Wars' residues

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Sal Somoza, Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Farah, pulls security outside the Farah provincial governor's compound in Farah City, Feb. 5. U.S. Navy photo by HMC Josh Ives

The people in power who start wars don't seem to much attend to this, but for people caught up in the violence they initiate, wars are never "over." If they are still around when the fighting dies down, nonetheless, their lives and their world are changed forever. Here are a few items I've noticed recently that highlight this:

• PTSD symptoms may NEVER subside.

  Mr. Perna was 80 when he finally made his way to the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, where he began therapy with Dr. Cook and joined other World War II and Korean War veterans in a Thursday afternoon support group. “We began to understand what was happening to us,” he told me. “In your home by yourself, you figure this is just you. You don’t know other guys are going through the same thing.”

  New Old Age, March 15, 2013

• Invaders may depart, but enmities linger.The U.S. will (more or less?) get itself out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But there remain the Afghans …

  Mr. Balegh dismissed American concerns that released prisoners would return to the war. “We Afghans are the ones who face the most danger from these people who are released, not the Americans,” he said.

  New York Times, March 26, 2013

  Novel notion that, attending to the people who live there.

• The majority of the men still held at the United States prison at Guantanamo have been "cleared for release" -- 86 out of 166. More detainees have died without charges in the camp (9) than have been convicted of a crime (7). Now, according to lawyers who represent some of them, some 130 are on a hunger strike against mistreatment by Army guards and their indefinite, endless detention. On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay spoke about the camp:

  “… this systemic abuse of individuals’ human rights continues year after year,” she said. “We must be clear about this: the United States is in clear breach not just of its own commitments but also of international laws and standards that it is obliged to uphold. When other countries breach these standards, the US – quite rightly – strongly criticizes them for it.”
  
  “As a first step,” Pillay said, “those who have been cleared for release must be released. This is the most flagrant breach of individual rights, contravening the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. …

  Office of the High Commissioner, April 5, 2013

  Guess the Guantanamo prisoners are just the unwanted residue of the misbegotten "War on Terror" indulged in by a terrified nation.

Saturday scenes and scenery: a few automotive hood ornaments

Once upon a time, in my youth, it was easy to pick out different car models. In those days, car companies competed to distinguish their wares one from another. The result was some truly baroque designs -- tail fins, huge front grills, bodies sleek, and other bodies boxy.

These days, pretty much all modern cars look alike. I long ago stopped being able to discern the differences. And consequently, some tiny fraction of us, striving for individuality, are adding after market hood ornaments -- or treasuring old ones -- that help our vehicles stand out from the crowd. Here are a few I've seen recently.


This add-on lady strikes a pose.


Dodge has been using variants of ram figures for a long time. This one is surprisingly finely detailed.


This one was on an old Pontiac.


I don't know quite what inspires someone to add this to their car, but there it was.

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Why can't Medicare "go paperless"?

This will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this who is on Medicare, but it sure isn't hard to suggest some obvious measures that would help the program save money.

Every month I receive an envelope that displays, on the exterior, this phrase:

Inside, the enclosure is headed with this:

 The government takes my payment directly out of my bank account. The monthly mailing is just a receipt.

Unlike any other big institution I deal with, there is no option to "go paperless." My bank statement is paperless; my electric bills are paperless; the water bill is paperless. The IRS even takes my taxes out of my bank account by way of online filing. But for some reason Medicare is still sending me mailings, mailings I might easily find confusing or frightening. This doesn't make sense.

*** And that doesn't even go into the difficulties I had setting up automatic payment from my bank. Now I know most people get their premiums deducted directly from their Social Security -- but I haven't taken Social Security yet. But I certainly didn't want to have to write the government a check every month, so I figured they ought to be able to do direct withdrawal (everyone else does.) Not so easy. It's not as if there's an online way to request bank withdrawals. I had to call up and talk to a nice man who answers inquiries; he had to mail me the correct form; I had to fill it out and mail it back; and then I had wait six weeks while they processed it.

This is nuts. The municipal garbage authority can do this immediately, online. Why not Medicare?

*** Don't get me wrong -- I'll fight to the death any politician who wants to cut or privatize the system. But I look forward to the day when Medicare lumbers into the current century.

Friday cat blogging: yearning

Morty wants something ... something OUT THERE. His back speaks desire.

As it happens, we know what he wants. He wants to eat grass. Sometimes he gets a few mouth fulls if we are unwary and he slips by someone going out. He's not supposed to go out. There are dogs and cars out there. He's never gotten further than the clump of grass and he's not going to. But he wants ...

Good news for the day, no. 2

Brian Banks, a 27 year old rookie linebacker, signed with the Atlanta Falcons. This time of year, aspiring football players with little experience sign contracts all the time; most of them don't last past training camp -- so what's the big deal about Banks?

Ten years ago Banks was a prime high school football prospect on his way to play at USC when a woman accused him of kidnapping and rape. According to CNN, he was confronted with the choice of trying to convince a jury of his innocence and risking a 41 year sentence -- or pleading "no contest," serving a five year sentence and a long stretch on probation, and being permanently stigmatized as a sex offender. He took the plea, even though he always claimed to be innocent.

Ninety-five percent of criminal cases are resolved through such plea bargains. A friend explained his job as a deputy DA:

If defendants play along and agree to spare the state the effort and cost of a trial, we repay them in time. If they insist on their rights, we get tough.

The courts wouldn't work if most cases didn't end before trial. But when prosecutors threaten to "get tough," defendants have to calculate their odds, even innocent defendants.

In fact, Banks didn't rape the woman. Ten years later, she recanted her claim. There had been no crime.

So Banks has spent the past year beating his body into football shape and has won a chance from the Georgia team. No wondering he's beaming in his XONR8 sweatshirt:

Good news for the day, no. 1

No human being is illegal, says the Associated Press, even though some people do take up residence in this country without legal permission.

Count this as a victory. Colorlines, Presente, and the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas have worked long and hard for this day.

Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll of the Associated Press explains:

The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.

… we had in other areas been ridding the Stylebook of labels. The new section on mental health issues argues for using credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels. Saying someone was “diagnosed with schizophrenia” instead of schizophrenic, for example.

And that discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to “illegal immigrant” again.

We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance.

So we have.

Good for the AP; this suggested change in reporters' usage will percolate through the society gradually. It will help move discussions of comprehensive immigration reform in a more humane direction. After all, no human is "illegal."

Warming Wednesdays: what I learned about climate from Nate Silver

The New York Times' resident statistical whiz kept me on an even keel during the run up to the Presidential election: his calculations always gave some advantage to Barack Obama even at the candidate's lowest ebb after the first debate. I wasn't really paying much attention, having my own campaign to work on, but Nate Silver's predictions confirmed the little I could glean from my other observations.

Nate Silver has published a book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- but Some Don't, that I can heartily recommend to anyone who wants to evaluate the many predictions we encounter around us and that we make ourselves. It's an argument for utilizing Bayesian probability, an application of mathematical logic, in how we think about the world; if that sounds forbidding, just let me say that Silver's book is not difficult at all. He's a sharp observer of multiple subcultures, including sports, gambling, weather forecasting, economics, and earthquake science. In short, this book is fun and I thought a convincing argument in favor of a mode of prediction that might improve our understandings.

In particular Silver puts the arguments about the reality of climate change in a context I found slightly different than I'd understood. There are people for whom not believing in the climate conclusions of mainstream science is a good gig (sponsored usually by the fossil fuel industry) or who thrive on pure contrarianism, so it possible to say that "not all scientists" agree that global warming is real. But it is possible to discern which climate assertions win wide agreement and which are open to appropriate scientific questions.

… climate scientists are in much broader agreement about some parts of the debate than others. A survey of climate scientists conducted in 2008 found that almost all (94 percent) were agreed that climate change is occurring now, and 84 percent were persuaded that it was the result of human activity. But there was much less agreement about the accuracy of climate computer models. The scientists held mixed views about the ability of these models to predict global temperatures, and generally skeptical ones about their capacity to model other potential effects of climate change. Just 19 percent, for instance, thought they did a good job of modeling what sea-rise levels will look like fifty years hence. …

It is useful to the mere interested observer of scientific argument to have to parameters of consensus laid out so clearly.

The fact that some issues still need more data points and more sophisticated models in order to generate predictions that command overwhelming assent would not be a problem if climate change were merely a puzzle for scientists. But the scientific mode of knowledge has wandered into a political minefield where its conventions don't fit social needs.

The fundamental dilemma faced by climatologists is that global warming is a long term problem that might require a near-term solution. Because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for so long, decisions that we make about it today will affect the lives of future generations. In a perfectly rational and benevolent world, this might not be so worrying. But our political and cultural institutions are not so well-devised to handle these problems …

Michael Mann, who is director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University,
"We're in a street fight with these people," he told me, referring to [one characterization of climate change skeptics]. The long-term goal of the street fight is to persuade the public and policy makers about the urgency (or lack thereof) of action to combat climate change. In a society accustomed to overconfident forecasters who mistake the confidence they express in a forecast for its veracity, expressions of uncertainty are not seen as a winning strategy by either side.

"Where you have to draw the line is to be very clear about where the uncertainties are, but to not have our statements be so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens to what we're saying," Mann told me. "It would be irresponsible for us as a community to not be speaking out. There are others who are happy to fill the void. And they're going to fill the void with disinformation."

Responsible prediction is hard; Nate Silver at least makes its contours more accessible in this book.

Drug patents are not a fact of nature

Yesterday, the New York Times headlined a business article about that perennial point of contention: drug company patents.

NEW DELHI — People in developing countries in Africa and Asia will continue to have access to low-cost copycat versions of drugs for diseases like H.I.V. and cancer, at least for a while. … The debate over global drug pricing is one of the most contentious issues between developed countries and the developing world. While poorer nations maintain they have a moral obligation to make cheaper, generic drugs available to their populations — by limiting patents in some cases — the brand name pharmaceutical companies contend the profits they reap are essential to their ability to develop and manufacture innovative medicines.

… In the United States, companies can get a new patent for a drug by altering its formula or changing its dosage. The companies contend that even minor improvements in medicines — changing a pill dosage to once a day instead of twice a day — can have a significant impact on patient wellness. But critics say the majority of drug patents given in the United States are for tiny changes that often provide patients few meaningful benefits but allow drug companies to continue charging high prices for years beyond the original patent life.

… While advocates for the pharmaceutical industry argue that fairly liberal rules on patents spur innovation, a growing number of countries are questioning why they should pay high prices for new drugs. Argentina and the Philippines have passed laws similar to the one enacted in India, placing strict limits on patents.

This article is a fine example of journalists accepting framing that constrains possible understandings of the issues involved. The writers could have improved their grasp of the competing interests here by considering the viewpoint in a free e-book by economist Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Consider this:

In policy discussions, patents and copyrights are usually treated as part of the natural order, their enforcement is viewed as being as basic as the right to free speech or the free exercise of religion. In fact, there is nothing natural about patents and copyrights, they are relics of the Medieval guild system. They are state-granted monopolies, the exact opposite of a freely competitive market. The nanny state will arrest an entrepreneur who sells a patent-protected product in competition with the person to whom it has granted a patent monopoly.

Patents and copyrights do serve an economic purpose — they are a way to promote research and innovation in the case of patents, and a means of supporting creative and artistic work in the case of copyrights. However, just because patents and copyrights can be used for these purposes, it does not follow that they are the only mechanisms or the most efficient mechanisms to accomplish these purposes.

… It is necessary to have mechanisms for supporting innovation, and many alternatives to patents and copyrights already exist. The government directly funds $30 billion a year in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, a sum that is almost as large as the amount that the pharmaceutical industry claims to spend. A vast amount of creative work is supported by universities and private foundations. While these alternative mechanisms would have to be expanded, or new ones created, in the absence of patent and copyright protection, they demonstrate that patents and copyrights are not essential for supporting innovation and creative work. The appropriate policy debate is whether they are the best mechanisms.

My emphasis. Just because enterprises have long been organized in a familiar fashion doesn't mean that this is the only way. The patent system is a social invention; if we chose, we could try other incentives. In the book, Baker suggests alternative spurs to innovation that don't involve monopoly profits for a few companies or exclude the world's poor from access to drugs.

Not only can Baker's book be freely downloaded at the link above, you can even get it as a free audiobook here.

Easter Monday

Karen Armstrong understands why I spent so much of last week at church services:

Religion ... is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. …

If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it. In the modern period, however, we have turned faith into a head-trip. Originally, the English word “belief”, like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo, meant “commitment”. When Jesus asked his followers to have “faith”, he was not asking them to accept him blindly as the Second Person of the Trinity (an idea he would have found puzzling). Instead, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table.

New Statesman, March 2013

And so -- now that Christ is once again risen from the grave "trampling down death by death" -- I think I'll take a day off from blogging.

Cesar Chavez remembered

Detail from a mural on a public school wall in the San Francisco Mission district.

In California, Texas and Colorado, March 31, the birthday of the United Farm Workers Union co-founder Cesar Chavez, is a state holiday. Especially among Mexican Americans, Chavez -- the labor leader, not the boxer -- is revered for demonstrating that poor and humble people could rise up against agribusiness and Anglos prejudices. He taught pride -- and organizing for justice.

The union Chavez founded is campaigning to make the date a national holiday.

For a contemporary appreciation of Chavez's legacy, one that acknowledges some elements that do not stand the test of time, see this discussion by Maegan Ortiz.

In this moment when it appears that full inclusion of gay and lesbian people as complete citizens is rapidly approaching, we should remember that Cesar Chavez was a very early supporter of gay civil rights. I know; I heard him acknowledge us among a list of people struggling for fuller freedom at a rally concluding a farm worker march to Modesto in 1975. At the 1987 Gay and Lesbian National March on Washington, he was in the first rank, helping to carry the lead banner.

Because the Chavez commemoration fell on Easter Sunday this year, actual observances are all over the lot -- some offices closed for a day last week; the annual Mission District parade and 24th Street fair in San Francisco has been moved to April 20.

Easter bonnets

Seen in the Mission.

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Saturday scenes and scenery: socks place their relationship ads

Single striped knee-high looking for solemate


Rainbow toe looking for same sock marriage

These photos are by-products from my photoblog project: 596 Precincts -- Walking San Francisco. If intrigued, take a look and sign up for sporadic email updates.

Good Friday observance

The Christian observance of Good Friday reminds us (or should remind us) of the human propensity to torture and kill that which we find frightening or too just terribly different from ourselves. We do that all too easily. And we do it over and over.

In the U.S. gulag at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, prisoners have been on hunger strike for the last month. Lt. Colonel Barry Wingard, one of the military lawyers representing these men, explains their motivation for refusing food.

"… these men who live in animal cages in America's offshore prison ask for justice. They've been there 11 and one half years; 90 percent of them have no charges. Having looked at my clients' cases, they will never get a trial based on the evidence that is against them. ... Forty eight men will be condemned to die [in Guantanamo] without ever having been given a trial or an opportunity to defend themselves. They are essentially condemned -- dead -- men who just happen to breathe. … The vast majority of people in Guantanamo Bay are cleared for release. … the United States acknowledges they have committed no crime …These men have figured out that probably the only way for them to go home, cleared or not, is in a wooden box …

Of course the United States has many other prisons. In domestic prisons, at least there has been some pretense of a process before humans are confined forever. Every once in a while, far too often, the system admits it has imprisoned the wrong person and releases an innocent. The National Registry of Exonerations lists 1085 cases since 1989 as I write. And even the properly convicted usually are returned to the "free world" at some point.

We can't be sure how many other -- secret -- Guantanamos the United States has somewhere on the globe. The President says "no more secret prisons" but his word provides little assurance.

We do know about this Guantanamo and these cases. Witness Against Torture is leading a solidarity fast while the inmates remain on hunger strike. This seems appropriate to the day.

Chinua Achebe: choosing to side with the powerless

The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe died last week at the age of 82. He mattered:

Mr. Achebe was a source of pride to many Nigerians, an elder we could point to when the world laughed at our shortcomings. We often invoked his name like that of a fierce god.

… With fiction and nonfiction, he helped us deride colonialism. … He also addressed corruption head on, teaching younger Nigerians not to be hungry to the point of selling our birthrights. His soul and conscience were nonnegotiable. He turned down Nigeria’s national honors twice because he was one who believed an elder should not eat his meal atop a heap of malodorous rubbish.

Mr. Achebe was a gentle rebel who refused to shake the necrotic outstretched hands of corrupt leaders. He was an old breed, a wise man from a different generation who could not stand the wanton looting of Nigeria’s public coffers.

Mr. Achebe would have loved to spend his twilight years among his own people instead of in America. With the bastardization of a nation he was once proud of by kleptocratic military and civilian rulers, the old man had no country to return to alive.

Victor Ehikhamenor, New York Times, 3/26/13

By coincidence, I have just finished reading Achebe's memoir, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra. The book is a chronicle of his hopes for Nigeria independence in 1960; how hope turned sour amid corruption, continued Western interference, and ethnic competition; and the terrible story of how his native Biafra (region) attempted and failed to secede from the federal state. A massacre of some 30,000 Eastern region Nigerians -- members of his Igbo people -- prompted the secession in 1967; federal Nigerian forces killed some three million Biafrans by direct military invasion and a blockade of food stuffs in the war that followed. The war (and Biafra's independence) ended in 1970 but Achebe still was moved to add his final witness to that terrible experience in this 2012 book.

Achebe published his first novel about one African experience of British colonialism, Things Fall Apart, in 1958 and was immediately recognized as an accomplished literary interpreter of his country to English speaking readers. I remember reading Things Fall Apart in high school in the early 1960s while studying decolonization. In this new book, he recalls meeting some South Korean students who had also read it in high school -- and who recognized the sort of interaction it portrays between colonizer and indigenous people because they too had been colonized -- not by Britain, but by Japan.

Achebe's memoir is well worth reading for its history of the Biafra war and insight into the failure of the Nigerian state to deliver on the promise of democracy and independence. But, in light of the author's passing, it seems more important to dwell on some of his observations on his vocation as a writer; this was a man who viewed his own talents within the frame of his responsibilities to his community.

… Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective -- in full earshot of the world.

… Some of us decided to tackle the big subjects of the day -- imperialism, slavery, independence, gender, racism, etc. And some did not. One could write about roses or the air or about love for all I cared; that was fine too. As for me, however, I chose the former. Engaging such heavy subjects while at the same time trying to help create a unique and authentic African literary tradition would mean that some of us would decide to use the colonizer's tools: his language, altered. sufficiently to bear the weight of an African creative aesthetic, infused with elements of the African literary tradition. I borrowed proverbs from our culture and history, colloquialisms and African expressive language from the ancient griots, the world views, perspectives, and customs from my Igbo tradition and cosmology, and the sensibilities of everyday people. … My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this universal storytelling before we can say, "Now we've heard it all."

… I believe that it is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest. In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint. Even those early novels that look like very gentle re-creations to the past -- what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past. That was the protest, because there were people who thought we didn't have a past. What I was doing was to say politely that we did -- here it is.

… The question of involvement in politics is really a matter of definition. I think it is quite often misunderstood. I have never proposed that every artist become an activist in the way we have always understood political activity. Some will, because that's the way they are. Others will not, and we must not ask anyone to do more than is necessary for them to perform their task. At the same time it is important to state that words have the power to hurt, even to denigrate and oppress others. Before I am accused of prescribing a way in which a writer should write, let me say that I do think that decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. …

The United States seems bent on meddling further in the affairs of Africans, extending our military presence (AFRICOM), competing with China for the continent's resources. Somehow, I cannot trust we'll have much care for the powerless. That, if it comes at all, will have to start with Africans.

An Easter challenge to targetted killings

As we approach Easter, religious leaders challenge our political leaders' presumption that they can ethically play God.

Warming Wednesdays: the price of carbon

Carbon pollution makes for "weather on steroids." Who pays?

At the moment, a good place to get plugged in to the international citizen movement to stop all this is 350.org.

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.

Who are the super rich and what are they doing to us?

Last fall during the election campaign I'd occasionally be asked what I really thought about President Obama. Questioners seemed to mean something along the lines of "who is he?" Damned if I know. Mere consumers of the political theater of democracy can't know, of course. But even when he is disappointing, Obama remains a fascinating figure. I'd say I had a book to recommend, one that I found somehow a little more enlightening than his own autobiography, or David Remnick's effort or William Jelani Cobb's. I suggested Jodi Kantor's The Obamas. I don't know if anyone took up my suggestion -- after all, this was "chick nonfiction" (according to historian Douglas Brinkley.) But it brought me insights that none of the others had teased out.

Chrystia Freeland's Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else strikes me as another important book that a lot of people are probably dismissing as "chick nonfiction." Dismissing this is a mistake. Freeland has been an accomplished financial journalist with the Financial Times and Thomson Reuters; she cut her reporting teeth on describing the rise of Russia's post-Communist billionaires in Sale of the Century. Sure, she writes charmingly about the milieu of her subjects -- but it's the dimwitted reader who misses the edge she brings to her topic.

In this book she chronicles the two current Gilded Ages she sees global plutocrats exploiting concurrently.

… we aren't just living through a replay of the Gilded Age --- we are living through two, slightly different gilded ages that are unfolding simultaneously. The industrialized West is experiencing a second gilded age; … the emerging markets are experiencing their first gilded age.

The gilded age of the emerging markets is the easiest to understand. Many countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa are industrializing and urbanizing, just as the West did in the nineteenth century, and with the added oomph of the technology revolution and a globalized economy. The countries of the former Soviet Union aren't industrializing -- Stalin accomplished that -- but they have been replacing the failed central planning regime that coordinated their creaky industrial economy with a market system, and many are enjoying a surge in their standard of living as a result. The people at the very top of all of the emerging economies are benefiting most, but the transition is also pulling tens of millions of people into the middle class and lifting hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty.

… The collapse of communism is more than a footnote to today's double gilded age. Economic historians are still debating the connection between the rise of Western democracy and the first gilded age. But there can be no question that today's twin gilded ages are as much the product of a political revolution -- the collapse of communism and the triumph of the liberal idea around the world -- as they are of new technology. …

At the same time, the West is also benefiting from the first gilded age of the emerging economies. If you own a company in Dallas or Dusseldorf, the urbanizing peasants of the emerging markets probably work for you. That is good news for the plutocrats in the West, who can reap the benefits of simultaneously being nineteenth-century robber barons and twenty-first century technology tycoons. But it makes the transition even harsher for the Western middle class, which is being buffeted by two gilded ages at the same time.

Freeland, not surprisingly given her experience, is one of the many smart critics of plutocracy who adopts the view that un- and under-regulated free market capitalism is the worst of all possible systems -- except any other that humans have created.

Like at least one other female financial journalist I can think of (Gillian Tett), Freeland approaches her subjects with an ethnographer's eye.

… if you are looking to define the archetypal member of the super elite, he isn't Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy, with his gorgeous acres of Pemberley. He -- and they are almost all still men -- is an aggressive, intensely educated mathematician, the son of middle- or upper-middle-class parents, who made his first fortune young. … The result is a super-elite whose members have been working to join it for most of their conscious lives -- if not since nursery school, certainly since high school, when the competition for those elite college places begins in earnest. … One sign of the shift is the illicit drug of choice among the gilded youth -- Adderall. Its great virtue, one Princeton engineer told me, is that you can study for twenty-four hours without losing your concentration or needing to sleep.

… Revolution [technological, financial, political] is the new global status quo, but not everyone is good at responding to it. My shorthand for the archetype best equipped to deal with it is "Harvard kids who went to provincial public schools." They got into Harvard, or, increasingly, its West Coast rival, Stanford, so they are smart, focused, and reasonably privileged. But they went to public schools, often in the hinterlands, so they have an outsider's ability to spot the weaknesses of the ruling paradigm and don't have so much vested in the current system that they are afraid of stepping outside it.

… If wonks were fashionistas, big data would be this season's hot new color.

… The plutocratic bubble isn't just about being insulated by the company of fellow super-elites, although that is part of it. It is also created by the way you are treated by everyone else. One financier, speaking about his friend who is one of the top five hedge fund managers in the world, said, "He's a good man -- or as good as you can be when you are surrounded by sycophants."

Freeland seems to find the plutocrats she has reports on alluring, if also slightly horrifying; I find them repulsive. Their myopic worship of money and undisguised greed leave me wondering how their mothers can have failed so utterly to knock some humane values into them.

But Freeland knows that the society these men are building is a house of cards that can't last if plutocrats succeed in warping our institutions entirely to their benefit. She explores some of the contradictions between the one percent and the .01 percent that provide some space for efforts to rein in the global super rich. She covers some of the same ground explored in Why Nations Fail, such as the example of the Venetian Renaissance elite who stifled innovation and social mobility and ended up losing their preeminent position in commerce. A Gilded Age, new or old, is delightful for global winners and their hangers on, but it is devastating for most of us.

If you want your plutocracy charmingly and bitingly described, this is a book for you.
*** I need to mention that the notion that uncontrolled free market capitalism is heating up the planet in ways that are likely to change the prospects for even the most affluent humans shows up nowhere in this book. In 10 years, in 20 years, in 50 years, will be it be possible to describe how our economies are and have been organized without mentioning the impact of climate change? I doubt it. But for now, the band plays on...

Marriage equality at the Supremes - NOT a Roe v. Wade rerun

On Saturday, the New York Times previewed the hoopla that will accompany arguments about marriage equality in the Supreme Court this week in an article entitled "Shadow of Roe v. Wade Looms Over Ruling on Gay Marriage."

When the Supreme Court hears a pair of cases on same-sex marriage on Tuesday and Wednesday, the justices will be working in the shadow of a 40-year-old decision on another subject entirely: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion.

Judges, lawyers and scholars have drawn varying lessons from that decision, with some saying that it was needlessly rash and created a culture war.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal and a champion of women’s rights, has long harbored doubts about the ruling. “It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far, too fast,” she said last year at Columbia Law School.

The article goes on to acknowledge that there are differences in the political climate and in political discussion of same-sex marriage, even though the opponents of equality -- Roman Catholic, fundamentalist Protestant, and other traditionalist religious groups -- are very much the same forces that have tried for forty years to substitute fetal personhood for women's control of our reproduction.

The meme sent me running to Professor Kristin Luker's Abortion & the Politics of Motherhood, a 1985 study that I consider the essential history of the earlier phases of the abortion debate.

Luker sets the stage for the 1973 Roe decision by tracing the legal history of abortion in the U.S. This country only acquired laws against abortion in the late 1800s as a byproduct of the medical profession's effort to kick a variety of competitors -- homeopaths, chiropractors, midwives -- out of the business of healthcare. University trained doctors didn't really have much to offer patients until the early 1900s, but they wanted exclusive rights and used the state governments to get them.

The abortion prohibitions allowed doctors discretion to conclude that some physical or mental impediment made the procedure indicated. Abortion wasn't something people talked about; it was a dirty secret. Because doctors didn't discuss openly the criteria they used to make exceptions to the laws and accorded each other the professional courtesy of not asking, individual doctors evolved different definitions of necessity for abortions. Meanwhile women continued to attempt self-abortion (think knitting needles) and to pay dangerous quacks to enable them to escape pregnancy.

Pressure for state-by-state reform of abortion laws only evolved in the 1950s and early 60s as doctors began to understand that they had very different views of the practice. The women's movement was not really launched until the end of the 1960s by which time medical professional advocates had won liberalized abortion laws in California and New York. Doctors who believed in liberalized abortion had achieved legal cover for their activities. Only the rudiments of an activist movement in favor of women being central to the decision to give birth had come into being when the Supreme Court legalized the practice, as a right for the woman and her doctor, in 1973.

Only then did opponents of legal abortion organize themselves to try to overthrow the Court's judgement. Opponents simply had not imagined that any substantial set of people believed women should have the option to decide when to raise a child. From Luker:

The new group of people brought into active participation in the anti-abortion movement by the Supreme Court decision were predominately women with high school educations (and occasionally some·college) who were married, had children, and were not employed outside the home. They were, as the earlier pro-life activists called them, "the housewives." None of them had ever had an abortion, and only a few of them had ever had a friend who had had an abortion; the closest most of them came to actual experience in the matter was having heard rumors in high school about someone who had "gotten in trouble" and "done something" about it. Their values and life circumstances made it unlikely that they themselves would need abortions, and they were surrounded by people who shared these values. Moreover, since they were known to be devout, traditional women who valued motherhood highly, they were not likely to be on the receiving end of confidences from women who did not share these values. As one of them said, "Look, I'm a devout Catholic and people know how I stand on these kinds of things. I'm not the kind of person you would confide in if you were having an abortion. "

… One out of every three pregnancies in California might end in an induced abortion by 1971 -- but these did not include their pregnancies or those of their friends.

… We may now ask why the Supreme Court decision of 1973 provoked such a massive response from people who had tolerated (or at least lived with) what were in effect very liberal abortion laws for years. It will be recalled that reform physicians in California originally claimed that the Beilenson bill would do little more than "clarify" the legal grounds for the sort of abortions they were doing anyway and that the deletion from the bill (under threat of a veto by Governor Reagan) of a clause permitting abortion for "fetal indications" removed any explicit challenge to the belief that the embryo is a full human life. Pro-life people could believe, therefore, that the principle they cherished was still safe, that only the decision rules about how to weigh one life against another had been modified. Equally important, the new California law said that the abortion decision had to be made not by the woman involved, nor even by the woman and her doctor, but by a panel of three doctors -- in effect, by representatives of the medical community. Thus, from the pro-life point of view, abortion was still medical, still the taking of a human life, and still wrong, except in extraordinary circumstances.

The Supreme Court decision changed all that. …

Because a fraction of the population that was politically uninvolved was totally dumbstruck by evolving professional opinion as embodied in the decision, there was huge space in which an anti-abortion movement could grow. Pro-choice women were not much better organized yet either and took some time to rally themselves against their unexpected foes.

The current decision about marriage equality will come in a very different environment. We've been arguing about same-sex marriage for 20 years in the public square -- more or less since Hawaii's highest court decided for legalization in 1993 and sent their legislature scurrying to stop it. We've fought elections over marriage equality for years, first losing, then winning in the ultimate court of public opinion. Progressive religious denominations have affirmed marriage bonds between LGBT couples. Opinion polls show 58 percent of us now support the novelty.

What this means is that there is no currently silent constituency that will be awakened by a pro-marriage equality decision. This is not like the abortion debate. It may take some years to work all the legal kinks out, but marriage equality is coming.

An isolating, vicious psychodrama

Scientology hasn't been the most prominent whack-a-doodle, abusive cult on view in Northern California in my time here. After all we've housed the Peoples Temple and Synanon, so L. Ron Hubbard's baroque faith had serious competition from this part of the world.

When I heard Lawrence Wright interviewed about his new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, he explained that he had been interested in exploring how large numbers of people can come to accept and hold on to what seem crazy beliefs. Since I knew Wright as a reporter who'd done a creditable job explicating the intricacies of the development of Al Qaeda (The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11), I figured this one could be worth exploring.

The book certainly was worth a look -- as an example of what careful, fact-checked reporting should look like. Of course Wright had to be tight with his sourcing. Scientology was enjoined by Hubbard to sue, sue and sue again anyone who criticized it. It even managed to drive the old Cult Awareness Network out of business (though apparently Scientology's apparatchiks took over the name.) And, according to Wright, Scientology successfully browbeat the IRS into labeling it a legally recognized religion, giving it considerable latitude in financial and other disclosure issues. The story is pretty awful -- this seems to be one of those two-tiered outfits where leaders and movie stars like Tom Cruise are pampered by (small) armies of mistreated followers. For my friends on the left, this reminded me of nothing so much as what I've heard of the nasty inner life of Marlene Dixon's unlamented Democratic Workers Party.

Though this is a great exposé, it doesn't quite do what Wright has seemed to promise in his interviews. All the focus on the abuse by the powerful doesn't catch why apparently sensible, otherwise ordinary people who weren't born into it get caught up in Scientology's isolating psycho-drama. I was pleased to read that Scientology's institutional homophobia is currently stirring unease among some adherents; it's good to know my people are disturbing the (minor) powerful in yet another arena.

This book is a good read and a good warning about what we're capable of.

Saturday scenes and scenery: San Bruno Mountain in spring

When I started uphill, the fog still covered the way ahead. But not for long. The city is lovely and a bit magical this spring day.


The air is clear all the way to Mount Tamalpais, even though the Golden Gate is still fogged in.


I could hardly be surprised that these runners whizzed by me. I was "running" but I am no longer in their league.

Yes, I know, I publish a post much like this every spring. But how could I cease to be amazed by the proximity of this barren summit to the city? On weekdays, I sometimes see no one else on the 3.1 mile circuit.