Monthly Archives: September 2013

Good Question

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Alex Pareene describes a recent town hall meeting of Grandpa John McCain vs. Constituents.

McCain was heckled and aggressively questioned at the Phoenix meeting. One man used marshmallows as a prop but most questioners had pretty straightforward arguments, like “we do not want another engagement in the Middle East.” John McCain promised that this would not be a real war, meaning a war in which Americans would be in any danger of dying in large numbers, but rather just the sort of minor, small-scale military action that will probably just kill a lot of Syrians. This did not seem to satisfy his critics. One of them had a particularly pointed, but sort of misdirected message:

“We didn’t send you to make war for us. We sent you to stop the war,” one man said to applause.

My question is this: Why would you send John McCain anywhere to stop a war?

That’s a good question!

Anywhere besides “retirement,” I mean? Arizonans have been sending McCain to Washington (well, they haven’t been sending him there — he lives there — but they have been asking him to represent them in Congress) for a quarter-century now, or longer if you count his time in the House. In that time he hasn’t been consistent on much, but one thing he’s always been steadfastly in favor of is war. He’s never heard of a proposed military intervention he didn’t immediately support, or not support mainly because it wasn’t a big enough military intervention.

Some Republicans pull a bait-and-switch of sorts, as when George W. Bush campaigned against Clinton-style foreign interventions and then started a couple of horrible, endless wars, but you know what you’re getting with a guy like John McCain, a man who sings fun songs about the countries he wants to bomb. Mother Jones made a map of the countries John McCain has wanted to bomb or invade over the last 20 years. There’s a lot of them!

At least they’re all in the other hemisphere.

A New Reagan Myth?

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I’ve seen the claim that Saint Ronald of Blessed Memory was opposed to military interventions crop up here and there, and I don’t believe I have heard this one until recently — Dave Weigel reports:

Robert Costa goes inside Rand Paul’s campaign to block a Syria resolution.

His team is eager to cast Paul as an heir to Ronald Reagan, who, they argue, was frequently reluctant to involve the U.S. military in foreign civil wars. “It’s about reclaiming the party from hawks and putting us back in the mode of Reagan,” says a Paul source. “As we do that, we want to help him, so we’re pushing back really hard against the isolationism chatter. That’s not what he’s about; he’s about non-intervention and the national interest.”

Waving the Reagan banner to make a case for realpolitik is, of course, totally consistent—Reagan would speak ringingly of human rights and in the next breath re-emphasize that the “human rights first” Carter strategy was a disaster.

That His Blessedness was opposed to interventions really is news to me, and not what I remember. There was, for example, that Libya thing that Saint Ronnie began in 1981 —

Libya refused to be a proper Middle East client state of Washington. Its leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, was uppity. He would have to be punished. U.S. planes shot down two Libyan planes in what Libya regarded as its air space. The U. S . also dropped bombs on the country, killing at least 40 people, including Qaddafi’s daughter. There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow him, a major disinformation campaign, economic sanctions, and blaming Libya for being behind the Pan Am 103 bombing without any good evidence.

Yeah, that’s what I remember. And then there was Lebanon — The U.S. was part of a multinational force formed in 1982 as “peacekeepers” in a civil war in Lebanon, so this wasn’t just a U.S. action. But as I recall Saint Ronnie was all gung ho about it until that little incident in 1983 when 241 American servicemen were killed in a barracks bombing. Kinda makes Benghazi seem like small potatoes, don’t it? Anyway, Saint Ronald lost his interest in Lebanon after that.

Then … on to Granada! Truly, that military action caused the American people to stand up and say, WTF?

And do we want to talk about Nicaragua and Reagan’s “freedom fighters,” the Contras? I’d call that an intervention by proxy.

This image of Ronald Reagan, Man of Peace and Restraint, seems at odds with the older view of him as the Great Serious Man with his hand on the nuclear trigger who scowled at the USSR and said, “Make my day.” Thereby bringing about the end of history, or something. I guess the real political genius of Reagan is that the Right can evoke his blessed name to bolster any position they want bolstered, even if it has nothing to do with what he actually did.

Quote du Jour

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At the least, when the main cheerleaders for the last war talk about what to do now, they should be relegated to a rubber room reserved for Bernie Madoff discussing financial ethics or Alex Rodriguez on cheating in baseball. [Timothy Egan]

It’s a good column; do read it.

The Road to Damascus

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Regarding the resolution approved by Senate committee yesterday, be afraid:

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona joined seven Democratic senators, including Barbara Boxer of California, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Chris Coons of Delaware, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Bob Menendez of New Jersey in approving the resolution.

I’m saying anything McCain, Corker and Flake approve can’t be good. On the other hand, the specimens voting against the resolution included Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. So we were screwed either way.

Seriously, my take on where the progressive/liberal/left is on this issue is that the range of opinions mostly falls from “Why are we doing this, again?” to “Hell, no.” I fall somewhere in there, myself. There are a few exceptions, mostly holding the opinion that “It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.” Not a lot of enthusiasm for bombing, in other words.

The Right is more interesting on this issue. At one end of the spectrum is Grandpa John McCain, who seems to want to nuke the entire Middle East so it will stay off his lawn. At the other end are paleo-isolationists like Rand Paul. Oh, and there’s also the genius who thinks all this hoo-haw over Syria is just to distract us from Benghazi. Idiots in clown shoes, indeed.

Assuming this resolution passes in the Senate, it’s likely to run into a brick wall in the House. Whether you are a House Democrat or a House Republican, right now I see little political risk in being against the thing. It may be that the teabagger/isolationist Right eventually will be brought to heel by the old-school neoconservative Right, but not easily, and not without considerable mess. And I don’t see opponents on the Left changing their minds, either.

A few days ago I wrote a post complaining that too much of the “debate,” such as it is, on Syria amounts to re-arguing Iraq. Whatever the merits or de-merits of bombing Syria, Syria is not Iraq any more than Iraq was the earlier Gulf War, the earlier Gulf War was Vietnam, and Vietnam was World War II. It would be really nice if people could clear their heads and look at situations as-they-are without replaying old tapes.

For example, a commenter this morning looks at the Obama White House on Syria and sees Condi Rice warning about evil centrifuge cylinders and mushroom clouds. Clear your heads, people. Don’t imagine ghoulies and beasties that aren’t there. One of these days — and I’m not saying Syria is it, because I don’t think it is — the U.S. may really need to intervene in something, and lefties will oppose it because Bush lied.

On the other hand, the Right finds itself in the unaccustomed position of being cautious. Even Liz Cheney says she opposes bombing Syria. But do they mean it? Dave Weigel writes,

This probably isn’t the curtain call for neoconservatism or for Republican interventionism, however. On Wednesday interventionists led by John McCain got the resolution they wanted through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after their preferred amendment strengthened it. But they had to overcome a growing conservative consensus that intervention doesn’t bring the results America wants. It’s a delayed—long-delayed—hangover from the debacle in Iraq.

Well, that and the fact that making President Obama look weak and ineffectual is what they live for.

Anyone looking forward from 2002 would find this party unrecognizable. Back then only six Republican members of the House, and zero in the Senate, opposed the authorization of force in Iraq. “You still had the aftertaste of 9/11, and you had popular support for it,” remembers former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis. “Everyone’s a little more war-weary after Iraq. America is out there by itself, basically—you had a coalition of the willing in 2002, and now it’s just France and the U.S. going it alone. You’ve even got some of your right-wing organs coming out against this.”

What you have is a return to the politics of 1999, when most Republicans opposed the Clinton administration’s requests for intervention in Kosovo. Kerry harked back to that war after Marino pledged not to send any more troops to their graves. “We had a 28-day campaign, there were 30,000 sorties, none of which is contemplated here, and there were zero casualties,” said Kerry. That just didn’t move Republicans at the time. “I was one of a handful of Republicans who voted for Kosovo,” remembers Davis. “The reason I did is that I didn’t want to undermine the president, and actually it worked out pretty well. You take that same rationale to Iraq, though, and you can get embarrassed.”

I’ve also read, somewhere, that some righties oppose bombing Syria because they are afraid that what happens there will reduce their chances for getting the war they really want, which is with Iran.

My prediction is that after a messy fight in the House the President will get either no authorization or one that is so restricted it amounts to no authorization, after which he will either throw up his hands and say “all right, whatever,” or choose to ignore it and bomb Syria anyway.

See also Dana Milbank, “The GOP wants to have it both ways on Syria.”

Power of Music

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I’m shamelessly copying what Anne Laurie did in a post this morning. But for some reason, this Joan Baez cover of a Woody Guthrie song has been running through my head the past few days, anyway —

The song is about a California plane crash that killed 28 Mexican farmworkers in 1948. The farmworkers were then buried in a mass grave without being identified. More than six decades later, a writer named Tim Z. Hernandez, partly inspired by the song, did a lot of detective work and identified the people in the grave. This week a large gravestone listing the names was placed on the grave, and the song was sung as part of the ceremony.

I’m sure this song was on a Joan Baez album I bought sometime in the 1970s, and I always liked it, but for some reason I never connected it to a real event. Anyway — Woody Guthrie was a great man. Just sayin’.

Here’s another version, with Arlo G. and Emmylou Harris.

Life Expectancy of Poorly Educated White Women Drops a Lot

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Apparently there has been a significant decline in life expectancy of poor white women who dropped out of high school. In the past 18 years they have lost 5 years of life expectancy. They now have a lower life expectancy than African American women who have dropped out of high school. In many ways the article is frustrating, but here’s the meat of it:

The journal Health Affairs reported the five-year drop in August. The article’s lead author, Jay Olshansky, who studies human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a team of researchers looked at death rates for different groups from 1990 to 2008. White men without high-school diplomas had lost three years of life expectancy, but it was the decline for women like Crystal that made the study news. Previous studies had shown that the least-educated whites began dying younger in the 2000s, but only by about a year. Olshansky and his colleagues did something the other studies hadn’t: They isolated high-school dropouts and measured their outcomes instead of lumping them in with high-school graduates who did not go to college.

The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors. Although women generally outlive men in the U.S., such a large decline in the average age of death, from almost 79 to a little more than 73, suggests that an increasing number of women are dying in their twenties, thirties, and forties. “We actually don’t know the exact reasons why it’s happened,” Olshansky says. “I wish we did.”

One factor the article barely mentions is access to health care. That’s the first thing I wanted to know — do these women have access to health care? It’s unlikely they’ll find jobs with benefits, so are they on Medicaid? The article doesn’t say. Duh.

The “example” the article focuses on, a morbidly obese woman who died at 38 of natural causes, had been told by a doctor that she was diabetic, and she was “waiting to get medicine.” How long had she been waiting? What was the holdup? See what I mean by frustrating?

I also wanted to know if there was a difference between women in this demographic who lived in cities/suburbs and those who lived in rural areas. It’s so much easier to become really isolated if you live in rural America.

The story focuses on a family in northern Arkansas. I know the area slightly, and it’s not much different from where I grew up. The girls who get pregnant in high school drop out and spend the rest of their lives taking care of children and maybe a neglectful husband or a succession of boyfriends, and no one takes care of them. Often the family/community support that sustained their grandmothers is pretty much gone. If there is any part of our population that constitutes a canary in a coal mine, it’s them.

The Missing Virtue — Sustainability

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Sustainability is a word that should be on everyone’s tongue these days, because it’s a virtue that we really, really, really need to cultivate if we’re going to survive as a nation, or as a species, or possibly as a planet.

Tom Philpott writes about the way maximum agriculture on the Great Plains is draining the region’s aquifer. I’ve read about this elsewhere, and it’s very, very frightening. And it’s not just the Great Plains; major aquifers in North America are being drained faster than they can re-fill.

… they’re on the verge of essentially sucking dry a large swath of the High Plains Aquifer, one of the United States’ greatest water resources. The researchers found that 30 percent of the region’s groundwater has been tapped out, and if present trends continue, another 39 percent will be gone within 50 years. As the water stock dwindles, of course, pumping what’s left gets more and more expensive—and farming becomes less profitable and ultimately uneconomical. But all isn’t necessarily lost. The authors calculate that if the region’s farmers can act collectively and cut their water use 20 percent now, their farms would produce less and generate lower profits in the short term, but could sustain corn and beef farming in the area into the next century.

Philpott points out that another part of the problem is that much of this agricultural effort is being put into raising corn and only corn, because that’s in demand. And most of this corn gets fed to cattle. See also “Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust.”

So we’ve got unsustainable agriculture, an unsustainable economy, unsustainable politics, and unsustainable energy sources on our increasingly unsustainable planet. Something’s got to stop.

Labor Day Links

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Paul Krugman:

In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.

It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.

Ed Kilgore:

Some pundits and pols, unfortunately, keep seeking to turn Labor Day into something entirely alien to its tradition. You may recall (as Paul Krugman did today) Eric Cantor’s tribute to business owners in his Labor Day message last year. On Friday we were treated to a Peggy Noonan column about Labor Day that wound up being about the “romance of the marketplace” and the deep insights of Ronald Reagan—who, whatever else you think about him, did not exactly exemplify the Work Ethic—into the connection between hard work and the American character.

Please: on this one day a year, can we be spared the contempt of the wealthy and the powerful for the “losers” who still work for wages and can’t seem to save and invest? Can Republican pols perhaps re-learn the lip service for the necessity of collective bargaining rights and the utility of unions they used to employ on occasions like this? And can conservative “thinkers” express some understanding that workers are not mere raw materials to be burned up in the creative forges of heroic capitalists? Can we please stipulate that the wildly unequal wealth and income levels in this country that are getting more unequal every day are not the pure product of natural or marketplace selection or—more laughable yet—the results of employers and individual workers freely contracting as equals?

Probably not.

Shawn Gude (on the Washington, DC, living wage bill):

The vituperation with which Walmart has attacked the living wage bill is perhaps most striking because capital’s threats, typically tacit, have actually been openly made. The City Council dared question the untrammeled control of capital, and now they’re seeing the result of such temerity. Even marginally shifting the locus of power from capital to labor— even if it’s done by a state that usually does the bidding of business—is enough to occasion outcry from the business community. DC’s deputy mayor, for instance, has said,“People have no idea how damaging this is,” and argued that even a veto wouldn’t be enough to restore business confidence.

The controversy throws into sharp relief one of our era’s great unspoken truths: Capitalist democracy, if not an oxymoron, is less a placid pairing than an acrimonious amalgamation. The marriage that Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced eternal is in fact a union of opposites. Inherent to capitalism is inequality, fundamental to democracy is equality. Class stratification, the lifeblood of capitalism, leaves democracy comatose. The economic “base,” to put it in classical Marxian terms, actively undermines the purported values of the political superstructure.

Capitalist democracy is a domesticated democracy. Even before it makes its existence visible in the political arena—via campaign donations and high-powered lobbyists—capital markedly narrows the range of policies available to citizens and their elected officials.

See also:

Krugman, “How the Other 47 Percent Lives”

David Sirota, “How Labor Day Was Hijacked”

Sarah Kliff, “Happy Labor Day, in Eight Charts”

Benjamin Sachs, “A New Kind of Union”