Aurora in Flight

A two minute video compiled from still shots taken every two minutes by a camera mounted in an empty seat on a commercial Air France flight from San Francisco to Paris, that includes flying through an Aurora.  It's mind-blowing to see it in the middle of an otherwise normally wondrous flight, so it's a neat video. (There's a music track, too.)  But it reminds me why I get a window seat at least one-way on long flights--there's nothing, not even this video, to compare with what you can see live: clouds, sun and moon, mountains and waters and landscapes that can't even be described yet alone identified.  You don't get much of a sense of flying on those big planes, but you do get a much different experience of the planet.

Screeching, the Deatheaters Take Off Their Masks

I'm not sure that I'd call it a Harry Potter budget plan (as this congressperson did) but it clearly is a sincere expression of the party of Voldemort.  As every Democrat in soundbite sight pointed out (echoing President Obama in the speech generously excerpted below), the Ryan budget the GOP now owns "ends Medicare as we know it."

 Some believe this vote will nail the coffin shut on the GOPer attempt to keep a House majority in 2012.  It does appear to be unpopular already--and the more people learn about it, the more they dislike it.  Without a creditable opponent so far, President Obama now has an issue to use as central to his campaign.  This analysis is interesting: that it allows him to return to meta-themes of 2008, this time centered on "compassion."

Before GOPers overwhelmingly passed their budget in the House on Friday (which will have no effect except politically), they were busy bleating about President Obama's speech.  Was Obama's Speech Too Fiery? the CS Monitor asked, responding to copious GOPer leaders' expressions of hurt feelings.  But Joe Klein at the Time blog called it Wounded Elephants Screeching."    "Republican World has become a very self-referential place, only vaguely in touch with reality," Klein writes:

Here is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue--and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years.

"Indeed, the sheer hatred that Republicans have for Obama has led them to overreach, to latch onto Paul Ryan's well-outside-the-mainstream budget plan," Klein continues, but it's a particular kind of hatred. In her blog piece about "Pouty Republicans" responding to President Obama's speech, Joan Walsh at Salon noted the remarks of Senate GOPer leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,  "he sounds like a headmaster correcting an errant schoolboy about "not only his tone but his direction." He's actually the president, Senator, not a schoolboy...

Other GOPers were dismissive in a particular way.  My favorite such response to the President's speech was from a House leader from Texas: "I missed lunch for this?"  These remarks owe something to payback for the disrespect many expressed for President GW Bush, although no Dem leader was ever as utterly dismissive of Bush as these GOPers are of President Obama.  In this regard, they owe a lot to racism. There's really no getting past that. They can't help themselves.  It must be hard for them not to call him boy in public.

So even if President Obama wins re-election and Congress returns to Democratic control in 2012, there's no reset button in life, history or politics.  We're losing precious years.  There may be benefits--perhaps some purgation of mean spiritedness and racism, though that's a lot to hope for.  There may well be changes that won't be reversed, so that the corporate bosses running this party will have gotten what they really want, perhaps at the level of law, particularly state law.  But in any case we're losing precious time and wasting resources for the fight of the future as the Climate Crisis takes hold, and all the current projections for the next 20 years of budgets or anything else become vain fantasy.

President Obama: The Kind of Future We Want

While the process was underway leading to the necessary agreement to keep from a potentially disastrous government shutdown, President Obama kept his own counsel while the House Republicans talked loud and long.  On Wednesday, President Obama had his say on budgets and deficits.  Typically he put it all in context, from the past to the future, and especially in the context of values.

I'm going to quote extensively from this speech, which as usual was more discussed than heard even on the day it was given.  Then that's probably going to be it for awhile around here on these topics, because in Washington it's just going to be a lot of sound and fury signifying not very much, for the foreseeable future.  And it will all be about numbers that have no meaning to me whatsoever.  I'm still surprised that I can spend $30 at the grocery store and carry home so little.

But I will note a few last news items on these topics.  It turns out (surprise surprise) that the vaunted $38 billion in budget cuts actually cut much less.  One measure says a bit less than half, the Congressional Budget Office says much less than that.   According to polls, voters give Democrats and the President credit for averting the shutdown and a majority approve of President Obama's handling of the situation, while a Public Policy Poll finds that "after a little more than 3 months in charge House Republicans have fallen so far out of favor with the American public that it's entirely possible Democrats could take control of the House back next year."  Plus there is no great call for more budget cuts--slightly more Americans in this Gallup poll favor no more cuts.

Okay, now the speech--from the top (of the speech, and of this page)...

President Obama began by setting the context of American values in American history: 

"From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.

But there’s always been another thread running through our history -– a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

And so we’ve built a strong military to keep us secure, and public schools and universities to educate our citizens. We’ve laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce. We’ve supported the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire new industries. Each of us has benefitted from these investments, and we’re a more prosperous country as a result.

Part of this American belief that we’re all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments."

Then the President reviewed more recent history, in connection with the federal deficit: how in the 1980s the deficit and cumulative national debt began to grow and threatened to get out of control.  How "...our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation’s deficit -- three times. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush, then made by President Clinton, by Democratic Congresses and by a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice. But they largely protected the middle class; they largely protected our commitment to seniors; they protected our key investments in our future."

Then how after the 2000 election  "we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -– tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more."

Then the President outlined in stark specifics why it is important to control deficit and debt.  His twin conclusions: ultimately, all this rising debt will cost us jobs and damage our economy.  It will prevent us from making the investments we need to win the future...  Here’s the good news: That doesn’t have to be our future. That doesn’t have to be the country that we leave our children. We can solve this problem. We came together as Democrats and Republicans to meet this challenge before; we can do it again."

Then President Obama spoke in plain terms about common attitudes concerning the government and its budget, and how politicians exploit these feelings: "But that starts by being honest about what’s causing our deficit.  You see, most Americans tend to dislike government spending in the abstract, but like the stuff that it buys... And without even looking at a poll, my finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes they should be paying higher taxes. (Laughter.)

So because all this spending is popular with both Republicans and Democrats alike, and because nobody wants to pay higher taxes, politicians are often eager to feed the impression that solving the problem is just a matter of eliminating waste and abuse. You’ll hear that phrase a lot. “We just need to eliminate waste and abuse.” The implication is that tackling the deficit issue won’t require tough choices. Or politicians suggest that we can somehow close our entire deficit by eliminating things like foreign aid, even though foreign aid makes up about 1 percent of our entire federal budget."

So here’s the truth. Around two-thirds of our budget -- two-thirds -- is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Two-thirds. Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans’ benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20 percent. What’s left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That’s 12 percent for all of our national priorities -- education, clean energy, medical research, transportation, our national parks, food safety, keeping our air and water clean -- you name it -- all of that accounts for 12 percent of our budget.

Now, up till now, the debate here in Washington, the cuts proposed by a lot of folks in Washington, have focused exclusively on that 12 percent. But cuts to that 12 percent alone won’t solve the problem. So any serious plan to tackle our deficit will require us to put everything on the table, and take on excess spending wherever it exists in the budget.

A serious plan doesn’t require us to balance our budget overnight –- in fact, economists think that with the economy just starting to grow again, we need a phased-in approach –- but it does require tough decisions and support from our leaders in both parties now. Above all, it will require us to choose a vision of the America we want to see five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road."

President Obama then examined the Republican plan for dealing with the budget.  It is the plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, though the President didn't name him.  He was not shy about describing this plan's intent or its effects.  And he made clear what changes he would not accept as President.

"But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

A 70 percent cut in clean energy. A 25 percent cut in education. A 30 percent cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That’s the proposal. These aren’t the kind of cuts you make when you’re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget. These aren’t the kinds of cuts that the Fiscal Commission proposed. These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America that I believe in and I think you believe in.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them.

Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. They’re scrambling to figure out how they put more money into education. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but on biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the American people, the United States of America -– the greatest nation on Earth -– can’t afford any of this.

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you’re a 65-year-old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

It’s a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody’s grandparents -- may be one of yours -- who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some of these kids with disabilities are -- the disabilities are so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves."

Then came the heart of his message about the GOPer budget and his own vision for America: 

"And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though Americans can’t afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President. (Applause.)

This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That's not a vision of the America I know."

"The America I know is generous and compassionate. It’s a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other; for the country we want and the future that we share. We’re a nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and we saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives. That’s who we are. This is the America that I know. We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit our investment in our people and our country.

To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I’m President, we won’t."

"So today, I’m proposing a more balanced approach to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years...It’s an approach that puts every kind of spending on the table -- but one that protects the middle class, our promise to seniors, and our investments in the future."

President Obama outlined four steps.  First, to keep domestic spending down, "but I will not sacrifice the core investments that we need to grow and create jobs. We will invest in medical research. We will invest in clean energy technology. We will invest in new roads and airports and broadband access. We will invest in education. We will invest in job training. We will do what we need to do to compete, and we will win the future."

Second, to cut defense spending--not only by getting rid of unneeded programs, but (in a little noticed assertion): "We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but we’re going to have to conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world."

Third is to reduce health care spending, but not by the GOPer budget's idea: "Now, here, the difference with the House Republican plan could not be clearer. Their plan essentially lowers the government’s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead. Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself."  This can be accomplishment by implementation of the health care reform bill and by "building on these reforms" to dramatically lower the costs of Medicare and Medicaid.  But the President was also clear on what he would not do:

"But let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations. That includes, by the way, our commitment to Social Security."

 "The fourth step in our approach is to reduce spending in the tax code, so-called tax expenditures. In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.


Beyond that, the tax code is also loaded up with spending on things like itemized deductions. And while I agree with the goals of many of these deductions, from homeownership to charitable giving, we can’t ignore the fact that they provide millionaires an average tax break of $75,000 but do nothing for the typical middle-class family that doesn’t itemize. So my budget calls for limiting itemized deductions for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans -- a reform that would reduce the deficit by $320 billion over 10 years.

But to reduce the deficit, I believe we should go further. And that’s why I’m calling on Congress to reform our individual tax code so that it is fair and simple -- so that the amount of taxes you pay isn’t determined by what kind of accountant you can afford.

I believe reform should protect the middle class, promote economic growth, and build on the fiscal commission’s model of reducing tax expenditures so that there’s enough savings to both lower rates and lower the deficit. And as I called for in the State of the Union, we should reform our corporate tax code as well, to make our businesses and our economy more competitive."

So this is my approach to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. It’s an approach that achieves about $2 trillion in spending cuts across the budget. It will lower our interest payments on the debt by $1 trillion. It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in tax expenditures -- spending in the tax code. And it achieves these goals while protecting the middle class, protecting our commitment to seniors, and protecting our investments in the future."

Then the President dealt with the objections he anticipated to his plan and his vision.

There will be those who vigorously disagree with my approach. I can guarantee that as well. (Laughter.) Some will argue we should not even consider ever -- ever -- raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It’s just an article of faith to them. I say that at a time when the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century, the most fortunate among us can afford to pay a little more. I don’t need another tax cut. Warren Buffett doesn’t need another tax cut. Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare. Or by cutting kids from Head Start. Or by taking away college scholarships that I wouldn’t be here without and that some of you would not be here without.

And here’s the thing: I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me. They want to give back to their country, a country that’s done so much for them. It’s just Washington hasn’t asked them to."

President Obama was sympathetic to those who believe the current recovery will be hampered by reduced spending, and that's "why we have to use a scalpel and not a machete to reduce the deficit, so that we can keep making the investments that create jobs. But doing nothing on the deficit is just not an option. Our debt has grown so large that we could do real damage to the economy if we don’t begin a process now to get our fiscal house in order."

He is also sympathetic to those who say that any talk of reforming Medicare etc."will immediately usher in the sort of steps that the House Republicans have proposed. And I understand those fears. But I guarantee that if we don’t make any changes at all, we won’t be able to keep our commitment to a retiring generation that will live longer and will face higher health care costs than those who came before."

He acknowledged that especially in today's toxic Washington, the parties coming together to deal with these issues is very difficult, but he believes it is possible, because Americans in dire times have done it before.  He said--as he has before--that the argument over the size and role of government is as old as America and can be a healthy one.  

"But no matter what we argue, no matter where we stand, we’ve always held certain beliefs as Americans. We believe that in order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own happiness, we can’t just think about ourselves. We have to think about the country that made these liberties possible. We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community. And we have to think about what’s required to preserve the American Dream for future generations.

This sense of responsibility -- to each other and to our country -- this isn’t a partisan feeling. It isn’t a Democratic or a Republican idea. It’s patriotism."

"The other day I received a letter from a man in Florida. He started off by telling me he didn’t vote for me and he hasn’t always agreed with me. But even though he’s worried about our economy and the state of our politics -- here’s what he said -- he said, “I still believe. I believe in that great country that my grandfather told me about. I believe that somewhere lost in this quagmire of petty bickering on every news station, the ‘American Dream’ is still alive…We need to use our dollars here rebuilding, refurbishing and restoring all that our ancestors struggled to create and maintain… We as a people must do this together, no matter the color of the state one comes from or the side of the aisle one might sit on.”

“I still believe.” I still believe as well. And I know that if we can come together and uphold our responsibilities to one another and to this larger enterprise that is America, we will keep the dream of our founding alive -- in our time; and we will pass it on to our children. We will pass on to our children a country that we believe in."

Don't Bother Me, Dahling, I'm Defending the Poor

She's always seemed to me to be a strange candidate for dahling of the left, despite her Gabor sisters accent.  Arianna Huffington first became visible as the face of her very wealthy and decidely right wing husband's campaign for U.S. Senate from California.  Her ideology-change operation happened little more than a decade ago.

Lately she's been running the Huffington Post, which was the first to apply the Rupert Murdoch journalism principle to an online magazine: a combination of heavily ideological politics and tabloid entertainment.  She tilted Huffpo to Hillary as hard as she could in 2008 but despite that failure the site emerges as probably the most powerful of its kind.  Even the Daily Beast couldn't kill it.

And possibly because she kept the overhead down so well with the simple expedient of not paying writers.  This was pretty common for even the name blogs at first, and of course remains common for those of us dumb enough to contribute or do this on our own.  It also owes a certain lineage to the alternative press, where just getting published was supposed to be the reward.  Plus some swag (as it's called now.)

 Some of the alternative press, which includes some papers more prosperous than the so-called established press, continues to exploit its freelancers.  I'm being exploited by one such right now.  But Arianna has taken this to a whole new level.  First she doesn't pay anything, and brags about it.  Second, she announces a multimillion dollar deal with AOL at the Super Bowl.  Champagne all around.

So now some of her writers are suing her, and I'm here to cheer them on.  Heading the suit is Jonathan Tasini, who I remember as the president of my union--the National Writers Union--back when I could afford dues.   Tasini still has a way with words--he calls her a slave owner.

Huffington counters that she pays a staff of reporters and editors, she just doesn't pay mere bloggers, who get exposure.  It's familiar stuff--for newspapers who don't pay for opinion pieces, and for the general treatment of freelancers.  Publications may depend on us, tell us they can't afford to pay more, but staff gets salaries and health care, and suddenly they've got spanking new offices to go to, while freelancers are paid what freelancers were paid in the 1970s--not adjusted for inflation mind you, but literally the same dollar amount.

Of course Arianna might have to pawn some of her jewels to pay her bloggers, but life is tough all over.      

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"It Was Green & Blue OK" by Georgia O'Keeffe

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

Jose Luis Borges

No Cause for Celebration

At the last impossible moment, Congress averted a federal government shutdown, at least temporarily, with a continuing resolution that keeps the doors open until late next week, when the overall agreement comes up for a vote.  The agreement calls for some $39 billion in cuts--a total of some $78 billion below President Obama's original budget--but without the policy riders, such as the last one in contention, defunding Title 10 health programs primarily for women.  GOPers finally realized they'd basically won, while Democrats pretended it was a civics lesson in democracy.

The excessive fights aren't over, though it could be that America's patience is (how many people even noticed a 7.1 earthquake in Japan last week?)  The epic battles ahead are on debt ceiling and next year's budget, but even next week there is likely to be a lot of contention on this agreement.  Tea partiers are likely to vote against it because it doesn't cut enough for them or doesn't include defunding Title 10, EPA, NPR and quite possibly Evolution.  Some Democrats may well vote against it because of specific cuts or because this immense amount of money drained from the economy may well derail economic recovery. 

It's easy enough to talk about this in terms of extremes on each side losing out for a compromise in the middle.  But in the middle of what?  There are no sides involved when it comes to impact.  These cuts are either going to result in the loss of 100,000 to 450,000 jobs (as one economist estimates, according to Ezra Klein of the WA Post), or they aren't.  What does seem very likely is that it will be the middle class and the poor and the sick who will pay, and certainly not the corporate elite and the mega-wealthy.

But another really troubling aspect of this trend is how it increases vulnerability to the inevitable dangers ahead.  In the short run it increases the vulnerability of individuals and families on the edge, and it increases the overall vulnerability of the economy as it erodes incomes both directly dependent on government and indirectly.  All of this is a result of the refusal of government to increase revenues by taxing wealthy businesses and individuals. 

In the long run it erodes the ability of government to respond to emergencies--particularly the long emergency of the Climate Crisis.  It erodes that ability both in terms of specific capabilities, which are being slowly starved (though President Obama placed emphasis on the compromise budget saving investments to win the future.) But it is also in the area of attitude, of the growing ferocity of seeing government as the enemy, instead of the commons, where we pool resources to help the whole and help those who most need it.  In that regard, this violence to our ability and will to deal with these problems threatens the future.  So maybe the Washington Monument stays open, but this is not a day to celebrate.     

War on Women

As I write this there are about four hours until the federal government shuts down.  There has been talk for the past several hours that another stopgap measure is being prepared, and it's safe to speculate that there is a lot of furious engagement going on in Washington right now.  Because over the course of the day, the game has changed, and the Republicans have gamed themselves into potential disaster.

"If it sounds ridiculous," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "that's because it is ridiculous."  He announced--and other Democrats have been on this all day--that Democrats gave in further on budget numbers and had an agreement last night, but GOPers are balking because of one thing: they demand funding be cut off for Title 10 services: women's health services.  They trumpet this as cutting off Planned Parenthood, but there are a lot of other clinics serving the growing number of women (and therefore children) who have little or no affordable alternative for a range of health services, including screening for cancers. (Planned Parenthood, by the way, also offers prostate cancer screening for men.)

House Speaker John Banal is going around insisting it's about the numbers, but this particular funding is .008% of the federal budget.  Title 10 was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, and one of its cosponsors was George Herbert Walker Bush.  The funding cannot by law go to abortions. It is imperious overreach for the extreme Rabid Right, and this time they may have reached too far.

The pictures today were dramatic, for anyone paying attention.  Women Democrats in Congress were all over the media, passionately denouncing this. Women Republicans in Congress held a press conference, but it turned to disaster when they refused to answer any questions about Title 10.   Commentators of nearly every ideology expressed disbelief.

There was some question about who would be blamed for a government shutdown, before today.  Now there is no question.  Democrats reportedly agreed to about three-quarters of cuts the GOPers demanded.  When Reid and others announced that the sole remaining issue was Title 10, a very popular program, the GOPers have been on the defensive all day.  Had they accepted this deal, declared victory, they would be in stronger position on upcoming and bigger budget and fiscal battles.  They may well be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

There are only two possibilities for some salvation for the GOPer fringe running things.  That in the next few hours they agree to a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open and then in the next few days to a deal.  And/or that today's furor doesn't ripple out and "go viral" politically in the coming weeks and months, but is confined to a one day embarrassment.

This is a blunder of proportion, but it is not inconsistent for the Rabid Right.  In the onslaught of extreme proposals GOPer governments are ramming through in various states, there are plenty that attack women's rights and callously endanger the health and well-being of women and their families.

Now perhaps the basic inhumanity of their ideology has been exposed.  They are engaged in extortion, not caring who they hurt and the proportion of that harm.  In effect, they want to recreate this country with narrow sectarian rule, a mirror image of the Sharia law that they and only they are so afraid is coming to America.  If it does, they will bring it.   

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
in his dissenting opinion to Citizens United

Proportion of federal income consisting of  tax revenues from corporations in the 1950s:  30%

Proportion of same in 2009: 6.6%

Orange You Jealous? And Other Random Notes

I noted with I hope obvious amusement that this blog was in the Final Four of a blog-sponsored tournament of Humboldt County blogs.  (Like VCU, it lost in the semi-finals.  Congrats to whoever won.)  It's a laugh to me because this is barely a blog at all, let alone a Humboldt County one. 

Sure, it's published as a blog, on blogspot, but I probably don't have to point out the many ways it differs from the usual blog.  And it's a Humboldt County blog only in the sense that I live here, now.  I almost never write about local politics (I barely mention the entire state of California.) I understand that it's a failing but local politics and local news just don't interest me.  I'm sure they should, but there's only so much time in my day, and so much gas in my tank.

What I do occasionally write about--what does interest me--is life as I live it here.  (That's probably reflected even more in my photos.)  What I value about living here has more to do with the clouds and the trees, the ocean, the smell of wood smoke, the cows in the pastures along the highway (as there were when I was growing up in western PA, but are no more.)  And the oranges.

When I was a kid in western PA, biting into an orange was taking a chance.  It could be good, it could be not so good. It was the same everywhere else I've lived since, with the not so good becoming more frequent.  But here we get oranges, particularly navel oranges, for a good part of the year, but especially right now.  I guess they come up from the Central Valley.  They're California oranges anyway.  And they are good.  They are excellent.  And they are always, always excellent.  And they have been from the first ones I bought at my first Saturday Farmers' Market on the Arcata Plaza in the fall of 1996, to today (when I'm more likely to pick up a week's worth at Wildberries Market on senior discount day.)

Dream up globally, even galactically.  Eat and drink locally.  That's about as Humboldt as I get.

Though I do have this part-time job that requires me to go to plays in Humboldt County.  I've just revamped my Stage Matters blog, and I like how it looks now.  Posts like the Tom Stoppard ones are a real indulgence, but then so is this.  I was also amused that this blog's showing in the tournament revealed its existence to some other local bloggers.  This blog's first post was in 2005.  I started "blogging" (on American Dash) in 2002.  Welcome, newcomers.

Oh, and our 101 is open again--thanks to the folks who cleared that mudslide away so quickly.  The only effect I saw was a day or so without New York Times or San Francisco Chronicles.

Fighting Back

I don't mean to be a Rachel Maddow echo machine here, but she continues to make the most cogent and direct case for a particular big picture politics: the domestic Shock Doctrine and its ultimate goal, which is to keep Republicans in power indefinitely by crippling the ability of anyone--Democrats first of all--to successfully oppose them.  She outlined one aspect of this long-term strategy on Wednesday: bleed the unions of the money they would give to Democrats, and the corporate controllers of the GOPers are in forever.   

It seems to me to be a strategy so carefully planned and ready to go after the November elections, coordinated over a number of states as well as in the U.S. House, that it must have been developed and waiting to go, with just a few people empowered to decide to put it into motion.  I'll take a wild guess and say that would be the corporate bosses like the Koch brothers who are financing the Rabid Right tea party soldiers and the ghost organizations that dispense the money to fuel it.  Look at the tactics: flooding all these state governments with these extremist proposals to send the opposition into frenzied disarray, and get enough of the proposals enacted into law--the domestic political equivalent of Shock & Awe.  It's very unlikely those tactics arose spontaneously and coincidentally.  This was planned and coordinated, and not by Michael Steele or John Banal.  Talk about the political sideshow.  It's pretty much all sideshow--everybody from Glenn Beck to Donald Trump-- all distraction, and it's been working.

But not completely.  Beck is on the way out was Wednesday's news, but perhaps the more telling event is the apparent victory of  JoAnne Kloppenburg for supreme court judge in Wisconsin.  Her opponent, a Republican tool and injudicious backer of Governor Imperial Walker, was 30 points ahead a couple of months ago, in a usually ignored judicial election.  Walker's kill the unions law inspired unions to work for Kloppenburg but even with their support, she was outspent two to one.  But she still won, however narrowly.  Update 4/7: The apparent discovery of an entire town's uncounted votes has apparently changed the outcome.  This may well be legitimate.  But this is the swing vote on the court that decides whether Boss Imperial Walker's laws are legal according to the Wisconsin constitution.


This is a good sign, especially if it provides hope and motivation for continuing the fight in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere.  In Wisconsin, the next step is the recall of Rabid Right legislators, and the election of Democrats.  But then the Walker law has to be repealed (if the courts haven't struck it down by then.)  That's the real Endgame.  And we're a long way from that in time, so the battle is also against the usual attention span.

This election result (plus the overwhelming victory of a Democrat in Milwaukee who won Walker's vacated job) and the polls in various states may even provide a little jostle to John Banal and the Voldemort Brigade in DC before they jump off the cliff of shutting down the government.  On that I do think Howard Fineman is right--if it happens, tea partiers are going to celebrate, and if they do, GOPers may well pay a big electoral price.

As for the long-term strategy, you might wonder why now?  It's a high stakes gamble, after all.  I think it's because the long-term demographics aren't good for GOPers.  It is increasingly an old southern white people's party, serving the interests of old white billionaires.  For awhile the party played with attracting the upwardly mobile young of any race or ethnicity, especially Latinos, the fastest-growing category, but they are too invested now in racism on a number of fronts, especially as galvanized by their almost helpless response to the first black President.  They're not going to hold onto power by getting the most votes.  They have to tilt the playing field structurally, and use whatever other means to keep others from getting momentum.  If they relegate the Dems to a few years cleaning up their worst messes every once in awhile, that works for them.  It took FDR 12 years to reverse the worst of the past and start moving forward.  Those 12 years had effects that lasted through the 1970s.  Why, corporations and supremely wealthy people actually paid taxes in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations!  Can't have that.         

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

  "The polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life."
Hannah Arendt

Closing Time

I'm not even quite sure why anyone is taking the so-called budget proposal by the Rabid Right's latest blue-eyed boy Paul Ryan seriously for even a day.  It passes no known smell test, it doesn't save the government money or decrease the debt (according to the CBO)  or help the economy (it wrecks everything) as well as taking the country back to before the Great Depression, when at least a third of seniors were living below the poverty line, and a third of the country was headed that way.  Even in announcing it Ryan declared, "It's not a budget, it's a cause."

But it's not even that.  It's a ploy.  Just as the congressional GOPers apparent plan to shut down the government at the end of the week.  It's a partisan political ploy.  Shutting down the government will play to the tea party fringe's anger and ignorance, while hopefully turning off any remaining government stimulus and hurting the economic recovery enough to damage President Obama's chances for re-election.

That's what this is about at the highest GOPer levels--especially among the oily rich who run it--and that's what everything they've done since November has been about.  Starve the labor unions, so they can't help Obama and the Democrats.  Prevent minorities and the young from voting, because they are likely to vote for Obama and the Democrats.

They don't care who they hurt in doing this.  As long as they help themselves.

America is open for business.  That's what it means.      

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Society may be said to be in its natural state, when worldly power and moral influence, are...exercised by the fittest persons whom the existing state of society affords."
John Stuart Mill

The Cost of Staying Stupid

As promised, here are some of the figures Rachel Maddow talked about on Friday, which are relevant to the ongoing Rabid Right Class War as well as to the ongoing congressional budget farce which--on Monday at least--looked as though it was going to lead to a government shutdown.  As well as to their arrogantly cruel and self-destructive long-term proposal which includes destroying Medicare.

First, corporate profits last year, with high unemployment and stagnant or dropping incomes for most Americans :
General Electric: $14.2 billion
Google: $18.9 billion
Exxon: $149 billion

At the same time, corporate CEO pay increased 27%, led by the chairman of Viacom, who pulled in $84.5 million.

In the last 3 months of  2010, American corporate profits grew at a rate not seen since the 1950s.  At that rate, total profits for a year would be $1.68 trillion.

Meanwhile:

Exxon-Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009.  They paid no federal taxes, and they got  a $156 million IRS rebate.

Bank of America made $4.4  billion in 2010.  They paid no taxes.  They got a $1.9 billion tax refund.  

General Electric (Rachel Maddow's ultimate employer) $26 billion over the last five years in profits  no taxes, $4.1 billion refund from the IRS. And nothing due to Uncle Sam in 2010.

These figures come from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  His website adds these as well:

Chevron: $10 billion profits in 2009, no taxes, a $19 million refund from the IRS.

Citigroup: more than $4 billion in profits in 2010, no taxes.

Valero Energy, $68 billion in sales in 2010, no taxes, $157 million tax refund from IRS plus $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.

ConocoPhillips, $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.

If GOPers were truly serious about balancing the federal budget, they would end the Bush tax cuts on the supremely rich.  That would cut the deficit in half over the next decade.

They would end absurd and obscene tax giveaways to oil and gas corporations. And then they would get some revenue from the corporations making huge amounts of money, the biggest of which are polluting the planet and destroying the health and future of America's children, while taking from the U.S. Treasury enough to fund needed programs and pay entire state budgets.

Instead they want to cut programs they don't like for other reasons but that uniquely serve the American people (and don't cost that much either) as well as rob the poor and destroy what secure old age exists.  They talk in homespun terms about balancing the federal budget like balancing the family budget, but when families have the opportunity to increase their incomes, they generally don't refuse--no, I don't want income I'm already due by simple fairness, I'd rather starve my children and keep them stupid.  They are the vile and deluded in the employ of the supremely vile.

Emerson for the Day

   "In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.  Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles,  at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the brink of fear."

Emerson

Open for Business

Earlier this year, when the GOPer government of Wisconsin began what turned out to be a simultaneous national attack on unions, working people generally, as well as women, children, seniors, the sick, the poor, and generally everyone who isn't rich or a corporation,  the GOP launched a TV ad justifying the Wisconsin actions specifically.  Remember that in Wisconsin, as in these other states, the measures that materially take away from the non-rich as well as take away their rights were accompanied by tax breaks and other giveaways from state budgets to large corporations.  The TV ad cast all this as slashing state budgets and creating a better climate for corporations.  It ended with the resounding declaration that thanks to these GOPer efforts, Wisconsin would be "open for business" again.

It is a telling phrase, though not in the way the admakers meant it.  For in regards to government, the expression "open for business" is a euphemism for the agencies of government and all its actions are for sale.  As more and more of these GOPer laws have been proposed and many of them have been passed in many states, it's become clearer and clearer that this is indeed the true meaning of the phrase.

In the old days, and perhaps in some countries or states or cities today, "open for business" meant simply that government officials took bribes.  You wanted a permit, you bribed all the necessary officials.  You wanted a law passed, it cost more but if you could afford it, you could make the deal.

It's maybe a little more sophisticated now.  Money doesn't necessarily change hands immediately, in an acknowledged quid pro quo deal.  But some politicians who owe their office to big contributors know who they are working for.  They will find lucrative "employment" when they leave office.  They will be part of the most influential networks.

These days, when the rich are incredibly, unbelievably rich, and their corporations are richer still, while everybody else is just sliding (slower or faster) down the mudhill, that's a pretty potent motivation.  Everyone who has even gotten a sniff of what this means knows what I'm talking about.  Even writers who these folks like can find themselves getting huge fees to talk to corporate meetings and business roundtables, etc., where their books are piled high for eager sale.  They may even find themselves smiling and chatting on corporate media.

It's also no secret who the most influential corporations are: when government is for sale, it naturally goes to the highest bidder, and that means the big oil companies, the ones whose names you know, and the ones you don't.  Their profits make Google and Facebook look like the income of college students pushing carts of books around the library.   Then come the financial institutions, otherwise known as banks.  And then the telecoms and other big corporations, some of whom own media.  Some of them (and their owners) are buying government at wholesale prices.

They've accumulated the means of government production very quietly, a lot of it through the courts, expanding the power of corporations while making them less accountable to the public. In terms of campaign finance--a small part of their game--they increased visibility a bit with everybody knowing about the Supreme Court decision called Citizens United--but this enabled them to be in position to cripple any countervailing forces before the 2012 elections.  A nice adjunct to their strategy of growing politicians for themselves--while supplying them with lobbyists for hand-held guidance-- has been to have actual rich corporate leaders spend a few years in public service, making sure the trends accelerate in their favor, before they go back to making more billions.

But elected officials are only part of the government that's open for business.  For many years it's been the appointed bureaucrats in key jobs (once again in alliance with lobbyists), especially in federal departments, that have quietly made sure the government does what the corporate powers demand.  It's hardly a secret that the Energy Department in Washington, for example, has largely been controlled by energy companies, and even in the Obama Administration, it may still be.  If people wonder why all of Obama's environmental promises haven't been kept, I wonder how he's been able to keep as many as he has.  He's dealing with government departments that are deeply divided, harboring as they do the agents of corporate hegemony.

At this point, it's not that policies like this and actual corruption are coincidental, or even that they are loosely related.  They are pretty much the same thing.  And the boldness and greed are utterly astounding.  Corporate profits just registered their biggest gains since 1950. Rachel Maddow had a list of some Friday--I'll pass them along when that transcript becomes available.  But they are huge.  The rich are still getting the Bush tax cuts, while huge corporations pay no federal taxes and in fact get rebates the size of some state budgets.  So their relentless remaking of government is not exactly because they are threatened with penury. 

No, their current efforts are to slash the pay of already underpaid grade school teachers, slash the pay and take the jobs of firefighters and police, while taking away the little power they have to protect themselves in collective bargaining.  They are increasing taxes on seniors--not many of whom have their stock portfolios or even those horrifying little pensions--and they're trying to reduce or cripple Social Security and Medicare. They're cutting aid to the sick, the disabled, to poor children and the poor in general.  They've even convinced the Energy department to slash support for the poor to afford home heating oil, at the same time as the price of oil is skyrocketing, so Exxon Mobil can make more billions this year.

There are I'm sure some corporations and probably lots of small businesses trying to do the right thing, to maintain a sense of balance, to keep in mind where their profits come from ultimately.  But there are corporations--unfortunately including the world's largest--that are bloated and ravenous, like some mythological beast that is always hungry, that devours everything until it has only itself to consume.  And they appear to be the ones running the show, the puppet masters of the tea party people--half-mad with confused anger and fear--as well as the narrow-minded and narrow-souled suits they employ to make sure that government is always and everywhere open for business.                    

Splendid--but Still Isolation

The North Coast and Humboldt County offer many wonders.  Recently a travel writer for the New York Times Magazine exulted:  "The sights of Humboldt County, Calif., can be hard for the rational mind to reconcile. Its hysterical shifts in landscape and weather conspire to make you feel, in the most pleasurable way possible, that you are going out of your head. A day’s drive in Humboldt carried me past what appeared to be: a Hawaiian beach, an Icelandic coastal flat, a swath of rustic Switzerland, an elk-thronged Montana prairie, a street in San Francisco, the Ewok moon of Endor, a prop village from a musical about the Gold Rush, and Allentown, Pa. The dawn brought blue skies, which turned to brilliant sunlit rain, then hail, then sleet, then driving snow, then back to full sun refracting into a huge rainbow that seemed like the meteorological equivalent of a crazy person’s laugh."

Besides the beaches and the ocean itself, we have these wonderful trees.  That's the Avenue of the Giants south of here (both of these photos are from the New York Times story.)  This is a piece of the old Route 101, more or less parallel to the multi-lane part of the "new" 101.

But there is another aspect to living here: our isolation.  In many ways it protects us.  But it has its drawbacks, too.  And when our delicate lifelines to the rest of the world are disrupted, it can cause problems.

Here's one of them...

  This is the result of a "mudslide"--more like a hillside toppling into the highway--on our lifeline to the south, Route 101.  The slide is reputedly 600 feet wide and 12 feet high in places.  It's a bit more than an hour south of Arcata, and it's going to close 101 for days at least.  There are not too many good alternatives for truck traffic, and we aren't served by railroad here anymore.  A few days may be just an inconvenience, especially to the folks down there around Garberville.  But it does suggest another side of living here. 

 

And while we're on the subject of Humboldt--when this blog got entered into a certain competition (completely unbenownst to me until about an hour ago) for the best Humboldt County blogs, all those experts at ESPN were outraged.  How could this be, when there are so many blogs clearly more qualified, with bigger audiences and local relevance?   Blogs that have been household names for years!  The VCU of HC blogdom! Well, the field has been narrowed, and apparently, Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily is in the Final Four.  March Madness for sure!

Cratering

It looks like the moon, but it's actually the first photo ever of the planet Mercury from orbit, taken by the Messenger spacecraft.

That's the cool part of technology.  Around here however, I'm dealing with a new text editor that Blogger has mandated, along with a lot of problems with the photo program I usually use, Picassa, which at the moment is not working at all.  That's a little worse than the text editor, which is--like most new technologies--adding new levels of complication, requiring more steps to do the same thing that the old editor did, with so far no new applications I am likely to use.  So far blogging has been at least fun technically--pretty easy, and it looks pretty good when it's done.  Why else would I do it?  I can talk to myself in other ways.  But the jury is out on these changes.  So far I am definitely not happy.

The GOPer Class War: Casualties and News from the Front

The news from the Front is more of the same: apparently defying a judge's second order, the Rabid Right government of Wisconsin is trying to go ahead with its union-busting law--while even admitting (or bragging) that this is exactly what it is: a union-busting law.

More salvos in the war on working people in Michigan, where a new law cuts unemployment benefits from 26 to 20 weeks, with similar bills in Florida and elsewhere.  All this is happening as income inequality continues to rise, and the consequences of it become clearer--not just on the poor, or the unemployed, but on the working middle class, and most dangerously on the possibilities of upward mobility through education and other efforts.  Without that, the American Dream is bullshit.

This is one of the conclusions of a PBS series on the subject.  A couple of interviews tell the practicalities.  One woman says she's been trying to go to college for 20 years, so she can get a better job, but she's always been stopped by the cost.  These days she has to skip meals to feed her family.  But the next interview was with a black woman who has graduate degrees.  So does her brother. Neither can find a job. Both are unemployed. 

The PBS series builds on a series published in Slate last fall.  It was the subject that the great Bob Herbert chose for his last New York Times column.  To the all-too familiar statistics, he adds this: "As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion."

But as he adds: "Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable."  That's been true since the 1980s and you have to wonder if people are in fact waking up now--thanks to the likes of the Wisconsin GOPers--or if this is the time that the nails go into the coffin of the American Dream.