ICE: The Union Buster's Trusty Tool

Well, as I promised yesterday, here’s an update on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement middle of the night raid on Smithfield employees yesterday in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and four other counties surrounding the plant.

To start with, the scenario was not nearly as dire as I originally reported, but it’s heartbreaking nonetheless. In the confusion that often occurs when an eyewitness calls in, excited, scared, and confused, some of the facts got garbled. To clear up those earlier distortions, as far as I can tell from reading multiple accounts in North Carolina papers (here and here), there were no dogs and doors were not kicked down.

But ICE agents knocked on doors between 3 and 6 a.m., took people into custody and broke up families, in a few cases leaving parents to scramble to find childcare in the middle of the night for crying and terrified children as they watched their parents being escorted, in handcuffs, to detention facilities.

Here’s an eyewitness account, from the News Observer, by a union organizer, Eduardo Pena:

Union worker Eduardo Pena said he watched agents surround several mobile homes throughout the day, sometimes coaxing suspects to come out after negotiations through closed doors. In other cases, he said, agents waited hours for suspects who didn't answer their doors.

Pena said that he knew of at least two cases in which single mothers were arrested. In one case, he said, a child was left with a relative. In another, three children were left with a neighbor, Pena said.

He said union representatives were talking with the neighbor and woPena called the raid a "humanitarian disaster" and said that the arrests sparked fear among the Smithfield plant's Hispanic employees.

Twenty people were taken from their homes between 3 and 6 a.m. Eight others were picked up at Smithfield’s pork slaughterhouse at 4:30 a.m., during their shift. Twenty-five of those in custody are from Mexico, two are from Guatemala, and one is from Honduras.

Although Smithfield claims they were only informed about the raid a short time before it happened, other ICE raids, such as one last January, also occurred during a period of intense union organizing efforts. A major rally in support of the workers has been planned for the August 29 Smithfield Annual Shareholders Meeting in Tar Heel.

The timing of these ICE raids could, of course, just be a convenient coincidence for Smithfield. But the company has a long reputation for abysmal working conditions and for use of intimidation tactics to fight efforts of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union to organize. Indeed, Duke 1676, from MyDD, wondered on June 24, 2007, about the ties between the ICE raids and the company’s union busting activities.

Here’s what Duke 1676 had to say

There is mounting evidence that the recent spate of immigration raids might have more far-reaching implications than originally thought. Appearing at first to be the result of increased pressure from the right to take a tougher stance on illegal employers, growing evidence suggests that in some cases the raids are instead being used by businesses to help them fight union organizers.

Any question of collusion between employers and ICE were put to rest in January with the revelation of a new program called IMAGE that has allowed employers to essentially use ICE as modern day Pinkertons in union disputes...

...Prior to it's announcement, Bush administration officials spent months trying to persuade businesses that rely heavily on immigrant labor to join the ICE Mutual Agreement Between Government and Employers (IMAGE) program. Operated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security, the IMAGE program calls on businesses to submit all their current I-9 records for employment eligibility to ICE for an audit and verification. ICE would then also verify worker's Social Security Numbers. The upside for employers who voluntarily joined the new program and handed over worker's documents to the government would be some protections from penalties and the freedom from embarrassing immigration raids.

Duke also reported on the efforts to intimidate and harass Smithfield workers who try to organize. H/T to Duke for this link to the Raleigh-Durham Independent Weekly, which had this description of conditions as far back as 2005:

The fear factor: It's the fear part that the Justice @ Smithfield campaign wants to underscore. Approximately half of the 5,500 to 6,000 employees of the Tar Heel plant are Spanish-speaking immigrants, an unknown--but large--number of whom get hired after presenting phony documents that the company accepts, but might at any time "check into."

These illegals--and legal immigrants, too, if they're unsure about American laws--are unlikely to complain about the low pay ($8.10 an hour to start) and brutish working conditions in the plant, which were brilliantly described by Charlie LeDuff of The New York Times in 2000 as part of a Pulitzer-Prize winning series on race in America. (LeDuff got hired at Smithfield, and after three weeks on the line, he understood the saying that the company doesn't just kill hogs, it kills people, too. He reported that turnover in Tar Heel was around 100 percent a year--that is, there are 5,000 new hires, and 5,000 who leave, every year.)

But seven years later, when it finally addressed the union's appeal, the NLRB found that Smithfield had systematically harassed pro-union employees while openly favoring anti-union workers; it also threatened in forced-attendance meetings to cut wages or even close the plant if the union won. All of which is illegal.

In addition, the NLRB said, in the run-up to the election the police presence both inside the plant and outside (thanks to the Bladen Sheriff's office) was deliberately suffocating to the organizers and designed to intimidate those workers--immigrants especially--who might be thinking about voting pro-union.

Then, just after the votes were tallied, the NLRB found, the Smithfield cops helped mug two union activists, dragged them out of the plant in handcuffs and arrested them on phony charges that were later dropped for lack of evidence. The two won damages of $755,000 from Priest and Smithfield in a civil jury trial; their award, however, was overturned on legal technicalities by a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel.

The NLRB ordered a new election, and though Smithfield's appealing its ruling in the courts, and in particular the part that says the election must be held somewhere other than the plant, the UFCW's already begun a third organizing drive.

As you can see, not much has changed. For more information on the rally at the Shareholders meeting and general information about abysmal conditions at the Smithfield plant, which is one of the largest pork slaughterhouses in the world, go here and here.

Kick Down the Doors at 4:30 Am - Or Smithfield and ICE Say Zig Heil!

This is a developing story ....

Exactly one week before a major protest was planned for the Smithfield Annual Shareholders' Meeting, which moved to Williamsburg from its traditional Richmond location, reports are surfacing that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has somehow gotten the addresses of supposed undocumented workers for the company. At 4:30 this morning, they kicked in doors and used dogs to round up as many as 30 people in an effort to intimidate workers trying to organize a plant.

This comes in the wake of a major union organizing campaign at one of Smithfield's North Carolina facilities. Smithfield, which operates both unionized and non union facilities has been bitterly fighting the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) organizing efforts for years.

This is not the first time that Smithfield has used ICE to intimidate workers. As shown here and here, Smithfield has a history of using the federal immigration authorities to intimidate workers fighting for basic rights and human dignity. But, as is pointed out in these articles, Smithfield likes to avoid having the raids occur at their facilities. So this time they managed to get ICE to knock in the middle of the night. Yes, just like the Gestapo and the Bolsheviks in a sadder age and in another continent.

Or, for many who remember a different era, even here in the U.S., it looks like Smithfield got the the descendants of the Southern Klan to kick down the doors last night!

It's Still the Economy, Stupid!

In the world according to the GOP, we are in a good economy and have been for the past six years of the Bush administration. Of course, the housing bubble just burst and the credit crunch is roiling the markets on Wall Street and making investors on Main Street nervous too. Even the Bushies have temporarily suspended the happy talk so they don’t appear completely out of touch with reality, as they frequently do on the topic of Iraq.

But the truth is the economy has been a worry to ordinary working Americans for a lot longer than the recent mortgage and housing bust. This report in the New York Times shows what everybody has known for a long time, that wages have been flat for years. Here’s what David Cay Johnston writes:

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.

It looks like that moisture you feel dropping on your head isn’t just much needed rain ending the recent drought. It’s actually the trickle down theory of economics pissing on your hopes and aspirations.

While ordinary Americans have been experiencing flat wage growth, reductions or outright loss of pensions, and loss of health care coverage, here’s how the upper class has been making out like bandits.

The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent to 303,817 in 2005, from 389,685 in 2000.

These individual who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.

Those with incomes over $1 million received 62 percent of savings from tax reductions on long-term capital gains and dividends. Those tax reductions were signed into law by President Bush and a Republican Congress.

Predictably, Republicans are actually arguing that it’s not their elitist economic policies and failure to invest in tax cuts targeted to the middle class, which would have created real job growth, that have caused wage stagnation for ordinary Americans. They are actually still blaming it on the bursting of the Internet bubble back in 2000. Honest, here’s Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman who should be ashamed of himself:

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, attributed the drop in average incomes to “the significant wrenching hits that our economy took in 2001 and 2002, so no one should be surprised that what a bubble economy created in the late 1990s and 2000, where economic data were skewed, would take some time to recover.”

As I already said, Fratto, who once served as spokesman for the U.S Treasury should be ashamed of putting out such junk economics. But that would require some intellectual honesty, not to mention human decency. Let me see, this administration has been in office seven years now and they still think they can get mileage out of blaming the Clinton administration for flat wages?

Simple truth is that good jobs were more plentiful and wages actually grew under Clinton. Here’s the real record, taken from the White House under the Clinton administration, with sources such as the Bureau of Labor statistics, Council of Economic Advisors, and the Census Bureau. All sources sited in the quote:

Longest Economic Expansion in U.S. History. In February 2000, the United States entered the 107th consecutive month of economic expansion -- the longest economic expansion in history. [National Bureau of Economic Research and Council of Economic Advisors]

More Than 22 Million New Jobs. 22.2 million new jobs have been created since 1993, the most jobs ever created under a single Administration -- and more new jobs than Presidents Reagan and Bush created during their three terms. 92 percent (20 million) of the new jobs have been created in the private sector, the highest percentage in 50 years. Under President Clinton and Vice President Gore, the economy has added an average of 248,000 jobs per month, the highest under any President. This compares to 52,000 per month under President Bush and 167,000 per month under President Reagan. [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Fastest and Longest Real Wage Growth in Over Three Decades. In the last 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased 3.8 percent -- faster than the rate of inflation. The United States has had five consecutive years of real wage growth -- the longest consecutive increase since the 1960s. Since 1993, real wages are up 6.5 percent, after declining 4.3 percent during the Reagan and Bush years. [National Economic Council, 6/00]

Household Income Breaks $40,000 for First Time in History. Income for median households rose $1,072, or 2.7 percent, from $39,744 in 1998 to $40,816, marking an unprecedented fifth year of significant growth in income. In 1999, the median income of African American households increased from $25,911 in 1998 to $27,910 -- an increase of $1,999, or 7.7 percent, which is the largest one-year increase ever recorded. The income of the median Hispanic household, adjusted for inflation, increased from $28,956 in 1998 to $30,735 in 1999 -- an increase of $1,779, or 6.1 percent, which is the largest one-year increase ever recorded. [Census Bureau, Money Income in the United States: 1999, 9/26/00]

Lowest Poverty Rate Since 1979. In 1999, the poverty rate dropped from 12.7 percent to 11.8 percent, the lowest rate in two decades. Since President Clinton and Vice President Gore passed their Economic Plan in 1993, the poverty rate has declined from 15.1 percent in 1993 to 11.8 percent in 1999 – the largest six-year drop in poverty in nearly 30 years (1964-1970). There are now 7 million fewer people in poverty than in 1993, and over 2.2 million, or over 30 percent, of this decline occurred during the past year. [Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States: 1999, 9/26/00

Kind of makes you long for the good old days, doesn’t it?

Of course, Fratto’s response begs another question: If we are still not recovered from a bubble that took place seven years ago – although the wealthy actually rallied from it admirably – what’s going to happen to working people now that we have a new burst bubble, this time in the mortgage and credit industry?

There will be the calls to tighten our belts as these people try to tell us, “we’re all in this downturn together.” Of course, we’re all in the same boat when it runs aground in economic bad times. But the rising tide sure didn’t lift all the boats when the rich were rolling in those good times.

But, I’ll let the NYT have the last word with this quote that sums it up best:

Robert S. McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, said that even though he expected a few very wealthy people to reap most of the tax savings generated by lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, the size of the savings “still takes your breath away.”

He said the tax savings at the top, combined with lower average incomes after five years, “shows that trickle down doesn’t work.”

Amen!

Lies, More Lies and the Lying Liars in Iraq!

Last week the New York Times ran an op-ed that buzzed around the Internet and other publications. In it two Brookings Institution scholars, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, asserted that we could win in Iraq. They had been over there on a fact finding trip and found that soldiers’ morale was higher than it has been in a long time. According to them, the soldiers felt a renewed sense of purpose, were enthusiastic about their mission, and believed they were accomplishing their military goals. The scholars also found there was more cooperation between the Americans and Iraqis, who were forging new alliances.

To be sure, both O’Hanlon and Pollack cautioned that these gains were modest. And our notion of victory would have to be redefined to acknowledge less grandiose goals than we had originally envisioned. But, they concluded, the gains we’ve made and the renewed hope for leaving a stabilized country were worth staying the course into 2008.

What made these revelations so startling that both the mainstream press and bloggers immediately picked up the story and spread it across the media landscape was the authors’ claim that they were long time critics of the war effort.

Ask yourself – and be very, very honest here – if this article and its conclusions had been reported by two scholars billing themselves as long time staunch supporters of the invasion who had simply grown disillusioned with the Bush administration’s botching of the war, would it have had the same universal impact?

Probably not.

In fact, it would have been viewed as more “happy talk” disconnected from reality. And it turns out this is exactly the case.

As this expose from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com shows, both O’Hanlon and Pollack actually were long time supporters of the invasion of Iraq and efforts to depose Saddam Hussein. I already noted in a previous post on this topic that Kenneth Pollack was author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Since that time, I’ve done more research and found out that O’Hanlon was every bit as much a hawk as his colleague. Not only that, but it turns out their whole trip was paid for by the military. Here’s the quote from Greenwald:

...O'Hanlon's answers, along with several other facts now known, demonstrate rather conclusively what a fraud this Op-Ed was, and even more so, the deceitfulness of the intense news coverage it generated. Most of the critical attention in the immediate aftermath of the media blitz focused on the misleading depiction of the pro-war Pollack and O'Hanlon as "critics of the administration." To his credit, O'Hanlon acknowledged (in my interview with him, though never in any of the media appearances he did) that many of the descriptions applied to him -- including Dick Cheney's claim that the Op-Ed was written by "critics of the war" -- were inaccurate:

Indeed, as I documented previously and as he affirmed in the interview, O'Hanlon was, from the beginning, a boisterous supporter of the invasion of Iraq. While he debated what the optimal war strategy was, once it became clear exactly what strategy Bush would use, O'Hanlon believed -- and forcefully argued -- that George Bush was doing the right thing by invading Iraq...

Since that op-ed appeared, a more realistic article about the nature of the new alliances in Iraq ran in the Washington Post. Secular Sunnis, disgruntled with al Qaeda in Iraq’s excessive piety, have cut their ties to that organization and are trying to forge relationships with the Shiite power structure by aiding the U.S. so they can get a seat at the table in the new government. And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. It is a hopeful sign that Sunnis both want to participate in the government and see us as a preferable alternative to extremist groups like al Qaeda. But they are motivated by narrow self-interest not a great vision of building a democratic nation for all Iraqis.

Despite that more cynical assessment of the Sunni's motives, O’Hanlon and Pollack are not entirely wrong when they argue against leaving Iraq too hastily because of the very real dangers of further destabilizing that country. That’s also my argument for not pulling out too quickly.
If O’Hanlon and Pollack had been honest in revealing their true position, it would not have automatically negated their argument because every opinion piece should stand on its own merits and on the evidence presented, not the authors’ previous views.

But the simple truth is that O’Hanlon, Pollack, and the New York Times misrepresented who the authors were to create a buzz that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

There was more than meets the eye in their disingenuous self-definition. But there was also less than meets the eye in their arguments, which have already blown up in their face just as lethally as the latest car bomb explosion in Qataniyah and Jazeera, which killed 250 people, the most deadly attack to date.

And news reports on TV and NPR demonstrate that our troops, far from being re-energized, are exhausted. Their families are also exhausted and discouraged with the long deployments. Our resources have been stretched woefully thin because of this war.

It’s time to plug our ears to the siren song that we can win anything worth having over there and to get over the rightwing attack machine that insists that telling the truth is defeatist. No, it’s not. It’s just a refusal to continue to be stupid. We do need a cautious strategy that gets our troops out of harms’ way without further destabilizing the region. I’ve already dealt with that here and here. Nothing O’Hanlon and Pollack have said has changed my position. But it has altered my respect for the New York Times for going along with this last ditch charade.

Conservatives Crying Wolf

Far too many conservative bloggers casually call Democrats socialists and mischaracterize Democratic programs as socialism. They do this because they have no idea what real socialism is.
To prove they don’t know what they are talking about, here’s a description, from a story, written by Simon Romero, in yesterday’s New York Times showing what a socialist regime would really look like. It’s from a story about the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, and his latest power grab, including his attempt to abolish term limits for his presidency, which would allow him to serve as leader of his country indefinitely. At the same time, he is proposing to alter the Venezuelan Constitution to impose stricter term limits on local governors and mayors to eliminate any challenge from them to his authority. In addition, Chavez is seizing industries, nationalizing them, centralizing his power, and shutting down TV and radio stations critical of him.

Here’s the money quote that perfectly describes his version of state socialism:

Mr. Chávez’s proposals would centralize his control over political institutions even further, potentially weakening opponents...Mr. Chávez’s current term expires in 2012...

“We are entering a new stage implying more intensive state control of society,” said Steve Ellner, a political scientist at Oriente University in eastern Venezuela...

...He has nationalized telecommunications, electricity and oil companies; forged a single socialist party for his followers; deepened alliances with countries like Cuba and Iran; and sped the distribution of billions of dollars for local governing entities called communal councils.

There is nothing in the Democratic Party platform or the policies and positions of any mainstream Democratic candidate that remotely resembles this. No Democrat, indeed no organized labor official, proposes to seize corporations from their rightful owners to nationalize them.

There is a debate in America between advocates of a pure market-based economic system and those who want a mixed system that would basically keep the free market intact but would enact legislation to ensure health and safety regulations in the workplace, the right to collective bargaining, minimum wage laws, and discourage outsourcing through tax incentives to companies that stay in the U.S. and hire American workers. This is all part of the larger debate on the role of government in helping the middle class and poor people. But it’s not about taking over industries or income redistribution.

The debate is actually twofold. It’s partly about how much regulation we need to protect health, safety, and wages without placing too onerous a burden on businesses and discouraging economic growth. Get the balance wrong and you either have a drag on the economy as businesses fail or a free for all where people get sick from unsafe products and the middle class sinks into poverty.

And this debate is also about which services we as citizens wish to fund, through taxes, for the common good. Do we, as a society, believe that funding public education, health care, Social Security, street repair, traffic control, police protection, and a myriad of other services have value? Do we want to pay for some of these things and leave others to the individual? Which ones do we fund and which do we leave alone? Those are fair questions for discussion. None of these topics include nationalizing the oil industry or turning healthcare over to government run clinics. Indeed, in America we are more apt to discuss how to privatize services than how to nationalize them. So, the debate is more likely to be about which services, traditionally provided by the government, we should keep and which should be contracted out, not which industries we should seize next.

Another area for debate is which branch of government should provide those services. What is the role of the federal government versus the state and local governments? The traditional conservative approach is to devolve power down to the level closest to the people, while liberals have favored greater involvement at the federal level to provide services to the broadest number of people.

In terms of efficiency, the arguments can go either way. We can gain economies of scale by providing services, like Medicare, at the federal level to the entire nation. On the other hand, money can be saved and duplication of effort eliminated by letting each state and municipality design its own system to meet local needs.

As you can see, there are real policy differences between the parties, but none of them are anti-capitalist or pro-socialist. One party favors a more ideologically pure and robust free market system with more sweeping laissez fair. The other party is more pragmatic and favors some government regulation for health, safety, wage protection and a safety net beneath which nobody would fall. The real argument is how much regulation and service to provide and how to fund it?

It’s important to present the real debate and give voters a true choice. It’s equally important not to misuse labels because once you start throwing around inaccurate accusations, you trivialize the language. The problem with crying wolf is that once you call Hillary Clinton and John Edwards socialists, when Hugo Chavez comes along and really threatens democracy and capitalism, people will no longer heed your warnings because the very word socialist will have ceased to have real meaning.

Optimism in Iraq - Proceed Cautiously

A few days ago Chris, at Mason Conservative, wrote a piece thundering against Democratic defeatism in Iraq and trumpeting an article by William Kristol. He also cited a New York Times op ed by two analysts from the Brookings Institute, a Washington, DC think tank, who wrote there was reason for cautious optimism in some recent events in Iraq. (I have more to say about the authors of that report and the op ed piece below)

At the time, I posted a reply to Chris that his take on the op ed piece was overly optimistic and out of proportion to the authors’ claims. At no time did either of them say that victory, as Chris, other conservatives, and the Bush administration envision it, is a possibility. Their claim was a modest one. We shouldn’t be too quick to leave. Mainly, they were cautioning about the dangers of a precipitous withdrawal and urging patience based on some recent improvements in security.
The surge has in fact helped the military situation modestly. Another development caught them by pleasant surprise. And it’s been corroborated by this report in today’s Washington Post. Some Sunni insurgent leaders are fed up with the group al Qaeda in Iraq and are trying to negotiate a role for themselves as allies with the U.S.

Their motives are two-fold. They want a political role in the Iraqi government, and they realize that to get it they need to cooperate with the American forces. And they are unhappy with al Qaeda in Iraq’s insistence on Sharia law.

Indeed, the Iraqi Sunnis were always more secular than most of the Arab world. Under Saddam Hussein, women were discouraged from wearing the veil. Women’s dress in the Arab world is a snapshot of where a country or a movement is heading in terms of extremism. The veil is as much a political statement as a religious one. And until the destabilization of that country, the rise of the Shia and al Maliki’s government, women did not wear the veil. They dressed in Western style clothing, had their hair done in salons, held jobs throughout the business and professional world, and even served in the military. In other words, they had an equal role in society.

While they have not slid backwards to the degree that women under the Taliban in Afghanistan did or Saudi Arabia under Wahabbism, they no longer enjoy the freedom of movement they formerly had.

The Shia have always been less secular in Iraq than the Sunnis and this is reflected in the style of clothing women now wear, including the veil. Under Sunni rule women did not wear it, and it’s the al Qaeda insistence on the veil that is one of the reasons the Sunnis are turning against them, as well as other puritanical religious rules against music, encouraging men to grow beards, etc.

So, the Sunni insurgents, put off by the piety of al Qaeda and wanting a role in the new government have decided to cast their lot with aiding the Americans and perhaps even attempting an uneasy peace with the Shia to gain their ends.

But the Americans on the ground, while working with them, give them only cautious trust, which is probably wise. After all the Sunnis still state openly that by cooperating with the U.S. and the Shia to gain a role in the Iraqi government, they also hope that America will go home. They want to run their own country without our presence and if cooperating with us brings them closer to that goal, they will try it.

But that begs the question of whether they will continue to cooperate with the Shia once we leave. Or even if the Shia will embrace them in a power sharing arrangement.

While the military and security situation gives analysts some reason for cautious hope, they still agree that the political situation has not improved at all. And that’s really where we need to see progress.

I basically agree with the assessment that we should have a cautious patience for somewhat longer and that leaving in too hasty a manner would be dangerously destabilizing. Sorry, I know that’s an unpopular position with some Democrats. But I believe it’s true.

On the other hand, we can’t stay there indefinitely. By doing so, we are weakening our military strength, spending our treasure, hurting our economy, and hamstringing our diplomatic and military efforts in other parts of the world that are even more dangerous. That includes routing bin Laden and the real al Qaeda from Wazirstan in the wild, mountainous tribal lands of Pakistan. There also needs to be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation; and Iraq, rather than helping that, is a diversion.

We need an exit strategy that includes plans to keep any Iraqi civil war from spilling over its borders into surrounding states. We also need to involve the international community, including other Arab nations in the region, by convincing them that they have a stake in stabilizing the area and preventing genocide.

Unfortunately, as we come up to election season, we will be getting simple sound byte opinions to a complicated problem that needs a complex and nuanced solution.


Note: Although the authors of the Brookings report, Michael O’Hanlon and Kevin Pollack, are called critics of the Bush administration’s Iraqi policy, there could be some misunderstanding of their real position. Kevin Pollack, a former CIA analyst, wrote a book called The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, which was anything but anti-invasion. If he objects to Bush’s handling of the war, it’s because he perceives Bush as having botched it, not because he opposed invasion. Not that this invalidates his findings, but his bias is actually pro U.S military intervention in Iraq to start with.

Well Done Faithful Servants...

Two people, both of whom I admired greatly, passed away this Sunday. Oliver Hill, the Virginia civil rights giant, died at his home in Richmond. He was 100. It’s already been noted in the blogosphere here, here, and here, among other places. There’s also a very nice memorial tribute to his life on the front page of today's Washington Post.

Hill was elected to the Richmond city council in 1948, the first black in 50 years to serve there. He is remembered and revered in Virginia for his role in challenging the separate but equal clause that formed the basis of school segregation in the South. Hill was the lead lawyer in Davis v the County School Board of Prince Edwards County, Virginia. That was one of five cases that were rolled into the landmark Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954 that helped end legal segregation.

Hill also helped devise legal strategies to combat Virginia’s massive resistance to desegregation, including ways to keep public schools open when they were closing rather than admit black students. In addition, he fought for equal pay for black teachers in Norfolk Hill

Oliver Hill withstood threats and intimidation including having a cross burned on his front lawn. In fact, his wife put up floodlights on their lawn because of these threats.

Today, the Washington Post also carried this obituary of Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger, 80, who died in Paris. He had been archbishop of Paris in the 1980s. He was an intimate of Pope John Paul II. In many ways, he was a traditionalist, but he always promoted ecumenicism and dialogue with other faiths.

Lustiger was born Aaron Lustiger to Polish Jewish immigrants in France. During World War II, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 15 and later entered the priesthood. His mother, Gisele Lustiger, was killed in Auschwitz. Lustiger made it his life work to reconcile Jews and Catholics in Europe and he strongly supported Israel, making many trips there.

Both men, Hill and Lustiger, experienced the darker side of human nature. Both listened to their better angels. These men realized that to keep a man in the gutter, you have to get in it with him. Instead, they chose to lift humankind higher.

I expect that when both of them see the face of God, they will also hear the voice of God and it will be saying, “Well done faithful servant!”

The Politics of Obstruction

Note: I participated in today’s press conference and below is my write up:

The good news is that the Democrats are fighting back against the Republicans’ well planned strategy to block all legislation and then label this a “do nothing Congress.”

And make no mistake, my friends, this is a very carefully thought out strategy to filibuster or veto every spending bill, every reform, and every piece of legislation that would help the lives of ordinary Americans. What it also is, though, is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters who elected Democrats to the Senate and the House in 2006 to end the war in Iraq and clean up the Republican mess of the last twelve years.

Some of the bills Republicans have filibustered, or the president has vetoed or threatened to veto, include healthcare reform, a prescription drug plan for senior citizens, healthcare for children whose parents often hold two or more jobs but can’t afford basic medical services for their kids, and any attempt to change course in Iraq. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq was one of the major factors that led to the ouster of Republicans in 06 and it’s the most important issue fueling public anger right now. And it’s Republicans who are blocking any attempt to bring sanity to our Iraqi strategy now.

In addition, they have blocked bills for safety measures, to make student loans more affordable, to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations, environmental legislation to fight global warming – indeed many of them even deny there is global warming.

Robert Borsage, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, in a press conference with media and bloggers today, likened these Republicans to someone who “mugs the mailman then complains about mail delivery.”

But Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich), Representative George Miller (D-Calif), and Representative Jan Schakowksy (D-Ill) joined Borsage and Brad Woodhouse, president of Americans United for Change, to fight back against these tactics of obstruction.

The also pointed out that despite the Republicans’ attempts to block legislation that benefits the average American, the Congress has indeed succeeded and passed some important bills that improve lives including raising the minimum wage, and healthcare for children, which just passed the other day. Despite passing with 68 votes, making it virtually veto proof, the president is threatening to use his veto power.

Indeed, the Republicans have used the filibuster 43 times, making this the most filibusters in history, triple the previous record, and the president has used the veto 31 times from May through August.

To combat this, for the month of August, Democrats and their allies vow to hold press conferences, on-line discussions, and appearances on talk radio and television to shine a light on the Republicans obstructionist agenda to thwart the will of the American people.

In addition to a month long campaign targeting Republican senators including Mitch McConnell, John Sunnunu, Pete Dominici, Susan Collins, Norm Coleman, John Warner, Elizabeth Dole, Charles Grassley and Voinavich for their contributions to the politics of obstructionism, Democrats are airing this video, with Jason Alexander, from YouTube.

In doing so, they hope the Republican strategy will have a boomerang effect and when the GOP legislators hit their districts, the summer environment will be “hot enough to fry an egg on the hood of a car” when they meet with their constituents and hold their town meetings.

Despite the new militancy, the Democrats vowed they will not change the Senate rules or limit the legitimate voice of the minority, or the voice of conscience. Remembering their years as the minority party, they will vow no “nuclear options” to strip away the filibuster. But they do promise to shine the sunlight on the way Republicans are now abusing it and using it as a weapon of mass obstruction.

Because Debate Is Good!

Ok, it's a circle jerk, but I'm going to link back to Brian Kirwin, at Bearing Drift, because he put up a post about Janet Oleszek's open letter, which I posted the other night.

I'm doing it because nobody has made a comment defending Ken Cuccinelli here. I'm not the most read blog in the blogosphere, but I do hope to be fair and provide honest debate.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am for Janet Oleszek. I think she'll make an excellent senator and I think that Ken's conservatisim is increasingly out of touch with this district. On issues, I don't agree with him. But as I've said in the past, I do like him. He's a great person.

I don't feel the need to demonize everybody I disagree with. But I also don't feel the need to pull punches on whom I support. I'm a left center Democrat. I also know Janet Oleszek personally and have tremendous respect for her intellect and her integrity. I like her very much too.

So, I will support her strongly. But I do feel the need to be fair to Ken. So, here's the other side's response, as best I could bring here.

However, I will be writing more favorably about Janet, and more critical of Ken in the coming months leading up to the election. But I hope to keep a civil tone and I do encourage his supporters to defend him.

Because debate is good for democracy.

Open Letter From Janet Oleszek to Ken Cucinelli

I received this from Janet Oleszek via email.

August 2, 2007

I wanted to forward you the open letter I sent to Ken Cuccinelli today. Recently he has been trying to defend his position on the abuser fees, and I wanted to let you know that we are continuing to hold his feet to the fire. The open letter is below.
August 2, 2007

Senator Cuccinelli:

In a letter to your constituents, including myself, dated July 31st, you attempted to explain your position on the notorious abuser fees recently passed by the Republican-led General Assembly. Since these fees are nothing but a tax on abusive drivers, I will refer to them as what they are - an abuser tax.

Your letter raises many questions and fails to provide any answers.

The facts of your voting record, as presented in your letter are:
You voted against the abuser tax in 2006
You voted for the abuser tax in 2007
You were the deciding vote for the transportation bill that included the abuser tax
You voted against the final bill which included the abuser tax in 2007
You voted against the final bill which "reduced the General fund dollars for Northern Virginia" and "allow[s] an unelected body called the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority to raise taxes on everyone in our communities..."
In addition to these confusing statements, you make the following claim on your campaign literature: "Building Roads- Senator Cuccinelli cast the decisive vote allowing Northern Virginia to get and keep $400 million annually to fight congestion!"

Based on all of the information that you have provided, I have the following questions for you:

1) Have you not signed a pledge to your constituents - and by constituents, I mean a Washington, DC special interest group - to vote against all taxes? Is voting in favor of a fee that is designed to raise revenue to pay for government services not a tax?
2) If you were the deciding vote to get and keep $400 million dollars, weren't you also the deciding vote to allow the outrageous abuser tax to be put in place?
3) If you were the deciding vote to send the transportation bill - which resulted in $400 million annually to fight congestion - to the Governor, weren't you the deciding vote to "allow an unelected body... to raise taxes on everyone..." as you so bluntly put it? Again, what about your pledge to special interest groups not to raise taxes?

Now that over 150,000 Virginians have signed a petition against the abuser taxes, you are calling for a special session. After all of your talk about saving the taxpayer's money and trimming government, it's interesting that your proposal to fix the problem is to invest tens of thousands of the taxpayer's dollars on a special session. Wouldn't it have made more sense to vote against the bill in the first place?

Ken, when you cast a vote on a bill, you shouldn't vote based on the need to fill blank space on your campaign literature. You should vote for a bill because you believe it is the right thing to do for the citizens of the Commonwealth, and your constituents. Either you are proud of the vote - and should be willing to take responsibility for the negative effects on your constituents that will result from it, or you should have voted no.

Your call for a special session raises additional questions:

4) Is this your plan for governance? Each time there is public outcry regarding a policy you have voted for will you call for a special session?
5) If you consider the fees so egregious that a special session is necessary
to repeal them, why didn't you vote against them when the bill needed
your vote for passage?
6) How can you be so proud of a vote to put it on your campaign literature but be so ashamed of the same vote that you call for a special session?

It takes leadership to get something you don't like removed from a bill. It takes bi-partisanship to change something you don't like about a bill. And it takes courage to vote against a bill if you don't like it.

Sincerely,

Janet Oleszek
Constituent & Democratic Candidate for the 37th State Senate District

The Negative Attack Dogs of August

UPDATE: Brian Kirwin pointed out to me on Vivian Paige's site that by titling my piece "attack dogs" I was implying that he was a dog. That was never, never my intention. Frankly, I just thought it was a snappy title. But I guess because of the proximity of the title to Brian's name in the post, you could make that connection. So, I am sorry Brian. You are not a dog. I'd never call you that. AIAW

Or just a reasoned, vigorous debate?

Brian Kirwin, on Bearing Drift, challenged Creigh Deeds to condemn a new Democratic Website for going negative and attacking Republican candidates. For some background, at last month’s Blogs United conference in Hampton Roads, Deeds said this in a speech:

Whether it’s in Washington or in Richmond, we have to change the tone of the debate and put a stop to the endless bickering and gamesmanship that has come to define politics.

We have to reject the poisonous language that is used to describe the other side and hold up as an example those people who believe, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

So, Kirwin, whose favorite part-time hobby is to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy, thinks that Deeds should publicly disavow TheyDon’tGetVA.com.

Of course, turn around is fair play so let me point out that he thinks it’s perfectly fine for him or his cohorts, like Squeaky Wheel, to call Hillary Clinton a utopian socialist here.

First of all she’s no such thing. She is a moderate centrist Democrat who believes the government does have some role to play in solving social problems like health care. She also believes in public education, a socialist scheme that came over from England on the Mayflower. And her husband was the president who got NAFTA and other free trade agreements passed in Congress. There are real liberals who actually have trouble with her candidacy. But that doesn’t stop these two from misrepresenting and stereotyping her.

Or from whining when indeed there is turnabout. Somehow, Democrats are always the ones with the double standard when they retaliate against attacks. All schoolyard bullies love it when their victims are too cowed to fight back.

Unfortunately for them, Democrats are more and more refusing to be cowed and are fighting back. Something I heartily recommend, as long as they do so fairly and with integrity.


So, I went to the Website that’s causing these two conservatives such profound distress because of its patent unfairness - or so they allege. I decided to check it out for myself and here's what I found.


It’s neither unfairly negative nor an attack site. It’s a challenge.

The Democrats who put up the site do indeed claim they think some conservative Republicans are out of touch with most Virginians. And they back it up with fact-based evidence for their position.

For example, they point out that Tricia Stall signed a petition and made statements that she does not support public education. I’ve been to the anti-public education Website and seen her signature there (you do have to scroll down to see it) and read her subsequent statement.

So, what TheyDon'tGetVA.com alleges is true. In fact, you can even argue that if others agree with Stall’s position, then this site would help her by publicizing it. It’s only if you disagree with her public position on education and think it is extreme that you would call this is a negative attack.

The site also illustrates Jeannemarie Devolites Davis' less than sterling attendance record at the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority and the Northern Virginia Transportation Committee. JMDD claims credit for her clout, expertise and dedication to solving the transportation problems in Northern Virginia. If she’s not attending the meetings of boards she is on that address this issue, it’s fair game to mention it.

In fact, anything that challenges a candidate on either a public position they’ve taken or their performance on the job is perfectly fair. Without debating differences or scrutinizing competence and dedication, how is the public supposed to make an informed decision in November?

What’s unfair and negative is to make a personal attack on a candidate for things that are irrelevant to his performance, competence or public positions. It’s wrong to demonize people, stereotype or slander them. Telling outright lies is wrong. So far, this site has done none of that. It’s promoting fair and vigorous debate.

Not only does Creigh Deeds have nothing to apologize for, I invite Republicans to put up a site as balanced, fact-based and temperate as this one. Go ahead. We can stand the heat in the kitchen.

Chief Justice Roberts Hospitalized After Seizure

Chief Justice John Roberts has been hospitalized after having a seizure. According to this report, he was taken to a hospital in Maine, near his summer home, after a seizure caused him to fall. He had minor scrapes and cuts and is expected to be released after an overnight stay.

According to AOL News' "The Daily Pulse":

"It's my understanding he's fully recovered, said Christopher Burke, a spokesman for Penobscot Bay Medical Center, where Roberts was taken.

Roberts, 52, was taken by ambulance to the medical center, where he underwent a "thorough neurological evaluation, which revealed no cause for concern," Arberg said in a statement.

Roberts had a similar episode in 1993, she said.

Doctors called Monday's incident "a benign idiopathic seizure," Arberg said. The White House described the January 1993 episode as an "isolated, idiosyncratic seizure.

"A benign seizure means that doctors performed an MRI and other tests to conclude there was no tumor, stroke or other explanation.

In addition, doctors would have quickly ruled out simple explanations such as dehydration or low blood sugar.

By definition, someone who has had more than one seizure without any other cause is determined to have epilepsy, said Dr. Marc Schlosberg, a neurologist at Washington Hospital Center, who is not involved in the Roberts' case.

Whether Roberts will need anti-seizure medications to prevent another is something he and his doctor will have to decide.

Although Roberts has had other seizures, in 2001 Roberts described his health as "excellent" according to Senate Judiciary Committee records.

WeeWaw News Is Back Up at a New Site

Just updating the link. It's a great site that focuses on bringing positive stories to the blogosphere.

To be honest, it's usually the last site I visit, especially at night. I don't like to shut my computer down and go to bed mad. What happens is my mind churns with all the snappy comebacks and snarky posts I could put up to answer whomever I disagree with. I'd rather have the last thought in my mind be some piece of good news that inspires me.

William listens to his better angels in searching for the stories he puts on his blog. Thank you, William, for reminding us that they exist.

Tag - I'm It!

Ok, I’ve been tagged by Bawana. So, according to the rules of the game, I’ve got to tell you eight things about myself that you might not know – that will be fun! At least one or two may be doozies.

And I’ve got to tag eight more people. That may be harder. I don’t know everybody who’s been tagged already but I’ll give it a shot. If you've already been tagged, sorry and just ignore.

First the eight things.

1. I collect teddy bears and have over a hundred of them spilling into every room in my house including my downstairs bathroom.


2. I also collect Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad lore with their Chessie logo, which is the sleeping kitten.


3. Back in the late 1970s, I gave up a job on a suburban newspaper to live in New York City and write about the Greenwich Village/Lower East Side music scene for alternative newspapers.


4. While doing that I interviewed, and became friendly with, Kinky Friedman, who recently ran for governor of Texas; and Chinga Chavin, who recorded the Country Porn album (my articles were PG-Rated). I don't have a link to those articles but I still have my clippings.


5. Although I came from a very musical family, I can't carry a tune and have a terrible singing voice.


6. I used to act in straight dramas and comedies (anything non-musical) in high school and college and I wrote poetry that I performed as a one-woman show.


7. I am terrified to fly but I do it anyway.


8. I was once a Young Republican for one day. A friend of mine needed a vote in a convention and she paid for my membership. We won!
   
   Now my tags – you’re it:

Lowell

Catzmaw

Kestrel 9000

Terry Rhea

Brimur

Jambone

Eileen

Squeaky Wheel

Yeah, the last one is actually in Ohio now. And somebody else may have tagged him. But it's the least I can do to annoy him :)

Chocolate as Health Food

Ok, I'll admit that I actually believe the perfect health food is cheesecake, especially if you glop some strawberries on it. I maintain that it's the perfect balance of high quality protein and good carbs. The graham cracker crust provides fiber and strawberries give you Vitamin C and they are an anti-oxidant.

So, that might be pushing it a bit.

But all kidding aside, I've seen in Prevention Magazine and various other sources that dark, semi-sweet chocolate - the kind adults like - really does have as many anti-oxidants as green tea or red wine. Nutritionists are claiming it's good for the heart.

Well, I was walking down the candy aisle at CVS during my lunch hour and lo and behold, there's now a whole section of dark chocolate. All of their labels announce the percentage of cocoa they contain. Ghiradelli has 65%. One of them has a full 85%. I guess it's the cocoa that makes them so healthy. I bought the CocoaVia, which is the chocolate that Prevention had mentioned. It's a dark, bittersweet candy that has the added advantage of having 25% of the daily minimum requirement for calcium, and it's only 100 calories.

So, now when I have my glass of red wine with dinner and top it off with a candy bar for desert, I can feel very virtuous.

New To the Blog Roll

I've been meaning to do this for some time but fiddling around with the blog, as opposed to writing and spouting my own opinions, is not always my favorite thing. But Blogger has made it much easier to add new links to the sidebar.

I'd like to welcome a really great progressive Democratic blog to my site, although they are far from new and most of you probably already read them. They should have been here long ago.

I'm proud to have the VB Dems listed on my blogroll.

Labor Night at the Ballpark Part II

There's the picture from last Friday's first annual Labor Night with the Nationals, which raised over $5,600 for the AFL-CIO's Community Services Board.

L-R: Kathy McKirchy, Executive Director of the CSA; Screech; Josh Williams, President of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Central Labor Council; proud union member's wife; Dan Duncan, President of the Northern Virginia Central Labor Council.

The only thing I'lll add is that unlike Zimmerman, we all knew how many outs there were:)

Political and Blogging Rules for the Road

Vivian Paige posted the following rules for enjoying politics, which sound suspiciously like civility and good ethics, something both political activists and bloggers could use. They come from Bob Gibson over at the Daily Progress.

H/T to Waldo too for finding it first over at the Daily Progress.

No. 1: Look for the good in people. There’s usually something you can find.
No. 2: Killing with kindness is much more effective than killing with invective.
No. 3: Agree with people when you can. Common ground often is easier to find than one might think.
No. 4: Tell people when they make a good point. One’s position often is made stronger when acknowledging the strength of another’s position.
No. 5: Politely remind someone of his own previous words when they buttress your current position and he is in conflict with his current position. Nothing disarms a speaker quite as effectively as a polite demonstration of his former wisdom after some people have hastily abandoned it.
No. 6: Use YouTube to creatively and amusingly demonstrate No. 5 as Fairfax County blogger Kenton Ngo did. The teen-ager shows House of Delegates floor remarks of the Northern Virginia delegates who sponsored the original "abusive driver" legislation explaining how it applies to certain misdemeanor driving offenses and how it does not apply to drivers from other states.
No. 7: Stick to the facts as you understand them when trying to make a point. Ask people to explain the facts and go to the source when you do not fully understand them.
No. 8: Watch and listen to people sincerely. Try to understand their motivations and backgrounds in the light in which they see and feel them.
No. 9: Leave your prejudices at the door, or at least be aware of how they limit and shape you.
No. 10: Give people the benefit of the doubt, at least until they act so egregiously that they must forfeit that right.
No. 11: Enjoy the humor of every situation without demeaning or injuring those responsible for it when they do not intentionally cause it.
No. 12: Take yourself less seriously. The sun and the earth do not revolve around you or anyone you know.
No. 13: Take any elected official less seriously, as too many people take them too seriously and this tends to rub off on them.
No. 14: Smile and enjoy the company of serious people.
No. 15: Decide whether you favor the Old Testament admonition, "An eye for an eye and an impeachment for an impeachment," or the New Testament teaching to "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
No. 16: Insert a positive thought into any negative conversation.
No. 17: Apologize sincerely for foot-in-mouth transgressions and for unintended slights.
No. 18: Read, listen and watch before speaking, remembering that God gave us all two ears, one mouth and one YouTube.
No. 19: Remember at all times that no Democrat, no Republican, no independent and no Libertarian has a corner on the truth.
No 20: Try to put things into perspective, be aware of the past and rest assured things could always get worse.

I'm printing this out and posting it right by my computer as a reminder. Again, thanks Mr. Gibson, Vivian and Waldo.

Labor Night at the Ballpark

Last night I had the thrill of my life – something that I’ll probably never get to do again. I was out on the field of a major league baseball team, hanging out on the sidelines watching Screech, the Nationals’ mascot, observing some of the ballplayers’ wives as they were interviewed on TV, and seeing the singer who was going to open the game with the National Anthem prepare for her big moment.

It was the First Annual Labor Night with the Nats, co-sponsored by the Northern Virginia Central Labor Council and the Washington DC Metropolitan Central Labor Council.

So, on a balmy July evening, I got to see my husband, Dan, who is president of the NoVa CLC; Josh Williams, his counterpart on the DC-Metropolitan CLC; and Kathleen McKirchy, Executive Director of the Metropolitan DC AFL-CIO Community Services Agency as all three were awarded the Nationals’ Team Spirit Award. It’s why we were all out on the field.

In addition, somebody from the Ironworkers local threw out the first pitch. And any union local that sold 50 tickets got to see their name on the scoreboard.

The First Annual Labor Night with the Nats was one of the biggest ticket sales programs for the Nationals, with tickets costing six dollars and one dollar of each ticket sale earmarked for donation to the Community Services Agency. That amounted to $5,600 for the charitable arm of the DC Metropolitan Central Labor Council. Union members who attended were also urged to bring unwrapped toys to be donated to Toys for Tots at the game.

I hope to be able to post some pictures of this in a few days.

Then, we joined about 5,600 union fans as they munched on hot dogs, drank beer and cheered on their favorite team. I spotted Delegate Adam Ebbin and Brian Moran shaking hands, chatting with union members and their families and enjoying the game.

In fact, I was sitting next to Brian, in the nose-bleed section, and talking with him when we stopped mid-conversation because it looked like the Nats would turn around a 3 to 1 defeat in the 8th inning. But after a heart-stopping rally, with a man on 1st and another on 3rd, the Nats blew it with a dumb mistake. Unfortunately, Ryan Zimmerman lost count of how many outs the team had and thus assured that the game would end in defeat.

Here’s a sad description from the WaPo of what happened:

Thinking there were two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning, Ryan Zimmerman took off from second base as soon as the ball connected with Austin Kearns's bat. The Washington Nationalswere down by two runs and Ronnie Belliard already was on third. Representing the tying run on a night when runs were precious commodities, Zimmerman knew he could make it home, assuming the ball fell safely.

The ball, though, was caught by Colorado Rockies second baseman Kazuo Matsui. The play would not have been noteworthy but for the fact there was only one out, not two. Matsui fired the ball to shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, and Zimmerman was doubled off to end the inning.

"It was a bad mistake," Zimmerman said. "You can't do anything about it now, but you can't let that stuff happen."

Well, there will be other games. And other labor nights. But on a beautiful mid-summer night a large group of labor folks got to contribute to charity and enjoy a ball game with their families. And they got to see their unions’ names in lights on the scoreboard.

Late Friday Afternoon Musings on a Slow July Day

Have you ever Googled an old friend? Somebody you lost touch with many years ago?

I have several friends like that, people I knew from college days who, like me, wanted to be writers or actors. I’ve always been curious about what happened to them and did they ever achieve their dreams.

It’s gotten easier to research and find the people from our past. I’m not always sure that’s a good thing. What about the girlfriend that doesn’t want to be found by a once over-ardent suitor? Or the guy who didn’t call the next day like he promised? It’s now easier than ever to bring immeasurable embarrassment and discomfort to those from our past who maybe should stay in the past.

Nevertheless, I was curious, on a slow summer day at work, so I began to Google names from my own past. For the most part, I have no plans to actually contact any of these people, though if I did, at least, I could say I was on good terms with all of them when I last saw them. And I was never romantically involved with any of them. They were good friends and people I worked with on creative projects. One was an editor of the same college newspaper that I worked on, also as an editor. Another was somebody with whom I wrote poetry, which we turned into one-man shows. That person, Chuck Stead, first got the idea. So much of his poetry was themed and one poem segued into another in a way that could be turned into a one-act, one man performance. He gathered a few like-minded friends whose work seemed to do the same thing. I was one of them, and so we performed together for a time. He even used several of my pieces in something he created, with others acting out my words.

Being an author and sitting anonymously in the audience was actually scarier than being on stage – and I always had wrenching stage fright, which was why I gave up acting in the end.

But at least as an actor people who might not have loved my work were usually tactful and polite in my presence. When they sat behind me in a darkened theater and heard some shocking line that came from my pen, I saw their unvarnished reactions and they were unedited by tact or politeness because they had no idea that I was the perpetrator of their shock. Pretty scary!

Chuck was the guy who made me take those risks.

And I know he’s continued to work in the genre he created and has stayed true to his roots as a Ramapo Mountain storyteller. I didn’t know, until I read about him, that he also is an adjunct professor who teaches environmental sciences and works with some fairly technical aspects of environmentalism. Back when I knew him, I knew the artist and had no idea he had a solid grasp of, or interest in, hard sciences.

There are other people I’ve Googled because I know they do things that put them in the public eye.

And it’s fun to see what those from our pasts have accomplished. No need to actually contact most of them. There’s just a secret satisfaction in knowing that old friends have done well. I’m happy for those who achieved their aspirations – if not their original dreams of glory, at least dreams that are close enough to it for it to still be satisfying to them. But of all the people I’ve looked up on the Net, Chuck is the one who has stayed truest to his vision even while expanding into things unknown. He’s the one I’ll contact, if only to let him know that he now has a link on a Virginia blog. I think it will tickle him.

When Great Minds Think Alike

First of all, the great mind belongs to Jim Wallis, not me. Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, is a political activist and an Evangelical minister (he’s a Plymouth Brethren). He posted this piece on the Sojourner Website on July 18. He has long been one of my favorite authors, political activists, and religious leaders. He has, in fact, been a huge influence on my own political and religious thought.

What strikes me is that both he and I made the exact same connection between these two New York Times articles. Since these NYT articles appeared on two different days, that connection wasn’t necessarily obvious to a casual reader. I also have to add that I think his post was better written than mine. It was more concise and more focused.

And the fact that he also picked up on it gives me validation that we may be on to something here. Just a thought.

Another Panda Fan

Since I’m personally a huge fan of Tai Shan, the National Zoo’s panda, I’ m linking to William at Weewaw, who obliviously is a fan of Yin, the red panda at the Virginia Zoo. He has a great post about this wiley escape artist. If you want to feel good, go read.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, WeeWaw!

H/t to Vivian, Lowell, and Jim for finding this first.

William Saxman, who is eleven years old, just started a blog, WeeWaw. Yup, they are getting younger all the time. If the last name sounds familiar, his dad is Chris Saxman, one of the classiest people in politics, and William already appears to be taking the high road in blogging. He’s dedicating his blog to reporting on all the positive news. Here's the money quote:

Today I started a blog because I was sick and tired of seeing al the negative news on TV, the newspaper and the internet.

I think all the negative and bad news really makes people unhappy.

So, I will focus on all the good things that are going on because I believe that many good things are going on out there but we never get to see them because that is not what makes headlines.

Welcome to the blogosphere, William. I’m also putting you on my blogroll!

Riding the Crest of Economic Populism

There were a couple of interesting articles in the New York Times, one yesterday, July 16, and one the day before, which provide a study in contrasts.

The first piece, by Louis Utichelli, focused on the new gilded age and the wealthy tycoons, who have been riding the crest of a wave of fabulous wealth and increasing wage inequality the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 1920s.

And if you listen to some of these newly minted moguls, they compare themselves proudly to the robber barons and captains of industry from that era. Here’s what Sanford Weill, founder of Citigroup had to say.

“People can look at the last 25 years and say this is an incredibly unique period of time,” Mr. Weill said. “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs.”

And other tycoons back up his assessment and rate themselves as uniquely deserving of extravagant compensation while the wages of their employees remain flat.

Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter“unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

He counts himself as a talented entrepreneur, having assembled from scratch a cable television sports network, the YES Network, that he sold in 1999 for $200 million. “Jeter makes an unbelievable amount of money,” said Mr. Hindery, who now manages a private equity fund, “but you look at him and you say, ‘Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.’ ”

You can almost see and hear the old Saturday Night Live character, the Church Lady, with her crooked smirk, saying, “Well, isn’t that special? We really like ourselves don’t we?”

Pride may goeth before a fall. But skepticism springs eternal at such arrogance and bragging.

Indeed other, equally successful businessmen aren’t buying these self-laudatory assessments of these tycoons with over inflated egos.

A handful of critics among the new elite, or close to it, are scornful of such self-appraisal. “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,” Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman, said in an interview, challenging the contentions of the very rich that they are, more than others, the driving force of a robust economy.

The great fortunes today are largely a result of the long bull market in stocks, Mr. Volcker said. Without rising stock prices, stock options would not have become a major source of riches for financiers and chief executives. Stock prices rise for a lot of reasons, Mr. Volcker said, including ones that have nothing to do with the actions of these people.

“The market did not go up because businessmen got so much smarter,” he said, adding that the 1950s and 1960s, which the new tycoons denigrate as bureaucratic and uninspiring, “were very good economic times and no one was making what they are making now.”

James D. Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, the discount retailer, echoes that sentiment. “Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company,” he said. “The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.”

A legendary chief executive from an earlier era is similarly critical. He is Robert L. Crandall, 71, who as president and then chairman and chief executive, led American Airlines through the early years of deregulation and pioneered the development of the hub-and-spoke system for managing airline routes. He retired in 1997, never having made more than $5 million a year, in the days before upper-end incomes really took off.

He is speaking out now, he said, because he no longer has to worry that his “radical views” might damage the reputation of American or that of the companies he served until recently as a director. The nation’s corporate chiefs would be living far less affluent lives, Mr. Crandall said, if fate had put them in, say, Uzbekistan instead of the United States, “where they are the beneficiaries of a market system that rewards a few people in extraordinary ways and leaves others behind.”

“The way our society equalizes incomes,” he argued, “is through much higher taxes than we have today. There is no other way.”

It actually sounds like these older and more down to earth business executives are saying those emperors have no clothes. Or at least they are far less deserving than they think. They've probably sold their boards of directors and stockholders a bill of goods and rigged the market for CEOs in their own favor.

There's another key point that emerges from Louis Utichelle's article.

First, in the 50s and 60s when corporate chiefs didn’t make nearly as much money, the economy was just as robust and so was the economic condition of the average worker. The compensation gap wasn’t as steep and Americans enjoyed a record level of genuine prosperity and financial security that has been unmatched in any other era before or since. Here’s the telling quote (emphasis is mine)

The new tycoons describe a history that gives them a heroic role. The American economy, they acknowledge, did grow more rapidly on average in the decades immediately after World War II than it is growing today. Incomes rose faster than inflation for most Americans and the spread between rich and poor was much less. But the United States was far and away the dominant economy, and government played a strong supporting role

In addition to the historical fact that the economy was actually better when there was less of a gap between the compensation of the top executives and the average worker, the sheer audacity of these vainglorious men’s’ claims that they are somehow so special that they are entitled to the obscene amounts of wealth they are accumulating at both the expense of their workers and their investors does not hold up to the light of examination.

Indeed, just as in the last Gilded Age, the intense concentration of wealth in the hand of a few and the reckless investment risks that they took was the leading edge of disaster.

Such talk alarms Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who started on Wall Street years ago as a partner with Mr. Weill in a stock brokerage firm...

...Mr. Levitt is skeptical. “I view a gilded age as an age in which warning flags are flying and are seen by very few people,” he said, referring to the potential for a Wall Street firm to fail or markets to crash in a world of too much deregulation. “I think this is a time of great prosperity and a time of great danger.”

The simple truth is that all this excess, both the arrogance of these corporate chiefs and the concentration of wealth at the top, benefits neither workers nor investors. It sets up the economy for too great a risk for investors and leads to an extreme class system with a few very wealthy CEOs teetering at the top of a narrow pyramid and too many people sinking from the middle class back into poverty at the broad bottom with not much in between.

The small wealthy class at the pinnacle and a large underclass of underemployed impoverished workers also sets the stage for a destabilized society with a higher crime rate, greater drug and alcohol abuse, child and spouse abuse, and the disintegration of the family. Can we as a society really afford the fall out from the harsh new economy of the Second Gilded Age? Go back and study the novels of Dickens and others to find out what social conditions were really like in Victorian England and America at that time.

Alcoholism, prostitution, lack of stable family was the norm for the working class. Family life, as we know it now, was practically non-existent among the blue collar workers in the an urban environment. It was only with the advent of the middle class that we truly got a large number of people in stable nuclear families, which we now take for granted.

We should be going forward, not sliding back.

But I think a backlash is coming. There is a groundswell of discontent rising from an increasingly anxious middle class, and Democrats are more and more attuned to it.

And that brings me to the second New York Times piece. According to yesterday’s article, Nancy Pelosi has given Democrats their marching orders. As Robin Toner reported, Pelosi gave this blunt assessment, "The American people want to know what we’re doing about their economic security.” So Congress will be taking up economic issues including the negative effects of free trade and globalization on workers and communities.

On Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail, Democrats are increasingly moving toward a full-throated populist critique of the current economy.

Clearly influenced by some of their most successful candidates in last year’s Congressional elections, Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities. They deplore what they call a growing gap between the middle class, which is struggling to adjust to a changing job market, and the affluent elites who have prospered in the new economy. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, calls it “trickle-down economics without the trickle.”

But the latest populist resurgence is deeply rooted in a view that current economic conditions are difficult and deteriorating for many people, analysts say, and it is now framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care. Last week, Senate Democrats held hearings on proposals to raise taxes on some of the highest fliers on Wall Street, the people at the top of private equity and hedge fund firms.

An interesting counterpoint to the laissez faire capitalists and anything goes free traders who would drag the middle class backwards for the sake of their own greed.

I think the party that says "enough" to the corporate greed that is bleeding the middle class dry - both investors and workers - will be the one that dominates the elections. The party that speaks to the concerns of the average voter will ride the wave of economic populism into the new century and, hopefully, return us to the prosperity of the fifties and sixties when unions were stronger, corporations felt a sense of loyalty to their workers, and ordinary people were able to sleep securely at night, knowing they and their families were covered by adequate health insurance, they could save for their children's educations and still have enoug left over to retire with dignity and be independent in their last years. Modest ambitions, compared to the robber barons of the new gilded age.

But perhaps that's why we've got to challenge the greedy whose emphasis is on robber, not just baron.

The Window Snapped Shut

The one thing you can say about Pope Benedict XVI is that he is an equal opportunity offender. Last year, he managed to inflame relations with Muslims by quoting 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologos II from a debate he had with an educated Persian Muslim. Pope Benedict quoted the emperor as saying:

'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."'

At that time, Evangelicals and conservative Protestants, along with their traditionalist Catholic allies, cheered the pope.

Perhaps they’d like to rethink some of their alliances now that they know what this conservative pope and those traditionalist Catholics really think of them and their religion.

On July 10, the pope declared that other denominations could not be considered churches but ecclesiastical communities. Protestant denominations responded with statements of protest. But basically all the pope did was restate what Domine Iesus had said in 2000. Pope John Paul II signed that document but it was Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote it. In Domine Iesus, Protestant denominations were called defective.

This latest slap at Protestant churches came a week after Benedict decided that churches could, at the request of individual parishes, reinstitute the old Latin Mass, which has a passage praying for the conversion of the Jews and saying that they fail to understand the Christian truth. This obviously has put a strain on his relationship with the world-wide Jewish community.

Back in 2000, the current pope also managed to simultaneously insult Jews and Protestants. Then, the issuance of Domine Iesus was proceeded by a storm of controversy surrounding the beatification of Pope Pius IX. He was beatified at the same time that the beloved Pope John XXIII, the initiator of Vatican II, was raised to the status of Blessed, the step before canonization.

Pope John XXIII was fondly remembered, not just by Catholics, but also by people of good will in all faiths, for convening Vatican II with the hope that it would “open a window and let in the fresh air of the Holy Spirit to blow where it will.” In contrast, Pope Pius IX proudly declared himself “the Scourge of Liberalism.”

Vatican watchers believed that pairing the two beatification ceremonies, in 2000, was a way to placate Catholic traditionalists, who have always had trouble accepting much of Vatican II’s liberalizing effects, especially its commitment to ecumenicism.

Pope Pius, however, was about the worst choice for beatification unless you were trying to pick a fight with all but the most conservative Catholics and send everybody else a message that they were no longer welcome in the Catholic Church. It was also a great way to send a message that dialogue with Jews was no longer valued. And Domine Iesus sealed the deal that traditionalist Catholics really felt the same about alliances with Protestants.

Let me tell you why Pope Pius IX was so controversial. Even in his own time, the mid-1800s, he was a divisive figure. But it didn’t start out that way.

He was originally the choice of liberals and moderates from the College of the Cardinals at the papal conclave to replace the arch-conservative Pope Gregory XVI. Pius started out sympathetic to liberalizing trends in Italy and the Church but grew increasingly more conservative after he was deposed from the Papal States in Italy’s revolutions of 1848, which unified that country and turned it into a secular republic.

Pope Pius’s relations with the Jewish community also were ambiguous. Before he was briefly exiled from Rome, he opened the Jewish ghetto, allowed wealthy Jews to move out of it, and repealed laws that forced Jews to attend church four times a year and listen to sermons urging them to convert. He also repealed laws that blocked Jews from entering certain professions. But Jewish testimony remained inadmissible in a court of law, which meant that even if Jews were the victims of a crime, they couldn’t testify against their attackers.

Then after returning to Rome in 1850, he re-instituted the ghetto and many of the harsh laws against the Jews. But the worst transgression against the Jewish community was the kidnapping of a young boy, Edgardo Mortara, which occurred in 1858.

An illiterate young housemaid informally baptized Edgardo Mortara when the child was very ill. The maid, fearing that the boy would die and go to hell, baptized him without the consent of his parents. Indeed, the parents did not even know it. The maid eventually told the story to a priest who reported it to the Inquisition. The Vatican Swiss Guard seized the child and the Pope declared that because he was a Catholic, his Jewish parents could not raise him to be a proper Christian. The parents argued that the child was too young to give informed consent so the baptism should not be considered valid and binding. Indeed, dignitaries and prominent figures from around the world, including Emperor Franz Josef of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and Napoleon III of France, protested to the pope.

By 1864, Pope Pius IX was firmly opposed to liberalism, democracy, secularism, freedom of religion, and even rationalism. He convened the First Vatican Council, where he decreed the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

Although Pope Pius IX was controversial in life, during a turbulent time in Italy’s – and all of Europe’s – history, few sensible people would fault the modern Catholic Church for its excesses of intolerance in an earlier age when such intolerance was common to most faith traditions.

But the beatification of Pope Pius IX in 2000 brought renewed turmoil and protests from liberal Catholics, from Jewish groups world wide, and from descendants of the Mortara family, who still live in Rome.

Coupled with the issuance of Domine Iesus, a week later, this wasn’t the Church’s finest hour. But it was also no coincidence. Just as it is no coincidence that once again a statement insulting Protestant denominations is paired with a return to the Latin rite, which includes prayers for the conversion of Jews and a reiteration of the belief that Jews are blind to the truth of Christian belief.

Pope Benedict’s fingerprints are all over these couplets, both those of this past week and those of 2000. The Roman Catholic Church is on a retrograde path back into the past at a time when it is losing influence in the West and in Latin America. And that is it’s right, sad as it is to watch.

But don’t look for better interdenominational relationships, greater tolerance, more open ecumenical dialogue, or progressivism any time soon. The few stalwart liberals are gradually dying out, and the window that Pope John XXIII had opened to let in the renewing Holy Spirit has been firmly snapped shut by Benedict.

Down for the Count

Some sad news for me. I am deeply disappointed that I will not be able to go to the Blogs United in Hampton Roads Conference after all. I was really looking forward to it. But I had something of a dental emergency and had to cancel at the last minute. But before I go into that, there is something that I want to make very clear.

Because of all the controversy that has been stirred up recently, the first thing I want to restate is that I support this conference and Jim Hoeft with all my heart. I think he has done a wonderful job of putting this event together. And I am deeply disappointed that I am going to have to miss it and miss meeting some great bloggers from across Virginia.
Unfortunately, my simple little root canal ended up with complications, not the least of which is a very painful case of TMJ, which is getting worse not better.

Before I go any further, I also want everybody to understand that this is unusual. Please, please don’t use me as an example if you are scared of root canal. I was frightened of it for a long time too. The actual procedure IS NOT PAINFUL! I would go through it again without hesitation if I needed it.

My dental problems are longstanding and well documented on this blog. I have a history of tooth grinding, also called bruxism, and TMJ. Bruxism can be caused by stress, but just as often it has physiological causes due to a problem with a person's bite.

And my root canal took two and a half hours – most of them run about an hour to an hour and a half. It took four shots to numb me. They had to take numerous X-rays because the canals were so deep and they also were curved. During this entire time, my mouth had to remain wide open so my jaw muscles were overstretched. That’s in addition to the normal strain I put on my jaw by grinding my teeth all night in my sleep (most bruxism occurs during sleep and those who have the problem aren't even aware they are doing it until their dentist sees the problems - but if you even suspect you grind, tell your dentist and get a dental guard to protect your teeth).

As my dentist said afterward, “you are special.” It wasn’t a compliment. It was a complaint – this procedure exhausted him too.

Anyway, I am so sorry and disappointed that I will not be down at Newport News with all of you bloggers and electeds.

I have to add that two of the classiest electeds are Delegates Kris Amundsen and Chris Saxman, both of whom immediately wrote me back when I emailed to let the others know I wasn’t coming. And Chris Saxman also sent me an e-card that made me laugh just before I left for my dental appointment (they say timing is everything). These are all great people on a human-to-human level. It’s why bloggers conferences and bi-partisan events are so important.

I think it’s possible for us to disagree, fight hard, and then all have a beer together afterward, as Squeaky Wheel, from Bearing Drift, has pointed out. It’s how we should be conducting ourselves. Before we are Democrats and Republicans, we are Virginians, and also Americans. We also are all human beings. There should be more that unites us than divides us in the longer run. This is something that I want to think more about and I’ll probably be writing more about it too.

However, don’t expect me to go soft on Republicans at election time because of it ;)

Meanwhile, to all who will be there, have a great time and lift a glass of whatever your favorite beverage is for me!