What, me worry?

Here’s a new drinking game we can play: while watching the newscasts and the breathless statements from political leaders, whenever someone discusses the causes of the storm without mentioning global warming, down a vodka shot! You’ll be having a private storm surge over the toilet bowl well before the next high tide.

I see some entirely appropriate, mid-hurricane twitting of the Ryan budget plan that calls for federal emergency spending to be cut to shreds along with Social Security and Medicaid. But there is nothing from anyone, including our stalwart liberals, about Obama’s shameful silence on the most crucial environmental issue of our or probably any time in human history. Instead, the two bobble-heads compete over who will make the U.S. ‘energy self-sufficient’ first as if that were a laudable goal. Come on, even the Saudis are trying to develop wind and solar power for the day when they’ll have no stores of liquid gold.

When future generations—if there are any—look back on this period, they will shake their deformed heads in awestruck wonder at the capacity of their biped forebears to ignore the evidence before their eyes about an imminent threat. They also will curse us for what we left them.

Beyond red & blue. . . is green

The New York Times published an extensive exposé Friday of the mysteriously obtained wealth of Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier. It’s a pretty staggering display of the Wen family’s web of stock and real estate holdings arranged in innocent sounding enterprises overlaid with layers of owner-masking shell companies, all comprising a family tree whose boughs sagging with cash are sprinkled with the magic Chinese businessman’s fairy dust: political connections. The Chinese government was not amused and blocked access to the Times on its Internet servers. I suppose the Chinese should be glad that this sort of despicable behavior, at least, still has to remain hidden away.

Luckily for us, we still have a fourth estate with the time, energy, resources and freedom to dig into such things and write them down for all to see. Curiously, the Times quotes liberally in the piece from diplomatic cables made public by Wikileaks despite the paper’s nose-holding attitude toward Wikileaks’ public face, Julian Assange, now holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London to avoid disappearing into an American rabbit hole. Thus we can still see what is happening to our principal trading partner and recipient of all those manufacturing jobs ripped out of the heartland.

And what do we find has happened to the great Asian workers’ and peasants’ state? Why, it’s a giant looting operation organized and run by the Communist Party—how’s that for an ironic twist after the Cold War paranoia of two generations back? It turns out that we have indeed been betrayed to the commies after all—by American businessmen.

The Chinese elite’s arrangements must make the Wall Street boys jealous as hell. Still, we sneer at our peril. The incomparable Yves Smith, whose Naked Capitalism blog is essential reading for understanding our present circumstances, implicitly suggests that we are headed toward something much closer to the Chinese model than to our own golden past:

We are in the midst of a finance-led counterrevolution. The long standing effort to roll back New Deal reforms has moved from triumph to triumph. The foundation was laid via increasingly effective public relations efforts to sell the Ayn Randian worldview that granting individuals unfettered freedom of action would produce only virtuous outcomes since the talented would flourish and the rest would deservedly be left in the dust. In fact, societies that have moved strongly in that direction such as Pinochet’s Chile and Russia under Yeltsin, have seen plutocratic land grabs, declining standards of living (and even lifespans), and a rise in authoritarianism or (in the case of Colombia) organized crime. Those who won these brawls did flourish but at tremendous cost to society as a whole.

I date this counter-revolution roughly to the ascent to power of Saint Ronald the First in 1980-81 at which time the country’s attitude toward itself and the citizens whose comprise it underwent a profound shift. We left behind the bad old attempts of entities like the civil rights movement to obtain fairness for all in favor of unrestrained greed and personal selfishness. (Ironically, this was precisely the cliché criticism of the sixties as an era of irresponsible pleasure seeking and sexual indulgence by spoiled brats—but I digress.) With Reagan and his radical circle in power, we were encouraged to jettison any notion that people should strive to make a contribution to the well-being of others in favor of the new, ‘muscular’ ideology of neo-liberal self-reliance and market worship in which real men made tons of money, gained power and prestige, and had a blast as top dogs while pathetic losers down below could piss off up a rope. The nanny state would no longer be responsible for these inferior, weak elements, starting with ‘welfare queens’ and other leeches standing in the way of unbridled capitalist bliss.

It’s no accident that Reaganism arrived jointly with the Christian right and its calculated attack on women (dressed up as a reaction to ‘feminist’ excesses), especially including their reproductive function, and on gay emancipation, another aspect of the redrawn sexual hierarchies. The new politico-economic religion was grounded in the old macho virtues, slightly recast to accommodate women in new roles, an adjustment that was only skin-deep in any case: while women were permitted to infiltrate the old boys’ clubs in business, politics, and science, the anti-abortion crusades kept the pressure on. As long as reproductive autonomy remains in doubt, women cannot breathe entirely freely. Meanwhile, the Equal Rights Amendment, once thought to be as sure a thing as women’s suffrage, went down to defeat by the church ladies assisted by the Democrats’ usual lackluster defense.

Back to Smith’s analysis of how the uber-rich utilized stealth weapons to seize the commanding heights of the economy and the state:

In the U.S. the first step was making taxation less progressive. A second parallel measure was deregulation, particularly in financial services. Together, they fostered the growth of an uber-wealthy cohort that increasingly lives apart from middle class and poor citizens. The rich can thus tell themselves they have little to gain from the success of ordinary people. And, perversely, the global financial crisis has worked to the advantage of the financial elite. As former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson described in a May 2009 Atlantic article, the U.S. instead suffered a quiet coup with the top end of the financial services industry becoming more concentrated and more firmly in charge of the political apparatus. And you see more vivid evidence of the financial takeover in Europe where technocrats are stripping countries of their sovereignty and breaking them on the rack via failing austerity programs so as to avoid exposing the insolvency of French and German banks. In the U.S. the events of the last year are less dramatic but no less telling, including a coordinated, 17-city paramilitary crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, a ‘get out of jail almost free’ settlement for the mortgage-industrial complex, and an election where the two candidates are indistinguishable in their enthusiasm for having old people die faster cutting Medicare and Social Security and murder by drone.

Smith is telling us that the structural changes taking place at the upper reaches of the system under which we live are setting us on a course for further and deeper disaster, and she offers a bracing corrective to the naïve Obamanians’ fervent desire that the ‘true’ Barack will suddenly appear in a second term and fulfill all their hearts’ desires. I’m as disgusted by the demented Republican thugs as anyone, but I concur that the real dangers for our fragile future lie not solely with the outright loonies but also with their legions of willing collaborators in the supposedly sane camp.

[Smith’s blog at www.nakedcapitalism.com is holding its second annual fund-raiser at present; all decent and solvent persons should send a donation.]

Blind justice

CIA employee Jon Kiriakou will now go to jail for spilling state secrets. NOT DONE, Jon, telling reporters the identities of the guys who torture people wearing handcuffs. We know who you are.

Sadly for the moral state of our society, we do not know the identities of the people who carried out these heinous acts because we have decided not to know. They are the faceless executioners of our collective decision to toss out human rights as a fundamental principle of our judicial and punitive actions and to return to the Star Chambers of old.

We decided that that dumping 500 years of civil protections against arbitrary state power was a minor price to pay for making sure the perpetrators of the attack on our society were caught and that future attacks were be prevented—as if there could be a guarantee of that.

The desire for revenge also played a considerable role.

To avoid prosecution for ‘espionage’, Kiriakou has now pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. Espionage usually means telling secrets to a foreign power. In his case, that foreign entity was us.

Kiriakou revealed to reporters that one of his CIA colleagues was taking round-the-world tours to secret CIA dungeons where he (or she) personally oversaw and even engaged in the torture of prisoners.

Torture wasn’t actually legal at the time, but the defense of that sacred statute has been deemed unnecessary thanks to the decision by a Mr Obama not to pursue prosecutions for such illegal behavior. Wink wink.

So torturing people? Meh. But hey, telling the public this nasty little secret, not a good idea at all.

Many people have warned the nation that saying yes to torture was a dangerous, slippery slope from which there would be no easy return. We Americans largely ignored that. Like I was told by a Chilean momio (supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship) in the 1980s, If I were to see torture, I would be against it.

So that solves it! Just keep it out of our sight, but don’t worry about being punished. We’ll concentrate our fire on the guy who disturbs our sleep by telling us what is going on in our name.

Did Obama go on an ‘apology tour’ in 2009?

That was the accusation by the Mitt last night in the third and, mercifully, final debate. The reference is to Obama’s trip early in his term to Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries where he made nice with the residents thereof and actually grabbed the attention of people who thought maybe the yanks were genuinely about to turn over a new leaf and stop doing things like, um, invading and slaughtering them.

It was actually one of the least mendacious things Romney had to say although also mind-fuckingly cynical. But it is true that, given the basement-level standing of the U.S. in that part of the world after Bush 2 had finished the non-stop debacle of his tenure, Obama dutifully set off to repair the damage and buy some time.

Which he did. His speeches hinted recognition of the possibility that the U.S. in fact had erred. Europeans, Arabs and those forgotten Latin Americans were impressed with Obama, his smarts and his history, and they were more impressed with us for electing a guy from a minority group that was historically suspect in the eyes of the white majority. It really did seem as though new winds were blowing and that things just might be done differently.

But that turned out to be just fluff, and Obama never backed up his lofty orations with what I maintain would have been the key lever to break with the past: a repudiation of the Bush years. This would have had to include at least two aspects: aggressive and illegal war-making against a non-threatening enemy; and grotesque violations of basic human rights both as part of said wars and domestically in the bogus ‘War on Terror’. For good measure, he could have tossed in the looting of the national wealth, especially though not exclusively through the official wink-wink at the massive corruption being practiced by the financial sector in the run-up to the great meltdown of 2008.

Obama did none of that. Instead of opening up a debate on the origins of the Iraq conquest, he promptly turned the page on that sorry chapter and said so explicitly at the time. He threw in for immediate burial the top-level collusion in the torture of defenseless detainees. Despite his immediate photo-op to ‘close’ Guantánamo, the place remains open to this day; worse yet, Obama went beyond Bush’s worst crimes and instituted official murder as part of presidential power. We can thank him for that new Oval Office faculty, which will undoubtedly be utilized in all sorts of ways that today’s liberal apologists seem not terribly worried about—but one day will mourn, no doubt in a state of shock.

As is now well known, Obama also conspired actively with his top advisors to pump a vast river of cash into the coffers of the banks and into the grubby mitts of the same bankers who had collapsed the world economy to satisfy their greed, all the while pretending to champion the much abused little guys. Many experts whom even I can read and understand have been proposing dozens of alternative approaches to restoring the financial system to health, but Obama has kept to the Bush strategy of strengthening the 1% and waiting for prosperity to trickle down. Or not.

So Obama now has to face an opportunistic attack from sleazeoids like Romney who should be thanking him for covering their exposed buttocks when they and their enterprises were in serious danger. Obama pretended to apologize for the Bush screw-ups, but he didn’t mean it; now that his humble-face, Mr Audacity usefulness is not needed, he gets twitted for being a wimp.

George McGovern was a great guy

It is a sign of our sorry times that this completely decent, thoughtful, courageous man who once carried the standard of his party to the highest level became an anathema with his ideas thrown overboard as some sort of dangerous bilge water. George McGovern had the audacity (a real version, not the present head-fake) to say that going to war in Vietnam was not only wrong but immoral and to say it on the floor of the Senate. A lot of people saw that he was right at the time, but the machinery of state, especially including the propaganda apparatus that sustains it, promptly set to work to airbrush that debacle out of our histories and our minds and to repaint the picture of our heroic warriors in a more favorable light--so that they could go out and do it all again.

McGovern had a dangerous job in World War 2 (bombing missions), so he wasn’t all glassy-eyed about the marvels of going to war and its effects on masculine character. He campaigned and spoke about what was right, not what was good for American power and influence, and for that he was crushed, not just in the elections but forever afterward when he became a non-person and his supporters were blamed for the weather. While Richard Nixon, the guy who shellacked McGovern in the 1972 election, was later pilloried for his political crimes, his massive and pointless slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the unnecessary extension of the war during his first term was quickly forgotten, such that one Bill Clinton could eulogize him with disgusting ease. And let’s not even talk about the other architect of those crimes, the ‘elder statesman’ Henry Kissinger, now comfortably earning his millions.

As a college student I worked for McGovern in his Washington office in the years before his presidential run and had the chance to meet him on several occasions (once with Veronica Lake in tow—I didn’t even know who she was). He was soft-spoken and amused at the blockheadedness and perversity around him in the Senate, but he was still optimistic about the chances for making a progressive case to the nation. Then his nomination came about, propelled by the remnant energies of the 1960s and a brigade of young volunteers at least as alienated from the political system as those of today. The professional operatives were appalled, and even though the Democratic Party had not yet been captured by the neo-liberal business lapdogs, they probably weren’t sorry to see him lose.

McGovern was later turned out of his senate seat in South Dakota, too, and he was philosophical about that loss. He said that the voters wanted someone more conservative, and so they got one. But he mourned his failed shot at the presidency because his campaign was bushwhacked by the Thomas Eagleton disaster where his Veep pick had to quit in mid-campaign after some revelations about his treatment for depression. McG said he would have accepted defeat if he had had a chance to make his case, but the noise over Eagleton drowned out his arguments.

In retirement McGovern took up another cause that is less well-known: that of alcoholism treatment in honor of his beloved daughter Terry who struggled with the disease all her life and in 1994 was found dead in a snowbank after relapsing. The book he wrote about that experience sold well enough for him to form a small foundation in her memory. A second of his four children also died of alcoholism-related illnesses a few months ago. McGovern said his daughter’s death was the most painful event of his life.

George McGovern retained a gentlemanly demeanor and wry, self-deprecating humor throughout his decades dedicated to serving the public welfare. If citizenship, rather than power and cash, were our core values, we would be lining up to salute his remains and his exemplary life.

Now I really like Javier Bardem

I thought Javier Bardem was very convincing in both Before Night Falls (gay Cuban writer) and No Country for Old Men (psycho killer). So he’s a good actor and also pretty cute. That said, it turns out he has a conscience, too, and puts it to use by raising awareness of the decades-long scandal of occupied Western Sahara.

Never heard of the place? How about that, hardly anyone in the audience at the IFC Center Tuesday had either, where Bardem introduced a new documentary film about the situation, Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony. It explained how the decolonization of Africa missed one corner when the Spanish occupiers of the sparsely populated Mediterranean coast packed up to leave. But instead of granting independence to the native population, they stood aside while the Moroccan king Hassan II occupied the place to fulfill his irredentist vision.

The usual horror story followed: slaughter, mass dislocation, violent resistance, a long-running guerrilla war and a police state in the cities. And finally, a security wall hundreds of miles long dividing the country in two. The financial drain on the Moroccan occupiers over the last 30 years has been enormous and a good reason why that country is a prime candidate for an Arab spring given its stagnant economy and vast pool of youth with no future.

Once the story is laid out, the film has few surprises, but the commentary afterward from Bardem and others, like Kerry Kennedy of the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights [both below], was gripping. They described their visit to El Aaioun, the capital of the occupied colony, and the creepy scenes they witnessed, including beatings in the street and retaliations against anyone who talked to them as well as constant surveillance. Bardem explained that Spaniards feel a special responsibility for the situation given that their leaders had the chance to stop what happened and instead abandoned the local people, known as Saharaoui, to the invaders.

Morocco was a Cold War ally of the West, and the situation has been conveniently forgotten for years. But high-profile support from celebrities and Kennedys can’t hurt, and one should not underestimate the potential of a human rights-based campaign to tear away the veil and pressure a regime. Plus, the Cold War is over, and Morocco isn’t so important any more now that Libya is solidly in the West-friendly camp and no proxy wars are active anywhere on the continent.

One aspect not mentioned of the Western Sahara nightmare was its close resemblance a certain ongoing occupation just down the block, which also includes a dividing wall and a settler movement—Palestine. It’s understandable that no foundation associated with RFK, given how he died, would touch that issue. But as the campaign for justice in WS continues, the similarities will be hard to ignore.

Tour de Bronx

The Bronx is New York’s poorest and poorest served borough. It also has the worst socioeconomic and health indicators in the city. But on the annual Tour de Bronx, the 17th version of which was held last Sunday, one gets a chance to see a very livable place with dozens of cozy neighborhoods where rent doesn’t cost your left, um, eye.

Unlike other organized rides that occur during the warm months from May to October that can cost up to $100 a person, this one is free. Sponsors include the borough itself and several of the largest hospitals in the Bronx, like Montefiore, Bronx Lebanon and St Barnabas, all eager to support anything that will get people moving and using up calories. My very own Transportation Alternatives, the most professionally managed nonprofit I’ve ever come across in a lifetime of do-gooderism, is another proud partner.

Sunday was an ideal autumn day, cool and partly overcast. Five thousand bikes set off from the courthouse on Grand Concourse around 10.30, late for a biking event, and pedaled through Soundview and along the waterfront to City Island (check out the 2010 Andy Garcia film of the same name, it’s amusing and was partially shot there) for a rest stop at Orchard Beach, the ‘Bronx Riviera’ [above]. It’s easy to forget amid our urban frenzy that the city is built on water; beaches abound, even up here. Staten Island also has a nice one that no outsiders know about.

The spirit at these mass cycling events is quite unusual, in my experience, friendly and laid back despite the rigors of getting to the finish line, marvelously diverse even for New York and remarkably uncompetitive notwithstanding the 80/20 male/female ratio. (Woman at rest stop: ‘I can’t believe the lines are longer for the men’s room!’) Mechanical assistance is readily available for the asking; a friendly sort pumped up my sagging tires at the merest hint of cyclist-in-distress.

All the boroughs except Manhattan itself now have these annual bike tours, relatively leisurely events covering 20 to 40 miles and ideal for a family outing. With cops stopping traffic at key intersections, one gets to sail through the city streets without performing death-defying acts of heroism and has a chance to explore neighborhoods hitherto unknown. (Example: SUNY Maritime is located under the Throgs Neck bridge in an old naval fort—who knew?) They aren’t fund-raising affairs, and you don’t have to be drumming up support for anyone’s disease. It’s just a bike ride.