Stumble of the Week

Personhood. Since the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, it stands to reason that they can be criminals as well, and yesterday British Petroleum pled guilty to 11 felonies in connection with the fatal oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago. BP will pay $4.5 billion in fines and stands to lose up to $21 billion more for violations of the Clean Water Act. Three of its employees have also been indicted. Unlike other kinds of people, however, a corporation cannot go to jail, so BP has instead returned to profitability and increased its dividend. There is ongoing debate as to whether that is a sign of rehabilitation or recidivism. Finally, while felons lose their right to vote, BP can continue to give millions of dollars to those who promise to vote on its behalf. Right-wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day connecting the dots from the Petraeus affair to the Benghazi incident. I myself am on to a somewhat larger story, one that traces a devious line directly from Paula Broadwell to Benghazi to Nairobi to the Clintons’ murder of Vince Foster to the LBJ single-bullet cover-up to John Wilkes Booth to Aaron Burr’s 1807 indictment for treason. Democrats all, they have been funded by a secret cabal of secular humanists, from the Marquis de Sade to George Soros, whose unwavering goal is to impose the party’s alien ideology and elitist values on an innocent America. Think big, Krauthammer. Think DaVinci Code. I’ll keep you posted.

A Skunk at the Oil Party

Gone are the days when we asked of the Arab world, “How did our oil get under your sand?” Now we are relentless in our quest for energy independence, and recent forecasts indicate that we will achieve it within a few years. Who knew that, while the presidential candidates bashed each other over who would develop fossil fuels faster, we were already exporting more oil products than we imported? We are expected to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer in five years, and Russia as the top gas producer by 2015. Only China produces more coal than we do. A future of no more gas lines, no more US warships escorting Mideast tankers, no more energy blackmail has been America’s dream since the 1970s. We now really can turn our backs on the world. All of which puts Barack Obama in something of a bind.

The forecasts assume development of the natural gas locked in our shale deposits, increased oil drilling and, of course, coal. In other words, we must tear up our ground, drill in our water and remove the tops of our mountains to replace Middle Eastern oil.

Both parties made economic growth the mantra of their campaigns, and Obama will be expected to deliver – to consumers, to labor, to business. The costs of doing so went unmentioned during the campaign. No talk of climate change, of carbon emissions, of pollution.

But the long-term trends of such dependence are clear and serious. Environmentalists voted for the president in huge numbers, and he owes us a serious discussion about alternatives to conventional growth.

Randy Generals

As someone who never made it out of the enlisted ranks in his military career, I don’t have a good grasp on the recent behavior of the general staff. But with a second Afghanistan commander-in-chief in limbo for what is being deemed “flirtatious” behavior, others are reacting to the unexpected hormonal explosions. “It’s the damned drones,” said a person not authorized to speak for the Pentagon. “With more and more of the real fighting controlled by technocrats at an airbase outside Las Vegas, instead of by commanders at the front, the number of testosterone-displacement-syndrome cases has risen sharply. This is a serious problem, and video games and authorized biographies are only part of the solution.”

Several potential 2016 presidential candidates also wasted little time in weighing in.

Happy to finally be able to explain why someone as belligerent as he is took a series of draft deferments during the Vietnam War, Newt Gingrich said, “The military is the only place left in America where adultery is still a crime . . . except, of course, in Callista’s and my house since I made my peace with God.”

“Crime or no crime,” retorted Rick Santorum, “the real problem here is contraception,” which he called “nothing but a license to commit sin.”

Paul Ryan reassured the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he has “binders full of women” left over from his last campaign.

Flying 42,000 feet above the fray in her Boeing 757, Hilary Clinton was unavailable for comment. As was Bill.

Herman Cain enlisted. He can now be reached at @Herman@fortbragg.gov.

Principles and Pragmatism

As I drove northeast into Maine, listening, when I could stand it, to talk radio’s toxic spew, I wondered whether Maine’s diverse political composition might provide a blueprint for a fractured nation to move forward together. The first step is to turn off the hatemongers, those who make a living demonizing their opponents and inciting their followers to make it personal. The antidote to bad ideas is not personal attacks. It is better ideas. The response to lies is not bigger lies but an honest effort to find the truth. The role of journalism is not simply to tell us what each candidate said but to analyze the truth of their claims.

But then what? How can we reach common ground without compromising our principles? How do people like me, who find much of the current Republican platform abhorrent, bridge the divide? One answer is to honor basic principles – our own and others’.

For pragmatists, accommodation is a first principle. It is not a bad thing to have leaders who understand the importance of compromises that will enable small steps forward. But core principles are, by definition, not negotiable. We must determine which those are for us and keep fighting for them. That’s what Lincoln did, and Churchill.

We must be sure that the principles on which we stand are too vital for us to give up and too important for us to give in. And if we lose, we must keep fighting for them without scorching the earth.

MaineStream

As I drove east through Ohio and Pennsylvania after Election Day, listening to Rush Limbaugh spew his relentless rhetoric of hate-filled racist and nativist venom, delivered in Stepinfetchit dialect and Latino accent, I thought, what hope have we of coming together? And what would it look like if we did? As I entered Maine (where Limbaugh has a big radio audience), I wondered if a piece of the answer might be here. Maine has been a reliably blue state in presidential elections for 20 years, although it had earlier been solidly Republican (one of two states to vote for Alf Landon in Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide). But consider:

• Its two senators are moderate Republican women, although Independent Angus King, a popular former governor, will replace the retiring Olympia Snow.
• Its governor is a Tea Party Republican, elected with just 38% in a three-way race.
• While both members of Congress are Democrats, one is a liberal woman, the other the only New England member of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition.
• The state legislature is narrowly Republican.
• After rejecting same-sex marriage in 2009, Maine voters approved it last week.
• It has implemented one of the country’s most successful dam-removal programs.

But Maine is not some political nirvana. Its governor has been disastrous, and an unholy alliance of left-wing demagoguery and corporate greed killed a broad-based sustainable forestry initiative several years ago. So what lesson can we take from its kaleidoscopic political landscape that produces disproportionately good candidates across a spectrum of strongly held beliefs?

I’ll try to answer that tomorrow.

Stumble of the Week

Karl Rove. “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money” – tweet from Donald Trump, who should know a stumble when he sees one (but doesn’t). Rove’s political groups gave $127 million to Romney and $10 million to defeat Sherrod Brown in Ohio, where Rove played a particularly seedy role – or roles – as an “outside” fundraiser, a political insider and a Fox News commentator. When the network declared Ohio for Obama, Rove had a conniption and then an on-air fight with the Fox (!) staff. Results: Rove’s groups lost one of one presidential, 10 of 12 senate, and four of nine house races. Common Ground. Amid all the talk of bipartisanship, consider this: In Obama’s first term, Congressional Republicans tried to kill 70 percent of all bills before a vote and made more filibusters than had been made over six decades after WWII – an era that included intense opposition to civil rights.

Return on Investment. Sheldon Adelson was the “biggest single donor in political history” and Linda McMahon spent $97 million of her own money on two senate seats in two years: ROI 0%.

Graciousness. “What happened? A political (sic) narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division” (Mary Matalin).

King Coal

Both sides in the election campaign made impossible promises about economic growth based on unconscionable pledges to develop energy sources: drill, baby, drill; go nuclear; frac that shale; build that pipeline and, above all, remove those mountaintops and strip that coal. At least the president consistently included alternative energy sources in the mix, for which the Republicans consistently ridiculed him. Amid all the talk of moving forward, we got paeans to coal, the engine of the 19^th century. In the midst of one of history’s most destructive storms, we heard nothing about global warming. We must change the conversation about growth and energy, and only the Democrats seem willing to do it. And no matter how shrill our environmentalist warnings, they will not reach the hearts of those struggling just to get by.

So instead of going after the bad guys in the GOP who won’t listen, why not begin with the Democratic senators from coal states? There are a lot of them, and they tend as a group to be more “moderate” than their caucus. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania is pro-life; West Virginia’s Joe Mancin refused to attend his party’s convention; Jon Tester just scraped through a close election in Montana. And Jay Rockefeller need not rely on coal companies for money. While their constituents depend on coal jobs, they are also the front-line victims of the environmental contamination that accompanies production. And they are increasingly organizing on behalf of their families’ health and quality of life.

Their leaders need to get ahead of them on this issue. In 2012, the only Cole that should be King is Nat.

The Morning After

What has changed? The president was re-elected with fewer electoral votes than he had in 2008, an almost identical political composition in the House, a sliver of a gain in Senate seats, a knotted popular vote and a political map of America that shows vast expanses of red between coastal slivers of blue? No wonder Democrats take global warming seriously: they live by the oceans. But yesterday, I think, brought a sea change of a subtler kind. In a country where millions of people are really hurting, voters rejected the Republican’s punitive economic alternative and stayed the course. We do need real change, but not the kind being offered. And we saw a more generous America in other ways: gay marriage won a referendum for the first time ever – in Maine and Maryland – and is leading in Minnesota and Washington; the Tea Party’s most frightening candidates – Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana – lost in heavily Republican states; and Obama’s huge support among immigrant voters of all kinds will lead, I hope, to kinder and more effective immigration policies. (One person told me yesterday that Asians vote overwhelmingly Democratic because the evangelical lectures on “family values” so offend them.)

What now? I think the pundits need a rest. We have had enough of scrutinizing Obama’s impenetrable soul and parsing Romney’s shifting principles. The question the president faces remains: how do you reach across the aisle to folks who want nothing to do with you? With neither Romney nor Ryan carrying his home state, Americans signaled that they are tired of hard-right intransigence.

Immigrants and Others

For the immigrant families, both working- and middle-class, I have met in my few days in Ohio, the vote is an almost mythical thing. Unlike many people whose doorbells I have rung, new citizens seem grateful I have come to urge them to vote. They have not taken Ohio’s early-voting option because they want to go to the polls in person today and stand in line with their fellow citizens. Several plan to take their children to see the process of a democracy in which they still strongly believe, at least on this one day. The people of color with whom I have spoken – native-born and immigrant – are overwhelmingly supporting Barack Obama. Does that mean that race is the driving force in this election? I believe it is one of them. But those who play the “race card” are not those seeking the minority and immigrant votes, but those who have written them off. Voter suppression is a big issue in Ohio, as it is elsewhere, and it is the Republicans who are most intent on using it, while its victims are overwhelmingly minorities, immigrants and the poor.

Yet those are the people who have said to me, “We are all in this together,” which is exactly the opposite message the Republicans have been sending overtly until a few weeks ago – and continue to signal to their core.

In a changing country, I think it is both a reprehensible and a losing strategy.

The sun is out this morning in Cleveland for the first time in a week. I take it as an omen.

Notes from Ohio

Day 1: (Cleveland) No one answered the door at my first house, which was listed as the residence of an old woman. As I was leaving the porch, a car sped up with its hood raised. The driver angrily asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was looking for Mrs. ____. “She’s not here.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“She won’t be back.”

“Is she dead?"

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. Do you know you’re driving with your hood up?”

“I saw you snooping around my property and came over to blow your head off.”

And he threw it in reverse and roared back to the repair shop across the street.

Day 2: Now in the suburbs, I spent the day in McMansion ghost towns – sprawling subdivisions of huge houses on eerily empty streets. While the houses are all different, the mailboxes are identical. Here is where the housing bubble burst, as people watched their impossible dreams turn into defaulted mortgages. Several of those I talked to were immigrants, who had recently bought from the original owners. Many houses appear vacant. I did not see a single child playing outside.

Day 3: I talked to young middle- and working-class couples who remain undecided two days before the election. Because they are struggling so in this economy, they are focused, not on ideology, but on things that affect them directly. Romney’s extreme makeover and mendacious TV ads do not seem to enrage them. They are not mean-spirited; they are worried about their families and their future – and they feel their politicians have betrayed them.

Stumble of the Week

Political Sanity. As I stumbled into Ohio late yesterday, I heard this disquieting radio report: In one more race awash with outside money, the Ohio Senate candidates have spent over $41 million on over 62,000 TV ads. Republican challenger Josh Mandel’s campaign has spent four times that of incumbent Sherrod Brown, and 85% of Mandel’s money has come from a few donors who can remain anonymous because of the Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United ruling. Penn State. A few years ago I was working with Pennsylvania newspapers to improve the state’s restrictive open-records laws, and I witnessed President Graham Spanier tell a Senate committee that Penn State should be exempt from the new law because . . . well, it was Penn State. No longer simply a state college in a bucolic region, the university had become a huge business enterprise whose trade secrets apparently outweighed its academic commitment to transparency. All the newspapers want to know, Spanier peremptorily told the committee, is how much Joe Paterno makes. It turned out that the university was concealing far more about the football team than the coach’s salary. Yesterday Spanier was indicted for his role in a “conspiracy of silence [to] actively conceal the truth” in the Jerry Sandusky case.

The Climate Hoax. Most politicians continue to tap dance around the connection between the growing frequency of huge storms and other weather “events” and the science of global warming. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is confronting the issue firsthand, yesterday endorsed Barack Obama because he is the only candidate to take the matter seriously.

Mysterious Democracy

Dateline: November 1, 2012. Ramada Plaza, I-95, Albany, NY . . . home of the world’s slowest Internet . . . but halfway to Cleveland. There is a good deal of time to think on my drive, and one thing that occasionally pops into my passive brain is polling. This is not an especially enlightening internal discourse, but polls are in the news a lot these days, and everybody this side of George Gallup seems as confused about them as I am.

Polling has become a sophisticated science, driven by complicated mathematical formulas that make possible statistically significant results from a tiny sampling. And while everybody has a story about how wrong polls have been (DEWEY WINS), they seem to be predictive most of the time.

But other than that this election will be close, the current glut of polls seems unable to predict much of anything, including what their numbers will look like tomorrow. While the change is small each time (partly because polls use such small samples), it seems real – and very confusing. Do some people change their minds every day? Are the polls finding the rare voters who remain undecided?

I don’t know who will win this election, and I’m pretty sure my vote won’t be the deciding one. So why bother? And why go to Cleveland? If I stayed home, it would mean one fewer vote out of millions and a handful of Ohioans who won’t go to the polls. Peanuts.

I can’t explain it, really, but I believe the efforts of each of us are part of something larger and that somehow they make all the difference.

Obama

Delayed by Sandy, but not denied, I am heading to Cleveland to do what I can to help re-elect the president. When I came of age, I realized that the things I most cared about were: ensuring civil rights; eradicating poverty; caring for the earth and ending war.

They still are, and for me Barack Obama remains the embodiment of that unfulfilled agenda. Mitt Romney is its antithesis.

It is neither an easy nor a popular agenda, and we are engaged in a battle whose outcome is uncertain, and some of the reason for that falls on people like me.

Drawn to Obama’s humanness, we turned him into an icon . . . and then expressed our disappointment when he showed himself to be human.

We loved his innocence . . . until it became his inexperience.

We resonated to his appeal across race, class, gender and ideological differences . . . except when it led him to compromise on issues we held non-negotiable.

But it was more than just his frailties or our expectations. He inherited a global depression that was created by the values he opposed and was creating an America we would not recognize. He faced two off-the-books wars and policies that made us loathed around the world. And he encountered implacable opposition that was as well-funded as it was mean-spirited.

He accomplished much, from health care to Iraq, that is significant and lasting.

He is not prefect, but I believe that Barack Obama has been one of the best presidents of my lifetime, and he has the chance to help transform this nation.

This is my 200th post. Thank you for being a part of it. If you know others who might like to read it, please invite them to www.jamesgblaine.com

Armageddon (the Movie)

One of my daughter, Gayley’s, and my favorite movies is “Armageddon,” a B-grade thriller that is exciting, funny, romantic and completely trite. Its plot centers on the desperate efforts to save the world from a huge asteroid heading right for us. Pieces have already bombarded New York, and other bits will wipe out Paris and Shanghai. NASA decides that the only hope is to detonate a nuclear weapon deep in the asteroid, and the only folks who can get up there and bury the bomb are a bunch of tough, freehearted oil drillers led by Bruce Willis. After a series of zany episodes and dramatic mishaps, the team manages to get the bomb in place, only to learn that someone must stay behind to detonate it manually. Ben Affleck draws the short straw, but Willis tricks him into leaving so he can go home and marry Liv Tyler, Willis’ beautiful daughter.

The unfortunate message from the film is that it takes the combined efforts of a nuclear bomb and the world’s best deep-sea oil-drilling team to save the earth.

I thought of “Armageddon” as I followed Sandy’s path along the eastern seaboard – about how this storm seemed to thumb her nose at our efforts to dominate nature, and about how two of the biggest threats to our own annihilation are nuclear proliferation and our frantic search for fossil fuels . . . and that exactly 50 years ago in Silent Spring, as a historian recently wrote, Rachel Carson warned “that efforts to control nature threatened man’s survival.”

Just Wondering

Sorry for the delay. Technical difficulties this morning. Unknown if they are related to Sandy. Would you be intimidated if you got a letter from your boss that said “another four years of the same presidential administration” threatens your job?

Of course not. You would see through such strong-armed tactics and, thanks to the secret ballot, retaliate without fear in the voting booth.

But would you wear your Obama pin (to date, all letters have backed Mitt Romney) to work? Or park your bumper sticker in the company lot?

These company-wide letters, which several large employers have recently sent out, might be counterproductive in individual cases. But their overall effect is chilling. Just as your boss didn’t build his (the senders are male) business by himself, so you can’t build your rebellion by yourself. It requires communication, the exchange of ideas, open discussion. No one will note who is wearing a Romney pin, but it takes courage to show the other guy’s face.

These small things matter. When was the last time you saw a national politician without an American flag in his lapel? For me, it was in 2008 when someone asked Obama why he didn’t wear one? He does now. It’s part of the uniform.

When I taught school, I didn’t say the pledge of allegiance. I didn’t make a spectacle, but stood respectfully, because I don’t believe in rote oaths of fealty. Some of my students noticed and asked me why I didn’t say it. They did not ask those who did.

I hope some day one of them will.

Sacred Cows Redux

In which we look more closely at yesterday’s non-partisan six-point economic plan.

1. Eliminate the home mortgage deduction: America’s most popular deduction costs the government $84 billion annually in lost revenues and inflates home prices. Its social-engineering goal, long abetted by highways and oil subsidies, is to subsidize the American Dream of single-family suburban home ownership. Those who really dream big can get us to subsidize their second homes as well.
2. End tax deduction for company-provided health care: This perk, non-taxable to donor and recipient, encourages enhanced coverage and more usage, which drives up health costs for everyone else. I’m not saying it’s bad . . . but with all these deductions, we should recognize how entitled those who rant against entitlements really are.
3. Eliminate the corporate income tax: Bad, say the economists, because it taxes job creation. To get money from the rich, tax the owners. That make sense, but we still need to regulate corporate activities . . . and when they break they law, fine them without mercy. That might close the deficit right there.
4. Eliminate all income and payroll taxes: Taxes discourage what your taxing, economists say, and income is good. So where would the money come from? The economists recommend a consumption tax that protects low-income households. I’m all for a progressive consumption tax, and ending the regressive payroll tax . . . but we still need a graduated income tax to provide for our national needs and to assert fairness as a core principle.
5. Tax carbon emissions: Tax bad things. But since carbon and consumption drive our entire economy, wouldn’t taxing them actually slow growth? It might force us to, finally, reconsider the increasingly ugly and unsustainable path our current obsession with growth is taking us.
6. Legalize marijuana: Like, yo. If we do this, who cares about the other five?

Sacred Cows

NPR, which, along with Planned Parenthood, has become the focus of the administration's extremist funding priorities and out-of-control spending, ran an interesting series last weekend on All Things Considered. “A Tax Plan That Economists Love (And Politicians Hate)” asked five politically diverse economists to come up with policy changes that would drive the economy and stem the red ink. Here are six proposals on which they all agreed:

• Eliminate the home mortgage deduction, perhaps the country’s most popular entitlement program.
• End the tax deduction companies receive for providing health care to their employees.
• Eliminate the corporate income tax.
• Eliminate all income and payroll taxes.
• Tax carbon emissions . . . and so drive up the price of gasoline.
• Legalize marijuana.

At first blush this lists seems closer to Ron Paul or the Libertarian platform than to either of the major parties – and in the latest polls the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, stands at a whopping 3%. Indeed, when NPR presented the economists’ platform to two experienced political consultants, they responded with something less than enthusiasm.

“You’re insane,” said one, calling it “a radical plan to bankrupt families.”

“You should move to another country,” said the other.

But in fact, not only is there is something in the plan for everybody to hate, there is also a good deal to chew on . . . once you have adjusted to seeing a landscape strewn with the carcasses of sacred cows or looked at the world through the haze of your now-legal joint.

We’ll look more closely tomorrow.

Cabinet Making (2)

The re-election campaign has caused the president to consider major changes in his second-term cabinet in response to Republican criticisms of his World Apology Tour, runaway spending, the unappreciated role of the cavalry, the central importance of Bill Clinton and the shifting landscape.

• Secretary of State: Ima Sari
• Secretary of Defense: Smarty Jones
• Secretary of the Treasury: Outsourced to the idle printing presses of the Gannett Corporation
• Secretary of the Interior: To be abolished, as Republican-led state legislatures push ballot measures to take over western federal lands, including the Grand Canyon.
• Secretary of Health and Human Services: With GOP senate candidates declaring that pregnancies from rape are either an impossibility or a gift from God, the department will be downsized while Democrats bone up on other medical procedures besides abortion.
• Ambassador to the United Nations: Robert Toll of Toll Brothers (so we can do some nation building here at home)
• In addition, the Ambassador to Kenya will be elevated to full-cabinet status.

All other cabinet positions will be overseen by Bill Clinton, who will also be in charge of redecorating the White House for the 2017 inauguration of President-elect Hillary Rodham (Clinton).

Because of the magnitude of his two roles, the former president has assembled an advisory panel composed entirely of private citizens:

• Foreign Affairs: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Sofitel Hotel, New York City, and Paris, France.
• Domestic Affairs: Eliot Spitzer, New York, NY
• Public Affairs: Anthony Weiner, Brooklyn, NY
• Private Affairs: “That woman . . .

Cabinet Making

With their talking over, the candidates have turned to the substance of governing, and speculation is rampant about who will end up in each man’s cabinet. Here is what a Romney cabinet might look like, in order of official rank. ▪   Secretary of State: Judging from last night’s debate, we don’t need one

▪   Secretary of the Treasury: Herman Cain, 9-9-9, Atlanta, Georgia

▪   Secretary of Defense (which will take back its traditional name, the Department of War): Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, the world’s largest private army

▪   Attorney General: Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania; long-time resident of Great Falls, Virginia.

▪   Secretary of the Interior (now the Department of Oil): David Koch, philanthropist, Wichita, Kansas

▪   Secretary of Agriculture: Hugh Grant, Chairman and CEO, Monsanto

▪   Secretary of Commerce: The donor wishes to remain anonymous

▪   Secretary of Labor: Abolished

▪   Secretary of Health and Human Services: Todd Akin, Congressman, Wildwood, Missouri

▪   Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Kerry Klinger, former CEO of the former Washington Mutual, Inc.

▪   Secretary of Transportation: Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO, ExxonMobil

▪   Secretary of Energy (now the Department of Gas): Charles Koch, philanthropist, Wichita, Kansas

▪   Secretary of Education (abolished along with the public school system)

▪   Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Newt Gingrich, Honorary Veteran, McLean, Virginia

▪   Secretary of Homeland Security: Joseph M. Arpaio, Sheriff, Maricopa County, Arizona

▪   Chair of the Council of Home Economics Advisors (chosen randomly from a binder): Ann Romney

▪   Administrator of the EPA (Economic Production Agency): Hon. James M. Inhofe (R), Tulsa, Oklahoma

▪   Ambassador (now Minister) to the United Nations: Terry Jones, Pastor, Gainesville, Florida

Tomorrow: Obama’s cabinet.

A Modest Proposal (Updated)

With tonight’s final presidential debate focused on foreign policy, here are two issues we haven’t heard much about: climate change and the world’s poor. As it happens, they are not not unconnected. Half the world’s poorest people live in India and China, while another quarter live in Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia. Coincidentally, perhaps, the five countries where climate change kills the most people are China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia: three million die annually, and another 420 million are negatively affected. Not one of the five is among the world’s poorest countries. In fact, all are growing rapidly, and at least three have nuclear weapons. But their most distressed people are increasingly the victims of both poverty and environmental devastation.

What will happen, I pondered, if the world does nothing, as the world seems bent on doing? And then it hit me . . . Laissez-faire! . . . or “Laissez les eaux furieux rouler” as they used to say in New Orleans, “Let the wild waters roll.” If we continue to deny the reality of climate change and ignore the plight of the poor, the bottom billion will disappear. There will be no need for the birth-control programs that so irritate Republicans, nor for huge transfer payments to the developing world. Global purchasing power will be little affected, while thousands of miles of new beachfront will open up. Not since Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal that the destitute Irish sell their children for food to the English gentry has a solution presented itself that so benefits rich and poor alike.