Steven Colbert was joined in his debate with himself last night over global warming by VP Al Gore. Gore's reputation as "humor-challenged" should take a beating from this appearance...
Remember School House Rock's cartoon about how a bill becomes a law? Here's the updated version (a little depressing for those of us who would prefer to save our children from unprecedented climate disruption)...
Rep. Ed Markey has a post up on HuffPo today that calls for the online public to support his bill, HR 3458, The Internet Freedom Preservation Act", which he and Rep. Anna Eshoo proposed in July. He notes that it is a legislative support for the actions the FCC took last week to preserve equal access to the internet for all content providers (this is what is commonly referred to as "net neutrality").
Contrast that with John McCain's recently introduced "Internet Freedom Act of 2009", which is a newspeak name for an attempt to make sure that the internet can be easily controlled by commercial entities - the "freedom" it refers to is freedom from regulation by the FCC (because watching the economy crash has shown us how well deregulation works!)
McCain admitted during his campaign for the presidency that he didn't use the internet, but has received more donations from the companies who would benefit from this legislation than any other senator. His bill would allow those companies to privilege the upload of some content over other content (kind of like what's happening with your cable bill now), and frustrate the actions the FCC just took to preserve the open access to the internet that has made it the most successful communications development in history. Here's Boing Boing Editor Xeni Jardin describing the argument to Rachel Maddow (note the observation that Vint Cerf and most of the others who created the web as we know it today are all on the side of preserving equal access):
In other words, McCain's bill is crafted to do exactly the opposite of Markey's bill. The distinction is critical, and Markey's bill deserves the support of anyone who values the free exchange of ideas on the web. E-mail, call, or write your representatives today!
Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has produced a documentary about the Afghan war that makes a strong case for disengagement. This is the first of six parts, all available online at Brave New Films' site, RethinkAfghanistan.com.
The documentary includes interiews with a large number of experts in the mechanics of the region, and considering the decisions facing us about getting further mired in this conflict, this is a point of view that we need to see:
Most of the time, this blog's name alludes to shouts of "NO!" that spring unbidden from the viewer (at least, this viewer) at the inanities, banality, sloppy reporting, and outright lies that appear nightly on our TV screens. Every now and again, though, the same screen produces shouts of "YES!", and it would be both silly and churlish not to acknowledge them.
Last night was such a night. First, Keith Olbermann delivered an hour-long "special comment" about the need for health care reform that drew upon his own recent experience in caring for his father, who was stricken by serious illness last month. In that editorial, Olbermann made reference to the fears that inform the craziness that has been prominent among opponents of reform, the failure of the supporters of reform to allay those fears, and the high stakes that raise the pressure and the volume on both sides of the argument ("it's about pain and death").
Olbermann's special comments have become legendary (or infamous, depending on who you talk to), and I had my doubts about whether he could keep one going for a full hour, but he did it, in spades. If you have time, click the link and have some - it's great television and a service to the republic.
Olbermann's show was followed by the always interesting Rachel Maddow, who provided a characteristically informative and provocative hour, but the last segment of her show was the cherry on top of the evening's offering - an inteview with Sarah Vowell about her history of the Puritan settlement of America, The Wordy Shipmates, which is newly out in paperback.
Vowell's take on our history is layered with both pride in our country's principles and and ambivalence about our shortcomings, and so provides a much richer assessment of the subject than most. Unsurprisingly, her history of the Puritans runs true to this form. She compares the experience and writing of John Winthrop and Roger Williams as two poles of the Puritan experiment, and makes an interesting case that much of our national character is both represented by and was established in the conflict between these two men.
What made the segment on Maddow's show so compelling, though, was a discussion of Winthrop's famous sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity", written while Winthrop was on his way to become governor, and famous because of its exhortation that the Massachusetts Bay Colony should rise to its destiny as a "city on a hill", the city that Ronald Reagan referred to as "shining" in his paean to American greatness three hundred years later. Vowell pointed out that unlike Reagan's speech, WInthrop's sermon takes much more account of the fact that we can fail at this task, and that if we do so, it will be from a lack of the communitarianism that he calls for.
I expect that it was a coincidence, but coming as it did after Olbermann's personal and impassioned plea that we fix the glaring hole in our community represented by the health care system in this country, it was particularly moving and appropriate. Vowell points out that in making reference to the "shining city on the hill", Reagan buried the lede of the sermon itself. Instead, she commends to us a much more poetic and much less triumphalist passage, which comes just before the city on the hill reference:
"We must be willing to
abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’
necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness,
gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make
others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and
suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in
the work, as members of the same body."
I'm not a believer, but even I can say "amen" to that.
For decades, we have measured our economic success as a nation by reference to GNP (and more recently, GDP, as we recognized that GNP included a lot of "product" of which we didn't enjoy the benefits). That measurement has some value, but just as it has become obvious that the free market can't or doesn't solve all its own problems, it's becoming more and more obvious that GDP alone isn't an adequate measure of our health as a nation.
On one level, the shortcomings of measuring only our material wealth have been obvious for decades. Robert Kennedy's first campaign speech 41 years ago made an eloquent case against fixation on GDP:
More recently, Nobel laureates in economics Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have just produced a paper that concludes that it is a mistake to focus solely on GDP, even to answer questions within the narrow sphere of economics. From today's NYT:
"By their reckoning, much of the contemporary economic disaster owes
to the misbegotten assumption that policy makers simply had to focus on
nurturing growth, trusting that this would maximize prosperity for all.
'What you measure affects what you do,' Mr. Stiglitz said
Tuesday as he discussed the study before a gathering of journalists in
New York. 'If you don’t measure the right thing, you don’t do the right
thing.'
According to the report, much of the world has long been ruled by an unhealthy fixation on swelling the gross domestic product,
or the quantity of goods and services the economy produces. With a
singular obsession on making G.D.P. bigger, many societies — not least,
the United States — failed to factor in the social costs of joblessness
and the public health impacts of environmental degradation. They
allowed banks to borrow and bet unfathomable amounts of money, juicing
the present by mortgaging the future, thus laying the ground for the
worst financial crisis since the 1930s."
The Times article goes on to say that the study is more critique than prescription, and I can think of no better use of the time of these economists than coming up with the prescription that's missing from it. Whether they do or someone else does, though, the critique from within the economics profession is long overdue.
Here's a great op-ed by Paul Krugman about Obama's dilemma regarding the stimulus package and the political night of the long knives that the president's opponents are trying to get started as a result of the worse than expected economic news from this week. Read the whole thing, but the essence of it is in the last line:
"What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already
done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like
adults."
Here's a great offer from MoveOn.org - get a great clean energy graphic designed by Shepard Fairey on a free sticker, and put it up wherever it can be seen the most (maybe you should leave it off your Hummer, but maybe not):
This incredible article was published as a paper and delivered as a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Pacific regional meeting in June of 1968. Since then, it has become the most widely quoted piece of peer-reviewed scholarship in history, and it deserves it. Read it if you haven't. Reread it if you have.
It's been too long since I posted here - for the few of you who have actually been stopping by to read, thanks for your patience and please accept my apologies.
The reasons for my silence have been mostly personal - lots going on in meat life lately, including a good deal of work, the beginning of summer, preparations for a major trip next month, and a great house concert last weekend by my friend and onetime classmate Stevie Coyle (thanks Steve!). Time has been short.
The other reason has been a bewildering series of events over the last several weeks, which seem so significant that I'm not sure what to make of them yet. I feel a little like the proverbial blind man trying to describe the elephant by feel - it's a certainty that the description is flawed, but without a lot more groping around, it's not even possible to guess what the flaws are.
There have been several of these changes over the last few weeks, but two have been standing out for me over the last couple of days. They are completely unrelated to one another, except insofar as they seem to have the potential to portend really big changes in the sweep of history. Both are immediately dangerous, and both will cause a great deal of suffering (albeit of different kinds), but both contain the possibility of reversing developments that occurred decades ago that I believe were disastrous for our country, and indeed for human civilization as a whole.
That's big stuff, and may be overdrawn, but bear with me:
California is bankrupt. There is no money in the state treasury, and there is a $24 billion state budget deficit that nobody has any idea how to pay for. The citizens of the state have declined to vote for any tax increase to cover the costs of the services that they're using, and the federal government has (rightly, in my view) declined to step in to bail out those citizens in the absence of any real effort to preserve those services for themselves.
The governator has said that this means that numbers of critical government programs must be terminated, because there is no way to pay for them. The speaker of the state senate is working on a bill that attempts to preserve those programs' structures, but seems to effectively eviscerate their funding, such that they will be mere shadows of their former selves untril further funding can be secured. Neither seems likely to succeed entirely, but both will parbably get some of what they're after, and the state will see drastic reductions in fairly essential services until it begins to sink in with the voters that they need to find some way to pay for the programs they want.
There has been a great deal of chat about the whys and wherefores of this bankruptcy (national recession, California being the epicenter of the mortgage collapse, and various political posturings on the part of one side or the other), but the one thing I haven't heard mentioned yet in the national coverage I've seen of the problem is something that happened thirty years ago. That something was the passage of the ballot initiative known as Proposition 13, the "Jarvis-Gann" property tax initiative, which amended the state constitiution to limit the state property taxes to 1% of assessed value and prevented any increase in that assessment greater than 2%/year, unless the property changed hands.
The measure immediately cut property tax revenues in half for the state, leading to budget nightmares that have persisted ever since. It also was the first shot fired in a national tax revolt that ushered in thirty years of conservative dominance of national politics, along with the cavalcade of economic fantasies about the value of cutting taxes which that dominance has spawned.
Unlike the federal government, California can't print money, so it has long been a bellweather of the impact of making political hay by cutting taxes without reducing spending - school budgets and other state services have been pared to the bone for decades, which has turned the state's world-class public education system into an distant echo of what it once was (and an led to explosion of private schools in the state that exacerbates the difference in the quality of education recieved by rich and poor).
Since the lack of state tax revenue forced local communities to make up the shortfalls in sevices left by dwindling state budgets, it also contributed to a widening gap between rich and poor communities (indeed, it was the redistribution of revenues from richer to poorer communities that prompted the initiative in the first place).
California was an incredibly wealthy state at the beginning of the process, though, so it has taken a long time for the state's finances to arrive at the complete collapse that they find themselves in today. At this point, the state's ability to convince creditors that it can make good its debts is gone, so it seems likely that we may see the real consequences of Prop 13 played out over the next few weeks. Once the state's citizens see those consequences in real time, we may well see a movement grow to overturn Prop 13 or otherwise free the state from its inability tro fund itself. That could generate another political sea change in California and add to the similar change which we can only hope is underway in the country at large.
I'm watching a chorus of folks decrying the refusal of the federal government to save "the eighth largest economy in the world" from its troubles, but in none of those comments have I seen any mention of the fact that the eighth largest economy in the world has just finished declining to fund its own government. speaking as a resident of a state with a smaller economy, I can think of no good reason to fund the continuation of that sort of irresponsibility with money my state's having its own trouble raising.
At almost the same time that California was sabotaging its own finances and inspiring the nation at large to follow suit, there was a revolution in Iran that replaced the repressive, US-backed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi with the theocratic and also repressive regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, and led to the taking of the US embassy staff hostage for over a year by "students" obviously acting at the behest of the regime.
That act brought to a critical head an antagonism between the US and Iran which has stayed impenetrably hostile for thirty years and has contributed to several of the spectacular missteps made by the US government in the middle east over that time (including the invasion of Iraq, which in turn did a great deal to empower the hard-line theocrats in Iran and undermine any movement toward reform within Iran).
Whether President Obama's inspiring and ingratiating speech to the Muslim world in Cairo last month was a factor or not, the internal troubles within Iran have opened fissures within that country's politics that have come to a head over the last couple of days. The putative reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced by the country's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei, only to have the obvious fraud in that announcement overwhelmingly rejected by hundreds of thousands of Iranians, in protests that have continued (and even expanded) to this day.
Three things are impressive about this development. One is that it has been about the same thirty years since the revolution in Iran to the apparent beginnings of the disintegration of that theocracy that we're seeing in the current protests, and if it continues in this vein, it may well be that another sea change moment is upon us. The revolution in Iran and the attendant enmity for the US that attnded it had a great deal to do with the consequences of interventionist US foreign policy during the cold war (in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran by the CIA in 1953), and that memory has remained strong for the intervening thirty years. This evening, I've watched Reza Aslan on CNN reporting that there has been a call for a meeting of the Assembly of Experts that empower the Supreme Leader (the only body in Iran that has the power to actually change the direction of the government by changing or giving direction to that officer), so it's possible that we're finally seeing the consequences of that intervention wane and leave us.
The second notable aspect of this unrest is that the administration has been admirably wise about staying the hell out of the business of avidly supporting the protestors in Iran, since the predictable effect of such support will be to empower the reactionaries to crush the uprising as the product of US meddling in internal Iranian politics. Unfortunately, much of what's left of the Republican party has been predictably stupid about the same decision, with Congressmen Mike Pence and Eric Cantor proposing a resolution voicing support for the protestors, John McCain demanding that the administration condemn the elections as a fraud and the repression that has followed as unacceptable, and of course, Joe Lieberman continuing to wax hysterical about what a threat Iran is and what we must do to protest against that threat, regardless of the consequences of such protests.
Finally, the restrictions placed by the government on foreign press coverage of the uprising have been very troubling, but they have also spurred an incredible blossoming of citizen journalism from within Iran, and there has been a steady stream of reports via Twitter and Facebook that have described the trouble in gripping detail. Nico Pitney's live blogging of the uprising on Huffington Post has been incredible, and the video footage has been dramatic and moving. There has been a demonstrative proof that journalism is not dead, and I defy anyone to find me a professionally produced news package more dramatic, moving, or informative than this:
