Monthly Archives: November 2012

Capitalism – What Kind?

Posted by on 2012-11-30 No comments

Stephen Grossman’s piece, “Capitalism allows Americans to prosper,” lists a number of technologies which benefited humanity or changed society in some way. In most of the piece, Grossman conflates the scientific method and engineering advances with Capitalism itself.

I would probably agree with him that Capitalism has survived this long because greed is an unavoidably innate human characteristic. People were selling things and accumulating money long before accounting, international banking, and commodity trading were invented centuries ago.

In the 21st Century alone we have seen Capitalism in a variety of forms: an American version with varying degrees of greediness; a version under Fascism; a post-war European social-democratic variety; and now Chinese and Russian versions laced with remnants of their old command economies. If Capitalism is more-or-less a natural human activity, the question should not be “whether Capitalism?” It should be “what kind?”

But let’s deal with Grossman’s nonsense. It was cavemen who first discovered fire and the arrow. It was Communists who first sent a cosmonaut into space. Textiles, pottery, bronze, the wheel, the fulcrum, chemistry, navigation, celestial observation, agriculture, and many other sciences and technologies – all these were discovered or developed long before Capitalism became the religion of “Objectivists” like Mr. Grossman. If greed is an innate human characteristic, so is curiosity and laziness – the true mothers of science and technology.

Grossman claims that “the most rational people in any industry, company, or job selfishly pursuing their own happiness, increased everyone’s productivity vastly more than in any society in history.” To the stunted child workers of Fall River inhaling textile fibers, or the coal miners of Kentucky living half a life to profit someone else, this type of “productivity” is not something – to use Grossman’s own language – that a rational person would objectively choose for himself.

Indeed, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries – in which workers were exploited to such a degree – described nicely by Dickens and others – that they were kept in perpetual poverty; or lived “short and brutish” lives precisely because of the nature of piecework or industrial employment; or that the environment was polluted to such an extent – which led to alternate economic theories, revolutions, reforms, regulations, and the compromises we see today.

In contrast to the industrialists of the 18th and 19th century of which Mr. Grossman is enamored, today we know that our natural resources are finite. The capacity of garbage dumps, fuel supplies, water, minerals, even the capacity of the earth to deal with carbon emissions – everything is finite. And yet the main users and abusers of these resources produce products of questionable utility with dangers and expensive disposal costs like there is no tomorrow – and these costs are usually borne by society, not the companies producing them. A good example is our own PCB-contaminated harbor.

For Grossman there does not seem to be any middle ground. “Do you want Stalin… or Steve Jobs?” he asks. Now that we have discovered that many of Steve Jobs’ iPads were produced in Asian sweatshops, simplistic rhetoric like this should be tweaked to ask instead: What kind of Capitalism is acceptable?

This was published in the Standard Times on December 3, 2012
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20121203/opinion/212030324

Culture Park 2012

Posted by on 2012-11-25 No comments

Yesterday I caught the 2012 Culture*Park Short Plays Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I had the best ten hours. A few people from my playwriting group and a few friends were there, some of whose plays were being performed. My son met me toward the end of the marathon, seeing the kind of thing that has captured the old man’s fancy. Last night all was right with the universe.

As with anything, some plays had rough edges, but most were pretty good and quite entertaining — and some were excellent. As a beginning playwright, I learned a few things from several of them. Those that really connected with the audience’s emotions were those I paid particular attention to:

Bad Coffee by novelist, poet, director and playwright Pat Hegnauer depicts a novelist’s character haranguing her to promote the book and keep alive the world she has created. Hegnauer writes poetically, creating believable, moving and quite humorous dialogue. At the end, the writer’s character succeeds in keeping her world alive, something we of course have been rooting for all along. The takeaway for me was that powerful, moving language is often sufficient to carry a short play, especially if you really love your characters and don’t want to torture them too much.

Gin and Ashes by poet/playwright Kim Baker is the story of a daughter who has come to the hospital to obtain durable power of attorney for her terminally-ill mother and instead resolves a few mother-daughter issues. The characters are sparingly painted, yet we feel we know them. How does Baker do that? Playwrights can construct elaborate biographies for characters but, in the end, it’s the writing, not the detail, that makes them real and makes us love them.

How Kim Sa-Rang Got Her Name by Will Arbery is the story of a child who has been left to starve by negligent parents. Her desperate entreaties first appeal more to reason, then become more desperately emotional. Perhaps the writer’s artifice is easily-enough recognized, but it sure succeeds.

Wish by Kelly DuMar is the story of a woman who comes to a room in a convalescent home to visit a father who years ago raped her, leading to the birth of a child who then was taken from her. It compresses a life of pain into the thimble that is a ten minute play. The protagonist comes to confront her father, but all he can do is babble. The symbolism of her stealing his watch at the play’s beginning, then placing it back on his wrist at the end of the play, was just the right touch. The resolution is that, though she would like to steal back a lost life, she now accepts that she can never get back that time.

There were many more I loved, including a side-splitting, funny encounter between two drunken Bruins fans, a surprisingly poignant cooking lesson by a refugee, a tale from the Holocaust, a wonderful first play by a talented theater student, various studies of relationships, a wickedly funny, cynical piece on political campaigning, and several others. How great that New Bedford has Culture*Park!

The New Greatest Generation?

Posted by on 2012-11-22 No comments

Dear Mr. Dionne,

In your latest piece, “The new Greatest Generation,” you write: “… And here’s the most remarkable thing: Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them… we need to recognize the contribution that this new generation of veterans can make to our nation… we don’t need to be nostalgic about the Greatest Generation. It’s right here among us.”

We are a highly militaristic nation, often given to outright worship of the military. Liberals frequently go out of their way to demonstrate they have no problem rallying around the flag and “supporting the troops.” It’s in our culture.

What I take issue with in pieces like this is that Americans should be complaining about what is asked of the military. Low-level soldiers should be too. It was shocking – and necessary – when Stanley McChrystal blasted the incoherence of the war in Afghanistan. But somebody had to do it. Your new “greatest generation” isn’t doing it for the most part.

I am of the same generation you are. In my view, the “greatest generation” is still the citizen-soldiers of WWII who fought a war that was less morally ambiguous than all the many wars that followed it. The soldiers you praise today as “the greatest generation” are largely victims of a rotten economy who have found a new profession in the military. Surely, as a professor, you have noticed the demographic tilts that have started to manifest themselves in the makeup of the military. They are no longer the sons and daughters of every American family, and they no longer represent all regions of the nation equally. In a very disquieting sense, the military has become a new class of centurion-mercenaries.

I have no doubts that many of the men and women you encounter have a part to play and skills to offer the country. But so do all the rest of us. Today is Thanksgiving, not Veteran’s Day, not Memorial Day, not Independence Day – not one of the many days we already pray at the shrine of militarism.

Throwing My Vote Away

Posted by on 2012-11-12 No comments

Why do idealists vote for losers? Or: Why I didn’t vote for Obama.

For the last two years we heard we had a choice between two totally different candidates from two vastly different political parties, with two completely different roadmaps of where they wanted to take the country. If the Republicans had won, said the Democrats, there would have been a virtual Armageddon for the Middle Class, with the destruction of the world as we have known it since FDR and the precipitous rise of sea levels because of global warming. And if the Democrats had won, so the Republicans said, the real Armageddon would occur because Obama actually is the Anti-Christ. Either way, the election was framed in the most extreme terms by both parties as a last ditch effort to save the country — if not Western Civilization and the planet — from evil. There are only two views allowed in American politics, hence only two evils. And what sensible person wouldn’t vote for the lesser of them? But each time we do, we predictably get — evil.

In one corner we had the Republicans, a party 91.5% White — a party that reviles gays, atheists, civil libertarians, Muslims, undocumented workers, the French with their baguettes and 35-hour work weeks, foreigners in general, abortion, contraception, NPR, Subarus, quiche, Keynesian economics, gun control, environmental and consumer protection, the social safety net — and which rejects science, evolution, and climate change — instead embracing a hodgepodge of religious fundamentalism, Ayn Randian “Objectivist” worship of individual greed, Austrian/supply-side economics, American and Israeli Exceptionalism; and which every year talks about increasing the military budget, beefing up an already-bloated security state, putting more people in prison, disenfranchising as many young and minority voters as it can, deporting as many Latinos as possible, and rollling back civil liberties to Soviet era standards. This was their idea of Hope and Change.

The “new” Republican party has been rightly viewed as frighteningly extremist by even traditional Republicans, but this ignores the fact that it has been extremist throughout the life of most Boomers — dating back to Goldwater, to Patrick Buchanan and, yes, even Saint Reagan. To add a little perspective, in 2011 births from minorities overtook those of Whites. For the GOP, then, 2012 was the Last Hurrah for the Defense of the White Man, Western Civilization, Christianity, and traditional values before demographic Armageddon — and for many Republicans, the real one — arrives. Its Birther obsession with a “Muslim” “Kenyan” could be explained by the racist fears that grew the KKK to such huge numbers in most of the Red states. But this was the last election in which Republicans could woo exclusively White voters. As even Republican pundits now acknowledge, at some time very soon the Republican tune will have to change. Many of the Tea Party faction are older, and hate tends to pop blood vessels. Demographics are not on the Republican Party’s side, though they seem unwilling to change their “core values.” Instead, next time they’ll have a few brown faces delivering the message.

In the other corner we have the Democrats, a party 66.2% White and arguably more representative of American demographics in general, led by a newly-reelected President who not only hobbled himself in the first two years of his Presidency by choosing a muddled middle road that frustrated friend and foe alike, but who is still opposed by the same obstructionist Congress that still has not discovered either moderation or compromise. Obama’s second term will look remarkably like his first.

My Liberal friends wail: if only the Republicans would let Obama make the changes we voted for! But this is self-deception, something I succumbed to myself. In his first two years, the new President had a Democratic majority in Congress, but neither his Congressional majority nor the President himself showed much enthusiasm for their mandate or any intention of fulfilling campaign promises. Why was that? It’s important to consider what the Democratic Party really is today to understand why it happened..

Quite the opposite of the Republican caricature of “Socialist” Democrats, ever since the Reagan era the Democratic Party has moved consistently to the right on most economic issues. Bill Clinton’s “centrist” Presidency brought us deregulation of the financial industry, globalization, outsourcing, dismantling of many programs for the poor, and drug enforcement programs that tripled incarceration of the poor and minorities. His Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, saw nothing wrong with exporting a million IT jobs to India, though Reich sings a different tune today. The Democratic Party has participated in, and been equally culpable in, the dismantling of the Middle Class, long before Obama took office. Since then, the Wall Street and Motor City bailouts — with their “trickle-down” benefits to Main Street while failing to help mortgage owners directly — have predictably yielded unimpressive results. Pumping money into banks while not requiring them to lend it out has predictably resulted in a lackluster recovery. And with all the money tied up in banks, wars, and debt to pay off past wars, the stimulus projects created were insufficient to create enough jobs. So when the chips were down, Wall Street and the Defense industry turned out to be more important to the Democrats than Main Street.

We’ve seen the Democratic Party’s “new” neo-Liberal embrace of globalization and the military power to enforce it numerous times. The civilian body count from Republican war hawks in Iraq was a match for the Democrats’ civilian carnage in Viet Nam. Most Congressional Democrats have consistently supported wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, and have no real objection to another one in Iran — though you’d hardly believe it from the DNC convention, at which they positioned themselves as an anti-war party while simultaneously defending “surgical” drone attacks, SEAL raids, and trumpeting their militarism. If only Drone Wars really were conducted by surgeons instead of butchers.

In foreign policy and civil liberties, the President and the Democratic Party has as shameful a record as the Republicans. Guantanamo is still open. Threats of war on Iran, sanctions, and Congressional letters and resolutions for consumption by AIPAC, WINEP, and wealthy pro-Israel donors flow as easily from Democratic mouths as Republicans. Whistleblowers are more likely to face persecution under Obama than under Bush. As during the Bush era, American vetoes at the UN protecting Israel for war crimes mirror Russia’s protections of Syria. Torture is still used by the CIA and the military and, as a professional (or personal) courtesy, the Obama Administration announced recently that no one in the CIA would be prosecuted for deaths that occurred during torture under any administration. It is quite likely that the next Secretary of State will be John Kerry — a fan of war in the Balkans and Libya. Not much has changed from the Bush years.

You call this Hope and Change?

Many Democrats, not just Progressives, believe the President and the party simply lacked courage, backbone, brass, cajones. But all that’s changed, now! Speeches at the DNC by Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, and Deval Patrick advanced this notion while crowing that the party has rediscovered its bravery. But the problem is not with anybody’s cajones. It’s that Democrats today have turned their backs on Progressive values and acquiesced to neo-Liberalism, globalism, militaristic foreign policy, and they themselves preside over the dismantling of social programs and deregulation.

The President might have played “tough” on British Petroleum but, in a case of literally letting the foxes inspect the chickens, he let poultry companies replace FDA inspectors with their own. The Democratic Progressive Caucus, branded “Communists” by former GOP crazy Alan West, does not appear to have much value to its own party. Democrats like Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, and Ross Feingold have been turned out to pasture. Ted Kennedy’s seat was recently occupied by a Republican and this may be repeated if the President taps John Kerry for Secretary of State. Neo-Liberals, globalists, Blue Dogs and Dixiecrats are what Democratic voters have to chow down on, but it has been a meal set before them by their own party leadership.

During this year’s DNC convention, besides the well-scripted theme of “we’re all in this together,” viewers witnessed nauseating GOP-Lite displays of militarism (“we got Bin Laden”), defensive genuflection to the Gods of Entrepreneurship, conspicuous and exaggerated religiosity, American Exceptionalism (“USA, USA, USA”), and scripted pandering to pro-Israel hardliners. From the GOP’s perspective, the Democrats were vulnerable to criticism that they wouldn’t worship at all these altars simultaneously. What a miscalculation! But this is where the Democratic Party is right now. Perhaps it’s because, as one pundit suggested, the Democrats have had to embrace Left, Center — and Right — since Republicans have ceded everything except the Far Right. But for many Progressives and even some traditional Democrats, today’s Democratic Party most closely resembles the Republican Party under Eisenhower — with considerably more saber-rattling than the former general, and with much less a commitment to building infrastructure.

It was once true that American political campaigns could not be fought without millionaires. The Citizens United ruling changed all that. Now it takes billionaires. People like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers (for Republicans) or Haim Saban or George Soros (for Democrats) or powerful interest groups and PACs managed again to cherry-pick their respective party’s messages, ads, and platforms. Was it a coincidence that, during the election, in a month with an unprecedented number of mass shootings, the President explicitly pooh-poohed bans on assault weapons and controls on large ammunition purchases? The Democrats didn’t want to be in the NRA’s sights. Why did not one Democrat bring up Global Warming? While there was much talk of strengthening the Middle Class, there was not a peep about the poor. Where was the Democrats’ new-found backbone?

Another disturbing example of pandering was this year’s inclusion of “God” and “Jerusalem” language in the 2012 DNC platform. Despite failing a voice vote on the floor of the convention, the party platform was changed by decree of the President and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, through consultation with several AIPAC lobbyists who made sure the wording was just right. The vote’s results and the speaker’s teleprompter text announcing those results had already been scripted before the vote.

So here was the choice before the electorate:

Voters had a binary choice between two candidates who, between them, spent over $6 billion of PAC and wealthy donor money to deliver on promises to their true “constituencies.” Voters could choose between two — only two — candidates because, despite the spectacle of up to ten GOP candidates duking it out in the primaries this Summer, in the Fall there was curiously only room for two on the podiums offered by the major media and self-appointed election groups — which habitually ignore third party candidates they deem “non-viable.”

After the two candidates were chosen, both of them shook their Etch-a-Sketches vigorously. Positions were calibrated and adjusted precisely through polls and focus groups to present a calculated but misleading impression. What a surprise it was, then, for convention watchers to “discover” that Republicans actually love Hispanics and Medicare (even while trying to get rid of both). Who knew that the Democrats loved Judeo-Christian values and SEAL teams so much? Or that the Romneys were so poor they had to eat off an ironing board? Or that Democrats have recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided” capital all along?

Not everyone appreciates that our voting choices have been trivialized, limited, scripted, and sabotaged by numerous mechanisms designed to attenuate or neuter real democracy. Not everyone appreciates the insinuation that “third party” candidates “contaminate” elections — like Green Party Candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson or candidates from the American Independent Party, American Third Position Party, Constitution Party, Grassroots Party, Justice Party, Objectivist Party, Socialism and Liberation Party, Peace and Freedom Party, Prohibition Party, Reform Party, Socialist Party USA, Socialist Equality Party, and the Socialist Workers Party — and half a dozen more so-called “crackpots.” Have you ever heard anything in the press about any of them? Apparently the Fourth Estate doesn’t appreciate their intrusion into electoral politics either. Rather than informing voters, they censor all but what’s truly “newsworthy.”

Short of campaign reform, reducing term limits, repealing Citizens United, abolishing the Electoral College, using existing law to limit the concentration of ownership of newspapers and the media, keeping lobbyists and foreign nations out of our politics, making voting compulsory like jury duty, limiting the voting season to weeks instead of years, making it easier to vote, not harder, and presenting not just two but a multiplicity of ideas from a variety of candidates — we must stop referring to the quadrennial political theater we call Presidential elections as a sign of a healthy democracy. The repair of even some of these seriously broken systems should be a goal for both parties to embrace, but they have repeatedly failed to achieve even one of them. And why? Because when it comes right down to it, neither party really stands for democracy as much as self-preservation.

_

Everybody loves a winner._ In the binary American electoral system, you ultimately either vote for a winner or a loser, whereas in a parliamentary system winners and losers form coalitions and hash out their differences. In the American system, voting one’s principles is viewed as senseless. Better to vote for the most “viable” candidate whose chances of “getting something done” are greater than the “crackpot” idealist. Any other choice is just “throwing your vote away” — even if he lies or fails to live up to promises and rhetoric. This is just about the riskiest form of voting I can think of. Yet, despite all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of “getting something done” still persists.

Principles actually do count for something. Are we not moved by the passion of principles when we hear a convention or stump speech? How then can we so easily discount our own? Voting is not simply about choosing a winner or loser. It is also about registering exactly what we want in government, even if our candidate “loses.” The alternative is to simply acquiesce or rubber-stamp PAC-designed campaign promises — knowing at some level that they mean nothing after the election. Ultimately, betraying your own principles is the surest way to throw your vote away.

So as long as I’m throwing my vote away in what passes for electoral democracy, I’d rather do it myself — and not let some politician do it for me.

Changing Faces of the Republican Party

Posted by on 2012-11-09 No comments

In the wake of this week’s election, Republicans have decided that they weren’t paying enough attention to Hispanic voters, and now they’re going to change all that. In his editorial “The Way Forward,” far-right columnist Charles Krauthammer writes: “The principal reason [Latinos] go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants.” A few paragraphs later he proposes that, by moving immigration reform ahead and advancing Latino candidates, Republicans can “counter [Democratic appeal] in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem.”

This is a simplistic if not paternalistic view, similar to the one Republicans have about Jews who, in their minds, are supposedly devoted to a single issue: Israel. But the recent election proved to be a wake-up call for Republican (and Israeli Likud supporter) Sheldon Adelson who put hundreds of millions of dollars into uber-Zionist candidates, seeing practically every one of them lose. Meanwhile, JStreet’s PAC provided political money and cover for more moderate, less Likud-oriented, Middle East policies – and all 49 of their candidates won. In Florida, where Adelson and the Republican Jewish Caucus and others attacked President Obama on Israel, the strategy actually backfired. 27% of Florida Jews said the ads made them more likely to vote for the President.

So if Republicans plan to use the same strategy on Hispanic voters, they may be in for a wild ride.

I will leave it to Latinos to speak for themselves, but I’m guessing that years of discrimination, working for social justice, and caring for one another are not unique to any one minority group in this nation, and no matter how much Spanish is heard at the next Republican convention, Latinos will remember who their friends have been. And let’s not forget that the Republicans have had their Herman Cains, Allen Wests and Mia Loves, but a sprinkling of Black faces has not and will not alter a party unwilling to part with its extremist values. Krauthammer says as much: “Ignore the trimmers. There’s no need for radical change… Do not […] abandon the party’s philosophical anchor” – an anchor that promises only: I got mine; you’re on your own.

The Kindness of Strangers

Posted by on 2012-11-05 No comments

Jerry L. Kastenbaum
Coatesville, PA

Dear Jerry,

As we get older we look back on the sometimes strange paths our lives have taken, the odd choices we have made, fortuitous and tragic events that have shaped it, and the many people we have encountered on the way who – sometimes without knowing it themselves – said something or did something that took us down a different road.

I am retired now and volunteer as a tutor at an urban school, and I was thinking about this, mainly in the context of the 5th graders I work with, and the group of volunteers who come twice a week, sometimes just to give the kids some attention. But then, of course, I realized how fortunate I myself have been to encounter the kindness of others.

Your father, Bernie, was one of the people who, probably without knowing it, changed my life. In the late Sixties I was a kid from a troubled family. Fortunately for me, at the end of the trolley tracks in Media, your father had opened a used bookstore. For me it was more than just an escape into reading. Every time I visited his store, your father would say this or that about a book, suggest something, or sell me a bundle of books he liked. And we would talk a bit. I still have many of the books: Toynbee, Malinowski, Malamud, literature, anthropology, history, politics, sociology, religion. He even sold me a Koran under protest once, describing it in somewhat unflattering terms. Without knowing it, your father opened up a world of ideas to me – ideas that were not even necessarily familiar to him – just by chatting with me, feeding and respecting the mind of some teenager he barely knew.

Our public and private sides are often different. I don’t know what kind of man he was to family and friends. Part of me hopes he was just as I imagined him: the quiet, humorous, cultured, self-deprecating pipe-smoker I encountered each time. He never seemed to have any customers, and he would joke that the store only existed because his wife needed him to get out of the house and do something. Your father’s Jewishness and the way he spoke of things may well have influenced me too. Coming from a family without religion, I became a Jew thirty-some years ago and, while not very observant, Jewish ethics express my values best and reflect what I have tried to pass on to my children.

The kindnesses of strangers – the seemingly insignificant, half-forgotten things we do for others – they are greatly underrated. They can literally change lives. You dad’s kindness changed mine. I’m so sorry I never got to tell him this personally.

Sincerely,

David Ehrens