Tag Archives: politics

Our longest serving independent senator

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Public Domain photo.

On September 7, Bill Moyers interviewed Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent senator for five years who served 16 years before that in the House of Representatives.  Before going to Washington, he spent four years as mayor of Burlington, which was judged one of the most livable cities in the country.

Sanders is proud that his last campaign was financed by 130,000 individual donors who gave an average of $40 each.  This goes to the heart of his recommendation to fix what is most broken in our government:  a constitutional amendment repealing Citizens United.  So far, legislatures and governors in six states have voiced support for such an amendment, and millions of people have signed petitions, 200,000 of them on Sanders’ website alone.

“It is going to be a long process,” Sanders admits.  He goes on to say, “I think in the process we’re going to educate the American people about one of the most serious problems facing this country. And that is that virtually no piece of legislation will get passed in Congress unless it has the okay of corporate America and big money interest. So the corrupting, absolute corrupting impact of big money is something we have to address.”

For those living outside our borders or tuning out the political process entirely, Citizens United was a 2010 decision by the U.S. Supreme court ruling that the First Amendment (freedom of speech) prohibits the government from restricting political contributions by entities like corporations, unions or political action committees (PAC’s).  All attempts at campaign finance reform became void, and several important recent elections have gone to the side that raised the most money.  Sanders told Moyers, “I fear very much that if we don’t turn this around, we’re heading toward an oligarchic form of society.” 

People across the political system seem to agree.  Sixty-four municipalities in Vermont sent resolutions to congress calling for an amendment.  I seem to remember hearing of similar efforts underway in as many as 20 states.  As a concrete step, Sanders’ suggestion carries a lot more weight and plausibility than vague calls to abandon existing political parties and form new ones.  That doesn’t seem feasible on our current playing field.

For me, Bernie Sanders discussion with Moyers was a bright moment in an otherwise dismal political season.  You can find the video and a transcript here.  http://billmoyers.com/segment/bernie-sanders-on-the-independent-in-politics/

*** Update, Sept 14, 2012***

Here is a link to Senator Sanders’ official website: http://www.sanders.senate.gov.

There’s a link to the Moyer’s interview and a button labelled, “Overturn Citizens United.” If you click it, you’ll find a map showing local efforts across the nation, as well as info on how to add your local group information to the list. It’s really encouraging to see that we are not alone in our outrage.

Pondering, mulling, musing, and ruminating on the year so far

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I was looking for just the right word for “think over” and pulled out Webster’s Dictionary to check  precise meanings.  Here are some of the definitions I found:

  • ponder, from the Latin pondare – to weigh, mentally; think deeply about; consider carefully; deliberate; meditate.
  • The definition of mull points back to ponder:  “to cogitate, to ponder.”
  • ruminate, from Latin ruminatus, means  1 to chew (the cud) as a cow does and 2 to turn something over in the mind; meditate.
  • The word I wanted was  muse.  It’s usage as a verb comes from the old French, muser, and carries these definitions:   “to ponder, to loiter, (originally) to stand with muzzle in the air, to think deeply and at length; meditate.

So here I stand, with muzzle in the air, loitering and pondering 2012 as it turns into the home stretch.

Even without a calendar, the signs are everywhere. It’s almost dark at 8:00pm, and the mornings are chilly. Halloween decorations are on display at the supermarket, and the volume of Christmas catalogs has notched up from a drip to a steady trickle.  Before you know it, they’ll be playing “Little Saint Nick” in the stores (kill me now!).

Things have been good in 2012 on the personal front – much to be grateful for.  Good health, food, shelter, and the resources to do our thing(s).  No catastrophic events like fires or floods in this area.  Even our little dog, Holly, who seemed to be at the end of her life in June http://wp.me/pYql4-1TW is stable, hanging on for while, thanks to a good vet and our daily medical interventions on our behalf of her failing kidney.

Holly, about eight years ago

It’s a blessing to have this extra time with her, to give her special attention even as we learn to let go.

I also posted about my good fortune this summer to be able to attend teachings by a senior Tibetan lama http://wp.me/pYql4-2jk, about his knee surgery and its successful outcome in August.

Long life puja for His Eminence Choden Rinpoche, July 28, 2012

We also have an exciting trip planned for the fall, which will be the subject of more than one post later on.

***

If things are positive in the personal sphere, I know I’m not the only one who finds the public arena disturbing this election year.  There’s something schizophrenic about the media messages we receive on one hand, and our day to day experience on the other.

As the election nears, we constantly hear how polarized we are as a nation, yet in my experience, in parks and public places, restaurants, and stores, people mostly treat each other with courtesy and respect.  I haven’t seen kamikaze parking lot behavior since last year’s Christmas season.

Last week, as I glanced around our local waffle place, it struck me that at places like this across the country, you see “ordinary” people who, if given a chance, could do a better job of getting things done for the good of the nation than our elected representatives.  Did anyone in that breakfast place, or ones like it across the nation, decide to vote for the candidates most likely to freeze up government like an engine without any oil?

And yet it happened, which means (a) it benefits some group of influential people or (b) our politicians are morons or (c) somehow our dysfunction has become systemic.

I lean toward the third choice. In it’s Labor Day editorial, The Sacramento Bee underscored a point I made several days ago http://wp.me/pYql4-2lV – that the fortunes of the middle class mirror the fortunes of labor unions:

“Draw one line on a graph charting the decline in union membership, then superimpose a second line charting the decline in middle-class income share and you will find that the two lines are nearly identical.” The middle class has shrunk significantly, from 61 percent of the adult population in 1971 to 51 percent in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve. http://www.sacbee.com/2012/09/03/4781267/editorial-to-rebound-labor-needs.html

A forty year decline indicates that the trend is truly systemic.  It’s not the exclusive fault of Bush and/or Obama – rather it’s something built into our current political/economic system.

I know I’m thinking that way now because of Bill Moyer’s guest on Sunday, Mike Lofgren, author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.

In his interview with Moyers, Lofgren is not sanguine about our chances to reform the status quo.  He advocates something like folding our hand and asking for a new deck:

BILL MOYERS: But what do we do about it? Nothing seems to tame the power of money in politics.

MIKE LOFGREN: The only thing that will achieve it is fundamental political reform. And the only way you’re going to get that is mass defection from the parties. Because the parties simply do not serve our interests anymore…there is a point where if there is mass public outrage at this, just as there was in the prairies in the 1880’s and 1890’s, eventually they’ll get the message.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/mike-lofgren-on-dysfunction-in-our-political-parties/

When Moyers asks him to state greatest fear and hope, Lofgren says:

“My greatest fear is that this whole impasse simply carries on. And this country becomes more and more polarized and ungovernable. And we could be faced with a very bad situation, internationally and domestically….My greatest hope is that we can govern ourselves again in a spirit of bipartisanship.”

When Moyers asks if he thinks that’s realistic, Lofgren replies, “We must let our hopes be greater than our fears.”

If his answer doesn’t ring with confidence, it’s still good to remember that more than anything else, it is fear that drives us to act in mean spirited ways.  Generosity follows finding the threads of faith and confidence within, and generosity of spirit is what we desperately need.  Sometimes I imagine this through one of William Stafford’s last poems.  It’s a simple but powerful answer to give to our fears.

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Bad Science

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Besides Congressman Akin, who clearly ditched high school biology, my favorite member of the Congressional Science Committee is Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who is on record as saying:

“Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases? … Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?”

http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/8/21/congress-s-science-committee-doesn-t-get-science

According to Motherboard, the Congressional Science Committee is responsible for “the entire spectrum of national science interests, from energy, the environment and the atmosphere, civil aviation and nuclear R&D, and space.”

I wish I could say these are actors in a Mel Brooks movie, especially since Congressman Brooks (R-AL) said, in an interview with Science Magazine  that high levels of carbon dioxide means that “plant life grows better, because it is an essential gas for all forms of plant life.”

I’ll let the opportunity for an “essential gas” joke pass.  There’s enough to laugh and weep over in these words from our members of Congress.

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich – A book review

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Anyone paying attention knows that our nation has lost its way, but that’s where clarity ends.  How and when did we go wrong?  Sometimes I wish I could read the histories that will be written a hundred years from now, after time has lent perspective to the chaos of current events.  Thanks to Andrew Bacevich, we don’t have to wait for at least one piercing analysis.

Bacevich, a Viet Nam veteran, retired as a colonel after 23 years in the army.  He holds a PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998.  In March, 2007, he described the US doctrine of “preventative warfare” as “immoral, illicit, and imprudent.”  Two months later, his son died in Iraq.

Andrew Bacevich

In The Limits of Power, published in 2008, Bacevich steps back to examine our history from WWII to the present, to look at the root cause of the folly that has made constant warfare, with its huge cost in lives and resources, our norm.  Foreign policy and domestic policy are wedded together, he says.  Despite political rhetoric, our seeming state of perpetual warfare is not simply the result of international villains like Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, or even Osama Bin Laden.  To blame them, he says, is like “blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression or…attributing McCarthyism entirely to the antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy.”  Foreign policy has become “an expression of domestic dysfunction.”  Bacevich pulls no punches, and pinpoints the nature of this dysfunction in the title of his first chapter, “The Crisis of Profligacy.”

“For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.”

Bacevich says the critical, though seldom acknowledged, turning point was bookmarked by two presidential speeches.  The first was President Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise” speech, though he never used the word.

The seventies was a decade of severe economic shocks that saw the first oil crisis, a stock market meltdown, and our transition from a producer to a consumer economy.  On July 15, 1979, Carter said the real crisis was not what OPEC was doing to oil prices, but our way of life, which makes us depend on foreign oil.

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God…too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.  Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.  But we’ve…learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

To continue down that road, Carter said, was “a certain route to failure.”  He urged a renewal of national purpose, characterized by national restraint and an effort to find and develop alternative energy sources.  The main effect of his speech was to provide ammunition to his political opponents.  Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, in his “morning in America” speech told us there were no restraints.  The energy crisis was the government’s fault.  The solution was to reduce federal spending and cut taxes.

In an effort to salvage his re-election prospects, Carter adopted a pugnacious tone, articulating the “Carter Doctrine” in January, 1980.  He said the nation would “use any means necessary, including military force,” to prevent any other power from dominating the Persian Gulf.”  Sadly, this endorsement of American imperialism rather than his earlier call to fiscal and moral balance is what guides our politicians to this day.  It isn’t hard to see why.  In the 1980 presidential election, Carter won just four states, while Reagan carried 48.  No one in Washinton missed the message:  the way to get elected is to pander to our illusions, to suggest that our credit is infinite and the bills will never come due.

In 1983, President Reagan proposed his “Star Wars” missile defense shield, implying that our national security and way of life were wedded to military superiority.  “Defense is not a budget item,” he said.  George Bush didn’t think so, nor do this year’s presidential candidates.  The President criticizes the Ryan budget for draconian cuts to key domestic services, but says nothing about its huge uptick in military spending – perhaps because for Democrats too, “defense is not a budget item.”

Bacevich articulates solutions akin to Carter’s – an end to the fool’s errand of trying to reshape the world in our image and an effort to set our own house in order.  He cautions that expecting those in power to adopt such a course of action is like expecting the CEO of a major car company to lobby for public transportation – there’s too much power and money vested in the status quo. Among other suggestions, he says:

“No doubt undertaking a serious…national effort to begin the transition to a post-fossil fuel economy promises to be a costly proposition.  Yet…spending trillions to forcibly democratize the Islamic world will achieve little, while investing trillions in energy research might actually produce something useful.” 

Technical innovation has been an American strongpoint, from the Mahattan Project to the space race, to the digital revolution.  In contrast, our efforts to reshape other cultures has been rather dismal.

If a change of course is possible, Bacevich does not think it likely.  Throughout his book, he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor, theologian, and author who wrote between 1930 and 1960.  He gives us this quote by Niebuhr:

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

The Limits of Power is a disturbing book to read, but one I can recommend to everyone who prefers hard truth to subterfuge and lies.  For a more recent look at Andrew Bacevich and his ideas, I recommend this interview, conducted in March, on “Moyers and Friends:” http://billmoyers.com/episode/moving-beyond-war/

As they say in 12 step programs, admitting there is a problem is the first step toward a solution.

Bill Moyers on “The Cowardly Lions of Free Speech”

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Here is Bill Moyers’ response to the recent Supreme Court decision not to revisit Citizen’s United.  Check out the full clip, which only runs 6 1/2 minutes.

Three things don’t go together: Money. Secrecy. Democracy. And that’s the nub of the matter. This is all a sham for invalidating democracy in the name of democracy. It’s the trick authoritarians always use to hide their real intention — in this case absolute power over our public life and institutions: the privatization of everything. The Supreme Court is pointing the way. Instead of mitigating the worst excesses of both the state and the private sector, the Court has taken sides. Saying to the massed wealth of the one percent: America is yours for the taking, for the buying.
 http://billmoyers.com/

There really is nothing to add to something so shameful and tragic.

What I’m Listening to Now – A World Undone by G.J. Meyer

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I’m a huge fan of audiobooks and have been since the days of cassettes.  Audiobooks are great for travel, especially over repetitious routes.  I spent last weekend in the bay area to attend some Tibetan teachings, and I’ll be making more trips in the weeks ahead, so I wanted to find something to listen to on the road.

I usually favor action-adventure novels for travel, but this time I chose A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918, by G.J. Meyer.

The opening was so fascinating – history truly can be more fantastic than fiction – that I downloaded the ebook in order to read certain sections in detail.

But why choose such a tragic story for a road trip?

For several reasons.  Mostly because the Great War has held a haunting fascination for me since I read All Quiet on the Western Front when I was sixteen (the author, G.J. Meyer said something similar in his introduction).  Because of my father’s work, we were living in France when I read the book, and older people at that time remembered the war.  Several told us there wasn’t a family in France that didn’t lose a father, or husband, or brother, or son.  I remember sitting in old cafes and parks, thinking that everything must have looked the same to the young men in 1914 who would march into a maelstrom no could have imagined, least of all their leaders.

Like the Titanic two years earlier, the first world war was a tragedy we cannot forget because it marked a loss of innocence for the generation it consumed and for every one that came after.  As the title of Meyer’s book suggests, a world order was swept away in a horror no one wanted.

“Thirty-four long, sweet summer days separated the morning of June 28, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shot to death, from the evening of August 1, when Russia’s foreign minister, and Germany’s ambassador to Russia fell weeping into each other’s arms and what is rightly called the Great War began.”

An assassination should not have sparked a world war.  In that era, assassinations were commonplace.  In the years before 1914, presidents of the United States, France, Mexico, Guatemala, and Uruguay were killed, as were Prime Ministers of Russia, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Persia, and Egypt.  Kings and Queens of Austria, Italy, Serbia, Portugal, and Greece were murdered, and no armies were mustered.  This time things spun out of control through a series of errors and misunderstandings that makes one cringe when seen through the lens of history.

“Men with the power to decide the fate of Europe did the things that brought war on and failed to do the things that might have kept the war from happening.  They told lies, made mistakes, and missed opportunities.  With few if any exceptions they were decent, well-intended men…But little of what they did produced the results they intended.”

Those results reverberate down through the present day.  Think of Iraq, a nation of sects and ethnic groups that hate each other, created by European diplomats who understood none of that as they drew the borders.  Think of the lesson the world learned from the Armenian genocide – that most of the time, perpetrators can get away with “ethnic cleansing.”

Meyer describes in detail these “decent, well-intended men,” leaders of backward-looking monarchies and empires that were already out of date.  Kaiser Wilhelm owned 300 military uniforms but failed to understand how little glory there was in facing machine guns and poison gas.  Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, didn’t even like his nephew, the Archduke who was assassinated, but he let his generals persuade him that punishing Serbia might restore some of his nation’s fading glory.

Such accounts go on and on and perhaps are the point of this post.  A hundred years ago, political leaders failed to grasp that the world had changed and required new methods and understandings.  Today I believe our political leaders have failed to grasp that the world has changed and requires new methods and understandings.  I spotted a fine example last Friday, just before I got in the car, in Time Magazine.  In her article, “Your Global Economic Mess is Now Being Served,” Rana Foroohar says:

“Not only are the fortunes of the world’s major markets and economies still very much tied together, but the root cause of their problems is the same:  dysfunctional politics.  There are economic solutions available that could calm markets and help countries avoid the risk of a double dip; what’s lacking is the political will to implement them.”

This take on the world economic situation is eerily similar to Meyer’s description of the political landscape a hundred years ago.  Nations are linked together even when they would rather not be, while leaders are lost in the mindsets of the previous century.  Nineteenth century poet, Matthew Arnold described the condition like this:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born

What does one do in such a situation?  There aren’t any clear answers, but a few thoughts came to mind as I mulled this stuff over during my trip.

It helps to think that most of our leaders are clueless instead of the villains I sometimes take them to be.  The thought reminds me that it’s as much a waste of time to indulge in anger as it is to believe they have any real solutions.

Our current politics and economics are mostly driven by fear.  During the run-up to World War I, the Austrian ambassador said, “Fear is a bad counselor.”  His words are as true today as they were a hundred years ago.  Making decisions based on fear is something I try to avoid, though clearly it’s sometimes difficult.  Avoiding most TV news programs is a good place to start.

And finally, there’s something like acting as if this was already the world I want to live in.  What that looks like can change from moment to moment.  Often it’s a matter of small gestures and courtesies.  And yet, if enough people acted in ways that went beyond us and them thinking…

There’s a man named Jean Jaures who did his best to stop the outbreak of World War I.  As a pacifist and a socialist, he was loved by some and hated by others, but Meyer says,

“As a leader, a thinker, and simply as a human being, Jaures stood out like a giant in the summer of 1914…he had dedicated his life to the achievement of democracy and genuine peace not only in France but across the continent…Everyone who knew him and has left a record of the experience tells of a sunny, selfless, brilliant personality, bearded and bearlike and utterly careless of his appearance, indifferent to personal success or failure but passionately dedicated to his vision of a better and saner world.”

Jean Jaures

In Meyer’s opinion, Jaures was the one man in Europe who might have been able to calm the war fever that gripped all of Europe at the end of July.  On the afternoon of July 31, 1914, a confused and unemployed 29 year old named Raoul Villain was walking through Montmartre with a gun in his pocket.  He was planning to travel to Germany to assassinate the Kaiser, when he saw Jaures and some friends enter a nearby cafe.  Ever careless of his own safety, Jaures sat with his back to an open window.  Forgetting the Kaiser, Villain fired two bullets into his head.  War was declared the next day.

Jaures reminds me of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, two other men whose lives and deaths ask us what kind of world we want to live in.  One way or another, our actions answer that question every day.

I know what kind of response I want to give.

Andy Grove on How to Create American Jobs

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In the wake of this week’s jobs report, here is a Businessweek article from the July 1, 2010 in which Andy Grove, lays out a path to American economic renewal. If anyone has the chops for this, it’s Grove.  One of the three founders of Intel, he helped light the fire that gave us Silicon Valley and changed the world.

(l-r), Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore in 1978, on the 10th anniversary of Intel. Photo courtesy of Intel

The bad news is that Grove’s formula depends on intelligent and focused government action. In 2010, that didn’t seem as hopeless as it does now.  Yet perhaps ideas are like seeds; the good ones grow, even though they may take a while to germinate.

One key problem, according to Grove, is our loss of hi-tech manufacturing jobs, not only because of the human cost, but because of our loss of the expertise that production brings.  He says the US has already fallen too far behind to ever catch up in technologies like solar panels and batteries for fuel efficient cars.  “Not only [do] we lose an untold number of jobs, we [break] the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”

Grove suggests we need an employment-centered economy and political leadership.  He cites the performance of several Asian economies, including China, the source of so much hand-wringing in the face of perceived U.S. decline.

Andy Grove, 2010

Grove recommends government incentives to aid the growth of key industries and keep the manufacturing base at home. He ends the article with a chilling bit of history:

Most Americans probably aren’t aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed. It was 1932; thousands of jobless veterans were demonstrating outside the White House. Soldiers with fixed bayonets and live ammunition moved in on them, and herded them away from the White House. In America! Unemployment is corrosive. If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.

I suggest everyone concerned with employment and US technical expertise take a moment to read what Grove has to say:  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm