Health care reform shorts: AFL-CIO's Trumka spells out what's up

Speaking at the National Press Club, President Richard Trumka had this to say (I quote at length because I don't trust most media to bother to tell us what a union leader says.) After a running through a litany of progressive efforts supported by labor, he continued:

...these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor. But today, as I speak to you, something different is happening with health care.

On the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the small part of our country that has prospered in the last decade--the richest of the rich--to pay a little bit more in taxes so that most Americans can have health insurance. And the House bill reins in the power of health insurers and employers by having an employer mandate and a strong public option.

But thanks to the Senate rules, the appalling irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power of the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill instead drives a wedge between the middle class and the poor. The bill rightly seeks to ensure that most Americans have health insurance. But instead of taxing the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by taxing workers' health plans--not just union members' health care; most of the 31 million insured employees who would be hit by the excise tax are not union members.

The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families. This is a policy designed to benefit elites--in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public.

Transcript at TPM

My emphasis. Sad to see a Democratic President siding with the elites and dividing his "friends."

More on those Okinawa military bases

In response to the previous post Linda Hoaglund emailed:

I am an American filmmaker, born and raised in Japan and I'm currently finishing editing a film about Japanese resistance to U.S. military bases. ... Most Americans, even progressive people of good will, have no idea there are still bases in Japan nor that they are deeply resented.

She offered this YouTube [3:22] about the struggle of Okinawans against the continuing U.S. military presence on their island 65 years after the war that first brought the troops.


You can view the complete trailer for Hoaglund's forthcoming film about Japanese resistance to U.S. war preparations and bases at ANPO: the movie. Some of the scenes from the YouTube are repeated in this, set among works from celebrated Japanese artists. The trailer is a haunting, graceful combination of angry and beautiful. Do check it out. (ANPO is the Japanese acronym for the treaty under which the U.S. maintains its bases.)

For a straightforward list of crimes committed by U.S. forces on supposedly "friendly" Okinawa since 1948, check out this exhaustive list.

Imperial sickness

Last week the New York Times published an op-ed about U.S.-Japanese relations. In a patronizing tone, Joseph Nye, an assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, warns that the newly elected Japanese government is upsetting the Pentagon. The election of this Japanese government is, in its own society, as much a break from the past as President Obama's election was here. The Japanese Democratic Party overcame the Liberal Democratic Party's 50-year lock on governing. And the new party won its victory on a promise of "change."

What distresses Nye, and the Pentagon, is that the new prime minister, Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, has begun to insist that previously settled agreements about the status of U.S. military forces in Japan, especially the Futenma base on the island of Okinawa, should be revisited. Nye complains that Hatoyama leads a

government that is inexperienced, divided and still in the thrall of campaign promises to move the base off the island or out of Japan completely.

... Sometimes Japanese officials quietly welcome "gaiatsu," or foreign pressure, to help resolve their own bureaucratic deadlocks. But that is not the case here: if the United States undercuts the new Japanese government and creates resentment among the Japanese public, then a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic.

Nye certainly knows more about this than I do. But I can't believe that Japanese readers of these words don't resent Nye's apparent assumption that they are children to be led and manipulated.



This op-ed reminded me of Chalmers Johnson's account of U.S. bases in Okinawa in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. According to Johnson, Okinawans have good reason to be furious about the U.S. bases that since 1945 have occupied much of their 454 square mile territory, an area about the size of Los Angeles. In 2000 Johnson wrote that the island housed 39 bases occupying 20 percent of agricultural land, as well as adjacent seas and the airspace overhead.

With a population density amounting to 2198 persons per square kilometer, it is one of the most densely populated areas on the world. Neither Japanese nor Okinawan courts or police have any jurisdiction over these American-occupied lands, seas, or air spaces.

This lack of jurisdiction matters. Again, from Blowback,

At about eight pm on September 4, 1995. two American marines and a sailor seized a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping, bound and gagged her, drove her in a rented car to a remote location, and raped her. Marine Pfc. Rodrico Harp and Seaman Marcus Gill confessed they violently beat her and that Marina Pfc. Kenneth Leder bound her mouth, eyes, hands and legs with duct tape. Described in court by an acquaintance as a "tank, " Gill was six feet tall and weighed 270 pounds. He confessed to raping the girl, while the other two claimed they had merely abducted and beaten her. ...

...A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press, "I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl."

And this was just one case among many of abuse of the "native" population by the supposedly friendly occupiers. In a 2003 article available online, Johnson concluded that

the rape of local women by American soldiers has been the dominant metaphor of America's imperial presence.

Blowback is the first volume of Johnson's monumental trilogy on U.S. empire; it was followed by Sorrows of Empire (in which, in passing, Johnson explains how learning about the Okinawa saga put him onto the project) and Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic.

As the United States becomes ever more deeply mired in wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and wherever our politicians and generals take us next, Johnson's deeply researched, painful, and wise three volume opus remains completely relevant. He never lets his readers escape awareness that empire abroad encroaches ever more deeply on popular sovereignty at home, new faces in office notwithstanding.

What is the Mission watching?

Via Kevin Drum, the New York Times, Google and Netflix. If you live in a major city, you too can see what your neighbors are renting.

We didn't rent one of these.

Saturday scenes and scenery:Patagonian lakes and mountains

The show begins in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, moves on to the Fitzroy Massif east of El Chalten, Argentina and ends with shots from the shores of Lake Argentina near El Calafate.

After the first few days in Patagonia, we decided that the constant weather changes demonstrated the truth of Donovan's '60s era ditty:

First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.

I never understood that until I hiked in Patagonia. One day in less than 6 hours we experienced rain, snow, sleet, fog and sun.

If the slideshow doesn't work, you can see the set here.

"Saturday scenes and scenery" will be a frequent feature here in the future.

Saturday scenes and scenery:Patagonian glaciers

Here are a few of the hundreds of glacier photos we took on our Christmas trip to Patagonia. The very blue photos of a huge glacier running into a lake are of the Perito Moreno ice flow in Argentine. The rocky, snowy flows are on the Fitzroy Massif, also in Argentina.

If the slideshow fails for you, you can see the photo set here.

"Saturday scenes and scenery" will be a frequent feature here in the future.

Death threats for this?

Cartoonist Mark Fiore is getting death threats for this one [1:31]. I can't think of a better way to support his creativity than by putting it up. Take a look.

2009 retrospective: Constitutional decay. Senate category.

If you thought democratic (small d) government meant majority rule, 2009 revealed all too painfully how very far our Constitutional system strays from that hope. James Fallows describes the problem gracefully and dispassionately:

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries -- long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation.

I could point to all sorts cracks in the branches -- legislative, executive and judicial -- and in the federal scheme itself, but for today, let's deal with the Senate where the health care "reform" process has made two faults of that body all too visible.

• The distribution of Senate power is strongly tilted against most of us. I'm old enough to remember when the principle of "one person, one vote" was imposed on state legislatures and the House of Representatives by Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s. Racists and entrenched political elites howled. Previously, all too often, legislative districts gave disproportionate representation to large rural areas while slighting geographically compact cities with far larger populations. In that era, outside the South, those cities were often much more black and brown than the rest of states, compounding the inequity in who got represented among lawmakers. The new rule, gradually over decades, changed the balance racially and economically. The Senate was immune from "one person, one vote" because it is written right in the Constitution that each state gets two Senators. As a result, we are living with a situation in which states that include 12 percent of the national population can elect 41 Senators, enough because of the other presenting dysfunction in the body to dictate to the rest of us.

• A requirement for a 60 vote majority has become the norm in Senate procedure.This undemocratic development is not a constitutional bug; it is a feature that Senators have given themselves by choosing and hanging on to rules and customs of procedure. The filibuster rule did not always constrain all Senate business; it was a rarely used, oppositional last resort. But Senators have let this tactic and their accustomed "courtesies" dictate their entire current process. As a result we are seeing a determined minority hamstring an unusually large majority and empower the outliers within that majority to make outrageous demands on most of us. It's ugly.

Can anything be done to make the Senate more democratic?

Maybe. It's certainly worth understanding the need and working toward it. Twice in the history of this intentionally undemocratic body, popular pressures have forced some reforms.
In the original version of the Constitution, Senators weren't even elected by the people. State legislators had the job. According to even the Senate's own history,the set-up led to an obviously corrupt result; state-level big business competed to buy enough legislators to buy a compliant Senator. Political conflicts in state legislatures sometimes meant that no Senator was sent to Washington for long periods. Pressure for reform began in earnest in the 1870s, though Senators and the political parties treated direct election as a fringe idea. At the beginning of the 20th Century, portraying Senators as bought and paid for shills for fat cats became common. Media of the day made being a Senator synonymous with being a crook, an exploiter of ordinary people. In 1913, states ratified the 17th amendment which provides for the direct election of Senators. A bad arrangement got a little more democratic.
The filibuster -- originally the right to talk against a measure forever, now a simple threat to use 41 votes to prevent legislative action -- has been a procedural rule in the Senate from the get-go. But it is not law -- it's constraints are a choice that Senators put into their rules every two years. Whoever is "in" (the majority) goes along because they fear someday they might be "out." For many years, the filibuster and the inability of other Senators to "impose cloture" (limit debate) mostly attracted attention as the means by which Southern segregationists prevented national civil rights legislation. This country never passed an anti-lynching law because of the Senate filibuster. Until 1975 when a post-Watergate Democratic majority changed the rules, ending a filibuster required two-thirds for closing off debate (66 votes); in that year the number was cut to three-fifths (60) votes. How did this get done? The filibuster had become synonymous with racist stonewalling and with the discredited Nixon's political trickery, so a long-sought reform, though not abolition, became possible.

What can we take from this history?

Several lessons seem apparent:

• Reform takes time. Better get going on it.

• Because reform takes time, there will probably be a lot of ideas about how to make the Senate more democratic. That's okay. I lean toward supporting what look like tweaks rather than grand schemes of constitutional renewal, but I might be argued into more.

• Reforms followed periods of populist unrest (among 19th century workers and farmers; the civil rights and anti-Vietnam eras) even when the Senate was not the focus of alienation. We may need another such period and if this Recession is a double dip event, we could get one.

• Historically, the Senate's anti-democratic aspects have been vulnerable when brought into the light. Mostly people don't know or want to know what their elected representatives are doing. But when popular understanding has built that Senators are crooks, up-for-sale, racists, obstructionists, they have moved in the past. Contemporary communications technology offers highly democratic opportunities to shine the light on this bunch of anti-democratic, egotistical elitists. Let's go for it (and applaud any that will work for reform, of course.)

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

Found object

This hangs in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I have trouble imagining how it got out of the city sign shop and how it then came to hung. Actually there are several of them.

On the other hand, I've probably passed this 100 times without noticing.

I assume they meant to point to this.

Hotel workers march and sit-in for health benefits

Under their last contract, members of Local 2 UNITE-HERE enjoyed full health benefits with low copays. The management of the Hilton San Francisco Union Square, the Grand Hyatt, the Palace, the Westin St. Francis, and the W Hotel want any new contract to require workers pay for their insurance.


The workers -- roomcleaners, cooks, dishwashers, bussers, bellpersons, servers, and bartenders -- claim they can't afford any takeaways. They turned out on Tuesday to urge a boycott of the Hilton. About 160 volunteers were arrested in a peaceful sit-in.


Labor's big guns were on hand. That's AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on the left alongside UNITE-HERE President John Wilhelm.


Many labor stalwarts turned out in support as did health care activists.


There were at least 1000 marchers.


In this tourist town, these folks are what a large fraction of our stable working class looks like. Trumka and Wilhelm seem in this context a throwback to a union movement that was very different in race, ethnicity and gender from the core of today's. But on Tuesday, they were there in solidarity where they were needed.

2009 revisited: two heros for LGBT rights

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

On Monday the New York Times ran a major article about how right wing evangelical Christians from the U.S. have stoked an anti-gay panic in Uganda that is putting the lives of LGBT people there at risk. Today the same paper ran an editorial denouncing Uganda's proposed death penalty for homosexual conduct as

barbarism [that] is intolerable and will make [Uganda] an international pariah.

I believe this horrible news has clawed its way into the mainstream in great part because of the self-sacrificing efforts of two women I had the privilege of working with over the last two years. Their initiative also teaches lessons about how campaigns for justice move from fringe efforts to common knowledge.

Uganda probably has its own indigenous flavors of homophobia, but the shape of the beast there has way too much to do with efforts by right wingers to export our culture wars in order to undermine the witness of mainline Protestant churches to a compassionate justice agenda in both the U.S, and abroad. Journalist Jim Naughton documented this complicated story several years ago in Follow the Money. A key aspect has been conservative U.S. Anglicans encouraging (supporting financially) evangelical African Anglican bishops to denounce the (non-existent) threat of gays undermining their independent cultures. Some African bishops, especially those from Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Uganda, have thundered that homosexuality was an imperialist import: they didn't have any queers til the European colonizers came. That's bunk of course, but not uncommon bunk from people who have foreign domination their history.



In 2008 the international Anglican bishops' meeting at Lambeth in the U.K. was bringing together about 800 princes of the church from around the world -- and was expected to be a place where intra-Anglican conflict over homosexuality would figure heavily. Independent TV journalist and writer Katie Sherrod of Forth Worth, TX and Episcopal priest the Rev. Cynthia Black of Kalamazoo, MI knew how to refute the lie that African churches had no LGBT members: they would go talk with African gays on film. This would get around U.K. immigration restrictions that make it exceptionally hard for gay Africans to visit even briefly because they are suspected of seeking permanent political asylum. It was tough to get the project funded and deadlines slipped, but they managed to create a 20 minute preview.

This early effort was a tremendous hit with the relatively small number of people at Lambeth who saw it. Here were African LGBT Christians speaking for themselves. Katie and Cynthia determined they would finish the film in time for the massive General Convention of the Episcopal Church held in Anaheim last July. Groups advocating for full inclusion of LGBT people in the church, Integrity and the Chicago Consultation, put enough institutional muscle behind the project to enable another round of filming and some professional editing.

And so, last summer, Voices of Witness Africa played over and over to the 10,000 or so Episcopalians who passed through General Convention. Thanks to Katie and Cynthia's determination, probably 80 percent of them became aware of these articulate African LGBT people.

Meanwhile, the anti-homosexual bill was being cooked up in Uganda. In decades past, such a draconian law would have drawn opposition from significant gay groups, such as the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Such organizations have labored tirelessly for justice for gays, but they have always struggled to reach outside of a gay advocacy ghetto.

Showings of Voices of Witness Africa to all those nice, mostly middle class, mostly fairly entitled, U.S. Episcopalians last summer created a new base of people who had learned to recognize African homosexuals as sister and brother humans. Many concluded they had some responsibility for the wellbeing of these strangers. They lobbied their church and other churches to speak out against the Ugandan legislation. I have no doubt that when LGBT and other human rights voices sought to raise the alarm about the Ugandan bill, their ability to enlist straight church folks for the cause was greatly helped by Katie and Cynthia's bright idea. That's good campaigning and a kind of heroism for humanity in my opinion.

Here's the trailer for Voices of Witness Africa. [3:00]

I still don't see a distribution plan on the website, but interested readers can email the filmmakers at voicesofwitnessafrica (at) gmail.com. And all of us can continue to try to push whatever influential groups we may belong to into denouncing the proposed Ugandan legislation.

Many retrospectives judged 2009 discouraging in various ways; I intend to get to some of my own disappointments in future posts. But unsung work to increase the reach of justice and compassion such as that Katie and Cynthia undertook in creating their film deserves a lot more notice than it gets. Good developments usually don't just pop up without hard efforts to create the ground work. There are good folks toiling away at such projects, everyday, and we all owe them gratitude.

More security theater; more stupidity

Here we go again. The sponsors of the underpants bomber must be giggling in their caves. Under pressure from the 'fraidy-cat contingent (right wing Republican sub-set), TSA has decided to subject ALL airline passengers originating from or passing through 14 countries to special search procedures. The list:

Flights from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria (countries classified by US as state sponsors of terror)

Also, flights from Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen

BBC

The 'fraidy-cat contingent screams DO SOMETHING; we must NOT apply common sense to keeping ourselves safe.

Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has some sensible thoughts on the measures we really need.

Attacks such as the failed plot to bomb the airliner on Christmas Day cannot possibly have a real impact on our nation in military terms. These attacks are a form of psychological warfare designed to impact public opinion -- the very definition of terrorism -- and make us do things we would normally reject, such as profiling.

Profiling sends the message to millions of Muslim travelers that it is their faith, not terrorism, that is the problem. This is precisely the talking point put forward by the religious extremists of Al-Qaeda who say the West is at war with Islam and all Muslims, and that everyone had better choose sides.

Religious profiling is a recruiting and public relations tool for terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. Let’s not do Al-Qaeda’s work for them.

If not profiling, what action can we take to boost airline safety and security?

First look at behavior, not at faith or skin color. Then spend what it takes to obtain more bomb-sniffing dogs, to install more sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and to train security personnel in identifying the behavior of real terror suspects.

Along with boosting training and detection equipment, clean up the inaccurate terror watch lists that have ballooned in the post-9/11 era and work the kinks out of an intelligence system that would let a person get on a plane to America even after his own father had notified security services about his disturbing behavior.

Emphasis is mine.

Such thoughtful responses are not allowed. We must have more theater and massive over-reaction. The national character seems to be lurching closer to timid and feeble-minded by the day.

Photo by way of Atul's Blog.

2009 revisited: Gaza: last year ... and still today

Most everyone else in the blogosphere who indulged in 2009 retrospectives got them done between Christmas and New Years -- I went to Patagonia. So I'm going to allow myself a few such items over the first few weeks of this year.

Health care reform shorts: Of "fairness" and community

With the Senate's passage of something or other on Dec. 24, it looks like Democrats will pass some kind of "reform" of the insurance non-system. It will make abortion less available to women in need and will line insurance executives' already bulging pockets, but just maybe, more people will at least be able to get in the door to see doctors. Or maybe not. We won't really know until 2013 or 2014 or so. It all seems like a lot of sound and fury with a very uncertain result.

But it also still seems worth understanding the terms in which the thing has gone down. And in that respect, Princeton economics professor Uwe E. Reinhardt's discussion of "community rating" in a New York Times blog post casts an interesting light on the premises behind the "reform."

Reinhardt defines "community rating" --the system of setting premiums that the coming law will order insurance companies to practice for persons mandated to buy insurance outside the employer-based system -- as

the practice of charging a common premium to all members of a heterogeneous risk pool who may have widely varied health spending for the year.

That is, if the insurance companies had their profit-driven drothers, they'd charge people who weren't likely to get sick a small enough premium that these folks would still bother to buy insurance and charge people who were likely to get sick a vastly higher premium that deterred them from getting insurance at all, or at least covered most of what the insurers would have to pay out for them. Or maybe they just would refuse to insure people who were likely to get sick. That's a fair description of where we are now. By forcing everyone to buy insurance and forcing insurers to sell to people they'd rather deny outright, the "reform" throws those two populations in together (at least in the individual markets to be called exchanges).

Reinhardt points out, realistically, that young healthy people may very well think the new system "unfair" because they'll be ordered to buy policies whose cost includes a portion of the costs for sick people who wouldn't have insurance at all if insurers were allowed (as they are now, without much limit) to set premiums based on the expected health care costs of individuals. He offers a simplified mathematical model to illustrate how things will work under community rating:

Would it be "fair" that the healthy individuals of cohort A pay a pure insurance premium of only $2,450 a year, while the sicker citizens in cohort B must pay $6,600? This is, after all, how health insurance now is priced in most states for individuals.

Or does "fairness" require that the two groups be merged into one large national risk pool A & B, whose risk profile is shown in the right-most column of the table. If each member of this merged pool is to pay the same pure premium, then the latter will have to be $4,525 to break even. Such a premium would be said to be "community rated" over these two distinct risk pools.

With a community-rated premium for the two risk pools, it would be predictable ex ante that, on average, members of cohort A would be subsidizing members in cohort B. We can infer the degree of subsidy from the premiums. Relative to their premium in a perfectly risk-segregated market, the community-rated premium of $4,525 will cost members of low-risk cohort A $2,075 more and the sicker members of cohort B $2,075 less than they would have paid in a risk-segregated market. Is that "fair"?

Reinhardt is wonderfully clear and I urge readers to look at his post.

But all this is not really a question of economics, but of politics and values. The enormously complicated "reform" is only complicated because, as a society, we have failed to answer the question: is it the duty of a rich nation to ensure that people within its borders have access to health care? If we answer that "yes," as every wealthy nation except the United States does, then of course all citizens share the risk of the costs of illnesses -- through taxes. Taxes are the price of community. Complicated calculations of premiums don't ever come into the discussion.

If we have to build complex contraptions that pay off the greedy who profit from human misery, the United States is a sorry excuse for a community. The health care reform process so far has made it clear that we are, indeed, a broken society which has lost touch with human beings' essential interdependence.

Security in the time of the underwear bomber

Given this blog's past interest in the TSA no fly list, I suppose I ought to have some commentary on the Nigerian underwear bomber. Actually the subject seems mostly boring -- it is not exactly news there are people who want to kill people -- but here goes:

• This aspirational terrorist was on some "watch list," but that didn't do anything to protect anyone. Why? -- well, a million or so names, many of them shared with perfectly harmless people, makes the list useless. When almost all matches are false, those charged with using the list will begin to ignore it. The U.S. can "watch list" people all it likes, but that's just for show, not to protect anyone.

• As security guru Bruce Schneier has been saying for years, the episode proves that the most important security improvement since 9/11 works: passengers and crew, at whatever risk to themselves, will jump to incapacitate anyone doing anything that seems suspicious. Now that we know that there are nuts who are willing to bring themselves down along with us to get the world's attention, we won't sit around to let it happen. This may not stop a more competent terrorist, but it worked with this asshole and the shoe bomber.

• Concern over full body image scanning is not new. See this and this.

• It's still worthwhile to terrorist masterminds to send incompetent clowns to create air travel terror incidents, even if they fail, because international air travel is easy to screw up. I passed through Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires on December 28 -- what a miserable mob scene! In addition to the apparently common two hour check-in lines, we were all subjected to extra personal wanding, hand luggage searches, individual questioning ... by harried airline personnel who also were also expected to carry out their usual duties. I'm pretty sure that a smart terrorist would have slid right through, but thousands were inconvenienced and even humiliated in long lines. You have to really want to travel to go through this kind of thing; do we really want a society made up of United States residents who have been convinced that visiting the rest of the world is so difficult? Or a United States that no sensible foreigner would visit because getting in requires abuse and humiliation? We're working on it.

When "security" is just theater, it helps the terrorists more than it serves us.

The photo is from a Sydney Morning Herald travel blog that labels Ezeisa one of "the world's worst airports." That was in "normal" times; I concur. Given the atmosphere on the 28th, I didn't think it a good idea to shoot my own photo of the chaos.

Justice for Oscar Grant

Guess I'm home. On my jog this morning, I saw that local activists had created a reminder that one year ago, a young man named Oscar Grant was shot in the back and killed by a BART police officer while the officer was trying to restrain him. The event was captured on several cell phone videos -- the officer resigned and will go on trial for murder sometime this year.

The graphic layout on Bernal Hill strikes me as a pretty good example of the populist billboard genre. This sort of thing is tough to do -- I know, I've been part of a few such efforts.

Happy New Year: a potpourri of Patagonian beers

In southern Argentina and more especially Chile, the right thing to do would be to drink the local wines. But my partner doesn't drink alcohol and most of the places we ate didn't sell wine by the glass, so instead I decided to sample as many varieties of local beer as I could in 10 days. Some impressions:


In Argentina, the standard brew, available everywhere is a blond Quilmes. Think Budweiser -- with approximately the equivalent warm piss quality. Occasionally Quilmes Bock is also available. It is a little better.


The Chilean equivalent is Austral, very similar. And also not very appealing.


In El Calafate (Argentina), I ran across this fearsome looking local brew. The Gulmen Red was quite tasty; I found the Black Porter bitter.


The Morenita Malta (Chile) had quite a strong, sweet flavor, as did the Antares Scotch Artesanial (Argentina). The latter brand is eclectic; they not only make beer but also offer a Barley Wine in a similar bottle.


When you think of yourself as living at the back of beyond, as Patagonian residents often do, it's not surprising somebody has brewed an other worldly beverage. This one too had a good flavor.


Far and away the beer I enjoyed most turned up at our most remote stop. El Chalten is always referred to as "Argentina's newest town," a community of about 1000, really sort of a backpackers', trekkers' and climbers' base camp still barely attracting a permanent population. There we wandered into a pizza joint and climbers' bar that made its own hooch. The Patagonicus Chalten Negra was a little bitter, but the Patagonicus Chalten Red was delicious.

Don't get the wrong idea; I only had one of these at any given sitting ... and mostly didn't want more. But the beer survey made for a pleasant sub-agenda for our trekking vacation. In the new year, it's back to the old work: peace, justice, and thankfulness for whatever good comes. May we all find and make lots of the last in the coming year!

Patagonia reading

Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia was the book I should have read before traveling to the hinterland of South America. I didn't, so I'm glad I found the 1977 classic there and consumed it on the way home. If you have any interest in this still-exotic place, I would urge you to do likewise.

According to the forward by Nicolas Shakespeare, Chatwin was annoyed that his story was marketed as "Travel." I understand that: I'd call this a collection of vignettes that shape a picaresque quest whose truth is more that of marvelous realism than reportage.

If I'd read Chatwin, I'd instantly have been able to place the 10 foot high statue we encountered while walking into Puerto Natales (Chile). It's a kitschy rendering of the town's famous extinct mascot -- the Mylodon, a giant ground sloth -- whose mysterious history shapes Chatwin's wanderings by bus, on horseback and on foot south through the Argentinian back country to the Chilean lands on Straits of Magellan.


Though apparently this Brit's Spanish was rudimentary, the Argentinian frontier in the mid-twentieth century was still so full of odd wanderers, failures, dreamers and exiles from many lands that this was little barrier. He's an economical storyteller, able to convey character with few words. Consider these hotel keepers:

The hotel in Rio Pico was painted a pale turquoise and run by a Jewish family who lacked even the most elementary notions of profit. ...

In the morning, I had a tremendous row about the bill.

"How much was the room?

"Nothing, if you hadn't slept in it, nobody else would."

"How much was dinner?"

"Nothing. How could we know you were coming? We cooked for ourselves." ...

"What can I pay for then? There's only bread and coffee left."

"I can't charge you for bread, but cafe au lait is a gringo drink and I shall make you pay."

Another encounter in the same tiny town, with a very old, very lonely former cabaret singer:

At some negative turning point she had married a moon-faced Swede. They joined two failures into one and drifted together to the end of the world. ...The Swede died fifteen years ago and she had never left ...

Christian missionaries pushed into the area, some of them apparently more interested in anthropological speculation, archeological digs and exploration than spreading the Gospel.


The Salesian, Father Alberto María D´Agostini (d. 1960), is remembered as a mountain climber in a statue in El Calafate. Chatwin shares an encounter with another Catholic priest out in the boonies:

"Tell me, brother, which religion are you?"

"Protestant."

"Different road," he sighed. "Same Divinity. Adios, Hermano."

Frontier life may have precluded a more narrow Christianity.

Not all of Chatwin's vignettes from the road are of helpless castaways. There are plenty of dynamic actors, including the famous North American outlaws, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; European, Chilean and Argentinian scientists, colonizers and swashbucklers -- including Charles Darwin -- whose activities resulted in extermination of the indigenous population; and the prisoners who survived Chile's 1973 military coup, jailed away on remote Dawson Island.


And then there were the "revolutionaries of 1920-1." A leader, Antonio Soto, is memorialized on Calafate's main street. These were laborers, many Chilean, who worked on the great sheep farming estates. When the world wool trade took a dive after the First World War, land owners tried to cut wages; the men had absorbed some socialist and anarchist ideas and they organized. So the land owners called in the Argentinian army who promised freedom to strikers who gave up their weapons and then massacred them. Chatwin quotes a British settler about these events.

I asked Archie Tuffnell about it and he scowled.

"Bad business. Bunch of Bolshie agitators came down and stirred up trouble. That was one thing. Then the Army came down and shot good, honest, reliable men. They even shot my friends. It was a filthy business from start to finish."

Soto survived and escaped to Chile, never again to raise rabble. But other anarchists did kill the Army general who ordered the massacre and tit-for-tat killings went on for some years.


It was interesting to see how much public remembrance there still is of these events in the otherwise resolutely commercial, bustling tourist town of El Calafate. I had to wonder whether talk of 1921 was substituting for talk of the much more immediate sufferings of Argentinians under the repressive army regime of the late '70s and early '80s.

If you have the slightest interest in Patagonia, do what I didn't do and read Bruce Chatwin's tale before you go.

Patagonia impressions

Back in town today from almost two weeks in the far south of Latin America -- a few days in Chile and more in Argentina -- I've got oceans of work clutter to clear away, so this blog gets only a few oddments about the trip for now. More later.

It would be mad for me to claim to know anything about the countries whose mountains, parks and hospitality I've been enjoying. The appropriate analogy for what I convey here might be impressions of the United States garnered by a non-English-speaking tourist dropped into South Lake Tahoe who then visited Yosemite Valley. Not deep or necessarily meaningful. But here goes.

The world watches and waits on Obama, anxiously.


Headline from the English language Buenos Aires Herald on the day we arrived.

The old maxim, "when the U.S. sneezes, Latin America catches pneumonia" still holds, or at least people fear that it does.

Knowing that politics in other people's countries is not our business, we engaged in only one substantive political conversation. This was with an Argentinian who had lived in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980's, in exile from the rightwing military's (and CIA's) Dirty War of torture and "disappearance" against leftists and students. He volunteered that when Obama was elected, people had had great hopes that the United States had changed. But he fears that the new administration's support for the anti-democratic coup in Honduras in June and the sham elections there in November has emboldened right wing elements throughout the continent.

Our new friend, on learning that my partner is a student of the implications of the U.S. adopting torture as policy under the Bush regime, spoke proudly of Argentinians' twenty year effort to prosecute their own torturing generals. "It took a long time, but the result is worth it."

Badly behaved tourists.

Somewhat to my surprise, there is a set of tourists much more resented in Chile and Argentina than the relatively few oblivious North Americans. People from both countries volunteered their disgust with the behavior of back-packing Israelis. "They are not well-brought up; they leave garbage all over."

Hence the sign at left from an Argentinian park.

I have no idea whether this sentiment contains elements of European anti-Semitism, stems from repulsion against Israel's treatment of Palestinians, or simply reflects that traveling Israelis actually do act boorishly when wandering the world. This was something I had not encountered previously.

Argentinians and Chileans don't much like each other

However little Patagonians may like various foreigners who descend on their countries, they save their real distrust and dislike for each other.


Once upon a time this Chilean sheep farm on Last Chance Fiord was a grand estancia, though land reform and the contemporary economy has reduced its owners to welcoming tourists for magnificent lamb barbecues.


But the current Senor Eberhard proudly recounts that when Argentinians tried to move in during the last century, his grandfather continued to fly the Chilean flag, defending the land.

Chileans we met seemed to feel that neighboring Argentina was "the boondocks." Their border crossing bureaucrats were strict and thorough, a little reminiscent of the paranoid U.S. TSA, in fact. Argentina seemed "laid back" in comparison.


A bronzed figure of Francisco "Perito" Moreno sits behind a desk in an information center of Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park.

Meanwhile, Argentinians described Chile as aggressively grasping. Mr. Moreno, pictured above, is a hero for having surveyed the Patagonian hinterland in late 19th century and successfully staking out Argentina's claim to the peaks that became this most astonishing park.


In contemporary El Calafate, the tourist town that serves as Argentina's gateway to its Patagonian wonders, people had very immediate concerns. Chileans, enjoying a stronger economy, are "buying up all the land." Don't know if this is true, but I have enough experience of urban gentrification to know what ugly feelings arise when property becomes unaffordable to its present residents ...

Winter on the Bay Bridge

Heading east from San Francisco on the Bay's unglamorous span to Oakland involves driving through what feels like a dark tunnel. The top deck, running into San Francisco, has all the views. The under side, the lower deck, is enclosed, cave-like.


Winter means rain, sometimes dense rain.


Under the joints of the upper sections, water cascades on cars below. It can be hard to see.


The center of the bridge is an actual tunnel through Yerba Buena Island, a large rock that was there long before the bridge. There's less rain in the tunnel, but distorting light, even at midday.***Since I was driving, I didn't take these shots. But I think my lovely assistant did darn well with an iPhone, don't you?