Sensible thoughts about food

Food technologists have made a science of making food attractive, right down to the sound that food makes when you crunch it between your teeth. It's convenience, it's price, it's prestige, it's how it looks and smells. All this has combined in modern society to make us fat, because that's what our genes are dreaming of.

Our genes are saying: 'See that gazelle carcass? Eat as much of it as you can.' Except here we are sitting in a mall with no gazelles but plenty of hamburgers. Given the right environment, three-quarters of the population will become overweight. Some people will just get there sooner. It is not a problem you can solve by yourself.

So says Martijn B Katan, Ph.D., a professor in health sciences at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in Consumer Reports on Health. This newsletter is rigorously matter of fact and sane. It's one of the few print periodicals that still seems worth the subscription price.

Recently Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein -- who is a classic yuppie foodie -- offered an opinion that is the broad scale corollary to Mr. Katan's assertion about individual behavior.

I can't think of a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again. Are there any examples I'm missing? Maybe so. But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative.

The problems caused by what we eat will have to be solved by society-wide changes in market incentives. We're not going to make ourselves healthy or thin by individual effort. This means, if we eat junk, it is not our fault and kicking ourselves is not going to help. But that we can work to let the corporations that supply our food know that we want and will pay for healthier products. And we can use government action to create incentives for production of healthier food.

Where's the gas main?

Like everyone else mesmerized by the spectacle on TV last week of the gas explosion and fire in San Bruno, I wondered whether I was living on top of such a potential hazard. Thanks to the Mission Loc@l, I learned it is possible for anyone to find out from a map at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, within the U.S. Department of Transportation. (You need a fast connection for this one; the site is huge and slow.)

Here's the map for San Francisco:

The blue lines show the pipes. Looks like the same people who get the freeway fumes also are most at risk if more of PG&E's old pipes are getting frayed.

U.N. running from Afghanistan; war means higher U.S taxes or program cuts

It's getting hot in Afghanistan. Afghans are about to hold an election. Remember the last one? International monitors agreed the current President, Hamid Karzai, had stolen it fraudulently, but it was treated as legitimate anyway. This time, international monitors figure they better run for their lives.

The UN has evacuated about a third of its permanent international workforce from Afghanistan amid fears that this weekend's parliamentary elections will be marred by violence and fraud. ...The decision highlights the risks to international organisations involved in the election ...

The Guardian, 9-15-2010

Meanwhile the commander of British troops over there isn't exactly a model of optimism.

"I am not, and never have been from my time in Afghanistan, optimistic. The reality is that the insurgency will have a go on election day. I just hope they don't do as well as they did last year". ... Carter compared Kandahar to Moscow in the 1990s, with "mobs, mafia and protection rackets" as well as the Taliban. The police were loyal to powerful individuals rather than to the Afghan state, he said. Afghan security forces had to "wrestle with the influence of power brokers".

Guardian, 9-15-2010

Too bad our General Petraeus can't give us that sort of straight talk. But no, he has to spin fables of progress or even more than the present 54 percent of us would think the U.S. should just get out.***The need to spin our wars is polluting all of our political choices. Matthew Yglesias, writing for The American Prospect points out the slight of hand involved in Defense Secretary Robert Gate's ballyhooed plan to cut military spending.

The United States built up a globe-spanning military capacity in the 1940s to fight simultaneous wars against Germany and Japan. We kept such a capacity in place to face down the Soviet Union. Today we're doing … what, exactly?

Not nothing. But considering that Afghanistan's entire gross domestic product is only $14 billion per year, it's hard to believe that spending $5.7 billion each month on the war is a cost-effective way of doing business. If our allies' problem in Afghanistan is really the Taliban's awe-inspiring operating budget, it should be possible to level the playing field for a fraction of total current spending.

The out-of-whack costs of the war have implications not just for Afghanistan but for the entire American military posture around the world. Spending hundreds of billions a year to maintain a worldwide military presence whose main job is now posited as fighting ill-financed insurgent groups in sundry backwaters simply doesn't seem very sensible. ... More money for defense means higher taxes or less for other programs. Ignoring that point has been key to the politics of national security for the past 15 years, but it's nonetheless true. ...

And Yglesias, though thoughtfully critical, has not yet even called for ending the Afghanistan war -- this dire summation is how crazy our bloated military spending looks to someone who as recently as last June was still opining about how Afghanistan could be won!

Photo shows an Afghan response to Pastor Terry Jone's planned Qu'ran buring. AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq

Poor women get the shaft while Senate flails

A friend laid it out for us last weekend: "There used to be programs where you could send them. But now -- nothing." She works with the down and out in San Francisco's Tenderloin, the sort of dense, relatively cheap, dope-infested and dangerous downtown slum that barely exists in newer and smaller cities. Think grit among apartment buildings dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Many of the people in those buildings are families -- women on their own with children, new immigrants with little English, African-Americans, the unlucky of all races.

Back when Bill Clinton was trying to make nice with a recalcitrant Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich, both parties combined to "end welfare as we've known it." That is, they agreed they'd stop offering cash benefits to women with kids who couldn't work, setting a 5 year limit on how long women could get any help -- and giving the states the funds as block grants that they were supposed to use to help poor women get into the labor force. Women on welfare and their friends howled, but the plan -- called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) -- sailed through in 1996. (Full disclosure -- I was employed in those years on campaigns to expose what Congress was doing to poor people.)

The horrors we anticipated didn't completely show up because, just as the cuts were taking effect, the economy got much stronger, some women were able to find jobs, and the rolls got smaller. "Success!" both parties crowed.

But those block grants to the states haven't grown; they are still set based on 1994 welfare costs to states and have lost 27 percent of their value. Moreover states are allowed to divert the federal grants to other uses, such as balancing their budgets. Stephanie Mencimer reports in Mother Jones that even before the Great Recession hit

the state of Georgia dropped nearly 90 percent of the women off its TANF rolls between 2004 and the end of 2007, even as unemployment soared by 30 percent, and then diverted millions of dollars in federal anti-poverty money to other parts of the state budget. Thanks to this, only 18 percent of all children in Georgia living below 50 percent of the poverty line -- that is, on less than $733 a month for a family of three -- were receiving TANF in 2008.

When welfare was a guaranteed federal program, the case rolls would have automatically increased in a recession like the present one, helping tide people over until the job market improved. But with the current rules and system of federal payments to the states, that isn't happening. In fact, according to a report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, census data shows that TANF is horribly broken.

... despite the nearly 10 percent unemployment rate, almost 90 percent of poor women with children are struggling through the recession without any financial assistance. The numbers range from 60 percent of poor women not receiving aid in DC to fully 96 percent in Louisiana who aren't getting a dime.

The federal stimulus package passed in 2009 did help some people.

The TANF Emergency Fund (TEF) ... has given states over $1 billion to operate subsidized jobs programs that have proved successful on multiple fronts. The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future.

But this program ends on September 30 unless Congress reauthorizes it. That's why Jobs with Justice, a coalition including labor unions and community organizing groups that work among and are the poor, rallied outside Senator Diane Feinstein's office this afternoon, urging reauthorization. As has been true of so many bills this Congress, the House has passed an extension but the Senate is stymied by Republicans' (and perhaps the usual Dems') refusal to allow a vote.

Meanwhile, as my friend the Tenderloin caseworker explained, "there's nothing left." Medical won't enroll the sick at least until the health reform kicks in; training programs are closing; non-profits are being shuttered. Lfe is going to even tougher if the TANF emergency program is allowed to expire. Annie Lowrey in the Washington Independent reports today that

.. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) held a hearing to urge the TEF’s reauthorization. ... Casey is looking for a vehicle for the funding, but the chances seem dim.

Dumping on poor people is so much easier than taxing Wall Street to pay for civilization ...


The "welfareQUEENS" from Poor Magazine raised spirits at today's rally.

Seen in Reno this morning

I sure wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of this garbage. [:25] I doubt you would either.

Yet another anniversary of upheaval

We've just been reminded that on 9/11/2001, "everything changed." But Joseph Stiglitz makes the case that 9/15/2008 is the date that really will seem pivotal when historians look back at this decade. On that date, the collapse of Lehman Brothers signaled that the organization of the world economy as we had known it wasn't working anymore.

Among all the books I've read describing the mistakes, misdeeds and malarkey that got us into the current Great Recession, Stiglitz' Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy is the most ambitious and comprehensive. The 2001 Nobel economics prize recipient, former World Bank economist and professor at Columbia takes an very expansive look at what's wrong and what might be done about it. This book is too big for a quick summary (and I'm underqualified to write such a thing) but I can share what I found so appealing about it, in addition to the fact that it is written to be read by general readers.

• Stiglitz starts with a thorough description of the subprime mortgage bubble, highlighting fraud and predation on poor people by bankers and financial whiz kids. He writes as if it matters that ordinary people ended up fleeced of their savings and without a home so Wall Street could inflate profits. He wonders repeatedly why the U.S. government didn't act more creatively to keep people in their homes after the bubble burst.

• He writes descriptively about what it means that we've had nearly 10 percent official unemployment for well over one year. In particular, he digs into one of the long lasting consequences of the lack of jobs that I had not seen explained elsewhere: unemployed people who might have held on in the working economy despite major disabilities have been forced to struggle their way into the permanent disability category of Social Security. Officials estimate that by the end of 2011, one million will have applied for disability and 500000 will get it, for the rest of their lives.

• Stiglitz asks questions that are so obvious to "little people" tossed around in these hard times, but are largely invisible to folks who are still prospering. Questions like: what's an economy for? -- he think it might include stability and leisure as well as vast wealth for a few. Or why do we need a financial sector? He suggests finance's reason for being is to move capital around to where it will serve the larger economy, not to act as a handy casino for the filthy rich.

• He is caustic on the limits of unregulated and under-regulated markets.

• He is critical not only of the Bush administration, but also of Obama's response to the crisis, despite having been an Obama booster in 2008. He uses the language "muddled through" and "moving the deck chairs on the Titanic" of the current adminstration.

  While the Obama administration had avoided the conservatorship route, what it did was far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. The perception, and reality, that the rescue packages were "unfair" -- unfairly generous to the bankers, unfairly costly to ordinary citizens -- has made dealing with the crisis all the more difficult. It has become commonplace to say that underlying the crisis is the loss of confidence in the financial system. But the failure of government to undertake a fair rescue contributed to a loss of confidence in government.

  Written last fall, that seems a prescient description of our present moment.

• We might expect from a former World Bank economist, he puts his entire discussion in the context of the world economy at large. The Great Recession proceeds in the context of technological shifts, climate change, and emerging new economies; the U.S.A. is not the unchallenged top gun anymore. We cannot restore the illusory economic and political bubble that existed in 2000. We have to accomodate to a new reality.

Stiglitz hopes we can make the country work again, though doing so will require applying old ideals within a new economic reality. And ultimately our problems are political. Here's how he summarizes this:

Every game has rules and referees, and so does the economic game. One of the key roles of the government is to write the rules and provide the referees. The rules are the laws that govern the market economy. The referees include the regulators and the judges who help. enforce and interpret the laws. The old rules, whether they worked well in the past, are not the right rules for the twenty-first century. Society has to have confidence that the rules are set fairly and that the referees are fair. In America, too many of the rules were set by and or those from finance, and the referees were one-sided. That the outcomes have been one-sided should not come as a surprise.

... In the end, the only check on these abuses is through democratic processes.

... Dealing with this crisis -- and preventing future crises -- is as much a matter of politics as it is economics. If we as a country don't make these reforms, we risk political paralysis, given the inconsistent demands of special interests and the country at large.

...we have no choice: if we are to restore sustained prosperity, we need a new set of social contracts based on trust between all the elements of our society, between citizens and government, between this generation and the future.

Highly recommended.

We don't care; we don't have to ...

The headline in the New York Times reads: "Floods Stunt Pakistani Fight Against Insurgents."

Gosh -- a country thinks trying to help millions of its people made homeless and starving by natural disaster is more important than fighting a war for a petulant power on the other side of the globe? How novel! How thoughtless!

Contributions to help the relief effort in Pakistan can be made via Global Fund for Women and Doctors without Borders.

Photo via Abubakar Jamil.

A chart to ponder ...

We are told Social Security benefits should be cut (or made less accessible by raising the retirement age) because the government might run up debt, in the far future, to pay them. Never mind that most of us paid taxes all our working lives to fund the program. And never mind that very rich people, the top 3 percent, got a bonanza under President George W from tax cuts that forced the government to run up debt.

The chart at right shows the consequences of allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich -- not for anyone else -- expire next year. Neat huh? Better for everyone, unless you really think millionaires need a windfall. In this economy, it's hard to cry over asking them to pay a larger share toward the good of all.

Republicans have a hard time getting their minds around this simple equation. The conversation about the Bush tax cuts really points up the power of money in politics; rich people who pay for campaigns, of both parties, get a lot of say about what should be a very simple matter. It's not as if paying a larger share for the well-being of all is going to bankrupt the rich.

Democrats listen to the rich too -- though the rich fear they are less reliable. But on this, President Obama seems to be laying down a line this campaign season. When he does right, he needs a noisy swarm at his back (even though he often seems not to want those pesky enthusiasts making noise). The Bush tax cuts for the rich should die; Social Security, the country's most effective safety net program, must live.

Berkeley against hate on 9/11

Yesterday while some 1500 New Yorkers gathered in what Josh Marshall called a "Republican hate festival" in Lower Manhattan to protest the proposed Islamic Cultural Center (and an almost equal number opposed them), several hundred Berkeley residents turned out calmly to hear chanting of chapters of the Qu'ran and proclaim their community's solidarity against all forms of religous and secular intolerance.


A long line of determined people wound their way through Ohlone Park to a partially shaded area by the playground.


The sheer number of eager participants was a happy shock to those who had called the gathering. They were prepared for 25, not ten times as many.


Organizer Robin Braverman spoke her truth:

I am a Jew. I am an American. Today is Shabbos Shuva, the shabbos of turning between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is the shabbos of returning to what is right and good in oneself. ... This turning, this shuva takes action. First one must apologize to those whom we have hurt -- a sincere apology, which comes for the sincere desire to never make the mistake again. I apologize to my Muslim brothers and sisters. I apologize for being silent in the face of the rampant Islamophobia that is gripping America. I apologize for my lack of action, for being blocked from the action I should have taken, for being too busy to take the action, for being too afraid to take the action I should have taken -- too blocked or too busy or too scared to say the words I should have said to my fellow Jews and to my fellow Americans. ...I promise to learn about the Muslim faith, more than I know and to make a sincere effort to understand Muslim ways. Most importantly I pledge to never again remain silent if others speak against Muslims or Islam in public or in private. ...

A man chanted a sura.


People in the crowd spoke from their hearts about why they had come.


A Berkeley crowd is not solemn, even when protesting bigotry.

It's easy to dismiss or mock this sort of gathering, but this too is where we start.

President gets this right ...

"We've got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens in this country," Obama said. "They're going to school with our kids. They're our neighbors. They're our friends. They're our coworkers. ... We don't differentiate between them and us, it's just us. And that is a principle that I think is going to be very important for us to sustain."

Now that's a principle to honor on the anniversary of 9/11. This country doesn't do religious tests -- hey, it's right there in the Constitution.

Torture will out: anguish and ambivalence

(To mark this anniversary of 9/11/01, I begin with our shame.)

Last week the Obama administration won its legal fight to keep secret any government misconduct it wants by declaring the matter a "state secret." The allegations that it was hiding in this instance are already public knowledge, that the Bush administration flew prisoners around the world to be tortured. The tortured men wanted to sue the private company that delivered them to be tormented. Even such a mainstream publication as the New York Times labeled this seizure of unreviewable executive power to muzzle known facts a very bad precedent.

The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake -- nuclear weapons details, for example, or the identity of covert agents. ... All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America's reputation are already too well known.

It's true; we do learn more and more about what has been done in our name despite any legal obstacles. Lots of people were involved in the American torture regime, many of them quite ordinary soldiers who "just followed orders." They have told their stories, many privately and a few very publicly. Some are struggling with the moral dissonance they've brought back from their experience, the horror of striving to do right and feeling they've done very wrong.

Justine Sharrock reports the experiences of four such individuals in Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things. It's a terrible indictment of what the U.S. military (and our spooks) are doing that Presidents of both political parties have seized the authority to keep such stories out of the courts .

From Sharrock's book, here are some bits of one such story. Brandon Neely who was among the first contingent of soldiers unloading the first set of prisoners at Guantanamo, remembers that day.

That first day, as Brandon was putting an elderly man in his cage, he, as ordered, threw the man down on his knees inside the cage and began to remove his shackles. ...The detainee tensed up and tried get away. Brandon yelled at him to stop, but then as Brandon and his partner unlocked the first handcuff, the man jerked away. Acting on instinct, Brandon threw the detainee to the ground with allof his body weight. Each time the detainee tried to raise his head, Brandon bashed it back down on the cement floor, over and over. ...Brandon had the honor of being the first soldier to get to beat up a terrorist. That night, soldiers kept coming up to him to congratulate him. "Nice job, man, you really got some," they said, patting him on the back. It felt good to be getting so much praise, but Brandon says he was left oddly unsettled.

The memory still haunts him.

"There has not been a day that goes by that I have not relived what I did or saw in Guantanamo or Iraq," he says. "It does not get any easier; it just eats you up inside, day by day."

Chris Arendt was an unlikely and not very willing soldier who found himself at Guantanamo years later. He had joined the National Guard because

...for kids like him living in a trailer in Charlotte, Michigan, it was the only ticket out and a way to go to college like the rich kids. The way he saw it, it was either join the military, sell meth, or gamble on whether he could land a factory job.

He never quite fit, never thought much of the wars, never stopped feeling "a wimp," but found others like him and tried to keep his head down. Then, one day, as Chris was just doing his job ...

they carried the detainee through the final sally-port to the interrogation room, they smashed the prisoner's head into a metal pole. He wasn't knocked unconscious or even bleeding, but it was a sickening blow. ...What Chris did that day may not sound so bad, especially compared to the large-scale atrocities of war. ...

Soldiers operating in combat zones have the understandable excuse that they have to make rash decisions to save lives and survive. Even killing innocent civilians when these people drive too close to checkpoints can be understood when soldiers are being blown up by car bombs. Trigger-happy soldiers who make mistakes are acting on hypervigilance, which is often necessary when sniper fire is imminent. But Chris and those other soldiers didn't even have the justification that they were softening up the detainee to make him talk. They had no defense for hurting prisoners, but they had no other channel for their anger or enthusiasm. Just like other soldiers, they were trained to be killing machines but were robbed of sanctioned opportunities to act out.

...Compared to other incidents of detainee abuse that have been reported, this incident was trivial. But it revealed something to Chris about who he is and what he is capable of. ... Few would see Chris as a torturer -- his worst offense was slamming someone's head into a wall. But for Chris it isn't the individual acts that make a man a torturer, but his role in the larger machine and his mentality toward the detainees. When Chris learned that he was capable of not caring what happened to the detainee, he saw a dark side of himself.

Because Chris Arendt became involved with Iraq Vets Against the War, he took this story of abusing a detainee to the public. This didn't much help him sort out his feelings, but it plunged him into a complicated vortex of recrimination with the guys who had been his soldier friends -- was he condemning all of them? Eventually Moazzam Begg, a released (cleared) prisoner now organizing against torture, invited Arendt to join him in speaking tour in the United Kingdom. Arendt was surprised to find that in speaking with former detainees he felt "a strangely intimate relationship." (The words quoted are Sharrock's language.)

U.S. panic about "security" and our aggressive wars have done strange and evil things over the last nine years. This book is sometimes a little over-preachy; Sharrock might have been a more convincing story teller if she'd let these former soldiers speak more for themselves in all their anguish and ambivalence. But these interviews and discussions with former soldiers, their families and their disconcerted communities are a huge contribution to understanding who we've become since 9/11.

Friday cat blogging: beware chomping human

Frisker impassively risks coming close to my overburdened mental state.

Lots to do today, including email server upgrade, much writing, some socializing. In fact the whole weekend looks full of worthy and unworthy busy-ness.

Frisker is not worried: cans will be opened and litter boxes cleaned. Any other human antics are inconsequential.

Inferno in San Bruno

I meant to write something for the blog last night, but ended up in front of the TV watching a live video feed showing the fires started by a gas main explosion in a suburb down the road. The horror of the incineration of a neighborhood was unfathomable.

Presumably by the time this entry posts in early morning, this San Francisco Chronicle story will have more details.

What should the peace movement learn from Iraq?

Neither the Iraq war nor the Afghanistan war is over . But President Obama is trying to tell us the first is mostly done (tell that to the families of these dead soldiers). And elites are backing off from Afghanistan; see this or this. The U.S. will, one day, draw back from large scale troop commitments to these too visible wars.

But that doesn't mean the empire will stop throwing its weight (drone-fired missiles?) around. And that presents questions for people working for real peace and some sort of global international law. On an email list I participate in, a member asked recently:

How will the peace movement tackle covert and proxy war, with all its ills for the people in countries like the Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Algeria, Kenya, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, & Pakistan, to name a few of the 19 countries where this war is widening?

That certainly seems one of the right questions.

Steve Burns from the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice suggested some lessons we might learn from Iraq (and Afghanistan) that seem worth pondering:

1) A popular insurgency, armed with not much more than surplus AK-47's and artillery shells wired to disposable cell phones, can defeat the most powerful military machine on the planet. This is a lesson that is being reinforced in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military is taking note of it, even if it's not discussed much in public.

2) The U.S. still retains enough power to make defeat look like something else. President Obama has said that wars no longer end with a signing ceremony on the deck of a battleship, but they also don't end with people being plucked off the roof of the U.S. embassy by helicopter, either. The U.S. doesn't have sufficient military power to "win" (whatever that means) but it does have enough power to produce a muddled outcome which it can spin as victory. ...this is the most likely outcome for Afghanistan.

3) The public has learned the lessons of Iraq, even if our elites haven't. Opinion polls still show near 70 percent opposition to the war, despite a years-long PR campaign to spin the "surge" as a success and, now, to spin our departure as a victory. People aren't buying it, and this is a serious problem for elites, who can be expected to bemoan the presence of an "Iraq syndrome" that limits our ability to intervene militarily in the future.

4) U.S. wars are getting smaller. From nearly 700,000 troops and contractors in Vietnam in '68, the peak level of U.S. forces in that war, to less than 400,000 troops and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan combined (and troop levels in Afghanistan have probably peaked), the trend is clear: The U.S. no longer has the capability to send large numbers of troops into battle. Relatively small numbers of troops in Yemen and Somalia are probably about all the U.S. military is going to be able to muster in the future.

But none of this makes U.S. wars less bloody for us or their targets -- or more just. Responsible U.S. citizenship includes stopping these adventures. How do we go about it?

Why we still need Democrats ...

Do you doubt that having Democrats as the government is a better deal for most of us? Get a look at this:



Then go read the source, Timothy Noah's "The Great Divergence: the United States of Inequality" at Slate. The only people who do even passably well under Republican Presidents are the top 5 percent.

A repulsion election

It has become a commonplace that what we are facing in November is a "referendum" election. As I wrote the other day, Democrats were put in power in Washington to "fix it." They didn't. The economic situation for most people got worse. Democrats will be punished.

It's no good to say we did a lot of things you didn't notice and it was really hard. Even when that is true. And even if there were terrible obstacles (like the entire Republican party). In a nutshell --

None of this is entirely -- or even mostly -- this administration's fault, but that's sort of irrelevant. We are where we are.

Adam Serwer

Since elections present a binary choice -- yes, we are stuck with Republicans or Democrats; other "choices" are fantasies -- the standard countermove to finding your party on the wrong end of a referendum on genuninely bad times is make the election a repulsion election. In a repulsion election, you win by tearing down the other side. Hey, we may be disappointing -- but the other guys are worse, much worse.

In these circumstances, this is true. Democrats are, by a lot, what I once heard a five year old called "the least worst" to have in government. They need to make this a repulsion election. But they aren't doing much of a job at it. What's in the way?

• Obama: He just did a little of this in a Labor Day speech, but it is profoundly not his style to resolutely demonize the other guys. I stopped bothering to wonder a long time ago whether he really believes his "bipartisanism" schtick, but he sure has stuck to it through conditions that seemed to cry out for drawing sharp contrasts, so I don't expect him to change markedly now.

• Jarring atmospherics: Having just won a national election on hope and change, it's hard to pivot to "I'm your only hope of suffering just a little less ..." Inspriation is so much more pleasant to dispense than raw self-preservation.

• The future Democratic coalition: The Millenials, the younger voters who came out in droves to elect Obama but are disinclined to vote in midterm and are the future of the Democratic party, detest the kind of politics that makes for and wins a repulsion election. Here's a respresentative snippet from the progressive blog Future Majority:

  What does a nation without negotiation look like? It's ugly. No one is happy and the entire country is pulled in different directions. The country would be plagued with martial law and civil wars. This is not our country. Our country has a long standing tradition of compromise. We were founded on the idea of protecting everyone's beliefs and creating the fairest possible system we could. ...
  
  We understand that quality interactions with our counterparts advocating in good faith are more important than building huge e-mail lists based upon tactics of fear and hate. We talk to others, on this blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, and we do it with civility - or at least we try. We interact this way because we know others are watching and that everything we do and say is on-the-record. This does not mean that we don't stick to our principles and our values and voice our opinions. What it does mean is that we know that we are having conversations with people, other than those that just agree with everything we say. We're not about burning bridges; we're about mending them and building them out into the future.

  I may think that is insanely unrealistic, inadequately appeciative of the ferocity with which people enjoying privilege will hold on to power at the expense of others. But the sentiments seem to be common and they make running a repulsion campaign problematic, at least in the longer term.

• Victories in repulsion campaigns are weak. That may seem counterintuitive in our winner-take-all system -- if you win, what's weak about that? After all you are in office. But the reality is more complex. Here in California we have lived a very clear example. The Democratic politician Gray Davis rose in state politics the old fashioned way, starting in lower offices and gradually working his way up to state Controller, then Lieutenant Governor, then Governor. He never seemed charismatic; the joke among California Democrats was that "Gray is gray." In 2002, he helped conservative Republicans run off moderate Republican challengers in their primary, then successfully demonized the resulting very conservative Republican candidate. He was back in as Governor! And in 2003, less than a year later, Gray was gone, easily recalled and replaced by the Governator. A lifetime of campaigns in which Davis had sold himself as less bad than the alternative left him with no friends when push came to shove.

So Democrats face difficulties running the apparently obvious repulsion campaign this year -- will they do it? Can they do it?

I think they'll try and the results will be mixed. The Republicans have given them the gift of nominating quite a few candidates, Tea Baggers, who should be vulnerable to being portrayed as repulsive. Senator Harry Reid may pull through against Sharron Angle -- a candidate who declares there are "doemstic enemies" in Congress and advocates "Second Amendment remedies" -- because Republican primary voters really did display their extremism by nominating her. He's a fighter when it comes to elections (in the Senate not so much) and I wouldn't bet against him.

Other Democrats will have a harder time of running that kind of hard contrast campaign, some because it doesn't fit with their self understanding or because they care about the contrary factors enumerated above.

They might all be well-advised to listen to this from the American Prospect blog:

There's nothing wrong with highlighting your opponents' positions. Even if the economy were going gangbusters and people were throwing health-care celebration parties, the Democrats would be well within their rights to point out that Republicans haven't changed their policy prescriptions as a result of the crisis but simply doubled-down on them.

Horserace politics: Let the campaign season begin

The big union of (mostly) government employees, AFSCME, is putting $1.5 million behind this campaign message. I like it. It has the merit of being true.

Because at root I'm an organizing and campaigns geek, as we head toward the November elections, my interest in the mechanics of politics will overwhelm my attempts to understand and explain issues and policy in our limping democracy. It happens every election season. I've decided to post these thoughts occasionally under the general title Horserace Politics til I get them out of my system. Expect a lot of these posts over the summer and fall.

Sociopathic individuals and societies that favor sociopathy

Probably I would not have picked up The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout if I hadn't just read about the meaning-free massacre at Columbine. How do people who can do horrible things experience the world? Stout's book tries to tell us.

Her subtitle is "the ruthless versus the rest of us." Her point is that some people are irretrievable sociopaths -- people who simply live without the restraint of ever feeling guilt.

About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. ... Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all. ...

What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron -- or what makes the difference be;ween an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer -- is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. ...

Stout is a practicing psychologist. She works with survivors of psychological trauma, often of abuse inflicted by the sociopathic among us whom they've had the misfortune to run up against. She wants to give those of us who do experience conscience, who are able to grasp and anticipate empathetically what our behavior might mean for others, some tools for identifying the dangerous sociopaths among us. The tip off, she says, is "the pity play." Sociopaths are people who have learned to get their way by encouraging others to make up sympathetic excuses for behavior for which they would otherwise be condemned and shunned.

For something like 96 percent of us, conscience is so fundamental that we seldom even think about it. ... And so, naturally, when someone makes a truly conscienceless choice, all we can produce are explanations that come nowhere near the truth: She forgot to give lunch money to her child. That person's coworker must have misplaced her briefcase. That person's spouse must have been impossible to live with. ...

When scientists use brain imaging to measure the reactions of people who psychiatrists diagnose as sociopaths to emotionally laden cues -- like the words "kill" or "kiss -- they have discovered that the subjects' brains simply don't respond. However, these people do have to get by in the world, so they learn to act.

Clinicians and researchers have remarked that where the higher emotions are concerned, sociopaths can "know the words but not the music." They must learn to appear emotional as you and I would learn a second language, which is to say, by observation, imitation, and practice. And just as you or I, with practice, might become fluent in another language, so an intelligent sociopath may become convincingly fluent in "conversational emotion."

But they never really "get" loving connections between people; they can't.

All societies seem to have some frequency of sociopathy, but Stout produces some evidence that some cultures embrace norms that reduce the disorder's expression. While she maintains that 4 in every 100 of us in the United States are conscience-less, in Japan and China, the prevalence seems closer to 1 in 100. She muses:

...how is it that some societies have a positive impact on incipient sociopaths, who are born with an inability to process interpersonal emotions in the usual way? I would like to suggest that the overriding belief systems of certain cultures encourage born sociopaths to compensate cognitively for what they are missing emotionally. In contrast with our extreme emphasis on individualism and personal control, certain cultures, many in East Asia, dwell theologically on the interrelatedness of all living things. Interestingly, this value is also the basis of conscience, which is an intervening sense of obligation rooted in a sense of connectedness. If an individual does not, or if neurologically he cannot, experience his connection to others in an emotional way, perhaps a culture that insists. on connectedness as a matter of belief can instill a strictly cognitive understanding of interpersonal obligation.

Stout wrote this book in the close aftermath of 9/11, a time when she saw a vengeful lust for violence, a willingness to mindlessly maim and torture "the enemy," enjoying a distressing level of approval among many of her fellow citizens. She is clearly wrestling with the problem not only of individuals born without human empathy but also with whether entire countries can lose empathy. She's more than a little freaked by what she sees and hears around her -- something I have no trouble empathizing with.

This is not a tightly argued book. It is full of descriptive vignettes that create a picture of what a sociopath is and of suggestive tidbits that tweak the imagination. It's not definitive science; it's very smart, thoughtful, intriguing journalism. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to know what is wrong with some of us that enables us to do very bad things. And I'd take it all with many grains of salt.***My personal quibble here is with the assertion that 4 percent of people in the United States are sociopaths. For Stout, sociopathy is a binary condition: you either are one, or you are not. In my work life, I've known hundreds of people, actually probably thousands. And I can only identify perhaps one, or maybe two of them, who fully fit the description of a person acting without conscience.

Oh sure, I've known lots of people who acted without conscience some of the time. And I've definitely known people who had to learn how to pretend to experience the conventional emotions, just as Stout describes. But among the latter, what I've observed is that a life of pretending to consideration for the (incomprehensible) feelings of others sometimes leads to acquiring some of the habits of conscience almost despite the intent of the individual doing the pretending. Maybe that accords with Stout's evidence about East Asian societies.

I've also seen people who had no discernible conscience, over time, begin to act as if they did comprehend the emotions of people around them. And then, sometimes, even respond appropriately to those emotions. It looked a herky-jerky process, but sometimes, when someone, firmly and compassionately, loved the loveless one, something that looked like healing happened. It is a dangerous business for the person(s) doing the loving, but it sure looks to me as if sometimes love can move the empty shell of a person that is a sociopathicly inclined individual into full humanity.

Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I think I've seen it happen and I am very glad that I cannot reject that possibility. I'm also very glad that the few times I've run across sociopathic people in full bloom, my gut instinct has been to run away, quickly.

Jerry Brown: why bother?

Once upon a time. ca. 1975. Oakland Museum

Since it is Labor Day and all, I suppose it would be irresponsible of me not to begin to pay attention to Jerry Brown's campaign.

Oh, he has one? Maybe that is a little unfair. Queen Meg's personal millions spent on ads everywhere may just be making it look like Jerry died and and we didn't notice.

But when he sticks his head out, we get this:

If you're looking for frugality, I'm your man," the California attorney general and former two-term governor said in a meeting with The Chronicle's editorial board. When he was governor from 1975 to 1983, he said, "I vetoed the pay raises for the state employees not once, but twice. I was overridden by 23 Republican votes.

"I called for the two-tier pension system in 1982," added Brown, 72. "Of course, the next four governors didn't do anything. I'm willing to get in the battle."

... Brown, a Democrat who also served as Oakland's mayor from 1999 to 2007, sidestepped questions about his specific plans on the budget, as well as where he stands on the Democratic-controlled Legislature's proposals to resolve the budget impasse, which include raising $1.5 billion by increasing vehicle license fees, $600 million by taxing oil wells and $2 billion by suspending corporate tax breaks Instead, he reiterated his off-repeated stance on revenues: "No new taxes unless the people vote for them," he said.

San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 4, 2010

Earth to Jerry: If that's your attitude, why bother? You are not convincing this progressive that fighting back against an isolated Whitman would be worse for the state than electing you.

The only reason you are still in the race at all is that labor had your back; so kick 'em, huh?

California can only recover its momentum when we tax the people who have money to enable us to carry out policies that create more equality and hence more prosperity. Jerry's father did that and we got the University of California and drained the rest of the country for brains. His son apparently missed out in the gray matter department.

End of summer with the Mime Troupe

We marked the "end of summer" yesterday as we often do by taking in the San Francisco Mime Troupe show in Dolores Park. POSIBILIDAD or Death of the Worker is good anarcho-communist agitprop and the audience clapped as enthusiasticly at the idea of overthrowing the capitalist system as I've heard us do in a long while.

A small U.S. factory is shutting down. All of the workers are losing their jobs, and to add insult to injury, they have also lost their last two weeks of pay and retirement funds, which were raided over the years to pay stock dividends. On the final day of work, a pregnant employee, suddenly overtaken with labor pains, sits down on the job. Interpreting this as an act of defiance, The Boss calls security. The situation escalates and before anyone has a chance to think, the Workers have accidentally occupied the Factory!

Some past Mime Troupe shows have seemed faster paced and wittier to me, but this one is certainly enjoyable. And timely.


The audience enjoyed the sun and each other.


This eager little fellow following his nose as far as the leash allowed seemed delighted to be out in the bright, lazy day.

Color and tribalism, then and now

The Souls of Black Folk, W.E. B. Du Bois' classic 1903 work of vivid description and advocacy for African-American self-education and self-emancipation, is a wonderful book for "reading" by ear. What looks florid on the page comes across as appropriately dramatic, sometimes ironic and often deeply moving when fluidly declaimed by a talented reader. This auditory feast is available free from the Apple iTunes store via iTunes U. The full text of this volume is also available free on the web via Bartleby.com

It's hard to imagine Du Bois taking this to a publisher today. It would likely be rejected for being all over the lot, for trying to combine grounded sociological description of the lives and vicissitudes of black Georgia tenant farmers with stories of personal pain, including narratives of the deaths of his infant son and a greatly admired older teacher.

The line from this book that a few of us might have encountered somewhere is Du Bois' introductory note:

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

My emphasis. He was right of course. Struggles against lynching and segregation of African-Americans on through a formally successful campaign for full voting rights and civil equality, global struggles against European and American colonialism -- that was the 20th century for people of all colors. Much progress was won and much remains to be gained.

As I read this book, I tried to understand whether I thought the problem of the 21st century is still the problem of the color-line -- whether differences in perceived "race" will still be primary determinants of how people live and what opportunities they have in our emerging world. The mere fact that I can write "perceived 'race'" signals that something has changed. In this world in which those of us who live above the level of mere subsistence, with our heads above water metaphorically, live in a world in which "race" no longer carries an absolute meaning. The globe as we see it consists of people of many backgrounds and cultures, all mushed together by speedy transportation and communication. Our global proximity is not always, or even usually, comfortable or without friction, but it is unavoidable.

I wonder: will the problem of the 21st century be more accurately be described as the problem of tribalism -- the problem of conflicts bred of the allegiances that individuals and communities inflate in defense against the strains of involuntary proximity to new and different people? That's one way of looking at the idiocy some people in this country throw at Muslim-Americans, one way of looking at the rise of vehement and often vicious religious fundamentalisms worldwide. ***Du Bois makes a simple observation about how residential segregation in Georgia worked that suggested to me a significant factor in how "racial" friction works today.

It is usually possible to draw in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding and intricacy of the geographical color line varies, of course, in different communities. ...

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity.

The latter part of this observation is simply no longer true in most of the United States. Whatever the civil rights movement may and may not have won, Du Bois' "best" people of whatever color -- the most educated, the most well-off -- now do rub up against each other in daily life. This may be exactly (and all) it means that the United States has a Black president. Among young people of all races in any kind of "higher education," proximity happens, however uncomfortably.

The class structure of racial separation has flipped; these days, it is the old and the poor -- Black, white, Latino, new immigrant Asian -- that live in racial isolation, not the comfortable. That's different and it has implications for our peculiarly U.S.-flavored tribalisms. No, I won't get started on Republican tribal demagogues here ...

Saturday scenes and scenery: Retired lawn

I ran across this in a northern California suburb this week. It's a scene alright.

But seriously, retiring our lawns (and some golf courses, perhaps) is one of the responses most of us probably will be forced to make to global warming. California mountains will get less snow; we just won't be able to continue to surround every house with a patch of lush green grass.

A 2006 report from the Public Policy Institute of California spelled out the problem.

Landscaping currently accounts for at least half of all residential water demand, according to the report. Without new conservation efforts, the amount of water going to outdoor landscaping is predicted to rise by 1.2 million acre feet a year [by 2030] -- enough to serve roughly 4.8 million people. ...

... future shortages could be exacerbated by the dominance of single-family homes on relatively large lots in the state's fast growing interior -- particularly the greater Sacramento region, the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire in Southern California -- where much of the future projected growth is expected. ...

Bob Drobny, manager of Zamora Sod Farm in Chico, which sells sod from Yuba City to the Oregon border, said his company has been doing strong business as the inland population has boomed. "You almost can't buy a house that isn't landscaped in the front and back with grass being an integral part of it," Drobny said.

Sometime down the line, we're going to have to retire some of those lawns. The mini-gnomes will remain optional, I certainly hope.

Hyatt Regency workers want a good contract

The Hyatt hotel chain wants to cut what past contracts have guaranteed to workers. They say workers' pay and benefits are nibbling too much of their profits.

The union, UNITE HERE Local 2, says the hotel chain is doing just fine. The Great Recession may have cut into hotel profits, but why should workers who make $30 thousand a year or less be expected to prop up a billion dollar business?

Hotels do seem to be climbing out of the recession ahead of most of us. The U.S. Travel Association predicts a 7 percent increase in meeting and convention booking this year. Analysts also expect the average hotel income to increase by 2.3 percent. That's better than most (non-financial) U.S. busineses. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the Hyatt chain as doing particularly well.

Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Hyatt Hotels Corp., the Pritzker family chain that raised $1.09 billion in an initial public offering last year, reported a second-quarter profit as demand for high-end lodging improved. ... Revenue at Hyatt rose 5 percent to $889 million.

This small picket line on Thursday greeted the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention at the boycotted hotel. As seems to be true all over the world, a great many of the people who work in the San Francisco "hospitality industry" are gay. And Local 2 has long recognized the LGBT fraction of its members and protected them in its contracts. So this morning's picket was a gay affair, very much in the style of Sleep with the Right People.


A long time activist (straight and never narrow) asked me what I thought of this banner which was the most prominent message at the event. I'm still musing on my answer. I understand the intent of the slogan given the presumed audience: it's saying something I'd paraphrase as remember LGBT workers are gay like you, journalists, and we think having a good unions is a wonderful thing.

The banner certainly also proclaims unions don't have to be stodgy; they can stand for fun as well as grim struggle. That's vital and the message is attractive, just like the fabulously popular Bad Hotel video (over 250 thousand views) from the same folks.

But there's a part of me that wonders -- how does this kind of messaging work for the rest of the workers, the ones who don't identify as gay? They're there in the picket line -- it's their work site too. How does it work for the casual passerby? They probably think the whole picket is some obscure San Francisco gay thing. Does that matter? I'm not sure. Because I follow these things, I know that an owner of a local Hyatt in San Diego was a $125 thousand funder of Prop. 8, the 2008 ballot measure that outlawed gay marriage. But the way the gay issue was communicated at this picket line doesn't explain that.

I know what I'm seeing here is good messaging at a Pride festival. I know it is important to communicate that labor events can be joyful. Gay unionists and friends must be able to be as gay as we want to be in the context of labor struggles. But somehow, in the particular time and place of Thursday's picket, I didn't feel we were communicating as many messages as we would want to ... More creativity is required ... Now that's something LGBT labor activists have demonstrated over and over through the years.

9/11 happened to all of us

What part of "all of us" don't the people protesting the Park51 project and Muslim-American communities understand? And when are we going to turn to healing rather than holding on to our pain as if it were a lifeline? Our world will never be the same, but we didn't die and we honor those who died by living well and generously in life-affirming opposition to the twisted killers who wreaked havoc that day.

Biometric identities: San Francisco and Iraq

My gym now uses my biometric "signature" to figure out whether I am a paid member. "We no longer issue membership cards" the signs proclaim. No -- you enter your phone number and stick your finger onto the boxy little scanner in the picture above. If all goes well (not always in my case), a green light on the scanner flashes and the read-out at the top of the key pad urges "ENJOY YOUR WORKOUT!" All very efficient.

Ten years ago I might have protested allowing a gym to store a scan of my index finger. I probably still should, but that's a fight I haven't got the energy for. After all, the Feds got my fingerprints decades ago when I blockaded one of their buildings and the local cops took prints at many of my civil disobedience arrests. Not to mention that the State of California takes prints at the DMV. They know who I am; they have for a long time.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that my gym is effectively running a marketing test of whether consumers will accept giving private entities their bodily signatures.

"It's just part of our 'cyber-existence' these days," said Dan Miller, a senior analyst at Opus Research in San Francisco, which has focused on voice verification. "The neat thing about biometrics is that you are the thing that identifies you."

More creepty that "neat" it seems to me, but we will undoubtedly live with more of it. ***As the occupation phase of the U.S. war on Iraq winds down, Iraqis are encountering unanticipated consequences of U.S. enthusiasm for collecting biometric identities. Our soldiers wanted any help they could get in figuring out who was blowing them up, so they collected biometric data on as many Iraqis as they could get their hands on.

Nearly 7 percent of Iraq’s 29 million people are cataloged — their names, facial scans, and often other details about them, such as whether they were considered a friend or foe. ...

US forces started collecting fingerprints in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, as part of interrogations of agents of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The US military also helped computerize Iraq’s fingerprint files from Hussein’s era. US soldiers reportedly collected fingerprints and DNA samples from 80,000 detainees in their custody. (It is not clear how those samples have been used.)

After the military’s incursion into Fallujah in 2004, US soldiers collected fingerprints and iris scans of every resident as they passed through checkpoints to return. They wanted a record of the legitimate residents, so they could detect infiltrators. In parts of Baghdad, US soldiers went door to door, collecting information. They also enrolled entire villages at the request of tribal leaders.

So now that the U.S. Army is on the way out, who gets this collection of identity information? In a society that has mostly been ruled by dictators who employed a diligent and vicious secret police, this is not an idle question. The idea of one or another of the competing sectarian ethnic cleansing gangs that now label themselves political parties getting the data is scary. So is the likelihood that someday having had a close contact with the U.S. occupiers may be enough to get an Iraqi fired or even killed. Opinions differ on what passing on the data will mean:

Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida'ie, said he would like to see Iraq's government use it fight corruption. ...

But Sa'ad Al-Izzi, 36, a former New York Times reporter who fled Iraq after he was threatened for working with Americans, said he fears such intelligence cooperation between the United States and Iraq will cause problems.

"It is dangerous to hand this information to the Iraqi government and security forces, which are infiltrated to a great extent by militias and insurgency groups," he said. "It would be useful for a national trusted official security force. . . . But are they a professional, national, trusted security force? In my opinion, they are not."

For the Iraqis, the war isn't over, despite Oval office speeches.