We are living in exponential times

Sometimes my head whirls. [4:58]

H/t Telling Secrets.

A God strategy

I had high hopes for The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America by David Domke and Kevin Coe. Certainly we all need a better understanding of how politicians profit from waving their religious faith before voters. Unfortunately, this slim volume contributed less to my understanding than I'd hoped. I think the authors, political science academics, have overestimated the value of rather simple-minded quantitative analysis of speeches and other political effluvia for references to God. Proving the obvious -- that politicians play on voters' faith attachments -- is not particularly instructive.

Still, they make some interesting observations. I don't think I'm misrepresenting them when I pull out this as representative of their insights:

The Golden Rule
The God strategy requires walking a fine line. Politicians must signal to devout religious believers that they share and appreciate these citizens' faith, but do so without pushing away religious moderates or secular-minded voters, the latter of whom are particularly important for Democrats. Hence the golden rule of today's U.S. politics: exhibit faith, but don't be too strident or nakedly partisan in doing so. Deviation from this rule in either direction leads to precarious electoral territory. Politicians who veer left and send few religious signals, send the wrong ones, or send none at all often are unable to attract significant support among the many Americans whose faith is important to them. ... The God strategy's raison d'etre may be the rise of religious conservatives as a political force, but the success of this approach hinges just as much on religious moderates. If a Democrat attracts them, or a Republican holds them, that candidate wins. Whoever fails to woo them delivers a concession speech.

Now you could almost certainly say the same thing about who wins on just about any left-right axis you choose, say for example butter vs. guns or individual liberty and privacy vs. national security. But this version of the axis has been at the fore because most of us attribute some of the most grotesque recent episodes in our politics -- such as the Bush administration undercutting scientific research and the insistence on sticking tubes into the inert Terry Schiavo -- to the religious version of the axis.

Domke and Coe show that politicians use the tactic of "narrowcasting" to walk the tightrope between showing allegiance to religious concerns and scaring off moderates and the secular fraction of the population. That is, they send signals to conservative religious people that are invisible or little noticed by others, such as visiting evangelical colleges or declaring "a day of prayer."

For religious citizens, these communications and activities can be crucial signals that do much to establish the religious bona fides of the political leaders behind them. ... Targeted, under-the-radar messages denote who is part of the club. It's like a secret handshake, writ large and electoral: politicians who narrowcast religious cues are assigned considerable credibility by voters in the targeted constituency.

I do have to say that I, and probably millions like me who value a religious faith, resent being verbally linked to folks whose faith requires such secret signals from political actors. But that's another problem.

The Domke-Coe book came out before the 2008 cycle. I'm sure they'd observe that the Obama campaign largely followed their golden rule for attracting conservative Christians without scaring off others, even though Obama improved his fraction of the white evangelical vote only marginally, if at all, over Kerry in 2004.

I think it is worth considering whether perhaps contemporary intense, engaged political chatter on the internet is reducing the value of narrowcasting. It used to be that politicians could dog-whistle their more controversial constituencies with relative impunity: the mainstream was never going to know (or at least report) they'd been signaling to the fringes. No more. Rightwing theocrats instantly call out the slightest deviations from their guys on their core issues like abortion and gay rights while the left blogosphere howls as when Democrats make conciliatory gestures to Christianists such as Obama fronting the homophobic singer-preacher Donnie McClurkin in southern primaries. (The Rick Warren episode at the inauguration was something else, not narrowcasting, but in all probability a serious instance of tone-deafness.) On both ends of the spectrum, channels between activists and more mainstream media outlets are opening up; what was hidden is more frequently spotlighted.

Domke and Coe's "God Strategy" can't operate underground any more. Their book is successfully descriptive of an era, but an era that I think, and hope, is coming to an end. Politicians and religious constituencies are being forced to be more honest with the nation at large. This should lead to debate over the ground level policy implications of what were just throw-away cues to niche constituencies. That has to be good -- such policy debate is the ground on which a multi-faith, legally secular democracy should make choices.

Good news on the international front

Back in December, in response to President Obama's hurtful choice to include anti-gay Pastor Rick Warren in the inauguration, I suggested that the new administration could easily show its concern for LGBT people by reversing one of Bush's many shameful policies. That same week, the Bush government put the U.S. on the side of Islamic theocracies and the Vatican by refusing to sign on to a United Nations declaration urging decriminalization of homosexuality.

It seems now Obama has done just that. At a Geneva United Nations commission meeting, the U.S. recently joined the European Union and South American countries in naming discrimination against gays as human rights violations, according to UN Dispatch.

Progress...

H/t to Obsidian Wings.

The lesson of the California budget

Today the New York Times draws this lesson from California's protracted failure and final success at passing a budget for these times:

... economists say this budget foreshadows the difficult choices that other state legislatures will soon face as the national economy worsens.

I'm sure that's true.

But that is not the most important lesson from the California experience. This state would have had a budget months ago if we had not embedded a viciously anti-democratic procedural requirement into our legislative process. Because of a two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget, a small minority of Republican legislators who don't give a rat's ass about the common good could hold the state, its elected legislative majority and its Republican governor hostage for months while hawking their voodoo economic nonsense.

The lesson of California is: don't hamstring your legislative process by giving a minority veto power.

Now isn't there a legislative body in Washington where a majority of votes won't get a bill passed ... I think remember something like that...

On Black History Month

I'm no one to disagree with Morgan Freeman, but I do. The YouTube clip is short. And it is sort of fun to see Mike Wallace flummoxed. [:55]



When asked "how do we get rid of racism?" Freeman says "Stop talking about it!"

No -- that's not how it works. We reduce racism when we raise our consciousness about how systems of racial power infect every aspect of our lives. Black History Month may be trite, tacky, and irritating to Black People. Maybe White Supremacy History Month would be preferable.

I was delighted to see that Eric Holder, Obama's Attorney General agrees. Here's what he said to an audience of Justice Department employees.

[He] urged employees yesterday to take advantage of Black History Month to begin a dialogue about race, labeling the United States a "nation of cowards" for not discussing the country's checkered history openly. ...

Holder told employees that the level of social interaction among people of different races is "bleak" and that it in many ways does not "differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago."

Demographic changes that within decades will result in no single racial majority only underscore the need for openness and, in some cases, confrontation on issues that separate people, Holder said.

He added: "If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about racial matters that continue to divide us."

Washington Post
February 19, 2009

Why (did) do they do it?

Canadian Maher Arar

In the early days when revelations about the Bush regime's sabotage of the rule of law leaked out -- the Abu Ghraib photos, Jose Padilla's due process-free imprisonment, the "extraordinary" renditions for torture -- it was hard not to ask: why are they doing this? Besides being obvious violations of historic legal norms, these acts were also self-evidently counterproductive even in the most utilitarian calculus. If you want to make law-eschewing terrorists, act like one yourself. But that's what the Bush-Cheney regime did.

Eventually it became clear that, despite claims about protecting us from terrorists, they did it because they could. Cheney, Addington, Yoo et al. had an axe to grind: they wanted to prove that a U.S. President could get away with being an absolute monarch if he wanted. And they did.

It remained unclear how much Bush ever absorbed their monarchical ideal. These days, apparently Dick Cheney is distressed that his pet king didn't get around to pardoning his loyal henchman.

But, somewhat surprisingly, power was passed on to Obama's successor regime on January 20. And today Charlie Savage has published an extensive catalogue of instances in which the Obama folks have hung on to Bush's lawless policies. Apparently at least some of the new folks like the authoritarian state:

• Elena Kagan, Obama's nominee for Solicitor General, thinks holding people without any legal process is just fine;

• Leon Panetta at the CIA doesn't endorse waterboarding -- but he envisions asking for authority to go beyond "approved" interrogation techniques. We've seen where that leads.

• Panetta thinks passing on suspected terrorists to other countries to hold and perhaps abuse without any legal process is just fine too.

• And where some of these abuses might see the light in court proceedings, the Obama government has threatened the Brits if they open up torture stories and stopped our own federal judiciary from proceeding by a claim that "state secrets" would be revealed.

There is a pattern here.

So I have to ask again, why are they doing this? Besides inertia and protecting individuals that some people know who did some pretty bad things under Bush, what motivates Obama to continue the Bush policies?

An early guess on a factor that I'm sure contributes to these policies: today Obama is in Ottawa, Canada. Canada has come clean on the case of Maher Arar, one of its citizens who its police wrongly fingered to U.S. authorities as a terrorism suspect. The U.S. promptly shipped Arar off to be tortured in Syria for nine months. A Canadian inquiry determined that Arar was guilty of nothing (except Middle Eastern origins of course) and that led to the Canadian government paying Arar millions of dollars of compensation.

If Obama were to really reverse the Bush torture regime, our country too would be paying victims additional millions. The New York Times editorialized today in favor of such a gesture to Arar.

Do they do it because they don't want a flood of cases revealing abuse, cases that will cost a lot of money? Seems likely. How depressing.

A cow's life

This splendid animal was living a very "natural" life indeed in the Guatuzos Wildlife Refuge.

An email from the Greener Choices program of the Consumers Union alerted me to a new US Department of Agriculture (USDA) voluntary labeling standard that allows producers to call their meat "naturally raised."

There's a big gap between what "naturally raised" means to the USDA and what it means to most of us. The government agency means no growth hormones, animal byproducts or antibiotics in the animal's feed. CU polled meat buyers and learned we agreed -- but many of us assumed it meant many additional conditions, including that the animal had been raised in a natural environment, was not cloned, and had access to the outdoors. Not so.

It isn't only consumers who don't like the new standard. The Animal Welfare Institute reported:

...many ranchers, farmers, and others testified in public meetings in 2006 and 2007 that the ability of animals to range freely, eat diets natural to their species, and engage in natural behaviors are essential aspects of a "naturally raised" claim.

The Center for Rural Affairs in Lyon, Nebraska added:

The standard ... will enable large-scale feedlots that don't use antibiotics or hormones to qualify for a USDA label that says their product is "naturally raised." We have seen some of the feedlots (have some right here in our home state) that would fit this category, and we have to say, there isn't anything natural about that.

Reading a bit on this led me to a fascinating article about Dr. Temple Grandin. Dr. Grandin was born autistic. She sees the world differently than most of us; for her, thoughts are a series of pictures. She has used the possibilities her different cognition offers to visualize how animals picture and react to their environments. Something like one third to one half of the slaughter facilities in the country use her designs. Isn't it a contradiction to use her understanding of animals to design the places where they are killed? She explains:

Her answer is as clear and logical as her thinking. Everything dies eventually, she says, but we humans owe the animals we eat a good life while they're here.

Obama and Afghanistan

US Army soliders set out on a patrol in Paktika province, along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in 2008.

Under the headline "Obama slows troop boost decision," Politico reports:

President Barack Obama is refusing to be rushed into his first decision to send troops into combat, an early sign he may be more independent-minded than U.S. military leaders expected.

The new president's methodical decision-making offers an early insight into how the new commander in chief will approach the war in Afghanistan and has surprised some Pentagon officials, who had predicted repeatedly in the past two weeks that Obama would decide within days on additional forces, only to find the White House taking more time.

Well good. We should all be glad he's going to think carefully before jumping in deeper.

It's probably worthwhile for all of us to take a mental step back and think about why Obama would even be contemplating sending troops to Afghanistan.

The U.S. moved in to overthrow the Afghan Taliban government in October 2001. Most in the U.S., though not all, applauded. The on-the-ground forces were mostly from the pre-existing Northern Alliance, a grouping made up of many non-Pashtun speaking militias led by warlords who got their start in the U.S. backed war against the Soviet occupation that ended in 1989. The war's aim, aside from extracting revenge from somebody for the attacks of 9/11, was to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and to replace the Taliban with a democratic government.

U.S. forces, small in numbers and dependent on Afghan allies, failed at the first objective. A façade of democratic government was created with the elevation of Hamid Karzai as Afghan president. Some regional elections followed. But Karzai never controlled much beyond the capital, Kabul; the sadistic warlords of the Northern Alliance maintained their military fiefdoms; Karzai's government proved rapaciously corrupt; and the Afghan peasantry reverted to reliance on the cash crop of previous eras, opium poppies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. dashed off to invade Iraq. NATO allies were dragged in to take up what they were promised would be a nation-building mission but which proved to be a shooting war. Afghans were miserable enough under Karzai that some welcomed back the Taliban who had continued to enjoy safe haven in and funding from Pakistan.

In short, Afghanistan is FUBAR (fucked up beyond all repair) in U.S. Army slang. The best account of all this I know of is Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos. Rashid's book is a lament for what might have been, the opportunities lost in Afghanistan and Pakistan because of U.S. arrogance and incompetence.

So why would Obama want to throw away more U.S. lives (leaving aside for the moment those of allies and Afghans) in this futile war? Let's think of some of the motives that might be in play.

• After seven years of dreadful imperial failure, our country hasn't quite got the revenge bug out of our systems. Some Republicans may sell Iraq as a "victory," but the U.S. people have known for several years, according to polls, that Iraq was a failure and a mistake. We haven't been thinking much about Afghanistan; maybe we can "succeed" there to compensate for failure in Iraq? Maybe we'll get lucky and kill Bin Laden?

• President Obama may genuinely believe that there is some good that can be done by more U.S. troops in that theater. After all, our mucking around there has contributed to further exacerbating pre-existing instability in Pakistan, rendering the whole region an even more volatile, dangerous place than it was before we got there. If he has such beliefs, it seems likely that the more he concentrates on the situation, the less he'll be confident that there is a meaningful mission to define for any unfortunate grunts who get thrown into Afghanistan. Is this dawning recognition the source of his delay?

• U.S. politics require Democrats to prove they are tough dudes. Republicans have historically done a good job of selling the notion that Democrats are wimps. So Candidate Obama loudly took on a "more troops to the right war, on to Afghanistan" posture. One of the more promising things about President Obama is that he seems to feel some deference to his campaign promises. In this case, the promise was ill-considered, but he probably believes he is bound by it, unless he can give the people a good reason to act differently.

In the end, the U.S. is going to leave Afghanistan, just as the Soviet Union had to 20 years ago. Most people here will get sick of their kids getting killed thousands of miles from home in a war that has no understandable mission or endpoint. We literally can't afford empire anymore. We will eventually comprehend this, whether slowly or rapidly.

If Obama is as smart as he sometimes seems to be, he's trying to figure out how to define an achievable, short-term mission for the Afghan war -- and he is beginning to think about how to extricate the country from this facet of George W's legacy of quagmires.

The people need to encourage him -- we've had enough of meaningless wars of empire.

UPDATE February 17: It seems that Obama has gone for 17000 more troops now -- and is still mulling the endgame. People need to let him know that there has to be one.

For more, check out Get Afghanistan Right.

Where are the US economic protests?

Chinese factory workers protest.

Yesterday the New York Times ran the headline: "Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide." The article focuses on the pressures that the busted worldwide economic bubble places on nations to protect their economies from global capitalism. That is, the Times defines stability as governments resisting pressure to intervene to protect local jobs from foreign competition; workers interpret interpret the same facts a race to the bottom that screws them.

Preserving globalization is not the greatest danger most people worldwide see in the current economic implosion. They are getting hammered and they want the powers that be to fix things. Der Spiegel reports from Europe:

• France: On January 29, schools were closed, and so were railroads, banks and stock markets. Theaters, radio stations and even ski lifts were shut down temporarily. Trash receptacles were set on fire in Paris once again, and a crowd gathered on the city's famed Place de l'Opéra to sing the Internationale, the anthem of revolution.

• Britain: workers protested at a refinery near Immingham in Lincolnshire, triggering solidarity strikes in 19 other locations in the United Kingdom.

• Russia: dismal labor statistics have driven Communists and anti-government protesters into the streets from Pskov to Volgograd in recent days, and in Moscow members of the left-wing opposition even ventured onto Red Square. They ripped up pictures of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, until police arrested and removed them.

Forbes warns that China is seeing waves of economic protest:

In 2007, China had over 80,000 "mass incidents", up from over 60,000 in 2006, according to sociologists at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. That sounds like a lot. But many involve no more than dozens of participants, and are mostly peaceful. ...

China worries that crowds of disappointed job seekers could galvanise into protests or riots, especially if the economic slowdown gathers momentum. The government's biggest worries are the migrant workers moving from farms to find work in cities and industrial zones. Some 20 million of the country's 130 million migrant workers have recently lost their jobs, according to one official count.

The factory region of the far south and other industrial areas could see flare-ups of protests by unemployed workers. With idle job-seekers milling around, smaller clashes between officials or bosses and workers could escalate.

It's getting hot out there.

According to the same New York Times article, 3.6 million people in the United States have lost jobs in the last year. Where are the protests here? About the only one we heard of was Chicago workers who sat in their factory to demand severance benefits.

Some pretty random thoughts on why U.S. people aren't more vocal in demanding government help -- yet.

• As a history professor says, protests "are rare because they violate the everyday laws of property, and for the most part American workers are law-abiding people. They occur only when workers feel morally aggrieved, when they sense that ownership has itself violated the law, when the boss has become the outlaw in their eyes and in that of the community as well." Note: we've made effective protest tactics illegal here. But should many former workers conclude that their former bosses were law-breaking scum ... watch out.
  

• Maybe the laid off are protesting widely, but the media just doesn't cover them. There are damn few labor reporters left in the dying dead tree media. That trend is not limited to the States. Here's some British commentary on what is simply no longer known because of the demise of labor journalism.

• Maybe so many U.S. workers have been suffering falling real wages for so long (since 1970), cushioned only by more two income households and unsustainable debts, that they have had the starch kicked out of them. Do they believe "resistance is futile"? Will there come a moment when they think instead "nothing left to lose"?
  

• A huge fraction of the U.S. low wage work force consists of immigrants, with and without documents. Both sorts face harassment and even being simply snatched up, imprisoned, and deported, if they stick their heads up. On the other hand, our immigrant workforce often has a stronger belief in the dignity of their own labor than we see from longtime citizens these days.

• Many of last year's layoffs hit the "FIRE" sector (finance, insurance and real estate) hardest -- these workers haven't thought of themselves as needing collective protest action and, compared to other unemployed folks, sometimes have some cushion to fall back on -- for awhile.

• Folks are hoping in President Obama and giving him a chance. Their protest was to elect him to fix things. How long will they wait?

It's not as if the United States had no tradition of economic protest. The Depression of the 1930s saw sometimes violent protests by veterans, farmers and factory workers. It is possible we ain't seen nothing yet.


U.S. veterans set up camp to demand benefits in the 1930s.

Change we can enjoy

Wanda Sykes is going to headline the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on May 9.

We're not in Kansas anymore -- maybe California where Sykes married her girlfriend during the brief window when that was possible. [Not work or possibly children safe; very funny. 4:38]

A jeremiad for these times

The book jacket says Andrew Bacevich is "a conservative historian and former military officer." I'd say his newish book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism shows him to be a smart observer who cuts through a lot of bull to get to some uncomfortable truths about the contemporary U.S. He convicts our society, addicted to consumption, especially of imported oil, of a heedless profligacy. Bacevich is sure that the day of U.S. empire -- crumbling and rotten -- is over, whether our rulers and citizens know it or not. Those are some large assertions for a small volume.

Bacevich points out that this country adopted as universal truths an understanding of its own participation in World War II that was largely false (wars are winnable in some defined sense) and foolish (the U.S. is the bearer of virtue to the world). I find it useful to look at the history of my lifetime as governed by these false paradigms. We are still surprised when our wars don't fit these preconceptions. For example, even those of us who adamantly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq never anticipated that all that military might could not win some kind of "victory" in that unfortunate country. Nor would we have believed that six years later a new administration would for practical purposes be negotiating with the Iraqis about how to get out.

Bacevich denounces the national security state; for the sake of imperial hegemony, we have acquiesced in the imperial presidency.

Beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, the occupant of the White House has become a combination of demigod, father figure, and, inevitably, the betrayer of inflated hopes. Pope, pop star, scold, scapegoat, crisis manager, commander in chief, agenda setter, moral philosopher, interpreter of the nation's charisma, object of veneration, and the butt of jokes -- regardless of personal attributes and qualifications, the president is perforce all these rolled into one.

This volume was published before President Obama's election, but it is easy to see the new guy being slotted into the familiar roles. In this system, Congress exists merely to perpetuate "democratic" theatrics. He writes

The Congress may not be a den of iniquity, but it is a haven for narcissistic hacks, for whom self-promotion and self-preservation take precedence over serious engagement with serious issues.

The failure of the Democratic Congress elected in 2006 on an antiwar mandate to do anything useful to end the Iraq war proves the point for this author (and for many of us).

But Bacevich doesn't just blame "the national security elites" -- those I usually call "our rulers." He blames the people of the United States for demanding that nothing disturb our accustomed standard of living.

The chief desire of the American people, whether they admit it or not, is that nothing should disrupt their access to [imported] goods, [imported] oil, and [imported] credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part through the distribution of largesse at home (with Congress taking a leading role) and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad (largely the business of the executive branch).

Obviously, Bacevich wrote this before the financial pyramid scheme that underlay it imploded. I'm sure he wasn't surprised. Much of the book is a chronicle of the sheer incompetence that follows from official Washington's detachment from realities, especially in the author's area of professional expertise, the management, care and feeding of the military.

This is a conservative jeremiad, a prophecy of deserved doom, ringing largely true from the left end of the political spectrum as well as from the right. I highly recommend it. Alternatively, listen to or read what Bacevich has to say in an interview with Bill Moyers last August. We're not used to such blunt honesty in our politics, even in the era of "change."

No more passivity ...

More petitioning against Prop. 8 in Oakland, California yesterday. Same campaign as this one. Anyone who underestimates the energy and determination involved in this effort is making a mistake.

Talking in a trap

I'm sitting in a political meeting much of which is about "messaging." If we can just use the right "frames," we'll win, so the communications people tell us.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans are wailing that President Obama is a failure. He's not being "bi-partisan." The stimulus bill is "not transparent."

Hey guys -- listen to yourselves. You are trapped, trying to argue your case on ground that President Obama laid out in front of you and convinced the public was the right playing field. He made bi-partisanship his trademark and transparency his issue. Republicans fighting on those matters have walked into a message trap. Obama wins; you are playing his game with his rules.

(This post is not a commentary on whether the Obama administration is promoting measures the country needs. I have no idea. I hope so. This is a post about political tactics. The Obama folks are doing fine on that level.)

Friday cat blogging

Mr. Louie lives in Denver. I visited him several weeks ago.


He wants to know what I've brought to his house.




He's not at all sure I belong in his territory at all.


Fortunately he has good humans who give him his diabetes shots.

On donating guns to the bad guys

Afghan President Hamid Karzai looks at an artillery piece during a ceremony of U.S. military arms donation to Afghanistan's army on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007. AP photo by Musadeq Sadeq

Oh great -- the U.S. is arming the Afghans who are shooting at our troops there. Or so it seems likely.

American military officials failed to keep complete records on about 87,000 rifles, pistols, mortars and other weapons — about one-third of all light arms the United States sent to Afghan soldiers and police officers from December 2004 to June 2008, auditors from the Government Accountability Office found. Further, American military trainers kept no reliable records on 135,000 more weapons donated by 21 countries, including Hungary, Egypt, Slovenia and Romania.

New York Times,
February 11, 2009

Where have we heard that one before? Oh yeah, just about 18 months back, in Iraq.

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

Washington Post
August 6, 2007

It's a misuse of the U.S. Army to send it to occupy countries that don't want us with no clear mission. Yet that's what empires do and we seem addicted to it. Then we pass out the guns to shoot our own troops with.

It would be easy to conclude we need to get out of the empire business.

What European city to do you belong in?

This quiz got me right I think

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions. You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

What European City Do You Belong In?

They didn't ask me whether I was a linguistically impoverished American, but I am. So somewhere English is spoken seems a good idea. And I do like beer.

H/t Acts of Hope

View out my window: Evanston, Illinois

It's foggy and rainy outside Chicago today.

This picture makes me think about why downtown hotels so often seem to loom over church buildings. My view in Denver also included an old church.

Once upon a time, those churches were the highest, grandest edifices in their neighborhoods. Now they are small breaks in high skylines. Does anyone ever enter them? Possibly, on Sundays. The one in Denver had what appeared to be a daily food line for the down and out. Don't (and won't, because I'll be working) know whether this one does.

Yet another reason to loathe Republicans and some Dems

The Winooski Bridge outside of Burlington, Vermont is a "Transportation Enhancement."

One of the numerous advocacy outfits I support, the Rails to Trails Conservancy (RTC), has just let me know that Republicans worked hard to keep any funding at all for walking and cycling out of the stimulus bill. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina offered an amendment (defeated) to prohibit such funding. Senator John Ensign of Nevada chimed in:

This is not a time to build [bike paths]. If we are going to invest in infrastructure, invest in infrastructure that actually makes the economy more efficient, such as roads that are needed.

Guess he doesn't want to encourage people to move more and drive less by providing safe and attractive trails, leading to healthier people and a healthier planet.

The House version of the stimulus did include $1.35 billion for what in Washingtonese are called "Transportation Enhancements," trails and bikeways. The RTC lobbies in particular for those delightful -- and readily developed -- graded paths that can be made on old railroad right-of-ways.

Though the Senate version just passed didn't include the Republicans' prohibition, it didn't explicitly include funds that could be used for non-motorized transportation. The centrist Democrats figured this was a throwaway.

If you care about walking, running or cycling, it's time to get on the horn to your Congresspeople and Senators and get this fixed in committee -- "Transportation Enhancements" mean a more pleasant, healthier country. And talk abut "shovel ready"! This one is easy.

Trust

They want us to trust them, but trust is broken.

ABC News' Jason Ryan reports that Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said [in Federal court today]:"It is the policy of this administration to invoke the state secrets privilege only when necessary and in the most appropriate cases, consistent with the United States Supreme Court's decision in Reynolds that the privilege not 'be lightly invoked.' ...

"The Justice Department will ensure the privilege is not invoked to hide from the American people information about their government's actions that they have a right to know. This administration will be transparent and open, consistent with our national security obligations," Miller said.

ABC News
February 9, 2008

I do not trust them -- and with this, they, our new Democratic rulers, forfeit their claim to have renounced the Bush Administration policies of torture, lawless imprisonment and monarchical executive power.

As they admit, we have every reason to believe that the previous regime invoked the legal doctrine of "state secrets" to hide its crimes. The facts of the particular case at issue today have been spread all over the media -- see for example, the New York Times. Employees and contractors of the U.S. government snatched up individuals they believed to be "terrorists," tortured them in hidden prisons, passed them on to compliant governments that tortured them further, and then locked them up under brutal conditions at Guantanamo.

All of this is known. Oh, there is probably more, but the outlines are quite clear. The only purpose served by keeping any ramification of it hidden is to make it impossible (harder?) to identity which individuals in our government are guilty of human rights law abuses.

The "state secrets" policy is a claim to a court that stops legal proceedings because -- well, they don't have to say why, they just say, "stop because the President says so." This is not the rule of law, it is an exercise of arbitrary power. We were told that President Obama would restore the rule of law, but his Justice Department today signaled that it is on the same track as the Bush guys.

"Trust us," they say. That's the appeal of a government of men, above the law. We weren't supposed to have one of those.

Why we need more government spending

The other day I was talking with a co-worker about the dire state of our economy and the President Obama's stimulus plan. She's does not follow politics obsessively (yes, I do). She lives in a very depressed state and has been involuntarily under-employed for quite a while. She's not poor, but she is certainly among the economically anxious. And she voted for our new President and wishes him well.

But she was not sure about his stimulus plan. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I sure hope the Republicans get off their high horses and let Congress pass the President's economic plan.

My friend: Well, I don't know. Maybe it's time we all learned that we can't spend more than we earn. I mean, people took on mortgages that they could not possibly pay. And they bought everything they wanted whenver they wanted it on credit cards. I know people who are never going to get out of debt.

I'm just not sure the government should be encouraging people to keep spending more than they really have ...

I knew I should be able to explain why, at this moment in time, we should fear more that people will stop spending, than that this country will go back to unthinking consumption. But I wasn't able to be convincing.

For those of us who have always worked at not carrying big debts, who don't run up credit cards, who have tried to save for the future, it is hard to understand why the government should now be trying to get people spending again. Didn't greed coupled with individual irresponsibility run the economy off a cliff in the first place?

Well , yes, but most economists agree that the danger now is that people and businesses will become fearful, save (hoard) what cash they have, and our economy will fall into the stuck place they call a "deflation." Here's Paul Krugman:

... it’s quite clear that we’re in serious paradox of thrift territory here. Or perhaps more accurately, we’re in a paradox of debt.

What does he mean? Fortunately, Matt Yglesias today took a crack at putting this in understandable terms. He says, just suppose

... it’s not just me looking to build a bigger cushion by cutting back on spending, it’s a whole bunch of people looking around and feeling nervous and deciding to cut back. Well, with all that cutting back there’s a lot less stuff flying off the shelves. So retailers start laying off workers (who need to reduce spending and whose friends start feeling nervous and reducing their own spending) and discounting the merchandise. Maybe the sales are so impressive that everyone changes their mind, decides that the bargains are too good to pass up, and goes and buys a bunch of stuff rather than increasing savings. If so, the economy just had a minor hiccup and life goes on. But maybe the accelerating wave of discounts just makes people feel more nervous. ...

The economy needs someone to decide to borrow some money and start a new firm that employs these newly unemployed people. But with the volume of consumption going down so rapidly, nobody’s really in the mood to start a new business. And existing businesses are busy scaling back production, not interested in borrowing money to ramp it up. The result of this is an overall fall in the average level of income. And that means that even with the share of income being saved going up, the actual level of savings can be going down and we can truly end up in the toilet.

We're living in a time when individual decisions not to spend, added together, can and will add to the tailspin the economy is already suffering. Those rational, responsible decisions will lead to more people being laid off, less reason for businesses to invest or expand, and more people who need help from the safety net.

And in such a time, most individuals won't be able to risk spending more -- they'd be irresponsible, as my friend said. But some push to get the economy working again has to come from somewhere and only the government can afford it today. The bet is that a growing economy tomorrow, spurred by spending today, will enable the government in the future to pay down the debt it takes on now. The U.S, government has always been able to grow back into solvency; lenders, even today, still seem to trust that it will be able to pay its bills in the future.

So if we are to have a hope of a prosperous future for our society, we need stimulus spending now. In fact a lot of economists think what is likely to come out of Congress is not irresponsibly large -- it is irresponsibly small. Maybe someday I'll learn enough to be able to talk about that coherently.