Goodbye Elizabeth Edwards

Elizabeth Edwards, the beleaguered wife of former Senator John Edwards has died of cancer today in North Carolina at the age of 61. She has been dealing with recurring cancer which started with breast cancer in 2004. She has not only had to endure chemo, radiation and chronic illness and the heartbreak of losing her 16 year old son, Wade in a car accident in 1996, but also her idiot husband's very public and very humiliating infidelity.

But Elizabeth was not one to wallow in self pity or engage in spiteful retribution. She bore all in quiet dignity, working diligently on projects she was passionate about. She was an attorney and acted as an advisor on her husband’s campaigns.

She also became an advisor to Barack Obama on healthcare issues. She was an outspoken advocate for healthcare reform and worried about women with cancer that did not have the monetary resources she did.

She was a supporter of gay marriage, “I don't know why someone else’s marriage has anything to do with me. I'm completely comfortable with gay marriage."

She wrote several popular inspirational books that detailed her life, her losses and her illness. She legally separated from John Edwards in January, intending to divorce him after the mandatory one year separation. She ran out of time.

Her last facebook message:

"You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces – my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined. The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And, yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.
But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. It isn't possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you I simply say: you know.”

I always thought the wrong Edwards ran for office and that Elizabeth Edwards would have been much better at it. I would have voted for her.

She died as she lived, surrounded by friends and family giving and receiving support and inspiration.
She did not want to be remembered as having battled cancer and lost but rather as having lived well every day. And that she did.

"Handful of Senators Don't Pass Legislation": Tax Cuts, Unemployment Benefits, and the Post-2010 Dispensation

I gather that President Obama is opting for a compromise in which long-term unemployment benefits will continue, but so will the entire spectrum of Bush-era tax cuts. I won't criticize the president harshly for this compromise; I will instead do some simple-dino thinking out loud, set (if you like) to the background music from "Eve of Destruction." I opine that there are two ways to look at the matter -- which seems best?

1. Thanks to our predictably dim-witted, memory-free electorate, the GOP now has a much stronger hand and is essentially blackmailing the entire country to benefit its own prospects for 2012 and the tiny sliver of ultra-wealthy citizens that is the party's main purpose for existing at present. Faced with such prospects, the president might be viewed as having acted appropriately and compassionately. Sure, it adds to the deficit/debt problem to the tune or almost a trillion dollars and will eventually give the conservatives an even stronger hand when it comes time to ELIMINATE all those annoying social programs ordinary people need. But it's still what I called in an earlier post "keeping a declining republic going with baling wire and chewing gum." It's either that, one might say, or run with the prospect of letting the country fall apart right in front of the current generation's eyes.

In this view, all those brilliant so-called liberal or independent voters who stayed home last November "to send a strong message" have nobody to blame but themselves, the Blinking Idiots of America. If you're amongst that honorable assembly, I've got your message right here, channeled (as near as this dino can attune its liberal sensibilities to the appropriate frequency) straight from the Grand Old Party: "If you don't have a net worth of at least eight figures, we don't care what happens to you, now or at any other time. Go straight to hell, you twenty-first-century peons, and don't bother sending us the bill for the trip."

2. President Obama might have done best to let the cuts expire, then strongly and continually advocate the proposal and reinstatement of working-class and middle-class tax cuts and an unemployment benefits extension, all the while excoriating congressional Republicans when they resolutely refuse to help millions of people whose well-being is of no interest to them. This is a difficult and painful path, especially since, if I understand the process correctly, come January House Democrats will no longer be able to drive the legislative agenda. In that body, the Republicans will have the main say in what gets proposed and voted on. The most likely scenario is two years' worth of gridlock. The up side of this strategy would be, of course, that at least the GOP would come under intense pressure not to do the worst it is clearly meditating to do. What I'm describing is something like Bill Clinton's gambit against the shutters-down of government back in the 1990's. It worked pretty well for him, I recall -- the conservatives backed down because people rightly blamed them for their juvenile temper tantrums and stalling tactics while people suffered. The president's hand might be very strong in such a case: "Do something! Stop arguing about what did or didn’t happen last month or last year! Do something, you mean-spirited rotters!" It's exactly the sort of blinkered-historical-vision, short-term, bark-it-up strategy that Republicans themselves are so good at (as when they call liberals "whiners" for reminding us that Bush 43's mistakes are partly the cause of our current troubles) -- why not turn it against them for a change to do the people a good turn?

Buried Treasure from the WPA Era

WPA Mural

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 as a continuation of his New Deal, a campaign to revive American optimism and create jobs during the dark days of the depression. From 1935 to 1943 roads and public buildings were built and over eight million jobs were created.

In addition, the WPA’s Federal Art Project hired thousands of artists. “More than 20,000 paintings, murals and sculptures were produced by artists who were paid up to $42 a week. Among them were future superstars Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Thomas Hart Benton. Much of the art was installed in public places such as schools and hospitals.”

Just in the past few years, the General Services Administration (GSA) has recovered at least 150 pieces of art.

The Postal Service owns more than 1,200 murals and sculptures that were commissioned by the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts from 1934 to 1943. Post office art wasn't meant to create jobs, says Dallan Wordekemper, preservation officer for the Postal Service. Instead, artists competed to create works that would boost morale during the Depression.

The idea, Wordekemper says, was to "bring art to the populace" without charge in a place they visited daily — the local post office. Art that is recovered and restored, he says, often goes right back on post office walls or libraries for the same reasons.

Wordekemper has no budget for repairs, but he says he can sometimes scrounge up funds if a community is willing to raise half the cost. Residents of Herrin, Ill., are collecting donations now to repair a post office mural that had been AWOL for years before the son of a former postal employee returned it. It shows Indians meeting with Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark.

Many of the artworks have been lost or destroyed over the years but communities around the country are trying to rescue them. The U.S. Postal Service is diligently working to conserve surviving post office art. The GSA “is cataloguing art created with WPA funding . . . and recovering works that are for sale in auction houses or online.”

Other on-going projects include:

University of Rhode Island: During the renovation of a campus building in July, workers who were tearing down the drywall found six murals behind the plaster. They were painted 71 years ago by Gino Conti and have been hidden for 43 years. The $1.5 million project was paid for by federal stimulus funds.

South Pasadena, California: The “PTA raised $7,000 and won an $8,000 National Trust for Historic Preservation to restore a 1933 bas-relief sculpture showing Civilian Conservation Corps. workers at South Pasadena Middle School. The sculpture had been painted over because its artistic value wasn’t recognized and then sandblasted . . . .”
Florida: St. Petersburg Preservation is monitoring two huge murals of George Snow Hill’s fanciful jungle scenes in a commercial building but the redevelopment project is on hold.

Chicago: When I think of Chicago I think of two things: fantastic food and art everywhere you look. “A grass roots effort and money from arts groups, corporations and the city saved 400 artworks in Chicago public schools, 166 of them by WPA artists. The city has a trove of the art because it was a hub of muralists studying at the Art Institue of Chicago when the WPA began. . . .”

I suppose there’s no chance that our current administration would have the foresight to embark on a modern day WPA. But even if an attempt to launch such a program were made, the Republicans would surely kill it before it even came out of committee.

I couldn’t find illustrations of any of the works featured in this article but following are some of the fine artworks that were produced in those dreary days. Maybe they didn’t put much food in the bellies of the artists but they provided a needed morale boost for the people during that time and an appreciation of the history of that era for the people of today.

WPA Mural

Rudolf Weisenborn

Contemporary Chicago, 1936

WPA Mural

Marguerite Zorach

Hay Making Scene, 1939

Monticello, Indiana

WPA Poster

WPA Mural

Pillars of wisdom

It seems to me that there are two kinds of Americans these days: the uninformed and the misinformed although one has to allow for considerable interbreeding. Is this more true than it used to be or are they just more self assured now that we have multi-billion dollar industries devoted to supporting both mental conditions?

At any rate, it's increasingly customary in the world of blogging in these latter days, to suffer unrestrained and personal attacks in proportion to how well one backs up one's thesis with facts and figures and of course the fury is loudest when one of the fragile pillars of the Republican temple are leaned upon. So let's have another go at it and see what happens. Having been subjected to the unending right wing Jeremiad about the massive public debt and the question of who bears responsibility for it, I thought it interesting to show what the U.S. Office of Management and Budget can tell us about where we are now.


First and most obvious of all is that we're nowhere near the level of debt we had by the end of WW II, although that may be as expected, but that debt fell sharply and almost uninterruptedly until Ronald Reagan established forever the two regnant principles of Republican policy: Debt doesn't matter and tax cuts pay for themselves by creating businesses and jobs. Looking above, it's hard to see the evidence. High marginal taxes of nearly three times as high as today's were in effect as the debt fell, Debt began to rise sharply in response to Reagan's tax cuts and what the chart fails to display is that unemployment during the Teflon years rose to 9.6%, essentially the current levels we have today. Neither does it show that no new private sector jobs were added during the years of the Bush II tax cuts.

Again, what you don't see is how expensive the S&L collapse under Bush I was or how quiet was the Right about Bush's bailout of an industry that collapsed largely because of deregulation. Uninformed? Misinformed or just hypocritical?

We can see elsewhere however, that during the Clinton years, characterized by hysterical outrage at the "confiscatory" tax structure of the Democrats, employment soared and the debt sank, not to resume it's climb until the Commander Guy outdid even Reagan in illustrating that, no, tax cuts don't pay for themselves, don't create jobs and do as they did in the 1920's precipitate bubbles, busts and recessions.

So, I'm waiting for the slurs about my parentage, defective IQ and the rest of the typical projectiles, or at least the catechism of unsupportable maxims we've heard from every Republican since the debt began to climb, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Expiring Tax Cuts: Deal Or No Deal

Politics is and always has been about negotiations. Lines drawn in the sand are just to test the waters. Both sides know that ultimately you give some to get some. It appears that the trade off is going to be the tax cuts for the wealthy for the extension of the unemployment benefits. 

On Friday, House Democrats mustered sufficient votes to pass a bill that  extended the current tax cuts to the middle class and eliminated the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy. On Saturday, the Senate Republicans voted unanimously to defeat the Senate version of that bill. The vote was 53 (yes) to 36 (no), seven votes shy of the 60 votes needed to pass the legislation in the Senate.  While Republicans voted in a bloc, four Democrats voted with the Republicans, Senators Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Ben Nelson of Nebraska,  and Jim Webb of Virginia, as did independent Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

A second measure that would have extended the tax cuts to include those earning up to $1 million annually also failed to receive the necessary 60 votes to move forward. The vote on the second measure was 53 (yes) to 37(no) with a slightly different crew of Democrats voting with the Republicans--Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and the ever consistent Feingold and Lieberman.

At stake is not only the continuation of the middle class tax cuts, but the Republicans are also holding the extension of unemployment benefits hostage unless they get tax cuts for all. The White House has its own demands--passage of legislation extending the unemployment benefits for millions of people, as well as renewal of expiring tax breaks for lower and middle class wage earners, college students, and businesses that hire the unemployed.

I keep hearing how Obama and the Democrats should stand firm and declare no tax cuts for the wealthy. What then? What happens to the lower class (even if you don't have to pay income tax, there are some cuts for which you may qualify), the middle class and the unemployed who will find themselves with a decrease in revenue? When you have bills to pay to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, politicians having an old west style standoff are not a source of inspiration or admiration.

The Republican Senators aren't going to cave on the extension of unemployment benefits unless they get something that they want, in this case, the extension of the tax cuts for all. They will deny culpability, spinning it to be Obama's fault for being unwilling to compromise on the tax cuts and the public will buy it. I feel like a broken record, but the office of the president has no authority to force Congress to do anything. He influences Congress but he doesn't command Congress. 

Congress is answerable only to us and we seldom get off our collective asses to do anything to let Congress know that we will not accept their behavior. 

Of course Obama can veto the bill that comes to his desk if it contains an extension of tax cuts for the wealthy. Congress has the authority to override that veto but it's unlikely that both chambers would get the votes required to do so. However, it would be an incomplete victory. Any bill that the Republicans sign on to will also include the tax cuts for the middle class as well; veto the bill and taxes for the middle class also increase allowing the Republicans to again blame Obama for failing to keep his campaign promise to not allow an increase in taxes for the middle class.

It all reminds me of that game show hosted by Howie Mandel, the one where the contestants are asked, "Deal or no deal?" To get tax cuts for the people who need them the most, the administration will have to cut a deal with the Republicans to extend the Bush cuts to all. Rumor has it that the president is holding to setting a time limit on the cuts for the wealthy so that they will expire prior to the the tax cuts for the lower and middle class.

I wouldn't want to be in Obama's shoes; no matter what he does he will be condemned by the right and the left. However, Washington will roll on as it always has, playing some shady version of "Deal or No Deal."

The Bush Tax Cuts vs History

The Trophy Wife is currently reading The Road from Versailles by Munro Price. Subtitled, in case you're a completist, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the Fall of the French Monarchy - you know, the French Revolution. We read stuff like that: her more than me, to be honest, but there you are. It's important to understand history.

Let me just quote a little from the first two pages of Chapter 3 (typed in with my own bleeding fingers, I'll have you know).

The monarchy that Louis XVI embodied at the opening session of the Estates was still a grand if somewhat dilapidated edifice...

Below the king and the royal family, French society, like that of all continental old regimes, was divided into a hierarchy of orders, known as estates. Each one was legally defined, and had its own rights and duties. The clergy ranked as the first estate... they were not taxed directly, but instead voted a don gratuit, or "free gift," to the crown at their five-yearly assemblies.

The nobility, too, the second estate, were subjects of the king... True, the nobility were exempt from the main direct tax, the taille, but from 1695 onwards, they had been subjected, along with everyone else, to a succession of income-based contributions...

Below the clergy and nobility stretched the third estate, composed of all lay commoners... the bulk of its members comprised the urban working class and, above all, the peasantry, who made up fully 80% of the French population. Socially, politically and economically, it was the third estate that paid the price of the unspoken bargain between the monarchy and the privileged orders. Its members bore the brunt of taxation...

Can we talk about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the millionaires now?

Obama goes to bat for the bad guys

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
Saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

-Phil Collins-

The truth can set you free, and it can get you hanged. It all depends on who you know and how much they owe you. Yes, we may live in a world of denialism, mythology and cover-ups but I hope truth still has a few teeth left. That's why I'm rarely the first to scream 'treason' when someone blows a whistle or leaks a secret. Sometimes it even gives me hope.

So people have been asking me, since my last post on the latest Wikileaks fatwah, just what we learned that was useful enough to warrant embarrassing our delicate diplomatic efforts. Well a number of things, in my opinion. For one, we now have cause to reflect upon the Obama administration's efforts to thwart international prosecution of Bush, Cheney et al, for using torture to extract confessions from suspects.

Spain has had a lot of experience with torture and gruesome treatment of prisoners from the Inquisition right up through the last of the Fascist dictators. I think they've grown a bit intolerant and perhaps touchy on the subject of right wing excesses. So perhaps when that country set out to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, our current administration had many reasons to worry about turning tables, embarrassing revelations and the repercussions of such an investigation on our future conduct. Without Assenge and Wikileaks, we might never have known that Obama and company had a rare bipartisan success in 'persuading' Spain to squelch the effort. It's nice to know and it sheds some light on the puzzling friendliness that Bush has recently shown the man his party has been presenting as something loathsome and dangerous.

We didn't need any breaches of state secrecy however to learn that Dick Cheney's vast ossuary of a closet still has occupants with inconvenient stories to tell. Nigeria is planning to charge him and his Halliburton cronies with bribery and to issue an Interpol warrant, says Bloomberg Businessweek. You may recall that the Right Wing US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing Congress to ditch The Foreign Corrupt Practices act which makes such practices illegal under US law. If you were puzzled as to why we needed so badly to do that so quickly, perhaps we now can answer the question.

Will Wikileaks make Obama think twice about protecting war profiteers and international criminals - maybe even think a third time about trying to portray leakers as dangerous traitors now that we have had a glimpse of what's been going on?

Boiling the Tea kettle

"The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."

-US Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas-

Anyone in the US with more political awareness than a telephone pole knows that there's a whole lot of loosely related and sometimes contradictory stuff hidden under the camouflage blanket of "we're for smaller, less intrusive government," including the somewhat contrary and certainly not Libertarian opinion that that government may, at its own discretion, hide its actions, its statements and defend its deceptions and coverups, making the exercise of protected rights a crime. That so many who feel concern about paternalistic government can none the less defend it passionately and thus sanctify subterfuge is puzzling. That members of that government can ask that we treat the media and its sources as traitors and terrorists with all the extra-legal powers it possesses, is hardly puzzling at all. That the need to cover its ass supersedes any respect for the Constitution it pretends to worship: that government can be in terror of being exposed, hardly makes the case, in my opinion, for Terrorism. Perhaps the test of being a true and loyal Republican is not to think of Richard Nixon at this point.

So how do we feel about Wikileaks release of leaked State Department documents yesterday? Well at least one Republican congressman recommends that we move that organization under another one of those capacious and convenient camo blankets: the one we call terrorism, or 'terrism' in the dialect spoken by a great number of self-styled conservatives. So, by the gerrymandering of ill-defined symbols, we manage to expose -- or at least the horrifically hyperbolic Rep. Peter King (R-NY) hopes to expose Wikileaks and perhaps anyone revealing that which slithers through the wires to and from Washington, to the dire and drastic treatment we afford "foreign terrorist organizations." To expose embarrassing diplomatic cables showing many world leaders at their scurrilous antics, is "worse than a military attack" he said last night.

King, says CBS News, New York, has written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder asking that Julian Assange of Wikileaks be prosecuted as a spy for publishing 'sensitive' information given him by a whistleblowing soldier, even though that's what the mainstream media does, is supposed to do and the Court has affirmed their constitutional right to do.

It will be interesting to see the Tea Party reaction to this -- if there is one. They'll be torn between maintaining support for the First Amendment and the role of a free press and the treasured myth of its untrustworthy liberal bias. I'd like to think that it might increase pressure to actually define what they mean by a smaller, less intrusive and more limited government, but as they say - a watched teapot never boils.

Ayn Rand's Right: Vomiting In Its Own Hat

Testimony before The House Un-American
 Activities Committee, 1947

The Republican/Libertarian/Tea-Party/Christian/Patriot conglomerate constantly quotes Ayn Rand, which baffles and sickens me. Rand's novels were grandiose, turgid amorality tales that appealed to me briefly as a college freshman in 1966 and, shortly thereafter, struck me as...sophomoric. Now, they strike me as the polar evil of the Stalinism that Rand escaped.

The Great Socialism Paranoia of the Right

A fellow blogger left an interesting comment on a post (Thanksgiving Turkey) to The Swash Zone in which he offered an explanation as to why Americans are so quick to cry "socialism" when presented with any programs or policies that seek to provide to each according to her need. He cites one candidate's comments on a Tulsa City Council Questionnaire as indicating the core belief of those who see socialism in every social justice program or policy: 

I almost fanatically hate bullies and tyranny; I love individual liberty and the exercise of the individual human will. I am strongly opposed to any form of socialism, since all forms of socialism are based on force and the theoretical superiority of the group over the person. I strongly support the free market and the right of people to organize their own lives and make their own choices in their lives….All Government is based on force or the threat of force. The more government we have, the less liberty we enjoy. The less liberty we have, the less success we enjoy. Freedom just naturally produces success; that's what made America great. As the federal government tightens its coils around us, the nation begins to fail. 

The Tea Party is a bold manifestation of the underlying belief that individual liberties are of more significance than the good of all. The reality is that we do cede some of our individual liberties to government in order to promote a civil society in which the rights of the few are just as significant as the rights of the many. Perhaps it's time for the left to stop denying that socialism is an acceptable and even desirable element of a government by the people and for the people, if that government is to truly serve the interests of all of the people.

Social Contract theory as proposed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau has at its core a belief that individual liberties have to be tempered by government if we are to live in an ordered society where the basic rights of all are protected. I confess that I am Hobbesian in my beliefs. Humankind in its natural state without the controls of government is selfish and each person is focused on his/her own interests. In this state of nature, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. Hobbes argues that leaving us to pursue our own individual interests would lead to a "war of all against all" and  lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To prevent this perpetual state of war, men in the state of nature agree to a social contract and establish a civil society. (A good place to start if you are unfamiliar with social contract theory is with the Wikipedia article; it's not comprehensive but it provides a good intro.)

Where I part company with Hobbes is that he thought the most efficient government was to have an authoritarian monarchy to whom all ceded their natural rights for the sake of peace and protection. Hobbes was a true proponent of authoritative government. Locke proposed a more liberal monarchy and Rousseau advocated that government should be modeled on liberal republicanism (has nothing to to do with the Republican Party). I support a government that makes room for individual liberties but recognizes that those individual rights must be subsumed when they would result in the denial of basic rights to some individuals. 

The common good must exceed individual liberties. Over emphasis on individual liberties would result in the strong always being able to exploit the weak. Our government wasn't implemented to enforce the rule of the majority but to protect the rights of the minority. The Constitution that the right babbles on about incessantly has at its core the premise that the government's role is to uphold equal treatment of all under the law. Those founding fathers that Palin, Beck, and Limbaugh claim to know personally, didn't look to the Bible for guidance in determining the governing structure for this country but they did look to the work of Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes. You can hear the echoes of their various philosophical treatises on the purpose and structure of government in the Declaration and the Constitution. 

This promotion of self benefits the individual and the common good be damned. It is a philosophy that supports that if people are hungry and without shelter it's because they are lazy. It's an ideology that concludes that people remain unemployed not because they can't find a job but because they would rather not work. It is a belief that concludes that welfare recipients, the homeless, the poor, have no one but themselves to blame for their lot and it's no concern of the rest of us to do anything to provide them with the necessities of life. It is a selfishness that supports denying access to health care to those who cannot afford to pay for it. We have become a nation of nasty and brutish people, and we revel in it.

We are also a nation of hypocrites. The very people who sing the praises of individual liberty and oppose programs designed to help the underclass, deriding such programs as entitlements, also firmly assert that this is a Christian nation founded upon Christian values.  What Christianity is there in the philosophy of every person for herself? What happened to the core Christian concept of being your sister's keeper? From what I know of Christianity, Jesus definitely had socialist leanings.

The next time someone accuses me of being a socialist, my response will be, "Yes I am and proud of it."