(it’s always darkest before the) GREEN DAWN

Well, the election results are in, and, as has often been the case in Tennessee, it wasn’t easy being Green. The best percentage of the vote received was the race run by Green fellow traveler Jon Davidson, who garnered 20% of the vote in State House District 52 against well known liberal Democrat Rob Briley—yeah, the family they named the parkway for. Talk about being part of the establishment…. Twenty percent! Over twenty-two hundred votes, nearly as many as statewide candidates Howard Switzer pulled in the governor’s race (2600) or Chris Lugo in the Senate race (2500). Well, at least the Dems can’t call us spoilers. Harold Ford lost it more or less fair and square, probably snowed under by the boobs who turned out to make their religion’s idea of marriage a part of the Tennessee Constitution. All these people so scared of homosexuality…you know, there have been tests done that show that the people who are most homophobic are the ones who are repressing the fact that they have those feelings…as the misadventures of Tom Foley and Ted Haggard have recently demonstrated. The queer tidal wave that all those people are afraid of is—them. The vote in Tennesee demonstrates that we are surrounded by a seething sea of repressed homosexuals! Well, as one of my teachers sarcastically commented, “If you can’t control yourself, control someone else!”

But, I digress….in U.S. House races, Katie Culver and Robert Smith also received better percentages than our statewide candidates, Katie with 1800 votes and Robert with 1,000—if Howard and Chris had done as well as either of them, they would have won about 18,000 votes, still not enough to change the election or even get our party name on the ballot, but I think it would have left them feeling more satisfied. I’m surprised they didn’t do better, especially Howard, since it was obvious Phil Bredesen was going to win in a walk. Howard campaigned intensively among those who have been dumped by Bredesen’s Tenncare purge. He should have done better.

Commenting on the election, Switzer said, “I think the main thing is we don’t have an extensive enough network to get the word out about our candidates. … We have to become more vocal advocates for who (we are) and what we want, pass the word and expand our networks. But, with (electronic voting machines) who knows what the vote tally really was? Our votes are counted in secret in an electronic box we are supposed to have unwavering faith in. “

The biggest kinda-Green vote getter in the state was Ginny Welsch, who won about 3600 votes in Nashville, where conservative Democrat Jim Cooper had no problem retaining his seat. Ginny explored running as an out-and-out Green but backed away when she discovered how much antipathy the label can ignite among ignorant, reactive Democrats, who are, after all, a major voting bloc that any serious candidate somehow needs to cultivate.

I talked with Jon Davidson, who was disappointed in his showing—a friend of his in the state legislature told him that just having his name on the ballot in an otherwise uncontested race should get him about a third of the votes. Jon tested this by spending “only about $100” and not doing any campaigning beyond putting up a website and getting a 45-minute interview from the Tennessean—which, alas, only appeared on their website. Neither Senate candidate Chris Lugo nor gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer got even that much of a nod from Nashville’s newspaper of record.

Jon noted that his district, according to who votes in the primaries, is about 90% Democratic—he thinks a lot of people just voted the straight Democratic ticket—but he found it gratifying that, in the neighborhood he used to live in, he got 40% of the vote. “And I got 38% of the absentee vote,” he added–”but I don’t know if that was from my friends in the touring music community or from pissed-off Republican soldiers in Iraq.” Jon also noted that turnout in his district was no higher than it had been for the 2002 midterm elections, in spite of all the publicity about how crucial this election was going to be. Nationwide, the turnout was a disappointing 40%.

Some of the best news for Tennesseans was Steve Cohen’s easy win over Harold Ford’s cousin and a Republican for the U.S. House seat from Memphis. Steve has long been the most sensible person in the Tennessee Senate, and he will be sorely missed there, but I look forward to his influence at the national level.

Someone he won’t be seeing in Washington is Richard Pombo, head of the House Environmental Resources Committee, a California representative who went down to defeat. Pombo’s name had become synonymous with putting human greed ahead of the welfare of the planet. He has been replaced by wind turbine entrepreneur Jerry McNerney. Thank you, California.

Tammy Duckworth lost to a Republican. In case you don’t remember, the National Democratic Party literally moved her in from out of state to compete in a race where Christine Cegalis, a fairly radical anti-war candidate was already in place, because they didn’t think Ms. Cegalis could win. Maybe she wouldn’t have won, but neither did Ms. Duckworth. Did Rahm Emmanuel and the Democratic Campaign Committee learn anything from that? Somehow I doubt it.

And I’m not that upset about Harold Ford losing here in Tennessee. Unlike Ford, Bob Corker is honest enough to admit he’s a Republican. We didn’t need to advance the career of a so-called Democrat who wanted to privatize Social Security, who supported anti-environmentalists like Richard Pombo, and who voted for the Patriot Act and the Torture-is-not-torture (Military Commisions) Act. Hint to Harold: try taking Jesse Jackson for a role model instead of Colin Powell.

In general, as I look over national Green Party results, I see the same thing we find in Tennessee: the more local the race, the better the Green Party did. And, while I love tilting at windmills as much as the next old hippie, I think the lesson is clear: we need to follow our own philosophy and act as locally as we can. We need to be working on school boards, zoning boards, county commissions, and the like—we could see our long-term strategy as moving up to winning mayoral races and then state legislature positions. That’s the route individual politicians take, and I think there’s a reason for it: you have to prove your worth at a lower level of responsibility before people will trust you with a higher one. It’s slow, it’s not glamorous, and time is short; but I think it’s the path we have to follow. It’s all about taking care of the details.

That seems to be how the rest of the party sees it.

In a “campaign wrapup letter,” Chris Lugo said:

“Although my ultimate goal would be campaign finance reform,

in the meantime, the practical reality is that progressive candidates in Tennessee

are going to need to do fundraising to get their message out.  Even though we are

going to continue to lose in Tennessee for some time to come, we won't even

register in the eyes of most Tennesseans until we start doing some serious fundraising.

Regarding running Greens locally versus statewide, I think we need to continue to do

both.  In Knoxville (we) are running Greens locally and even though they are losing,

they are continuing to build, having received thirty five percent in one recent Knoxville

 election. I think running candidates for statewide office is very important though, because

that puts (our) voice into the election, which is ground (zero) for the body politic.  There

 is no time when people are more concerned about politics or what is happening in the

 country than during an election, and that is exactly when we need to make sure that we

are being included.”And, as I already said, Statehouse candidate Jon Davidson got 40% of the vote in a

neighborhood where he was known personally without doing any campaigning at all.

So that's what we as Greens will be working on:  networking, fundraising, and local,

 local issues.

The Democrats got themselves elected as part of a national spasm of revulsion.

 They have no coherent plan, and all too many of them have no clue either.

John Conyers, who waxed so eloquently about the sins of the Republican administration,

 now joins Nancy Pelosi in saying “impeachment is off the table.”

 Perhaps this is just a diplomatic move.  Perhaps impeachment will be on the table again

 in the Spring, if the White House sticks to its guns and starts stonewalling Congressional

 attempts at oversight.  But if the Dems stick to form and get all namby-pamby, I believe

the country will neither forgive them nor return to the Republican fold.  Winston Churchill

remarked that “America will always do the right thing, but not until they've tried everything

else.”  The Republicans haven't worked; the Democrats won't work.

There is a Green dawn glowing on the horizon.

(and I don't know why this bottom part got all funny looking!)

music: Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”

SCROOGE LIVES

This next bit is a little complicated to explain, but bear with me.

If you own your own home, but don’t have much income or other assets, and quote/unquote “need” nursing home care at the end of your life, Tenncare will pay for it, but then they are entitled to sell your home to recover their expenses. In a way, it sounds reasonable, but it seems less reasonable when we examine its actual effects and its impact on Tenncare’s overall nursing home expenditures. When we start to look at the “need” for nursing home care and consider what this says about our society, this provision starts to look like another case of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer.

First, the numbers. Tennessee, in combination with the federal government, spent 994 million dollars on nursing home care last year. This covered about 24,000 people out of the approximately 33,000 in nursing homes in the state last year. Nursing home care costs an average of about $46,000 a year per person in Tennessee.

How much was recovered by sale of the assets of deceased nursing home patients?

Fourteen million dollars. About one and one-half percent of the total. If you figure that each home was worth about $140,000, that’s a hundred homes. A hundred lower-class family homes. A hundred families in which the older generation passed away, leaving nothing much but memories, ’cause the government took the old homestead. What a trade—a family’s center knocked out to cover point zero-one-four percent of a government bureaucracy’s bloated budget—and that budget is funded in part by the taxes that family paid. Shouldn’t they be getting something for their money? This is a prime example of government policies contributing to the erosion of the middle class in America—but it’s not just a government policy.

More math: thirty-three thousand people at forty-six thousand dollars a year each comes to about a billion and a half dollars. That’s the budget of the nursing-home industry in this state, and as long as lobbying is legal they will be working to keep that money going into their pockets, even though home care has consistently been shown to be better for most older peoples’ health, happiness, and longevity—not to mention their pocketbooks. Home care costs about half of what nursing home care costs.

I know about this from personal experience. My mother used to live far away from me, and, as she grew older and her health and ability to care for herself deteriorated, she needed to stay in nursing homes occasionally. She was fortunate enough to be able to afford an upper-level nursing home, but when I and my family visited her there, we found it impersonal, shabby, and depressing—and it was one of the “nice” ones.

When her condition deteriorated to the point that she needed constant care, we figured out how to build a place for her adjacent to my son’s home, and arranged for her care among family members and close friends. She is taken care of by people she knows, loves, and trusts—for a fraction of what it would cost us to hire strangers in an institution.

But we are among the lucky few in this country– because my mother has a pension that’s actually sufficient to cover her care at our informal, not-coverable-by-insurance level, because I and my friends have the kind of flexibility in our lives that allows us to work with her, and because we get along well enough as a family to figure these things out. I am painfully aware of my rare good fortune, but I think it shouldn’t be so rare.

The focus of government policy on elder care should be on keeping people with their families and in their homes to the greatest extent possible. This should focus on psychological and emotional issues as well as economics, and should be coupled with a deeper change of attitude: we need to abandon the materialistic view that everyone must be kept alive as long as possible regardless of the cost and quality of life that result. It is OK to die when you’re old. The bulk of medical expenses and interventions in a person’s life come when they are dying; it would be easier on them, us, and the economy to shift the paradigm into recognition that death is a graceful part of life, not a desperate battle to the finish. I’m not specifically talking about assisted suicide or euthanasia here, just putting natural death on the same footing as natural birth. If we can get millions of people to crave artificially sweetened, carbonated, caffeinated liquids that don’t quench their thirst, we ought to be able to put an idea like “easy death” across.

This is pretty radical. It’s a long way from the economics of elder care, in a way, but then again, when I say it’s radical, I mean it’s a view that encompasses the root of the situation. That’s what we Greens are about—rethinking the fundamental assumptions of our dysfunctional society. Old age, sickness, and death are inevitable—so what’s the intelligent way to treat them?

music:  James McMurtry, “Hands Like Rain“

IT’S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID! (AS WELL AS THE ENVIRONMENT)

I must confess I suffered from a severe buildup of paranoid fantasies coming up on this election. War on Iran, massive vote stealing, riots, martial law—I was feeling downright apocalyptic. Would Bush use his new powers to declare Cindy Sheehan an “enemy combatant”? What about Harry Reid? What about…ME??

What a relief that none of it happened—or hasn’t happened yet, anyway. Too many people were too mad and watching too closely for any major funny business. The day after the election, at his “Ding-dong-the-Rummy-witch-is-dead” press conference, Bush sounded so shrill—was it just a symptom of how desperately he wanted to go on a drunken bender, or did somebody in the CIA have his balls in a vise? Will we ever know?

Then again, maybe they just let it go because they figured it was time to get out while the getting is good. The economy is teetering on the brink; let the Democrats catch the blame when it collapses, while the Bush family shuffles off to Paraguay—did you hear about that? Apparently Poppa Bush is buying a huge tract of land down there. If it was good enough for the original batch of Nazis….

Hey, Kennebunkport’s gonna be under water, but not central South America—and besides, the Paraguayans don’t have much in the way of extradition treaties with the U.S. Maybe Rummie will join them down there—there’s already talk of indicting him for war crimes in Germany now that he’s lost his diplomatic immunity. No, he didn’t commit war crimes in Germany, that we know of, except for maybe an extraordinary rendition or two, but German law allows anyone who’s committed war crimes anywhere in the world to be held accountable in Germany. For some reason, they’re real sensitive about that over there. Something about Nuremberg…..

Meanwhile, America is about to go Weimar, or at least Argentine.

Our trading partners in Asia are starting to think they’ve bought enough dollars and U.S. securities and now it’s time to diversify their holdings. The Chinese, especially, are cooling their eagerness to prop up the U.S. economy, which for a number of years has “grown” via the mechanism that China is loaning us money to buy things from them, and then layering it further by loaning the US money to pay back earlier loans. This economically dysfunctional relationship is drawing to a close, it seems. If the rest of the world expresses its lack of confidence in the U.S. by ceasing to buy our Treasury bills, then all the Democrats’ plans about social security, health care, and college will go in the toilet. That’s the bad news—the good news is that our country’s ability to finance overseas military adventures will also be curtailed. So, the Dems had better push that increase in the minimum wage through soon, because it could become meaningful to a lot more of us sooner than we’d like to think.

There are rumblings coming from a lot closer to home, too. Savings have largely been replaced in this country by ownership of real estate, but the housing boom in America is beginning to cool, and people are finding themselves paying more for their homes than those homes are worth—and, as employment contracts still further, finding themselves unable to pay for their homes at all. The bankruptcy rate, which punitive anti-consumer legislation was supposed to slow down, is approaching the level it was at before the Republicans tilted the field in favor of lenders.

Here we see the unintended consequences of the greed of the medical system, as more than half of all bankruptcy filers cited medical debt as a major reason for their plight. The medical parasite is causing life-threatening damage to the organism. It’s that simple, and that complicated. It affects not only individual Americans, but Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance as well. Will these players gang up on the medical business, now that the Democrats, who are marginally less supportive of endgame capitalism, are in charge? Maybe.

Now, it’s possible that the Democrats’ recapture of the legislative branch of our government will inspire our overseas creditors to cut us some slack, at least for a while—but the Dems will have to at least attempt to reverse the Bush junta’s financial overindulgences—Bush still has the power to veto such reversals, so any real reform will have to wait until after 2008, which is a long time in the life of an economy. Will the Democrats have the spine to do this? Most of them supported the various so-called “free trade agreements” that started destroying America’s economy, and many of them are in thrall enough to big business to still be in denial about that. Bush’s tax cuts were just the icing on the cake.

My advice? Pay off your debts if you can. Grow a garden. Make sure your home is energy-efficient. If you have investments, do like Dick Cheney and move them overseas as much as possible. The recent election may have saved us from fascist weirdness, but the financial weirdness is just beginning.

music:  Steve Earle, “Ashes to Ashes“

TRUTH IN STRANGE PLACES AND LOTS OF IT

This month’s Truth In Strange Places Award goes to Phillip F. Anschutz, owner of Regal Cinemas, a well-known Republican who has contributed heavily to many anti-abortion and anti-gay rights campaigns. He has also helped finance and distribute the new environmental movie, “The Great Warming,” which is drawing evangelicals into the anti-global warming movement. I read a review that informed me that the movie ends with the words,“the current leaders who, in the face of all this evidence, do nothing about the problem run the risk of going down in history next to Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.”a line clearly aimed at the Bush-Cheney junta.

Isn’t it ironic that a couple of years ago, “MoveOn.org” couldn’t get away with comparing Bush to Hitler, and now a Republican billionaire is doing it for us?

A runner-up in for the award goes to Thomas Friedman, long a cheerleader for George’s big adventure, who, days before the election, excoriated the administration, saying, “Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.” Well, we voters rose to the challenge—the next question is whether the Democrats we elected will rise to the challenge.

Let’s not forget that Robert Gates, Bush’s nominee to replace Rumsfeld, was involved in the Republicans’ extra-governmental, extra-legal arms-for-hostages deal that scuttled Jimmy Carter’s Presidency and went on to help funnel more weapons to both the Iraqis (Saddam Hussein) and the Iranians, depending on which one had the advantage in the long war they fought in the 1980’s, and that Gates has a history of bending the facts to fit the political desires of his Republican masters. Carl Levin, the Democratic Senator from Michigan, could derail this—but he’s waffling on it. Write him and tell him what you think! I did!

And of course we have the “Neocons Repent” article in Vanity Fair. It would be funny to read their backpedalling if their harebrained ideas hadn’t cost so many innocent lives. Ken Adelman, the former member of the Defense Policy Board who originally predicted the war on Iraq would be a “cakewalk” now says:

“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

How long had he known Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the junta? How many decades? Would this testimony stand up in a war crimes trial? I suppose that depends on whether Nancy “too nice” Pelosi or Ray McGovern is the prosecutor. Meanwhile, I wish his “Truth in Strange Places” runner up award could be a cream pie in the face. A shaving cream pie….eeww!

music: Jennifer Berezan—the whole world is burning

GLOBAL WARMING—NOTES FROM ALL OVER

Australian meterologists have declared that the country’s current drought is the worst in a thousand years—and its end is nowhere in sight.

I’m quoting from England’s Manchester Guardian: Mike Young, a water management expert at the University of Adelaide, told Reuters this week that Australia’s long-term climate was changing. “When the drought breaks we will not return to cooler, wetter conditions. It is the worst type of drought because we are not expecting to return back to the old regime. The last half of the last century was much wetter. What we seem to have done is … built Australia on the assumption that it was going to be wetter, and we haven’t been prepared to make the change back to a much drier regime.”

Which, by the way, is what scientists are starting to say about California.

In the Northern Hemisphere, this summer found ships sailing the Northwest Passage along the northern coast of Canada—now there’s a phrase you haven’t heard much, yet– through straits that have historically been blocked with ice year-round. On the Canadian and Alaskan tundra, hundreds of ponds are disappearing as the permafrost melts—the warming, drying soil means increased CO2 and methane releases—we’re worried about the wrong meth—it’s the methane that’ll kill us—legalize herb and no one will fool with methamphetamine! but i digress—

Yet another study has found that the supply of edible fish in the ocean is dwindling fast. An industry spokesman has disputed the findings.

Scientists in England recently announced that in November of 2004, the Gulf Stream slowed down and stopped for ten days before it picked up and started moving again—nobody expected it—nobody knows what it means—Prof. Harry Bryden of England’s National Oceanographic Centre claims that the overall slowdown of the Gulf Stream’s flow so far is likely to generate a one degree Centigrade drop in temperatures in England over just the next ten years; a complete failure of the Gulf Stream would drop England’s average temperature by as much as six degrees. That would make the climate of southern England akin to what we currently find in Iceland or northern Norway—and the north of England? Will that be Spitzbergen? And what might happen to Scandanavia and northeastern Europe, especially if the rest of the world is warming up while they cool off? That’s a recipe for bigtime storm systems—there’s general agreement among climatologists that the changes we are seeing will mean more precipitation, especially in northern latitudes. More snow. Hmm. Not really the kind of climate you want to have a crowded, high-tech society in—too bad there’s one already in place there. What’s going to happen? It’s beyond our predictive abilities to tell, but we should have a definitive answer on that one in about thirty years. Stick around, it’s going to get interesting—as in the Chinese curse. Speaking of the Chinese curse, let’s take a look at East Asia.

There is now a semi-permanent haze over Southeast Asia from burning jungles in Sumatra, Borneo, and Java—it ain’t just forest fires—multinational corporations and greedy individuals are destroying the complex, carbon-sequestering ecosystem in order to sell lumber to China and plant monoculture palm plantations for the production of that wonderful new ecological fuel, biodiesel. America’s very own Archer-Daniels-Midland Company has proudly announced that they are going into the palm-oil business bigtime, touting it as “alternative energy development.”

Can you say, “greenwashing,” boys and girls?

Not only are our planet’s jungle lungs being destroyed, the smoke from the fires is a definite health hazard. The government of Singapore advises people not to go outside or exercise strenuously on the worst days, but not everyone has those options, only those wealthy enough to afford air conditioners. Children in the region are growing up with permanent lung damage.

But permanent lung damage from environmental degradation is not only a third world problem. A recent study found that kids in the South Bronx (OK, that’s pretty third world) are suffering from a 25% asthma rate due to the particulates in diesel fuel exhaust—the occurrence of their asthma attacks rises at rush hour, when the most fumes are being emitted. Hey, the good news is, biodiesel has significantly lower emissions than petrodiesel—but the bad news is, biodiesel is going to have to take a big bite out of either our ability to breathe or our ability to eat in order to become a mass fuel. Which would you rather give up? Breathing? Eating? Or driving?

Music:  Julian Cope, “Drive She said”

REM, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It“