Irish-American working class woman adrift ...

I strongly looked forward to the public library acquiring Joan Walsh's What's the Matter with White People?: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was. Walsh spent six years as Salon's editor in chief. I've read her for years and learned to trust her consistent injection of a woman's perspective into the all-too-male enterprise of progressive liberal punditry. Besides, as a white woman myself, I wanted an answer to the question posed by her title. Finally I got a crack at it. Here are some reactions.

Walsh's book is a personal story, not an analytic exercise. It's the tale of how her Irish immigrant working class relatives drifted away from supporting racial and economic justice and away from liberal Democrats. Like too many older whites, they somehow ended up in the party of the plutocrats, of G.W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. It is also the tale of how Walsh managed to remain a liberal Democrat despite feeling out of place among progressives. And so, necessarily, it is a story of feeling whiplashed, without a place.

Like such authors as Rick Perlstein, Jefferson Cowie, and even the too little noted Judith Stein, Walsh points to the late 60s and the 70s as a hinge time, the time when the white working class became alienated from Democrats.

Because Democrats were in charge when the country came undone in the 1960s, Democrats got blamed. …

… prosperity undermined the New Deal coalition, giving white workers the freedom to believe their enemy was black protesters and white hippies, while providing the New Left with the dream it could create a progressive majority coalition without big labor. The two groups suddenly had the luxury of hating each other, of focusing on their cultural differences, because their economic battles seemed to have been won.

She mourns the disdain and ignorance with which liberals treated the terrible history of Irish suffering -- somehow other people's travails counted more than those of her people. None of us respond well to feeling our culture has been dismissed.

And Walsh experienced a particular wrenching that many white progressives felt in the Reagan era:

… I had given up on my working-class family; I tuned out their problems and anything they had to say that was legitimate. I was out of touch with the number of people who shared their concerns and blissfully ignorant of what the new Reagan Republicans would impose on the national scene in the coming decades -- a full-scaled Republican revolution that used social issues to inflame the people I grew up with, while betraying their economic interests.

She identifies with the experience Obama recounts in his autobiography of checking out the squabbling sectarian left groups of that era while seeking a political home and, like him, recoiling at their lack of realism and of an inspiring vision.

A savvy post movement do-gooder stayed away from that leftover left. … Obama went into community organizing, I went into community journalism. Trying to be effective in the Reagan years, we mostly had small dreams.

I lived some of the same sense of losing my place (though my mostly WASP family had always been Republicans of the now-extinct northeastern sort), but for me, insurgent feminism filled the hole where New Deal populism might have once lived. Though Walsh is the epitome in some ways of what the women's movement has won us -- a Hillary-admirer, a writer, a TV commentator who brings a woman's experience to politics -- the women's movement doesn't seem to have served her as a political home in that difficult time. She reports with resentment her feeling of having no place in social struggles in which race seemed to trump concerns for economic justice.

In at least two different Oakland meetings, heavily attended by welfare-rights groups, the very same African American woman stood up, as if on cue, pointed to me sitting with the decision-makers, and said angrily, "There's only one reason you're sitting there, and I'm standing here." No one needed to spell out the reason: that I was white. I understood her anger, but it felt like theater, not practical politics intended to bring about change. (I also noticed that "minorities" always singled out other "minorities" at such times. Why didn't she suggest an older white male colleague had taken the place that should have been hers?)

I'm a little older than Walsh with a different political history, but I've been in some of those meetings -- in Oakland in fact. Come on Joan -- you shine that stuff on. It will either pass away or it won't; you'll either be accepted for your work by people whose work you respect or you won't; there's nothing to do but let it go and do the work. I'm sure she knows that, but the book is a testament to how hard it has been for her to hang on to what she knows.

Anyone who has read this far will have gathered that I'm ambivalent about What's the Matter with White People? It didn't help as much as I hoped in answering its own question. I can't stop with recognizing the humanity of people whose bitterness (yes -- bitterness and disappointment, I will just say it) keeps them acting politically against their own self-interest. I want to know what we can do -- truthfully, respectfully -- to help them change that. I'm an activist, I guess.

On the other hand, if you don't know much about the history of Irish assimilation in the U.S. melting pot, this is a good and valuable book. There are more histories in this country than we realize and we become more ourselves as we assimilate more of them.

Move-On is moving

President Obama -- stand up for people who need Social Security, Medicare, and I'll add Medicaid!

This is a tough ad. Let's help get it out there.

Standing up to save her home

The Rev. Gloria Del Castillo listens while a small crowd rallied in front of Citibank in San Francisco this morning.

Citibank wants to sell Del Castillo's home out from under her on December 31. With the financial crisis, she had lost half her paid hours and couldn't afford her mortgage payments. She had been negotiating with the bank to refinance for months, submitting paper, re-submitting more paper when they lost some of it, making phone calls, etc. At the same time, without notifying this Episcopal priest, the bank had been completing legal foreclosure proceedings. Last week she found a notice on her door that her house would be sold next week. This underhanded behavior by a bank is called "dual-tracking."

On January 1, dual-tracking will be outlawed by the California Home Owners Bill of Rights. Rev. Gloria traveled to Sacramento last spring with other clergy leaders from the San Francisco Organizing Project to lobby for these protections. Citibank is out to get her before she enjoys the protections of the law she worked to pass.

Her friends, her congregation, and numerous faith leaders rallied to stop this. Instructions on how to call the bank here.

UPDATE: When Rev. Gloria carried a letter from protesters into the bank, Citibank employees said they'd be canceling the auction of her home set for December 31. Good news, but the bank has a lot to prove before we can be confident they are acting in good faith.

Wind-powered mine clearing

Damn, we're an ingenious animal! We make horror and we invent ways to abate our horrors.

Mine Kafon | Callum Cooper from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

A boy from Kabul grows up to be an engineer in the Netherlands … and comes up with an ingenious device for making his country and other combat zones livable again.

H/t Afghanistan War.

Incongruously, this clip is available thanks a contest sponsored by the military contractor General Electric. They made the problem; they expect to profit from the solution?

What Barack Obama's pet accounting gimmick would do to us

Here's the answer in one chart; the fine print points out this starts from the "Chained CPI" standard being in place for three years. So if you are, say, currently 62 and plan to take Social Security at 65, this is your future.

Why is Obama willing to give this to obstructionist Republicans? Damned if I know. If he does give it in the course of current fiscal negotiations, he better explain the truth: both Democrats and Republicans are signing on to force 90 year old ladies to get by on cat food.

This woman is about to lose her home

Losing Home, Fighting Back - Rev. Gloria's story from Stephen Eyer on Vimeo.

You can help stop the bank from selling her house out from under her. Even if you can't join us tomorrow -- Thursday, Dec. 20 at 10am at 245 Market St. in San Francisco -- to protest, you can call Citibank.

From the website of the San Francisco Organizing Project, here's how:

1. Call Citigroup Corporate Headquarters: (212) 559-1000 and ask for “Michael Corbat,” Citigroup’s CEO.

2. When the robot asks you if you are trying to reach Michael Corbat, say “Yes.” You will then be connected to the CEO’s office.

3. Tell them your name and that you would like to lodge a complaint with the CEO on behalf of Rev. Gloria del Castillo, whose home is being foreclosed upon. Tell them to cancel the auction of Rev. Gloria del Castillo’s home, explain that even though she has been in negotiations with CitiBank about her loan, she recently received notice that her home will be auctioned off on December 31st, one day before the Homeowner Bill of Rights goes into effect, making this practice of dual-tracking illegal in California.

4. In case they ask: Rev. Gloria’s phone number is (510) 837-1430, she serves a church in San Francisco and lives in El Sobrante, California.

UPDATE: A friend made one of these calls and reports she felt empowered by the experience.

I did call the Citigroup CEO's office and spoke to a secretary who really listened. She said they'd had a lot of calls about this case and that it may possibly be changed. So, I felt sort of powerful as I hung up -- and I'm going to ask all my friends to call, too. It's a little hassle to deal with the automated robot, but then you get connected to the CEO's office where a real person talks - and listens!

Warming Wednesdays: many expect government action

The Public Religion Research Institute has good news and bad news on U.S. citizens' understanding of global warming.

• Sixty-three percent of us believe weather is more extreme and human activity is the cause.

• As the chart shows, 91 percent of those who see climate change happening want action to do something about it.

• Majorities of the religiously unaffiliated and Catholics see climate change as causing weather disasters. So do 50 percent of white evangelical Protestants.

• More than one third of us think that severe weather events show that we are entering the scriptural End Times. Most of these are Protestant evangelicals, but not nearly all.

• Significantly,

  A majority (55%) of Americans agree that God gave human beings the task of living responsibly with the animals, plants, and resources of the planet, which are not just for human benefit. Nearly 4-in-10 (38%) Americans disagree, saying that God gave human beings the right to use animals, plans, and all the resources of the planet for human benefit.

• Fifteen percent of us believe the world will end in accordance with Biblical prophesies in our lifetimes.

• Unhappily, for the hope of getting anything done, our beliefs about climate change and end times correlate closely with our political divisions.

  Seven-in-ten (70%) Democrats and 65% of independents agree that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of global climate change, compared to only 43% of Republicans. A majority (55%) of Republicans disagree.

  If anything is likely to fuel religious strife, that divide can do it.

As is so often the case in these surveys, mainline Protestants and religious congregations in the communities of color get no more than a glancing mention in these statistics. According to the Pew Forum 14 percent of us are mainline Protestants, 5 percent are Latino Catholics, and 16 percent are Black Protestants. The later two groups are increasing as a political force. All these religious segments of the population have been moving strongly toward the Democratic Party -- and, I imagine, toward the consensus Democratic stance of demanding climate action from government.

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" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

How NOT to cover a school shooting

Here's the BBC being self-critical after a previous episode.

Every time we have intense saturation coverage of a murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week.

I've had this squirreled away since I first ran across it via Jay Rosen. But in the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting, I too forgot what I had understood, along with everyone else.

Gun massacre preaching

Sunday night the President preached at Newtown, Connecticut. I would describe his message as "paternal." The guy is not usually all that forthcoming about what really matters to him; he's too carefully controlled, too cool, to reveal his moral foundations. But I suspect this speech gets close to the inspiration for his own trajectory: he feels responsible for making this a society (and a planet?) that ensures a good future for his own children and all children. Despite the 18 minute length, this is worth watching or you can read it here. He's telling us we are grown ups and asking us to act our age.

One of the instinctive, but unconsidered, linguistic tics we have recourse to when confronting the latest massacre is to invoke the "innocence" of the victims: "innocent" children, "innocent" civilians, always "innocents" … (Conservative columnist Ross Douhat provided a fine, maudlin example of the genre here.) Do we really mean that only the deaths of "innocents" count in some cosmic scale? And who are "innocents" anyway? Does the noun include the suffering crazy people who are often the perpetrators? Are young victims more "innocent" than ordinary adults caught in extraordinary circumstances? Why? Why not?

One of the best treatments of the "innocents" question that I've run across was in this reflection on the school shootings by the theologian Marilyn McCord Adams:

Visceral responses to attacks on our young are hard-wired. I think of Giovanni Pisano’s pulpit sculpture of Herod’s soldiers’ butchering, of the mothers’ tug-of-war vice-gripping their babies with primal rage and hysterical grief. Big-brained creatures need more time to mature, are vulnerable for longer. Biology builds in instincts to protect offspring at all costs. They are our species’ future. Human biology transposes this into the personal.

A sense of the "innocence" violated, whether among children or other random victims of atrocity, is not a moral categorization. Our sense that "innocence" is significant in our responses is an inarticulate recognition of our common humanity with people more directly touched or harmed.

A friend, a woman I admire -- not yet a priest but on the way to being a very good one I believe -- preached in church on Sunday. She quite successfully navigated the difficult business of tying the liturgical readings, the Advent season, and the Newtown horror into a coherent message of hope and possibility of love. But along the line, she used one phrase that yanked me out of the flow:

…the hurt of unjust violence …

What's that? What is "unjust" violence? Or alternatively, what is "just" violence? In a setting where the message is Hope died and comes alive again, I am not sure there is any such thing.

Having just been through a campaign to end death sentences in California, I've thought a good deal about "just" and "unjust" violence. At one level, our entire effort in support of Prop. 34 was to enable people to understand and internalize that the death penalty is not about "justice." It's insanely expensive, convoluted, and broken beyond repair, and cannot completely avoid the risk of making an irreparable mistake. To an astonishing degree, California voters internalized that message -- 48 percent of them.

Unfortunately, 52 percent did not. Some portion of the majority were people who have had personal experience of violent evil and want the perpetrators dead. But most of them were people applying a rather vague notion of desired "justice." When a heinous act has been done, someone should suffer -- that's a gut reaction, seldom a deeply considered conviction. When people put their minds to it, numerous other factors lead to a conclusion there are better responses to perceived harm. That is, more adult responses.

It's no crime to respond viscerally to the evil some of us do to other members of our species (not even to get into what we do to other species and the planet) -- but most of us do have to try to become grown ups and act our age.

Busy today ...

A friend, the Rev. Gloria Del Castillo, is facing foreclosure of her home at the end of the month. Yes, she was behind in her payments and the house is "underwater" -- worth less on the current market than her remaining mortgage debt would require her to pay.

She has been attempting to negotiate refinancing with the bank (CitiBank, in case you wondered) but apparently the bank has been engaged in the underhanded practice of "dual tracking" -- pursuing foreclosure without disclosing this while stalling talks with my friend.

On January 1, this sort of bank duplicity will be outlawed under legislation passed last year. So naturally CitiBank has scheduled foreclosure for the December 31.

Time to organize against this outrage! The San Francisco Organizing Project has called for a press conference and demonstration outside a branch of the bank. Here's the information:

Thursday, Dec. 20 -- 10am sharp
CitiBank at 245 Market Street, near Embarcadero BART, SF

Call CitiBank Corporate Headquarters: 800-285-3000 and tell them to stop the auction of Rev. Gloria del Castillo’s home! Press 8 for the Directory, then press * for operator assistance, tell them your name and that you would like to lodge a complaint with the CEO on behalf of Gloria del Castillo, whose home is being foreclosed upon. You will probably be put on hold for a little while. More information about making these calls at SFOP.

Regular blogging will resume when I've done some organizing for this.

We need to put the banks on notice they can't get away with their greedy tactics.

Gun despair

Yesterday my friend Ronni was taken to task by commenters for failing to devote her blog to the Connecticut school shootings.

I didn't write about the horror either. Why would I? There is no reason to believe that anything is going to change. Crazy people we will always have with us. The Supreme Court has adopted crackpot legal interpretations that protect the right of lunatics to possess weapons. Many states let nuts carry their guns wherever they go. We don't yet ordain that broken, angry people must have firearms, but as a society we've decided we want guns to be so available that if such folks want guns, they'll have no trouble getting them.

For too many of us, this bumper sticker (sighted in Massachusetts) says it all. (You might need to click on it to see a larger image. Then hit the back button of your browser to get back here.)

Then, when nature takes its course, we soothe ourselves with perfunctory wailing, maybe a vigil or two, and move on, just glad it wasn't our town, our school, our friends … this time.

What's to write about? Call me when you've got a strategy to extirpate gun culture. Until then, we can expect nothing but repeats of Newtown.

Saturday scenes and scenery: urban eyecatchers

Just looking at you ...


Always a good idea, but points off for spelling ...


Cri de couer ...


Breath taking.

Contemporary Hannukah

A friend passes this along ...

Outsourcing the shame of empire

The judgement doesn't even show up in the electronic summary of the New York Times I look at every morning.

Yesterday the European Court for Human Rights issued a 6000 page judgement against EU member state Macedonia for its cooperation with the U.S. CIA in capturing and torturing Khalid el-Masri in 2003. El-Masri is a German auto mechanic; our spooks mistook him for a terrorist. When they realized their mistake, they dumped him without apology on an Albanian mountain side. U.S. courts won't touch his case; that's why his lawyers have gone after the European state for enabling his treatment.

What did we do to him? We tortured him. I reproduce part of the ECHR description of his capture:

On that occasion [el-Masri] was beaten severely from all sides. His clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife. His underwear was forcibly removed. He was thrown to the floor, his hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus…a suppository was forcibly administered on that occasion. He was then pulled from the floor and dragged to a corner of the room, where his feet were tied together. His blindfold was removed. A flash went off and temporarily blinded him. When he recovered his sight, he saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks. One of the men placed him in a nappy. He was then dressed in a dark blue short-sleeved tracksuit. A bag was placed over his head and a belt was put on him with chains attached to his wrists and ankles. The men put earmuffs and eye pads on him and blindfolded and hooded him. They bent him over, forcing his head down, and quickly marched him to a waiting aircraft, with the shackles cutting into his ankles.

Naturally the guy's a mess now, sometimes in trouble with the law; most people have a hard time making a good life after this kind of thing.

This atrocity was U.S. work, but we'll let the Macedonians -- who admit their complicity -- pay the fine.

Friday critter blogging

Jojo does serenity.

It's not all she does; you should see how energetic she can be if she gets a whiff of something desirable to eat. She lives out behind us.

Older parents: really such a novelty?

In December issue of The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz explores "How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society: The scary consequences of the grayest generation." Here's her jumping off point:

…we have our children much later than we used to…

Well, yes. Many of us are accustomed to the possibility of older parenting. I just had a conversation a few days ago with a friend who is 60 who is trying to adopt a 4 year old. (He knows what he is getting into; this would be a second round for him.)

Schulevitz, TNR's science editor, catalogues our emerging understanding of chromosomal and other genetic anomalies that apparently increase as the age of procreation rises. Scientists attribute to couples procreating over 35 much of an increased frequency in the incidence of a spectrum of disorders ranging from full blown autism through more subtle "delays" among contemporary children. Older childbearing exposes offspring to whatever accumulated environmental stresses the parents have survived and it is not as if our eggs and sperm live a safe, pristine setting. There's even a finding that men over 55 are "three times more likely to father a schizophrenic child."

She also knows the news about older parenting isn't all bad.

Study after study has shown that the children of older parents grow up in wealthier households, lead more stable lives, and do better in school. After all, their parents are grown-ups.

But she worries about how older parenting disrupts the social life-cycle:

A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46. The [mother] who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37. The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the child is 33.

And all this goes with a lower birthrate worldwide which she concedes may not be all bad.

Fewer people, of course, means less demand for food, land, energy, and all the Earth’s other limited resources. But the environmental benefits have to be balanced against the social costs.

She knows why birthrates go way down in all modern societies: when women can control our fertility and achieve creative satisfaction outside of raising the next generation, they (we) will do so -- in significant numbers. But she thinks the "social costs" are too high. I don't see it. I bet the species can figure out how to adapt to less population growth and different life-cycles.

Feminists have a lot to say about Schulevitz' themes. I ran across her piece through commentary at Feministe. I'm among those who question Schulevitz' handwringing .

But I want come at this here from a more personal angle: I'm the product of a long family line of people who had children when they were older. I can't say the family was completely well balanced, but I don't think my forebears were that much wackier than anyone else's either. Some data points:

• My great grandfather was born nearly 200 years ago -- in 1814. His son, my grandfather who was a lively part of my childhood, was born when that great grandfather was 60 years old (to a younger wife in those pre-fertility-enhancement days). He had not married until he was 54. Such late marriages seem to have been a form of fertility control when birth control measures were less accessible and reliable; unless you were able to support them, it was thought irresponsible to have children.

• My own parents were in Schulevitz' "old" category when I was born -- their first and only child. My mother was nearly 40 and my father older still. That's me at one year with my father at 45 above. According to Schulevitz, they might have been expected to die when I was in my 30s, but in fact I was 52 when my mother died. That is, I was grown up. Moreover, my older parents didn't operate under the social assumption Schulevitz makes that grown-up children rely on their parents into middle age. Perhaps as a familial adaptation to long generations, my parents seemed to assume that relations between grown children and parents would be loving, but not intimate. Some of my best times "with" my parents were when we were all just adults, independent. They struggled to remain independent of me as far as they could in old age. They thought that was how the life-cycle was supposed to work. That too is a possible social adaptation.

• This may be a function of being a member of the earliest Baby Boom cohort, but I was not completely unusual in my childhood in having parents who were "older." I think this may have been a function of the parental cohort having come up first through the Depression and then through World War II. Times and livelihoods were simply too insecure to encourage forming families while young. They waited, even after they married. One of my mother's best friends had her first child (my age peer), when her husband came back from the war and she was 44. She then proceeded to have two more (!) children, all without any fertility enhancements that I know of. It was just what people did, when they could.

I don't know quite what all this means, except that I'm inclined to take Schulevitz with considerable grains of salt. Her article is an artifact of a very particular time, place and social situation, as is my life history. Human beings -- genes and societies -- find diverse ways of organizing how we perpetuate the species. Sure, there are (or were before some modern technologies) physiological constraints on how we can organize families, but possibilities are broader than any snap shot of "reality" is going to suggest.

Warming Wednesdays: ciimate migrants

Al Jazeera reports on one of the discussions at that climate conference in Qatar.

As Juan Cole comments:

There are no climate change deniers in Bangladesh.

Warming Wednesdays: before we smash into the underlying reality, there are things we can do …

We can adopt better light bulbs. No, really. And we're not just talking about the awful squirrelly fluorescents many of us have dutifully inserted in place of incandescents in recent years. Since lighting uses something like 19 percent of the electricity we consume and far too much of that is generated by coal fired plants that are spewing carbon, wider adoption of more efficient bulbs is a good thing. And new bulbs using new materials are being invented. First there were new bulbs that use light emitting diodes (as are used for indicator lights). But now there are bulbs that create light by running a weak current through layers of plastics. The inventor explains:

"What we've found is a way of creating light rather than heat."

That's got to be more efficient.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has thought up some ways that President Obama can push for serious cuts in carbon emissions without needing to win a Congressional vote, according to an article by David Roberts at Grist. The Environmental Protection Agency has the legal authority (and duty) to force coal-fired generating plants to clean up their act under the Clean Air Act. But since reaching the lower standards is pretty much impossible for most old coal plants, the agency has not issued a standard because they haven't wanted to fight the ferocious opposition the electric industry would undoubtedly unleash. NRDC proposes the EPA should regulate emissions on a state by state "fleet" basis. That's how it works for automakers: they face an average fuel efficiency target that their entire line must meet. Electrical energy generation would get the same treatment. That is, some old plants might continue to exceed the standard, so long as newer natural gas and alternative energy sources kept their emission well below it and so kept the entirety of an electric utility's pollution at a lower level. Might work -- and the legal mandate for this sort of regulation is already in place.

Along with these initiatives, the New York Times reports that a promising campaign is underway to persuade colleges and universities to disinvest from large fossil fuel companies. Crazy? No way. Students may not be able to win these battles rapidly, but this is a good fight in a good arena that will yield a new generation of climate warriors. Students feel the urgency -- it's great to find them an avenue to make a difference. Who knows what might grow out of such campaign? Gotta start somewhere ...

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" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Health care reform shorts: what screenings are good for

Since our rulers seem to be dicking around again with Medicare and Medicaid funding so as to protect rich people from paying their fair share for the common good, it's refreshing to run across someone who remembers what doctoring is for.

We're often told that improved preventative care will save the health system (and insurance companies) lots of money. And we tend to believe it. Heck, I'm running off this morning for a mammogram suggested by my HMO. But Aaron Carroll reports on a study of the fiscal impact of getting people to stop smoking that says this conventional wisdom ain't so. If smokers quit, they do live an additional 3.7 years (yeah!) but the added life just means they cost more in medical bills.

[The study] also makes the point that the increased spending is modest. I think that’s besides the point. We should get people to quit smoking because it will make their lives better and their lives longer. If that causes them to cost the health care system more eventually, so be it. I’m a doctor, and making lives better and longer is why I got into this. It’s also what the health care system is for. That should be the focus. It’s not always about saving money.

Urgent messages for a December evening

A small group of citizens assembled on Monday night in San Francisco Civic Center to wave signs urging our Congressional representatives to shun the austerity bluff, tax the rich, protect Social Security and Medicare … that is, do what we elect them to do. The event was called by the AFL-CIO, Move-On, our faithful single payer agitators among others. It drew about 100 people, most of them old enough to have a personal stake in the safety net for elders.


Fr. Louis Vitale, who spends too many of his days in prison for impeding US wars, posed with Tim Paulson, Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council.


Several singers formed a small chorus.


Watching our rulers dither, it's hard not to fear they'll let us down -- again. This gentleman and his dog expressed a common sentiment: Don't Cave! It's easier to be upbeat when the sun shines.

On encouraging low frequency voters to get the habit

This admonition from Ed Kilgore to progressives crowing over the November election results has been bumping around in the back of my head since I encountered it:

… the one [concern that] should most trouble Democrats: the growing disparity between the partisan leanings of the presidential and midterm electorates, attributable to the unusually high correlation of party preferences to age and ethnic divisions. Just as odds of Republican gains in 2010 went up the moment after Barack Obama’s election, so too have the odds of GOP gains in 2014, regardless of what happens in Washington between now and then. So it’s no wonder Republicans want to get there fast.

Yup. Our folks -- the young, new citizens, low income people of color -- just don't turn out in the same numbers in midterms as they do in presidential elections.

So what does it take to get more of them voting more regularly? Obviously more participation from these citizens would change the kind of society we make. And obviously, we do need to "fix" (as as the Prez said on E night) a voting system that makes it difficult to participate whether through registration hoops and/or other obstacles like long voting lines and short hours. But also, we need to think in terms of helping folks acquire the habit of voting.

The people who are more likely turn out every time -- older, whiter, and more affluent folks -- are people who think of themselves as rightful, responsible participating citizens. Part of their self-definition is that they are voters; voting is what good citizens like them do, pretty much every election. How do we encourage that affirming self-understanding among currently less engaged people? Those of us who work in campaigns have long assumed that voting is "habit forming." But how do we help people get the habit?

In Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns, Lisa García Bedolla and Melissa R. Michelson report on their research on just that question. They studied the efforts of community groups that were turning out new voters over multiple cycles, looking at what sort of activities raised participation and helped create the voting habit. And they concluded that it is possible to draw these folks into regular participation. But this can be hard to see if our focus is mainly on turn out in presidential contests. It was the contacts in previous, low turnout, often local and insignificant, elections that raised turn out in presidential years.

... habit casts a different light on the usual way of evaluating the costs and benefits of a GOTV campaign. The typical approach is to think only in terms of votes produced in the current election. A more realistic calculation would take into account the future effects of this year's voter mobilization drive. If a campaign generates 1,000 additional votes at a cost of $40,000, the price amounts to $40 per vote for the current election. But if we also include the 310 votes in the next election, the price falls to slightly over $30 per vote ($40,000/1,310).

… What these habit formation calculations tell us is that increasing turnout in communities whose members have a low propensity to vote not only is possible but has enduring effects. Those living in low-income communities of color will vote, assumptions notwithstanding, and they may even vote at high rates. When made to feel included in a way that moves them to adopt a voter schema, they will vote, particularly in high-salience elections when the perceived importance of doing so is obvious.

The enduring effects of voting once make it clear that a socioculturally based cognitive shift happens during the initial mobilization, one that is reinforced by voting to produce a remarkably enduring long-term effect. By acting as voters, those previously moved to the polls become voters.

These findings have real world implications.

• If we want to build the habit of voting -- and Democrats sure should! --we need to contest every election in order to maximize the number of opportunities for people to experience that cognitive shift. It doesn't matter if the election is to select a dog-catcher. The habit built by participation can have effects in the big contests.

• We need institutional players to make investments in minor elections so that we can reap the rewards down the line. The experiments these researchers carried out tracked the foundation-funded work of small local community organizations. These formations enjoy the enhanced legitimacy that comes from being neighbors among the target population, but they lack the stability and scale to rapidly move large numbers into voting. As non-profits, they cannot legally work on candidate campaigns. They make good labs to carry out experiments; they don't have the capacity to be the main game. There were was a time when urban units of political parties saw this task of incorporation as their work. We need Democratic Party organs to see this as the party's most vital function. Outsourcing it to NGOs won't cut it.

Oh hell, do I have to stick my toe in to party politics to encourage this? That may be more than this jaded activist can stomach, but I am sure grateful to the people who labor in those trenches. Spreading the voting habit, along with structural voting improvements, must be a significant piece of any strategy to get the country onto a more sustainable and equitable track.

The picture above comes from a pretty scuzzy San Francisco Mission District alley. Some one is on this voting thing ...

Health care reform shorts: we are still skeptical

After the election comes the analysis. The sample of citizen opinion expressed, however murkily, on election day is larger than any poll. But pollsters try to fathom and shape our understanding what those 120 million voters meant by it all.

So the polls keep on coming and people who have something to say try to knock the results into the thick skulls of our politicians. This seems about right to me.

***One of the more thorough and interesting post-election surveys has been described by Ronald Brownstein in the National Journal. Brownstein devotes most of his attention to the huge disparities along partisan and racial fault lines in attitudes toward government and policy found by the survey. Guess what? Expressed in multiple ways, the emerging majority that re-elected Obama believes government exists to promote the general welfare, not to protect the rich.

The whole is worth reading, though not surprising.

But hidden away in Brownstein's description of the findings is this remarkable paragraph:

On the impact of health care reform, Americans sort almost exactly into three camps, with about one-third each saying Obama’s plan will improve the system by increasing access and lowering costs, hurt the system by disrupting it, or not do enough to change it.

Get that? Three camps, not the two -- young and brown v. the old and white -- that this commentator sees facing off on almost all other topics.

It's still true: the unspoken secret underlying Obamacare's failure, so far, to win majority support is that about one third of us simply suspect that it will not to go far enough to ensure access and care for all of us. With the insurance profiteers in the mix, we remain unconvinced -- and largely unheard.

Maybe the implementation of Obamacare all work out, but with Republicans throwing up every road block they can find, the administration has a hard job ahead.

UC has a new logo

This may surprise some people, but this ancient Berkeley grad likes it. And I love this promotional video.

Saturday scenes and scenery: EWASTESF.com to the rescue

I saw the sign yesterday on my walk.

Our chance to clear out the basement had arrived!
Some of our stuff was huge -- note the twenty-year old, 150 pound, photo copier on the lift at the right (next to the monster picture tube-era TV, not ours). The small stuff, 4 dead printers, a couple of scanners, several routers, plus all their various cords and accessories filled our small SUV.

As we offloaded the junk, we realized this was the third time since we became early PC adopters in the 80s that we had performed this sort of clean out of a carload of expensive obsolescence. At least now days the stuff is cheaper and lighter and getting rid of it responsibly is free.

Transit in campaign organizing

Yesterday's post about transit policy racism reminded me that I learned a lot about shared transportation in the context of working on the Prop. 34 campaign. This was not something I expected.

• This was the first time in years that I've been able to use public transport to a job. Riding BART daily gave me a heightened appreciation of my fellow commuters; I enjoyed having the train deliver me to the job. I also experienced one of the contentions in the POWER report I wrote about yesterday: when fares go down, I become much more willing to ride. In my the cost of riding dropped precipitously on my birthday.

• Twenty years ago it was rare to hire a twenty-something organizer who didn't own a car. I remember one, but she was an odd ball. Today, many -- even most -- don't assume that owning a car is a necessary part of life. We even had two staff in Los Angeles who had no vehicle. (No, that didn't work very well.) Access to some by-the-day car sharing option has become a necessary campaign expense. This is almost certainly a planet-healthy cultural shift, but not one I'd anticipated.

• I proved it is possible to get to and from LAX (the main Los Angeles airport) to downtown on public transportation, but I can't say I'd recommend the effort. If you shop around for off-brand car rentals, you can get a rental for roughly the same cost. Something is wrong there, but that's the fact. I put energy into figuring out the most emission and energy efficient way to carry off one-day trips into and out of Los Angeles and kept coming back to car rentals.

Times and habits are changing.

San Francisco moving toward transit justice

Last night I attended a public party to celebrate the release of the publication pictured. If, like me, you are linguistically challenged, that's NEXT STEP: JUSTICE -- Race and Environment at the Center of Transit Planning in the English edition. It seems a solid piece, spelling out how seemingly neutral policies can harm people dependent on public transportation who are overwhelmingly people of color. Necessary graphs and maps are supplemented by the testimony of members and supporters of the community organization POWER.

POWER has just led and won a community campaign for free transit passes for low income youth. San Francisco had started its 16 month pilot program -- POWER sees its next job as making this victory by and for young people a permanent practice. The new publication (not yet available on the web -- I wonder if they'll make it downloadable?) has a lot of little gems packed in.

Just to give you a taste, here's Howard Nelson from the Transit Workers (bus drivers) Union describing his job:

Being a Muni driver is a good skill to have because, just like people need food, people will always need public transportation. At one time driving the bus was one of the only jobs that any minority could get. Muni drivers today are still majority Black and Latino and increasingly also Asian. Before, no one ever wanted to be a driver. It is a hard job. In a new class of 25-30 operators, Muni is lucky if 5-6 them stay on as drivers. …

I would also like to see the MTA [the transit authority] invest in our buses. There are new models of buses that are much easier for elderly people and people with disabilities to enter, and I know I will get older myself one day. If the MTA can spend money on a light rail, the Transbay terminal and the America's Cup, they can afford to buy some new buses. When we look at the bigger question of raising more revenue for public transit, I think Obama is on the right track. No one needs to die a billionaire -- what good does that do you? People making over $250,000 a year can afford to pay more taxes to fund things like transit…

Gotta love this guy. Gotta support the transit justice project, whoever you are.

Photo via Westside Observer.

Violence and efficient mass organization combined

I needed a long reading project concurrent with the recent campaign, so I dove into Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. This volume is the first of three; I'll write about the other two as I (slowly) work my way through them.

Evans is a Brit, a professor of history at Cambridge. An interesting preface explains why he felt an exhaustive narrative history of the mid-20th century German rogue state was needed. He served as an expert witness in the 1996 libel trial in which historian David Irving sued historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for writing that Irving was a Holocaust denier (the court concluded he was). Evans discovered in that work that a new general account might help. He also seems irritated that for English speakers the paradigmatic account of Hitler's Germany remains William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He explains:

...the number of broad, general, large-scale histories of Nazi Germany that have been written for a general audience can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The first of these, and by far the most successful, was William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, published in 1960. Shirer's book has probably sold millions of copies in the four decades or more since its appearance. … There are good reasons for the book's success. Shirer was an American journalist who reported from Nazi Germany until the United States entered the war in December, 1941, and he had a journalist's eye for the telling detail and the illuminating incident. His book is full of human interest, with many arresting quotations from the actors in the drama, and it is written with all the flair and style of a seasoned reporter's dispatches from the front. Yet it was universally panned by professional historians. …

The emigre German scholar Klaus Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer's book presented an 'unbelievably crude' account of German history, making it all seem to lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power. It had 'glaring gaps' in its coverage. …even in 1960 it was 'in no way abreast of current scholarship dealing with the Nazi period'. …For all its virtues, therefore, Shirer's book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader.

It does seem that Evans is distressed that Shirer managed to make his account so gripping that it has endured. He also finds Shirer morally judgmental and intentional chooses not to emulate him in this. I think I am an admirer for Shirer's history of the Third Reich precisely because of the visceral outrage he incorporates in his narrative.

But these quibbles certainly don't mean that I didn't get a lot out of Evans first volume. He describes its purpose:

Understanding how and why the Nazis came to power is as important today as it ever was, perhaps, as memory fades, even more so. We need to get into the minds of the Nazis themselves. We need to discover why their opponents failed to stop them. …The story of how Germany, a stable and modern country, in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair is a story that has sobering lessons for us all; lessons, again, which it is for the reader to take from this book, not for the writer to give.

What stands out for me from Evans' account of Hitler's rise is the centrality of violence -- assaults on opponents, rioting, intimidating mass marches -- employed by many factions in Weimar German politics. Defeat in World War I and the economic pain that followed left ripe ground for the growth of intolerance. He shows that as early as the 1920s, what had been a pervasive cultural anti-semitism was transformed in this unstable context into a foundation that would underlie the Nazi project of mass extermination.

It was not just an unprecedented willingness to translate vehement prejudice into violent action that broadly distinguished post-I9I8 antisemitism from its prewar counterpart. While the overwhelming majority of Germans still rejected the use of physical force against Jews during the Weimar Republic, the language of antisemitism became embedded in mainstream political discourse as never before. The 'stab-in-the-back', the 'November traitors', the 'Jewish Republic', the 'Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy' to undermine Germany -- all these and many similar demagogic slogans could be regularly read in the papers, whether as expressions of editorial opinion or m reporting of political incidents, speeches and trials. They could be heard day after day in legislative assemblies, where the rhetoric of the Nationalists, the second largest party after the Social Democrats during the middle years of the Republic, was shot through with antisemitic phrases. …The sensibility of many Germans was so blunted by this tide of antisemitic rhetoric that they failed to recognize that there was anything exceptional about a new political movement that emerged after the end of the war …

The Great War had left behind a substantial cohort of damaged ex-combatants (and younger siblings who envied their "heroic" older "brothers") who knew no way to be in society except as warriors. A Columbia sociologist, Theodore Abels, persuaded the Nazi Party to back his collecting the personal stories of many original Nazi movement members, especially the para-military brownshirts who intimidated and fought other Germans with other political allegiances. Their motivations don't seem to have been very ideological.

Among ordinary Party activists in the I920s and early I930s, the most important aspect of Nazi ideology was its emphasis on social solidarity -- the concept of the organic racial community of all Germans -- followed at some distance by extreme nationalism and the cult of Hitler. Antisemitism, by contrast, was of significance only for a minority, and for a good proportion of these it was only incidental. … Men often came to the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party after serving at the front in 1914-18, then becoming involved in far-right organizations such as the Thule Society or the Free Corps. …Violence was like a drug for such men …

"The terror of police and government against us', as one stormtrooper put it, was another source of resentment against the Republic. Such men were outraged that they should be arrested for beating up or killing people they considered to be Germany's enemies, and blamed the prison sentences they sometimes had to suffer on the 'Marxist judicial authorities' and the 'corruption' of the Weimar Republic.'

…It is difficult to grasp the full extent of the stormtroopers' fanaticism and hatred unless we accept that they often did feel they were making sacrifices for their cause. …The Nazi Party depended on such commitment; much of its power and dynamism came from the fact that it was not dependent on big business as the 'bourgeois' parties and the Social Democrats to varying degrees were, still less on the secret subsidies of a foreign power, along the lines of the Moscow-financed Communists.

In addition to their violent, fanatical base the Nazi leaders seem to have excelled at organizing party activities -- a quality that seldom goes with ideological lunacy and celebration of violence. The Party generated groups and projects in all sectors of German life. It was very good at running electoral campaigns, at spreading propaganda, and mobilizing voters.

All this mass organization meant that in 1933, when the politicians of the Weimar Republic -- a collapsing state structure that had long since ceded any allegiance to democracy and the rule of law -- gave over power to Hitler as Chancellor, the Nazi Party was organized to take over the functions of a government that had lost its legitimacy. Nazi organizations quickly took over the police, "cleansed" the government bureaucracy and educational institutions of Jews and political opponents, and generally dominated public life in all its aspects. Evans makes it clear that they could accomplish this as quickly and completely as they did because they combined an enthusiastic use of violence with efficient mass organization. It required both to install the Third Reich, the Nazi dictatorship.

As a student of history and politics, I still am amazed that this incendiary combination of forces could emerge in a large, rich, modern state. Evans is right: this is a sobering narrative.

Warming Wednesdays: climate talks in Qatar

Did you know that one of those periodic world climate meetings took place last week at Doha in Qatar. Probably not. It's not as if U.S. media had paid much attention.

Go ahead; watch this Al Jazeera video of the very controlled protest allowed by local authorities at the meeting venue. I found the "whole world watching" display very heartening. We're all in this together, though the effects so temperature increases will strike the poorest and weakest most. (H/t Juan Cole.)

You also probably will not be surprised to read that much news from climate researchers is discouraging. We're still hooked on energy processes that belch carbon.

Emissions continue to grow so rapidly that an international goal of limiting the ultimate warming of the planet to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, established three years ago, is on the verge of becoming unattainable, said researchers affiliated with the Global Carbon Project.

…The new figures show that emissions are falling, slowly, in some of the most advanced countries, including the United States. That apparently reflects a combination of economic weakness, the transfer of some manufacturing to developing countries and conscious efforts to limit emissions, like the renewable power targets that many American states have set. The boom in the natural gas supply from hydraulic fracturing is also a factor, since natural gas is supplanting coal at many power stations, leading to lower emissions.

But the decline of emissions in the developed countries is more than matched by continued growth in developing countries like China and India, the new figures show. Coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, is growing fastest, with coal-related emissions leaping more than 5 percent in 2011, compared with the previous year.

“If we’re going to run the world on coal, we’re in deep trouble,” said Gregg H. Marland, a scientist at Appalachian State University who has tracked emissions for decades.

New York Times, Dec. 2, 2012

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put that trouble into everyday language.

…What results have two decades’ worth of international climate confabs produced? By the World Bank’s reckoning, even if the nations of the world meet the pledges they have made to reduce carbon emissions, we’re still likely to see warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius — 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit — by 2100. And if the pledges are not met, which seems a reasonable assumption, there is a 40 percent chance that by the turn of the next century, temperature rise will reach the disaster benchmark of 4 degrees Celsius.

That passage does something we don't usually see. These discussions are ordinarily couched in numerical language of science -- and most of us can't translate Celsius into Fahrenheit without access to Google (guess this is why we all need our smartphones…)

Clearly, if President Obama wants to be remembered for his long game, he can't let another four years go by without trying to turn the United States toward leadership on climate change. We've made some progress toward reducing emissions. We need to make as much more as we can, since what we put out today, in human terms, essentially alters the climate forever.

Our brains and our institutions are not good at thinking about "forever," but we have no choice.

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.

This shit really does still go on

US evangelicals have helped inflame native Ugandan anxiety about their native LGBT population who are emerging from the shadows in our more open global society.

Now there is a bill in the Uganda parliament that would not only criminalize LGBT people, but perhaps make gays subject to execution.

Political Research Associates has done vital work on the links to homegrown U.S. bigots.

For two days in early March 2009, Ugandans flocked to the Kampala Triangle Hotel for the Family Life Network's "Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals' Agenda." The seminar's very title revealed its claim: LGBT people and activists are engaged in a well thought-out plan to take over the world. The U.S. culture wars had come to Africa with a vengeance.

To put on the conference, the Uganda-based Family Life Network – led by Stephen Langa with the goal of "restoring" traditional family values and morals in Uganda – teamed with two U.S. hatemongers from the Christian Right, Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively and Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay group Exodus International. Vocal opposition in international circles did not stop the country's high profile religious leaders, parliamentarians, police officers, teachers, and concerned parents from attending. Indeed, parliamentary action to wage war on gays was on the conference agenda. It was not enough that homosexuality is illegal in Uganda ...

Read the rest of Zambian Anglican priest Kapya Kaoma's report here.

This U.S. export is very much our business!

Myopia moment

Any blogging today will have to wait. I'm off to get my eyes examined and expect dilated pupils will linger all morning if not all day.

Apparently this is age-appropriate behavior. For more interesting graphic depictions of how our consumer behavior changes over time, check out this Business Insider article. H/t Andrew Sullivan.

"Handguns do not enhance our safety."

Sportswriter Jason Whitlock writes for FOXSports. He came there from covering the Kansas City Chiefs.

Here's some of Whitlock's reaction to the news that KC linebacker Jovan Belcher had shot the mother of their child, then blown out his own brains at the team facility on Saturday.

… We’ve come to accept our insanity. We’d prefer to avoid seriously reflecting upon the absurdity of the prevailing notion that the second amendment somehow enhances our liberty rather than threatens it.

How many young people have to die senselessly? How many lives have to be ruined before we realize the right to bear arms doesn’t protect us from a government equipped with stealth bombers, predator drones, tanks and nuclear weapons?

Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.

In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

That is the message I wish Chiefs players, professional athletes and all of us would focus on Sunday and moving forward. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it

FOXSport.com

Almost as a amazing as Whitlock's plea for gun sanity is that I know about the column because commentator Bob Costas read an excerpt at halftime on NBC's Sunday Night Football.

I doubt if any of this will faze the fanatics who run the National Rifle Association and the thousands of legitimate gun owners who fall for the paranoid fantasies that fill the NRA's coffers. But we can hope ...

Advent 2012

The Christian season of "waiting in hope" for the Light begins today. I've always felt in harmony with this season -- though I often wonder whether it would have the same resonance if I lived in the southern hemisphere where daylight is lengthening, instead of waning.

I've just emerged from a different sort of much prolonged "advent" and so has the country. Waiting in hopeful and anxious anticipation is the normal condition of people who engage deeply with elections. This last contest seemed to stretch on forever.

Unlike most of life, there is a fixed date on which the anticipated and feared decision will be made. In the run up, there is an enormous amount that should and must be done, more than can be done. But then Election Day comes and it is over. Thud.

If your candidate or your proposition wins, there is joy and relief. There probably should be terror; for with victory comes responsibility that cannot be entirely fulfilled. You tamed it; you are now responsible. But you get to enjoy the victory for a bit, before feeling the responsibility.

If you lose, it is just over. You can analyze at length, but if you were doing your job, you already know why, at this time, your fellow citizens made other choices. Some people recently weren't doing their jobs. You shouldn't be able to tease out much new from the returns. Later, someone with more distance may have insights, but those are not likely to be immediate.

As readers of this blog know, I come into this Christian Advent having just lived through a nasty thud. My fellow Californians were not ready to replace the death penalty, to choose a different path to satisfy our hope to live under a fair and functioning legal regime. When I look at the long trajectory of our understanding of punishment, safety and justice, I know I should remain confident that we'll move away from the death penalty. The campaign successfully implanted an understanding that relying on execution to deliver "justice" costs too much, suffers from systemic impediments that can't and won't be fixed, and always risks killing the wrong person. But for now, we're just not quite ready to give up the idea there's some magic "justice" to be grasped by giving a death sentence to a terrible offender.

So today I wait in hope for the return of the Light -- literally as I listen to a Pacific storm howling outside, metaphorically for the rebirth of the hope that Good comes among as, as poor and weak as we are. Hope is not a mood; hope is a virtue. Like all virtues. it must be practiced to form and deepen it. After a loss, I need a blessed Advent this year, to begin to renew, not hope itself, but strength for the practice of hope which is the struggle for justice. It will come. It always does.

Saturday scenes and scenery: election residue

It's all over but the fading signage and lingering bumperstickers.


The self-deprecating Barack makes an attractive image here on a sprightly red VW.


Captured through the slightly soiled front window of a BMV.


Someone disappointed lives here.


New York Times columnist Susan Collins provided a public service by repeatedly reinforcing the story of Seamus' bad ride.