Category Archives: Politics

Is It Bad Enough Yet? Yes, It Is

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“Is It Bad Enough Yet?” That’s a wonderful title for an article by Mark Bittman about where we are today:

The police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration.

You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse….

The root of the anger is inequality, about which statistics are mind-boggling: From 2009 to 2012 (that’s the most recent data), some 95 percent of new income has gone to the top 1 percent…

Everything affects everything. It’s all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters: A just and righteous system will have a positive impact on everything we care about, just as an unjust, exploitative system makes everything worse….

When underpaid workers begin their strikes by saying “I can’t breathe,” or by holding their hands over their heads and chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot,” they’re recognizing that their struggle is the same as that of African-Americans demanding dignity, respect and indeed safety on their own streets….

Increasingly, it seems, there’s an appetite and even unity to take on the billionaire class. Let’s recognize that if we are seeing positive change now, it’s in part because elected officials respond to pressure, and let’s remember that that pressure must be maintained no matter who is in office. Even if Bernie Sanders were to become president, the need for pressure would continue.

“True citizenship,” says [Saru Jayaraman of U.C. Berkeley]— echoing Jefferson — “is people continually protesting.” Precisely.

So warmest congratulations to the fast food workers and Walmart employees demanding a living wage and to the thousands who have marched or stood silently in protest because black lives matter. It’s all connected.

And enough is enough. That’s what Senator Elizabeth Warren said this week. Listen to her talk about Citigroup’s stranglehold on the Federal government and why we need to break up the biggest banks. It’s only 10 minutes and it’s worth watching and sharing.

We can’t directly vote against Walmart or Citigroup, but we can boycott them. Don’t shop at Walmart until they institute a living wage and don’t use a Citigroup credit card or checking account until they’re small enough to fail, because, yes, it is bad enough. 

We Don’t Torture Them Now – We Kill Them Instead

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American insanity isn’t limited to Republicans or Republican-sympathizers, of course. For example, President Obama may have curtailed our use of torture, but he’s expanded our use of drones. From The Atlantic:

A report from the CIA’s inspector general [in 2004] had raised the possibility that the CIA’s interrogation techniques violated the UN Convention Against Torture, and that individual officers might be liable for criminal prosecution. That torture report … “was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.”

The difficulty in keeping terrorism suspects locked up indefinitely without access to the regular judicial system gave our government an additional reason to kill them instead of capturing them. The result has been more drone attacks:

Though the U.S. drone war started under Bush …, Obama has ramped it up considerably in his half-decade in office. [According to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama] has authorized over nine times as many strikes as his predecessor… Estimates of the precise number of fatalities in those operations range widely; Zenko’s own tally, based on reporting from non-governmental research organizations, puts the rough death toll at around 3,500 people. These include an unknown number of civilian casualties believed by independent researchers to number at least in the hundreds….Tuesday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, lists 119 terror suspects known to have been detained by the CIA, of whom “at least 39 were subject to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques”….

But despite the vast disparity in the numbers of people abused through the CIA’s detention program versus killed by drones, there has been no official accounting of the latter program on par with the torture report released this week. “[Those] normally interested in upholding human rights ideals and promoting transparency (generally Democrats) simply will not investigate their own,” Zenko explained. “And as I’ve pointed out, in every public opinion poll … Americans are more comfortable killing suspected terrorists than torturing them.”

As Andrea Tartaros of Fox News said the other day, “We are awesome!”.

Insanity, Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, …

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You could make a list: the Declaration of Independence and most of the Bill of Rights; the electric light bulb and the Model T; the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Marshall Plan; Citizen Kane and “Good Vibrations”. The Apollo program. The personal computer and the Internet. Where would bloggers be without those?

We Americans have done some very good things. No doubt we’ll do many more, considering that there are almost 320 million of us now.

Still, the first entry on this blog, back in July 2012, was “Insanity”. I wrote it a few days after the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado (12 dead, 58 wounded). Since then, according to the statistics, my most frequent topics have been “America” and “Republicans”. Insanity has been a continuing theme.

It strikes me now that I might as well stop writing about how screwed up this country is. It’s like beating a dead prisoner.

Too often, we’ve been brutal and greedy, fearful and stupid. 

And it isn’t that we’ve simply had bad leaders now and then. Many of us have been in favor of slavery and genocide and showing those foreign bastards who’s boss. Today, an amazing number of Americans think racist cops are heroes, torture is justified, global warming is a hoax and the Rapture is coming any day now. For crying out loud, in 2004, a majority of American voters decided to give Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld four more years!

Maybe reading about Ferguson, “I can’t breathe”, the lowest turnout in 72 years, Boehner and McConnell, the CIA, the rapacious rich and the incessant shrinking of the middle class have merely put me in a temporary funk. But it’s hard to deny that there is something seriously wrong with America and many Americans. 

Rather than filling this blog every day with the latest outrage, I could add a sentence or two to every post: “BTW, America is still screwed up and not getting better. Please vote and, if you call yourself a Christian, try acting like one”.

Or maybe I can focus on things we could do to make things better. In that spirit, here’s what Senator Bernie Sanders called for recently. He wants to make Election Day a national holiday, amend the constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, and institute public funding of political campaigns. But he knows that none of that will happen unless more of us vote:

For those of us who believe in a vibrant democracy with an engaged and well-informed electorate, we have a lot of work ahead. Sadly, in the year 2014, we must still convince the American people about the relevance of government to their lives.

We must convince young people that if they vote in large numbers, we can lower the 20% real unemployment they are experiencing with a major jobs program. We must convince students that if they participate in the political process, we can lower the outrageously high student debt they face. We must convince low-income workers that voting can raise the national minimum wage to a real living wage. We must convince seniors that not only can we prevent cuts to Social Security – we can expand the paltry benefits that so many are forced to live on. We must convince the millions of Americans who are deeply worried about climate change that political participation can transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy – and create millions of jobs.

Throughout American history, people have fought and died to protect our democracy and set an example for other nations. In these very difficult times, we cannot turn our backs on them.

Well, actually, we can. But if we choose not to, how do we go about convincing more people that it’s worth being part of a “well-informed and engaged electorate”, while convincing many of our fellow citizens to give up their benighted political, economic and social beliefs? I really don’t know.

Republicans Are Evil (Blogging Made Easy)

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The Guardian reports:

Ohio Republicans push law to keep all details of executions secret.

They don’t want anyone, not even the courts, to know how executions are carried out in Ohio, because the gory details make capital punishment look bad.

Political Postmortem and Forecast

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Like many of us, I read some articles analyzing the recent election. None of them were very surprising. It was noted that, of the one-third of the electorate who voted, many were angry, scared old white people who don’t mirror the electorate as a whole and especially dislike our first black President; our midterm elections favor Republicans, and the electoral map was especially bad for Democrats this year; Americans insist on reelecting their own Senators and Representatives even though they hate Congress as a whole; the average voter is quite ignorant; negative advertising works; and 2016 will be better.

Of the articles I read, I thought this analysis by Andrew O’Hehir was worth sharing. It’s called “Democracy on the critical list: How do we escape this toxic political cycle?” After some painfully entertaining discussion of the election, O’Hehir concludes that “the upshot of all this is that nothing got done in the last Congress and nothing will get done in the next one, but this time the nothing will be a lot scarier to watch”.

He then asks:

Is there any plausible way out of this obsessive, recursive cycle, in which we can expect to see President Clinton 2.0 take office in January of 2017 with a feeble and ineffective Democratic majority, only to be punished for her feminist acts of treason by the resurgent angry white men in 2018, and so on, ad nauseam?

He considers four scenarios:

First, a charismatic, transformational leader will come along who can bring us together, much like some Democrats (apparently including Barack Obama himself) believed President Obama would do. You may remember this scenario from The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which the transformational leader came from another world.

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Second, the opposition will see the error of its ways and realize the other side was right all along. This is even less likely than scenario #1.

Third, our changing population will move our politics to the left. O’Hehir recognizes that American society is changing, but isn’t convinced our politics will change as a result. As more Hispanics do better economically, for example, they may move to the right. The same thing may happen with today’s younger voters as they grow older. (Personally, I wouldn’t rule this out. Politics tends to run in cycles and there may yet be a progressive reaction to the Age of Reagan.)

Fourth, some cataclysm will lead to the current system collapsing, leading to martial law, mass incarceration, revolution and so on. I think he’s joking when he mentions Senator Ted Cruz losing the Presidency and getting the South to secede. He also considers natural disasters and financial collapse. (One possibility he doesn’t mention is a really bad virus, like the one Obama was supposed to do something about. Its name eludes me.)

Instead of any of these alternatives, O’Hehir thinks it’s more likely that our democracy will simply fade away, as “tiny cadres of the ultra-rich squabble over control of the economy, [while] electoral politics is angrily contested over a narrow but contentious range of lifestyle issues, [driving] away all but the most committed culture warriors on either side….In due course the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats stops mattering, stops existing and is gone with the wind”.

It’s hard to be optimistic about America’s future. O’Hehir certainly isn’t. The only answer I see is that more people have to start caring enough to pay attention to politics and actually vote. The system still allows for the government to represent the majority of Americans, but only if the majority of Americans wisely choose who their representatives will be.