Category I want to understand my country.

Tread All The F$%^ Over This

Dusty Leave a comment

(To Secretary DeVos, Part II. Part I Here.)

It starts with the tests. It always starts with the tests. But really, it isn’t just the tests: it is the very concept of “accountability.” Accountability says that we need to have paperwork — data — that shows that our schools are accomplishing what they are supposed to accomplish, and that the teachers are doing what they are supposed to be doing, and not something else. Accountability is founded on the idea that we don’t trust teachers. We think — because sometimes it’s true — that teachers are in it only for the paycheck, that they don’t care at all about the students who pass anonymously through their room.

We all have that story, right? Of the teacher that taught exclusively through movies and worksheets? I’ve known several (Though honestly, I never had one when I was in public school.) at the various schools where I’ve taught: there was the health teacher whose entire curriculum was canned, who showed his students videos four days a week and then tested them on the videos on the fifth. There was the math teacher who, every single week, Xeroxed the next chapter out of his textbook and handed it to his students while he sat at his desk and read the newspaper. Yeah, I’ve known those teachers. And I think those teachers should be gently pushed out of the profession. Or maybe not that gently: because the harm they have caused to my profession is entirely out of proportion to their actual sins.

They brought the idea of accountability to the fore. From lazy bastards like that, we got the idea that there are many teachers who don’t work very hard. And in order to satisfy those who insisted that this was a serious threat to our children’s futures, lots and lots of people agreed to ensure — ACCOUNTABILITY.

And so we get testing. And it’s funny, because everybody hates testing — students hate it, parents hate it, teachers fucking loathe it: but everyone likes, or at least accepts, the idea of accountability which drives that need for testing.

I had a meeting last week. An all day meeting, with all of the English teachers in my — my company, I guess it is; it’s a group of charter schools here in Arizona, some in Tucson and some in Phoenix. It’s a private corporation that runs these schools, though they are public schools, so yeah: my company. (Which means, of course, that I and my fellows are precisely what DeVos wants teachers and schools to look like; except that we collect our money from the state, instead of from tuition or tax vouchers. Down, Voucher, down! Gooood Charter.) And in this meeting, the biggest complaint was about our current testing system. We bitched about it for hours. Literally. Killed the whole meeting agenda. Hey — English teachers, we got a lot to say. Especially about standardized testing. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a stupid testing system, no question. And the consensus was that we should get rid of the clunky thing.

But.

All of them wanted to replace it. With a different system, that would work better. One that would allow more essay tests, for instance, and that would follow our curriculum more closely. (Even though the curriculum is shitty. Know what the selling point for this curriculum was? It was made by other teachers. So it must be good. But it’s not. It’s shitty. But it’s ours, and we plan to follow it. And find a testing system that will align more closely to it. More on why the curriculum is shitty below.)

I don’t know if I was the only one who thought this, or if everybody else was just saying what they were supposed to say, but: I kept thinking — why do we even have a testing system at all? Why do we need to assess student learning? I mean, in theory we’re supposed to do it so as to make teaching more efficient: we learn what students know, and then we know what students need to learn, and then we teach that. That and, of course, accountability: because while the teachers are figuring out what the students know, the administrators and the politicians are using what the students know to determine how well the teachers are teaching.

Except that never works. Tests don’t show everything a student knows. The various members of any given class never know the same things, never need to learn the same things. In theory I’m supposed to differentiate instruction so that each student learns only and precisely what he or she needs, but of course that’s a joke: that flies in the face of public schooling, which is built around the idea of efficiency through mass instruction: I teach 100 students so that we don’t need 100 teachers. But that only works if I can teach 100 students basically the same thing. And I can’t even do that, because not all of the students care, or are interested, or see the value in it; not all of them like me and want to work with me; not all of them are present regularly, and not all of them are sober when they are present, or when they take the tests. And it’s even more skewed because they are sick, to death, of testing. I give them a test to find out what they know, and what I find out is: they know they hate tests. They stop trying about halfway through, and start guessing — if they didn’t start guessing from the outset. And there is nothing I can say that will change that. Somewhere, many years ago, a student guessed on a test and got an A, and every student who doesn’t care has been trying to replicate that feat. And not caring when it doesn’t work, because at least they didn’t put in much time or effort. And if they get a failing grade because of the test (Which is actually a bad idea, the administrator in my meeting told us: because the tests are designed to assess growth, and growth can’t be given a letter grade because letter grades show achievement, not growth [Example: I know everything my 10th graders need to know. If I take the test at the beginning of the year, I will score 100% achievement. When I take another test at the end of the year, I will show 0% growth — because I’ll score another 100%, because I already knew everything. So what’s my grade, the 0% the test says? Or an A+ based on my knowledge of the concepts?]. Which is funny, kinda, because my school administrators told me to make the test score a grade in the class, in an effort to get students to take the test more seriously. Didn’t work. Because:), they don’t really care because they’ll make up for the grade somewhere else, or else they’ll just live with a C as their final grade in English this year. Who cares? Not them.

So then you want accountability, right (Well, not you, but somebody sure does)? So how well am I teaching? Let’s say — because this actually happens a whole hell of a lot — students like my class, and they learn a lot from me; but they’re not too concerned with grades, and they hate standardized tests. So they intentionally blow it off as something of a protest, and shrug when I give them a bad grade — and then go right back to really learning, really thinking, really getting everything I’m trying to help them achieve. What’s my accountability score? Am I a rocking teacher for getting kids who don’t really care about school to pay attention and learn? Or am I a shit teacher for not getting good test scores out of them?

My answer is different from my school’s answer.

So there’s the thing, the main thing, that I am willing to see destroyed by Secretary DeVos if she manages to pull down the public education edifices in this country. If she wipes out standardized testing and the need for multiple layers of accountability, I will be ecstatic. I would like my school to know what I teach, how well I teach it, because they come and watch me teach. Frequently. Because they read my students’ papers, and see the comments I put on them. Because they talk to my students about what they learn, and their parents about what their kids have talked about this school year. On all of those measures, I’m a goddamn rock star. I would love it if DeVos pulls down the enormous wall of tests and lets people see what I can actually do. I would much, much rather be transparent, than accountable.

There’s more, too. The desire to make sure every school teaches the same thing, to ensure that every kid has the same access to the same learning, that everything bloody “aligns,” is a liberal obsession. It leads us to the Common Core, and standards-based education. Which is a goddamn joke, almost on the same scale as testing. Because here’s the thing (And it’s also a large part of the issue with standardized tests): who decides what the students need to learn? That’s the critical question about standards, and it never, never gets asked. But it has to be asked, because the ends determine the means: if I have to teach critical thinking, it’s going to mean a different class than if I have to teach grammar, which will be a different class from the one I teach to create cultural literacy.

So who decides? If it’s teachers, then you can expect to never actually get a working document: because every single person who teaches — who really teaches — a subject is going to have different ideas about the best way to do it, and the precise goals one should be aiming at when teaching that subject. Me, for instance: every English student needs to read Fahrenheit 451, and understand tone and symbolism in poetry. They have to do independent reading, and they need to write personal essays. They don’t ever need to study grammar or read any Victorian literature. There, see? I just caused every English teacher reading this to roll their eyes, and/or drop their jaws in shock. And when they come back and say every student simply MUST read Dostoevsky and the Brontes and diagram sentences, I’m going to puke black bile and India ink, just for them. No, that’s too gross. I’m just going to say No. Not in my class. Not ever.

So who decides? Easy: businesspeople decide. The ones with the money. They hire think tanks, who hire ex-teachers, who say whatever the businesspeople want to hear about what schools can do and what they should do. Because they are ex-teachers. What they hell do they care about what bullshit teachers have to put up with? They got out of the game already! Then those businesspeople bring their information to politicians and say, “This is what the business community thinks their next generation of workers should know. Don’t worry — we asked teachers, and they said all this was solid gold!” And the politicians, hungry for campaign contributions (“Did someone say gold?!?”) and eager to say they helped kids be ready for gainful employment, mandate that all schools in the district/state/country have to teach this vital information. And then maybe — maybe — some teachers sit down and talk about how they could teach that stuff. And they promptly disagree about everything, at which point the school district/state/federal government hires consultants: the ex-teachers who work for the think tanks. And they come and tell us, “It should be done this way.” And the teachers either think, because they’re like me, “All right, bro, but I’m still going to teach Fahrenheit 451 and tone and symbolism in poetry.” Or if they’re like most teachers, who were A+ students and still want to get gold stars, they think, “Okay, well I’ll try that and see if it works. I want to do what’s best for my students.” And there are the consultants, patting them on the shoulder and saying, “Trust me: this is what’s best for students.”

The first part of this process, up through the politicians, creates the Common Core. The second part, with the teachers, creates Engage NY. And the politicians love Engage NY and the Common Core because they make the businesspeople happy, and they mandate that all schools have to teach using that curriculum (or something just like it with a different name), and teach those standards (Or the same standards with a different name — like, say, the Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards, or AZCCRS.). Then they buy a testing system that aligns with those standards and that curriculum (And any liberals involved say, “Well, good, at least every student is getting exactly the same education and the same set of standards! That’s fair!”), and mandate that schools must achieve high scores or the state will impose sanctions. And then the Galileo company comes along and says “Use our test for practice, because then your students will get higher test scores on that state test!” And the administrators, who also have no idea of nor interest in what gets taught and how, buy the Galileo testing system because it’s cheap, and then they tell teachers that they have to do whatever it takes to raise student test scores on Galileo, because, they imagine, that will get students to do better on state tests (Because it aligns! IT ALL ALIGNS!), which will please the politicians, because it pleases the businesspeople. And so teachers — give up. And teach to the test. Because we can’t change the damn system, and we can’t escape it, and we might as well earn a decent paycheck, for once.

But we don’t, because the businesspeople also got the politicians to cut their taxes and cut spending, which means there’s less money for schools; and then they break teachers’ unions, and there’s nobody asking for more money for teachers, or trying to shift the focus off of testing and the Common Core.

All of that, Secretary DeVos. Kill the Common Core and all standards-based curricula, and let me decide, based on what I know and what my students want to know and need to know, what I should teach. Wipe out standardized testing, because if I want to know what my students know, I will assess their knowledge and ability in some way that makes sense: I will assign an essay, and I will read it. And you all can read them, too, if you want; (But only if Mrs. DeVos kills FERPA, the law that prevents teachers from allowing students names and grades to be public information, and which therefore keeps us from publishing student samples — even though one of the very best ways to learn is to read what other people just like you have written.. Please kill FERPA, Mrs. DeVos.) or you can ask me how they’re doing, and I’ll tell you. Because I will know. That’s actually my job, you know. And while you’re at it, lay off 2/3 of the administrators, from assistant principals to superintendents: at least 2/3 of all of the administrators that I have ever known have been even more incompetent and unqualified to run a school than — well, than you, Secretary DeVos. And that’s saying something. The other 1/3 have been outstanding: I would be happy with just those outstanding people running the school. And if you got rid of common curriculum, standards-based learning, standardized testing, and FERPA, then 2/3 of the school’s paperwork would disappear, and we wouldn’t need nearly as much middle management to handle it. Oh — and wipe out 504 plans and IEPs, would you? I have never yet had one of those things actually change the way I teach. Because if a student of mine has a learning disability or a challenge of some kind and they need extra time or extra help or a different standard of achievement, you know what I say? I don’t say, “Where’s your documentation, buster?”

I say “How can I help?”

Because I’m a teacher. Because I’m a good teacher.

So keep me, Mrs. DeVos. And if my colleagues are not good teachers, you can find out by talking to their students and parents, and watching them teach and talking to them about what they’re teaching; and then, by all means, fire them. Go out and find better teachers. Shit, if I’m wrong and I’m actually a terrible teacher, who’s been able to hide in the chaos and paper-smothered madness of modern education, then fire me, too. Find new people with new ideas and interesting subject matter. Let them make up classes — why does it always have to be math and science, history and English? Why can’t there be a class on video games? If it teaches critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, and good communication, who cares if it’s never been done before? Who cares if there isn’t a test for it? Let’s see if it works!

It certainly can’t be worse than the system we have now. Which, as long as you do it carefully and thoughtfully, feel free to break into smithereens. I’ll help.

Don’t Tread On This

Dusty 1 Comment

I don’t want Betsy DeVos to screw up my job.

I sympathize with her, in some ways. In several ways, actually: we both have names that are easy to make fun of. But, Betsy — are we not men? (I know, it’s a stupid joke. It is. Talk to me on Hump Day, Bets.) And we both got picked to do a job for which we were (are) grossly unqualified, me as a first-year English teacher, her as the most important figure in American education. But the main difference is that my time as a first-year teacher couldn’t have screwed up Mrs. DeVos’s chosen career as a billionaire lobbyist and political donor; but her time as the Secretary of Education could certainly screw up my chosen career. In a number of ways.

The thing is, though? It’s already pretty screwed up. My job, that is. In fact, there are several aspects of teaching that I wouldn’t mind at all if Secretary DeVos bit off, chewed up, and spit to her conservative Hellhounds, Voucher and Charter. I have such mixed feelings about education, in fact, that I’ve been trying for five days now to write this blog, but I keep getting tangled up and losing track of the path to Senseville. So the solution I’ve come up with is to split my thoughts into two sections, and write two blogs instead of one: one about the aspects of education that I hope survive this administration; and one about the aspects that I would like to see get thrown to the wolves.

We’ll start with the positives first, shall we? Because really, I think this is the greater issue. I think we would be in worse trouble if this stuff were lost than we would be if the bad stuff remained. Though neither scenario is ideal, and I fear that both may be coming to a head, to a tipping point where we may all lose something precious — perhaps by clinging to something worthless. We’ll see.

All right. The first thing that I think when I consider the state of education today is, this is my life. I was educated by public schools, as were most people I know; and not to toot all of our horns or anything, but I know a lot of smart people. There are a huge number — millions — of really freaking smart people in this country that went through American public schools. It’s hard for me to see public education as doomed and failing when I know scientists, artists, lawyers — and of course, teachers, lots and lots of teachers — who all learned most of what they know from public schools, many of us all the way through college and even graduate school at public colleges and universities. I know that it’s impossible to say how much intelligence or ability comes from schooling and how much from natural ability and inclination, and how much from home environment and social milieu; but still, education can’t be all bad when it helped make all of us. And I’ll bet anyone reading this could honestly say the same thing: you know a lot of damn smart people who went to public schools.

For me personally, I have been a part of the education system from the top side for almost two decades. I have taught enough people to populate a small town. For all the things we get wrong (See next blog, hopefully tomorrow), I do a lot of things right, as do my colleagues. The main thing that I get right is that I understand what my job really is, at the heart of it: I create an opportunity for learning to happen — and it does happen, most of the time, for most of my students. And then sometimes I am able to help create unique moments: moments of clarity, moments of revelation, moments of doubt, moments of change; and it is in those moments that people become something other than what they were before. That is what we are talking about when we use the cliche “making a difference.” In the strictest sense, I make a difference for everyone I teach, because if they hadn’t been taught by me, they would have been taught by someone else, which would have had a different result; but that’s not what making a difference is about. Making a difference is about changing a person in a definable, tangible, unique way. I have done that. I’ve done it with some students through personal relationships, as a friend or a mentor or even an inspiration; I’ve done it with specific classes I’ve taught that have been particularly useful for some; I’ve done it with books I’ve helped students to understand and with concepts I have made clear and meaningful; sometimes I’ve done it with a single statement, a single idea that I put into someone’s head. I don’t know that I’ve done it a lot, because I don’t know every time that I’ve done it, and I don’t know what “a lot” would be; but I know I’ve done it. I know that it’s good.

But even without this hippy-dippy touchy-feely stuff (He said in commiseration with the at least theoretical conservative reader who hates phrases like “make a difference” and thinks teachers are all liberal brainwashers who indoctrinate innocent American children into the wonders of multicultural homolovin’ Communism — aaaaaand now those conservative readers have left the building.), there is something purely valuable in public education, something I suppose I do my part for, but which mostly happens before students get to me: the basic foundations of an educated and thinking populace. Public education ensures that our society includes mostly people with a basic grasp of literacy and numeracy; people who understand how to read a newspaper and calculate their tax burden, even if they don’t always sit down and do either of those things. They can, and so when the opportunity and motivation arises, they do, and that is critical. Because as a society, we can work to get people interested and involved; and there are times in life when events conspire to get people interested and involved — such as the last election and the circus that has followed after it — but if the people can’t take in and grasp the information, then it makes no difference how much we work to get them interested or involved: they can’t be. If you can’t read a newspaper, then you can’t take part in a modern society. (If you don’t read newspapers or other genuine news sources, then you are choosing not to take part in society, but that’s a different issue, and not one that our education system is solving. In fact, it’s probably one that education today is exacerbating. Tune in next time, when despair takes over from hope!) And if you can’t take part in society, then all the democratic ideals in the world don’t keep you from being a slave. Public education does that extremely well. There are still gaps, still people who go through schools in this country and never master the basics and so line up for a life of toil and drudgery; but we do a far, far better job of ensuring that minimum ability in our populace than most societies have, and better than any society did farther back than a few centuries or so.

(Oh yeah: me personally, I teach critical thinking more than literacy or numeracy. I do a pretty damned good job at it, too. But that, unlike literacy and numeracy, doesn’t have to come from schools. The social environment does a better job of teaching critical thinking than it does of teaching literacy.)

I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want Secretary DeVos to close public schools in such ways that thousands, or tens of thousands, or even millions of kids are left without a fundamental education. I don’t want to create a new serf class, and trap them in the dark ages of the mind. Because ignorance sets, like concrete, and then it becomes impossible to dig out; you have to chip that shit away, bit by bit, blow by blow. And even then, you still get dumbfucks who think the goddamn Earth is flat. Jesus wept. If we defund public schools, or take away any educational standards so that a small religious community might decide that their children only need to learn to read the Bible and obey the word of their ministers and the Town Elders, then we may have children who become trapped in bubbles of ignorance — bubbles made of concrete. I don’t want that.

I don’t want to lose inspiration, either. I recognize that homeschooling done right can be incredibly effective — the two smartest students I have had in seventeen years of teaching (And really, I’ve had a lot of smart students, but when it comes to the absolute top, there is no. Freaking. Contest. It’s these two guys.) were two brothers who were homeschooled entirely through what would have been eighth grade, and then entered public schools as high school freshmen. But homeschooling, because it comes in a very familiar environment, is less likely, in my opinion, to be inspiring. Our parents can stand as role models for us, but it is much easier for them to be the people we rebel against than it is for them to be an inspiration; and when they are an inspiration, it often inspires us to imitate, not to create ourselves as something new. I think outside influences are better at that. What I mean is, my father is an inspiration to me as a hard-working and deep-thinking man; my mother is an inspiration as the kindest person I have ever known. But neither could ever inspire me to be a writer, because they aren’t writers. They don’t see literature the same way I see it: my mother sees spirituality that way; my father sees that inspiration in physics. And maybe I could have been like that, too — but like most kids, I intentionally went away from what they were, and so I am an atheist who reads literature instead of physics textbooks. My inspirations were teachers, and the authors they introduced me to.

I don’t mean to overstate this, or to denigrate the idea that parents are inspiring. But I think it is important for young people to see inspiration in people other than their family, in people who are tangibly different. School is not the only place that can happen — but it’s a good place. Because school is full of people who are, first, qualified, and often possessed of profound expertise, in their subject; and second, generally decent people. Teachers are good potential inspiration. I think it’s important that we be available for that, even if everything taught in schools could be learned from YouTube.

So I don’t want Secretary DeVos to make the job so difficult, so onerous, or so belittled and undercut, that every good person leaves the profession. We’re already working to drive them out, with our political factionalism taking on schools and teachers as handy scapegoats, or turning schools into the indoctrination centers that they should never be; and DeVos could make it worse, and may want to make it worse: anyone who opposes public education opposes teachers’ unions, which essentially means they oppose teachers. No, really: I understand the arguments against unions, and they’re stupid, but that’s not the point: the point is that teachers’ unions, even if they are too powerful, even if they are too greedy (And they’re not — that’s the stupid part), work only to protect and support teachers. The desire to break teachers’ unions is a desire to break teachers, often for financial reasons, and often for political ones. I think DeVos, with her support for Voucher and Charter (“Down, Voucher! Sic ’em, Charter! Attaboy!”), has both reasons for wanting to break teachers’ unions, and therefore teachers; if she succeeds on a national scale, she will essentially break us. I’ll tell you right now, I work in a charter school in a “Right-to-work” state, and while there are a lot of good teachers at my school, few of them are the new teachers who came up without unions. (Some of them are, which is awesome.) Most of us learned our skills in an environment where a union protected and sheltered us, and that made us better teachers. I’ve worked both with union membership and without, and teaching is unquestionably better with.

I hope DeVos doesn’t kill it. I hope nobody does. I worry that the wall, and the Executive Orders, and the Russian connections, are all distractions from the real harm that could be done to public institutions like the schools and the health care system, the free press and the right to vote. For that reason, I hope that Secretary DeVos, and President Trump, are exactly as inept as they seem to be. Because when it comes to education, this teacher wants them to fail.

On the Sixth Day of Blogging, Just Dusty Blogged for Me . . .

Dusty 1 Comment

A political post; his specialtyyyyy!

Here’s the truth: we all know what’s coming.

The Republicans are coming.

It’s like watching a storm coming in: the clouds roll out across the sky like a cloth unfurling; first they are white, then grey, then black. The color leaches out of the world. The wind turns cold and biting, and then the first drops arrive: if it is a summer storm, then the big, fat splashes are refreshing, though the tang of ozone in the air is alarming.

But I don’t think this is a summer storm. It feels like winter. Those drops are cold. We are shivering.

When the storm hits in winter, it brings quiet. The wind may howl, but after it goes, everything is still. Frozen. Asleep, or dead.

That’s what I think this feels like. Like the storm is coming, and we need to get into shelter, and cover everything. Anything left out will freeze solid, will turn black, will die. We have to cover ourselves, we have to batten down the hatches. And ride it out.

But hang on: winter storms don’t kill everything. Yes, there will be some death: the EPA seems doomed, and Obamacare will be lobotomized, dissected, cut down into pieces too small to sustain itself any longer. Maybe the Department of Education, too, since the nominee for Education Secretary is against public education. Irrevocable harm will be done to the environment as new oil leases are sold, new mining contracts offered, coal dug and burned at will. Internationally, the day of the strong man is on the rise: the new administration will be a friend to Putin, and Netanyahu, and probably Assad and a dozen others who hold an iron grip with their right hand. America will no longer be the defender of freedom around the world. But then, we haven’t actually been that for a long time: we have defended our interests, and little else. That will continue, to the joy of the exceptionalists. Surely we will no longer fight against genocide or oppression: pity is the most delicate flower, and will be the first to freeze.

But not everything will freeze. It will get deathly cold, but our shelters run deep, and are well-protected. And though the storm will be bad, it will not last long. That’s the truth: it will not last long. At some point, perhaps in four years, perhaps in only two when the new Congress is elected, the storm will break, and the skies will clear.

Then we will have to see if there is another storm behind this one. It is possible, you know. This storm may last eight years. If it does, we’re going to have a lot of frostbite.

But think of this. No party has won three elections in a row since Bush followed Reagan. Before that, not since Truman followed Roosevelt. Twice in almost a century have we had a Democratic president after a Democrat, or a Republican after a Republican – Johnson following Kennedy and Ford following Nixon notwithstanding, for obvious reasons. Which means that things will change. The storm will end. Believe it.

Here’s what we hope for, between now and then.

Hope that the storm does some good. Storms do, you know. They wash things clean, they break away dead branches and scour away debris. I am a progressive, and I believe in the power of government to do good things; but the truth is that our government has a lot of debris stuck in its branches. And some dead branches, I think. It is entirely possible that, even while it harms and breaks good things, the storm will also clear away some of the bad. We have to hope so. Maybe there will be some positive effects.

The key for us – for all of us – is going to be objectivity. We must be dispassionate, and we must be rational. Reasonable people can agree, can compromise, and what was most noticeably absent from this last election was reason — and therefore agreement, and therefore compromise. To keep the weather metaphor: some people like cold weather, like storms, like the rain; other people prefer warm sunshine. But only unreasonable people claim that there is nothing good about cold, that only warm sunshine can ever be acceptable; only unreasonable people claim to hate it when the sky clears and the sun comes out, at least once in a while. Reasonable people realize that Arizona summers are too freaking hot, that New England winters are too freaking cold, that the Pacific Northwest is too overcast and rainy, and the Southeast is too muggy.

We have to be reasonable. If the Republican control of the government leads to some good things, leads to some reductions in unnecessary regulations (and there are such), leads to some reversal of government overreach and invasion into private lives (and there is such), then we must be happy that good things are happening. We must not make the same mistake that unreasonable people have made when they have claimed that, for instance, President Obama has been bad for the economy. Or that the First Family has been an embarrassment to the country. Hate Obamacare all you want, but the economy has turned around since the recession. (And I say Fie to anyone who claims that the economy would have grown faster had the president for the last eight years been Republican. Fie. Prove it. Show me where economic predictions have ever been reliable. If a simple cause and effect were provably true, the argument would be over. It ain’t. So fie.) The Obama family are a model of dignity and grace.

So let’s not make the same mistake. Let us be reasonable. Let us take the long view and see: if a thing is broken or taken away, was that thing actually necessary? Perhaps not. Perhaps when Obamacare is destroyed by the storm, we will come out of our shelters when the sky clears and build something even better.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, when Miss Maudie’s house burns down during the winter freeze, she simply says this:

Miss Maudie looked around, and the shadow of her old grin crossed her face. ‘Always wanted a smaller house, Jem Finch. Gives me more yard. Just think, I’ll have more room for my azaleas now!’ 

‘You ain’t grievin’, Miss Maudie?’ I asked, surprised. Atticus said her house was nearly all she had. 

‘Grieving, child? Why, I hated that old cow barn. Thought of settin’ fire to it a hundred times myself, except they’d lock me up.’

‘But—’ 

‘Don’t you worry about me, Jean Louise Finch. There are ways of doing things you don’t know about. Why, I’ll build me a little house and take me a couple of roomers and – gracious, I’ll have the finest yard in Alabama. Those Bellingraths’ll look plain puny when I get started!’

There are ways of doing things. That’s how we have to see this. Like the burning down of an old house. It’s dangerous and damaging – and we have to try to fight the fire, and we have to try to save what we can from its flames – but we have to remember that after the storm, after the fire, life goes on. And maybe the new day will dawn even brighter. Anything that is destroyed that shouldn’t be, we can rebuild. Maybe we can even make it better.

Now: that is me being reasonable, because we should be, about Republican control of government. Republicans are not fools, and are not evil; though I think political parties are harmful to this country, it is certainly true that two parties are necessary, that one party alone, even my party, would be doomed. I think of when Frodo offers the One Ring to Galadriel, and she refuses it because she would become a queen, awesome and terrible — “All will worship me and despair,” she says, as she’s imagining it. Gandalf turns it down, too, for the same reason: nobody can use it safely, even if they mean to do good. The federal government is, in some ways, the Ring. The key to using it safely is in numbers: no one person can hold it for too long; no person can go it alone. Frodo never makes it to Mt. Doom without Samwise. Realize that, while we seem to have handed the Ring to Denethor, the madman on the throne of Gondor, it wouldn’t be any better if we hung on to it ourselves: we’d go mad like Frodo does, and decide to keep the Ring for ourselves. That is a fate to be feared no less because progressives have, I think, the right idea. I may write more about this another time.

For now, let’s talk about the other part of the winter storm scene from To Kill a Mockingbird: let’s talk about the Morphodite.

You remember the Morphodite, right? The snowman that Jem and Scout build, that is actually only a coating of clean snow over a big ball of mud? Right. Jem turns him into a caricature of their loud, obnoxious neighbor Mr. Avery, but at Atticus’s request, he changes it into a more innocent imitation of Miss Maudie, dressing it with her sun hat and hedge clippers. She, of course, takes it as an insult (though she doesn’t mind too much) and names it a morphodite, meaning a thing that changes its shape. The Morphodite melts in the heat of the burning house, and Scout and Jem have to clean up the muddy, filthy, sticky mess.

I think we all know what I’m talking about. I don’t, in theory, have a problem with the Republican party taking control of the government — though I am extremely nervous that, after they push through a conservative Justice for the Supreme Court, they will control all three branches of the Federal government — but we’re not just talking about conservatives or Republicans, are we? We’re talking about this guy:

You know — the Morphodite. See? Clean and white on the outside, nothing but sticky brown nastiness underneath. (And I’m not making a racial reference here, just using the symbolism of white snow=purity, and mud=shit=corruption.)

So here’s the thing with the Morphodite. He was picked largely as an alternative to a lot of bad choices, mostly (but not solely) on the Republican side. I still believe, absolutely, that he entered the race solely to increase his name recognition and give himself a veneer of patriotism; maybe to make some political connections he could use to his advantage for his business. I think nobody was more shocked than he when he started winning, and that state of shock continued all the way through the final victory. I mean, he’s been unprepared the whole way; it’s no less true now. And he’s filling his cabinet with people who are likely to support him and his ideas personally, with their own selfish interests in mind, rather than people who are civic-minded, or who will likely consider what is best for the American people before considering what is best for themselves. Just like him.

The man’s a narcissist, that much is clear. He acts like a spoiled child: and he seems happiest when he breaks things and gets attention, which he then turns into more attention as he mocks the people who chastise him for breaking things. He thrives on attention. It is why he entered the race, why he ran so hard and why he has acted the way he has since his election.

So what do you do with a spoiled child who acts out for attention?

You ignore him. Don’t give him the satisfaction. Don’t give him what he wants, because it is the only thing he wants, and he doesn’t care in the least if it is good attention or bad attention. All he wants is for people to talk about him.

So stop. Stop using his name. Fortunately there are a thousand alternatives, from John Oliver’s call to make Donald Drumpf again, to the various versions of orange-themed insults that plaster the internet. Any of those are fine; he wants to see his name, his actual name. I think he prefers The D_____, actually, though clearly the last name, associated with the business, is the #1 priority. But there are so many others, too: Rump. Dump. Chump. Chimp! Lump, Slump, Gump, Hump (Wait — not that one. Too close to home.), Bump, Thump, Clump. So many possibilities, and not a one of them will give him what he wants.

If you feel a call to protest, please do. But address your concerns to the part of the government that is actually still a government. And when the reality TV guy comes on stage — change the channel. Or better yet, just turn him off.

Let him melt back into a puddle of goo. Then we can have a couple of kids rake him up and throw him away.

Never Stop! Never Stop Fighting Until the Fight Is Done!

Dusty 1 Comment

Hey. HEY!

Stop being sad. Stop it.

I know: I feel the same way. This was not the result I was expecting. I was growing more and more stunned all last night as I watched  the results come in, and in, and in. I watched the commentators on CNN and then on BBC being just as stunned.

We didn’t think this was possible. We didn’t think this was our country.

It was possible. It happened.

And this is still our country.

It is not The Donald’s country. He did not win us. I know he thinks he did, and at some point today I’m going to have to watch a victory speech from that smug  asshole that is likely to make me vomit. He is going to have to start lying —

Wait. I honestly can’t believe I actually wrote that.

His lies, ongoing and ever more egregious, will now focus on trying to convince people he hates that he doesn’t hate them, right before he begins working to enact policy to prove that he hates them. The hypocrisy, and the assurance of our gullibility, will be infuriating. I’m already annoyed that my Republican friends are crowing over the victory. And I know I’m going to be mad a lot over the next four years, at least.

But this is still my country. And like it or not, that rotten son of a bastard is going to be my president.

My wife says he’ll never be her President. She said she may not be able to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance for the next four years.

Good.

We all know exactly what happened: millions of people looked at their options, and chose what was, to them, the lesser of two evils. Millions more of us think they chose wrong. And millions of us are racists, and sexists, and xenophobic bigots who want walls built, refugees interned, and immigrants deported.

Not everyone who voted for him. Not everyone. Millions, yes. But not everyone.

The thing that makes this worse is that we didn’t expect it. We didn’t realize this was coming. Neither did the media. This should tell us something: the discussions I have  seen of late that say that our world is turning into an echo chamber, where we only hear what we want to hear, where we only communicate with people who agree with us  and share our views, are correct. If you settled the election based on my  own Facebook feed, then Bernie Sanders would be president. If not Cthulhu.

This,  then, is our task. Tasks. There are several.

First, we have to start listening to each other. Even to people we disagree with. We have to be better than the hypocrite that just got elected, who will ignore the needs of millions of people who were not in the demographics who supported him, whom he campaigned against. We have to understand that there are millions of people who thought Donald Trump was the lesser of two (or four) evils. Millions. Those people must be heard, because the biggest reason that they voted for Trump was, I think, that they believe they have not been heard.

So listen. Take them seriously. They are people, and they are important. Not the racists and sexists and xenophobes: fuck them. But listen to the millions of rational, genuine people who believed Trump was the best choice, or at least the least-bad.

Second, we have to fix this government. Millions who voted for Trump, and millions who voted for third party candidates, and many, many millions who did not vote, believe our government is broken. It is. We have to fix it, because Trump won’t. He will take advantage of the breaks to break it more — for one thing, he’s going to nominate a hard-right pro-life conservative to the Supreme Court, and then perhaps another, since the liberal justices are aged and unwell. That means all three branches of government will be Republican, behind Donald Trump. So we must work. We must be vigilant. We must read the news — unbiased sources, if we can find them, because if the surprise on the newsmen’s faces last night says anything, it says that the liberal media bias has some validity, that the news channels, too, are become something of an echo chamber — and we must speak out, and we must organize, and we must march, and we. Must. Vote. 59,000,000 some odd votes  for Clinton, 58,000,000 some odd votes for Trump. 330 million people in the country. 219 million eligible voters.

This is broken. We must fix it. We can fix it.

Last,we have to deal with the worst part of this. Millions of Americans are sexist and racist and bigoted xenophobes. We have, it seems, spent too long considering them anachronisms and harmless cranks, and sweeping them under the rug. We pushed them out of the echo chamber. And then they found a  candidate who was just racist enough, but not too racist — “He was talking about illegal immigrants, not Latinos! He meant Syrian refugees that might be terrorists, not all Muslims!” — and sexist enough, but not too sexist — “He was just talking. He wouldn’t actually sexually assault anyone! He’s got a beautiful wife! He hires women!” — that millions of other people could stand to vote for him.

Remember that. Not everyone who voted for Trump is racist or sexist.

But there are millions who are. And we must deal with them. Not simply demonize and push them away: deal with them. Educate them. Argue with them. Fight them, if necessary: but we cannot continue to ignore them.

 

We can do this. We can. I mean it. We were hoping that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party could save us, and they failed. They failed. Not us. Not those of us who voted for her, and not those of us who were too disillusioned to vote for her. We did not fail.

The only way to fail is to give up trying.

So don’t give up. Fight. Fight for the country you want, and you believe we can have. Be active: learn, and speak, and act, donate, protest, canvass, join a third party and run for political office. Always oppose Trump’s plans, if he ever actually makes any real ones. Listen to the people who voted for him, who aren’t terrible people. Fix our government. Fight the evil that has reared its head all the way into the White House: the evil of racism and sexism and bigotry.

Do something. Don’t be sad: be determined.

We  can do this.

Weird Al-lection

Dusty Leave a comment

I think we’ve probably all (And by “all” I mean the very small percentage of people who actually listen to Weird Al, filtered through the even smaller percentage of people who are still willing to think about the election) seen Weird Al Yankovic’s song about the debates. If not, here it is:

 

This is, of course, excellent. But I am prejudiced: not only can I talk about politics forever, but I have been a dedicated Weird Al fan for his entire career: my dad played me “Yoda” when I was about 9, and I bought “Weird Al In 3-D” soon thereafter. I have been a fan of his longer than any other band, any other musician, any other genre. I know pretty much all of his songs, most of them by heart.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that as I listened to this, I realized that it wasn’t the only Weird Al song that was appropriate for this election.

In fact, Weird Al has created the theme song for the whole thing. I mean, all of it. Every candidate — and for some of them, two or three.

So, in honor of a man I do honestly consider a musical genius, who can do anything at all, from reggae to heavy metal to rap to country, and in hopes of adding a wee bit of levity to our long national nightmare (Which will end soon! Only a week! Don’t forget to vote!), I hereby present The Weird Al-lection.

 

Starting with the Republicans:

Governor Jeb Bush: For the third Bush to run for President, who based all of his policies on “Well my brother did this, so I think it’s a good idea,” and his appeal on, “Hey, aren’t a lot of you folks white men? So am I!” This is the only song:

 

 

 

Dr. Ben Carson: Sometimes it’s too obvious. Though I like how absurd the lyrics are, and if you imagine this parody of a surgeon actually doing this job on you, that’s pretty much how I feel about Carson being president.

 

Governor Chris Christie: Now, this seems like a cheap shot; but actually, the connection to the New Jersey governor is more about the attitude in these lyrics: “Just watch your mouth, or I’ll sit on you.//If you see me comin’ your way, better give me plenty space; If I tell you that I’m hungry, then won’t you feed my face!”

 

Senator Ted Cruz: This one bothers me because this is one of my favorite songs, and Cruz is one of my least favorite organisms. But it’s perfect.

 

Carly Fiorina: 1. It’s about computers, like Ms. Fiorina; 2. it’s a parody of a song about money, also like Ms. Fiorina; 3. While the song is a good parody, it is vastly annoying. Like Ms. Fiorina.

 

Governor Mike Huckabee: I know he wasn’t in the race long, but Governor Huckabee’s mixture of devout Christianity and political incompetence makes me think this would be the result of his election. Rick Santorum can share this song.

 

Governor John Kasich: Since his pitch seemed to be, “Well, you can’t vote for Jeb Bush any more, so how’s about me? I can swing Ohio!” he gets this:

 

Senator Rand Paul: My impressions of Senator Paul: he is a strange derivative version of his father. He is frequently angry for very little reason. He is extremely white. There are actually some things about him that I like, but overall, I can’t stand the guy. Which is how I feel about polka. I’m sorry, Mr. Yankovic; I find them amusing when you do them, but — it’s just such a terrible musical form!

For Senator Paul: The Angry White Boy Polka.

 

Governor Rick Perry: For the man who can’t count to three:

 

Senator Marco Rubio: Again, this seems like a cheap shot — and a racist one, at that — but I thought this fit because Senator Rubio tried to take advantage of his heritage while also trying to appeal to all the honkies in the GOP; that reminds me of someone who speaks only food Spanish. Hence this song. Plus the original is all about trying to be smooth, which Rubio tries but can’t pull off; and the singer, Gerardo, is only appealing on the surface. Like Rubio.

 

Governor Scott Walker: The man is nothing but a front for corporations. He is an empty suit stuffed with dark money. So, he gets to have another of my favorite Al songs — one that says a lot about our culture, while saying nothing at all. Like Governor Walker.

(I’m adding a second song because Gov. Walker’s treatment of teachers in Wisconsin makes him pretty much The Most Hated Man On My List. Other than the Big T, that is.)

(By the way: if you’ve never seen this first video, it is brilliant, as is the song, if you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment.)

 

Finally, in honor of the forgotten candidates, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Jim Gilmore, and George Pataki, none of whom anyone can remember, because nobody cared about their incredibly short runs for the Big Chair, I present my favorite completely absurd Weird Al songs. Because these people, like these songs, make no sense whatsoever.

(The video for this one also makes no sense.)

 

 

Now we finally get to the Dems.

 

Governor Lincoln Chafee: The guy’s so cool. And so utterly not.

 

Governor Martin O’Malley: You know, I don’t have much to say about Governor O’Malley. He seems like a pretty reasonable centrist Democratic candidate. I think this just wasn’t his year. Maybe that means it won’t ever be his year. So, he gets this one:

 

Senator Bernie Sanders: Such a mensch. Just listen to the first ten seconds, and you’ll see why this song. But the rest of it fits, too.

 

Senator Jim Webb: Senator Webb strikes me as being pretty much the guy who yells at kids to get off his lawn, if his lawn was a national debate stage.

 

Now for the big ones: those actual nominees who will be getting our votes in a few days. Please understand this post is not intended to endorse any particular candidate; please vote your conscience, wherever that leads you. Just please vote.

Don’t vote for Trump.

 

 

Dr. Jill Stein: I particularly like this one, because Dr.  Stein seems reasonable and logical and appealing at first — but the longer you listen to her, the less rational she seems. Let’s just cancel college debt? Anti-vaxxers have a point? Here you go, Doctor:

 

Governor Gary Johnson:  Mr. “What’s Aleppo?” gets two, one just because he was the governor of New Mexico.

 

Hillary Clinton: First, for all the promises she’s made, particularly the ones she’s made in exchange for a check:

And then, just because one song about mail is not enough for Hillary Clinton (Best thing about this is that the gist of this song is that people keep sending the same crap around the internet, and that people believe complete bullshit without any evidence. Perfect.):

 

Donald Trump: This is the way Mr. Trump actually lives. No exaggeration. It’s beautiful. Bigly beautiful.

And this is how we all feel about him.

 

It’s Time for The Talk.

Dusty 1 Comment

All right: so let’s be clear. Donald Trump is not the problem.

I didn’t want to write about this, you know. I’m trying to keep this blog focused on lighter subjects, funny things, and on books and reading and teaching. And  the Trump campaign is not funny. It hasn’t been since Iowa. Since we found out that people actually wanted to vote for him. People actually want Donald Trump to be the President of the United States.

That’s the problem.

Look — he denies that he’s a divisive incendiary racist demogogue. Who wouldn’t? I deny that I’m an subversive lazy egotist, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And one of the more disturbing things about Donald Trump (May I call him Drumpf? If you haven’t watched John Oliver’s splendid takedown of Mr. Drumpf, do so now. Though for the sake of clarity, I’ll use his actual name.) is that it seems impossible to tell if he is aware of the part he is playing, or if he is being as genuine as he can be. Because it could be that he’s playing a part, having learned how to act in this role of reality-TV-star-and-capitalist-mogul that has brought him fame and fortune; but it also could be that he is one of those lucky souls who has fit perfectly into his specific niche, and this is just who he is. The famed book of Hitler speeches by his bedside could go either way on this.

But it doesn’t actually matter if he really believes everything he says, and if he’s aware of the effect he is having on his followers and on this country, and if that effect is really his intent or if he is, as I have been arguing since the start of his campaign, just trying to increase his name recognition because that is the foundation of his wealth, himself as brand. It doesn’t matter because Donald Trump is not the problem.

The problem is that millions of Americans want to vote for Donald Trump.

And the larger problem is that the rest of us didn’t know this, and we are not doing what we should be doing to fix this.

I’ve argued with a number of Trump fans. And there are three things going on here. The first is the economy. This is the biggest reason why people want to vote for Trump: they believe that the problem with the economy is the government spending too much money, which piles up too much debt, which will bring our country crashing to its knees, just like an individual who owes too much money to credit card companies. They believe that Trump knows how to handle that, that he will stop the government from spending so much money, and he will reduce the debt, because he’s a businessman, and businessmen understand money and how to make a profit. The second thing is that Trump is a bully, and bullies are funny. People like things that make them laugh, and Trump makes people laugh. He also has a reputation for honesty, and honesty is something that Americans can’t make up their minds about.

Seriously. Let me just pause to talk about this for a moment. I ask my students every year, in one context or another, how they feel about honesty and lying. And every year, they say they prefer honesty, but think that lying is just fine in two circumstances: when the truth would hurt someone’s feelings, and when telling the truth would get you in trouble. What does that mean? That means they prefer lies, but don’t want to admit it (So they’re lying when they say they like honesty.). Because what other reasons, apart from those two, does anyone ever have for lying? People lie to spare someone else’s feelings, and they lie to cover their own butts. That’s the vast majority of lies, and if those are okay with you, then lying is okay with you. Sure, there are people who lie for profit, and people who lie for malice; I can accept those as categories of lies that even Americans don’t like. But for the most part: we prefer to be lied to. We like it. We like having our feelings spared.

And then Trump comes along and says things that most of us would never say, and would prefer never be said about us — and somehow he is admirable for doing it. He is “honest,” and we love him for it. My best understanding of this is that people believe that politicians are so dishonest and so corrupt that they lie with every word they say; and we are tired of it. So even though Americans personally would prefer some little white lies, we want a President who would never, ever lie to us. And I get that: I would prefer an honest politician, too.

There is also an impression of courage in the willingness to stand up and say ugly things. Makes the man seem tough. Comes back to the bully thing: we admire bullies. Always have. We like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and we like mafia dons like Al Capone and John Gotti, and we love fictional characters that follow the same pattern. We like, as another Scarface would put it, a man with balls. And the willingness to offend, particularly in an arena — politics — where offending anyone in any way is shunned, and where people work very hard to twist themselves into knots  trying to please everyone all at once, saying offensive things seems like courage.

These two issues — Trump’s business acumen as a cure for the economy, and his crass rudeness as A) a source of humor, B) a sign of honesty, and C) a sign of courage — are reasonable enough, are understandable enough. Trump isn’t the first guy to earn our admiration for his crass rudeness: pretty much every famous radio DJ and half of the talk show hosts and stand-up comedians we love are exactly the same way. Why do we like Roseanne Barr? Howard Stern? Rush Limbaugh? Simon Cowell? All the same reasons we like Trump. As for the business thing, that has roots that go back probably as far as the United States: we have always believed that there is something special, some secret knowledge, that comes with wealth; we always think that someone who knows how to make money one way knows how to make money all ways. As if that first million — or billion — dollars is a key that unlocks the Midas touch. Carly Fiorina ran on exactly the same platform, as did Herman Cain in 2012, and Mitt Romney in every campaign he ran.

But then there’s the third reason why Trump is winning. And it’s the most disturbing. The third reason is that Trump is a bigot. He denigrates and objectifies women, an attitude that you can see reflected in the malice and bile that Americans direct at Clinton. He treats Muslims and Latinos, and women, like Untouchables: fine as long as they stay in their place and know who’s boss, but needing a lesson as soon as they get uppity and start breaking the rules that are meant to keep them in their place, separate from the nice white Christian American folks (Or, in the case of women, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.). And that message resonates. It resonates strongly. There are millions of Americans who feel exactly the same way, particularly about those two racial/ethnic groups. Never mind that illegal immigrants (the epithet Trump uses for Latinos, because that wording divides the “bad Latinos” from the “not so bad ones” — you know, the ones that stay in other countries instead of coming to this one) and legal immigrants, which comprise all racial groups and nationalities — but when Trump is talking about building a wall on the southern border, he isn’t talking about Asians coming to California on cargo ships or Europeans overstaying their visas — are actually good for the country, bringing a necessary labor force and a positive addition to the cultural mix. Never mind that Islam is no more violent or dangerous a religion than every other: that is to say, when fanatics use it to convince others to commit violence, it is a staggeringly effective tool; but if guns don’t kill people, neither does Islam. Never mind that women are better than men (That’s right. I said “better.” My wife is smarter and more talented than me. More organized, harder working, more reasonable and level-headed. Better.), and even though I personally support Sanders, I would dearly love to see Hillary Clinton debate Donald Trump. Because she’ll grind his bones to make her bread, and all he’ll be able to do is make a comment about menstruation.

The truth is, millions of Americans believe women should submit to men. The truth is, millions of Americans hate and fear Muslims and Latinos. They fear that Latinos will take over this country and make it different; and they fear that Muslims are terrorists. And they want a leader who thinks like they do.

The problem isn’t Donald Trump. It’s that despite all of the progress we have made since the Civil Rights era, despite all the political correctness and the affirmative action and everything else we have tried to do to achieve racial equality and a just society, we haven’t really done anything. We haven’t really changed anything. But we’ve convinced ourselves that we have: we elected a black President, after all. And the Ku Klux Klan is no longer hanging people by the side of the road in broad daylight. So surely we have improved; surely the problem is less now.

But it’s not. And the problem is still here because even those of us who want to try to fix the problem are not going about it the right way.

I said it above: I’ve been arguing with people who support Donald Trump. I’ve been doing it frequently, on Facebook; my students would never try to challenge a teacher on a political issue: they know how angry people get about politics, and while they don’t mind arguing with their teachers, they don’t want to make us mad for fear of grade-related consequences. And though I argue as reasonably and courteously as I can, people get angry about politics. I get angry about politics. No, that’s not true: I don’t get angry about the topics. But when someone I’m disagreeing with says, “Lol, your a retard. You need to grow the fuck up.” then I tend to get angry.

My wife can always tell. The volume and speed of my typing always goes up when I’m mad, as I start hitting the keys harder and faster. “Are you arguing again?” she asks. “Yup!” I say, pounding away. Telling someone that I don’t need to grow up, they need to learn how to think.

And that’s what we’ve been doing. Those of us who don’t support Donald Trump, who can’t believe that other people support Donald Trump, have begun every discussion with his supporters with “What the hell is wrong with you? Trump? Really? What are you thinking?!?” But they’re thinking what I listed above. They are thinking reasonable things.

You cannot convince people who are thinking reasonable things to change their minds by telling them they are unreasonable. Just like I get mad when someone says “Lol, your a retard.” That is no different from saying, “How can you support Trump? What is wrong with you!” You cannot win an argument by insulting your opponent.

To deal with Trump as a candidate, people need to treat him as a candidate: the people who support him for rational reasons need to be talked to like rational people. They need to be questioned fairly, and their answers listened to, and then, perhaps, argued with if we can do that without losing our tempers. I hope that the two people running against him (whichever wins the nomination) will behave like the long-time politicians they are, and focus on his ideas and qualifications, and refuse to go down to his level and have a bully-fight. If they can stay rational and courteous, I don’t doubt that Trump will lose the general election. The fact that gets lost in the uproar and hoopla is that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to running a country. Because he is not a politician, he is not a government worker, he is not an elected official: he has no experience. He does not know what he is doing. Businessmen can run businesses, but the country is not a business. But that is not our argument: that is either Bernie Sanders’s or Hillary Clinton’s argument.

What the rest of us need to focus on is going back to square one. There are bigots in this country. Millions of them. Our current system of affirmative action and token representatives (“The Oscars/Hollywood aren’t racist! Halle Berry won Best Actress in 2002!”), paying lip service to real understanding through nonsense like politically correct speech, have done nothing. If anything, we have pushed the problem underground, where it can fester and swell. And now it’s bursting out. Which means, as hard and uncomfortable and ugly as it is, now is our chance to clean out the infection.

We have to deal with racism. We have to fix this problem at the root: and the root is not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not the problem.

We are.

The Party’s Over

Dusty 1 Comment

“Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king. That’s why I did this: to protect you from yourselves. –Sideshow Bob, “Sideshow Bob Roberts”

(This is the third installment of my political corruption series, and the last. For now.)

Let’s be clear (If you read my stuff, it’s probably already clear): I am a lifelong Democrat. I am the child of two lifelong Democrats: my parents voted for John F. Kennedy, for William McGovern, for Walter Mondale, for Michael Dukakis; I voted for Clinton, for Gore, for Kerry, and for Barack Obama, twice. I don’t understand why people can vote Republican: the wealthy, for whom it makes personal sense, have to be callous, I feel, in order to refuse to maintain the social safety net for those less fortunate than they, or unbelievably greedy in order to agree to destroy the regulatory state so that they can make even more money at the expense of our very world; the poor and middle class are voting for social causes, not for personal gain (Unless they believe in trickle-down economics, but in that case they are deluded), but I see two problems with that: first, they are on the wrong side of most social issues – anti-choice, anti-equality, xenophobic, and parochial – and their candidates don’t ever deliver on their promises. So if you’re wealthy, how can you stand to vote Republican? And if you’re not, why would you ever think to vote Republican?

I read an excellent book by Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas, in which Frank examines how Kansas, his home state and, through the 1800’s and early 1900’s, one of the most radical and progressive states, became so very staunchly, unflaggingly, self-destructively conservative. What happened was that Republican candidates around the early 90’s started pushing a pro-life agenda as the only issue that mattered – you know, the usual “40,000,000 murders,” “Culture of life” stuff – and when elected, every Republican proceeded to lower taxes, kill social services, remove regulations on business, make sweetheart deals with corporations, and basically ruin life for the average person; and then go back to election yelling “We have to end the scourge of abortion!” Which got them re-elected, into majority after majority — and yet they continued to fail to do anything about abortion, simply pushing their pro-business agenda on the state to its steadily growing detriment. But the pro-life agenda, whipped into a frenzy every new election cycle, was so compelling that nothing else seemed to matter to the voters, who kept voting Republican until it put their state where it is now – essentially hollowed out, unable to provide even the most basic elements we expect of our governments, like schools – not that Kansas schools teach anything other than creationism and abstinence, according to the campaign promises of the Republican candidates.

That’s how I see Republicans: selfish, deluded, misguided, and absurdly optimistic– or, less kindly, willfully blind to the fact that their politicians don’t ever deliver on the things they promise that won their constituents’ votes: on the national scene, we still have Obamacare, we are still giving foreign aid to dozens of other countries, our veterans are still dying on the streets, abortion is still legal, gay marriage is now legal as well, and there still isn’t a wall between the US and Mexico. So why would anyone vote Republican?

Here’s the thing, though: why do I continue to vote Democratic? It was Clinton who ended the Glass-Steagall Act, which, more than anything else, precipitated the economic crash that happened ten years later, under George Bush but not – I repeat, not — because of him. It was Bush’s fault that our government wasn’t in a better position to help after the crash, because he gave away Clinton’s surplus in tax breaks and war spending; but the crash was because of the Democrats. Democrats who I voted for. And of all of my other causes, the most important to me is the reduction of violence and misery, and the improvement of equal opportunity for everyone; the largest obstacle to all of that is income inequality. Which Democrats conveniently ignore, not wishing to appear – gasp – Socialist. (I know, I know – Bernie Sanders. But he’s also pro-gun.) We have Obamacare, but without the public option, it is more of a burden than anything useful; my costs for health care are still going up, every year, while my wages are going down: I make less now than I did ten years ago. Unions are still dying, and women still don’t make the same wages that men do, and Guantanamo is still open and still incarcerating prisoners of war who have never been to trial, and guns remain unregulated, and schools remain unfunded, and everyone is still driving Hummers while we drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

So who’s really the fool, here?

I think the answer’s pretty obvious: we all are. We have all been sold a bill of goods that doesn’t match what the grinning faces behind the counter are putting into our baskets.

This is the last form of political corruption I want to write about, and that I think I have a solution for: this one is the corruption of the entire system, through partisanship and self-serving deception. This political corruption is the two-party system.

I would love to go back now to when the two-party system made sense and worked well for Americans; but in all honesty, the two-party system has always been about helping itself. Having a clearly defined and well-known political party makes it easier for candidates affiliated with that party to get elected: the party label offers a certain legitimacy, and even loyalty, in that people often vote the “straight ticket,” picking the candidates affiliated with their party without knowing anything about them. The party also offers a political apparatus that makes it easier to get heard and therefore elected; you need staff, you need volunteers, you need access to media and to debates and the like, you need a platform that people can hear and understand and support. The political party that exists before and beyond one’s own candidacy offers all of that; unless you’re a billionaire loon like H. Ross Perot, bless his wrinkly, big-eared heart, you wouldn’t want to form your own party just for your candidacy, and you almost certainly couldn’t afford to. So political parties are useful, and they aren’t going away – more’s the pity; because by far the easiest solution here is just to ban them entirely. But then it would be too hard for anyone not an incumbent to mount a national political campaign, or even a serious state-wide one, and that would not be any better, as those in power – who already have political staff, legitimacy, and access to media – would get re-elected even more often than they do now. So okay, we’ll keep political parties.

Now, if that party represents a certain set of values that the voter supports, then well and good: but because there are only two parties with any real legitimacy in this country, those two parties become too large and unwieldy, their umbrellas too wide and encompassing such extremes, that voting for the party doesn’t really mean supporting one’s specific causes: is this Republican candidate an evangelical Christian who wants to put the Ten Commandments on the American flag and mandate both creationism and prayer in schools? Or is he a Libertarian seeking the end of the income tax and government reduced to only two services, international commerce and the military? Is this Democrat in favor of a path to citizenship, but also supports private prisons, or is she looking to legalize marijuana and strengthen the Second Amendment at the same time? We can’t tell based on party affiliation.

Now, the two-party system theoretically serves the middle: because the two parties have to have such broad appeal, they tend towards the center. And thirty or forty years ago, I think that was probably true: but it isn’t now. And before that – say, eighty or a hundred years ago – it also wasn’t true. Way back when it was formed, the Republican party was single-mindedly abolitionist, which was an extreme (albeit correct) position; the Democratic party, in response, was for decades staunchly segregationist and pro-states’-rights. Also not moderate positions. Today, we have one party – I’ll let the reader guess which one – that has discovered that it can motivate its base through extreme and inflexible positions on social issues; in other words, the more extreme and zealous and inflammatory the party gets, the more votes they turn out. The entire party is moving away from the center, and at the same time, becoming more successful, because of it. More successful, that is, at winning elections: they are certainly not more successful at governing, a profession they seem to have cast aside in favor of demogoguery. Meanwhile, the opposition party is trying to maintain its foothold in the middle; but as the other party keeps going farther and farther to one side, the middle drags in that direction – and rather than hold their ground and make the extremists come back, the moderate party is moving with them, and thus also becoming less moderate: while surrendering entirely the side of the political spectrum they were supposed to be watching. I feel like, any minute now, the Democrats are going to turn around and see that a Republican has captured their flag while they were all on the other side, trying to keep an eye on the Republican team – who were having a dance party around their own flag, completely ignoring the Democrats and the entire game, but subtly distracting their whole team so that no one was left to play defense. And somehow, Vince Lombardi was behind it all. Or Ronald Reagan.

The two-party system is also supposed to provide stability: because the parties are predictable, and centrist, and inclusive, and effectively share the electorate, they are forced to compromise, which isn’t terribly hard because their positions aren’t far apart, and so they can respect and agree with each other on most things; any one politician also realizes that his opposition is not going away, and so he has to work with them. Except our parties aren’t providing that, either: instead we get hatred and bile and petty partisanship that blocks everything useful, even stuff that shouldn’t ever be a question, like raising the debt ceiling, or providing for the 9/11 First Responders. Honestly, any government that can’t give those guys health care and a pension that would choke a horse is no kind of government at all.

So that’s what we have: no kind of government at all. The parties have lost their way: rather than improving our democracy, they are hurting it; because their goal is no longer to represent the will of the people, but rather to maintain and expand the power of their party. As long as their party wins, nothing else matters. Politics is become a team sport. The propagandists (You know – the cheerleaders. Though I can’t think of anyone on this Earth who looks less like a cheerleader than Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove.) have taken over, and they have realized that they don’t need to steer their parties towards what the people want; they can make the tail wag the dog, and the party can tell the people what they want. As long as they say they are in favor of what the people are in favor of – this side will ban abortion, that side will close Guantanamo and ensure that women make equal pay for equal work – they don’t actually have to do those things in order to maintain power. And as long as the person says they are a Democrat or a Republican, that’s a win, even if they don’t actually act like it: and so the Republican party will support Donald Trump if he wins the nomination, and the Democratic party will support Bernie Sanders, even though he is a Socialist independent.

I don’t even have to argue that the political system is broken: the race for President – which has already been going on for a full year – will likely come down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders will likely not be in the running. (And I have to say: in that scenario, I almost wish that Ted Cruz would win, so that Mitch McConnell could stand up in the Senate and say that his first goal is to ensure that Ted Cruz is a one-term president. I want to see how well Mr. Cruz can do when he can’t blame things on Obama. Although of course he’d keep blaming Obama for everything, anyway.) If the system worked, then Sanders would run as a Socialist, Trump as the head of the shiny new Trump-Solid-Gold Party, Hillary Clinton as a Democrat, Ted Cruz as a member of the Inquisition, and probably Marco Rubio as the Republican. And then we’d have a race, by God. You’d have two actual centrists, Rubio and Clinton, one on the left in Sanders, one on the far right in Cruz, and Trump off on a tangent, somewhere far out in Nutsville.

So how do we change things to achieve that glorious outcome in the future? Well, there are a couple of ways. The first thing is we can bring back the Fairness Doctrine, which required opposing viewpoints to be presented on any television station that aired political views; that, with a certain minimum percentage of votes – say, 5% of the popular vote in any one election cycle – required to gain status as an opposing viewpoint, would allow alternate parties to gain media access, publicity, and a voice in the system. That would be the best thing: allow parties a chance to gain their own foothold, and stop this nonsense where everyone other than a Democrat or Republican is a “third-party candidate,” which is seen almost universally as a wasted vote.

We could also eliminate the one-winner-takes-all election system, and the single-representative system with it. Depending on whether we want more representatives in Congress, it could look like this: the Congress members from a certain state would all run in one general election, with up to as many candidates as there are seats from each party – so in a state with ten Congress seats, there would be ten Republicans, ten Democrats, ten Socialists, etc. – and the popular vote would be divided by percentage. So if 50% of the state voted Republican, 30% Democrat and 20% Socialist, then the state would get five Republican congresspeople, three Democrats, and two Socialists; you could either have the parties choose their reps by caucus, or have a run-off within the party for which candidates get the slots. Alternately, you could run the same system but with multiple candidates from the various parties winning a single “seat,” that is made up of several actual members; though that would greatly increase the number of Congresspeople, and still allow for districts to be gerrymandered. I like the state-by-state bloc voting, personally.

And one other thing is critical: term limits. It is absurd that we don’t already have these in Congress when we have them almost everywhere else, including the Presidency. I’d suggest about a decade for each seat: four two-year terms in Congress, two six-year terms in the Senate. Maximum twenty years in the legislature. And anyone currently past that is out at the next election.

All of us are unhappy with the partisan politics. I have seen this meme several times of late, and I expect to see it even more between now and November.

Screw the Demopublicrats

We need to fix the system, because the people who are breaking it aren’t going to turn around and fix it, and breaking it even further is not going to magically bring it back around to a good place. Too be specific: Donald Trump will not make America great again. No Republican and no Democrat will.

We the people can. We will. We just have to do it. Now, please.

How do you shut a revolving door?

Dusty Leave a comment

ANSWER: With a door-stop made of JUSTICE!

(This is the second in a series about politics that’s looking like it will be three essays long. Once again, if you’re not interested – no, you know what? You should all read this. And share it so that other people can read it too. Because – damn.)

And speaking of corruption in politics . . . two words: regulatory capture.

Two more words: revolving door.

And the final five: Lobbying in the United States.

You know that there’s a real problem when the corruption has become so common, and so tightly bound into the fabric of government, that there is a Wikipedia article about it. There are three, actually, which I’d suggest as reading – they are all linked above. And it is amazing that this is such a common and accepted situation that the articles talk about recent events, about people whose names we know – this isn’t the Teapot Dome scandal, or the robber barons of centuries past; this is Eric Holder, who left after six years as Attorney General to return to his partnership position at a law firm that represents Wall Street banks (Now you understand why no bankers have been prosecuted for the financial collapse?); this is Deepwater Horizon and the oil companies that got new permits to drill in the Gulf of Mexico only weeks after the worst ecological disaster in history; this is the very internet I am using, and SOPA, et al. This is our world, us, right now.

Regulatory capture is when a government regulatory body – like the FCC, or the SEC, or the Department of the Interior or Agriculture – is controlled by the industry it is intended to regulate. The fox not only gets into the henhouse, he puts on a red comb and declares himself the rooster. Then he puts in place a new Hen Resources policy whereby every hen must have a one-on-one meeting with the new CER(F) [Chief Executive Rooster (Fox)], out back in the woods, at night; and the hens have to bathe in barbecue sauce beforehand.

Think I’m exaggerating? Allow me to quote from the Wikipedia article on this subject:

Commodity Futures Trading Commission

In October 2010, George H. Painter, one of the two Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) administrative law judges, retired, and in the process requested that his cases not be assigned to the other judge, Bruce C. Levine.Painter wrote, “On Judge Levine’s first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant’s favor,” Painter wrote. “A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow.” In further explaining his request, he wrote, “Judge Levine, in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complainants to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case.” Gramm, wife of former Senator Phil Gramm, was accused of helping Goldman Sachs, Enron and other large firms gain influence over the commodity markets. After leaving the CFTC, Wendy Gramm joined the board of Enron.

 

That’s right: the wife of a senator running a regulatory agency, corrupting a judge, and then taking a seat on the board of the company she was supposed to be regulating. There are more examples, too. Many. How about this one:

Federal Aviation Administration

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has a dual-mandate both to promote aviation and to regulate its safety. A report by the Department of Transportation that found FAA managers had allowed Southwest Airlines to fly 46 airplanes in 2006 and 2007 that were overdue for safety inspections, ignoring concerns raised by inspectors. Audits of other airlines resulted in two airlines grounding hundreds of planes, causing thousands of flight cancellations. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee investigated the matter after two FAA whistleblowers, inspectors Charalambe “Bobby” Boutris and Douglas E. Peters, contacted them. Boutris said he attempted to ground Southwest after finding cracks in the fuselage, but was prevented by supervisors he said were friendly with the airline. The committee subsequently held hearings in April 2008. James Oberstar, former chairman of the committee said its investigation uncovered a pattern of regulatory abuse and widespread regulatory lapses, allowing 117 aircraft to be operated commercially although not in compliance with FAA safety rules. Oberstar said there was a “culture of coziness” between senior FAA officials and the airlines and “a systematic breakdown” in the FAA’s culture that resulted in “malfeasance, bordering on corruption.”

 

So glad I flew Southwest when I traveled this past Christmas. Or maybe you’re concerned with nuclear power? Here, this is a peach:

The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has given a license to “every single reactor requesting one”, according to Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio to refer to the agency approval process as a “rubber stamp”. In Vermont, ten days after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that damaged Japan’s Daiichi plant in Fukushima, the NRC approved a 20-year extension for the license of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, although the Vermont state legislature had voted overwhelmingly to deny such an extension. The Vermont plant uses the same GE Mark 1 reactor design as the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The plant had been found to be leaking radioactive materials through a network of underground pipes, which Entergy, the company running the plant, had denied under oath even existed. Representative Tony Klein, who chaired the Vermont House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said that when he asked the NRC about the pipes at a hearing in 2009, the NRC didn’t know about their existence, much less that they were leaking. On March 17, 2011, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a study critical of the NRC’s 2010 performance as a regulator. The UCS said that through the years, it had found the NRC’s enforcement of safety rules has not been “timely, consistent, or effective” and it cited 14 “near-misses” at U.S. plants in 2010 alone. Tyson Slocum, an energy expert at Public Citizen said the nuclear industry has “embedded itself in the political establishment” through “reliable friends from George Bush to Barack Obama”, that the government “has really just become cheerleaders for the industry.”

 

There’s more, too. And again, let me note: this is from a Wikipedia article. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything like whistle blowing or investigative journalism; this is common knowledge, stuff that is all over the news, all over the web. I got to all of this with exactly two clicks: one from my Google search to Wikipedia, and one from my first article (on “revolving door”) to the link that said “See also: regulatory capture.” These examples I have cited are just a few from the section headed “United States Examples.” (If it makes you feel better, there is also one Canadian example, two Japanese examples, and one international example. To balance the twenty-plus American examples. USA! USA!)

And speaking of the revolving door: this is the name we apply to the practice of private professionals becoming government officials, generally with power over those same industries that employed them prior to election or appointment, and government officials becoming private professionals in the industries they oversaw. This is the kind of thing where members of Congress block a bill regulating, say, Wall Street, and then leave office to get a lucrative job as an advisor on Wall Street. The most famous example is probably Dick Cheney, who “left” Halliburton to become Vice President (Got a “severance” package of $20 million, too) and then spent much of his vice presidency creating new business opportunities for Halliburton (the company builds oil fields and refineries), particularly in Iraq. But there are others: Dick (Two corrupt men named Dick? COINCIDENCE?!?) Gephardt, who was a Congressman (And a Democrat, lest anyone think I am bashing on the GOP, or everyone named Dick.) for years, is now a lobbyist; the FCC commissioner who approved the NBC/Comcast merger left the FCC four months later for a position at Comcast; the use of bovine growth hormone was approved by three employees of the Food and Drug Administration with ties to Monsanto.

Again, not investigative journalism: I Googled “Government officials from the industries they regulate” and clicked on the first link, which was to the “revolving door” article on Wikipedia.

It shocks me, to some extent, to think that anyone believes it a good idea to hire government regulators with ties to the industries they are supposed to regulate. But I get it: those people understand the industry, have ties and connections to the corporations involved; they could be very good at administering the people’s interests. And, to some extent, the interests of the industries need to be protected from heavy-handed government intervention; if they put me in charge, for instance, I’d just eliminate half a dozen major corporations entirely, which would, I guess, be bad for the economy.

Though considering what those same corporations did to the economy, and how much it affected me personally, I’m kind of willing to make that sacrifice. Then again: even if I crushed Halliburton and Monsanto and Enron and Goldman-Sachs and Exxon-Mobil and Wal-Mart beneath the heel of my jackboot, I know perfectly well that other companies would simply rise up and take their place. The lobbyists wouldn’t even be replaced: they’d just change a number in their speed-dial.

But I do get the need for a voice from the industry in the regulatory agencies. In my own small world, I think it is always best (and only rarely true) that school administrators be former teachers, with more than a couple of years of experience, in subjects more demanding than P.E. Those people understand what teachers go through, understand that the ever-increasing burden of unnecessary and even counter-productive requirements – for testing, for accountability, for record-keeping, for committee membership and meeting after meeting after meeting – is what keeps teachers from actually doing our job. It’s funny to say that government intervention is the biggest problem facing teachers in schools, but it’s true.

On the other hand: my motive for doing my job is not profit. I want to do my job well. I want administrators who understand my job not because I want their approval of my new untested pharmaceutical to go straight to market, sacrificing public safety in order to increase my bottom line; I want understanding administrators so that I can teach To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet. And my influence over those administrators, those government officials who regulate my industry, is based on exactly one thing: my status as a citizen and a teacher. That status allows me to, maybe, get a chance to speak my mind on this issue, provided I go through the efforts to put myself in front of those officials. I can, perhaps, use my eloquence, what I have of it; my reputation, if people actually like what I do; and even my soapbox, this here blog. What I can’t use is billions of dollars and a quid-pro-quo offer of a position after retirement.

Though that’s a great image. Hey, Congress, I got a deal for you: you eliminate the requirements for standardized testing in public schools, and I’ll hook you up with a position as a Teacher’s Aide in a special needs classroom. Or I can try to swing a spot as a fill-in janitor. Huh? Huh? Tempting! Tell you what: I’ll sweeten the deal with, say, $20. Which is about all I could afford in bribes. Hang on, let me see if I can do a DonorsChoose . . .

Now the question is, what do we do about this? We can’t simply ban lobbying, as tempting as that is; citizens have the right to “free speech” (Sarcastoquotes brought to you by the Citizens United decision: claiming that money is speech from sea to shining sea, and conveniently forgetting that most speech can not be used by the audience/recipients to buy yachts, and that this somewhat changes the equation. [Imagine how many readers I could get if you could trade my words for yachts?!? I would sleep on a keyboard so that when I rolled over I could make $50 from whatever words I randomly typed.]) and the right to petition their government for redress of grievances; again, my personal prejudices aside, corporations have the right to have their interests represented by the government that seeks to regulate them.

But the difference is: the companies don’t need to have their employees hired by the regulators. That is not part of “petitioning the government.” When I wanted to argue against the decisions of my local school board, I didn’t get myself appointed to that school board; I went to a public meeting and spoke in front of them. (Guess what? It didn’t work. Well, it kind of worked: they grew to fear me. The last time I spoke at a school board meeting in Oregon, they pushed me to the end of the line, allowing every other person with an opinion to speak before me. Which just gave me the headlining spot. But you know what else? It didn’t work: they didn’t change the policy.) They are welcome to speak to the regulators, they can even “speak” to them using money and hired lobbyists. There is an argument made in the Lobbying article on Wikipedia which claims that the solution to the problem is to increase lobbying competition: to have more non-profits, more public interest groups work the lobbying system as well, to balance the private corporations; I can see the value in that.

But we need to close the revolving door. The regulators should not be hired from the industries they regulate. It may make their jobs harder if they don’t have ties to the industries, don’t have those handy insider contacts; good. Jobs should be hard. That’s why we get paid to do them. I can see industry people as advisors, as resources, as witnesses testifying in front of committees; not as the ones holding the gavel, the ones actually in charge. You might ask your kids what they want for dinner, but you don’t let them cook it. You can poll inmates in a prison as to what improvements they would like to see, but you don’t let them make the decisions: “I’d like to see the bars and fences and walls removed, and all inmates put on the honor system.” As ridiculous as this is, this is what we’re doing with Monsanto and Halliburton and Wall Street.

At the same time, it is absurd that government officials can leave office and then go to work for those companies they “regulated” while in office. Direct bribes are already illegal, and I have already argued against the use of campaign funds as indirect bribes. So the next step in ending corruption should be this; and in this case, it’s a pretty simple law, and it’s a law that could be passed, I think, with our current legislators – the majority of whom are not part of corruption quite this brazen. I may not like most of the people in office, but they’re not Dick Cheney. (Did you know that the EPA can’t regulate fracking because of the “Halliburton loophole,” a clause added to a 2005 energy bill by Dick freaking Cheney when he was Vice President? Suddenly I feel like he shot me in the face. Or rather, the entire country.) If we the people apply a modicum of pressure to our elected officials, we may be able to get a simple delay put in place: a government official cannot work for an industry that benefited materially from that official’s votes or committee membership for a period of ______ years after leaving office. Let’s say five. After five years out of office, the official’s ties and contacts would be out of date and useless; and five years out of office and working at a normal human’s job is too long a delay: I don’t think most people would accept the offer of a lucrative job as a bribe if they had to wait five years to cash in. Not even the corrupt ones.

So here’s what we do: agitate for this law. There are already laws in place regarding the connections between lobbyists and officials, and ex-officials turned lobbyists, and lobbyists turned regulators; even Dick Cheney had to “retire” before he could be “elected.” (This latter set of Sarcastoquotes brought to you by the Supreme Court decision to end the recount in Florida, which handed an election actually won by Al Gore and Joe Lieberman over to Bush and Cheney, who actually lost. And so did the country.) All we need to add is a law mandating a delay between leaving office and becoming a lobbyist or consultant. Then we set up a committee (or give the responsibility to an agency already in place, like the FBI or the Federal Election Commission) to oversee what federal officials do after they leave office, correlate that with their votes for or against any industry that subsequently hires them, and bring charges if they break the waiting period.

And oh yes: the people on that committee can’t be lobbyists.

Citizens: Unite!

Dusty Leave a comment

(I’m going to do a few posts on politics and money. So if that annoys you, come back in a week or so.)

Donald Trump is not the problem.

(He’s a problem, as you can see from this article about a man who live-Twittered a Trump rally. But the problem of Donald Trump is self-correcting: the Twitters make it clear that the audience is small, and almost entirely white, angry, and incoherent. People with that voting base do not win Presidential elections, witness Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, David Duke, and of course, H. Ross Perot, the other angry, incoherent billionaire who ran for President. Trump will, eventually, go away.)

The problem is money. And the first thing we need to do, before we worry about getting rid of this politician or that politician, before we worry about legislation on this issue or that issue – the first thing we need to do, right now, is separate money from politics.

There’s no way to separate them completely, of course. We live in a capitalist society, and money is in everything. Money can buy everything (Other than love.), and so money can represent, can serve as a stand-in, for everything – which means that, on some abstract level, money is everything. Government is largely powered by its ability to control money: through taxation, through regulation, through allocation. Politicians have to be able to spend money, in quantities that are inconceivably vast. I have found myself lately unimpressed by “billions.” I hear that this industry earns profits of $3 billion a year, $5 billion a year, and I always think, “Is that it?” It’s because I pay attention to politics, where the numbers are hundreds of times, thousands of times greater than that. Trillions impress me. Politicians have to spend trillions, and take in trillions, every year. Politicians also have to get paid, and while I sort of like the Founding Fathers’ system of part-time legislators who had to have full-time jobs because they didn’t get a salary for government office, I do know that politics today are much larger and more complicated than 200 years ago, and so I think it should be a full-time job. Therefore they need to get paid.

Maybe less than they do now, though. President Obama made a comment in the State of the Union about how the only people who have been able to keep the same job for thirty years and build up a good retirement were in the Chamber. And they laughed. And I thought, “That’s not a fucking joke, you asshats.” Forgive the rancor, but as someone who has not been able to keep the same job even for fifteen years, and who has a retirement account balance of “We’re still hoping to save something someday,” I find the President’s comment telling. Almost makes me want to go into politics.

But that’s just it: people want to go into politics for personal gain. Because politics is a profitable industry. Of course it is: politics is about power, the wielding of power over hundreds of millions of people, in nearly all aspects of their lives; and money is transferable. Those two facts make some corruption inevitable. Of course people are going to offer money in exchange for favors – meaning the application of power – and of course politicians are going to take money in exchange for favors. But as the people who are manipulated for that money, but don’t get any of that money, it is incumbent on us to try to limit that process, to protect ourselves from being shut out of control over our own lives. We can’t eliminate it: power corrupts, and money is the tool of corruption, and in a capitalist society with a government of any kind, there will be corruption.

There should be less of it, though.

So where do we start?

Fortunately, the most obvious form of corruption, the direct peddling of influence, is already illegal. I suppose, if we believe it still happens too often, that we could strengthen the law enforcement system that investigates this – the FBI, I believe. But I don’t think the issue is a weak FBI. I think it is a weak media. But I’ll come back to that.

The first issue is the second most obvious form of corruption: campaign contributions. These are limited to spending for re-election, and thus are not simple profit for the politicians who take them – but since money buys elections in this country, because money buys advertising and publicity, and advertising and publicity are more reliable ways to get one’s name into the voters’ heads than the media is, campaign contributions are a way to buy the politician’s influence through offering a chance for the politician to retain and expand that influence. It’s sort of an interesting loop, because the money is buying the application of power through the offer of more power; so it’s a power-for-power deal.

But it’s still corrupt. And it’s actually a really, really simple fix, though admittedly not easy to put in place, because the people who want the system to continue as-is are the ones who currently have the money and the power, and therefore the control.

The fix is this: we make it illegal to spend money in a political campaign.

I’m not the first to think of this; several other countries have political finance laws that limit spending in various ways: the UK doesn’t allow television advertising; France and Germany don’t allow contributions from corporations or unions or government bodies; Australia limits the length of campaigns to six weeks. (Wikipedia) It is only in the U.S. that a Presidential campaign can cost $2 billion, as the race between Obama and Romney did in 2012. (Those billions impress me.) Because our system is the most ridiculous, I would call for the most definite limits: limits on overall spending, limits on campaign contributions (I’d like to see that limit be “$0,” but I’ll take something small like $100 and no contributions from organizations.), a complete ban on buying television and radio advertising. Restrictive? Yes. Now let’s talk about why it is needed, and justified, despite being restrictive.

First, let’s point out that the Citizens United decision was incorrect: while spending may be considered free speech – I just argued that money is in some way everything, so I can’t now say that it isn’t speech, as much as I would like to – the Court’s decision ignored the idea that buying political ads in support of a candidate could be a path to corruption because it can buy political access and a more generous consideration from that candidate; they took direct quid pro quo as their only definition of corruption. This is absurd. When someone gives me a gift, I think of them more kindly afterward. When someone gives me a gift and asks me to think kindly of their cause, I will spend more time thinking about that cause, in addition to thinking kindly about the person who gave me the gift and brought the cause too my attention. When that gift is a million dollars, which allows me to keep my lucrative job for another two to six years, I am going to be especially generous to that cause and the side of the giver, in the hopes that I will get another similar gift later on. And that’s corruption: it’s the purchase of influence, if not actual quid pro quo purchases of votes, and it locks those without millions of dollars to spend out of the equation: but not out of the consequences of the decision. This is why we have right to limit this “speech” – because its free exercise limits our own freedoms, and your rights stop where mine begin.

Along with that, the idea that money may be considered a form of speech doesn’t mean that we are free to speak in any way we like: if the “speech” is something like, “Hey, Doug Ducey [Governor of Arizona, for those who don’t already know the Deuce], we’ll give you millions of dollars to run your campaign, in exchange for you representing the interests of large corporations over the needs of your citizens. Love, the Koch brothers,” then we should not consider that speech free. You might as well tell Hired Goons, Inc., that its standard, “Hey, nice blog you got there. Be a shame if something was to happen to it…” sales pitch was protected free speech, or a conversation between terrorists planning a bombing is First-Amendment-sanctioned free assembly.

You can’t use the First Amendment to protect your ability to do harm to others. Even if your ostensible intention is to help yourself.

If we limit campaign contributions to $100 per person or so, then candidates could still be supported by individuals; and if corporations wanted to support candidates with more than a personal contribution, they could use their ability to gather together many individuals – the whole idea of “incorporation,” taking several separate pieces and forming one “body” from them – and convince them that this candidate was better for the corporation’s collective interests than that candidate. You know, political campaigning. The way unions used to do it, before they got lazy and then corrupt themselves. (Don’t get me wrong: I support unions wholeheartedly. But the disconnect between union leadership and its members has led to the same problems that such distance between head and base always creates: members who are not represented by the body they expect to represent them. Though in the case of unions, it’s not because of campaign contributions and monetary corruption so much, but rather because of inertia and apathy on the part of the majority of the workers. Says the former local union leader. Anyway: different topic.) A CEO with 10,000 employees could, even without threats or coercion, help to swing a $1,000,000 campaign contribution. Even without corruption, that’s power. But it’s the right kind of power: because an elected official should listen to the wishes of 10,000 of his or her constituents. And please, let’s not assume that a CEO just naturally represents the wishes of his or her employees; do you think the Waltons speak for the political will of the nation’s Wal-Mart greeters? Neither do I. But the Waltons do have an easy audience in those workers, and they could try to convince them to support the same political causes and candidates. You, know, legally. With actual free speech.

If we limit campaign spending, we will achieve something even more important than limiting campaign contributions; because with the current system of limited personal contributions (Though the current cap is much higher than I would like it to be) and unlimited spending, all that happens is: Trump and Ted Cruz. Trump can swing an election because he can pay for it himself, and outspend any normal opponent; I am using Cruz here to represent politicians who stop doing their actual jobs in order to spend all of their time soliciting campaign contributions, and who are little more than empty shells echoing the sound of the ocean – in this case, whatever is the absurdity most likely to please the people who continue to give him money. If he can raise enough of a “war chest” (And isn’t it indicative of the trouble in this scenario that we use that phrase? Really? The funding used to conquer a people – or maybe the tribute extracted from the conquered. That’s swell, America. Why don’t we ever pay attention to our own words?) then he can win an election; but it takes a huge amount of work, and an even huger amount of bullshit, to raise that much money, and so that’s what we get: politicians who are full of shit, and who spend no time doing anything other than fundraising. So what we do is put a cap on the amount that can be spent on a campaign, with larger caps for larger offices, and/or larger numbers of voters in the campaign. We should also make TV advertising for politics either illegal, or free for all recognized candidates on an equal-time basis. Advertising is the largest expense by far (Though there are others – travel and staff payroll are two expenses I can’t really quibble with; I think it’s good for politicians to get on a bus and travel through the country and meet the people they want to represent. I think it’s good that voters get to hear speeches from their would-be representatives, in person. And I think politicians need good aides and assistants, since I doubt anyone could fully grasp all of the issues a politician will be expected to deal with.), and if we limit that, then the rest of campaign spending could be counted in realistic numbers – millions or tens of millions, rather than hundreds of millions and even billions. You could raise millions in $100-increments if there were enough constitutents pulling for you. At the least, you could pay for your bus and your staff, and sandwiches for everyone.

Now, I’d like there to be only public funding of elections; if we raised a small tax, we could put some millions of dollars aside for elections, and pay for all campaigns without any personal influence at all; but there are ways for that to be corrupted, as well, and so it may not be a necessary step. Still: I think we should reach the point where we agree that money as free speech should be severely curtailed, and political campaigns are a good place to start.

So okay, Humphrey – how do we achieve all of this? It took years for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill to become law, and even then it was first watered down and then overturned by Citizens United. The people who make the laws are the very ones you’re looking to limit. So what’s the plan?

But lucky for us, we do still live in a democracy, and there are still ways that the will of the people can override even the most intransigent resistance from the current political and economic powers. One of the ways – the best way, because it can’t be changed by anything but the will of the people – is a Constitutional Amendment. And I would argue that this problem is so widespread, and so pervasive through different levels of government, and so damaging to our national interest, that a Constitutional Amendment is called for. That Amendment could set limits on donations, on spending, on advertising; even if they were basic, it could be enough to swing politics back to what it should be: public service, rather than private enterprise.

Let’s show the government, and those who corrupt it, what citizens united can really do. So that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not vanish from this Earth.