And to think we owe it all to *these* guys!

I think it is clear that no one is more responsible for the election of Barack Obama than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. By being clearly the Worst President and Worst Vice President Ever, they were able to do a couple of very important things. First, they woke many people up to the moral bankruptcy of the Republican party in its current formulation. As part of that, they exposed the nasty underpinnings of the whole political climate which has existed in this country, which made it OK to label people who publicly said that maybe invading Iraq wasn't such a swell idea terrorists and anti-American. It hasn't been so long since we were warned that we should "watch what we say." I think it made a lot of people wake up and say, hey, what happened to freedom? What is freedom if it is only freedom to shop at Wal-Mart, or to work at one, if you're lucky, when those are the only jobs left. Building on the work of their predecessors (Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton too), pert near destroying the economy through years of undermining the middle class and working people was their pièce de résistance, to use a fancy French expression.

If you had asked me four years ago whether I thought there was a snowball's chance in hell of a black man with an Islamic middle name being elected with margins we haven't seen for a Democrat in decades (much less being elected at all), I would have laughed and laughed at the thought. It just didn't seem very bloody likely, given all that we've seen during the Bush/Cheney regime. But here we are. It's a new day in America. And I think we must give credit where credit is due.

I don't mean to imply that John McCain and Sarah Palin had nothing to do with it; of course they did. But I think the lion's share of our thanks goes to Cheney and Bush. And I mean that in the nicest of ways. I know many of the people who do not like Bush and Cheney feel a lot of anger toward them, and I've been there too. But I think we also owe them some gratitude, because we needed someone to draw back the curtain on what's been going on for years, and they did that. Inadvertently, perhaps. But in their sorry hubris, they brought us to a point where real change, and not just cosmetic change, is possible. Is it inevitable? No. It will take a lot of work and perseverance. We can't just say, "OK, Obama's been elected, we can just relax and go home and wait for him to take care of stuff for us." It won't work that way. We must build that change from the ground up. If we want a more perfect union, and a better world, our work remains before us. This election only makes that change more possible.

Still, I cried tears of joy and relief and amazement over and over again this week. It brought to mind this scene, from Return of the King:

The battle is over, the good guys have won. The darkness has been banished, and the new king has been crowned. It's a similar moment, of joy, and relief, and hope. Yet the world outside is damaged and scarred. The job ahead is daunting. Yet we can enjoy the moment for a little while, and then we get to roll up our sleeves to start rebuilding.

My New President

I wasn't going to take anything for granted this election, although I was trying hard to be resigned, whatever the outcome, knowing that I don't always know the impact of events in the true scheme of things, and that sometimes what seems terrible is just what is needed to move things closer to better.

I had a hard time driving home tonight for the tears. Hallelujah! I didn't know if I would ever live to see this day.

Today I am so proud of America. I have always loved American ideals, but I was born during a terrible war, and my innocence about America was not long lived.

The world will never be quite the same after today. There is still much work left to do, to get us closer to what we strive to be as Americans and what we long to be as human beings. But today is like the glimmering rainbow I saw this past Saturday, the rainbow we watched from the middle of a pouring rain. It is a promise of hope, and I'm glad my son is old enough to remember this day, although he can't really fully understand what it means—for our country, and for him, as a mixed-race child.

Mr. Obama, soon it will be time to start holding your feet to the fire, to make sure you remember the people who helped bring you to this day. But right now, I'm just proud of you, and of the people of this country, who have done what many people thought could not be done.



Link:
The full slide show on the Huffington Post

Alaska Women for Obama!

This sweet little video brought a different sort of tears to my eyes.

This video brought tears to my eyes!

Sarah Palin is just a few years older than me, which means that she shared the same coming-of-age years when Reagan was threatening nuclear Armageddon and the Russians were threatening to bomb/invade etc. in any number of books and Hollywood films. So it warmed the little cockles of my heart to see this video. Enjoy!

Did I mention I love Dar Williams?

We just went to see Dar Williams in Seattle last night with Shawn Mullins. I pretty much only knew his one (as he said Dar called it) "monster" hit: "Lullaby," so it was fun to hear more of his repertoire; he's quite a good performer.

Dar had only a drummer on an African drum and a guy on keyboards, so a smaller entourage than she normally has, but they were quite good.

Her new album "Promised Land" is great; she has one song that stands out in terms of being thought-provoking, about the Milgram experiments at Yale:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

-The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram

The song is called Buzzer, and it's about a woman who participates in these experiments and ends up with a sobering insight into herself:

Right away I knew it was like I failed a quiz
The man said, "Do you know what a fascist is?"
I said, "Yeah, it's when you do things you're not proud of
But you're scraping by taking orders from above"
I get it now, I'm the face, I'm the cause of war
We don't have to blame white-coated men anymore
When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game
I pressed the buzzer
I pressed the buzzer
Here's your seventy bucks, now everything's changed

I had an interesting conversation with our babysitter, a very sweet teenaged girl, yesterday, on the way home after the concert; I shared a little about this song, and she said she had been studying the Holocaust, and that she thought the people who'd done those atrocious things were just evil. And I was like, well, that's sort of the message of these experiments. How much does it take for "normal" people to follow orders and do horrific, unimaginable things?

At any rate, NPR has an interview segment up with Dar where she talks more about the new album and about this song in particular. Some of the links aren't working at the moment (coincidence, surely?) but hopefully this is just a temporary problem.

And of course, Dar being Dar, she doesn't let any of us off the hook. The song ends like this:

But tell me where are your stocks, would you do this again?
I pressed the buzzer
And tell me who made your clothes, was it children or men?
I pressed the buzzer


Links:
The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram, from Harper's Magazine, 1976
Main Dar Williams page at NPR

If this doesn't do it for you...

...I don't know what will. Deregulation is a disaster; always has been, always will be. There is a reason why you need regulation: greed. Until greed goes the way of the dinosaur, we will need to watch people to make sure they follow the rules.

I don't know if Obama will have the guts to do what needs to be done to get us out of this mess, which is nothing less than to reverse the tide of wealth flowing upward. It has made the vast majority of us on earth less secure. It is not inevitable that things are this way. We can choose a different path. But it will mean some very very tough choices in the months and years ahead.

Bottom line: Don't look to the poor and middle class to fund this reconstruction. We have been being bled dry for decades. And that doesn't just mean us in the "first" world (if we can still claim membership); people in the "third" world were better off in 1960 than they are today. There are those who claim otherwise, because people in the third world use more money today than they used to. But if you didn't use to have to pay for shelter or food because you owned land that kept and fed you, you didn't have as much need for money. But I digress.

This is John McCain. He is a true believer, and as they say, "by their fruits, you shall know them."

Eliot Spitzer Editorial on the Mortgage Crisis, and Bush's House of Cards

I heard Thom Hartmann read part of this little article today about the mortgage crisis and I found it hard to maintain my equilibrium. I knew part of this story. I knew that a lot of people were worried about all the crazy loans and the housing bubble and this and that. I just didn't realize that Bush can add to his resume that he actually stopped the states from protecting their citizens against predatory lenders. Unbelievable. And a few days ago he stood before us like this (check out Bush, coming in at about 2:40 into the clip):



In the Spitzer article, published shortly before he was taken down in the prostitution scandal, he said this (from the Washington Post, February 14, 2008): [In the face of predatory lending] "Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye."

Using a law dating from the civil war, the Bush administration derailed efforts by many state attorneys general and several state legislatures to protect consumers from predatory lending. The article is short, but stunning. I mean, I knew the Bushies didn't do anything to help, and I knew their lax policies had helped the crisis grow. I just didn't know that they actively prevented consumer protection. It's enough to make you sick to your stomach. Is this why Spitzer was taken down?

The whole article is here:
Washington Post article by Eliot Spitzer
Project Censored article: Bush's Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

Too Much Money in Too Few Hands

The thought that keeps coming back to me as this whole new (manufactured?) crisis unfolds, is that this is what you get when you get too much money in too few hands. The economic policies of the last thirty years have been all about a shift of wealth from many hands into few. The tax policies and trade policies of the "conservatives" have allowed us to buy cheap toys with easy credit, but have done nothing to ensure the long-term security of the middle and lower classes--quite the opposite, in fact. We've become a nation drunk on debt, where debt seems to be one of the only things we reliably know how to produce.

When you have rich people with too much damn money, all they want to do is invest it to make more money. Hence the creation of ever-more-creative "vehicles" for investment. Tech stocks stop making money? The money flows to mortgage-backed securities. Those start to tank? The money flows to commodities, like corn and oil. Where it goes doesn't really matter. The imperative is just to make more and more money. Of course, there is a need for more stringent regulation. But I think we cannot overemphasize the importance of this wealth shift and what it means for us, ordinary people, who have seen our real wealth erode as the cost of everyday needs has soared: housing, energy, food. When regular people have more money, they can pay their bills. They can pay off their loans. They might even be able to save some money, so that they have a cushion in tighter times that doesn't rely on a credit card. But the wealth shift orchestrated by the free traders and the tax avoiders has made the whole world more and more vulnerable. It's crazy.

What I would like to see in these debates about the bailout is this: You can have the money, with all these conditions (oversight, an equity stake, limits on executive compensation etc)--and... you know all those tax cuts we gave you that added more money to the huge pots of money you guys were sitting on already? We'll have them back, thank you very much. You can pay for your own bailout. For icing on the cake, we could also end that war that has continued to bleed us dry, because we just can't afford it anymore.

I got an email yesterday from Food First about the crisis that I wish I could link to, because I think it was a very powerful synopsis of the problem. But it doesn't appear to be on the internet yet except as a comment to a New York Times blog post! But you can at least see that here.

Other links:
Food First website
Article: Let Them Eat Free Markets