Category Archives: Political

Frigging Politics

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“Just when I try to get out, they pull me back in.”

I didn’t want to write about politics or Obama again.  At least, not right now.  Jah Energy (not an oil company, but my community softball team named after the Jamaican god), has a one-or-done playoff game tonight.  I’ve been trying like a dog to edit my second Matt Jacob book (Two Way Toll) so it can be formatted for multi-digital platforms, and am gathering materials for a photo shoot of the digital cover for Still Among The Living.

I really didn’t want to write about politics.  But after the last couple of weeks watching congressional bozos on both sides of the aisle make jackasses out of themselves, and seeing our country slide into a sinkhole so deep it may be impossible to climb out, I just can’t help it.  Sorry.

I feel like Peter Finch in the movie Network when he stuck his head out the window and screamed, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

My rage primarily has to do with the debt ceiling deal that President Obama blessed, albeit with some verbal regret over the absolute refusal to implement a truly fair progressive income tax that might help people who are just barely getting by. Problem is, verbal regret doesn’t cut it for those already bent over a chair and are now gonna be bending even lower.  Nine percent unemployment, my ass.  Those are only the people they count.  If it ain’t double that number, feel free to shoot me.  It doesn’t take a weatherman to know what programs and which people are going to get fucked by the newly agreed upon debt reductions.

We are already living in an era when the differential in wealth between Whites and people of color is the greatest it has been since the Civil War.  We’re eyeballing folks who have saved for a lifetime only to lose their houses due to mortgage manipulation (aka fraud) by banks.  Banks our president was more than willing to rescue and are now making more money than ever before.  We’re back to robber baron times.

And I haven’t yet mentioned two wars that nobody wants other than the congressional jackasses.   And the President.

I know the excuses since I’ve used them myself: The Republicans burned down the house then gave the key to the Black guy. Obama never really had a real majority because of the Blue Dog Democratic Senators.  President Obama believes in bi-partisan politics as the best way for a country to be run. The Republicans have never totally refused to work with a sitting Democratic president before, and are doing it now because he is Black.

I know the hopes: During his fifth year, he’ll be able to be himself and do what he’d hoped to do during the first four.  Roosevelt’s first term was less than stellar as well.  If President Obama is somehow able to forge an “adult” dialogue with and between members of Congress, it will be a huge achievement.

I know the accomplishments:  His support of gays in the military.  He forced health insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions.  He jammed through coverage for millions and millions of people who had no health insurance whatsoever.  After eight years of neglect, the Justice Department and EEOC are again enforcing employment discrimination laws.  The administration continues to deescalate marijuana interdiction and raids, eliminate mandatory sentencing for first-time drug abusers and simple possession, and dramatically increase the amount of cocaine possessed that leads to a jail sentence.

And there have been more accomplishments:  (See http://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2010/10/president-obamas-244-accomplishments-part-4/)  But these accomplishments have mostly come through Executive Orders and not “adult” discussions with, or bills passed, by Congress.  How many times do you need to be hit in the head with a baseball bat before you change your tactics.  Even if it’s just to give the other guy a noogie.

The bottom line is this:  President Obama is certainly better than the Republican nominee who will stuff the Supreme Court with lunks only too happy to off a woman’s right to choose and add to the already ugly list of draconian decisions.  So I will hold my nose and vote for him again.  But it’s gonna hurt.

Fact is: Progressives, and our organizers, have to make some serious decisions for the long term.  Actually, we have to make some decisions, period. First we need to form a coalition between all the liberal groups out there.  And if petition signing is any indication, there are quite a few.  Then, that coalition has to decide whether to spend its time, money, and effort to try to take over the Democratic Party.

And I don’t mean doing what the Tea Party is doing–getting enough votes to hold the rest of the party hostage. (Though that might be a good start.)  I mean turning the Democratic Party into a full-bore progressive party that doesn’t give a shit about moderates who are really Republicans in Democratic colors.  This has been the cry from Democratic Socialists for generations, and for generations it just hasn’t succeeded.  But it is one of the options.

The other is to throw the full weight of the progressive coalition behind a third party, something that has been tried in past and usually, if successful at all, created a nudge for change and then disappeared.  Neither strategy has kicked ass, but the past need not define the future.

In either case, or perhaps the third option, is that we actually mobilize our constituency.  We may talk politics more than many, but usually it’s shaking our heads over a beer.  “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” means DOING SOMETHING.  Actions, instead of whining. Message to self, maybe something more than just signing petitions (see my 3/21/11 post LOVE ME, I’M A LIBERAL).

We also ought to redefine our constituency.  We typically try to politicize the voting public.  I believe our real goal has to be engaging the forty plus percent of the population who doesn’t vote, maybe has never voted.  Unless we appeal to these folks, they never will vote and we’ll never have a real progressive government.

“Don’t make me repeat myself.” ~ History

(Might want to laugh or cry at:
http://front.moveon.org/hilarious-i-didnt-f-_-_-k-it-up/?fb_ref=.Tj6yEX8cYbr.like&fb_source=home_oneline)

Spoiler Alert

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(Parts of this experience will probably show up fictionalized in one of my new Matt Jacob novels.)

Boston, like much of the country, is in the midst of a heat wave.  Temperatures have topped 100, a new thing for me even though I’ve lived here for more than thirty years.  I’m doing my best to keep cool in a city where cold rules, but this weather brings back memories of the summer month I spent in Oklahoma City researching the Murrah Building bombing for a consortium of lawyers.

First thing I noticed after landing was the oil well digging on airport property. (Had never seen one anywhere before, let alone in such a bizarre location.)  The second was the stifling heat, which soaked my shirt while I waited for the van to the rental car office.  I’d been hot before but never like this.

And the heat never changed throughout my entire stay.  Triple figure digits running like a ticker tape across the television screen night after night, week after week.  Walking out of the hotel meant walking into a pizza oven.  The only saving grace were the pipes outside bars and restaurants spritzing a light mist of water onto their patio customers.  Another thing I’d never before seen.

I wasn’t in Oklahoma City to study the heat, though there was a constant “weather voice” similar to the interior monologue in Peter Gent’s novel North Dallas Forty where his protagonist’s football body aches always danced in his consciousness.  I was there because the lawyers, none of whom conspiracy theorists, had received reports that seemed to indicate some kind of Federal foreknowledge of the bombing.  They wanted me to discover whether there was any substantive evidence that the government either knew beforehand about the bombing or had actually initiated it. (The latter, something I never and still don’t believe.)

I worked with a local lawyer and his private detective, first to make sense out of all the initial conflicting television news reports which we reviewed: The suspect was an Arab looking man, there was more bombs planted inside the building, the truck bomb had done all the damage, the truck bomb couldn’t have done all that damage, there were one?, two?, three? men in the truck—one contradiction after another.

Despite the pigfuck of reporters who converged on the city the day of the bombing, all anyone actually knew was they were watching a tragedy unfold before their eyes. Bodies were handed from one person to another as they were found in the rubble and taken from the building.  Children’s bodies as well as adults since the Murrah housed a daycare center.

When I got there months had passed.  The bodies had been buried, funerals and memorial services were over.  In fact, by the time I arrived, the building had already been demolished and a chain-linked fence surrounded the city square block hole in ground.  Everywhere you looked, the fence was adorned with mementos of those who had died—flowers, dolls, and toys with people still adding to the assemblage.  It was another thing I had never seen—a huge, living, evolving memorial to human tragedy.  A smaller, but no less painful, dress rehearsal for Ground Zero.

The survivors and relatives of those who lost their lives on that April 19, 1995 had created this memorial.  And, during my investigation I interviewed a whole lot of them.  Indeed, it was the grandmother of a dead child who first contacted the lawyers.  She and her boyfriend had written a 200-page pamphlet that contained the most heinous accusations against the government.

I met with them early in my stay to go over each charge.  I had read the entire “book” and tabbed every assertion I felt needed support evidence if there was to be a viable case.  There were a ton of tabs.  As I began to make my request for evidence, tab after tab, the two of them grew increasingly angry until, after an hour or so, they threw me out of their house.  They also contacted the local lawyer and demanded I be run out of town and stop my investigation.  The local lawyer asked me what had happened so I showed him my tabbed copy, recounted my questions and their reactions.  To his credit, all he said was to take notes (which I’d been doing) and keep on keeping on.

And so I did and had the opportunity to talk with many, many more people about what had actually occurred before that morning, that morning, and the days, weeks, months after.  Although there were an incredible amount of contradictions, there was also enough hard information to keep me digging.  For example, the sheriff’s video tape of the entire day, which he began shooting about an hour after the bombing (and which I had the opportunity to study) showed a long break in the rescue effort during which people from the bomb squad removed all sorts of weapons and what looked like blocks of C4, a serious explosive.  Apparently, besides a daycare center, the building also housed an arsenal.   We’ll never know how many people died during that rescue “time out.”

We do know it was against the law to have an arsenal and daycare center in the same building.

But today’s post isn’t about the information I learned during my stay.  I’m writing about scorching heat and a blast of sorrow.  Truth was, it was a heart wrenching experience.  Truth was, whether the government had foreknowledge or not wouldn’t have brought peace to most people with whom I spoke.  These peoples’ lives had changed forever and nothing I found would bring back their old lives or those who they had lost.  Some had kept their children’s’ rooms as they were on the day of the bombing.  Some will never be able to enter a large building without terror.  Some won’t be able to work again.  And some will gut out the rest of their lives trying to put that horrific day behind.

Which may never happen.  Probably won’t.  Even though I wasn’t in Oklahoma City on bombing day, even though I wasn’t a victim and did not lose any relatives or children, when the temperature in Boston hits 90, I think of that summer and, in my own silent way, mourn their loss.

“Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.” Joseph Conrad

Independence Day

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(Happy 29th Anniversary to Jeff & Donna, my brother and sister-in-law.)

At first I resisted writing about July 4th.  I figured everyone else would.

I rationalized that there was nothing to celebrate.  I thought about a class taught by William Appleman Williams while I was at Madison.  He lectured about the American Revolution, but used data to show it really wasn’t a simple popular uprising, but rather one initiated by those who wanted expansionist capital to be housed in the New World and not just in London where it was locked and loaded.  Hardly a grassroots revolution.

Then came the usual “I want to be different” bullshit, which seems lodged in my DNA, never to completely disappear.

So I’m writing about the 4th.  What the hell, despite my democratic socialist views and cynical eye, I still believe there’s “…a lot to like in America…”

I know the politically correct thing is to begin with regret about the lost and maimed soldiers who have fought in all our wars–but it wasn’t the first thing that popped to mind.

I just never before thought about war on the 4th–I thought fireworks.  (Yeah, I know, pretty fucking stupid not to have made the connection between fireworks and bombs, but give me a break.)

The 4th ended with fireworks in my hometown park (Carteret, exit 12 off the N.J. Turnpike), but better yet was the earlier parade where I could see Spot, the Dalmatian my family once owned in his new digs.  He was riding the fire truck since we had given him to the local department when he grew too large for the house.  Bittersweet, but cool.  (Probably more associations to be made with that last sentence fragment too-but not today.)

All in all, it was a great day because I always pretended my birthday was July 4th (even though it was the 6th) so that all the parades and parties were for me
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Then the next fireworks blast (sorry) hit me on Miami Beach when my youngest son was still an infant.  The day featured The Jefferson Starship with Grace Slick belting out songs all afternoon.  Come evening, we met up with the family of my older son’s friend and walked the beach.  Fireworks were cascading from the top of the Art Deco hotels toward the ocean, met in the middle by more fireworks aimed toward the beach from a flotilla of boats along the shoreline.

The experience felt like walking under the overhead canopy of flashing neon in downtown Las Vegas or the scene inApocalypse Now where the river boat meets up with soldiers protecting a bridge under rocket and mortar fire. (Another connection between Independence Day and war.  Hmmmm.)

But the funniest and most frustrating firework memory happened right here in Boston during my father’s first visit.  It was the Bicentennial and the city had been bragging for weeks about the magic that would light the sky after the traditional Boston Pops concert on the Esplanade next to the Charles River.  I had a close friend who lived in an apartment with a perfectly located roof for viewing.  As everyone at the party, including my father, climbed the stairs to the sound of THE 1812 OVERTURE (always played to introduce the fireworks), we walked into a cloudless night.

With a breeze.  A fucking windy breeze.  That July 4th may have been the greatest show on earth, but all we saw was smoke.  And more smoke.  ‘Coulda been a factory stack belching nonstop black and grey.  At least some smokestacks have fire burning off their tops and it would have been more light than we saw that entire night.

Welcome to Bicentennial Boston, Pop.

My final 4th story has nothing to do with fireworks or even Independence Day, per se.  I was working as a teacher’s aide in a Chicago high school right before I moved to Boston.  I had long since mailed my draft card back to the local board but it was the day they instituted the lottery for the Vietnam War draft and the numbers were published in the newspaper.  Each number corresponded with a birthdate.  I grabbed the paper, skimmed the dates, and saw my hideously low number thirteen.  My gut tightened ’cause I knew my shit was gonna hit the fan one way or another.  It was a really long anxiety ridden afternoon until something inside whacked me upside the head.  I had looked at July 4-that childhood idea had stuck around painfully long.  I scrambled back to the garbage where I’d stuffed the newspaper and found July 6.  My real number was in the three hundreds.

Although I now sometimes forget how old I am, I haven’t made that mistake again.

“I guess if the 4th looks like a war, sounds like a war, it is indeed connected to a war.”
Zachary Klein

The Tea Party: We Gettin’ One Lump Or Two?

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There are plenty of labels people hang on the Tea Party:  patriots, idiots, people who want to stop the insanity, people who are insane, rednecks, and racists–just for starters.  Then there was an anonymous comment I read online: “Tea Party is just a nice way of saying KKK.”

Would that it were so simple. The KKK made no bones about their public hatred of Blacks.  They were founded and acted on tenets of white supremacy, and weren’t the least bit shy about using terrorism to make their beliefs crystal clear.

But from where I sit, the Tea Party’s brand of racism is, in some ways, far more insidious because its followers are unable (or unwilling) to perceive that much of the underpinnings of their philosophy is indeed racist. That is, their demands to obliterate safety nets that have been in place since Roosevelt and Johnson in the name of small government–non progressive tax programs (flat tax), limitations on growth in federal spending, etc–would result in worsening the already lousy living conditions for countless people of color and the poor of every hue.  The TPers’ obliviousness, their refusal to even acknowledge the logical consequences of their programs and philosophy, trades racist rhetoric for racist policy results, real lynchings for slowly twisting in the wind.

Worse, The Tea Party movement is a natural outgrowth of our domestic policies and ideologies.  And Progressives miss the point when they froth at the mouth about the Palins, Rands, and Bachmans-as foolish and detestable as their thinking might be.  The Tea Party is simply a naked distillation of historical and modern political thinking about race, poverty, taxes, and government.

LET’S START WITH RACE:

It’s not surprising the TPers landed where they are.  How many decades have Republicans and “New Democrats” objected to Affirmative Action, citing time after time that we now live in a country that has a “level playing field.”  Or, both parties raising the specter of Welfare Queens, which conjures up big Black women living high on the hog without a care in the world.

This wasn’t begun by TPers but from the Reagan Revolution that Bill Clinton did nothing to stop or undo.  In fact, he encouraged the myths through his program “to end welfare as we know it. (Which in reality meant a huge jump in the prison population of women between the ages of 18-25 for non-violent crimes.  With or without welfare, people need to survive).  And if Democrats are honest about it, Clinton was more than willing to suspend civil liberties to invade Cabrini Green, a non-white housing project in Chicago.

So please let’s drop the pretense that somehow the TPers are more racist than traditional politicians who, in the face of institutional and individual racism, call our society’s opportunities equal for all.  If anything, the TPers are more sincere in their mistaken beliefs than the regular pols, who actually know the truth but pander to the make-believe for political gain.

TAXES:

Another Tea Party inheritance.  Prop This, Prop That, and trickle-down economics have been a mainstay of the Republican Party and, in their own way, post Reagan Democrats who act as if taxes have no relationship whatsoever to the betterment of people’s lives.  I’m not suggesting there isn’t government waste.  And I certainly have no truck with where a significant portion of our taxes go.  But to eviscerate the idea of taxes, to turn the word into an obscenity has its roots much farther back than the TPers, who have come by this “no taxes” mantra via decades of politically professed hatred of government.

It’s time for Progressives to champion the belief that government has the potential to enhance people’s lives. That government is a social compact between all that live here, and the definition of that compact needs relentless work.  Something we haven’t done effectively for decades.  We seemed to take too many of our truths for granted, above discussion.  But we were the only ones who stopped talking, stopped acting, and look what’s happened with issues like a woman’s right to choose, institutional racism, social responsibility-hell, even evolution.  We need to recapture lost ground-ground that has allowed the TPers to plant their flag.

We need to trumpet that race is not irrelevant, that poverty exists beyond most American’s wildest dreams, and that it existsbecause of our social structure, not because of an individual’s own doing.  We need to fight about how taxes are spent, not whether they should exist.

Our lack of organization, our inability to reach out and connect with people who don’t share our beliefs, our preference to react rather than act, our waste of time ad homonym name calling of people with whom we disagree, and especially our blindness to the real effects of the Reagan Revolution helped create space for the Tea Party.

As much as I hate to say it, most of them are pretty genuine in what they believe.  And getting rid of their political ideology is gonna be much more difficult than comparing them to the KKK or deriding their “stupidity.”

We live in a political and cultural crossfire.  Some call it Red versus Blue.  Some call it North versus South.  Some call it Conservative versus Liberal.

I call it Truth versus Myth.  Our war isn’t against the Tea Party, but against the propagation of the myths that have infected our entire society.  For it is these myths which aided and abetted the Tea Party’s creation.

A government of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%.

Time For Israeli Regime Change

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If we are comfortable instigating regime changes in countries that oppress their inhabitants (and three wars suggest we are), then it’s time to take a cold hard look at Israel.

From the moment of its inception, Israel has systematically treated its Arab/Palestinian inhabitants as second class citizens without the same rights afforded to Jews.  First, was a systematic and escalating land grab.

— The Israeli government confiscated any “common land,” untitled ground upon which non-Jewish people lived.

— The Israeli government also took all lands owned by out of the state non-Jewish residents.  (There is an argument that Palestinians left their land at the behest of Arab countries just prior to the 1948 war.  While this is still under debate, there is no question about the Israeli threats that drove other Palestinians from their homes, land, and villages.  This was the land the government then declared to be “absentee owned.”

— If this wasn’t bad enough, the State confiscated territory Palestinians owned even if they were still in Israel but not literally home at the moment of seizure.  Too bad for those who happened to be visiting relatives or out for a cup of coffee.

— And, of course, there were no Israeli inhibitions about taking whatever they wanted by declaring the need for “military land.”

This was no helter skelter response to the 1948 war. It was simply the start of an ongoing and continuous process.  Take, for example, Israeli citizenship categories and the privileges-or lack thereof-that accompany them:

JEWS:
Privileged access to the material resources of the State as well as the social and welfare services of the State. Access to use 93 percent of pre-1967 Israel controlled by the Land Agency. Note that no one can actually purchase Agency land, which is leased to Jews only.

NON-JEWS/ARABS: 
Taxpayers and citizens with voting rights, but denied the right to utilize the 93 percent of pre-1967 Israel controlled by the Land Agency. Denied equal access to water, social and welfare services. Generally not permitted to serve in the military, which automatically excludes many social and welfare services available to those who complete compulsory military service (i.e., Jews).

NON-JEWS/ARABS:
About 200,000 taxpayers and citizens with voting rights, classified as “absentees.”  Denied the right to utilize property in 93 percent of pre-1967 Israel. Denied equal access to water, social and welfare services. Denied all rights to the property (lands, houses, corporations, shares, bank accounts, bank safes, etc.) they owned until confiscated by the Jewish state. This theft was made “legal” by the Absentees Property Law of 1950.

NON-JEWS/ARABS:
3,000,000 taxpayers without voting rights. Denied the right to utilize or buy property anywhere in pre-1967 Israel. No access to social and welfare services. Many (mostly those who once lived in pre-1967 Israel) have had all their property confiscated by the Jewish state without compensation and been forced to live in ghettos in two areas that resemble concentration camps.

This information above comes from Israel: An Apartheid State by Uri Davis, published in 1987, but still pretty accurate. Let’s look beyond the second class citizenship that the Israeli government permitted Palestinians during the early years of statehood.  Let’s look at now.

Palestinian suicide bombing, shelling of Israeli cities from Gaza and the West Bank are violent acts that have been, and ought to be, condemned and punished.  But the picture we’ve gotten from the mainstream media looks quite different if we compare some very ugly numbers:

Since September 29th, 2000 to the present, 124 Israeli children have been killed.  The number of Palestinian children killed during the same time period–1,452.

Since September 29th, 2000 to the present, 1,084 Israeli adults have been killed.  The number of Palestinian adults during the same period–6,430.

Since September 29th, 2000 to the present, 9,226 Israelis have been injured.  The number of Palestinians injured during the same period–45,041.

The current number of Israeli political prisoners or detainees is 1.  The current number of Palestinian political prisoners or detainees is 5,935.
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Since 1967 the number of Israeli homes that have been demolished for settlement reasons is 0.  Since 1967 the number of Palestinian homes demolished for settlement reasons–24,813.
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Israeli unemployment is presently 6.4 percent.

Palestinian unemployment rate in the West Bank–16.5 percent.

Palestinian unemployment rate in Gaza–40 percent.

Of the 40 towns in Israel with the highest unemployment rates, 36 are Arab towns.

According to the Central Bank of Israel statistics for 2003, salary averages for Arab workers were 29 percent lower than for Jewish workers.

U.S. government aid to Israel in 2009 was 8.2 million dollars of military aid per day.

U.S. government aid to Palestinians in 2009–0 dollars.

(These numbers and their primary sources can be found at http://www.ifamericansknew.org.)

Nothing frightens Israel more than the demographic reality of the booming Palestinian population.  And given Israel’s continued and adamant refusal to negotiate anything close to a fair two-state solution, (which would mean the immediateinternationalization of Jerusalem (a holy city to at least three religions), a return to the 1967 borders without any Jewish settlements on the Left Bank, and the cessation of the Gaza Blockade) what alternative will the Israeli government have other than driving the Palestinian Nation into Jordan proper?  Just one, genocide.

As a Jew who lost family in the Holocaust and was schooled in yeshivas from the 3rd to 12th grades, I’m appalled that mypeople, victims of that horror, have no qualms about imposing rigid apartheid on the Palestinian people. I feel sick that Israel has followed such destructive and self-destructive policies for over 60 years.  Policies that have turned their back on any justtwo-state solution, a solution I no longer believe feasible because of Israeli intransigence.  And that lack of belief has me staring what could be the most horrible era in all of Jewish history.  A time when a people, who had been systematically and murderously oppressed throughout our past, becomes an agent of genocide.