Category Archives: Politics

Drought

Photography, Politics

Cathedral -

Cathedral in the Desert 2005, exposed by low water level in Lake Powell (really a reservoir). © srstern

On January 17th, Governor Jerry Brown finally declared a drought emergency in the state. He also asked all citizens to cut back at least 20% of their water use. In typical  Jerry Brown fashion, he had lots of charts and photographs showing us how bad it is and it is very serious. Last year was the driest year that California has had since we started keeping records in 1895. The Department of Water Resources said that Gasquet Ranger Station in Del Norte County has only 43% of normal and Sacramento is even worse with 5.74 inches of rain instead of the typical 18 inches.

This is probably not news to anybody who lives here and has gone outside this year. I have never seen it this dry and I have lived here since 1940 and paid attention since about 1956, when I started backpacking. The scary thing is that we don’t really have enough water for our lifestyle even if there were no drought. The good news is that the drought, which is aggravating the problem, may actually make us think about the underlying problem.

Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus

 Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus. © srstern 

That is not something we – we meaning, probably, all Homo sapiens, maybe all mammals – are good at doing; looking at subtle, underlying, problems and correcting them before they become big emergencies. Jerry Brown was the first politician that I remember who talked about national limits, saying The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits. He got laughed off the stage as Governor Moonbeam. Jimmy Carter was the first president to really face an energy crisis, complete with gas lines. He asked everybody to turn their heat down to save energy, and he was belittled for it, losing to Reagan’s It’s morning again in America campaign.

As an aside, Carter had several firsts as a president; he was the first president born in a hospital, he was the first president to wear jeans in the White House, he was the only president – so far – to have lived in subsidized public housing, and he was the only President to have been interviewed by Playboy. End aside. My friend Ed Cooney is in love with Jimmy Carter, Ed is an amateur presidential historian and smart enough to know that, in many ways, Jimmy Carter was not an especially effective president but enough in love to want to overlook these Presidential flaws. However, I think that he is actually in love with Carter because of Carter’s political flaws.

What hurt Carter as a president, is partially what made him admirable. Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Annapolis and later did graduate work in atomic reactor technology and nuclear physics; he was a rational man more than a political man. He knew we weren’t going to solve our energy and resource problems by ignoring them, and we haven’t.

I am not sure if I have become more or less cynical over the years. I used to think that we would know when we really have a water problem when they stop watering the golf courses, now I am not so sure. Now I think that water flows towards money more than downhill and we can be in a very serious drought with very green golf courses.

Silverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srsternSilverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srstern

Strong Tea parties and weak tea

Politics

Protest-5934

A day or so ago, I got an email requesting that I sign an online petition. Like most people, I suspect, I get these alot . It seems so much like petitioning  the choir that I often just delete them and move on. But, I read an interesting article in The Economist that started me thinking about that petition and other ones like it. The article shows the results of Tea Party rallies over April 15th, 2010.

new research suggests that the people whom left-wing pundits once dismissed as “teabaggers” made a big difference in the mid-term elections of 2010, when Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives….When it rained, attendance at rallies halved….Dry rallies created momentum…and the rallies a year later were twice as large. Such enthusiasm translated into a 7% rise in the Republican vote in 2010, compared with wet areas. If the Tea Party merely expressed voters’ frustrations rather than inflaming them, one would expect no difference between wet and dry districts. The authors conclude that protests can indeed shape policy.

In a way, this is what I expect, it is why I walked precincts for Obama and turned out for Occupy protests. But, often, when I am doing that, my mind tells me that what I am doing is not going to change anybody’s mind and I didn’t walk as many precincts as I had time for, I didn’t go to most of the Occupy and Move-On protests I was invited to, and I haven’t signed most of the petitions I believe in.

It is nice to see that rallies have effects, and scary because it means that not doing anything has an effect, even if it is negative. Liberals seem to concentrate on Presidential elections and Conservatives on local and down ticket elections. I think the conservatives are right. Having a school Board that is in agreement with  their basic beliefs is more germane to their daily lives than having a President that is. We Liberals scream like scalded cats when the School Board wants to buy books that say Intelligent Design is a real theory but the best way to stop that is to get people on the School Board that don’t believe in that nonsense in the first place.

The article ended with Watery tea may be weak, but the strong stuff makes lawmakers sit up and take notice, which reminded me that Courtney Gonzales brought over some green tea on Christmas Eve and showed us how to make it weak. I – we – think of tea as a way to administer caffeine but  for hundreds if not thousands of years, it has been a way to make water safe to drink.

To stretch my ramblings on The Economist’s article a little further, I would say that the same is true in politics. The strong tea of presidential politics gets the headlines but it is the weak tea of down ticket politics that, eventually, makes the water safe to drink. It is state and local policies that determine if family planning clinics stay open and determine the boundaries of electoral districts. It is easy for me to fall back on the belief that politics is a way to shock the system into change every four years, but I am starting to believe that politics is the almost daily work of signing protests, the daily work of trying to be heard.

Occupy-5923

 

Well, I guess it is Governmental Transparency

Politics

US-intelligence-seal-Nothing-Is-Beyond-Our-Reach

Close to a couple of weeks ago, the National Reconnaissance Office – that’s NRO to the cognoscenti –  launched a new spy satellite.  The NRO was founded in 1961 – but the government didn’t get around to telling anybody until 1992 – and, according to its website,  is in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining… America’s spy satellites. The logo for the latest spy satellite is a malevolent octopus humping the earth. For the dense among us, they provided the tag line Nothing is beyond our reach.

At first look, it seemed sort of off-putting – Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU, tweeted, You may want to downplay the massive dragnet spying thing right now. This logo isn’t helping. and that is a mean looking octopus – but I think he is wrong and the logo is brilliant. In its own way, the Defense department – I think the NRO must work for Defense, they wouldn’t be under State would they?  – is doing the same thing as Edward Snowden. The logo is designed to stop terrorists more than to catch them.

The thing that stops me from driving faster than traffic on The 280 coming back from San Francisco at 11:30 Saturday night is that I don’t want to get a ticket and, going into San Francisco at 5:30, I saw several black and white Highway Patrol cars that, I am worried, are still around. Edward Snowden is like the guy flashing his lights at me, saying Slow down, there is a cop ahead. The logo is like painting the Highway Patrol cars black and white so I will know they are at work. The presence of the Highway Patrol stops me from speeding and the presence of NRO satellites keeps terrorists from using emails. Sure, not all the terrorist, but most.

A holiday of Muslim movies

Americana, Politics, Religion

The SiegeFor no particular reason, except that this is the way the Universe works some times, we saw three movies about Muslims over the weekend.

The first one was The Siege, made before 9-11, about a fictional Iraqi terrorist group and the countries over-reaction to the carnage they cause. Denzel Washington plays a New York based FBI agent and Tony Shalhoub is his Arab- American partner. In the movie – and, I believe, in real life – the terrorist are reacting to what we are doing in the Middle East. In this case, we think the chain of events started when a a secrete American “extraction team” kidnapped a Shiite cleric. Annette Bening – the very same, overwhelmingly attractive, Annette Bening that charmed President Andrew Shepherd – plays a CIA agent who set up a Shiite terrorist operation to oppose Saddam Hussein’s regime that set-up the kidnapping. It wasn’t a great movie.

The second movie was much better. It was the The Reluctant Fundamentalist by the Indian director, Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding).  The Reluctant Fundamentalist bridges 9-11 and is about a very smart, very secular, Pakistani who is living in New York as a successful management consultant. When 9-11 hits, he goes from being “king of the world” to pariah. Not so much in terms of his friends but in terms of the America he loves.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The last movie was The Past by Asghar Farhadi – the Iranian who directed A Separation, nominated for an Academy Award – and is playing now. It is directed by an Iranian and stars Ali Mosaffa, another Iranian, who has come back to Paris to be divorced by his French wife, played by Bérénice Bejo,  but it is not about Muslims, it is about people and it is superb.
The Past

A couple of weeks ago, I got in a conversation with a friend about religion. That is not a big surprise, two of my favorite conversation topics are religion and politics and it is two of my friend’s favorites as well. He is – if not a baptised, at least a confirmed – atheist. I knew my friend found all religions troubling, but he surprised me by saying that Islam is the worst by far. That those qualities that make it the worst religion, are built it. As an aside, I would classify myself as pro-religion. I believe in The Wonder, A Divine, Love, but I find it very hard to understand, let alone believe in, an anthropomorphic god.  I find it borderline insane that anybody thinks there is a god who created the Universe with its billions of galaxies, of which we are in a tiny corner of one, and then cares about how we have sex; but I also think religion can comfort and can be a force for compassion and good. If pushed, I would say I am an agnostic with Buddhist leanings. End aside.

The first two of these movies touch on what it is to live in a world in which good people, smart people, even compassionate people, think your religion is one of hate and terror. To live with people’s assumption that you are not the same as them at a very basic level. All three movies deal with the deeper question of not completely belonging. Not belonging in the sense of not being accepted. Not because of anything the characters have done, but of not being accepted because of who they are.

At one point in The Past, a friend of Ahmad’s – the Iranian who came back to Paris to be divorced – says You were not made for this place, you do not belong here. And he doesn’t which is why he left his wife and her two kids to go back to Iran. Changez Khan, the reluctant fundamentalist, wants to stay, he is very good at getting rich the American way, but he is driven out by full body searches at airports, stares in restaurants, and the burden of being the other. Agent Frank Haddad in The Siege, wants to quit the FBI when his son is jailed in a round-up of young Muslim men.

These three movies tell the collective story of Muslims between worlds. In a way, it is the classic immigrant story but it is also the story of a minority that has been identified with the enemy. When I read about Bernie Madoff ripping off investors, my first reaction is Oh shit! not another Jew. I am sure that when most Muslims read about some asshole blowing people up at the Boston Marathon, they say something like, Oh shit! not another Muslim, why can’t it be another Timothy McVeigh?  In their case, in 2014, the consequences can be much more serious and that makes me feel sad.

 

Catching Fire, Catwoman, Elysium, and Unionizing Wallmart

Americana, Film, Politics

catching-fire-capitol-couture Laura Atkins, Michele and I saw Hunger Games: Catching Fire over the weekend. It was very good, just as the reviewers said it would be. I didn’t expect much from the first Hunger Games movie and was shocked when it turned out to be so engrossing. With better reviews, I expected the second movie to be good – and it was – but it didn’t carry the surprise of the first movie. It was good but I wasn’t knocked out. Part of the problem is that I had seen Gravity in between the two Hunger Games movies and part of the problem is that it is hard to have a great second movie of a trilogy, just look at The Empire Strikes Back (OK, that was probably overkill and The Dark Knight was probably the best of Nolan’s trilogy).

However, Jennifer Lawrence is great, even if it is in a sort of Ree – from Winter’s Bone – way and carries the movie. In both her scene with President Snow, and when she finds out that she will have to go back into the area, she projects fear and utter hopelessness better than anybody I can remember. Now, after watching her on The Daily Show, I am looking forward to see her do a comedy.

Another part of my problem with Catching Fire is that the basic premise of the reaping and the Hunger Games really doesn’t make sense as anything but, as David Denby says, a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to cast the movie in the same mold as 1984 and Brave New World. Those books were meant as cautionary tales on where the world was headed. I keep wanting to see this movie as a comment on the country’s direction towards decreasing equality and I kept getting hung-up on Why did President Snow do that, it will just piss people off and make them even more likely to revolt. But maybe that is just the movie being unperceptive, Walmart doesn’t seem to understand that what it is doing is just pissing people off and making them more likely to strike.

Even so, while I am willing to admit the inequality is not what Catching Fire the movie is about, the inequality in Panem does set the tone for the movie. The movie takes the point of view that the future will be bringing less, not more, equality. So does  The Dark Knight Rises. It is all about the disparity between the rich and poor in Gotham City. It is pretty explicit when  Commissioner Gordon references A Tale of Two Cities in Bruce Wayne’s eulogy with It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known…Selina Kyle is even more explicit when she says There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us. 

And Elysium drops any nuance. Earth is a giant slum and the 1% live in orbit (with universal, instant, healthcare, seemingly, the same healthcare that the rich have in Panem). All three movies paint a bleak future. I think that they are really projecting the bleak present onto the future because most people do not realize the reality of the present. inequality-page25_actualdistribwithlegend-1Back in the late 50’s when the country was much more equitable than now, my first real job was a summer job as a Union Laborer working on – what we then called – Bayshore Freeway. It was easy to become a laborer and get into the Laborer’s Union. It was considered an undesirable job because it was a hard and dirty job but it was a Union job and a big percentage of my fellow workers were supporting themselves and a family because it paid pretty well. Even so, it was looked down upon by my friends who had more prestigious summer jobs inside. I always thought that was a little strange because I was making more money than they were.

After the Army and after I graduated from college, I went back to work in the construction business. Because the Laborers were making high, Union, wages, everybody up the foodchain was making, correspondingly, high wages. Occasionally I would talk to friends who worked for banks and had much more impressive jobs than I did. I was a basically a field guy and spent much of my time with guys who worked with their tools, in the dirt, while my banker friends worked in an office and  wore nice suits. I was always surprised at how little they were paid, I was always surprised that they got their suits at JCPenney.

I remember dating an executive who worked for I. Magnin – she was a big deal and had been hired away from Neiman Marcus – and I was shocked that she couldn’t afford a car. A couple of times, I joked that they should start a Union and they laughed, telling me that they were above that, Unions were for the masses, they were Bankers or Management.

Now the Unions are being driven out of the private sector workplace. Wherever possible, Union workers are being replaced by nonunion people and there are lots of ways to do it. When Standard Oil moved their data processing from San Francisco to the suburbs in the San Ramon Valley, I was working for Shapell in the area. I wondered, out loud to everybody I knew, why they would do that. A leasing agent for Bishop Ranch explained it to me, In San Francisco, the data processing is done by, largely, minority workers who are Unionized. In San Ramon, the work is done by wives of low level executives. They are all Republicans and don’t want to be in Unions so Standard Oil can pay them less. According to the New Yorker, In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen dollars an hour; the new ones made around nine.

Unions are being driven out of the construction industry partially because Mexicans are getting their jobs. Unions are being driven out of the car manufacturing industry as manufacturers move south to non-Union states or overseas. Unions are being driven out of everything.

Because of that, everybody, except the very few, is making less money.

For awhile that was hidden because, as manufacturing went non-Union, or moved to China, stuff got cheaper. So a guy wanting a Skillsaw paid less for it than he would have twenty years ago. But now, so many people are paid so little that, as the New York Times reported, Walmart and Target both trimmed their yearly forecasts recently, citing economic factors like slow wage growth. That is another way of saying , workers aren’t getting paid enough to even buy the cheap stuff they sell at Walmart and Target. Too many Americans now work low-paying jobs like working at Walmart. The workers can no longer afford to buy enough to stimulate the economy. People can not live on the $7.75 an hour minimum wage, they can not support a family on the $8.00 an hour Walmart pays.