Tag Archives: republicans

Failing up.

I’ve heard a lot over the past few days about how the Republicans were able to do so well in Tuesday’s election. What is uncontroversial is that the Congress of the last two years has been an unmitigated failure, with fewer bills passed by the House than in any session in living memory. They put forward draconian bills that they know will never go anywhere. They work a week and take two weeks off. They demonize their opponents and make compromise a four-letter word. Where did they go right? Not sure, but the mid-term electorate has spoken, and they have rewarded failure with two more years of power and Republican leadership in the Senate.

It's THIS guy who worries me.That can only serve as an endorsement of the GOP’s strategy of doing absolutely nothing and letting nothing be done by anyone else. Here we are, at a time when interest rates are at historic lows, letting our national infrastructure rust away when we could be rebuilding it under very favorable terms, putting people to work, and investing in the future. Instead, we’ve opted for austerity at both the federal and the state level, laying off people instead of putting them to work, squeezing the air out of the economy years after the financial crash.

So, sure … this means more reactionary policies than before. You know, Inhoffe in charge of the Environment committee in the Senate; McCain presiding over Armed Services, Fox in charge of the henhouse committee, and so on. But hey … we’ve been through this before, right? If you want to work for positive change, here are a few things to look for:

  • “Free” Trade – Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch is warning that the fight over the TPP will take place in the House of Representatives, initially over fast-track authority. What you can do: Call your representative, Democrat or Republican, and ask where they stand on this issue; then tell them to do the right thing if they’re not already.
  • War in Syria – The Republican Senate will want to double-down on American military involvement in Syria. What you can do: We need to raise our voices against this and do it now.
  • Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid – The president will likely try to work with the GOP Senate to hammer out a version of his beloved “Grand Bargain”, giving away the store on Social Security and using the trust fund to pay for tax cuts, etc. What you can do: The president and our senators need to hear from us. Call them, email them, send up smoke signals.

Don’t give up. Organize. It’s the only thing we have … and the only thing we’ve ever had.

luv u,

jp

Vote, etc.

We live in what’s casually referred to as a democracy; more specifically, a representative democracy dominated by a “two party” system that is, in actuality, a single party with two wings. One wing is a wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthiest individuals and corporations on the planet. The other is an actual political party with a relatively broad base but that’s sluiced full of cash from many of the same players. I am not going to sit here and suggest that voting makes all of the difference in the world – it obviously doesn’t. But I will say that it’s something we must do (among many other things) if only to keep things from becoming exponentially worse than they are right now.

Vote because of these guysI know – that doesn’t sound like a gee-whiz, hyper positive, up-with-people rallying cry of the sort we have all grown to expect since our kindergarten days. It’s merely the truth – the vote is a right people have died defending in this country (see Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney), and we need to exercise it. We also need to encourage those around us to do the same thing. Because if we stay home, sit on our hands, choose to watch the game instead of marking the ballot, our opponents – those who are part of the wholly-owned corporate subsidiary known as the Republican party – gain even greater influence and power. Elections always have consequences.

Indeed, the evidence is all around us. We are still living with the fallout of the 2004 presidential election; specifically, every reactionary 5-4 Supreme Court decision from Citizens United to Shelby County vs. Holder is the product of the second Bush term and the appointment of what may be a permanent activist conservative majority with justices Alito and Roberts. The outright disaster of the 2010 mid-terms will be with us for at least the next decade, with Republican-biased redistricting, severe limits on abortion rights, attacks on voter access,  forced budgetary austerity, and persistent denial of and inaction on climate change.

So listen, friends … you may not love your congressional, gubernatorial, or down-ballot choices, but you need to vote for them, then work for more progressive alternatives. That’s the only way things ever change for the better in this country. So go do it.

luv,

jp

Back to the future.

This past week the president announced the deployment of 300 “military advisers” to Iraq in an effort to address concerns about recent territorial gains by the radical Sunni group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This sparked outrage on the part of the coterie of statist reactionaries (not “conservatives” in any way) who started the 2003 Iraq invasion, all of whom wish to turn back the clock to the days when they had some say over what battalion of other people’s children may be sent to what hell-hole.

Neocon good old days.Of course, they already had their hair on fire about Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East. Once again, the alarm bell is cranked up to eleven … like it was for the capture of the Benghazi jihadist, and for the the Bergdahl deal, and for pretty much every thing that happens anywhere, every day of the week. Not sure why we should listen to people like Dan Senor, or John McCain, or Bill Kristol, or anyone else still on television after having been so fantastically wrong on what they were supposed to be experts about, but we keep hearing from them anyway. Go back into Iraq, they say … it’s the only way to keep the country from falling apart.

Fortunately (or not), there is virtually no evidence that American intervention has ever done any underdeveloped country any good at all; quite the opposite, in fact. Our efforts in Afghanistan in the 1980s to rid that country of its Soviet-backed government resulted in more than a generation of civil war, anarchy, and frankly worse government. Our backing of Saddam Hussein during that same period brought disaster to the region, and most sickeningly to Iraq itself; our subsequent removal of Hussein has resulted in calamitous loss of life and a rending of the Iraqi nation that will never be undone.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the very thing advocated by war-lovers like McCain is a primary driver of the current crisis. We have, in fact, been aiding the opposition in Syria, both directly and through proxies in the Gulf. Just as happened in Afghanistan in the 80’s, we have invested in an unstable force whose most aggressive and bellicose elements McCain and others are insisting we must now bomb to smithereens in neighboring Iraq.

When are we going to stop being guided by people who are so reliably wrong?

luv u,

jp

Left behind.

The right-wing nut-job media machine has really been cranking overtime this past few weeks. One wonders how long the hair-on-fire outrage routine can possibly continue to work for them. When you sound the emergency broadcast system every day, 24 hours a day, doesn’t it reduce the effect … or, at least, the specialness? Maybe not in the context of today’s insatiable media culture. Perhaps there is no saturation point for this level of madness.

Right-wing target #1 this weekI confess, this Bergdahl-as-a-traitor obsession is simply astounding. Didn’t think they would go there, but apparently they have. The man spent five years as a captive of the Taliban, is finally released, and the reactionary pundits (and some of the centrists, as well) have been roasting him and his family alive ever since. This is trial by media, and they keep stoking the flame higher and higher, trotting out retired colonels and former Army comrades of Bergdahl who paint this craven picture of the young man, none of it based on demonstrable fact. My reliably conservative neighbor came out of his house the other day spouting this line about Bergdahl being a “deserter”; pretty much parroting what’s being said on Fox News.

Amazing. Really, people … can you give the guy a chance to recover, at least, and speak for himself? Of course, in actuality he is the projectile, not the target. The target is Obama and congressional Democrats. That will be the focus of everything the GOP does, every position they take, every word they say, from now until November. It should be lost on no one that at this point in the Clinton presidency, the impeachment process was well underway with an eye to the approaching mid-terms. This time around, I think they may be smart enough to avoid actual impeachment, opting instead for relentless, daily assaults on every breath Obama takes from a policy standpoint. That capability was in its infancy in 1998. Not anymore.

I will say this. If any of what they say about Bergdahl is true, it’s likely that he is actually a sensitive kid who was disillusioned by war.  Hard to blame him for that. The rest is pure conjecture.

luv u,

jp

NEXT WEEK: The “other side” of the deal.

Hot air.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is just the latest Republican politician with presidential ambitions to cast doubt on the validity of climate change, a necessary prerequisite for claiming the G.O.P. nomination in 2016. Indeed, anyone who is going to have a ghost of a chance with the tea-party fueled right-wing electorate in that party needs to be a climate change denialist to the core (though Rubio has since backpedaled slightly, perhaps in embarrassment). Sadly, then, the senator is not alone.

Found floating in denial.Now, I don’t usually comment on opinion columns, but I will make an exception on this occasion, only because columnist Tom Morgan is spectacularly deserving of the “tin ear” award for his column “Remember that report? Well, forget it.” I know Morgan is trying to be, well … sort of funny, I guess, but when he spouts something like this, the humor escapes me:

That is part of the problem the president and the Greens face. They want us to be alarmed by climate whatever. But the reason they changed the term from global warming is that the globe did not warm — not the way they predicted. And so many more of their predictions have not come about.

Morgan goes on to say that many of the predicted “calamities” related to climate change have failed to occur. All of this, mind you, on the week when it was reported that the West Antarctic glacier is, well, melting away … in fact, it’s in the midst of what’s described by researchers as an unstoppable retreat which will result in a precipitous rise in sea level over the long term. That’s long term.

Short term, the evidence of climate change is simply undeniable. Glaciers are retreating in Greenland, the arctic is melting, California and Texas are experiencing unprecedented drought, and extreme weather is becoming more and more extreme. Maybe Morgan doesn’t live in Tornado alley, but frankly, if he doesn’t now he may soon. Here in upstate New York, we’ve had more tornadoes in the last couple of years than in the previous 30. The next big storm may be headed your way.

Perhaps when Super Storm Sandys start happening twice or three times a month, people like Morgan and Rubio may start admitting the obvious. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

luv u,

jp

 

Week that was (redux).

Okay, I’ve been out of commission for a few days, taking comprehensive exams for a master’s degree in lethargy. (Hard to study for, actually … I keep falling asleep.) And though I’ve been quiet, very quiet for the last couple of weeks, I have been paying attention to what’s going on out in that wacky world of ours, and I have a thing or two to say about it. Just bet you can’t wait to hear it! Harumph!

Mr. Benghazi himselfBenghazi. Really? I mean, really? The republicans are on this Benghazi thing again? Why? Because the Affordable Care Act may not be as good a campaign issue as they thought? I keep hearing this trope about how awful it is that four people were killed. Yes, it’s awful. But Libya is a war zone. And these people make more noise about those four lives than they ever did about the more than 4,000 Americans that died in their Iraq war. How about we hold someone (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) accountable for that first, then maybe look at Benghazi (right after Afghanistan)? If magnitude counts for anything, Benghazi shouldn’t even be on the list in the first place.

Let us pray. It’s official – public meetings can be opened with some kind of Jesus prayer. Thank you, Supreme Court and, yes, George W. Bush, who replaced the then-dying William Rehnquist with another reliable young conservative, thereby locking us into reactionary decisions from the Court for another generation. I love the way proponents of prayer in the public square frame this as a freedom of religion issue. For crying out loud, YOU CAN PRAY ALL DAY LONG IF YOU WANT TO. When you do it in a public meeting, representing an institution of government that should have no association with a particular religion whatsoever, you are just cramming it into people’s faces and undermining their trust in the impartiality of government.

Nigerian abduction. Well, it took long enough for the press to talk about this, but they are finally giving it the coverage it deserves, thanks to a groundswell of anger from the grassroots. For a couple of weeks after this abduction, I kept thinking, where is this story? Our press tends to keep its distance from stories in Africa, unless they are real blockbusters. It’s just as well that there is some people power behind this … maybe that will bring about some meaningful  change in Nigeria.

luv u,

jp

White hats.

Ladies and gentlemen, Cliven Bundy has spoken, and mainstream conservatives are now running for the exits.

Well, his hat's in the right place.I use that term “conservative” in the very expansive sense that is in common usage now, descriptive of the type of “conservative” who appears to favor facing off against federal law enforcement officers with firearms. That’s the kind of conservative we saw praising Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his militia-inspired neighbors as he took his somewhat bizarre and incoherent stand against the Bureau of Land Management. It was the classic reactionary fairy tale, and our friends at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, and Limbaugh central sucked it up with great relish and spewed it out over the airwaves so that everyone in America knew the name of this rambling, aged, white-hatted patriot.

I’m no fan of extreme police tactics (like, for example, the violent dispersion of Occupy Wall Street), but pulling guns on federal agents is a serious matter, and I was flabbergasted over the past couple of weeks that I would need to explain that fact to people who term themselves conservatives. Of course, it seems that they didn’t make a very close study of the man they were raising to the level of Paul Revere, as it seemed to come to them as quite a surprise when he piped up with this little gem about African Americans:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

Okay, I may as well just say it. Not only is this guy a racist, he appears to be suffering some form of dementia; perhaps early stage Alzheimer’s. I think the latter condition may play a role in his lack of the ability to conceal the former. I would almost feel sorry for him, frankly, were it not for the fact that he’s bilking the federal government for a million dollars in back grazing fees and fines (note: the fees are very, very reasonable) and apparently content to start the equivalent of a modern range war to keep from parting with his cash. (It’s not hard to imagine what would happen to black people in, say, Philly if they were to try something similar.)

My advice to the Feds is this: the man has bank accounts, doesn’t he? Do to him what you are doing to the Russians and the Iranians. Freeze his assets until he complies. No guns needed for that.

luv u,

jp

Beer hat politics.

This past week, on The Daily Show, Patrick Stewart made an appearance as the Chinese moon probe “Jade Rabbit,” complete with ludicrous spacecraft headgear. He was reading the strangely lyrical farewell message advanced by the Chinese government as having come from the probe. Now, that was funny, but I’m afraid it barely meets the level of ridiculousness attained by political pundits now deployed across all media, busily framing in this fall’s election as a bounty-in-waiting for the Republicans and basically a replay of 2010.

Punditus domesticus

Here we are, nine months from casting the first votes and it starting to sound like the election’s already over. Part of the problem is that the 24 hour news cycle has a voracious hunger for news that’s easy to report on. The horse race of political contests is a particular favorite, so election season never, ever ends. The moment 2012 was settled, the pundits were talking about 2014 and even 2016. Now the talk is constant about the upcoming mid-terms, and how historically the president’s party does particularly badly on second-term midterm elections. Nothing can ever be different. Rinse and repeat.

It’s like they’re planting this beer-hat on all of us, with blinders on either side. This is what you can expect, they say. Just drink your beer and don’t deviate from the usual course. People don’t turn out for mid-terms, they tell us over and over. People aren’t interested in politics or governance, we are reminded. Move on, people – nothing to see here.

Reactionary politics at any level relies on the non-participation of the majority of the electorate. The pundit class actively encourages this non-participation. The only defense for the rest of us is to get actively involved in the mechanism of politics. There are a million different ways of doing this, from participating on the precinct level in local party politics to working with your neighbors and broader community on specific causes. But the minimum bar for this is to vote, under any and all circumstances. Especially …. especially when they don’t want you to.

And trust me … if you are non-white and living in a now-red state, they don’t want you to. All the more reason to do it.

luv u,

jp

It ain’t broke.

Not that this is all that unusual, but I heard from various representatives of the Republican party and the “tea party” movement on NPR this morning. I really wonder why these right-wing types are so critical of NPR – the network is almost wholly devoted to providing them with outsized coverage. Every time they sneeze, Steve Inskeep is holding the rag. Sure, I listen to them regularly, because they have some good reporters, some good programs, and because they’re better than everything else on my upstate New York radio dial. But that’s a bit like voting for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Yeah, Barry’s a pretty lousy president; he’s just better by an order of magnitude than the object he was running against. Pretty low bar, frankly.

Low-bar radioWhat irks me, though, is the legitimization of truly extremist right-wing notions of governance (or lack of same) through what I’m sure NPR and other networks consider “balance coverage”. A brief example: yesterday there was a report on some research having to do with economic inequality and the degree to which people believe the federal government has an active role to play in addressing its effects. It was presented in the usual “this side thinks this, while the other thinks this” manner; specifically, 90% of Democrats believe the government should be involved in fighting inequality, while Republicans are evenly split. This was played as reinforcing the notion of a nation divided along party lines, but they buried the lead – by these percentages, it looks like a significant majority … maybe 60 -70% – agree that the government has an active role to play. Why the hell isn’t that the story?

The only reason why extremist tea party-type ideas significantly influence national policy is that they have an outsized voice in the national conversation. That’s why we are essentially cutting the long-term unemployed off at the knees, canceling their unemployment when there’s still three job seekers for every available job, slashing food stamps while cutting taxes on corporations and throwing more money at the Pentagon. Large numbers of unemployed people are a necessary component of capitalism – that keeps labor inexpensive and profits high. So to the free market fundamentalist, that system is not broken … it’s working just fine. And that is the point of view that will continue to drive the national conversation until, along with the tea party, Occupy Wall Street gets their own response to the State of the Union.

Color me disgusted.

luv u,

jp

Austerity rules.

Just a few things I want to comment on this week, not at any great length. Bear with me, please.

Human Rights. In what appeared to be an effort to elicit Vietnam’s cooperation in the looming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade agreement” – really an investors’ rights agreement – Secretary of State John Kerry recently paid a visit to Hanoi to discuss new maritime security cooperation measures, against the backdrop of China’s recent declaration of a kind of demilitarized zone in the South China Sea. None of this is surprising, but what kind of made my jaw hang open was the reporting around the visit. The main hook was that Kerry had been part of America’s expeditionary force in South Vietnam during the war, and he toured some of his old haunts in the south. NPR (not to single them out – everyone else did this, too), practically in a single breath, made reference to this trip down memory lane, then referred to problems with Vietnam’s human rights record, which Washington complains about.

Kerry greets a survivor.Really? Just a little bit of context might be nice. What was Kerry doing there in the 1960s again? Vacationing? No. Oh, that’s right – he was part of a massive invasion force that was grinding Vietnam – particularly southern Vietnam – to a bloody pulp, leaving probably 2 million dead and three countries destroyed; a massive crime that we have never been held accountable for. I think it’s a little premature to lecture Hanoi on human rights, frankly.

Work release. The Fed will be dialing back their “quantitative easing” policy in the coming year. I have mixed feelings about this, frankly. The central bank has been the only organ of American power – public or private – seemingly willing to invest in this economy. Much of that investment has been in vain, as the banks the Fed lends to have been extremely reluctant to lend that money out. Corporations are sitting on their money, not hiring at any great clip. And of course, at every level of government, it’s cut, cut, cut; thousands of public sector jobs eliminated. Austerity rules, once again.

I have this nagging feeling that American capital is unwilling to invest in American workers – that they feel it’s a bad risk, and so they seek richer pastures elsewhere, where workers rights are even less protected the meager safeguards we enjoy here. What we need is some public investment entity to pick up the slack. We need to commit ourselves to full employment – if someone is willing and able to work, and the private sector has nothing to offer them, let the government provide them with work. They, in turn, will spend that money in their local economy, supporting private sector jobs and growth. At the same time we need to stop incentivizing corporate off-shoring of jobs (see the TPP, above).

Austerity isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice, a bad one, and we have to reject it if we want a better life.

luv u,

jp