I don’t know how this gem of a political thriller escaped me, but now that I’m hearing about Alvin Greene and reading up on his run for a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina, I can’t look away.
Greene won a whopping 59% of the vote in the primary, despite the fact that he’s an unemployed veteran who with no political background to speak of.
After Greene’s primary victory last spring, U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn, called for an investigation and forwarded the notion that Greene was a “plant.” The Democratic Party in South Carolina also asked Greene to step off, given that he has a felony obsenity charge handing around his neck. Green refuses to admit any wrongdoing in the case and he refuses to remove himself from the race.
But can he defeat Jim DeMint next month and become the freshman Senator from the Palmetto State? It’s highly unlikely, but so is everything else about Alvin Greene’s candidacy. Including the publishing of his “manifesto for a fairer America” in The Guardian.
I’m unemployed, and, if elected, I can teach the Harvard rich kids in the White House and the senate a thing or two. I will vote for any law and propose any measure to keep jobs in my state of South Carolina. I will vote for huge tariffs, and, if necessary, vote to ban imports of foreign goods. Millionaire egghead politicians in the pocket of big business talk about “free trade” – and let all of your jobs get shipped overseas.
No more free trade. Your job is not going to Indonesia.
In this time of internet hoaxes and fake news, it’s only natural to bring a lot of skepticism to this story. When you watch Greene get grilled by ETV, CNN and MSNBC it’s hard to image that his run for Senate is for real.
Yet, his run for Senate is real. Some of the explanations for Greene’s primary win include the fact that his surname is a popular name in the African-American community. Others have pointed out the simple fact that Greene’s name appeared first on the ballot–a ballot with a lot of unknowns–helped him win. Then there’s the fact that some South Carolina voters made the association with soul singer Al Green.
According to the Spartanburg newspaper, Greene spoke in upstate recently about widening roads, expanding water and sewer access in rural communities and the need to invest in alternative forms of energy. He also reminded the 80 people in the crowd three times that South Carolina ranks 49th in education. The reporter also noted that Greene “was noticeably more confident than the last time he spoke in Spartanburg County.”
I say, Go Greene! South Carolina could do a lot worse, and will, with six more years of radical conservative Jim DeMint.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found that the tea-party movement has emerged as a potent force in American politics and the center of gravity within the GOP.
In the survey, 71% of Republicans described themselves as tea-party supporters, saying they had a favorable image of the movement or hoped tea-party candidates would do well in the Nov. 2 elections.
“These are essentially conservative Republicans who are very ticked-off people,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.
If the Republicans win control of the House or Senate this fall, Mr. McInturff added, the survey shows “enormous amounts about how limited the interest is going to be in those new majorities to try to seek negotiation with the president or the Democratic leadership.”
All of which leads me to ask, what do these people want? According to the report they want to cut federal spending. Guess what, that’s not radical. We all want to cut spending. The question is where to cut? Tea-partiers want to cut entitlements. I’m for that. How about we cut the defense industry’s entitlement to half of all the taxes collected in this nation?
Tea-partiers are for small government. Again, that’s not a radical position. Topics like efficiency and productivity are truly not political. There may be a bureaucrat or two quaking in his boots at the thought of a smaller federal government, but downsizing is the trend, everyone and everything is moving in that direction.
Ultimately, I think many on the left and in just as many in the middle share the frustration and anger at “the way things are” in Washington, DC. But anger and frustration do very little for the nation. Frankly, it’s time to rise above. It’s also time to realize that two political parties can not possibly represent the plurality that is America.
In Oregon (and elsewhere) the race is on for the governor’s mansion. Let’s take a look at the candidates’ commercials.
Oh, an elbow to the ribs. That hurts.
But Dudley’s endured an elbow or two in his time. Here’s his counter:
A poll released today by Riley Research Associates shows the governor’s race in a statistical dead heat. The poll has the former governor favored by 40% of likely voters, while Dudley is favored by 39%. But one of every six voters, or 16%, are still undecided. Which means the voters in the middle will decide this race. Many of these undecided voters may wish they had a few more choices on the ballot, or at least one more Independent choice, but that’s not how a two-party system works.
Freelance writer Leland Baxter-Neal traveled to Humboldt County, Calif. to report on the marijuana economy (and what it might mean for Oregon) for The Portland Mercury. California’s Proposition 19, should it pass, will legalize pot in the Golden State–while Oregon’s Measure 74 would bring medical marijuana dispensaries to the Beaver State. Both measures could have huge economic impacts for the citizens of both states.
What I like about Baxter-Neal’s coverage is the fact that his article is not about politics. From a moral or political point of view, legal pot is a loser. But from an economic point of view it’s a big winner. And given the shaky footing states, counties, cities, businesses and individual households are in right now, a big economic win is exactly what’s needed.
I also find it very interesting how legalization would spread the wealth around, a fact not everyone likes, but a fact nevertheless.
California’s state tax commission estimated that legalizing and taxing marijuana sales could generate $1.4 billion in tax revenue. The tax commission also predicted, however, that the “legalization of marijuana would cause its street price to decline by 50 percent.”
That thought has sent chills through the Emerald Triangle, sparking a series of community meetings where the notoriously reticent growers have joined economists and local government officials to craft a plan in case the bottom drops out of their livelihood. Ideas being churned out include specializing in high-end, organic marijuana or promoting weed tourism—picture tours of weed farms much like wineries, and pick-your-own-bud farms.
Right now this multi-billion dollar industry is conducted on the black market. Change that and you not only fill the state’s coffers, you also spur private sector innovation. Weed tourism, for one, sounds like a great new industry that will employ bus drivers, hotel workers, restaurant workers, and more. I can also see a future for retailers who specialize in high end strains, some of which might also offer mail order and/or home delivery.
There’s also packaging, distribution and marketing to consider. Comparing this industry to the wine industry or craft beer industry is a good idea. In Oregon alone, many hundreds of small producers make and sell Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. How does the consumer know one Pinot from the next? Packaging, distribution and marketing is how. Again, we’re talking about a lot of non-growers and non-sellers with the ability to all of a sudden make a lot of money by going into business with said purveyors. Naturally, all that money is taxable too.
It’ll be interesting to see what develops. Once the cash registers in California start to ring, it’s a sound that will be heard around the world. And it won’t take long for people outside of California to realize that prohibition is a horrible burden on their state, whereas legalization is the opposite.
SEATTLE—Out-spoken and fearless urban planning expert, social critic, author and journalist James Howard Kunstler is a man on a mission. He wants to shake the American people awake with his special brand of righteous anger, and tonight he’s on stage in a grand ballroom at the Westin to do just that.
Kunstler is here to deliver the opening keynote at Living Future 2010, “the unconference for deep green professionals” put on by Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the U.S.G.B.C. (and my wife’s employer). Kunstler is an interesting choice to open the unconference, for he is a rabble-rouser of epic proportions.
He says, “People call me a ‘doomer,’ but I call myself an actualist.†One of the things he’s being “actual†about is suburbia, which he says is “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.†Kunstler says, “We’ve invested our identity in this. Suburbia is part of the American dream.â€
Kunster claims the suburban dream is over, despite our lingering dreams. He claims builders and others are waiting for the bottom, so they can resume building, but “no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run suburbia.â€
Americans are conditioned to want something for nothing, he says. Kunstler reminds the liberal audience that President Obama said, “We won’t apologize for the American way of life.†Building on that, Kunstler says he is sorely disappointed by the nation’s elite cadre of environmentalists who are more concerned about producing electric cars than they are about living in walkable communities. His word for it: techo-grandiosity.
“We are not a serious society, not at all,†he practically spits form the podium. He tells a story about speaking at the Googleplex in Mt. View, CA. “The whole place is like a kindergarten. It seems the whole idea in business today is to be as infantile as possible.†Worse yet, Kunstler says the Googleites don’t know the difference between energy and technology, which is his way of saying technology isn’t going to solve all our problems.
Lack of political will is another sore point. He says we’re spending stimulus money to fix highways, when “we have a train system that would embarrass the Bulgarians.†Sadly, “we can’t afford to be clowns.â€
During the question and answer session, a psychologist in the audience asks Kunstler if he doesn’t have a more hopeful image he can share, one that will make an already paranoid people feel less paranoid. In true Kunstler fashion, he says, “we can’t fix everything with therapy.â€
When the talk is done, people applaud, but not as vigorously as they might. It seems the air’s been sucked out of this vast ballroom.
One attendee tells me he found Kunstler’s talk depressing. And therein lies the crux of the matter. Kunstler paints a broad canvas where all sorts of American ugliness are put plainly in view. Yet, most people working on solutions—like creating green buildings—are busy addressing one small part of the problem, not the entirety of the matter, and they want to feel good about their contributions. But Kunstler doesn’t care about making people feel good. His thing is to sound the alarm and make it ring loudly in our ears.
For most Americans polar bears are animals they see from time to time in the zoo or maybe on a PBS special. In other words, the polar bear is totally remote, whereas the things that need to be fueled with oil–one’s car, one’s home, one’s business–are all quite near and dear. Hence, how much do we really care about the plight of the polar bear or what happens way way up there in Alaska? The answer to that rhetorical question is, of course, not enough.
Frances Beinecke, President of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), reminded me in an email that this year is the 50th Anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Sadly, her occasion for doing so wasn’t a party announcement, but a grave letter of concern, asking for help now that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has given Shell the green light begin exploratory drilling in the area. Because what we care about as a nation, now as always, is the discovery and removal of natural resources.
The Minerals Management Service, part of the federal Interior Department, yesterday gave Shell the green light to begin exploratory wells off the north coast of Alaska in an Arctic area that is home to large numbers of endangered bowhead whales and polar bears, as well as walruses, ice seals and other species. The permission would run from July to October next year, though Shell has promised to suspend operations from its drill ship from late August when local Inuit people embark on subsistence hunting.
Environmentalists condemned the decision to allow drilling, saying it would generate industrial levels of noise in the water and pollute both the air and surrounding water. Rebecca Noblin, an Alaskan specialist with the conservation group the Centre for Biological Diversity, said: “We’re disappointed to see the Obama administration taking decisions that will threaten the Arctic. It might as well have been the Bush administration.”
That’s damning criticism and fans of The President might bristle at the suggestion. But facts are facts.
In related news, Willamette Week recently ran an article that asked people who supported Obama for President what they think now, one year into his run. Lawyer and peace activist, John Bradach, isn’t pleased.
I was disappointed when he adopted the war team that Bush had left in place. For Obama to take those guys on, he really has allowed himself to be maneuvered into adopting those policies. And that’s not why I voted for him. Now I’m really disappointed, more than cautiously disappointed.
I do not want to hear Barack Obama justifying war, period. I am tired of wasting American kids on that war and on that policy, which is not going to win and will just be an indefinite commitment of American blood and resources.
Obama promised change, but change isn’t easy to implement in Washington, DC. But there’s more to it than that. Policy wise, change was always a false promise from Obama, a centrist Democrat.
Obama has been building consensus since his days on the Harvard Law Review, and he’s not about to veer from that practice now. Yet to truly change the way things are, the art of compromise itself needs to be compromised.
Activists seeking “Climate Justice” have been methodically protesting in Copenhagen during the two-week U.N.-sponsored summit on climate change, in order to push delegates and leaders toward real solutions instead of the usual rhetoric-filled nothingness.
According to The New York Times, the protests went from peaceful to heated today.
In Wednesday’s demonstrations, protesters began massing north of the center shortly before noon and pressed into a tight line of riot police blocking access to the hall. Some of the officers wielded truncheons against the chanting, shoving protesters in a close-order scrum. After forcibly removing protesters from a truck parked in an intersection outside the Bella Center, police in blue vans kept moving the protesters backwards, nearly pushing some into a watery marsh.
As the police vans advanced, skirmishes broke out with protesters who formed human chains and chanted their commitment to nonviolence and to helping people in parts of the world that they said would be hardest hit by climate change. A number of protesters encouraged individual groups to keep pushing against the police.
Apparently, 250 people were arrested today in these “skirmishes” with police. Like the protests around the WTO meetings in Seattle and elsewhere, it’s a hard core minority that seeks to escalate the confrontation. But I don’t believe anti-capitalist sentiment is a minority opinion. People are tired of powerful interests simply running people into the ground.
Mette Hermansen, 27, studying to train teachers, and a member of the International Socialists of Denmark, told the Times, “In the Bella Center they are not discussing solutions to climate change. They are discussing how rich countries can continue emitting and how to sell that to the public. We are not preventing leaders from making solutions but encouraging them to make solutions.â€
Bonus click: I also wrote about “Hopenhagen,” the U.N.’s effort to rebrand the famous Danish city during the Conference, on AdPulp.
Darby and I have been intently viewing seasons one through four of HBO’s The Wire (care of Netflix), which leaves just season five to go. I’m afraid we’re already dreading the end of the series. We don’t want it to end, the way you don’t want a great novel to end. But end it must.
In preparation for this coming conclusion of what one critic calls the “greatest TV show ever made,” I’ve begun searching for and processing the criticism.
Mark Bowden of The Atlantic called the show’s co-creator, David Simon, “the angriest man in television.” In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Simon says he doesn’t mind “being called that” and asks rhetorically if there’s a better response to the America of the last decade.
Bowden also makes note of the literary form advanced by The Wire.
Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary†fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.
It’s a point well taken. I’ve often thought that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be successful in Hollywood. It’s also interesting to understand Simon’s background as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. For 12 years the man told detailed, well researched, fact-filled stories, but those stories didn’t change policy in City Hall, Annapolis or Washington, DC. Simon isn’t holding his breath to see these changes come as a result of his TV show either. He sees the problems in America (like the failed War on Drugs that his show dramatizes) as systemic, and argues that conditions will have to become much worse before they get better.
Here, let’s listen to the man:
Simon says our economy doesn’t need the underclass, and that’s why these urban black communities have been pushed completely from the frame of American life. He’s right about the extreme marginalization, but I would counter that this nation does need the underclass and that poor, under-educated workers can become productive and change their station in life and possibly the country’s future in the process.
President Obama is conducting a “jobs summit” this week to help spur jobs training and jobs creation. In my opinion, we need to get off our collective ass now and institute a 1930s-style public works program. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much work there is to do. The nation’s roads and bridges need repairs and we must build high speed rail from Seattle to San Diego and from Miami to Boston. Moving to energy, the nation’s entire electrical grid needs to be refitted to store and conduct DC current produced by solar and wind. And the list goes on. Meanwhile, little progress is made.
In one episode of The Wire, “Bunny,” of Baltimore city police, says he doesn’t know what the answer is to getting kids off the corner and returning the streets to the citizens of Baltimore, only that it can’t be a lie. That’s correct, and it can’t be a lie in real life. Yet, empire is a lie. The wars to maintain it are a lie. The war on drugs is a lie. Saying we don’t have the resources nor the will to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the uninsured is a lie.
It’s easy to get fired up by The Wire, and that art’s role in society—to challenge us, to make us think, and help us to care. On these fronts, HBO’s gritty crime drama is a huge success.
Frustrated with the lack of meaningful dialogue around the nation’s health care debate, columnist Paul Krugman let one rip in The New York Times yesterday.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Yes, because the zombies–in this case the insurance companies and big pharma–have lots of money at stake. When there’s lot of money at stake, the public will be under-served every time. That much we know.
Krugman, unlike most Americans, is a student of history.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,†said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.†And last year we learned that lesson all over again.
Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.
Sadly, our present day recession is bad, but not bad enough to break the stranglehold. We haven’t reached a tipping point yet. In the 1930s one-in-three Americans was out of work and let’s remember that women typically didn’t hold jobs at that time, which meant one-in-three households had no income whatsoever. Today, things are falling apart, but not as fast.
More importantly, the psychology of the situation isn’t leading Americans to fundamental change. Instead of coming to terms, millions are busy trying hard to hold on to whatever they have—their boat, their home, the college fund for the kids and/or a retirement nest egg. Let’s just get back to normal is the prevailing mindset and that’s not going to lead to radical change.
We needn’t look back very far to recall what a miserable start the Clinton White House had in 1993 because of health care. Whatever the powerful interest–health care, the gun lobby, welfare farmers, warring oilmen–they can be outdone, but only through a massive public uprising. And who has time for that kind of vigilance when there’s a job to keep (or find), kids to feed, dogs to walk and favorite TV programs to capture on the DVR?
Krugman is astonished that nothing has changed in America. He knows we ought to know better. But we don’t know better and therein lies the real challenge. How do we lead our neighbors, friends and family from the fear that binds them into a new era of cooperation and trust? I don’t know any way other than to write it out and talk it out.
The New York Times Sunday Magazine today features Chicagoan Bill Ayers, college professor, author and former member of Weatherman Underground. He provides some great answers.
How do you define yourself politically?
I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
Do you regret your involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol?
Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That’s really despicable.
How do you feel when you wake up?
Happy, and then I drink coffee and I’m even happier. I’m a work in progress and, even at 64, living in a dynamic history that’s still in the making.
You’re weirdly cheerful for a former bomb-thrower.
I suffer from a genetic flaw, whichis that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
