The List: Yes. No. What?

+YES+
+Ellen Goodman's piece on the Bush "No Regrets Tour." He doesn't worry about history in the short term. He doesn't worry about history in the long term. That's because he has people telling him who the good historians are--see Condi Rice below.

+A simpler Christmas and Holiday season, aided and abetted by a Pacific Northwest snowfall.

+Dan Rather making gains on his $70 Million lawsuit against CBS, which seems to be leading to the conclusion that a) the president did pressure CBS and b) CBS caved to the pressure on the Abu Ghraib story.


-NO-
-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggesting that we will soon thank Bush, and when "Asked about historians who say Bush is one of the worst presidents, Rice said those "aren't very good historians." on CNN.com. Yes, because historians aren't normally trained to look back at things and compare them... they just must be bad ones.

-Lexus commercials for reliving your childhood Christmases by delivering a car to your loved one. 1) these commercials have always been ridiculous, and 2) they are just crass at a time when I have spoken with so many people who have simplified and realized how little they miss all the "stuff."

-Dick Cheney on torture on The Moderate Voice.com “Did it produce the desired results? I think it did…it’s been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.” Yes, we don't have those bothersome principles to stand up for anymore...


?What?
?Evangelist Joel Osteen's blank stares on Larry King's interview with him, when he was asked about gay marriage, and the article in Newsweek contesting the conservative right's interpretation of it. He claimed to not really have looked into the issue of gay marriage (but he can still oppose it), had not read the article, and indeed, almost seemed to be unaware that there was a printed media outside of his own media circle.

?The Madoff pyramid scheme and the losses to people who should know better. What happened to all of the advice about diversifying your accounts so that you didn't lose everything. Goes to show, once again, that greed trumps common sense when deregulation is the mantra. Does this give you faith in privatizing social security for everyone? Of course it does...

?Obama buddy Axelrod on Rick Warren's presence at inauguration as a "healthy thing." Unless you happen to believe in equal rights, not discriminating, or think that there is such a thing as a kinder, gentler homophobia...

?Chip Saltsman, what are you thinking? "The Magic Negro"? "Star Spanglish Banner"? Who knew that the RNC "big tent" would be back, but for bigots... Must have been going for Colin Powell's vote.

The American Dream, and Stuff...

The New York Times story on the Bush Administration's stoking of the mortgage bonfire demonstrates a couple of interesting points about home ownership in the United States. The first is the fact that there is no "market" when it comes to housing, if you are deregulating and advocating policies that convince more people to borrow beyond their means when it comes to a mortgage. While it is a complete hypocrisy within conservative thought, to believe in a market but toy with the conditions that regulate it, it is not limited to them. The lack of a broad range of ideas regarding property ownership, which excludes everything from Libertarian to Marxist thought, suggests that the only viable parties buy in on this notion of encouraging home ownership at the expense of reasonable consideration of debt.

The other major flaw in this thinking is that it is also a policy that leads us in pursuit of more "stuff." Jerry Seinfeld, when he was first a stand-up comedian used to do a bit on how we got our "stuff," and how often we did not know what our "stuff" was, or how we got our "stuff." The mortgage bonfire, as the NYT calls it is the ultimate example of a focus on consumerism and materialism. The Bush administrations policy, in complicity with both political parties, focused on living out the American Dream through the things we have rather than the relationships we cultivate with friends and family. Instead of making home ownership a possible outcome of the American Dream, it was made a goal of it, and like Seinfeld, we wake up with a stuff hangover that then leads us to ask, as the president is quoted as saying, "How did we get here?"

It is refreshing to see many families focusing on spending time together, doing things with one another, rather than accumulating more stuff. It would be great to see more people considering their spending more consciously, all the way up to and including home ownership. The American Dream should be about the quality of our relationships in our communities and the world, not merely focused on the material world.

Obama and Rick Warren--inclusiveness versus vision

Gay rights activists are upset at the inclusion of Rick Warren for the inauguration, to which the Obama camp replies that they are seeking inclusiveness, and they are reaching out. This is where the future Obama administration needs to distinguish between inclusiveness versus laying out a progressive vision. The choice of Warren is a problem, because it is suggesting that inclusiveness is vision, which it is not.

The United States, especially since the McCarthy era, has demonstrated a notable lack of inclusiveness, discussion over wide-ranging ideas, and a willingness to consider and debate ideas from the left and from the right. That millions of Americans can not only hear about, but actually believe that Obama is a socialist, displays an astounding lack of understanding of what anything remotely on the left stands for, in terms of policy. While this may seem like an unrelated, I would argue the contrary. At this point, U.S. politics has been so devoid of intelligent debate from left, right and center, that we mistake inclusiveness for vision.

Warren can be included by being invited to the inauguration as a guest. However, acknowledging his ideas (which as a Christian, I myself find impossible to get to his oddly split-personality decision) is much different from laying out the the path Obama believes we should take. The use of Warren is not "inclusive," it is tacit approval of his position. Have him there, but then show Warren, Americans everywhere and the world that you have a different and more progressive way of looking at the world; you do this by having someone who is acceptable to the gay community and to those who are supporters of the gay community.

So now we are left to wonder; is Obama really just being inclusive, or is this just a muddled vision?

The List: Yes. No. What?

+YES+
+The World Wildlife Fund's criticism of Brazil's plan for the Amazon. Losing Amazonian forest in chunks the size of Rhode Island is not a plan.

+Jon Stewart's brilliant interview with Mike Huckabee on gay marriage. He goes to the main points incisively, and Huckabee ducks, dodges, and never answers.

+Not often I agree with the Vatican on bioethics, but yeah, don't send in the clones...


-NO-
-The Bush administration's theocratic move eliminating mandatory scientific input for decisions made about federally protected wildlife. Brilliant. Now we should eliminate lawyers from consulting on legal decisions, economists on the economy, and sociologists on social issues. Wait, the last one already happens...

-Voting down an auto deal because you hate the UAW, as southern senators appear to have done. Way to stay focused, keep the salient issues on the front burner. It's those pesky organized laborers that got us into this mess anyway, isn't it...? All cars are designed from the assembly line up... The UAW is not who needs to be watched.

-The brilliant plan to fight abortion by defunding Planned Parenthood, as reported on Slate.com's William Saletan on his blog Human Nature. Planning parenthood would be a natural deterrent to abortion, wouldn't you think?


?What?
?Oregon's own Linn County School Board 3-3 split on whether or not to keep the "Bunny Suicides" in the library. It's like they're neither dead nor alive, just in limbo; what to do... You do have to wonder about the quality of life in Halsey, Oregon, at the moment.

?This should be a "no," but with corruption so blatant, it just defies imagination--how brilliant was Blagojevich? "Are you tapping my phones now? How about now? What if I spoke to someone about selling a senate seat now? What about if I threaten a children's hospital?"

?...And then there was Blago's lovely philanthropic wife cheerleading in the background... Although I have heard "F*ck the Cubs" from Cubbies fans...

Freaky Friday

America's long-term short-term problem strikes again. According to a report from NYSE reporters there was a strong uptick in sales on Black Friday, one of many U.S. days dedicated to consumption. The article talked about how $41 Billion dollars over the Thanksgiving weekend, up over 7 percent from the previous year. How is it that this is possible, as people stare down the barrel of one of the worst recessions in U.S. history?

One of the problems has to do with the fact that we are so focused on consumerism; Rostow (The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto Cambridge University Press, 1960) suggested that this is the highest form of economic development. Whilemuch has been written on economic development since then, I would argue that few concepts have become so ingrained in U.S. economic policy, as well as in our popular culture. One indication of this was the push from the Bush administration after 9-11 to convince people to continue spending, literally as an act of patriotism.

Recently we had friends up from Habitat for Guatemala, and they spoke about how the impact of the problematic global economy is immediate in Guatemala--doubling transportation prices, increased food prices and increased housing costs. People have had to respond immediately to transportation problems, or have suffered right away from increases in food costs. Luis Samoya, Director of HFH openly wondered when we would see the impacts of the recession, while he was already seeing it in Guatemala.

Two things are notable here. First, we live so well that we can be in denial longer than countries who have weaker economies. By this I do not mean that we live within our means, but our expectations are that we can continue to live beyond our means, and that things will eventually get better--even as we see people losing their jobs. One of the quotes I saw on television was (paraphrasing) "that since things were going to get bad, now was the time to get as much cheap stuff as possible on Black Friday." Americans do not have an economic cushion, we do not save enough, but we have a reality cushion which seems to prevent us from acting for long-term good.

We also have economic measures that continue to focus on short-term consumption as being necessarily good. Housing starts, short-term worker productivity, home sales, car sales, buying goods, etc. (and the list goes on) all are ways of measuring how well we are doing according to consumption. In the mid-90s, a group of economists began using an adjusted, Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)
as a way to include other measures of well-being into our thinking, rather than just focusing on GDP as our measure of economic well-being. You have to wonder, if we were using more of these indicators of the quality of life in our society, such as credit for volunteerism and housework, leisure time, encouraging lower environmental degradation and pollution, would spending on more things on Black Friday be important?

We need to a) decide what a good life is, and b) be willing to make conscious and proactive changes in how we reach those goals, rather than salivating like Pavlov's dog the minute Black Friday comes along every year.

America's Long-term Short-term problem

After paying over four dollars a gallon, the economy going into the tank (literally) and an election that was partially fought on the future of energy policy, you would think that it was time to do things differently in our use of resources. We now have the Big Three auto makers pleading for dollars to keep them afloat; you would think that it is irreversible, but not to fast.

Suddenly, oil prices drop and gas prices go down. All of a sudden there are questions about whether or not we can "afford" to implement some of the policies advocated by those concerned about the environment (including Obama) unless oil prices are high. That is what it takes to be economically viable and "worth" it. This highlights one of the major issues that we have in the United States, not that of economic viability, but the belief that somehow long-term solutions are not worth it unless we have short-term reasons to do the right thing.

In the late 1950s and 1960s Oscar Lewis and others introduced the notion of "the culture of poverty" (1959), which he thought characterized the poor, and prominently among them was the idea of an inability to defer gratification. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan publishes the now (in)famous Moynihan Report, applying this theory to Black subcultures. These ideas have widely been critiqued and discredited by sociologists and anthropologists, and appropriately so. I would argue further, however, that not only is short-term thinking not a characteristic of the poor, it is actually a characteristic of our dominant culture.

So, basically, we cannot make progress on clean energy, which also gets us off oil dependency, unless it can be sufficiently profitable over another form of energy. Our resolve to do the right thing has to last longer than just during the period of discomfort we feel while gas prices are high. We also need to stop listening to experts who suggest that it is only the market that drives alternative energy in the short-term, rather than long-term viable solutions. One of the major barriers to energy transition is that we need to move beyond the idea of short-term profitability in favor of long-term viability.

The nearing collapse of the U.S. car industry demonstrates the poverty of logic that the industry will do what is best to be profitable. Profitable companies look to the future and make changes which ensure long-term viability and sustainability, but the Not-So-Big Three have long focused on trying to avoid changes. Corporations need to learn that when you sacrifice the longer and sustainable view for short-term, non-sustainable profit, you will lose.