December 2009 Archives
Regarding the dilemma of airport profiling, let me go back to a piece from the rival paper that I wrote back in 2002. With some qualifications, i still stand by the basic premise. But having been profiled up and down in Israel in 2006, I find that it's easy for profiling to become obnoxious, which is why I don't much want to go again to Israel anytime soon.
Are Muslim only lines at airports next? The thought is offensive, disgusting, and blatantly unconstitutional. But it's hardly far-fetched. Three years before suspected Nigerian airline terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was hauled off a Northwest airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a powder and liquid explosive device stuffed in his underwear, British Department of Transportation officials openly discussed corralling men of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance at airports for intense questioning, checks and searches. The plan outraged Muslim leaders and British officials backed off the systematic profiling of Muslims. However, single men of Asian and Middle Eastern appearance were still subject to intense checks and searches. Britain was not alone. France and the Netherlands had already imposed de facto profiling of Muslim appearing young men and families at airports since the September, 2001 terror attacks. Polls showed that a substantial majority of Europeans agreed that racial profiling was not repugnant if it made airline travel safer and thwarted a possible terror attack. The clamor for a racial crackdown was first heard in the U.S. following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1996.
Then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno had the good sense not rush to judgment and scapegoat Muslims. The swift arrest of Timothy McVeigh squelched the building mob hysteria against them. But it didn't squelch public suspicions that all Muslims were potential terrorists. The federal building bombing propelled Clinton's 1996 Antiterrorism Act through Congress. Civil rights and civil liberties groups had waged a protracted battle against the bill. The law gave the FBI broad power to infiltrate groups, quash fundraising by foreigners, monitor airline travel, and seize motel and hotel records and trash due process by permitting the admission of secret evidence to expel immigrants. The implication was that present and future attacks would likely be launched by those with an Arab name and face rather than by men like McVeigh.
President Bush, as Clinton, took the high ground after the 911 attack. He did not reflexively finger-point Muslims. The Bush administration publicly assured that profiling was reprehensible and violated legal and constitutional principles, and that it would not be done. But the attack stirred tremors among Muslims that they would routinely be targeted, subject to search and surveillance, and profiled at airports.
The profiling alarm bells went off again after a soldier with a Muslim name shot up the military base at Ft. Hood back in November. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass killing. The Council didn't know at that moment whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was a Muslim by birth, a converted Muslim, or even a Muslim at all. The name and the horrific murder spree was enough to drive the group to quickly distance itself from the rampage. Other Muslim organizations instantly followed suit and issued their own equally strong disavowal of Hasan.
This didn't stop the pack of Fox Network commentators, conservative radio talk show hosts, writers, and some officials from again openly shouting for even tighter scrutiny of Muslim groups. Terror suspect Abdulmutallab has simply raised the decibel level on their call for transportation officials to openly profile Muslims at airports, train stations, and even on the open highways.
Some elected officials have even jumped on the profiling bandwagon. Congressman Peter King, ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, predictably loudly called for the profiling of Muslims. Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind went further and announced he'd reintroduce the bill he first introduced in 2005 to let police stop and search anyone they deem to be suspicious. Hikind didn't specifically finger Muslims, but the intent of the bill was unmistakable, namely to target Muslims.
The New York Assembly will reject Hikind's bill again. But the rejection isn't likely to be unanimous. Legislators read the papers and the polls. Informal on line polls taken immediately after Abdulmutallab's failed terror attempt found that a majority of Americans are ready to turn a blind eye to law, the constitution and just plain human decency to target Muslims, any Muslim, for special scrutiny. No matter that a potential terrorist can come in any shape, size, color, gender, and disguise. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights noted that convicted terrorists John Walker Lindh were white, and Richard Reid was Jamaican and British. Abdulmutallab is Nigerian, but from all appearances he could just as easily be mistaken for a young African-American hip hop artist.
Broad-based ethnic profiling creates in turn panic and the false sense of security that airlines are actually preventing terrorist attacks. It also causes law enforcement resources to be squandered chasing the wrong targets. Worse, it's a witch-hunt against a group based solely on their religion and ethnicity. This fuels even greater racial division, fear and hysteria. The public whispers and the right wing's open talk of Muslim only airport lines do the same.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.
One of the boldfaced truths about life is that if you tell a lie enough, people will start believing it. Take the ones about the Israelis and the Jews that surface every day or two. It used to be that Israel stole the land. Now it is that we are squatting on the land in addition to some other prime jewels and gems.
The truth is that shortly before the United Nations partitioned the land in 1948, many of the Arabs left with their leaders' blessings only to strike back on the eve of Israel's independence. But no one wants to hear that.
Hoping for peace, Israel returned land won in all those wars where they defended themselves. But the creative and peace-loving Palestinians used it to launce more rockets. Alas, no one wants to hear that, either.
What they do want to hear is that the Jews have discriminated against the Palestinians by turning the whole place an apartheid pit. No one knows when these individuals last boarded the mother ship, but it is the unusual victim who spends his days rioting, looting and maiming or thinking about ways to kill others and seize property his people didn't do anything with when they had it and haven't done anything with since.
The truth is that if the Israelis can build themselves up with the constant marauding and threats then so can the Palestinians. But alas, no one wants to hear that, either.
Karl Rove is divorcing his second wife. Me, I blame liberals and the mainstream media. By constantly changing the age-old definition of marriage, they confused poor Karl, and Tiger Woods, and Charlie Sheen. How can these good hetero eggs keep track of what a marriage is supposed to be? As for me, I've got commitment issues, because I'm constantly worried about accidentally marrying a man, thanks to these darned changing definitions. Thanks a lot, MSM, for depriving me of one of God's great gifts.
Take me back to the good, old days, when the definition of marriage was simple and constant: One man and one woman or many women. Or one one man and many women and some concubines. Or one man and one woman for a few months. Or one woman and one man of the same race, lest there be a lynching. Now, the world's done changed. A pity, eh?
Nigerian failed airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab got a US visa, wasn't on Homeland Security's no-fly list, got only the briefest notation on its terrorist suspect watch list even after his father warned the US that he was a threat. Abdulmutallab for an early moment was suspected of having some connection to a Yemen based Al-Qaeda faction. It didn't take long for anti-terrorism hawks from Joe Lieberman to GOP congresspersons to dump the lax security, terrorist watch breach, and faulty intelligence on Al-Qaeda on President Obama. They blasted Obama for shutting them out of intelligence briefings and for ignoring their inquiries for information on intelligence operations. This was also a ramp up to their main knock that Obama courts folly if he moves ahead with his plan to close Gitmo, and worse, transfer some of the prisoners to Yemen.
The out in space partisan hit on Obama for the security breach and the Gitmo shutdown was predictable. The soft on terrorism charge has dogged Obama from the early days of the presidential campaign to the White House. But he's not alone. The charge has been a political albatross for other moderate Democrats. During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry tried to do an impossible political somersault and out Bush Bush on terrorism.
Kerry pledged to launch preemptive strikes against terrorists wherever they were and said that he would launch search and destroy missions to ferret out bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. The foolhardy pledge fooled absolutely no one. Countless polls showed that the voters repeatedly gave Bush huge percentage margins over Kerry when asked who they thought would do a better job in the anti-terror war. Kerry still didn't get it. He kept pounding on Bush as being, weak and ineffective in fighting terrorism. He touted his military credentials as a Vietnam combat vet to supposedly prove that he would and could be every bit if not more the hardliner on terrorism than Bush.
If Kerry had looked at the polls much closer he would have seen what it really took to beat Bush. Those same polls that consistently showed that if the election came down solely to a referendum on who best to fight terrorism he'd lose, and he did.
Obama tried the same tact during the 2008 campaign. He promised preemptive strikes, to escalate the Afghan war, pump massive funds into counterinsurgency campaigns, to keep Bush's patently illegal anti-terrorism spy, surveillance and wiretapping snooping on Americans largely intact. This didn't budge the polls one point upward in his favor in a head to head match with McCain on the terrorism issue. Voters by big majorities still said that if it came down to waging the tough fight against terrorism, McCain not Obama was the right man for the job.
Mercifully for Obama the election didn't come to that issue. 2008 was not 2004. Bush and the GOP's wreck and ruin of the economy, its sex and corruption scandals, foreign policy bungles, a perceived failed war, and the passage of time, made the terrorism scare a bottom rung political issue in the election.
Abdulmutallab's thankfully bungled terror try won't change that. Hints that the White House has done a less than stellar job in the anti-terrorism war won't change that either. This won't stop the GOP, though, from playing soft on terror card against Obama every chance it gets. In this case, it was played to hammer him for planning to close Gitmo. Obama will eventually close Gitmo. And that insures that the terrorism card will stay on the president's table.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.
Is Garrison Keillor the new Father Christmas? Let's hope not. In "Don't Mess with Christmas," the "Prairie Home Companion" writer and syndicated columnist elevates the holiday to its loftiest heights since the Third Reich when he bemoans Unitarians and others who wreck the holiday by changing the lyrics to songs and "those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the mall every year."
Among those "Jewish guys" he is referring to are: Irving Berlin who wrote "White Christmas," Johnny Marks who penned "A Holly, Jolly Christmas," and Leonard Cohen who wrote a marvelous version of "Hallelujah" sung by last year's winner of Britain's "X-Factor, Alexandra Burke. Although Burke is Black, Keillor would be happy to know that she is a Christian, which may make it copasetic for her to sing that song, depending on just how Christian she is in his book and where she worships.
Some say that if Jewish people can write Christmas songs, then gentiles ought to take a crack at writing Jewish songs as well. But it just wouldn't be the same. First, most people agree that Christmas has gone about commercial as it can go. And second, gentiles trying to pen Jewish songs would send up another red flag as another misguided attempt to convert us, which we never were that excited about to begin with. Also, the songs would have to be accepted, meaning that the auteur would have to have a pretty keen understanding of the culture and traditions, which would pretty much put the skids on it from the start.
I don't know when ethnicity became a prerequisite for writing songs for a holiday where even the banks, post offices and department stores close, but if that's how Garrison Keillor feels, then he should move to a monastery in the hills so that he won't have to subject himself to any more of this horribleness.
Pope Benedict XVI's decision to press harder to make Pope Pius XII a saint is not a hostile act against Jews, it's an abomination. The Vatican's mute silence on the Holocaust under Pius's watch aided and abetted it. The Vatican added more insult to Pius's disgraceful World War II silence when it ducked and dodged repeated demands that the Vatican fully disclose all Pius's correspondence and actions while the slaughter raged. Six years ago the Vatican hinted after repeated demands from Jewish scholars and leaders that the Vatican would release more of its World War II-era files on Pope Pius XII. It didn't. So far, the Vatican has released a handful of carefully scrubbed wartime documents that reveal almost nothing about the Vatican's dealings with Hitler.
It was virtually an article of faith during the decade I attended Catholic schools that Pius XII would one day be canonized a saint. The priests and nuns routinely punctuated their prayers with paeans in praise of the goodness and greatness of Pius XII. They urged us to pray for his continued health and well-being. In the decades since his death in 1959 Pius XII's march to sainthood has been wracked by fierce debate over his dealings with Hitler and his refusal to speak out on the Holocaust.
There was great hope that this would change when John Paul II took over the Vatican reins. Over the years, he raked Catholics over the coals for saying and doing nothing about colonialism, slavery, and the pillage of the lands of indigenous people. But his continuing unwillingness to confront the Vatican's complicity in Hitler's Holocaust was another matter.
Vatican defenders cloud Papal guilt in the Holocaust by incessantly reminding that the Nazis murdered thousands of Catholics in and outside of Germany who aided the Jews. They also remind critics that Pius XII poured millions into relief for war refugees, gave sanctuary to Jews inside the Vatican, and played a huge role in post war recovery efforts and the restoration of democracy in Western Europe.
In 1998, the church made a mild stab at public atonement for past injustices when it formally apologized for centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism and the failure to combat Nazi persecution of the Jews. But the Vatican made no mention of Pius XII's stone silence on Nazi atrocities. And it's this continuing blind spot that riles many Jewish and church scholars.
The Vatican continues to keep silent on its Holocaust involvement for a painful reason. Its silence was not due to the moral lapses of individual Catholics, or that the church was ignorant of, or duped by, Hitler's aims. It was a deliberate policy of appeasement crafted by church leaders. Before he ascended to the papacy in 1939, Pius XII was the Vatican's ambassador to Germany and secretary of state during the crucial period when Hitler rose to power, and knew full well what Hitler was up to.
In his well-documented work, "Hitler's Pope: the Secret History of Pius XII." John Cornwell, Jesus College, Cambridge University professor notes that the Vatican signed its ill-famed concordat with Hitler in 1933 to prevent him from grabbing church property and meddling in church affairs. In return the Vatican pledged the absolute obedience of Germany's Catholic priests and bishops to Hitler. As Pope, Pius XII sent a letter praising "the illustrious Hitler," and expressing confidence in his leadership.
Even as evidence piled up that thousands of Jews were being shipped to slaughter in Nazi concentration camps, Pius XII refused to reverse the Vatican's see-no-evil, hear-no-evil political course. He ignored the pleas of President Roosevelt to denounce the Nazis. He declined to endorse a joint declaration by Britain, U.S and Russia condemning the killings of Jews, claiming that he couldn't condemn "particular" atrocities. He was publicly silent when the Germans occupied Rome in 1944 and rounded up many of the city's Jews. Many were later killed in concentration camps. He continued to send birthday greetings to Hitler each year until his death. He did not reprimand the Catholic archbishop of Berlin for issuing a statement mourning Hitler's death.
Pius XII's one and only known pronouncement during the war on the mass murders was a tepid, vaguely worded statement denouncing the deaths "of hundreds of thousands." By then there were millions, and he did not mention Hitler, Nazi Germany, or the Jews in the statement.
In an Alice in Wonderland twist on reality, Vatican defenders say that airing old dirty laundry and fingering the culprits within the church that turned a blind eye toward Hitler's ravages could damage the many efforts the church has made to heal the rift between Jews and Catholics. But the call for Benedict to bare the Papal chest on church sins for the Holocaust is not an academic exercise in moral flagellation. The thousands of Holocaust victims still alive bear the eternal scars of the Vatican's Hitler-era acquiescence to genocide. And the modern day killing fields of Congo, Sudan, Rwanda and Cambodia are grim fresh reminders that the world still has not rid itself of the horrors of genocide.
John Paul II's apology a decade ago for the sins of Catholics against the oppressed and Benedict's many denunciations of the Holocaust was a step forward toward exorcising the wrongs of the past. But bestowing sainthood on Pope, Pius XII who said and did little while Hitler murdered millions is a huge step backward.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.
2000 was the decade of wonder, but not always in a good way, either. It was a decade of surprises, proving once again, that no one ever knows what's next. It was the decade that the Internet took hold and changed the way we meet, do business and relate. Although it connected people globally, it also cost some people their jobs by cutting out the middleman.
Some researchers once conducted a study about the effects of television depravation. Those denied their usual TV time became moody, irritable and suffered from sleep loss. The same could be said of those deprived of their Internet usage. I know that without it, I become moody, irritable and suffer from blurred vision and start speaking in tongues.
That aside, it was the decade of 911proving once again how gullible my fellow Americans can be, judging by how quick we are to forgive and make nice to those who danced in the streets as the Twin Towers disintegrated in a heap of ash.
It was when illegal immigrants came out from the shadows and were proud to march at MacArthur Park and other locales and hurl bottles at the police. That any group would march and display their illegal activities is something that never would have occurred even during the rocking and raucous seventies. Then, there would have been people to march for them while they hid, but this is the decade that shame has taken a back seat while lawlessness and her twin, irresponsibility, have gotten to drive.
It was when we hit a brick wall financially speaking. The excess of the 90's turned out to be a repeat of the gilded age of the 20's, and when we crashed, we crashed hard. Of course, it was greed and stupidity on both sides that were partially to blame. Some people, especially those with no income or bad credit, just shouldn't own property no matter what the liberals or the American dream says. Period, end of story.
Yes, it was the decade that we elected a biracial president who considers himself Black. I never thought it would happen, but that guy is so convincing and has so much confidence that he probably could have broken into the movie industry and passed himself off as a muscle head if he wanted.
For me, it was the decade I had to face the inevitable loss of a parent. Loss is never easy, and I know that my father would have rather I buried him rather than the other way around, but it still hurt and stung when the time came. But at least we had the chance to square things away and say what we wanted to say, and I at least had the chance to thank him for all he'd done for me and to tell him I loved him one more time. My advice to anyone would be the same. Say what you want to say now while you can because you just never know.
No decade can be all bad that begins on the beach in Puerto Vallarta with family and friends and delivers us six new grandchildren. Still, it was a ten years of anxiety and surprises--some good and some truly terrible. The great lesson of the "Zeros" was that we worried about the wrong things and were equally wrong about our positive expectations. It was bad decade for pundits.
I watched the fireworks as the New Millennium was born. Their explosive concussive force foreshadowed some of what was to come. They illuminated the sky from the Nueva Marina to our north all the way down the coast to Mismaloya. With the sky lit by fireworks, we all waited for the electric lights to go out, the computers to crash and Y2K to bring the world to a standstill. Y2K didn't show. We spent hundreds of millions trying to make a hi-tech fix for a non-problem. We worried in vain.
However, we didn't foresee the low-tech hijacking by box-cutters of four airplanes, the worst attack on our homeland in history and the start (but no finish) of two wars and a worldwide struggle against militant Islam. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, we expected an era of peace. Wrong.
With budgets not only balanced but in surplus, some experts predicted endless growth. The business cycle had been defeated. The only direction possible was up. One pundit held that history had come to an end, and democracy and capitalism had permanently triumphed. Not so fast.
The nature of bubbles is to burst, and so the real estate bubble, the stock market bubble and the auto industry all went POP! Manufacturing went off shore, and we all got jobs as consumers, borrowers and providers of services. Who knew that the bill would come due and we couldn't pay it? We lost two cities, but not to terrorism. New Orleans to water and Detroit to rust.
On the other hand, no one in my Chicago family dreamed, as we watched the fireworks on the beach in PV, that an African-American from Hawaii, by way of Chicago, would be elected president of the United States in this decade. Nor could we have foreseen that Democrats would gain control of the Congress and in the Senate have a theoretically veto-proof majority--veto-proof against everything except other Democrats. Okay, that part should have been foreseeable. Will Rogers said in the 20s (the other Twenties), "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
Lot's of things didn't happen that we Americans are better off for having missed: Nuclear war, plague, civil insurrection and widespread domestic terrorism. Let's keep missing them.
Some good things that didn't happen may in this coming decade: A cure for AIDS, the Cubs in the World Series and Peace in the Middle East.
Hey, don't laugh, and don't give up hope. Remember how wrong we were about the last decade!
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The '00s were the Decade of American Anxiety. Or, perhaps, the Decade of Denial.
This decade began with the popping of the tech bubble in the spring of 2000. Experts had been in denial about the economic laws of physics, claiming the Internet had created a business model in which profits or even income were irrelevant measures of success. Now reality, and anxiety, set in. Temporarily.
9/11 exposed how America wasn't immune to the chaotic effects of the very globalization we had unleashed on the rest of the planet. Yet the result of our awakened anxiety represented still more denial, believing as we did that a whack-a-mole foreign policy would make the rest of the world pay us proper tribute.
Meanwhile, we replaced the techiest bubble with the lowest-tech bubble, surmising that land can't disappear into the air the way bandwidth does. But again we denied the laws of physics, believing that economic productivity had less to do with building new things and more to do with refinancing our homes -- for a handsome profit -- every twenty minutes.
An economic panic nine years into the decade should have signaled that it's time to come to grips with our many hangovers. But once we became somewhat stable, it became time not for serious discussions about the nation we seek to be, but for tea parties and ridiculous mouth-to-ears combat. This hysterical form of pseudo-dialogue represents both our anxiety and our continuing denial that we must grow up.
Denial and anxiety, they placed their stamp on our decade -- and we have postponed resolution of such matters till the next decade. Stay tuned... as if we had a choice.
2009 was just another year. The pity is that it didn't have to be that way. The estimated one to two million persons stood in frozen rapture on the Capitol Mall to cheer the nation's first black president take the oath of office on a pledge of hope and change. That alone promised to make 2009 one of the most electric years in living memory. It wasn't to be. Wall Street didn't get the horse collar that Obama and the Democrats promised. Home foreclosures continued to skyrocket, small businesses still died on the vine, and unemployment hit numbers that hadn't been seen since the real Great Depression. Even the promise that millions of uninsured would finally get something that resembled affordable health care got drowned in the swill of Washington trench warfare on the health care reform bill. This wasn't helped by the death midway through of the Kennedy family's and the nation's last Patrician, Teddy Kennedy who would have fought tooth and nail to get a real reform bill through.
There were other distractions in 2009 to make up for the Washington crash and burn. The drug wars in Mexico inched uncomfortably close to America's shores and borders. The theatre of the absurd was on full display in the streets outside convention hall in Copenhagen as every green counterculture group in creation demanded that the rich guys stop suffocating the planet.
Closer to home, L.A. got a new stay at home police chief. California for the third year in a row nearly went belly up as public approval of the state's actor turned governor, and soon to be actor again, and his surrounding crew in the state legislature hit disapproval lows that made Hoover Hoover look like the second coming of JFK. The politician's lows were so low, that a couple of mega millionaire Republicans with zero political experience, and who were too busy making money, or simply too bored and disinterested to vote, tossed their hat in the rink for governor and Senator
The bird brain antics of and the media slavering over Britany and Lindsay got muscled out of the news by the almost equally mindless fascination with the he said, she said irrelevancies of Kate and. Mercifully, that got muscled out by Tiger and his 10, 12, or some other double digit number of alleged mistresses. Then there was Sarah, that's Palin. A gubernatorial resignation, the hint of scandal in her home state Alaska, a spat with John McCain, and a Rogue book tour helped SNL's favorite punching bag climb back in the public eye, and amazingly even get some media chatter about her actually being a presidential contender in 2012. You go girl.
But there was occasionally room for some good stuff. The Lakers finally got their championship rings, and their long suffering fans got to riot, the NFL actually made some faint soundings about getting a team back into L.A. or somewhere close, and the FF writers are still in business at the Daily News.
Yes, 2009 was just another year.
Continue reading Something Special for Everyone from Obama, But Not for Blacks .
Leave it to the geniuses at AOL to blame an entire country for the acts of a few. A December 22 headline reads, "Country Admits to Harvesting Organs." The problem is that all the doctors in that country, Israel, did not harvest organs. Only one person did, and the Israeli officials are investigating it.
Back at the ranch, the Palestinians are having a heyday with this one and are demanding a full investigation. While they are at it and are still as pure as the driven snow, they might also want to investigate the wars they waged, the rockets they lob into the area, the suicide bombings, the children they've killed, the murder and dismemberment of Israelis who wander into their area, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.
2009 was a year of many firsts. It was the year that a one-term freshman senator from Illinois with as much political experience as a one-term freshman senator from anywhere was sworn into an office ordinarily reserved for the more experienced. Even Ronald Regan with all his acting chops trumped our current president's experience with at least a gubernatorial position.
And boy, did our choice show. While no one can fault Obama for the mess he inherited, he has been spending like a nuevo riche Powerball winner. Among his dalliances were a Wall Street bailout that cost $700 million, a $787 billion stimulus bill he signed into law and a health care bill that experts say will drive our debt into the trillions. And we all know who is ultimately going to pick up that tab. The Democrats may have criticized Bush's spending, but Obama makes him look miserly by comparison.
It was the year when senators and congressman could openly be bought off to get a bill to pass. Backroom deals are nothing new except that this wasn't in any backroom. It was out in the open, and it is all so disheartening. Politicians once used to cower and lie to hide any evildoing. Now they are out in the open as if it is normal, which for many of them it is.
I too thought that things would be better by now, but with the unemployment rate in the double-digits and Diamond Jim signing us deeper into debt, it seems that the change we were looking for may be further off than we thought and that our plane is going to land in Bangladesh rather than Oz.
Still, we are a people of hope, aren't we? After all, we're the ones who elected the freshman senator from Illinois. We're the ones who acquired the land from all those other countries and engaged in Westward Expansion many years ago by hook or by crook. We're the ones who by hook or by crook will rebuild after we've been torn down. Hope is within our spirit.
It was the year that a frumpy, middle-aged Scotswoman trudged on stage amidst catcalls and jeers on Britain's X-Factor and belted out "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Miserables." Susan Boyle's confidence and rendition of that song silenced and stunned her critics. Here was a woman with the fight of a tiger and the voice of a dove who gave hope to any wanna be who ever spent years toiling away after a dream. Here is the poster child of hope for us all.
It was the year the Palestinians and Arabs moved forward with their PR campaign to vilify their neighbor on a parcel of land about the size of New Jersey. They are a smart lot, though, and their campaigns have started to take root in other Arab conglomerates like England and France.
But things turn around, and hope is all we haves. Otherwise, how could we get out of bed each morning to face another wonderful day?
I really can't tell the difference between criminal fraud and just "do'n" business. We all know that bribery is both morally wrong and criminal, but I no longer know what makes the giving of money for benefits a bribe and when it's just legislation, normal business or only for "access."
American business folks get into trouble regularly for bribing foreign officials. We know that we are not supposed to give people money in order to get orders for our products or services--even when it's completely normal within their culture. We know that we cannot offer an American politician money for his or her vote or support for a law or policy of particular interest to us. So, we just go through a charade designed to evade the intent of the law while giving us plausible deniability when accused of giving a bribe.
We can give money to a political action committee(PAC). We can buy tickets to his or her favorite charity event. We can bundle contributions, and we will expect not simply the pol's ear but a very friendly ear. Still, it is not legally bribery. Were there a direct quid pro quo, we'd both be in serious trouble.
This kind of thing happens all the time, but it is usually pretty well hidden. When it happens in daylight (or at 1 AM) and in the open, many of us figure that it must be okay--or they'd hide it. This is the only explanation for why there is no real outrage at the ugly and corrupt process that brought us Senate passage of the cloture resolution to advance health care reform and openly bought (or at least rented) several Senators.
Most egregious was Senator Nelson's purchase--not simply by kow-towing to his views on abortion--that was an ugly but legal tradeoff. No, what was egregious was the promise of an eternal federal pay commitment for Nebraska of their Medicare costs. These were underwritten for all states for 6 years, but for Nebraska? Forever. The good news is that another Congress can rescind this naked exchange of a vote for political gain.
Senator Mary Landrieu, of famously corrupt Louisiana, fared just as well--exchanging her votes for 500 million dollars in pork for her state. It should make for a pretty extravagant bar-b-q. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, when not trying to get his girlfriend a government job, had time to hide a special benefit for his state in the form of Medicare coverage that only benefits a class of victims defined in a June resolution. Sen. Joe Lieberman held the bill hostage, on principle, he said, but in truth to serve his donors and masters in Connecticut's largest industry: Insurance.
Whether you support a healthcare reform bill or really hate the idea is not the issue. This is not, or should not be, partisan. This is about corruption--the money that McCain from the right and Feingold from the left, agree is toxic to the body politic. We hardly notice the corruption hiding in plain sight. As in the making of sausage, at first the stench is shocking. Then we become use to it, and it seems normal. The truth is that when the tree falls in forest, it makes noise, and when politicians trade their votes for personal and political benefit it stinks.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
So, the Democrats say they have 60 votes in the Senate to close debate. Okay. Maybe. That is if no other Senator gets the idea to extort further concessions, payments and pork--as both Landrieu and Nelson have. Also watch for principled (and unmovable) conservative Democrat Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia.
Oh, and one more thing: All 60 have to be in good health, not snowed in or absent with family emergencies. Anyone see Sen. Robert Byrd yesterday? He looked as healthy as the Public Option.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Presidential candidate Barack Obama's report card showed all A grades. The problem is that the As were based on promises. He promised to end the Iraq War, chase the lobbyists and special interests out of Washington, get people back to work, put the kibosh on the Wall Street greed merchants, provide affordable and accessible health care for all, make transparency the watchword in Washington, fight the terrorism without trampling on civil liberties, and to patch things up with America's allies and even enemies.
Obama's first homework assignments and test scores are in. There are no A grades on any of them. Iran and North Korea have shown no willingness to broker a deal on their nukes. The stalemate on Middle East peace is still intact. Unemployment stands at a decade high. Home foreclosures still soar. Banks and financial houses have shown absolutely no interest in plowing some of the trillion plus taxpayer bailout dollars they got into business and industry loans. The stimulus has done to little for too few. Health care reform is looking more and more like a giant insurance and pharmaceutical industry scam.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, progressives scream that Obama has betrayed every progressive principle, liberal Democrats grouse that he's snuggled up to big money special interest and lobbyists, independents have deserted the Democrats in droves, and the GOP is more bellicose and defiant than ever. The consolation: Obama's failed report card is his first. He's got three more years to improve his grade.
I will join Gail-Tzipporah in giving Obama a C for foreign policy, but for completely different reasons. GT is bothered that Obama is "kowtowing" to the wrong persons. I'm bothered that Obama is just Dubya II.
Afghanistan has become an overrated front, yet he escalates our involvement there. Obama has also demonstrated a tone-deafness in his willingness to escalate predator-bombings of Pakistan. That captures his unwillingness to grasp the Hydra effect of counter-terrorism -- how the clumsy manner in which you attack one terrorist may unwittingly breed three new ones. But based on what GT and Jonathan have written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent months, this doesn't stun me.
On economic policy, I give Obama an overall B or B-. This could be broken down to an A+ for helping us avoid an epic meltdown of the financial system, and a D for his lack of zeal for fiscal discipline.
I really like Obama and I'm glad that I voted for him and that he won. If I'm unhappy with some of his policies and aspects of his leadership (and I am), he remains far preferable to the alternative.
As with most of us, his strengths and weaknesses are related. He got where he is by being a bridge builder, a link between black and white, between lower middle class and intellectual elite. He's a uniquely American success story.
Some on the right hate him personally and politically, while many in the center and left love him personally but not always politically. Abroad, countries appreciate the change of tone he exemplifies. Gone is American bellicosity and unilateralism.
His openness to dialogue with Iran and North Korea is commendable. That it hasn't been reciprocated isn't his fault. It was worth a try. I like that he's tried bi-partisanship at home. Again, not reciprocated, but worth the effort.
My problem--and I believe his problem--is that while he is mostly liked and even respected, he is not feared--neither by our enemies, nor our allies, neither by the Republicans nor the Democrats. When he speaks, the public listens but when he urges politicians, they ignore him with no fear of consequences.
Some of his generals leak their own policy preferences and are not cashiered. Senators Lieberman, Nelson and Landrieu get to exercise virtual vetoes over legislation without worrying that they'll lose committee chair positions or get their offices moved to Siberia.
I believe that he has failed to use the bully part of the "Bully Pulpit" to get bills shaped and passed. I believe he is simply wrong on Afghanistan. His own grade of B+ is high. I give him a B- on leadership and an Excellent on attitude.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Time Magazine's editors got a jump on April Fools Day when they named Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke its Person of the Year. Here's what Bernanke did since he took over the Fed in 2006 to earn the laughable award. He winked and nodded at the fraudulent AIG, JPM, and Bear Stearns bailout without demanding compensation to the treasury (taxpayers) in return for the giveaway billions. He looked away as the banks and financial houses went on a free wheel orgy in trading risky and ultimately hollow deriviatives.
He winked and nodded again when Godman Sachs did its own deft shuffle and transformed itself from an investment bank into a bank holding company. The result: Goldman got FDIC coverage for a nearly $30 billion loan. Bernanke said nothing when Goldman played fast and loose speculation with the money. This obliterated any semblance of the firewall between commercial and investment banking
Bernanke winked and nodded yet again at the massive bait and switch sub prime lending scams. This was the tipping point that plunged the economy into the current faux 1930s Depression spiral. The estimate is that Bernanke's Rip Van Winkle sleep at the wheel nod off to Wall Street will cost every American family tens of thousands in lost wages, income, assets and productivity in the coming years. Bernanke has thumbed his nose at the tepid, and scattered protest from some in Congress to provide transparency on how and to whom the the Fed shelled out trillions through the Fed's special lending programs.
Bernanke's provided absolutely no hard target regulatory oversight over the failed and flawed Wall Street banks and financial houses. Even as he faces a rough day on Capitol Hill when his confirmation hearing comes up, he still hasn't said what he'll do to end Wall Street's casino play of public monies.
Bernanke screamed wolf as loud and long as Former Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson did last year that Wall Street and the big banks would collapse without an immediate dump of billions to them. He finally badgered and hectored a scared stiff Congress into plowing the cash into the coffers of Wall Street under alleged pain of financial armegeddon. And then he did not utter a peep of protest when Wall Street took the money and continued to outrageously fatten the bank accounts of their motley crew of greedy, incompetent and inept executive horse traders who brought the very banks and financial houses Bernanke shouted were to big to fail to near financial shambles. He did not breath a whisper to the big bankers after they grabbed the cash that they must open the lending spigot to at risk home owners, needy small businesses, and industry in return for their ill gotten taxpayer gain.
Time's rationale for dumping its award on Bernanke is that he was the Churchill of America's financial system. He saved it from collapse. This is Tooth Fairy tale stuff. Bernanke didn't save a system from collapse. He saved a handful of flopped banks and financial houses that engaged in Las Vegas style roulette stock spins, swaps and game playing with investor and public monies from a crisis that he and they helped create.
He did it by tossing billions of free money taxpayer dollars at them. If Time really wanted to do its Person of the Year joke right it should have given its award to swindle king Bernie Madoff. But then again maybe that wouldn't have been much of a joke either since Bernie's scams cost rooked investors billions. Bernanke's cost taxpayers trillions.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.
Kill the Health Care Reform Bill. Put it out of its misery. Most of us are against prolonging death. We understand that life can become so compromised that there is no reason to keep the body in a state suffering and dying. The mercy we show to our pets we would ask for ourselves.
And so the time has come to euthanize our once beloved Health Care Reform Bill. The glittering dream of many liberals, including me, is now a hollow shell, a not so beautiful corpse, from which the spirit has departed.
Meant to reign in the insurance companies, to stop them from capping people, rescinding policies of sick people and denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, it has been turned into a bailout of insurance companies. They retain the ability to charge more for old or sick people while legally mandating that people buy their, often defective, products at extortionate prices.
Without containment of either medical or insurance costs, both individuals and the government will pay through the nose. The hundreds of millions of dollars that big insurance and big pharma donated to rent our politicians was money well spent.
Does anyone really believe that Joe Lieberman is blocking all the provisions that restrict insurance companies because of deeply held moral principles? What state does he represent? Oh, Connecticut. Where is the Insurance Industry headquartered? Oh, Connecticut. Hmmm.
Without cost containment and without either a public option or expansion of Medicare, but with the legal requirement for everyone to purchase it, this should be pronounced dead. What the Republicans only tried to kill, the Democrats have succeeded in killing. The Republicans were relentless and the Democrats feckless. Its heart has been removed and it's starting to stink. Bury it.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
If there is one thing about Barack Obama, it's that the man likes himself. He really, really does. A casual observer can tell by the way he poses for pictures with his chin angled just so while light beams all around him.
A person can tell by the way his clothes hang, too. They are perfectly tailored and drape just so. A person has to really like himself to be so well turned out all the time. No one will probably ever see him in sweats and a plaid shirt on TMZ. He has way too much style and panache for that.
So it should come as no surprise that he gave himself a B plus on his report card. Modesty is not something this man lacks. Following on the heels of that was his national approval rating, hovering at around fifty percent. Now I am no mathematician, and I never worked at a bank, but even I know that fifty percent falls somewhere around the F mark.
Here is my moderate Republican report card for this man.
Attitude and Manners - A
Foreign Policy - C -. Sorry, Chico, but you are always kowtowing to the wrong people.
Illegal Immigration - D. Sorry, again, Bucko, but you are not doing enough to stop it.
Health Care Plan - ??? Let's pass one that doesn't break the back of the economy and then we'll talk.
Overall score - A good solid C, probably because I am slightly dopey from having had the flu earlier in the week.
Pundits like making predictions that are vague and couched in caveats. A straight-up call about what is going to happen is to be avoided because, well, it might be wrong.
Casting caution to the winds, I predict that Obama will NOT go to Copenhagen as scheduled this Friday. He may cite the Health Care bill or maybe he'll just be doing his hair. Something will come up.
Copenhagen is a no-win mess. There is no good reason to put Obama's and the nation's prestige on the line again in Copenhagen, where, if memory serves, we got dissed big time trying for the Olympics.
A good speech will not fix the situation or confer any benefit on either Obama or the nation. We are putting on the table one billion dollars per year over ten years to help offset the costs of going green for the small developing nations. The small countries in turn are demanding both that we sign Kyoto (we won't) and a 200 billion dollar commitment from the major nations. We can't either fiscally or politically.
When Obama announced a few weeks ago that he and some other heads of state would show up after all, I thought there might be a hush-hush deal, something dramatic sounding, if not substantial. Now it appears just to be a large-scale disappointment. My prediction is my advice: Obama (will) stay home.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
England has learned nothing from the tragedy of the Nazi efforts to annihilate Jews--or has it? Maybe England learned the wrong lesson. During the Nazi persecution of the Jews, they forced all Jews to wear yellow Jewish stars on their clothing and also to mark their business with stars. I can almost hear the apologists at the time innocently wondering what could be wrong with Jews identifying themselves as Jews? After all were they not proud of whom they were?
Today such policies and empty and dishonest rationalizations are seen through. We would never be fooled by such a tactic again. We know that to force identification is not to mark some kind of ethnic pride but to separate Jews from the mainstream, to marginalize, demonize and ghettoize us.
I may choose to wear a Mezuzah or Star of David (I don't). I may choose to have a Mezuzah on the doorposts of my home (I do). I may choose to wear a kippa on my head (I do sometimes). All of these are my choices and not required by our government. As my choices these are morally neutral. Were I and all Jews required to use these symbols or forbidden to use them, I would see either as an existential threat to me as an individual and to all Jews as a people.
England, having apparently learned the wrong lesson from history, is trying to demand that products from the West Bank be identified as coming from Palestinians or from Jews. They reason (sic.) that the public has a right to know whether the fruit it is buying comes from good peace-loving Palestinians or bad exploitive West Bank Jews. Their purpose is to promulgate a boycott. This much was admitted by the largest British trade union. They would actually prefer that importation of Jewish products from the West Bank be banned, but are willing to settle for labeling as a first step.
Ignoring that their understanding (sic.) of a stark moral dichotomy is inaccurate, the West Bank farms, orchards and vineyards employ a lot of Palestinians, and even issues of the ownership of certain groves are not clear. There are also joint projects and leased lands. Indeed, there are little green shoots of hope and cooperation.
However my main concern is neither social nor economic; it is the re-emergence of European anti-Semitism, masquerading as social justice and a mere critique of Israeli policies. This is particularly horrifying in England where Israeli scholars are banned from academic conferences and their papers go unpublished. Israelis are also kept from many industrial and scientific gatherings.
This, of course, raises the issue of whether any criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic. Clearly criticism of any nation's policies is legitimate and doesn't imply racial/ethnic/religious bias. Unevenly applied criticism does raise legitimate questions. Where is the outrage towards China's use of slave labor and prisoners? Where are the calls to boycott the products of sub-Saharan Africa because of their genocides, use of rape as a war tactic and the stoning of the victims of rape for adultery? With all the many iniquities in the world only "blood diamonds and Israel get world-wide attention, condemnation and calls for boycotts. We have to ask what makes Israel different from all of the nations? The answer is that it is Jewish.
There is a rapidly emerging pattern of isolating and persecuting Israel and Israelis, of labeling and libeling the fruits (literally and figuratively) of Jewish origin. Like the banning of Jewish art, the firing of Jewish professors and the imposed Jewish Stars under the Nazis, history begins once again down a well-worn path. It is not too late for England to turn away from the abyss. Their ignorance and intolerance should not be tolerated.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
Getting the world's richest and poorest nations to cut a deal on climate control that both sides can live with has never been easy. This was evident again when Sudanese ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Dia Ping who represents 130 countries in a bloc called the Group of 77 and China flatly called a preliminary draft of a policy document on climate control at the Copenhagen climate conference racist and imperialist.
Ping's strident name call is overblown and hyperbole. But his troubling point that industrial production and expansion has driven Western economic plenty isn't. And that to change the game and impose restrictions on industrial growth at the expense of poor nations seems unfair, especially if rich nations aren't willing to dole out the billions that they promised to aid the poor nations combat grinding poverty and boost economic growth.
Ping's blast at the rich nations for dragging their feet on aid to the poor nations is hardly new. Third World leaders have long charged that clamping tight caps on carbon emissions will make it almost impossible for the poorest nations to catch up with the West. By every measure of economic well-being, employment, technology, industry, and national GDP, the imbalance between the haves and have not nations is staggering. When the poor nations demand monies from the rich nations as the price for cutting a deal on climate control they are assailed as obstructionist, selfish, and fatalist on combating global warming and pollution. Third World leaders agree that global warming is a danger. It threatens their water supplies, forests, crops, rivers, and the seas that border their nations. The decades of colonial rule, economic exploitation, the systematic gut of their resources, and crushing debt, have stripped these nations of the resources to combat the threat.
The conflict over how best to balance climate control measures with Third World economic uplift exploded in bitter exchanges at a preliminary conference in Bangkok, Thailand in October. Third World delegates accused the rich nations of trying to wiggle out of their commitment to provide nearly $100 billion to a global donor's fund to aid poor nations promote economic development and growth. The European Union initially pledged to pump $15 billion into the fund by 2020. The Copenhagen conference has an added sense of urgency since the Kyoto Protocol Accords on climate control run out in 2012. Kyoto established the basis for a global warming control agreement.
The US and China are the world's two biggest carbon emitters. Yet they have not contributed a dime to the global fund so far. The Bush administration opposed Kyoto. Bush claimed that the treaty was unfair as its legally-binding provisions for curbing carbon emissions apply only to rich economies, not developing countries. But Bush was deeply influenced by the drumbeat conservative attacks on global warming as a hoax and part of the liberal agenda to retard US industrial growth. The Obama administration is under heavy pressure to reverse Bush policy on Kyoto and drastically cut greenhouse emissions as well as to contribute billions to the global fund for the poor nations.
While China does not slough off the global warming threat, it's still a developing nation, and has a huge vested interest in watering down any effort to place restrictions on emissions from its expanding plants and factories. China so far has opposed the effort to place a "peak" year on capping carbon emissions.
The charge of imperialism and racism aside poor nations will push the US Europe, and Japan hard at the Copenhagen conference not only to come up with ways to clean up the air that they pollute and heated up the planet with but also to strike an accord that does not do further damage to the tottering economies of the poorest of poor nations. They rich industrial nations did the damage to the earth and the economies of poor nations. The burden is on them to undue it. They must fulfill their pledge to shell out the money that they promised to boost poor nations. That's literally the price to make Copenhagen a true success for the planet.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.
Earl is correct that the developed world, largely made up of nations whose populations skew predominantly white, have had free run to pollute the air, earth and water for a century. In this time we have taken the ore from Third World countries, exploited their labor and dumped with great abandon, heedless of the human costs. We also did a fair job of creating our own toxic waste sites leading to cancer clusters. We so defiled our major and minor rivers that one actually caught fire. Our smokestacks were a symbol of our wealth our industry and our industriousness.
Now that we have begun to see the deferred costs and have gotten ecological religion, we are telling the Third World not to do what we have done. It's good advice but it is also understandable that they might think: Whoa, you got your wealth doing this but you won't let us catch up?
Who are we to tell China and India to defer their modernity by not following our example? Who are we to tell Africa not to burn coal or trees because of pollution? I do understand the justice in their view but there really is only one ocean and one river and one lake. All the water from icecaps to the Amazon, from the Himalayas to the Nile, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico are connected. All the air from what is left of the Rust Belt to Beijing, from Cairo to the no longer Buenos aires of Buenos Aires is connected. There is only one atmosphere.
So what should we do or say? What is the proper behavior if we are all treading water in a polluted lake that we polluted and the new folks who are treading water with us want to do what we have done? Do we say, "Go ahead. It's only fair," or do we look together for a way of saving all of us? Surely we all share a common fate.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The debate over global warning almost always plays out as a debate between conservatives who scream that it's an Al Gore manufactured hoax to torpedo industrial growth and advance a liberal political agenda. Gore and liberals say nonsense. The melting polar ice caps, rising ocean levels, the extinction of Artic wildlife and torrid global temperatures in the last decade are ample proof that the sea of toxic industrial carbons in the atmosphere is killing the planet.
There's another side to the debate, though, that's mostly ignored. Third World leaders shout that clamping tight caps on carbon emissions would make it almost impossible for the poorest nations to catch up with the West. One delegate to the Copenhagen Climate Conference even blasted the Copenhagen plan for carbon caps as racism and imperialism. The strident name call is overblown and hyperbole. But it makes the troubling point that industrial production and expansion drives Western economic plenty. To change the game and impose restrictions on that very growth could hurt the nations that need it most.
The charge of imperialism and racism Third World nations dump on the Copenhagen conference table will and should push Western nations to think harder about how cleaning up the dirty and torrid air that they caused will hurt poor nations. The issue then is not solely whether global warming is a hoax or a reality that threatens us all. The issue is now whether climate controls wreak havoc on poor nations.
More good news in for this holiday shopping weekend: 17,000 more people are out of work than the Labor Department anticipated. It may not seem like a lot considering how many people legally live in this country, but it is a lot if you're one of them. Then it's everything.
I know that Obama has elected to turn the economic ship around in a small port, but he ran under the moniker of change, so nearly a year into his presidency, where's the change? Where are the bananas?
In one blogger's not so humble opinion, he should cop former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's methods for rescuing the economy and just create more jobs. As a taxpayer and current member of the working class, I wouldn't even mind shouldering some of the bill. On the other hand, he should have some fireside chats, put himself on an economic diet and cut spending on things like ACORN and cou out the fancy trips. Then he should use the Nobel Prize money towards helping rescue our distressed economic ship. It may be like the finger in the dam approach, but it will at least look like he is supporting his words.
And to the Republicans, this one's for you, baby. Try working with the guy once in a while rather than always standing along party lines in your attempt to block him. I still like you, though not as much as I once did.
The seeming success of our surge in Iraq is giving some hope for some measure of success for our Afghan surge. While I certainly hope it works, we would do well to look more closely at the actual success of our Iraqi surge and see what we can learn that would be useful in Afghanistan.
The introduction of more military personnel certainly helped us on the ground in dealing with the insurgency. But there was another, in my view badly under-analyzed, factor is calming Iraq. That is our aid--monetary, military and protection--of the Sunni fighters who became the Sons of Iraq. These people were the insurgents--former followers of Saddam and his ruling Baathist Sunni government. When in power they had been cruel and terrible persecutors of the Shiite majority. Now out of power they feared, not unreasonably, that the Shiites would extract a fair measure of revenge. They were, in their fighting and bombing, fighting for their lives and the lives of their families. This does not justify their barbarism, but it does explain it.
We pacified them by employing them. We paid them and promised to protect them from Shiite revenge. Seeing that they had already lost the civil war, it was in their immediate interests to align themselves with our power and protection--not to mention the cash.
Now, as we surge in Afghanistan, we learn that we are also paying some of the locals to take our side against the Taliban. We also learned from Gen. McChrystal's testimony, that the Taliban are paying the locals more, giving them walky-talkies and weapons. We understand the part that Taliban violence is playing in frightening people into joining (or tolerating) them, but their program of positive re-enforcement by pay needs to be recognized.
Whether or not should be engaged in a bidding war for the fickle loyalty of the locals, we must count the part that money and protection played in the surge in Iraq and apply it to Afghanistan. Guns and bombs alone cannot lure otherwise unaffiliated Afghans away from the Taliban.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The controversy over global warming is a distraction. As usual matters of intrinsic importance are being trivialized for the sake of political gain. There is, in fact, virtually no disagreement that the globe is warming. We can see the icecaps of the North melting. We can see the Antarctic Shelf cracking and crumbling. We can measure the rise in sea level. Sarah Palin acknowledges that the once permafrost is no longer so "perma." Increased episodes of El Niños and La Niñas are giving us some extreme weather.
So what do we do? We debate the cause. I don't think it matters much if we jumped (human cause) or were pushed (Nature's cycle). What matters is that we are falling. This takes us to the critical question: Is there anything we can do that will make a difference or are we just spectators? The answers fall into a couple of categories. We know we can protect ourselves to some extent from rising seas by building sea walls. Talk about a massive public works project. It would be expensive but a step towards worldwide full employment for island and costal folks. We think we can make a difference by limiting CO2 emissions and various gases and pollutants.
Maybe the problem is all nature. Ice Ages have come and gone before unaided or impeded by human efforts. But if our industries, smokestacks, effluents are part of the problem, to err on the side of cleaning those up seems more prudent than just watching the earth warm and the seas rise. These are global warnings. We would be wise to take heed.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Once upon a time, red-eyed frogs were mainly found in stories like "Alice in Wonderland" or in the aftermath of a Grateful Dead concert. Now, thanks to global warming, they are part of everyone's reality, and if we don't stop, then we're going to mutate to the point where we one day have Cyclops people roaming around, too.
That it has gotten to this shows just what corporate greed can do. When I was in high school, we knew how much damage dumping factory waste into our air and waterways could do, so my friends and I went to protests and did other high school-like things like airing our views in order to listen to ourselves talk, but those belching smokestacks continued no matter what we did.
And now here we are years later in the land of the mutant frogs. Skeptics say that climate change occurs every 3,000 years, and that this is it, but that is only a small part. The other parts are corporations and cultures that put money first and health fifth. The incidents of cancer are up, more people are dying in floods and drought and more children are being diagnosed with autism because we are polluting ourselves to death. Scientists say that even if we stop now it will still take the earth 100 years to heal. We should take their advice anyway before we go the way of the Babylonians.
I make my case for there being no good choice in tomorrow's CD2 runoff.
A pine tree probably fell on Senator Maria Caldwell's head. Otherwise, she would have had the sense to stay out of the Amanda Knox trial. The Democratic senator from Washington State is urging Secretary of State Clinton to intervene to make sure that "Foxy Knoxy gets a fair trial. (Read get a free "Get out of Jail" card.)
I believe she nurdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Peruga, Italy when the two students were sharing a house together, and if she didn't, then she had something to do with it and should be imprisoned for being an accomplice.
First, she changed her story several times. She first said she was in the house covering her ears to muffle out her roommate's screams. If that was the case, then why didn't she call the police or at the very least try and see what was wrong? After Meredith Kercher's death, Knox said that she was "saddened" by her friend's death. A real friend would have seen what was going on and would have at least offered some support.
Then, she said that she was at her boyfriend's, Rafael Solecito's, house hoofing it up, getting high, watching a movie on his computer and getting boinked. Yet, the forensic evidence showed that they had not watched a movie on his computer when they said they had, adding yet another lie to the timbers.
Her DNA was also found on the murder weapon, and palm and fingerprints matching hers were found on Meredith Kercher's face and neck.
Some kids are just bad seeds, but to raise a full-fledged sociopath takes the same amount of consistency that raising a philanthropist does. They both come from consistent parenting. In Amanda Knox's case, her parents probably let her do whatever she wanted, thought that everything she did was cute and never set any appropriate limits on anything. The fact that he accepted her drug use and Lolita-like behavior says a lot about how he viewed his role as a parent.
Some say that Knox didn't receive a fair trial and that she was the victim of her own innocence, which caused her to act celebratory when she should have been shocked and coquettish when she should have been centered and serious. Pictures taken just hours after the murder show her kissing her boyfriend, and she also bought sexy lingerie, which would hardly be normal for one whose friend was just murdered and whose house was robbed. This tipped off the Italian authorities, as it well should have.
They say that Amanda Fox was convicted in the court of public opinion, but in the end, she only convicted herself.
You may or may not have noticed that I haven't been posting a lot recently. I've been finishing up a book that I'm publishing independently through Wheatmark, Inc.
The subject of the book: me!! Or, more accurately, my Pakistani-American journey, and what it tells me about how differing cultures and religions interact in these crazy times.
It will be available come January on Amazon. Here's something from the foreword by Warren Bennis, the famed leadership guru who's advised four U.S. presidents and a good chunk of America's corporate world:
"The victories that Asghar discusses here, involving acceptance and reconciliation among people who can feel deserted and betrayed by their closest kindred, are victories, I think, for our larger family of human societies as they grind up against one another each day in an era characterized by identity politics and partisan posturing."
Oh well. Barack Obama may still end up being a great president, but he's struggling a bit. Earl is right that Afghanistan is the war he always wanted, and there should be no surprise there.
But the disappointment, for me, comes from two sources.
One involves how Obama is positively Bushy in his obliviousness about the roots of conflict -- and especially of the Hydra effect when fighting terrorists in a way that inflames people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who can't keep track of whether the enemy comes from within or from the West.
The other one involves how he doesn't keep track of price tags. I can't buy certain things I once planned to buy, because of fiscal realities. Washington rarely understands this when planning wars or domestic programs, whether a conservative Republican like Reagan or a liberal Democrat like Obama is in charge. Oh, for the balanced-budget days of Clinton...
I teach a couple of courses at the university on the media. My students want to learn about the news and what makes something newsworthy. So when they came into the classroom and saw that the lead item of my agenda was the Tiger Woods saga, some revolted, and they all acted as if the topic revolted them.
I explained that it is indeed news and an example of Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good money. Or in this case: Junk news drives out serious news. This is a story line that offers everything that makes news. It is simple and human. We may not understand cap and trade or derivatives, but we do know sex, celebrity and cheating. We feel smart because we all knew that no one ever crashed a car backing out of a driveway at 2:30 AM and no one was ever rescued by the wife, who just happened to be carrying a golf club, breaking in the rear window.
Then there is the Schadenfreude (or in Yiddish, reverse nachiss) the pleasure people get in the bad fortune of others. Here are the elements of Greek Tragedy as explicated by Aristotle. A man of high degree, a hero (deserved or not), is brought low by flaws intrinsic to his own character. The hero needs to be otherwise unblemished. This is a classic storyline because Tiger had not previously been scarred by scandal.
While I planned on devoting only 15 minutes of our hour and a half class to this lightweight trash, my students carried on enthusiastically for 40 minutes! That's why it's news. It draws eyes, attention and feeling of superiority--as well as the car wreck response of: Phew. Glad it wasn't me.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Barack Obama is the left wing's version of Ronald Regan. He is going to be this generation's Teflon President. His ratings may be down, but he will probably ride it out and drive off into a sunset in glory. Even so, there are many things he has not followed through while driving into the White House under the moniker of change, change and of course, change. The economy is down, we still do not have a viable healthcare plan that won't also kill our dead horse of an economy, and then there are those ACORN blunders.
But he is right in sending 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. If it's for people's safety and happiness, then it's a good thing. If it helps create a world where we can ride on buses, subways and trains without thinking about meeting our maker, then that's a good thing. If it means that one more mother, father, sister or brother gets to go to a mall or be with their family and friends, then that's a good thing, too. It's just too bad that people have to send their children in to straighten out the mess.
Some have compared Afghanistan to Vietnam, but even on their worst days, the Viet Cong never blew things up around the globe. Some, like Michael Moore, who leans so far to the left he is lying down, feels that we should quit meddling in others' affairs, but sometimes it's just the thing to do.
Earl, kiddo, you have to remember that Tiger Woods is only part black. The other parts are Asian, white and Native American, so maybe the media is aiming at those parts instead. Besides, everyone knows that if it's salacious then the media will go out after it. Let's take a look at some recent breaking events from TMZ and other sources:
Oprah is throwing in the towel, the Kardashian sisters are vying for a spot on that show before Oprah rings down the curtain, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gylenhaal are calling it quits and let's not forget Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who are about as Caucasian looking as they come. So when they media jumps all over a story, they jump all over it brown, white or in between.
Many online outlets posts stories like these first due to Fast Food journalism, which states that the easier the story is to digest, the longer it will remain on the virtual menu. On the other end we have the Filet Mignon journalism where the focus is on beefier stories like the war in Afghanistan, the 1,000 plus page health care bill or a presidential speech, which usually gets bumped to the back of the net to make room for the next debacle. And it's all because Fast Food journalism that requires that is easier to swallow and digest and makes the rest of us look relatively normal.
The war in Afghanistan is no longer the Bush legacy; it is now Obama's. Ironically, he made it his own by delivering a speech that, save for one paragraph about having too long ignored and under-resourced Afghanistan, could have been delivered by George W.
With neither a fireside chat's intimacy nor the stirring rhetoric of JFK (We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.) he tried to sell America on a war that after 8 years we are tired of. He tried to reignite the passion and unity we felt following 9-11, but the visuals contradicted the intent. The subliminal message from the serious faces of West Point cadets, who will soon be in harm's way, was not hostile but neither was it enthusiastic about either the president or the mission.
Filled with stay the course allusions and substituting Bush's conflation of Al Qaeda and Saddam with his own conflation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, it was filled with vague hopes, false promises and half-truths. He claimed that we are not alone but have 43 allied nations with us. If you understand "with us" as not condemning us, then I guess it may be true. If, on the other hand, you infer--as he implies--that we have 43 active allies rendering meaningful assistance, then it is a lie. He claims that we have to put in more military in order to withdraw our military. This is the 21st century version of burning the village in order to save it. He claims that his generals have a plan and that Gen. Petreaus has found the core truth of anti-insurgency. Okay. But that core truth depends on fighting for a viable and legitimate entity, a real government. Karsai and his corrupt drugeaucracy have no real legitimacy. His election was as fixed as Ahmadinejad's.
Obama asserted that setting an 18-month window to bring the war to a successful conclusion and begin withdrawing would concentrate the minds and will of the Karsai government to get their act together and help get 200,000 troops trained and 40,000 police in service. These are not realistic goals but opium-induced pipedreams.
While Republicans make much about the 18-month goal as being dispiriting to those who might be willing to cast their lot with us, truthfully, it doesn't make much difference. No sensible Afghan believes that we are there for the long run. They know we will go away and those who cooperated with us will be punished--even killed.
They have a saying there: "You have the clocks but we have the time." Yes, the Taliban will go underground and lay low for 18 months, then come back as we begin to go. In 18 months we will have to re-evaluate and if things are going worse, we can't leave. On the other hand, if things are going better, we can't leave. Yet, we will leave eventually, leaving our allies in a lurch. The Taliban know this--as do the others.
This is not political, not the property of any one American party. It is historical. We encouraged the East Germans to revolt in the 1950s, and then let them be crushed. We did the same with the Hungarians. Then in the Czech Springtime of Freedom, we implied help to Dubcek and stood by again as the Soviet tanks rolled in. We promised aid to our Shiite friends in Iraq during the First Gulf War and left them to Saddam's not so tender mercies. We promised the Sunni Sons of Iraq protection against the Shiites recently and have effectively abandoned them too. We have a long record of abandoning our allies and appropriately have little credibility to show for it. Can anyone forget the frantic crush on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon as our onetime friends were left behind?
Obama outlined three choices and tried to sell the one that didn't seem to be self-evidently catastrophic. As usual, he tried a middle way between pulling out and making an unlimited commitment.
There is a fourth way: Cut our troop levels to 20,000 and keep the base at Bagram. Use it as a kind of aircraft carrier to launch against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and prevent the re-infestation of Afghanistan with Al Qaeda training bases.
As reprehensible as the Taliban are, there are many reprehensible regimes that are intolerant hateful, oppressive and misogynistic. They are not all our enemies. Al Qaeda is.
In 18 months, Afghanistan will not have a civil society with less corruption or a large well-trained army or police. We will have more dead and mutilated Americans and 30 billion fewer dollars to spend on nation building in our own homeland.
Mr. President. If you are going to be either a great president or a one-term president or perhaps both, risk it all for something worthwhile, something that can serve our interests. Err on the side of truth-telling. This speech, and worse this policy-by-committee, offers neither victory nor peace.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Only the most hopelessly naïve, star struck or a true believer could have ever thought that President Obama would not dump massive numbers of fresh troops into Afghanistan the first chance he got. He said or strongly inferred that escalation of the Afghan war was in his cards on two occasions as a presidential candidate, and once before he became a presidential candidate. He strongly inferred he'd fight in Afghanistan in his anti-Iraq war, Bush bashing speech at Chicago's Federal Plaza on October 2, 2002. The speech drew widespread attention, burnished his credentials as a war opponent and established him as a political comer on the national scene.
Sporting a peace button on his right suit jacket lapel, Obama went on the attack. He blasted the senseless killing, Iraq government corruption, called it a drain on American resources, and a foreign policy nightmare. He repeatedly called it a dumb war. The "dumb war" characterization implied that there were wars that were worth waging. Earlier in the speech, he made it clear that he was not a reflexive opponent of all wars. The US was simply fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place. He demanded that Bush fight an all out, no holds barred war against terrorism. Though he did not mention Afghanistan directly, in the speech it didn't take much to connect the terrorism to Afghanistan dots.
Six months after he announced his presidential candidacy Obama was still among the pack of Democratic presidential candidates. But in a speech in August 2007 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars he left no doubt that Afghanistan would be his number one target for attack if he was elected.
He made an impassioned promise to wage what he dubbed the war that had to be won. He spelled out in minute detail his plan of attack. It was virtually identical to the plan he laid out in his West Point speech. He vowed to drastically increase troop strength, ramp up spending on an array of military related programs such as mobile special forces, pacification teams, intelligence operations, and to beef up military aid to Pakistan. He vowed to take the war to the Taliban in Northwest Pakistan. Eleven months after his Wilson Center speech, Obama was still only the "presumptive" Democratic presidential candidate. Yet, in a CBS Face the Nation interview, he promised to "finish the job" in Afghanistan. These are the exact same words that he used to sell escalation in interviews in the build-up to his West Point speech.
In his pre-presidential speeches, interviews and comments on the war he massaged his war plan. He promised to set a timetable for eventual withdrawal, get out of Iraq, corral America´s European and Middle East allies in a partnership to wipe out the terrorists and their mass destructive weapons, end corruption, hold free elections, bolster Afghan security forces, boost intelligence gathering and monitoring, beef up afghan security forces, and insure a stable government in Afghanistan. This again is virtually identical in every detail to his West Point escalation speech. Two years after he spelled out the plan, the US had shelled out more than $200 billion dollars and suffered nearly 1,000 dead. Not one of these goals has been met.
By then however, Obama had hardened on the military option, and pledged that he'd redeploy troops as fast as he could from Iraq to Afghanistan. Though he tossed out the figure of two brigades as the number of troops he planned to send, he hinted this was not fixed, and the number of troops might go much higher.
Obama has never cited Pentagon pressure as his reason for upping the military ante in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has certainly hammered hard for troop escalation. But the massive troop increase is clearly Obama's call. A call he made and firmly decided on long before he ever got to the White House.
Some hopeful Afghan war critics blame the Pentagon, GOP war hawks, defense contractors, and oil interests, for arm twisting Obama to escalate. This helps to rationalize their bitter disappointment at the president's disastrous escalation decision. The truth though is that Afghanistan is the war that Obama always wanted.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.
The movie theater was showing previews for two movies about the Apocalypse and a post-apocalyptic world.
I was being assaulted by the cacophony and chaos of exploding cars, disintegrating planets, and screaming people, while ducking the crashing and exploding computer-generated rubble flying towards me. I wonder at these intimations of global mortality offered as entertainment.
The religious and political right tell us that God is looking at us and isn't happy. We've been bad enough to make the people of Sodom and Gomorrah blush with either shame or envy. God is about to undertake the divine urban redevelopment plan of all time by wiping out Earth. If we can't learn to love each other, then it's time to bring the curtain down.
Liberals also see human beings as the cause of our almost certain destruction, but they focus on different behavior. We're cutting down the rain forests--the lungs of the earth. We're polluting the oceans and rivers--the earth's lifeblood. We're filling every liquid with toxic waste. Little time bombs are going off in the poisoned DNA of fish, fowl and folk.
The earth warms, icecaps melt and seas rise. We face calamity from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with filth.
The world is exploding politically. Pakistan has around 100 nuclear weapons and an unstable government. Iran is building a nuclear capacity. We're fighting two wars and are uncertain whether any meaningful victory is achievable.
North Korea is competing in the nuclear one-upmanship. Israel is surrounded by nations who are more than willing to demolish it. Russia is returning to Cold War (indeed Tsarist) policies, while unraveling politically and economically.
China has all the money these days; although this could be an illusion. It may just be carrying all the debt. The modern miracle of the Middle East, Dubai, has just gone into Chapter 11.
As the eco-system crashes, the global economy tanks, AIDS, earthquakes, and rumors of war circulate, it's no wonder that many people are turning to an apocalyptic vision.
On the other hand, people have always had apocalyptic sensibilities. It's one way that we deal with our own mortality. It's as if to say, "When I die, I'm taking the universe with me."
End-of-the world stories are deeply embedded in our human culture. The Mayans were uniquely optimistic, having the world survive 1,000 years past the making of their calendar. Socrates thought the kids of Athens had lost all respect for the wisdom of their elders. The early Christian Church was secure in the faith that He'd be back pretty quick bringing Gabriel to blow taps. The anti-Hellenistic Jews (the Maccabees) thought the people had slipped away from the one true God and went "whoring after false gods." And things weren't any better earlier. There were Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as Lot and his daughters. Think of the Noah story. God saves Noah, and Noah thanks God by planting a vineyard, getting drunk and passing out. You could see how we might try God's patience.
The problem with our apocalyptic feelings isn't that they're irrational; it's that they're paralyzing. If it's already too late, if God is irredeemably annoyed, if the icecaps are too far gone, if the population is too large, if the nuclear genie can't be contained, if fire, flood, earthquake and plague are our fate, then the only sensible thing to do is to give up and accept disaster as we accept our own mortality--with denial and neurosis.
We live in unique and challenging times but not uniquely challenging times. We seem to agree that things aren't going well, and whether it's Father God or Mother Nature, the gods need appeasing--not by burnt offerings (way too polluting). We would do better, rather than trying to appease, to repair with work and dedication and heal our beautiful broken world; by feeding the hungry, pleading for the widow and orphan, and doing justice; by loving mercy and walking humbly with our God, with Nature, and with each other.
Cassandra will be right--some day. Some day the sun will go nova. But till that far away day, we have work to do. Fatalism is fatal. Hope is hard. It demands active engagement to make our world, our community, and our selves not so much holy as whole. There may not, in fact, be a meaningful distinction between the two.
This is the season of hope. It is Chanukah and the flame that would not go out. It is the winter solstice and the promise that the sun will climb high once again in the sky and light and life will conquer the gloom and darkness. It is Christmas and the celebration of new life, of the miracle of love made flesh in every birth. It is New Years and a fresh start for us all.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
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