Category Archives: Politics

Cinema and Television, Politics, World History

Hope

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Saw a Masterpiece theatre movie last night: Endgame.  The beginning of the end of apartheid.  Michael Young, head of communications for Consolidated Goldfields, was the unlikely and successful convenor of talks between the African National Congress and the South African elite.  You could read a bit about him here.  His role was crucial and yet he managed, as one of the delegates to the talks said, “To keep himself invisible.”

This was a movie with little overt action, a modest movie for the most part, but it moved me.  There is something deep in my soul that gets touched when people struggle in an authentic way for justice.  It is not easy.  It has many traps.  But the results are so powerful.

The main characters, the ANC representative in the talks, Thabo Mbeki, (top) and an Afrikaner Professor of Philosophy, Willie Esterhuyser, (bottom) were played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and William Hurt.  Their understated acting made the change they wrought in their country, and in themselves, more poignant.  Mbeki replaced Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa and Esterhuyser became one of his principal advisers.

A squib at the end of the movie noted that a similar process used in these talks had been pushed forward in Irish-British talks about the troubles and in the instance of Hammas and Israel.

Family, Holidays, Politics

A Good Idea Failed

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Kate and I drove in to Minneapolis today, to the Smack Shack.  The Smack Shack is not, as you might justifiably think, a boutique heroin market, but a food truck doing a transformer move into a very large seafood restaurant.  The featured menu item is boiled lunch complete with your choice of a 1.5 or a 2.0 pound lobster.

This was a holiday lunch with Anne, Kate’s sister, who lives in Waconia.  A smattering of west suburban upper class types were there and the prices wouldn’t shock any of them, but if any of our neighbors showed up they’d grimace.  The food is o.k., but not worth quite the bite it takes out of the wallet.  Still, for the purpose, it was great.

Kate and I shared a boiled lunch and Anne had one to herself.  We both had plenty to take home.  The lobsters are red and look very much like their coastal nickname, bug.  On the plate were several grade b skin on red potatoes, two links of polish sausage, two fresh ears of corn, a half lemon wrapped in cloth, two small metal containers of cole slaw and a pot of melted butter.

Bibs in place we dug into the meal.  Both Kate and I remember the days when, at least in the midwest, surf and turf was about as fancy as food got.  Lobster was the pinnacle of haute cuisine, even one step higher.  Surf without the turf.  Now I find lobster ok, but usually tough and not as flavorful as I remember from days gone by.  Of course, that could be my taste buds.

The sisters compared arthritis in their hands, spoke of sewing and retirement.  Anne turns 62 this year and finally, as a result, rotates onto the day shift at a metro County Jail.  She commented on the increasing number of drunks, mentally ill and generally decompensating people that show up in our culture’s catch basin, the county hoosegow.

Just the other day five of the 11 women in her charge had serious mental health issues, one screaming and another lacerating her arm with her fingernails.  It made me recall those days in the late 60’s and early 70’s when deinstitutionalization had reached its moment.

They were exciting times.  People were to be freed from the Victorian confines of state hospitals for the retarded and the insane, places with institutionalized violence and clients aberrant adaptations to an aberrant, abnormal living situation.  The watchword was normalization.

Normalization meant re-introducing these populations to society, helping them in the process through community based services, residential for those who needed them, supportive services for those who didn’t.  Community Involvement Programs employed me for 8 years in its residential training program for developmentally disabled adults.

C.I.P. was an example of the best of the community based services.  We took folks straight out of Fairbault and Cambridge State Hospitals, put them in their own apartments in a 32 unit building we ran and trained them in budgeting, cleaning, cooking, shopping, making appointments and integrating into the community.  It was good and important work.

What happened though a confirmed cynic would have foreseen, but we didn’t see it back then.  As states cut funding to their large state hospital systems, the money was supposed to flow into the community based treatment programs.  And some of it did.  But not anywhere near enough.  This was the root cause of the first wave of homelessness, developmentally disabled and mentally ill citizens released from state hospitals to the streets our major cities.

This is one of the great tragedies of our time, but it has gone largely untalked about. The people who suffer are the marginalized among the marginalized, the folks whose disabilities render them vulnerable to shifts in income, housing, treatment.  The answer, of course, is not more state hospitals, but increased funding for community based treatment.

But in an era of Republican budget cutting, which has largely dominated the political scene since the early 80’s when Reagan came into the Whitehouse, this kind of state and federal funding has proved easy to slash.  The result was–to use an overused but apt metaphor–a perfect storm of liberal policy releasing thousands of our society’s least able to cope into cities where prevailing political realities made them largely unhelpable.

This is a big reason that our county jails have now become our community based treatment centers.  They resemble in many ways small outposts of the old state hospital system, run by authoritarian hierarchies that respond to the needs of bureaucracy first, not inmates.

And Anne, in her role, sees the results and has to deal with them.  Surely we can do better.

 

 

 

Politics, US History

My Hope for the New Year

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Winter                                                                Winter Moon

Ever since Reagan, and with the witting aid of William Clinton, the poor have receded from the public debate.  Oh, yes, you see comments about inequality like the 99% of the short lived Occupy movement and even occasional woe saying from a pundit or two, but otherwise the Appalachias and deep Souths and poor urban cores have gone missing.  But only from the news and from positive policy making.  (Yes, it’s true, they did appear at Farm Bill time as the expensive food stamp item and in the grim socialist nightmares of Tea Party folk asleep in their beds — the spectre of Obamacare, but only in these negative ways.)

We have been and are in a time when the economy and its travails have become the focus of political conversation.  Can we afford that war in Afghanistan?  That war in Iraq?  Social Security?  Medicare?  Medicaid?  Can we afford the deficit?  All these questions trump a larger question, the one of the social compact, the unum in E Pluribus Unum.

In America the question used to be not first about what we can afford, but what we need. Even the most benighted president of recent times, Richard Nixon, proposed the earned income tax credit which would have assured a stable annual income for all Americans.  My wife, a physician, and I have agreed for a long time that single payer health care is the only responsible and just course for America.  Every person should be able to find a job, health care, housing, food and a decent education.

Why?  Because we’re all in this together.  If the argument of simple justice doesn’t persuade you, look at our demographic future:

“…the United States of 2050 will look different from that of today: whites will no longer be in the majority. The U.S. minority population, currently 30 percent, is expected to exceed 50 percent before 2050. No other advanced, populous country will see such diversity.”   the Smithsonian, The Changing Demographics of America.

This means that our doctors, teachers, business leaders, union organizers, federal, state and municipal workers and politicians must come in significant numbers from within the majority population composed of the combined Asian, Latino, Black, and Native American communities.

Think about it.  This means the children of these communities need not just adequate schools, but good ones.  And to learn in those schools those children need to be well fed and healthy.  Too, they need a stable home in which their parents model for them the kind of work habits our complex economy demands.  Their parents can only provide that model if they, too, have jobs.

This is good news.  It means that by shaping an America that knows its self interest lies in the fortunes of all its citizens we can ensure our common future and therefore help lift each other toward a just nation.

It means we cannot afford to have hungry, sick Asian children at their school desks.  It means we cannot afford to have Black adults who lack jobs with decent wages.  It means we cannot afford to have Latino citizens who can’t find housing in which to raise their children.  It means we can no longer allow native reservations to be among the poorest regions of our nation.

It takes no political savant to imagine some of the policy directions that flow from these realizations.  Yes, the particulars may differ among people of good will, but these are the kind of expenditures around which we need to build a national budget, around which we define first what we as a nation need, then look to public policy to help us decide how we can afford it.

 

 

 

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club, US History, Weather +Climate

On the Margins

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Samhain                                                                  Winter Moon

We’re in the dark period of the year, the time when the Winter Solstice stands out even among long nights as longer and deeper. Tonight, all Solstice eve, it’s 4:30 pm and twilight fell a while ago.  Snow comes down, adding to an inch or so to what we got over last night, all accumulating on top of the snows of early December.

Let me demonstrate how odd my religious situation is.  When my doctor, Corrie Massie, asked me what plans I had for Christmas, without thinking, I said, “We’re Jewish.”  Now we’re Jewish in that I support Kate’s Judaism, but what I really meant was, “I don’t celebrate the Christian holiday.”  Didn’t want to start with the whole theological narrative in my doctor’s office so my unconscious answered.  Not a lie, just not the whole truth.

No elevator speech for following the rhythmic cycles of nature, for celebrating not transcendence but immanence.  No quick way to say I’m an outlier here, too, standing on the margins of religion.  So often I find myself in conversations where I just don’t want to go through the whole analysis to explain myself.

Yes, too much carbon dioxide is, will be a problem. The unseemly gathering of wealth threatens the fabric of our culture.  No, I’m not really a Democrat and am planets away from Republicans.  Tea Party?  Different universe.  No, I don’t use pesticides.  Yes, we grow a lot of our own food and keep bees.  Oh, and I have a son in the Air Force who now has aspirations to become a general officer, to make sure authentic folks have their say.  No, mining minerals on the border of the Boundary Waters Wilderness does not make sense.  Socialism and single-payer health from Mark Odegardcare?  Sign me up.  I’m glad China and the rest of Asia have begun to grow strong.  I love the U.S.A.  Cable television?  Cut the cord.  That sort of thing.

I guess I’m at an age where I’m living the life I chose and choose, yet no longer have that evangelical zeal for my decisions.  Maybe because I recognize more and more how many right answers there are.

 

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Sexism and Privacy

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Samhain                                                                        Winter Moon

Snowden did us all a good turn.  I don’t see others saying it, so I will.  It’s no accident that a US Judge for the first time applied the 4th amendment to the NSA’s actions.  Without Snowden’s leaks we would have no idea how far this opaque bureaucracy had gone in eroding our privacy rights.  We could not have a debate about the reasonable limits of super snooping with cyber tools. Though computer surveillance was not imaginable in the Revolutionary era, abuses perpetrated by the powerful were.

Franklin’s famous quip applies here:  “They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  the original quote according to this wiki site.

Also, how about those Catholics?  Did John Nienstedt really touch a confirmand’s butt? Who knows?  What is known is that the Nixon lesson is difficult to learn for those in positions of power.  The cover up is often worse than the crime.  That’s true in this case.

Why?  Well, covering up sexual abuse by priests is on the face not as bad as the act itself; but, when that cover up allows known offenders to circulate through different parishes and ministries with the laity ignorant, then the cover up facilitates the abuser, gives them opportunities to offend they would not have had in a transparent system.

This is an old boy’s club where a wink here and a nod there pass for scrutiny.  Much like the NSA.

One more place where secrecy and male domination protect abusers.  The military.  When rapists know their crimes will go up the chain of command, up the ladder in a buddy system, then the logic of deterrence due to exposure lessens.  A lot.

In all three of these large institutions run by men the rationalizations of the powerful take precedent over the needs of the powerless.  This is sexism in the service of sexual abuse and the erosion of personal privacy.  Considered from one perspective sexual abuse is, too, a dramatic case of the erosion of personal privacy.

Where is the Ed Snowden in the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul?  They need to step forward, files and computer discs in hand.  We need them.

Great Work, Minnesota, Politics, Sierra Club

Please Help Stop This Mine

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Samhain                                                           Winter Moon

Today’s Star-Tribune has an excellent article by Lee Schafer, business columnist:  PolyMet mine report has a giant hole in it.

An excerpt:

“Late last week, the voluminous environmental impact report for the first project in what could be a major expansion of mining in Minnesota, PolyMet Mining’s proposed copper-nickel mining operation near Hoyt Lakes, was released, but without much that was meaningful about financial assurance.

(William Ervin)

It’s baffling that over a decade into the project’s evolution, the public still knows next to nothing about the financial assurance provision. It’s hardly trivial, given that the proposed mining and processing operation could require the treatment of water for more than 500 years.

The idea behind requiring financial assurance to make sure there’s money to contain and clean up polluted sites is really pretty simple. A mine is operated by a corporation that could go bankrupt, or fold up like a circus and leave town once the money has all been made and the mine is played out…

It takes up a little over three pages in a report so big that just the glossary alone is nearly five times bigger. It has a one-line table, showing estimates of cost if the mine were to close at the end of year one, at the end of year 11, or at the end of year 20. The high end of the cost-estimate range is $200 million….

If operating a water treatment facility costs $1 million a year, the financial assurance for PolyMet should be easily manageable, he said. “But if that operating cost got up to $10 million a year, that is pushing $1 billion to pay for that. That’s why at PolyMet it becomes an issue.””

Financial assurance connects directly to the question of tailings runoff.  PolyMet will claim that its estimates are correct because their new, never-before-proven technology will create safer tailings and tailing’s ponds.  No sulfide mine ever, anywhere has created a safe tailing’s situation.

The basic problem is simple.  The overburden and the rock not containing copper, nickel and other valuable metals contains sulfur. When rain and snow and sleet fall, melting water runs through the massive hills of tailings.  The water which runs off the tailings creates a sulfuric acid load.  But, it’s water, too.  So it flows into the watershed around the Hoyt Lake’s plant.

“That sulfates can kill manoomin is evidenced by the Wild Rice Dead Zone – a stretch that begins where the Bine-ziibi (Partridge River) enters into Gichigamiwi-ziibi (St. Louis River) and extends 140 miles to the Anishinaabeg-Gichigami Maamawijiwan (Lake Superior Basin). The Wild Rice Dead Zone is the result of extremely high concentrations of sulfate released by U.S. Steel’s Keetac and Minntac taconite mines. Sulfide mining will add yet more sulfates into rivers and lakes thereby affecting the food that grows on water.”   (IC Magazine, Supporting Indigenous People)

A bonus feature of this area is that a confluence of continental divides makes some water head down the Mississippi to the dead zones of the Gulf, some water heads into Lake Superior on ies way to the Atlantic, while other water drains out of the tailings ponds into streams headed for Hudson Bay.  That way one mine can pollute three different large bodies of water and streams and rivers along the way.

Thus, to prevent acid drainage over the potentially 500 year long exposure to toxic runoff either requires a lot of money or excellent unproven technology.  Or, ideally, both.

As Schafer points out in a video discussion, Shakespeare was writing 500 years ago.  500 years is a long time.  The iron range gets 20 years of jobs against centuries of ruinous pollution.  Public policy must weigh the balancing benefits.

 

 

Politics

Nelson Mandela Day, Juneteenth

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Samhain                                                          Winter Moon

Mandela.  King.  An American and an African.  Different, so different in background, but similar in their life work and impact.  No, not the same path, at least not at first, but similar in the end.  Leading with an open heart, an organizer’s toughness, an idealist’s hope and the clarity of true seers.  One assassinated in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the other dead of old age in the land of apartheid.

(I was not born with a hunger to be free; I was born free. Nelson Mandela)

Both, it turns out, were human.  As should be known from the beginning since no one descends from the womb into this life a virtuous person.  Neither, it turns out, will be forgotten.  As it should be.  We need men and women who teach us about the possibilities for those of us with flaws, with dreams, with passions for justice.

MLK got a national holiday.  It would be a stunning gesture to give Mandela a national holiday here, too, wouldn’t it?  Say on Juneteenth, balancing King’s winter with Mandela’s summer.  So, from this day forward, Ancientrails will celebrate June 19 as Nelson Mandela day.  Maybe others will, too.

Anoka County, Art and Culture, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Politics, Sierra Club

Why I Live Here

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

I have decided, over and over again, to remain here in Minnesota.  Leaving occurs to me from time to time, more often now the direction considered is north, beyond our borders where the politics, health care and weather all seem more sane.  Even with those attractions, and they are considerable, Minnesota and in particular the Twin Cities Metro always trumps any competition.

The arts here are a wonder.  Having the MIA and the Walker in a small market city like Minneapolis doesn’t amaze us, because, after all, they are here.  But it would if you considered them in a national, even international light.  The Guthrie is only the most visible island of a large theatrical archipelago, boasting more seats than any other metro area in the nation outside of New York City.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is a gem.  Again, nationally.  The Minnesota Symphony used to be an internationally renowned organization, as recently as two years ago, before dimbulbs began a series of self-inflicted wounds.  Dance, local rock music, glass and clay arts, printmakers and galleries all thrive here.  Jazz, supported by KBEM of internet renown, flourishes.

There are substantially more dining options now than when I moved here in 1970.  More than Kate and I can visit before they disappear.

Writers in Minnesota consistently publish and make the national book news.  The Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Loft provide outside academia support for the literary community.

Healthcare is as good as it gets. Anywhere.  Hawaii and Minnesota are tops in the US and good US healthcare is as good as there is anywhere.

When policy makers divided the land in the Upper Midwest and created Minnesota they included the intersection of three US biomes:  prairie, deciduous forest (Big Woods) and the boreal forest.  The Wisconsin glaciation scoured out numerous lakes and the Great Lakes.  Though flat our terrain is remarkable for its diversity and its  pristine nature in the north where the moose and the wolf still live.  At least for now.

Where else do you get all these things?  Nowhere else.  That’s a large part of why I stay. Another, equally large part, is friends.  The Woolly Mammoths, the MIA docent class of 2005, the Sierra Club and various past political activity has peopled my life with friends. They’re here and I am, too.

In the past, too, I valued the Minnesota political culture which showed compassion to the poor, effectiveness in government and sound stewardship of the state’s natural resources. A long desert of mean policy makers, eyes and hearts captured by the great god money, have devastated much of that culture though I continue to believe it exists.

The common good, defined broadly, is just that.  Our future depends on an educated work force, receiving a decent wage, a hand-up when life turns sour and a healthy environment in which to work and live.  These have seemed and still seem to me the necessary elements of a civil society.

Family, Politics

Collaborative, Getting Along

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Kate’s in Clear Lake, up Highway 10 toward St. Cloud, for a sewing day.  She goes once a month or so and sews with two, sometimes three other women.  This is a tradition as old as needle and thread I would guess.  These sessions offer a time for getting work done, for learning from others and being with each other, visible.

Women have made more opportunities in their lives like this than men have.  Child rearing, cooking, sewing and the keeping/making of a home have provided chances to share the load of what could be lonely work.  Men usually left the home for work, for hunting and left the woman home with the children.  Now that’s changed a lot, a whole lot, and in my lifetime, but the traditions of mutual support and aid still work.

Of these women, for example, Kate was a doctor, Carol a dentist.  Contemporary young women have joined in groups Stitch and Bitch and child care co-ops.  Women’s culture has tended more toward collaboration and this is a valuable trait women now bring to the work place.

Men have tended more towards competitive approaches, seeing other men as challenges rather than potential collaborators.  Who will bag the deer?  Catch the fish.  Bring home the money. Advance to the next position.  Win the game.

Yes, of course, there are men who collaborate and women who are competitive, and sometimes these are even the same person, perhaps competitive in one sphere of life and collaborative in another.

I don’t know what a macro look at these trends would reveal now.  As many women have entered the work place and left the full-time stay-at-home role, they are in cultures that emphasize competition and getting ahead rather than collaboration and getting along.

And, yes, there are work place gurus who try to coach folks into more collaboration and less mutual throat cutting, but this aspect of our overall culture will, I suspect, die hard.

Still, I’m hopeful that the collaborators and the getter alongers will eventually make in roads, creating more humane work places and homes.  That is, if global warming doesn’t make all so irritable than we can’t sustain attention long enough to change.

 

Politics

Looking Ahead to 2014

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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

When we reach the elections of 2014, a morality play based on the pragmatic side of politics will probably have played out.  The phenomenal self-inflicted thumping the tea party gave themselves and their erstwhile partners in the GOP got more painful in the elections held yesterday.  Christie’s win is for a moderate Republicanism of the older (that is what I remember from last century, last millennia politics) sort, pushing the tinfoil trefoils back a bit further in the party’s now rickety bus.

The GOP can read the demographic and electoral and opinion poll tea leaves as well as any one can.  The demographics of American minority populations means the influence of the older white male voters who make up to the GOP’s current core will decline.  Already have declined.  See the demographics of Obama’s win.  But, the GOP optimists say, yes that may be true nationally, but at the state level, where congressional races are run, we still have the oomph to maintain the house and maybe gain seats in the senate.  Maybe.

But this is where the opinion polls come in.  If the American public sees the dizzy we bleed red white and blue crowd as Republican, even that state level advantage can be reduced.  And it doesn’t need to be reduced much to give the Democrats a shot at the House.  They need only 17 pick-ups in 2014.  Admittedly, given the current configuration of House districts, many of them gerrymandered in a right wing Republican way (and, yes, there are a few left wing districts, too.  Just see Minneapolis and St. Paul for examples), the Democrats face a tough road to control of both houses.  But it can be done.  And the tea party can help.  That’s a tea party I’d attend.