Kemstone's Journal

When Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks guest-hosted for Dylan Ratigan this past week, one the segments he did was a quick little oddity about UFO lobbyists:

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Apparently the group “Exopolitics” is lobbying the government to release the truth about extra-terrestrials. Stephen Bassett, a lobbyist for the group, claims that the government has known about the “ET presence” since the 40s, that they sequestered the information for justifiable public security reasons, but once the Cold War ended there was no longer a good reason to keep the truth from the people.

First of all, I don’t believe that extra-terrestrials have ever visited earth. As Carl Sagan used to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and there is no extraordinary evidence of an ET presence on Earth. That said, there is a plethora of unconvincing evidence that when taken as a whole might lead one to believe that it may be true. After all, if ETs were around, wouldn’t they try to be as discreet as possible?

But watching this segment just got me thinking about how monumentally awesome it would be if it were true. If the government just decided one day to let everyone know that humans are not, in fact, alone in the universe, that the galaxy is brimming with life and interstellar empires—I think my biggest sensation would be one of relief.

We live at what must be a relatively unique time-period in the history of an intelligent species, at which we know how vast the universe is and how incredibly small we are in relation to it, but we still know too little about the formation of life and DNA that we must still face the possibility that we could be the only planet with life—or at least the only planet with intelligent life—in the entire cosmos.

And if that’s the case, think of the tremendous responsibility we have. Through us, the universe has become aware of itself. We could be a miracle of existence, the unlikeliest of unlikely phenomena that arose only because given enough time and enough planets on which organic compounds are floating around, there’s bound to be one in which a DNA molecule forms, replicates, and sets the process of biological evolution into motion, and we just happen to be the result of that process.

If that’s the case and we snuff ourselves out, it would be a tragedy of cosmic proportions. To think of our enormous potential—to go out and explore and experience the entire universe—squashed by our own short-sightedness and thus limiting the universe’s self-awareness to a mere blink of an eye on one speck of dust in the void.

But if intelligent species are the norm, if interstellar empires abound throughout the cosmos, then we’re off the hook in a big way. Even if we go extinct, awareness will continue in other forms and life in the universe will go on without us.

If there are ETs around and the government does know about them, I wish they would tell us. Not only do I think it would create a sense of global community in a way never before imaginable, but it would provide us with a cosmic peace of mind that we’ve never before been capable of.

Sometimes it really feels like the people in power are deliberately robbing the poor to give more money to the rich. Or to put it more accurately, like they’re funneling money from the middle class to pay their rich friends in the military industrial complex, the energy industry, Wall Street, and so on.

Whenever there’s talk of cutting spending, it’s almost always about spending on the middle-class and never about subsidies to giant corporations. A huge case-in-point came last week when House republican leader John Boehner gave an interview in which he made a policy suggestion for how to deal with the deficit:

House Republican Leader John Boehner said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review out today that he would back raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 for those who will not retire for another 20 years.

Obviously, we can’t keep paying out social security checks if we want to pay for war in Afghanistan. We’re talking priorities, people.

It might not be as scary if it weren’t for the fact that the talk of cutting entitlement spending weren’t coming from both sides of the aisle. Obama took a lot of heat from his own supporters for creating a bipartisan deficit commission to address the growing problem.

“We’re going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because if you take those off the table, you can’t get there,” commission co-chair Erskine Bowles, former Clinton White House chief of staff, said in a March speech. “If we don’t make those choices, America is going to be a second-rate power and I don’t mean in 50 years. I mean in my lifetime.”

They keep talking about how Social Security is in crisis. That it’s going to go bankrupt unless we take drastic measures such as privatization (i.e. handing control of our retirement money to the same people who caused the financial collapse). This is based on the premise that once revenues from payroll taxes fall short of the cost of paying out benefits, it will be broke. But as Paul Krugman explains, this doesn’t take into consideration the last 25 years of surplus in the program. Social Security is just fine. It’s this giant cash-cow that the wealthy interests have had their eyes on for a long time. They can’t wait to raid social security to cover their financial bets, pay for more war, and do whatever else it is they do with our money.

The big misunderstanding comes from the word we use for programs like social security and medicare: “entitlement” programs. Yes, we’re “entitled” to that money because it’s our money. We pay into the system our whole lives with the expectation that when the time comes and we can no longer work or afford our medical bills, the government will be there to help us out. But they’re trying to take that away from us, to take the money we’re entitled to (because it’s ours–not because it’s some kind of gift that they promised us) and use it to pay for war and financial shenanigans.

Cenk Uygur does a great job explaining it in this clip from The Young Turks:

Don’t let them tell you we can’t afford to pay back your money that you’re paying into the system. There are a hell of a lot of other things we can cut, starting with unnecessary and unwinnable wars.

When the Rolling Stone article that brought down General McChrystal came out, many in the establishment press immediately jumped over Michael Hastings, the reporter who wrote that story, for violating some kind of unspoken agreement between journalists and the people in power they’re supposed to cover. Most notably, CBS reporter Lara Logan criticized him for reporting things that he knew could damage McChrystal, and even though nothing was officially off-the-record he should have simply opted not to include it out of deference to the general.

As many have now pointed out, this is exactly the problem with so-called “journalism” today. Reporters don’t do actual journalism–they do stenography. They just write down whatever it is the public figure has to say and leave it at that. This is mostly because these beat-reporters are afraid that if they publish anything unfavorable to these sources, they’ll lose their access. Barack Obama might have said something that would have destroyed his entire campaign if it ever went public, but the reporter won’t publish it because she doesn’t want to burn her bridges.

This is why even if you take the differences between the liberal and conservative media into consideration, you end up with a mostly one-sided view of things. Matt Taibbi lays this out brilliantly in his blog, which is worth quoting at length:

True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth – spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department – but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?

And true, most of the major TV outlets are completely in the bag for the Pentagon, with two of them (NBC/GE and Logan’s own CBS, until recently owned by Westinghouse, one of the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturers) having operated for years as leaders in both the broadcast media and weapons-making businesses.

But is that enough to guarantee a level playing field? Can a general really feel safe that Americans will get the right message when the only tools he has at his disposal are a $5 billion P.R. budget and the near-total acquiescence of all the major media companies, some of whom happen to be the Pentagon’s biggest contractors?

[...]

Apparently not, according to Lara Logan. Apparently in addition to all of this, reporters must also help out these poor public relations underdogs in the Pentagon by adhering to an “unspoken agreement” not to embarrass the brass, should they tilt back a few and jam their feet into their own mouths in front of a reporter holding a microphone in front of their faces.

The media’s job is to challenge the powers-that-be, but in reality all it does is prop them up. When a reporter actually does his job and calls it like he sees it, the rest of the media loses their shit and starts running around like headless chickens squawking about how that’s not how it’s done. Geraldo Rivera’s head nearly exploded in an interview with Bill O’Reilly in which he was trying to argue that Hastings’ reporting, because it damaged the reputation of a top-commander in the U.S. military, was borderline treason!

As Cenk Uygur points out in this clip from The Young Turks, this is from a guy who was kicked out of Iraq for broadcasting details about troop movements for all to see, including the enemy.

The problem with these “journalists” is that they think they actually work for the people they cover–that their job is to help them out as much as possible. Taibbi blasts this notion:

They don’t need your help, and you’re giving it to them anyway, because you just want to be part of the club so so badly. Disgustingly, that’s really what it comes down to. Most of these reporters just want to be inside the ropeline so badly, they want to be able to say they had that beer with Hillary Clinton in a bowling alley in Scranton or whatever, that it colors their whole worldview. God forbid some important person think you’re not playing for the right team!

Meanwhile, the people who don’t have the resources to find out the truth and get it out in front of the public’s eyes, your readers/viewers, you’re supposed to be working for them — and they’re not getting your help. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Is it worth all the bloodshed and the hatred? Who are the people running this thing, what is their agenda, and is that agenda the same thing we voted for? By the severely unlikely virtue of a drunken accident we get a tiny glimpse of an answer to some of these vital questions, but instead of cheering this as a great break for our profession, a waytago moment, one so-called reputable journalist after another lines up to protest the leak and attack the reporter for doing his job. God, do you all suck!

They do indeed. If “journalists” in this country had been doing actual journalism for the last nine years, we would have been out of Afghanistan a long time ago.

Use this argument on anyone who still insists on “staying the course” in Afghanistan:

Hypothetical situation: It’s the year 2101 and the United States government has long since crumbled under the weight of its own corruption. Most authority is local, with most cities and towns controlled by Evangelical Christian Militias who aim to impose their own strict interpretation of Biblical Law across the entire country.

Meanwhile, China is the world’s sole super-power and is exterting its influence around the globe. Because they are seen as anti-Christian, the Evangelical Militia groups despise China and would like nothing more than to see it crumble. So they commit an act of terrorism which draws China into a war with the United States.

The Chinese army rolls in, takes out a big chunk of the Militia’s leadership, and sets up a new federal government with China’s full support.

But most Americans never see this government as legitimate, and the remnants of the Christian Militias rise and grow stronger as even non-Christians join them in their struggle to expel the foreign occupiers. On top of that, the latest presidential election is discovered to have been fraudulent, and the president himself is known to have ties to underground drug cartels. Yet the Chinese insist on continuing to back him up militarily.

The Chinese army won’t leave until the Evangelicals are defeated and the U.S. government is capable of supporting itself and preventing any Militias from ever rising again. Yet the Evangelical Militias remain very popular in many parts of the country and the Chinese are almost universally hated because their soldiers don’t speak English, have no understanding of American culture, and frequently kill innocent civilians through carelessness.

The question: Is it possible for China to succeed in its mission? Could it succeed after only one year? Ten years? A hundred years? Or is this the kind of task that is simply impossible to accomplish, like landing safely on the moon by shooting yourself from a cannon?

Obviously, in this analogy China is the United States. The United States is Afghanistan. The corrupt government is the Karzai regime. And the Evangelical Militias are the Taliban.

The United States is as likely to be able to succeed in Afghanistan–by our own definition of “success”–as China would be likely to be able to stabilize a corrupt U.S. government and completely root out right-wing Evangelicals.

So let’s get. the fuck. out of there.

[Full disclosure: I got this idea while watching Cenk Uygur and Jonathan Kim discuss the film "Restrepo" on last Friday's episode of The Young Yurks]

I’m still on the fence about Twitter, but one of the decidedly positive things about it is the exposure to certain articles I would never have read had I not clicked on a link in somebody’s tweet. Yesterday I came across this article which I think is a must-read for anyone who gets their news from almost exclusively one source, be it Fox News, MSNBC, or even network television.

The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.

The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.

Our brains are configured to seek patterns. As such, we tend to see what we’re looking for. We’ve all experienced coincidences in which we think of an old film for the first time in years, and suddenly we notice that film being mentioned all over the place. There’s nothing miraculous about this–it’s just that we take in so much information that our minds have to filter it. It filters out whatever it finds irrelevant or contradictory and leaves us with whatever is relevant to or supportive of our pre-existing thought patterns.

When a conservative watches the news, his mind only pays attention to the facts that support his conservative worldview, just as a liberal pays attention only to facts that confirm his liberal bias. Cable news commentary shows are so popular because the information comes pre-filtered. The mind doesn’t have to dismiss contradictory information because it’s only exposed to information that confirms what it already believes.

Does this mean that everything we believe is wrong? Of course not–it only means we should make an effort to get our news from a variety of sources and to be open to considering other points of view.

I get most of my news from lefty sources, but I make sure to expose myself to conservative arguments as well from time to time. Occasionally I’ll even let one sway me. Still, I would probably do well to spend more time outside the liberal media bubble.

But in its defense, the liberal media bubble isn’t nearly as closed off as the conservative bubble. Liberal blogs often post conservative arguments and liberal talk shows often show clips from conservative talk shows in order to refute those arguments. None do it better than The Young Turks, as Cenk Uygur often plays entire segments of conservative shows so that nothing is taken out of context. But how often will a conservative host expose their viewers to lengthy arguments from the liberal side? They may have a liberal guest on to present an opposing viewpoint, but that guest is typically shouted down without being given an opportunity to fully make their case. The viewer only remembers the shouting match, while the actual point being made is filtered out and forgotten.

If all you want is to have your pre-existing worldview confirmed, then by all means watch nothing but Fox News or MSNBC. But if what you want is a well-informed, thoroughly considered opinion which you can defend with confidence, you have to expose yourself to other sources and remain vigilant against your mind’s innate confirmation bias.

I write a lot about America’s problems in my blog, but this time I’ll actually offer a solution. It’s not an original idea—I’m sure we’ve all thought of it at one time or another—but it’s such a simple and obvious measure we can take to get government working on behalf of the people again that it bears repeating as often as possible.

We’ve all heard the term “revolving door congress” which refers to the implicit bribe that public servants have to cater to big industries at the expense of their constituents. Spending time as a congressman or senator may not earn you a great deal of money while you have that job, but it will earn you significant credentials for any future job. Whether it’s a place on the board of directors of a major corporation, or merely a job as a lobbyist, you can earn a lot more money when you move from the public to the private sector.

But the revolving door isn’t only in operation for actual congressmen—it works for their staffers as well. A huge portion of staffers on Capitol Hill, perhaps even the majority, are only in it for their resume. They work in Washington, make connections with the power-players, and put those connections to the service of lobbying firms once they’re done. The staffers are the ones who actually write the legislation, and if their main goal is to be a lobbyist for a big corporation, they’re going to make sure they write that legislation in a way that benefits, to the greatest degree possible, the corporation they intend to work for. That corporation will reward them with a nice fat salary when they’re finished. It’s not bribery per se, but it’s pretty damn close.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks gave a perfect example on the show last week. Having just returned from a protest they organized in Washington, he’d had a few conversations with Washington insiders which provided some additional insight into the situation. His source wanted to remain anonymous, so he couldn’t be very specific, but there was a provision in the Financial Reform package that was so transparently helpful to Wall Street and harmful to Main Street that not even the republicans could openly support it and it was removed from the bill. But when a new draft came along, the same provision had miraculously reappeared, and had to be removed again. The same thing happened a third time, and finally they realized that staffers at the Federal Reserve, who had been given the task of actually writing the legislation, had been slipping the provision back into the bill with each new draft.

How can we expect Washington to produce any legislation that works in our favor if the very people writing that legislation have a vested interest in making it work in the corporations’ favor? Public pressure made the financial reform bill much stronger than many of us expected it to be, but once the debate in front of the cameras was over the bill got fatally weaker. When all is said and done, there will be enough fine print and loop-holes so as to make Wall Street feel as though the whole legislative battle had been nothing but a dream and things can continue exactly as before.

The solution is painfully obvious, so obvious that it’s a wonder the public isn’t demanding it so loudly and forcefully that congress has no choice but to act: close the revolving door.

There are already rules that prohibit congressional staffers from lobbying their former colleagues for at least one year after they leave those jobs. But a mandatory year-long waiting period is a joke. Of course they’re just going to wait out the year and go to work for the lobbying firm the minute they can. For a huge portion of them, that’s their exact plan. Help to sabotage financial reform, wait a year, then go to work for a Wall Street bank. Help to sabotage health insurance reform, wait a year, then go to work for a private health insurance company. Now, help to sabotage energy legislation, wait a year, then go to work for an oil company.

Some say we should insist that they expand the waiting period to five or ten years, but we all know what happens when we start from an already-compromised position. We have to insist that they completely prohibit all public servants and their staffers from ever working as lobbyists for as long as they live. Don’t just slow down the revolving door—destroy it completely. If we keep demanding this, we might reach a compromise whereby the waiting period is extended. That will at least improve the situation a little.

But what’s wrong with demanding the life-long ban? Why shouldn’t we insist that if you want to work as a public servant, you must give up the opportunity to be a lobbyist? The government’s job is to work on behalf of the people, to protect our interests from the interests of giant organizations—be it a country or a corporation—whose interests conflict with ours. If you want to work for the government, why shouldn’t we say that you then have to give up your right to lobby the government on behalf of those organizations?

There should be no financial incentive to work for the government. The only incentive any public servant should have is to serve the public. Destroy the revolving door and all those single-minded greed-driven individuals who only use government as a springboard for their future careers will have to find another path to success. The government will once again be composed of principled people whose only desires are to do some good for their communities and their country.

If anyone who reads this knows anyone with the know-how, the skills, and the resources to organize a campaign to demand this badly needed change to our system, I hope you’ll encourage them to take up this fight. This is a cause that Americans from across the political spectrum would support, and if enough of us demand it we can’t possibly be ignored.

A recent change in my schedule giving me Fridays off has led to what I think will be a good blogging routine of Friday and Saturday devoted to specific news-of-the-week topics and Sunday to a more broad, universal issue. As such I’ll close out this blogging weekend with a look at the issue of race and how it lies hidden beneath many of the opinions held by conservatives. Almost all of them will swear they’re not racists, and I believe that they believe they’re sincere about this, but on closer examination you’ll often find racism lurking just below the surface.

As any avid viewer of The Young Turks is aware, a couple of recent studies have indicated that bias against members of another ethnic group can exist subconsciously. In one study, subjects were shown videos of a hand being pricked with a needle and had their brain waves monitored to indicate the level of empathy they felt. When the hand being pricked was of the same color as the subject’s, more empathy was felt in most cases. Another study was less subconscious, as they tested whether black people have a harder time selling things online by posting ads on sites like Craig’s List or ebay in which either a white hand or a black hand was holding an Ipod to be sold. Not only did black sellers receive fewer responses than white sellers, but buyers were less likely to use their own name and more likely to express concern about making long-distance payments when contacting a black seller.

I doubt that any of the people who withheld their names or expressed concern about payments to the black sellers believe that they are racists. And I’m sure if you came right out and asked them, “Do you think white people are superior to black people?” they would say no, of course not. But there’s still no denying that racism was a factor in their behavior.

I believe that racism is also a huge subconscious factor when it comes to many people’s political beliefs. They might not recognize the racism, and they’ll almost certainly deny that it’s there, but it is there whether acknowledged or not. I’ll look at five major conservative attitudes or opinions in which racism is a factor—I’m sure you can probably think of many more.

1- Opposition to welfare

It’s a perfectly legitimate position to be opposed to welfare, but how much of that opposition is a result of an underlying psychological connection between the word “welfare” and the image of an overweight black person sitting on a couch all day? That’s the image that pops into my head when I hear that word because I grew up among conservatives who overtly associated welfare with black people. I’m sure not everyone has that association, but I can assure you from firsthand experience that a whole lot of people do.

We can argue about the underlying principles behind liberalism and conservatism all day, and conservatives can make some legitimate points about how people who refuse to get a job should not be entitled to a portion of the earnings of those who work hard, but when all is said and done I think we all feel better off with some kind of social safety-net than we would without one. Not everyone on welfare is just leeching off the system—some people are just genuinely down on their luck, and since we all might find ourselves in that position due to circumstances beyond our control (just ask a Louisiana fisherman) I think we could all agree that welfare is necessary.

But there are those who go to the extreme and rail against any government assistance programs whatsoever. Some of these people will come right out and say that they don’t want no goddamned ACORN taking the white man’s money and handing it out to black folks. Most of them won’t be so explicit, but I would definitely wager that somewhere in the back of their minds is the same sentiment. If you passed around a collection tray to help out a white family down on its luck, I’m sure they’d give without reservation. But say that the donations are for a black family and they’ll instinctively feel put off. Those black folks get enough help from the government with their affirmative action and social assistance programs, so why should they give them any more help?

2- Immigration furor

When it comes to immigration, racism is hardly hidden at all. Right-wing radio commentators don’t even bother to hide their hatred of Mexicans, cracking racial slurs and jokes whenever the issue is brought up. But there are plenty of commentators who insist that this is purely an issue of principle and that they have nothing but sympathy for Mexicans who come to this country in search of a better life.

It has nothing to do with race, they insist. It’s just that when people come here illegally, they take jobs from legal residents and enjoy the benefits of taxpayer-funded institutions including schools and hospitals. Well, most American citizens probably aren’t interested in working out in the fields or cleaning hotel rooms for a living, and even illegal immigrants pay taxes so I’m not sure how much force those two arguments have. It’s certainly unfair that some people wait years to immigrate legally while others just bypass the law altogether, and there’s no doubt that having a significant portion of illegal workers willing to work for below minimum wage drives wages down for everyone—but these problems can be addressed in a sane and rational manner.

But the conservatives’ solution to the problem is just to round up all the brown people and ship them back to Mexico if they can’t produce proof of citizenship (and then build a big fence to keep them there). You can’t honestly believe that there’s no element of racism behind the support for Arizona’s new “papers, please” legislation. If the law mandated that everyone be asked to produce proof of citizenship, support would plummet. It only remains popular because white folks know that they won’t be suspected of being illegal and won’t be harassed. They just don’t care if Mexicans are harassed, even if many of them are hard-working citizens.

3- Torture and denial of rights

In the same way most conservatives can’t or won’t put themselves in the shoes of a Mexican immigrant, they refuse to put themselves in the shoes of an Arab who might have been falsely accused of terrorism, thrown into Guantanamo for years without a trial and subject to torture. Even if the Arab in question didn’t personally commit an act of terrorism, conservatives seem to feel, they probably support those who do. After all, they were dancing in the streets after 9/11.

They just can’t seem to get past the idea that Muslim = Terrorist. As such, they’re all for racial profiling at airports, the denial of Miranda rights, and even outright torture of terror suspects with names like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab or Faisal Shahzad. Ask them if you think the same should be done with white terrorists with names like Tim McVeigh or Joe Stack.

It used to be that Americans across the political spectrum were opposed to torture because it was against the principles which America supposedly stands for. But since 9/11 there has been a massive wave of anti-Muslim sentiment and the demonization of anyone from the Middle East. We used to put ourselves in the position of the person being tortured, understanding that no matter how great their crimes might have been there’s no justification for inflicting that kind of suffering. But conservatives are either unwilling or unable to put themselves in the position of a Muslim being waterboarded. No sympathy is felt. It could be argued that anyone who carries out an attack that kills innocent civilians deserves no sympathy, but it’s hard to see anyone being tortured and feel nothing at all. I suspect conservatives would sympathize with a white terrorist under torture, whereas they couldn’t care less about a brown one.

4- New Orleans apathy

It’s been awhile since Hurricane Katrina, but immediately afterwards there was no doubt that conservatives were tripping over themselves to blame the victims. New Orleans has a high black population, and it seemed that most of the people caught in the storm were black. Why didn’t they just get out? They were stupid enough to stay behind, so they deserved whatever they got. How dare they demand that the government be quicker in its response? Can you believe the sense of entitlement of these people?

Conservatives would snicker whenever a black face came on the TV to complain about the government’s pitiful response, as if in the same position they wouldn’t be on TV complaining just as loudly. If it had been a rural town full of white folks trapped on their rooftops, however, I’ll bet they would have been just as adamant in their demands to get those people some assistance and just as outraged when that assistance didn’t come fast enough.

Today we’ve got an oil-spill threatening to destroy the marshlands that serve as a natural barrier for New Orleans in a hurricane, and still nobody cares. They probably feel that those black people who are stupid enough to still be living there deserve whatever they get.

5- Obama hatred

As anyone familiar with my blog knows, I’m no big fan of Obama, but I try to keep my criticisms based in fact. As much as the Tea Party shouts and screams about how it’s not racist and their opposition to Obama is rooted purely in policy, any actual look at Obama’s policies would reveal how hollow such claims are.

They decry him for being a socialist when all he does is bend over backwards to private industry. They accuse him of being soft on terror when he continues to fight Bush’s wars, leave Guantanamo and Bagram open, and agrees to military tribunals for terror suspects. They say he wants to take their guns away when he’s done absolutely nothing to touch the second amendment. They scream about how he’s redistributing the wealth from the rich to the poor (read: black) when all of his policies actually serve to solidify the system that funnels wealth from the lower classes to the upper.

Just admit it already. You hate him because he’s black. You can’t stand the fact that a negro is your representative to the world. Obviously, he didn’t earn the job. It was affirmative action and the liberal media that put him where he is. He’s not smart—he just reads from a teleprompter. He’s actually the most incompetent president we’ve ever had.

All of these nonsense criticisms of Obama must be rooted in something, and reality surely isn’t it. Almost nothing of substance has changed in this country since Obama took office, and yet all these people are just now taking to the streets to yell and scream in protest. As far as I can tell, the only major difference between this administration and the last is the color of the president’s skin. Sure, there are minor differences in terms of tone and substance and Obama’s policies are a bit more liberal than Bush’s, but not nearly enough to justify the over-the-top hyperventilating from the right. If we had a white president doing exactly the same things that Obama is doing, you’d have to be in serious denial to believe there would be just as much momentum behind the Tea Party movement as there is now.

Conclusion

To be called a “racist” is now one of the most offensive things you can be called in America, and in many ways that’s a good thing. It’s nice that we no longer live in a time when you can be proud to be a racist and celebrate your racism as a virtue. But on the other hand, it forces racism below the radar to hide in the cracks of our political discourse where it can’t be confronted so easily.

Nobody wants to be called a racist, so almost nobody admits to racism. They’ll deny it to everybody including themselves, but it can’t be escaped. So much of the feelings that lie behind conservative opinions are inextricably bound up with race whether they like it or not. I think they should have to acknowledge it.

Allow me to depress the hell out of you for a moment as I step back and take a broad look at the state of affairs in the world and draw my gloomy conclusions. Hopefully someone can tell me why I’m wrong and that things aren’t as bad as they seem.

Cenk Uygur, the host of my favorite political show—The Young Turks—sees most things almost exactly as I see them with one major difference. He insists that while he may be pessimistic in the short-term, he’s “long-term optimistic” and I know a lot of people who also feel that way. But not me. I look at the world and the human race and I see a species on the verge of extinction, brought about by its own blind ignorance and refusal to accept responsibility for its fate.

Just look at what’s in the headlines today. Wall Street Executives are expressing sighs of relief at the financial reform package just passed in the senate. You don’t need to know a damned thing about economics to take that as an indication that the reforms didn’t go far enough and the bankers can continue with business as usual. Banks can still be too big to fail and they can still trade derivatives. There is slightly more oversight and rules banning some of the more reckless financial practices…but no penalty for banks that break those rules. Just this one line from the New York Times piece says it all:

Some experts predict that Wall Street, like water overcoming a dam, will easily adapt to the new regulations, or at least exploit what loopholes do remain and thrive again.

If I had any money I’d bet heavily on another financial crisis hitting within the next few years. And when it does, the damage is going to be far worse than the last one. The big banks haven’t been broken up so they can still hold the economy hostage. The public has to bail them out or it all goes under. But people are still enraged about the first bailout—how is it going to be politically possible for anyone in congress to vote for another one? I suspect they all will because they can hide behind the cover of “this is absolutely necessary” like they did the first time, but there’s a chance that the people just won’t stand for it this time and the banks will go down. In any case, Obama will be blamed (rightly so in one sense) and the Tea Party movement is likely to boil into open revolt. Economies all over the world will fall like dominos and countries that have a social safety net will find the number of unemployed far too large to handle. Billions will be out on the street with nowhere to turn, and global chaos will ensue.

Maybe that won’t happen for a few decades, but that seems to be the direction we’re heading in. Thanks to these financial crises the human race seems to be waking up to the fact that the entire global monetary system is based on nothing more than a kind of international consent. We agree that your money is worth something and you agree that ours is too. But economies are becoming less based on actual tangible goods and more on abstract ‘financial products’ that have no intrinsic value. Wealth is just a number in a bank account, scarcely more real than points in a video game. The entire global financial system is a balloon filled with hot air and we’re doing nothing to stop those who keep blowing into it because they hold the balloon—they own everybody in a position to potentially stop them—and sooner or later the balloon is going to burst.

But that’s just money. The global chaos that will ensue when the balloon bursts may set humanity back to the Dark Ages but it won’t kill us all. The other big story in the news these days is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which in and of itself won’t be too devastating but it’s just one symptom of a much larger problem—one far more threatening than any economic collapse.

Not everyone accepts that CO2 emissions are warming up the earth’s atmosphere and not everyone believes that the earth’s resources are as limited as environmentalists claim they are, but just about everyone accepts the concept of a food chain. Anyone who knows anything about ecosystems knows that all forms of life depend on other forms of life for their survival. Nature establishes equilibriums, and when it’s thrown off balance the consequences are usually devastating. Remove just one species from a marsh and hundreds of others might disappear depending on how crucial that species was.

This planet is currently undergoing what scientists have labeled the Sixth Extinction, in which the earth loses about 30,000 species per year due to human activity. This has been going on since the development of agriculture thousands of years ago, but there is no doubt it’s accelerating rapidly due to industrialization. The Gulf oil spill is almost sure to take its fair share of species from the ocean, and there is no indication that we as a species have any intention to stop drilling any time soon.

And of course there’s only so much oil in the earth’s crust, so when that’s gone we’re really going to run into trouble unless we can find another fuel source that can provide us with as much energy as fossil fuels do. Wind and solar won’t provide enough power to keep civilization running as it currently is, and nuclear energy has its own problems, the biggest being radioactive waste.

But even if we find a way to keep the engines of civilization churning, those engines will continue to rape the environment, pollute the sky, and destroy species by the minute. Common sense tells us that there’s only so much damage we can do to the environment before a tipping point is reached and some element of the food chain that was critical to our survival disappears. It may not happen for another century, but unless we drastically alter our way of living it is bound to happen, and I see no sign of willingness on the part of humanity to make such drastic alterations.

The last story I read today is about the Muslim world’s perception of America on the one year anniversary of Obama’s Cairo speech, and how nearly all of the hopes he raised in that speech have been dashed over the last year. The prison at Guantanamo remains open, Israel is still building new settlements in disputed territory, and American troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the wars, Iraq may be “winding down” but people are still being killed by insurgents nearly every day, while Afghanistan truly is “heating up” while many objective observers are saying that our presence there is counter-productive. Our troops are basically there to prop up and support a corrupt, criminal government with a leader who almost certainly won the election through fraud.

Why is this important? Why is it a sign of humanity’s impending doom? Because the leader of the free world is not George W. Bush anymore—it’s Barack Obama.

I came to true political awareness during the Bush administration and back then I was just as filled with doom and gloom. Clearly, the guy was the worst possible president we could have had. Not only was he an ignorant buffoon who probably genuinely believed that Jesus wanted him to start these wars—he was transparently a puppet of the giant corporations that dominate us. He was a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil and a staunch ally of the military industrial complex. Under Bush, you could be sure that the environment would continue to be raped and war would be the order of the day. Clearly, there would be no effort towards world peace or environmental sustainability.

But then Barack Obama came along with a promise of change. He talked the talk and inspired the world with the very vision we needed most—the vision of a world united in peace, an end to unnecessary wars and a true drive towards clean and renewable energy that would protect and preserve the environment we all depend on. If anyone was going to lead the way to that future dreamed about by men like Gene Roddenberry or Carl Sagan—in which humanity survives its technological adolescence and dedicates itself to its own betterment and to exploring the universe beyond our planet of origin—it was Barack Obama.

But clearly we’re a long way from the United Federation of Planets and it’s doubtful we’ll ever get there. If Obama had the best of intentions when he got into office, he quickly discovered that there were serious limitations to what he could accomplish. The powers that be were already too powerful. If the best he could do with Wall Street was to give them a slap on the wrist and warn them not to cause another financial crisis, if the best he could do with the two wars was to slightly alter the deployment numbers and shift a few resources around, if the best he could do to address climate change was to offer more subsidies for offshore drilling and then give up the fight when something went wrong, and if the best he can do during an actual environmental catastrophe like the one in the Gulf is to let the corporations handle it and hope the story just goes away—then humanity is more fucked than most people care to admit.

It turns out that it really doesn’t matter at all who the president is. If we’re heading in the wrong direction no matter who is at the helm, we’re eventually going to fall off the cliff. And what can I do about it? What can any of us do about it? That’s a question for another blog entry, one I’ll write if I ever come up with anything. For now I think the best we can do is simply recognize it. To understand that humanity’s survival is not guaranteed—that our grandchildren may not live to have grandchildren of their own—and that the only hope we have is to stop making enemies of each other and to come together and fight against extinction, the common enemy of us all.

I hear this argument again and again from democrats: By criticizing the president, you’re undermining his agenda. Funny—he seemed to be doing a pretty good job of undermining his own supposed agenda without my help.

A few days ago, I got into a little tussle with another Huffington Post commenter after agreeing with another commenter who expressed frustration with Obama and the democrats for continuing to fail to deliver on the promises of change at the heart of the 2008 campaign. Specifically, they voted down the amendment to break up the big banks and Obama sat idly by while Too Big Too Fail remained firmly in place. I wrote that this practically guaranteed another financial crisis and taxpayer bailout in the near future—a position that many economists agree with. I was called a “clown” who was “wasting his time” over the “arbitrary size of the banks” when I should have been focused on more important issues like making sure “the government continues to protect deposits.”

What ensued was a back-and-forth that I might have found quite valuable if the guy didn’t insist on attacking me personally, but that’s just the way it goes in the online comment jungle. (The Huffington Post allows you to flag comments that you find abusive, but I don’t believe in doing that. Let people be as vitriolic as they want—they’re only undermining their own credibility by doing so. Plus, I’ve had more than a few comments removed that weren’t abusive at all but merely a little snarky, so I refuse to flag anything. I’m a free speech purist.)

The thing is—I honestly feel this is a debate worth having. Are people like me in fact doing more harm than good by constantly expressing frustration and disappointment with the president and the Democratic Party for not going far enough to solve the problems we believe are the most significant this country is facing? Should we just stand behind the president no matter what, accepting any and all compromises he chooses to make?

I’ll risk a little quote from this guy:

The Democrats have consistently been delivering for the American people; the legislative record for the Congress clearly proves that. And, frankly, outside of not having Guantanamo Bay closed, President Barack Obama and his Administration have been delivering on the change that they promised on the campaign trail. Barack Obama never casted himself as a guy that was running from the left fringe of the Democratic Party and, frankly, I don’t see where all this “frustration of broken promises” from the left is coming from.

Obviously he doesn’t watch The Young Turks, as the host Cenk Uygur—whose political views and attitude are the closest to mine of any other commentator—has been doing a fantastic job of explaining it. On issue after issue, Obama has turned what could have been real change into “pocket change” as Cenk likes to say, and it only naturally follows that “Sometimes, I feel discouraged.”

No need to make a laundry list of the disappointments…well, maybe a little one: No accountability for those who authorized or carried out policies of torture. Instead, a surge in Afghanistan. No public option for health insurance. Instead, a mandate to buy private insurance even though there are no real cost controls. No independent consumer financial protection agency. No support to audit the Federal Reserve. And apparently, no legislation this year to address the climate change issue because it would have to include subsidies for more offshore oil-drilling.

But according to my online adversary, the reason all of these compromises and back-room deals had to be made is because of people like me, and apparently people like Cenk Uygur and every other progressive blogger/commentator who try to push the president further to the left. If it weren’t for “clowns” like us, we would have had a public option, strong financial reform would have already passed by now, work on the climate and immigration issues would already be well under way, we’d be seeing massive economic recovery and job growth, and the troops would be coming home from Iraq with the tide turning in Afghanistan.

Well holy shit, if only I’d known. I guess the right thing for progressives to do would have been to…what? Not demand a strong public option? Not put the pressure on for strong financial reforms including regulation of derivatives, an independent consumer financial protection agency, and an audit of the Fed? When Obama decided to concede to offshore oil drilling before the debate on climate legislation even began, I guess we should have cheered him on. Way to go, Obama! That’s Compromise We Can Believe In! Maybe you should concede even more to the interests of multi-national corporations!

All kidding aside, I just don’t buy it. We’ve got half the country (or at least what feels like half the country thanks to all the coverage they get from the mainstream media) howling that Obama is a socialist and what we need is less government regulation, more freedom for private insurance companies and Wall Street banks, and above all more oil drilling, baby. If these were the only voices we heard, you think Obama would move further to the left? If the political discourse is solely between the center-right and the far-right, it’s absolutely ridiculous to assume that politicians are going to go anywhere near the left.

But I continue to be attacked by Democratic Party supporters who insist I’m being naïve and childish, many of whom have been far more abusive and belittling than this guy. “Who did you think you were voting for?” they say. “Obama never promised to be a progressive president.” As if this matters at all. I criticized Bush from the left, but for some reason I shouldn’t criticize Obama from the left?

During the 60s, didn’t LBJ tell civil rights leaders that he wanted to do civil rights legislation but that they had to “make him do it”? Am I imagining things, or didn’t Obama ask the same thing of progressives when he first took office? That’s the whole point of political criticism—get out there and shout your demands so that the politicians can credibly say they are following the will of the people.

As far as I can tell, the “Don’t criticize Obama” crowd believe just the opposite: that criticism of the president—any criticism—damages his poll numbers and thus feeds into the narrative that he doesn’t have popular support. If we stood by him, however, his approval rating would be higher, and according to my commenter friend:

President Obama, hypothetically, could take those numbers to Congress and clearly argue that the American people are staunchly with him and with his ideas on the way forward, drastically leveraging the bully pulpit to secure more of what he wanted.

What’s missing from this picture? The actual policies we need is what. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the president’s personal approval rating. Look at the poll numbers on the specific issues. The public option consistently had about two-thirds support among the American people—an overwhelming majority in such a polarized political climate. But did Obama—who supposedly wanted a public option—ever take those numbers to Congress and use the bully pulpit to push it through? Not even close. How much support was there to break up the big banks? Enough to get the amendment passed if Obama had wanted it to.

And that’s where I believe these Obama-loyalists go wrong. If Obama actually wanted the things that progressives wanted, we wouldn’t be criticizing him! But instead of rallying support from those that got him elected, he keeps trying to court so-called ‘moderates’ and conservatives as though desperately trying to prove that he’s not the radical socialist they accuse him of being.

This is why I’m coming to believe more and more that he never wanted any of these things in the first place—that he was a corporatist all along whose only agenda was to become the POTUS and do favors for the wealthy and powerful. He tosses a bone to the left every now and then to make it look like he still cares, but if he really cared we’d be seeing a much different White House.

Of course I could be wrong. As I wrote to my comment-buddy:

I honestly hope you’re right and that “clowns” like us are just whining and complaining over nothing, that the Democratic Party really does place more value on the good of the American people than the good of their corporate campaign donors, and that all of this watered-down industry-friendly legislation that’s being marketed as “Change we can believe in” actually does change things and that after Obama’s presidency we’ll look back and marvel at our wonderful health care system, clean environment, risk-free financial system and booming economy—I sincerely hope all of that, and if it happens I’ll be first to admit I was a naive fool for thinking it was all just political theater.

But, more importantly:

That doesn’t mean I’ll regret holding the democrats’ feet to the fire and making sure they knew the perception was out there that they were selling us out. I don’t believe we’re doing any harm—we’re just challenging them to prove us wrong. I hope they do.

I just highly doubt they will.

I ended my last personal blog entry by saying that nothing in my life really makes it worth living. That may still be true but I’m feeling much better about it now. Perhaps the fact that for the first time in what feels like years there’s not a cloud in the sky has something to do with it. But yesterday was cloudy, cold, and rainy, and I felt really good then too.

Things are still as uneventful as ever, but two very recent developments have given my overall mood a much-needed boost. The first is that I started cross-posting my political blog entries at “The Young Turks” website, where I became a member about a month ago because I really like the show and wanted to be able to download the whole thing. The host, Cenk Uygur, is probably more on the same page with me politically than anyone other than Corey, so I figured that by posting my thoughts on that website I’ll be reaching a handful of like-minded people, which is the audience I direct my writing towards.

I’d been feeling a little wary about the blog recently as nobody ever comments here and though I get about 60-80 hits after each new political post, I feel like nobody is reading it and it’s just a waste of time. But the day after posting my first entry to The Young Turks site I got 14 comments, from people who both agree and disagree, and the day after posting my second entry I got 20 comments, many of them very thoughtful and enjoyable to read, including those from people who disagreed with me. It felt great to know that at least a dozen people spent a portion of their day actually thinking about my ideas, that I may have had some teeny tiny influence. And a teeny tiny influence is certainly better than none at all. Once you drop those thoughts in the blogospheric ocean, they tend to spread. You just have to drop them somewhere from which it’s easier to spread. Huffington Post comments get the most readers but you’ve got a word-limit on what you can say. The Young Turks website is perfect for me for right now. And I’m glad conservatives go there too because it’s nice to finally get the other side’s perspective and respond to it directly. I suppose it’ll change my tone a bit as from now on I know I won’t just be writing for people who know me and who probably agree with me.

So that’s the blog thing. Feeling slightly less insignificant than I did a few days ago. Still, that’s kind of an abstract thing.

The other thing is of a much more concrete nature, as it has to do with Japan. Several weeks ago I applied to the James School of Northern Japan is it had the best website of any Japanese language schools I looked at by far and it’s definitely my first choice. I was told that selected applicants would be contacted for an interview, but after two weeks of hearing nothing I wrote a follow-up e-mail asking when I should expect to know if I’d been selected or not. The woman wrote back saying she was only interviewing for people who would be starting within the next three months, and that she wouldn’t know if there’d be any openings in September but didn’t think there would be because most teachers are renewing their contracts due to the economy. I wrote back saying that I didn’t have to start in September—this was just the earliest I could start—and I asked if it would be possible to work out some kind of arrangement whereby I’d just take the first position that opened up after September, even if it takes a few months. And yesterday she responded saying she’d like to set up an interview with me for next week via Skype and I should send her my schedule.

Naturally, that’s fantastic news. Getting an interview means I’m being considered, and that my offer to move there any time after September is feasible. As for the interview, I’m so confident that I might even be a little bit over-confident. I mean, why wouldn’t they hire me after talking to me? Not only am I a native English speaker with nearly two years of teaching experience, but I’ve got this whole bag of mad intellectual skills and whatnot that anyone who talks to me always picks up on. With one exception, I’ve been offered every single job I’ve ever interviewed for. The only slight doubt I have about this one is that I’m not too familiar with Japanese customs and cultural attitudes so I might inadvertently say something wrong, but I’m pretty sure the personnel woman I’ve been talking to—who’s name is Kathy—is not Japanese but a fellow expatriot. In any case, I’m damned good at job interviews so as much as I don’t want to jinx it I think there’s a pretty good chance this will work out in my favor.

And that’s where things stand right now. I’d still prefer a life involving a loving girlfriend and all that joy, but I’ll take what I can get. And if all I can get is a tiny morsel of influence within the political blogosphere and years of enlightening world-travel, that’ll have to do.