Barney At The Airport

Seeing Barney Frank at Logan this morning, I was reminded of something you tend to forget when you watch public figures on T.V. 
Living in Washington, DC it was easy to remember those images on TV actually belonged to real people. I filled my car tank at the gas station on River Road where Wolf Blitzer filled his tank.  Henry Waxman bought milk at the High's store in Glen Echo. Supreme Court justices belonged to my swimming pool. When you see people in the flesh, you realize, oh, they're just people, but you tend to forget that when your only connection is television.

I've never met Hillary, but everyone in my town seems to have met her and they all remark how small she is, physically. (Not spiritually.)  Her energy and warmth do not translate well to the cool medium of TV, apparently.

I've been roiling that my favorite politician, Barney Frank, is not running for President, or perhaps, Vice President with Elizabeth Warren for President.

But seeing Barney Frank today, I could understand immediately why he retired. He is vastly overweight and moves painfully, his trousers slipping down below his gut, the cuffs dragging along the floor as he walks. He pants with the short exertion required to get him to the ticket counter. Nobody says anything to him, either because they don't recognize him with his scruffy beard, or because they are Bostonians and they respect his space. 

But, it is clear, physically, he is struggling. And it is sad to see a man with such a lively brain, with a steel honed wit, capable of great clarity and insight, carrying the cross of physical infirmity. He could not run for President because he could not muster the stamina to walk, much less to run, much less to rule.

I have seen Bernie from a distance, and despite his age, he looks pretty good for 74. But even on TV, he does not look vital and vigorous. 

We have to remember the Presidency is a marathon punctuated by sprints.

I'm not even sure Hillary, who was born the same year I was, is physically up to the task. But she looks like a better bet.

If either Hillary or Bernie wins, I sure hope they pick a vigorous Vice President. Martin O'Malley looks fit enough.
And let's not forget Elizabeth Warren. 

Bernie vs Hillary and the Fierce Urgency of Now

There is a Republican debate sometime soon, but I'm still reeling from that masterful 2 hours the Democrats gave us, courtesy of Maddow and Todd and MSNBC.

Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders confronted the actual thinking which voters, if they are intelligent, will have to consider before casting their votes. For the 40% of the nation who are weighing whether it should be The Donald or Cruz or Rubio, the process of thinking is irrelevant, but for the Democrat or the Independent, last night gave everyone something to chew on.

The basic argument is not whether change is needed. Both candidates want to get the country to the same place. What they are arguing about is what strategy will be most likely to succeed. Ms. Clinton says America does not change by revolution, by large leaps forward, however much we might wish it would. Mr. Sanders says the forces he wishes to overthrow are so dug in, the only way to dislodge them is with a frontal assault: a Wall Street which embraces as its business model fraud, a system in which wealthy individuals and corporations are expected to buy politicians, which is inherently, structurally corrupt cannot be changed by nibbling around the edges.

Sanders, in fact, sounds much like Martin Luther King, who was constantly being counseled to move more slowly, to appreciate it will take time to change minds and hearts, to not push his fellow countrymen to move faster than their culture would permit. But King argued for the "fierce urgency of now" and the movement he led could not possibly have succeeded by incrementalism. 

Some would say that movement did not, in fact, succeed in the end. Yes, the Voting Rights Act was passed to allow Blacks to vote in the South and yes, Blacks were admitted to elite colleges and yes, Blacks entered the professions and the suburbs in greater numbers. But there was fierce resistance. There were riots over busing in Boston. And now the Supreme Court has nullified the Voting Rights Act, and the proportion of Blacks in elite colleges is falling and white flight left many upwardly mobile Black families living in a new ghetto, walled off from wealthy white gated communities.

In fact, Ms. Clinton has history on her side in the case of Medicare. In 1965, when LBJ managed to get Medicare signed into law, the law was a vestigial thing, a mere embryo of the colossus it would become. It covered only the fees of physicians seeing patients in hospitals, not the hospital charges, not the lab or radiology tests, not drugs, not follow up care and no outpatient services at all. Of course, the Republicans and the American Medical Association said it was the first toll of the bell of imminent collapse of American civilization and outright communism. 

The men in the government who fashioned the law, civil servants working with Congressional staffers, figured if they could just start small, just get the one thing covered, and if that worked out okay, then next year they might add something else. And that's exactly what happened, and now fifty years later, Medicare has become an institution it is hard to imagine we didn't always have. How could we live without Medicare?

Bernie Sanders is saying someday we'll all be shaking our heads wondering how we could have been so foolish as to not see that Medicare for all was inevitable.

But Hillary knows nothing in government is inevitable and she is saying the way we'll get where Bernie wants to go, to universal Medicare, is the way we got to Medicare in the first place, small steps.

A Debate Like No Other: One for the Ages

Watching the classic debate between the fictional candidates in West Wing, Matt Santos (Jimmy Smitts) vs Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) I could only say, "If only." If only a real debate could be like that, where the moderators stay out of the way and the candidates get to speak as long as they want and then respond to what the other says. But no, I thought, that could never happen in real life.

Tonight, however, I was proved wrong. 

Rachel Maddow and Mark Todd were masterful at serving up the questions and then getting quickly out of the way. And they asked all the questions I wanted to ask: Bernie, are you electable?  Why would you not simply be the next Barry Goldwater or George Magovern, an extremist beloved by a cult following but defeated in 49 states?  Hillary, how can you say you are not in the pocket of Goldman Sachs when you accept $675,000 in "speaker's fees" from them? 

Hillary had the tougher job, in defending taking the money. Basically she said, well, I was cashing in, but that never affected my vote or my vigorous pursuit of Wall Street when it came to voting for regulation and legislation to rein in Wall Street's excesses.  She scored points for saying you have insinuated I'm corrupt for accepting this money, an  "artful smear" on my character.  Bernie deftly side stepped that by saying, essentially, I'm not saying you are corrupt, but I am saying, as a system, it stands to reason Goldman Sachs and the others wouldn't be spending money on politicians if they thought this was not a good investment. When Wall Street Banks spend millions lobbying for regulation and Congress votes for deregulation, don't you think there might be a connection?

Bernie is pointing to our systems of legal bribery, where Congressmen can accept money as long as there is no specific deal for a specific vote.  Hillary responds by saying, Bernie nobody can be pure enough for you: President Obama, Barney Frank, nobody is up to your standards; wake up and live in the real world.

Well, Bernie says, the truth is the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Anyone who saw "The Big Short" or read "Liar's Poker" will know what he is talking about. 

We all have to swim in the same water, Hillary was saying, and she was basically admitting its a toxic system, but you have to swim in the polluted water if that's what you've got. Bernie is saying, no, I won't dive into that scummy pond. I'm going to decontaminate the pond. 

The wonderful thing about the two of them was how they managed to recover from their own tempers, to get past their very apparent, very real anger, and move on. Bernie took pains to agree with Clinton, when he could and she with him.

He refused to take the bait about demanding a recount in Iowa. He shrugged it off. We are talking about two delegates out of 2500, he said. Get past it.  And he reaffirmed his disinterest in her email problems, saying there was already a process in place and he would not politicize it, which was pretty crafty, actually, because he never said it was unimportant. 

Even the final summary statements were worth watching. Hillary was all polished and prepared, saying she was aware some people in New Hampshire were saying they would vote for Bernie if they voted their hearts but for Hillary if they were voting with their heads and then she wrapped up her nicely shaped and well rehearsed summary by saying she hoped voters would bring both heart and head to the voting booths. It was professional and well crafted, but too clever by half and that's why people don't connect with her. She's too well coiffed. 

Bernie, on the other hand, demonstrated why he has won hearts. He started off by saying his father came to America at age 17 and didn't speak English and would be amazed, had he lived to see his son running for President. This is the sort of thing Marco Rubio trots out all the time, but coming at that particular moment in the night, and put in the tone of wonderment Bernie struck, I found myself almost tearing up. It was like his wordless ad, "Looking for America." There is just something so decent and humble and likable about the man. 

I'm just sorry I didn't record it. Maybe it's on youtube.

The Essence of the Argument: Can You Be a True Progressive without Being a Revolutionary?

When was your last stress EKG?

"Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding."
--Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

Democrats are actually having a substantive debate right now. Bernie has said Hillary is a progressive on some days and Hillary points to the times she has accomplished progressive goals, like passing the Child Health act and says, "Well, I was progressive that day." 

Her point is, of course, it's nice to rant and rail but if you want to get elected and if you want to govern and pass legislation, you have to compromise.

Bernie says, that would be a good formula for another era, but when you are faced with Mitch McConnell and his right wing mob and a reactionary Supreme Court, you cannot simply elect a single President and expect anything to change.

A good woman, but that ship has sailed

Tracing the history of the four years prior to his Second Inaugural, Lincoln, in his humble way, remarked about how wrong he and all his countrymen had been, as they drifted into the Second American Revolution which was the Civil War. Lincoln himself thought the slaves could be freed without disrupting the essence of Southern life, and Republicans of his time thought with time, they could persuade Southerners they did not need slaves to continue their cherished way of life, which is to say, their dominance over Negroes, the cotton economy and their highly stratified society which resembled our present 1% owning most of the wealth. Most Southerners were poor or middle class and did not own slaves, but they liked the idea that someday they might, might have a plantation and get rich. 

So Lincoln thought, well, the large majority of whites in the South will eventually realize slavery wasn't worth going to war and change would happen as reasonable men made reasonable choices.  But, as he described in his wonderful address, he was wrong; everyone was wrong; the only choices turned out to be drastic choices and so war came; a revolution came. 


This is the insight Bernie grasped early last year: The system we need to change, although it protects only the top 1% is so thoroughly infiltrated into our national fabric, so tenaciously protected by coordinated power, money, judicial perversity, there is no gentle, gradual, gradual way to change it. 

When you look at a malignancy, you see tendrils penetrating deeply into surrounding healthy tissue and you realize that excising just a piece of it, nibbling at its edges or probing its center will not excise it.  When you decide to renovate the house and you uncover the walls, you find you have to do so much more than you expected, as the foundation is cracked and the wiring has to be replaced.

Mr. Sanders keeps pointing to the big problems:  with the Supreme Court having handed Citizens United to the Koch brothers, big money now can control who sits in Congress and, sometimes, the White House.  You can't just paint over the walls by placing a new Congressman in office if he is still stuck pursuing big money donors. Nothing changes but the color of the paint and the name on the door. If you do not wash Congress clean of the Tea Party Republicans, elected to destroy government, sent to Washington to sit on their hands and do nothing or to shrink government, then electing a progressive President changes nothing.

Hillary says she can get things done by working the game from inside the White House.  President Obama tried that.  He met nothing but intractable resistance from Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and the whole array of Republicans who want to shrink government so small they can drown it in their bathtubs. 

Is it enough to elect Hillary, to claim the White House and to keep it out of the hands of the Republicans? Or do we need to gamble on the idea of trying for genuine change which might rip control of the economy and the government from the hands of the 1/10 of 1%?

As James Baldwin observed, slavery hurt not just the slaves, but their masters.
If we really did redistribute wealth, so the bottom 80% now made $80,000 a year rather than $40,000, this huge population would create huge new markets and they would spend, buy homes, cars, go on vacations, invest in stocks and the people at the top would actually become more secure because the economy and the nation would be more secure.

Right now many of that small group of 300,000 people (roughly 15,000 families) are fabulously wealthy, but they are nervous. Walk around their estates with them and you sense their unease, their sense they might lose everything tomorrow. Where that anxiety comes from is anyone's guess. Guilt? (I don't deserve this and my Marie Antoinette moment is coming.) Insight--all this is built on a phony economy.  Who knows?  But if the nation shared a sense that what we have, where we've arrived is fair, then everyone would be more secure and wealthier and happier.

Memo to Bernie: Put her on the ticket

Boldness: The Bernie vs Hillary Argument

Counsels Caution: Acceptance of the Real World

Says We Will Never Get Change If We Don't  Try

Writing in Salon, Robert Reich gets at the essence of the choice for Democrats and the nation. Here's the link.

Robert Reich in Salon   



What he is basically saying is we have tried the working within the system approach for 7 years with President Obama and the guys trading credit default swaps at Goldman Sacks and Morgan and all the Wall Street firms are still making billions and still behaving as if their ponzi schemes are not hurting everyday people. 

The Republicans still control Congress and have stymied every effort to actually govern.

The T Party, like the Dixiecrats before them, have the power to derail efforts at any meaningful reform.

Invoking Teddy Roosevelt who busted the trusts and got a progressive tax system which taxed the rich more than the poor, Reich says sometimes you have to aim high to hit the target.

When I was in college, we all hated the system we labored under which meant the first elective course I got to take was in my senior year after satisfying all the requirements for my major, my pre medical course and "distribution" requirements to insure I had a "well rounded" education.  The whole idea of education had been corrupted by the pursuit of good grades.  Ira Magaziner came around with the idea that education ought to do more than just prepare a resume for use as a merit badge in applying for jobs or graduate school and he proposed a system where grades were optional. This was radical. A revolution. Everyone said it would never get past the faculty, not to mention the president of the university and the board of trustees, but events conspired and it was adopted and the result was that education improved at the university and the school, which had been the last choice for students applying to the eight schools in the Ivy League moved up to fourth, after Harvard, Yale and Princeton.  

So sometimes, revolutions do succeed and when they do, results can exceed expectations.

It hasn't happened often in American politics, but it has happened: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, all Presidents who led successful, if painful revolutions. 

Are we ready for a revolution?

Hillary, Mother Jones, The Girl in the River

This morning I am thinking about women. 

I have just read a New York Times piece in the Sunday Review by a woman who wants to love Hillary but finds herself ambivalent, which runs right next to a piece about Bernie Sanders, his deep but very narrow appeal. The reservations this erstwhile ardent Hillary advocate voices are inchoate. What she is really seems to be  saying is it's so much easier to love a purist than a compromiser, a knight errant driven by passion for righting wrongs, than a pragmatist who will not spit in the eye of the oppressor but will sit down with him and negotiate. 

She does remind us of Hillary's performance at the Benghazi hearings, where she sat, unruffled, through the smarmy, slimy, absurd rantings of the Republican jackasses across the floor from her and with withering clarity made fools out of each and every one of them.

Yesterday, after watching a public television program about the vile history of the destruction of miners' unions in West Virginia, I read about one of the giants of that struggle, Mary Jones, Mother Jones.  Mother Jones walked into mining towns in West Virginia which were built, owned and ruled by mining company owners and were nothing more than plantations where the slaves mined coal instead of picking cotton. She was engaging in a battle as quixotic as that faced by Bernie Sanders, trying to rally the down trodden against all the coordinated forces of money and power. 
 When the miners responded to the machine gun and rifle fire of the owner's private enforcers with shootings of their own, Mother Jones was arrested, tried, convicted, ultimately set free and she trudged off to fight more battles elsewhere in West Virginia and in  Colorado.  
By today's standards, she was no feminist: She believed women belonged in the home, raising children, but she believed to protect the home, women had to get out into the world and work for labor unions, harass strike breakers and "raise Hell." She thought suffrage beside the point, saying, "You don't need to vote to raise Hell."

And then there is the story about the documentary "A Girl in the River" about a Pakistani woman who defied her parents by marrying the man she loved, to which her father responded by abducting her, pointing a pistol at her head and pulling the trigger, stuffing her body in a bag and throwing her in a river. She, miraculously, survived and the father was charged with attempted murder, but in Pakistan, this was called an honor murder. Had he been a better shot and killed the daughter and had he been charged, he would have been set free as long as the rest of the family forgave him. 

He is still  proud of his deed, even though he did not succeed in murdering his daughter, he says the rest of community now respects him for restoring honor to his family and, furthermore, no other girl in their family will ever consider trying to marry for love, rather than marrying the man their father has chosen.

This story made me think of the woman who is at the center of the Europe which is currently receiving the flood of young, mostly Muslim men who are deserting  Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in search of a better world. Angela Merckel, the woman who is the President of Germany is exercising her power to welcome men fleeing the collapse of societies ruled by  intolerance,  13th century notions of "honor" and male dominance.  The same value system which brings chaos to the Middle East, that system of belief which places women at virtually the same level of existence as cattle or, at best, dependent children, which is defended by fathers with guns aimed at the heads of their daughters, which forgives and embraces murder when it is done to defend male pride, is no different in its cruelty and malevolence from that of the mine owners whose paternalism justified their enslavement of coal workers. 

Nobody should vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. 
I still prefer Bernie.

But who can deny that when you tally up the points, women do tend to be the drivers of positive change in the world?

Before Bernie: There was Mother Jones

Reading about Mother Jones, Mary Harris Jones, I am reminded of that Paul Simon line to the effect of when I think of what I was taught in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.  History was my favorite subject until college, but the "history" we read had not a word about Mother Jones or Jane Addams or the violent strikes in Colorado or the industrial police state in West Virginia coal mines in towns like Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, where coal mine owners kept workers literally under the gun, machine guns of hired private police, and where the workers owed their souls to the company store.

But now, owing to the wonders of the internet, I can read about Mother Jones and fall in love across time and space with a woman impressionable young men should be reading about, by whom they should judge the young ladies in their own lives.

If great conflict brings out great actions and great character then Mother Jones was destined for greatness from the start, in County Cork, Ireland, where the potato famine drove her family from Ireland to Toronto. 

In Toronto, she was sent to free public schools and, in fact was paid a small sum to stay in school, in an enlightened program Bernie Sanders would have to love. She became a teacher, but found her assigned school so depressing, she moved to the United States, where she married a union organizer in Memphis, had four children, only to see them all, husband and children, die from yellow fever. Moving to Chicago to establish a dress shop, she saw that literally go up in flames in the great Chicago fire. 

It was the natural world of disease and fire which devoured her early life, but it was the world created by men which inspired her to greatness. Leading a Children's Crusade against the abuses of American industrial might, pointing out that children were working rather than going to school, she tried to get photographs of children who worked the mills and mines, many of whom were missing fingers or limbs, published in newspapers who refused, for fear of offending their corporate advertisers.

She marched to Teddy Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, New York, where the Progressive President refused to see her, but she embarrassed enough Congressmen to motivate stronger child labor laws.

Oddly, while the people's champion, the man elected by "the people" refused to see her, John D. Rockefeller did not refuse and having spoken with her, he decided to investigate her charges about the conditions of his workers.

She had strong convictions about the importance of family:  She insisted men ought to be paid enough so their wives could stay home to raise the children. Women at work meant children unsupervised and that was the source of juvenile delinquency she said.  Today's feminists will not be wearing Mother Jones T shirts, but she also saw the potential of woman power, organizing mine worker's wives to intervene against strike breakers arriving on trains in West Virginia towns. 

The villainy of those coal towns and their corporate masters in southern West Virginia is mind boggling.  At least the Southern slave owner fed and clothed his slaves, but the West Virginian coal mine owners required their workers to live in company shacks, to pay exorbitant rent, to shop for their food, clothes and tools at the company store, at prices which put them into debt to the company and so the coal mine owners deftly managed to enslave the workers, who lived under spotlights from towers above their homes, manned by private police forces, armed with machine guns and rifles.

Into all that, walked Mother Jones, determined to organize the workers. She cultivated the role of "mother," wearing old fashioned clothes, calling the miners her "boys." You can well imagine why.  A woman alone, speaking with men. So she de-sexualized herself and played the role of "mother" and cleverly avoided that line of attack. 

She was jailed, sentenced to twenty years only to be freed and to strike again. 

She reportedly spoke in an enchanting Irish brogue, her voice getting deeper and more moving as she became more emotional through her addresses and she had a magnetism the most ardent Bernie adulators would appreciate, as she insisted the preachers at the churches the coal miners attended had it wrong. The reward was coming in Heaven, the preachers said, but Mother Jones told them their reward should be a bit of Heaven in the here and now on Earth. 

She opposed female suffrage. "You don't need the vote to raise Hell!" she said.  She opposed anything which might draw women away from the home, where she believed the primary role of women belonged.

Can you imagine her running for office today? She's pro labor, fundamentalist family, endorses the woman at home, but urges women to protest and organize, is for free public education. We don't know  where she stood on abortion. But you know who she would stand with on immigration. 

I never learned about Mary Harris Jones in my public school education. I can well imagine why.  Her story is too incendiary. Can you imagine children going home to their Southern Baptist parents in Montgomery County, Maryland telling them about what they learned about the evil capitalist coal miners and the fight against them led by an agnostic woman? Not going to get past the County School Board curriculum committee.

But thanks to Bill Gates and the United States Government we have the Internet and that has made all the difference. 

Mary Harris Jones for the $20 bill!