Boehner Praises Obesity Report

John Boehner paused long enough from his August vacation at the Koch brothers’ Reclaiming America boot camp to take credit for the decline in obesity among very poor young children. “You can sum it up in one word,” said the Speaker. “Food stamps.” Flanked by Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, Boehner cited a report just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a small but perceptible drop in obesity rates among low-income children between the ages of two and four. “Our caucus sent a strong message in last month’s Farm Bill when we uncoupled food stamps from actual food,” he told reporters. “And that message got through. It’s clear that the Republican Party’s tough love toward poor minority kids is working.”

“It’s very hard on our members to vote 40 times to repeal Obamacare,” said Cantor. “But middle-class taxpayers are tired of this administration trying to shove socialized medicine down our throats. We need real deficit reduction, and we need to put the nanny state to bed and turn off the lights.”

“This is not about being mean to kids,” added Ryan. “It’s about teaching them to take personal responsibility. The American people are tired of Michelle Obama telling their children to eat their vegetables and Mike Bloomberg trying to take away their right to a big Pepsi.”

“The phrase,” said Cantor, “is not ‘poor, fat and happy.’ It’s ‘rich, fat and happy.’ Fat and happy are not government entitlements. You have to earn them.”

Domination, Stewardship, Communion

On June 30, 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, which protected the beautiful California valley from development, the first such use of federal power in history. In 1984 Yosemite National Park was designated a World Heritage Site. Today, even with 95% of the park protected as wilderness, the National Park Service has proposed changes to soften the human footprint on the vulnerable landscape. The debate about how accessible and commercial our parks should be is not new, and it affects every park in the country. It is part of the broader question of humans’ relationship with the natural world, and over the last millennium three distinct attitudes have evolved. The most powerful is domination, which sees nature as existing for human use. It has its origins in monotheistic religions whose God exists outside the world, most famously in the Book of Genesis, where God tells Adam to subdue the earth. Because humans have proved pretty good at that, there arose a movement to mitigate it. Accepting man’s dominion, it emphasized the need for stewardship to protect Earth’s resources for future generations. Finally, the belief that we are an integral part of the natural world asks us to hold it, not as a collection of resources, but as the source of all life, including our own. It is an attitude “realists” condemn as naïve and mystical, and yet it may ultimately be the only way to protect the earth from our power to destroy it.

Too Big to Fail

Remember the huge, corrupt, rapacious banks that were deemed too big to fail despite the spectacular damage they wrought during the last market crash? That drama may have been just a dress rehearsal for something much bigger, which is now lurching under the weight of exponential growth and colossal corruption: China. And just as we were told in 2008 that it was essential the banks survived, so we are now being told the same about China. This concern stems from no particular fondness for the Chinese – any more than our support of Middle Eastern sheiks, whose kingdoms sat on top of our oil, belied affection for Arabs. It is because American economic well-being is entwined with China’s stability, which is now threatened by the side-effects of unrestrained growth and a mind-boggling corruption that has brought huge disparities in wealth to a country that still mouths the platitudes of socialist solidarity. As a net energy exporter – and a net exporter of oil for the first time since 1949 – America is no longer dependent on energy imports, despite what the drilling zealots insist. Now we are dependent on Chinese money and manufacturing, and once again our foreign policies are dictated by our domestic addictions. China has become the Walmart of the world, promising cheap goods while hollowing out our communities and the local economies that sustain them. I wish no ill to the Chinese, but we have got to redefine the good life in terms other than never-ending growth and more cheap stuff.

Three Lives

I read obituaries for the light they shed on living. On Monday, three men with little in common reminded me of the diversity of our travels from birth to death: Bud Day was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and endured five years of living hell in the Hanoi Hilton prison. He never broke, and his courage inspired his fellow prisoners, including John McCain. I consider personal courage among the highest virtues; I just wish our culture would uncouple it from warfare and honor it in all its manifestations. And I was saddened to read that Colonel Day later supported Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in their efforts to smear John Kerry, a sad postmark to a brave life.

Garry Davis, also an army aviator, embarked after World War Two on a quixotic journey when he renounced his American citizenship to become a “citizen of the world.” “The nation-state,” he wrote, “is the breeding ground of war” – a point worth thinking about as our government insists that secure national borders are the key to peace in Palestine, where the shame of the Israeli settlements is less that they infringe on Palestinian sovereignty than that they are an inhumane response to the tragic squalor of Palestinian camps.

J.J. Cale’s life celebrates the importance of making music. A musicians’ musician and writer, Cale didn’t need the bright lights on him. “I’d like to have the fortune,” he wrote, “but I don’t care too much about the fame.”

Detritus

Early one morning, as I was walking near the campus of Kean University in Union, New Jersey, I happened upon a garbage truck picking up the neighborhood trash, black plastic bags neatly piled on the curb. It was the start of a 98-degree day, the three men were already sweating, the garbage smelled, and the truck was obnoxiously loud. I was offended by this assault on my tranquility and resented the garbage men who caused it. That evening I showed my class Poet of Poverty, a film about Camden, New Jersey, one of the most blighted cities in America. Camden is, literally, the garbage dump for the state. Because its people are powerless and poor, the legislature has put in its neighborhoods the state prison, the county’s trash-to-steam incinerator and the sewage treatment plant. “It is,” said Father Michael Doyle, who has served in Camden since 1968, “as if all the toilet bowls in the county are lined up on Camden, and every flush says – to Camden, to Camden, to Camden.” The stench, particularly on a hot summer day, is overwhelming, and Camden is an assault on America’s image of itself.

Neither the garbage men nor Camden create the stench we blame them for. Their role is to get it out of the noses of the rest of us, so we can continue in the belief that we take care of ourselves when we put our trash in black plastic bags and set them on the curb for removal from our neighborhood.

Public Rights and Private Parts

Those who insist the Supreme Court did not eviscerate the Voting Rights Act last month, when it declared a key part of it unconstitutional, argue that the five-justice majority simply demanded that Congress update the data to reflect the realities of 2013 instead of 1965. They believe the South is being unfairly labeled as racist long after it has changed its ways. Maybe so, but much of what I read makes it clear that if you are poor and black, you do not want to live in the deep South – although it's pretty hard to get out. The latest case in point: a study of upward mobility, released by the Equality-of-Opportunity Project and analyzed by 24/7 Wall Street, found that the 10 cities in which the poor are most severely trapped in poverty are: Memphis, Tenn; Clarksdale, Miss; Greenville, Miss; Columbus, Ga; Auburn, Ala; Wilson, N.C; Montgomery, Ala; Albany, Ga; Spartanburg. S.C; and Atlanta, Ga. All 10 are in the old Confederacy and all have significant African-American populations. Does this prove they violate the Voting Rights Act? No. But it does help us understand why Congress left the old formula intact when it extended the act for 25 years in 2006. The increasingly activist court majority overturned that legislative decision in June. Meanwhile, we learn that Anthony Weiner, under the sobriquet of Carlos Danger, continued to text photos of his crotch to unsuspecting women while undergoing therapy for texting photos of his crotch to unsuspecting women. And while he is polling second in New York’s mayoral race, it’s not even fun to make fun of him anymore. He needs help, not attention.

Black and White

A president has perhaps no more important role than to embody the contradictions of our national conversation: Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning hundreds of slaves; Abraham Lincoln, who set out to hold the union together and ended by emancipating the slaves; Dwight Eisenhower, the warrior who warned us against the military-industrial complex; Barack Obama, who is black and white in a country where legally and demographically people are black or white. We have made much progress on the issues of race since Jefferson’s time, but the issue itself will not go away because we refuse to address it openly – until it rears its head, as it inevitably did again after Trayvon Martin’s murder. Race is implicit in so many of the issues with which the country wrestles: the immigration debate is about people of color; the bankruptcy of Detroit reflects the apartheid of our inner cities on which we have turned our backs; the growing disparity in wealth, in which whites own 20 times more than African-Americans, and aspiring blacks are urged to choose class over race, while impoverished whites are taught to identify with their race, not their economic condition.

The president cannot duck these issues because he is a target of them. And when he addresses them – as our national leader and a human being – as he did in 2008 in Philadelphia and last week at the White House, I remember, again, why his presidency is so important for our country.

Let Teachers Teach

I spent last week with a group of the hardest-working, most dedicated and most frustrated professionals I have ever met: New Jersey teachers. A measure of their commitment is that they voluntarily participated in a course that met for 12 hours a day in Union, N.J., where the temperature hit 105 on Thursday. They came because they loved learning and they loved kids. And they were frustrated because they believed that the state’s sole focus on improving test scores had elevated political and bureaucratic demands over educating students. New Jersey is not Afghanistan, where the per-student expenditure is $70 (versus $20,000) and girls are threatened with murder. But its importance to both our individual and collective futures cannot be overstated, and the 16 teachers with whom I spent last week have dedicated their lives to teaching children. They are professionals who feel unable to do the work they were trained to do because politicians and bureaucrats decided they knew how to do it better.

In his essay, “What is Education For?”, David Orr urges us to look at the world and rethink our ideas of education, including:

• Its goal is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person.
• Knowledge carries the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.
• We cannot say we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities.

What I learned last week is that the best way to have children learn is to let teachers teach.

Health Attack

Before the increasingly unglued House Republicans vote – for the 38^th time – to repeal Obamacare, they might look a bit more closely at how Americans have fared under the old system. The Republicans claim that the new law – which, lest we forget, was supported by the American Medical Association, passed by both houses of Congress, signed into law by the president, and approved by the Supreme Court – will (1) bankrupt the country and (2) diminish and “ration” care. So how did we do in the old days? According to a 2010 study of health care and spending by developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (published by 24/7 Wall Street), the United States spent far more on health care than any other country and achieved worse results than most. We spent over $8,500 per person annually, including $1,000 on drugs, all of which added up to a staggering 17.7% of GDP – figures that put America in a league of its own. And the results? Off-the-charts obesity and a life expectancy that ranks America 9^th from last. And yet the United States remains almost the only developed nation not to provide universal coverage.

Meanwhile, in a further blow to America’s personal and political health, House Republicans unanimously passed a farm bill that (1) abandons food stamps, the 40-year-old program that provides critical nutrition to the nation’s poor, and (2) reaffirms their commitment to corporate welfare by rolling back food safety measures and providing billions to special interests who gleefully [pork] belly up to the public trough.

Note: I will not be posting for a while, as I am teaching a course this week that meets from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Talk with you next week.

Reign of Horror

With his announcement on Monday that he will not seek a fourth term as governor of Texas, Rick Perry signaled an end to 20 consecutive years of rule by two of the most frightful politicians of my lifetime: George W. Bush, who served as governor from Jan. 17, 1995 until he resigned in December 2000 to get ready to be president, and Perry, who succeeded Bush and will finish his third full term in 18 months. Obviously Texans must like these guys, and they’re welcome to them. It’s when they go national that bad things really start to happen. Bush, who was first elected president by a one-vote majority of the Supreme Court – and, Jeffrey Toobin told NPR’s Terry Gross, Sandra Day O’Connor now regrets the vote she cast that December day – spent the next eight years destroying pretty much everything he could get his hands on. He had just returned to Washington from the longest vacation in presidential history when the World Trade Towers went up in flames, and he responded by launching not one, but two, disastrous wars, which together produced 57,000 American casualties (and more than 130,000 civilian deaths), sent the federal deficit into orbit, poisoned the country’s relations with most of the world, created the country’s first private mercenaries since Allan Pinkerton, and sanctioned torture as a legitimate policy of the United States. Perry, whose 2012 presidential candidacy went from front-runner to embarrassment to history in barely five months, thanks largely to his stunning ineptitude, appears poised (sic) to try again. God save us.

Farming in the Rubble

If you have never seen an entire city privatized, keep your eye on Detroit. Saddled with an $18-billion debt, it is staring into the abyss of bankruptcy. Its demise parallels that of other large industrial cities after World War II, when federal highway, housing and energy policies fueled suburban growth and the massive exodus of middle- and working-class whites, leaving behind an impoverished and segregated city with ballooning social needs and a vaporizing tax base. Detroit’s fall was the steepest and most enduring: it has lost 1.1 million people since 1950. And its tragedy is special: the automobile industry, on which its prosperity depended, pushed relentlessly for policies that benefited General Motors and decimated Detroit. Privatization is a politically explosive word. Progressives point to corporate theft of community resources like water and energy, and conservatives respond with stories of government corruption and market efficiencies. But such rigid dichotomies overlook two kinds of private initiatives on which Detroit’s recovery depends. Already, there are signs of revival in the business district and middle-class housing construction required to build a tax base. But downtown development and gentrification must not overrun the burgeoning efforts of devastated communities to rebuild themselves. Right now, Detroit has a non-cash underground economy that relies on informal networks and barter systems to support 150,000 people, a fifth of its population. There are 27 urban farms of an acre or more and 1,800 community gardens. “Agriculture in the city,” says community activist Charity Hicks, “is the way of resilience and the means of resistance.” This is privatization that must be nurtured.

Draft ‘Em

A friend sent me a report on last month’s Aspen Institute Summit on the Franklin Project to establish national service for every American, an idea I have supported in previous posts that seems to be gaining traction. There are many examples to build on – military service, Civilian Conservation Corps, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps – and there is so much to do – rebuild our infrastructure, revitalize urban neighborhoods, protect natural areas, educate children, revive a military that reflects the people as well as defends them, create a sense of shared community in a deeply divided nation. But I worry that the current efforts to attract the broadest constituency will just water down the program. It’s fine to appeal to vague idealism, but we already have the flag, mom and apple pie. Rotarians and legislators love the clichéd language of civic boosterism, but do 18-year-olds? Doesn’t the call to make universal service “socially obligatory” rather than “legally mandatory” mean that those who don’t want to do it don’t have to?

I think we should draft them, all of them. It’s fairer – one of the great injustices of the Vietnam-era draft was that the system was easy to manipulate by those seeking a way out. It’s more democratic – we pay lip service to the soldiers we hire to fight our wars, even as we grow increasingly separated from them. And it would make us pay attention to what is happening to our country, both at home and abroad, and produce young people who might really become the change we have been waiting for.

They the People

In light of the Egyptian army’s sacking of the country’s democratically elected – if unpopular – president in the name of the people, it’s worth considering who the people are and who gets to speak for them. As we used to say as kids, “Yeah, you and what army?” Just about everyone claims to speak for the people (except for the pope, who speaks for God). Robespierre did all the way to the guillotine. Lenin did, and Mao. Just yesterday, Bashar el-Assad said the Egyptian uprisings somehow demonstrate that he speaks for the Syrian people. Our own congress is supposed to embody the people’s will, although at the moment only 6 percent of the people approve of its performance.

Our constitution begins simply, “We the people,” and then proceeds to lay out a series of checks, balances and restrictions that put a good deal of distance between the government and what James Madison called the passions of the people. Ironically, this seems to be the source of its strength and longevity. Those who wrote the constitution recognized the fallibility of the people they were exalting and the dangers of unchecked power. They understood that anyone who claims to embody the popular will is a demagogue, not a representative. For “the people” is an ideal – the aspiration that all the different peoples of America will live peacefully together. Democracy is the messy process of trying to get there, and it only works when it strives to include all the disparate voices in the conversation.

Casualties

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the third and last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War and the long-sought victory that drew Abraham Lincoln back to the battlefield in November to give the best (and the shortest) speech in American history. The battle provided instances of extraordinary valor, notably the defense of Little Round Top by the 20^th Maine Voluntary Infantry Regiment. Out of ammunition, they fixed bayonets, charged the regrouping Confederates and saved their comrades from being overrun. Overall, however, it was three days of horrendous carnage and the bloodiest fighting of the war – 8,000 dead, 27,000 wounded, 11,000 missing or captured – symbolized by Pickett’s charge, one of the most senseless wastes of human life in the history of warfare. As Southern infantrymen walked in lines across three-quarters of a mile of open field, Union guns on Cemetery Ridge annihilated them; almost half never came back. Yet even those figures pale next to the magnitude of loss suffered by the Granite Mountain Hotshots, 19 of whose 20 members were burned to death last Sunday as they fought a huge fire outside Yarnell, Arizona. Young men in the prime of their lives, with young wives and children, girlfriends and parents and extended families, gone in an agonizing moment, while the 20^th, the survivor, will be forever changed. Despite all the current cynicism about human selfishness, we still depend on those who act bravely on our behalf. All deaths are sad, but some just break your heart.

Meat

This is no plea for Aaron Hernandez, the huge former tight end of the New England Patriots football team who has been charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, who dated Hernandez’s girlfriend's sister. The Patriots released Hernandez last week, 90 minutes after his arrest on then-unspecified charges. On Friday the team announced that fans could exchange his team jersey for another “of comparable value.” And that, as far as the Patriots are concerned, is the end of Aaron Hernandez. He had become “a distraction,” and the Patriots have become the league’s most successful franchise because they don’t brook distractions. The team was within its rights to dump Hernandez and had no obligation to offer him public support or mouth the usual pieties about “the presumption of innocence.” He seems an unsavory guy, but that isn’t the issue for the Patriots. To them, he is a piece of meat. Professional sports in America, and particularly football, should not be confused with the games we used to play. Nor should those who play them be confused with role models or heroes, however valuable their jerseys or their contracts. They are fodder for their egotistical owners, corporate profiteers and rabid fans. They are, like their forebears in ancient Rome, entertainment for the American empire’s masses.

In other NFL news, Jim Hudson, a hard-hitting defensive back for the 1969 New York Jets Super Bowl winner, died last week of “Parkinson’s dementia” likely caused by head traumas. He was 70, and his brain has been sent to researchers at Boston University.

The Mommy-and-Daddy State

The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor holds that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. That’s worth noting these days when hyperbole, contorted reasoning and convoluted language have become the coin of our political conversation. Take, for example, the [condensed] response of Heritage Foundation Fellow Ryan Anderson when a Times reporter asked if the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision “isn’t the ultimate conservative ruling because it [leaves] people’s lives to themselves:” “The reason the government is in the marriage business isn’t because it cares about the love lives of consenting adults. Government is in the marriage business because there is a certain type of union – the union between a man and a woman – that can produce new life. Government wants to make sure that new life has a mom and a dad; and upholding the institution of marriage is the least coercive way to ensure that. When this doesn’t happen, that is when we’ve seen government grow – the welfare state grows, crime increases, the prison population rises, child poverty increases, social mobility decreases. So, everything you care about, if you care about limited government and the poor, about liberty and social justice, is better served by a healthy marriage culture.”

If I understand this breathtaking – and unproven – assertion, we need government to enforce a particular view of the most intimate parts of our lives so that all the problems that require government solutions will disappear, and the state, as Engels wrote, will “wither away.” Good-bye, Nanny State. Hello, Mommy-and-Daddy State.

The Six-Percent Solution

Yesterday five justices of the Supreme Court enshrined the southern strategy of the Republican Party into the Constitution of the United States. In so doing they vacated the court’s six-decade history as the protector of civil rights and social justice. In 1954, a Republican chief justice, Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education, declared segregated schools unconstitutional, a decision that changed America. Yesterday, another Republican chief justice, John Roberts, writing for a sharply divided court in Shelby County v. Holder, announced that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was no longer needed, at least in its current form. Certainly there have been improvements, and as Roberts noted, Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama, both murderous places in the 1960s, now have black mayors. But in 2006, Congress, by a combined vote of 488-33, renewed the act until 2031, and recently we have witnessed a series of efforts, ranging from voter-identification laws to gerrymandering, aimed at suppressing minority voters. It’s that history the court majority ignored. Another movement emerged from the civil rights era, one that transformed the GOP from the party that enfranchised black voters to one that received 6% of the black vote in 2012, making it perhaps the most segregated institution in the United States. This is not a coincidence. From Strom Thurmond’s switch to the party in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to Nixon’s southern strategy to Reagan’s “welfare queens,” Republicans have consciously sought to divide the country for political gain. The legacy of Lincoln is no more.

Double Oh Oh

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”                   T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

As Edward Snowden reenacts OJ’s 1994 Bronco chase in airplanes, with Sen. Lindsey Graham squawking that “we’ll chase him to the ends of the Earth” and civil libertarians issuing apocalyptic warnings about “1984,” I am simply baffled by this theater of the absurd. The road to Armageddon turns out to be, not tragedy, but farce.

With college graduates suffocating under $1.1 trillion of student debt, a high-school dropout gets a job with a high-powered consulting firm, at a salary (he says) of $200,000, and subsequently hands over the U.S. espionage capability to a British newspaper. For his sins against the world’s largest spy network, our hero is charged with . . . espionage. And so, in search of a haven of transparency, he sets off for China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, where criticizing the government is not for the faint of heart. Carrying four computers of data, the man who condemned the NSA’s invasion of privacy seems bent on sharing its files with every other spy agency in the world. Since they are all engaged in the same activities, they presumably already have the information. Still, this is not the kind of transparency that reassures my sense of privacy. Meanwhile, we wait for the Chinese version of Edward Snowden, whom we will hail as a hero.

When Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed America’s code-breaking agency in 1929, he did so because “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” Naïve, yes, but how refreshing.

Google and Glenn Beck

As I drove outside our nation’s capital the last two days, I listened to C-Span-radio broadcasts that were at once mind-numbing and fascinating, if that’s possible. The first was a House Intelligence Committee hearing, in which members of both parties expressed support for NSA surveillance activities but fretted over privacy issues. One proposed remedy was to keep the “meta-data” in private hands unless and until the NSA needed specific information, which it would then request from the corporations that had it. Agency chief Keith Alexander said he was open to the idea, subject to “speed in crisis.” In other words, our own officials think it’s wiser to keep the massive amounts of personal information collected on all of us in the hands of Google, Facebook and Amazon.com instead of the government. Equally bizarre was a Tea Party rally on the Capitol steps, in which Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sen. Mike Lee and others spoke fervently about the movement to protect our civil rights from the godless totalitarianism of the Obama administration. Beck drew a straight line from the Tea Party to Martin Luther King, Jr., and he didn’t stop there, likening the protesters to Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist ex-slave whose bronze statue had earlier been unveiled on the Capitol steps.

I tried to picture Glenn Beck marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, just as I tried to imagine myself relieved that lots of information about me is owned and mined, without my consent, by corporate goliaths. I failed on both counts.

The People’s Parks

What is it about parks? From People’s Park in Berkeley to Uhuru Park in Nairobi to Gezi Park in Istanbul, governments have violently suppressed grassroots opposition to plans to convert public land to private use. At 4:30 a.m. on May 15, 1969, “Bloody Thursday,” California Governor Ronald Reagan’s unannounced decision to send troops to take back “People’s Park”* left one student protester dead, another blind and hundreds more hospitalized. In 1992, Kenyan President Daniel arap-Moi ordered his thugs to beat Wangari Maathai unconscious for protesting the proposed construction of a 60-story office complex in Uhuru Park. (Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize 12 years later.) Last Saturday night Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the storming of Gezi Park, where protests against replacing the last significant green space in Istanbul with “an Ottoman-themed shopping mall” had escalated into broad rage against the government.

Three parks, decades and worlds apart, become epicenters of popular protest, which three elected officials brutally crush. Why? Parks are the epitome of the people’s land, open to all, owned by none. They are some of the last refuges from the chaos of modern urban life. And the public insistence on their sanctity threatens the growing determination of corporate and political institutions to sell off what little remains of the commons.

These places of tranquility have become battlegrounds for all who oppose privatizing the public square. Parks are the antithesis of the gated community, and their protection is everyone’s fight.

*The University of California at Berkeley owned the land.