TIME TO STOP BEING AFRAID OF ISRAEL

Sam Smith

Every time Israel doesn't something mean, cruel or stupid you can almost hear the sound of liberals and progressives rushing for a place to hide. Strip away the rhetoric and the excuses and the problem basically comes down to the fact that people don't like being called anti-Semitic.

It's a great shtick the Israelis have used so effectively that behaving appropriately towards their country has cost the U.S. over $100 billion since Israel was founded. For gratitude we have been granted a plethora of unnecessary conflicts, anger in the Muslim world that contributed to 9/11 and the madness of the war on terror, as well as periodic spying on the U.S. by Israeli agents. What other country to whom we have given so much has been so loath to return the favor?

Israel's attack on Gaza, for example, is not only vicious, inexcusable and a violation of international law, it is a direct attempt to interfere with American politics by making sure Obama's hands are completely tied.

Yet, once again, the Israelis are getting away with it because even such supposedly enlightened corners of America as the media and liberal groups are afraid to take them on.

If, the other hand, one feels that it is far worst to support a cruel and unnecessary war than it is to be labeled an anti-Semite then it may be time to be as brave in the face of right wing Jewish accusations as we are confronting criticism by Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. It is, after all, a partner in illogic - of the sort where unsupportable accusations are used to drown actual facts - such as the constant evocation of the Holocaust in which past victims are shamefully dishonored by using them to justify the creation of still more victims.

Once you take the simple liberating step of saying that you don't give a damn what Abe Foxman says about you, then the whole Mid East issue takes on a new look.

For example, you are suddenly free to wonder whether some sort of boycott against Israel might not be worthwhile. As UN General Assembly President, Miguel D'Escoto Brockman put it recently, "More than twenty years ago we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a nonviolent means of pressuring South Africa to end its violations. Today, perhaps we. . . should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations."

Such a boycott might include all of the following: AOL Time Warner, Coca-Cola, Disney, Estee Lauder, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, L'Oreal, Nokia, Revlon, Sara Lee, Home Depot, Starbucks, Timberland, or McDonald's. Or it might include just one for ease of organizing.

Another approach would be a campaign to cut aid to Israel. A modest ten percent - $300 million - would start to make the point.

If you're not quite up to being at least as tough on Israel as Congress was on the auto workers, there are other ways to make your discomfort known - including sending some money to groups like the New Israel Fund that are trying to set an example of what a progressive Israel would be like.

But whatever the approach one prefers, we should all take a New Year's vow not to be afraid of pro-Israeli extremists anymore. They are bullies and it's long past time that we started treating them as such.

BURYING BURRIS

Sam Smith

Bad as Rod Blagojevich may be, Harry Reid and other superlative hypocrites in the Senate are certainly giving him a run for his money. And they're getting aid from liberal Democrats who are ready to dump basic principles - such as guilt being determined by a court and not by the media or a prosecutor - in hopes of saving themselves some embarrassment.

The hypocrisy includes the fact that the current Senate is the most corrupt in American history based on the amount of contributions accepted from those with clear intent to wrongfully influence legislation. The only real difference between Blagojevich and the Senate is that the former may have been too dumb to do it all under cover of law.

Further, journals such as Slate have come up with remarkably tortured arguments as to why the Senate should be allowed - essentially on an ad hoc basis and without any formal warning in advance - to determine who gets to join it. At the very least, however, the Senate's membership requirements should be as accessible to applicants as those of the Metropolitan Club.

CNN even reported that Senate Democrats were seriously dealing with the question of whether to arrest Burris should he show up seeking his seat:

"The first Democratic aide said if Burris tries to enter the Senate chamber on Tuesday, the Senate doorkeeper will stop him. If Burris were to persist, either trying to force his way onto the Senate floor or refusing to leave and causing a scene, U.S. Capitol police would stop him, the aide said. 'They [police] probably won't arrest him,' but they would call the Senate's sergeant-at-arms, the aide said."

The Democrats are not being driven by any new found love of integrity and the law. Rather they have been embarrassed and they're trying desperately to keep their distance from Blagojevich after rejecting the alternative of a special election, since that might add one more GOP senator.

A dignified and democratic solution would include an acceptance of the fact that Blagojevich is the governor of Illinois and entitled to act like one until the law says otherwise. It would also not engage in the semantic waterboarding of a somewhat obscure constitutional provision in order to satisfy only the most puerile of political goals. And the Senate should state its qualifications openly and not engage in ex post facto legislation, which a far more important section of the Constitution prohibits.

AN EARLY BLACK VICTIM OF THE POST RACIAL SOCIETY

Sam Smith

The Illinois Senate appointment is a truly strange story. Or perhaps not. At the very moment when liberals are talking so smugly about moving into a post racial society, the Senate Democrats have voted not to admit a black man because they are embarrassed by the white guy who appointed him. Roland Burris would be the only black member of the Senate. If blacks were proportionally represented, there would be 13 of them.

The law is admittedly marginally debatable, but precisely because it is so, the wisest course would be to defer to the jurisdiction sending the legislator to Washington. Once the Senate and the House start making such choices, they become hardly distinguishable from a private club.

Forty years ago, this issue came up in Congress and, ironically, it also involved a black man, Adam Clayton Powell. Whatever Powell's personal failings, he would join another far less then perfect politician, Lyndon Johnson, in getting more good legislation passed in less time than anyone else in American history. But that didn't matter to the goo-goos who preferred the appropriate to the useful.

In a 1967 piece, "Keep the Seat, Baby," I argued:

|||| The punishment proposed for Mr. Powell is the loss of his congressional seat. A strong case can be made against such punishment on constitutional and other legal grounds. Furthermore, there is a good defense based on precedent.

As recently as 1956, a member of the House was convicted of income tax evasion, sentenced to jail and fined $10,000. Not only did the offending gentleman subsequently regain his seat, but his seniority as well. Senator Dodd has not been made to stand aside while more serious charges against him are examined. Nor were Mississippi's GOP congressmen unseated last session despite massive evidence of the disenfranchisement of Negroes in their districts. Congress has repeatedly declined to act in cases involving far more evil than that alleged in the instance of Mr. Powell. Even Senator [Joseph] McCarthy got off with censure.

Should the charges lodged against the former chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee be pressed with equal vigor against all other deserving legislators in the land, it would become difficult to raise a quorum in either house of Congress or for our state legislatures to exist at all. . .

There are too many fingerprints on the apple to justify the current display of public sanctimony in the case of Adam Powell. And if all we are going to get in return for Powell's riddance is more mealy-mouthed, psychologically blanched Negroes who sit respectfully at the back of party caucuses, then by all means let's save Adam. For in the long run, we must judge the man's politics more important than his morals.||||

A couple of years later the Supreme Court agreed with my position if not my arguments, finding, according to the New York Times, that "the House could not bar Mr. Powell, who had been accused of financial impropriety, if he met the constitutionally determined qualifications for age, citizenship and residency.

The Roland Burris case is far simpler. Not only is Blagojevich still the governor of Illinois and thus legally entitled to name a successor, to condemn his choice is an act of hypocritical excess that libels Burris by inference.

It is worth noting, for example, that Burris

- was the first black national bank examiner for the Office of the Comproller of the Currency.

- was National Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for Operation PUSH

- was elected to the office of Comptroller of Illinois. He was the first African American to be elected to a statewide office in the state of Illinois. Burris was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1984, losing to Paul Simon who went on to defeat incumbent Senator Charles Percy.

- was the second African American elected to the office of Attorney General in the United States.

- ran for mayor of Chicago, losing to incumbent Richard M. Daley. In 1998 and 2002

- was Vice-Chairman, Democratic National Committee Chairman

- was named by Southern Illinois University one of its Ten Most Distinguished Alumni

Instead of some modicum of decency, he is being dissed by the incompetent and useless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, joined by the other members of the Senate Democratic caucus, using a weak and narrow legal argument to slap a black politician accused of nothing worse but being appointed by the wrong man. The motivations behind this move - although couched as a moral judgment - are in fact nothing more than sucking up to public outrage over Blagojevich and trying to rig the seat their way. If the Democrats really want a post racial society, showing a little respect of the most ordinary variety would be a good place to start.

PROPOSITION NINE, TEN & ELEVEN

Sam Smith

It's probably a sign of me having lived in Washington too long, but I've been thinking of a solution to the gay marriage controversy based on the carbon cap and trade principle. Since we are being asked to support heterosexual domestic partnerships and gay marriages at the same time, and since I can come up with no legal or philosophical argument for this lack of synchronicity other than that, in either case, it's none of my damn business, it occurs to me that a true Washington resolution of the problem would be for heterosexual domestic partners to trade their sacred marriage privileges to gay couples for a fee. I'm not quite sure what to do if the heteros later decide to get married or the gays want a divorce but I've sent emails to several lawyer friends and expect an answer shortly. In any case, it seems a perfect Washington solution: a hopelessly complex response that deftly resolves a moral and spiritual issue by converting it into an aggressively amoral economic one.

Judging from the carbon cap and trade program, however, my plan may not work all that well, in which case I will have to return to my previous proposition on the matter i.e. if you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay.

But this thesis also has a problem, which is the large number of people who think that not only do they know whom they should marry but everyone else's proper choice as well. This is the matrimonial equivalent of choosing what the whole neighborhood will have for breakfast.

The purported basis for this intrusion is supposedly the concerns of law, but other than needing children and providing adequate protection for them, the state has little serious concern with this matter. Of course, some like the Reverend Rick Warren have argued that letting gays marry each other could lead to an "older guy marrying a child" or presumably even an animal. The problem with this argument is that it could also be made against allowing a man and woman to get married. You let marriage happen in any form and there's no telling where it will lead.

But since we have no need for additional children in this world and since there is no evidence that gay couples are any harder on their children than straight ones, the law's real interest is minimal at best.

What actually currently drives the definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman is not the interests of the state but religion - or, more precisely, some religions.

In other words, what is being presented as a gay vs. straight issue is actually a religion vs. religion issue. Any law against gay marriage is an act establishing religion because it says, for example, that what Mormons or the Reverend Rick Warren believes is more important than the views of Quakers and Unitarians. The Constitution forbids this sort of differentiation as it clearly represents the "an establishment of religion."

Unfortunately, the more enlightened sects have been completely overwhelmed by extremist voices from Jerry Falwell to Rick Warren. With the help of politicians and a media that considers only loud mouthed Baptists to be "faith based," and cowed by the evangelical onslaught, progressive Christians have failed to fight back or even hold their own.

A direct challenge to laws like Prop 8 by these groups - defending the establishment clause of the Constitution - would be one of the healthiest things that could come out of the conflict. We need more progressive Christian soldiers marching as to war and fewer of them, like our president to be, palling around with those perpetrating bigotry in God's name. Civil liberties groups also need to get a better handle on the establishment clause and fight the growing governmental preference of one religious approach over others.

WHERE'S BIN BEEN?

Sam Smith

A conversation with a friend in the dialysis business reminded us that we still haven't caught Osama Bin Laden. Over the past seven years we have ruined our budget, our constitution and our reputation in an effort to suppress the incapacitated warrior and we seem no closer than ever. Since it sounds like the Obama administration plans to continue this escapade, it may help to put it into some perspective. Assuming that AlQaeda exists - and even a British police commissioner has said it was more an idea than a reality - estimates of its force size are in the 5,000 range with an annual budget, according to the 9/11 Commission, of around $30 million (with an unknown proportion laundered through hedge funds and the like). That's what it cost the Pentagon to build a new mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base.

If a country the size of the United States can't handle 5,000 guerrillas operating on one tenth the amount with which Bernie Madoff absconded, we really are in serious trouble. On the other hand, it may occur to the new crowd that the way to reduce the threat ofguerrilla activity is to lessen the cause. After all, Osama bin Laden is a monster created by American foreign policy. You can kill him but unless our foreign policy changes, there are more monsters where he came from.

Sam Smith, 2002 - So here we are a year later, $37 billion out of pocket and still scared as hell someone's going to attack us. We're not the first with the problem. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone..

This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.

EVANGELICALISM IN POLITICS

Sam Smith

I was in the living room as the TV in the kitchen was playing a reprise of the campaign. I couldn't hear the words too well, but as I listened to the cadence and tone of Barack Obama on the trail, it suddenly dawned on me why he and Rick Warren hit it off so well. They're both evangelicals.

Warren is an evangelical of the born again Christian right and Obama is an evangelical of the born again Democratic center right. They both got where they are not by saying the right thing as making it sound like the right thing whether it really is or not, which is why preachers are more popular than investigative journalists.

I have sometimes challenged the converted to come up with a single thing Obama said during the campaign that is worth remembering. They tend to mumble and change the subject. Because in the end it wasn't the lyrics but the tune and how they were sung. And, of course, the melanin density of who was doing the singing.

The Obama base was not a constituency, but a congregation. He did not give speeches but sermons, and, with remarkably consistency, spoke down to his followers from a sectarian pulpit. Like the religious evangelical, his act was based on using a Bible - in this case the Democratic platform - as the backdrop for a performance that stirred show business and the spiritual into an inseparable stew, all designed to make the crowd accept the man in front of them as the sina qua non of salvation.

So what better model than Rev Rick Warren, so extraordinarily successful at rendering under Caesar that which is the Lord's?

It is interesting that in the con lib defense of Obama's choice of Warren for the inaugural invocation, he is portrayed as a selfless worker in the field of climate control, HIV/AIDS and poverty. But when you peer a little deeper you'll find what the Revealer blog pointed out:

"Warren isn't joining the liberal crusade, much less the leftist fight, against poverty -- he's reviving the good-natured, laissez-faire Ronald Reagan style. That style has roots in American evangelicalism, as it happens, going back to the conservative evangelical activists of the 1930s, who argued that economic malaise was a reflection of spiritual suffering, and ought to fought on the spiritual plane."

What he is doing in these areas, while worthy on an institutional level, offers no models for government action or for serious policy.

Time Magazine described it this way:

"Five years ago, he concocted what he calls the PEACE plan, a bid to turn every single Christian church on earth into a provider of local health care, literacy and economic development, leadership training and spiritual growth. The enterprise has collected testimonials from Bono, the First Couple, Hillary Clinton, Obama, McCain and Graham, who called it "the greatest, most comprehensive and most biblical vision for world missions I've ever heard or read about." . . . Having staked so much on his global initiative, Warren can't allow it to die. But the scale of his ambition does raise questions that confront the American evangelical movement as a whole as it tries to graduate from a domestic political force into a global benefactor. In fact, it is easier to save souls than to save the world."

Add to this the fact that the major results of such efforts will not be the eradication of poverty but the expansion of churches like Warren's, churches that strongly encourage poverty by trying to restrict a woman's right not to have children.

Warren's skill at doing unto others what helps himself is comfortably in sync with Obama's approach. After all, our new president got where he was in part by turning the purpose of community organizing on its head: designed to help those on the bottom; he used it to get to the top.

As Warren is giving his invocation, let's do as his Democratic apologists would have us do: think beyond his bigoted views of women and gays. Let's recall that this man whom Obama admires so much was coached by management guru Peter Drucker who, says Time, "refined Warren's organizational gift and offered a secular vocabulary with which to express it." Let's remember that in the last election he worked under cover for Bush. Let's reflect on the fact that he wants religious restrictions on AIDs assistance. Let's keep in mind that here is a man who has said, "I don't believe politics is the most effective way to change the world. Although public service can be a noble profession, and I believe it is our responsibility to vote, I don't have much faith in government solutions, given the track record."

Clearly another post-partisan in our midst, saying I don't believe in politics but, on the hand, I strongly support the extreme right view of government.

Obama has also played to the Reaganesque anti-government crowd so they ought to hit it off on that score as well as they do on, say, their mutual opposition to gay marriage.

In the end, post-partisanship means one of two things: I don't know or I'm not going to tell you. Neither is acceptable at a time when America needs reality as never before.

The victims of Warren's evangelical con are limited in part by the capacity of Saddleback Church. The rest of us have a more serious problem with the man using the White House for his bully pulpit. It may help to keep in mind the thoughts of J. Christ himself, "When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet." Or put another way by Huey Long, "The Bible's the greatest book ever written. But I sure don't need anybody I can buy for six bits and a chew of tobacco to explain it to me."

FLUNKIN' DUNCAN

Sam Smith

If we're going to insist on judging our children primarily by how well they score on tests, we should probably do the same for education secretary nominees. The problem is that it spoils the fantasy that the major media has been creating around Arne Duncan. Still, turnabout is fair play, so here are a few of the results.

Duncan was named head of the Chicago schools the middle of 2001. The following results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress cover 2002-2007. To summarize what has happened in Chicago schools: not much. Bear in mind, that even where there has been improvement, it has amounted to less than a 1% increase in test scores over a five year period.

Fourth grade reading

Scores were 3 points higher in 2007 compared with 2005 and 8 points higher than in 2002. Total change: less than one half of one percent.

The 2007 score was lower than that of public schools in large central cities

Eighth grade reading

Scores were one point higher than in 2002.

Fourth grade math

Between 2003 and 2007 scores rose 6 points, or less than three tenths of a percent.

The scores in Chicago rose only 2 more points than in the state of Illinois at large.

Black students gained 6 points, Hispanics 2 points, and whites nine points.

Eighth grade math

Scores rose 5 points in Chicago and 7 points nationwide between 2003 and 2007

Blacks gained 2 points, latinos gained 6 points and whites gained 11 points.

Duncan - like DC's school chancellor Michelle Rhee - has fostered a dysfunctional rightwing, corporatized system of education that not only isn't working, it is damaging our children as it trains them to be obedient worker-drones incapable of analyzing or understanding what is really going on about them. This system is being enabled by the same media that for three decades enabled a dysfunctional rightwing, corporatized economic system that finally collapsed in 2008.

The dangers of this system include:

- Teaching our children only to give the right answers and not to ask the right questions.

- Grossly limiting education to fact accumulation and basic manipulation of data, leaving little time for analysis, creativity, judgment, philosophy, gaining social intelligence, as well as learning about, and participating in, the non-mechanical aspects of life such as art, theater and music. This system deliberately teaches our children not to think.

- Through the use of charter schools, turning public education into what was known in earlier times as pauper schools.

- Damaging communities by destroying schools, institutions that not only served students but their parents and provided commonality in ever more atomized urban areas.

ALL PUBLIC WORKS ARE NOT THE SAME

Sam Smith

One of the things to keep in mind as we start pouring money into public works is that not all money spent on capital items has the same results. For example, a Humvee provides employment for the workers who build it and the community that benefits from their employment. It also provides jobs for those who supply it with parts, but since the soldiers who use it would still be soldiers whether it was there or not, you can't really add them as benefits. Once it's overseas, many of its ancillary benefits (such as needing fuel) disappear from the domestic economy. When, however, the Humvee gets blown up in Iraq, you can fairly add the cost of hospitalization and/or burial of the crew and subtract from the economy the transfer of some of these dead or injured troops from being productive parents to becoming a drain on their families and subsequently the economy.

Now let's take the same amount of a money and put it into an urban bus. The bus will have all the initial benefits of production but probably have a much longer lifespan and will contribute directly to the economic benefit of each rider who uses it to go to and from work or shopping. Marines don't go shopping in their Humvees. In other words, a stronger daily economic contribution for a longer time. Better yet, if the bus is not just a replacement along an existing line but part of a new exclusive bus lane system in some city, the benefits will be even greater as now we have this vehicle helping to attract new business and residents along its route.

This is just a rough example of something about which we don't talk enough. Military capital spending is one of the least productive ways to use public funds because it has relatively few spin-off benefits, is often short lived, and largely serves a community that would be there with or without it.

If you take a look at Obama's public works plan, it suffers from some of the same problems. Clearly many of our roads and bridges need repair, but this is a separate issue from the question: what are the best public works projects to spur the economy? Improved energy efficiency is also important but that doesn't mean that it is always the most efficient way to produce new jobs.

Strikingly absent from the Obama plan at this point, for example, is rail. Not the high speed systems that Biden and others would like which would largely benefit elite intra-city commuters, but a program that would make railroads as important in this country's transportation system as they are in a vast number of other countries. Included could be mass transit built in the median strip of some of the highways the Obama administration plans to repair or conversion of some of the lanes to exclusive bus service.

Here are a few of the bonus stimuli possible from such an approach: new opportunities for Detroit if it switched some of its auto work to railroad cars. Additional economic opportunities for the large number of people using the new system. And most importantly, new business and residential development along the new routes.

This is just a rough sketch offered not as a definitive answer but to illustrate the sort of thinking that should be happening and isn't.

THE OBAMA CON

Sam Smith

Barack Obama is one of the best con artists I've seen in a half century of covering politics. He's not quite the Bernie Madoff of liberalism, but there are some striking similarities, such as taking large sums of money from unsuspecting persons, using it for purposes quite contrary to those implied and leaving them, at the end of day, with little to show for their investment.

Admittedly, Obama really didn't deny his agenda; he merely concealed it behind clouds of platitudes, ambiguities and vague promises. But this is true of any good con; if the victims had just been a little more attentive and cautious they might not find themselves in a mess.

And there were plenty of clues. Almost a year ago, Obama said: "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."

As Matt Stoller of Open Left said at the time, "Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. . . . It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power."

Then there was the fact that Obama made it from obscure state senator to presidential nominee in four years. That simply doesn't happen unless an individual does something extraordinary - and Obama did nothing - or if the candidate is seen as the right face and the right brand for something that others want to do.

To get a sense of how substantial the deception was, liberals should ask themselves this question: would you - on principle and not personality - have voted for someone who promised to appoint as secretary of agriculture an ethanol booster and ally of Monsanto, an education secretary who would continue the war on public education, an energy secretary who is pro nuke and pro Yucca Mountain, a defense secretary who has been part of the Iraq disaster, a budget director who favors cutting Social Security for those under 59, an attorney general who helped increase the prison time served by young blacks on minor drug offenses, a secretary of state involved in numerous scandals, a transportation secretary who is an extreme conservative and knows little about the field, a staff stuffed with a team of revivals form the Clinton years, and an inaugural preacher who treats gays and women as lesser beings much as others once did to blacks?

That is not change we can believe in. That's a lot of problems.

In short, Obama is not what he pretended to be nor what his most enthusiastic fans believed him to be. The sooner progressives and liberals face up to this the better off we all will be. The mere fact that so many are urging patience towards Obama suggests at least a nascent appreciation of the problem, but many, many more have to let him know that they feel let down or deceived. It doesn't have to mean total alienation; it does mean challenging his post-partisan hustle and his palling around with the very sorts that have brought America down. Just call his con and start treating him as what he really is: another politician who is only as good as the pressure he feels.

MOVEMENT TIME

Sam Smith

I may be jumping the gun a bit or perhaps I've let some childish optimism sneak out from under my usually cynical brow, but I think there may be a movement underway.

A movement is not like a campaign. No one gets to start a movement and no one gets to own it. You don't have to file any contribution reports. The archaic media pretends you don't even exist for as long as it can. And it doesn't even have to have a name.

That's why I just call it the movement. It's sort of like the Gulf Stream, hard to see yet undeniable as it moves you faster in a certain direction.

And if a movement hasn't started, it may not be long before it does. I have never seen so much cause for so many Americans to be so mad at so many of those who have been running the place - establishment politicians, academics, media, economists and corporations. They've lied, denied, connived and contrived, often with an unprecedented blend of stupidity and greed for which we all now paying.

If a movement has started, then present at the birth were those factory workers who staged the sit in until Bank of America backed off.

And if a movement hasn't started, then one reason why may be the Reddit, headline that read, " Vote up if you would rather bail out NPR for 30 lousy million than failing auto companies for 15 billion."

You had to travel a third of the way down the 500 comments before any responders even mentioned the auto industry, and when they did many didn't like it or its workers. An exception came when one of the workers wrote:

"I like reddit a lot. But sometimes it really gets me down. People here so often come across as children in the way they speak, or how biased they are. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people may lose their income if the auto industry goes under, and you joke about it."

It's not just the people in power who are the problem; it's the ones they've taught. Taught to believe in lies and now think they're clever by being snarky about anyone who wasn't smart enough to believe those lies, the sort of education that leads you to think that saving NPR is more important than saving the auto industry. The sort of education that makes you think you have to choose between them.

When I saw it, I remembered that it was like that under segregation, too. You had the bad guys at the top and then you had all those who went along, either to get along and get ahead or because they had come to truly believe the stupid stuff the bad guys at the top had taught them. And even educated people talked about blacks back then like educated people talk about auto workers today.

But now the market for myths and lies has dried up and there's nothing on the shelves any more but reality. The folks who deceived us can't come up with the answer so it has to come from somewhere else.

We are now into the third month of the most severe financial breakdown since 1929. And, worse, we are in the third month of repeated demonstration of the incapacity of leaders of both parties to deal rationally with the problem other than to throw money at it in directions unknown, for uses unknown, and with results unknown. Add to this the disaster in Iraq, our inability to respond sensibly to climate change and the dismantling of our constitution, and it would be hard to point to a time when the American elite has reacted worse to its problems. We are, for all intents and purposes, a dysfunctional country in a state of collapse.

The solution lies not in a new administration whose appointments seem to reflect more a team of revivals rather than of rivals, including repeat performances by some of the very people who created the mess in the first place.

The answer, if there is one, lies in a movement that that gathers the wisdom of the disaster's victims, the critics of what created it, and the imagination of those able to see past both cause and effect to a truly better time.

It is hard for some to conceive of such a phenomenon because of the current obsession with Barack Obama and the still widespread belief that he will, through some personal magic or gift of God, come up with answers that not only have eluded all the rest of Washington, but eluded his own campaign and transition as well. Those of us who question such a fantasy are called mean spirited and instructed to be silent until the wise one works his way.

But then America often works like that. There's always some myth to distract us from what's really going on. We're like a schizophrenic trying to play soccer. One minute our eye on the ball, the next moment we're deep into some national delusion.

Truly bad times don't have much tolerance for that sort of thing. And so ordinary, rational people have to come up with their own answers, often small solutions in many different places. Such as the group in Milwaukee creating a local currency. Or the sit-in at the factory.

We can expect more of this as matters continue to deteriorate. It will include new ideas as well as ones brought back to life and ones that have already been pursued for years with too little money and respect. It will include union workers, environmentalists, teachers tired of test totalitarianism, 401Kers discovering the difference between stock funds and a pension, unemployed professionals, women losing their jobs only a few decades after gaining a right to them, minorities learning that white guys can also get screwed, white guys learning what it feels like be dissed like a minority, the ill without proper care and people who want their constitutional rights back again

Add it all together and you start to see a movement. It doesn't need a name; it doesn't need an address; it doesn't need an icon on the alter.

At times the movement may find itself allied with Barack Obama; at other times he may be its major opponent. In either event, Obama will define change no better than John Kennedy defined the civil rights movement or LBJ the anti-Vietnam war movement. Change doesn't originate in the White House; what happens there merely reflects the power of the change around it. Which is one good reason not to go soft just because Obama's in the White House. If he won't be an ally, then he must be made irrelevant.

Where might the movement lead us? Sarah van Gelder of Yes Magazine has given us a clue based on polls -, "an agenda that the majority of Americans support, whether they vote red, blue, green or something else."

67% favor public works projects to create jobs.

55% favor expanding unemployment benefits.

76% support tax cuts for lower- and middle-income people.

71% say unions help their members; 53% say unions help the economy in general.

80% support increasing the federal minimum wage.

59% favor guaranteeing two weeks or more of paid vacation.

75% want to limit rate increases on adjustable-rate mortgages.

58% believe a court warrant should be required to listen to the telephone calls of people in the U.S.

59% would like the next president to do more to protect civil liberties.

79% favor mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions.

90% favor higher auto fuel efficiency standards.

75% favor clean electricity, even with higher rates.

72% support more funding for mass transit.

64% believe the government should provide national health insurance coverage for all Americans, even if it would raise taxes.

55% favor one health insurance program covering all Americans, administered by the government, and paid for by taxpayers.

81% oppose torture and support following the Geneva Conventions.

76% say the U.S. should not play the role of global police.

79% say the U.N. should be strengthened.

85% say that the U.S. should not initiate military action without support from allies.

63% want U.S. forces home from Iraq within a year.

47% favor using diplomacy with Iran. 7% favor military action.

67% believe we should use diplomatic and economic means to fight terrorism, rather than the military.

86% say big companies have too much power in politics

65% believe attacking social problems is a better cure for crime than more law enforcement.

87% support rehabilitation rather than a “punishment-only” system.

81% say job training is “very important” for reintegrating people leaving prison.

79% say drug treatment is very important.

56% believe NAFTA should be renegotiated.

64% believe that on the whole, immigration is good for the country.

A stunning portion of these choices of the American people are at odds with those of their leaders in both parties and with the way popular opinion is routinely described by the major media. The choices are also far from radical. They are actually conservative, aimed at conserving our constitution, our integrity, our economy, our environment and our standing in the world. It is the establishment center that led us into this disaster which has been radical and extreme: radically wrong and extremely incompetent in dealing with the consequences.

Back in 2001, in my book "Why Bother?," I tried to describe what was happening to America and what could be done about it:

The system that envelopes us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it."

The unwitting dead -- universities, newspapers, publishing houses, institutes, councils, foundations, churches, political parties -- reach out from the past to rule us with fetid paradigms from the bloodiest and most ecologically destructive century of human existence. . .

Yet even as we complain about and denounce the entropic culture in which we find ourselves, we are unable bury it. We speak of a new age but make endless accommodations with the old. We are overpowered and afraid.

We find ourselves condoning things simply because not to do so means we would then have to -- at unknown risk -- truly challenge them.

To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.

How one does this can vary markedly, but one of the bad habits we have acquired from the bullies who now run the place is undue reliance on traditional political, legal and rhetorical tools. Politically active Americans have been taught that even at the risk of losing our planet and our democracy, we must go about it all in a rational manner, never raising our voice, never doing the unlikely or trying the improbable, let alone screaming for help.

We have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions.

People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.

Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.

What I was talking about was a movement of the sort that may now or soon be underway. Providing mediation for anger, structure for hope, and pragmatic plans for tomorrow, a movement can seem anarchistic, disjointed or directionless, yet what we see may be no more the little waves on the surface that conceal the force of the current underneath.

Further, it is sometimes hard to perceive because while the cause is national, the action is often local. We have become trained in recent decades by both liberals and conservatives to define action by simply being on a national mailing list and making a contribution. Which is why Move On and Emily's List are so powerful but nobody knows what a liberal is any more.

Movements work differently. They don't use popes; they rely on independent congregations. They are driven not be saviors but by substance. They assume a commitment beyond the voting booth, they think politicians should respond to them rather than the other way around, and they believe in "Here's how" as well as "Yes, we can."

If you are presently doing anything to try to repair the damage that has been done by our cynical, greedy and incompetent leadership you are part of the movement. Student, union worker, teacher, retiree, infirm, ecologist, defense attorney, community organizer, informed or reformed - you are part of the movement.

So welcome to the movement. If you don't believe there is one, trying using the word anyway. The very term is a weapon in our arsenal. If the politicians and the press start hearing the phrase in places they thought had little in common, they will start to pay attention. We can leave it to the historians to define it. In its very ambiguity lies its strength. We may contradict ourselves, but as Walt Whitman once noted, that's okay; it merely proves that we contain multitudes.

HOW CORRUPTION HAS CHANGED

Sam Smith

From Shadows of Hope, Indiana University Press, 1993

In 1816, Columbus, Ohio, had one city councilmember for every hundred residents. By 1840 there was one for every thousand residents. By 1872 the figure had dwindled to one to every five thousand. By 1974, there was one councilmember for every 55,000 people.

The first US congressional districts contained less than 40,000 people; my current city councilmember represents about twice that many. Today the average US representative works for roughly 600,000 citizens. This is double the number for legislatures in Brazil and Japan, and more than five times as many as in Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, and West Germany.

It isn't just a matter of numbers. Back in the early days of television and the late days of the Daley era in Chicago, Jake Arvey was an important man in national Democratic politics. At Democratic conventions, Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley would ponder what Arvey was going to do; presidential candidates would seek his blessing.

Yet Arvey's power base was not a national organization nor telegenic charisma, but rather the 24th Ward of Chicago, from which he helped to run the city's Democratic machine.

Another Chicago politician described it this way: "Not a sparrow falls inside the boundaries of the 24th Ward without Arvey knowing of it. And even before it hits the ground there's already a personal history at headquarters, complete to the moment of its tumble."
There was plenty wrong with the Daley machine and others like it. One job seeker was asked at a ward headquarters who had sent him. "Nobody," he admitted. He was told, "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

Among those whom nobody sent were women and minorities. The old machines were prejudiced, feudal and corrupt.

And so we eventually did away with them.

But reform breeds its own hubris and so few noticed that as we destroyed the evils of machine politics we also were breaking the links between politics and the individual, politics and community, politics and social life. We were beginning to segregate politics from ourselves.

George Washington Plunkitt would not have been surprised. Plunkitt was a leader of Tammany Hall and was, by the standards of our times and his, undeniably corrupt. As his Boswell, newspaperman William Riordon, noted: "In 1870 through a strange combination of circumstances, he held the places of Assemblyman, Alderman, Police Magistrate and County Supervisor and drew three salaries at once -- a record unexampled in New York politics.". Facing three bidders at a city auction of 250,000 paving stones, he offered each 10,000 to 20,000 stones free and having thus dispensed with competition bought the whole lot for $2.50.

Tammany Hall was founded in 1854; its golden age lasted until the three-term LaGuardia administration began in 1934. For only ten intervening years was Tammany out of office. We got rid of people like Plunkitt and machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed out a philosophy and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well.

Plunkitt was not only corrupt but a hardworking, perceptive and appealing politician who took care of his constituents, qualities one rarely find in any plurality of combinations in politics these days. Even our corrupt politicians aren't what they used to be. Corruption once involved a complex, if feudal, set of quid pro quos; today our corrupt politicians rarely even tithe to the people.

Politics, Plunkitt said, "is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business" and it was based on studying human nature. He claimed to know every person in his district, their likes and their dislikes:

I reach them by approachin' at the right side . . . For instance, here's how I gather in the young men. I hear of a young feller that's proud of his voice, thinks that he can sing fine. I ask him to come around to Washington Hall and join our Glee Club. He comes and sings, and he's a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our baseball club. That fixes him. You'll find him workin' for my ticket at the polls next election day. . . I rope them all in by givin' them op¬portunities to show themselves off. I don't trouble them with political arguments. I just study human nature and act accordin'.

Plunkitt also believed in sticking with his friends: "The politicians who make a lastin' success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary . . . Richard Croker used to say that tellin' the truth and stickin' to his friends was the political leader's stock in trade." These principles have become largely inoperative.

His prescription for becoming a statesman was to go out and get supporters. Even if it's only one man, "go to the district leader and say: 'I want to join the organization. I've got one man who'll follow me through thick and thin'" and then you get his cousin and his cousin and so on until you have your own organization. It was a principle that worked well for Tammany Hall, which at its height early in the 20th century had 32,000 committeemen and was forced to use Madison Square Garden for its meetings. In contrast, when the Democratic National Committee decided to send a mailing to all its workers a few years ago, it found that no one had kept a list. The party had come to care only about its donors.

But most of all Plunkitt believed in taking care of his constituents. Nothing so dramatically illustrates this than a typical day for Plunkitt as recorded by Riordon:

Plunkitt was aroused a two am to bail out a saloonkeeper who had been arrested for tax law violations. At six he was again awakened, this time by fire engines. Tammany leaders were expected to show up at fires to give aid and comfort. Besides, notes Riordon, they were great vote-getters.

At 8:30 am he was getting six drunk constituents released. At nine he was in court on another case. At eleven, upon returning home, he found four voters seeking assistance. At three he went to the funeral of an Italian, followed by one for a Jew.

At seven PM he had a district captains' meeting. At eight he went to a church fair. At nine he was back at the party clubhouse listening to the complaints of a dozen pushcart peddlers. At 10:30 he went to a Jewish wedding, having "previously sent a handsome wedding present to the bride." He finally got to bed at midnight.

Concluded Riordon:

By these means the Tammany district leader reaches out into the homes of his district, keeps watch not only on the men, but also on the women and children, knows their needs, their likes and dislikes, their troubles and their hopes, and places himself in a position to use his knowledge for the benefit of his organization and himself. Is it any wonder that scandals do not permanently disable Tammany and that it speedily recovers from what seems to be crushing defeat?

These glimpses are instructive because they contrast so markedly with the impersonal, abstract style of politics to which we have become accustomed. It was, to be sure, a mixture of the good and the bad, but you at least knew whom to thank and whom to blame. As late as the 1970s the tradition was still alive in Chicago as 25th Ward leader Vito Marzullo told a Chicago Sun-Times columnist:

I ain't got no axes to grind. You can take all your news media and all the do-gooders in town and move them into my 25th Ward, and do you know what would happen? On election day we'd beat you fifteen to one. The mayor don't run the 25th Ward, Neither does the news media or the do-gooders. Me, Vito Marzullo. that's who runs the 25th Ward, and on election day everybody does what Vito Marzullo tells them. . .

My home is open 24 hours a day. I want people to come in. As long as I have a breathing spell, I'll got to a wake, a wedding, whatever. I never ask for anything in return. On election day, I tell my people, "Let your conscience be your guide."

In the world of Plunkitt and Marzullo politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King It was not the product of spin doctors, campaign hired guns or phony town meetings. It welled up from the bottom, starting with one loyal follower, one ambitious ballplayer, twelve unhappy pushcart peddlers. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.

Sure, it was corrupt. But we don't have much to be priggish about. The corruption of Watergate, Iran-Contra or the S&Ls fed no widows, found no jobs for the needy or, in the words of one Tammany leader, "grafted to the Republic" no newly arrived immigrants. At least Tammny's brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter could with greater regularity count on something in return. In fact, we didn't really do away with machines, we just replaced them.

AS BRIBES GO, BLAGOJEVICH IS A PIKER

Other than breaking the law, Rod Blagojevich's two biggest problems are that he's a piker and he's dumb. Over the past couple of years, both John McCain and Barack Obama accepted far larger bribes than the Illinois governor allegedly did, but they did it the smart way: by inference rather than by tapped phone. This is why we find the Congress so speedy in bailing out Wall Street and so indifferent to the fate of auto workers.

The alternative is public campaign financing before an election, rather than after, which is what we have now as politicians pay off their contributors by funding pet projects or granting tax favors. Until we deal with this, we shall continue to get outraged by the Blagojevichs of politics while happily ignoring the vast legal corruption that supports our electoral system.

Sam Smith, US Capitol Rally, 1999 - I have three objections to our current system of campaign financing.

The first is literary. Being a writer I try to show respect for words, to leave their meanings untwisted and unobscured.

This is alien to much of official Washington which daily engages in an activity well described by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe said, "By ringing small changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip. . . could 'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, a leg-of-mutton."

For example, for centuries ordinary people have known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.

In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise.

But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time not so many months ago when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt.

The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or the phrase which brings us here today: "campaign contribution."

Another example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it.

As George Orwell rightly warned, "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

My second objection to our system of campaign financing is economic. It's just too damn expensive for the taxpayer. The real cost is not the campaign contributions themselves. The real cost is what is paid in return out of public funds.

A case in point: Public Campaign recently reported that in 1996, when Congress voted to lift the minimum wage 90 cents an hour, business interests extracted $21 billion in custom-designed tax benefits. These business interests gave only about $36 million in campaign contributions so they got out of the public treasury nearly 600 times what they put in. And you helped pay for it.

Looked at another way, that was enough money to give 11 million workers a 90 cent an hour wage increase for a whole year -- or, to be more 1990s about it, to give 21,000 CEOs a million dollar bonus.

This is repeated over and over. For example, the oil industry in one recent year gave $23 million in campaign contributions and got nearly $9 billion in tax breaks.

The bottom line is this: if you want to save public money, support public campaign financing.

My final objection is biologic. Elections are for and between human beings. How do you tell when you're dealing with a person? Well, they bleed, burp, wiggle their toes and have sex. They register for the draft. They register to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they have babies and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.

Now this may seem obvious to you, but there are tens of thousands of lawyers and judges and politicians who simply don't believe it. They will tell you that a corporation is a person, based on a corrupt Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment from back in the robber baron era of the late 19th century -- a time in many ways not unlike our own.

Before this ruling, everyone knew what a person was just as everyone knew what a bribe was. States regulated corporations because they were legal fictions lacking not only blood and bones, but conscience, morality, and free will. But then the leg of mutton became a turnip in the eyes of the law.

Corporations say they just want to be treated like people, but that's not true. Test it out. Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation just like they exercise theirs in your election. You'll find out quickly who is more of a person. We can take care of this biologic problem by applying a simple literary solution: tell the truth. A corporation is not a person and should not be allowed to be called one under the law.

I close with this thought. The people who work in the building behind us have learned to count money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the money changers out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress to adopt publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would suggest that while fighting this difficult battle there is something we can do starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent organization and individual in communities all over America -- the churches, activist organizations, social service groups, moral business people, concerned citizens -- and begin drafting a code of conduct for politicians. We do not have to wait for any legislature.

If we do this right, if we form true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians will ignore us only at their peril.

At root, dear friends, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.

THE CRASH OF AMERICAN IMAGINATION

One of the problems with hiring a Harvard Law School graduate as president is that you're likely to find someone steeped in precedent and shallow - even skeptical of - possibility.

The law, after all, represents the rules of the existing order. It favors the past over the future, the tested over the experimental, the documented over the imagined.

It is necessary, of course, but it is, in the end, a skill rather than a philosophy and is based on reviewing old records rather than opening new windows.

There are plenty of lawyers who understand this and use the law as a tool rather than as a product, which is why, for example, we have the ACLU or the countless volunteer legal advisors to worthy non-profit organizations. My lawyer father used to advise my friends to go to law school but then do something different.

Barack Obama, however, seems one of those attorneys who pride themselves in turning reason into a religion rather than as a road to some place else, the sort who either pompously or pedantically elevate their belief (often self-serving) in caution, the status quo and elite consensus into a god, ignoring Jim Hightower's wisdom that there is little to be found in the middle of the road other than a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.

This is not a political problem, but a cultural one. Here we are, at a moment screaming for new ideas, imagination and reasonable risk and we find ourselves stuck with a Harvard Law School grad whose appointments and pronouncements have been, to date, almost pathetically conventional.

Obama, of course, is not alone. What is truly scary about this crisis is that no one in power has offered a single exciting or appealing idea as to what to do about it. Not Paulson, not Congress, nor the Washington media.

A major part of the problem is that we are run by a generation highly educated in the skill of coming up with approved answers according to the standardized tests of our culture. The current fiasco is a grim warning to those persisting in the mechanical solutions of No Child Left Behind: they produce the sort of adults who are now leaving us all behind. And at the top of the list are the huge number of lawyers that have come in recent decades to control Washington, people who have never had to start, invent, convert, salvage or create anything. At a moment crying for massive change, we are guided by those trained in the art of keeping things as they are.

This struck home when, on the same day, I read the latest frustrating news on the bailout and then this from the Maine Life website

Maine's lobstermen are in such dire straits that many fear the industry won''t survive this recession. But Mainers and Maine businesses have pulled together and are doing everything possible to help out. . .

Downeast Toyota in Bangor has promoted Maine lobster in its automotive advertising, while a full-scale community lobster bake was spearheaded by Heidi Stevens, co-owner of By George Jewelers in Rockland.

Lobster appreciation events in the coastal Maine communities of Georgetown, Rockland, Stonington and Boothbay Harbor have resulted in the sale of over 10,000 lobsters, with additional lobster bakes and promotional plans in the works in other communities.

Maine state representative Leila Percy of Phippsburg wrote and recorded a lobster jingle featured in the PSA campaign.

Hannaford, Shaw''s and Wegmans supermarkets are featuring Maine lobster promotions in their stores in New England and New York.

Restaurants, including the Weathervane seafood chain and DiMillo''s Floating Restaurant in Portland, also have launched lobster promotion efforts and advertising campaigns.

Lobster retailers are donating back proceeds from their sales to the Maine Institute and Grudens, who make the foul weather gear and overalls worn by almost every lobstermen, is donating a portion of the proceeds from their "eat lobster" t-shirts back to the institute as well.

Recently, we've been invited to and have eaten more lobster dinners than I care to count. Everyone is buying lobsters having friends over and doing what they can to help out. Others are shipping lobsters to friends and family far and wide.

Such behavior is in the old Maine tradition of "fix it up, make it do, wear it out, use it up, do without," a spirit that is almost entirely absent from Washington. Lobstering is also a complex form of competition and cooperation totally foreign to free marketers. I once knew a lobsterman in Maine who was badly injured. With a few days, all of his traps had been hauled and neatly stored - a service to him, his competitors and the lobsters, a communal act totally alien to the way Washington thinks and acts.

While Obama's public works program will undoubtedly help, it is a sign of how far the capital is from reality that the new administration is being compared to FDR's New Deal. As Steve Fraser wrote in Tom Dispatch, it is no such thing:

A suffocating political and intellectual provincialism has captured the new administration in embryo. Instead of embracing a sense of adventurousness, a readiness to break with the past so enthusiastically promoted during the campaign, Obama seems overcome with inhibitions and fears. . .

All of these people [of FDR's administration] -- the corporatists and the Keynesians, the planners and the anti-trusters -- were there at the creation. They often came to blows. A genuine administration of "rivals" didn't faze FDR. He was deft at borrowing all of, or pieces of, their ideas, then jettisoning some when they didn't work, and playing one faction against another in a remarkable display of political agility. Roosevelt's tolerance of real differences stands in stark contrast to the new administration's cloning of the Clinton-era brainiacs.

It was this openness to a variety of often untested solutions -- including at that point Keynesianism -- that helped give the New Deal the flexibility to adjust to shifts in the country's political chemistry in the worst of times. If the New Deal came to represent a watershed in American history, it was in part due to the capaciousness of its imagination, its experimental elasticity, and its willingness to venture beyond the orthodox. Many failures were born of this, but so, too, many enduring triumphs.

Of course, failure is a dirty word these days in national politics, Far better to simply spend a lot more money doing things the same old way. Then, when you fail, it will be harder to notice.

The mere fact that Obama, his aides and the Washington media speak of rebuilding "infrastructure" is a clue. No one outside of politicians, think tankers, and media uses this term. Real Americans call it bridges, roads, and schools or, if you want to be really abstract, public works. The term "infrastructure" reveals both the distance of the capital from ordinary people and the ability of the city to turn even the most visibly tangible object into an invisible, intangible gossamer.

A major portion of his plan involves roads and bridges. As Obama puts it, "We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s.

Clearly roads and bridges need rebuilding. But why at a time when people are so ready for change - they even thought they voted for it - is Obama limiting himself to something so cautious? Here are a few of the things that appear to have been ignored:

- Why not provide money for parallel mass transit rail lines or exclusive bus lanes on roads being rebuilt?

- Why not provide money for creation or expansion of such services within cities as well as intra neighborhood transit as we move towards more self-sufficient and less transportation dependent communities? Americans are already voting with their fare cards: transit and rail ridership is going up while road use is down.

- Why not provide for a major expansion of rail service in the US? How can such a self-assumed intelligent administration ignore the need for America to catch up with the rest of the world in this area? And we're not talking, Biden like, about sexy high speed trains that will serve the elite but freight lines and ordinary passenger routes that are desperately needed.

- Why not spend money on facilities that will reduce the need for people to commute, such as neighborhood business centers where workers can hold video conferences, such as with their colleagues at suburban headquarters?

- Why not spend money on facilities that will reduce the need for people to travel longer distances by helping to change the general migratory culture of business? Much of this movement - such as for conferences and conventions - is ritualistic, while it remains unnecessarily difficult for colleagues on a specific topic to come together because, say, one is in Denmark, one in Thailand and the other in Des Moines.

In short, why is so little of this money being spent on two of our most pressing needs: stopping people from having to move around so much and finding cheaper ways of doing it when they must?

One reason is that the modern, well educated, legalized, corporatized and bureaucratized official finds it hard to think this way. The other answer is that we need results in a hurry and we don't have time to plan.

That would be an appealing argument if it were not for a bit of history that doesn't get enough attention - not the New Deal depression years but the massive conversion of the country as a result of World War II. Christopher J. Tassava described it for Economic History Services . As you read it, ask yourself: could we do this now and if not, why not?

"Conversion" was the key issue in American economic life in 1940-1942. In many industries, company executives resisted converting to military production because they did not want to lose consumer market share to competitors who did not convert. Conversion thus became a goal pursued by public officials and labor leaders. In 1940, Walter Reuther, a high-ranking officer in the United Auto Workers labor union, provided impetus for conversion by advocating that the major automakers convert to aircraft production. Though initially rejected by car-company executives and many federal officials, the Reuther Plan effectively called the public's attention to America's lagging preparedness for war. Still, the auto companies only fully converted to war production in 1942 and only began substantially contributing to aircraft production in 1943. . .

Merchant shipbuilding mobilized early and effectively. The industry was overseen by the U.S. Maritime Commission, a New Deal agency established in 1936 to revive the moribund shipbuilding industry, which had been in a depression since 1921, and to ensure that American shipyards would be capable of meeting wartime demands. . . The entire industry had produced only 71 ships between 1930 and 1936, but from 1938 to 1940, commission-sponsored shipyards turned out 106 ships, and then almost that many in 1941 alone. . .

[Another] wartime socioeconomic trend was somewhat ironic, given the reduction in the supply of civilian goods: rapid increases in many Americans' personal incomes. Driven by the federal government's abilities to prevent price inflation and to subsidize high wages through war contracting and by the increase in the size and power of organized labor, incomes rose for virtually all Americans - whites and blacks, men and women, skilled and unskilled.

Despite the focus on military-related production in general and the impact of rationing in particular, spending in many civilian sectors of the economy rose even as the war consumed billions of dollars of output. Hollywood boomed as workers bought movie tickets rather than scarce clothes or unavailable cars. Americans placed more legal wagers in 1943 and 1944, and racetracks made more money than at any time before. In 1942, Americans spent $95 million on legal pharmaceuticals, $20 million more than in 1941. Department-store sales in November 1944 were greater than in any previous month in any year. Black markets for rationed or luxury goods - from meat and chocolate to tires and gasoline - also boomed during the war.

As observers during the war and ever since have recognized, scientific and technological innovations were a key aspect in the American war effort and an important economic factor in the Allies' victory. While all of the major belligerents were able to tap their scientific and technological resources to develop weapons and other tools of war, the American experience was impressive in that scientific and technological change positively affected virtually every facet of the war economy. . .

Aerospace provides one crucial example. American heavy bombers, like the B-29 Superfortress, were highly sophisticated weapons which could not have existed, much less contributed to the air war on Germany and Japan, without innovations such as bombsights, radar, and high-performance engines or advances in aeronautical engineering, metallurgy, and even factory organization.

Encompassing hundreds of thousands of workers, four major factories, and $3 billion in government spending, the B-29 project required almost unprecedented organizational capabilities by the U.S. Army Air Forces, several major private contractors, and labor unions. Overall, American aircraft production was the single largest sector of the war economy, costing $45 billion (almost a quarter of the $183 billion spent on war production), employing a staggering two million workers, and, most importantly, producing over 125,000 aircraft. . .

Between 1939 and 1945, the hundred merchant shipyards overseen by the U.S. Maritime Commission produced 5,777 ships at a cost of about $13 billion. Four key innovations facilitated this enormous wartime output. First, the commission itself allowed the federal government to direct the merchant shipbuilding industry. Second, the commission funded entrepreneurs, the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser chief among them, who had never before built ships and who were eager to use mass-production methods in the shipyards. These methods, including the substitution of welding for riveting and the addition of hundreds of thousands of women and minorities to the formerly all-white and all-male shipyard workforces, were a third crucial innovation. Last, the commission facilitated mass production by choosing to build many standardized vessels like the ugly, slow, and ubiquitous "Liberty" ship. By adapting well-known manufacturing techniques and emphasizing easily-made ships, merchant shipbuilding became a low-tech counterexample to the atomic-bomb project and the aerospace industry, yet also a sector which was spectacularly successful. . .

Reconversion spurred the second major restructuring of the American workplace in five years, as returning servicemen flooded back into the workforce and many war workers left, either voluntarily or involuntarily. . .

Servicemen obtained numerous other economic benefits beyond their jobs, including educational assistance from the federal government and guaranteed mortgages and small-business loans via the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 or "G.I. Bill." Former servicemen thus became a vast and advantaged class of citizens which demanded, among other goods, inexpensive, often suburban housing; vocational training and college educations; and private cars which had been unobtainable during the war. . .

The U.S. emerged from the war not physically unscathed, but economically strengthened by wartime industrial expansion, which placed the United States at absolute and relative advantage over both its allies and its enemies.

In brief, as economic historian Alan Milward writes, "the United States emerged in 1945 in an incomparably stronger position economically than in 1941". . .

Will we be able to say something similar four years from now? We might if we shifted automobile production to trains and ecological products just as Walter Reuther got plants to shift to planes or as Budd shifted from building Dodge parts to building railroad cars before World War I. We might if we treated the environmental crisis with the same seriousness was we did WWII. Or if we were willing to use this time to build an exciting, imaginative future rather than just rebuilding freeways we shouldn't really be using anyway.

It clearly happened during the Roosevelt years. In a non-economic sense, it also happened during Lyndon Johnson's Great Society when more good legislation was passed in less time than at any other point in American history.

But it's not happening now, despite all the talk about hope and change, and it won't happen unless we honor innovation, imagination, creativity, reasonable risk and possibility more than we do today - the sort of values that built America until we decided being smart didn't have to include them anymore.

BAIT & SWITCH

Sam Smith

Watching Barack Obama's bait and switch left me with an indefinable sense of deja vu until the parallel finally dawned. The personalities were so different that they obscured a common technique.

Marion Barry was elected mayor of Washington in 1978 thanks to a coalition of blacks and white liberals. So strong was white liberal participation that a columnist in the Washington Afro American said Barry was part of a plan by whites to take over the city.

By the end of Barry's second term, however, his constituency had shifted. The blacks were still there but the white liberals had become largely irrelevant thanks to funding from the white business community. The most integrated meetings in town were when the Barry team sat down with its campaign contributors.

His stand on development issues, in particular, had alienated white liberal support. Development, he promised blacks, was going to bring jobs. Since most of the development would be in white neighborhoods, the question of density, traffic and destruction of community would not be a black political issue.

Thus black power cut a deal with white power. The middle class and poor of either race weren't part of the deal although they were mightily affected by it.

In fact, the deal didn't bring jobs to blacks. By 1986 there were some 40,000 more private jobs in DC than in 1980, but a thousand fewer DC residents were employed. All the new jobs in that period went to mostly white suburban commuters.

Entering office with a biracial liberal coalition, Barry had converted his base into one that relied heavily on black votes and white corporate money. The former he attracted by rhetoric, the latter with the real estate at his disposal.

This is in contrast to the popular image of Barry as portrayed in the press, but when I would ask for examples of Barry doing anything that seriously jarred the agenda of the white business community, nobody could come up with an example.

If you ignore Barry's other big shift - from power to cocaine as his drug of choice - and if you substitute Wall Street and similar big lobbies for Washington's local Board of Trade, what Obama is doing to his white liberal constituency seems oddly familiar.

And Barry and Obama are far from alone. The typical black politician of modern times - i.e. mayor - has been a king whose power has been rigorously circumscribed by a white business community serving as the local parliament. In the end it turned out to be a fool's paradise of black power because within a decade and a half, upper income whites were taking back the cities and the constituents of the black mayors were being evicted in what amounted to socio-economic urban cleansing.

Civil rights and black power - as independent movements - faded in inverse proportion to the rise of blac