He recently proposed a plan that would cut the budget deficit dramatically by 2020, through draconian cuts in taxes and spending. Normally, one would hope that the stupidity filter would have limited the exposure of this idea, by now an ancient, but persistent Republican solution. I believe this Republican retread is now in the Old Testament. But, the Washington Post made a big deal of Ryan’s  plan and reported that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) indicated that indeed, the budget deficit would be cut in half by 2020 if government adhered to his ingenious prescription. But, in one of Paul Krugman’s best op-ed pieces in some time, he points out that the CBO only calculated the budget savings based on the decrease in government spending and did not figure in the lost Federal revenues from the tax cuts. Oops! Obligingly, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center took up the issue and made the appropriate calculations, indicating that the tax losses from Ryan’s plan would be $ 4 trillion over the next decade, so adding the two figures  together–tax cuts and cuts in government programs– gives a deficit of $ 1.3 trillion or about the same as the estimate for the current fiscal plan of the Obama administration. Ryan achieves his miracle by cutting taxes on the richest 1%, while increasing taxes on everybody else. Then too there are unspecified cuts, most of which will come later by dismantling Medicare. As Krugman points out, this is the same plan that Newt Gingrich, another genius Republican, suggested in 1995, as the Republicans assumed command and control of Congress. You will want to read Krugman’s article, as my summary here doesn’t do justice to his wit, sarcasm and simple arithmetic.

RFM

A gripping story, describing three generations within a family (the Nicholson family in Grafton, Mass) who experienced three different transitions in our economy, including the post-WW II, post-Vietnam and today’s recession, was published a few weeks ago in the New York Times. For the millennial generation of 18-29, the unemployment rate, officially at 14 percent, approaches the level  for that group during the Great Depression. But, now add to that the 23 percent that have stopped looking for work, based on Bureau of Labor statistics, and you come up with a whopping unemployment rate of 37 percent, the highest it has been in more than three decades and within the range of the 1930s. For young adults seeking work today, this is their Great Depression. Adult unemployment in the Great Depression reached about 20% of the work force (though numbers for this period are not as accurate as today’s; some numbers that are higher for unemployment during the depression did not include classifying workers in emergency work, like the temporary work created by Federal jobs programs, etc as being employed).

Among the millennial generation, a college education helps, but the unemployment rate among college-educated young adults is currently at 5.5%, or nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession in 2007. That is the highest level by two percentage points, since the bureau began keeping records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college. A college degree is no longer an insurance policy against prolonged unemployment. We have hollowed out our economy and exported many would be good paying jobs. So far there are no signs that things are getting better for any group of workers in our economy, quite independent of their level of education. Indeed, recent economic forecasts suggest that our economy will contract before it expands, as stimulus money runs dry and nothing is available to pick up the slack.  Europe’s decision to introduce an anti-Keynesian fix to their problems, beginning with Greece, is compounding the issues we face in reaching for a more global and balanced economic recovery. So what happened?

A major fault line in our economic recovery strategy was the insufficient level of the stimulus package we engineered to soften the blow of the collapse. If we had invested somewhere between two and three times what we did invest as our stimulus package, we surely would have been seeing more light at the end of the tunnel by now (too much of the stimulus package was in the form of tax breaks, which are often not used or used late). Very likely, we would have started seeing new job growth through a stronger nurturing of the new economy we will require,  as new businesses could have been generated based on the richest resource we have–our scientific and technological skill level, which now lies fallow because of poor investment decisions and too much money spent on propping up banks and corrupt financial institutions. This unfortunate outcome, the lack of a sufficient Keynesian response to our financial collapse, has left us with rich bankers and unemployed young people. Is that an even sensible trade? Where will our economy come from that we need in order to generate good-paying jobs that can fill the void and the reduce the vast unemployment debt we have accumulated as the biggest obstacle for our future? Right now we seem to be content to let the bankers get away with it and allow our young people to suffer. They are paying the real cost of this economic disaster.

The youngest member of the Nicholson family, caught in exactly this circumstance, remains optimistic about his future, a very different outlook compared to those who went through the Great Depression in the 1930s. Let’s hope we can right our ship in sufficient time to reward his optimism and start generating the new economy by investing in the one area where we stand a chance of regaining leadership–the art and science of saving our planet and learning to live within the limitations of  finite planetary resources. Are we that stupid? Have we been out-Foxed? Is corporate power too much for us to resist and prevent us from reshaping our economic foundations? I don’t think so, but these numbers for the unemployment among young people must become more broadly known and right now the traditional media that we rely on for news refuses to get down and dirty in the places we need in order to flush out and reveal the truly suffering class, our youth, who are currently spared from despair by their innate optimism. How much longer can that last? It would be better for all of us if it didn’t last much beyond tomorrow because it is fixable.

As a companion to the worst recession since the Great Depression, we have a political and financial system that got embedded in the army and acquired the art of generating financial bubbles. Those same people that gave us our bubbles, including the dot com and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, have given us a solution by a massive transfer of wealth that has yet to be recognized as such. Scott Nicholson’s good paying job went into buying a Goldman Sachs executive a new house and a new boat and a twenty five year lease on an expensive boat slip in Long Island.

According to Lou Dubose, editor of The Washington Spectator (highly recommended), here is what the banking industry visited on our economy: $14 trillion in lost household wealth; 8 million jobs gone, not yet returned or even on the horizon (thus the need for brand new ones); 200 community banks closed and more than $14 trillion in bailouts accompanied by a staggering increase in deficit spending needed to keep the economy out of a depression (it just wasn’t enough to give us a good jump start). The credit default swaps that swamped our economy were created by speculators that didn’t actually own the stock in question. What they made was a bet about whether one stock might default and another investor gave them  credit default swap insurance against that happening. Neither investor actually invested in the company per se. By the time credit default-swap trading destroyed the economy, 90 percent of the traders were speculators and many of them were banks. Furthermore, it was the Wall Street bond lawyers who wrote the “Commodities Future Modernization Act” that Phil Gramm held up as the wave for our new future in 2000. With the final regulatory constraints out of the way, over the counter derivatives went from $100 trillion in 2000 to $600 trillion when the economy collapsed in 2008–that was 10 times the GDP of the entire world! Graham was Wall Street’s operative in the Senate, but the bill had strong support from Clinton’s Treasury Secretary (Larry Summers–now in charge of Obama’s National Economic Council). Not surprisingly that bill also had the strong endorsement of Alan Greenspan. The same people who engineered our financial meltdown are now engineering our recovery. Any wonder why we are not seeing anything close to a recovery? Is there any doubt why the recovery that was engineered for us to enjoy is not enjoyable at all? Obama hired the wrong team. We need a new one. For starters, I would recommend Joseph Stiglitz.

RFM

Twain was an avowed anti-militarist and abhorred the empire wars he watched America engage in, including the Spanish American war, in which he describes, in the new biography, American soldiers fighting in Cuba as “our uniformed assassins.” You can see why the author of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” might pause before allowing remarks such as that to come into print during his lifetime. But Mark Twain had a tragic life. He almost committed suicide once in San Francisco before he became a famous writer, after which he experienced serious debt problems and witnessed the loss of many of his family members to sudden illness. Twain was a great humorist, but his sharp sense of humor was the frosting that covered a layer cake of tragedy and worry. Nearly everyone has read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, as it remains required reading in public schools (I hope). Twain once said that he is not an American, he is the American and who can disagree.

As we all await the first of the three new volumes on Mark Twain’s autobiography to arrive, you might find it interesting to review the life of Mark Twain as told in the excellent documentary by Ken Burns, available on Netflix as a DVD or streaming video.

When thinking about human evolution, I can’t help but remind myself of  one of the remarks that Twain made, which  surfaces in the Ken Burns documentary. He said “I think God invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.” As one of Twain’s biographers said, what made Twain unique was space and slavery. The America Twain grew up in was a gigantic space, unrivaled as such in the known world and slavery was a part of that new space, which any humanitarian had to address. Twain did address slavery, after the Civil War in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, published in 1885; in so doing, he changed forever the American understanding of slavery, race and prejudice. It has been argued that without “Huck Finn” the civil rights legislation of the 1960s could never have been passed, or at least it would have been considerably more delayed. The cultural penetration of a great novel, when read by most Americans,  is hard to deny but not easy to fathom.

At the time of his death, Mark Twain, who had struggled all his life against the Samuel Clemens within him, was the most famous writer in the world and, when seen walking the streets of any city in the world, would be surrounded by people hoping to hear a remark from him about any subject that pleased him. He adored and sought out visible public adulation and was comfortable speaking on virtually anything that pleased him. In general, when he spoke, it also pleased those that gathered to hear his remarks.

RFM

Al Franken

If you watched any part of the Elena Kagan Senate judiciary hearings for her nomination to the Supreme Court, you might have recognized that someone stole the show. It was not Kagan herself, though she had some good moments and, as a future Supreme Court Judge, one can anticipate that she will make an excellent foil against ideologues on the court, who want to rule from their gut, such as Antonin Scalia.  Kagan knows the law and she’s firm enough in her convictions through scholarly experience that we hope she won’t back down to decisionary arguments that arise directly from the intestinal wall.  Nevertheless, her placement on the Supreme Court will still preserve the current  5 to 4 decision-making balance, as the court will still be able to march the country to the very edge of a corporatist state. But the star of last week’s judicial hearings was Minnesota’s junior Senator Al Franken, the newest member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although he was probing the opinions of Kagan herself on legal issues, his message was really directed to his fellow Republican members on the Judiciary, whose favorite theme was whether Kagan would be an “activist judge” and if so they would argue, she would be an undesirable new member of the court.

But during Franken’s questioning, he established how, in many cases, the Roberts court had exceeded  the normal judiciary philosophy and and in doing so was effectively making new law from the bench. The court that the Republicans wanted to defend was in fact the most activist court in decades, sort of like the pro-slavery Supreme Court of the 1850s.  Franken showed deep knowledge of case law in the examples he cited and he always structured his arguments in such a way that he was supporting the average person when confronted by legal obstacles, or unfair practices.  Franken did most of the talking and appeared to frustrate Kagan, as she was given little room to express herself except that she mostly agreed with Franken’s assertions, at least on principle issues. Franken’s probing left little doubt that the Roberts court, through their many, sometimes shocking decisions, is effectively the right arm of our march to a corporatist state and he gave very concrete, important examples of how this was being achieved and how prior laws, such as labor laws, were being undermined or ignored by the Roberts Court. A C-Span video is available where you can see Franken’s remarks on labor laws and mandatory arbitration and how the court has dismissed previous congressional labor laws which bestowed an employees right to sue his/her employer with new rules that replace that right with mandatory arbitration clauses embedded in the labor contract. This trend has been aided by recent decisions of the Roberts court. You can watch a section of Franken’s interview with Kagan here, though you have to go into the video by about 1:32 to see the Franken section.

Before Franken’s turn at the microphone in the Kagan hearing, several Republican Senators had used Kagan’s appearance to slam Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge appointed to the Supreme Court. Kagan was formerly a law clerk with Marshall and had given glowing evaluations of him as a Supreme Court judge. Many Republicans have racism in their genome, but make sure their race card gets played out through deflected attacks, such as those on a deceased Supreme Court judge.  Franken defended Marshall very eloquently and pointed out how his decision-making process and his rulings and opinions made him one of the great Supreme Court  justices of all time, primarily because his decisions were not aimed at improving the fairness under the law only for blacks, but for all people against whom discrimination had been given the sanctuary of law.  Franken’s probing of the law, with Kagan as background,  provided stark relief from the simple-minded nature that Supreme Court Justice nominee hearings have been in recent years: he cited case law and even footnote numbers to demonstrate what justices had decided in several famous cases that seemed to go against the grain of common sense or prior established law. Franken stood in stark contrast to all other Senators, who must have been embarrassed to see a non-lawyer out-doing them on matters of judicial philosophy and details of important case law.  He single-handedly raised the bar for future Supreme Court nominee interrogations and hearings. It is doubtful that the Republicans would even try to defend the Roberts court decisions in these many areas, as they have chosen obfuscation over clarity.  Franken’s views are unabashedly progressive and he doesn’t try to hide them–he is staunchly committed to the law as it exists to protect the average citizen or including those workers who are no longer getting a “fair shake” under the law, especially when standing before the current iteration of the Supreme Court. His views include the old fashioned idea that corporations exist to serve the public, not the other way around. Once we get back to that point of view, we should be able to pronounce our society as healthy once again.

Ever since the two term Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, was tragically killed in an airplane crash during his campaign  for re-election in 2002, something has been missing from the Senate. During his short two-term Senate career, Wellstone had a clear voice in which he articulated the case against going to war with Iraq in 1991 and in 2002 and spoke out forcefully for the average citizen in such areas as increased support from our healthcare system for viewing and treating  psychiatric illnesses as valid health problems. Although Ted Kennedy was also articulate and passionate on many matters, particularly health care, Wellstone’s focus made him standout as a special protector of the poor and dispossessed.    He was passionately sincere and a populist supporter of a progressive legislative agenda. He reproduced Robert Kennedy’s trip into Appalachia to demonstrate than malnourishment among the poor in that region was just as bad as when Kennedy had visited there some forty years earlier.

When Wellstone spoke, the entire senate listened and he became identified as the conscience of the Senate. His oratorical capacity to articulate his point of view was almost obligatory listening for all Senators, from both sides of the isle, even though many felt the same way they had felt about Hubert Humphrey many years earlier–that he talked too much. However, Wellstone’s absence since 2002 has reduced the Senate to a much more contentious, confrontational and highly polarized body that had, at one time,  seemed far more focused and sensitive when Wellstone’s voice was among them. Many liberal Senators, such has Harkin of Iowa,  were shocked and wept openly when Wellstone died; no one has quite replaced him.  Although the DFL (Democratic-Farm-Labor) party in Minnesota tried to quickly insert Walter Mondale to oppose Norm Coleman in the closing days of the 2002 Minnesota Senate campaign, immediately after Wellstone’s death, voters were disgusted at the apparent attempt to turn Wellstone’s public eulogy into a political event promoting Mondale’s candidacy (Franken, who attended the event, pointed out in his book (see below) that painting the Wellstone memorial service as a political event was right-wing propaganda and those that promoted this idea (Peggy Noonan as one example) were not even in attendance). Propaganda or no, Wellstone’s Senate seat was filled by Republican Norm Coleman, former mayor of St. Paul and former Democrat, who would prove to be a right-wing apologist for GW Bush up and down the political spectrum.  This transition between Wellstone and Coleman in the span of a single Senate seat was an excursion in political philosophy and independence that was shocking in its operation and disgusting to see as a resident of Minnesota. Six years later, comedian Al Franken, a most unlikely candidate, won the DFL’s endorsement and the Democratic primary to run against Coleman, who was seeking his second term. Though one of the closest elections in Minnesota history, Franken was eventually declared the winner, after a massive, complex recount of the vote. The delay imposed by the long vote recount and court actions surrounding the election, meant that Franken’s appointment to the Senate was delayed and that he couldn’t enter in a timely fashion with the incoming congressional class from the 2008 election results. He was sworn in as U.S. Senator on July 7, 2009. He had been officially  declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate election by 312 votes.

When Franken joined the Senate, he was given the standard treatment for a junior Senator, but did manage to get a spot as the lowest ranking Senator on the Judiciary committee. However, no one knew what to make of him as a Senator. He had been a famous comedian on Saturday Night Live. He had migrated to have his own syndicated radio show, Air America and had written five best-selling books, one of which seemed to frame his evolving political personality in his 2003 book “Lies and the lying liars who tell them: a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” in which he took on the main right-wing pundits, such as O’Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, Paul Gigot, the editorial section of the Wall Street Journal and many others. This was not just a simple pundit’s book; it was one aided by a group of Harvard students who helped chase down articles, such that the book included references as if it was a book of scholarship and research, containing  notes for each chapter in the back of the book. Despite the title, the book was a “cut above.” It served to help Franken establish a kind of demarcation line between himself and those he criticized and made fun of.  He was sued by Fox News for his use of “Fair and Balanced” which they claimed was a registered trademark of the O’Reilly show. A federal judge dismissed the suit saying that it was without merit. In the meantime, very slowly, but with deliberate intent, Franken began speaking out about how the court system had violated judicial restraints by making recent landmark decisions which exceeded their authority under our constitution.

I had expected that when Wellstone died, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin would assume the leadership role for the progressive movement in the Senate and become the movement’s principal leader.  But, for reasons unclear to me, Feingold has been muffled, more so since Obama was elected. It now seems increasingly clear that the leadership role for progressive arguments and political philosophy will fall into the hands of someone other than Feingold, perhaps Al Franken. Franken is ambitious, very smart, with a good sense of humor and a person who strikes a little bit of fear in the hearts of every other Republican Senator who feels that they might become the target of one of Franken’s jokes. Given the nature of political reporting these days, a timely  joke or label from Franken about a Republican Senator might have the sticking power of super glue. The modern press, robbed of creativity of its own as a self-inflicted scarring wound,  loves to latch on to little phrases and descriptions so they don’t actually have to write about news, rather than cite quips.  Franken still has a long way to go before we can pronounce him the “Lion of the Senate,” but his comfort zone for this kind of leadership is rapidly growing as he gains experience and grows in reputation. It is quite amazing to me that no one in the mainstream media detected the separation that Franken established between himself and all other Senators on the Judiciary committee during the Kagan hearings. To me this separation was self-evident and full of substance. Those committee meetings will never be the same–their discourse has been irreversibly elevated.  Franken has not qiute finished a full year as a junior Senator, but there is no doubt that his voice will be heard more often as he has quickly become the most fascinating of all members of the Senate. To attach trivial descriptions to members of the Republican opposition, ones that will stick with the press is all that will be required for the press to begin talking about them as if their arguments and actions are indeed trivial.

RFM

As befitting a militarist society, especially after deciding to rule the world after WW II, we typically allow our generals to get their way in times of conflict and they are very experienced and skilled in how to game the system to achieve  their objectives. After all, most military officers in command positions are careerists–they are in it for the long haul, whereas with Presidents, it’s two terms at best, and then you’re out. Furthermore, the military is like a one party system that favors the most confrontational approach to our conflicts and in some areas, like the Air Force, is becoming a fundamentalist Christian organization, working through the right hand of God.  Our military leaders have learned to play our Presidents like a fiddle and they always have the upper hand: cross them or diminish their requests and you run the risk of endangering our troops that are already on the ground, or you are in danger of a complete meltdown of your presidency.  Lyndon Johnson was paranoid over losing Vietnam and going down in history as the first President to surrender a country to communism (who was responsible for Cuba?).  As a result, until the time when his Presidential aspirations were destroyed, Johnson  never said “no” to General William Westmoreland during the major part of his tenure over the Vietnam War; he allowed a massive troop infusion which reached a peak during his Presidency of 535,000 American soldiers on the ground.Vietnam was America’s biggest disaster if only for the fact that it was derived out of our ideology over communism and failed to see the nationalistic fervor of Ho Chi Minh.

But the contrast to the image given to us by the news media can be gleamed from a Newsweek excerpt from Jonathan Alter’s new book “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” which appeared in May of this year as “Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room” [the following is largely based on Alter's article]. We all remember that when Obama ran as a candidate, he referred to the Iraq war as the “wrong war” and Afghanistan as the “good war.” After all that was the war against those who had actually attacked us on 9/11. As Alter points out, when Obama was first formulating his new strategy for Afghanistan, he pronounced that he didn’t want to continue with the same policies that had produced an apparent quagmire and helped to make Afghanistan into a “narco state.” Obama had become acutely aware that during both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, there had never been any key meetings by policy makers where all the issues and assumptions were laid out on the table and discussed–both wars had escalated by incrementalism. OBama was determined not to let that happen over Afghanistan, especially since he demanded that a new strategy needed to be implemented. Obama basically said that for the past eight years, the military under GW Bush got everything they asked for and it was time to put some brakes on this process and view the conflict through a different set of spectacles. As Obama began to press for the kinds of meetings in which all issues could be discussed, he had the first of 10 “AFPAK” meetings on September 13, 2009. He raised the concern that the war in Afghanistan was soon going to be longer than the war in Vietnam (11 years) and would be the longest military conflict in American history. He was well aware of the fact that whatever policy he pursued, unless it was rapid removal of all troops, the war in Afghanistan would become Obama’s war and he ran the risk of having that war not only determine his Presidency, but perhaps, as it did to Lydon Johnson’s, destroying it in the process.

But, the military knew how to get their way and they began to engage in  gamesmanship. As the AFPAK meetings evolved, the Pentagon began to leak reports in order to force Obama into adopting their strategy, which included a large troop surge and a strategy of counterinsurgency, with virtually no end in sight.  In particular, an early  report by McChrystal on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan (before he was in charge) was leaked to reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post before Obama had a chance to see his recommendations. As Alter points out in his Newsweek article, “the military ran PR circles around the neophytes in the Obama White House.”

One idea for a new policy in Afghanistan was favored by Vice President Biden, who supported the strategy of the increased use of drones and restriction of military actions to those of pursuing Al Qaeda. At a speech in London in early October, McChrystal was asked if he favored a drone war focused on Al Qaeda and replied “The short, glib answer is no.” In other words, it appeared that McChrystal was prepared to defy the President, should Obama side with Biden’s suggestion–a clear act of insubordination and an unmistakable challenge to  civilian control over the military (something in fact that happens on a regular basis, particularly for military hardware procurements).  Obama and his advisers finally got the message–they interpreted McChrystal’s remarks as those of a naive spokesperson who was actually speaking for Joint Chief of Staff Michael Mullen and General David Petraeus, who were trying to box Obama in before he had decided on a policy in Afghanistan. Petraeus appeared to have both military and political power projections and has been considered as Presidential material for  a run for the Presidency as a Republican candidate in 2012, something he has denied.

In response to McChrystal’s London speech (October 2009), Obama decided that he needed to show the military brass who was in charge. Gates and Mullen were summoned to a National Security Council, where Obama told them that he was extremely unhappy with the Pentagon’s conduct and said that [From Alter's article]  “the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were disrespectful of the process and damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.” Obama insisted that he be informed “here and now if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.” As far back as anyone could remember, the military had never been spoken to like that and it grabbed everyone’s attention. No single President since Harry Truman had ever challenged the military as directly as Obama did that day. Mullen was “chagrined” after the meeting and claims to have always supported civilian control over the military. He and Gates pledged the kind of support and commitment that Obama demanded of them and told Obama that their conduct would change. A few days later Gates would say in a speech, “it was imperative that generals provide their advice candidly but privately.” At that point, the Pentagon stopped trying to sell McChrystal’s own plan for Afghanistan and agreed to support the President’s strategy. In the November AFPAK meeting, Obama called Petraeus on his bluff–and asked directly whether he could deliver in Afghanistan what he did in Iraq, using a counterinsurgency strategy coupled to a surge in troop numbers. His answer was affirmative. Obama agreed to a troop build-up, but only if the surge could be ramped up and then down on a much shorter time frame: the military was suggesting many years of commitment for the entire process to unfold–basically an unlimited extension of the war.  Obama demanded that the process be shortened so that by 2011, one could begin to bring troops home if it didn’t work or, alternatively,  if it was hugely successful. The key to the success of this strategy was to turn over retaken territory to the Afghans. The President’s instructions to McChrystal were clear–”don’t take territory unless you can immediately turn it over to the Afghans.”  Biden asked Obama [Alter's article] “if the new policy of beginning a significant troop withdrawal by 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn’t be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes.” Obama had learned how to deal with the military. He would thereafter close each meeting by saying “and that’s my order.”

In a private White House meeting, Obama pressed Petraeus harder by asking if he could really deliver a meaningful result in 18 months and Petraeus answered “yes.” He reassured Obama that the army could train the Afghan National Army to assume the responsibility for the war in that time. Obama got all of the military leaders, including Gates, Mullen and Petraeus to sign on board for the new policy. In this way, Obama managed to turn the tables on the Pentagon. If the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in the next 18 months, then it would be proof that the military’s insistence on more troops could not get the job done and their policy of counterinsurgency with a “surge” of troops would be a failure. No one then could say Obama had not given the military what they wanted, except that it was not going to be on their timetable. Had Biden been President at that time, he probably would have fired Gates and Mullen and forced Petraeus into a position of obscurity. When Obama spoke to McChrystal by teleconference when he first assumed command in Afghanistan,  he could not have been clearer in his instructions according to Alter: “Do not occupy what you cannot transfer.” McChrystal got the message.

This finally brings us to McChrystal’s interview in the Rolling Stone, the event that brought about his firing. By openly admitting that the battle for Marja was all but lost or interminably delayed, McChrystal was conveying that the counterinsurgency he had signed onto in 2009 was horribly naive and perhaps could never succeed. His own troops were angered by the approach; they were denied access to fighting a war, rather than handing out peanut butter.  It is not clear whether McChrystal was on a drunken spree with writer Michael Hastings or whether he was sober enough to understand that his remarks would undoubtedly relieve him of responsibility for carrying out a policy that he knew could never succeed, certainly not in the time frame that he believed could be accomplished when he signed on.  Now, fittingly, the conduct for the war in Afghanistan is in Petraeus’ hands, perhaps where it should have been all along. Petraeus knows too well that his strategy for the war cannot succeed–he knows that better than anyone. One can only wonder why we allow the surge in Iraq to be called a success, when in reality it was the conversion of Sunnis to get rid of Al Qaeda that initiated the reduction in violence.

Petraeus has positioned himself in such a way that the failure of the policy in Afghanistan will fall squarely on his shoulders, even though Republicans will argue otherwise.  In the meantime, more troops are needlessly dying and more roadside bombs are exploding. The countryside in Afghanistan is very divided about the American presence and there seems to be little support from Afghan president Hamid Karzai, though he pleaded with Obama not to fire McChrystal. But, McChrystal is merely a willing dupe or a pawn in a much larger game, about which he was and probably still is, very naive. The handbook for counterinsurgency was written by Petraeus, not McChyrstial. The best outcome for the Americans will be to wind down our military presence and eventually disappear, as every invader has done when they tried to confront and occupy the region known to us as Afghanistan. We are spending billions of dollars on the fifth poorest country in the world and our drones seem to be committing us to new enemies rather than first getting rid of the old ones.  While it is surely a lost war, by sticking to his timetable and putting the emphasis on another failed projection for success by our military leaders, much as they did when we were in Vietnam, Obama can prevent Afghanistan from destroying his presidency and might even have the troop commitment seriously winding down by the time he runs for re-election. No matter what the outcome, Obama has revealed himself as a shrewd, open but firm leader who is confidently in charge of our military, very much unlike his predecessor. That much we can be grateful for and in the end, that may be the best part of his Presidency. In Vietnam, we lost a war and did so in the battlefield. In Iraq and probably in Afghanistan, we are teaching ourselves how to re-tool defeat and shape it into something we call victory. It’s a grand illusion all over again.

RFM

BP has denied there are any health hazards to which cleanup workers get exposed and claims to have taken measurements of the air quality to prove it. But, but those measurements have yet to appear in public. Mr Guidry, knowledgeable about air quality issues, brought respirators to the commercial fisherman who were employed by BP for the cleanup, but they were all informed that BP would fire anyone caught using a respirator. Guidry claims that this experience goes all the way back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when respirators were not allowed to be used so that the company limited its liability; the use of respirators is an indication that the oil company believes there is an environmental problem with air quality and, as such, exposes them to the liability for respiratory ailments, a situation that could lead to long-term legal problems for the company. BP has stated that nothing is wrong with the air quality in the cleanup areas. If so, what made the workers ill a few weeks ago? Guidry claims it was exposure to toxins in the air. As it turns out, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Federal agency responsible for monitoring air quality has no jurisdiction for air quality over the water, but would have jurisdiction once the air moves onto land. It appears that the Coast Guard and MMS have jurisdiction over air quality issues in the water and so far these organizations have not made any decisions about air quality or cleanup worker safety. Measurements of air quality seem to be limited to those provided by BP. Mr Guidry reported that when he did work in cleaning up oil refineries, all workers had protective clothing and boots, as well as respirators as part of the normal routine worker protection. He has claimed that the lack of such protection exists solely so that BP limits its liability.

It would seem that The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a regulatory branch of our Federal Government, should have jurisdiction over environmental standards facing Gulf workers, since one could extrapolate work on the Gulf oil spill as as constituting a “workplace.” And, OSHA has standards for worker protection, which includes the need for respirators when adequate air quality conditions are not met. Under OSHA rules, respirators are supposed to be provided by the company. But, so far the respirators that have been showing up, though banned for use by BP, have all been provided by individuals, or in one case by the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).

Beginning today, the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, is sponsoring a two-day workshop in New Orleans, LA, to discuss environmental health issues that face workers and residents in the region, related to the oil spill and the cleanup operation. You can watch a webcast of the meeting and even submit questions by going here. To view this properly, you will need Microsoft’s Silverlight which you can get here. The government of the United States needs to step in and take control of the environmental issues that are now apparent in many locations of this oil spill. Everyone in the region smells “oil.” Those workers closest to the source where the oil comes to the surface of the ocean must experience the most serious air quality problems. Why isn’t BP releasing measurements from these regions? Already we see in BP a company with a long history of safety violations, with little interest in responding to them, followed by subsequent disasters, followed in turn by minor fines which they treat as the cost of doing business. And, all of this takes place in a country that doesn’t matter to them, because corporate headquarters are in Great Britain. So far, our government has basically rewarded BP for their unresponsive attitude towards our safety regulations, and, their behavior in the Gulf oil spill is simply an example of continuity with their long-established corporate traditions, going as far back as when the company was Anglo-Persian, then Anglo-Iranian, at which time every drop of oil that fed the entire British economy, including fuel for ships, cars and lawnmowers, came from Iran, while the people in Iran got little in return and were treated as impoverished workers. BP would like to treat the people of America as they did the people of Iran and will continue to do so unless the people of America finally grasp the deficiencies in this arrangement.

There is straight line continuity in the BP we see operating in the Gulf today and the BP that felt it had exclusive rights to all Iranian oil, without adequate compensation to the Iranian people some seventy years ago. BP as a company should only survive so that its resources can be used to fund the study and cleanup of the Gulf oil spill, followed by company profits that will be funneled into the development of alternative energy sources. In other words, forcing the company to live up to their ads which talk about bp meaning “beyond petroleum.” What is yet to be established is whether BP will stand for “beyond prosecution.” We have plenty of safety standards that we could impose tomorrow should we choose to do so. Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity for Obama and his administration to finally take the wheel of this out of control vehicle we call BP?

RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

The New York Times also has a multimedia site that is worth checking out; among other sources of information,  it has a history of major oil spills beginning with the oil well leak in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara. In that instance, prisoners were used as a major source of labor for the cleanup which employed tons of straw. But, how desperate are we for oil such that some wells in the gulf have been granted permits to drill beginning at more than 9,000 feet below the surface? Is this oil-drilling chutzpa or are we pursuing true needs? Oil companies fear that if they don’t feed the never ending growth of the expanding  global thirst for oil, consumers will turn to alternative fuels and sources of energy, dropping the price of oil and making these more risky oil adventures less cost-effective. But is that really true? How desperate are we for oil and how scarce are the sources, if we are now drilling at such deep sites, without having a more foolproof method for handling accidents.  This is an issue, in which the biggest oil-consuming country on the planet, namely us, can have a huge impact on our economy, the environment and the need for ever increasing oil supplies by adopting more sensible restraints on oil usage: the new federal standards for improved fuel economy will help, but other measures are needed to meet the demands in front of us for global climate change. The Copenhagen agreement seems too little too late, even though it’s better than nothing.
So far bp has been reluctant to have scientists make more definitive calculations of the magnitude of the oil spill, because this measurement will have a direct impact on the financial liability of the company.  A government report on the spill magnitude, compiled by several different agencies,  is due out this week. In the meantime bp is sticking to 5,000 barrels a day, but other estimates, based on seeing the films of the oil leak, go as high as 70,000 barrels/day. Bp refers to these higher estimates as alarmist!

RFM

With the new financial reform bill close to agreement, it has become clear that Obama intends to un-Reaganize the American economy and reshape how the government spends its money. In place of the GI bill at the end of WW II, which gave us a new vibrant middle class, Obama believes that increasing access to education, improving our public school system and putting more money into research and technology, can achieve the same objectives by reshaping government spending priorities.   David Leonhardt, a New York Times financial writer, has an excellent article in the Times today that briefly covers the major historical trends of the New Deal, the GI Bill, Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson followed by the Reagan years, which really lasted from the time he was elected President in 1980 until 2009 when Obama took over. You could actually include the Jimmy Carter presidency in many ways, as a component of the Reagan era, since he began the march towards deregulation when he began the process with the airline industry, and by not recognizing the strength of the Democratic Party resting with workers and unions, both he and Clinton fractionated the very party that got them elected.
In retrospect, the last 16 months of the Obama Presidency have provided a new vision, one that has been partially obscured by the financial crisis and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, looking around the corner, if Obama can get elected again and continue with his policies of reshaping the way Federal expenditures get distributed, his visionary zeal might just change America to a country we can, once again, feel good about or at least feel better about our future as a livable country, one for which we don’t have to apologize.   This year’s election will surely be the most fascinating in many many years. The Teabaggers have taken some primary elections and unseated standard Republicans, like Bennett in Utah. If Democrats insert truly liberal and progressive candidates to oppose them (a big if), we may see, for the first time in our life time, political contests that will have the most dramatic impact on congressional composition and philosophy, because candidates will be promoting truly opposite views that can impact government in significant ways. Perhaps this will be the election year, when the nation decides whether they want to continue the cultural wars or whether such engagements are beneath a serious country with a set of serious problems.
During Obama’s first year as President, I was disappointed in his centrist, cautionary policies, including his cabinet selections. But, since the Scott Brown election, I see a different Obama, one who is trying to reverse Reaganism, but needs to be elected a second time before he can tackle the really big issues, like reducing the military budget and more wisely investing in education to reduce its cost. Remember, that until Ronald Reagan was governor of California, tuition at the University of California system was free and we didn’t concern ourselves about whether creationism should be taught in science classes (as governor, Reagan first proposed that as a test balloon to see if it resonated with the country). We could return to that long lost previous iteration of ourselves as a functional country, if we return to morphing our prior selves, when we had  a country committed  to education, science and technology as the driving engine for better jobs and a better economy. Then, in my opinion, the cultural wars of today will rapidly disappear and we could have a real culture again.

RFM