Helping and Holding On in Haiti

This photo from the LA Times suggests that in the midst of enormous tragedy and extreme emotions and situations, the struggle for many in Haiti is to live through these days the best they can. While estimates of the dead now vary from 140,000 to 200,000, the leading edge of the massive aid began reaching Haitians on Friday. Dangerous and difficult rescue of survivors still in the rubble has been in some ways the simplest task, with still a dire shortage of doctors, medicine and facilities, and the stores of water and food had not reached many of the needy. Some of the logistical slowness is hard to understand to an outsider--why weren't more trained medical personnel on that aircraft carrier? Why aren't supplies and personnel parachuting in? But while there has been some violence, I heard one (black) U.S. general caution that people get a little too nervous about crowds of black people, and exaggerate the threat of widespread violence--as indeed turned out to be the case in New Orleans after Katrina, where there was much less crime than first reported. While many of the aid efforts now underway are nothing short of heroic, we all hope and pray things get a lot better Saturday.

(Here's another LA Times story--I like their reporting--that goes into the military's efforts, and why they didn't do air drops. Apparently a paratrooper on NPR suggested that troops could be dropped along with supplies to prevent rioting, but perhaps that was impractical, too.)

Late Saturday Update: Water, food and medical care reached more people on Saturday, and rescuers freed people who incredibly survived four days in the rubble, but the massive problems coupled with the massive influx of stuff still meant that distribution was still difficult and many needs were not yet being addressed. With some reports of looting and violence, but also with more soldiers and police to keep order, aid officials emphasized progress, with more progress expected Sunday and in succeeding days. Some were beginning to turn their attention to longer run needs, and as enormous as the immediate need is, there is a long haul ahead.

A Very Dangerous Game in Kennedy Country

The assassination of a young archduke of a European power and his wife by terrorist fanatics of the Black Hand, set off a chain reaction of war that became the Great War, the first world war that killed a generation of young men and led to millions of deaths from disease.

It doesn't always take something as titanic as a presidential election--or the stealing of the presidency--to end up wreaking incredible destruction. This Tuesday it could be a special election in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate. According to polls and pols, the previously unthinkable could happen--the conservative Republican could win Senator Ted Kennedy's seat--a man who pledges to defeat the universal health care bill, what Kennedy described as the cause of his life. And thanks to the lack of any margin in the Senate, he would do just that.

A defeat of health care, after so much political capital has been spent on it, would be a devastating blow to Democrats and to the Presidency of Barack Obama. That of course is what has Republicans so excited. It's their Tea Party revolution, the functional overthrow of the elected government and the not really American, not white enough President! And it could very well begin a chain reaction that ends any hope for the future.

That may sound like alarmism, but all the dominoes are lined up. With the ability to filibuster and therefore defeat any major legislation, Republicans will kill not only health care but economic reform and stimulus, climate crisis legislation, nuclear weapons treaties, green energy, environmental protection and, in short, anything that Democrats or President Obama propose for the next three years or longer--not even because Republicans oppose it, but because their political enemies are for it. This is the definition of political party fanaticism. All for themselves, not a care for their country.

That's the state of this country right now--while the electorate that elected Obama sleeps, or indulges their frustrated fantasies of instant change, extremists have taken over the GOP with loud voices proclaiming outrageous lies, aided and comforted if not led by racists and cynical fanatics like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck--currently lambasting President Obama for trying to help Haiti's earthquake victims--and the smug ignorance and lies of stealth zealots like Sarah Palin, who don't care about facts or reality but only on imposing religious and political ideology, and making a personal fortune doing it.

You can describe them in various ways. Baby Bushcorps on steroids. Tools of corporations solely interested in feeding more millions to their billionaires. Possessed by ambition and their own unconscious wrath and destructiveness. Their blatant lies and obvious racism is chilling. Whatever you call them and however they are described, if unleashed they will lead the way to the new Dark Ages. And that isn't hyperbole. There is only so much time left to confront our growing problems before they overwhelm us.

The Democrats aren't blameless. The Dem candidate in MA, Martha Coakley, is by many accounts not a very good candidate, though she would be infinitely better as a Senator than her opponent. In general throughout the country, Democrats have not fielded very good candidates or made good appointments for the many vacancies resulting from Obama's election and cabinet appointments. Nor have they responded adequately to the economic pain and disquiet in the country, or to the shameless lies of the Rabid Right.

It's a perilous moment. Former Obama supporters, especially in the blogosphere, are engaged in various civil wars, including progressive contests that seem to be more about ego, marketing and glands than ideology, and more about ideological purity than a better if imperfect future. In Massachusetts as elsewhere, many Obama voters are withdrawn, nursing disappointment that the world hasn't changed in a year, and that Obama has chosen to try to make a real difference rather than go down gloriously in pure self-righteous flames.

But the sins of the Dems don't match the stakes. The stakes couldn't be higher. President Obama needs this election in Massachusetts, he needs the Haiti relief effort to succeed faster, and he needs to get health care done and out of the way. And then he needs to go on the offensive, and confront his opponents and their threats directly. What's going on in Washington now is often not very pretty and at times angers and disgusts us all, but the Republicans have no solutions.

The ugly genius of Republicans since Obama's elections, even more than in the Bush years, is to look into their souls and project their own tendencies onto their chosen enemies. They are fascists with all the respect for the truth that Orwell's Big Brother had, and so they call Obama and the Democrats fascists and Big Brother. They are racists who shout that they are the victims of racism, and they compare to the Holocaust a health care bill more modest than most civilized countries in the world, that gives some government control over a wasteful, unjust and inhumane private health care system that is wrecking small and large businesses as well as countless lives--as well as help for those who will otherwise suffer and die without minimum health care. That these people are even taken seriously demonstrates in chilling fashion our society's decadence and lack of maturity. That they are this close to effectively reversing the last election and taking power again, with a single election in a single state, is beyond frightening.

Few if any in America, and not many in Europe, knew anything about the Archduke Ferdinand. Europe was a well-armed tinderbox, but a world war wasn't inevitable. Most historians would probably now agree that World War II was mostly an extension of the Great War, and the Cold War was a result of World War II. It was a chain reaction that mauled the future of generations.

Now once again, what happens in a single state, in a special election nobody was paying much attention to until recently, on a single day, the day after a holiday, may lead to immense damage and suffering for generations, and possibly more than that.

The Democrats have woken up. President Clinton, very popular in the Commonwealth, is there. President Obama will go. Mrs. Edward Kennedy is more visible and audible there. I hope more of the Kennedy family joins her there as well. But the last word comes from the voters of Massachusetts. They can't afford to "send a message" or think it doesn't matter who wins.

That's the kind of non-thinking that got G.W. Bush so close to the White House that he could steal it. The divided progressives, the start-over/new face/ bright new product consumerist approach to elections, it's the same formula. And all we got then was at best a lost decade, the treasury raided by arms merchants and oil companies, a surplus to help prepare for the future turned into a deficit to cripple the future, one of the longest and most costly and unjustifiable wars in American history, official federal corruption including partisan political rule over the judiciary and the outing of our own intelligence agent working on terrorism, torture as a national policy, an attitude of let people die in New Orleans because they're black and Democrats, plans for more nuclear weapons and refusal to ratify nuclear proliferation and Climate Crisis treaties... and the list goes on.

Thanks to that little tremor in the national electorate in 2000, we'll be lucky to get out of this century alive. Another little tremor in Massachusetts on Tuesday will most probably set us on a course of foaming conflict that makes that getting-out-alive prospect considerably more remote.

But we can still come out of this, if Massachusetts steps up. Once the health care bill is a done deal, President Obama's State of the Union could be the time we turn the corner, and renew the focus and the hope that flowered last November, and--hard as it is to believe--only a year ago next week at the Inaugural in Washington.

Doomsday Postponed...Slightly

Today the Bulliten of Atomic Scientists moved back the minute hand on their famous doomsday clock, because of a "more hopeful state of world affairs," due to a "new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government’s orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of Obama." The scientists have traditionally been concerned with nuclear weapons, and so--like the Nobel Prize Committee--they cited President Obama's efforts towards ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

But in recent years, the scientists--including 19 Nobel laureates-- also included the Climate Crisis in their calculations. So their statement said: "By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization."

Yet the change (only the 19th since the clock was established in 1947) was only one minute, and so the Doomsday Clock reads six minutes to midnight. Other news reminds us why: the world is not yet facing up to the likely rise in sea level of at least 7 feet over the next century, thanks in part to well-funded Climate Crisis deniers like U.S. Senator James Inhofe who complained that he was only #7 on Rolling Stone's list of the "planet's worst enemies." Inhofe insists he is #1. And apparently very proud of it.

"You Will Not Be Forsaken, You Will Not Be Forgotten"

With visible emotion, President Obama pledged this morning: "To the people of Haiti, we say clearly, and with conviction, you will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you. The world stands with you."

Water, food, medicine, doctors and rescue personnel arrived all day to the only airport in Haiti, but travel is still extremely difficult because of devastated roads, and communication is still lacking. Rescue teams are working, and heavy equipment is arriving to clear or even create roadways. For the first time since the earthquake, there are runway lights at the airport so flights can land and take off at night. U.S. ships have begun arriving, and an aircraft carrier will arrive Friday with helicopters, supplies and U.S. Marines.

CNN reports that some 400 Americans have been flown out of Haiti, but many of the 40,000 or so Americans there are remaining to help with relief efforts. The Red Cross estimates some 50,000 deaths, including several UN personnel and at least one U.S. State Department worker. The Haitian governmental infrastructure remains practically nonexistent.

Friday update: This LA Times story tells the tale: airport and seaport damage, roads and other logistical problems mean aid is only slowly reaching those who need it. The weekend could be crucial.

The Horror in Haiti

Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 earthquake, but relief efforts have begun--see the post below. Photo: by Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times, with this story.

Help Is On the Way

Those whose experience of disasters is mostly from disaster movies may be wondering why more wasn't being done Wednesday to respond to the utter catastrophe in Haiti, in the aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake plus numerous aftershocks in the 5. range. It certainly is horrible and tragic to see the dying and suffering continuing, and survivors mostly spending a second night sleeping on the streets.

But those of us here on the North Coast of CA, where we've been counselled that our Big One is inevitable (and where we got a scare on Saturday with a 6.5 offshore), know not to expect much help from the outside for the first 48 hours, even when we're within the U.S. That's the nature of catastrophic disasters. It takes time to get the resources organized and transported, and even to prepare to receive them.

In Haiti of course it is much, much worse. Vulnerable old buildings, poor public services, widespread poverty and overcrowding in the city of Port-au-Prince, all on an island. The earthquake destroyed what infrastructure there was, including all major government buildings. Many key people were killed or are missing. Roads are impassable. Electricity, water, telephones including cell phones, all down. Just communicating from one part of the city to another has been next to impossible.

But while relief workers already there (those who survived), including Doctors Without Borders, traveled on foot and worked with their bare hands to treat the wounded, and pull out survivors from the rubble, the U.S. federal government (as well as other countries, and states and even local governments, organizations and businesses with the U.S.) was working all night to mobilize resources and plan relief efforts. (Here are links to accounts of those first hours.)

The first task in Washington and especially in Haiti was assessing what resources were needed and how they could be marshaled and applied. When U. S. military teams arrived Wednesday afternoon, one of the first important efforts was to get the airport up and running, which required setting up air traffic control--the facilities there were destroyed.

On Thursday, the pictures from Haiti should start to look different, as help begins to stream in--and there is a lot of it on the way. It will pick up even more on Friday, when the ships start arriving--including an aircraft carrier loaded with helicopters, personnel, food and medicine.

President Obama is taking charge of "a swift, coordinated, and aggressive effort to save lives." Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates are both returning from foreign trips to coordinate efforts. "... given the many different resources that are needed, we are taking steps to ensure that our government acts in a unified way," President Obama said Wednesday morning. "My national security team has led an interagency effort overnight. And to ensure that we coordinate our effort, going forward, I've designated the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Rajiv Shah, to be our government's unified disaster coordinator."

There will be more tragic news from Haiti over the next days, but there will also be help. In addition to massive and skilled aid from the U.S. and other governments, and the efforts of other organizations, individuals who wish to contribute to relief efforts can do so in many ways. Two sources of information on how are White House.gov and this page at the Rachel Maddow Show.

A Bengal tiger, like all tigers, rapidly disappearing from the wild. Today's UN declaration of an International Year of Biodiversity will try to focus attention and action, but is it too little too late? See post below.

Tigers R Us

In an Animal Planet poll, the world's favorite animal was the tiger. Hooray. Animals that humans have known since our species began, their range and numbers have dwindled since at least the 19th century. There were only about 100,000 left at the start of the 20th century. I remembered reading about them as endangered species in the early 70s. Today there may be as few as 2,000 in the wild, or as many as 3,500. Tiger, tiger burning out.

Tigers are the victims of land clearing and hunting for profit, giant pandas and monarch butterflies of urbanization, mountain gorillas of all of that plus human warfare in their remaining habitat, bluefin tuna of overfishing, and we know what's killing off the polar bear. And those are only six of the most endangered on the World Wildlife Fund watch list. There are hundreds, thousands more, including less glamorous lifeforms, like coral.

Today (Jan. 11) the United Nations launched the International Year of Biodiversity. The announcement was not exactly front page news in the U.S.--what could compete with Harry Reid's comment of more than a year ago, or Mark McGuire admitting he used sterioids in the 1990s? This is depressingly familiar when environment and the Climate Crisis are the topics: the Google News search will show you the BBC story, other European outlets, environmental sites and blogs, as well as Aljazeera, Xinhua and the Malaysian Insider. (The Wall Street Journal covered German Chancellor Merkel's remarks on the subject.)

Perhaps that's related, at both ends of causality, with the fact that experts, organizations and governments have decried species extinctions for decades and done very little about it. As Richard Black in the BBC story notes, "Eight years ago, governments pledged to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but the pledge will not be met."..

"The big opportunity during the International Year of Biodiversity is for governments to do for biodiversity what they failed to do for climate change in Copenhagen," said Simon Stuart, a senior science advisor to Conservation International and chair of IUCN's Species Survival Commission.

Black also notes something else that isn't new: With species extinctions running at about 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate, some biologists contend that we are in the middle of the Earth's sixth great extinction - the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts.

The end of species signal the end of their habitat, principally forests that are torched and bulldozed away, lands and waters that are poisoned, but also climate-sensitive landscapes, waters and ice. Animals, insects, plants--that's biodiversity, too, the web of life that supports our existence.

So UN leaders spoke today of economic impacts, the numbers indicating the stupendous stupidity of this destruction. Black notes deforestation costs the global economy between $2 and $5 trillion a year. Earlier estimates of the world's ecosystems and "natural capital" placed their economic value conservatively at $33 trillion a year--when the total gross national product of the entire world is $18 trillion a year.

There is natural death for species and habitats. Sometimes sudden, more often over time. Even natural crashes can have devastating consequences for other species. This unnatural killing of biodiversity in general is suicide for humans as a life form. Before that happens, the economic costs will topple civilizations. Life would go on, without us.

There's more awareness of the problem, and more support for efforts to protect at least some species. But at this level of action it's not enough. Emotive photos and amazing motion pictures try to substitute for untold centuries of human interaction with animals and plants--the interactions that, in Paul Shepard's phrase, "made us human," but are now not even memories. But are these consciousness-raising efforts enough, strong enough, fast enough?

They're battling the conservatism of the comfortable, the interests of the monied and powerful, and science that only recently began to emerge from its unconscious assumptions, derived (so professor of psychology and ethnology Jordi Sabater Pi believed) from religions that preached that animals and nature were inferior and subservient to humans. Commenting on the near eradication of some of our closest genetic relatives, apes and chimpanzees (millions lived in Africa a century ago, 90% gone now), Dr. Pi said, "I believe that humanity is on the road to abolishing the mistreatment of animals, but when it finally makes it into legislation, there will not be any animals left in the wild to protect."

As for what this International Year can accomplish, Black writes that "the UN hopes some kind of legally-binding treaty to curb biodiversity loss can be agreed at the CBD summit, held in Japan in October." There's also an agreement on deforestation that looked as if it was a done deal at Copenhagen time, but mysteriously stalled. These could be significant, if they happen.

The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and other organizations have for years been taking a direct approach: buying up vulnerable land--often in tropical forests where 40% of known species live--to preserve that biodiversity. What such relatively small measures will ultimately do is hard to figure. But Chancellor Merkel was right in linking biodiversity to the climate crisis. Their stories are related, and are going to be related, however they come out.

An Obama Perspective on 2010

President Obama's five minute Saturday address is a good balance and a good tonic for all the skepticism (here and elsewhere) and pessimism about the coming year, as he talks about the economy and health care. A few takeaways: although unemployment is still growing, job losses in the last quarter of 2009 were one-tenth of those in the first quarter. And despite the phasing-in of elements of the health care bill, a lot will be provided in the first year, to make health insurance more available and affordable, less restrictive and more effective--including free preventive care.

And he ends with a hopeful New Year's message: "We enter a new decade, now, with new perils – but we’re going to meet them. It’s also a time of tremendous promise – and we’re going to seize it. We will rebuild the American Dream for our middle class and put the American economy on a stronger footing for the future. And this year, I am as hopeful and as confident as ever that we’re going to rise to this moment the same way that generations of Americans always have: as one nation, and one people." (If you'd rather scan the transcript, it's here.)

Update: The new CNN poll shows that by and large Americans are not buying the GOPers relentless fearmongering on terrorism. In fact, concern has gone down a tick from summer. While the President's approval rating on this is not as high as it should be--and would be in a less politically toxic environment--it is still at 65%.

These Are Our Leaders?

Now that we've had the official versions, several new 2008 campaign books are dishing the dirt. The provisos and cautions about one such book in this New York Times piece probably should be applied to others as well, but at least some of this high level gossip and revelations for a purpose (political or/and personal) has the ring of truth.

And it's about almost everyone: John (and Cindy) McCain, Sarah Palin, John and Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary and Bill Clinton. In addition to the above-cited piece, there's tidbits here , and here, and here, and here. To name a few.

The name conspicuous by its absence is Obama. Only friction between the presidential and VP campaigns has been reported.

But the stuff reported about the others--some of it tracking with stuff I read before, some just with my intuitions about these people--makes you wonder about the kind of people our current system insists on as political leaders. That as well as the latest self-serving craziness from Michael Steele and most of what we know about other GOPer leaders.

The only solace is that the sanest one of the bunch got elected President.

Economy 2010 Part 2

If you thought I was downbeat in my new year assessments, here's how Bob Herbert began his first column of the year this week: "I’m starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation’s grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues — the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga — while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift."

Herbert begins his uneasy litany with the problems of unemployment and housing. "Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it."

Those "false hopes" turned out Friday to be false in more than one sense, as unemployment rose more than expected in the first December assessment, though far below the worst levels last year. This Times story checks with the usual economics suspects, and as usual they don't agree on what should be done. Some continue to call for another big dose of government spending, but the Screeching Right is focused on the "socialism" of that prescription, while of course also screaming that President Obama isn't doing anything to create jobs.

Meanwhile, Obama is getting little press or credit for the substantial accomplishments of the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says has kept at least 6 million Americans out of poverty, and lessened the severity of poverty for at least 33 million more. The Congressional Budget Office affirmed that the stim has created or saved from 600,000 to 1.6 million jobs, a fact that got much less press than the purported "overestimate" earlier by the White House, of 650,000 jobs.

Such current or future spending takes time to create real jobs, especially when the stim is a "Reinvestment" package as well--targeted not just to infrastructure but the new energy economy. (See part 1 below.) But among other pressing problems (continuing housing mess, slow to nonexistent financial regulation reform) the one that's looming now--with the most impact on employment and the national economy--is the severe slump in state government income.

In his Friday column--"Invitation to Disaster--Bob Herbert zeroes in: "This is an arrow aimed straight at the heart of a robust national recovery....This is not a disaster waiting to happen. It’s under way. Without substantial new federal help, state cuts that are now merely drastic will become draconian, and hundreds of thousands of additional jobs will be lost. "

As usual, California leads the way, and Governor Terminator's budget message on Friday was full of cuts of unparalled dimensions and cruelty, as well as a churlish tone regarding federal responsibilities. This state is already reeling from last year's cuts, and their effects haven't even been fully implemented.

The dire state that states like California and New York are in (as well as Commonwealths like Pennsylvania) is due in part to political failures--some of them institutional, some of them due to past gutless expediency, and many of them, especially in California, due to the past "successes" of the Screeching Right in choking off tax money in favor of corporations and the rich.

But the banks were hardly paragons of virtue when the federal government had to bail them out. If there is anything too big to fail without catastrophic consequences, it's state governments. Way too many jobs are directly and indirectly affected, as well as services to the common good, obligations to those who worked and contributed in good faith and did their duty to their families, as well as those who can yet contribute to a better society.

Economy 2010 Part 1

There was an interesting economics debate at Salon this week. First up was their columnist Michael Lind, asserting that the Clinton boom of the 90s was essentially an illusion, and its premise--that a better educated workforce in knowledge jobs with high tech information infrastructure (the Internet, etc.) was creating a prosperous New Economy--was wrong. That's important, because in many respects, it's what the Obama administration is promoting to revive the economy now.

Lind writes that the productivity gains were overestimated by as much as 20%, with much of the rest accounted for by the tech and housing bubbles. Most gains were made by the top 1% of earners anyway--with the middle class losing ground. Lind's prescription for actual prosperity is: "The most effective way to raise wages at the bottom would be to increase the bargaining power of workers, by unionizing the service sector and by tightening the labor market through restricting unskilled immigration. That would probably spur genuine productivity growth over time as employers substituted technology for more expensive labor." He suggests that the corporate backers of the "middle way" Democrats discourages this, and so the Democratic party doesn't get behind such an effort.

A day or two later, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute disputed Lind's thesis and conclusion. He argued that productivity did increase in the Clinton years, and that economic gains were felt across all income levels. He also cites economic data showing "strong positive returns to educational attainment," so "it seems perverse to argue that Clinton and his allies, as well as President Obama, are mistaken in wanting to see more Americans attend college. "

As usual with these things, they often argue past each other. Marshall writes that steep drops in union membership is due to the fading industrial sector, but doesn't mention Lind's argument that unionizing service workers should be a priority. Lind seems to ignore the structural changes involving information tech that Marshall cites as transformative. Finally, there's no reason that the country--or the President--should have to choose between advocating better educational opportunities and more and stronger unions.

Still, it's an interesting debate. I don't know if Lind's economics is right, but it makes sense to me that stronger and more widespread unions are needed to get working Americans a just wage, and (along with more reasonable--that is, higher--corporate taxes) return this country to the economic and social balance as well as the prosperity of the 50s and 60s.

On the other hand, Marshall is right about changes: neither the economy nor society resembles or could resemble the 50s and 60s in important respects. Putting aside for a minute the new reliance on the service economy, the information technology aspect is only part of the relevant equation. The corresponding part, which neither Lind nor Marshall mention, is energy. U.S. prosperity was fueled by cheap fossil fuel energy, and an energy grid that is now deteroriating and obsolete, even without the need to replace fossil fuels.

President Obama has emphasized that jumpstarting a new economy and creating jobs requires emphasis on new clean energy technologies, and both the manufacturing and service companies and jobs to create a clean energy industry. He's advocating, he's envisioning, and he's devoting chunks of the Economy Recovery and Reinvestment Act money to such projects.

There are lots of pieces to this puzzle, though. There's the question of markets and market share, and whether the U.S. will innovate and lead in this area as it did to a debatable but substantial degree in information technology. So far, the evidence isn't entirely favorable, as countries in Europe and South America as well as Japan and China are in some ways ahead. Given our dependence on the global marketplace, this is probably a big deal--especially if the transformation of the U.S. itself relies on foreign-made systems. Can't happen? Ask General Motors about that.

A clean energy boom might help to restore some manufacturing to the U.S. economy mix, and some better wages. The idea that the service economy can remain so dominant requires such elements as robust government spending (politically unlikely, especially in the states) and foreign slave labor manufacturing (unlikely to continue, as the places where that's economically feasible are declining, even apart from the moral depravity of the practice.)

The debate has been raging for years now on just when fossil fuels are going to become so expensive that solar, wind etc. become competitive. As limitations on coal become part of the equation, and as oil is a finite resource, it seems inevitable. One aspect of this that fascinates me is that those on the left, right and center who are totally in love with the Internet and cellular networks and all the new devices using them, manage to not think about all the energy they use. (A few years ago, George Gilder projected that Internet computing would soon require as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001). As well as all the toxic chemicals they use and electronic garbage they create and to make them (author Hunter Lovins estimates the manufacture of a laptop computer creates 4,000 times its weight in waste. Cell phones are being discarded in the billions.) These are going to be enormous problems. We can't go on forever, advocating an end to greenhouse gas pollution, while using fossil fueled electricity to say so.

What nobody wants to talk about is more of less, of the enormous waste built into this consumer economy that is unsustainable. Or the distinct possibility that there are no models for what's happening, and neither Lind nor Marshall, nor any oft-quoted economist, has anything like an accurate idea of what's ahead.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth."

--John Keats. Painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Not Always So

It's not easy to face what causes fear, rightly and wrongly. Some of what I write here constitutes a way for me to grapple with these subjects, and with those fears.

Though at times I find it overwhelming--prospects of my personal journey taking painful turns and ending, as well as the larger scale prospects I more often write about here--I don't dwell on all this as much as might be suggested by what appears here. Nor should anyone dwell on all of this too much.

Concentrating on the play of consciousness in time, which is all we clearly have, is a more pleasant way of living, though it doesn't dispel an essential sadness. Some philosophies that advocate such an approach--usually though not exclusively forms or derivations of Buddhism --acknowledge this sadness as an appropriate response, though elements of joy are also part of it.

Consciousness of being in the world is a tricky thing. It takes hints from the hyper-reality of some dreams, it's often inspired by nature, and the easily derided emotions easily evoked by children and animals, or by beauty in all its forms, warm and cool. Meditation is a tool specifically designed for such consciousness of the moment, but I also use forms of writing that don't appear here, at least by my authorship. And then there are conversations and other relations, and the more physical involvement, including music, the long vigorous walk, and Zen and the art of shooting hoops.

I mention this here and now because recent posts and quite probably future ones accent the gloomier prospects and aspects of life today. All of this is important, it's a responsibility as well as part of life--we do like to figure things out, as well as to do what we can to make possible a better future. But we're here such a short time. We ought to take it in, and enjoy what we can.

The Mechanics of Fear

Unwarranted and ultimately self-destructive fear is apparently a byproduct of a set of natural responses designed to help creatures like us avoid or escape from mortal danger. But the excesses of a glandular or pre-conscious response (disproportionate to the danger, or evoked mistakenly or falsely) become more consequential when culturally ossified or automated, and especially when linked to the power of machines, which multiply the human ability to damage and destroy to horrific proportions.

Historically this became apparent with the Great War of the early 20th century, when fear and hatred on societal levels supported warfare that otherwise made no sense, except for a few rulers, military leaders and those who made fortunes on armaments and other fuel for the fires of war. It was the nationalistic response to that war that inspired the coining of the term "brutalization" to describe a nation's psyche and behavior (in this case, France. Jay Winter wrote a very powerful and illuminating essay/review on civilian support for World War I and the subsequent disenchantment, in the Times Literary Supplement of June 16, 2006. ) Such fervor was not unprecedented--but the power of modern machinery to kill so many was new, and shocking.

That war was an enormous shock to European thought, and for awhile to political life. But the madness continued, resulting in another World War. And fear did not end with that armistice either--in fact, it got worse and even potentially more consequential. After the machinery of World War I killed a generation of young men, the even more destructive machinery of World War II was trained on civilians as well, and killed millions of them, climaxing with the death by blast, fire and radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by means of the atomic bomb.

But even that was not enough to inspire sanity's control over rampant, frenzied unreasonable and often artificially created fear. The atomic bomb that could kill a city was made larger, and multiplied. Then the hydrogen bomb multiplied that destructiveness geometrically, and a few nations made tens of thousands of them, aimed at each other, ready to launch at a moment's notice.

In a review of a new history of the cold war (in the New York Review of Books, 12/17/2009), Brian Urquhart writes:

“It is useless, though tempting, to speculate on who was the most responsible for the cold war and for the fantastic risk and expense it entailed. The paranoia of Stalin; the aggressive language of the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism; the wild exaggerations and panicky assumptions, sometimes for short-term political objectives, that created dangerous reactions; the tendency, on both sides, to confuse military capacity with military intentions; the mutual ignorance and hostility that led to the most hazardous and expensive arms race in history—to none of these factors, or to the people involved in them, can be confidently assigned the entire blame for a phenomenon that held the world in dread and suspense for more than forty years. The contestants in the cold war, it now seems, were all caught up in a monstrous nuclear nightmare of fear, anger, suspicion, and irrationality that no leader seemed able to dispel.”

Later in the review he adds: “Thus, until quite recently, we lived in a time when many of the most powerful and brilliant people in the world spent their energy and talent, and huge sums of public money, on developing weapons that, if used, would have almost certainly destroyed orderly life on this planet. That it was impossible, for forty years, for the two superpowers to discuss this most lethal of threats to all life in a rational manner must rank, in retrospect at least, as the greatest foolishness and the greatest shared irresponsibility in history.”

Though he guesses that leaders early on realized that these nuclear weapons should never be used, and that common sense often prevailed over panic, that the human race got through the cold war was, Uurqhart writes, miraculous.

Now we face a crisis that is a threat to "orderly life on this planet" that is different in many ways, but is just as grave. To fail to address it would easily replace the cold war as "the greatest shared irresponsibility in history." But to address it requires even more unfamiliar ways of thinking as well as common sense, and above all, it requires urgent attention. Fear only gets in the way.

Two things happened during the Cold War. The consequences of nuclear war were so severe that the citizenry at large, at least in America, simply shut down emotionally and refused to face it. The prospect of societal self-destruction was too much to deal with, and it was largely absent from public dialogue. It wasn't dealt with consciously, though subconscious fears were alive, and were expressed in the arts, especially movies--from the bug-eyed monster and alien invasion flicks of the 50s to the nuclear dramas and satires of the 60s.

It could be argued that's happening again. With relentless and passionate Climate Crisis denial buttressing the tendency to avoid the paralyzing fear of a horrific future, emotions are driven underground, expressed not only in end-of-the-world cinema but in fashionable tales of zombies and vampires: the walking dead.

At the same time, fears and suspicions of the other side--more familiar feelings, perhaps more tangible--distracted society from even considering what needed to be done. Now that Americans and other westerners travel easily to Russia, and there is more access to all the cultures involved, it may seem inconceivable how monstrous stereotypes could inspire fear for so long a time. But they did. Though there were ups and downs, some of the same stereotypes from the 1950s were repeated in TV commercials in the 1980s.

The analogy to today's irrational fear of terrorism is not exact: the threat of nuclear annihilation was real, whereas the chances of anyone in America dying from a terrorist act is minuscule--crossing a small town street is statistically much more hazardous. But the grip of fear on our political life and national dialogue is just as obvious and disheartening. One failed and pretty sorry terrorist attempt on one airliner has once again thrown this country into panic, as predictably as a literal knee-jerk reaction.

So, for example, this story, which appeared in the Eureka, CA Times-Standard:

Suspicious device found on trail in Sequoia Park

A suspicious device reported to authorities Monday afternoon was destroyed by the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office bomb squad.

According to a press release from the Eureka Police Department, at about 2:21 p.m., EPD received a report of a suspicious device on a trail in Sequoia Park. An officer responded and found that the device was an archery arrow with a duct-taped cylinder attached to the arrowhead end of the arrow.

EPD requested the assistance of the explosive ordinance disposal experts from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office, who came to inspect the device. They responded with their EOD robot.
After inspecting the device, they subsequently destroyed it using the robot's water cannon.
”The device was obliterated but appeared to have been some type of foam rubber that had been wrapped in the duct tape, and not an explosive device,” said the release.

Several people in the immediate area of the device were evacuated from the area while the investigation was conducted. "

That foreign terrorists would train and dispatch an operative to blow up an unsuspecting hiker on a trail in this remote corner of the country, or that this financially strapped county would deploy a robot with a water cannon to douse an arrow with a bit of foam rubber stuck to it--all pretty laughable, though not quite on the Doctor Strangelove level. Except that it's indicative of what fear can do, and how it can absorb attention, short-circuit rational thought, and above all, distract from real threats.

Today there are still more than 20,000 nuclear devices in various stages of readiness in the world, including a thousand outside the direct control of the U.S. or Russia. And there is the ultimate time bomb churning away in our thin veil of atmosphere, a fire we are feeding every day, while we indulge in familiar fears and comforts. Our ability to destroy our world and ourselves thanks to our machines far outstrips our apparent ability to deal with those machines and the aspects of human nature--including the dynamics of groups and nations--that unleash our machines against us. If that remains so...the hand of evolution, having written, will move on--even if it will seem to us to move backward.

An artist rendering of a recent discovery: the Voyager spacecraft found that our solar system is surrounded by a kind of cloud, which is held together by a magnetic field. It's wispy but a pretty big cloud--30 light years across. This magnetic field, it's now felt, helps to shield us from cosmic radiation. The Earth has its own magnetic field shield as well.

Too Good A Story

"Fear and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."
Samuel Johnson

Here's a story you might have heard. Back in the 60s, NASA wanted a pen that astronauts could use in space, so they could write in zero gravity. They spent millions developing the technologically sophisticated and expensive "space pen." Meanwhile, the Soviet space program came up with their own solution. They used pencils.

It's a perfect story in its own way. It cheers those who are against government spending and feel that government always wastes money and screws things up. But it also cheers those who have experienced bureaucracy in any organization, and who are suspicious of high tech solutions for everything. And it cheers people who want to believe that scientists are buffoons, out to trick everybody for their own benefit.

So it gets repeated, in print and on the air, and in clever emails. It also happens to be untrue in almost every detail.

Both the Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts started out using pencils. Both space programs worried about the hazards of keeping the pencils sharp and the lead breaking off and floating around in the weightless space capsules. They used grease pencils for awhile. Meanwhile, an entrepreneur named Paul Fisher independently designed and produced what's known as the Fisher space pen. NASA didn't spend a cent on developing it. And eventually both the U.S. and Russian space programs adopted the Fisher space pen.

There are many other untrue stories that get prominently and endlessly repeated, many of them much more pernicious, told often enough by deliberate liars and retold by people predisposed to believe them. This alarming trend is growing. Sometimes it's because it's a good story--even if it's too good to be true. But more often these days, stories are accepted because they are sensational, or because they support a prejudice and a worldview, while they feed hatred and fear: everything from death panels to a conspiracy of scientists on the Climate Crisis. It leads to contempt, intimidation and violence, and terrible politics. If this is viral communication, we as a nation capable of dealing with the future and the real world are in danger of dying of it.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“Chaplin’s great virtue, aside from his comedic gifts, was his emotional readiness. Those who don’t respond to it will be quick to deny that emotion, or to call him saccharine—and indeed, Chaplin did have a tendency to pull out all the emotional stops and risk bathos. But it always felt real. His was not false sentiment but rather a naked display of raw sentiment. And that’s more than forgivable. It’s who he was. It’s what he had to risk to make his art, and the transcendent emotion of his best work shows that he was right to trust his heart.”

Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle

The Last Decades

It's an odd feeling, beginning this new decade. I start by realizing it could be my last, and almost certainly is my next to last decade. During the next ten years, I could well make the transition from late middle age to old age, that is to a certain frailty and disconnection. Not that I know really what to make of this, but it all gives a different sort of significance to this change of the calendar, compared to past decade markers.

The decade begins also as I'm beginning to read David Orr's new book, Down to the Wire. He starts by saying straight out what climate scientists seldom say very clearly (clotting it all with scientific caution and jargon) and politicians won't say: that we've already done so much damage to our atmosphere that the climate of the planet will be inevitably and seriously changed, and no matter what we do, the change will persist for thousands of years. Human civilization will have to adapt to "'a different planet,' one we won't like," or it will fall. Moreover, human civilization will have to change quickly and deeply to avoid causing an even hotter world, which would bring near certain doom, not only for humanity but for much of the planet as we know it.

Basically this is the same message I've been passing on here and elsewhere, except that Orr interprets it all in terms of time. It's that "thousands of years" that takes my breath away. He also quotes the UK's senior scientist Martin Rees as writing that human civilization has a 50% chance of surviving this century. James Lovelock is not even that generous. So I must consider the enormity of this: that this human civilization, which has sweated and bled its way to this point for several thousand years, could be gone in nine decades. Which likely means that it will be seriously unraveling, in blood and tears, in--what?--fifty years? Two decades? Some would say it has begun down that road already--in drought-stricken, war-torn parts of Africa, for instance. This is another head-spinner, and heart spinner, too.

Orr's book is about what needed for political and other kinds of change to avoid the worst: "I also write with the assumption that we will succeed in reducing atmospheric CO2 below the level that would create runaway climate change; otherwise there is no point in writing anything other than an elegy or funeral dirge."

But Orr also writes that preventing the worst--or even some of what is now inevitable--would have been easier and cheaper 30 years ago, or 20, or 10. But from now on, it gets harder and more expensive, and more uncertain. Very much harder, and very much more expensive.

I've also been saying this for awhile: that the climate crisis presents humanity with its greatest evolutionary challenge: can we as a civilization think and act in the more complex and sophisticated ways required by the nature of this crisis? If we can and do, we're fit for the future. If not, it looks as if civilization won't continue. So far, on balance, we're flunking the test.

Looking back on the past decade from the future, if there are historians to do so, the defining moment for humanity may well have been the theft of the presidency by the forces of G.W. Bush, and all that followed (apart from preventing the presidency of the man who has since won a Nobel Prize for his championing of climate crisis awareness.) In his latest column in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne writes:

"Certain decades shape the country's political life for generations by leaving behind an era to embrace or, at least as often, to scorn...I'm afraid that the past 10 years will be seen as a time when the United States badly lost its way by using our military power carelessly, misunderstanding the real challenges to our long-term security and pursuing domestic policies that constrained our options for the future while needlessly threatening our prosperity."

But that isn't the half of it. The lost opportunity to build a consensus and begin addressing the Climate Crisis ten years ago may well be the fateful failure. Then again, it wasn't done in the 90s during the Clinton administration either.

And I look at what Orr and others are saying, and realize that I personally didn't do enough in the 90s and the past decade to make the stakes clear, to communicate clearly and well enough to cut through the denial and cognitive dissonance, the public relations smog engineered by fossil fuel profiteers, the sensationalistic distractions (if someone had an unbelievably profitable oil business and no conscience, might they not consider funding violent terrorists of any persuasion?) There's responsibility enough to go around.

The drumbeat of denial is comfortably part of our devolved politics (which even a right of center columnist like David Brooks notices, though he barely scratches the surface of it.) It plays into comfortable if tragically false analogies, like this op-ed piece which tries to compare the Y2K panic of 2000 to alarms over the Climate Crisis. The Y2K panic never smelled right to me--it is actually more like the panic over terrorism. We don't need panic. But we do need a crisis response. The evidence for the Climate Crisis has built up for more than 30 years, especially when contributing factors are considered (global population, loss of land and water, depletion of biological diversity, poisoning of the environment.) Even in the old story of crying wolf, the wolf finally came.

"It should not surprise us that the battle for the future will be shaped by struggles over the past," Dionne writes. But that's one of the traps we fall into--we fight the battles of the past, and lose the future. I for one am going to devote some time to trying to get my head around these timelines: the personal ones, within the context of the human prospect.

R.I.P. 2009

Among those we lost in 2009: guitar innovator Les Paul, actor Gene Barry, Soupy Sales, Senator Ted Kennedy, writer Larry Gelbart, Farah Fawcett, Ricardo Montaban, writer John Updike, Walter Cronkite, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary. Also: writer J.G. Ballard, director Budd Shulberg, producer Don Hewitt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, actor Patrick McGoohan, Michael Jackson, director John Hughes, actor Natasha Richardson, painter Andrew Wyeth, dancer Merce Cunningham, Robert MacNamara, deep ecologist Arne Naess. Many of them--and other actors, directors, writers, artists, entertainers who passed away in 2009--brought us joy, and depth to our souls. Others made a difference in our world, taught and informed us, guided us by good and bad example. We owe them. Farewell. Click collage to enlarge.

The Nameless Decade

Update 12/30: A version of this is on the Rescued List at Daily Kos.

Update 1/02: Think Progress notes exactly how much of nothing this decade was for American workers: zero net job growth and the first decline in median income since the 1960s.

Ten years ago, I speculated on what this first decade of the 21st century ought to be called. The choice wasn't obvious, and the alternatives weren't very appealing. I used this conundrum as a way to talk about purpose: would this be the decade of zeros--the postmodern, consumer society, corporate dominated nothingness-- or the decade of the Oughts--when we assumed responsibility for what we ought to do, our responsibility for the future?

The problem of what to call the decade was solved by ignoring it, which pretty much sums up how that responsibility idea went. As trend writers this week struggle to come up with something to say about the past ten years, a new title is bandied about--the "noughties." (As my piece linked above traces a bit of the history of "ought" for zero as slang for "nought" as nothing, zero or the "o" in x's and o's, this piece from this week explains more about "nought.")

Whatever you call it, writes Paul Krugman, it's been a big zero. "Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever."

In terms of economics, he writes, this was "the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing." He suggests we just call it the Big Zero.

My 1999 piece questions the whole enterprise of dividing experience into decades with their defining characteristics. At best, it's shorthand for an image, a mood. Mostly it's advertising.

But when it comes to time, I realize more and more I can only speak for myself, with some reference to my contemporaries. Maybe that's why I can locate a complex of feelings as well as images for "the 50s" or "the 60s." But when it comes to the decade we're leaving, I've got nothing.

I have images and memories, of course. But nothing defining. This decade for me is nameless because it is incoherent, without defining characteristics. Except perhaps for the cell phone. That's not much to hang a decade on.

It wasn't bland. It was extreme, but in every direction. How can you define a decade that began with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and ends with Barack Obama? It may be remembered as the decade of lost opportunity, of too late a start, of fatal delay and suicidal strangeness. And with a little hope near the end.

Of course people who grew up, got married, etc. in this decade will always remember its textures. But apart from what began in 2008, let's hope this decade is forgotten, that it remains nameless. And the next one is very different.

Snow Flyer

Lots of snow in lots of places this winter--this photo is from Washington, D.C. Before global heating changed the predictable winters of western PA, snow was the default condition from late November through much of March. In my 1950s childhood, a white Christmas was such a fixed event that the subject of my first play--in third grade--was the amazing Christmas when it didn't snow (or at least, not until the last minute.) So it was that riding down the hills on my Flexible Flyer was a regular adventure, and Frosty the Snowman was a myth made from the world around me.

Where I live now it never snows, and I miss it--especially the silence, the muffling white of it. In the promo for his winter album, Sting mentions the beauty and mystery the blanket of snow brought to the industrial town where he grew up, and though my town was something like that but more picturesque--the snow did have a transformative effect. I loved walking in the town during and just after a snowfall, also in the city of Pittsburgh. (I did arrange my life so I could survive without driving in the snow.) Even in New York, where snow quickly became blackened slush, walking in the snow was exhilarating. In fact, when I realized my brief residence in Manhattan would be coming to an end, I walked from midtown above 50th down to 13th Street in the swirling snow--my last Manhattan memory.

A Christmas Carol

By way of Charles Dickens and the Marx Brothers, Paul Krugman offers a near-future version of A Christmas Carol, set in the U.S. after current health care legislation takes effect--Tiny Tim's bleak 2009 fate with a pre-existing condition and expensive health insurance (not through Scrooge, of course) is changed by the Senate of Health Care Past: "But reform legislation enacted in 2010 banned insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history and also created a system of subsidies to help families pay for coverage. Even so, insurance doesn’t come cheap — but the Cratchits do have it, and they’re grateful. God bless us, everyone."

While Krugman sees merit in progressives who grieve for the bill's insufficiencies (but says this was the best that could get enacted), he scorns opposition from the "Bah, Humbug" fiscal conservatives who ignored the CBO's evidence that the bill is fiscally conservative, and especially "the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people — a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party. In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause."

The Invention of Holidays

“Holidays were invented in 1203 by Sir Ethelbert Holiday, a sadistic Englishman. It was Sir Ethelbert’s hope that by setting aside specific days on which to celebrate things...that the population at large would fall into a collective deep depression. Holidays would regulate joy so that anyone who didn’t feel joyful on those days would feel bad. Single people would be sad they were single. Married people would be sad they were married. Everyone would feel disappointment that their lives had fallen so far short of their expectations.”--Christopher Durang.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays anyway.

This One's For Ted

Dana Milbank of W Post, writing about Senator Ted Kennedy and the final Senate health care vote: " The president pro tempore of the Senate, 92-year-old Robert Byrd, shot his finger into the air to signal his "aye" vote. "This," the West Virginia Democrat called out strongly from his wheelchair, "is for my friend Ted Kennedy." That was very much the story of the massive health-care legislation that finally cleared the chamber early Thursday morning...

More than anything, it was his memory, and his final exhortation, that allowed the Senate Democrats to overcome considerable differences between moderates and liberals in drafting a compromise. President Obama, in his address to Congress in September, read from a letter Kennedy had written as he neared death, saying he was 'confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the president who at long last signs into law the health-care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society.'""One after the other, Senate colleagues invoked his name in a manner more often associated with his slain brothers."

The Eve of History

Today's New York Times:

President Obama said after the vote that the health care bill was “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s” and that together with the House bill, represented “the toughest measures ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.”

If the bill becomes law, it would be a milestone in social policy, comparable with the creation of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965.

Politics 2009

Now just hours away from the last Senate vote on the health care bill, which once again is expected to be 60-40, with all GOPers voting against, David Herszenhorn in the New York Times opines that " [t]he votes also marked something else: the culmination of more than a generation of partisan polarization of the American political system, and a precipitous decline in collegiality and collaboration in governing that seemed to move in inverse proportion to a rising influence of lobbying, money, the 24-hour news cycle and hostilities on talk shows and in the blogosphere."

Meanwhile the voices pointing out the dangers of current misuse of the Senate filibuster now include President Obama, in a PBS interview: " I mean, if you look historically back in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s - even when there was sharp political disagreements, when the Democrats were in control for example and Ronald Reagan was president - you didn't see even routine items subject to the 60-vote rule. So I think that if this pattern continues, you're going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us."

Update: The actual final vote was 60-39. One GOPer didn't bother to show, but the elderly and ailing Senator Robert Byrd, who earlier this week some of those Christian Republicans prayed would die before the vote was taken, made sure he was there. He voted in honor of "my friend," Senator Ted Kennedy.

Shortly after I took photos of the rainbow last Saturday I've already posted, I walked around to the back, and took some photos of the clouds above the setting sun. This is one of them.

This Fateful Moment: Follow-Ups

Copenhagen is over, the health care bill passed its first and probably decisive test in the Senate on a straight party-line 60-40 vote, the minimum necessary to avoid an unbreakable filibuster. So evaluations of the outcomes have begun.

Internationally there's a lot of skepticism about the Copenhagen agreement, expressed particularly in UK papers, like the Guardian. This BBC summary is a bit more balanced but still pretty brutal.

Update: Sam Hummel's useful and detailed account at Salon questions much of the reporting on Copenhagen. He asserts that no better accord was rejected, that while they were disappointed that the accord wasn't stronger, most developing nations supported it; the accord was put together by a representative group rather than a "backroom deal" of a few countries; and that the accord is meaningful: "The importance of getting an agreement under which the major developing nation emitters recognize they have a responsibility to act cannot be overstated!" He also says that Obama is not to blame for any perceived weakness in the accord, and that his contribution was positive. He concludes: "The things I saw, in every segment of the COP15 negotiations that I had the opportunity to watch, gave me hope."


On the health care bill, while some on the left are still angry, some oppose provisions or especially what's lacking so intensely that they remain opposed to the bill, others--like Kos--are calling for the left to continue to try to improve the bill until it is in absolute final form. At that point, if it doesn't become "worse," he and others will likely support it.

There's a growing sense that it's the best that could be expected, that all major "revolutionary" legislation began in a limited, inadequate form, and that what it does is better than things as they are. And there's the beginning of admission that it's an historic achievement for the Obama administration. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, "It was as grueling a victory as the one in the primaries, and took even longer. But it was a victory, a substantive, enduring legislative victory the like of which no president has achieved since Reagan."

In the context of the ongoing madness in the U.S. Senate on health care, several more voices have joined mine and Ezra Klein's in asserting that the current misuse of the filibuster as demanding a super-majority for any substantive bill is the prime suspect in a government that can't quite govern: The Nation's Chris Hayes said so on MSNBC, and Paul Krugman concludes that "the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional."

But what does all this mean for "this fateful moment" in the shape of things to come? It's more than a truism to say, only time will tell. It's a reminder that quite a lot is unpredictable. But from this perspective, it is ominous. The basic fact is that neither the need for a decent health care system in the U.S. and a concerted effort to address the Climate Crisis by the entire world could overcome the power of other political and economic interests.

While there is plenty of responsibility to go around, the usual suspects of the huge financial and economic interests--the multinationals and their banks, the big fossil fuel and insurance conglomerates--have been busy in the shadows, pulling silent strings.

Those interests mightily influence U.S. politics, and since I know this landscape better, this is where I see the most disgusting and disquieting evidence. It's true on the Climate Crisis as well as health care--for the lack of congressional action on carbon limited what President Obama could promise or persuade in Copenhagen.

This is despite what I believe is much stronger public support for universal health care and for action on the Climate Crisis. Polls suggest this as well, including a new one on the Climate Crisis, in which 65% favored regulating carbon emissions.

So at this moment, the conclusion on both issues suggest important beginnings, but containing flaws that may turn out to be fatal. The health care bill may not control costs or lower premiums enough, may impose an unpopular and perhaps unconstitutional "individual mandate" to buy products from private insurance, and may be phased in so gradually that it remains vulnerable to political destruction before it takes full effect. The Copenhagen agreement may not lead to real agreements to act, and may signal that national governments won't act quickly enough or sufficiently to either blunt the effects of the Climate Crisis in the near future, and especially stop the worst from happening later on.

I agree with those who say that even if he had done some things differently, President Obama could not have altered either outcome for the better. And I'm not going to waste my energy on political posturing. I have no editors to please or ideological banner to wave from my masthead. I have no producers to please by being outrageous.

As far as what we do to make a better future using the instruments of politics as well as of science, business and law: this is where we are. Both the health care bill (assuming that something like this becomes law) and the Copenhagen agreement do reverse the recent and seemingly unstoppable official refusal by the U.S. government to recognize and confront these fateful issues.

Most of these efforts will be conducted by people younger than me. To them I reiterate that hope is not what you feel but what you do.

Health Care Deal

Senate Democrats have apparently secured the necessary 60 votes to pass the current version of their health care bill by Christmas. Judging from what I've read about the contents of the bill, I believe it should be passed.

Here's some sense of the latest changes, and while I am troubled by what the bill lacks, I am most persuaded by descriptions like this--in a Washington Post oped Sunday by Victoria Kennedy--of what the bill does do:

" Thirty million Americans who do not have coverage would finally be able to afford it. Ninety-four percent of Americans would be insured. Americans would finally be able to live without fear that a single illness could send them into financial ruin.

Insurance companies would no longer be able to deny people the coverage they need because of a preexisting illness or condition. They would not be able to drop coverage when people get sick. And there would be a limit on how much they can force Americans to pay out of their own pockets when they do get sick."

It is even more important to pass this bill, and quickly get through conference committee and get the final bill signed into law. It is time for this to be over.

Once the bill is passed, the light can shine on the disgraceful conduct of congressional Republicans. As a candidate, Barack Obama made a persuasive case for an end to political divisiveness for its own sake, particularly on major issues of common concern. He tried to work with Republicans on this issue and others, and was rebuffed, insulted, lied to and lied about, and worse. For the next several days anyone paying attention will see even more clearly the Republican strategy of obstruction for its own sake. At at time when we need substantive attempts to find the best solutions for increasingly dangerous problems, we are mired in politics of the worst sort, and discourse that is as crude as any I remember, and even more shamelessly mendacious than any in my lifetime.

The end of the health care debate will free the White House from the pretense that congressional Republicans are acting as a legitimate partner in governing, or that the political hysteria Republicans are whipping up nationally is either normal or useful. It is all unpatriotic and undemocratic. I expect President Obama to unleash hell on the Republicans in the next year for their obstructionism, for their abdication of a constructive role in democracy. And they deserve it.