Month: January 2012

I want to join the small band of people who are advocating that Vice President Joe Biden graciously retire so that Hillary Clinton can join President Barack Obama on the 2012 Democratic presidential ticket. 

I have no complaints about Joe Biden term as Vice President (his weasel-like behavior in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings years ago is another story).  But replacing him with our Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would benefit the country in three ways (and please forgive me if I repeat a little of what political consultants Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen and New York Times columnist Bill Keller recently have written:

1. It would virtually ensure the re-election of President Obama and perhaps help to recapture the House of Representatives and keep the Senate. Hillary is regarded by most as a highly successful Secretary of State and has been the most admired woman in the United States 10 years and counting. I have no illusions about President Obama and this current crop of Democrats, including Hillary. They are centrists who lean towards corporate interests, but they are a lot better than the Republican’s virulent right-wingers. We can’t afford to give the Republicans four years to lower taxes on the wealthy even more, gut social programs, take away civil rights and destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, National Labor Relations Board and other important government agencies.
2. We would have perhaps the most qualified Vice President in our history, with the possible exception of Henry Wallace, who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second VP. Hillary Clinton has served as a corporate attorney, first lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State and has distinguished herself in every role. She has shown an uncanny ability to keep growing, as witnessed by the lessons that she obviously learned from her failed attempt to pass healthcare legislation in her husband’s first term. Hillary is also well respected across the globe and has helped to shape President Obama’s mostly successful foreign policy. And like Barack Obama, she is clearly an intelligent person who prefers science-based solutions and analyses to those based primarily on faith. 
3. It would set Hillary up for a successful run for President in 2016, when she will only be 68 years old.   With her experience, her popularity in the United States and around the world, her ability to get things done and her essentially compassionate vision, I believe that Hillary would make a lot of headway in rebalancing the distribution of wealth and income and addressing the triple-headed environmental monster of global warming, resource shortages and pollution.

For those who want to create a band wagon for Hillary Clinton, there’s no time to waste.  You should write, call or email both President Obama and Secretary Clinton, the sooner the better.

You can find contact information for the President at a website called “Contacting the President.” It’s a little harder to reach Secretary Clinton.  I might start by emailing the State Department.   

But your activism shouldn’t end there.  You should also make sure that you advocate positions to President Obama and every Democratic candidate that drive them further to the left, including:

• Raising income tax rates on those who make more than $200,000
• Removing the cap on income that is assessed the Social Security tax
• Strengthening the NLRB and raising the minimum wage
• Reducing defense spending
• Investing more in repairing roads and bridges, increasing mass transit, developing alternative energy and creating a new generation of pollution controls.

Both Santorum and Gingrich played the race card last week, which should serve as a not-so-gentle reminder that much of the appeal of right-wing rhetoric reduces to the seemingly intractable racism that has poisoned the United States since its inception and has been destroying it since the end of World War II.

Their statements are based on false assumptions and manipulated numbers, but they have their effect among racists, the less educated and those who have been kicked around so much these past few decades that they seethe with undirected resentment.

Let’s start with Newt, who said “And so, I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention to talk about why the African-American community should demand pay checks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

The false assumption is that African-Americans are satisfied with food stamps and African-American leaders spend a significant amount of their time and money advocating for higher food stamp allowances. Certainly, African-American leaders see the necessity of food stamps for all poor families, but their agenda is exactly what Newt says it should be: jobs and economic opportunity, which require equal access to education and strict enforcement of civil rights laws.

For example, I perused the NAACP website looking for references to food stamps and found nothing. There could be a mention (the website has no search function), but I found nothing. It was easy, though, to find information on NAACP efforts to foster diversity in the news media, lower the level of obesity among African-Americans, improve our education system, enforce existing civil rights laws and address the fact that pollution and other environmental problems affect areas in which people of color live throughout the world much more than they affect other areas. These are just a few of the projects on which this mainstream organization is working that are featured and easy to find on the website.

Newt was merely channeling the mythic kindly patrician trying to give well-intention advice to the field hands. Rick Santorum’s comments were a bit more odious since he was fomenting racial warfare with his usual “politics of resentment.” Here’s Angry Rick’s quote, in reference to a question about foreign influences on the U.S. economy, which he quickly morphed into a rant against government programs to help the needy, which he, like so many, call “entitlements”: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

Singling out blacks implied that African-Americans receive the lion’s share of Medicaid benefits. That’s just not true. Santorum’s defenders immediately cited the misleading statistics that while 12% of the population is African-American, they represent 30% of those receive Medicaid benefits. It’s the wrong comparison, since Medicaid is only available to the poor, about 30% of whom are African-American.

Some might make the false statement that it’s their own fault so many African-Americans are poor, but that would ignore the lack of social mobility that exists in the land of the free. Many studies through the years have warned that fewer people move between classes in the United States than in Europe. The latest report—this one by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)—finds that there is even less social mobility in the United States than previously thought and that virtually all social mobility involves middle class people gaining wealth or losing it. If you’re poor, it’s statistically extremely difficult, if not impossible, to move up the ladder. Only someone who ignores these statistics can blame the poor for remaining poor, and that goes for both impoverished whites and blacks.

But what makes Santorum’s comments so offensive is that he creates a divide between African-Americans and other Americans. He is saying that it’s wrong for the virtuous “us” to provide free health care to the undeserving “them.” We know that Angry Rick is against Medicaid and other government programs for the needy, but that’s not what he says here. He says that he’s against giving money to blacks.

What does Santorum want exactly:  A Medicaid system that only gives benefits to whites? A segregated system in which taxes from white are earmarked for white people and taxes for blacks are earmarked for blacks?

Angry Rick, I think is going after bigger game: He is employing the old “divide and conquer” tactic. Divide the middle class and poor by creating an underclass that is easily recognizable as different by the color of their skin. He wants whites to believe that blacks are taking money from their pockets, so they never realize that the interests of most blacks and whites coincide and that pro-wealthy, tax, anti-union, outsourcing and spending policies have resulted in most Americans losing ground over the past three decades. He seems to want to incite a racial war which divides whites and blacks of the poor and middle class so that we ignore the class war that the wealthy have waged against the rest of us since the ascension of Ronald Reagan.

The friendly looking and sharply dressed middle-aged African-American man looks out at us from a full-page ad with a confident smile. A headline in a type face that looks like someone wrote it out by hand reads the words this impressive executive-looking man is supposed to be saying to us: “I’m an energy voter.”  

The rest of the ad consists of about 70 words which tell us that we need energy from all sources to create new jobs and then makes the unproved assertion that to get the energy we need “means developing our plentiful domestic energy—like oil and natural gas.”  The text then urges us to become “energy voters.” Underneath a campaign button that reads “Vote4Energy.org; more growth.” below which it tells us we can learn more at Vote4Energy.org.

I saw this print ad in yesterday’s USA Today. When I went to the website I discovered that it is part of a series of ads which feature a diverse mix of attractive people telling us to vote for energy.

The Vote4Energy website has lots of facts and figures (all without attribution, so we don’t know how to check if they are true), including projections of how many jobs could be created with a greater supply of domestic energy. Vote4Energy gives us 6 energy issues, including access to energy, energy security, jobs, taxes on energy, consumer needs and the environment (which focuses on not “undermining the economy,” an unveiled code phrase for deregulation).

Vote4Energy also uses many web pages to propose actions that energy voters can take, including registering to vote, writing letters, attending Vote4Energy events and holding letter-writing parties. It provides information and calls-to-action related to every one of the 50 states of the union. You can actually download voter registration forms for all 50 states.  There’s also a place to join, which costs nothing but requires you to give all your personal contact information to the organizers of the Vote4Energy movement.

The funny thing about the website is that it keeps talking about domestic sources of energy, but it only ever mentions oil and natural gas in the boiler plate description of the “organization,” in which nuclear, renewable and alternative energy sources appear in a list that begins with fossil fuels. For this one mention of non-fossil fuels I found dozens of mentions of oil and natural gas until I stopped counting.

Funnier still: the only specific action related to a real issue, as opposed to the nebulous concept of “developing our plentiful domestic energy,” is to remind President Obama that time is running out to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which will run from Canada to multiple U.S. destinations. Any frequent follower of the news knows that this pipeline is extremely controversial because of its high cost and the environmental havoc it will wreak along thousands of miles. The Natural Resources Defense Council has stated that the Keystone XL undermines the U.S. commitment to an economy built on clean energy and instead would deliver dirty fuel from oil tar sands at a high cost. And no, I didn’t get that last piece of information from the Vote4Energy website!

It came as no surprise, then, to discover that Vote4Energy is a project of the American Petroleum Institute (API), which represents 490 oil and natural gas companies.

The approach is quite deceptive for two reasons: 1) API keeps saying “energy,” but it clearly means oil and gas; 2) it focuses on actions that are depicted as empowering to voters, but the one specific action it advocates is to put pressure on the Obama Administration to make the decision to build a pipeline opposed by a large and growing number of state and national elected officials, environmentalists and even some oil refineries.

What’s truly fascinating is that API has launched what is in part a voter registration campaign. API member companies and their executives tend to give money and votes to Republicans, who for the past few years have been pursuing an aggressive campaign to make it harder for people to vote.   

I’m not proposing a conspiracy theory by any means. I would be extremely shocked to learn that the API and the Republican Party are working together to create a more conservative electorate. 

But what is true is that both Republicans and the API are using deceptive means to cook the voting rolls. The Republican Party is sponsoring and passing state laws that restrict voters based on the bogus issue of voting fraud, which is statistically non-existent. The API is encouraging voting among people whom they have deceived with their misleading marketing campaign.

It sure seems as if there has been a lot of news lately about people trying to carry firearms onto airplanes. As it turns out, people have been trying to sneak guns on board for a long time, at the rate of 2 per day 18 months ago. In December, that number more than doubled, to from 4-5 a day. The week of December 19-25, for example, TSA screeners  found 31 guns in carry-on bags, many of them loaded, with bullets in their chambers.

What I find disturbing is the news that the TSA does not have these gun-toters all arrested.  As a blogger representing the TSA recently stated (I’m giving you the original reference but note that the New York Times was my source), “Just because we find a firearm on an individual does not mean they had bad intentions, that’s for the law enforcement officer to decide.”  Evidently, a majority of passengers found with firearms in their carry-ons explain sheepishly that they simply forgot they had them in their bags.  

As far as I’m concerned, that’s like saying the dog ate your homework. I believe that every person who attempts to check a gun through security should go to jail for a minimum of a month. If the gun is loaded or if bullets in the gunperson’s possession, it should be for a minimum of a year. To my mind it’s absolutely amazing that someone can spend years in jail for selling marijuana to adults (a victimless crime), but some people who try to sneak a gun on board a plane can get off with a wrist slap.

I would also end the practice of allowing people to carry unloaded guns on board if they register them first. If someone were waving a gun around on airplane, would you assume that it is probably unloaded? Too bad we can’t get the opinion of the people who went down on planes on 9/11 because terrorists brandished box cutters. Let people check their guns in their suitcases. 

Like so many other issues, the United States seems divided about the issue of gun control. A survey by the Pew Foundation after the Tucson shooting of Representative Giffords found that 49% of Americans currently say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns, while 46% say it is more important to control gun ownership.  Unfortunately, the National Rifle Association has thrown millions of dollars into convincing state and national lawmakers to pass looser gun laws, money that gun control advocates don’t have to spend. The result has been a spate of recent state laws that make it easier to own a gun and expand the places that people can carry them.  Currently 32% of all households have guns in them, which seems high, but in fact is the lowest total since they started keeping records of such matters in the 1970’s. Meanwhile, the number of criminal background checks for gun sales set a record in November and broke that record in December.

My own approach to gun control is to protect society: I would outlaw possession of all handguns outside of shooting ranges and only allow private ownership of hunting guns, making gun enthusiasts rent other guns or keep their guns under lock and key at shooting clubs.  I would do away with all the gun shows and all mail-order and on-line purchasing of guns, because it’s so hard to police these sellers. I would make the purchase and background check procedures much more rigorous. I respect hunters and range shooting enthusiasts, but I also respect pilots and drivers of automobiles, yet agree with all the restrictions we put on their rights to protect themselves and others.

The old saw that it’s not guns who kill people, but people who kill people, is wrong. It’s people with guns who kill people.