DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

The August 2^nd election was one of the happier ones I’ve participated in lately, if only because I adjusted my expectations. I really liked David Briley, but it was becoming obvious that he wasn’t going to win, so I voted for my second choice, Karl Dean, because I didn’t want to see a runoff election between Bob Clement and Buck Dozier. Well, Karl Dean ended up the front runner, at least in this round. It’s not often that my guys win, these days.

But I didn’t have anything to worry about on the Buck Dozier front, because Howard Gentry surged on ahead and came within just a few hundred votes of taking Clement out of the race entirely. Gentry is an easy-going, soft spoken guy, in my experience (which consists of talking to him a few times about diet and nutrition in the health food store where I used to work), but I bet he got a little steamed about that. When you lose an election by that small a margin, you can go back and think about all the little things you could have done that would have gotten you over the top. Almost taking out Bob Clement is small consolation for involuntary retirement from public life. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of Mr. Gentry.

The vice-mayoral race between Carolyn Baldwin Tucker and Diane Neighbors raised an interesting question: what’s more important, being populist or being progressive? I had been prepared to slam Ms. Tucker for being a fundamentalist homophobe when someone writing to fellow bloggers Sean Braisted and S-town Mike raised the point that, while Diane Neighbors is a “progressive,” she has also been known to ignore her constituents’ wishes and work to accommodate developers, while Ms. Tucker is known for responding to the needs of the people of Nashville. It didn’t change my vote, but I did choose to hold my fire.

The fundamentalist question decided another vote for me. When Ken Jakes praised Carolyn Baldwin Tucker, saying

” I AM VERY MUCH IN SUPPORT OF MS. TUCKER FOR VICE MAYOR. SHE IS A GOOD CHRISTIAN LADY WITH THE PEOPLE AND CONCERNS FOR NASHVILLE AT HEART. SHE WILL HOLD TRUE TO HER BELIEF EVEN IF IT IS NOT THE BEST POLITICALLY. SHE VOICED HEAVY OPPOSITION TO THE SEXUAL ORIENTATION ORDINANCE THAT WAS PRESENTED TO THE COUNCIL IN 2003. SHE VIEWS AN ELECTED OFFICIAL AS A PUBLIC SERVANT AS WELL….”

I decided that, although I had no clear idea where Lonnell Matthews Jr. stood on these questions, I’d rather vote for him. He says on his Myspace page that two of his favorite musicians are Bob Marley and “The Beattles,” and so I don’t guess he’s too Christian for an old spiritual hedonist like me, even if he can’t spell the name of one of his favorite bands.

The District One Council race, like the mayoral race and four of the council-at-large seats, will be going into a runoff, because the election split three ways without any candidate getting a majority. Ken Jakes got the most votes, 1500, with Lonnell and “Bug” Mason neck and neck at just over a thousand, somewhat to my surprise. Mr. Mason’s parents run one of the largest churches in the area, and I’m guessing that had something to do with his strong showing–but Lonnell beat him by just two dozen votes. Again, this election shows the power that just a few voters can wield.

In another local council race, former Green Party Senate candidate Chris Lugo came in dead last, with only 69 votes, but said that when he got involved in the candidate forums, he realized there was a lot of consensus about the issues among the candidates, and felt that he didn’t need to push his candidacy in order to see his issues advanced. Dude, that’s great, but if you want to be a serious politician you got to have more ego than that! Gee, maybe Chris is being an example of that “new paradigm” everybody keeps talking about….

The at-large metro council race has also been thrown into a runoff, with the top eight candidates who didn’t get the 10% of the vote necessary to secure a seat vying for the four remaining seats. Many of those in the runoff are former district reps who want to stay on, which increases my previously stated suspicion that a lot of people voted in their sleep. Tim Garrett, a slightly-liberal guy for whom I would not vote, was the only candidate elected this time around. He has been a metro council member and a state legislator–at the same time, no less–I guess he just likes to do the government thing. But his take on homelessness–”Left unchecked, this problem will discourage residents and tourists from spending time in our city’s vibrant commercial districts. I will work to increase the presence of police on the street to protect the interests of everyone who lives, works and plays in our historic city center.”–shows either a failure to understand the issue or else a facile pandering to the fears of mainstream voters, either one of which turns me off.

Fortunately, two of my candidates made it to the runoff–Megan Barry and Jerry Maynard. The one who didn’t, Jon Davidson, was hampered by medical problems and the Nashville Scene’s laxness in contacting him for a statement in their issue on the Metro at-large races. They left a phone message for him Tuesday afternoon for a story whose deadline was Tuesday afternoon, and so by the time he got back to them, it was too late. Yo, Scene! Try a little harder, hey? My man Jon woulda done better than that with a little help from your readers! But noooo……..you call him at the last minute! What kind of journalism is that?

But Jon was pretty happy about the results–he doubled the number of votes he received when he ran for the state legislature. In a press release, he said,”I believe that we will wind up with a better council as a whole after the runoff. I am firmly convinced that my controversial attempts to connect local government actions with the Iraq war and global warming forced some people to think, and if that isn’t a green victory I don’t know what is.”

Jon, to me a Green victory is when we take office. It’s not enough just to make people think. Come the the candidates’ school at the end of the month and pick up some pointers!

So, the runoff election will be September 11. Why do I think there’s something ominous about that date? Oh, don’t be superstitious! Just because the US overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile and SOMEBODY flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that date, doesn’t mean the US economy, which is starting to seriously crumble under the weight of the subprime bust, will be in total ruins by then. But hey, that’s another story…..

music: Kate Wolf, “The Hobo“

to get my fair share of abuse,” Mick Jagger wrote nearly forty years ago. Well, Mr. Street-Fighting Man, some of us are still going down to the demonstrations, but what we get these days is more like benign neglect than abuse, at least most of the time, at least from the public. The old days of passers-by shouting insults, flipping us off, and occasionally getting violent are no more. Like Al Gore in 2000, we have won the popular vote, but failed to gain control of the institutions.

The particular demonstration I went down to was a Hiroshima Day observance in Nashville, held at a busy intersection at rush hour. We were polite and stayed on the sidewalk—hey, there were only a couple dozen of us, compared to the hundreds who often turned out for early anti-war demos in this town—it was no time to be rude. And there would have been no point in trying to stop traffic, anyway—most of the drivers honked and waved and were generally friendly. “HONK TO STOP THE WAR IN IRAQ,” one of our signs read. If only it were that easy.

Of course, it was crazy hot, which I am sure cut into the turnout—and, as I said, people have started to sense that, although we are still free to demonstrate all we want in this country, the Bush junta has decided that it is cheaper and more effective to ignore us than it is to repress us.

A lot of people in our vast, unnameable movement are very freaked out about a recent dictat from Cheney/Bush entitled “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” My friends are concerned that this is means the Bush junta is about to start rounding us all up and and putting us in camps. Now, I have to admit that this presidential order is a fascist’s wet dream–it separates people from their money and property, which is a civil action, but does not actually arrest the people themselves–which would be a criminal action. If they took criminal action against someone, that person would be entitled to a lawyer and have some shreds of habeus corpus left–but, by keeping it as a civil action the junta manages to separate people from both their right to a free lawyer and their ability to hire one– <!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } plus, they tar any lawyer who will work for such a person with the same conspiratorial brush and open that lawyer up to having his or her property confiscated, too. Kind of a domino effect. Very clever, Karl. I mean, it’s thoroughly unconstitutional, but we have seen time and time again that the courts aren’t going to worry about Constitionality at a time of crisis like this.

Hey, the administration just got a passel of Dimocrats to roll over and vote for a bill that takes them off the hook for the illegal domestic spying they have been doing. They’ve got the Supreme Court in their back pocket. Why should they worry about a few peons out in the streets with signs? Our noise does not reach their ears. If it should, they will give us, as Napoleon once said, “a whiff of grapeshot,” or at least do their best to pick off some leadership, but they’ve got better things to spend their money on than locking up all of us.

F’rinstance, the Justice Department has decided to pursue its crusade against medical marijuana in California by threatening dispensary landlords with property confiscation for renting property to a criminal enterprise. No more heartbreaker photo ops of the Feds putting handcuffs on people in wheelchairs, just behind-the scenes maneuvering.

I think that, in spite of all their denial, they know full well that a storm is coming, and like the rest of us, they want to be the ones to survive. Unlike the rest of us, they have the power, will, and lack of morals to do everything they can to make sure of their own success, and so in their eyes they are performing triage on the human race, which means letting all of us inferior types perish, preferably through benign neglect–levees, bridges and steam pipes breaking, insufficient health care, financial collapse, that sort of thing. Sooner or later malnourishment, epidemics, and bad water will be on the list of acceptable collateral damage to make sure that God’s Chosen Genepool keeps on reproducing. Hey, they’re already acceptable everyplace else in the world–why not here at home?

They may be powerful now, but I think they’re too crazy to survive. Between their lifestyle habits and their twisted psyches, they’ll eventually kill themselves off, and then the rest of us can get on with the business of creating a peaceful, just, and gracious world–even if it’s no longer a very wealthy one. Peaceful, just, and gracious beats wealthy every time, in my book. Hang in for the exciting conclusion of this one–next chapter is, “NATURE BATS LAST AGAINST DICK AND KARL’S EXCELLENT CONSPIRACY.” You won’t believe how it comes out….. and I don’t know yet either!

music: Steve Earle, “Conspiracy Theory“

The collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis-St. Paul cut especially close to me because I have two kids who live in Minneapolis. One of them was out of town at the time, and I knew the odds were long on the other one having been harmed, but I was very happy to hear his voice on the phone. He had been nowhere near the bridge.

The thing about this kind of an event, though, is its longevity. That bridge didn’t just fall. It is fallen, and it will remain out of commission for at least a couple of years. Meanwhile, everybody in the Twin Cities is going to have to figure out how to work around that missing link, and wonder about the durability of whatever other bridges they use, because the big news out of the I-35 collapse was that it may not be unique for long. It turns out that there are about 70,000 bridges in this country that are in about the same shape, and that the American Society of Civil Engineers, not known for being a bunch of radical hotheads, has been talking up this number, and the estimated 190 billion dollars it will take to fix them, for quite a while. The I-35 bridge has been on the “repair or replace” list since 1990.

But the bridges are just the tip of the iceberg–there’s highways, water treatment and sewage plants, schools–the whole American commons is in disrepair. The engineers estimate it will cost 1.6 trillion dollars over the next five years to fix everything back up to standards.

Hey, we all put off repairing things. I fixed the tail light lenses on my truck with tape for a couple of years until a cop stopped me late at night because the plastic was flapping in the breeze and shining bright light in his eyes and that was an excuse to pull me over and see how I smelled, which was just fine, thank you, no vapors of any kind coming out of the cab of my truck, nosir. But, I digress….

Now, a hundred and ninety billion dollars is a lot of money–it’s almost forty percent of what we’ve spent in Iraq so far. And 1.6 trillion is about four times what the war has cost. It’s really a lot of money. And that is where we start getting to the roots of this problem.

One major root is the “no new taxes” mantra. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty made that part of his platform, and last Spring he vetoed a five-cent per gallon gas tax increase that would have funded, among other things, bridge repairs. Herr, Bush, likewise, jawed down a motion among Democrats to raise the gas tax back in 2005. As a result of this and, doubtless, other negligence, the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which had about $23B in it when Bush took office is nearly empty now, and will likely be exhausted by next year. Now, 23 bil is nowhere near 190 bil, but at least it was something. Congress actually passed a $286B transportation measure in 2006, but somehow there wasn’t quite enough money in there for bridge fixing. I guess the Repugs wanted the bridges to take personal responsibility and fix themselves, eh?

“No new taxes” was also the mantra that encouraged negligence of the New Orleans levee system, another catastrophe that just keeps on happening. With more attention to conservation and maintenance and less corporate welfare and military adventurism, neither of these tragedies, which have directly impacted far more Americans than the attack on the World Trade Center, would have happened.

What’s next, guys? Giving the Iraqi insurgents 190,000 AK-47s and pistols? Oh, yeah—already done that. Who needs foreign terrorists? We’ve got Republicans running the country!

The cool thing about this kind of terror is that it really is random and unpredictable and unstoppable. You just neglect it all and see what collapses next–and hope you’re not on it when it does. In fact, you don’t even think of it in those terms. That really lets you off the hook. You think of yourself as an advocate of “privatization,” and blame bridge failures and levee failures and medical care and social security failures on the ineptness of the public sector, conveniently ignoring the fact that the public sector is inept because you’ve been starving it to death by cutting taxes on those who benefit the most from this country: its corporations and its richest citizens.

You act as if “insufficient funds” was an inherent problem of government, and advocate privatizing America’s infrastructure–roads, bridges, water systems, health care and social security–as the answer. Yessir, private corporations are models of integrity and efficiency. Just look at the insurance companies, the oil companies, look at Enron–well, don’t look at Enron, it’s not there any more anyway. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN….HOLY SMOKES, BATMAN, IT’S DICK “DARTH VADER” CHENEY!

Excuse me… I don’t know what came over me. Anyway, you talk about privatization and making America “an ownership society” and all this kind of red, white, and blather, and just conveniently ignore the fact that for-profit corporations are corporations for profit first and whatever else second, and that with the onus of maximizing profit and executive salaries added onto whatever else they are supposed to do, they will be inherently less efficient–not to mention less responsive to the public they serve–than a government agency that is owned by we, the people of the United States.

But this public/private ownership question is only one root of the two roots of this decaying infrastructure problem. The deeper root, the deep green root, is this: We thought the gravy train was going to go on forever, and so we painted ourselves into a corner with individual, private transportation. When I was a kid and they were starting to build the interstate highway system, I looked at the huge cuts and fills that were being made to create the straight, wide roads and realized that we were altering the landscape for millennia. Blissfully ignorant of the imminence of peak oil, I nevertheless wondered, even then, if these marvels of engineering would become the stuff of myth in a few thousand years.

Later on, I watched this country’s financial decline begin in the early eighties and I started thinking of the maintenance of the Interstate Highway System as a huge millstone tied around America’s neck, as maintenance costs increased and tax revenues dwindled. I saw the presumption that owning an automobile was necessary for full participation in American life as an insidious form of fascism—you have to pledge a percentage of your money to the auto manufacturers and gas companies, as well as pay income taxes—we are forced to support corporatism or suffer the consequences of immobility, inconvenience, and isolation.

Now we’re beginning to reap the foolishness we sowed with making private cars the primary form of transportation here in America. Our economy was built on the supposition that oil would always be cheap and plentiful. It is no longer cheap, and soon it will no longer be plentiful, either. Last year, when oil prices hit a record high, the Israel-Hezbollah war was raging and there had just been a major spill at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. This year, when that record was broken, there was nothing in particular happening. Where will oil prices go the next time there’s a crisis? Further, production has dropped from the 2005 peak of 85 billion barrels a day—the forecast is that by next year we will be about 10% off that, at about 78 billion barrels a day, while demand just keeps on rising.

This is not a crisis that can be solved by ethanol production or electric cars or more nuclear power plants or so-called “clean coal”–tell it to the West Virginians! Some oreo politician spouting the feel-good “politics of hope” is just playing the other side of the coin to Cheney/Bush’s politics of fear, and neither one is in touch with reality. Amory Lovins recently said in Grist magazine, that he thinks that public policy is the least effective way to change the dynamics of our system. He holds out great hope for the private sector. I hope he’s right, because we are already in a train wreck of massive proportions, and there’s way too much inertia in government to make the changes we need to go through. Perhaps the current credit/stock market collapse will merely clear away the flim-flam and allow us to focus on real cultural transformation. Don’t count on it. And try to stay off bridges during rush hour. By the way, here in Nashville, there are three bridges on I-24 and on I-40 that are considered to be in about the same shape as the I-35 bridge. The good news is, they are mostly bridges that cross streets, and none of them are Cumberland River bridges. That’s good news?

music: Will Kimbrough, “I Lie“

It sounds crazy: with home prices rising beyond reason and value, banks start giving variable interest loans to millions of people who previously wouldn’t have been eligible for a home loan, due to low income. Was it “faith-based lending”? Then many of these people start defaulting on their loans, caught between the collapse of the US middle class due to outsourcing, soaring house payments due to the variable interest loans they took on, and the suddenly falling value of their homes . Some of the banks are mortgage specialists who go bankrupt because too few of their loans are being paid back. When they go bankrupt, the homes in question, which have been repossessed and are unsaleable for a variety of reasons, become the property of the bankrupt mortgage company’s receivers. Thus, millions of empty private homes in the US are now owned by multinational corporations…but what are they gonna do with ‘em? And what good does it do them? Especially since the housing price bubble has burst and home prices are sinking back towards sanity, which is nowhere near the amount of money owed on them?

“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” they say, and all those (mostly)boarded-up houses, in cities and towns all across America, are now lemons in the hands of multinational corporations that don’t give a rat’s ass about local communities. They are going to get squeezed, and the rest of us along with them. Where it is still possible, we will see the kind of urban displacement that the Supreme Court allowed in the New London eminent domain case. Those still living in neighborhoods with a high foreclosure rate may be pushed out so that upscale redevelopment can take place.

There’s another layer to this—these loans were put together into large groups–”bundled,” the Wall Streeters call it—and then sold by the banks to other companies, who, despite the obviously shaky nature of a financial instrument that depends on payments from a class of people who are being systematically put out of work, looked primarily at the fact that the classic Wall St. stock rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard and Poor, gave them good ratings. Due diligence, it seems to me, was not exercised.

In spite of what is a financial downturn for so many of us, Bush is right that the economy is strong. The economy is strong because money is flowing from the middle class into the bank accounts of the upper class at a faster and faster rate. The sale of these so-called “subprime loans” is just another example of this. America is becoming more and more of a two-tiered society, with government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy.

The case of the subprime bubble raises interesting legal questions, because there are laws against making loans that you know are likely to default. First, were the companies that made these loans acting in bad faith? Did they know that the people to whom they were loaning money were likely to default on their loans? Did they misrepresent the nature of the variable rates on these mortgages? What prudent person would make a loan he was reasonably sure would end up in default? Who would borrow money if they understood that, after a couple of years, their payments were likely to double? Smells like Enron spirit to me!

Sure, Congress should investigate, but, as with so many other things, it looks like the Democratic party will be shirking its constitutional responsibility. John Conyers has complained that there is too much Republican wrongdoing to investigate it all, so he has apparently stepped back from his earlier resolve to impeach the junta and is just trying to hold his breath until they leave. I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi did to make him fall in line, but I bet it was some kind of blackmail…on a black male….hmm…..if there’s a country left after this political, economic, and climactic freefall ends, I hope it’s a country with a nice, strong, Green Party…because the Republicrats and the Demicans are gaming America into a third-rate banana republic and blaming each other for it. When you start digging into the history of this real estate/loan bubble, it’s definitely a bipartisan creation. It’s embarassing to watch. It would be funny if it wasn’t about my life and the lives of everybody I know.

music: The House Band, “Pharaoh” (by Richard Thompson)

I was amazed to learn recently that a major chunk of the gasoline the US uses in Iraq goes for generators that are primarily used to run air conditioning—in tents. Air conditioned tents. In Iraq. In incredibly hot, sunny weather. All that sunshine pouring down, all that solar energy just bouncing back into infinite space, and American soldiers are getting killed driving fuel truck convoys to keep their air conditioning running—in tents. Why not just set the AC up outside and cool the whole country?

Now, it’s not “economical,” according to the current accounting paradigm, to replace all electrical generation with solar panels, but, even without the numbers, I have a gut feeling, Mr. Chertoff, that that is some mighty expensive gas-powered air conditioning…an application for which solar panels would be perfect—just bring ‘em in once, and they’re there…and while you’re at it, distribute solar panels to the Iraqis, by way of reparations.

They used to have 24-hour water and electricity, back before we started putting the screws to Saddam. They had a pretty nice standard of living over there, before we came along and trashed their country in the name of saving it…but anyway, neighborhood solar panel banks, owned and controlled by neighborhood co-ops, would decentralize the power distribution system and make it less prone to disruption from Iraqi freedom fighter attacks.

And, such a big bump in solar panel orders would bring the price down and prompt the development of even more efficient panels, according to those market forces Herr Bush is so fond of saying he trusts…..But NOOO…..we’re going to fight for our right to burn all the gas and diesel we can get our hands on. It’s the American way. Who cares if it’s killing kids in Iraq? We’ll solve the world’s problems by reducing the number of people on the planet through military competition. It’s the Republican way!

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Parliament has adjourned for the summer without passing the notorious oil law, which is always presented in this country as being about distribution of oil revenues within Iraq, but which is actually much more concerned with turning Iraq’s oil resources over to foreign companies for exploration,exploitation, and profit. That’s the best news out of Iraq in a while. Keep stalling, guys, something’s bound to happen. Maybe the US will go bankrupt—that seems more likely than a voluntary withdrawal at this point. The Dims want dominion and oil just as bad as the Repugs—they’re just not willing to play quite as nasty to get it.

Credit for this delay goes to the pressure of Iraqi public opinion. Oil workers actually went on strike over the question, in spite of persecution by the US- backed government. Hey, union busting is the American way, right? But it wasn’t just the unions—it was technocrats and bankers and lots of Iraqis telling their parliament that the law was a very bad idea. Once again, as with Hamas in Palestine, democracy is working in the middle east—just not the way the Bush junta wanted it to.

I mean, nothing seems to be going their way on this. Trying to drum up widening the war to Iran, they complain about Iranian help for the insurgents, which makes no sense because the insurgency is largely Sunni and the Shi’ite Iranians would like to see a stable Shi’ite Iraq–why would they destabilize a friendly government? Then we learn that not only are the US government’s claims of Iranian meddling counterintuitive, the gov’s own statistics show that a majority of the foreign fighters we have captured in Iraq have come there from our supposed ally, Saudi Arabia. And then there’s the little matter of the 190,000 AK-47’s and pistols that have gone missing since the US supplied them to the Iraqi army–we thought. Comin’ back atcha! And can I ice that cake with the story of fighter jet parts sold to Iran by the Pentagon even as Bush rattled his pecker–I mean his saber–at the Iranians? Soo…it turns out the US government has done more to arm its so-called terrorist opponents than anybody else!

That is a complicated issue, really. The dims cried foul, but only because they’re eager to out-pecker rattle–I mean out-saber-rattle–the Bush Junta when it comes to Iran. As a committed pacifist, I’m not in favor of anybody having any weapons, let alone using them, whether they’re pistols or fighter jets. So, when I see these kinds of antics, I have to laugh at the comedy of errors even as I hope nobody else gets hurt.

Way too many people have died already, and all this fighting and revenge is a distraction and a detraction from the central issue of creating a sustainable, just, and graceful human culture on this planet. A distraction because it keeps us from focusing on what’s really important, and a detraction because every human life lost, every gallon of oil burned, every piece of military hardware manufactured to feed this bonfire in the Middle East, means there is one less human intelligence, one less unit of energy, one less bit of our resources and manufacturing capacity available to create solutions to the mess we are in.

The Dimocrats are apparently right–that there is not the political will in Washington to end the war, but it if that is a fact, then it is indicative of a complete moral failure on the part of America’s politicans. It’s not just Bush and Cheney and Gonzalez that need impeaching, it’s Reid and Pelosi and Rahm Emmanuel and the rest of the sycophantic moral cowards who have infested national politics. Can we stop them before they get us all killed?

music: Jackson Browne, “Soldier of Plenty“

Solar Tribe, “Enlightened Paramecium”