PoliticusUSA (Politics)

With Three Sentences, Gail Collins Nails Republican/Democratic Foreign Policy Divide (September 11, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

gail_collins

After a several month hiatus, September heralds the return of The Conversation, The New York Times debate series featuring regular columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins. While the banter is often playful, the ideological divisions of the two pundits are serious and stark. Brooks represents what he thinks is the moderate, humanist right (another column for another time), while Collins takes up the mantle of the frustrated left.

The liberal grievances that Collins bespeaks in deceptively simple, pointed prose are sundry and do not always land at the feet of the intractable, regressive GOP. Collins’ voice has been notable in her willingness to take on cowering Democratic leadership, challenging them to stand for common-sense legislation around issues such as gun reform, immigration, health care and women’s rights. She doesn’t let either party off the hook for our nation’s stagnant and conflicted approach to social and economic progress. And she does so in approachable language that’s as clearheaded as it is egalitarian. Take this gem from Collin’s 2009 book, America’s Women:

“The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.”

Collins dares all Americans to take a certain level of responsibility for our situation. If we don’t like the way things work, we are at least partly complicit in tolerating the status quo. And this week, she holds our feet to the fire once again in her latestConversation with Brooks, “Our Reluctant National Security President.” After the conservative Brooks offers yet another rote, uninspired argument against America’s “leadership problem” under President Obama (to be fair, he lumps W and Clinton in this bucket as well), Collins succinctly destroys it. She writes:

“You’re looking at a decline of presidential leadership since World War II. I see a western world that has learned painfully, over and over again, how impossible it is to fight a ground war in other people’s countries. Particularly on a planet where your friends aren’t the only ones with weapons of mass destruction.

So maybe it’s not the presidents who have changed, but the world they confront.”

Yes! And the subtext embedded in this truth bomb (bombs are so much more enticing when they come in the form of learned dissent) is an indictment of a democratic leadership that seems determined to remain on the defensive, despite:

  1. Being, with few exceptions, aligned with the wishes of the voting public (such as nonintervention in foreign conflicts that do not directly and immediately impact our national security).
  2. Repeatedly failing to learn by case study (health care reform, immigration, the rollback of female reproductive rights) that the softer voices in the room are not heard. Those who talk loudest and most repetitively often win the messaging war.

The Democratic candidates presently running from the record of Obama, which includes significant economic recovery, a solid record in the war on terrorism (all crazy things Summer 2014 aside) and the greatest expansion to the social safety net in a generation, would do well to remember that every time they bob and weave, choosing “centrist” pandering over countermessaging, a soldier of Karl Rove gets his or her wings. And it allows the tone of the conversation to drift ever farther to the right.

Where Brooks views a lack of Presidential machismo as the ludicrous underpinning for our modern inability to order countries around, Collins sees a new reality. One in which America’s role – for financial, humanitarian, and yes geopolitical reasons – must be different. Most Democrats privately agree with this assessment.

One of the most important questions facing the party in the run up to the November elections is “Will we retain a Senate majority?” Instead, it ought to be, “Can we dispense with fear and expediency long enough to talk to voters and show them the real differences that exist between left and right?” The words don’t have to be lofty and long-winded as Collin’s continuous example proves. We need to do more than hold onto the Chamber. We need to change the conversation.

What the 1980s Toy Industry Teaches the 2014 Gun Lobby (August 31, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Replica_Uzi

I was two years old in 1980, young enough to experience everything the Me Decade had to offer across the full spectrum of childhood – toddler to pre-teen. As a 36 year-old adult, I remain imprinted by the decade’s pop culture (punk, pop and yuppie), politics (regrettably, I voted for Reagan in the first grade mock election at Pilgrim Lutheran School) and material goods.

As pertains to the latter category, as someone who spanned the ages of two to 12 across the 1980s, I feel qualified to comment on the era’s unofficial status as the Golden Era of Toys. My younger sister and I pined for the first editions of many of the greats that live on today: Nintendo, My Little Pony, Transformers, Strawberry Shortcake and more. Toys R Us was the most magical land this side of Chuck E. Cheese, and it was possible to love Cabbage Patch Kids and Garbage Pail Kids at the same time without a hint of irony

It was also possible to get hurt. Before the 1990s phenomena of helicopter parenting emerged, leaving no edge unblunted for Little Johnny and Jane, the Slinkys were made of metal. Earnest efforts could be and were made by the mischievous to unwind and turn them into long, thin saws. Children across the nation pulled Big Wheel emergency breaks while riding downhill at top speed, sometimes producing a gnarly spin effect that just as often launched you into a hard surface. And the day wasn’t really complete until you’d given your sister vertigo from the comfort of the family hallway, atop the Sit ‘N Spin.

Of course we know what happened. Parents got tired of the same nausea, cuts and head injuries and complained to manufacturers. The toys became safer. Goodbye Big Wheel parking break, hello hard plastic Slinky. Not quite as fun as the former models, but the great thing about kids is that if you give them a year or two they become a new demographic. Generation X was full of goth ennui by the time it noticed its cousins no longer swallowed little green army men.

I’m using a juvenile parallel to make a larger point, but the comparison is no joke. If rules and regulations pertaining to the manufacture, sale and usage of toys can evolve in response to a threat to children, why as we so dangerously and resolutely opposed to following suit with guns? In 1992, toy versions became required to have an orange plug or be entirely brightly colored to signify them as such. But we continue to allow the real thing to kill and otherwise scar our youngest Americans.

By now we’ve all had time to absorb the story. A 9 year-old in pigtails accidentally kills her weapons instructor while wielding an Uzi at the appallingly named Arizona attraction, Bullets and Burgers. While this tragic vignette has grabbed a multitude of headlines, it is far from an unusual occurrence. According to a July 2013 New York Daily News report:

“In the almost seven months since Adam Lanza’s demented slaughter of 20 Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders and six adults, at least 40 more children age 12 and under have died from accidental shootings across the United States, according to data compiled by the Daily News.

Those numbers do not include children killed by adults. Add those tragedies in, and about 120 innocents ages 12 and under have been killed by guns since Newtown.”

Despite the proliferation of child psychological terror and death by the collective relaxing of gun limits (literal and culturally), it never seems to be enough to shake the zombified Second Amendment zealots out of their trance. And you can always count on the cynical, heartless and tone deaf NRA to know just what to say. In the aftermath of the Arizona tragedy, RT.comreports, “Powerful US gun lobby, National Rifle Association, took the opportunity to present on social media ways children can ‘have fun at the shooting range’ following the horrific accidental killing of a shooting instructor by a 9-year-old girl in Arizona.”

At some point, as the 80s evolved into the 1990s, parents, manufacturers and lawmakers came together to decide that the safety of our youngest citizens was worth supporting. That’s right. Business, Congress and people working together for a common cause, a just cause. Toys didn’t suddenly become the stuff of black market trade, and no one lost their Constitutional right to play. The materials ad features just changed a little bit. It was logical.

How did we get here? How did we get to fourth graders being taught to view the handling of a semiautomatic weapon and the consumption of a hamburger with equal casualness? We won’t let our grown children show up for job interviews without us, but we’ll let the babies wield Uzis? And before you Internet trolls start your work, advocating for everyday common sense such as keeping weapons of war from the arms of kids, is no threat to your freedom.

It’s broken. It’s sick. And for the sake of our children, the limitless reach of guns has got to stop.

Michael Bloomberg Picks Up James Brady’s Legacy Where Republicans Abandoned It (August 25, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Michael Bloomberg

Metaphorically speaking, it’s been a hot, violent and angry summer virtually the world over. A June 20 report from the UN News Centre offered that “the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-World War II era, exceeded 50 million people.” Bearing in mind that figure was proposed over two months ago, it’s worth wondering if it has crept upward. Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, Israel and Gaza, children from Central America, parts of Africa – I supposed even Edward Snowden is counted in that tally.

America is grappling with civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City where recent evidence of police overreach and brutality have sparked demonstrations met with additional law enforcement violence. It’s tempting to liken these scenes to those of the 1960s and that decade’s Civil Rights movement, only with more smartphone cameras, tanks and sniper rifles.

Yet there is something demoralizing, alongside the inspiring scenes of community inspiration and activism, about the centuries-running persecution of young black American men by law enforcement and the judicial system. Something despairing in the repetitiveness and routine which the black male body is threatened, even as Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. wrote for the majority in last year’s Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, “Our country has changed.”

President Obama and the White House team are struggling to strike the right foreign policy note in an era where the United States can no longer monetarily or morally afford to police the globe. Yet it remains glaringly obvious that we can and should do more to combat one of the greatest threats to human life of any color right here at home – gun violence. Though it is certain that racist cops and citizens would find another weapon for expressing their vitriolic hate in the absence of a loaded gun, we don’t have to continue making execution so easy.

In this season of discontent, we lost a legend in the crusade for sensible gun reform. James S. Brady, the former White House press secretary for Ronald Reagan, died earlier this month, more than 30 years after being wounded in an assassination attempt on the President in Washington D.C. As New York Times writer James Barron wrote in an August 4 story for the paper, “The bullet damaged the right section of his brain, paralyzing his left arm, weakening his left leg, damaging his short-term memory and impairing his speech. Just getting out of a car became a study in determination.”

Had Brady retreated into a quiet life of retirement after the incident, who could have blamed him? Instead, Barron explains, “What Mr. Brady became was an advocate of tough restrictions on the sale of handguns like the $29 pawnshop special that Mr. Hinckley [Brady’s shooter] had bought with false identification. ‘I wouldn’t be here in this damn wheelchair if we had common-sense legislation,’ Mr. Brady said in 2011.”

Brady’s advocacy helped usher in a wave of reforms in the 1990s, such as The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and a federal ban on assault weapons. Unfortunately, the Republican legend lived to see a reignited NRA lobby intimidate lawmakers into rolling back signature pieces of legislation. The assault weapon ban expired in 2004 and numerous attempts to reintroduce it have been summarily thwarted.

With so much hysterical partisanship and misinformation surrounding the Second Amendment, and amidst sustained inaction on Capitol Hill, it’s fair to wonder at the specter of sane gun policy. The NRA has a big budget and cowering lawmakers at its heels, while Democrats fear being tarred and feathered as enemies of the Constitution. Thankfully there is still one big name taking on the gun lobby, a man with plenty of money in the chest and no stated desire to seek another public office. This slight, and slightly snooty, billionaire might seem a strange heir apparent to the Brady tradition, but we’ll take it.

In an August 21 piece for the Times entitled, “The N.R.A. Versus Michael Bloomberg,” Francis X. Clines writes:

“Mr. Bloomberg’s organization, ‘Everytown for Gun Safety,’ aims to hold its own in this electioneering face-off. The former mayor’s spokesman, Stu Loeser, said a strong gun-safety message helped defeat candidates last year in Illinois, California and Virginia. ‘This November, we will help defeat others who have made the mistake of aligning with the N.R.A.,’ vowed Mr. Loeser.”

James Brady was a rare conservative voice who came to believe through tragic experience that a citizen’s right to bear arms should be balanced by the collective claim to life and security. It is sad that as Brady aged, members of his party failed to coalesce around him, opting instead for a cynical approach to policy that has made the fear of public massacre a generally rational one. The scrappy, snappy Bloomberg may seem an unlikely heir apparent to Brady’s call for Second Amendment sanity, but finally we have a pet cause from a one percenter that’s in everyone’s interest.

We’ve Tolerated ‘Too Big to Fail’ for Far Too Long (July 23, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

too-big-to-fail-hbo-paul-giamatti-andrew-ross-sorkin-william-hurt

With international disasters and foreign policy imbroglios everywhere you turn, it’s easy to forget that we have numerous domestic issues with which we still must contend. To drill it down even further, we even have problems that warrant attention above and beyond nonstop Republican House attempts to disable Obamacare, either through legislation or lawsuit. And though it’s been hard to put faith in an unbiased justice system of late, I have decided to share our own Jason Easley’s optimism, located in his piece “Federal Court Ruling That Obamacare Subsidies Are Illegal Expected To Be Overturned.”

The Great Recession. Remember that? Although it’s been nearly six years since the catastrophic burst of the housing bubble and the subsequent stock market crash of late 2008, and though many experts tell us the worst was over in June 2009, most Americans aren’t feeling recovered. For a host of reasons including, but not limited to, sluggish job growth, stagnant wages, high levels of personal debt and underwater mortgages, the middle and working classes are struggling. And although the Big Banks would like very much for us to collectively forget their culpability in this mess, playing the persecuted victim card as often as possible (see U.S. venture capitalist Thomas Perkins’ letter to The Wall Street Journal, likening the “rising tide of hatred of the successful 1 percent” to the persecution of the Jews during Nazi Germany), their Jedi Mind Tricks have been only marginally successful.

Early this week, The New York Times columnist Joe Nocera brought the issue of the Great Recession back to collective consciousness with his piece, “Did Dodd-Frank Work?” In it, he observes, “There are many aspects of the law on which Democrats and Republicans disagree. But there is one area in which the two sides are largely in agreement: ‘Too Big to Fail’ is still with us.”

I don’t think we need to be financial experts to comprehend that not much has altered with our precarious system. While Bank of America, et al may be out of the subprime mortgage business, and the stock market has come back in a big way since the collapse of 2008, it’s tough not to feel that the financial system’s rebound continues to come at our expense – without us enjoying similar progress.

It also seems hard to believe that if a major institution once again found itself in dire straits, Uncle Sam wouldn’t ride to the rescue. The more things change, the more they stay the same after all and anyone left with the impression that the health and well-being Corporate America comes second to that of human citizens just hasn’t been paying attention.

Moving beyond common sense intuition to actual legislative fact, Nocera points out that, “In one part of Dodd-Frank, the banks are required to write ‘living wills,’ laying out how they could wind down without causing a financial catastrophe. Although they are now on their third round of living wills, the documents are thousands of pages, and the government hasn’t yet told them whether the second round of living wills, filed a year or so ago, passed muster.”

I can’t pass up the opportunity to point out another obvious corporate vs. citizen double standard. Though there are cities in America where it is essentially illegal to be poor and homeless, you can count on one finger how many bankers went to jail over derailing the global economy. And anyone who has undergone a personal bankruptcy proceeding can attest to the dehumanizing, humiliating scrutiny of medical bills, student loan amounts and income. It can take up to a dozen years before any entity will issue an individual credit again. Yet despite the disproportionate bluster, the nation’s banks operate as though they didn’t come to Washington with collective hats in hand little more than a leap year ago. And apparently they are not being held accountable to ensure it never happens again.

What we are left with, in the words of Nocera, is this: “the ultimate problem: We have no way of knowing whether ‘too big to fail’ still exists until we have another crisis. Let’s just hope we don’t have to find out anytime soon.”

Yeah, that doesn’t work. We must demand better of our lawmakers and regulators. What’s that they say about the definition of insanity?

Republican Ideology Has Its Worst Week Ever (July 20, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

lets_talk_ideology

Though you’d never guess by listening to its representatives speak, it was a terrible week for modern Republican ideology.

Those right-wingers who love to call President Obama weak on foreign policy, setting him in relief against their favorite bare-chested strongman Vladimir Putin, are scrambling to crawl under the nearest rock. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the icon of conservative male virility lent support to war criminals who shot 80 children from the sky. Per a report from theAssociated Press:

“On Thursday, Putin blamed Ukraine for the crash, saying Kiev was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions. But he didn’t accuse Ukraine of shooting the plane down and didn’t address the key question of whether Russia gave the rebels such a powerful missile.”

If gathering rumors are to be believed, Russian interlopers may have already absconded to Moscow with Malaysian Airlines Flight 17’s “black box” recorder. And as of Saturday morning, the crash site in Eastern Ukraine remains unsecured. As evidence decays and/or is purposefully tampered with, Putin’s Thursday statement may be the closest thing we ever get to an admission of the truth. A wise person once told me that when an unpleasant man tells you something about himself, believe him. And by shying away from implausible deniability (a sport in which the Russian thug routinely indulges), Putin is speaking loud and clear.

Russian sponsorship of the downing of the defenseless civilian airliners. Yeah, that’s real bravery. Keep talking McCain Nation.

Moving onto another human tragedy a little closer to home, the Republican Party continued its parade of heartless, xenophobic double talk about the Central American child immigrant crisis. Even as Colorado’s Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper offered a ray of humanitarian hope in writing, “If Denver or other communities in Colorado want to offer their support and sponsorship while these children are in the legal system, the state respects and would defend that decision,” and Pope Francis publicly cautioned the devout to love and protect the kids, a dark strain of ugliness continued to permeate the official GOP response.

This past week, retired medical doctor and Republican House member Phil Gingrey told NBC News, “The border patrol gave us a list of the diseases that they’re concerned about, and Ebola was one of those…I can’t tell you specifically that there were any cases of Ebola, I don’t think there were, but of course Tuberculosis, Chagas disease, many – small pox, some of the infectious diseases of children, all of these are concerns.”

These alarmist and disgusting comments continue to undercut our nation’s once-vaunted reputation as a refuge for freedom seekers. On a secondary level, you have to wonder if the GOP understands that they won’t be able to erase Hispanic voter memory in 2014 and beyond. Yet the certainty that the party is briskly digging its own electoral grave doesn’t do much to relieve the dire and fearful predicament of the kids. They’ve run from terror only to be treated as enemy invaders by the Land of the Free.

This year has been unbelievably tough for those in favor of contemplative, deliberate foreign policy, sensible gun and comprehensive immigration reforms and last but not least, liberty for the GOP’s most discounted “special interest group” – women.

New York Times commentator Timothy Egan makes the case this week that the SCOTUS’ disastrous Hobby Lobby decision does more than assault female reproductive freedom. It also takes a swipe at our founding principle – the separation of church and state. He writes, “In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.”

As Americans continue to grapple with the Supreme Court’s increasingly partisan suppression of human rights in favor of corporate ones, the media is finally (finally!) beginning to take the five Catholic male justices responsible to task in a semi-bipartisan way. Meanwhile, Democratic Congressional leaders are trying to develop and pass legislation that would grant women access to everything promised by the Affordable Care Act. May they be relentless.

It was a week when modern Republican claims to be defenders of freedom, limited government and human dignity were clearly exposed as money and power grabbing, racist scams. Individual rights trump all else – except for women who want to make their own family planning decisions. Give us your tired and your poor – unless they are frightened brown children. We have no money to take care of them properly as dictated by law. Those funds are subsidizing the lifestyles and business ventures of the one percent. And that weak-willed, effeminate Obama. If only he’d man up and covertly supply terrorists who murder international civilians like that macho Vladimir Putin.