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Clean Money

The Republican scandals—Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney—are all about filthy lucre, dirty money given to politicians in return for promised favors. Bribes, in other words. Talking Points Memo has a list of the perpetrators. They're almost all Republicans, members of the "Grand Old Party," so the website is called Grand Old Docket. As Josh Marshall puts it: "They're some of those basic questions young children learn to ask in civics class. Who represents me in Congress? And when do they go on trial?"

A few states have begun to attack the problem at its source, by instituting public financing of elections. The McCain-Feingold Act was an attempt to roll back the worst excesses at the federal level. If politicians didn't have to beg for money to get elected—in the process selling their votes to the highest bidders—truly representative government, government for the people rather than for the moneyed class, might have a chance to revive. 

Good news! Yesterday the California Assembly passed a clean-money bill to get the ball rolling in this state, and the author of the bill was none other than our Berkeley assemblywoman (once mayor) Loni Hancock. Don Thompson of AP reports:

The bill would provide public money to candidates who voluntarily give up outside contributions — similar to systems in use in Arizona and Maine. Connecticut last month approved public financing that will take effect Dec. 31.

The voluntary system would require candidates to first raise a large number of small donations from within his or her legislative district before qualifying for public financing. The candidate would then have to agree not to spend additional money, including his or her own money. Candidates who don't accept the limits would be subject to the same fundraising rules as are currently in effect.

A committee analysis projects public financing could cost tens of millions of dollars in each election cycle if a large number of candidates participated.

Monday's 46-24 party-line vote sends the measure to the Senate, en route to a joint Senate-Assembly committee that would try to work out details. If the plan is approved by lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, voters would have to adopt the system before it would take effect.

Common Cause has been pushing the bill, and its website touts it as a "huge victory" for the progressive group: "This Clean Money victory marked the first time a public-financing bill has been passed by a floor vote of either house of the California Legislature." (There's a PDF of the complete bill here.)

This is a huge victory for all Californians. Next: the state Senate. And after that: public financing for federal elections. It would be a far better way to spend our tax money than the current expensive public financing for the prosecution and imprisonment of Republican ex-congressmen.

Ron Dellums Is Inspiring

Last Thursday night at Humanist Hall in Oakland, the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club met to hear the three main candidates for mayor of the city. Ron Dellums, Nancy Nadel, and Ignacio De La Fuente each spoke for about 20 minutes and answered a few questions.

Nadel and De La Fuente are members of the city council—De La Fuente is president of the council—and until Dellums unexpectedly entered the race in October, the race between them was thought to be too close to call. Nadel is known as a progressive firebrand. Trained as a geoscience engineer, she was on the regional water board (East Bay MUD) for several years before being elected to the council eight years ago. Her signature issues, as listed on her campaign website, are violence prevention and employment discrimination, and she also focuses on the environment, the arts, and housing.

De La Fuente, who emigrated from Mexico as a young man, is the first Latino to rise to political leadership in Oakland, though certainly not the last. He is a machinist and union representative, and in his 16 years on the council he has focused on business and housing development, both downtown and in the neighborhoods, especially in the Fruitvale district. He is known as a dealmaker, and his campaign website stresses his work against drug-related crime and predatory lending.

Dellums is from a different era, if not a different planet. He was a member of Congress from 1971 to 1998, representing Berkeley and Oakland. Once a Marine, he was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, and he worked for a sane military policy as member and later chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the House. He fought against apartheid, for arms control, and for equal rights for all. Dellums represented his liberal district well, and he could have remained in Congress as long as he wanted. When he retired, he tapped his assistant, Barbara Lee, for the seat, and she has continued the Dellums tradition as a popular, progressive representative. (In fact, Lee was the only member of Congress who courageously voted to deny George Bush sweeping war powers in the aftermath of 9/11.)

Dellums is also an impressive physical presence. Tall and lean, he carries himself with the strength and poise of a natural leader. I first met Dellums in 1980 while coordinating Bay Area Census Bureau offices. When he visited the Oakland office, he delivered an inspiring speech that infused the Census workers with the certainty that their work was supremely important. Count the people well, they were told, and the people will have the representation and the public funds they deserve. He made us all believe.

At the Wellstone Club meeting last week, it was clear that Dellums has not lost his touch. He is still able to make his listeners feel they are important, that he is listening to them, and that he can lead them to do precisely what they want to do. He spoke of his vision of Oakland as a model city. With 400,000 residents—almost equally white, black, and Latino, with a significant Asian minority—it is "small enough to get your arms around and large enough to make a difference." We should embrace our diversity, he said, and create a city that is "coherent, cohesive, vibrant, healthy, educated, and informed." Dellums cited statistics on income, education, and health that made clear Oakland is not yet that kind of city: for example, one in three children live in poverty. "Knowledge is responsibility," he said. "Once you know, you have to assume the responsibility of doing something about it."

The brief speech was inspiring, not because of Dellums's resume but because he spoke these words to himself and about himself as much as to the Wellstone Club audience. He asked them to take responsibility, just as he was willing to come out of his comfortable retirement to take responsibility. Together, he emphasized, we can make a difference.

Both Nadel and De La Fuente are hard-working politicians in the northern-California liberal mold. Either would likely be a good mayor. But on Thursday night they spoke merely of their qualifications and accomplishments, as though they were at a rather formal job interview. Dellums spoke of a vision, and he asked his listeners to make it their own.

The latest poll indicates they will. Though many voters are still undecided, Dellums has a commanding lead: 40 percent, to 21 for De La Fuente and 16 for Nadel. As Jerry Brown leaves Oakland after eight up-and-down years, it looks like the post of mayor will continue to be held by a consummate politician. In the case of Dellums, that's not bad—the politician is also a truly inspiring leader.

Quote of the Week: George Bush

Bob Schieffer of CBS News interviewed George Bush on Friday. As usual, Bush blinked furiously at difficult questions and chuckled inappropriately at serious moments. But there was something new in his body language: he appeared more often supplicatory, leaning forward with narrowed eyes and a painful little smile, as though to say, "Please, please like me—whatever you may have heard." Bush knows he is in trouble, and he is trying to turn on the charm again.

Schieffer's most pointed questions were about unfettered presidential authority and torture. Asked if "there is anything that a president cannot do," Bush said:

You know, one of the--yeah, I don't think a president can tort--get--can order torture, for example. I don't think a president can order the assassination of a leader of another country with which we're not at war. Yes, there are clear red lines, and--it--you--you--you just asked a very interesting constitutional question. The extent to which a president, during war, can exercise authorities [sic] in order to protect the American people, and that's really what the debate is about.…

There is no question that Abu Gah-reb [Ghraib] pictures not only--we were disgraced, and it--it--it--it--I know it caused a lot of people that want to like us to question whether they should, and equally important it gave the enemy an incredible propaganda tool. No question. That's why it was important for us to investigate, to expose, and to hold people to account so people see there was a consequence for the behavior.

He's right, there are clear red lines—and he has crossed them. Therefore, it is more important than ever for us to investigate, to expose, and to hold people to account so people see there is a consequence for the behavior. Not merely the occasional PFC or SPEC4 who followed orders, or even a lightly reprimanded warrant officer who killed an Iraqi commander. There are colonels and generals and high DoD civilians, who gave the orders. There are the secretary of defense and the attorney general and the vice president, who developed the policies that led to the orders.

There is also the president who disgraced the country, who continues to disgrace the country every day, and he too should be held to account. Impeach Bush now.

CBS transcript corrected from video.

Global Warming: A Political Disaster

The earth is warming rapidly, as a direct result of what human beings are doing. The solution is also within our hands, if only we would grasp it.

Our insatiable thirst for energy is creating a pall of CO₂ that traps heat and deranges the biosphere. If we fail to change our ways, global warming will endanger the survival of the species: agriculture will be disrupted, many species will be exterminated, and coastal areas inhabited by hundreds of millions of people will be drowned.

Most world leaders now understand the scope of the problem. That's why the Kyoto Protocol was adopted by almost every nation, and that's why the recent Montreal meeting to extend international implementation of the Kyoto was supported nearly universally. But George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their Big Oil friends are oblivious to the dangers.

Bush is also trying to muzzle everyone who wants to speak truth about this issue. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the latest intended victim in Bush's War on Truth. In an interview with Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, Hansen said that

officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said it was all a big misunderstanding, that the agency simply wanted better "coordination," and that therefore scientists would be allowed to speak only about "scientific findings," not to make "policy statements."

Hansen responded, "Communicating with the public seems to be essential, because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic." He also pointed out that NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" and he said that the restrictive "directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents."

Hansen has continued to speak out, but some interviews have been canceled as a result of the new restrictions. Revkin writes:

Mutual Radicalization

When Yasser Arafat was the democratically elected leader of Palestine, George Bush refused to meet with him. As a result, Arafat's Fatah party was unable to accomplish anything significant during its ten years in power. It enjoyed insufficient leverage to improve Palestinians' security or economic well-being, much less to negotiate an end to the Israeli occupation and establish a truly independent state; and it dissolved into ineffectual local fiefdoms and factions, concerned with little more than maintaining their own shreds of authority.

Many Palestinians lost hope in Fatah, which they saw as insufficiently radical to deal with their country's unending repression and hopelessness, and when they were given a chance to vote, they elected the more radical alternative, Hamas. So now Bush is hinting that he will not deal with the newly elected government unless it renounces the radicalism for which it was elected and recognizes the legitimacy of Israel. At the same time, with characteristic illogic, Bush praised the voting process itself, saying, "We're watching liberty spread across the Middle East." It's all part of a pattern, as John O'Neil and Christine Hauser suggest in the New York Times:

Mr. Bush brushed off suggestions that the results marked a setback to his policy of lessening conflict in the Middle East by promoting democracy. In the last year, Iran has voted in a hard-line Islamic government, Iraq has given religious Shiite parties a dominant place in its new government and Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood have done well in elections in Lebanon and Egypt.

William Blum makes much the same point in his book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower: US intervention abroad creates enemies of the US. Bush's unilateral actions generate equal and opposite reactions. A radical American government that considers itself above international law turns potential friends into adversaries, some of them anti-US politicians and some terrorists.

The Hamas leaders and Bush are two sides of the same coin. They reinforce one another's views of the irrationality and bad faith of the other, and each becomes more firmly convinced that his own radical views are correct and necessary. BBC News reports:

A Hot Time

The earth is getting hotter, and 2005 set a new record, according to NASA. The dashed line in the graph (click for a larger version) shows the global annual mean temperature from 1880 to 2005, and the smoothed curve in red represents  the 5-year mean. The trend is ever upward, as AP's Malcolm Ritter reports:

Researchers calculated that 2005 produced the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.…

Hansen said … that 2005 reached the warmth of 1998 without help of the "El Niño of the century" that pushed temperatures up in 1998.

Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed a bit more than 1 degree [Fahrenheit] in total, making it about the warmest it's been in 10,000 years, Hansen said. He blamed a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The Environment News Service has more details:

The ranking of 2005 as warmer than 1998 is a result mainly of the large positive Arctic anomaly, or variation from the norm. Excluding the region north of 75N, 1998 is warmer than 2005. The team says that if the entire Arctic Ocean were excluded, the ranking of 2005 might be even lower.

The quasi-regularity of recent El Niños at intervals of about four years suggests the likelihood of an El Niño in 2006 or at latest 2007. In such a case the 2005 global temperature record will almost surely be broken.

Global warming is now 0.6 degrees Celsius (°C) in the past three decades and 0.8°C in the past century.

It's a crisis, and George Bush is not doing anything about it. In fact, several interlinked environmental crises loom, and the policies of the US government are falling short in nearly every area. A new report on environmental sustainability from Yale and Columbia universities (in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the European Commission) ranks the US 28th in the world, lower than every other rich country except Belgium. The 2006 Environmental Performance Index measures countries in six areas:

Orhan Pamuk and Turkishness

It has always appeared strange to me that the Turkish government denies the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918. After all, it would seem easy enough to admit that yes, regrettably, it happened—but we didn't do it. It was the work of that bad old Ottoman empire, they might say, but we followers of Atatürk are modern citizens of a secular world who have always embraced the rule of law and the importance of equal rights for all. The founder of our nation overthrew that ancient despotism and, as the quasiofficial website says, he "upheld the principles of humanism and the vision of a united humanity."

Unfortunately, however, the historical demarcation between Ottoman rule and the Turkish republic is not quite neat enough to allow such a claim. The Young Turks, who overthrew the sultan in 1909, were the modernizing precursors to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's rule (and he was himself a Young Turk). Their nationalism, based on the same sources of "scientific" racial superiority that led to Nazism, led them to abandon earlier Ottoman inclusiveness and persecute Arabs as well as Armenians in the name of Turkishness. Atatürk's military consolidation of Turkish power also drove a significant Greek population out of Izmir (Smyrna) and the rest of western Anatolia, which was historically part of Greece. The Ottoman identity morphed (and narrowed) into Turkishness.

When my wife and I traveled to Turkey in 1999 to see the solar eclipse, our erudite tour guide was an underemployed economics PhD whose parents had come to Istanbul from opposite ends of the Ottoman empire. His mother was Bosnian, his father Georgian. He considered himself Turkish. The conflation, like the eclipse, was total.

Criticizing the Ottoman empire, therefore, is considered equivalent to criticizing the Turkish republic, especially when pointing to events that occurred during the last ten years of the empire, like the Armenian genocide. Those events did not happen, according to the Turkish government, or at the least they were not genocide but rather battles and refugee movements such as occur always in wartime—and besides, the Armenians were fighting against the Ottoman empire.

But the events did happen, as surely as the genocide of American Indians, so when the Turkish government invokes the infamous Article 301, which forbids "public denigration of Turkishness," it appears retrograde and foolish. And when it invokes 301 against the extraordinary novelist Orhan Pamuk, its foolish stance is sure to be noticed, and that's unfortunate at a time when Turkey is bidding to become a member of the European Union. Pamuk, author of the wonderful novel Snow, was interviewed last year by the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger; he said "a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey" and pointed out that it was "taboo to discuss these matters in my country."

Pamuk was charged under 301, like many other Turkish writers and intellectuals, but yesterday his case was summarily dropped. Not, unfortunately, with a ringing endorsement of the principle of free speech, but with the excuse of legalistic questions about the scope of judicial authority. In reality, the government almost certainly dropped the case because it was an embarrassment in the midst of EU negotiations. Sure enough, EU enlargement chief Olli Rehn welcomed the development, but he also said it was not enough:

Defeating Pombo

This November, the Democrats need to win a net 15 seats (out of 435) to gain control of the House of Representatives. Given the power of incumbency and the partisan drawing of most districts nationwide, that is a tall order. But each district is a separate race, after all, and with good candidates and a good message the Democrats could capture the House and begin impeachment proceedings twelve months from now.

One district ripe for change, despite its gerrymandered Republican shape, is the 11th in California. It looks something like a seahorse, and if you click on it for a larger view, you can see that it has its head in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley from Manteca to Lodi; the body and foot include the exurban stretch from Tracy to Morgan Hill; and the tail bundles high-end suburbs like Blackhawk with mid-range Dublin and Pleasanton. It was designed by the California legislature to vote conservative.

Nevertheless, it skirts the eastern edge of the famously liberal Bay Area, and according to Our Congress contributor mschmidt73, the population is 49.6 percent minorities. George Bush beat Kerry by only 3 percent in 2004, and Barbara Boxer won the district in 2002. With the job-weak economy, the chaos in Iraq, the presidential claims to be above the law, and the Abramoff corruption scandals, the 11th could well elect a Democrat on November 7.

The current representative is a one-time rancher and full-time rapacious conservative, Richard Pombo. As part of his radical private-property fixation, he wants to sell the national parks; but he has no trouble being bought and paid for with dirty money from Jack Abramoff. The organization called Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington (CREW) recently named Pombo as one of the ten most corrupt members of the House (PDF here). He is especially dangerous on the environment, as Jim Carlton reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Last year, Congressman Richard Pombo and his staff considered selling off 15 national parks, monuments, preserves and historical sites, along with naming rights for visitors' centers and hiking trails, to corporate bidders.

Crazed by Drugs

The FEMAtization of the government, as Tom Englehardt calls it, has been most apparent this month in the botched implementation of Medicare Part D. George Bush's prescription drug plan is confusing and frustrating for most recipients and pharmacists, expensive for some recipients, and much more expensive than it needs to be for all taxpayers. Only the drug companies are happy with it, because Medicare is forbidden from negotiating for the better prices it could readily command, and they stand to make enormous profits.

Part D, unlike the rest of Medicare, is administered through multiple insurance companies, each of which has a somewhat different plan. The companies are advertising lavishly and misleadingly to get the business, and yet they are free to change their plans at will, adding or subtracting covered drugs, while recipients cannot change plans easily once they have chosen. Part D requires copayments, reimbursing only 75 percent of the first $2,000 a person spends in pharmaceutical outlays after a $250 deductible. Then the program pays nothing until spending hits $5,100 (that's called the donut hole), whereupon 95 percent reimbursements commence.

The bizarre system, unconnected to the doctor and hospital parts of Medicare, seems designed to increase the costs for those services as well. It has already created a nightmare for many poor and elderly people. In yesterday's New York Times, Robert Pear writes about some of them:

Mix-ups in the first weeks of the Medicare drug benefit have vexed many beneficiaries and pharmacists. Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said the transition from Medicaid to Medicare had had a particularly severe impact on low-income patients with serious, persistent mental illnesses.

"Relapse, rehospitalization and disruption of essential treatment are some of the consequences," Dr. Sharfstein said.

Dr. Jacqueline M. Feldman … said "relapse is becoming more frequent" among her low-income Medicare patients.…

Medicare's free-standing prescription drug plans are not responsible for the costs of hospital care or doctors' services. "They have no business incentive to worry about those costs," said Dr. Joseph J. Parks, medical director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, who reported that many of his Medicare patients had been unable to get medicines or had experienced delays.

Many states have begun to assist patients who can't get their drugs; but the states may not be reimbursed by the federal government. The program is a fraud and a scam. As Michael Hiltzik points out (in the Golden State blog of the Los Angeles Times), it began as a fraud, when Congress was told the ten-year cost would be less than $400 billion, though the Bush insiders knew it was expected to cost $535 billion. The current estimate is $700 billion. And yet patients still can't get what they need. Hiltzik writes:

Quote of the Week: Vernell Crittendon

The sanctity of life is alive and well in California. Convicted murderer Clarence Ray Allen is not. He was executed in San Quentin on Tuesday, as AP's Don Thompson reports:

Having had a heart attack in September, Allen, California's oldest condemned inmate, had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor.

''At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life," said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. ''We would resuscitate him."

And then execute him. That will teach him, will teach all of us, that the state of California values life and will kill to prove the point. It's illogical, unjust, immoral, and impractical, as I have noted before.

But the spineless California legislature still refuses to impose a moratorium on state murder. They sure don't want to appear "soft on crime." Just 646 more executions to go.

Hat tip to Harry Shearer and Le Show.