Obama as a product of ‘affirmative action’ – a heretical view

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Paul Krugman wrote (NYTimes, November 11, 2010):

… the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

My take comes close to a liberal heresy…namely, that Obama is a product of ‘affirmative action,’ boosted and carried along through Harvard, etc., as a black face for the white system…. He never had to deal with outright racism or poverty in any significant way as a personal struggle. I can’t imagine what he did as a ‘community organizer’; my experience with that (in late 1960s New Haven especially) brought me close to people who had a strong capacity to confront the world as they find it. I have seen a Republican suggestion that Obama is a student of Saul Alinsky; this is bullshit, as anyone familiar with Alinsky’s methods knows. Alinsky was in-your-face; Obama is Stepin Fetchit by comparison….

Obama made a mistake in bringing Summers and Geithner into the administration, both culprits in the banking debacle; next, his mistake was to dump $$ into the banks w/o taking control of them (even George Soros said as much in an article in the November 11, 2010, NY Review of Books); after that, he was wrong to put aside calls for investigations into Bush malpractices (including torture and Iraq ‘intelligence’ manipulation)…. on all fronts, his mandate to ‘change’ things would have supported reviews of what was to be changed, i.e., what had been done to get into these various messes. By not uncovering the deep mess, he empowered the right-wing nuts by leaving their discourse unchallenged…. and they, sensing his weakness to confront, surged ahead.

Who’s Afraid of a Filibuster?

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My letter to The New York Review of Books in response to Michael Tomasky’s, “The Specter Haunting the Senate” [NYR, September 30, 2010], appears in the NYR, November 11, 2010, under the title, “Who’s Afraid of a Filibuster?”. It is accompanied by a reply from Mr. Tomasky.

I am flattered that Tomasky finds my argument “worthwhile”; he says it has been “much debated in Washington over the past two years.” I agree with his concluding assessment that “Counting on the Democrats to outdo the Republicans in [a filibuster] seems a tenuous hope.”

J. G. Ballard and the Death of Rain (thoughts on the oil volcano in the Gulf)

In 1965, novelist J. G. Ballard published The Drought, an expanded version of his science fiction novel published a year earlier, The Burning World. With these early novels, Ballard was well under way toward achieving the literary distinction of having a genre named for him: “ballardian” — “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

The story of The Drought is the disappearance of potable water, a consequence of the disappearance of rain. The excerpt quoted below provides a capsule history of the disappearance and an explanation for it: the disruption of the hydrologic cycle caused by a thin “mono-molecular film” on the surface of the oceans. Covered by this film, the oceans no longer provide sufficient evaporation to produce rain on the world’s lands.

The striking thing about Ballard’s dystopian vision is in the details: The ocean film is “a complex of saturated long-chain polymers,” formed from a “brew” of “highly reactive industrial wastes—unwanted petroleum fractions, contaminated catalysts and solvents… mingled with the wastes of atomic power stations and sewage schemes.” Here is not only a vision, but prescience, a glimpse into a world post- British Petroleum’s Deep Horizon well blow-out.

Here is the excerpt [from pp. 33-35, Triad/Panther paperback (1985)]:

The world-wide drought now in its fifth month was the culmination of a series of extended droughts that had taken place with increasing frequency all over the globe during the previous decade. Ten years earlier a critical shortage of world food-stuffs had occurred when the seasonal rainfall expected in a number of important agricultural areas had failed to materialize. One by one, areas as far apart as Saskatchewan and the Loire valley, Kazakhstan and the Madras tea country were turned into arid dust-basins. The following months brought little more than a few inches of rain, and after two years these farmlands were totally devastated. Once their populations had resettled themselves elsewhere, these new deserts were abandoned for good.

The continued appearance of more and more such areas on the map, and the added difficulties of making good the world’s food supplies, led to the first attempts at some form of global weather control. A survey by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization showed that everywhere river levels and water tables were falling. The two-and-a-half million square miles drained by the Amazon had shrunk to less than half this area. Scores of its tributaries had dried up completely, and aerial surveys discovered that much of the former rainforest was already dry and petrified. At Khartoum, in lower Egypt, the White Nile was twenty feet below its mean level ten years earlier and lower outlets were bored in the concrete barrage of the dam at Aswan.

Despite world wide attempts at cloud-seeding, the amounts of rainfall continued to diminish. The seeding operations finally ended when it was obvious that not only was there no rain, but there were no c1ouds. At this point attention switched to the ultimate source of rainfall—the ocean surface. It needed only the briefest scientific examination to show that here were the origins of the drought.

Covering the off-shore waters of the world’s oceans, to a distance of about a thousand miles from the coast, was a thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air—water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above. Although the structure of these polymers was quickly identified, no means was found of removing them. The saturated linkages produced in the perfect organic bath of the sea were completely non-reactive, and formed an intact seal broken only when the water was violently disturbed. Fleets of trawlers and naval craft equipped with rotating flails began to ply up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, and along the sea-boards of Western Europe, but without any long-term effects. Likewise, the removal of the entire surface water provided only a temporary respite—the film quickly replaced itself by lateral extension from the surrounding surface, recharged by precipitation from the reservoir below.

The mechanism of formation of these polymers remained obscure, but millions of tons of highly reactive industrial wastes—unwanted petroleum fractions, contaminated catalysts and solvents—were still being vented into the sea, where they mingled with the wastes of atomic power stations and sewage schemes. Out of this brew the sea had constructed a skin no thicker than a few atoms, but sufficiently strong to devastate the lands it once irrigated.

This act of retribution by the sea had always impressed Ransom by its simple justice. Cetyl alcohol films, had long been used as a means of preventing evaporation from water reservoirs, and nature had merely extended the principle, applying a fractional tilt, at first imperceptible, to the balance of the elements. As if further to tantalize mankind, the billowing cumulus clouds, burdened like madonnas with cool rain, which still formed over the central ocean surfaces, would sail steadily towards the shorelines but always deposit their cargo into the dry unsaturated air above the sealed offshore waters, never on to the crying land.

There are those who will claim the mantle of science to dismiss Ballard’s vision as only fiction. The federal government itself, in partnership with BP, would have us believe the oil volcano (or “spill”) in the Gulf has been capped with no long-term damage to the ocean. Here’s their report, released on August 4, 2010, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey:

…. burning, skimming and direct recovery from the wellhead removed one quarter (25%) of the oil released from the wellhead. One quarter (25%) of the total oil naturally evaporated or dissolved, and just less than one quarter (24%) was dispersed (either naturally or as a result of operations) as microscopic droplets into Gulf waters. The residual amount — just over one quarter (26%) — is either on or just below the surface as light sheen and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments. Oil in the residual and dispersed categories is in the process of being degraded.

Despite this rosy assessment, the report concludes: “… federal scientists remain extremely concerned about the impact of the spill to the Gulf ecosystem. Fully understanding the impacts of this spill on wildlife, habitats, and natural resources in the Gulf region will take time and continued monitoring and research.”

In Ballard’s story, the “full understanding” took about a decade to acquire.

In a sign that others are more attuned to the dystopic possibilities of the blow-out in the Gulf, the report “set off a war of words … among scientists, Gulf Coast residents and political pundits about what to make of the Deepwater Horizon spill and its aftermath,” according to an article in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, further research by other scientists “confirms the existence of a huge plume of dispersed oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico and suggests that it has not broken down rapidly, raising the possibility that it might pose a threat to wildlife for months or even years.” The dispute about the science is ongoing, and at least one observer understands the potential for fiction in scientific reports: Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy and Environment subpanel, said during a hearing on the official report, “People want to believe everything is OK, and I think this report and the way it is being discussed is giving many people a false sense of confidence regarding the state of the Gulf.”

Local news reports along the Gulf coast provide additional information contradicting the official report: “a coalition of Gulf community activists, scientists and philanthropists are saying the federal government and BP are misrepresenting the amount of oil left to be cleaned up in the Gulf of Mexico and the safety of eating seafood from the region.”

One long-term Florida resident provides a useful compendium of information on a website wholly devoted to the Gulf oil mess: “What I was seeing in the local and national media barely scratched the surface.”

If you want to take a quick look at the kind of science that is being used to study oil in the oceans — including the variety of assumptions (dare we say “fictions”?) involved — see these documents:

1. The “Ask a Scientist” answer to a nine-year-old student’s question, “Does oil evaporate?“; provided by the Newton Project of the Argonne National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy:

… the molecules in some kinds of liquids, like oil for example, are rather large and well-tangled up and attached to each other. This means that evaporation, if it occurs at all, is very slow.

2. “Evaporation of Oil Spills,” by M. F. Fingas, Emergencies Science Division, Environmental Technology Division, Environment Canada, submitted to Journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 1994:

Although the process of oil evaporation is understood, the application of evaporation equations in spill models is sometimes difficult. This relates to the input data required for the equations. There are only 3 relatively well-used schemes currently employed in models. The most commonly used is that of evaporative exposure as proposed by Stiver and Mackay (1984). Difficulties with the implementation of this model are primarily in terms of input data. Model implementation requires a mass transfer coefficient and a vapour pressure for each oil. These are not routinely measured for oil and must be estimated using other techniques. The second most-commonly used method is that of applying oil fraction-cut data. These methods are applied by using the readily-available distillation curves to estimate parameters for the Mackay equations noted above or in a direct technique. The third most common method is to assume a loss rate which is estimated from oil properties and the presumption that the oil moves linearly or logarithmically to that end point.

A blurb from The New Statesman, reviewing Ballard’s The Drought, is quoted on the front cover of the 1985 paperback edition: “powerfully credible, a compulsive nightmare.”

Indeed.

A statistic from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “Approximately 80% of all evaporation is from the oceans, with the remaining 20% coming from inland water and vegetation.”

When a government borrows money…

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When a . . . government desires to borrow money it must divest itself for the time being of all sovereign powers, and come before its subjects as a private corporation. It must bargain with those who have money to lend, and satisfy them as to questions of payment and security. . . . The broad theory of constitutional liberty is that the people have the right to govern themselves; but the historical fact is that, in the attempt to realize this theory, the actual control of public affairs has fallen into the hands of those who possess property. It follows from this that when property-owners lend to the government, they lend to a corporation controlled by themselves.

Henry Carter Adams, Public Debts: An Essay in the Science of Finance (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), pp. 7, 9

That’s as clear as one can state the matter! Sovereignty is undermined by ‘sovereign debt.’ The newly-revealed financial crisis in Greece is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. [One wonders how long it will be before that phrase is meaningless. When the glaciers are gone, there will be no more icebergs.] The added revelation that the crisis results from toxic concoctions by Goldman-Sachs brings the circle to a close: the big financiers, not content to enjoy the governments they control, scavenge for deeper interventions and more problematic arrangements to feed their unquenchable greed.

The suicide note left by Joe Stack before he crashed his little plane into the Austin, TX, building where the IRS maintained offices may not be polished writing, but, as Christopher Ketcham says, “The coherence is there for all to see who have eyes to see it.” Stack went ballistic trying to grapple with a malicious tax code designed to foster what some refer to as ‘socialism for the rich,’ but which is better termed fascism: the integration of the government and economy into a single institution of power. I wrote about that in “Corporate Personality and Human Commodification,” Rethinking MARXISM Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer 1996/97), pp. 99-113.

Writing Elsewhere

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I’ve been writing elsewhere than this blog in recent months, much of it appearing in Indian Country Today. The focus is on sharpening and heightening the critique of federal Indian law in the face of increasing anti-Indian uses of that body of law by the US Supreme Court.

For example, here’s a three column series in Indian Country Today analyzing federal Indian ‘trust doctrine’ in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision denying compensation to the Navajo Nation for decades of underpaid coal extraction pursuant to federally approved leases [United States v. Navajo Nation, (2009)]:

“Navajo Nation, known as an ‘Indian tribe'” – ICT, April 15, 2009
“Can federal Indian ‘trust’ be trusted?” – ICT, April 22, 2009
“The sands of federal ‘trust'” – ICT, April 29, 2009

The columns have garnered a variety of comments and have been reprinted and linked to by other writers. I am happy to be part of a rethinking of these matters.

Martial Law in MA… or wider?

FYI – This Senate bill apparently now goes to the House.

http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/senate/186/st00/st00018.htm

I noticed a paragraph in Section 10 of the bill (amending chapter 111 by adding 2 sections) that would add a new section, 25L(c)(5), which includes the following in a separate paragraph:

The location of duty may be within the commonwealth, or may be in another state or a province of Canada if an official request for assistance has been received from such state or province.

The bill title refers to “Response in the Commonwealth,” but the possible mandatory deployment of voluntary personnel to anywhere in USA or Canada goes beyond that purpose.

Also, Section 25M includes provisions for control of “the market … product(s) or services(s) that are in short supply, and that … are essential to the health, safety or welfare of the people.”

A lot on the plate…..

p

Let the filibuster happen!

Elizabeth Drew’s analysis of Obama’s 30 days [New York Review of Books, March 26] repeats the conventional, misguided, self-defeating notion that the Senate cannot do anything significant without 60 votes, “to ward off a filibuster, or even the threat of one.” To the contrary, perhaps the most significant action the Senate might now take is to call the Republicans’ bluff and let them go forward with a filibuster.

Please note: If Democrats had insisted on real filibusters at several junctures during the past several months they have been in the majority, instead of giving in after failing to round up cloture votes beforehand, Republicans would have been forced to display — in public on the floor of the Senate — their obstruction to Medicare financing, as well as to funding to combat AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Harry Reid had cots brought into the Senate for an all-night session in July when Republicans started to filibuster the Iraq pullout bill, but he caved when the first cloture vote was lost.

As I have written before: What is the reluctance of the Democratic majority to call the bluff of Republicans and force them to follow through on threatened filibusters? Is it cowardice, ineptness, or laziness? Rounding up cloture votes to forestall a filibuster is not the same as actually tackling a filibuster. It is ‘filibuster lite’ and the cloture vote becomes a virtual vote, empowering the minority rather than overwhelming it. As a result, Congress becomes ever more opaque and Americans become ever more suspicious of the legislative process.

In 1964, segregationist senators held up Senate business for 57 days, filibustering against the Civil Rights Act. Their filibuster revealed to America the mindset of the obstructionists and paved the way for successful actual cloture and passage of the Act. The civil rights filibuster educated people about the historic struggle and the landmark legislation. A writer analyzing the process of the Senate ought to be familiar with this history. A progressive writer today ought to understand the significance and the necessity of calling the right-wing obstructionists to account for themselves.

David RePass (emeritus professor of political science at the University of Connecticut), “Make My Filibuster,” [Op-Ed, New York Times, 1 March] used the phrase “phantom filibuster” to make the same point:

It also happens to make a great deal of political sense for the Democrats to force the Republicans to take the Senate floor and show voters that they oppose Mr. Obama’s initiatives. If the Republicans want to publicly block a popular president who is trying to resolve major problems, let them do it. And if the Republicans feel that the basic principles they believe in are worth standing up for, let them exercise their minority rights with an actual filibuster.

Economic strength through land theft and war?

Reviewing Jeff Madrick’s The Case for Big Government in The New York Review [“Government Beyond Obama?“], Richard Parker writes that the influence of government’s share of GDP from the American Revolution to the Great Depression was “quite small,” but had a “disproportionately large” influence on the economy. [NYR, 12 March 2009, 38]

Parker’s analysis of the federal role in this period is that

…upon organization of the Northwest Territory in 1789, the federal government became the nation’s largest landowner—a fact not reflected in conventional GDP calculations. And over the next century and a half the federal government was able to shape economic growth through its land distribution policies: for example, it used sales and leases of its land to foster small-scale farming, promote free primary (and later higher) education, encourage forestry and mining, and finance the nation’s vast transportation network.

When we recall a fact not reflected in conventional history — that the lands over which the federal government asserted control were Indian lands, not public domain — we get a sharper and less pleasing view of the federal role in boosting the economy in that 150 years. It was land theft.

For example, Lincoln’s economic policies resulted in huge areas of Indian land being opened to colonization. States were granted 71 million acres. Another 85 million acres were awarded to homesteaders under the 1862 Homestead Act. Yet another 155 million acres of Indian lands, including “rights of way and alternate sections of non-mineral bearing lands,” were “granted outright” to “corporate interests which undertook to finance the construction of the transcontinental railroad.” [Jennings C. Wise, The Red Man in the New World Drama (1971), New York: Macmillan, 260].

Parker criticizes Madrick for ignoring “effects of American foreign and military policies on economic growth. Between 1945 and 1975—the period Madrick cites so approvingly in contrast to the decades that followed—half of all federal spending was for the military, and significant parts of the rest (including for education, roads, science, and technology) were justified as military preparedness.” [NYR 41]

Putting these two historical periods together — 1789-1939 and 1945-1975 — a truthful observer would say that U.S. economic strength derived from big government was based on theft and war. If we take into account how much war was involved in the early land thefts, we might conclude that the only thing big federal government has done to boost the economy in the entire 220 years since 1789 has been to wage war. Not so pretty a picture of American political economy after all.

Strangely enough, Parker concludes his review with a call for the federal government “first to save Wall Street and restore credit, and then to begin rebuilding the devastation Wall Street’s failure has left behind.” [41] Since credit cannot be conjured out of thin air, does this mean more land theft and more war? And what then for the devastation that financial success leaves behind?

Parker’s final sentence, “The challenge of creating a new era for government as long-term guarantor of our security and well-being lies ahead.” One wishes that “our security and well-being” could be founded on some new political economy, not the same old, same old, which, after all, is looking increasingly problematic on a global scale.