Category: Politics

Convincing meteorologists that climate change is real

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You can see from the above photo the challenge our president faces in convincing, of all people, our meteorologists, that climate change isn’t simply cyclic, but ongoing, posing devastating consequences for America, with no region spared. Further, we humans are its driving force.

The National Climate Assessment came out yesterday, only to be immediately dismissed as “alarmist” by–imagine my surprise–Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). Guess he must think the same about the recently released  UN Panel’s 40 volume plus study conducted by leading climate scientists. I’m reminded as a former prof of Victorian lit just what it must have been like for Darwin in the outpouring of public vitriol that followed upon his perceived tampering with hallowed establishment assumptions. By the way, I never cease to be amazed at the gall of politicians assuming equal footing with reputable scientists.

But it isn’t just the Republicans we have to worry about in Washington when it comes to taking climate change seriously and initiating immediate steps to at least mitigate its effects. You see this most pointedly when it comes to the Keystone XL project. Presently there’s a bipartisan effort to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate in favor of the project, assuring veto proof passage.   So far, 11 Democrats have shown willingness to join 45 Republicans in such a move, with one Democrat optimistic of getting several more.

As always, it’s the old song-and-dance scenario of jobs, when the fact is that if we were to put environment on a war-footing we’d have universal employment in harnessing the forces to slow global warming.   Solar energy has considerable promise, for example, and is already a key component in countries like Denmark. Instead of constructing pipelines with their potential for spills–and sabotage–we’d do better in shoring up our coast lines.

How wonderful it would be to see Republicans and Democrats give priority to long term public welfare rather than short term corporate interests and their reelection prospects. (Once again, a good point for term limits. If it exists for the Presidency, why not for Congress?)

As for the meteorologists, a George Mason University survey in 2010 showed only 19% of them accepted human activity as the primary contributor to global warming.  Some deny climate change period! (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1 ) While good at short term forecasting, they fall considerably short at the long term. Public icons, they can be given to a narcissism of overreach. Unfortunately, 62% of us trust our TV weather forecasters more than we do climate scientists!

The greatest proofs of climate change lie not simply in natural catastrophes, but in their ever increasingly frequency. We have computer models for that!

above

–rj

 

Climate Change: Can we win the fight?

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We just celebrated Earth Day on April 22, an annual fête of huge importance for those of us wanting to increase the public’s awareness of the challenge of climate change, and our substantial human contribution to it, and ways we might fight it.

It’s an important time for us in another way, too, as this yearly outpouring of Green advocacy transcending borders buoys up our enthusiasm, telling us we’re not alone in our caring. After all, sometimes it seems that we’re on this great big mountain we impulsively thought we could climb; so rituals of solidarity like Earth Day give us pause to catch our breath, reassess, and press on to our worthy goal of a humanity in harmony with nature as one species among others, each necessary to all. Just maybe we can pull this thing off. Anyway, good to dream big rather than live small.

The truth is that so much more needs to be done and that we’ve been moving at a snail’s pace in making climate change a palpable issue for the public. I saw this demonstrated all too clearly in the presidential debates in 2012, or just 18 months ago, with not a single question directed to environmental matters raised by debate moderators.

If the press can seemingly have no feel for the greatest issue ever to menace us with its destructive pay-load should we evade addressing it, then how much less can we expect the public to grasp what’s at stake? As is, individual lifestyle changes like driving less, getting rid of plastic, cutting back on electricity in our homes aren’t going to do the trick. We need more than bandages to treat the Earth’s hemorrhaging.

Now consider that a recent poll suggests that 37% of Americans don’t even believe in climate change. There exist also a good many, perhaps even more, who look at climate change as simply cyclic and that, just maybe, it might even right itself. Of course that view gets us off the hook and we can conduct business as usual.

Just recently the United Nations released the findings of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a careful study by credentialed scientists encompassing some 40 volumes. Insiders say they toned down some of their language and projections so as not to unduly frighten, though their findings still emerge as deeply sobering, with none of us escaping vulnerability to what surely are predictions on an apocalyptic scale. In all honesty, I haven’t noticed any work-up by media or any concerted effort by members of Congress to hold hearings on the report and what we might do to save the day. Like many of you, I grow weary–and wary–of their feckless accommodations to corporate interests.

What’s vital is that we impact the political process, as happened with the Vietnam War, ultimately culminating in LBJ’s decision not to pursue reelection. It started with just a few protesters, then took hold and proved unstoppable. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything like this breaking out. I think this is because many of our projections for climate change impacting us lie still in the future, whereas flag covered body bags coming into Dover AFB were a daily, tangible occurrence, which the media ultimately caught up with when it perceived a muscular protest movement, packing a punch, that wasn’t going to go away.

On the other hand, if we haven’t been able to muster cadres of protestors against our Iraq and Afghanistan incursions with their costly toll in life and wounded for a dubious cause, how much less likely for an environmental movement devoid of blood and gore? And that’s what makes climate warming so horrendously insidious, or like some invisible killer we know is out there, but don’t know where he is, or when he’ll strike, or how.

Perhaps our young people will again show us the way as they did with Vietnam by way of their fossil fuel divestment sit-ins sweeping our college campuses, some 300 as I write, with several success stories, including Harvard with its $32 billion endowment. If it’s wrong to destroy our planet, it follows we shouldn’t be seeking to profit from those who do.   I wrote earlier of the Vietnam days when students rallied to make a difference. All of us: unions, retirees, teachers, tech workers, etc., might do well to follow their lead in choosing our retirement portfolios more discriminately.

But divestment has its limitations, too. While it was practiced widely in the 70’s and 80’s to pressure South Africa’s apartheid regime, the invariable result was that other investors stepped in. It’s true value lay in shaping public discourse, and I venture this holds true with this present endeavor.

Still, I question the wisdom of painting with a broad brush the fossil fuel industry as some kind of axis of evil. We need energy. Are our students willing to follow through and divest themselves of their cars and their electricity and take on an Amish likeness? We would do better to focus on the coal sector, our greatest polluter.

I still like our president–articulate in his efforts to assure health care access, social and economic equality, tax, immigration and drug sentencing reform. So far, he’s championed alternative energy efforts, sought restrictions on coal burning power plants, held out against the Keystone XL project, endorsed alternative energy efforts.

As for Keystone, he needs our support even as we must sustain, and grow our protests, to keep a fire under his feet. When I think of Keystone and the big money behind it–think Koch brothers–I get nauseous: the obscenity of it, given the perils of climate change; the stench of it, given its association with pet coke; the callowness of it, given its destruction of farmland, water aquifers, and wildlife habitat.

The President will presumably make his decision after this fall’s elections, but faces immense pressure, even in his own party. It isn’t a given he’ll opt for courage over pragmatism. In the end, it’s important we all get to the polls and endorse environmentally friendly candidates such as the courageous Gary Peters (D-MI), who hopes to succeed retiring senator Carl Levin (D-MI).   Peters has come out against Keystone, provoking the Koch brothers to contribute substantially to his Republican opponent, who now leads in campaign funding. Peters is our leading spokesperson on pet coke. (By the way, you can access online the Sierra Club’s political endorsements, which include Peters.)

If it came down to, say, an errant asteroid making its way to befuddle our planet as once happened, plunging the world into a rebirth of its pre-evolutionary darkness, then you can bet your life we’d all get off our bottoms and fight the good fight. Well, think of that asteroid as climate change.

–rj

 

 

 

Putin: Better Think Again!

putinIn a recent interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said Crimea can be written off as a Ukrainian entity, with the possibility of still further Russian intervention in Ukraine until Putin gets a government to his liking.  I’ve always respected Gates, one of the best defense secretaries ever. 

The problem with Putin is that escalating our threats just won’t work.  He has options too.  Just recently there’s been a rumbling that if the West plays rough, then Russia will no longer allow inspections of its nuclear arsenal.  In short, we’d be virtually back to the Cold War.  And if Europe does take meaningful measures–highly unlikely–it can easily limit natural gas supplies Europe depends on.

Tough talk may even provoke Putin to order troops into Kiev to depose its interim government, which he argues resulted from an illegal coup.  We take it for granted we’re dealing with a rational leader, not a Kim Jong Un, but don’t bet on it.  We do know that he served 16-years with The KGB, or secret police, much of it in East Germany with its Stasi repression.  In a post-Soviet era, his thinking is a throwback to Communist conspiracy.

Asked recently what he considered Russia’s greatest catastrophe, he replied, “the break-up of the Soviet Union,” which goes a long way to explaining his designs on Ukraine and desire to reconsolidate its former vast territorial domain under the guise of the Eurasian Customs Union, slated to go into effect next year.  (See my earlier post,  February 28, 2014:  Russia Likely to Intervene in Ukraine.)

Certainly, world criticism never bothered the Soviets when they invaded Hungary in 1956; nor the Putin regime when it invaded Georgia in 2008, occupying two breakaway provinces where they still remain.  It’s bare-chested, black belt Putin fully on display, true to the narcissistic personality disorder with its broad symptoms of enhanced self-regard, arrogance, absence of sympathy for others, and readiness to exploit.  We’ve seen it all before in the Hitler and Mussolini demagogues of modern history.

I don’t think for a moment our president impresses the Kremlin leader, certainly not after turning his back on a cruise missile strike.  So far the White House response has been one of rhetoric rather than any substance.  While I don’t agree with Republican hawks advocating revival of a missile defense system for eastern Europe, I do think this isn’t the time for reducing our troop numbers.  I’d settle for booting Russia out of the G8 rather than just canceling its upcoming June meeting.  As in most things, the bottom line is money.  We must make Putin’s Ukraine strategy costly.

Russia’s economy, by the way, for all the show time glitter of robust health in its $40 billion outlay for the winter olympics at Sochi, continues in disarray, with present growth forecast at just 1%.  Much of Russia’s financial resources depend on gas and oil exports, or as much as 80% by most financial analysts.

For Russia to cut supplies to Europe is a no-starter.  Russia’s future, in fact, looks ominous, with America on a fast track to energy independence and with potential capacity to supply Europe.  Ironically,  securing the Ukraine, a nation $35 billion in the red, is surely the albatross around the neck that should give Putin pause.

Russia ought to worry instead about shoring up its deplorable infrastructure.  When I traveled by bus several years ago from Moscow to Tula, a distance of about 120 miles, I wished I’d had a kidney belt, what with our wheels tumbling in yard wide holes all the way to the nearby Tolstoy homestead (Yasnaya Polyana).

Its oil and gas infrastructure is declining as well and will entail Russia laying out billions to modernize, compounded by worldwide demand for technical prowess at competitive prices.

Putin has seemingly forgotten his Russian comrades–all 144 million.  Just a few days ago, Russia underwent the biggest stock sell off in 5-years, with the ruble tumbing to a record low, requiring the central bank to raise interest rates.

As is, Russia is fast losing its talented young people with emigration increasing 22% in 2012, and with them, its future.  In the last ten years, nearly two million from the middle class have left Russia.   Ukraine, understandably, wants no part of a dismal future with the Russian Federation.

The pity of Russia with its vast resources is that, like many third world nations, its economy is dominated by a kleptomaniac oligarchy lining its pockets at the expense of a long suffering people.   No wonder the exodus.

Will the last one out please get the lights!

–rj

Sequel to Russian Incursion: Ukraine’s Likely Fate

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What we’re seeing in Ukraine we’ve seen before; namely, Russia’s incursion into Georgia in 2008 when that government attempted to wrest back its secessionist breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  We did nothing then.  We will do little now, simply because we lack leverage.

The Crimea itself,  now fully occupied by Russian troops, poses a strategic necessity for Russia that goes back 240 years.  Adjacent to the Black Sea, it provides Russia with warm water naval outreach to the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.   Russia is unlikely to hand it back to a belligerent regime.

The scenario could get even worse for Ukraine, since Russian incursion may not stop with seizing the Crimea.  After all, a large swath of Eastern Ukraine is also Russian speaking.  One incident and Putin is likely to seize upon it as pretext for moving troops into this area as well.  Just yesterday, there was a bloody exchange between rival factions in the region.  In short, the dismemberment of Ukraine may already be underway.

But the situation could prove even more sinister:  Russia may decide to depose the Ukraine’s interim government and install a puppet regime loyal to its interests.  It tried to do this in Afghanistan in the 1980s, propping up a Marxist government.  What this would mean for Ukrainians is painful to contemplate–perhaps civil war between the factions or an incipient resistance movement.

I find it ironic, to say the least, that Russia has waged two conflicts to keep Chechnya within the Mother Land, yet has abetted secession efforts in Georgia and, currently, Ukraine.

In all of this, our hands are sadly tied, exacerbated by our own confusion.  The G8 nations of which Russia is a member, could refuse to attend this June’s trade summit scheduled in Sochi. Acting more bravely–don’t hold your breath–it could expel Russia.  This would sting.

But doing so could hurt our own interests as well.  We need Russian cooperation on Syria and Iran, say critics.  I would argue, however, that this is moot discussion, since it assumes Russian cooperation as a verity.  The truth is that Russia continues its efforts to support a ruthless Syrian regime and remains a potential menace to our efforts to curtail Iranian access to nuclear weaponry.  It’s quite evident that Russia, deeply jealous of the West and, especially the U. S., suffers from an immense insecurity complex reflected in a historic penchant for destabilizing Western aims.

Meanwhile, the UN can muster the Security Council, but to what end, since Russia will employ its veto yet again.

In all of this, Russia ironically doesn’t need to invoke troops, since its ultimate weapon to keep Ukraine in line is natural gas, which it enjoys in abundance.  Ukraine needs that gas desperately and presently owes Russian billions in deferred payment.  Putin, additionally, was already supplying the country with natural gas at sharply reduced rates.

As for the EU, it’s a given that it knows the potential seismic effects of a reduced gas supply from Russia to power its own economies, several of which are already floundering.

In all of this, I would draw a parallel with what happened in 1956 in Hungry, when the Soviets invaded to overthrow an insurgent rebel government.  2000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers died;  13,000 Hungarians were imprisoned; hundreds executed; and 200,000 refugees fled to the West.  Then, as now, the invaders blamed the revolt on western instigation and facist-nazi reactionaries.

The more the free-world protested, the more things stayed the same.  The Russians vetoed the Security Council’s mandate to withdraw and ignored the General Assembly’s majority vote.  Then, as now, the Kremlin called the West’s bluffs.  A few months later, both East and West were working trade deals.

And this is the way things will end for the brave people of Ukraine, despite Western protests and threatened sanctions.  Human rights didn’t keep the world from swarming to Sochi for the Winter Olympics.

The heavy truth is that politics has always operated in a context of power, not morality.  Right now, Russia enjoys the upper hand.

–rj

Russia Likely to Intervene in Ukraine

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Last week, Ukrainian protestors in Kiev’s Maidan (its central square) were mowed down by security forces of the hated Yanukovych regime.  Undeterred, they advanced into the fusillade. What is life without freedom?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ukraine, no doubt heightened by media coverage of the continuing unrest in that nation of 46 million.  But it’s more than the headlines.  When I was a young boy growing up in Massachusetts, I played with a friend who had recently arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine with his mother and siblings.  Though young, he had seen vestiges of World War II’s carnage.  While I can’t recall the details, they left me with an impression of a people that had endured considerable suffering.

In Lexington, Kentucky, there exists a vibrant, growing Ukrainian community.  We’ve had a lot of renovation done at our house and one of the primary workers is a Ukrainian affectionately dubbed “Slav” by his fellow workers.  We’ve talked about Ukraine on occasion.  On one occasion I accepted his invite to a bake sale at his Ukrainian church.  The church is doing well and is an anchor in providing a social network for newly arrived Ukrainians, which include many young people. The other day, I was walking back to my car after grocery shopping at Meijer’s, when a car honked. It was Slav. He had just returned from the Ukraine.  

Just maybe Lexington’s best roofing enterprise happens to be Ukrainian. My physician is from the Ukraine.  How can I not think about them?

It’s estimated that some 7 million Ukrainians perished from famine following Stalin’s collectivization of Ukraine’s peasant owned farmlands in 1932-33.  Another 10-million perished in World War II.  What most historians miss is that Ukraine bore the biggest brunt of the Nazi invasion, being a total battleground between German and Soviet armies.  Only 5% of Russian territory was occupied.

Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine announced its independence.  There was little Russia could do, since the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal was on Ukrainian soil.  In 2009, an agreement was worked out between the negotiating parties, which included the United States.  One of Ukraine’s demands was a guarantee of its sovereignty.  The U. S. granted Ukraine the same assurances guaranteed to non-nuclear signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the signatories of the Final Helsinki Act (1975).

As I write, paramilitary forces in Russian dominated Crimea have seized the local parliament buildings and its airports and Putin has put 150,000 troops on alert.  The Crimea had been added to the Russian Empire under Catherine II.  In 1954, it was restored to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, an ethnic Ukrainian.

Despite Secretary of State Kerry’s warning to Russia not to interfere, it’s not going to mean much in a way of any meaningful U.S. response, especially with an indecisive president in office who runs from confrontation; has failed to support moderate rebels in Syria, allowing extremist sectarian factions to enter into the fray; has never really signed on to supporting our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan; and is now bent on unilaterally reducing our army to pre-World War II levels.  No one wants war.  But it’s doubtful the EU or U.S. will invoke economic or trade measures either.

What seems a given is that Putin isn’t going to allow Ukraine to cozy-up with the West, culminating in joining the EU and becoming a NATO member.  Putin dreams of reestablishing a political and trade confederation of the former constituencies of the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU).  Slated to go into full effect in 2015, its prototype presently includes Russia, Belarus, and Kazakstan, with Kyrgyzstan to join soon.  This grand scheme ultimately includes Ukraine, which can only be accomplished by Russian economic pressure and/or military intervention.  Putin’s scheme is to return Russia to its past preeminence, a world competitor on equal footing with the EU, USA, and China.  It’s what Sochi was all about.

Right now, the situation in Ukraine is ominous, given the large Russian majority population in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.  Historians may remember that Hitler used the pretext of a mistreated German minority to invade Poland.

It will only take a spark for history to repeat itself.

–rj

Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Mayhem Alive and Well

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Despite President Obama’s spirited pledge to reduce the growing gap between rich and poor, his administration has been covertly involved in negotiating a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement whose potential fallout would only exacerbate, not lessen, the economic divide, consolidating what is essentially an oligarchy of Wall Street interests.

You may be unfamiliar with the TPP, as it’s not played up in the media, unless you’re a rare aficionado of the marketplace.  Briefly, 14 nations bordering the Pacific, controlling 40% of the world’s GDP and 26% of its trade, have been at work for more than a year, hammering out the final details of a complex agreement that would eliminate tariffs on goods and services.  Composed of 29 chapters, its scope would include not only the area of finance, or banking, but telecommunications (i.e., the Internet), and even food services.  It would have devastating consequences for those of us committed to environmental concerns that include global warming.

Ominously, it includes proposals that would curtail consumer protection across a wide spectrum.  According to Republican Reports, leaked TPP negotiation documents reveal the Obama administration’s attempts to stymie other governments from implementing financial regulations, believing they could mitigate another bank collapse.

These leaked documents (see citizen.org) indicate proposals allowing corporations to sue governments under the auspices of “foreign tribunals,” thus circumventing domestic courts and local laws.  Corporations could even demand financial compensation for “tobacco, prescription, and environment protections” that undermine their profits.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren–I like her more everyday–warns, such provisions allow “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place without the cameras rolling and the lights on.”

Alarmingly, even without the TPP, over $3 billion has already been paid out to foreign investors under current U.S. trade and investment agreements, with another $14 billion pending, “primarily targeting environmental, energy, and public health policies” (citizen.org).

Representing the U.S. in the negotiations is Obama appointee Stefan Selig, a former Bank of America investment banker nominated to become Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce.  Since his nomination, he’s received $9 million in bonuses.  (He had received $5.1 million incentive pay the previous year.)

Slated to join him in the negotiations, pending Congress’ approval, is Michael Froman, presently U.S. Trade Representative.  He received $4 million from CitiGroup as an exit payment in addition to $2 million in connection with his holdings in several investment funds.

This practice of banks lining the pockets of their former cohorts upon joining government is pervasive in the banking industry, pocket money for establishing influence in contexts affecting public financial policy.

Unfortunately, for all the pretty rhetoric coming out of the White House, the oligarchy of the one percent remains entrenched, and even abetted, while the TPP, added to its already formidable arsenal of financial peddling, poses a potent means to intimidating the common citizenry, here and abroad, opposed to its hegemony of privilege.

It certainly doesn’t contribute to economic parity.  According to a study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, as reported in the Washington Post, the economic gains would largely accrue to the wealthy.

–rj

Governor Cuomo: “They have no place in the state of New York.”

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As New York governor Andrew Cuomo sees it, pro-life activists, anti-gay activists and Second Amendment supporters aren’t welcome in his state:

Their problem (GOP) is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves.  Who are they?  Are these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault weapon, anti-gay?  Is that who they are?  Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Later, in an open letter to the New York Post, he claimed his remarks had been distorted.   Here, I’ll take him at his word–that he meant that the New York electorate won’t tolerate such views.  Judging by recent elections, he’s right.

Still, the genie is out of the bottle and his phrasing unfortunate, if not symptomatic, of an increasingly trenchant political milieu, though I admit that politics hasn’t ever been a safe place to venture, even at the private level.

I’m further dismayed that much of the current incivility comes from the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, intolerant of those who disagree with them, subjecting them to highly charged labeling, caricature, and derision.

It didn’t help matters when Mylan Denerstein, counsel to the governor, later published a backtracking piece on the governor’s website, using the phrase, “extremist agenda” for those with such views.

Ironically, with one verbal swoop, the governor sloughs off the sincerity of millions of Roman Catholics and evangelicals who believe abortion to be a termination of a human being or that homosexuality isn’t biologically a genetic component, or gun advocates who believe the Second Amendment supports their viewpoint.

Let me make clear I don’t subscribe to their beliefs, but I do advocate strongly their right to their beliefs in keeping with the First Amendment:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech….”

It’s time for all of us to quit throwing rocks at each other.  It solves nothing except to underscore an underlying insecurity about our views, spilling over into angry backlash rather than testing our beliefs in the arena of public debate.

Cuomo assumes this conservative element is both extreme and a minority viewpoint.  Does this mean that you judge the worth of an idea or belief by how many hold it, or the weight of public opinion?   As that “saint of rationalism, John Stuart Mill, cogently warned us in On Liberty (1859), majorities can ultimately consummate themselves as tyrannies repressing minority opinion even in a democratic context.

Minorities come not just in colors or ethnicities, but in beliefs as well. thus they also fall under the canopy of civil rights and need to be assertively protected.  Only one boundary should exist:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it (Mill).

Unfortunately, we’ve seen our liberty for divergent opinion increasingly eroded, ironically, often lurking within the bastions of academe and not just government or media.  Ideas, no matter how repugnant we may view them, deserve their exposure in public debate.

I think Jonathan Rauch, political commentator and Brooking Institute member, summarizes it quite well in his Kind Inquisitor:  The New Attack on Free Thought, Expanded Edition (Univ. of  Chicago, 2013):

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong.  This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.

Are you listening, Governor Cuomo?

–rj

The Yacht Mentality that Threatens our Economy

unemploy I turned on the TV while eating lunch yesterday to a feature called “Island Paradises,” thinking Hawaii or maybe some Caribbean gem like Dominica or St. Vincent’s.  Instead, it was about one man’s substantial investment, worth $28 million, in a plus 100 foot long yacht, sporting 3 recreational decks with pools, 7 bathrooms and 15 bedrooms, plus 3 bars and a below deck garage replete with several sleek motorized boats.  Docked in Ft. Lauderdale, it costs– Can you believe this?–$50,000 a fill-up.

I don’t know about you, but this kind of ostentatious display of wealth rankles me, not because I’m covertly envious, but because I think it represents excess and is just plain ethically wrong in a world of so many poor.  Again, I think of the 1% in my own country (USA), who own 37% of its wealth and whose income has actually increased since the economic downturn of 2008 (Pew Report, February 2013).  Meanwhile, hundreds of service food workers have staged walkouts in quest of a more sustainable minimum wage, presently $7.25 an hour. The average food service worker actually makes about $11 an hour, barely above the poverty line for a single parent with one child.

The President is compassionately urging an extension of unemployment benefits for 1.3 million presently receiving unemployment insurance.  (The total number of long term unemployed, however, stands at a stubborn 3.5 million.)  As he rightly put it in Saturday’s weekly address, “The holiday season is a time for remembering the bonds we share and our obligations to one another as human beings.”

It isn’t that the vast majority of these folks are free loaders.  It’s simply that they’ve been looking and can’t find work and that, by the way, is what the drop in unemployment to 7% really means, that thousands of despairing workers have simply given up looking for work. Unfortunately, the longer you’re out of work, the more companies shy away from you.  What’s more, in a strained economy, many companies are resorting to part-timers to circumvent having to pay benefits and to maximize profits.

What really hurts is when you’re past 50 and lose the job you’ve worked at a good many years, anticipating a reasonable retirement package just a few years up ahead.  This recently happened to a friend of ours, an engineer with a strong resumé in computer skills. Though he looked everywhere, he ended-up driving a school bus.  So even if you find work, you’re likely to find your sharply reduced wages sure to contribute to your continuing financial distress.  The situation for blacks and hispanics is even bleaker.

That yacht feature reinvests my thoughts as I write.  The obscenity of it!  The truth is, despite what conservative pundits tell you, a massive transfer of wealth is taking place in America and it’s not Robin Hood style from rich to poor.  Consider this from the Pew Report:

During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%.

Think movie stars with their posh Bel-Air and Malibu compounds; instant millionaire athletes, Wall Street traders; bank CEOs.  Hey, think Walmart with its six family progeny having a bloated net worth of $144.7 billion.  Wal-Mart currently pays its “associates” $8.81 an hour.

Again, our President weighs-in:

If Members of Congress don’t act before they leave on their vacations, 1.3 million Americans will lose this lifeline. These are people we know. They’re our friends and neighbors; they sit next to us in church and volunteer in our communities; their kids play with our kids. And they include 20,000 veterans who’ve served this country with honor.

In the meantime, House Speaker John Boehner, emerging as America’s Scrooge, has served notice of his opposition to any extension of unemployment insurance, set to expire December 28.

This is America.  We can do better than a yacht mentality of self-absorption, extravagance and indifference.

–rj

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The Heart of Darkness: The Syrian Inferno

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The civil war in Syrian, which began in March 2011, drags on with all its madness and no end in sight.  In that time, 125,000 (latest figures) have died and 2 million of Syria’s 6 million population fled, spilling its human burden into refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.

All wars are destructive, but civil wars usually are among the worst.  In our own civil war, 600,000 died, which is more than all our wars combined; more than a million perished in Spain; 2 million in Algeria and Korea.  One of the worst scenarios missed by the media is the loss of 5 million lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1998 and 2008.

The present conflict proves no exception.  While we normally associate casualties with the military waging war, the truth is that civilian casualties nearly always exceed military losses by a wide margin; for example, an estimated 20 million European civilians died in World War II.

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In Syria,  a good many of these casualties are children.  Consider these recently released findings (UN High Commissioner Report):

11,000 children killed.

More than half of 70,000 families now without a father.

4000 children separated from their families.

Hundreds of children born in refugee camps stateless (unregistered births and no birth certificate).

Most children cut off from school.

All wars are tragic enactments of the primordial vestiges still resident in Man. This conflict, however, has seen some of their worst manifestations, with children deliberately targeted by sniper fire and even tortured.

Horrendous as all of this is, no one seems to have come-up with a chokehold to halt the carnage.  Maybe it’s too late anyway in a struggle that seems to have come down to attrition.  While the Assad regime has gained momentum lately against the rebels, the war has become more complicated with jihadists, including al Qaeda, pouring in from other nations. Increasingly, the struggle has turned sectarian, with Shiites pitted against Sunni. It’s Iraq all over again with long term, intractable violence the likely fallout even after any settlement is reached.

In my view, it needn’t have turned out this way had we armed the moderate rebels from the beginning, even as the Saudis had wanted, and before the entrance of Iranian-supported Hezbollah and al Qaeda in large numbers.  While the Obama administration finally did opt to supply at least light arms to the rebels, it turns out that after a year it hadn’t shipped any.  It’s simply too late to help now, since the old alibi that weaponry might fall into extremists hands has gained a validity that didn’t initially exist.

I blame President Obama for much of Syria’s pro-longed anguish.  From the very beginning, he has been ambivalent, or unable to come to a decision, despite his often pointed rhetoric should the Assad regime use chemical weapons:

We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons (August 2012 News Conferences).

Then came his notorious aborted cruise missile launch in response to Syria’s calling his bluff with its chemical assault on civilians, resulting in a thousand deaths.  As it turns out, there had been previous, smaller scale chemical attacks and the President had not acted.  In mid stream, naval vessels off the Syrian coast ready to launch, the whole world watching, he did an about face, passing the puck to Congress, only to withdraw the vote option when Russia came up with its initiative to negotiate the destruction of the government’s chemical stockpile with Assad.  Got Obama off the hook, to say the least.

Imagine my surprise in all of this!  A Hamlet in the White House, this president suffers from an inability to act.  We should have seen this coming.  In election year 2012, he had the gall to use the bin Laden hit for political fodder, though the truth is he knew of bin Laden’s hideout  since  the summer of 2010, or nearly two years earlier, thus risking his escape.

As liberal Arianna Huffington shared with CBS: ‘We should celebrate the fact that they did such a great job. It’s one thing to have an NBC special from the Situation Room… all that to me is perfectly legitimate, but to turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do” (Daily Mail).  It turns out that the White House had drawn up a contingency plan with a general for a fall guy should the assassination go awry.

Returning to the cruise missile fiasco, I like how House Democrat Adam Smith, a key member of the House Armed Services Committee, put it:

I don’t think you draw a line like that, that is not well thought out.  You do not say, ‘If you step across this line, we will commit U. S. Military force,’ unless you really mean it, unless you know the full implications of it.

Under the cover of the chemical weapons agreement things have gotten considerably worse for the rebels, with Assad’s forces launching daily bombing raids on the rebels and civilians in the areas they control.

Sadly the American public seems in lock-step with Obama, despite dissenters on his own White House team.  If you dip into Google and Twitter commentary, you’ll find Syria virtually absent as a search or discussion item.  We’re much more into Miley Cyrus.

I think of Auden’s poignant depiction in his “Musee des Beaux Arts” poem with its ironic undertones of the corner existence of human grief in the public world:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just dully walking along.

………,,

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I think of Syria’s children.

–rj

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Detroit elects a white mayor: earnest on a nation’s future

duggan

Yesterday, in case you missed it, off year elections took place across America, most notably in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, the results ho-hum, or going according to the pundits.  There was one race, however, that grabbed my attention–the election of Mike Duggan as Detroit’s new mayor.  Duggan happens to be white in a city 80% black. He’s the first white in 40 years elected to that office.

It’s understatement, of course, to say he faces a gargantuan challenge in a floundering, virtually bankrupt, city plagued with endemic poverty and violent crime.  Detroit, by any measure, has become a largely vaporized city, with empty lots and boarded-up houses.  When I lived there in the 60s, the factories still hummed and population stood well over a million in our nation’s fifth largest city.  Today it’s shrunk to just over 700,000 as thousands of the city’s middle class blacks have joined long-gone whites in the suburbs.

In Detroit, it isn’t about color anymore, but about desperation.  I find a silver lining in this sad news–that yes, a populace rightly harboring resentment for past wrongs can move past bitterness, and even prejudice, to embrace giving the tools to the person who can get the job done.

I would love it just as much to see white majorities reciprocate.  We have a black president, historic–yes–but the truth is the majority of whites voted against him both in 2008 and 2012.  I’d like to think it didn’t come down to race, but I shed naivety when I grew up, and I’m wary.

But for today, I’m ecstatic about what happened in Detroit yesterday and you should be too, given our still all too prevalent tensions among races and ethnicities, despite our nation’s model, e pluribus unum (one out of many).  Only a few months ago wounds reopened with the Zimmerman trial.

As always, Dr. King put it eloquently in his “I Have a Dream” speech of 50 years ago:

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone

The bottom line is that what matters most isn’t color, but compassion centered in human need. Yesterday, Detroit paid earnest on the city’s–and nation’s–future.

Dr. King would be proud.

–rj