Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

Less that 7 weeks are left before one of the most important elections of our times, and it’s a dead heat. Wow. Usually by this time, there is a clear front-runner and the other candidate is trying to hard to catch up. But however the next number of weeks turns out, the one thing progressives should care most about is turnout. Regardless of the outcome, whoever wins will not prevail in a courtroom (God forbid), but they will preside over a fractured polity. America is as divided as it has ever been on any number of measures – culturally, racially, economically, and any other measure you might choose to employ.

Governing a divided country is not easy, nor has it ever been. If one can at least look back and note that more people voted than at other times – both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of qualified voters – the task will be somewhat easier. If one can also say that votes were counted without controversy, even better.

So what can we do?
This week, we are reaching out to any and all who share this view to support the Tides Voter Action Fund, our election protection initiative that support non-partisan, 501(c)(3) organizations working to increase both turnout and election integrity.  We feel this is important and we hope you will join us.

Tides has always encouraged our donors to support efforts to increase civic participation among low income communities, young people, single women, immigrants, and communities of color. Already in 2008, the Tides Voter Action Fund has granted more than $3.5 million toward these efforts.

If you are interested, please contact me or anyone at Tides and we will direct you on how you can help. There are some fantastic organizations out there which are working tirelessly on these issues.  You can get more specific information about the strategy and the grantees of the Tides Voter Action Fund here at TidesFoundation.org.

I’m a good way into Timothy Egan’s excellent The Worst Hard Time, a history of the Dust Bowl and its survivors, those gritty people who hung on and lived through one of the worst man-made disasters of all time. It truly is an amazing tale. First, how the boom in wheat prices drove speculators and real estate sharpies to plow up the prairie for perceived short term profits, and then kept plowing up more ground to compensate for falling prices as the market got saturated. Banks, largely unregulated at the time, took depositors’ funds and invested them in the frenzy, leading to the failure of thousands of banks. And then, the drought hit and went on for 6 years. No rain and scant snow across vast areas of northern Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. And the land just blew away. Dust storms were so thick, drivers had to navigate from one telephone pole to the next. In less than a decade, people in the mid-west subdivided cattle ranches into homesteads, ripped up the grass for wheat, briefly made huge profits, and then sank into inexorable poverty as the rains deserted them, and the soil took flight.

Though Egan doesn’t focus on politics much, it is interesting when he does. Hoover, elected in 1928, declared in an early address, “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” Then, as the Dust Bowl and collapse of the stock market took their toll, Hoover was forever saying that we are about to turn the corner back to prosperity, as though his wish for it would make it so. “All the evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on unemployment will have passed during the next sixty days,” he declared on March 3, 1930 (p. 95). Egan goes on, “By the end of that year, eight million people were out of work. The banking system was in chaos. The big financial institutions had once looked invincible, with the stone fronts, the copper lights, the marbled floors, run by the best people in town. Now bankers were seen as crooks, fraud artists who took people’s homes, their farms, and their savings. In 1930, 1350 banks failed….The next year, 2294 banks went bust.” The political seachange that occurred in 1932 was unlike any other we saw in the 20th Century.

I’ve been thinking about Egan’s book as I listen to the many convention speeches about what is right and what is wrong with America from the perspective of the two major parties. Democrats see a people who need more from their government. They seem to want a government that plays a balancing role by regulating markets, a government that provides opportunity and a safety net, and a government that works. Republicans seem to want less government, less taxes, and less regulation of business, despite their record of having grown government with huge deficits over recent years. It was fascinating indeed to watch their Vice Presidential candidate decry special interest funding while she has pursued earmarks in Washington for her city and hired lobbyists to garner a share at the federal trough.

It would be very difficult to argue that we face in 2008 circumstances even remotely like those of 1931 when a quarter of the population was unemployed. Our economy may not be zipping along, but it is not in the tank (despite the best efforts of the sub-prime lending hustlers). The challenge, though, is how to galvanize public action on two related issues that will require a political shift in will as occurred with the election of Roosevelt in 1932; those issues are climate change and energy independence. Right now, it doesn’t seem likely that those issues will affect the election much in one way or another, but if you talk with any experts in those fields, the globe must curtail the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or the climate system will spin out of control with unforeseeable results – mostly catastrophic, one might imagine.

Somehow, chants such as one heard last night – “Drill, baby, drill!!!” – seem unlikely to move us in the right direction.

Sy Hersh’s recent piece (New Yorker Magazine, July 7 & 14 , 2008 Issue) is one of the most frightening pieces I have read in years. In it, with his deft storytelling, he paints a picture of a struggle between the military command structure and the White House (primarily Dick Cheney) that has been pursuing an independent strategy to destabilize Iran.

Two things astonish: first, what was long thought a settled matter about the ability of the military command structure to oversee all field activities involving the use of lethal force, particularly important in a theater of operations such as the Middle East where what happens in a neighboring country can have very direct impact on our troops on the ground, turns out not to be the case. After all the scandals involving White House sanctioned “special operations,” Congress finally locked down the ability for independent action outside the military lines of command via the 1986 Defense Reorganization Actl…or did it? Remember the Iran Contra debacle? (more…)

I’ve spent the last couple of months working harder, and more excitedly, on something than I ever have, at least so far as my aging, addled memory can recall. It is, believe it or not, all about a repurposed conference that Tides has done a couple of times before. Momentum. Now, you might ask, why in the world would a normal person get so exercised about organizing a conference? Here’s why.

I graduated from college in 1970 in the middle of Nixon’s first term (he was impeached during his 2nd). At the time, the Woodstock generation was in ascendancy and grinding through a social change agenda as though ordained by the gods. Civil rights had finally come to people of color, farmworkers had succeeded in forming a union (still hard fought by agribusiness), the women’s movement was emerging as a force to change seemingly intractable traditions, and the Vietnam War seemed to linger just to remind us why attaining and exercising power was so important. For me personally, Bobby Kennedy’s race in 1968 inspired a sense of what was possible, despite his tragic assassination. Looking forward, at 21, to the coming years, I was so certain that our generation was going to transform American society into an enlightened, tolerant, moral force in the world. How could it not? (more…)

There has been a battle raging in the philanthropic rag, “Chronicle on Philanthropy” that was inspired by a fear-mongering conservative named William Schambra of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute. He started with the worst of fear-mongering which you can derive from the title to his prominent editorial, “Philanthropy’s Jerimiah Wright Problem.” The article basically tried to equate Wright’s outlandish rhetoric (albeit taken out of context) with a body of very thoughtful work being done by a number of non-profits and foundations that addresses an emerging analysis called structural racism. (more…)

From the front page of the NY Times today described the first day of the economic policy debate that will likely dominate the upcoming presidential campaigns. Why? Simple: folks are hurting. For all the good and bad things happening in the world, it’s pretty clear that no amount of social “wedge issues,” like gay marriage, choice, or whether America is a “Christian country” or not, will obscure the pain of the subprime meltdown or $4 gasoline. Cooper and Rohter in the Times wrote, “It is a battle between Republican supply-side economics and a Democratic tradition that uses government levers to try to reduce inequality and spur the economy.” Indeed, this may well emerge as the clearest ideologically-based choice voters have had since 1932.

We have had for nearly 3 decades an unchallenged rhetoric that argues that we have to “free up” capital by lowering taxes on investments (capital gains) in order to stimulate the economy. While progressives have been shouting unheard into the media wind that real wages have been flat for YEARS and that letting the rich get richer doesn’t really help working people, somehow the notion hasn’t gotten traction that the economic policy elite wasn’t really moving on the right set of tracks. Some, like ex-Nixon speech writer Kevin Phillips, have been decrying the emergence of a new Golden Age, more similar to the 1890’s or 1920’s when the rich were fabulously so, while ordinary folks wallowed unable to get ahead. This disparity between the rich and the poor, he argued in Wealth and Democracy, threatens democracy at its roots when the wealthy gain unfettered access to the power of government, turning it to their purposes.

So, have Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalists” been hiding out in the candy store after hours, gorging themselves on no-bid contracts, crop subsidies, military cost overruns, and government policy aided media monopolies? Sure seems so. Just listen to Larry Lessig on the toxic power of lobbyists, or Dan Rather on why corporate interests, particularly conglomerates that own some media but also a lot of other things, have everything to gain from a muzzled media. News has become all-Paris Hilton all the time. And meanwhile, who has noticed the corruption that seems to have broken out in DC?

Let’s hope the people have, and maybe that’s why folks are finally looking so closely at the economy as we enter this election process. How refreshing!

Someone to watch closely on this: Jason Furman, the new economic policy guy in the Obama campaign. Labor folks are unhappy with his strong ties to Robert Rubin, the bigtime Wall Street insider and former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton.

The 31st of May, and what a day in the bizarre world of modern America. A second crane crashed down to the street in NYC. A military judge in the Guantanamo trials was summarily dismissed after publicly expressing frustration that the military prosecutors weren’t sharing information with the defense. Is this a “show trial” or what?? The Obamacans and Clintonistas are slugging it out at the DNC Rules Committee over whether to seat delegations from Michigan and Florida where state parties knowingly scheduled their primaries earlier than the rules allowed. So the Rules Committee will decide whether their rules were really rules? And the rules shouldn’t be followed because….Hillary would lose? And then, yesterday, a Field Poll in California showed that if the elections were held today in CA, then Obama would win over Hillary and over McCain in the general. And a new report suggests that the world is experiencing more extreme weather than at any time since we have been recording such things. Oh, and GM is finding that people just aren’t snapping up those huge SUV’s that have been retooled (at a cost of $4k per) as “hybrids” thus increasing their mileage from 14 to 20 mpg. Now, there’s a shock.

So the real question I have this morning is “what in the world will progressives do if things really change next year?” In many ways, I don’t think we have a clue. We haven’t been in a position to drive policy for so many years, I think we have forgotten what matters. This recent experience watching the political machinations in Washington over the once-every-five-years Farm Bill does not give one comfort. For years, progressives on both sides of the aisle have been arguing that farm subsidies no longer provide a safety net for family farmers, as originally intended, but basically act as corporate welfare enriching the already large, successful agri-business enterprises.

So here comes President Bush saying that it is time to severely limit subsidies, especially because we are experiencing record commodity prices. And what did our progressive leaders in the Congress do? They decided that the status quo was just fine, not wanting to jeopardize recent wins in some rural areas. Wow. Makes you want to work really hard to make sure progressives win…..so they can continue the status quo? I think we still have some work to do. This whole “change” thing better be more than a slogan.

I read this morning that the Honorable Tom Tancredo, Representative to Congress from Colorado’s 6th District, has found His Holiness the Pope wanting with regard to his sympathetic, supportive stance regarding immigrants. From today’s NY Times:

Accusing the pope of “faith-based marketing,” Mr. Tancredo said Benedict’s comments welcoming immigrants “may have less to do with spreading the Gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the Church.” Mr. Tancredo, a former Catholic who now attends an evangelical Christian church, said it was not in the pope’s “job description to engage in American politics.”

Representative Tancredo is but the most recent example of the remarkable American trait of generational amnesia. All four of his grandparents immigrated to the US from Italy, part of some 4 million Italians who arrived here between 1880 and 1920. As a third generation American, Mr. Tancredo has adopted another uniquely American trait – “we got here first, so you stay away.” A quick review of the history of American Immigration Law reveals repeated exclusions of immigrants based largely on race: Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, and Filipinos all can claim their own special Congressionally approved bans, each in place for years before repeal. The racial underpinnings of our evolving immigration laws will confound any remaining skeptics of the concept of structural racism. Race has clearly been the basis of immigration policy over and over again, and especially so during the period that Mr. Tancredo’s grandparents were making their way to the US.

What’s intriguing about the son of a son of an immigrant becoming the Chief Immigrant Baiter among right wing politicians who collectively seem intent on blaming Spanish-speaking immigrants for every ill, is that it so clearly reflects an element of self-hatred. When Italians came in droves to the big cities of America a century ago, they were termed “Birds of Paradise” arriving to earn some money and return home, just as many, if not most, of our current undocumented workers wish to do (and have done for decades). The irony, of course, is that the conservative response to date, dampened only by the change in Congressional majorities two years ago, has been to erect barriers that prevent transit across the borders, thus effectively trapping these “remittance workers” here indefinitely when they used to return home seasonally.

As a Californian, the issue of immigration imbues both current and historical politics. This state, originally a part of Mexico, has inarguably been built on the labor of its immigrants. What few recall in the current debate, is that California is the only state in the nation that attempted to prevent immigration from other states. In 1937, California enacted the so-called “Anti-Okie Law” which was not overturned until 1941. It’s purpose? – stem the tide of Okies, Arkies, ‘Texicans’, and other predominantly white refugees from the famed Dust Bowl of the thirties in the mid-west. Just as Mexican and Central American migrant laborers do today, they largely came west to pick crops and scrape out a meager living, having suffered through one of the worst environmental calamities to afflict modern America. Okies were demonized more than Arabs are today throughout the media, that is until John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was made into one of Hollywood’s greatest films.

There is no suitable response to Tancredo’s critique of the Pope other than to quietly say that freedom in America means that even really stupid, rude, wrong things get said at times. That the sayer is a Member of Congress ought to be deeply embarrassing to those Coloradans living in the 6th District, just south of Denver. It surely is to me.

Arrived today to spring in NYC. Blossoms on the trees, people soaking up the sun. Why do I keep thinking about Guantanamo? Probably because I watched an old Democracy Now podcast about this kid held there since he was 15. I wonder what his spring is like.

Also of interest:

Gitmo: The New Rules of War Documentary Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrcO_l9iELg

Have you ever wondered why the only thing we ever hear about is tax relief? When was the last time you can remember anyone advocating tax increases? Such is the stuff of political suicide in our “borrow now, pay later” politics. Remember Bush 1 and his famous “read my lips” statement?

So, I’ve been curious about how we got here for a long time. The fact of the matter is that we are living on borrowed time, if history is any measure. A fascinating chart on TruthandPolitics.org’s site shows the variation in our “maximum effective” tax rates for upper income taxpayers. During the two World Wars, people paid some serious taxes (77% and then 94% respectively). During Vietnam, the rate moved back up to the 77% level after having fallen steadily through the 50’s and early 60’s. Where are we now? 35%, at least until Bush 2’s tax cuts are termed out in 2010. And what do we have cooking? The most expensive war since Vietnam and a pending debate on national health insurance for all.

If the federal government was a business, it would have been abandoned in the free market ages ago as a failed enterprise.

An interesting comparison can be made to countries that have national health coverage: Canada – mid-40% (federal and province); Australia – 45%; New Zealand – 46%; and Austria – 50% (as are many European countries). Oh, and they have only a fraction of the military costs that we do.

So….when is one of these candidates running for President going to break the taboo, and return us to Kansas (from this Oz-like place we’ve been living in for the past 3 decades)?