Quotes for the Week (Lest We Forget)

Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney is trying to polish his image as he gets oh-so-gently interviewed on television about his new book. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has this to say about Dick Cheney:

• "He wanted desperately to be president of the United States... he knew the Texas governor was not steeped in anything but baseball, so he knew he was going to be president and I think he got his dream. He was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration."
  
  
• "He's developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him." Both quotes quoted by Elspeth Reeve for The Atlantic Wire, Powell Aide: Cheney was President 'For All Practical Purposes'," posted 30 Aug. 2011.

Dahlia Lithwick reminds us that "until there are legal consequences for those who order or engage in torture, we will only be pretending. Cheney is the beneficiary of that artifice." And that's the tragedy:

Most of us do not want warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, or war against every dictator who looks at us funny. We may be bloodthirsty, but we aren't morons. On his most combative and truly lawless positions, Cheney still stands largely alone.

The tragedy is that it doesn't matter if we are all Cheneyites now. That there is even one Cheney is enough. He understands and benefits from the fact that the law is still all on his side; that there is only heated rhetoric on ours. As John Adams famously put it, the United States was intended to be a government of laws, not of men. Dick Cheney is living proof that if we are not brave enough to enforce our laws, we will forever be at the mercy of a handful of men.

And Conor Friedersdorf reminds us why Americans loathe Cheney (except those, perhaps, who frequented the cocktail circuit with him in Washington, D.C.; amazing how close proximity to power blunts the moral nerve endings--my observation, not Friedersdorf's). Friedersdorf's blog post titled "Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney" is based on the investigative reporting and writing of several people, including Wil S. Hylton, Barton Gellman, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage, and Jack Balkin. Friedersdorf ends his numerical march down memory lane with this gem:

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.

After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail. Thus his unpopularity circa 2008, when he left office.

Good riddance.

[my emphasis]

Morning Reading, Morning Thoughts

My morning's reading:

• Ryan Lizza's "Leap of Faith," about "the transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race," in The New Yorker. I found this article particularly interesting because, like Michele Bachmann, I was early influenced by evangelical Christianity; only for me, that influence was in a country Southern Baptist Church that my paternal grandmother helped establish. I also read Francis Schaeffer's works in search of an intellectual way to verify my beliefs, and for a time, the church in which I was a member focused on eschatology and most specifically on Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. So there is nothing in Michele Bachmann's far-right views that is unfamiliar to me. The difference is that I rejected those views. Brain-washing* is a peculiar thing: when you're under the influence, you don't realize that you are being manipulated--or if you suspect, as I did, you search for ways to justify your continued adherence to the views of your group while also fearing the rejection that will come when you leave the group. When you shake yourself free--not easily and not unassisted--you are appalled by your emotional and rational--and even moral--submission to views you now find untenable. Having been under the influence of far-right Christianity as a youth, I certainly don't want to experience being under that same influence as a citizen. While I find much to admire in the teachings of Jesus, I find much to abhor in how those teachings are expressed in far-right Christian theology.
  
  
• "Your Head on My Shoulder: Parasitic Twins and other Half-Formed Siblings," by Jesse Bering, in Slate--This article was interesting in its gruesome descriptions of parasitic twins, in which one twin is born healthy and another is mal-formed, incomplete, and attached to the healthy twin. And, also, the author's comments at the end connect to the current movement in this country to ban abortions. We have leaders advocating banning abortion of any kind, even if the young woman is a victim of rape or incest. Evidently, these same people would ban abortions of mal-formed twins (some of which are just a jumble of parts) though such intervention might promote the health of the fully-formed and viable twin. When Michele Bachmann and others such as she say they believe in "liberty," they don't mean the liberty for women to make their own reproductive decisions, even when those decisions are based on sound science and/or compassion.
  
  
• Dave Weigel's piece in Slate, "Republicans for Tax Hikes (Republicans have finally found a group they want to tax: poor people)"--My previous post responds to this crazy turn of events in the Republican party. But Weigel's analysis points out that there is a method to this madness: Tax the poor more so that they will support lowering taxes for everyone. That way, there is more support for keeping taxes low on the rich.

  In 2002 and 2003, long before it got Huntsman in the room, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that poor people who didn't pay income taxes were "lucky duckies." The poor slob with a low income and child tax credit would get a small or nonexistent tax bill, not one that would "get his or her blood boiling with tax rage." The problem here wasn't that the poor slob wasn't paying any taxes; the problem was that his meager tax bill failed to foment enough anger to reduce taxes on other people. Tax cuts for the rich—tax cuts for anyone, really, but the Journal has always been concerned about tax cuts for the rich—require a broad base of outrage.

  Diabolical. And I don't mean that in an admiring way.
  
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog post, "Affirmative Action for Colonial White People," on The Atlantic's website--Actually, I read this piece last night, but it seems to me that what Coates points out here about how slaves (black) and servants (mostly white) were manipulated to prevent their finding common ground speaks to how people continue to be manipulated by those in power in order to prevent those without power from uniting against that power. (See above.)
  
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  *"Brainwashing" may be too strong of a word to describe my experience in the Southern Baptist Church, but the message I got as a child was full of fear and loathing--loathing for the physical self, fear of damnation--and it was sometimes delivered in scary ways. We had preachers who would get all worked up about sin and hell until they were shouting and stomping around the pulpit. At the close of sermons, at what is called "altar-call," we were asked to close our eyes and raise our hands if we felt we needed forgiveness. "Don't worry," the pastor would say, "Only I and God can see your raised hands." But then, once we would raise them, he would tell us that if we had raised our hands, we now needed to come forward publicly and make a confession, implying that we fell "short of the glory of God," in the Apostle Paul's words, if we didn't have the courage to do so. Guilt was a mighty tool. And that time we were studying Hal Lindsey's books was a very dark time, full of foreboding. I had nightmares about Jesus coming back in the clouds and my feet not being able to leave the ground to join the throng of believers in the sky. And one of our pastors would get so excited when our church's gospel quartet sang "The King is Coming," that he would begin screaming. Really.
  

The Poor

My mind has lately returned to my childhood and a place that I once held very dear, my maternal grandparents' home in East Gate, Texas, on the prairie in Liberty County, near Gum Grove, Texas, not far from Huffman, Texas, and Dayton, Texas. My grandparents lived there in a wooden house built by my grandfather and his father. My mother and her siblings were reared there. And I spent many summer days there, picking peas and then shelling them in the shade of pecan trees, shucking corn, playing board games and dominoes with my grandmother, who never seemed to tire from playing those games with her grandchildren. In the evening, we would watch westerns on television or the Grand Ol' Opry with my grandfather. My grandmother would prepare food that sent us home in despair when we were teenagers; one summer one of my sisters gained ten pounds after staying a week with my grandmother. The typical breakfast spread? Fried eggs and bacon, sausage, homemade biscuits served with milk gravy and butter from the Jersey cow, fig preserves, and very black coffee. My grandmother would also prepare spice cake, lemon meringue pies, chocolate meringue pies or pecan pies for later desserts. Supper was frequently fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a selection of vegetables we had perhaps helped pick.

My grandparents' education did not go beyond 9th grade. My grandmother told me that when she was in ninth grade, she caught flu and stayed home to recuperate. She never returned to school. My grandfather worked the rodeos, labored in the oil fields before I was born, and worked for Liberty County doing odd jobs. He raised cattle and sold cattle. He, my father, and one of my uncles herded their cattle together, with that of other friends, on government land in the marshes of Old and Lost Rivers when I was a child. I still have clear memories of my grandfather on a horse, of the sound of boots on a wooden floor, of the jangle of spurs and the whispering shush of leather chaps--and of Papa playing "Redwing" and "Orange Blossom Special" on his harmonica.

My grandmother's favorite television show was a morning show called "Dialing for Dollars." At the beginning of the show, the host would announce a password, and later in the show, the host would dial a telephone number. If the person answering the telephone knew the password, that person would win prize money. We couldn't be far from the telephone on those days that my grandmother watched; she always hoped that she would win. And I think she did win some groceries one time. Other than that, my grandmother didn't watch much television. But she loved the Houston Astros, and she would listen to games on the radio.

Only occasionally was I reminded that my grandparents were poor, especially in their old age.  My grandmother clipped coupons, counted her change, and was careful to purchase items on sale. When I was a very little child in the early sixties, she made her own cotton dresses on a treadle sewing machine. I remember the old wringer-washing machine that was in the side yard next to the house and the clothesline where we hung out clothes to dry. Later, of course, she had an electric washer and dryer installed in what we called "the back porch," rooms enclosed at the back of the house near the kitchen. I suspect that the electric washer and dryer were gifts from family, perhaps her children. The house itself lacked air-conditioning. Instead, someone had installed an industrial fan in the dining-room window. The fan didn't have a switch. We would have to plug it in and then give one of the fan blades a push to get it going.

And, then, once when I was a young adult, maybe still a teenager, we had a family gathering at which I was forcibly reminded of my grandparents' poverty. A young woman from Houston whose mother had married into the family was visiting with her fiance, a very well-off young man. As they walked under the shade of the pecan trees into the yard bare of grass and up to the un-air-conditioned house, I overheard the young woman say to her future husband, "Can you imagine living here?"

I can still feel the hot flush of anger...and shame...that I felt then, loving my grandparents as I did and also realizing that they were indeed poor, specimens of poverty in the eyes of the suburban middle-class and the Houston wealthy.

What we never lacked at my grandparents' house was plenty of love. My grandmother's freezer and refrigerator were always full of food, and she loved preparing meals for her extended family. She and my grandfather were generous and kind.

I think of them when I hear pundits sneer about the poor today, about how 51% of Americans don't pay federal income tax because they are, indeed, poor. Those pundits easily forget that those Americans pay other taxes,  payroll taxes (if they have jobs), taxes on goods, property taxes, and state income taxes in those states with such taxes.  I was enraged by Fox News pundits claiming that Democrats, President Obama, and even that really wealthy guy Warren Buffet were inciting class warfare against the rich -- and at the language used on Fox News to describe the poor as "takers" and "moochers." And I was happy to see Jon Stewart expose the hypocrisy and meanness of those who think the poor can't be poor if they own a refrigerator or a microwave or a cellphone. Watch Jon's takedown here: Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, August 18, 2011.

We owe a lot to the working poor.

Irony

Here's a bit of irony: "Karl Rove Created Rick Perry--Now Can He Stop Him?"

Karl Rove created campaign tactics to cynically appeal to the religious far-right. Now there's a presidential candidate that perfectly (and just as cynically, perhaps--who knows?) epitomizes the far-right to which Rove appealed, and Rove doesn't want that candidate to be nominated for president.  Why? Because he thinks the guy can't be elected, or that, if he is, folks like Rove won't be able to control him or the far-right that he represents. Karl Rove is Frankenstein, I guess, who has created a monster (the far-right's current influence on the Republican party, not Rick Perry, necessarily--I don't know the man personally, but I was reared in far-right country).

Interested in Rove's amoral political tactics? Read the following:

• "Karl Rove in a Corner,", by Josh Green, for The Atlantic, 2004.
  
  
• Frontline's "Karl Rove: The Architect."

And Karl Rove's political predecessor, Lee Atwater:
Frontline's "The Lee Atwater Story: Boogie Man."

University Costs

My husband and I recently moved both our adult children back to the universities that they are attending: two children in two different states. Now we're back to a two-adult household, just as we started our married lives 33 years ago--except that we still have dependents. We are essentially maintaining three households, with some assistance from our children. The undergraduate has a state scholarship based on high-school attendance in the state and on grade point average.  The graduate student just discovered that he has been assigned a Teacher Assistant position in the department where he is studying, a position that will perhaps waive out-of-state tuition (but not tuition altogether) and offer a small stipend. Both saved money from summer jobs this year while living with us to cut expenses.

What a difference I see between the time that my husband and I were in college and today.  The costs of higher education have increased significantly since 1978-1987, when my husband and I married as undergraduates and then attended graduate school. My husband and I were able to pay all our expenses with the money we made as a Graduate Assistant Teacher and a Graduate Research Assistant. Our son's  TA position will fall far short of providing for living expenses, books, and tuition. Students such as he must either depend upon family assistance or student loans. One university sent our son a letter informing him that he was eligible for a loan, of course--for $45,000 a year, essentially what comes to a $100,000 debt for a master's degree. My husband and I paid less than $100,000 for each of the first three homes that we bought between 1983 and 1993.  And we graduated with a master's degree and a Ph.D with no debt, due to scholarships, teaching and research appointments, cheap married-student housing, food hand-outs from family, and penny-pinching. Pity the kids who graduate with a $100,000+ debt and want to begin a Ph.D program, too. Or start a family.

See also: "The Debt Crisis at American Colleges," by  Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, in The Atlantic, posted 17 August 2011.

Interesting Comparisons

A recent study published by the Pew Research Center used data collected by the Census Bureau to determine the effect of the recession on certain segments of the population.  From 2005 to 2009:

• "the median wealth of Hispanic households fell 66 percent
  
• ....while the median wealth of whites fell just 16 percent over the same period."
  
• "African Americans saw their wealth drop 53 percent."
  
• "Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent."
  
  Source: "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest," Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times,  26 July 2011.

In contrast, the Center for Responsive Politics has a new study out showing that:

• ... "congressional members’ personal wealth collectively increased by more than 16 percent between 2008 and 2009."
• ... "[n]early half of them -- 261 -- are millionaires, a slight increase from the previous year..."
• "And of these congressional millionaires, 55 have an average calculated wealth in 2009 of $10 million or more, with eight in the $100 million-plus range."
  
  Source: "Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour National Economy," Open Secrets Blog at opensecrets.org

Here's how the median household net worth plunged for different segments of American society:

• Hispanics:  from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,235 in 2009.
  
• Blacks: from $12,124 in 2005 to $5,677 in 2009.
  
• Whites: from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.
  
• Asians: from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009.
  
• All: from $96,894 in 2005 to $70,000 in 2009
  Source: "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest," New York Times.  

In contrast, the median wealth of our leaders in Congress and the Senate INCREASED:

• U.S. House member:  from$645,503 in 2008 to $765,010 in 2009.
  
• U.S. Senator: from $2.27 million in 2008 to $$2.38 million in 2009.
  
• ALL members of Congress, House members and Senate members: $785,515 in 2008 to $911,510 in 2009. 

Source: "Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour Economy," www. opensecrets.org

Of course, these numbers represent median wealth of groups whose members have very disparate household worth. But the comparison is stark between the median wealth of members of the U.S. Congress and those of the citizens who elected them and who are suffering the most from the economy. It is therefore difficult not to be cynical when Republicans insist on not raising taxes on the wealthy (letting the Bush tax cuts expire, as was initially planned) to help balance the budget. Two-thirds of the American people think those taxes SHOULD be raised on the wealthiest. Therefore, whose interest are Republicans serving?

Signs of the Times

• The rich hire protection from the economically-depressed masses: "These Guys will Stop you from Killing your Boss," Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones, July/August 2011 issue.
  
  
  
• Is poverty being criminalized?: "Turning Poverty into an American Crime," Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation (originally posted on TomDispatch.com), 9 August 2011.
  
  
  
• Why is there such hatred of the poor as the poor get poorer and the richer get richer?: "Nebraska AG Jon Bruning Compares Welfare Recipients to Scavenging Raccoons," Benji Sarlin, Talking Points Memo, 9 August 2011.
  
  
  
• What is happening to the middle-class in America?": "Can the Middle Class be Saved?," Don Peck, The Atlantic, September 2011 issue. 
 
• The unemployed need not apply: "The Help-Wanted Sign comes with a Frustrating Asterisk," Catherine Rampell, The New York Times, 25 July 2011.

• London burns in riots "led by gangs of young people and organized in part via BlackBerry instant messaging." The riots began in economically-depressed neighborhoods and have spread to other cities: "London Burning: A Foreign Policy Slide Show"; also "Why London Exploded Last Night," Michael Goldfarb, Salon, 9 August 2011.
  
  
• Social media used by criminals to create flash mobs to cover for crimes: "For Flash Mobsters, Crowd Size a Tempting Cover," Eric Tucker and Thomas Watkins for Associated Press, Salon,  9 August 2011.
  
  
  
• Voluntary citizen clean-up crews in London use Twitter to organize after rioting: "Londoners Turn to Technology to Stop the Looting,", Adam Clark Estes, The Atlantic Wire, 9 August 2011.
  
  
  
  
• governmental coverups--Severity of radiation exposure downplayed by Japanese government: "Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril," Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler, The New York Times, 8 August 2011.
  
  
  
• regulation coverups--Is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the U.S. doing its job?: "Whistleblowers Say Nuclear Regulatory Commission is Losing Its Bite," John Sullivan and Cameron Hickey, ProPublica,  27 July 2011.
  
  
  
  
  just a few.....

Sunset

This is a photo of the sun setting in Mississippi yesterday evening. I took the photo while I was driving back to my home after taking my daughter, my youngest, back to university in another state. Like the sun here, I am no longer at Astronomical Noon in my children's lives. One must adjust emotionally, of course. I just hadn't realized that it would be this difficult.