Warming Wednesdays: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima Daiichi

Each August, I try to mark my country's choice to unleash the nuclear genie in 1945 by obliterating the cities and people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This year, it seems appropriate to highlight that that the survivors of this signal event have chosen to speak out about Japan's current dependence on nuclear power.

NAGASAKI, Japan — In 1945, Masahito Hirose saw the white mushroom cloud rise from the atomic bomb that incinerated this city and that left his aunt to die a slow, painful death, bleeding from her nose and gums. Still, like other survivors of the attacks here and in Hiroshima, he quietly accepted Japan’s postwar embrace of nuclear-generated power, believing government assurances that it was both safe and necessary for the nation’s economic rise.

That was before this year’s disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan confronted the survivors once again with their old nightmare: thousands of civilians exposed to radiation. Aghast at the catastrophic failure of nuclear technology, and outraged by revelations that the government and power industry had planted nuclear proponents at recent town hall-style meetings, the elderly atomic bomb survivors, dwindling in numbers, have begun stepping forward for the first time to oppose nuclear power. ...

“Is it Japan’s fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?” said Mr. Hirose, 81, who was a junior high school student when an American bomb obliterated much of Nagasaki, killing about 40,000 people instantly. “I wish we had found the courage to speak out earlier against nuclear power.”

NYT, August 7, 2011

There are environmental prophets like George Monbiot who have concluded that some increase in nuclear power generation is the only available "bridge" to a global society that has given up fossil fuels for renewables. In the linked article he makes his best case. But Japanese survivors bring moral force to a debate in which the pr0-nuke arguments more and more seem to require willful disregard of the limits on human capacity to achieve technical and moral perfection.

As the New York Times reported yesterday, the more that comes out about Fukushima Daiichi's multiple meltdowns, the more it is proved that both the power company and the government lied repeatedly about dangers they knew were real and present. Why? Because numerous very human mistakes were made -- and admitting the truth would have added to the already staggering toll of the earthquake and tsunami.

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry. As the nuclear plant continues to release radiation, some of which has slipped into the nation’s food supply, public anger is growing at what many here see as an official campaign to play down the scope of the accident and the potential health risks.

The people responsible for nuclear safety didn't dare -- in the crunch -- to tell the people who might be harmed the truth that their precautions had failed. This seems to be a pattern in relation to nuclear energy: the authorities in most countries deny and obfuscate as long as they can. And errors are not rare: in California we've got a reactor which was licensed despite earthquake supports installed backwards.

Though in many countries, including the U.S., Japan, and the United Kingdom, nuclear generating plants are privately owned, it is impossible to build them without government protection against liability. Insurance companies aren't willing to be on the hook for the potential costs of a mishap -- something no engineer in his right mind can really promise given the history of a meltdown every decade or so. And the costs spread out over a country's whole life. Back in March, long before the worst of the Fukushima situation was known, Craig Bennett described how the disaster rippled outwards:

Following the incredibly expensive evacuation, there has been a suspension of sales of food from the area, and now even fears about drinking water in Tokyo. These measures will hopefully ensure the health impact remains minimal.

As well as being incredibly distressing for the people living nearby, this is all costing a fortune. Add to it the clean-up costs, more stringent safety regulations and an inevitable increase in insurance arrangements, and the economics of nuclear will be forever changed. And they weren't particularly healthy to start with.

... No nuclear power station has been built without state cash ... No subsidies means no nuclear. Supporting nuclear means getting behind taxpayer-funded subsidies ...

My emphasis. And that's one of the worst aspects of these things, on top of the actual dangers. Technocrats like nukes -- they trust themselves to do it better next time. But ordinary people have pay for them. And in general, when democracy is working, we don't want them, especially if we have to live near them.

Nukes only get built when the wishes of the neighbors can be discounted and run over. Neighbors seldom enthuse about the cooling tower down the road; they worry. NIMBYism may look unattractive --selfish -- but it is a natural response to a dangerous technology whose owners and sponsors have repeatedly been shown to be over-optimistic at best, and more likely just liars.

Nevada NIMBYism has prevented the U.S. from sinking nuke waste in the ground, a much contested "solution" to the inevitable waste disposal conundrum. Nuclear promoters have to claim they'll find a magic solution to waste disposal, though no answer have turned up over the last 60 years. Fukushima wouldn't have been so dangerous if it had not had pools of radioactive waste sitting around -- U.S, nukes mostly have those too, since we have no national plan for disposing of the deadly stuff. Nuclear engineers always hope a solution to the waste is just around the technological corner, but so far, nothing convincing.

If something goes wrong with a nuke, experience has shown over and over that authorities lie and minimize. They don't trust people with true information.

Nukes are a deeply anti-democratic solution to the problem of human generated global warming. They seem to require lies to get built, to require disguised promises of tax dollars to run, and require companies and governments to deceive in a crisis. I'm just not so desperate yet about climate change to be willing to go there; let's get serious as a society about renewables -- that's hard enough to achieve and a damn sight less dangerous.

A formerly democratic country must beg its betters for deliverance

Joe Nocera writes oped columns for the New York Times. He comes from a background in business journalism. He doesn't think of himself as liberal, rather as a realist. Last week in a column headlined "The Tea Party's War on America," he got in trouble with right wingers for pointing out that, during their ginned up debt ceiling crisis, the Republicans were behaving as "terrorists" He then apologized two days later, suggesting he'd stooped to his opponents' level by using intemperate language, though I don't think he repudiated his criticism of their actions.

Today, having watched the stock market dip after the Republicans' stunt got U.S. bonds downgraded, he comes pretty close to throwing in the towel on United States democracy:

I keep waiting for one wealthy, well-known figure to stand up and say publicly that he or she is willing to pay more in taxes as part of the shared sacrifice necessary to gain control of the country’s deficit. I know there are wealthy people who’ve had that thought -- not just liberals like Warren Buffett, but old-fashioned, rock-ribbed Republicans who are worried about the country’s debt problems. I even have a pretty good idea who some of them are. Come on, folks. Your country needs to hear from you.

Apparently he has concluded that our democratic processes are so broken that, even though a majority of rank and file Republicans favor higher taxes on the rich, not to mention even larger majorities of independents and Dems, the opinions of these mere citizens count for nothing. I guess these days only our financial overlords get a vote. Nice mess they are making of the country, aren't they?

The war that shaped the 20th century

It all starts with World War I. Well not really, because human history always stretches backward through old cultures, old knowledge, and old hurts. But that first great war of the past century, which embroiled peoples all over the globe in a conflict begun in Europe, did set the stage for much of what everyone born through the 1990s thought was a durable reality. We may indeed, in this season when decline of U.S. empire has become more visible, be living in another turning point when old truths will be overthrown. But I remain convinced that the more we understand what we've come out of, the better we can understand where we are today. So. I'm reading a series of books about World War I and will be writing a good deal about the 1914-1918 "Great War" in the next few months.

First up is David Fromkin's 2004 volume Europe's Last Summer: Who Started The Great War In 1914? The question in the title has been much argued over in subsequent historical writing; essentially Fromkin brings the state of the debate up to date, incorporating archival discoveries from the 1980s and 1990s that in his view settles the question very simply: the German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke thought war was Germany's only chance for continued world power and he ensured war came when a chance presented itself.

This is not how we usually think about great historical events -- that one man could have maneuvered many states into actions that eventually killed over 20 million people and ended up with a redrawn map of the world. Here's Fromkin's conclusion in a nutshell:

The peculiarity of the First World War is that, even though it occurred in modern times, somewhat democratic and, to an extent, responsive to the voices of the public, its origins involved so few people: a handful in a handful of countries. It is not just that a tiny number of individuals made the decisions; it is startling that few people even knew that anything was happening or that decisions were there to be made or were being made. It was a crisis that arose and was played out in secret. ... In suggesting that one or more individuals started the First World War, I am using words in their most everyday and ordinary sense. I mean that there were men who wanted to start a war, and who deliberately acted in such a way as to start one, and who succeeded, by what they did, in starting a war. So the detective in a murder mystery, summing up the evidence for the house guests in the library, might point a finger accusingly and say: "There is the person who did it." In the case of Germany we point to Moltke. He started the world war, and he did so deliberately.

... It was no accident that Europe went to war at that time. It was the result of premeditated decisions by two governments. Once those two countries had invaded their neighbors, there was no way for the neighbors to keep the peace. ...To repeat, it takes two or more to keep the peace, but only one to start a war. And that means that it could happen again. An aggressor can start a major war even today and even if other great powers desire to stay at peace--unless other nations are powerful enough to deter it.

...The decision for war in 1914 was purposeful; and the war itself was not, as generations of historians have taught, meaningless. On the contrary, it was fought to decide the essential questions in international politics: who would achieve mastery in Europe, and therefore in the world, and under the banners of what faith.

I simply am not well read enough in the historiography of the Great War to know whether I accept Fromkin's conclusion that Moltke "did it." But I do take the warning implicit in his conclusions; a determined man in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead nations into dumb wars. After all, we've just seen what Dick Cheney, his sidekick David Addington, and a compliant George W. did in Iraq.***In untangling the threads of causation of the war in 1914, Fromkin has a lot to say that casts a fascinating light on that world and ours. Some tidbits:

• There's nothing new about what we call "globalization." The emerging capitalist global system was on track toward full economic integration. In this light, the nationalisms of the 20th century seem almost a detour.

  Even more than today, it was a time of free capital flows and free movements of people and goods. An outstanding current study of the world as of 2000 tells us that there was more globalization before the 1914 war than there is now: "much of the final quarter of the twentieth century was spent merely recovering ground lost in the previous seventy-five years."

• Prominent politicians died by violence in that world with a frequency that makes our our time seem orderly by comparison.
  

  Kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other leaders of government and society were murdered promiscuously, without exciting as much surprise as such events would cause today. ...During the twenty years of [before an Austrian archdukes's murder in Serbia was made a 'cause' for war], assassination had been a frequent and characteristic manifestation of the split between society and its underworld. Among those killed had been the President of France (1894), the Shah of Persia (1896), the President of Uruguay (1896), the Prime Minister of Spain (1897), the President of Guatemala (1898), the Empress of Austria (1898), the President of the Dominican Republic (1899), the King of Italy (1900), the President of the United States (1901), the King and Queen of Serbia (1903), the Prime Minister of Greece (1905), the Prime Minister of Bulgaria (1907), the Prime Minister of Persia (1907), the King of Portugal (1908), the Prime Minister of Egypt (1910), the Prime Minister of Russia (1911), the Prime Minister of Spain (1912), the President of Mexico (1913), and the King of the Hellenes (1913). On average, one head of state or head of government was murdered every year.

• War itself was thought to be a virtuous activity, at least among the ruling elites.

  Today, we take it for granted that governments hope to keep the peace. It is our often unarticulated assumption. Since the development of weapons of mass destruction, everybody would lose, we say, if war were to break out among the Great Powers. ... It would be a mistake, however, to assume that a century ago world leaders would have shared such a view. Their thinking at the time was well expressed in what has been called "the first great speech" in the political career of Theodore Roosevelt, newly appointed assistant secretary of the navy in the incoming administration of U.S. President William McKinley. Addressing the Naval War College in 1897, Roosevelt claimed: "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." War, he declared, was a fine and healthy thing. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races; and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then. . . it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best." He argued: "Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin."

Even the more evil among our rulers seldom promote this kind of moral imbecility publicly these days. Roosevelt sounds like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer.

• Fromkin stresses the extent to which the war launched in 1914 set the stage for events throughout the last century.

  The conflict that Germany's military leaders initiated by declaring war on Russia August 1, 1914, did not come to an end until the last Russian soldier left German soil on August 3 I, 1994.

  On this, I've prepared to believe him, being reminded of the long running and incalculable consequences of "hostilities" lightly begun. Wonder if President Obama has had time to notice this yet with regard to his little Libyan foray?

Too busy to blog today

At least I'm enjoying beautiful nearby sights when not cleaning out a basement

Just for fun: here's a thought that we all might act on more often.

Whitman wasn't singing a Mormon promise

James Carroll, a Boston Globe columnist and vital historian of the anti-Semitism embedded in Christian history, has made an interesting effort to explain Mormonism to the legions of us who find this variation on U.S. Protestantism cultish and simply weird. Like everything Carroll writes, it is insightful.

But I've got to say, these conclusions founder on a contradiction:

Mormonism may have roots in Calvinist Puritanism, but in important ways it broke free. Instead of the sinner standing alone before the judging God, or coming singly to Jesus, the Mormons stand together with each other in a radical communitarianism. No rugged individualism here. Family was the absolute value, a doctrine that initially reinforced a problematic - indeed, abusive - marital system that, willy nilly, vastly multiplied fertility. Commitment to the clan turned the religion into a people.

And, taking off from Smith’s own affirming personality, Mormon dogma left behind all Puritan notions of humanity’s innate unworthiness. Instead of Jonathan Edwards’ “sinners in the hands of an angry God,’’ Smith celebrated God’s beloved favorites. Hope, optimism, positive energy, expectation of success, success itself a sign of divine favor: such are the tenets - and appeal - of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Indeed, the religion provides mythical underpinning to the essential American dream. “What Whitman sang,’’ Harold Bloom wrote, “Joseph Smith actually embodied.’’

Please, you've got to be kidding. Walt Whitman would have been shunned and cast out of the Mormon community as a gay pervert. The optimistic Mormon community spits out the fraction of its children who are gay. It is a brutal environment for a young person who is "different." And then it uses its organization to stigmatize them by committing wealth and political muscle to impeding the progress of gay marriage.

It is very hard to credit Carroll's hope that there is "an unexpected image of positive possibility" in what Mormonism offers to our discouraged country. At least it's hard for this lesbian to buy it. I don't need yet another religious style that erases and suppresses me, thank you very much.

Afghanistan: more pointless deaths, more blather

Thirty-seven, mostly U.S., soldiers were shot down by the Taliban in a helicopter in Afghanistan yesterday. Oh yes, those surface to air missiles can be so effective against foreign troops who must be moved by air because they will be blown up on the roads -- or there are no roads. Ask Charlie Wilson.

Here's how foreign "aid workers" travel in Afghanistan:

FARAH, Afghanistan / U.S. Army Security Forces members of Provincial Reconstruction Team Farah gets his weapon ready to go on patrol to Farah Hospital, Farah City, Farah Province, Afghanistan, July 23. The Farah Director of Public Health and member of the PRT visited the hospital to assess the structure and working conditions. (ISAF Photo/ USAF SrA Alexandra Hoachlander)(Released) ISAF Media

New Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta knows what a war bureaucrat is expected to say when yet more deaths pile up:

"Their courage was exemplary, as was their determination to make this a safer world for their countries and for their fellow citizens," Panetta in a statement.

"We will stay the course to complete that mission, for which they and all who have served and lost their lives in Afghanistan have made the ultimate sacrifice."

Blah, blah, blah ...

Last week the International Crisis Group published a blistering sample of "humanitarian" bureaucrat speak assessing development in Afghanistan after 10 years of NATO/US war and occupation.

After a decade of major security, development and humanitarian assistance, the international community has failed to achieve a politically stable and economically viable Afghanistan. ...

The amount of international aid disbursed since 2001 -- $57 billion against $90 billion pledged -- is a fraction of what has been spent on the war effort. More importantly, it has largely failed to fulfill the international community’s pledges to rebuild Afghanistan. Poor planning and oversight have affected projects’ effectiveness and sustainability, with local authorities lacking the means to keep projects running, layers of subcontractors reducing the amounts that reach the ground and aid delivery further undermined by corruption in Kabul and bribes paid to insurgent groups to ensure security for development projects....

As more and more districts come under Taliban control, despite U.S. claims of substantial progress, and the insurgency spreads to areas regarded until recently as relatively secure, displacement and humanitarian needs are also rising. The U.S.-led counter-insurgency doctrine that aid should consolidate military gains has been at best unsuccessful, if not counter-productive.

Quick impact stabilisation projects, whether civilian or military-led, in areas retaken from the Taliban have failed to enhance public trust in government. The blurring of lines between needs-based assistance and the war effort has also challenged the ability of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to maintain their neutrality and independence and to operate in areas outside coalition and government forces’ control. As security deteriorates further, entire communities could be denied access to humanitarian assistance and basic services....

Or, in plain English, for too many Afghans, we've made life worse, not better. Oh, but we did spend a lot of money on the project, mostly in bribes and contractor profits.

A little understanding is a dangerous thing

If government were allowed to do its job, we're see a lot more compact and intelligent offerings like this.



But that would be terrible: we'd get smarter rather than more confused and resentful.

Bond market and stock market go their different ways

As Paul Krugman has pointed out the stock market and the bond market can be viewed as acting in contradictory ways since the Washington debt ceiling deal -- though he says that's not all there is to it (and he factors in European events). My brilliant partner who has written here before on matters financial, explains in this guest post just what those differing markets are and why they might have different paths. Just maybe, their divergence may enable those of us who aren't playing games with money to find some traction for demands that our rulers pay attention to the economy's real problems: failure to create jobs and to divide the nation's wealth fairly.

It's been said recently that, on the national level, the Republicans have become the party of Big Oil and the Democrats of Big Finance. Don't know whether I quite buy this, but there's something to it. What I do know is that there is a real division within Big Finance - between the stock market and the bond market.

As we've seen since the "deal" was sealed, the stock market has tanked, while the bond market is perfectly happy. I think this is because the stock market reflects the capacity of capital to earn a return on some kind of actual activity (though not necessarily making things) - while the bond market cares only whether or not there is inflation.

Bonds
When you invest in bonds, you know at the outset what your return is going to be; what you care about is whether or not inflation will make the same number of dollars less valuable when your bond matures. For example: Say you buy a one-year bond for $100,000. When it matures, you know you will get $103,000 back, earning $3,000 in interest. That's great - unless - during that same year there's been 5% inflation. Then, not only did you not make a profit, but while your money was sitting in the bond, it actually lost value. So "investing" in bonds is basically gambling on which is going to be higher - the interest you get paid, or inflation. (In real life, it's a little more complicated than this, because sometimes bonds kick off their interest during the life of the bond, rather than waiting until maturity, but this is the basic mechanism.)

That's why the bond market is desperate about controlling inflation at all costs (including the human costs of unemployment, loss of services, deferred maintenance on infrastructure). They don't care if the rest of the economy tanks, as long as it doesn't tank so badly that the companies and governments that sold them the bonds don't actually go belly up and default.

So the bond market really cares about reducing the federal deficit, because when the government spends more than it takes in, it does this literally by printing more money (or creating more digital dollars). This increase in the supply of money decreases the buying power of each dollar. Inflation doesn't hurt ordinary workers that much - as long as it's within reasonable limits - because wages usually rise to keep up with inflation. But it freaks out the people whose income and wealth depends on bonds.

By the way, the Clinton administration was deeply connected to the bond market. Part of the impetus for "welfare reform" was an attempt to find a place to cut government spending that would cater to class and race prejudices, and thereby reduce the deficit and keep inflation low.

Stocks
The stock market, on the other hand, used to be interested in long-term investments in the materials it takes to make actual products. In theory, you buy stock (a tiny bit of ownership) in a company; the company uses the money it raises by selling stock to invest in factories and equipment, or computers and software, in order to make more money by profiting on the stuff it sells. The stockholders get a part of that profit in the form of dividends.* As the company grows and reinvests some of its profits, the stock itself becomes more valuable. Eventually, the stockholders may decide to sell the stock itself, and make a profit on that "investment." Clearly, if there's been inflation over the same period, that profit is smaller than it would have been otherwise, but usually the value of stocks that are a good gamble goes up much faster than inflation.

In the last 30 years, however, there's been a change in how people gamble on the stock market. Instead of investing in order to earn regular dividends, and to make sure the principal doesn't lose value, people are now investing in order to make a profit on a rise in the price of the stock itself over a very short period of time. (In fact, some people even engage in a form of gambling called "day trading," in which they gamble on the changes in a stock's price over the course of a single day.) This means that instead of investing for the long term, both stockholders and company managements are thinking in terms of the reports that come out every quarter. If the price of a stock goes up during that short period, you can sell it and make a profit. And the managers who think they're responsible for that rise get huge bonuses.

This is why even though the U.S. economy is in the toilet, until the last few days, the stock market has been going up; it's completely recovered from the losses of the 2008-09 crash.

Why does any of this matter? I think because it gives us a little insight into one division within the class of folks who own stuff; it's a little more complicated because wealthy people tend to own both stocks and bonds, but what the two markets want from the economy is often very contradictory. There might be a place for a wedge somewhere in there for ordinary people who mostly don't own much of either kind of financial product to use to demand change and find a few allies.***
*Of course, if you're a marxist [or a thoughtful wage worker], you know that the actual profit comes from the fact that the workers weren't paid for all the labor they put into making the stuff, but that's a different issue. Right now we're thinking about how things work from the point of view of the people who own the stock. This is why when unemployment goes up, so does the stock market; higher unemployment means people who have jobs have less leverage on their wages, because the company knows that there are people without jobs who will work for the existing wage.

Friday cat blogging: Emerson visits his doctor

When you are on the road, you try to be of use to your hosts. We helped friends last week by taking Emerson to his doctor for a check up. He wasn't sure about this excursion.


Maybe I can get out this door? Not so fast buddy.


Oh alright, you can listen to my heart. See -- I'd be just fine if you'd let me alone.


Emerson visits a nice veterinary office where they understand the world properly. The sign says it all: "In ancient times cats were worshipped as Gods. They have never forgotten."

A socially useful 3rd party presidential bid?

In the last few weeks, New York's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been dishing out vast hunks of cash to constituencies that need at the very least to be neutralized if a person who has been a Republican (now an independent, before all that a Democrat) were to make a run for the White House. On July 24, he passed along $50 million to the Sierra Club to fight coal plants. Today the NY Times reports "Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth" -- to the tune of $30 million for a city program to try to connect African American and Latino young men to potential employers. (If there are any such employers, I have to add.)

At a moment when everyone from the vacuous Times columnist Tom Friedman to most voters watching Washington antics wish there was another way forward, maybe Bloomberg thinks he can make a go at being an attractive alternative who has not completely denied realities like climate change and racialized urban poverty, realities that neither party dares address at all.

Bloomberg took a brief run at a third party bid in 2008 -- maybe this time around the country is ready for a 69 year old billionaire? (After all, we just tried a fresh youthful face and got what appears a damn slow learning curve opposed by a bunch of lunatics.) And the Times article linked above indicates that, at least in that initiative, Bloomberg has fellow billionaire George Soros on the program with him.

Somehow, at a time when the richest one percent of earners grab nearly 25 percent of the country's income, it seems natural that rich men should think they could buy their way to saner policies. It's worked fairly well for New York City, or at least for Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. That is, if you set aside the damage to democratic (small "d") principles that comes with changing the rules of the game for an incumbent mayor (term limits were overturned to give Bloomberg a third term) and with the inhibition of communities from growing their own new leaders. But hey -- the guys with money don't have to do all that messy politicking. ...

I don't think this will actually go anywhere; the inertia in the system is likely to keep working. Maybe 2016? Bloomberg would only be 74. Anyway I hope Bloomberg keeps spreading his wealth around -- if we aren't allowed to tax the rich as the price of their citizenship, we need their vanity campaigns.

UPDATE: The Times has followed up by checking out response to Bloomberg's initiative for Black and Brown male youth employment in some of the neighborhoods.

“I’m glad to see somebody’s actually mentioning the words ‘young men’ and ‘color’ in the same sentence as ‘funding,’ ” said Danny R. Peralta, director for arts and education at The Point Community Development Corporation in the Bronx.

Still, Mr. Peralta worried that the money would just graze the surface of the problem. “If you can’t wake up in the morning to some food or if you can’t get some counseling for whatever traumas you’ve been experiencing,” he said, “it is not going to reach you.”

"They should just get in line"

Next time someone tells you that undocumented immigrants should have gotten in line like their law-abiding ancestors, show them this. There is no line for today's migrants.

I don't know about you, but my ancestors just sailed over the ocean in search of opportunity, busted their butts on the frontier and helped build this country, just like current migrants.



And check out the graphic's source: ColorLines magazine.

Warming Wednesdays: Californians like our climate policies

By the (low) standards of the United States, the state of California has enacted pretty good policies to try to mitigate climate change. By law, one third of our electricity is supposed to come from renewable sources by 2020 -- and by the same year, we are supposed to get our greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels.


A recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) survey shows we like the idea that California is doing something about climate change. As the Los Angeles Times graphic shows, we even want, across the political spectrum, to spend money on getting more renewables into the system.

One of the premises of much liberal politics is that, if we can just push reality-based policies through the many choke points in our political system, people will end up accepting their necessity and ever rather liking them. The PPIC findings on California's energy policy seem to bear that out. We've long fought air pollution and smog here.

As the Obama administration prepares to announce new fuel-efficiency standards for the U.S. auto industry, there is much more agreement among Californians on this aspect of U.S. energy policy: state residents overwhelmingly (84%) favor requiring automakers to improve fuel efficiency significantly, as do majorities across parties (90% Democrats, 81% independents, 76% Republicans).

When Californians see this year's array of extreme weather events -- floods, fires, heat waves -- they see climate change in progress.

The effects of global warming have already begun in the view of 61 percent of adults. This is an increase of 7 points since last July (54%) but similar to previous years (61% in 2009, 64% in 2008, 66% in 2007, and 63% in 2006). Another 22 percent say the impact of global warming will occur sometime in the future... Twelve percent say it will never occur.

Across parties, Democrats (69%) and independents (62%) are far more likely than Republicans (40%) to say the effects of global warming have already begun. The view that the effects of global warming have begun is up 10 points among Republicans, up 7 points among independents, and similar to last year among Democrats.

Most adults (58%) say California should act now to reduce emissions, while 38 percent prefer to wait until the economy and job situation improve. How do Californians think action to reduce global warming would affect employment? Nearly half (47%) say state action would result in more jobs and 23 percent say it would result in fewer, while 20 percent foresee no change in employment.

Interestingly, there is a racial difference in the importance accorded to effects of global warming.

Californians are more concerned about increased severity of wildfires (56%), air pollution (48%), and droughts (45%) than about increased flooding (28%). Blacks and Latinos are more likely than Asians and whites to say they are very concerned about each possibility. Less than half of whites are very concerned about any of these potential effects.

This mirrors divides throughout the national political picture: communities without wealth turn to government to soften the blows of systemic catastrophe while the more affluent think they can take care of themselves. The changing racial demographics of the population are likely to lead to shifts in government policy in the climate change arena as in so many others -- especially as Latinos increase their numbers and clout.

Debt ceiling process: it was all about Obama

One more thing about the debt ceiling debacle: the process reminded me, once again, that Barack Obama, like most politicians of our era, is not a political party builder. His brand is personal and those who might be his allies have to know that he'll do whatever he needs to do to maintain his own brand, without any concern for what his actions may do to the Democratic Party at large.

When I read Eric Foner on Abraham Lincoln, I was struck by the extreme lengths to which Lincoln was willing to go to build his party. During the 1850s, he stood down from running for the Senate to maintain a fragile party unity. As President, he knew he had to keep the irritating, moralistic abolitionists from completely bolting -- and this necessity forced him to into situations where he met with Black leaders and gradually came to be able to imagine ending slavery.

But major U.S. politicians don't have to do that kind of party-building/coalition-enhancing work anymore. Any major politician employs his own political consultant or guru, think GWB's Karl Rove or BHO's David Plouffe. The consultant's job doesn't derive from the party; it is dependent on the individual he/she is selling.

Moreover, at root, it is not the party that pays for campaigns. Campaign contributions are gifts (sometimes bribes for access) to the candidate, personally. The Party may matter in down ballot campaigns, but it is marginalized in presidential, senate, gubernatorial and even high profile Congressional contests. In modern campaigning, elections are all about individuals.

Obviously an African-American who managed to become President of the United States knows this in his bones. The Democratic Party was certainly not much there for him in his early days in Hyde Park or even running for the Senate from Illinois -- until he proved he could use charisma to overcome his natural (Black) negatives. There's nothing in that experience that would be likely to make him think that protecting the Party brand mattered at all in fights with the Tea Party Congress.

The reporter Elizabeth Drew, in one of her typical exhaustive and well-sourced explications of DC process, -- titled "What were they thinking?" -- offers several tidbits that reinforce the picture of Obama's actions being determined solely by his personal re-election strategy. She asserts:

The President argued that it’s critical to make cuts that will “get our fiscal house in order,” so that the American people and the politicians would accept the idea of new programs leading to growth and more jobs. But there are numerous indications that the public is ready for such programs now, and serious analysts see no reason why he should not also be taking such steps now, even if this increases the deficit in the short run. But that would be at odds with Obama’s current self-portrayal. People who are looking for work, or worried about their unemployment insurance, or getting their kids to college, may not be impressed with the argument that they must be patient while the President adjusts his fiscal image in time for the 2012 election. ...

“Everything is about the reelect,” [an] observer says—”where the President goes, what he does.”

Plouffe’s advice to the President defines not just Obama’s policies but also his behavior. Plouffe tells the President, according to this observer, that the [independent voter] target group wants him to seem the most reasonable man in the room.

Considering how utterly implausible and downright wacky the Republicans running for President are, this just might work -- though then again, rising unemployment may doom Obama regardless of what he does. If so, the poor, the young, and the elderly -- everyone who needs government -- will pay the price for his image burnishing. Meanwhile, the premises of his re-election campaign will only make it harder for candidates who hope to draw a contrast to Republican ignorance and greed in the 2012 cycle.

A Californian perspective on the screwy world of Washington politics

A rhinovirus has flattened me today, so instead of truly engaging with the progressive blogosphere's collective wail about the debt ceiling deal, I'm going to briefly amplify a Californian perspective I wrote elsewhere.

At a thoughtful blog where I frequently lurk, commenters were discussing what had caused the further right portions of the Republican party to take leave of the real world, enabling them to risk crashing the full faith and credit of the United States for the benefit of oil companies and their rich sponsors. This behavior -- though the media have lately treated it as normal -- is completely mad -- and against the best interests of the older lower middle class whites and small business owners who are the backbone of the Republicanism.

So how can this be happening? Why are Tea Partiers so eager to cut off their own noses to spite ... somebody? Here's a thought: a key component of this irrationality remains terror of losing racial dominance. Pretty soon, across the nation, white people aren't going to be the norm anymore. One response is organized racial panic; we've seen it in California. Here are some points drawn from the struggles against the initiatives (anti-immigrant laws, outlawing public affirmative action, outlawing bilingual education -- all populist measures that passed) we saw in the dreary 1990s.

• These people (Tea-Baggers in all flavors) fight as nihilisticly as they do because they really do feel they are drowning amid a sea of unfamiliar "Others";

• Back then, I thought consolidation of a different, browner, more functional Democratic Party would take at least a decade longer than it did -- we do have a better set of Dems in California now than we did when the party equivocated its way through the racial initiative wars. There seems to be a tipping point after which many younger whites accept and ally with rising majorities of communities of color to try to build rather than destroy;

• Despite this happy development, the residue of the structural damage done by the fearful, white, former majority is not something easily overcome. California still can't raise revenues and consequently is failing its browning population;

• California is just a state, however large; we are living through this at the national level in the context of declining American international hegemony -- political, economic, cultural. That's what scares me. If folks have hope of better times, they might reconstruct a reasonable polity after this wave of racially motivated wrecking passes through. But there are real challenges to hope going forward that arise from the unfamiliar situation of diminished power and choices the nation is experiencing.

No solutions from me except the usual ones: we need neither to mourn, nor to psychoanalyze the President, but to organize.

It's always worth the fight to protect the institutions of democracy insofar as we still have some; they give us the potential to live to fight another day. Weirdly, poll after poll tells us most of our fellow citizens don't like our current political trajectory. We need to make those majority sentiments effectual, not just complain about our losses.

Democracy's light fading

I'm sure I'll write much more about the horror show that has been the Washington fight over the debt ceiling, but for the moment I think I'll give the floor to my wise friend Darlene:

When our government was formed I am sure none of the wise men involved could envision a time when a handful of stupid dolts could destroy our democracy so effectively. .... This is one of the lowest times for our country that I can remember. I just can't bear to watch this charade we call 'government in action' much longer.

It's beginning to feel like watching a dear friend die. Link.

We are seeing a movement of radical rightwingers successfully break the institutions through which we the people democratically express our common needs and hopes in government.

• We elect a President on a promise of change. The Republican right refuses to cooperate even minimally with letting him implement his programs. Okay, some of that is just politics as usual.

• But in addition, in the Senate, the Republican right overthrows the principal of majority rule by abusing parliamentary customs and privileges, forcing every measure to get 60 percent of the vote rather than a majority.

• Thwarted by the checks and balances that prevent the legislature dominating the executive (and vice versa) in Constitutional system, the Republican majority in the House and the minority in Senate hold payments on the US national debt hostage while demanding Democratic legislators and the President agree to substitute undemocratic super committees and automatic spending cut mechanisms for an up and down vote on their budget ideas. Apparently they know they couldn't win an honest majority vote.

• Wherever they can, through state legislatures, Republicans are making it harder for people to vote who they fear might disagree with them. If they could, they'd deny the vote to Black, brown and young people entirely. They can't quite pull that off (yet), but they can push in that direction with difficult procedural hurdles and unnecessary demands for identity documents.

There's no point in sugar coating what we are seeing acted out in the debt ceiling fight: Republicans can't win in a fair participatory process, so they are willing to trash every historic achievement of U.S. democracy in order to get their way. Democrats and the President have been pathetically weak in responding to extortionate thuggery. We the people lose.

Observations from the road ...

You travel around, you see things, you meet people, you listen ... it all makes you think. This week we're on the road in New England. Some reflections:

• While picking up our rental car at Logan Airport in Boston, we faced the perennial question: "Did we want to add an additional driver on the rental?" That is, add my same-sex female partner. The honest answer was "yes." (I've been known to cheat on this one, but this wasn't one of the times to risk it.)
  
  So the young Latina behind the Budget counter asks us: "Are you married?" Picking my jaw up off the floor, I say "as much as the law allows in California." She says, "Okay -- no charge. In Massachusetts the rule is that we don't charge drivers with the same address."
  
  What a simple life one leads when the state considers you married!

• Both of us stayed in Appalachian Mountain Club huts in the mountains in our childhood, forty years ago. We remembered each hut having two large, dark single-gender rooms with nasty narrow rows of three-tier bunks. Imagine our surprise at the change in the intervening years. The AMC has cut the bunkrooms up into nooks and crannies, sleeping six or nine or even four -- still in three tier bunks but without any "male" or "female" designation. Everyone is thrown in together in smaller spaces. This is great for father-daughter hiking pairs (common) and really for just about everyone.
  
  We heard not one remark about having multi-gender accommodations and felt no discomfort in the arrangement. The world has changed. The huts do still have single-gender bathrooms; no one remarks on that either.

• En route to the mountains we fell into a conversation with a solid citizen of one of the surrounding New Hampshire towns. Somehow we talked a little about religious affiliations. He allowed as he was a Congregationalist in the tradition of the area.
  
  Then he remarked: "This new kind of religion people have gotten into in the last twenty-years -- the kind that is all about The Book [the Bible] -- it doesn't do much for the community. They are so busy with The Book, they don't care about the town's common life, about the teenagers ..."
  
  I was honestly surprised. I've got lots of beefs with literalist Biblical religion, but I didn't expect to hear this particular reflection on small town experience.

• At dinner one night, we fell into conversation with a Canadian family. They treated our being a lesbian couple as simply normal. Canadian gays have been getting married for nearly a decade.
  
  But we did have an interesting conversation about health insurance. The man does business in both the U.S. and Canada. He needs to attract highly skilled workers in a somewhat rare scientific field. It takes a lot of good benefits to win the ones he wants to hire. I was surprised to hear that even in Canada, this means that he offers supplemental benefits beyond the standard tax-supported Canadian "medicare" that covers everyone. Still, he is grateful to the government even about this: the state creates packages of clearly described insurance add-ons that he can buy for employees anywhere in the country and know what he is getting.
  
  Naturally, he finds buying health insurance in the United States for his employees something of a nightmare: every state has different offerings, if people move around they have to change insurers, and it is never entirely clear what is being covered. If he were running a giant corporation he'd have some bargaining power, but as a medium size technical business, his company is embroiled in constant hassles with insurance companies.
  
  If you were a responsible employer who had the option to locate a business in the U.S. or Canada, where you choose?

Saturday scenes and scenery: hiking the Presidentials

I've been out in the mountains again, the Presidential range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Compared to the altitude of western mountains, these are nothing, topping out at a little over 6000 feet. But they are not to be taken lightly, as this warning sign aims to get across. It doesn't work very well -- whenever I've been up on the ridge, I've always encountered at least a few unwary hikers with light footwear and inadequate clothing. We knew enough not to risk that (this is where I came to love peaks), but we could have had stronger knees and tougher feet. Oh well, we made it through our four day hike, though I limped a lot.


Hiking up to the ridge line requires a short, pretty steep ascent out of the forest and on to the rocks.


Yes, the motif here is rocks! The hiker is looking out toward Mount Washington from the col between the cones of Mount Madison (on right) and Mount Adams.


At the summit of Madison, more rocks and a rare wide view and blue sky. My mountain pictures always convey a slightly skewed perspective on my hikes. Most of the time on most peaks, clouds obscure at least some of the scene. But of course I snap pictures in the sunny moments, however rare.

Cairns like this mark the way above timber line. In foggy conditions, the quartz rock on top of the pile helps make the way more visible. Sometimes you just hike from cairn to cairn. Staying on the trail not only preserves the fragile alpine environment, but keeps you from slipping into an unseen ravine!


On the second day, we'd advanced much closer to Mount Washington, the crown of the range, having traversed the flank of Adams.


After Adams, the huge mound that is Jefferson comes into sight.


This is what the trail off of Jefferson looks like.


As we approached Mount Washington, the clouds moved in. We'd already skipped the summits because of my gimpy knee -- now we took a cut off around mountain's cone. The way led under the Cog Railway that carries tourists up the slope.


They photographed us, the crazy hikers, while we photographed them, the lazy dilettantes. Actually, we waved and smiled -- and hurried forward to get under shelter after a long hard day.

As we did throughout the trip, we stayed at an Appalachian Mountain Club hut that night. We launched off in the morning into pea soup fog, hoping for a little break in the clouds.


The break came, more swiftly and completely than we'd dared to hope.


The southern Presidentials, while still rugged, are a different sort of place than the high summits. Here, Monroe, Eisenhower and Pierce rise much less above the tree line.


On the flanks of Mount Eisenhower (we were still skipping summits because of my knee), there are exposed rock ledges. This one got its present name in 1972 -- before that it was known as "Pleasant Dome" which it is.


The last of the mountains we crossed on this trek was Mount Franklin Pierce which barely rises about the scrub pine forest. In my youth I remember it being called "Clinton," apparently for New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, the visionary who got the Erie Canal built. More history of the names is here.

This was a wonderful, tough trip for a couple of "old ladies." We both could have been in better shape, but we wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Rays of effing sunshine: NFL football is back -- and I discovered a new sports writer during the lockout!

It seems that while I was gallumphing through the White Mountains this week, football players and team owners reached an agreement that saves the upcoming season. Yeah! (Well, mostly "yeah" -- in 20 years many of us may be ashamed that we so loved a "sport" that left too many players brain damaged ...)

Like any fan, I followed the news of the negotiations. Unlike many fans, I had no problem deciding who was in the right. Football players may (sometimes) make millions, but most only have 3 or 4 good years getting beat up for our pleasure and then live with the results in their bodies for the rest of their lives. So I figure, they should get very well paid; they are entertainment industry workers of a unique sort. I go with the workers every time in labor disputes.

Last May the UC Berkeley Labor Center held an interesting forum on the dispute that I described here. At that forum, Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita (pictured here) suggested that the writer to read on the negotiations was Yahoo Sports' Michael Silver. I could not agree more.

All Silver's columns have been interesting, but if you care about the business of football as well as the sport, don't miss his summary response to individuals' actions during the lockout.

Here's a snippet to give the flavor of the piece:

So the question for fans and football columnists alike is this: Now that the owners will lift the lockout, can we unlock our hearts and forgive the transgressors who got us all hot and bothered before and during the work stoppage? In some cases, it won’t be easy. However, because I consider myself the ultimate team player -- or, more realistically, a guy with an increasingly lousy short-term memory who believes it’s healthier to let go of his anger -- I’m all about absolution as the football world returns to normal. ...

• Frustrated fans (and amateur economists): All you folks who informed me that I don’t understand capitalism, and/or called me a commie, were undoubtedly thrilled by my column comparing the owners to Politburo bosses. I might have used a bit of hyperbole for effect, but I stand by my basic premise that owning an NFL team is the least risky endeavor in American society. That said, econ class is over, and I’m not mad at any of you for disagreeing -- not even you knee-jerk management apologists on the right side of the auditorium.

• The owners and players who took the fans for granted: Yep, they gambled that you’d come running back to them once the labor dispute was settled, and I believe they were correct in that assessment. And I’m cool with that, just as I’m OK with the fans for not lashing out and/or tuning out en masse as a means of displaying their displeasure. ...

• The money-grabbers: Those owners who cut the pay of coaches and other employees once the lockout began, before any reasonable evidence of lost revenue, were being senseless, shameless and gutless, as I wrote in early June. And you know what? I don’t forgive them, unless and until they change their mind and refund the cash they gratuitously stole from their workers -- which the Jets have done. Sorry, but when someone like Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, who saved tens of millions of dollars in the uncapped year by reducing player payroll, institutes staff-wide pay reductions in March, someone has to whack him in the kneecaps. ...

Go on, go read the whole thing. And bookmark Silver for future reference.

I don't want to just gripe here all the time. I do after all, quite frequently, encounter things and people that delight me. Hence this feature: occasional posts labeled "rays of effing sunshine."

Where the IMF was born ...

While our rulers were testing whether they could crash the United States financial system through a combination of political brinksmanship and sheer stupidity, I've been offline for four days, hiking through New Hampshire's Presidential range. An Appalachian Mountain Club naturalist gave us a tip: "When you get down, you can see where they signed the Bretton Woods agreement -- just walk in." So we did, muddy boots, filthy clothes, smelly bodies and all.


In 1944, the rulers of the winning side in World War II wanted to create a financial system that would be rock solid. They believed the contentious national financial policies of the 1930s had led to the Great Depression and contributed to the catastrophic war. They also wanted to be sure they stayed on top. So they held a conference of 730 delegates from 44 nations at the Mount Washington Hotel in Breton Woods, New Hampshire. Pretty swanky place, then and now.


Nice digs for a meeting of the masters of the universe.


U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., photographed here in conversation with the British economist J.M. Keynes, led the meeting in setting up the International Monetary Fund and the predecessor organization that became the World Bank.


The Bretton Woods agreements, signed at this table, pegged the world financial system to the dollar -- and the dollar to gold. In 1971, President Nixon ended the arbitrary (and essentially irrational) practice of backing the dollar with gold and thus ended the original Bretton Woods regime. But the status of the dollar as the world's de facto safest form of money remained -- until our current clowns (mostly the Republican ones) put it in danger. If they succeed in crashing what remains of the international financial system to attain their dream of a world where they and their rich friends don't have to pay taxes, people all over will suffer. Evidently they don't care.

The institutions created at Bretton Woods have not been an unmixed blessing to most people in the world. The International Monetary Fund has forced brutal austerity regimes on poor countries to ensure they transfer their wealth to richer nations and individuals. But international financial anarchy is not good for most people either.


In the tranquil lobby, this fellow just stares down at the passing cast of characters, beyond worrying any more about it all. I had to wonder whether he hung there in 1944.

Walking the Presidentials

As you read this, I'll be coming off of the terrain above, having spent four days walking the ridgeline of the Presidential Mountains in New Hampshire. (That's not my pic; I stole it and will post some of my own when I get a chance.)

These are the mountains of my childhood, rugged but low. It's a privilege to be able to come back to them on vacation.