Big Corn

Only 610 days left until Election Day, and the pace is heating furiously in Iowa, whose caucuses are supposed to foretell the political fortunes of presidential aspirants and unlock the wallets of big donors – all to send 1% of the delegates to the national conventions. The 2016 campaign kicked off last week when a very rich “agribusinessman” named Bruce Rastetter summoned Republican candidates to Des Moines to talk about the Renewable Fuels Standards, an issues that barely registers on the GOP’s national radar but is a multi-billion dollar industry in Iowa. It’s also an example of how efforts to cut fossil-fuel emissions are hijacked by big business, given huge bi-partisan government subsidies (see, we can work together!), turn into perversions of their environmental intentions – and caused Republican hopefuls to tap dance around their core beliefs (market-based solutions, small government, and fossil fuels as the salvation of America).

Why just last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking on behalf of Big Coal, called on states to simply reject “so-called ‘clean-power’ regulations [that seek] to shut down more of America's power generation under the guise of protecting the climate.”

But out in Iowa they were singing a different tune, talking about the great benefits of planting the state from Davenport to Sioux City in one vast monoculture of subsidized corn. Only Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz demurred. But before we heap praise on Cruz for not “pandering,” it’s worth noting that in Texas Big Corn takes a back seat to Big Oil.

L’Etat? C’etait Moi!

Or as Hillary might have put it: “What do you mean I had to have a government-issue email address like some common bureaucrat? I was State!” And so we learn that Hillary Clinton didn’t use her government email account during her entire tenure as secretary of state. This week her lawyers handed over 50,000 pages of her personal emails, generously suggesting, The New York Times reported, they were “motivated by efforts to update the department’s record management system.”

According to news reports, access to clintonemail.com – which was headquartered, not at Foggy Bottom, but in Chappaqua, NY – was a sought-after status symbol. One person who had such access was Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long-time confidante and protégée. Abedin was a part-time advisor to the Secretary of State, while holding – but not necessarily reporting – three other paid consulting gigs: The Clinton Foundation; personal assistant to Hillary Clinton; and Teneo Holdings, a powerful “global advisory firm” with close ties to, um, the Clintons.

We are “not a lobbying firm,” Teneo explains on its website. “However, our experience helps us understand how decisions are made that affect our clients’ businesses. In the US, we use our deep relationships to provide strategic counsel and help clients navigate policy debates in Washington and state capitals as they look to find support, amplification and clarity around the issues that they care about.”

In other words, we’re a lobbying firm.

Ah, language: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”

Age of Apocalypse

I came of age in the Age of Aquarius when “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars." I seem to be exiting stage left in the Age of Apocalypse when true believers shout that the end of the world is at hand. Every crisis is a global crisis, every event a sign the last days are coming. We are not just pessimistic about the future, we are afraid of it. It makes it kind of hard to have fun. The brutality of ISIS portends a violent clash of civilizations – and as Graeme Wood’s chilling piece in The Atlantic asserts, ISIS believes itself “a key agent of the coming apocalypse.” Environmentalists worry we will die in our own emissions, fighting over our vanishing resources. Benjamin Netanyahu paints for Congress a Middle East “crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires.” “Obamacare = a death panel for the U.S. economy.”

When I was a kid, we played “Cowboys and Indians,” which transported us, six-shooters and all, into a mythical past. We were actors whose cap guns gave us some power in our small, politically incorrect drama. When I watch movie trailers now, I see a grotesque future filled with robots and monsters bent on destroying, as far as I can tell, the entire universe.

It's tempting to retreat from a world so out of our control. Or we could accept it, make what small contribution we can, and live fully engaged the few years we get on this earth.

One Week

We live obliviously in a dangerous world, a world where Putin appropriates territory as he pleases and his critics are murdered in the public square, where China smothers dissent and rattles its sabers, where ISIS – and its even more brutal disciples in Nigeria – have made slavery and beheadings instruments of dogma and recruitment. North Korea launched a couple of missiles yesterday, and Israel seems bent on instituting a policy of apartheid. And what do we do in the face of these challenges? On Friday, after the pettiest of brinksmanship, Congress extended funding for homeland security for one week. One week. And they had to go to zero hour to accomplish even that. Not that anybody particularly noticed. Sure, the press played up the melodrama leading up to the vote, although with far less ink than it gave the Oscars. When the vote was over and homeland security had been funded for seven whole days, the media returned to covering the 2016 presidential horse race as if that were the most immediate issue we faced.

This is America the exceptional, the nation that seeks to export our form of government to the rest of the world because it is so much better than everyone else’s. We can’t even govern ourselves. We have elected a Congress that has substituted grandstanding for governing and equates the empty gesture with “standing on principle.” For more proof, tune in tomorrow when Benjamin Netanyahu comes before Congress to insult the president of the United States.

Quotes of the Week

Which of the following statements did Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore not make?

• “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them. The sexual assaults . . . would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.”
• “He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me.”
• “I am one-hundred percent in compliance with IRS - period."
• “If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus . . .

The correct answer, of course, is (b), which is taken from Rudy Giuliani’s supposedly off-the-cuff and off-the-record remarks to a group of political donors at New York’s 21 Club. Rudy opened with, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America.”

My first reaction was that Giuliani had become demented in his never-ending search for the spotlight, but I underestimated the ambitions of the man. A YouGov poll conducted after he spoke found that only 47% of Americans think Obama “loves America,” a number that obscures the huge partisan divide: 69% of Republicans don’t think Obama loves America, three-quarters question his patriotism, and 88% view him unfavorably. These numbers, as Rudy well knows, encourage partisan attack rather than political compromise.

The other three quotes belong to Fiore, who owns a home health-care business and was just removed as legislative majority leader and chair of the Taxation Committee for having more than a million dollars in, um, tax liens.

The Pettus Bridge

Last night I went to see Selma, which opened with the bombing of Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church that took the lives of Carole Robertson (14), Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14) and Denise McNair (11), and ended with the Voting Rights Act two years later. One of the film’s main characters is Pettus Bridge, the steel arch that spans the Alabama River and the site of “Bloody Sunday,” where armed troopers beat peaceful  protesters without mercy. The bridge is named for Edmund Pettus (1821-1907), Confederate general, U.S. Senator and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The film’s power stems not only from its juxtaposition of violence and courage, but from its innocence. Black Americans put their lives on the line for things not much in vogue these days: the right to vote, something only 36.4% of Americans (and 41% of Alabamans) bothered to do in 2014; non-violence, in a country which today owns over 300 million guns; faith and community, where people of unimaginable courage turned to their churches for their strength.

Yet as I sat through the violence, the bloodshed, the humiliations, I suddenly and unexpectedly felt proud to be an American. African-Americans led the Civil Rights movement; the vast preponderance of its victims were black; the oppression they fought is older than the nation itself. But as I watched people hold America accountable for its own ideals, I realized that this was not just Black history. This was my history. And all the people who walked across that bridge were our greatest generation.

The Botox Dilemma

Congress has now voted 67 times to repeal Obamacare, which, while pleasing to people with nothing better to do, is clearly going nowhere. Meanwhile, King v Burwell is scheduled for oral argument before the Supreme Court next week. This frivolous case could accomplish what Congress can’t – overthrowing the Affordable Care Act. King is the case with the ludicrous cast of plaintiffs that the Federal Court of Appeals in Virginia unanimously threw out last June. “You are asking us to kick millions of Americans off health insurance,” Judge Andre Davis asked incredulously, “just to save four people a few dollars?” But four Supreme Court justices apparently found that reasonable and agreed to hear the appeal. It will take only one vote more to overturn the law.

The U.S. has been spending far more on health care than any other country since way before Obamacare, and Americans are no healthier for it. One clue to this enigma might be a full-page ad in Saturday’s New York Times, which featured 16 of the “Top Doctors in the nation," whose specialties range from: CoolSculpting to Abdominoplasty, from Nose Reshaping to Buttock Augmentation.

I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t have these procedures – in this short life, if we can feel better about ourselves, I say, go for it. But what does it say about our national health priorities when there is a full-Supreme-Court press to throw 6 million predominantly poor people off the health-care rolls, while 16 doctors are buying a $104,000 newspaper ad to tout their services?

Staying Put

The year is 2025. Imagine you are a Martian, minding your own business, when out of the blue a spaceship lands nearby and out pop four pale earthlings, who announce they are colonizing your planet. They are the first wave of settlers sent by Mars One, a Netherlands-based non-profit, which last week whittled 200,000 applicants to 100 finalists. Most are in their 20s and 30s. They seem educated and motivated, adventurous and idealistic, a little nuts. Eventually 24 winners will make up six crews that will blast off every two years, beginning in 2024. The trip should take seven months. There's no way back, so they’re going for good. An MIT study estimates they will survive for 68 days. This isn’t the first time small groups of humans have set out on months-long, one-way trips. The Mayflower carried 102 Pilgrims; 100 people settled at Jamestown. If history is any guide, the greenskins would be wise not to offer to help the immigrants – because life on Mars will never be the same once the pioneers set about planting gardens and blowtorching ice in the name of “expanding ourselves as a species.”

We have blown through this planet amazingly quickly; so it’s on to the next frontier. I won’t be going. I’m too old, and besides, I’d like to see what I can still do here – for, as Oliver Sacks wrote yesterday: “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

The Wisconsin Idea

I'd never heard of the “Wisconsin Idea” – “the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom” – until Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker set out to dismantle it. Born in the Progressive era, the idea was to make the state education system a “laboratory of democracy.” Walker has backed away from his earlier language to rewrite the university’s mission by removing, "Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth” and deleting the phrases to "extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus,” "serve and stimulate society,” and “educate people and improve the human condition." Instead, he would have the university’s mission be "to meet the state's work-force needs."

The creepily Stalinist language is gone, dismissed as “a drafting error.” But the utilitarian message lingers.

And then I received this from a friend: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ramped-up horrors abroad in the world, almost feeling like a descent into another Dark Age, and keep coming back to the notion that the only defense and antidote is beauty of whatever kind – it helps to balance the hideous dark stuff and thank God for it all!”

I think of Galway Kinnell, the late Irish poet who wrote, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up . . . and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

We need educated workers. We also need poets.

Documentary of Death

The scenic beauty and technical sophistication are chilling. The camera looks down from above – the classic angle of cinematic omnipotence – as 21 pairs of men walk along a beach on the southern Mediterranean, waves breaking on the shore, the sea stretching to the flat horizon. Twenty-one men in orange jump suits, each accompanied by another dressed in black, masked and carrying a machete. Those in orange are Coptic Christians. The others are their ISIS executioners. The film, writes The New York Times, features “slow motion, aerial footage and the quick cuts of a music video. The only sound in much of the background is the lapping of waves.” I cannot bring myself to watch this film – which seems intended as a propaganda piece for ISIS’ power and a recruiting tool for fanatic killers – but the still photos have a concern with artistry and technical virtuosity that give them the aura of a horrific ballet.

The mixture of art and propaganda did not begin with ISIS. Critics called the pathologically dishonest Nazi filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, “an artist of unparalleled gifts” who made “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” And D.W. Griffith, whom Charlie Chaplin called “the teacher of us all,” was lionized for The Birth of a Nation, which became a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan during a time of widespread lynching in the South. But what "artist" could have made this slick documentary that celebrates the beheading of 21 innocent men in orange jump suits?

Stumble of the Week

Friday the 13th The Wrong Stuff. When I board an airplane, I assume the pilot's in charge. Not so, it turns out, on Korean Air. In the much-ridiculed “nut rage” case Cho Hyun-ah was sentenced to a year in jail for ordering the pilot to return to the gate so she could kick off the chief steward, who had already apologized on his knees. What's scary is that the pilot complied. It’s hard to picture Chuck Yeager doing that.

Candor. Asked by a British reporter about his belief in evolution, current Republican presidential frontrunner, Scott Walker said, “I’m going to punt on that one.” Now for the hard questions.

Judicial Restraint. In King v Burwell, the challenge to Obamacare that somehow found its way to the Supreme Court, all four plaintiffs, writes Linda Greenhouse, “can’t afford health insurance but want to be declared ineligible for the federal tax subsidies that would make insurance affordable for them.” Huh? One listed her address as a short-stay motel where she hasn’t stayed since 2013. Another claims Obama is a Muslim.

Accountability. “It is ironic, to put it very mildly,” writes Joe Conason, “that more than a decade after the Iraq invasion, which resulted from official and journalistic deceptions on a vast scale, the only individual deemed worthy of punishment is a TV newsman who inflated a war story on a talk show.” Still, that’s one more than the number of top bank executives who have been fired since they took down the economy in 2008.

Another America

I fear the growth of two Americas, so removed from each other that we are losing our ability to communicate. Not Republicans and Democrats, but two countries in which words mean different things, no common mythology holds us together, and we listen only to our own. In this second installment of her response on terrorism, my friend describes her America. Our America – yet a country many of us has never seen. Perhaps we have not looked. “[French Prime Minister Manuel] Valls proposes that there is a fundamental difference between democracy and terrorism. From my life experiences and observations, living in this skin, there is no difference between “democracy” and “terrorism – not when “democracy” all but wiped out First Nations, promoted slavery, sustained Jim Crow and institutional racism (still alive and well); has maintained a prison-industrial complex with a majority of men of color and a post-incarceration system that does not facilitate re-entry into the society to be productive and contributory. This is terrorism to me. To only have access to inferior education, sub-standard housing, removal of boots and their laces so that there is nothing with which to pull one’s self up – that’s our democratic process, which Congress fights to maintain. That is terrorism to me. Living in fear that every time my nephews (young black men) go out or drive up from Florida or across from Indiana, we may never see them again. Democracy? That feels like terrorism to me. Barriers to voting, intimidation of voters. Democracy? That is terrorism to me.”

Seeking Common Ground

“Obama Defends Islam, Slams Christianity at Prayer Breakfast.” The religio-political firestorm unleashed by the president’s reference to the Crusades and slavery in his remarks on ISIS last week is the latest example of how we intentionally misunderstand each other and lash out without listening. I’d like this blog to be a commons, however small, in which we listen to other voices – not judging them, not dismissing them, simply trying to understand them. In my next two posts, I print a response to last week’s blog on French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ speech on terrorism. It came from a friend, a nurse practitioner who has spent her life working on women’s health issues in Africa. As she grapples with the violence, both in the Middle East and America, she offers a different perspective. May we take her words seriously, and may they challenge us. I just went to see “Timbuktu” by Abderrahmane Sissako yesterday evening; it has been nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film. I can’t say that I “liked” it – it is a hard film to watch, but it made me think about the portrayal of the jihadists, which I trust Sissako (Mauritanian) to have represented accurately. Their behavior and interpretation of “Islamic law” (substitute any adjective) was to me the same as the behavior of colonizers and missionaries, e.g., dismissal of existing cultures and cultural norms, unwillingness to learn the local language, a sense of superiority through their interpretation of a particular ideology, and the use of intimidation. It seems ironic that your piece touched on a similar vein.

I agree that words inform thought and that linking “radical and jihadist” with Islam taints Islam, for what we are seeing is NOT Islam – these are extremists. And yes, the war for some may be against terrorism not religion, but the media do not bear that out. Islam is demonized by our careless use of language.

Continued Wednesday.

Scientific Republicans

What is it about the Republican base and science? They seem to have such a toxic relationship. The latest example is the 2016 presidential hopefuls’ tap dance around measles vaccinations, which climaxed with Rand Paul’s proclamation: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.” Apparently, property rights die hard on the GOP's right wing.

The history of reflexive opposition to scientific data contains a dose of religious fundamentalism, mixed with anti-regulatory and anti-intellectual fervor, and a splash of paranoia, all wrapped in a conspiracy theory.

We’ve seen it in climate change, where Rick Perry castigates “scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

We’ve seen it in evolution, which Georgia’s Paul Broun labels "lies straight from the Pit of Hell,” adding, for emphasis, that "Earth is about 9,000 years old” and “was created in six days as we know them." Reassuringly, Broun served on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

We’ve even seen it lately in restaurant hygiene, where North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis improbably singled out requiring employees to wash their hands after using the toilet as an illustration of government over-regulation. “I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy,” Tillis added, “as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.'" Brilliant, but somehow the original regulation seemed simpler.

I cannot wait for the primary season to begin.

“We Are at War”

A friend, whom I have come to know solely through this blog, sent me a video of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ speech to the National Assembly after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Valls spoke with a clarity of language – and of purpose – that penetrated even my sorry French. Both have been too-often absent in our own leaders. “We are at war,” he said, against radical Islamic jihad. We are not at war against any religion, but against terrorism.

Surely, he is right. If we didn’t believe so yesterday, we must believe today, after the unspeakable immolation of the young Jordanian pilot.

Valls spoke with resolve. France has accepted the reality of this war; it has not launched its own. This is not Bush’s “global war on terror,” with its indiscriminate bombings, invasions and torture. In this war, Valls said, we do not jettison our values, we assert them. “There is a fundamental difference between democracy and terrorism.”

Finally, he spoke of inclusion to a deeply divided nation. We have suffered an attack on our people, he said, all our people – and on our values, “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Not all French people accept those values, and France doesn’t always live up to them. But Valls took the moment to reaffirm them.

A speech is only words. But words matter. They call us to our ideals, even as they reveal our continuing distance from their reality. And they call us together.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

Perils of Parenting

In what some might consider an odd approach to parenting, whenever a friend of mine came down with the mumps, my mother took me over and plopped me on his bed. I never got mumps, although I got all the others – measles, German measles, chicken pox, rheumatic fever (which almost finished me). But mumps was special because if you got it as an adult, you could go sterile. So, before the arrival of the MMR vaccine (1971), my parents engaged in a kind of homeopathy, believing that once I’d had these diseases (except rubella), I would be immune. Precisely the theory behind vaccinations. In early 1950s America, many common childhood diseases were no longer the killers they had once been (with the lethal exception of polio), and many parents thought it better to get over them while young than worry about them later.

In the current measles outbreak, parents give all kinds of reasons – from religious beliefs to irrational fears – for not vaccinating their children. Those that jump out for me are the “largely wealthy and well-educated families” who, The New York Times reported, "are trying to carve out ‘all-natural’ lives for their children.” The descendants of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement, they try to immunize their children against the “toxic” products of pharmaceutical companies and corporate agriculture – of modern life.

They're easy to ridicule – certainly my first reaction – until I remember our own anguished dilemmas about how best to keep our children healthy and safe.

The Real Cost of Oil

Oil Cash Waning, Venezuelan Shelves Lie Bare read this morning’s headline describing the hardships ordinary Venezuelans are enduring as plunging oil prices deepen an already-deep recession. President Nicolás Maduro reflexively blames right-wing enemies, both internal and external, and especially the United States. But most economists blame policies, launched by the late and unlamented Hugo Chávez, which stifled private economic initiative and squandered one of the world’s largest gold reserves. The real culprit is oil. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves, and oil constitutes 95% of its exports. Twenty-five years ago, when Venezuela was a very rich country, Ivan Maldonaldo predicted its future.

He was then an old man, one of the most interesting I’ve ever known. Convicted at 16 of plotting to overthrow the dictator, he was sentenced to a chain gang and later exiled. He ultimately got a veterinary degree in Czechoslovakia and returned home, on his father’s death, to take over his ranch in a remote corner of the country. He was a visionary who protected all wildlife as he built Venezuela’s largest cattle operation and went on to become one of its richest men. His politics shifted rightward, but he never lost either his curiosity or his empathy.

Ivan watched his country become addicted to oil – become an importer of food and other goods it once exported, a nation whose diverse and vibrant economy died while it giddily drowned in petrodollars – and he watched the return of the dictatorship he had sought to overthrow 60 years before.

The Libertarian’s Dilemma

“In the broadest sense,” write the feminist pioneers of Our Bodies Ourselves, “violence against women is any assault on a woman’s body, physical integrity, or freedom of movement inflicted by an individual or through societal oppression.” Broad as that definition is, it says little about assaults on a woman’s mind, spirit or workplace equality. But it underlines the significant, if incomplete, advancements in women’s rights since the 1960s, progress based on the belief that a woman’s body should be protected from coercion from both individuals and the state. That’s precisely what Cassandra C. claims in a recent essay in The Hartford Courant: “This is my life and my body,” the 17-year-old wrote, “not the state’s.” Cassandra, however, was writing about Connecticut’s efforts to force her to take chemotherapy for her Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She and her mother call chemotherapy “poison,” but doctors testified that it gives her an 80-85% chance of recovery and without it she will die. The state asserts that Cassandra is a minor, overly influenced by her mother. Cassandra insists it’s her decision. When she turns 18 in nine months, the state cannot intervene, but her chemotherapy will probably be over.

Meanwhile, down at Guantanamo Bay the doctors’ response to widespread hunger strikes is to force-feed prisoners, which many human-rights advocates consider, not a life-giving intercession by the state, but torture.

Belief in the inviolability of a person’s body and mind is the foundation of an individual’s right to be free of state coercion. We continue to probe its limits.

The Progressive’s Dilemma

The plunging price of oil has already had a number of consequences, including:

• providing a financial windfall for lower-income families hardest hit by high energy costs.
• prodding environmentalists to rethink aspects of fracking, which has reduced emissions from America’s power plants.
• making the Keystone pipeline, which Republicans have risibly renamed the Keystone Jobs Bill (it will create 35 permanent ones), as unnecessary as it is ill-advised.
• putting pressure on those who sell oil, from Putin to the Saudis, from ISIS to Exxon.

Perhaps above all, $45-a-barrel oil threatens to aggravate the historic liberal divide between those focused on social justice and those dedicated to environmental protection. At least as far back as John Muir’s battle to stop the Hetch Hetchy dam, economic and environmental progressives have had a wary, often antagonistic, relationship. The latter’s emphasis on wilderness and endangered species protection has often seemed in conflict with the social and economic needs of the poor and unemployed. The environmental justice movement arose to bridge that divide, arguing that the poor suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation and insisting that the fate of the earth and the welfare of its people is not about choosing one or the other.

But cheap gas has a way of making people ignore the real costs of energy consumption; and so today we do have a choice: we can burn these momentarily cheap fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow or we can use this fortunate interlude to build a better one.

We could start with a gas tax.