Category Archives: Politics

Aging, Family, Friends, Health, Politics

The Day

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Mid-Summer                                                                 Waxing Honey Flow Moon

The card gods have failed to smile on me the last three months.  Paying me back for that lucky streak, teaching me–again–humility.  But.  Bill Schimdt, with brother Pat over his shoulder, won big tonight.  Congratulations to Bill and Pat.

Kate walked into the surgeon’s office with only a cane for assistance two weeks to the day after her surgery.  She moves well without the cane and will not need physical therapy.  Soon she will be walking free from hip pain for the first time in 15 to 20 years.  There are miracles and we don’t need the supernatural to explain them.  Skill, pluck and advancing knowledge, they’re enough.

Brother Mark spent the day slogging it out door to door in his search for a job.  This takes toughness and he admitted it took him some time to work up his nerve, but once he got into it, he applied several places and has a possible call back tomorrow.  Way to go Mark.

In reading the book, The Death of the Liberal Class, my fire for economic justice relit.  Those of who can must fight.  Socialism is not a bad word.  A capitalist economy that punishes the poor and siphons money from them to the rich has no moral standing.  We need to strike back against it.  Just how, what these times offer as alternatives, I don’t know.  But I intend to find out.

Aging, Humanities, Politics, US History

Check My Logic, Please

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Mid-Summer                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero

Not sure where this is headed with gadgets like the Kindle, but Cicero and I have something in common.  In fact, this room in which I write has a lot of soul.  Piles of it.  Shelves of it.  Open and closed soul.  Big and little soul.  Profound and silly soul.

Check me on my logic here.  Banks and hedge funds almost sink our economy, the largest in the world.  Through dogged work of two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat, the looming depression did not come to pass, but in the process the government had to shovel billions and billions of dollars (and as Everett Dirksen famously said, “A million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.) into the sink holes that so-called premier banks had become.  The banks took the money, then promptly began foreclosing on all the loans they themselves had sold, blaming the purchasers for making unwise investments.  Scroll forward a bit more than a year and the Republicans in Congress, with a straight face, demand a deal because of the sky-rocketing national debt.  Created by those very same bankers who bankroll the Republican party and, oh by the way, sunk the economy.

How would we deal with the national debt created by the government bail outs?  Cut programs that help the poor and the elderly.  This whole scenario beggars the imagination.  It is the most corrupt, venal, embarrassing, immoral action possible.  Bail out the rich, then use the bail out created debt as an excuse for trimming Medicare, cutting back on social welfare programs?  The ninth pit of hell.  Dante’s inferno.  Look it up.

Family, Memories, Politics, US History

Political Heartbreak

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Mid-Summer                                                           Waxing Honey Flow Moon

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” – Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.

Stevenson was my first political heart break.  My dad and I were for Adlai.  Dad probably had his reasons, mine were because Dad was for him.  That might have been the last political agreement we ever had.  Anyhow, I watched the Eisenhower/Stevenson returns on our television, a still rare phenomenon in Alexandria at the time.  The returns took until the wee hours to come in and staying up late delighted me.  I was, what?  5 at the time.

The more I’ve learned about Stevenson, a Unitarian, since then makes me wonder how Dad could have liked this guy and been so far adrift when it came to the Vietnam War.  Stevenson was the real deal, a man I’d still be proud to support.  We haven’t had a candidate like him, perhaps with the exception of Obama.

Death of the Liberal Class, by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, a book I’ve just begun, had me gnashing my teeth by the end of the first chapter.  In a good way.  In that chapter he gives an astute analysis of the role of the liberal class in a culture, its necessary role as assurer of at least incremental reforms, and why America’s liberal class began to wither early in the 20th century until it is now virtually dead.  I suppose he’s right about needing a liberal class, I mean his argument makes sense to me, but the other point he makes, the way the liberal class of the FDR era right through today bankrupted itself through a mindless anti-communism and a venal capitulation to so-called free market economics, makes me mad.

Hedges’ political analysis seems spot on to me and it makes me want to get back in the struggles for economic justice and the true equality that only economic justice can bring.  If you want peace, work for justice.  As a long time convert to the New Left analysis, an anti-corporate, pro-union, anti-war, pro-working class movement, I worked most of my adult life on jobs issues, economic development, affordable housing, civil rights, single payer health care and radicalization of the Democratic party.  There have been some victories along the way, there have.  There have been many more losses and in today’s political climate, the matters that concern me most outside environmental ones have all but disappeared from public debate.

This makes me sad, but not defeated.  It makes me angry, but not rageful. It makes me unhappy, but not despairing.

We need again, a call to revolution in this country, not a tea-party, grab mine, forget about you revolution, but a neo-socialist movement that recognizes government’s role in insuring that no one goes broke due to medical expenses, than no one goes to bed hungry and that everyone has a bed, in a form of housing affordable.  Let’s get to work on that. Now.

Family, Politics

Capitol Camp Out

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Mid-Summer                                                                  Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Mark and I drove into St. Paul to help set-up the Capitol Camp-Out action on the lawn of the State Capitol.    We helped set up the sound system, then transferred to pitching tents, ones with which we had no prior experience.  That was fun.  How do these things work?  This cross piece bends and goes there.  Nope.  Over there.  Sigh.  To make things more challenging the tents could not have stakes, State Capitol grounds rules.  When Mark and I left, the area had begun to fill up already with tents.

After that we toured St. Paul, Rice Park, Irvine Park, Summit Avenue in particular.  Mark took over the wheel when we finished with Summit Avenue and drove us home, preparing himself for his driver’s license test.  He can’t do that until he gets a piece of paper from California confirming his previous license there some 20 + years ago.

Kate spent the morning entering contacts into her new IPad2.  She’s already learned how to play several games.  She has a definite solitaire jones, playing with care and precision, the same way she quilts.

Last night, still working out my new schedule, I spent an hour or so throwing out magazines.  Yes, I know.  I keep saving them for that mythical moment of return, which, I’m finally admitting, just never occurs.  Wired, Scientific American, Economist, Sierra Club, Philosophy Now, Dissent, Parabola, Orion.  I love magazines.  And don’t like to part with them.  Until now.

Humanities, Politics, US History

The 4th of July

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Mid-Summer                                                     Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Independence Day.  Celebrating our ancestor’s victory over the British army and considering how their enlightenment ideals apply to our time.  Happy 4th of July!

For an unreconstructed radical like myself, these are trying times.  I wonder where the sense of communitarian spirit has gone.  Yes, we have a can do, go it alone spirit, too and I participate in it.  The ethical underpinnings of Western civilization, however, fed by the the deep springs of Athens and Jerusalem have always reminded us that we share this journey.   Our lives are not ours alone, but belong as well to the whole, to the commonweal.  When we establish a government of the people, by the people, and FOR the people, we make this claim a part of our countries essence.

The rugged individualist, the objectivist, the capitalist have the inclination to see the community as a source for their betterment, which is fine as long as their betterment does not come at others expense.  In that case these same perspectives become exploitative and parasitic, not interdependent, mutual.  A 5-year old knows that if all you do is take and take and take, then the other kids will no longer want to play with  you.

The atomistic viewpoints of groups like the Tea Party and, in an insult to the Christian faith, the evangelical right, make it clear that they want the government to enforce their bigoted views of morality:  no stemcell research, homophobia and respect for only one point of view in struggle over Roe v. Wade.  They want no government aid to the poor, no environmental review for corporate projects that threaten the long term health of our natural world.  They have a vast umbrella of negatives with which they hope to block the sunshine of equality and shared responsibility.

They want the constitution, like the bible, to be an inspired document, written not by men and women, but by gods, inviolate and sacrosanct.  It isn’t true of the bible and it is even much less so true of the constitution.  Both of these documents live, that is, they get swept into new eras, with new challenges and demand a hermeneutics for understanding their relevance.  Always.  This is an iron law of human history, no document from the past means the same thing today that it did yesterday.  That is anachronistic thinking at its most damaging, its most infantile, its most destructive.

My sister lives in Singapore and, up until very recently, so did my brother, Mark.  This makes accessible, in a personal way, the viewpoints of other cultures toward our country.  Many people don’t like us, see us as arrogant, uncaring and ruthless.  Of course, the big kid on the block often has that reputation, deserved or undeserved, but our recent actions, Iraq and Guantanamo among them, have cemented these opinions.

Even so, I have this urge to celebrate our country.  We are a beacon of freedom, a beloved place of opportunity and real diversity.  We have committed ourselves to constructing a nation not on history or geography, but on founding ideals of freedom and equality and brotherhood. (sic) The number and variety of persons who come to this country from all over the world, the number and variety of them who become part of the patchwork quilt that is our history and our present at its very best, attest to the essential value of our presence.  We negotiate the boundary between sending cultures and our history and, again at our best, we do it with open hands and hearts.

Have we slaughtered Native Americans and held slaves?  Yes.  Have we engaged in first-strike aggression?  Yes.  Have we often pretended that our nation, defended by two oceans, exists alone and isolated?  Yes.  Have we laid waste to our natural resources in the name of jobs and profits?  Yes.

We should not be, cannot be, proud of these transgressions, but I submit that we are not the Great Satan.  We are not the only nation whose actions have transgressed human decency.  Further, I would submit that we are not even the worst, not even close.  Look at the Armenian and Jewish genocides.  The pogroms in Russia and the slaughter of the Stalinist era.  The vicious regime of the Khmer Rouge.  This is a long list and it runs deep in our world history.  No, we are a nation that has blundered and made arrogant mistakes, but we are neither all bad nor all good.  We are, rather, an imperfect nation with an imperfect history.

As I look around the world, I find no country more committed to creating a united states of freedom, no country more committed to embracing the worlds refugees, no country more aware of its errors and no country more able to make amends.  We are a young nation, barely 240 years old, maybe an early adolescent in terms of our development.

We must not give in to the petty, the self-aggrandizing, the screw the other guy mentality of our rising political movements.  We’re better than that.

Bees, Family, Health, Politics

A Reunion

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Mid-Summer                                                                                              Waning Garlic Moon

As the garlic moon wanes, the leaves of the garlic plants begin to brown from the bottom up.  When half of them are brown, I’ll pull a couple to see how they’re progressing.  I plant more garlic than we use; for some reason it appeals to me as a crop.  Partly because you plant it in the fall and harvest it in the summer.  A contrarian.

A Latin day today, perhaps tomorrow, too, after I see to the queen excluders in the colonies from which I removed them this weekend. I’m looking for movement of the workers up into the honey supers, starting to lay in honey there rather than in the hive boxes.

Into the city tonight to discuss the slightly revised issue selection process for the 2012 legislature.  We’re moving up our process by a month to allow for better campaign planning, gathering of allies.

My exercise commitment, once rock solid, has slipped in these past three weeks with many evening meetings.  I’m going to shift my workouts to the morning, see if I can get a new rhythm established.

At the end of July my sister Mary will travel here from Athens, where she gives a paper, then reverse field back through London to Singapore.  My cousin Diane, who stood up for me when Kate and I got married, also, by chance, will be in town for another reason, so we’ll have a Keaton and an Ellis reunion right here in Andover, star of the northern burbs.  Diane lives in San Francisco where she churns out a weekly newsletter, highly regarded, on the pulp and paper industry.

Great Work, Minnesota, Politics

Take Action Against Sulfide Mining Exploratory Drilling

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Mid-Summer                                                                      Waning Garlic Moon

This is part of a note I sent to the Forest Service about issuing permits for exploratory drilling in Northeastern Minnesota.  You can take part by clicking:

“Please accept these comments on the Federal Hardrock Mineral Prospecting Permit Draft EIS (DEIS). I have serious concerns about the project’s potential for harmful impacts to Minnesota’s natural resources.

Caring for our wilderness and natural heritage is a huge responsibility and I commend those of you in the Forest Service who have made it your life’s work.  Thank you for your commitment.

This particular instrument, a DEIS focused only on the environmental effects of drilling itself, is disingenuous. And you must know that.

The real environmental impact of drilling, whatever transient effects it may have, will be the mines, if any, that occur in its wake.  To not count the certainty of mining in the case of favorable mineral deposits as the first and most significant environmental impact of drilling makes us all look absurd.  Please, please add mining to the list of drilling’s environmental impacts.  Logic and good policy formation demand it.”

Minnesota, Politics

What Is It With Minnesota?

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Mid-Summer                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon

I live in Minnesota.  A state that has made me proud to be its citizen over and over again.  So.  Why is that the most mind-dulled adherent to the no-new taxes pledge, a blow-dried white guy like Tim Pawlenty represents our state among presidential candidates for 2012?  Why is it, even more incredibly, that Michele Bachmann, my congressional representative, has started punching holes in Pawlenty’s run?  Here is a link to a hilarious and scary article about Michele in Rolling Stone, Michele Bachmann’s Holy War.

Who appears on the national stage from Minnesota these days?  A trinity of bizarre political positions represented by two really strange people and one so bland he could be a 1950’s ad man:  Jesse Ventura, Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.  How did it come to pass that Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Eugene McCarthy got replaced by this trio of gibbering idiots?

At time I don’t even recognize the state to which I moved in 1970, 41 years ago.   We seem Californiaesque in our deeply divided politics with Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim representing Minneapolis at one end of the spectrum and Michele at the other.  When I work with the Sierra Club’s legislative program at the state capitol, I see this divide often.  We have, for example, Kate Knuth, an Oxford educated environmentalist who articulates a clear defense of the science of global warming and a nearby state senator whose eccentric views would find a welcome home in the climate change deniers national conference.  Which he attended.

I know this.  If those of us on the liberal, left and progressive wing of American politics don’t get organized, and soon, we may be headed to a world not too distant from the strange one that gave us George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Remember them?

Bees, Politics

Communitarianism No Longer In Fashion

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Mid-Summer                                                                          Waning Garlic Moon

Today is a bee day, with reversals and hive inspections.  In reversals hive boxes get shuffled to keep the queen working in the bottom hive box and so the colony feels there is plenty of room, therefore no need to swarm.  At last check the colonies all looked good, plenty of bees and brood.  We’re still working out the kinks of our honey extraction process, trying to figure out ways to make it less painful for all:  us and the bees.  This year we’ll try an experiment, running the extractor in the garage with overhead water and an enclosed trailer for the frames awaiting extraction.  Might work.

The potatoes still need mounding due to the back spasms yesterday.  If I can get finish that, I’ll call it a day.  No Tai Chi tonight, at least I think not.  We’ll see if the back limbers up after a day’s work or seizes up.

Lori Sturdevant nailed the main problem with politics in our time.  Communitarianism is no longer in fashion.  Democracy demands a sense that we’re all in this together, all of us, the poor, the environment, business and government.  The concept of social justice, so dependent on a robust notion of communitarianism, has disappeared from the political stage, reflecting in part the decline of the mainline protestant churches focus on the least of these.  It reflects, in part, too, the old, more muscular liberalism of Hubert Humphrey:

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

It is not only, nor even most importantly, the moral test of government.  It is the moral test of our nation.  In this high stakes testing, we have slumped, our gpa falling, falling, driven lower and lower by greed that blocks out the other, by, as Lori Sturdevant also pointed out, a religious perspective focused on individual salvation, by a shriveled sense of community, one so depleted that community may extend no further than the edges of our own yards, our own apartments.

Returning to Heidegger, we are thrown into the world, landing in it with many existential givens.  Those of us fortunate to have an upbringing that celebrated education, that helped us learn how to plan, how to work toward our goals, succeed.  Those thrown into poverty, into communities for whom education equals selling out, for whom planning does not extend past today and whose work ethic never had a chance to develop, don’t.  Of course there are exceptions, but note that there are exceptions in both sets of existential givens.  There are, too, those thrown into disabled bodies or saddled with disabled minds.

To not note the grim effects of our thrownness on some and its salutary effects on others is to deny reality, to pretend the world is other than it is.  This is the opposite of realism, it is denial.  To note those effects and be committed to leveling them is not idealism, it is realism.  In an increasingly competitive world we need the gifts and talents of all our citizens, not just a few, a lucky few with fortunate existential givens.

Let me try another tact.  Love thy neighbor as thyself.  We hold as self-evident that all (persons) are created equal.  As long as one person is hungry, then we are all hungry.

Politics

Read My Lips: No No-New-Taxes Hot Air. Anymore.

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Beltane                                                                             Waning Garlic Moon

Mid-Summer, the summer solstice, comes tomorrow.  Our eight times a year brief essay on the changing seasons of the Celtic calendar appears tomorrow.

Tim Pawlenty says, “What deficit?”  He claims there is no deficit in Minnesota, just bad accounting.  Bad accountability, yes.  Bad accounting?  No.  If there is no deficit, it is difficult to see what the game of chicken at the Capitol is all about.  It must have something to do with that big number.  What was it?  $5 billion.  Yes.  A deficit.  One caused by following the unusual to business practice of trying to keep business expenses level while decreasing income.  If expenses remain the same–the state budget–, and sales are intentionally allowed to fall off by a no-new sales promise, then?  Deficit.

If, however, expenses for keeping a state of the art business growing increase, then the sales force increases its effort.  Minnesota has been a state of the art state in so many things.  Compassion to the poor.  Education for all citizens.  Environmental consciousness.  Efficient and effective government.  Infrastructure improvement.  Education funding.  Property tax relief.

Now, under the no new taxes regime, we get the poor denied health care and basic needs like housing and food.  High stakes testing has reduced our education system to a teach to the test marathon without even significantly increasing test scores.  A state that gave us the boundary waters and the wild and scenic rivers act plus state level mandates for clean air, clean water, a moratorium on the construction of nuclear power plants and a similar action barring new coal plants and importation of new coal generated electricity is tripping all over itself to build an unneeded bridge over the St. Croix and can’t wait to get sulfide mining started.  Aid to local governments has dried up and the state is days away from a shutdown.  Transportation funding, especially for emission reducing forms of transportation like light rail, has tanked.  Education funding for the UofM has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk while school boards are forced to go to the levy to raise funds that should come from the state.  The result?  Rising property taxes.  This is the legacy that Tim Pawlenty wants to share with the nation?

It is a difficult time to have a radical analysis of the nation’s economic infrastructure since so many have tilted toward the center-right ideas of the free market, but it is an important time to have and to apply such analysis.  Who speaks for the poor now?  Who insists on gender, racial and age justice?  When did the guarantee of freedom in America get reduced to the right to carry concealed weapons and allowing states to deport persons?  When did careful interpretation of our founding document get replaced by a secular equivalent of biblical literalism?  We are deep into a time of unparalleled meanness in our politics.

It’s as if Jesus said, “I come to bring solace to the rich, recovery of  cash for those who already have much, release to the plutocrat yearning for more wealth, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s bounty for all those who already have a lot.”

It is no secret that children starve and adults go without health care in this the richest nation on earth. The left, the radical left, needs to heal its fractures and get back to building its base.