BP lessons for Japanese horror

A lot of disasters these days. Shouldn't be an excuse to forget that the consequences of earlier disasters are ongoing -- like BP. Just the opposite. There are lessons for our ongoing disasters from the past, though I know that is a potentially disturbing thought in our nation of goldfish.

Rachel Maddow is right about what Obama should have done (on a long list of things he should have done!), but there is still something we should do, too.

BP should cease to exist. Shut down. The consequences of its activity and inactivity should not be underestimated, and their responsibility should be made clear to everyone who is in that business. People died. The Mississippi Gulf Coast, not even close to recovered from Hurricane Katrina, is devastated economically, biologically, psychologically, and so on. The goal should be fear. Abject fear for anybody in the business of offshore drilling -- or really any other business as potentially deadly as BP -- in case they might even consider cutting corners on safety, lobbying for deregulation, or playing fast and loose with people's lives for profit in any way.

There is only one way to ensure that goal: shut down BP. Don't buy anything BP or BP-affiliated. Don't let their lobbyists in the door. Fine them. Fine them again. And then fine them some more. Then make the liable for all damages and cleanup. Sink them. Completely. Wipe them from the face of the earth.

Then take a hard look at nuclear power plants. And mines. And let's take a look at that list of deadly industries ... make them think a lot more than twice...

More Uses for Poverty

"The number of people in the US who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with ranks of working poor approaching 1960's levels that led to the national war on poverty," says an AP story on recent census figures. And considering all the low-income paranoids I know (and maybe you know) who dodge the census while their coworkers land stopgap gigs walking for the Census Bureau, not to mention how hard it always is to count the very people who need counting the most, we can safely assume that like most dire government statistics, these are optimistic.

Pop Quiz!

What's an 11 letter word that begins with "chicken" and ends with "it"? Obama Administration. OK, there's another one - Democrat.

Green pork?

In the news Pres. Obama is spending zillions of subsidies to manufacturers - nothing new, except for the more "progressive" focus: he targets "green businesses" for aid. (Perhaps not surprisingly, as the young, better educated, middle-income supporters of these things were a major Obama constituency in the election -- chicken and egg, you know.) So far, so good.

The stated hope is to create about as many jobs, maybe, as half of those cut in December 2009 alone.

But if we scratch the surface, what color is under all that green? Thus far, white workers are being hit pretty damn hard by the economic crisis, but workers of color are being hit a helluva lot harder. Preference will still be given to "shovel ready" jobs, i.e. they will favor folks who already have jobs -- who are of course in need of work, too -- but what about the poorest workers, some of whom have been out of work for years and have no networks currently operational for connecting with this futuristic aid package?

I'm all for green jobs, clean energy, sustainable growth ... but for whom?

Honduras and Obama: Change versus No-Change

The latest crackpot take on Honduras is that Zelaya was "properly impeached" - after the army removed him in his pajamas at gunpoint and declared martial law, of course, suspending all that free speech stuff, etc. (They had learned, I guess, from previous outbreaks of anti-American riots over far lesser offenses.)

But all the serious commentary agrees that the media-christened "interim government" that resulted is not precisely constitutional or democratic. What follows that is mostly hand-wringing and little else.

Meanwhile there have been some interesting connection made. The shocking and of course completely unexpected presence of US-trained thugs among the coup perps are just one - as if the School of the Americas phenom hadn't lurked behind the scenes of most right-wing coups in the Americas since, well, forever.

Another is the degree of influence that Honduran business has a big slimy foot in the Beltway door (in the person of Lanny Davis) and maybe another (in the person of our old friend Otto Reich):

"Otto Reich has [...] been investing his energy during the last couple of years in a campaign against President Zelaya. [...] Reich also co-founded an organization in Washington named Arcadia Foundation together with a Venezuelan, Robert Carmona-Borjas, a lawyer specialized in military law who is linked to the April 2002 coup d'etat in Venezuela, per his own resumé. [...]Since last year, Reich and Carmona-Borjas have been conducting a campaign against President Zelaya, accusing him of corruption and limiting private property rights. Through the Arcadia Foundation, they created a series of video clips that have been shown in different media, attempted to portray Zelaya as a corrupt president who violates the basic rights of the Honduran people.

[...] Carmona-Borjas has traveled frequently to Honduras during the last few months and even held public meetings where the coup against Zelaya was discussed openly. At one encounter where Carmona-Borjas was present, the Honduran Public Defender, Ramón Custodia, who was involved in the coup d'etat, declared to the press that "Coups are a possibility and can occur in any political environment." After the coup took place, Robert Carmona-Borjas appeared at a rally in support of the de facto regime, on July 3rd, and received the honors and applause from the coup leaders who declared him "an important actor" that "helped make possible" the removal from power of President Zelaya and the installment of the dictator Roberto Micheletti as de facto president."


US tentacles run deeper, of course, down to a USAID-funded opposition coalition ...

"The "Democratic Civil Union of Honduras" is composed of organizations including the National Anticorruption Council, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise (COHEP), the Council of University Deans, the Workers Federation of Honduras (CTH), the National Convergence Forum, the National Federation of Commerce and Industry of Honduras (FEDECAMARA), the Association of Communication Media (AMC), the Group Peace & Democracy, and the student group Generation for Change."

... and through one of those tangled web-thingies involving ex-Contra czar Negroponte, who's back pulling strings again ...

"In his new role, John Negroponte presently works as Advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Remember, the current US Ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens [who has been working with the coup since it started], has worked closely under Negroponte during the majority of his career. So it would not be a far jump to consider that John Negroponte, expert in crushing leftist movements in Central America, has played a role in the current coup against President Zelaya in Honduras."

... and even to discussions with "our partners" involved in the coup in the days just prior, although naturally as regards "precise knowledge of military actions" of course we had no idea!

Although the Obama Administration did withdraw some (not all) aid, its response to the coup has been perhaps the most telling example of what it's Doctrine of Change actually means: mostly not.

Salvadoran people win!

Congratulations to the poor people of El Salvador on their recent election defeat of the evil rightwing ARENA that held power for so long. Bizarrely enough the new US Administration is welcoming the FMLN government, quite a change from the millions of US dollars that that used to pour into the country to try to crush them.

It remains to be seen what the FMLN will mean to the brave people of El Salvador, as varieties of Bolivarian socialism or other left-populist movements win elections - and re-elections! - in one Latin American government after another in the "new world order" of only one superpower, and that one in economic crisis - at the center of a world economic crisis.

Some of the signs between San Salvador and Washington might suggest a danger of cooptation.

On the other hand there have been encouraging efforts among the new left governments of Latin America to cement their own bonds of solidarity, including welcoming Cuba back into the fold (there's a can of worms in and of itself!) and support for Bolivian President Evo Morales in last year's showdown with the US.

Keeping up with health care reform

As the national pudding of health care reform begins to near the legislative eating there are some half-fulls and some half-empties, but incredibly neither faction says what we need is more hanging out, playing "Guitar Hero." Except the mainstream media and the corporate world it lives in, that is.

Meanwhile back in the Beltway, there is actually reason to believe that the process could even respond to pressure ... for better ... or worse. Maybe that's why the media would rather we butt out.

At least the Clintons aren't in charge of this one.

Taxes and gases

The bizarreness of life with Obama in the White House was seldom more apparent (so far) than in the mad tea party around the mileage tax idea. Amazing how many of the rank-and-file "conservative" comments (see also previous link) blame Obama and the Dems - or "liberals"(whoever they are) - for this screwball idea, when it was a Republican who proposed it and Obama who "slapped it down".

The best one is, Obama must have okayed this, then when it was unpopular he sacrificed poor Sec. LaHood, his "favorite Republican". Of course it's possible, but a lot of Admin proposals are a lot less popular with people who are much more powerful, it seems. It's also possible that it was a fake or feint (and maybe LaHood is just a foil himself -we'll see) to make Obama's real proposal more acceptable - drum roll, please - like the Republicans' usual tactic of proposing 2-3 times what they really want in tax breaks for the rich and program cuts for the poor. Yikes.

The mere suggestion of a VMT is fubar, of course - along with tolls and gas taxes - and not just because it's an "invasion of privacy". Tolls and other "user fees" are Libertarian nonsense - if you care about the less fortunate. Likewise gas taxes, like all sales taxes, hit lower income folks the hardest. When they're not flying in their corporate jets, the big CEOs and a whole host of smaller business execs are charging their gas to the company anyway - and the company passes that on to "the customer" a.k.a. you and me, or cuts "labor costs" (again, you and me).

Here's where I have to differ with my friends the Greens: taxing poor people trying to get to work, especially in rural areas and in some cities, is just inhumane. In the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area, for example, there are over 1 million people but the public transportation sucks, especially if you're, say, an African American trying to get from your home on the East Side to a job (or to look for a job) across town or in one of the many white-flight suburbs. The train has one line, north-south only, and never makes it into any of the suburbs. The east-west buslines all turn at Main Street at the white-black neighborhood boundary and head north or south. Waiting for a bus transfer is bad enough when the snow's 6 feet deep and you're late to work, even if you didn't have to get your kids off to school, too.

And car insurance is higher on the East Side, too (high crime area - yeah, the people in the neighborhood say, we noticed! That's why we want the frak out!). Nah - gas taxes are not true progressive agenda.

So, how do we pay for roads? Hold on - first let's break down the assumptions here. A) One massive chunk of that money is for new highways and roads, or for expanding old ones. Some might be necessary, given our current lack of options, but most of it ... I'm thinking ... not. When we drive down through Tennessee there are 4-6 lane highways I've never seen more than a half dozen cars on at any one time - and I grew up down there. Here in Urbana, Windsor Road, for example, too damn wide. Most of our city streets are too wide, and street parking limited, too - but that's a whipping boy of another stripe. Essentially, there's a multimillion dollar shortfall comparing gasoline taxes to road-building, don't build some roads!

B) Maintaining current roads: back to "our current lack of options". This is where public transportation comes in. We need some economic infrastructure conversion here. Adding up the taxes and ticket prices, Amtrak costs the government more than cars and roads, you say? There's one big fat gas tax you're forgetting: Iraq. You wanna pay for something big? Cut that!

Oh, and here's another one: Afghanistan.

The thin edge - we're hoping

OK, I admit it. I am more satisfied making $8.50 an hour, and even happy making $10 an hour, because my feet remember so well making $3.25. I gladly sit in front of a computer for $350 a month, or stock produce or run a cash register for $300 a month, because it seems like only yesterday I was toting a claw bar down a dry, dusty railroad track - pines in the distance wavering in the 110F heat - through Sharp's Bottom, a snake pit punctuated by coyotes and pistols just far enough from the paper mill that the acid rain that hung around the smoke stacks didn't take the skin off unless you had to service that part of the track ... for $4 an hour.

So after Reagan and Bush, and Clinton, and then another Bush - meaner, nastier - yeah, I'm positively goo-goo over some of Obama's doings. Like today: anybody who wants bailout money from here on in, he says, pays no more than $500,000. See, I just got no problem at all with that. In fact I'll take half. Easy. And I'll throw in a bonus even though nobody has asked: if I manage to screw up the business, any business, let alone the world economy, even a fraction as monumentally as my predecessor(s) ... hell, I'll give back half of the salary I did keep.

I'm actually pretty confident that bonus would never be implemented. But that's beside the point: how come nobody's asking?

But even if they were, seriously, would it be enough? Do we really believe the executive's out-frigging-rageous pay grades are the biggest kink in our collective hose? It's so micro.

Sure, it's longterm stupid to pay people a commission to dismantle our economic base one factory at a time - that is, assuming a perspective of "promoting the general welfare," which I don't - but the hole we're dug into is way too deep for a long, sloping incline out. We've got to get macro on their asses.

How about, just for starters, something like: You want bailout money? Stop spending it busting unions and conspiring to block the Employee Free Choice Act. Stop dodging OSHA regs, the EPA, overtime protections and discrimination cases with merit. You want the money? Settle those legitimate lawsuits, fix that pollution problem, and pay your damn workers what they've earned. And by the way, federal inspectors get unfettered access to every square inch of your operations - including offshore subsidiaries - and 24-7 access to all the books (both sets). Congress calls you up and says, How'd you spend the money? and you say, Dunno, and if I did, wouldn't sing - and you can just whip out that big, fat corporate checkbook and pay it all back - at about 15% APR.

Still want it? I got some ideas for a "Social Monetary Fund" to talk to you about. There's a certain flexibility we expect from you, too. No, I don't mean logistics or whatever you call outsourcing these days. I mean you need to be about developing technology that will re-tool for new trends in the economy, and new priorities for energy and social margins, not just for the latest model of the miracle of built-in obsolescence you sold us last year. We - it is we who will have to demand it - want to see swords beat into plowshares, just about literally: military capital converted for local and global standards of living. And so on.

Is Obama the savior who'll bring us all that? It's the wrong question. The real question is what are we going too do to get started in that direction?

eating Obama's labor pudding

By now it’s clear to most people who pay attention to those things that Obama’s cabinet leans more to the dark side. Hillary Clinton as Head Hawk is certainly one of its lowest ebbs, though hopefully at least it keeps her out of Obama's electoral hair for a few years. Summers over Stiglitz, well, what can we say? Even the one real bright spot – Hilda Solis for Labor Secretary – is sort of a candle under a bush, if she gets through, as Robert Reich and Richard Trumka have made clear: Who gives a flying frak at a rolling doughnut about Labor Secretary? What can she do anymore in that office?

But - ‘things’ have been looking up this week. Obama says new federal contractors now have to first offer work to the employees currently doing the work before bringing in replacements. They can stop running anti-union campaigns on the federal tab, too. They may also have to start doing their work under Project Labor Agreements (PLA), one of those things they don’t teach us about in civics class, or in the media, because it’s too cool.

And when Obama signed his first ever bill into law, for pure symbolic value and for real, it was a good one: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, another of those little things a Dem can do that actually make a measurable difference in real people’s everyday lives. (It’s an example of what my good friend in Mississippi John Conlon was talking about when he used to say the Democrats, for all their obnoxious shortcomings, actually spend more time talking about things that help poor people than all the leftist parties in America!)

It’s also an excellent example of what to do when the courts stand in the way of justice (pun intended), like declaring corporations to be people, etc.

Not that most workers will be able to access these Ledbetter benefits any more than OSHA rights or most of the other rights we supposedly have, unless they have a good union to fight for them – which brings us to my second hobby horse for today…

First, I have to say, you gotta hate the name: Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, but not for all the reasons some of my comrades on the Left will hate. (I think names like the “Working Families Party” and so on are not the heterosexist exclusion that some of my friends in the gay rights movement argue. I know for a firsthand fact, for example, that the founders of the WFP had this in mind: a family can include anybody, and talking about working families instead of just workers broadens the scope to childcare, education, etc.)

But this bizarre faith of almost all Americans that “I am middle class” is a dangerous lie. Denial, as they say, is not just a river in Egypt. There is a class war raging in this country and so far it’s pretty lopsided: the rich are screwing the bejeezus out of the poor and working classes, every year wringing a new drop out of our hapless asses. And it does none of us any good to pretend that we’re “middle class,” like Jews in Nazi Germany calling ourselves “apolitical” or “patriotic” – it just misses the point.

Anyway. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and in the pocketbook, the doctor’s office, the classroom, you know… And all that remains to be seen. And it’s not a particularly hopeful sign that Biden is at the helm of this thing – with Summers in there, too.

But the impetus came from Change To Win, that ‘long’ lost twin of the AFL-CIO, which is a hopeful. Could we actually have a prez who listens to organized labor and other social justice groups? Could it be?

“I don’t see organized labor as part of the problem,” the man says. “To me, it’s part of the solution.”

OK, that would have sounded lukewarm just a couple decades ago. Now we can watch with glee as the Rush Limbaughs and Walmart CEOs get all apoplectic.

But this: “You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor union.” Now that’s pretty damn good – apart from that weirdness about the “middle class” again. As propaganda, it works, though. I wouldn’t go as far as Harold Meyerson in the TAPPED blog:

“But for a few stray remarks from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, that’s the strongest endorsement of the case for unions that an American president has ever made.”

I mean, really. Take a whiff: getting the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) kicking and screaming through Congress and around a snotty-hostile Supreme Court that killed FDR’s first attempts on the grounds of so-called “property rights” (well, whoop-de-do, as my grandmother would say), hey, that has to count for a lot. Now, it’s true that FDR was under a lot of pressure to do something Keynesian – and fast – and I’m not one to say vespers at the altar of the NLRA. It’s flaws are legion. Buttload legion. Starting with: agricultural employees, some of whom are now partly as a result of NLRA exclusions reduced to modern-day slavery, as well as domestic workers (ditto) got nada. In the cold. To the wolves.

Still, the proof of the NLRA pudding for just about forty years was nothing to sneeze at. Unions exploded. That includes existing unions increasing in size, faster than the union leaderships actually wanted (because it made their memberships harder to control) as well as new unions popping up like mushrooms all over the country. What this meant where the rubber hits the pavement Meyerson puts down crystal clear:

It was “the only time in American history that median household income increased at the identical level that productivity increased […], when both rates increased by 104 percent.”
And on that note, and most importantly, union leaders seem to be feeling a bit warmer and less fuzzy about the Obama phenom’s enthusiasm for the Employee Free Choice Act. Rahm Emmanuel had been giving off some noxious gas about the Employee Free Choice Act, which is long overdue by a couple decades. That’s about how long ago the NLRA stopped doing its job. And it’s been doing its job less and less every year. Too quote one of mine and my kids’ recent fave movies: “We’ve lost engine one! And engine two is no longer on fire!”

The Employee Free Choice Act has big holes, too. Ag workers, domestic folks, S.O.L. But the Employee Free Choice Act fixes the biggest engine-failure of the NLRA: the fact that American workers today, almost alone in the industrialized world, can face a brutal gauntlet of tyrannical ruthlessness in-between signing cards saying they want a union and the actual NLRB-supervised election.

The Employee Free Choice Act eliminates that anti-worker “waiting period”: workers want a union, 50% + 1 sign a card saying so, they have a union, period. It’s simple, it’s civilized, democratic, it’s the right of free association, and that’s exactly why Walmart and Bank of America don’t want it. That’s why they’re prepared to fight what the New York Times called “Armageddon” to block it. They, and the media (which is also “they” because it’s big business, too), know what they’ve been keeping most of us from learning: most Americans consistently tell pollsters that they would join a union if they could, and the only thing keeping them from it is the NLRA’s waiting period, that and the multi-billion-dollar union-busting industry that makes a damn good living in houses-they-don’t-even-know-how-many with their kids in big-name private schools taking advantage of that hole.

The trouble in passing the Employee Free Choice Act is not, strictly speaking, the prez, of course. The bill passed the House already, but couldn’t get past the Senate Republican filibuster in the old Congress. That’s why 60 is the magic number for labor, to defeat a filibuster in the Senate. With Al Franken in the Senate, maybe this time it can happen. But some of the Democrats are unreliable on this one, so Obama’s use of the bully pulpit – and other White House arm-twisting – may be crucial. So this is a good sign.

We have a lot of fires to put out, not all of them Bush-fires, and then probably many lifetimes of work to do after that to even approach justice for the downtrodden of the world. But with stuff like this coming out of Washington, after so many years of bitter hopelessness, it’s hard not to dream about those golden years that didn’t seem all that golden at the time, between 1948 and 1973.

A few Obama DO's and DONT's

http://www.ucimc.org/content/obama-should-make-clean-break-past-latin-america

Sometimes it's good just to run down the list. It is hard to imagine Obama being as bad as the W. (And this is just Latin America.)

Florida tomato pickers still want Obama to visit Immokalee, though. (See link below.) Slavery is still alive and well in America. So are a lot of things most people don't know about, especially in the fields.

Say it ain't so, Barack!

Obama's gang is telling us today (anonymously - how slick) that the new Prez might delay tax cuts to the rich ... because (incredibly) of the economic "downturn" (AP, 11-23-08).

WRONG! The "downturn" - economists sometimes call it a "correction" (or a "major correction") - is the best reason that's come along in a long time to increase taxes on the rich. In the immortal words of the esteemed Senator from Vermont: "Let the rich bail out the rich!"

Sanders's 10% on incomes over a million ($500,00 for individuals) won't be enough, but he's on the right track.

It is true, I have to admit, that income tax is not the best way to do it, not even a progressive income tax, which we barely still have. (The Bushies lowered the top bracket from 39% to 35% - a long drop from the 77% I recall from my pre-Reagan youth, as if in a dream.) A wealth tax would be better, according to the really smart people. In other words, we ought to tax what we don't want, not what we do. That is, we want production, not speculation, etc.

But in the short run, income tax is what we've got. Somebody has to pay, not just for the bailouts, but for all this stimulus ... and those of who are losing income, prospects, and so on, should not be the ones, nor should our children.

My point? Obama's apparently feeling a lot of pressure from the Dark Side - let's give him some from our side!

Auto bailout: gas guzzlers guzzle more than gas

So the "news" today is that incoming Pres. Obama wants Congress to fork over "as much as $50 billion to save cash-starved U.S. automakers" like GM, in the news recently for plummeting stock prices. But will it burn up on re-entry? Obama and a bunch of politicians from car-building states seem to think so, that the Big Three could fall into bankruptcy without this cash.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aBlCucXR33Jw

True, if even one of the Three go down the ripple effect could be deadly. Overall wages, benefits, and possibly working conditions could be dragged into the sinkhole. But what keeps getting lost in these rushes to bailout the big boys is what the taxpayer (or the folks who are too poor to pay taxes) get out of it.

In the bank bailout, the US decided to buy up stock, in the end, but non-voting stock (not like the UK). And no new regulations in the deal. Not good enough. For the kind of money we are shelling out, we need a say in how these companies decide to blow it all.

Same goes for the car industry. The bailout needs to have a price, a real price,a useful price. At a minimum, the deal needs to be linked to this policy both parties supposedly have called "reducing our dependence on foreign oil," or some such. The Big Three have played a very nasty game in this respect, aided by the Republicans - and "Who Killed the Electric Car" went way too easy on them. If we bail them out this time, we need some signatures on some dotted lines about affordable electric cars, hybrids, something.

But that won't help most people, who can't afford a new car no matter what it runs on. Poor folks in this country need to get to work, or at least to get in to look for work. And the history of car-making companies blocking public transportation could provide a clue to how the Big Three ought to be helping: put it in reverse.

As late as this summer the Three were focussed on luring people away from public transportation, instead of investing in it. This situation is untenable, and backasswards. What the government needs to do, if it has to bail out these big boys, is use it as leverage. Test the urgency. We need to get the Big Three working on our agenda if they are going to be working with our money.

ACORN better than Obama

The 2008 elections made me realize I've never been prouder that I worked for ACORN.