinhardt defines "community rating" --the system of setting premiums that the coming law will order insurance companies to practice for persons mandated to buy insurance outside the employer-based system -- as

the practice of charging a common premium to all members of a heterogeneous risk pool who may have widely varied health spending for the year.

That is, if the insurance companies had their profit-driven drothers, they'd charge people who weren't likely to get sick a small enough premium that these folks would still bother to buy insurance and charge people who were likely to get sick a vastly higher premium that deterred them from getting insurance at all, or at least covered most of what the insurers would have to pay out for them. Or maybe they just would refuse to insure people who were likely to get sick. That's a fair description of where we are now. By forcing everyone to buy insurance and forcing insurers to sell to people they'd rather deny outright, the "reform" throws those two populations in together (at least in the individual markets to be called exchanges).

Reinhardt points out, realistically, that young healthy people may very well think the new system "unfair" because they'll be ordered to buy policies whose cost includes a portion of the costs for sick people who wouldn't have insurance at all if insurers were allowed (as they are now, without much limit) to set premiums based on the expected health care costs of individuals. He offers a simplified mathematical model to illustrate how things will work under community rating:

Would it be "fair" that the healthy individuals of cohort A pay a pure insurance premium of only $2,450 a year, while the sicker citizens in cohort B must pay $6,600? This is, after all, how health insurance now is priced in most states for individuals.

Or does "fairness" require that the two groups be merged into one large national risk pool A & B, whose risk profile is shown in the right-most column of the table. If each member of this merged pool is to pay the same pure premium, then the latter will have to be $4,525 to break even. Such a premium would be said to be "community rated" over these two distinct risk pools.

With a community-rated premium for the two risk pools, it would be predictable ex ante that, on average, members of cohort A would be subsidizing members in cohort B. We can infer the degree of subsidy from the premiums. Relative to their premium in a perfectly risk-segregated market, the community-rated premium of $4,525 will cost members of low-risk cohort A $2,075 more and the sicker members of cohort B $2,075 less than they would have paid in a risk-segregated market. Is that "fair"?

Reinhardt is wonderfully clear and I urge readers to look at his post.

But all this is not really a question of economics, but of politics and values. The enormously complicated "reform" is only complicated because, as a society, we have failed to answer the question: is it the duty of a rich nation to ensure that people within its borders have access to health care? If we answer that "yes," as every wealthy nation except the United States does, then of course all citizens share the risk of the costs of illnesses -- through taxes. Taxes are the price of community. Complicated calculations of premiums don't ever come into the discussion.

If we have to build complex contraptions that pay off the greedy who profit from human misery, the United States is a sorry excuse for a community. The health care reform process so far has made it clear that we are, indeed, a broken society which has lost touch with human beings' essential interdependence.

Security in the time of the underwear bomber

Given this blog's past interest in the TSA no fly list, I suppose I ought to have some commentary on the Nigerian underwear bomber. Actually the subject seems mostly boring -- it is not exactly news there are people who want to kill people -- but here goes:

• This aspirational terrorist was on some "watch list," but that didn't do anything to protect anyone. Why? -- well, a million or so names, many of them shared with perfectly harmless people, makes the list useless. When almost all matches are false, those charged with using the list will begin to ignore it. The U.S. can "watch list" people all it likes, but that's just for show, not to protect anyone.

• As security guru Bruce Schneier has been saying for years, the episode proves that the most important security improvement since 9/11 works: passengers and crew, at whatever risk to themselves, will jump to incapacitate anyone doing anything that seems suspicious. Now that we know that there are nuts who are willing to bring themselves down along with us to get the world's attention, we won't sit around to let it happen. This may not stop a more competent terrorist, but it worked with this asshole and the shoe bomber.

• Concern over full body image scanning is not new. See this and this.

• It's still worthwhile to terrorist masterminds to send incompetent clowns to create air travel terror incidents, even if they fail, because international air travel is easy to screw up. I passed through Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires on December 28 -- what a miserable mob scene! In addition to the apparently common two hour check-in lines, we were all subjected to extra personal wanding, hand luggage searches, individual questioning ... by harried airline personnel who also were also expected to carry out their usual duties. I'm pretty sure that a smart terrorist would have slid right through, but thousands were inconvenienced and even humiliated in long lines. You have to really want to travel to go through this kind of thing; do we really want a society made up of United States residents who have been convinced that visiting the rest of the world is so difficult? Or a United States that no sensible foreigner would visit because getting in requires abuse and humiliation? We're working on it.

When "security" is just theater, it helps the terrorists more than it serves us.

The photo is from a Sydney Morning Herald travel blog that labels Ezeisa one of "the world's worst airports." That was in "normal" times; I concur. Given the atmosphere on the 28th, I didn't think it a good idea to shoot my own photo of the chaos.

Justice for Oscar Grant

Guess I'm home. On my jog this morning, I saw that local activists had created a reminder that one year ago, a young man named Oscar Grant was shot in the back and killed by a BART police officer while the officer was trying to restrain him. The event was captured on several cell phone videos -- the officer resigned and will go on trial for murder sometime this year.

The graphic layout on Bernal Hill strikes me as a pretty good example of the populist billboard genre. This sort of thing is tough to do -- I know, I've been part of a few such efforts.

Happy New Year: a potpourri of Patagonian beers

In southern Argentina and more especially Chile, the right thing to do would be to drink the local wines. But my partner doesn't drink alcohol and most of the places we ate didn't sell wine by the glass, so instead I decided to sample as many varieties of local beer as I could in 10 days. Some impressions:


In Argentina, the standard brew, available everywhere is a blond Quilmes. Think Budweiser -- with approximately the equivalent warm piss quality. Occasionally Quilmes Bock is also available. It is a little better.


The Chilean equivalent is Austral, very similar. And also not very appealing.


In El Calafate (Argentina), I ran across this fearsome looking local brew. The Gulmen Red was quite tasty; I found the Black Porter bitter.


The Morenita Malta (Chile) had quite a strong, sweet flavor, as did the Antares Scotch Artesanial (Argentina). The latter brand is eclectic; they not only make beer but also offer a Barley Wine in a similar bottle.


When you think of yourself as living at the back of beyond, as Patagonian residents often do, it's not surprising somebody has brewed an other worldly beverage. This one too had a good flavor.


Far and away the beer I enjoyed most turned up at our most remote stop. El Chalten is always referred to as "Argentina's newest town," a community of about 1000, really sort of a backpackers', trekkers' and climbers' base camp still barely attracting a permanent population. There we wandered into a pizza joint and climbers' bar that made its own hooch. The Patagonicus Chalten Negra was a little bitter, but the Patagonicus Chalten Red was delicious.

Don't get the wrong idea; I only had one of these at any given sitting ... and mostly didn't want more. But the beer survey made for a pleasant sub-agenda for our trekking vacation. In the new year, it's back to the old work: peace, justice, and thankfulness for whatever good comes. May we all find and make lots of the last in the coming year!