Too Many Witnesses

Have you noticed that the only presidential candidate really talking about making the nation better is the incumbent?

While there is an awful lot of nonstop campaigning for the Republican nomination going on, the men seeking the nod all like to blather on and on about "taking our country back," or "returning the nation to what the founding fathers intended," or in some way or another "restoring the freedoms we have lost."

But, really, there are too many witnesses who know firsthand about the shortcomings of the past to want that as a future for their children and grandchildren. I am not talking about slavery, sweat shops or child labor.

Those are all documented historic facts reflecting conditions in the United States that were sanctioned as official policy for decades or centuries. Yet, most of the victims of those systems are gone.

I'm talking about protective covenants in housing; glass ceilings and discrimination in hiring, promotions and other personnel matters, funding inequities in education and health care; discretionary law enforcement in cases of rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence and other crimes; racial profiling, lending and finance and the provision of basic services for socially, physically, or economically disadvantaged populations.
 
There are still millions of people alive who can speak first-hand of such injustices.

The founding fathers had the wisdom to ensure that an independent judiciary would have the final say on all constitutional matters.  Federal judges, and by extension, the Supreme Court have the right and the obligation to periodically reexamine laws and issues to determine whether, based upon reason and the times, certain aspects of American life warrant institutional review, revocation or change.

The problem is that freedom and equality have not always meant the same thing in this country. I've written before about property rights, voting rights, and human rights. People are entitled to all of these things whether they agree with you politically, morally, socially or not.

Religious freedom is not just for Christians, Jews and Muslims, it's also for Buddhists, Wiccans and Satanists.  Local standards and majority customs cannot define who can participate nor can any group force any individual to keep their own beliefs silent in the interests of not offending the majority.

Public education is not just for the gifted, the average and the able-bodied. It is something that is supposed to be universally offered and provided. Yet, more times than not, the courts or advocates have to fight tooth and nail to make sure that some children have access to the programs and services they need.

Women are still fighting for the right to maintain control over when and if they become pregnant, even as some would deny them the choice of whether to become parents.  We are taught that women have the right to say no and expect it to mean no. Now, some politicians are saying "I don't think so." 

Equal access in the job market remains a real challenge for many.  Growing numbers of men and women have learned during the Great Recession that the playing field is not level, and age, race, body type, sexual orientation and other factors can mean the difference between getting or keeping a job, and waiting for calls that never come.

Those who would seek to reign in courts, deregulate business, and limit the rights of the small to challenge the mighty do not offer a free and equal world. Instead they offer an America stripped of many of the protections that have gradually shifted us toward being a nation of greater universal freedoms.

They also promise their would be supporters a future they envision that those who have ever lived with the indignity of exclusion simply cannot allow. If justice is not blind, it is good to have laws and courts to offer her guidance.

 

One More for the Team

President Obama's reelection campaign will need a lot of volunteers.  

Some will be involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, others will dedicate their time to fundraising. But tens of thousands will be use their talents to support the Truth Team. 

The campaign wants to recruit as many as two million people to pursue a single goal: combatting the misinformation pushed out consistently by the opposition.

"People don't just want tl hear from campaign statements ans ads-- they want to hear from family and friends they trust," said Stephanie Cutler, deputy campaign manager for Obama for America. 

This sounds like the kind of volunteer work I might enjoy.  You sign up online and then start joining the effort to stamp out bull _hit. 

The team will be divided into three parts.  Each unit will have its own Web portal: 

Attackwatch.com will combat basic and over the top nastiness:

KeepGOPHonest.com will challenge Republicans who lie about their records;

And KeepHisWord.com will promote the president's record. 

All of this is necessary because the opposition is willing to say and do anything to win the Whitehouse, retake the Senate and keep control of the House. 

One thing I've learned, over the years, is that you do not edit the president. Once an individual is elected leader of the free world, what he says, everything he says, is a matter of public record.

Honest communicators to not paraphrase, distort or mislead their readers or their audiences with words presidents have not or do not say. When the quotes are available, they simply provide the quotes and let the readers or their audiences form their own conclusions.

Since all sorts of positions, policies and statements are routinely attached to the president and repeated as though they were facts, the need for a Truth Team is obvious.  I think it's a very good idea. I wish them well.

Gradual Shakeout

We already know the Democratic presidential candidate will run on his record.     

 The Great Recession ended under his watch, and despite congressional gridlock, the nation's economy is slowly turning around.

Whether the incumbent is opposed by Mitt or Newt, we will hear loads of promises about job creation, lower taxes and increased opportunity. The problem with that is neither has a track record of making that happen.

Selling off the assets of floundering companies may create limited profits, but it does not put people back to work.Instead, people with jobs are declared surplus, and the machines they used to run to turn out products are shipped abroad for use in sweat shops.

Deregulation that makes outsourcing easier takes away the incentives for domestic growth as quickly as raising taxes.  Contract workers cost about one-third less than permanent staffers and have none of the protections of employees.

Luckily, private sector job creation  is up, and first time unemployment claims are down. All the negative ads and campaign talking points in the world cannot change reality.

Pragmatism? Pshaw!

Nancy Brinker built a movement to save lives and honor the memory of her sister. Her idea was simple, "helping women beat the risks of breast cancer is a good." People bought into it and raised tens of millions of dollars.

Somewhere along the line, Nancy Brinker allowed idealogues to divide, and possibly doom her organization. If only for a few days, she turned her back on the poor.

Pragmatism embraces practical solutions without consequences. If you pack a board with people who believe certain things, then they can change the rules, take a vote and end alliances that were crucial to maintaining broad appeal.

In picking funding for Planned Parenthood, or an end run to eliminate it, a faction of the Komen Foundation selected a powerless target. The poor women, very young to premenopausal, who go to clinics offering services at no - to low costs.


Brinker and others did not realize that these women have a reservior of goodwill out here that would not sit silently by as donated dollars were used for exclusive purposes. The money did not come from any one group of people who believe certain ways, it came from lots of people willing to do something for women's health.

The Komen Foundation allowed its intentions and its brand to become  pawns in a political power play. We now live in a time when people, charities and institutions may find themselves offered up for pragmatic reasons. That means that those who would abandon all reason and compromise in favor of any single goal
will roll the dice, consequences be damned.

In this case, they were willing to let poor women, those who lack insurance and generally seek out the only preventive screening and other services within a busline, languish in uncertainty about their health or get sick and die.

There was no talk of alternative care and no true notice that vital breast screening provided at Planned Parenthood would no longer be part of a very fragile safety net.

Pragmatism puts no stake in consequences. It is built on concepts or statements repeated by rote without regard to any waivering thought.

Declare it right, label it just, and disavow anything that falls outside that narrow view. This time it was women and breast screening, last time it was "the poor" and food stamps, or faceless immigrants and a backlash against a 21st century Bracero program.

Pragmatism could lead to protective covenants, discretionary work rules and worse. These are dangerous times, and we should be very concerned about the poor.

 If you are outside the narrow view of pragmatic thought, perhaps you should also be concerned about the rest of us too.

Let's Remember How We Got Here

While Republican hopefuls have been campaigning for months, and conservative pundits have been indoctrinating the impressionable for years, the President of the United States has been cleaning up a world class mess. 

When Bill Clinton left office in January 2001, the U.S. economy was in pretty good shape. Then we had eight years of leadership straight out of Bizarro World.  Tax cuts and deregulation were the watchwords for better government.

The Sept. 11 attacks occurred, and we justifiably went to Afghanistan.  But somewhere along the line, Iraq became our first priority. Rather than going in to win, the president decided to fight his daddy's war.  That made Iraq a short-term limited conflict.  Even though he declared "Mission Accomplished!"  U.S. troops kept serving and dying there for ten more years.

On housing, President Bush unveiled his Blueprint for the American Dream in 2002.  That initiative led Fannie Mae to pursue a goal of helping six million first time homebuyers, including about two million minorities purchase homes before 2014.

Then, in love with the free market, the Bush Administration failed to act on what by 2006 was a looming economic course adjustment of worldwide proportions.   The results included massive job losses, the near collapse of the banking system and stalled manufacturing that prompted the disappearances of a number of great brand names that had been around for most of the last century.

While it all cannot be blamed on George W. Bush, there is no doubt that the economy was a basket case in January of 2009.  We know that TARP and TANF were ideas pushed through to stave off economic Armageddon.

Conservative revisionists may try to put those programs on President Obama, but that is revisionist nonsense.

In the three years President Obama has been in office, most of the TARP money has been paid back, American manufacturing is in the rebound, and private sector jobs are up by more than 3 million in 22 months. We are also out of Iraq, Osama Bin Laden and dozens of other top terrorists are dead and the Taliban are ready to talk about peace.

Now we have the 2012 presidential campaign. Vying for the Republican nomination are one man who made millions picking the bones of troubled companies. The other major GOP candidate is made big money lobbying for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and mouthing off for conservative media outlets.  The State of the Union is behind us. The choices are already relatively clear.

A Generation of Anger

I could have called this column "Why They're Pissed Off."

Basic stump speeches talk about how candidates will help the nation return to American values. Those speeches often embrace themes of how we have gotten away from the Constitution and what the founding fathers intended. They continue to blame most of the problems in the country on so-called radical deviations from the "American way of life."

I had an exchange recently with someone who assured me that an ancestor of theirs was really a Republican, even though he was elected governor of a great state as a Democrat. He told me the guy was only a Democrat because Republicans could not get elected in that state back then.

History is a wonderful thing. You can actually look back and give context to a lot of attitudes that exists decades or generations later.

There was a time, after the Civil War, when most voters in the 11 states that made of the Confederacy were Democrats. They stayed Democrats for decades because they blamed Republicans and Abraham Lincoln for changing the way of life of their most privileged friends.

One hundred years later, Lyndon Johnson changed their way of life with the stroke of a pen.  What Johnson, the Texas Democrat, did was sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But getting to the point where he had that option was not easy. It took months of negotiation, weeks of debate, and a lot of public attention to make that happen.

The one time that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. ever met face to face was March 26, 1964. They were in the gallery of the Senate Chamber of the U.S. Capitol to observe the Senate debate of the Civil Rights Act. A Democrat named Robert Byrd of West Virginia unsuccessfully had filibustered to block the vote.

When the final votes were tallied, the Democrats in the House voted 153 to 91 and Republicans voted 136 to 35 for passage. In the Senate, the vote was 44 to 23 for the Democrats and 23 to six for the Republicans.

President Johnson said on July 2, 1964 that American values made passage inevitable. It also cleared the way for a raft of changes that many people believe made America stronger. While passage of laws and inaction of regulations set standards for compliance, working toward institutional change and overcoming generations of injustice has been a constant struggle ever since.

In 1967, older and younger workers gained protections  under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Provisions of that law helped protect members of the World War II generation from upstart Baby Boomers as they reached the ends of their working lives.

In 1975, Congress passed the Sex Discrimination Act, and within 20 years or so, the game of grab ass became politically incorrect in the workplace. Seventeen years later, women of every age and every description and some men still have to struggle against workplace harassment and disparate treatment.

In 1978, the Ethics in Government Act passed and with the help of the federal courts, government workers gained a variety of protections designed to give them the same protections available to those in the private sector.

These were followed by the Americans with Disabilities Act  and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. Those laws gave disabled people access to jobs and facilities that most Americans continue to take for granted and made it illegal to just pick up the bones and belongings of long dead people who were here in ancient times.

When people rail about what's wrong with America and talk about the special interests who have ruined the country and radically changed what the founding fathers created as a perfect ideal, what are they really saying?

If you listen to the words of President Johnson from July 2, 1964, they are are speaking out against measures taken as America and its people evolved. Johnson and Congress, both Republicans and Democrats saw that they nation had to evolve. The promise of America had to grow closer to the literal meanings of the Constitution.

If you really think about it, the anger that has built up over 48 years and intensified over the election of a mixed-race president, could be based upon the changes that have occurred in since 1964. People passionate about rolling back the clock recall hearing about how much better things were "in the good old days."

 
The problem with that is context? Who reaped the benefits of a time when so many Americans were considered socially, sexually, racially and physically outside the concerns of a privileged few.

At Risk: 75 Years of Progress

The 2012 elections are about the future. There are alternate versions of that future that could well be determined by one national election and 468 House and Senate races. 

People really need to think about what the vision so-called fiscal conservatives have for the nation. They do not see a role for Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, or universal access to health care. They envision a nation where people can do business with whom they choose, have different pricing structures for different types of customers and refuse to serve areas for any reason they choose, even without explaining it.

Some of them speak openly of limiting or even eliminating the rights of victims to turn to the courts for justice and relief when they've been injured through negligence or circumstance. Some would even shift control of federal money, raised through taxes we all pay into the hands of people in the states, and try to limit the ability of federal judges to intervene under the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

Already, we are hearing candidates label such jurists as "bad judges" because some of their rulings consider Equal Protection central to U.S. laws. They would reduce or eliminate Pell Grants , in favor of loan programs that would turn our children into indentured servants for decades to come. They would privatize Social Security, and look coldly at those whose future security was lost in a system rife with marketplace flaws.

In the age of Super PACs, with unlimited corporate money flowing in to support candidates who would place business ahead of fairness, we have to do more than just focus on the presidency. The prevent defense that's stifled work on Capitol Hill in recent years could be on the beginning. We could see a new "Contract With America" that winds up being a contract on the working man.

Thirty years ago, President Reagan led the charge to turn community block grants over to the states. Now some of those cities that used to receive them contain residential dead zones. They are entire neighborhoods, of abandoned houses, broken glass and decaying streets that rival the brownfields of long-dormant industrial sites we've been dealing with for decades.

Between 1980 and 1997, 27 percent of the nation's public hospitals closed, eliminating 66,000 beds. As Baby Boomers age, Medicare, becomes our problem. Free market healthcare could well jeopardize any retirement we are able to salvage from the Great Recession, and frankly, most of us do not have time to build a financial cushion to protect us from that risk.

Rest, assured, there are many problems, and of course there are limits to what the taxpayers and the nation can afford, but when it comes to programs I know my parents and grandparents depended on and found comfort in, I am just not willing to risk everything on a crapshoot with the profit mongers and speculators.

Who occupies the White House and who does the work on Capitol Hill could well determine if more of that is part of America's vision of the future. Everything from FDR's New Deal to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society is hanging in the balance.


They may say "beating Obama is the most important thing," but believe me, they've got bigger plans than that, and if their vision of "returning to American values" does not include you, then finding that out in 2013 could be a truly costly mistake.

The Great Recession: We Survived

The economic downturn that began in 2007 statistically ended in 2009. While the human suffering and the struggle to recover has continued, somewhere along the line, that two-year period became a defining era.

The Associated Press, arbiters of journalistic style, and the hardest working collective group of 4,500  journalists in the world now refers to the period as the Great Recession. That means it is on a par with other benchmark events of the past 160 years. Those include the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II.

When you look around the room take pride in the fact that despite your diminished circumstances, your derailed retirement plans and the assorted boomerang children you may still be harboring, the fact of the matter is that you survived.

Seventy-five years from now, when people start reviewing the personal data of the 2010 U.S. Census, the details of your survival will become more than statistics. It will be part of the historic record and available to anyone who cares to look.

One of my brothers is a retired journalist who has used his talents for genealogical research in recent years. He has been able to look back on census date from 1930 and learn a lot about how my own family weathered the Great Depression.

It turns out that my maternal grandfather once was a member of my maternal grandmother's father's household. While I only knew my grandfather as an old man and great provider, he was once a young man dependent upon his wife's family for his very survival.

It's funny what history and official documents will be able to tell future generations about you and the people in your life. Very few of us will look back upon the Great Recession as "the good old days," but it is likely some of our children will remember it as a time when people of all types rediscovered the meaning of family.

Climbing out of the misery, and slowly watching people we care about find jobs and hope for better futures, some of us can look back at the spiraling collapse of the first decade of the 21st century. As we turn our thoughts to God and all the strength he helped to pull from deep within our souls, we can give thanks, smile inwardly and breathe the fresh breezes of relief.

Confronted with the all too real hardships of the Great Recession, we survived.

The Business of Governing

While you can try to run a nation like a family, you really can't run one like a business.  The motivations are different.

Families take care of each other.  They recognize strengths and weaknesses and act with empathy on behalf of members in need.  They also keep a place for the rowdy and disagreeable even when it's not easy.

 Businesses try to make a profit. Now there's nothing wrong with profits, but often getting there means neglecting the weak and casting off the disagreeable.  Anybody whose ever worked for a company or in an industry forced to change its business model knows the drill.

"We are downsizing... it's a business decision."  One way businesses have prospered in recent years is to absorb struggling firms, sell off what doesn't work, compromise the old pension plan and contract out production.  "We'll keep the brand, but slap the nameplates on something we made overseas."

Running the nation like a business is a scary approach.  Can you imagine selling off Cleveland, or Buffalo, or St. Louis just because aging urban centers are no longer profitable?

Coming out of the Great Depression, people did not have a lot of faith in bankers. They also expected businesses to change.  Very little of the change that followed was voluntary.

Much of the New Deal wound up before the Supreme Court. While everything the president came up with did not work. Those things that did, have worked well for more than sixty years.

I'm not ready to trust a banker. I also do not want to see the country run like a business.  That kind of mandate could lead to some very good people being declared surplus.

All About Jobs

The first ten years of the 21st Century will be remembered as the Decade of the Deep Hole.

After closing out the Clinton era with surpluses, huge job gains and solid consumer confidence, we hit some big bumps.  Besides two long wars and an unbridaled, irrational spending spree for domestic security, there were policy decisions made to neglect the cities, deregulate business and force the poor to find jobs with limited preparation.  Promises from corporate leaders to create jobs at home never happened.

Many of the offshore jobs they provided collapsed when Americans stopped spending and a worldwide recession took hold.  TARP was suggested and passed as a "Hail Mary" play by leaders who noticed the problems much too late.

The remnants of the 20th Century economy were dashed against the rocks.  Sears, Kmart, Pontiac, Merrill Lynch and dozens of other familiar brands either shrank dramatically or disappeared.

My conservative friends often tell me that government cannot create private sector jobs.  But when you think about it, government contracts in the last decade creates and sustained a whole lot of private sector companies.

It would be simplistic and perhaps unfair to blame the world's problems on Bush 43.  Presidents have power, but they are often at the mercy of world events.  President Obama took charge of a sick economy in a troubled world, but I can say "I am better off now than I was four years ago."  That's one question we won't likely hear asked by the opposition this election cycle.
 
The big issue during Campaign 2012 will be jobs: Getting them and keeping them.

Anyone who openly campaigns by saying they "like to fire people" makes me a little more than nervous.  It says to me that they believe in a world where investors have money and power, and workers and families don't matter.

I am all for change, but I think positive change should create opportunities.  We are now in decade two of the 21st Century.  Most of the TARP money has been paid back, more jobs are being created, and Congress is now in full blown campaign mode.

the one hand, we have a president who inherited the playbook mandated by TARP and made the best of it.  He is working against a recalcitrant Congress to offer leadership during a period of unproductive gridlock.

On the other hand you have six guys who have yet to outline any really better ideas.  Besides the guy who sees value in job elimination, there's the primary architect of 1990s welfare reform that never seemed to accomplish his stated goals.

There's another guy who wants to talk about welfare as those it is a "black thing," there's a guy from Utah who appears to be running because he looks presidential. And then there are my friends from Texas.

One has always been a little quirky but when he starts appealing to more than the fringe it stops being a laughing matter.  The other is a governor who doesn't seem to know the difference between a good job in the oil patch and spatula flipping at Whataburger. I think the difference is probably about 35 grand a year.

Let the campaign continue. America is watching, and some Americans are waiting for jobs.

2011: 24 Words and Out

I had a lot of fun with the challenge to sum up the news of the year in 24 words. It gave me a chance to be back on Houston Radio. I also heard from a lot of folks whose talents have raised the bar for me over the years and I am thankful.

This is the verse below, and the audio from my Houston radio appearance is now on YouTube.

One percent served, recession curved
Capitol shaken, Bin Laden taken
Ghadafi’s reign ended, DADT rescinded
Wildfires burned, Iraq troops returned
Kardashian’s fling, Arab spring