Not Housebroken

We might remember the roundups of Japanese Americans during World War II, when internees were initially housed in horse stalls at Tanforan race track. The caption to this image in a Washington Post story on an immigration raid reads, “Buses brought arrested workers from Postville to the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa, last week.”

Harper’s has published a guide to understanding how successive presidential administrations, beginning with John F. Kennedy, have monkeyed with economics statistical methodology. Some of these lies are really quite bald.

Despite the fact that vegetables literally make me gag, I’ve been trying to go vegan (emphasizing pastas, nuts, and grains) as much as possible, largely for health reasons–I just turned 49 and I approach the age where my past fast food sins might catch up with me–but also for environmental reasons and out of concern over how the meat industry treats animals. Peter Gelderloos offers a contrary view on some of these arguments (notably, not the health argument).

This is a story that cropped up as I have been changing my news gathering techniques to take advantage of a program I found called rss2email that allows me to convert RSS feeds to email messages, and thus to obtain feeds from sources I have not succeeded in getting email bulletins from.

The Supreme Court appears inclined to accept a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. I might not like a conservative Supreme Court for a bunch of reasons, but as my favorite professor points out, police are–to put it mildly–more respectful in places where people may have weapons, and the ability of the people to take up arms is a final bulwark against tyranny and the police state.

In this era, that’s important. Even if I’m nearly two months late on the story.

With Barack Obama–who promises at least some change–and Hillary Clinton–who promises to uphold the status quo—dueling for the Democratic faction nomination, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman explain how the recent Supreme Court decision upholding an Indiana state law requiring photo identification at the polling place will disenfranchise “between 10% and 13% of eligible voters, . . . disproportionately minorities and poor.”

Fitrakis and Wasserman also point to Democratic faction inaction on voting irregularities:

Though the Kerry Campaign solicited millions of dollars to “protect the vote” in 2004, it has not supported independent research into that election’s irregularities. In the King-Lincoln Civil Rights lawsuit, in which we are attorney and plaintiff, 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties destroyed ballot materials, in direct violation of federal law. There has been no official legal follow-up on this case, no major media investigation, and no support from the Democratic Party either to investigate what happened in Ohio 2004, or to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2008. The issue has yet to be seriously raised by the major Democratic candidates despite the fact that it could render their campaigns moot.

The Kerry-Edwards platform in 2004 was scarcely distinguishable from Republican faction positions. The mainstream Democrats elected to power in 2006 have done little to fulfill their election mandate to get the United States out of Iraq, have done little to reverse the Bush administration encroachment of civil liberties, and, as if this was a surprise, have done nothing to retard the incestuous relationship between corporations and government. And now the great progressive hope repudiates his former pastor for calling it like it is.

Jeremiah [Wright], he’s a pastor, and as a pastor you have to see things as they are. Politicians see things as they want them to be. –Rev. William Revely, Holy Hope Heritage Church

In the coming election, we will have a choice between war criminals who lust after the power the Bush administration has conveniently accumulated in the White House. None of them promise to get us out of Iraq, and I have little faith that any of them will restore the Constitution. With a failing economy, soaring food and oil prices, declining home values, a rising number of foreclosures, and a weak job market, this election would be the Democrats’ to lose, even if not for an unpopular war and a shameful Bush administration record of torture and other crimes against humanity. But the Democrats seem not to want to win.

I might be able to vote for Barack Obama this November, if he doesn’t continue to sound too much like Malcolm X’s “house negro.” I could never vote for war criminals like Senators Clinton and McCain who have repeatedly supported the Bush administration in a phony “war on terror.” But as of now, I just might write in Gloria La Riva.

Following Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s latest remarks, Barack Obama was visibly angry and has denounced Wright, saying, “The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.”

Wright relies on speculation when he blames the US Government for HIV, but to argue that the 9/11 attacks are not a consequence of US foreign policy is to bury one’s head in the sand; as Wright (and I think, Ward Churchill) put it, “the chickens came home to roost.” And to in any way minimize the plight of poor African-Americans, as Obama would now apparently prefer, is to ignore vast discrepancies in education, health care, the criminal justice system, and economic opportunity.

If Obama truly rejects Wright’s remarks, he should refute them, claim by claim. And if he cannot do this, then he is simply pandering to white bigots. What I need to hear from Obama is an answer to this question: In the language of Malcolm X, are you a house negro or a field negro?

According to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, in the United States:

Payrolls fell by 78,000 in April, based on the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey before the Labor Department’s May 2 report. Figures two days earlier may show the economy expanded at a 0.4% annual pace from January through March, the smallest gain in five years.

”Despite our forecast for positive growth in the first quarter, we believe the economy has formally slipped into a recession,” said Ethan Harris, chief US economist at Lehman Brothers in New York. ”Given the headwinds from the housing and credit markets, we expect spending to remain weak through the end of 2009.” Harris projects a 0.7% growth rate for the first three months of the year.

Economists forecast spending rose last quarter at the slowest pace in 13 years as the loss of jobs, increase in food and energy costs, and drop in property values hurt confidence. The Federal Reserve may lower the benchmark interest rate by a quarter-point to try to stem further erosion in the growth. . . .

”The employment report will clearly show the economy is in recession,” said James O’Sullivan, a senior economist at UBS Securities in Stamford, Connecticut. While a positive reading on first-quarter growth will stoke debate, ”ultimately, what will determine whether we’re in a recession or not is payrolls,” O’Sullivan said. . . .

”Contrary to popular opinion, the incoming data are, on net, getting worse, not better,” Merrill’s Chief North American Economist David Rosenberg said in an April 24 note to clients. . . .

Investors have been increasing bets in recent weeks that policy makers will pause after this week’s cut, according to Bloomberg data, as concerns over inflation mount.

The AP carries an analysis suggesting that Wall Street is moderately optimistic that the worst of the current financial mess is behind us.

Entitlement is the term that comes to mind. To believe, even as “12.7 percent of all residential borrowers” may lose their homes, as people stockpile rice, as rioters protest food shortages around the world, as oil prices reach $120 per barrel, and as gasoline prices breach $4.00 per gallon, even as middle, lower, and working class incomes remain stagnant, that we are through with this recession clearly requires self-delusion. This belief rests on an assumption that all these people still have money to spend, even if they can no longer rely on increased home values, and even if living costs are skyrocketing.

One can almost hear an elite mantra, We’ll be all right. We’ve been on top of this game for thousands of years, really since the foundation of cities. We’ve survived turmoil and tumult before. We’ll be all right.

But a declining dollar makes dollar-denominated debt less attractive. And only foreigners can finance a $9 trillion US debt; the US savings rate has been low for decades and can’t be expected to rise during a recession. We’ll be all right.

A professor who has disappointed me recently ridicules a chicken little argument. He doesn’t see the sky falling. Since he relies on noblesse oblige as a style of governance, I assume he figures the elite will pull some other trick out of their bag to get through this. Perhaps they will, but I am really wondering what will be happening about two years from now, after what looks to be President Barack Obama’s first year in office, and we’re still embroiled in Iraq and economic conditions have continued to deteriorate.

Credit Suisse analysts, led by Rod Dubitsky, estimated that “foreclosures on 6.5 million loans by the end of 2012 . . . could put 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers out of their homes.”

This picture was taken by followers of Warren Jeffs at the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints in Texas as their compound was being raided.