Thoughts on politics and culture
In the Netherlands, the law imposes a rebuttable presumption of liability on drivers -- if a motorist is involved in a crash with a cyclist, the law presumes that the motorist is liable for the crash, unless the motorist can rebut that presumption with evidence to the contrary. The reason for this shift is that the Dutch recognized that the cyclist will virtually always be the injured party in a collision with an automobile, and by putting the onus of fault on the driver, have provided motorists with a powerful legal incentive to pay more attention to the presence of cyclists.
The message of the rally, as I heard it, was that if the media stopped giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side forgetting that Obama tried that and found out...there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said the national conversation was dominated by people on the Right who believe Obama's a Socialist and people on the Left who believe 9/11's an inside job, but I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11's an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's a Socialist? All of them.Here's the full clip:
You've got "robo signers," the mortgage servicing employees who scrawled their signatures on hundreds of thousands of crucial legal filings without knowing what they said (violating federal rules), and "foreclosure mills," the full-steam-ahead law firms that cut corners and allegedly broke the law in foreclosing on homeowners quick and dirty (and are now facing multiple investigations). There's trusts and mortgage-backed securities and securitization itself. The list goes on and on.Or, he says, you can cut to the heart of the problem as Damon Silvers, policy director at the AFL-CIO and member of the bailout watchdog Congressional Oversight Panel, did in recent testimony:
Affordable, universal health care -- Medicare for all. Meaningful financial regulation. A stimulus program built around job creation, infrastructure spending, and protection of state and local governments. These are the specifics of "hope" and "change."What I hear on the ground is, people didn't say you went too far on health care. They say "You didn't do enough. You should have had a public option. You should have had this; you should have had that. You didn't go too far on job creation, you should have created more jobs." No one has said to me, "You know, Rich, you guys went too far in regulating Wall Street." Most people want to tar and feather them for what they have done. -- AFL-CIO President Richard TrumkaThe rest of the story: Trumka: Primarying Lincoln Was 'Priceless', Dems Will Realize Their Timidity by Sam Stein (Huffinton Post 2010-10-05).
As a result of a twenty-eight-year-long deregulatory spree, we've reached the point where it's painfully difficult for government to undo the damage done to our economic infrastructure by a few thousand millionaires and billionaires playing Monopoly.From Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (2009) by Thom Hartman.
And the destructive shift of power in this shift in cultural assumptions isn't just limited to the economy. We have reached the point in the United States where corporatism has nearly triumphed over democracy. If events continue on their current trajectory, the ability of our government to respond to the needs and desires of humans -- things like fresh water, clean air, uncontaminated food, independent local media, secure retirement, and accessible medical care -- may vanish forever, effectively ending the world's second experiment with democracy. We will have gone too far down Mussolini's road, and most likely will encounter similar consequences, elements of which we have already experienced: a militarized police state, a government unresponsive to its citizens and obsessed with secrecy, a ruling elite drawn from the senior ranks of the nations largest corporations, and war.
Half in Ten, a coalition working to cut poverty by half in 10 years, is pushing Congress to renew the TANF Emergency Fund, which is set to expire on Thursday. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia have used the program to provide 250,000 low-income and long-term unemployed workers with subsidized jobs. The coalition is also pushing to make the Obama administration's Recovery Act reforms to the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit permanent. These progressive policies keep families from falling into poverty and reduce long-term costs such as crime, public benefits and lost consumption. Estimates of costs associated with childhood poverty run at $500 billion annually, or 4 percent of gross domestic product.The rest of the story: As 44 million Americans live in poverty, a crisis grows by Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Washington Post 2010-09-28).
Mickey Z.: So much of the American experience is based on myths like the two-party system, "land of opportunity," and more. How do you offer a more nuanced view of US history in your work?Read Obama, Democracy and the "Drum Major Instinct": Interview With Author Paul Street by Mickey Z. (Truthout 2010-09-28).
Paul Street: I agree on the power of those great American myths and would add some other and related ones: the notion that the United States is a benevolent force for democracy and good in the world; the idea that that the profits system is a form of freedom and democracy; the myth that we can achieve significant democratic change simply by voting in quadrennial corporate-crafted and candidate-centered elections; the notion that we live in a "post-racial" era wherein racism has been mostly defeated; the myth of an independent and objective media. What I try to do to explode these and other key national legends is fairly similar to what you and other American dissidents like Bill Blum and Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn do. I try to rescue from what E.P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity" (and from what George Orwell termed "the memory hole") some of the many inconvenient facts that do not fit the official narrative imposed by the dominant fables. And I try to fit the doctrinally inappropriate alternative facts into a compelling, accurate counter-narrative that links past to present and vice versa.
are minuscule compared to the $4,504,493 Boehner’s campaign has collected so far this year. And we’ve begged the DCCC and the DNC for help. We could have been begging the NRCC and the RNC. They flatly refused every time. Even apart from the serious problem sleazy sugar industry shill and DCCC power-behind-the-throne Debbie Wasserman Schultz has with veterans and with progressives, the DCCC is determined to spend all the money they suck out of concerned Democrats on the actual Blue Dogs who have voted most frequently against the Democratic agenda and crossed the aisle to vote with Boehner– reprehensible anti-Choice, antigay, anti-reform, anti-healthcare conservatives like Frank Kratovil (Blue Dog-MD), Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL), Walt Minnick (Blue Dog-ID), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), Mark Critz (Blue Dog-PA), Harry Mitchell (Blue Dog-AZ), and Chris Carney (Blue Dog-PA). Financial help for Alan Grayson? Not. One. Dime. Financial help for Justin Coussoule? Well, they don’t even invite him to Democratic events down the road from his own home.The Clinton HRC Legacy PAC has given him its endorsement and is working on his behalf.
Thank God for independent-minded Members of Congress like Alan Grayson, Barney Frank, Raul Grijalva, Henry Waxman, Bob Filner, Earl Blumenauer, Mary Jo Kilroy and Betty Sutton and for organizations like the AFL-CIO, DFA, Vet-PAC and People For the American Way, who have endorsed Justin and have been trying to help him get his message across.
1. Make long-acting, effective reversible birth control methods like IUDs available free of charge to any women who want them. These birth control methods are effective for 5 to 10 years and don’t require a woman to remember to do anything in order to be protected from pregnancy. They can be used by women of any age. If a woman wants to get pregnant, she simply has the IUD removed and her normal fertility returns. This birth control method is widely used in Europe, but quite expensive and less frequently used in this country.These sensible proposals have little chance of becoming policy because so many anti-abortion leaders are more interested in imposing their crabbed moral vision on the society at large than they are on helping unwed mothers and unwanted children. As Barney Frank once said, the anti-abortion movement's concern for "life" begins at conception and ends at birth.
2. Cover all reproductive health care including all methods of birth control, infertility, tubal ligation, and vasectomy, under affordable health insurance.
3. Create excellent and affordable childcare so that women who want to have children can also make a living to support them.
4. Make sure young people learn how to create successful relationships as well as how to be responsible with their sexuality. That will give them the tools to create healthy families and be good parents with enough resources to care for their kids when the time is right.
5. Promote vasectomy as a very safe and inexpensive method of permanent birth control for men. This would be especially helpful for couples who have completed their families so that a late and unexpected pregnancy doesn’t throw everyone into emotional turmoil.
6. Increase research into developing safer, more effective and long lasting methods of birth control.
7. Make sure the Morning After Treatment is easily available, inexpensive, and covered by health care insurance.
8. Require by law that all pharmacies either fill prescriptions for birth control and Morning After Treatment, or else inform over the phone, in advertisements, and by posted signs that they are Anti Choice Pharmacies, and the location of the nearest pharmacy that respect a woman’s choices.
[The] progressive vision was on full display yesterday during a vigil led by Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) that halted, for now, the foreclosure of a cancer victim’s home. For months, Bonita, California resident Luz Maria Villanueva had been facing impending foreclosure on her home by Union Bank. Villanueva’s situation was especially dire due to the fact that her son has a kidney disease as well as cancer. As medical bills began to pile up, Villanueva had to choose between the life of her son and her home, and she chose her son....Comparing the struggle of families trying to keep their homes to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s which landed him in a Mississippi jail for two months, Filner announced that he’d be holding a community vigil on the steps of Villanueva’s house on the day a local sheriff was scheduled to come foreclose on her. He warned that doing so “may result” in his arrest, but that he was willing to risk it to help her save her home. Thanks to the publicity Filner and the surrounding community brought to the case, Union Bank decided to call off the foreclosure, for now.Note to Bluedogs and other lily-livered Donkeys terrified of angry voters: here's how to get reelected. Fight like a pit bull for your constituents; stop shivering like a fear-maddened cur at every bleat from Fox News and the Chamber of Commerce.
This is an Army that, under the pressure of combat, has turned inward, leaving civilian America behind, reduced to the role of a well-wishing but impatient spectator. A decade of fighting has hardened soldiers in ways that civilians can't share. America respects its warriors, but from a distance.The consequences are many: the rise of a new warrior class; a sharp decline in the number of Americans in public life with the sobering experience of war; a fading respect for civil authority; the declining ideal of public service as a civic responsibility; a perilous shrinking of the common ground of shared values that have shaped the way Americans think about war.
The authors of the report, holding to conventional faith in western-style economic and security arrangements, believe the United States should not "abandon" Afghanistan even though "U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice;" instead they argue it's time to rethink the current strategy. Trying to pacify Afghanistan by force of arms has not and will not work, but even if you accept the premise that America’s vital security interests are engaged there, the costly military campaign is more likely to jeopardize than to protect them. Although the authors continue to find the invasion justified because the attack was initially targeted at al-Qaeda, they admit that "there are only some 400 hard-core al-Qaeda members remaining in the entire Af-Pak theater, most of them hiding in Pakistan's northwest provinces." Since we can't attack Pakistan for various reasons, Afghanistan will have to do, but at least the U.S. should ratchet down its goals to ones that are both more consistent with what the authors define as America’s true interests and that, being more modest, are more likely to succeed.The way forward: A five point approach
- Emphasize Power-Sharing and Political Reconciliation
- Scale Back and Eventually Suspend Combat Operations in the South and Reduce the U.S. Military Footprint
- Keep the Focus on Al Qaeda and Domestic Security
- Promote Economic Development
- Engage Global and Regional Stakeholders.
Particularly disturbing is the growing support for "three-strikes" copyright rules that would disconnect whole families from the Internet if one member of the household was accused (without proof) of copyright infringement. The other big US agenda item is cramming pro-Digital Rights Management (DRM) rules down the world's throats that go way beyond the current obligations under the UN's WIPO Copyright Treaty. In the US version, breaking DRM is always illegal, even if you're not committing any copyright violation -- so breaking the DRM on your iPad to install software you bought from someone who hasn't gone through the Apple approval process is illegal, even though the transaction involves no illicit copying.. -- Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty: US trying to cram DRM rules down the world's throats by Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing 2010-09-06).
“if [they] shifted 50 percent of their highway funds to transit, they would generate an additional 184,801 jobs over a five-year period without spending any more money.” "You all are combat troops not doing a combat mission, although it looks, smells and feels and hurts a lot like combat." -- Lt. Col. Andy Ulrich, Hawija, Iraq (August 31, 2010).You may remember a time when Barack Obama was widely admired for a speaking style that was compelling and forthright. Even when you disagreed with him, as I did during his late run for the White House, you admired the clarity, directness and emotional uplift of his addresses. So you had to be disappointed with his uninspiring performance last Tuesday, even as you sympathized with the spot he's in. The chasm between the American self-image as the defender of freedom and justice and its true role as the enforcer of class and property rights around the globe has become so vast that no U.S. politician can be clear and forthright about anything.
However you describe the actions of the 50,000 plus troops and many more thousands of "security contractors" who remain in Iraq, "it looks, smells and feels and hurts a lot like combat." 
