Culture – a cause for war, a means for consensus

“In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.“
- President Abraham Lincoln, from Meditation on the Divine Will, 1862

Happy birthday, to America's strongest cultural warrior

The fight against slavery was a culture war. So were the battles to control European immigration, the fight for women’s suffrage and the marches against Jim Crow laws. They were all assaults on a status quo that refused to acknowledge the promise of a country established on justice, fairness, and possibility.

Those who grip to their ethnic past as an identity – whether racist, righteous, or radical – deny the dynamism of collective will. They push back against the sunshine of a more tolerant society by hiding the disdain on their faces below hoods and hat brims, by huddling their children into the dark caves of home schooling, and by gathering with their communities under the shade of ever expanding tents of religious dogma. To them, Washington, DC is Rome, and they are Judean zealots, hiding in the hills, waiting for the Lord – the mighty hand of God – to help them with their rebellion.

So hoist your banners high, and ready your flanks, for there is an active theater in the culture wars. Lest you doubt the current contraception debate is a call to muster, remember that the Republicans like to call it a “War on Religion,” and for women’s health advocates, the conservatives are waging another battle in the “assault on women’s rights.”

Of at least three major stories that have pushed cultural touchstones to the fore in the last week, the most press was from the contraception “misstep” of the Obama administration. The Department of Health and Human Services dealt with it by coming up with a compromise that satisfied most, but not all, religious institutions, to whom the rule enabling free contraceptives to people of all faiths, despite the religious ethics of the institutions at which they work, would apply.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said the White House ruling “will not stand.” Republican hatchet man, and chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), titled a Thursday hearing on the issue, with the unfactual, hyperbolic and rhetorical, “Lines crossed: Separation of church and state. Has the Obama administration trampled on freedom of religion and freedom of conscience?”

This, of course, follows the feud between Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and Planned Parenthood, which had the right and left taking sides, and in which, eventually, women were the ultimate victors, at least for now.

But the assault continues, with what one Virginia State House delegate called “an attack on women’s health.” Charnielle Herring was referring to the draconian, invasive Virginia anti-abortion bill that requires women who choose to abort their pregnancies to be vaginally penetrated for “fetal ultrasound imaging and auscultation of fetal heart tone services…. for the purpose of determining gestational age.  When only the gestational sac is visible during ultrasound imaging, gestational age may be based upon measurement of the gestational sac.” Rarely is the assault so literal as it is in this law requiring medical professionals to stick something into a woman against her will.

Yet more battles are brewing. Washington recently became the seventh state to make gay marriage a legal institution, and it has just passed in New Jersey, although Gov. Chris Christie promises a veto. Maryland is on the verge of passing a gay marriage law, and similar legislation, introduced in Illinois, has won the support of Chicago mayor, and former Obama Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

The victory of the cultural warrior is neither Pyrrhic nor shallow. We fight as much for who we are now as for who we want to become, for whether this is a nation only of the exclusionary principle “In God We Trust,” or the all embracing unifier, “E Pluribis Unum -Out of many, one.” Even an arch-Conservative like Barry Goldwater called for a “reconciliation of diversity with unity” (even though he was talking about unifying the crazy and the practical members of the GOP).

Recent news reports about incidents of interracial marriages in this country seem to bear out Goldwater’s advice, quite literally. According to data from the Pew Research Center, released Thursday, marriages that cross racial or ethnic boundaries were at an all time high of 15% in 2010. Add to that, the research shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans “‘would be fine’ … if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group,” and it seems that at least one small cultural battle in this country is finally getting put to bed.

Victory on the field of cultural battle may be seen as the last gasp of free thought and reason, left black and ashen, in the smoldering ruins of a civilization of promise. Victory may also be seen as the legacy of unaccepting intolerance finally falling into legend, and becoming a cautionary tale about how we were almost diverted from the city on the hill we built from our commitment to unity. The willingness to hold the flagpole, though, when the fighting is over, has to include looking at the other hands raising the flag with you, like soldiers on Iwo Jima, and feeling pride that whether we agree or disagree, despite our uncommon pasts, we hold a common future.

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
- President Abraham Lincoln, at his first inaugural, March 4, 1861

-PBG

Related articles

• Rick’s Lucky Culture War (thedailybeast.com)
• Is There a War on Women? (blogher.com)
• A new culture war? Nah (cnn.com)

If the dust only wouldn’t fly

   “The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew figures in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. If the dust only wouldn’t fly. If the top would only stay on the soil, it might not be so bad.

The owner men went on leading to their point: ‘You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.’

The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The plains of American promise have become a wilderness, sucked of their sustaining dollars by those who have moved on to riper riches, and abandoned by those whose dreams are as dead and dry as the grey sand that bites at their eyes. It’s the dust bowl of upward mobility, blowing in rolling black blizzards over the dried, overworked earth of middle class labor that once yielded bumper crops of opportunity. Now, the middle class is an icon, a legend, like Jesus or the Fountain of Youth, easy for many to believe in, but hard to prove ever existed.

Indeed, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) said in a New Hampshire debate, earlier this month, that the term middle class “is something that should not be part of the Republican lexicon.”

“We’re a country that doesn’t allow for titles,” he said. “We don’t put people in classes. Maybe middle income people.”

Today, the empty space where the “middle income people” used to be has been taken by bankers and bailouts, the honest hard work moved to China and other emerging economies. “Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores,” President Obama noted in his State of the Union speech, Tuesday. “Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled.”

These days, we are all Okies, but unlike the Great Plains farmers of the 1930s, the former middle class doesn’t have an emerging domestic economy out west in which to seek their fortune. Instead, we fade into the streetscape, the coffee shops and bars, the food banks and food stamp lines, and watch the dancing shadows of the capital gainers and offshore bank account holders, disappearing below a distant sunset horizon.

“Now, the banks aren’t bad people. They’re just overwhelmed right now,” the One Percenters say, echoing GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s words to a Florida audience, last Tuesday, as they continue their march away from the dying middle class.

But even depression era, dust bowl land agents knew that wasn’t the case. As John Steinbeck writes, in Grapes of Wrath:

“No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

Who owns the American Dream? Is it scrawled in the cracked earth of the middle class’ economic dust bowl, or locked away in the safe of the one percent, earning $50,000 a day in interest and dividends?

The money for the middle class recovery has to come from somewhere, and it’s not coming from the capitalists who are more concerned with creating wealth than creating jobs.

Bitter Tea Party shouters and stimulus doubters destroyed the political will for public funding, and the private capital that funds our freedom to enterprise, that made this the Land of Opportunity, is being hoarded by the few who see themselves as the lynch pin to America’s success, but instead, have become the firing pin in the bombardment on our economy. They’ve bought all they can buy, leaving the rest with nothing.

One day, the wealthy will turn around to ask for a cup of coffee, or to get some dry cleaning done, or get their car repaired, and there will be no one there to service them.  Their shouts and demands will echo into the evening, and dissipate over the acres of lost opportunity. If they want us, they will have to put their hats in their hands and come find us, for we will all be far away, across the dry gulch, our backs to them, greeting the new sunrise.

-PBG

Related articles

• It Is The Middle Class, Stupids! (catsnjammer64.wordpress.com)
• Swiss Mitt: Romney’s Latest Out-Of-Touch Debate Moments (thinkprogress.org)
• Santorum: Stop using term “middle class” (cbsnews.com)

Boycott 2012? A political system on the razor’s edge

“We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true! But you people sit there — all of you — day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds — we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe this illusion we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We’re the illusions! So turn off this goddam set!” – Howard Beale, “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves,” from the movie “Network,” by Paddy Chayefsky (Sc. 122)

Welcome to the media helicopter. Join us, as we fly over the political landscape. Below, to the right, you see the mountain that the Republicans have constructed, that if you were standing, with your feet on the ground, you would notice is actually a molehill. But don’t worry. Up here, we’re not afraid to blow everything out of proportion. Their memes make it so easy, and it seems the rest of the country takes to our words like pigs to slop.

You can track the landscape beneath us like a map. That’s President Obama’s motorcade on the road to the left, driving on what is, for sure, a bumpy trail that leads back to the White House. The DNC work crew is busy filling in the potholes with Obama’s patchwork accomplishments. They want the road to look good, at least, as they are counting on a convoy of support to fall in line, nostalgic music blaring “Yes, We Can,” the New Day “O” logo flying from banners, bumpers and car antennas.

There remains something strange about the landscape we tour from the helicopter. It maintains a certain sameness, where light and shadow seem never to change, no matter which direction the activity below us seems to be moving. It’s like, if you zoom in to Google Earth, and change the axis on your neighborhood view, there comes a point when all you get is a stretching out of roof lines, because the satellites are presenting only the tops of the houses, and not what goes on beneath the eaves.

The more you stretch it out, the closer you get to a single, thin, nearly invisible line. It is along that line our national politics play out, merely moving back and forth, side to side, or up and down. In its reluctance to embrace the texture of our varied and difficult lives, it seeks to flatten us, compress us, force us into the assimilation of a single political continuum: left, left of center, center, right of center, right.

And while there is plenty of blame for the dysfunctional breakdown of the engine of government that can be laid at the feet of Congressional Republicans, the executive branch is deep under the hood, up to its elbows in gears and grime, and the president cannot show his face as if it is clean of grease smears. Plouffe and Axelrod can dump a cooler of Go-Jo over the commander-in-chief as if he just won the Superbowl, but there’s still that puddle of dirt at his feet. Between now and November, every step he takes tracks damp and dingy traces of the mistakes and missteps of his presidency.

Americans, then, abandon the government issued vehicle at the garage, where they expect nothing good to happen, walk next door to the Greyhound station, and take a bus on a journey through the political wilderness. At least that way, they can chart a course that’s not as one dimensional as the one in which, the system insists, we are participants. Instead, they call for a new ideal, a new set of tools, a new “shining city on the hill.”

There are serious activists in this election cycle who are calling for a boycott of the presidential ballot. Their dissatisfaction will not even be placated with an idyllic third party run – it’s just putting questionable oil into the same engine, and there is no confidence it would go smoothly because, their Facebook event page declares, a third party has “no possibility of winning the Presidential election due to corporate control over the media and the electoral process.”

“Third parties and third party candidates are unable to establish an alternate party or see a candidate to victory,” explained political activist Terri Lee, in an interview with Political Context’s Matt J. Stannard. “We know it, the third party candidates know it and The Establishment knows it too. Boycotting presidential elections does no harm to them because there was no chance for victory from the onset.”

“I can’t believe people are talking about voting,” one recent Facebook commenter wrote, in referring to the bias with which Americans react to news about the inappropriate and unethical behavior of their political enemies. What does it take to go that far in one’s mind, to imply that not voting will send any signal at all?

“It’s desirable to The Establishment to have us follow these silly elections,” Lee said, “to have us believe in the illusion of choice, and to have the public think ‘that’s politics’ and busy ourselves with phone banking, fundraising, canvassing, etc which is all FOR THEM! Intentionally, purposefully, and loudly not-voting is an act of defiance.”

“We do not struggle for control of organizations, social circles, and government,” declares the Vote for Nobody Campaign, on its website. “We do not lobby the State for favors or permission to control those with whom we disagree. Rather, we advocate freedom.”

The question remains, though, by giving up your vote, are you not abdicating that very freedom to the forces you eschew? This may be one tool in the belt, but the only way to create change in this country is to “lobby the State.”

Even if you want to change the entire government system to, say, a parliamentary one, as Ms. Lee advocates in her interview, a Constitutional Convention is necessary. To convene one, you have to lobby for it. One must distinguish, then, between inaction, as “an act of defiance,” and action, as an act of engagement.

Ignoring  the November ballot, or even just the presidential sections (and I am not advocating that, yet) is not and cannot be the only solution one chooses to create real change and “freedom” in our country. It can, though, be a catalyst to get activists moving to produce the right kind of revolution, one that serves our social, economic and diplomatic future.

“You say you’ll change the Constitution.
Well, you know, we all want to change your head.
You tell me it’s the institution.
Well, you know, you better free your mind instead.”
- Revolution, by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

It’s the irony of revolution, that to change it on the outside, we have to change it from within; to move the surface, you have to start at the core. In our country, that’s the Constitution. I haven’t given up on that process, yet. Maybe Howard Beale and the Beatles are right – the media want to change my head, want me to free my mind and go along. They want to give dimension to the illusion of choice. I get that. But the real choices, when you get down to it, are either follow the Constitutional process, or engage in forceful, possibly armed, resistance, and if that’s in the mind of any of these movements, as The Beatles sang, “you can count me out.”

- PBG

Ron Paul’s sphere sucks young voters into racism’s toilet

To the casual observer, like Baltimore Sun columnist Thomas F. Schaller, the perception of the Ron Paul brand is a simple one.

“To look at him,” Schaller points out in his opinion piece, Tuesday, “Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul seems harmless. He’s cute and contrarian. He wears poorly fitting suits. He’s decidedly un-slick. You almost want to pat him on the head.

“But,” he adds, later, “don’t let Dr. Paul’s impish, avuncular and professorial style fool you.”

Republican presidential contender, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), is in a maelstrom of his own making. Buoyed early in his political career by the support of swastika-wearing supremacists, he is struggling to disavow his ties to those groups, so in a season of wild political extremism, he can appear an even-tempered moderate.

The legacy, paleoconservative anti-federalists, like the folks in white hoods and Tim McVeigh and gun-hoarding militias, have harpooned the general anti-government backlash of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, and siphoned out those who blame others for their problems. The sucking sound is turning heads, and getting those who should know better to cock an ear like a curious dog.

If they would just go sniffing around, the educated youth who are drawn to the vortex would realize that those who were “taken” by the language of the Libertarian Party, are the ones looking for easy answers. They would find that too many Ron Paul supporters are a caucus of racist, xenophobic and ignorant American voters, that hangs on the dependent clauses that complete the phrase, “Things would be so much better in this country, if …”

Like, “Things would be so much better in this country if we controlled our borders,” or, “Things would be so much better in this country if everyone owned a gun,” or, “Things would be so much better in this country if only we didn’t have Obama [read 'a black man'] in the White House.”

So, why is Ron Paul such a big hit with racist extremists? One answer, on a web page of the white supremacy group Stormfront, asks a similar question, according to an article in the Herald-Tribune. “I understand he wins many fans because his monetary policy would hurt Jews,” one of the answers, submitted in the comments section, says.

The HT article goes on to describe some of the controversial language in a couple Ron Paul newsletters from the 1990s, that has raised some of these charges of racism:

“In the mid-1990s, between his two stints as a Texas congressman, Mr. Paul produced a newsletter called The Ron Paul Survival Report, which only months before the Oklahoma City bombings encouraged militias to seek out and expel federal agents in their midst. That edition was titled ‘Why Militias Scare the Striped Pants Off Big Government.’

“An earlier edition of another newsletter he produced, The Ron Paul Political Report, concluded that the need for citizens to arm themselves was only natural, given carjackings by ‘urban youth who play whites like pianos.’ The report, with no byline but written in the first person, said: ‘I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming.’”

Despite his name on the newsletter’s masthead, Rep. Paul says he didn’t make those statements, that others wrote them for him. Even if that’s true (there’s no byline attributing authorship to the articles), one would think that a politician, albeit an activist one, would want to be more careful with his branding, and do some oversight.

Paul, though, gives the excuse of the dirty cop who claims he was taking money from the mob because he was doing some super-secret undercover sting, that only he knew about, and he was trying to flip an informant. He’s not guilty of association, he says, because, “I’ll go to anybody who I think I can convert to change their viewpoints… I’m always looking at converting people to look at liberty the way I do.”

The problem is, when you throw the ignorant-furious-paranoid and the educated-furious-frustrated in the same pool, you can’t wipe them down with the same towel of liberty, without their shit getting on everything.

-PBG

Related articles

• Follow the Ron Paul Newsletter Twitter for 140-Character Bursts of Horrific Racism [2012] (gawker.com)
• The hyprocrisy of Ron Paul and his supporters (capitolhillblue.com)
• Bill Schneider: Paul’s Power Play in Iowa — But What’s Next? (huffingtonpost.com)

Legislative surreal-ities; what the GOP resists, persists

Obama: "Got it!" Boehner: "Uh-oh. What? I...this isn't what it looks like." Cantor: "You ain't gettin' this hand."

Compromise – it’s the word that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) eschewed as a synonym for “sell out,” when he spoke to CBS’ Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, one year ago, before he took the gavel from Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in January. It should come as no surprise, then, that the third most powerful man in our government is meeting resistance, even within his own caucus, when it comes to implementing a basic and necessary tool used to mitigate government dysfunction.  There will be no negotiated solution, no compromise, as long as Boehner, Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and House Republicans maintain an unassailable majority in the Lower Chamber.

The numerical advantage enabled them to pull back from an apparent debt deal in the summer, and allowed Republicans on the ensuing Super Committee – which itself was supposed to negotiate a solution – to accept failure. And it pulled back Boehner’s hand at the current payroll tax cut extension agreement, because his caucus reminded him he would be branded a sell out.

Now, though, Boehner & Co. are under attack from those who are supposed to be on their side. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on CNN, Tuesday, that what his brothers and sisters in the House are doing with the payroll tax cut extension, ” is harming the Republican Party.”

In an editorial Wednesday morning, the decidedly right of center Wall Street Journal admonished the House GOP leadership, calling their actions a “fiasco.”

Despite the House’s maneuver that allowed their caucus to vote against the Senate’s compromise, Tuesday, without it looking like a vote against a tax break, the Journal recognizes it would be perceived that way, anyway. “The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter,” the WSJ editorial board said, adding, “This should be impossible.”

A somewhat cynical McCain took note of the dismal ratings of Congress in his critique. “It is harming the view, if it’s possible any more, of the American people about Congress,” he said.

The continuing cries from the House of, “But our bill will be better. We want a whole year,” is falling on deaf ears because, as they acknowledge, everyone wants a whole year. What they, the Senate and the President want or are willing to exchange for that year, in a hurried negotiation, is the sticking point.

By engaging in another post-settlement negotiation, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are substituting the “legislative realities” the Republicans like to talk about when they “negotiate” a bill, with legislative surreal-ities. And for the millions this legislation affects, the consequences of their political gaming couldn’t be more real.

“The entire exercise is political,” the WSJ editorial points out, “but Republicans have thoroughly botched the politics.”

Maybe the voters will remember that, come November.

-PBG

Related articles

• Conservatives Pan GOP Strategy On Payroll Tax Cut: ‘A Fiasco,’ ‘Entirely Outplayed’ By Obama (thinkprogress.org)
• Drama trumps progress on payroll tax (politico.com)
• Cantor: Failure of tax cut extension would ‘be on Harry Reid’s lap’ (thehill.com)
• Has Boehner lost control of the House? (politico.com)

‘Job Creators’ are Jōb creators

Satan smiting Job with boils, William Blake

“My worry is that for American job creators, all the uncertainty is turning to fear that this toxic environment for job creation is a permanent state.
“Job creators in America are essentially on strike.”
- Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), to the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., September 15, 2011

Job creators. We owe them our unbridled loyalty, the Frank Luntz inspired talking points assure us, because these companies – whose annual gross is at least in the eight or nine digit range and yet are still mysteriously referred to as small businesses – made the middle class mobility of the last century possible.

This is a story of America’s middle class, in the midst of peace and prosperity, and the greedy adversaries in the one percent who took it all away, because they wanted to challenge our faith in, and fealty to, the nation they have taken unto themselves, as if it were another bauble in their jewelry drawer.

“You have blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth Your hand now, and touch all he has, and he will curse You to Your face.”  Satan, goading God into testing Job’s faith, Book of Job, 1:10-11

Like Satan in the Book of Job, they jealously solicited Congresses and presidents for a test of faith in our system, one that had – to their dismay – smiled on, and showed at least some favor to, America’s working class. The prosperity of the 1990s made Bill Clinton one of the most popular presidents of modern times, practically immune to their slings and arrows. Between that and losing the popular vote in the 2000 election, those who stood against the social equality that is the Democrats’ legacy (thanks to FDR and LBJ), became paranoid, fearing they were losing the control to which the thought they were entitled, as “sons of God.”

Perhaps they may be forgiven that misguided illusion, since their cultural ancestors were enabled by our country’s sordid history of exploiting and disenfranchising the working classes, from slavery to migrant workers to the depressed wages of the South’s industrial underclass. Or as they call it, the good old days.

Our brothers and sisters in civil service and the trades are the latest caste of society to be sacrificed and exploited for the financial gain of the wealthy. Yet the entitled still expect us to worship them, as if the money they make falls to us like manna from heaven. They are envious, and derisive, of a society that “succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules,” as President Obama said in Kansas on Tuesday.

Such a broad, social philosophy is an anathema to those who believe their wealth is constantly under siege by the Federal purse, and must be protected. “[G]overnment cannot engineer an economic recovery from Washington,” according to a recent article by the Job Creators Alliance, a group of millionaires and billionaires who claim to represent the interests of small businesses. “What it can do is increase incentives for business leaders to invest in human capital, or encourage entrepreneurs by giving them certainty about what the tax rates will be moving forward, or stop the steady flow of burdensome regulations from weighing down small businesses on Main Street.”

The bankers, industrialists and oil executives of the JCA may know a thing or two about making money – for themselves and their shareholders. But when it comes to creating opportunity for everyone else, it will always be measured against the bottom line. The president, though, says he wants there to be a chance for everyone to succeed, for everyone to be considered above the bottom line – not below it.

“They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years,” Obama said in his speech, “and their philosophy is simple: ‘We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. ‘”

And then he added, to the delight of the crowd, “I am here to say they are wrong.”

It’s a shame that it took an unfunded war and the collapse of the economy for Americans to wake up about what it means to vote against one’s self interest. It may have been forgivable, had not most of those who voted grown up tasting a decent life, and taken it for granted. We’re not talking about what it takes to become wealthy – merely to be comfortable. Just to reach the middle class these days takes a Herculean effort. Maybe this is where we, as a nation, see the light of equal opportunity, a level playing field, a “fair shot,” as the president said.

Then, those who had forgotten, either through cognitive dissonance or the span of generations, what it means to be middle class in America, can have a new sense of appreciation of what they had and lost, as Job did, when he confessed to God, “I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” (Book of Job, 42:3)

-PBG

I’m with stupid – how blind loyalty is killing US politics

Victory casts a veil on truth, and crushes critical thinking with an anvil. It’s as true in politics as it is in sports.  You win in American football, and all the persistent clouds over execution are overlooked by the shiny object of the victory. In politics, too, the clouds over unexecutable policy statements and personal failings are burned away by the cognitive dissonance that emanates from the glow of election night acceptance speeches. The voters have spoken. The fans screamed their support. We won. Go team.

To some, for whom ambition applies more to policy than personality, the votes are a starter’s pistol, a referee’s whistle, a signal that the clock has started and it’s time to get busy. But to others, the win is a rush of serotonin – engaging, enraging, empowering – a call for blind loyalty that builds a brick-brained wall of silence against detractors, even when they’re right.

The Republican victories of 2010, as those of the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, were spun by the winners as an unquestionable mandate, an embrace of their agenda, as opposed to what the results of those elections really were – a repudiation of the actions – and inaction – of the sitting Congress.

These are politicians “who have refused to listen to the voices of reason and compromise that are coming from outside of Washington,” as President Obama said, last week, referring to Republicans on the Super Committee, a construct that itself was a nod to stubborn stupidity, and that truly, and sadly, represented nothing good about our republic – only the constipation of compromise, the lowest common denominator of what passes for political discussion in the District of Columbia.

It is only within the beltway bubble, that the GOP can rail against higher taxes for millionaires because, as Speaker Boehner’s office claims, it would be a “job-killing tax hike on small businesses,” while also railing against the president’s plan for tax breaks for small businesses to spur hiring. There’s no disconnect, for them (or their followers), because they’re the ones saying it.

Similarly, when the president announced, last month, that he would withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of the year, effectively concluding the war there, the Republicans pounced on his policy as “cut-and-run,” even though the agreement to pull troops out by December, 2011, was negotiated by the Bush “Mission Accomplished” administration.

But this cognitive dissonance doesn’t just cut against the GOP. The Democrats are guilty of it, too. Otherwise, the mid-term elections of 2010 would have had a much different result.

Much of the dissatisfaction is brought about by a perception of overreaching, whether it’s the Democrats with the Affordable Care Act (which really didn’t reach far enough), or Republican actions, like the recently overturned Ohio collective bargaining law and Mississippi’s controversial Personhood Amendment. Extreme, anti-populist, anti-middle class, legislation like that is  “too much, too soon,” as Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) admitted that night.

Politics like that have put us on an increasingly unproductive political course.

“Our politics have become so polarized that both parties seem to be getting pushed farther and farther from the center, which means farther and farther from where most voters reside,” Republican pollster, Whit Ayers, told the Los Angeles Times, after the election.

Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster, seemed to agree with his colleague, admitting to the LA Times, in the same story, “This is a passionately unhappy electorate.”

It has gotten so bad, that even popular legislative proposals, like the tax hike on millionaires, are re-framed as left wing socialism, solely because they are supported by most of the Democratic caucus and President Obama.

“The President can’t get anything done without the support of Congress,” then DNC chair, Tim Kaine, told a group of students in 2010, before the elections. He might have added, that without the agreement of the president, nothing can get done, either.

Our Founding Fathers intended the separation of powers to be a check and balance against overreaching by any single branch of government, with the expectation that reason would prevail. Instead, it has become a catch-22, where leaders are available only when they’re not there, and parading in lockstep is a fool’s obsession. “I’m with stupid” may make a cute T-shirt, but it’s a lousy name tag. Time for the real leaders, in all the policy making branches, to cut the cord.

-PBG

Linking arms with Occupy – the last, best Baby Boomer chance

I am of the undertow of the Baby Boomers, the last third of a generation, unwilling to let go of our ability to subvert the tide and change the world, defined for us by our older brothers and sisters. Born between 1957 and 1964, we are the President of the United States, the governors of ten states (only three states have chief executives younger than we are), 16 US Senators and almost 100 members in the US House of Representatives. We are Democrats and Republicans, atheists and adherents, activists and apathetics.

The older Boomers who came before us were born in a time of a great, nationalist, moral validation brought on by the victories in World War Two, born when the world was trying to right itself after the end of European colonialism and the beginning of the Arms Race with the Soviet Union. By the time we, the remnants of a generation, came along, it seemed all the hard work had already been done.

From Occupy Dallas, Dept. of Defense, UW Digital Archives & other public domain sources

Our younger brothers and sisters in the Occupy Movement have made that hard work worth doing again. Many more choose, once again, to link arms in unity against the enemies of social progress, like wealth disparity and growing national poverty, like a government controlled more by a complex of corporate corruption than by the needs of the people who elected them. The money promises to get our overpaid representatives reelected, and the new Super PACs, like the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and legislative ghost writers from ALEC, promise to keep their political opponents at bay by working to inhibit voter access through laws passed in more than a dozen states.

Just today, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) formally requested that US Attorney General Eric Holder investigate “whether new state voting laws resulted from collusion or an orchestrated effort to limit voter turnout,” the Miami Herald reported.

In one instance, a teacher in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, unknowingly violated that state’s new voter registration laws while trying to teach her students about the importance of becoming a voter. According to a story in the Daytona Beach News-Journal:

“What happened is that [high school teacher Jill] Cicciarelli helped her 17-year-old seniors with the paperwork to preregister for the voting rolls, as she does every year. She’d been on maternity leave in the spring when the Legislature passed a voting law that, among other things, requires third parties to register with the state before they help sign up new voters.

“The law has proved so daunting that the League of Women Voters suspended voter registration efforts in Florida for fear of exposing volunteers to up to $1,000 in fines.”

Nelson told the students, “It is voter suppression,” the Daytona Beach paper reported.

But it’s not just voting rights. The entire debt ceiling debate last summer, and the current travails of the resulting Super Committee, now in session, are about the tax breaks for the wealthiest versus the needs of those who depend on government help to feed themselves and their families.

And that demographic is growing alarmingly fast. According to a September report from the US Census Bureau, between 2009 and 2010, “[r]eal median household income declined,”  and “[t]he poverty rate increased.”

More to the point of the younger protesters participating in the Occupy Movement, the Census Bureau report continues:

“An estimated 5.9 million young adults aged 25 to 34 resided in their parents’ households in 2011, compared to 4.7 million before the recession. By spring 2011, 14.2 percent of young adults lived in their parents’ households, representing an increase of 2.4 percentage points since spring 2007.”

Why do so many more live at home at an age when the rest of us couldn’t wait to get out of the house? The report points out, “45.3 percent had income below the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65 ($11,344).”

Some people have folded their arms, unwilling to embrace Occupy because they do not understand what the movement stands for. That might be because there is so much not going right for the future of our country, that one can throw a dart and hit an issue of concern to Occupy’s participants and adherents.

That’s why it is important not to greet them with folded arms, but with linked arms, the position they are proud to take before they are arrested for calling attention to the vanishing American Dream.

-PBG

‘Careful’ and ‘Responsible’ foreign policy flusters GOP

“…we have a phased redeployment, where we’re as careful getting out as we were careless getting in…”
- Sen. Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, referring to his plan for withdrawal from Iraq, in an interview with Politico before the Potomac Primaries, Feb. 11, 2008.

“As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end, for the sake of our national security, and to strengthen American leadership around the world.”
- President Obama, announcing the end to the Iraq War, with all troops coming home by the end of the year, Friday, October 21, 2011.

No aircraft carrier. No glorious banner. Just a man announcing the resolution of a campaign promise, standing at the podium in the White House briefing room. What a refreshing change. Less than three years after taking his oath of office, President Obama announced today that not only he, but the nation he leads, our nation, “keeps its commitments.”

By doing so, he said, “the United States is moving forward from a position of strength.” That goes not only for the Iraqi theater, but also on the wide and brightly lit stage of global politics.

For his political opponents, though, all the president’s victories are framed as failures. It doesn’t matter how measured the delivery, or how much these foreign policy resolutions raise America’s stock in the eyes of our global partners, the GOP is ready to throw mud on it.

Getting bin Laden was a failure for Obama because he rejected “harsh interrogation techniques;” helping a NATO mission to get rid of Gaddafi was, according to former UN Ambassador John Bolton, a “massive strategic failure;” and today’s announcement has been greeted by Republican presidential primary candidate Mitt Romney as an “astonishing failure” of negotiation with the Iraqis, who could not get their parliament to agree on taking out the trash, much less protecting US troops from war crimes charges that would obviously be against our national interest. Romney actually called the president’s efforts at securing an agreement “sheer ineptitude.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) at least attempted to point out that it’s the Iraqis who failed, here, while he also blamed his former opponent. “It is a consequential failure of both the Obama Administration,” he said, “as well as the Iraqi government.”

We are no longer welcome in Iraq, and no amount of blood-lust pride is worth the arm twisting it would take to make their government work the way we would like. It was their deadline to meet, under the agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration, and they could not meet it. But the GOP and other right wing war machine have adopted the anachronistic, imperial view, that as long as we’re in charge, and we have guns, things will go our way. Might makes right is a basic tenet of their thinking, whether they’re talking about foreign policy or domestic issues. As conservative über-blogger Andrew Breitbart ranted in September, “We outnumber [liberals] in this country, and we have the guns.”

Breitbart, of course, is wrong. Guns don’t rule. People do. He is influenced by the same Second Amendment radicalism as the politicians, who operate under the influence of the diesel fumes and gunpowder smoke their perpetual campaigns must inhale to live. They are like ostriches on a pipe dream, still unwilling to accept that in our shrunken world, we can no longer be lulled by 1950s style, commie-behind-every-tree, mom and apple pie, Madison Avenue icons, nor can we be bullied into believing what is best for captains of industry is best for us.

President Obama talks with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq during a secure video teleconference in the Situation Room of the White House, during which he informed the Iraqi president of the decision to withdraw all forces by the end of the year. Oct. 21, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Iraq was Bush and Cheney’s war of revenge. It was a war to put money in the pockets of big government contractors, like Haliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root, and Blackwater. The failure to reach terms with the Iraqi parliament affects them as much as the troops. Should they continue to work for the State Department, they would no longer have any kind of diplomatic protection. Ironic, perhaps, because it is precisely because of Blackwater’s alleged overreaction in a Baghdad firefight, in 2007, which killed 17 Iraqi civilians, that blew away any chance of criminal immunity for America’s military, or the contractors who work for them.

“The tide of war is receding,” in our major foreign involvements, Obama reiterated, today. But as long as our Congress remains as dysfunctional as the Iraqi parliament, the ship of state will remain painfully aground, here, for there will be no reciprocal rising tide to lift us. Welcome to the economy, a new kind of quagmire.

-PBG

Occupy – Grassroots, at the root level

“Yesterday, I brought to your attention how offended we are at the Tea Party Express that the media would dare to continually insist that the Occupy Wall Street protests are motivated by the same issues that the Tea Party coalesced around and that they are the Tea Party of the left!”
- E-mail from Tea Party Express to supporters, sent Monday September 11, 2011

“[W]hen you compare these people with tea partiers—now you’ve got a problem with We the People.”
-  Web posting from Tea Party Patriots to its local groups, Tuesday, October 11, 2011

They’re offended. They’ve got a problem. They’re using exclamation points. The longer Occupy Wall Street, and its nationwide inspired clones, continue their protests, the more vociferous the right’s opposition is getting. The Tea Party just does not get the Occupy movement. They don’t get that it is an actual grassroots movement, in the dirt, at the root level, and not the grass of a manicured, suburban lawn, cared for by gardeners who have been hired by big banks and John Birchers like the Koch brothers.

It only makes sense that in trying to voice opposition to Occupy, the radical right has resorted to categorizing the participants in anarchistic memes. “[W]atch us keep owning Teamsters and Hippies,” invites one right wing video website.

“Whenever I hear somebody call me a hippy, I just write it off as ignorance, because that’s a term that’s no longer relevant,” said Kate, an Atlanta teacher and community organizer, who spent Thursday evening helping feed those camping at Occupy Atlanta, in Woodruff Park, in the heart of the city’s downtown business district.

“I have very little respect for people who try to take down someone else whose trying to do some good work,” she insists. Still, she says there is commonality among the Occupy and Tea Party movements. “The people I’ve spoken to from the Tea Party are interested in community work, and we may not agree on all of our political points, but I have respect for people who are trying to go out into the community and engage with their neighbors.”

A young web designer at the Occupy Atlanta site, named Ginsen, seemed to agree. “Overall, I support any sort of passion for people to change something they don’t believe is right,” she said, after setting aside the Hula Hoop she had been swaying around in.

Tea Party groups, however, see it much differently, feeling their organized, political message trumps any semblance of credibility Occupy participants think they have. “Tea partiers usually have informed opinions and clear articulation of their principles and goals,” claims the Tea Party Express. “The socialist mobs sitting around in NYC rely on mind-numbing chants, bongo drums and bullhorns, because there is no substance to their message.”

But Kate, the teacher, sees that as a plus. “Politics is not relevant on the grassroots,” she said. “What’s relevant here, is that people are coming together, on a very personal level. You can ask people here. You don’t see big non-profits, with a big presence; you don’t see labor organizations; you don’t see the Tea Party. You see people, and that, to me, is what grassroots organizing is. When you get politics involved, that is when it loses that people power.”

Harrison Schultz, an activist participating in Occupy Wall Street, told Politico much the same thing. “This is not a political movement, this is a social movement,” he said.

But the Tea Party groups see the politics as proof of their power, particularly after the 2010 Congressional elections. “Occupy Wall Street may someday become a significant force in American politics, but they’re certainly not today,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, according to the Politico article.

Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a group that trains tea party activists, told Politico that he’s not too worried about Occupy protesters becoming a force. “The more you read about [them] and their behavior,” he insisted, “the more it looks like they’ll implode on their own.”

"C'mon. Do we look like union organizers?"

In Atlanta, Ginsen seemed unfazed by the actions and threats of Tea Party and other right wing activists. “We can handle a little bit of push back. It’s okay,” she said, matter of factly. “In the end, if they push back, we’ll push harder.”

And while Ryun doesn’t seem to take the Occupy protesters seriously, the more strident Tea Party Express had a different characterization of the Americans participating in the Occupy movement. “They are a disorganized unruly mob of shiftless protestors that has been reinforced by union and organized labor thugs,” said Amy Kremer, in her letter to supporters, asking for donations.

Ginsen indicated that she believed that was nothing but partisan hype. “When you see girls with Hula Hoops, it’s kind of hard to think we’re a bunch of union organizers here,” she said. “I mean, c’mon. Do we look like we’re part of a union?”

-PBG

Related articles

• That Tea Party-Occupy Wall Street Venn Diagram (businessinsider.com)
• Tea partiers defend turf from Occupiers (politico.com)
• ‘Shop Talk’: Tea Party Battles ‘Occupy Wall Street’ (npr.org)
• A Very Simple Venn Diagram of Where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Agree (theatlantic.com)