At 7:31, I looked up and said, “It’s 7:31” at the same time Lila ran in from the kitchen, shouting, “It’s 7:31.” Heather popped her head out of the bedroom: “7:31, everybody.” It was 7:31.
***
Call me shallow but I really enjoyed this. Christina’s impressions of Britney and Cher were spot-on. Jimmy Fallons’s Bowie wasn’t bad either. And the Roots are the Roots. I would totally watch a weekly series in which celeb singers mimic one another. I watch the Voice with the family most Mondays, and have to admit to enjoying the bickering among the judges more than the performances of the contestants. It brings up warm memories of watching the Match Game with my mom on a little black and white tv.
***
I was writing yesterday about how the basic assumption of a U.S. official in a press conference is that there is no history. So, for example, any suggestion that the U.S. is involved, directly or indirectly, in trying to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela is outrageous on its face. The ability of reporters or the general public to search for Venezuela Coup 2002 — well, let’s pretend that’s impossible.
“The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush,” Kerry replied. “We all know what happened with that decision.”
It was a peculiar decision on the part of TPM writer Catherine Thompson not to mention a fairly obvious bit of context:
Of course, Kerry voted for the war in Iraq in 2002 and said he was for the invasion during his presidential campaign against George W. Bush in 2004.
I’m beginning to think the war on AP History in Kansas is not an idea from the fringe. This hatred of history is simply a core part of what makes American thought American.
It’s painful to say something’s unfair to Netanyahu, but John Kerry’s forgotten he also supported the Iraq war http://t.co/sO2mBpN7I1
KERRY: People who supported the Iraq war, like Netanyahu, are morons! *everyone else looks at shoes in embarrassment* http://t.co/sO2mBpN7I1 — Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) February 25, 2015
I also expected this from Glenn Greenwald. I happen to agree there is value in describing the horror and brutality, on a much larger scale, of the grotesque (intended) effects of our superior body-charring and -exploding technology. (Fire and/or ice, we have it covered.) First surprise was that the conversation surrounding Greenwald’s linking tweet was, as of 9:23 a.m. ET, surprisingly civil. There were the predictable howls of “false equivalence” but all in all a mild substantive conversation. This is not a twitter I recognize. (But the day is young.)
I will paste in a brief excerpt from the Greenwald piece, itself an excerpt from the Stanford/NYU “Living Under Drones” report.
The most immediate consequence of drone strikes is, of course, death and injury to those targeted or near a strike. The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration[3], shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss. . . .
In addition, because the Hellfire missiles fired from drones often incinerate the victims’ bodies, and leave them in pieces and unidentifiable, traditional burial processes are rendered impossible. As Firoz Ali Khan, a shopkeeper whose father-in-law’s home was struck, graphically described, “These missiles are very powerful. They destroy human beings . . .There is nobody left and small pieces left behind. Pieces. Whatever is left is just little pieces of bodies and cloth.” A doctor who has treated drone victims described how “[s]kin is burned so that you can’t tell cattle from human.” When another interviewee came upon the site of the strike that killed his father, “[t]he entire place looked as if it was burned completely, so much so that even [the victims’] own clothes had burnt. All the stones in the vicinity had become black.”
Also read with a deep sigh that King Abdullah puffed up his feathers, quoted a Clint Eastwood movie (not specified), and said “The only problem we’re going to have is running out of fuel and bullets.” Apparently “nobody” Sajida al-Rishawi, has already been hanged.
“She was seen as a dupe, even if she showed no remorse, it’s not like she exuded a lot of ideological energy, none at all, in fact,” said Joost Hiltermann, who is in charge of the Middle East for the International Crisis Group. “People see her as a very lesser person.”
The cycle of executions and reprisals is just getting started, it would appear. Last night I read, for the umpteenth time, Frank O’Connor’s short story, “Guests of the Nation,” in which a small group of rebels in a rural backwater hold a pair of British prisoners during the Irish Civil War. The rebels and the prisoners get along famously, play cards and argue religion, and then word comes down the prisoners are to be shot. The narrator Bonaparte does the deed. The final paragraphs destroy me every time I read them:
I’m kind of obsessed with Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, a faux-grassroots super-PAC of out-of-state millionaires ponying up big bucks to re-elect the odious turtle vampire zombie Mitch McConnell. That is some of their artwork up there. Pretty high quality, wouldn’t you say? In the graphic on the right there appear to be issues with color balance. Why, McConnell’s challenger Alison Grimes seems to be as dark, if not darker, than President Obama. Surely some mistake has been made!
As for the “Kentuckians” part. Well well well. Don’t see too many Kentuckians on this list. In fact, don’t see any.
Anyway, while I’m sure it cost a pretty penny, the Kentuckians for Strong Leadership web site looks to have been assembled by middle-schoolers. This particular page seems to take for granted that Harry Reid is some sort of radical liberal, and that the idea that coal makes us sick is some sort of laughable notion.
Ha ha. Reid is only talking about easily verified research — and he was only talking about air pollution. Look to West Virginia to see what coal does to our water. Kind of ironic, but not exactly funny, that the current water crisis catastrophe is caused by toxic chemicals used to make coal CLEAN (for the air, sort of).
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.
But lately, (this is pure speculation) since she has moved from the Washington DC area, Cox’s perspective appears to have broadened a bit.
In June she issued a series of tweets name-checking Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” That’s a poem I’m pretty much obsessed with so I notice these things. “Amazing how this poem, rolling around in my mind for the past month or so, keeps becoming relevant to the news,” she wrote. More recently she has used her bully pulpit as the US politics correspondent for the Guardian to shout to the mountaintops that the West Virginia water catastrophe is a big fucking deal, certainly orders of magnitude bigger than the stories that catch the imagination of establishment journalists.
Noting that there has been a second leak at Freedom Industries, inexplicably still in business following some shady bankruptcy/temporary financing sleight-of-hand, and more of the obfuscation we’ve come to expect from West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection, Cox writes:
This seems like juicy stuff to me. Yet the story, as the national media sees it, is over. On Friday, MSNBC killed a segment with activist Erin Brockovich on the topic in order to devote more airtime to Chris Christie’s traffic problems.
bumped by @msnbc as they cover Christie, 300k without water in WV & all these officials do is play political games http://t.co/rDkxoj8wWa
To anyone that follows environmental news, this arc is familiar: A human-interest story with an environmental pollution angle breaks through the media chatter. Cable news outlets roll clips of distraught residents. Footage the damage unspools (with or without stomach-turning images of dead or injured wildlife). There is a news conference of dubious utility. Investigative reporters find evidence of previous infractions of safety and environmental regulations. Politicians declare the need for hearings and more strict enforcement. Volunteers show up to help. Sometimes there’s a concert.
Then we move on. We move on despite the fact that the chemical leak was, in some ways, an improvement on the status quo for West Virginians: at least the residents knew there were questions about the water piped into their homes. Most of the time, most West Virginians simply live in the toxic aftermath of the daily release of not-quite-as-verifiably deadly chemicals. The mix of air, water, and soil pollution that is a matter of course in coal mining counties means that children born in those areas have a 26% higher risk of developing birth defects than those born in non-coal-mining counties. That’s not from drinking water that’s been declared contaminated, that’s from drinking water, breathing air, and playing on ground they’ve been told is safe.
The underlying crisis behind most environmental tragedies is the part of the story that we rarely hear about. Our attention is shifting away from chemical spill, as it has from mine collapses and explosions, from oil spills, and, often, from natural disasters as well.
Cox goes on to explore “a distressingly simple pattern of cause and effect”:
… for 200 years, and most particularly during the last two decades, the coal industry (and the energy lobby in general) has been as much, if not more, effective and industrious in its influence on politicians than it has been in generating electricity.
Our country has grown a vast and complex regulatory and financial support system for cheap, dirty energy: tax breaks, loopholes and the like. Researchers estimate that if Americans has to pay the real cost for each kilowatt-hour, factoring in hidden costs to communities’ health, economy, ecology, we would pay three times as much than we do today. The energy lobby’s approach to influence peddling, on the other hand, has [the?] systematic elegance of a see-saw: They put money into politicians’ pockets, and they get legislative favors back. Indeed, it has been 38 years since Congress passed any law that had a substantive impact on the use of toxic chemicals. To put that in context: in 1975, we were still using asbestos in our walls, you could smoke on airplanes and food packagers did not have to report or monitor pesticide residue levels on fresh produce.
Cox also mentions the stunning news (to anyone paying attention at the time) that the New York Times dismantled its environmental reporting desk last year, leaving “approximately 15 dedicated environmental reporters among the nation’s top five papers.” I do wish she had acknowledged the indefatigable, jaw-droppingly excellent work done by regional reporters. (If the Charleston Gazette staff does not win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Freedom Industries debacle, I will know the fix is in).
I was going to conclude this post by wishing Ms. Grimes well in her campaign against the McConnell machine, but then made a quick visit to her campaign web site and my shoulders slumped a little bit to read her “energy” position statement featuring boilerplate that could have been borrowed from Mitch himself.
I strongly oppose President Obama’s attack on Kentucky’s energy industry. This Administration has taken direct aim at Kentucky’s coal industry, crippling our state’s largest source of domestic energy and threatening thousands of jobs. Washington Democrats and Republicans need to be realistic about what powers our nation and recognize that developing Kentucky’s supplies of coal is crucial.
War on Coal. Please. Do not start with that. If Obama were fighting a war on coal, maybe he would have offered a comment on the Charleston debacle. He released disaster money for the Charleston, area, but otherwise … crickets.
From the EPA, that evil all-powerful slayer of the angelic job creators of the coal industry, pretty much crickets as well. The White House and the EPA are integral parts of the “tableau of abdication” Jedidiah Purdy noted in the New Yorker a few weeks back.
As are politicians from states controlled (there is no other word) by coal. One day there will be a Kentucky politician who acknowledges the real costs and depredations of the business of coal, which extracts the coal out of the ground, and the profits out of the state. But this ain’t that day. Even with the West Virginia catastrophe in the headlines, our state has no politicians to take the side of its mountains, streams and people against a brutally destructive business, a business that is, by any objective standards, “a loser economically, environmentally, and in terms of public health.”
“The incident that happened with this spill is not related to my view of the EPA, of overreaching and not looking at economics and trying to reach a balance in the energy industries,” Capito said, according to the Charleston Gazette. “I see this as a chemical issue, and so the coal issue is secondary. It’s a product used in the coal industry.”
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin: “This was not a coal company, this was a chemical supplier, where the leak occurred….. As far as I know there was no coal company within miles.”
“This is a chemical spill accident. It just so happens that the chemical has some applications to the coal industry, just that fact alone shouldn’t cause people to point fingers at the coal industry,” said Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association.
One problem with all of this, of course, is that the coal industry is always very insistent that every single job — direct, indirect, induced, whatever — be counted whenever anyone discusses the positive economic impacts of the coal-mining business to West Virginia. If that’s the way the industry and its political supporters want the discussion to go, then they’ve got to own this sort of accident as well.
The other thing, though, is that there are other clear connections between this chemical spill and its impacts and what the coal industry’s effects on West Virginia are like all the time. Plenty of West Virginia communities have watched their drinking water supplies be either polluted or dried up because of coal (see here, here and here). Me and my neighbors are getting a taste right now of what some coalfield residents live with all the time.
And then there’s this, explained most clearly on Friday by the folks at Appalachian Voices:
News reports of Thursday’s spill of a coal-processing chemical into West Virginia’s Elk River—and emergency orders to thousands of people to not drink or use their tap water—are currently focused on the still-unknown potential for direct harm to human health.
But the widespread disruption caused by the spill raises other important questions, including: How could a relatively small-volume spill in one small river cut off drinking water access to roughly 300,000 people across eight counties—16% of the state’s entire population?
An increasing number of private wells in southwestern and central West Virginia, where the spill occurred, have been contaminated by decades of coal mining and processing. One result has been an ongoing expansion of municipal water systems to rural communities that would otherwise rely on well water.
Yes, the well water has been pretty thoroughly poisoned. BY THE COAL INDUSTRY.
What if? What if this had happened to the water supply of the Upper West Side or Arlington or Berkeley? Would the reactions of the federal agencies allegedly responsible been so tepid? Shouldn’t the director of the EPA fly in and distribute water and vow to get to the bottom of this? (Really, this is the agency fighting a “war on coal”?) Where is the president on this? He released disaster money but has not addressed the subject directly. (I’m happy to be corrected on this point.) I think the inertia of the CDC and EPA speaks for itself. (Jedediah Purdy in the New Yorker: “The entire crisis is a tableau of abdication”). Incredibly, the strategy of the federal government is mainly to wait til it blows over.
And maybe it will.
It’s hard for me to think clearly about this catastrophe, so I will simply encourage everyone to follow the indefatigable Ward on twitter. I’m pretty much in awe of his output, and he always seems to be striking the right tone of anger or skepticism or fatalism at the appropriate moments.
But I don’t really think he is fatalistic, or resigned. Maybe this is wishful thinking, or projection, or just delusion, but I think Ward knows, or hopes, that this will be the event that sours people on coal in West Virginia, and the nation. I have been thinking that for days, and then yesterday he sort of confirmed it when he issued this gnomic tweet:
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Still processing Andrew Huszar’s remarkable Confessions of a Quantitative Easer, which appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page on Monday.
A former Morgan Stanley managing director, Huszar managed the Federal Reserve’s $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program from 2009 to 2010. Since the crash of 2008, he writes, the Fed has, by one estimate, spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as a $40 billion bump in output, which is minuscule (it’s sometimes tough to visualize a trillion dollars. Here is a handy reference.)
This, while BOTH parties insist “we’re broke” (Obama’s very words).
We’re broke, but the Fed can create $4 trillion to loan to the banks. Oh, I see. In return the nation got very little, but for the banks it was a windfall.
Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.
Here is a naive question: If the government can print $4 trillion to give to banks, to very little positive effect for the country, why can’t it print even a fraction of that amount to finance massive public works to make need infrastructure repairs, make education more affordable (or better yet, free), and convert our energy economy to one that is sustainable?
Hell,giving every American a few thousand bucks would be a much more effective stimulus than what the Fed has done.
And don’t forget that the QE program rewards the very entities that created the crisis.
Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.
As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy. Yes, those financial markets have rallied spectacularly, breathing much-needed life back into 401(k)s, but for how long? Experts like Larry Fink at the BlackRock investment firm are suggesting that conditions are again “bubble-like.” Meanwhile, the country remains overly dependent on Wall Street to drive economic growth.
Even when acknowledging QE’s shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington’s dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street’s new “too big to fail” policy.
Can’t explain exactly why I’ve been silent here for so long, or why I’m finally prodded into action by this (uncharacteristically) dumb Charles Pierce reaction to the “Obamacare by Morning” schtick at the CMAs the other night.
To these lyin’ eyes, Brad and Carrie’s routine looks like a fairly safe, innocuous jab at a much-discussed current event. And clever. Both in the wordplay and by the fact that it butters up featured CMA guest George Strait, who doesn’t always turn up for awards shows.
Its attitude is pretty closely aligned to this (also very funny) bit from the Daily Show:
But Brad and Carrie really set something off in Pierce:
Let’s forget, shall we, that the act is working gloriously in places like Kentucky, but that places like Tennessee, which hosted the yearly gathering of artificial redneck morons, have decided to sabotage the act because Tennessee insists on electing idiots, which is why there are a lot of the problems for Jethro and Zelda Mae to make sport of on the electric teevee. Let’s also forget how much an actual Medicaid expansion would help in all those Southern states where these posers sell records and that have governors who suddenly find themselves allergic to Free Money (!) Let’s also forget that none of the make-believe goobers on stage last night ever are going to have to make the decision between medicine for the kids and food on the table.
Not a lot to disagree with here on the substance (though I might be cautious about proclaiming “the act is working gloriously in places like Kentucky” until those enrolled actually try to get their claims processed), but what is notable (beyond the embarrassing attempt at country diction) is the contemptuous “How Dare They” vibe. “Jethro and Zelda Mae.” Wow. “Make-believe goobers”! Pierce knows as well as anyone the glaring issues with ACA, and Jon Stewart’s much more critical satire goes unremarked, but country singers making fun of what is looking (sadly) to be a prototypical product of 21st century (neo)liberalism is just too much for Mr. Pierce to bear.
First the ad hominem, and then the revealing obiter dictum.
Let’s forget all of that and concentrate on the main issue — which is that I think modern country music sucks gigantic bowls of monkey dick. It is, weight for age, the phoniest genre of music since Pat Boone was ripping off Little Richard. Most of what is celebrated as “country” these days is simply bad rock and roll played by people who look like they flunked the audition for a Night Ranger tribute band. I mean, Taylor Fking Swift is already a “legend,” and Patsy Cline would have eaten her on toast.
Stop the presses. Boston-based writer derides current country music as fake, knows what REAL country music is.
Pierce then moves on to the musical question “You know what coutry music is?” and name checks Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle and Harvard Divinity School dropout Gram Parsons. I’m a fan of all of these guys, but every one of them is a middle-class white dude, applying a bookish veneer to the country genre. To Pierce’s credit he does mention Loretta Lynn, but doesn’t link to any of her iconic songs (you know, the ones a Jethro or Zelda Mae might know), but to “Van Lear Rose,” from the all-over-the-place album she did with another slummer, hipster Jack White.
Which is a little weird. And where am I going with this exactly?
A first bash: patronizing east coast writer’s take can be summarized as: these rubes don’t know what they want (the ACA), or even what they like (debased country music, not the “real” stuff), and they sure as shit don’t know what’s good for them. There’s a lot of the crazy in Southern-identified folks mistrust of Yankee superciliousness, but sometimes there’s some justification….
Country music left its rural roots behind at least as far back as the (then-maligned, now celebrated) countrypolitan era. It’s been a suburban thing for half a century, so the Jethro and Zelda Mae jibe is kind of out of the blue. Are Brad and Carrie trying to act like hicks? Does Carrie Underwood have her teeth blacked out? Not exactly. Say what you will about her outfit here but … not exactly. (OK. Paisley does wear a cowboy hat. It’s a Nashville thing, a shorthand connection to country’s real country (distant) past. Also, a godsend for artists with receding hairlines.)
Ian Crouch’s dispatch in the New Yorker, while still a tad glib, at least indicates that he actually saw the CMAs and didn’t just fly off the handle because OMG these rubes were making fun of Obamacare.
And the music itself, as always, has one foot in respectability and the other in foolishness. The best-selling country album in the United States right now is a Christmas collection recorded by the family from “Duck Dynasty.” One of the tracks, “Away in a Manger,” features the vocals of Alison Krauss. It’s still a weird swamp down there in Nashville.
Weird swamp indeed. And it has always been so. As someone who listens to a lot of country music, both old (“authentic”) and new (“bogus”), I have a lot of problems with contemporary music trends, but beg to differ with the notion that today’s country stars are talentless hacks. All of them are in possession of major chops, as players, singers or writers (or all three) or they wouldn’t be on the CMA stage rubbing elbows with Vince Gill.
Random anecdote: I recently had a quick overnight visit to Nashville. Three friends and I went out to see some music. Being cheap–we only went to free bars, –and old–our night started at 5 and ended before midnight–, we were exposed to the absolute bottom tier of Nashville talent (it was a Sunday night too) but I found it pretty remarkable that everybody at that level could really play and sing. There are tens of thousands of full-time musical strivers between these cover musicians and the Carries, Brads, and yes, Taylors. Country is another classic American winner-take-all, long-shot business–like the movies, pro sports, and fashion–but the problem is never the talent. The business of Nashville is just like those other show biz machines. It mercilessly molds artists into a template that is predictable and sells. But the talent shows through, it always has. Personally, this is why I pay attention to any pop culture: genius, of some sort, rising above an overly rigid framework. The auteur theory of country music, to get all grad schoolier than thou.
A common tactic of those who argue for a false Golden Age of anything is to set up a dubiously intense competition between artists of yore and the poseurs of today. So “Taylor Fking Swift is already a ‘legend,’ and Patsy Cline would have eaten her on toast”. I disagree. If Patsy and Taylor had been contemporaries, they would have collaborated dozens of times.
To be even more contrary, I would go so far as to say that we are in the midst of a Golden Age of Nashville, for female singers and songwriters, at least. In thirty years, a crusty writer will spit when mentioning the current crop of fake country talent, fix you with a steely gaze, jab a bony finger in your chest and say, “Now Miranda Lambert. There was a true badass country singer.” (And so she is)….
Once again stuck for a way to end this, am bailed out by the great Robbie Fulks, who has noticed the tendency of Yankees to preach to country folks what real country is. I love the weird and wonderful adjectival mouthful below, and think Pierce might find himself somewhere in there. He certainly will see his reflection in the opinionated, overalled Bostonian (cue to 2:22).
Not a hillbilly dilletante, fair weather hick, demi-clod, faux po’folks, well-readneck…
Robert-E.-come-lately hayseed wanna-be undercover Yankee…
Mississippi Ph. D., Alabamateur, 50% less Tarheel armchair Arkansan
About Rand Paul’s filibuster the other night: Initially I was thrilled, but in the cold grey light of morning, it seems its most lasting effect will be limited to advancing Paul’s political fortunes.
It certainly exposed a rift between Paul and the Old Guard Republicans, who clearly seem unnerved at this challenge to the never-to-be-questioned primacy of the Military Industrial Gravy Train.
“What is it, all of the sudden, that this drone program has gotten every Republican all spun up?” Graham asked. He said that many are ‘astonished’ that Obama has continued President Bush’s war on terror. “I’m not astonished, I congratulate him for having the good judgment to understand we’re at war,” Graham added.
“To my party, I’m a bit disappointed that you no longer apparently think we’re at war,” he observed. “Not Senator Paul, he’s a man to himself. He has a view that I don’t think is a Republican view – I think it’s a legitimately held libertarian view.
Graham [also] slammed Paul for failing to sign a resolution in which the Senate professed its refusal to accept a nuclear-capable Iran.
McCain also had harsh words for Paul’s “stunt” and the pair had what must have been an incredibly awkward elevator ride together (shown in the image above).
So, are we any closer to progress here? Republicans (some of them anyway) spoke up in support of the filibuster and forgive me if I don’t quite believe they have become converts to the cause of civil liberties. It was simply an opportunity to get on television with the cameras rolling. The Democrats, who might be expected to have a civil libertarian or two among their ranks,* simply circled the wagons around their president and his scary nominee for CIA director. As Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday: “4 years ago, Brennan’s advocacy of torture forced him to withdraw for top CIA spot; now, all Dems except 2 vote to confirm him. #ObamaLegacy”.
You should never put faith in a politician to be jury, judge, and executioner.
In the GWOT decade we have seen successive, and mutually exclusive, fatuous personality cults built around whoever was sitting in the White House. Partisans of both parties would do well to put Kirell’s statement on a plaque somewhere in their offices. To me the distinctions between killing Americans on American soil vs. killing them overseas vs. killing non-Americans are really distractions from the major question: does any person, or group, have the right to sentence anyone to death based on secret criteria?
I’m hoping that years from now we will be able to look back on the past decade as an aberration, and we will revert to a time when extrajudicial assassination was, rightly, considered an appalling manifestation of an imperial mindset. Hoping, but not counting on it.
____
* OK there were exactly two, but one wished for more maybe?
In the Times, Julie Creswell’s A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry is about as good a case study in contemporary public/corporate sausage-making as you’re likely to find. Her story paints a vivid, if highly dispiriting, picture of the interplay between policy, lobbying and corporate profits (or profiteering).
I am always amazed at how cheaply our elected officials sell for. I am tempted to use a euphemism for prostitution here, but really that would be demeaning a profession where people actually work for their money. Typically these days, campaign contributions in the six-figure range can return profit boosts to lucky (generous) corporate donors on the order of half a billion dollars (or more) in increased sales.
Briefly, one thread of Creswell’s excellent article. Glenn Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a leader in electronic records technology for hospitals, gets a gig as health technology adviser to the Obama campaign. He visits the White House at least seven times after Obama takes office. Between 2008 and 2012, he personally makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Obama, as well as to Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee chair, and Jay Rockefeller, head of the Commerce Committee.
Coincidentally (or not), in 2009, “legislation to promote the use of electronic records was signed into law as part of President Obama’s economic stimulus bill.” Coincidentally (or not) Allscripts’ “annual sales have more than doubled from $548 million in 2009 to an estimated $1.44 billion last year, partly reflecting daring acquisitions made on the bet that the legislation would be a boon for the industry.”
Although much of Creswell’s focus is on the current administration, the electronic records Gold Rush got its start when President Bush called for digitizing national health records in his 2004 State of the Union address.
“After that, every technology C.E.O. wanting a piece of health care would have visited me every day if I had let them,” said David Brailer, whom President Bush appointed as the nation’s first health information czar.
Would it surprise you to learn this has been something of a jackpot for execs of electronic records firms? Cerner co-founder Neal L. Patterson has pulled down more than $21 million in total compensation and now has a billion-dollar stake in the company.
Creswell doesn’t report Tullman’s payday. In fact, she writes that he was forced out in what she describes as a “power struggle”–and that he has moved on to greener pastures.
He is now at a company he co-founded that focuses on solar energy — another area that, after Obama administration and Congress expanded government incentives in the 2009 stimulus bill, has been swept by a gold-rush mentality, too.
A nagging question for marginal bloggers (such as I): Why Do This At All? A corollary query: what the hell does a dude living in the sticks, who has chicken shit on his boots, who drives a ’95 Camry Wagon (with pride, I might add), know about politics? And (questioning myself again here, but echoing a persistent line of my dad’s, rest his soul), What Makes You So Smart? There are EXPERTS out there, and you act like they are always wrong and you are right. Do you think you know more than George Stephanopoulos?
And at no time do I feel more like I’m just being a jerk than this week, as many of my friends and peers are basking in the glow of the truly impressive pageant that was the inauguration. Quibbling about Obama’s ongoing wars, kill lists, drone attacks and secrecy obsessions; his imprisoning whistleblowers; his Austerity Lite–why complain about this? Now is NOT the right time. (It never is ….)
Yes, him!
And I … I … just sigh, and wish we had a president who looked more like the French model from the State Farm commercial, someone lacking the kind of charisma that obscures the actual policies….. Obama is for liberals what Reagan was for conservative middle Americans a generation earlier, a smooth operator who can elide, obscure, prevaricate, misrepresent, flat-out lie to you in a speech, and yet you just watch and say, “What a soothing way of speaking this man has.”
So … I have not given up on this, yet can’t think of any new ways to say what I think, or what I wonder. A two (and only two)-party system is pretty much the same thing as a one-party system. No one ever ran on the neoliberal ticket, yet that is all we have to choose from. How did we get here? How do we get out?
