From the streets of San Francisco

Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst. 

They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.

Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.

Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.

A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...

Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!

No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.

San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups. 

Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease. 

The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.

If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.

Truthtelling

We know the only thing he gives a damn about is saving his own guilty hide. He's coming apart mentally. But if he thinks beating on women will help him, he's happy to go there. 

I'd call this a pretty good ad, shared here because most of us don't live in contested states where it is being broadcast.

Kamala Harris: a long road to a new way forward

As I look at the presidential race, I wonder if I'm seeing an emerging majority coalition that has been inching its way into being for all the decades of my active election experience. We've come a long way.

The Washington Post's Philip Bump observed:

The country clearly exists in a moment of flux, in which, as Obama observed at the Democratic convention last week, we are fully testing the idea that a democracy built on pluralism can succeed. 

But part of the surge in enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy is clearly rooted in her overtly representing the diversity of America. Conservative White Americans often see America’s non-White population as a unified entity colluding to strip the power of Whites. 

The shift from Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket allowed for a shift in strategy, too, from treating Trump as an opposing force to treating him as a historic outlier. Waving off Trump as “weird” has a knock-on effect, uniting those opposed to Trump’s candidacy and politics as the true inheritors of the American tradition.

... It may be that Trump helped bring to fruition the political shift predicted with Obama’s 2008 victory. His win proved to be a potent organizing force for White conservatives.

The election of another Black president in the face of that force, an election powered by a coalition strengthened by opposition to Trump, might in fact turn the page that began being written 15 years ago. It is a page, though, that has appeared in American history books multiple times before.

This reminded me of observations I made in early 2008, while watching the Hilary Clinton/Barack Obama primary.

It looks to me as though the Obama candidacy is trying to birth a national coalition which, like the Democratic one in California, doesn't quite have a secure demographic base though such a base seems visible on the horizon. This coalition must, at present, attract enough support outside its obvious members to win an election. Naturally, its leading edge is young voters, folks who live closer to that diverse and difficult demographic future older folks can envision but do not so nearly inhabit.

As Historian Bruce J. Schulman [original link is dead, unfortunately] of Boston University notes, Obama is not the first to try this. In addition to RFK, it's only fair to mention Jesse Jackson in 1988 -- at the end of 2008, will Obama have exceeded Jackson's total of wins in 11 states? ...

A long-term national progressive coalition must somehow hold together most African Americans, most Latinos, probably the majority of various Asian-origin voters, and enough whites, probably predominantly female, to make a majority. ...

Republican overreach, robbing women of our control over our bodies, has hastened the movement of many white women into this coalition. And these white women definitely vote, as do Black women.

On the other hand, it's taken long enough to get here that more and more Latinos and Asian-origin voters are beginning to vote as other immigrants have learned to before them: making electoral choices divided more on their class position in the new country than by ethnic affinities. Think Italians or Irish moving beyond hyphenated status. That's too a kind of American progress but it adds to today's progressive challenges.

But in a general way, the potential Democratic Party coalition visible in 2008, and in California fifteen years before that, may finally be coming to fruition nationally in Kamala Harris' candidacy, if we can push this candidate over the finish line.

MAGA backlash replicates birtherism in response to Obama and California reactionary nativism of the 1990s and before. Anyone else remember when California was Ronald Reagan's launch pad based on bashing hippie students? 

Coalition pluralism was the challenge in 2008; it's still the challenge today. But it can happen. It's no accident that today a Californian leads a Democratic ticket capable of confirming the possibly of a new way forward.

Friday cat blogging

Mio enjoys an evening sunbeam. When you are a nearly 20 pound cat, you apparently aren't shy or cautious about exposing your furry belly.

Simple statement of fact

 

Snapshot of sign beside the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pennsylvania, thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College, is probably the most important state in the presidential election. The winner there is likely to win.

 

Everything suggests the contest will be very close.

As anyone who has worked in elections knows, the presence of lots of signs doesn't win the vote. But they sure do encourage supporters. This one is bold.

Tumultuous political failure

Rory Stewart is brilliant, charming, singular, and thoroughly obnoxious. His memoir, How Not to Be a Politician, would not be to many reader's taste, but I found it fun and informative.

Stewart is a Brit/Scot from an upper class professional family. I first became aware of Stewart when he served in various military and administrative roles among Brits allied in our Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the '00s -- and became a smart and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation's absurdities and dysfunction. As well he might have -- before these wars, he had famously walked across Iraq, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Nepal. He knew something about these people and places, unlike the North American bumblers with the guns and his own British politicians.

On returning home, he decided he needed to do something about all this. In 2010, he declared himself a Tory (that's the Conservative Party) and through luck and accident managed to win the opportunity to contest and win the remote district of Penrith and the Border adjacent to Scotland. He was now a Member of Parliament. Through a series of kerfuffles, policy controversies, and administrative misadventures, he survived as a Tory Member through 2019 when he ran for party leadership in a failed effort to avert a Boris Johnson government and a chaotic implementation of Brexit.

The policy strands of this memoir are what political memoirs usually center on, concerns like rural development in his isolated home constituency, an effort to extricate Britain from America's Middle Eastern wars, whether to leave the European Union via Brexit, and once his Remain position lost the popular referendum, how to carry out the people's will with the least damage to the country.

That's all important, but what made this an interesting account for me was his picture of how the accreted quasi-system that is Britain's unwritten political constitution was functioning. Not well. Now -- Americans have nothing to crow about as we struggle to preserve popular democracy within a written Constitutional framework constrained by such immovable absurdities as the Electoral College and the rule that every state gets two Senators regardless of the size of its population. But Stewart argues convincingly that British government is even more irrational.

He recounts his orientation to his new job from his Party legislative leader:

We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation ... 'I always try to get consensus as chief whip,' the chief whip concluded, 'and the consensus is that the prime minister is right.'

... Even the most rebellious MPs, famous for their obstreperousness, voted against the government in perhaps only five votes out of a hundred. All of which raised certain questions about the theory that MPs were independent legislators ...

Finding that his job as a backbencher was to be an automaton, Stewart worked on improving the lives of his constituents (notably by increasing broadband in the countryside) and finagled to get into one of the junior ministerial positions open to MPs. In this respect the system is very different from the United States.

Ambitious Members from the governing party are chosen by the prime minister to exercise executive authority in the various departments of government. But unlike cabinet members in the U.S. who genuinely attempt to direct the departments to which they are appointed by presidents, MPs continue as legislators; their sub-cabinet and cabinet appointments are add-ons. No particular expertise in the actual work -- such as preserving the environment, running prisons, or foreign aid -- is expected or required to become a minor minister. In fact, expertise was the reverse of what was sought; Conservative leaders sure didn't want Stewart having any authority over anything about Afghanistan or central Asia where he knew the ropes and the languages.

Stewart quickly learned that the permanent civil servants, accurately, figured that uninterested junior ministers came and went and could be ignored, politely. He recounts perhaps instituting some interesting reforms in the under-funded, under-appreciated prison system -- until he was abruptly moved on. Insofar as Stewart is fair and accurate, this seems a hell of an undemocratic way to run a government.

The stresses of governing after the destabilizing Brexit vote eventually did in Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May; ushered in the frivolous, self-aggrandizing leadership of Boris Johnson; and led through short prime ministerial tenures to this year's resounding replacement of the Tories with a Labour government. By then, Stewart was long gone. But his account of the early stages of the Tory self-immolation is cutting.

[In 2019] for eight and a half years, the government had been an elective dictatorship run by the prime minister, and Parliament an elderly, smelly Labrador, asleep by the fire. Once a year, perhaps, someone would step so hard on our tail that we would snap, and in doing so stop the redesigning of the House of Lords, or the Syria bombing; but generally we were entirely passive. We, the Conservative MPs voted loyally for the government day in and day out, late into the night.

But Brexit had transformed the conventions of British politics. The generally loyal, if grumpy, mass of Conservative MPs had been turned into warring Brexiteers and Remainers. ...

... authority was leaching away from all of us. The referendum, by giving a direct say to the general public, had made Parliament a low-lying island in a rough and rising sea. And many of the people, having 'spoken', began to perceive parliamentary debates and votes as just different forms of obfuscation, delay and betrayal.  ...

When the Party deposed Theresa May, Stewart felt he had to run for leadership because the more obvious candidates would not dare to state what to him was obvious:

... none of them was prepared to say that Boris Johnson was manifestly unsuitable to be prime minister. ... to put an egotistical character like Boris Johnson in the heart of a system that was already losing its dignity, restraint and seriousness was to invite catastrophe...

Stewart was proved right, of course. Often being right does not lead to popularity. 

His memoir has a supercilious tone that I am sure was endlessly grating to his colleagues. The guy is the opposite of a team player. He comes across as pretty sure he knows it all -- and sometimes he does. But the result is an delicious record of tumultuous political failure. I'm glad to have read it.

Why the turn to unions

It's no revelation that most of us have low confidence in most of the institutions of US society. So it is revelatory that one often scorned institution has been gaining in prestige over the last 15 years: labor unions.

Click to enlarge.

Michael Podhorzer, retired political director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, has some thoughts about how this came to be. 

Let’s be honest: If you’re reading this post, chances are good that you have at least some agency in your working life. You might be a knowledge worker who can telecommute, you might have pretty good pay and benefits, you might manage other people, and so on. Chances are also good that you strongly support unions. You might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life – unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will. When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!” 

This “fuck yeah” is exactly what scares plutocrats like Trump and Musk the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action. As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll. Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. Ordinary people need institutional collective power to make their demands heard, let alone met. 

To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about. Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu. ...

Read the whole thing for much more explication and elaboration.

Making a true labor day of it

For San Francisco hospitality workers who are members of the union UniteHERE, it's not a vacation day, it's a day to picket their hotel workplaces. Per the Chronicle:

Housekeepers, hosts, bellmen, servers, cooks, dishwashers and market assistants are striking at the 1,921-room Hilton Union Square, the city’s biggest hotel, as well as the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Grand Hyatt at SFO, Palace Hotel and Westin St. Francis.

 

There was plenty of spirit. 

And lots of energy.

Workers don't respect hotel owners pleas of poverty ... and there sure seem to be plenty of tourists gawking in Union Square.

Lots of local politicians showed up, as the smart ones do. I particularly liked the obvious delight on the face of Supervisor Connie Chan, up for re-election in the Richmond District.

Labor Day: workers built this

 

In addition to enjoying this celebratory picture, it's worth noting where I ran across it. The U.S. Department of Labor site has a rather nice history of the holiday. Somehow I don't think that would survive the implementation of Project 2025 under a Trump presidency ...

American labor has raised the nation’s standard of living and contributed to the greatest production the world has ever known and the labor movement has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation's strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker.

• • •

Michael Kazin, an historian of the Democratic Party, makes an observation about Labor Day that I think we should remember: 

There was a unique quality to Labor Day that set it apart from more universal, largely apolitical celebrations like Thanksgiving. Until the first observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Labor Day was the only national holiday that a social movement both created and persuaded the state and businesses to honor. [I would point as well to observance of Juneteenth.]

So take to the streets or spread out your picnic blanket and sing some of these great labor songs.

This democracy of ours is more and more the fruit of people's movements built on top of the foundation laid by aspirational Founders.

Mr. Clueless runs for President

 

As Johnathan V. Last points out at the Bulwark, the man is ghoul.

 

We knew that, but he keeps reinforcing it.

Has it ever occurred to him that some animals kick back?

Friday cat blogging

Let's give the local cats the day off today. 

JD Vance's complaint about "childless cat ladies" setting the tone for our politics has set off some significant rebuttal from a quarter whose influence he should respect.

Icon artist Mickey McGrath thinks he's full of it:

In my mind and experience, some of the strongest, bravest, most talented and intelligent — and let's not forget overlooked, patronized and defamed — people in church history were women who were childless, unmarried and closely connected to cats.

Holy Cross Religious Studies professor Joanne M. Pierce thinks he ought to know that

Vance’s views on childless women are sharply at odds with the attitude of his present Catholic faith. As a scholar of medieval Catholicism, I know that Catholic history is full of childless women respected for their work, many of them members of religious communities. They often contributed to lasting social and cultural change. In fact, the very existence of women’s religious communities is a testament to the value Catholicism puts on childless women’s lives.

Some Catholic authorities that Vance might recognize are less restrained:

Millions of people could remind Vance that he has picked on the wrong target.

The Baby Boom endures?

Kevin Munger points out: "Harris’s nomination locks in another Boomer presidency." 

 

I hadn't quite thought of it that way. As a product of the leading edge of the Boomers (b. 1947) I don't find it automatic to locate myself in the same age cohort as someone who missed the '50s and most of the '60s. But demographic wizards say all of us born between 1946 and 1964 (including Harris) are out of the same population bulge which first led to a need for new kindergartens and grade schools and now is leading to increased worry about funding Social Security.

Munger is the author of Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture. His commentary on the Harris-Trump match up is interesting. 

Despite being a Boomer, you may have noticed that she’s the young, exciting candidate.

Yes, the generational cutoff points are arbitrary, 19 is too many years to define a coherent generation. But the far more important fact is that Biden and Trump are really quite old.

The echoes of the Baby Boom structure our political, economic and cultural reality. Our country’s age pyramid is just what our country is.

It is a crucial but oddly politically inert fact that at both the mass and elite level, our country is far older than it has ever been before. ...

It’s our electoral institutions [that] cause the US to have such astronomically old leaders. The two-party system, lax campaign and especially campaign finance laws, and the primary system tilt the process heavily in favor of people with time, money and political interest — which, in our society, tends to be older people.

Combine this with the Baby Boom and you get the current situation, playing out in slow motion, a demographic wave not crashing but seeping into and drowning our politics.

... A media-theoretic aside: television has demonstrated its continued dominance of the media ecosystem. The 2024 Biden-Trump debate is — without exaggeration — one of the most important media events in modern history. ...

He goes on to delve into the history of recent elections when there was a substantial difference in ages between candidates (younger won) and the "unmet demand for younger politicians appealing to younger voters."  

We Boomers got to give way someday ... but by once again, somehow, presenting the country with the apparently young candidate in Kamala Harris, we are imprinting yet another generation of young voters with what Munger has named "Boomer Ballast." This has been very good for Democrats for decades.

Where religious voters might to be found

Peter Wehner was a speech writer for three Republican presidents and is a prominent voice in evangelical Christian conservatism. He sees Donald Trump's latest efforts to run away from the backlash against the work of his anti-abortion court appointments -- and sees the demise of the anti-choice movement. 

Trump has done what no Democrat—not Bill or Hillary Clinton, not Mario Cuomo or John Kerry, not Joe Biden or Barack Obama, not any Democrat—could have done. He has, at the national level, made the Republican Party de facto pro-choice. Having stripped the pro-life plank from the GOP platform, having said that Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban on abortion after six weeks is “too harsh” and a “terrible mistake,” and having promised to veto a national abortion ban, Trump has now gone one step further, essentially advocating for greater access to abortion.

But that’s not all. The public is more pro-choice today than it was at the start of Trump’s presidential term, with pro-choice support near record levels. Approval for abortion is strongest among younger people, who will be voting for many decades to come. (Seventy-six percent of 18-to-29-year-olds say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.) Since the Dobbs decision, ballot measures restricting abortions have lost everywhere, including deep-red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. In addition—and this fact doesn’t get nearly enough attention—the number of abortions increased 8 percent during Trump’s presidency, after three decades of steady decline.

So voting for Donald Trump didn’t mean you were voting for fewer abortions. Abortions declined by nearly 30 percent during Barack Obama’s two terms, and by the end of his term, the abortion rate and ratio were below what they were in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. But they went up again on Trump’s watch. Public opposition to abortion is collapsing. Pro-life initiatives are being beaten even in very conservative states. The GOP has jettisoned its pro-life plank after having it in place for nearly a half century. And Trump himself is now saying he’d be great for “reproductive rights,” a position that pro-lifers have long insisted is a moral abomination.

Wehner has long been an anti-Trumper; he catalogues fluently the former president's multiple immoralities. But he felt he could understand his co-religionists for whom being against abortion was the only issue. No longer. Trump has rendered that stance insupportable.

click to enlarge

Meanwhile, historian of religion Diana Butler Bass thinks Democrats trying to peel Christian voters from Trump are looking at the wrong group. It's not the evangelicals (however deluded) who might change their minds; it's the slightly more than half of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics who have been giving their votes to the orange felon.

But if you think religion is still important — and you want to flip religious voters — you need to find those people who are actually willing to change their minds. And those voters aren’t in evangelical churches.

The religious “margins” are in congregations more influenced by nostalgic patriotism than Christian nationalism and in faith communities that cherish democracy and diversity over authority and conformity. Those sorts of Christians don’t believe in one-time conversions or think that doubt is evil or that changing your opinion is heresy. Indeed, they cherish the idea of faith as a journey to follow grace and goodness wherever it takes them — even to unexpected ideas and places.

And those sorts of religious people are more likely to be in white mainline and white Catholic churches than in evangelical congregations — especially in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Will these folks stay with the crazier and crazier Trump in this crucial year? 

Nice men

The Democratic convention included many breakthroughs. Feminist Jessica Valenti, creator of Abortion,  Every Day, identified one that seems worth pondering. She reflects on the meaning of giving such prominence to men like Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz who show their soft sides: 

... it’s not just the natural march of progress that makes the 2024 election so different from the last time a woman ran. In 2016, the question framing Clinton’s run was whether or not the country was “ready” for a woman president. She became an avatar for women’s progress, the election a referendum on feminism itself. The first female president versus a misogynist huckster.

Voters have that choice again this November, but by drawing so much attention to this new, positive vision of masculinity, Harris’ campaign is giving Americans something they didn’t have in 2016: The opportunity to still, somehow, vote for ‘men.’

It’s brilliant, if a bit sad. Harris’ campaign has figured out that they can’t just offer up the vice president as the alternative to Trump—they need men alongside Harris to make her more palatable. Still, that doesn’t take away from how vital and needed new models of masculinity are, especially as we face the very real and dangerous policies of Republican men.

So if pushing good men to the forefront is what it takes to elect the first woman president, I’ll take it.

Though I certainly hoped and expected Hillary Clinton to win, I was never a fan. Sure, she would have been the first woman in the top job. But neither in policy nor style did she appeal to me.

Like Valenti, there's a part of me that feels "a bit sad" that it probably takes foregrounding nice men to advance the candidacy of this strong woman, Kamala Harris.

On the other hand, I'm delighted to struggle alongside the nice men of the world for the democratic (note small "d") empowerment of all. 

Achieving women's equal participation and leadership is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. So far the U.S. is something of a laggard (though I'm not sure such a categorization quite captures the recent role of Nancy Pelosi.) 

As of 1 June 2024, there are 27 countries where 28 women serve as Heads of State and/or Government. At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.

Let's add another woman on top in November.

An old good news from Palestine

Mitri Raheb  maintains most European Christians don't get it.

Mitri Raheb is Palestinian, a theologian, and the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Faith in the Face of Empire offers his insights, rooted in the conditions of occupied Palestine, into how place and circumstance shape the three great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These faiths, in turn, shape much of global history.

His undertaking is ambitious and more than a little mind-bending. And that's a compliment.

He wrote presciently in 2014:

My generation might be the last in Palestine to struggle with scripture and its meaning in its original context of permanent occupation. ... For me, as a Palestinian Christian, Palestine is the land of both my physical and my spiritual forefathers and foremothers. The biblical story is thus part and parcel of my nation’s history, a history of continuous occupation by succeeding empires. In fact, the biblical story can best be understood as a response to the geo-political history of the region.

In Palestine, to live under a cruel occupation is not a novelty:

The Bible is a Middle Eastern book. It is a product of that region with all of its complexities. While it might seem that I am stating the obvious, I firmly believe that this notion has not been given enough attention. ...

... The three monotheistic religions did not take root in and grow out of the Middle East haphazardly. And it is not coincidental that the Bible emerged from Palestine, not from one of the empires. It is, in fact, this context of ongoing oppression, of forever living in the shadow of the empire, that brought about the birth of both Judaism and Christianity, and across the sea, Islam. ... The revelation the people of Palestine received was the ability to spot God where no one else was able to see [God].

Firmly situated in his long suffering land, Raheb interprets Jesus' message:

... one cannot understand the Gospels if they are disconnected from their original context, which is Palestine. ... For the people at Jesus’ time, the occupation began with the Romans. Jesus had a far greater understanding of the history of Palestine. He looked at a thousand years all at once, and he saw a chain of empires.

There isn’t a single regional empire that at some point did not occupy Palestine. The first empire to occupy Palestine was that of the Assyrians, in 722 BC; it stayed for over two hundred years. The Assyrians were replaced by the Babylonians in 587 BC, who didn’t last because they were pushed out by the Persians in 538 BC. The Persians didn’t stay long either, because they were forced to leave by Alexander the Great. Then there were the Romans.

Two thousand years after Jesus we can continue reciting the list of empires that ruled Palestine: the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ayyubides, the Ottomans, the British, and last but not least, the Israeli occupation.

... We have been trained to naively connect Israel today with the Israel of the Bible, instead of connecting it to the above chain of occupying empires. If we focus on the latter, Jesus’ words make perfect sense. None of those empires lasted in Palestine forever. They came and stayed for fifty, one hundred, two hundred, a maximum four hundred years, but in the end they were all blown away, gone with the wind.

Jesus wanted to tell his people that the empire would not last, that empires come and go. When empires collapse and depart it is the poor and the meek who remain. The “haves” from the people of the land emigrate; they seek to grow richer within the centers of empire. Those who are well educated are “brain drained” and vacuumed up by the empire. Who remains in the land? The meek, that is, the powerless! Empires come and go, while the meek inherit the land. Jesus’ wisdom is staggering. ... Jesus was telling the Palestinian Jews that the Romans who had built those settlements would not be there forever. They would vanish because Palestine would be inherited by the meek.

Forty years ago, when I was first trying to get some kind of understanding of what most people then would have called the "Arab-Israeli conflict," an Arab friend insisted (I paraphrase from memory) that "we don't look at it that way. ... in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, this thing called 'Israel' will be gone."

I couldn't imagine this. I wasn't going to argue; I was trying to learn. I still can't quite imagine this.

But this historical awareness of how time works in Palestine is very much the consciousness from within which Raheb elaborates a theology of liberation in Christian terms.

Those who are the "have-nots," those who cannot escape the brutality visited on them by the occupier, they cry out of their desperation, "where is God?"

He believes the life and death of Jesus in the context of imperial oppression answers that question.

If the first disciples had gone forth blaming the empire and trying to elicit sympathy, Christianity would not have been born. If the first disciples had believed all that they had to share was the bad news of the cruelty of the empire, they would have remained unnoticed. The cruelty of the empire is not breaking news, and the world, dominated by the empire, is full of such news.

The Spirit empowered the disciples to proclaim the good news, which was different from that of the empire. The disciples went out with the conviction that they had a message to share and that the world was waiting for just such a message. The world understood that if good news could hail from Palestine, then a miracle must have occurred.

This is faith in the face of empire.

Street critters

The alleyways have their residents.

 

Might those guys chase this one if they met?

This big boy just watches the world trudge by.

When Democrats hold office, jobs are created

A couple of charts to ponder. 

Simon Rosenberg, that effectual cheer leader for a Democratic Blue Wave over at Hopium Chronicles, always reminds us that Democratic leaders create jobs. Here's his version:

Washington Post data journalist Philip Bump creates his own version of this information -- and what this responsible guy shows is not so different.

Bump is a careful reporter. He offers qualifications.

... caveats can be sprinkled over all of this. Job growth under Biden was increased to some extent because employers were getting back up to speed after layoffs at the outset of the pandemic, for example.

So what happens if we take just the middle two years of Trump’s and Biden’s terms and compare them? That eliminates the covid effects for Trump and the boost at the outset for Biden. It also gives a year during which their policies could be expected to have had an effect.

In 2018 and 2019, under Trump, the country added 4.3 million jobs. In 2022 and 2023, under Biden, it added 7.5 million jobs.

You don’t have to be a sports whiz to see that seven puts you ahead of four, either.

Still, it's a someone amazing picture. I had not intuited this and I lived much of this economic history. And if enabling people to find jobs is what you think makes for a good country, it contains a blunt conclusion. Dem leadership makes life better for most people.

DNC: exorcising hate

The unity of purpose was exciting; Kamala was powerful.

But I want to highlight something that probably very few people saw live since it was on air so early in the evening. Yesterday Yusef Salaam, Harlem councilman, one of the wrongfully convicted "Central Park Five," got to take it to the men's tormentor, Donald Trump. 

Here's David Firestone explaining to those too young or too distant to recall that ugly racist episode.

When Yusef Salaam was elected to the New York City Council in 2023, it was a thrilling public vindication for a member of the so-called “Central Park Five,” a group of young Black men who were wrongly convicted of the rape and assault of a young jogger in 1989.

But for Salaam, true personal satisfaction came on Thursday night at the Democratic convention, when he got to stand on the stage before a huge national audience and denounce the man who has continued to vilify him and the other four since their arrest and wrongful conviction some 35 years ago, Donald Trump.

“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict,” Salaam said, to furious cheers from the delegates. “He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will. That man thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not.”

In 1989, in fact, Trump was explicit about his eternal hate. 

“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump wrote in a full-page advertisement he paid for in The Times and three other newspapers. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” He added, for emphasis, “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.” ...

... Even after the five men were exonerated, Trump refused to admit he was wrong, and suggested there was a case to be made that they were guilty.

Nobody has a clearer view of Donald Trump than Black New Yorkers from the '80s.

Friday cat blogging

On the side windows of our house, we hang "glass curtains" (translucent curtains). After all, we're urban. Our neighbor's windows are less than 10 feet away. We give each other some privacy. But we still want the light.

 

On our return from vacation, the damage was unmistakable.

 

So was the culprit. Something had impeded Janeway's view from her perch.

 

Replacement was easy and cheap.

But how long will the new curtains last? She is not exactly a tame feline.

Michele Obama gave us our instructions: DO SOMETHING!

Let's go all in for the win!

The Democratic Party has come to its senses and given us a chance to put a stake in MAGA, the Trump cult, and Republican control in DC. We don't have to live with fear and anxiety -- and possibly worse -- for the rest of our lives. We can go forward toward greater freedom for all.

We can elect Harris-Walz and even a Democratic Senate and House if we do the work this fall.

There are multiple places to do this work. All us can contribute somewhere, with money and labor.

I want to urge you to join the campaign I've had the privilege to work with for the last three elections: organized hospitality workers -- members of UniteHERE/the Culinary Union -- in Reno, Nevada. Nevada is one of the seven battleground states which can give the victory to Harris-Walz. The margins are tiny there; in 2022, an 8000 vote Democratic margin in the Reno area literally made the difference in re-electing a Democratic woman U.S. Senator, Catherine Cortez-Masto.

Seed the Vote is organizing and training election volunteers for this campaign. Sign in through this website and they'll make sure your time and effort is not frittered away in disorganized meetings and unclear instructions.

We can do this. We've turned Nevada Blue repeatedly statewide since 2016 -- Nevada can come through again for Harris-Walz!

PS -- you can keep me from asking you over and over by letting me know what you are doing for this election in comments. I'm serious about asking this. Democracy is not a spectator sport.

• • •

There's a good chance that people reading here got this from me by email. But just in case ...

The power demonstrated at the DNC

I'm loving the Dem fiesta in Chicago. How could I not?

And trying to think about what this happy turn toward looking forward might mean.

Lester Spence is a professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins. He looks at our society and polity from within a thoughtfully critical frame: 

Over the past 40-50 years we’ve seen a sharp rise in income inequality. Rather than being a natural function of cultural capital or education, with some populations being better able to adapt to post-industrial America than others, this sharp rise is a function of politics, of public policy that reduces the scale and scope of the US welfare state, of political rules that simultaneously increase the mobility and power of capital and reduce the power of labor to organize, and of political rhetoric that lauds the entrepreneur over the citizen. In short, the rise is the result of the neoliberal turn. And during this period, not only has inequality within black communities increased, there’s more inequality within black communities than there is between black and non-black ones.

In his newsletter The Counterpublic Papers, he wrestles with this happy, strange moment: 

... this election is about defeating Trump, but [also] about establishing better democratic conditions going forward.

If we don’t have two fully functioning parties, then we need to create the conditions that ensure the one functioning party continues to win at the federal level, to ensure the one functioning party wins at the state level, and that the one functioning party institutes policies that promote and extend democratic practice. Nominating Harris was the best way to create these conditions. It sends a signal that they trust Harris and the population she’s thought to represent. Further it pushes people like us past spectatorship and into something a bit more robust. This increased responsiveness has the potential to transform the party. Perhaps not radically…but just enough.

• • •

One of the ... aspects of the Harris candidacy pundits and scholars are likely to examine to bits in the future is how quick the rollout was. Her support among black women and men have to be accounted for here. Within days of Biden dropping out, a group of black women who’d already been doing standard political organizing held a zoom call that topped out at somewhere around 44,000 participants—so many that Zoom had to stretch its technical capacities to enable the call. The women were able to raise somewhere around $1 million dollars. Less than 24 hours later a group of black men held a similar event, organized by media personality/journalist Roland Martin. Approximately 50,000 people signed up for that call and raised around the same amount. (I was on that call, and even though I opposed Harris in 2020 I wrote a check.)

We can and should read this as an example of black elites mobilizing to ensure that Harris wasn’t discarded (and we don’t have to look hard to see examples of this—the same day women met on Zoom, Aaron Sorkin suggested in an NYT op-ed that the Democratic Party nominate Mitt Romney), with black men following suit. ...

The delightful DNC is about pulling together the many strands of buried hope and aspiration among us. This sort of coalition can be fragile, but it is immensely powerful in its moment.

DNC night two: a warrior for women

Of course Barack and Michelle Obama brought down house on the second night at the DNC -- "Do something!" And we must.

But it was Illinois U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth who capped the night for me. In 2004, serving as an Army helicopter pilot, she lost both legs and mobility in one arm when shot down by a rocket propelled grenade over Iraq.

So, at length she came home and ran first for Congress and then for the Senate. 

She's the kind of person Donald Trump would hide or throw away. He is afraid of disability and irritated when close to physically "damaged" people. (You could make the case that he feels at home among the morally damaged, but that's another story.)

Duckworth didn't think her life was over when she lost her legs -- nor did she think she should not be able to have children. She spent 10 years trying to get pregnant and used IVF to have two daughters. 

Republicans threaten not only access to abortion for women who need to end a pregnancy, but also access to IVF for women who are desperately trying to have children. A bunch of old men legislators and other weirdos want to decide for everyone.

Duckworth serves now as a warrior for women.

Democratic Convention Day One oddments

How can I not enjoy this?

For the first time in nearly a decade, politics is not all about Trump. This is to the credit of Harris, Walz, and their campaign. The race is now about the future, and about hope and joy, as opposed to the fear that dominated politics since Trump arrived on the scene.

Harris talks about Trump, as she should. He is her opponent, but the thrust of her message is about herself, her values, and her vision. Before the change in candidates, the conversation centered on voting to defeat Trump. Harris is running to do something good, not stop something bad. -- Dan Pfeiffer, comms guy from Obama world

The new folks are moving in. A Chicago tower redecorated.

From historian of European barbarism Tim Snyder who knows how far we can sink:

Democracy is not an easy form of government.  It has none of the certainties of the various forms of tyranny.  It demands that the governed as well as the governing make compromises, learn to to listen, and sometimes resist impulses.  The champions of democracy are not the people who cling to power in its name, but those who put that greater consultation, that larger discussion, that continuing project, above themselves.

The president has set an example. The president did exactly the thing that he needed to do. That is an example we can follow.

Joe Biden has given us a benediction.  The rest is up to us.

Enough for Day One. On with the party

The battle for the US Senate: Montana

Among the worthy Democratic Senators running for reelection this year, Jon Tester of Montana is probably the most endangered. In 2020, Trump won his state with 56 percent of the vote to Joe Biden's 40. That's a tough partisan baseline to overcome.

If the MAGA mob, in thrall to extremist excitements, hadn't taken over the Republican Party, Tester might be toast. But he's the real thing, a slightly curmudgeonly rancher with a flat-top haircut. So he's got a chance against an opponent who doesn't shut up about his radicalism.

Here's how Tester is attacking his opponent: 

It's not very attractive to tell old people you are going to mess with their Medicare. If Tester can make this stick, he can eke out another improbable victory.

Restoring majority rule: the basics

Here's a succinct summary (gift) from Jamelle Bouie of the structural impediments that we live with. My emphasis.

The United States will always have a conservative party, but American democracy needs that party to be committed to the maintenance of our democratic institutions. The only way to plot a path from here to there is to forcibly change the incentives within the Republican Party, which is to say, the only way to break the fever is to change the rules of the game. A more democratic American democracy — where majorities elect and majorities rule — would force the Republican Party to try, once again, to compete for national majorities.

The reforms are straightforward.

• End the Electoral College and move to a national popular vote, possibly by embracing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

• End partisan gerrymandering and experiment with forms of voting that might enable more party competition, like fusion, which would let two or more parties nominate the same candidate for office.

• End the filibuster and pass a new, more robust Voting Rights Act.

• Grant D.C. statehood in accordance with the wishes of the majority of its residents.

• And pursue reform of the entire federal judiciary, so that the Supreme Court, which has been too happy to help Republican entrench minority rule in the states, cannot take an ax to this agenda.

If the aim of both the Democratic Party and its allies is to protect and defend American democracy, then it cannot avoid a confrontation with those aspects of the American system that enabled the Republican spiral into nihilism. If Democrats win control of Washington in November, they should make reforming our democracy a priority, since even without Trump, the sickness in the Republican Party will remain. It will take strong medicine to save the patient. Democrats must be prepared to administer the cure.

Getting rid of the unbalanced disaster that is the Electoral College is really hard. But much of this is possible with ordinary electoral majorities, including adding DC as a state, ending the filibuster, and national procedural voting reforms. 

So -- we need to win the critical Senate elections, especially Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Their states will go Republican, but these Democrats can continue to break through.

We need to win a majority in the House of Representatives -- should be possible with a lot of good candidates and lots of work.

And we need to elect Harris-Walz. Again, should be possible.

Remembrances of youth jobs

She worked at Mickey D's. Harris's campaign wants the world to know it. This ad is running in battleground states, highlighting her middle class origins and affinities.

As the Washington Post reports:

One in 8 Americans have worked at McDonald’s at some point in their lives, according to the fast-food chain. McDonald’s announced that statistic last year when it introduced the 1 in 8 initiative, a campaign to celebrate its vast army of current and former workers. The company said it surveyed a representative sample of American adults and found that 13.7 percent of people said they had worked or currently work for the chain.

I never worked at McDonald's -- the fast food giant had barely launched nationwide in my youth. I remember vaguely when the Golden Arches appeared in suburban Williamsville. We tried it -- phew, dead burgers, not food. Dairy Queen was still better.

But kids and very young people did do marginal jobs before McD's. One of my oddest was delivering the New York Times daily to faculty and a few intellectually inclined (pretentious?) students at my high school. A bundle would be dropped at the school office, and I'd run the newspaper around to home rooms and student desks. I doubt anyone read it diligently, though I can say I glanced at it.

A little later, I worked as an answering service operator. Before phone service came with voice mail,  small businesses and busy people would pay to have their calls picked up by a live person who hand recorded their callers' messages. There was some cachet, a pretension of professionalism, in having an answering service instead of just letting calls go unanswered. Two-bit lawyers particularly thought having "a girl" on the line sounded upstanding. 

From the point of view of those of us answering for these lawyers, they were slimeballs. Most of the calls we took were from desperate clients who complained that the lawyer -- court-appointed I assumed -- never returned their calls. We couldn't do a thing for these callers. I didn't last long at that job, just held on through the Christmas bonus, then quit.

Like Kamala Harris, most of us have memories of jobs we were glad to escape -- if we did escape. I invite readers to comment on their youthful work experiences. Do these "opportunities" still exist? What were these jobs like? Did they make you proud to be a worker? or just make you miserable?

Friday cat blogging

 

I often feel I am under intensive surveillance. Those boring eyes!

Janeway and Mio seem to feel its their job to keep track of me. Might I escape? Might I go where they are are not allowed to go? --- that would be "out".

A vexatious, nightmare interlude

Most of time, historians who want to be taken seriously by their academic peers confine themselves monographs, studying deeply small aspects of big subjects. For example, this study of war financing by the Union during the US Civil War. These make building blocks for grand narratives of the past; it is audacious and usually quite senior practitioners who attempt to offer their readers broad sweeping stories.

This is what economic historian Adam Tooze does in The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. His narrative bridges two episodes which have grabbed most if the available attention in popular 20th century history -- the horrific conflict which was World War I in Europe and the even more horrible sequel of economic collapse, war and fascism in Europe, as well as the definitive end of European global empires.

But what happened in the 1920s? If we have any mental picture at all, it's likely of a mess of little states stumbling to failure in Europe while Prohibition of liquor and crazed dancing of the Charleston captured energies in the United States. That is, an historic void.

Tooze is certain we're missing the significance of that time. The United States, haltingly, came into the leading role in the world its economic dominance implied.

A new order emerged from the Great War that promised, above the bickering and nationalist grandstanding of the new states, fundamentally to restructure relations between the great powers -- Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia, and the United States. It took geostrategic and historical imagination to comprehend the scale and significance of this power transformation. The new order that was in the making was defined in large part by the absent presence of its main defining element-- the new power of the United States. ... The one nation that emerged apparently unscathed and vastly more powerful from the war was the United States. ... Tracing the ways in which the world came to terms with America's new centrality, through the struggle to shape a new order, will be the central preoccupation of this book.

But powerful political movements and nations sought a different path.

... We grasp movements like fascism or Soviet communism only very partially if we normalize them as familiar expressions of the racist, imperialist mainstream of modern European history, or if we tell their story backwards from the dizzying moment in 1940-42, when they rampaged victoriously through Europe and Asia and the future seemed to belong to them. ... the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order. ... This was the terrifying lesson that the insurgents derived from the story of world politics between 1916 and 1933, the story recounted in this book.

Something new had been released between states and peoples by the horrible carnage of 1914-18.

The Great War may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more morally and politically charged -- a crusading victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order. With an American president in the lead, the 'war to end all wars' was fought and won to uphold the rule of international law and to put down autocracy and militarism. As one Japanese observer remarked: "German's surrender has challenged militarism and bureaucratism from the roots. As a natural consequence, politics based on the people, reflecting the will of the people, namely democracy, has, like a race to heaven, conquered the thought of the whole world." ...

... To describe the United States as the inheritor of Britain's hegemonic mantle is to adopt the vantage point of those who in 1908 insisted on referring to Henry Ford's Model T as a 'horseless carriage." The label was not so much wrong as vainly anachronistic. This was not a succession. This was a paradigm shift. ...

Tooze documents why America was unready and unwilling to exercise the stabilizing leadership which the world created by war hoped for and demanded. 

This isn't just about "isolationism;" it is also about America's struggles to stabilize its own internal and financial polity. It required the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal for the United States in the 1930s for the country to find its way internally and then assume the world leadership that its power and money implied.

And so, in addition to the mediocrity of the corrupt Warren G. Harding and silent Calvin Coolidge presidencies, it becomes clearer why the decade of the 1920s has receded from historical memory. If I believe Tooze, and I do, the United States was coming to terms with itself on the verge of jumping atop a truly global role.

How much of history is actually these "in-between" times which subsequent events will show were necessary preparation for what came later? Obviously, this view reads history backward and it a bit loose-brained for many. Still, it is interesting, for example, to try to situate the Obama presidency as such an episode. I guess we'll have to live out more of the sequel to find out.