Obama's non-political problems

Sam Smith

I plan to vote for Barack Obama despite considering him a pretty lousy and reactionary president. I’ll be doing this because I don’t consider presidential elections a choice of leaders but of battlefields. I also believe that in such elections, poker is a better guide than virtue. Obama is the best bet for a lousy hand.

That said, with eight months left to go, I’d like to get something off my chest  while it’s still relatively safe to say things like this. I not only don’t like Obama’s politics, I don’t like him all that much either. And I’m convinced that I’m not alone and that a major part of Obama’s problem is not political but personal.

I was reminded of this watching that video of Harvard law school student president Obama lecturing his classmates. I was surprised that even at such a young age he was so preachy and didactic, albeit combined with the occasional and thoroughly scripted moment of light humor. It is as though he has gone through his entire life standing behind a virtual pulpit and teleprompter, where he berates, grates and irritates.

There are several things wrong with this: for one thing it carries the subtext – you might call it critical speech theory if you were at Harvard Law - that the listener is not as bright as the speaker and, for another, it gets boring pretty quickly. Obama typically assumes the role of a professor, which leaves the listener in the position of a student rather than of a fellow citizen.

While the view of many towards Obama is driven by antipathy towards his ethnicity, I suspect there are many more, like me, who hear in Obama not the voice of blackness but of Harvard Law School, a robot of rigorously rehearsed rationality who seems somehow incapable of normal conversation, passion or beliefs.

It is the sound of otohbotoh – on the one hand, but on the other hand. It is the sound of data without dreams, of citations without soul, of examination without empathy, and anecdotes seemingly pulled from a TV commercial rather than from real life.

I also sense in Obama the character of someone who from an early age was told repeatedly that he was greater than, in fact, he was. This narcissism occasionally spills out, such as in comparisons of himself with other presidents or speaking of what he is going to do without any reference to Congress’ constitutional role in the matter.

Obama grew up in a culture in which data, legal details, management procedures, and presumed process takes precedence over what is actually accomplished. His administration reflects this in a two thousand page healthcare bill and a prescription for a national  electronic health database with so little concern for privacy. And soon, his solicitor general will be defending this bill before the Supreme Court,  arguing the superiority of a commerce clause that only lawyers can love over the rest of our Constitution. But, in the end, esoteric legal arguments don’t change many votes.

Further, to exercise the aforementioned skills, it is necessary that the federal government become a haven for law and business school graduates, data demons and process pushers. We’ve been headed this way a long time, and Obama is only the most recent and most exaggerated of the lot, but you get little sense he values anything that stems from actual experience, pragmatic suggestion, or advisers who are wise, inspired, or sensitive. He doesn’t even seem to like to talk with people from the Hill.

And it hasn’t just been members of Congress who are being dissed. I was reminded during the debate on the anorexic “stimulus, package” of the signs one would see on freeways under construction during the Eisenhower years. The reason I still remember the otherwise forgettable Paul Dever is that the Eisenhower administration shared sign space with even the Democratic governor of Massachusetts. With Obama, one gets the sense that states and localities are just part of the problem. Think how different this election might be if Chris Christie and other governors and mayors had gotten their names on, and credit for, the stimulus package.

I’m not talking Tenth Amendment here, but rather political common sense. A good politician knows how to share power. Obama has no feel for this.

Further,  if Obama and his wife have any sizable number of friends not dependent on power and political circumstances, it is a well kept secret. People without unpowerful friends are people to be careful of.

Finally, Obama is not honest. Not in a slimy way, like, say, a former Arkansas governor, but in an intellectually manipulative fashion. He frequently seems to be attempting to dredge up some verbal slick trick that will  get him through the evening news, but it just reinforces the idea that he is not someone you can count on. It began with his presidential campaign, which portrayed him as a liberal, which he certainly wasn’t. He was, in fact, elected by conning the most number of voters in recent American history.

I could, of course, vote Green. But I try to keep religion and politics separate. One demands pure virtue, the other just tries to give virtue another leg up.  And history teaches us that it is the grassroots organizing of third parties, not their presidential campaigns, that change the country.

Besides, we are in a time when our political system is so remarkably rigged that the answer lies not in playing the gangsters’ game but by finding an ever increasing number of ways to create new struggles with new rules, such as the Occupiers have recently demonstrated. Making the best presidential political choice can protect our flanks, but it can’t  provide the opening through which change can charge.

So before you get too upset with the foregoing, remember that I plan to vote for Obama. I’ll just be damned, however, if I’m going to brag about it.

It's the lack of a fairness doctrine, not Limbaugh, that's the real problem

Sam Smith

The Rush Limbaugh affair is a reminder of a silent split in the progressive community: some of its members believe a lot more in free speech than others. As liberals have become more a demographic and social class rather than an ideology, the once key virtue of free speech has increasingly gotten short shrift, witness the near total absence of the issue in discussions about Rush Limbaugh.

The puritanization of liberalism has troubled me deeply, in part because I grew up in a time when it was liberals – and not conservative talk show hosts – who were upsetting people and getting into trouble for it. I felt it directly when I was almost denied admission to Coast Guard Officer Candidate School because of  wrong perceptions of the views of my Cold War liberal parents. Here are some of the questions the Commandant of the Coast Guard formally demanded that I answer:

    10. Have your parents ever discussed with you their participation in these organizations which were dominated by Communists and supported the Communist cause?

    11. State the names and addresses of Communist Party members and sympathizers with whom you and your parents have associated.

    12. To what extent have your parents indoctrinated and influenced you concerning the politics of these and other Communist groups?

    14. Did your parents ever make any books, documents or periodicals of the Communist Party or Communist front organizations available to you?

    15. Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party? If so, who recruited you and what type of indoctrination were you given?

    16. List all contributions made by you to the Communist Party, USA or any of its front organizations, and any remuneration you may have received for services rendered by you to it.

    17. What are your views on Communism and the Communist Party?

I successfully fought back against the absurd implications based on such things as my parents’ support of a boycott of nylon stockings on behalf of the garment workers’ union and that my father, like a number of Attorneys General at the time, had belonged to the National Lawyers Guild.

I won and actually had a fine time in the Coast Guard, but I swore I would forever defend the right of Americans to say what they wanted no matter how much I disagreed.

Thus, much as I differ with Limbaugh, I also am deeply troubled by the liberal reaction to his remarks. I can’t imagine a decent America in which Limbaugh isn’t allowed to be the damn fool that he is.

One of those who understands how to handle such matters is Robert Egger, who two years ago – as director of DC’s Community Kitchen – responded beautifully to Limbaugh on another matter.

One problem with forcibly shutting Limbaugh up is that it gives fuel to those who want to shut up progressives. In fact, even as the Limbaugh controversy was underway, it was happening. A number of newspapers were refusing to run a Doonesbury comic strip that made fun of a Texas law requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion. Gary Trudeau’s syndicate even offered a substitute strip.

But liberals obsessing over Limbaugh hardly noticed what was happening to their own free speech, just as they have ignored the civil liberties implications of their support of hate crime legislation, which punishes someone for what they think.

There’s something else being ignored. The rise of the right on the airwaves has been the direct result of a 1987 FCC ruling doing away with the Fairness Doctrine. As Wikipedia notes:

“The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented.”

I was in the broadcasting business under the fairness doctrine and there was nothing onerous about it. It simply put some pressure on stations to be fairer than they might otherwise had been. What has happened since 1987 proves its utility.

What has happened is that a tiny number of major corporations have bought a public park known as the airwaves and now determine who gets to speak there. We wouldn’t allow this in a public park and we shouldn’t allow it on the on the public airwaves.

The elimination of the fairness doctrine shares with the Citizens United ruling responsibility for the most damaging assault on our democratic system in recent history.

It would be nice if a few liberals got as excited about it as they do about Rush Limbaugh.

The moderate myth

 Sam Smith


With Angus King running as an independent for Maine governor, we will continue to be inundated with disingenuous talk of "moderation." In fact, those called moderates - like King and Olympia Snowe - are actually on the right,  just not as far as some. The political spectrum has moved so far to the right over the past 30 years that the closest thing to a moderate would be somewhat to the left of a blue dog Democrat. In fact, any liberal Democrat of the the New or Fair Deal, or of the Great Society, would be most at home today in the Green Party.To check this out, count the number of major pieces of legislation passed in the past thirty years by either party that has helped the economic and social conditions of large number of Americans. One hand will do.


It is further the case that the only extremism in American politics today that actually wins votes is of the conservative variety.  Thus it is not a left-right conflict at all but a dispute among conservatives. Those the media insists on calling moderates are basically right wingers who aren't as mean to women and gays as some of their colleagues.

Music's real problem is downgrading, not downloading

Sam Smith

Missing from the righteous outrage over the attacks on the Internet by the film and recording industries has been fact that movies and music are quite different.

From its beginning, music has been the one the few forms of art intended to be replicated and shared and not just absorbed. There are no garage film producers making covers of popular movies. We don't gather in bars to dance to trailers. We don't go to church and paint copies of famous art works between prayers and sermons. And while writing is often quoted, the total occurrence is miniscule compared to the way cultures have recirculated music throughout human history.

There are a number of explanations of how this came about. Charles Darwin thought it had to do with sexual selection. Others have similarly suggested that singing and dancing indicated both a desirable physical and mental fitness. Other theories include bringing groups together, teaching cooperation, and passing along cultural truths from generation to generation.

Steven J.Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals, writes of studies by John Blacking:

"He undertook one of the most informative studies of communal music making when he studied the Venda people of South Africa during the 1950s. He described how they performed communal music not simply to kill time, nor for any magical reasons, such as to create better harvests, nor when they were facing periods of hunger or stress. ln fact, they did the reverse: they made communal music when food was plentiful. Blacking believed they did so, at times when individuals were able to pursue their own self-interest, precisely in order to ensure that the necessity of working together for the benefit of society as a whole was maintained as their key value through the exceptional level of cooperation that was required in their music-making."

Mithen notes other roles such as aiding "the performance of a collective task by rhythmically facilitating physical coordination. But in the majority of case it appears to be cognitive coordination that is induced by the music, the arousal of a shared emotional state and trust in one's fellow music makers."

Blacking cited another group function of music:

"Some years before I arrived in Venda, famous Chief, Ratshimphi, was fed up with the actions of the white Native Commissioner, and so he gathered force of over 350 tshikona players and went to Sibasa 'to honour the Native Commissioner' before making 'a small request'. The sound of the musicians dancing round the District Offices brought all court and clerical work to a halt, but the Chief pointed out that to stop the music would be seen by his supporters as a loss of face for the Commissioner. As a result, the Chief's request was granted and the Native Commissioner was reminded noisily of the sort of support that Ratshimphi could command."

Blacking concluded that "all human beings have a right to music and to opportunity of artistic expression,, and therefor the goal of musical progress must be not so much to create 'free music' as to enable free people to be free to make music."

This is obviously not the purpose of the RIAA or the politicians it has paid off. Like so much in our culture, the goal of politics, power and the legal world has been to remove as much as possible from the public sphere, turning it into exclusive profit centers for someone. What they're up to is not just a war against music and the Internet, but against basic principles of functioning human cultures.

Their manipulations have included the cornering of the market through ever extended copyright coverage. Copyright law followed the invention of the printing press. In 1709, Britain passed the first major measure, which dealt with the problem that "Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors... to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families."

The American principles contained in the Constitution, gave authors protection for up to 28 years, or about one third the length of today's copyrights.

Thomas Jefferson even proposed the issue be included in the Bill of Rights:

"Art. 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding __ years but for no longer term and no other purpose."

The goal, in short, was to protect the rights of the authors and their families, not to create to create an interminable profit node for mega-corporations.

In the past few decades, the music industry has favored the latter course, while claiming that the illegal use of music has been the major factor in the decline in music sales. Politicians and the media have bought into this argument and helped to push the anti-Internet laws and other legal actions that have caused such a furor of late.

But the real story is quite different.

For example, last year Michael Degusta in Business Insider pointed out that when you convert music sales to a per capita basis and correct for inflation, things look even worse for the industry yet with a markedly different explanation.

  According to Degusta, the music industry is down 45% from where it was in 1973. Also:

- 10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.

- Twenty-six years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.

According to the RIAA argument, the problem is led by illegal downloading hurting CD and legal digital sales. But DeGusta points out, on a per capita basis and correcting for inflation, "the CD peak was only 13% better than the vinyl peak."

And it doesn't explain a decline that goes back four decades. Notes DeGusta: "Turns out that, somewhat unsurprisingly, the recording industry makes almost all their money from full-length albums. Equally unsurprising, no one is buying full albums any more'"

Legal and illegal, we are back to to the days of digital versions of single platters and 45s, but with even less interest in albums.

Further, as the recording industry pursues its faux demons, it ignores more important headaches - in particular the decline of music as a part of our communal culture. The real problem is downgrading, not downloading.

This doesn't mean that we don't listen to music. We obviously do. But the Venda people of South Africa of the 1950s would find us odd, because our relationship has become increasingly passive - a matter of consumption rather than of participation.

Others - say musicians of the 1930s and 1940s - would be stunned by how much music has become a form of visual theater rather than sound, complete with smoke, explosions, circus-like dancing, and vocalists appearing to be having an orgasm as they sing something as arousing as, "And so I had another cup of coffee." ooo

One survey has found that the percentage of adult population performing or creating any of the major genres of music never surpasses 4% with the exception of those in choirs of chorales (about 6%).

On the other hand 14% engage actively in photography, 13% in weaving and sewing, and 9% in painting or drawing.

A study by the National Endowment of the Arts found that between 2002 and 2008, even attendance at jazz events was down 28%, classical music performances down 20%, and opera down 34%. There was no evidence that the missing audience was illegally downloading these performances.

What is even more striking is another study that found a huge drop in attendance by those aged 18-24 between 1982 and 2008. The worst hit was jazz with a decline of 58% but even musicals fell by 13%. For adults as a whole the decline ranged from 19% for jazz to 30% for opera.

While having industry lawyers deliberately mislead the public is not all that surprising, the media also routinely fails to mention such factors.

And there are other considerations. For example, in 2004 Rolling Stone pubished what it said were the 500 best songs of all time. Let's leave aside the question of whether they ignored a few centuries of western music by only choosing numbers from the 1940s on. What is truly amazing about this selection - made by critics widely considered among the hippest - is that only 5% of the songs came from 1990 and later. Forty percent came from the 1960s and 28% came from the 1970s. Even the 1950s did better than the 1990s.

This unintentionally raises an interesting although little discussed question. Could it be that American creativity has been on its way down some time?

I wrote about this a decade ago at the beginning of my book, Why Bother?;

|||| Over lunch one day, I asked journalist Stephen Goode how he would describe our era. Without hesitation, he said it was a time of epigons.

An epigon, he explained to my perplexed frown, is one who is a poor imitation of those who have preceded. The word comes from the epigoni -- the afterborn -- specifically the sons of the seven Greek chieftans killed in their attempt to take Thebes. The kids avenged the deaths by capturing Thebes - but they also destroyed it. They were generally not considered as admirable and competent as their fathers.

Being around epigons is like being trapped at a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better....

In anthropology class, I was first introduced to the notion, revolutionary for its time, that progress was not inevitable, that there can be an ebb as well as a flow to cultures. In one American archeology course we studied the steadily improving design of a tribe's pottery. As time passed, the browns and the blacks and the whites and the zigs and the zags became ever more intricate and appealing. But then cultural entropy set in and it all started to go the other way, the art a poor imitation of its predecessors. In short, the tribe forgot what it once had known. Like the tribe, we have also have forgotten much about ourselves. |||

Some of this is inevitable. Although the mathematical possibilities for different melodies in our music is in the millions, the number that one actually wants to listen to may be relatively quite small. Certainly if the melody is based on an extremely simple chord structure such as the blues, you can't realistically expect to keep coming up with wonderful new tunes. In fact, the development of chords themselves may have run their course. If you go back to early Christian music, you will find chords based on notes that are 4, 5, and 8 keys apart. Then along came minor chords in the Baroque period and the use of chords beyond the few most common ones. By the Classical period, the dominant seventh chord began to thrive with more chord alterations in the Romantic era.

And so forth and so on. And as music became ever more complex and, coincidentally, used up more of its possibilities, it reached at least a mathematical peak - if not for all an aesthetic one - with modern jazz.

So what do you do next?

Obviously, the attorneys at RIAA can't help us.

One answer is to share and integrate your music with another culture. But the Recording Academy, even as their world is falling apart, recently decided instead to kick some of these cultures out.

Democracy Now described what happened: "Dozens of musicians demonstrated outside the Grammy Awards protesting the Recording Academy's decision to eliminate dozens of ethnic music award categories, including Hawaiian, Haitian, Cajun, Latin jazz, contemporary blues and regional Mexican. Some protesters see racial bias in the revisions, others see them as harmful to low-budget indie labels. Last August, four Latin jazz artists filed a lawsuit with the New York Supreme Court claiming that the dropping of such categories had adversely affected their careers."

To realize how counterproductive this is, consider the origins of a music considered most American: jazz. As the musicians' site, Aces & Eighths, points out:

"Many blues elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The Diddley bow, a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South in the early twentieth century, and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary."

The first jazz arranger was Jelly Roll Morton. And he had no problem with borrowing from another culture, in his case Cuba. As he explained to Alan Loamx: "Then we had Spanish people [In New Orleans]. I heard a lot of Spanish tunes. I tried to play them in correct tempo, but I personally didn't believe they were perfected in the tempos… In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz." The term "Spanish tinge" would live on in jazz."

When I heard about the Grammy blackout of ethnic music, I was immediately reminded of the Buena Vista Social Club album of the 1990s.

And when I had first heard that album, something had immediately come back to me, something I hadn't thought about in thirty years - how, as a young musician, Afro Cuban jazz had been a familiar part of the repertoire and how silently it had faded from our lives.

PBS described its departure in introducing the Buena Vista Club movie:

"The revolution of 1959 stands as a border in time. The music of Cuba emigrated to the United States and Europe throughout the early part of the 20th century causing not a few "crazes" among Latinos and non-Latinos alike. But by the mid-1960s, after the Cold War embargo of the island took effect, a generation of music and musicians suffered a premature death."

The Grammy blackout and American sanctions against Cuba are two examples of how of how easily music can become either the tool or the victim of those in power.ooo

Of course, it can also be used the other way, which we tend to forget about because the last time large numbers of people routinely stood together and sang songs of protests was in the 1960s.

Which doesn't mean it doesn't still happen and still doesn't have an impact as Greg Mitchell described recently in the Nation:

Last October 15, mass protests took place around the world, organized by the burgeoning Occupy movement and other groups ... But by far the largest turnout took place in Madrid, where a crowd estimated at half a million gathered in the Puerta del Sol after dark.

From afar it was hard to judge all that happened that evening, but videos posted on YouTube a few hours after the event suggested that the high point of the world’s biggest protest was not a speech by a political icon or a mini-concert by a famous pop star. Instead, it was a performance of part of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—the “Ode to Joy” segment and then the finale—by a small, ragtag, amateur orchestra....

Kerry Candaele has documented Beethoven’s global impact in his upcoming ninety-minute documentary titled Following the Ninth. Now I have written a book and e-book with him, Journeys With Beethoven...

Yes, many know that the “Ode to Joy” has been transformed into the anthem of the European Union... But did you know:

- In Chile, women under the Pinochet dictatorship sang the “Ode To Joy” outside torture prisons to offer hope to those inside.

- In China, student leader, Feng Congde, played the Ninth over a loudspeaker in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as troops moved in to crush the movement for democracy.

- In England, the folk/punk singer, Billy Bragg, wrote a new libretto for the Ninth in English—and his version was performed before the Queen by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

- In Japan, the Ninth is performed hundreds of times each December, often with 5000 or 10,000 singers in the chorus, transmitting a message of solidarity among all people. As Journeys With Beethoven reveals, the Ninth turns worlds inside out and upside down.

- Pro-Palestinian protesters in London recently rewrote the “Ode to Joy” this way:

Israel, end your occupation
There’s no peace on stolen land.
We’ll sing out for liberation
’Till you hear and understand.

Ironically those trying to capitalize on music can easily work against themselves.

For example, music is made up of numerous genres and often the fans of those genres are far apart. I haven't uncovered any analysis of this in the United States, but a study in Japan in 2003 found that rock was the only musical genre that had more people like it than dislike it. Every other genre - eleven of them from rap to classical - had 43-66 percent of the public disliking it.

Yet the music industry acts as though we are far more unified than is actually the case. And it is so obsessed with the big winners that it forgets a majority of Americans dislikes much of its output.

It is worth remember that some 200 million Americans did not buy Michael Jackson's "Thriller" - and that it sold less than the number of cups of coffee that Dunkin' Donuts sells in a month.

Even more significant is the fact that you create markets with something worth buying, not with regulations.

For example, music was thriving in the 1940s through 1960s despite the fact that a key accessory to many musicians was the illegal fake book - a collection of hundreds of songs reduced to their melody and chord symbols.

You just walked into a music store and bought one under the counter for $25. Everyone did it. Even the FBI, in 1964 memo from its Cleveland office, noted, "It is his belief that practically every professional musician in the country owns at least one of these fake music books as they constitute probably the single most useful document available to the professional musician. They are a ready reference to the melodies of almost every song which might conceivably be requested of a musician to play."

One way to think about these musicians is that they were loss leaders. Yes, they didn't pay for the rights to use the music but by their performances they greatly increased the market for music that others might otherwise have easily forgotten. Like a public library, they kept the vast musical treasures of the country within convenient reach.

The music industry might be obsessed with new hits; but bands had to deal with audiences whose aural memory could extend several decades. Thus they kept alive what top ten lists would kill.

You might almost describe the fake book at a sort of musical Bible. And the metaphor is apt because the real Bible is probably the book - thanks to translations and modifications - most frequently used in violation of its copyright. Yet it is also the best selling book in the western world, a status constantly reinforced by its legally incorrect use in our society.

This is not a unique oddity as Cory Doctorow pointed out in 2009:

"A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live shows, listen to more radio, buy more CDs, buy more bootlegs of live shows, buy more t-shirts, talk about music more, do more downloading -- all of it.

"And of course, these are the people the music industry's super geniuses have set their sights upon for bizarre enforcement regimes like the one that British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has promised: anyone who lives in a house that generates three or more copyright infringement notices will be barred from Internet access."

And it is worth remembering the the musicians union opposed the idea of records and RIAA opposed VCRs.

Long ago I discovered a principle of urban planning that works well in other fields: look for things that normally honest people do illegally and change the law to adapt to them. The planning issues included illegal apartments (40,000 in Los Angeles alone) or double parking in front of places where people are just running in and out. Perhaps the greatest example in America is four decades of cruel and pointless marijuana laws.

The over-prosecution and over-fining of downloaders clearly belongs in the list. There other ways of dealing with the problem such as treating Megaupload like a local bar or concert hall and coming up with a fair fee or revenue percentage, mediated if necesary by the courts.

But destroying people's access to the Intenet or to music - especially that not at the top of the list of RIAA's member corporations - is an obscene alternative that no one should accept. It is not only music that is endangered but our whole culture that depends upon it,

The noise channels at play

Sam Smith - One thing that Fox News and MSNBC have in common is that their hosts like to shout. Where the idea developed that viewers wanted the tranquility of their living rooms rent asunder by the screams of Bill O'Reilly or Rachel Maddow  has never been revealed. Certainly the limited viewership of these channels suggest a different approach might be more helpful.

In any case, contrary to the common assumption, neither are news channels. They're noise channels, a sort of political version of Pandora, where you can get your favorite cliches pouring into your ears hour after hour.

Thus it didn't really surprise me that each channel fired someone who - while often miles from my political views - at least presented an alternative in a sincere and reasoned manner, unlike, say, the current crop of GOP presidential candidates who often  mean the same thing but hide it through verbal machination.

Where else would you find the core of  some of the GOP philosophy better expressed than in this excerpt from Buchanan's news book?

 For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection ... mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone”?

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.

I would, of course, much prefer that Buchanan didn't think that way, but it is far better that it be laid on the table clearly than deceitfully manipulated by the likes of Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney.

Further, I think of listening to Buchanan  as a form of batting practice. How would you knock his argument out of the park? You can't even hit one of Romney's balls because they don't really exist.

Besides, more than a little of Buchanan's anti-imperialism and Andrew Napolitano's civil liberties views make sense.


That isn't the way they think at MSNBC, however. As one press account put it,
"MSNBC President Phil Griffin said last month that he didn't think Buchanan's book 'should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.'"
 

In getting rid of these two clear - albeit frequently wrong - voices, we not improving the dialogue at all. We're simply making it easier to keep the true debate hidden in verbal code and, once again, using noise as a substitute for argument.

How to tell the four leading Republican bigots apart

Sam Smith
 

A key subtext of the Republican presidential campaign has been the bigotry of its candidates who clearly dislike blacks, women, gays, and the poor. They are, in fact, the most bigoted bunch of national candidates since George Wallace ran for president. But the bigotry of each of them is a bit different. Here are some of the distinctions:

Ron Paul might be described as a recovering bigot. Yes, there were those anti-gay, anti-black newsletters in the 80s and 90s that complained about the criminal tendencies of black men and the "gay lobby," but he behaves himself much better these days. Dan Savage put it well to Dave Weigel at Slate: "Ron is older than my father, far less toxic than Santorum, and, as he isn't beloved of religious conservatives, he isn't out there stoking the hatreds of our social and political enemies. . . Ron may not like gay people, and may not want to hang out with us or use our toilets, but he's content to leave us the fuck alone and recognizes that gay citizens are entitled to the same rights as all other citizens."

Mitt Romney is a circumstantial bigot whose dislike for various groups of people rises and falls with the geographical location of his current speech and the latest polls.

Newt Gingrich's bigotry is less effective than it might otherwise be since it is often obscured by the fact that he really hates everyone except himself.

Rick Santorum is the most sincere bigot of the lot. He doesn't think gays deserve equal rights, which should be reserved for those who perform activities that are "healthy for society." And, as he noted, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money." Santorum bases his bigotry on his deep faith, which would make Jesus at best an enabler and at worst a co-conspirator in Santorum's bigotry. Fortunately, however, Santorum understands Jesus no better than he does blacks or gays.

How Donald Trump got his new hotel

Sam Smith

 

If Donald Trump’s new buddy, Mitt Romney, is elected president, the developer can visit him from his new hotel just four blocks away from the White House (and twelve blocks from the Capitol). The Government Services Administration has just announced that it will be turning over the grand late 19th century Old Post Office Building to Trump.

In 1971, the building had been slated to be torn down, but local citizens responded with anger, led by a fledgling group dedicated to the then still novel idea of historic preservation that went by the even more novel name of Don’t Tear It Down. The forerunner of the Progressive Review – the DC Gazette -  was also on the case,  with Val Lewton pessimistically reporting a rally near the building:

|||| A USIA worker stumbling past the circling picketers asked politely if any of the protesters had ever worked in the dirty old building. A girl in a white mini skirt said she had ridden on the ‘marvelous’ open iron grilled elevator.(It is rumored that the Postmaster General was so proud of these elevators that at the building's inaugural, while showing them off to the press, he stumbled and fell to his death down the elevator shaft.) A disbelieving tourist stopped: “Who wants to save that thing! ‘

No one cared, it looked dirty, the squat brooding columns of its portico were caked with black soot; and in the evening tired government workers wait in front for the buses to take them to their manicured lawns across the bridges in Virginia. Of course, when it's hot, or it rains the shelter of its broad, deep arches are welcome; but the day was bright and the building looked grey and uninviting.

It may be hard to imagine the old building transformed into a multipurpose dream building. But it could happen. It could become as John Wiebenson (Associate Professor of Architecture, Maryland University) said in the lone speech at the rally: "A place for government workers to drop out of file cabinets for awhile. " …

But who can imagine this gaunt old maid of a building putting on a new face and strutting down the aisle a bridesmaid once more? So considerations other than historic, or aesthetic, or nostalgic will probably prevail and what seems most permanent in art--bricks and mortar and carved stone - will be the first destroyed. And the Old Post Office Building, once a landmark, will become another footnote and photo in the "Guide of Architecture in Washington." ||||

In fact, that was just what the Pennsylvania Avenue Commission had proposed six years earlier. But Don’t Tear It Down and John Wiebenson, who would soon join the Gazette to contribute what was then the only urban planning comic strip in America, would have none of it.  

Aside from agreeing on the principles, I had another reason to be fond of the building. Over a decade earlier I had gone there as a radio reporter to interview an Assistant Postmaster General after news broke that his agency was blocking the delivery of some magazines. His office was the grandest I had seen in Washington short of the White House. He directed me from his desk the grand distance across the room to two immensely comfortable leather chairs under church sized windows. As I sat down, I noted behind his chair a large, messy pile of girlie magazines, playing, I assumed, the dual role of evidence and distraction. That memory would return many times as I dealt with the inconsistencies of public officials.

 Some months later, under the headline “The great Post Office robbery” we ran a piece from Don’t Tear It Down that noted

|||| The Post Office currently provides the government with over 215,000 square feet of office space With normal maintenance it can continue to serve as an office building. Restoration to its original elegance would cost less than 25% of the cost of the proposed IRS building and would provide over 60% of the space of the new building.

While there are significant cost advantages in saving the Post Office, the issue is not simply economics. The Post Office should be saved for what it does and can contribute to the vitality and life of Pennsylvania Avenue. It is the only significant example left in Washington of American Romanesque architecture, a style which has been termed the first creative contribution of American architects. The buildings intricate carvings, elaborate arches and deeply relieved walls leading to its turrets and great tower, provide a rich complex of textures and shapes. The heavy stonework of the Post Office rises from the very roots of Victorian Washington, providing concrete expression of the confidence of its generation.||||

In the end, the building was saved and the city’s preservation movement gained a life that would last for decades.

The only problem was finding tenants and it was this frustration that ultimately led to its most recent and most ironic change.

I don’t begrudge it, though, because, when you think about it, having Trump in the Old Post Office is far better than it would have been to have the Old Post Office in the dump.

The right to be jerks

Sam Smith


There is no doubt that on the matter of birth control - not to mention the status of women and gays - the Catholic hierarchy behaves like a bunch of mean jerks.

One of the beauties of America, however, is the right to be a jerk as long as you don't interfere with someone else's right to be a jerk.  In more polite circles it's called reciprocal liberty or tolerance.


But the term tolerance has all but disappeared from the the rhetoric of both left and right. This is too bad for a number of reasons including that it diminishes people's rights, it increases their anger, and it doesn't work. One reason it doesn't work is because people don't typically move from a stupid to a reasonable position as a single act of conversion; it often takes them a while during which the most effective approach is to keep them moving in the right direction.

In the case of the Catholic Church, for example,  98% of its members in America are ahead of their leaders on the issue of birth control. Now, the tone deaf Obama administration has issued birth control regulations that play right into the hands of the tone deaf Catholic hierarchy giving it a cause around which to revive itself. And, of course, it plays right into the hands of the likes of Mitt Romney who has clearly forgotten the words of the Mormon apostle Orson Pratt:

"The Roman Catholic, Greek, and Protestant church is the great corrupt ecclesiastic power, represented by great Babylon which has made all nations drunk with her wickedness, and she must fall, after she has been warned with the sound of the everlasting gospel. Her overthrow will be by a series of the most terrible judgments which will quickly succeed each other, and sweep over the nations where she has her dominion, and at last she will be utterly burned by fire, for thus hath the Lord spoken. Great, and fearful, and most terrible judgments are decreed upon these corrupt powers, the nations of modern Christendom; for strong is the Lord God who shall execute His fierce wrath upon them, and He will not cease until He has made a full end, and until their names be blotted out from under heaven."

Before it was run by lawyers and MBAs, politics used to be a lot more like music. It wasn't just a matter of the right notes, but the right sound, the right volume, the right rhythm and the right swing. 


Having been raised on that sort of politics, my immediate reaction to the Obama birth control regulation was, "Oh shit, they blew another one."


Then I went and Googled how far apart the Planned Parenthood offices in my nearby city of Portland, ME, were from the fine Catholic Mercy Hospital. It turns out that if you were at Mercy - where  an inquiry on its site about contraception produces "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here," - the distance is 2.4 miles, which will take you about 5 minutes. Here's a map in case you're in the 'hood and in a hurry:

I've long suspected that Barack Obama wasn't much of a community organizer, because part of that skill is not in proving how righteous you are, but in helping others move in the right direction. This is an sad example of how not to do it.

What time is it?

Sam Smith

Historians of the future – provided their trade still exists – will find our era fascinating. Free of the burden of having to live through it, they will examine carefully what happened during the Great Economic Recession and the Great Cultural Depression and pronounce precisely how these events either insured America’s collapse or preceded yet another Great Revival.

But today, whether you’re just trying to keep things together, are out of work or being sent for the fourth time to fight in a war that no one can explain, it is, instead, a time without answers.

I’ve seen it before, coming of age in the 1950s. Caught between the far more assertive, self-assured and self-important World War II and Boomer eras, most of my generation, which couldn’t even produce a president, didn’t fight the past or the present. But, at least among beats and other cultural dissenters, some just turned their backs on it. When I think of the time, I sometimes recall Miles Davis playing a whole number facing the stage curtain rather than the audience.

But there was something else. Although many forget it, the civil rights movement began in the 1950s. And the most important book I read at Harvard wasn’t, and wouldn’t have been, assigned by any course: Stride Towards Freedom by Martin Luther King Jr.

In such odd, inconsistent and sometimes crude ways, we served as a sleeper cell for the 1960s.

         

Many years later I would be interviewed by a writer doing a history of Harvard Square. I asked him which periods he had found most interesting and he included ours. Then he quoted George Christoph Lichtenberg who had once said, "The most interesting creatures reside on the borders of things."

Which is where we are again.

To be sure,  this time it’s not just about the boring prospect of having to become another man in a gray flannel suit but a critical and seemingly almost fatal economic and cultural decline. We have learned, as we did in the fifties, that much of what we were taught, told, and preached about the future just wasn’t true, that we were victims of endemic misrepresentations ranging from the merely misguided to the premeditated malicious.

If you are, for example, a recent high school high school graduate, the myth that opportunity, status and profit are the predictable results of effort, ambition and study has already failed. And if you are headed for college, you already know that you  probably face a life of servitude to some loan office without any assurance that it will be balanced by decent or consistent  employment.

Add to that the failure of civil liberties, democracy and American “exceptionalism” (aka narcissism)  and it gives discouragement, depression and anger righteous standing.

Except that they don’t help much.  

For example, they obscure the fact that the American establishment has seldom been in so much trouble as it is now. Or that the print media – with its concentrated ownership and closed shop mentality -  is being deeply challenged  by the Internet. Or that we haven’t had a successful war in decades. Or that multi-storied centers of power are being deeply threatened by those simply in tents.

One way to think of it is that the future has become unclaimed territory for which the decent, the daring and the democratic can still fight and still have a chance to win.

But how?

It’s not clear at all. There are those – the Green Party is an  example – who have thought about this for a long while and even transcribed in platforms or books what a new America might become. But few could be bothered with such speculation when compared to that purportedly found in the housing market or hedge funds, or in the inherent privileges of having an MBA.

And there are those, like the Occupiers, who have launched the first highly visible charge against the failed past. They have caught our attention but some argue have failed to convert their response into a clear vision Yet  that is like accusing a fire department of not bringing along materials to rebuild the home they just saved from burning to the ground. Yes, it is only a first step, but so was the first sit in. What mattered then was not what the participants did next but that they would inspire others to follow suit in 25 cities in just six months.  They rang the alarm and it was answered.

And already things are happening. Look at the number of ideas even liberals have thought odd or radical that are suddenly on the table. Things like state banks, reforming the Fed, cooperatives, credit unions – matters that the media, politicians and academia didn’t have time to mention because they were too busy pontificating on the virtues of a “free market” that didn’t even exist. Like the frogs in Emily Dickinson’s poem, they croaked capitalism’s name “the livelong day to an admiring bog.”

It is important to recognize that these frauds, miscreants and misguided conventionalists are now as confused and scared as anyone. And that they have neither the integrity nor the intelligence to know what to do about it.

So the Republicans imitate segregationists attempting to block civil rights legislation and try futilely to rebuild a wrongful world that will never return. The evangelical right blasphemes Jesus and the Bible on behalf of a culture they can’t even practice themselves. And a couple of GOP presidential candidates split their time  between blatantly false economics and proving that their opponent is a bigger liar.

Meanwhile, the most conservative Democratic president of modern times pretends promise is a product and that life is just a game of Scrabble in which the best are those who find the right word.

The voters, meanwhile, think they are being asked to choose between leaders. In fact they are selecting their battlefield.

And deciding which choice will do us the least damage.

And so the folks in the tents may be far stronger than even they imagine. Choice remains only in open spaces. Opportunity sits around half filled cups of coffee in café corners. Power resides in churches that rediscover the power of witness as well as faith. Dreams flow through microphones in front of drum sets. Action blossoms with the rediscovery of community.

The future has become an amateur sport.

What time is it?

Ours, if we choose to take it.

There is a religious test for high office and here it is

Sam Smith, December 2007 - We are once again being treated to that remarkably self-serving and hypocritical myth that there should be no religious test for high office. For one thing, it's a lie: if you aren't religious, you don't get high office. For another thing, if you are religious, you spend a good deal of your campaign convincing some voters just how faithful you are while trying to fool the rest into thinking that it doesn't make any difference. In both cases, the unusual aspect of the test is that no one is meant to think it exists.

As yet another public service, the Review proposes to bring the religious test out of the closet and into the debate in a reasonable fashion, helping the voter judge the relative worth of various candidates' Leave No Apostle Behind programs. We shall revise the exam from time to time and welcome any suggestions

RELIGIOUS TEST FOR HIGH OFFICE

1. Does the candidate belong to one of the kookier sects such as Scientology or Mormonism? What does this suggest about the candidate's ability to deal rationally with real situations and the quality of that candidate's judgment?

2. Is the candidate a saint in the church but a devil under cover? As Mahalia Jackson put it, "I can't go to church and shout all day Sunday, come home and get drunk and raise hell on a Monday."

3. Does the candidate try to appear highly religious to one set of voters and highly broad minded to another?

4. If the candidate is a Catholic, whom does he or she most admire: the current Pope, the Berrigan Brothers or various liberation theologians?

5. If the candidate is Episcopalian, to which branch does he or she belong: the high and crazy, broad and hazy or low and lazy?

6. Which aspects of the candidate's religion or its history will that candidate openly condemn?

7. Is faith used by the candidate as a space filler for the absence of facts or is it used as a false replacement for facts?

8. Does faith primarily influence the candidate by providing positive values or by supplying wildly unsupportable information posing as truth?

9. Would the candidate support the end of discrimination against secularists? For example, would the candidate support an atheist opening sessions of the Senate and would the candidate host idea breakfasts as well as prayer breakfasts at the White House?

10. Does the candidate think God talks to him? How does one distinguish this from the heard voices that lead others to be committed to mental institutions?

11. Does the candidate believe God is responsible for improvements in poll numbers? Does the candidate agree with Mike Huckabee's assessment: "There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people?"

12. If, as Mitt Romney claims, "We are a nation under God, and we do place our trust in him," and if as Barack Obama says, "What role does [religion] play? I say it plays every role." then shouldn't there be a religious test of candidates so we can tell who God trusts the most?

13. But since there supposedly isn't a religious test for high office, why does Mike Huckabee run TV ads proclaiming himself a "Christian leader?"

14. Why does the media use the term "pro-family" to describe Republican policies when the divorce rate in heavily GOP states in the Mid West is higher than in God-forsaken Massachusetts?

15. If there is no religious test than why are issues like abortion and gay marriage so important, since the about the only people worried about them are religious fundamentalists?

16. Mitt Romney says, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." What section of the Constitution is that in? What if one seeks freedom from religion?

17. If there is no religious test for high office, why does a new president have to take an oath using a Bible?

Otohbotoh Obama

Sam Smith

If the Democratic Party still had the same sort of philosophy it had until the mid 1970s, Barack Obama would have little trouble getting elected against Mitt Romney. He would be able to brag about all the jobs he had created, all the new public works underway, and all the nearly foreclosed homes he had saved through his rescue policies. That’s the sort of case that would be hard for one of the 4,000 richest people in America who played such a role in the financial disaster to argue against.

Of course, it hasn’t worked out like that. Beginning with Carter, and escalating with Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have moved steadily to the right, making them contributing perps to the crisis and stripping their campaigns of worthwhile arguments.

While Clinton approached the matter with boisterous blarney and bulimic bull, Obama decided – assuming he had any psychological choice in the matter – to be the man square in the mundane and muddled middle. All politics aside, he is about the most boring politician of modern times, who probably can’t even decide how to get out of bed in the morning without evoking the principle of otohbotoh, i.e. on the one hand, but on the other hand.

That isn’t what you hire a president for. You hire them to be someone in favor of something folks can understand and appreciate.

I have watched Mitt Romney over the past few weeks with fear because instead of ineffective simultaneous conflicting positions in the style of Obama, he is a serial prevaricator based on the political weather of the day. And if you call him that, he’ll just stand there with a pathological grin on his face. While Obama tries to be everywhere at the same time, Romney just picks the position that works best today and to hell with whatever he said or did a few years ago. This is one reason that a hedge fund hustler is currently considered more reliable on economic matters than the Democrat in office, by nine points according to one recent poll.  

Neither approach is a virtuous political lifestyle, but discontinuity spread over time gains more votes

I was reminded of Obama’s problem recently when he and his White House set forth two campaign driven positions, one on the anti-Internet bills and the other on supposed improvements for small business.  

Now that the Republicans have backtracked on SOPA, the spin is that Obama stopped them. In fact, the White House response was so mealy mouthed that pro-Internet groups didn’t quite know how to react. This publication even found itself belated sticking the word “seems” into a headline about the White House’s apparent opposition because close examination the matter made it uncertain what Obama would do in the long run.

As one Reddit reader wisely wrote, "I am very happy that Obama has 'come out against SOPA and PIPA'. I was also very happy when Obama was against the NDAA, Guantanamo Bay, prosecuting medical marijuana, and escalating conflicts in the Persian Gulf."

And therein lies the problem with those who think they’re being clever but, in fact, are even keeping their potential supporters justifiably confused and skeptical.

Victoria Espinel, who is Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget - which is roughly equivalent to having a Walmart Property Enforcement Coordinator at OMB - put it this way:

“Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.

                   

“Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation.”

In other words, Victoria Espinel and her boss left the back door wide open.

In another example, Obama himself announced a reorganization of some agencies that was supposedly designed, in the words of the Washington Post, to get from Congress “the authority to consolidate the roles of several federal agencies which he said would lead to streamlined services and a smaller government workforce.”

As usual, the  Post bought easily into the pitch: “The proposal comes at a politically opportune moment for the president, who has faced sustained Republican criticism that his administration has failed to tame a bloated federal bureaucracy. With an eye squarely on his reelection campaign, Obama announced that he would initially focus on merging sprawling entities that deal with small businesses in a bid to save $3 billion by eliminating more than 1,000 jobs over the next decade.

At a moment when Obama faces a neck and neck race with Romney, he is proposing the stunning idea of cutting 100 government jobs a year over the next decade.  That’s not the sort of thing that presidents used to go behind a podium to brag about. 

And here’s Obama’s thrilling reorganization plan:

“The new department would combine the trade and commerce functions of the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Trade and Development Agency.”

Now, theoretically, if you’re trying to get small business on your side, you should do something the average small business owner will understand and appreciate.  But here’s what the NY Times reported:

On the one hand, reorganizing federal agencies to create a ‘one-stop-shop’ for America’s small businesses could streamline processes and make accessing information and assistance much easier,” Todd McCracken, chief executive of the National Small Business Association, said in a statement. “On the other hand, such a reorganization could minimize the emphasis placed on small business by the federal government and lead to an even greater imbalance toward promoting the interests of large businesses over those of small business.”

John Arensmeyer, chief executive of the Small Business Majority, a group initially formed to back the administration’s health care reform, said: “Right now small business has an independent agency that reflects its needs. The obvious concern is that by bringing this into larger agency there’s a risk that some of that voice gets lost. We know that government is held in very low esteem by small business, but the S.B.A. is an exception to that right now.

There were some stronger views. For example, the American Small Business League, which protests the diversion of federal contracts for small business to large corporations, sided firmly with the other hand. “This is not a move to save money,” said the league’s president, Lloyd Chapman, in a statement. “This is a move to eliminate federal small-business contracting programs.” 

These are just two examples of the fog Obama creates around his own policies. Add to them the fact that few know what the “stimulus” did other than help banks, that the fate of endangered home owners is hardly mentioned, that the health care bill is a hopeless muddle, that the unemployment rate remains far too high, and that the withdrawal from Iraq coincided with increasing rumors that it would be replaced by a war with Iran, and even the most transparent window into the White House can’t eradicate the fog on the other side.  

This is not about policy,  this is simply about good politics, which is dangerously lacking in the Obama administration.  And so we go into one of our most critical elections confronting the real bastards with a guy who doesn’t understand that promising   in an often indecipherable manner a little something for everyone only ends up meaning anything to anybody.  Which is not a good way to win votes. 

Let’s just hope that the GOP screws up enough that it won’t matter.

Post empire survival guide

Since 1989, we have occasionally published a guide to getting through the crummy era that we are still in. In 2003, we intially noted that the First American Republic was over. Last year for the first time, however, it seemed that our view was no longer radical nor unique; quietly it had become part of mainstream consciousness. To aid our readers get through these tough times, we offer another updated edition of our guide.

 Face the facts -The First American Republic is over. The Constitution is being trashed by both major parties. We are incapable of responding to the environmental crisis. Liberals can't tell the difference between being elite and being extinct. We're in the most expensive wars of no purpose in our history. Both major parties have moved steadily to the right over the past thirty years. Both have never been so corrupt. Ethnic prejudice is at an overt level unseen since the days of the civil rights struggles. The economy is still in the pits. Thanks to Citizens United, money has replaced votes as dominant political campaign objective. Our creative culture has been reduced to the likes of Lady Gaga, Desperate Houswives, the Kardashians and Jersey Shore. And Barack Obama has turned out to be the Bernie Madoff of the Democratic Party - successfully conning America's liberals out of their hope and spare change.

Work around it - If a hurricane comes to your neighborhood, you don't just sit around the kitchen table complaining about it; you do things to help your survival. The same is true of the great storm of American disintegration. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time. It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.

Find some useful precedents. Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome, for example, has been remarkably indifferent to 500 years of its history. The Umbrians have been invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths, Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini, the German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade Organization. Umbria has managed not only to survive but keep its culture, a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history's tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American these days.

We don't have to go that far back, though. Consider the novel, 1984. Orwell saw it coming, only his timing was off a bit. The dystopia described in 1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents of Oceana didn't live in it. Orwell gives the breakdown. Only about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in the Outer Party. The rest, numbering some 100 million, were the proles.

It is amongst the latter that Winston Smith and Julia find refuge for their trysts, away from the cameras (although not the microphones). The proles are, for the most part, not worth the Party's trouble. .

Orwell's division of labor and power was almost precisely replicated in East Germany decades later, where about one percent belonged to the General Secretariat of the Communist Party, and another 13% being far less powerful party members.

As we move towards - and even surpass - the fictional bad dreams of Orwell or Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World,', it is helpful to remember that these nightmares were mainly the curse of the elites and rather than those who lived in the quaint primitive manner of humans rather than joining the living dead at the zenith of illusionary power.

This bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite that is alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - an elite willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with minimal weapons.

Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Yet like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, the elite is now spending huge sums to put themselves inside a prison of our own making. The densest concentration in America of police per acre, for example, is around the US Capitol.

Strange as it may seem, it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political and economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of the castle dwellers who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.

Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern Methodist University has described Orwell's underclass this way:

"The Proles were the poorest of the groups, but in most regards were the most cheerful and optimistic. The Proles were also the freest of all the groups. Proles could do as they pleased. They could come and go, and talk openly about whatever they felt like without having to worry about the Thought Police. . .[Orwell] concluded that the hope for the future was contained within this group."

Make the local about far more than lettuce: Because of the foregoing, the role of the local in American life has assumed an enormous yet still largely unrecognized role. It is no longer just about sensible communities, friends or wise bulying habits. It is our major bastion against the bastards. Sadly, liberal Amerias become increasingly federocentric, assuming that those speaking of states or local rights are just right wing nuts. This ignores the history of every important progressive movement in America: from the abolitionists, to the populists, labor unions, environmentalists, and the advocates of civil rights. In each case, success was based not on playing the elite's game but through mass decentralized organizing and pressure. Few things scare national politicians more than people getting organized.

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Morning Line: A culture on its way out?

Sam Smith – I keep having this unfashionable notion that what we’re seeing on the right may be the last gasp of a culture that is on its way out. Still noisy, still powerful, it also feels much like the segregationist southerners of the 1960s desperately try to hold their rotten system as history cranked up the gears against them.

One of the ways you can test out such a notion is to look at the young. Evangelical churches, for example, are having a harder time attracting the young. And this, from The Hill,  provides another hint:

Amid boos and occasional cheers, Santorum defended his views on same-sex marriage and legalized marijuana, as he was peppered with questions by a crowd of college students. Santorum's support among independents, who can vote in New Hampshire's Republican contest, dropped from 6 percent to 3 percent after the college event, according to Suffolk's findings. His support from 18 to 34 year olds dropped from 9 percent to 2 percent.

That said, beyond the Occupiers, there are few signs yet that we’re on the cusp of a big change such as the 1960s. For one thing, the Democratic Party doesn’t have an alternative, its president is the weakest of their party in over a century, and liberalism has become more a private club than a public cause.

 In fact, the real change may be between the selfishness and cruelty of individuals – epitomized by the GOP right – and a corporatized and more sophisticated version of the same thing, featuring equal opportunity employment and equal opportunity oppression at the same time. Only the language will have changed.

What I learned from four hours of GOP debate

Sam Smith

- Barney Frank is right. The Democrats may not be perfect but at least they’re not nuts.

- The Republican candidates believe that slashing government is a good way to increase jobs. But one of the biggest government budget cuts occurs following wars and in almost every case we have had a recession. The only way that cutting government increases jobs would be if private industry does the same work less efficiently and thus with more employees. But, of course, this doesn’t happen thanks to people like Mitt Romney who display their business creativity by firing thousands of people whenever they get a chance. The GOP candidates were thus basically arguing for a more prolonged and deeper recession.

- The same Republicans who argued for smaller government also argued that “we” created X number of jobs when “we” were in office. Newt Gingrich even claimed to have created millions of jobs. You can’t have it both ways. Either government hurts the economy or it helps it. Unless, of course, they’re saying that government only works when, say, Gingrich or one of the Rick dicks is in it.

- Anti-gay politicians like those in the debate should probably be a bit more careful, given that their purported religion was started by a guy who never got near that "sacrament of marriage," never dated any women, and hung out mainly with twelve close male buddies.

- The Perry-Santorum-Gingrich view of Christianity is so deviant that it made a couple of Mormons seem like the most theologically normal candidates.

- If, however, the Perry-Santorum-Gingrich view of Christianity is correct, maybe I better become a Jew.

What Washington cab drivers know about free markets that politicians, economists and journalists don't

Sam Smith

Whenever I hear some pompous, politically adulterous politician talk about “free markets” - or some puerile pressie cite them as the dominant economic force in America, I think of the taxicabs in which I rode during most of my many years in Washington.

One thing I’ve learned about free markets in America is that they belong on the economic endangered species list. And high on the list would be the DC taxi industry.

For many decades, DC had a taxi fare system based on zones rather than meters. This system made it virtually impossible for large corporations to take over the taxi industry as they had no way of knowing how much an individual driver was truly making. Thus the big outfits avoided the city.

DC's taxi industry flourished, reaching 8,000 cabs by 1994, more cabs per capita than any other city in America. If all of DC’s cabs had been owned by one company, the firm would have been the city’s largest private employer. A study I did in the 1990s found that if DC had as few cabs per capita as Paris or London, the fleet would drop more than 90%. While DC had one cab for every 75 citizens, New York City had only one for every 600.

DC's cab system was thus in violation of an almost iron law of non-competition in the taxi industry that dated back at least to 1636, when the owners of Thames water taxis got King Charles I to restrict the number of horse-drawn hacks to 50 in order to cut down on the land-borne competition. And as recently as 1962, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley guaranteed 80% of any new cab permits to one of his buddies.

While the zone system was great for lower income residents - ranging from newly arrived blacks in the segregated city of the 1950s to a string of immigrant groups, whites and the Washington Post didn't like it. They argued, among other things, that the zone system made it too easy to cheat the passengers. In fact, if there is one universal of the global cab industry it is that cab drivers cheat, reflecting little more than that cabbies tend to be extraordinarily knowledgeable residents who do a lot of business with extraordinary ignorant visitors.

A 1990s study by US News & World Report found, in fact, that DC was no worse than most of the major cities it looked at. While the USNWR study found overcharges of about 5 bucks on an DC airport run, it also reported that in New York one should ask a taxi dispatcher for the best route to your destination: "A driver who takes the Belt Parkway from JFK to midtown, for example, can add $20 to a $25 to $30 fare." The reporters were overcharged $5 bucks for a similar run in Chicago, cheated by limo drivers in San Francisco, reported occasional $20 overcharges in Boston, and so forth. Even the DC cab commission's own study found that passengers were overcharged only 17% of the time, while being undercharged 10% of the time.

And to some, there was a more important problem: the zoned fares kept powerful corporate interests from taking over the system. A Department of Justice study in the 1990s found that 87 percent of some 100 cities with taxi service restricted entry in some way. Around the same time, Chip Mellor of the Institute for Justice noted that Denver had routinely turned down every application for a new taxicab company from 1947 on. Chicago and LA were closed.

A few years ago, the city did away with the zone system. It also introduced a series of new regulations designed to make the industry more favorable to a corporate takeover, adding to the drivers’ expenses without helping their business. It was assumed that these measures might lead eventually to a medallion system under which cabbies would be required to fork over six figures just for the right to drive a vehicle. In the few years since meters were introduced, the number of cab drivers in the city has already plummeted by around thirty percent.

So much for free markets.

The only markets that Washington politicians truly understand are highly corrupted ones, either by regulation-induced monopolies or campaign financed bribes known as contributions.

And, in fact, as soon as the city began “regulating” the tax industry, the corruption soared. Within two years of the meters, federal authorizes arrested 27 people in a massive bribery case.

DCist reported : “Two indictments released today accuse a total of 39 individuals of conspiring to bribe city officials in order to obtain fraudulent taxi licenses between 2007 and 2009…. The payments involved on the taxicab commission's end appear to be much larger: first $14,000 in cash, then $8,000, and even a shopping bag filled with $59,880, plus numerous smaller payments of around $3,000, all totaling up to ultimately hundreds of thousands of dollars. “

It is the popular myth that Marion Barry was the king of modern DC corruption. This is far from true. The Washington media won’t admit it, but his first term and a half as mayor did more good for more local citizens than any time since. Which is one reason Barry could get cab drivers to help his voters get to the polls for free.

Barry’s corruption was real, but it was personal and small time by current standards. Today, the whole city political system is corrupt and instead of helping the little guy along the way as traditional corrupt politicians did, it helps only the most powerful interests in the capital. What has happened to the cab system is a striking case in point. Instead of being a valuable form of public transportation, it is increasingly seen as a source of money and power for the few.

How do you push the little guys out of the “free market?” Regulation is a nifty way, and DC now wants cabs to carry expensive credit card machines, According to the Washington Post, the new rules would also:

- “digitize what is now a paper recordkeeping process, mandating devices that send trip data to the commission in real time and ’can record and report all fares and earnings for tax purposes.’”

- A new driver training course envisioned by the law would cover the “geography of the District, with particular emphasis on major streets and avenues”; “public relations skills, including cultural awareness and sensitivity training”; and “driving skills and knowledge of the rules of the road.” Would-be drivers would have to pass an exam of no fewer than 100 questions.

And the bill would require satellite navigation systems plus a single paint color for all city’s 5,000-plus cabs – thus saving a prospective taxi monopoly the cost of repainting the vehicles. Total cost to the cab drivers: in the four figures.

The DC cab industry has been one of the great rare examples of a free market system in a country where the powerful in politics, academia and the media do everything they can to make sure it doesn’t happen. It looks like they’re going to succeed in getting rid of the capital’s rambunctious residue of a system they want to exist only in their speeches and articles, but certainly not in real life.

Morning Line: 2011 in brief

Where we stand, totter, or fall as we approach a new year. . .

Sam Smith

Hope and change moved last year from the White House to the tents of protesters in downtown urban America. They seem much happier there.

The Congress has become one of the few places in America where the 99% are consistently wrong and the 1% represents the bulk of America.

We seem to be living in a new Middle Ages where the only safe place is a farm, village or monastery (assuming you’re not a young boy). But these things can change quickly, witness the shift from the catatonic 1950s to the activist 1960s. 

My optimistic view of what’s happening comes from the civil rights debate in the 1960s. The southern Democrats back then were basically fighting a furious but losing battle to stop inevitable change. The current GOP seems quite similar, a last cry for things that can not last. On the other hand, there is nothing equivalent to the civil rights movement to replace today’s archaic Republican philosophy and, when I remember that, my optimism fades.

The Republicans are trying to reverse 80 years of political progress in one election cycle. We haven’t seen anything like this since the Redeemer movement of the post-Reconstruction era, which also worked to lower taxes, cut government spending, slash public funds for transportation and welfare, and change voter registration laws to cut black and poor white voting.

Barack Obama is the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. He even outdoes Bill Clinton, founder of the Vichy Democrats. His major problem is not that he’s black, but that he’s a Harvard Law School grad who thinks, talks and acts like one. His empathy seems contrived, his solutions inadequate and his passion under perpetual house arrest.

Republicans and Democrats are not really arguing about progress vs. regression, but at what speed the latter will occur. The 2012 GOP primaries are like the playoffs before a Super Bowl between two conservative leagues playing the same game under the same rules but with different players.

The occupier movement is the most exciting political development in several decades. Its role is not to define change, but to open the door so change can enter. This it has done. Now, let’s see who walks through.

For years, many believed salvation lay in the Democratic Party. Today, this party believes in stupid foreign conflicts, huge bank subsidies, destruction of the public school system, and ending civil liberties - combined with extraordinary indifference to those who have lost their jobs and/or their homes.

The following continue despite decades of failure:

• Our imperial foreign policy and useless wars
• The war on drugs
• Policies that favor large corporations over small business and citizens
• Environmental policies that refuse to include the major factor of population growth

Politicians and the embedded media talk about the fiscal problem as though it was our major crisis, while ignoring the unemployment and foreclosure crises that cause immediate pain to far more people and are a major cause of the fiscal problem. Further, the Fed has printed more money for banks in trouble than the Super Committee needs to meet its budget goals.

America, as a constitutional republic, no longer exists. We are controlled by random power exercised in a culture of impunity, which is to say that those with power do what they want and betray whomever they want.. This is one reason you find so many adulterous politicians. They learned it on the job.

Here are some things that set a good record in 2011:

• Lung cancer rates among women declined for first time. Men's rate continued to fall.
• The teenage birth rate was at a record low

 Here are some things that set a bad record in 2011:

• Global emissions of carbon dioxide
• Record number of children homeless
• Number of underemployed
• SAT reading score
• Number in poverty
• Number and percent using food stamps
• Percent of Forbes richest 400 making money from money: 25% now vs 8% in 1982
• Housing building permits
• Housing price collapse
• Percent of young people with jobs
• Number not in labor force
• Percent of American men employed
• Black-white wealth gap

Here are some things that got better in 2011

• The Iraq war seems to have ended for the time being
• Number of black businesses
• Violent crime down for the fourth straight year. Property crime down for the 8th straight year.
• Highway deaths lowest since 1949

Here are some things that got worse in 2011

• Black unemployment
• Corporate tax revenue
• Percent of Americans in poverty
• Percent of Americans in the middle class
• Food prices
• Percent of Americans without health insurance
• Home purchases
• Housing starts

Race to the bottom: the worst of 2011

Public institutions: New York City Police, Homeland Security, Republican Party 

Corporate institutions: ALEC, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, RIAA, Koch Brothers

Corporate officials: Koch Brothers, Lloyd Blankfein

Public officials: Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner, Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Michael Bloomberg, Rick Santorum, Barack Obama, Janet Napitolano Sarah Palin, Eric Holder, Arne Duncan

Media - Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh 

Celebrities - Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen

And, finally, thanks to (among many others). . .

Occupiers, Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich, Dean Baker, Ralph Nader, Glenn Greenwald, Sarah Van Gelder, Fair Vote, Mark Thompson, those working to end corporate personhood, the Green Party, my new Ipad, Greg Mitchell, the Guardian, Project on Government Oversight, Political Wire, Antiwar, Don Imus, ACLU, Gawker, Life Hacker, Counterpunch, Colin Woodard’s book, American Nation, Population Institute, Jon Stewart, Joe McHale