Would You Like a Side of Irony with Your Hypocrisy?

Has everyone already seen this story? The CEO of ExxonMobile, Rex Tillerson, has joined with his neighbors to file a lawsuit in Texas to stop a fracking project near his horse ranch, arguing that a planned water tower, and the large number of heavy trucks hauling on the nearby roads would "devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy."

And the lawsuit is right. But ExxonMobile is the largest natural gas producer in the U.S. and the company has never shown any concern about the rights and interests of other property owners around the country.


Watch the documentaries Gasland I and Gasland II to see how much respect fracking companies have for property owners around the country.

A New One Percent Doctrine

To those people who continue to deny the evidence for climate change, or who admit climate change but deny there is enough proof that it is caused by man, I have always thought the best argument is that the world simply doesn´t have time to wait for perfect, 100% conclusive evidence. The risk is that, by he time we have such evidence, we will all be toast, water-logged toast if we live by a coast. I marvel at the risk these people are willing to take with other people's lives.

Ted Kaufman, in a recent blog post, makes the point much more deftly. He reminds us of the so-called Cheney doctrine shortly after 9-11 which declared the U.S. had to act in situations where there was even a 1% chance of a terrorist attack. Kaufman asks:

Can a rational human being who doesn’t believe in climate change at least agree there is a remote possibility that 95 percent of climate scientists are right? Maybe a 1 percent chance?

The More Things Change, The More They Remain the Same

Today I finally finished the Kearns-Goodwin book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. I enjoyed it as much as anything I've read in a long while, mostly for all the parallels between the issues then and now, e.g. the influence of big business and big money in politics, questions about regulating and/or breaking up the big trusts. And the biggest parallel of all, the breakup of the Republican party. 

Back then it was the progressives vs. the establishment party bosses as opposed to the tea baggers, but the similarities are marked. Committed progressives were willing to let Democrats win before they would compromise on their principle, just as tea baggers are today.

Some of the issues that the progressives fought for, and which made a lot of sense at the time, look somewhat different at this historical distance. I'm thinking specifically of the primaries as a means of choosing candidates as opposed to having those decisions made by party leaders. At least on the Republican side, we can see what that has led to: Michelle Backmann, Rick Perry and several other doofusses debating the theory of evolution. Well, actually they aren't having a debate because they all "think" alike, but this hardly seems like progress.

I don't know if Kearns-Goodwin had these parallels in mind when she wrote the book, but I can't help but believe she did. They are just too omni-present. I promise you can't read the book without thinking of the situation today at almost every turn. Even TR's justifications for going to war over Cuba sound eerily like GW's rationalizations for going into Iraq. (Fifty years after we saved the Cubans from Spanish oppression, they had to have a revolution to save themselves from us, or at least from our corrupt Cuban dictator friends. Whatever Iraq looks like in forty years, I'll wager it will be like nothing George and Dick promised us.)

One thing that delighted me throughout the book was the discovery of Taft. The book really fleshes him out (no, really, that is not a weight joke), and he seems like a remarkably erudite and also exceptionally likable fellow. It is dangerous to form an opinion of an historical figure from only one source, still I can't help but like the guy that Goodwin portrays. And, according to her, all of his contemporaries felt the same. For anyone as ignorant of Taft as I was, the book is worthwhile just to learn more about him. 

We currently are at the beginning of what I hope will become a real debate about allowing the Post Office to perform some limited banking functions again. That was one of the things that TR, Taft and the Progressives fought for and achieved in 1911 and which existed until it was repealed in 1967. Elizabeth Warren and others are working to bring it back. It is too bad that progressives have to keep fighting the same battles over and over again.

Another battle that TR and the Progressives fought and won was to keep corporate money out of elections. I'm not clear what Taft's position was, but I think he agreed. Now, as everyone knows, we have once again regressed and need to fight that same fight all over again, only now the abuses of big money in our elections are beyond anything the people of that earlier era could have imagined.

One difference between the two eras is that the voices of today's progressive journalists are being drowned out by the overabundance of nonsense and the fact that journalism as an institution is in a state of flux. Plenty of good investigative journalists are still around, but their work isn't having much of an impact.

When I see that we are not only fighting the same battles that progressives were fighting a century ago, because much of the progress that was made then has been rolled back and the abuses now are greater than ever, it seems to me that public funding of elections is one sensible solution to the abuses of money in politics.

I don't think any of us should hold our breath.

Stand Your Stupid Ground

I think people who believe it is cool/necessary/smart to carry guns in public, concealed or otherwise, are idiots, living in some kind of imaginative, wild-west, individualistic free-for-all world. Perhaps they even have small cocks, as has been suggested. But that is all a matter for debate; perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the sun will come up in the west tomorrow too.

What should no longer be a matter of debate and what has nothing at all to do with the 2nd amendment is the fact that the so-called Stand Your Ground Laws are a disaster, based on the evidence of how they are working. 

The latest ridiculous example is a mistrial in the case of a white Jacksonville, Florida man who shot and killed an unarmed black teen in a parking lot in a dispute over loud music. He claimed in court that he saw the teenager point a shotgun at him, but police confirm there was no shotgun, or any other weapon. With SYG laws, all the man had to do is convince one member of the jury that he thought he saw a shotgun and felt threatened. It's hard to explain why he still felt threatened and had to keep shooting even as the car was pulling away, but I suppose that is quibbling. At least the killer faces 20-60 years of prison time for a series of lesser charges of which he was convicted, and we can hope he gets something close to the high end. And we can also hope that the prosecutor will retry the murder charge.

With SYG laws, all the killer has to do is convince a jury that he/she reasonably felt threatened, even if the threat was an imaginary shotgun. Sometimes all the killer has to do is convince the police and the DA, and the case never even makes it to a jury. The homeowner in Georgia who killed a 72 year-old alzheimer's victim who rang his doorbell at 4am might not face any charges at all because of SYG.

Then there was the homeowner in Florida who killed a black teenage who rang his doorbell at 2am seeking help when her car, or the car in which she was riding, broke down. Never mind that she was already moving away from the door and had her back to the killer when he felt so threatened he had to start shooting.

One wonders when the sound of ringing doorbells in the night became life threatening.

Or take the case of the Florida (I think) homeowner who shot and killed a young person who had been in his back yard. Again, never mind that the young man had already jumped the fence and left the yard before the homeowner felt his life was threatened and started blasting.

These are just the cases that come to mind on short notice. I know that the killers, in all of these cases, claimed SYG as a defense. How the cases are progressing through the justice system I do not know. I also have no evidence that SYG laws influenced any of these killers prior to their pulling the trigger. There have always been trigger-happy gun nuts after all. But there is no doubt that SYG laws have provided, at the very least, a convenient after-the-fact justification for the killer's bad judgment. And I think it is reasonable to believe that SYG laws have had an effect on the prevailing culture so that people with guns feel freer to use them. That, after all, was the stated intent of the legislators who passed the SYG laws in the first place.

One caveat that these self-styled vigilante saviors of the world should keep in mind before pulling the trigger: it is best to feel threatened by a young black man. The retired Florida cop who carried a gun into a movie theater presumably felt safer because of that gun. John Dillinger, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Aurora, Colorado mass killer all frequented movie theaters, and maybe this guy just believed in being prepared for the worst. Still I suspect he is going to have a difficult time convincing a jury that he felt reasonably threatened by popcorn thrown in his face (or not). But only because the alleged popcorn thrower was a nice respectable middle-class white family man. If it had been a black teen in a hoodie, the killer would have nothing to worry about.

Again, this is not a 2nd amendment issue, no matter how much the NRA might want its members to believe it is. This is not about the the right to own guns or the right to carry guns in public. It is a public safety issue about how you use those guns and the responsibility that comes with gun ownership.

Inequality For All

The Robert Reich documentary, Inequality for All, is well worth a Netflix rental. The movie is not just about what I hope is going to become a serious topic of national debate, i.e. the inequality that threatens our very existence as a democracy. It is also about Reich's fight over the course of three decades to make it part of the national discussion. Reich narrates the film and is on camera a lot, but that's no problem, as he is a witty, articulate and engaging personality.

  People who talk about the magic of the market will concede, although I think always with a mild reluctance, that there is no such thing as a truly free market economy, and never has been, for all practical purposes. Reich's film provides a subtle reminder that any number of laws effect the way the market works, e.g. the abolition of slavery and public safety laws have regulatory effects on the market. No person would argue seriously that the government has no business interfering in the market in such ways. So, yes, people, through their governments, have the right to regulate the way the marketplace works. They always have and always will. And we'd better get serious about it.


Because I am so sick of hearing Republicans talk about their concern for the so-called job creators, I was thrilled to see a couple of billionaires in the film calling bullshit on that whole idea. And we should too whenever we hear it. People with capital do not create jobs; consumers create jobs. And we do not have enough people with sufficient disposable income to consume things. I assume everyone has seen the stories about how the market for mid-level durable goods is stagnant while the high-end market is booming, or how middle class restaurants like Red Lobster and Olive Garden are seriously struggling.

Because I am so sick of hearing Republicans talk about their concern for the so-called job creators, I was thrilled to see a couple of billionaires in the film calling bullshit on that whole idea. And we should too whenever we hear it. People with capital do not create jobs; consumers create jobs. And we do not have enough people with sufficient disposable income to consume things at a rate to keep the economy flowing. I assume everyone has seen the stories about how the market for mid-level durable goods is stagnant while the high-end market is booming, or how middle class restaurants like Red Lobster and Olive Garden are seriously struggling.

I did not consciously plan it, but Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism is a great companion piece to the Reich documentary. As the subtitle suggests, this isn't just another book about Teddy Roosevelt. I presume the parallels between that age of corporate excess and our own were in Goodwin's mind as she researched and wrote this book. Unfortunately I don't think the parallels are strong enough to make me optimistic for the onset of a new progressive era.

 

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Goodwin's book for me was the discovery of Taft as an engaging personality. Other than his immense weight, his eventual falling out with TR, and the fact that he went from the Presidency to the Supreme Court I didn't know much about him. I didn't even know exactly where he fit into the Taft family dynasty that still plays a role today (I believe) in Ohio Republican politics. Goodwin depicts him as a principled and admirable man, whose abilities and political destiny were widely recognized early in his career.

Another pleasurable aspect is the amount of time Goodwin devotes to the important muckraking and progressive journalists of that time, especially S.S. McClure, Ida Turnbull, Lincoln Steffans, Ray Stannard Baker, and William Allen White. These journalists had important relationships with Theodore Roosevelt and played important roles in highlighting the corporate excesses of the era and bringing about a public demand for change.

Finally, despite the fact that I probably wouldn't have bothered reading Goodwin's book if it were just another book about Teddy Roosevelt, I have enjoyed the reminder of just what a complex, puzzling and ultimately fascinating person he was. There was so much about him that was admirable mixed in with the blustery jingoism and outsized personality. We can all be glad, probably, that he lived and died before the age of television or we'd be sick of him.

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Because It's Never Too Early

The best thing about this picture is that any adults in the area are, apparently, in front of the guns.