by Cliston Brown | Jul 6, 2014 | Political Commentary
I stayed the night last night in an unfamiliar city in southern California, and needed to get some breakfast before embarking on an eight-hour drive home. As I knew nothing about the town, I didn’t know where I could find a good breakfast place, but there was a Denny’s right next to my hotel. It’s not the most spectacular food, but it is predictable and cheap, and when it comes to road food in an unfamiliar location, predictable-and-cheap is often preferable to the alternatives.
As I ordered—a shaved ham-and-egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheeses on sourdough and hashbrowns—the server asked if I’d like anything else, maybe a short stack of pancakes.
For a second, I was sorely tempted, and then it hit me that the question—which could be paraphrased as “Would you like 600 calories’ worth of pancakes, butter and syrup to go with the 1,100 calories of ham, egg, cheese, potatoes, bread and grease?”—was really a metaphor for the last 70 years of American politics: “You don’t have to choose one tasty meal or the other, hungry patron of mediocre breakfast food! You can have both!”
This is the same idea we Americans have been sold from the political menu since the end of World War II, and by and large, we have happily consumed it. “Guns OR butter? Who says you have to choose? You can have guns AND butter—and you can put that butter on that extra side of pancakes!”
In the heady postwar era, it really did seem like we Americans could have all we wanted and never have to concern ourselves with the consequences. While most of Europe and large swathes of Asia and Africa were devastated, America was the only major industrial power that was largely unscathed. America became the material colossus of the world, the leading supplier of goods. Factories worked in three shifts around the clock, and well-paid jobs were there to be had by anybody who grabbed a high school diploma one day and walked into the local factory the next.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and it is easy to look back and realize that it couldn’t last—that sooner or later the rest of the world would rebuild itself and compete with us, and that we would no longer be the only major seller of industrial and consumer goods, with inevitable consequences for the postwar U.S. economic boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s, with skyrocketing inflation and a growing dependence on cheap imports, made it plain to people such as President Jimmy Carter that the nation’s voracious consumerism needed to go on a diet. The late 1970s was an era of downsizing and increased efficiency—smaller, fuel-efficient cars, turning down the thermostat, installing solar panels. The gravy train was also over, certainly, in the political realm; we either had to raise taxes or cut services, or some combination thereof.
However, Ronald Reagan—who ironically rose to political prominence by delivering a speech, on behalf of the doomed 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, titled “A Time For Choosing”—came along in 1980 and essentially told us all that no, we did not have to make any hard choices. We could continue to have all the essential government services, and we could also institute massive tax cuts (largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans). He gave us a third option by which we could avoid both raising taxes and cutting services, and we eagerly took it: Put it all on the credit card. We’ll pay it off later. Reagan told us we could have both the tasty sandwich-and-hashbrowns meal, AND the pancakes, and we listened because it was what we wanted to hear.
The truth is that we do face hard choices as a society, and the longer we put those choices off, the higher the bill is going to be. In the same way that a person who makes no responsible choices at the table will eventually suffer health consequences, the longer we go on failing to choose as a society, the more it will hurt us in the end.
So our choice is this: do we continue to allow a small number of extremely wealthy people to continue to hoard vast sums of money, more than many of them could spend in dozens of lifetimes, while everybody else lives either in poverty or the realistic possibility of poverty? And let’s be honest, that’s exactly the situation we face. How many Americans today live a life of quiet desperation, knowing that if they lose a job or suffer a major illness, they go from financially comfortable to bankrupt, or even homeless, in a few short steps?
Do we continue to pay our bills as a country on a giant credit card, knowing that at some point, future generations will have to pay the bill? Hell, they’re already paying the bill. As colleges have raised tuition to meet growing costs, students have had to take on massive amounts of debt that were largely unheard of prior to the 1990s. They are then entering a job market in which there are very few jobs for them, in part because older workers, whose ability to draw secure pensions has been severely eroded, lack the financial security to retire. Those same older workers, faced with working into their 70s, are also faced with partially or fully supporting their adult children—as upwards of a third of all Americans between 18 and 31 now live with their parents. And their adult offspring, more and more, are faced with delaying their careers, thereby delaying their ability to save money, pay off their loans, buy homes, have children if they wish, and eventually retire. We are just now starting to see the consequences of our failure to choose.
Sooner or later, we Americans are going to have to understand that we have to choose the sandwich or the pancakes, and maybe eat only half of what we ultimately do choose. We have to unlearn the lie, which we have eagerly accepted, that we can have everything we want and that we never have to choose—that we can continue to spend trillions of dollars on a bloated military budget, and idiotic wars of choice like the war in Iraq, and that we can simultaneously continue to give tax breaks to bloated billionaires and corporations. Meanwhile our cities fill with the homeless and hungry; our bridges and roads crumble; we are losing an entire generation of Americans whose careers and paths to financial security appear hopelessly blocked; and our educational system continues to collapse, in part because of continued political meddling, and in part because teachers are so poorly paid and underappreciated that the most promising college students choose fields such as finance. We need to decide whether it is more important to fund the things that will benefit our society as a whole, or if we are going to continue to buy more of what we don’t need and can’t afford.
Even if you disagree, as I do, with the solutions Reagan advised us to choose in 1964, he was right about one thing: that we do, in fact, face a time of choosing. But he was wrong, when he told us in 1980, that he was just kidding.
by Cliston Brown | Dec 4, 2013 | Political Commentary
When I got home from work last night, HBO West was showing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I hardly ever miss a chance to see this classic, which I believe came out in 1983. (For anyone who has been living in a cave for the last 30 years, the basic storyline is a year in the life of a group of teenagers at a typical American high school, learning how to be adults one youthful mistake at a time.) I’ve always thought it was a pretty good representation of that era, as best as I can recall (I was 10 at the time). Every time I see the movie, I can’t help but ponder the societal differences between then and now.
It struck me last night that the society of the 1980s, in some ways, was simultaneously more naive and less sheltered than today’s society. To wit: Stacy and Damone never gave a second’s thought to using birth control when they had sex—and yet, when Stacy became pregnant as a result, she immediately owned and took charge of the situation in a decisive, clear-headed way that I don’t think some adults could do today.
And that brings me to a related point which I think also demonstrates a major societal change in the last 30 years: confronted with an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 15, Stacy decides to have an abortion. The movie conveys that this is just a matter-of-fact thing: She’s 15 years old; of course she’s going to have an abortion. End of story. She has the abortion and goes for ice cream. There’s no long, drawn-out, agonizing decision-making process, no wailing, no seeking out of counseling, no crisis of conscience—either before or after the abortion.
Does anybody think that situation would be dealt with in the same way on screen today? I think it is clear that it would not. In most TV or movie productions we see today, characters who face unplanned pregnancies do not even consider abortion except obliquely and momentarily (such as in Juno, Knocked Up and Fools Rush In, to provide three cinematic examples), and then, they dismiss the option almost immediately. In fact, it seems the very word “abortion” can’t even be used. The most outlandish circumventing of the word comes from a character in Knocked Up, who hints that the procedure the Katherine Heigl character should consider “rhymes with shmashmortion.” Seriously?
Even more interesting is the fact that when abortion is summarily dismissed as an option in these films, it always results in a positive and “ideal” outcome. Let’s examine the three movies I’ve cited:
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In Juno, the title character is “saved” from her appointment at an abortion clinic by a well-meaning protestor, and she ends up finding the perfect person to adopt the child she will bear. Of course.
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In Fools Rush In, two total strangers, connected only by the fetus they conceived during a one-night stand, magically overcome tremendous cultural differences and fall in love.
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Worst of all, in Knocked Up, a successful career woman’s pregnancy, resulting from a one-night stand with a perpetually stoned slacker, causes said stoner to straighten up, overnight, and fulfill his responsibilities.
So this is what the American cinema is selling—just have the kid, ladies, and everything will work out? Yeah, sure, because that’s realistic.
I wonder if anybody in 1983 thought we would be at a point today where we can’t even hear the word “abortion” in a movie, much less see a female character actually decide that abortion is the most appropriate choice for her. What’s next? Are we going to get to a point where we cannot view a movie about Charles Darwin in most American theaters because it focuses on his Theory of Evolution?
Oh, wait.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 8, 2013 | Political Commentary
Not surprisingly, I am seeing a number of people, on Facebook and other message boards, offering the opinion that the current federal government shutdown is equally the fault of Republicans and Democrats. I am sure it seems like a reasonable thing to say, and it provides the effect of making the person who says it look moderate and evenhanded.
There is only one problem: it just isn’t true.
I am sure there is very little need for me to pause here and note, in the interest of fairness, that I am a Democrat. Most people who know me understand that I generally support what the Democratic Party supports, and I generally oppose what the Republican Party supports. I am not going to take the time here to get into all the reasons for my support of a liberal political philosophy, which is another discussion for another time. But to be fair, I feel it important to note up front that I do have a very strong political bias, so that those of you reading this post can make your own judgment as to my objectivity.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I am going to do my absolute best to present the facts of the case, and I am going to try to leave my own personal bias out of it as much as I can.
The Republicans, as you probably know, have a majority of seats in the United States House of Representatives, while the Democrats control a majority of the United States Senate and the presidency. We have come up to a couple of deadlines.
One deadline, which passed October 1st, was the deadline for Congress to pass a law that would continue funding the federal government. The failure of Congress to do so, due to the inability of the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate to agree on passing the same bill, is why most federal functions have shut down at this time.
Another deadline, which is approaching on October 17, is the date by which Congress must raise the nation’s debt ceiling. I’m going to take a moment here to explain what that means. The debt ceiling has to be raised to pay for the bills our country already owes. If the debt ceiling is not raised, the country will have to begin defaulting on the bills it has already incurred but has not yet paid. That is expected, by most financial experts, to have extremely negative effects on the financial markets and very possibly create another economic recession or depression.
To go back to the first deadline, which passed days ago, the reason why the House and Senate failed to agree was because the Republicans who control the House refused to pass any bill that did not defund or delay the new health care law, passed in 2010, which the Republicans began calling “Obamacare.” That bill, of course, passed Congress and was signed into law by President Obama, at a time when Democrats had very large majorities in both the House and the Senate. The law passed with the support of no Republicans in either the House or Senate.
Republicans have strongly opposed the health care law from the beginning and have continued to try to find ways to end it, especially after the 2010 Congressional elections gave them control of the House and more members of the Senate (though Democrats maintained a majority). The Republicans in Congress are now attempting to force the Democrats to go along with either ending “Obamacare” (by taking away its funding) or delaying it, in exchange for Republican consent to continue funding the federal government and pay its bills.
What I have presented, to this point, is strictly factual. Here, I am going to begin to offer my opinion as to why the Republican position is unreasonable and why it is incorrect to blame the Democrats for “refusing to negotiate.”
First of all, I consider the Republican position unreasonable because the Republicans are offering the Democrats only one choice, which they know the Democrats cannot accept: either destroy or delay the program they worked very hard for many years to get. The Republicans are offering no other alternatives. They are demanding that Democrats give them 100 percent of what they want, or they will shut down the government and possibly default on the nation’s debts, with potential catastrophic effects for the economy of the country and the world. This is not a good-faith attempt to negotiate; it is blackmail.
Secondly, I consider the Republican position unreasonable because the Republicans are trying to block the health care program before the government has even had a chance to implement it and see if it works or not. Even though the program was enacted in 2010, it has taken time to get it ready, and it won’t be fully functional until 2015. Naturally, Democrats think “Obamacare” is a good idea, or they wouldn’t have enacted it, and Republicans think it is a bad idea. However, there isn’t a single person alive who can tell us, with any certainty, how it is going to work out. Anybody who says he can tell you that it will succeed or fail is either 1) just guessing or 2) lying. Most people would say that it is perfectly reasonable to get rid of the program if it fails. What is not reasonable, in my opinion, is to keep the program from ever being tried out, and that is what Republicans are attempting to do, by trying to force Democrats to defund it or delay it. To defund it would keep it from getting started at all. To delay it for a year inevitably would lead to another Republican demand, a year from now, to delay it again, and another, and another, until such time as a Republican president and Congress are elected and can overturn it. The Republican object is, clearly, to keep it from ever getting off the ground. I do not think this is a reasonable position.
Third, the implementation of “Obamacare” has nothing at all to do with funding government operations or raising the debt ceiling. Changing the health care program is not required to do either of these things. Republicans are simply holding the country’s fiscal health hostage in order to gain leverage to destroy a program they oppose, before anyone knows whether that program will be good for the country or not.
If Republicans were offering ideas to help improve the health care program, I would consider this a more reasonable approach. But they are only offering a demand to stop it, which I do not consider reasonable.
In short, the Republican Party is the party that is making what I consider unreasonable demands, and I do not think the Democrats are at fault for refusing to give into unreasonable demands. To do so would only encourage more unreasonable demands in the future.
It should also be noted that Democrats are attaching no demands to their own legislation that would fund the government, and in fact have already compromised on many of the things they would like to do. The bill the Democratic-controlled Senate passed already had much lower levels of government funding than the Democrats wanted.
And in fact, it is also true that the health care law Democrats enacted in 2010 was much less than what Democrats wanted, or the president campaigned on. The law did not include a “public option,” which would have created a government-based health insurance option to compete with private carriers; Democrats left this out as a concession to conservatives, even though it was a centerpiece of President Obama’s 2008 campaign and very popular with the people who voted for him. The president took a lot of political heat from his own base by leaving the public option out of the final proposal. So to claim that Democrats are being stubborn about government funding or health care is to ignore the fact that they have already made substantial concessions. It is the Republicans who are not making any concessions.
So when people claim that the Democrats are equally at fault, I believe the facts of the case prove that this is simply not true. The Democrats have made many concessions. It is time now for the Republicans to back away from their unreasonable demands and allow the government to be properly funded.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 3, 2013 | Political Commentary
Even though I am a committed and partisan Democrat, I feel a bit sorry for U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Sure, the man has his faults, but generally speaking, he strikes me as a reasonable adult who would love to make some sort of far-reaching deal with President Obama.
The problem for Boehner is that there are, by most estimates, about 40 of his 232 members that are dead set against making any kind of deal with the president or the Democrats. And without those people on board, and needing (currently, due to vacancies) 217 votes to pass anything, the only way he can get a deal done is with Democratic votes. This, of course, sets up a problem for the speaker—retaining his speakership. He can only lose, at this point, 15 Republican votes and still win a majority of the House at the next speakership election. That number will go up a little, or down a little, after the current vacancies are filled and the next general election is held in 2014, but the bottom line is this: if he gets crosswise with the Tea Party element of his caucus by bypassing them and doing a deal with the Democrats, he loses his speakership.
But there’s another problem, which is this: if this shutdown goes on or, even worse, Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling in two weeks and the economy tanks, most polling shows that the voters, correctly, will blame Republicans. That could mean, as Boehner himself has reportedly warned his caucus, Democratic control of the House in 2015, or at the least, a loss of Republican seats and a narrower majority. In either case, Boehner probably loses his speakership—definitely so if the Democrats win the House, but probably so if his party loses seats in a midterm under a Democratic president, which almost never happens. The last time that happened to Republicans, in 1998, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) was obligated to resign.
Boehner’s dilemma, in short, is that if he cuts a deal with Democrats, he probably loses his speakership; and if he doesn’t, and things get bad for the Republicans, he probably loses his speakership. It’s a real damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario. Maybe he can hang on if Republicans do lose seats but keep their majority, or perhaps the voters will forget all about this by next year (entirely possible, sad to say) and Republicans will increase their majority, in which case Boehner could keep his job. But those possibilities, at the moment, look unlikely.
So at this point, Speaker Boehner really has to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask himself this question: “If I’m going down one way or another, how do I want to go out?” And one hopes that he will decide it’s better to go out with some honor and dignity, and that he will work a deal with the Democrats, and a few reasonable Republicans in swing districts who are scared to death of losing their seats next year, to prevent an economic calamity. History will be far kinder to him if he sacrifices his speakership in a good cause. It would be far better to go out with his boots on than to be found, at the end, hiding under his desk, in fear of his own caucus, and going down as a coward.
by Cliston Brown | Sep 29, 2013 | Political Commentary
With a government shutdown perhaps a little more than a day away, the nonsense emanating out of Washington is heavier than usual, but this bit of claptrap on Twitter by a fellow who normally seems like a pretty decent journalist, Mark Halperin, got my blood up this morning:
Tips for inciting left/right attacks on CR tweets: say both sides share blame; say media is doing its best; say Obama/Boehner both good men
— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) September 29, 2013
I’d like to take issue with at least two of Mr. Halperin’s three points of contention.
First of all, how exactly is this whole mess even partially the Democrats’ fault? Allow me to recap precisely what is happening here. The House Republicans, attempting to appease their wacko primary voters who might otherwise vote them out unless they stick it to the black man in the White House, sent a bill to fund the government to the Senate that would defund “Obamacare.” That, of course, would be the most notable accomplishment of the Obama presidency, which hasn’t even been implemented yet.
OK, let me pause here for a quick civics lesson. Generally, when a law is enacted, it is given time to work before we determine it is a failure. If it does, in fact, fail to work as hoped, we overturn it at that time and try something else. We don’t strangle it in the crib before we see whether or not it is actually going to do what we hope it will do. This latter thing—strangling it in the crib—is what Republicans are proposing to do because they believe it won’t work, or perhaps more correctly, because they fear it will work.
So, to get back to where we were: the House Republicans sent a bill to the Senate that would condition the funding of government operations IF the Senate Democrats agree to take away all funding for their chief accomplishment that hasn’t even been implemented yet.
The House Republicans had to know that this proposal would be rejected, as in fact it was; the Senate amended the bill to take out the defunding of Obamacare and sent it back to the House. At this point, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who is not normally known for standing up to Republican bullying, told the House: stop wasting our time. We are not going to agree to gut our own healthcare bill, so send us something else.
The House Republicans responded by passing another bill, this one delaying Obamacare (which is what you do when you can’t defund it outright—you delay it and delay it until you get control of the government, and then you kill it). And when it became even more clear that Harry Reid really wasn’t bluffing (which, let’s face it, the Republicans already knew), they pivoted to a third bill that, also, will take steps to prevent Obamacare from ever taking effect.
I’d like Mr. Halperin to answer this question: exactly what part of this is the Democrats’ fault? The Republicans have made it plain that they will shut down the government unless the Democrats agree to give up on the centerpiece of their brief control of the government from 2009-11. They have given the Democrats no other options; they have put no other proposals on the table. It’s either gut Obamacare or government shutdown. Every time the Senate Democrats say “Leave Obamacare out of the funding bill or we won’t pass it,” the House Republicans send the Senate another bill attacking Obamacare. How, exactly, are the Democrats even partially to blame for the fact that they are being blackmailed by obstinate, childish Republicans? That is a case of “victim blaming” on an epic level.
As to Mr. Halperin’s second point (the media is doing its best)—please. Today’s media covering federal government and politics, with a few exceptions, appears to be a hapless collection of glorified stenographers who feel their only responsibility is to accurately report what either side says. So if one side lies, and the other side tells the truth, both are given equal weight because it is not the media’s responsibility to actually find and report objective facts. If they merely present each side’s talking points accurately, they seem to believe that they have done their job properly. “Team A says the sky is blue, and Team B says the sky is pink with purple polka dots. We report; you decide!”
As to Mr. Halperin’s third point, that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are both good men, well, that one may well be correct. From my observations over the last few years, I’ve always gotten the impression that Boehner would like to cut a deal with the president, but that the absolute loons on the far right of his caucus have blocked him from doing so. But even this point, if correct, is irrelevant to the larger point. That point, simply put, is this: the Republicans are so hell-bent on strangling Obamacare in the crib that they are willing to shut the government down to do it. Shouldn’t the media be making that point and, more importantly, asking why?
by Cliston Brown | Sep 9, 2013 | Political Commentary
As President Obama prepares to go on the airwaves to seek support for a military attack on Syria, a new development has entered the equation. A new Russian proposal would have international monitors take control of Syria’s chemical weapons, offering everybody involved a face-saving way out.
For the president, the Russian plan is a lifeline. Having been trapped by his own pledge to become involved in Syria’s civil war if dictator Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons— which hawks like Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and his protege, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) have used to put constant pressure on him—Obama needed a way out to avoid an unpopular attack. He made a smart political move to put the onus on Congress—which, importantly, broke a longstanding precedent of presidents violating Congress’s constitutional war-making prerogative—but this gives him an opportunity to get out of the trick bag cleanly.
If the deal happens, and Syria gives up its chemical weapons, President Obama can say—probably not without justification—that his threats of force brought the Syrians to heel. He will have won, through a triumph of pressure diplomacy and the happy coincidence of the Russians saving his political bacon, a diplomatic triumph without firing a shot. One wonders if he and Russian president Vladimir Putin didn’t cook this up during the recent G-20 summit in St. Petersburg. If so, it was a brilliant move by both presidents. It gets Obama out of a political mess at home, and it makes Putin look like a positive contributor to the global diplomatic scene—not exactly a familiar role for the often-criticized, autocratic Russian leader.
In fact, it is probably Putin who comes out the big winner here. It’s a PR coup for him, at home and abroad; this marks a major return to the world leadership arena for a country that has suffered a crisis of confidence since losing the Cold War and seeing the Soviet empire break apart at the seams. Putin can make the case that Russia is back on the world stage—if not quite at the top, then at least near the head of the table.
But even if Putin is the big winner, Obama can also come out smelling like a rose too, which seemed impossible just a day ago.
I have been a harsh critic of the president’s push for military intervention in Syria over the last few weeks. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was gambling that mere bluster and threats would win the day, and he wouldn’t have the need to actually engage militarily. I obviously have no idea, but if that was his plan, it wouldn’t be the first time Obama was playing chess while everyone else was playing tic-tac-toe.
Assuming the Syrian government takes the deal—and it would probably be stupid not to, because what it gives up in chemical weapons, the Russians will more than make up for with conventional ones—it looks like this thing may have just come together as well as possible, and that rarely happens by accident. The only losers here appear to be the Syrian rebels, and given the uncertain character and composition of their movement, that may not be a terrible thing. Assad’s a bad guy, sure, but sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
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