What's a matter of meaning between words?

So rather than write the lengthy blog about McCain'sw newly unveiled six paragraph approach to higher education, I decided to have a little fun today... Politics is about words, and words is about definitions. So, what's rich?



Obama thinks America's rich earn a little over $250,000 a year. McCain estimates rich people to be a rarer species (perhaps some potential for the ESA?). Rich for McCain is something close to $5,000,000 a year. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-rich18-2008aug18,0,3413584.story

Of course, all of us non-rich folk by either definition take comfort in America's original non-rich folk philosopher: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone," Henry David Thoreau.

Unfortunately, McCain can't let so many things alone. In fact, he's got so many homes, he can't remember a couple here and there... http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/08/mccain_unsure_h.html

Thanks goodness for the Jedreport!



The rest of us all know, home is so much more than a $4,000,000 Pheonix condominium. I quote, "I hear you call my name, and it feels like home."

Unpaid or Uncounted?

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/07/unpaid-internsh.html

I'm about a year away from my first experience in the working world out of college. One of the many options put before me, or so I thought, might be working in DC. For better or worse, "working" seems to be a mistatement of sorts.

Perusing the opportunities of an NGO called "TOSTAN," which works in Western Africa, I came across the concept of an unpaid internship in DC. Get a college degree and start working for free... or isn't that what a lot of us competitive students in the rat race already do? I certainly volunteer or have volunteered throughout college. I've made note that for students who have to hold a job in order to afford college, this competitive advantage is more or less impossible. The Student Senate meets for about four hours a work- add two hours of committee meeting and at least three more hours of work with student engagement and you're talking about ten hours of unpaid work ontop of a full academic semester each week. IF you're on the crusp of affording school, that sounds ludicrous. Fortunately for me, I haven't been put outside the gate in that regard. But a lot of students who could be incredible assets to organizations don't have the resources to give free time.

The absurdity about the proposition put forward in DC is that after college, facing interest on student loans and the very real cost of living, students are expected to continue working for free. Some of the people I work with haven't finished college, and I have a sneeking suspicion that this may be related to making choices between earning a living, working in a relevant field, and finishing college. Rather than let the best students from any income level compete, unpaid internships present a real barrier to career development for the majority of American students.

Barack Obama suggests paying students a $4,000 educational stipend in exchange for volunteering or community service. He says, "Work for America, and America will work for you." I like this mainly because it allows students to support themselves without working at Starbucks- a move that could be damning to a career in politics or social development. Instead, under this proposal, students can attain their competitive advantage giving time to a homeless shelter or political organization. It isn't making a killing, but it helps make a living.

Our generation finds itself confronted with earning less than our parents. The cost of college has outpaced inflation more than ten times over in the last half century. And America's income gap is undeniably growing. Opportunities for the wealthy don't seem to be under any strain, but opportunities for the less-advantaged have disappeared. What do we do? Now it seems the hyper-competitive job market is finding another barrier for low income people moving up the ladder: it's called "unpaid internships" and it may leave low-income students uncounted for in America's future.

The American Farm (Better Known as the "Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008")

So, maybe you have or haven't heard of Michael Pollan. I'm into palatable non-fiction, and The Omnivores Dilemma has been on my short-list of things I should read. I took it with me to Michigan, opened up the soft-back pages, and found myself transported to the American farm. It looks something like this... a little white house towered by groves of oak trees, the red barn, and a dusty road that leads straight through green stalks of soft wheat.

But now let me take you back to Michigan: last year. My parents gave me charge of grocery shopping one afternoon, so I hopped into the rental van and headed into town. My father is very into GPS units, and of course, he's got one in the rental car. After nearly crashing in to every other car on the road, I finally program the unit for "groceries." A list pops up, and the name "Real Food" catches my attention. You see, in Helena, Montana we have this store called "The Real Food Store" that sells outrageously expensive industrial-organic foods that I happen to love. So I took a chance on it, turned up the Sarah McLachlan blasting from the stereo, and found the interstate. I'm not much for paying attention when I drive, so it didn't really phase me that the box stores had slowly become less dense and eventually gave away to the countryside. No, I kept right on trucking, singing along "Swe-eeet! Surrender..." Then the GPS joins in, "Turn Right." Great, I think, almost there. A mile farther down the road and finally the destination. "Real Food," chimes the female robot voice. I'm looking out the van window at a vast, endless field of corn. No white house or picket fence. Not even a single sign of life with the great exception being green ears of corn.

And it might shock you all to know that Americans not only produce the stuff in droves, but we eat corn in everything. America's health problems were staring me in the face, and it was "Real Food."

I recommend the documentary King Corn (http://www.kingcorn.net/) for starters, but Pollan's first of three sections does good justice to why corn dominates are food markets (and pretty much everything else). It's more a less a problem of policy (you knew I was going to get back to politics eventually, right?).

Earl "Rusty" Butz, under direction of Richard Nixon, reinvented America's farm system in 1973. Prior to Butz' tinkering, New Deal legislation allowed farmers to take out what's called a "nonrecourse loan" if the price of a commodity was lower than the government target, which could then be repaid when the price recovered; or, farmers could (and I love this) keep the money from the nonrecourse loan and leave the grain in the government coffers, also known as the "Ever-Normal Granary." Butz enters the scene at a politically poignant moment. In 1972, Butz sold Russia 30 million tons of American grain (from the Ever-Normal Granary), elevating food prices and capturing the farm vote for Nixon. This of course created a backlash against high food prices among consumers, so Butz started doling out agricultural subsidies in direct payments, not loans, that enabled farmers to continue production in a saturated market. More to the point, it flooded the market with cheap agricultural commodities- commodities like corn that have since been taken from "real food" and converted into anything and everything but "real food." Currently, America's farmers produce 3,800 calories per person in the country, and that's not counting for the calories lost in converting corn into feed, feed into beef, and beef into something that marginally resembles a hamburger in the proper sense. More than that, Butz' announcement of "Get big or get out" showed the preference of these loans is for big corporations and consolidation.

"EWG finds that the top 1% of beneficiaries received 17% of the crop subsidy benefits between 2003 and 2005. Their average benefit was $377,484 per person for the 3 program years or over $125,000 apiece annually. As a point of reference, the average adjusted gross income within the ZIP codes of those same top recipients was $45,853 in 2004 (the latest year for with IRS provides data from tax returns by ZIP code)." - Environmental Working Group

In Montana, the largest subsidy recipient from 2003-2005 was Nielsen farms, at a staggering $854,614. You might figure a program that pays out so handsomely costs a lot of money. You'd be right. $288 billion right.

The Farmland Trust and the Center for Rural Affairs both criticized the 2008 farm bill for failing to address the misdirection of subsidies; the CRA "opposed passage of the new farm bill because it commits the federal government to subsidizing the destruction of family farming for another five years and invests little in the future of rural communities."

I made it to David Sirota's book signing again tonight (this one in Missoula), and I've noticed he likes to finish saying if you buy the book, think of it as activism. If his book sells well, the media will be forced to address the issues, will be forced to take David on conservative talk shows. It's a great point. But if it were empirically true, the US farm bill would have been on everybody's political plate this last spring (Pollan's book is a perpetual NYT bestseller). However, one has to note that the farm bill passed through congress with hardly a blink by the media while food prices were reaching record highs.

I mean, I need to say that just for my own sake once more, we approved a $288 billion subsidy package to corporate farmers while getting fleeced at the grocery store. That is the brilliant buoyancy of corporate farming afloat on a sea of corn, better known as the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008.

Re-Emergence

I was tempted to title this blog "resurfacing," but my vague memory of pop artifacts suggests this may be the name of an album by Sarah McLachlan...

A little bit of research shows the title of the album, released in 1997 and featuring such hits as Adia and Building a Mystery, is simply "Surfacing." So now we have established two things: 1) I am a Sarah McLachlan fan and 2) Whatever inspiring post one would hope to accompany a "re-emergence;" well, quite frankly, this isn't it.

No, I have only recently become convinced that a blog does serve a political purpose, and that tight-rope walking the duties of non-partisan discourse and political rabble-rousing should be approached as an amusing challenge. David Sirota said last night that the Montana Legislature was a circus; my co-worker whispered, "we don't have trapeze artists." I beg to differ.

Arco's Debacle

A couple weeks ago, while roaming around Missoula by bicycle, I heard a segment from NPR's Fresh Air (via podcast) on Joseph Stiglitz' new book The Three Trillion Dollar War (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87801279). Stiglitz points to increasing fuel costs as one of the major "unanticipated" costs of the war. International equity markets, he argues, prior to the invasion of Iraq had predicted that crude oil would stay steady around $25 a barrel for the next decade. Since the war, oil has skyrocketed to new records, in excess of $100.

"Excess costs to the government are reflected in excess profits to the defense contractors, who have been (along with the oil companies) the only real winners in this war...

The rising price of fuel is a second reason that costs have increased so much. A modern army runs not just on its stomach but also on fuel oil. The world price of oil has risen from around $25 per barrel when the war started to close to $100 as this book goes to press. The price of fuel delivered to Iraq has risen even faster, driven by heavy transport costs from long and dangerous supply lines."

The instability of oil supply, recently excaberated by the new battle in Basra (http://www.hindu.com/2008/03/28/stories/2008032855181600.htm), has put intense upward pressure on oil prices. For producers outside of Iraq, production costs have remained constant while the overhead amounts to massive profits.

I'm not one to be pessimistic about political motives, nor am I an inventor of crazy conspiracy theories. IN fact, I maintain that President Bush believed (and still believes) Iraq posed a serious security threat to the United States, and that liberating Iraq was morally justified (a valid contention). Yet even under the veil of naive optimism, it's hard to ignore the beneficiaries of the war in Iraq. The BBC's Katty Kay reported in January of 2001, two years before the invasion: "The president, vice-president, commerce secretary and national security adviser all have strong ties to the oil industry"
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1138009.stm).

Right now, my roommate's cat Arco is digging under the new loveseat. I've inspected the situation a hundred times, and there's no kitty cat toys to be found. Yet he insists there's something to be gained under the couch, and now he's gotten stuck. So does the President insist there's something to be gained in Iraq, and now he's gotten the US stuck. So where's the gain? Four thousand Americans, and nearly one million Iraqi civillians (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) have died, while American families struggle to manage budgets under the burden of unaffordable gasoline.

Arco's managed to save himself, and wiggle out from under the loveseat unhurt. Nothing about this analysis of Iraq comes from the deep- it's all straight talk from highly accredited people. Unfortunately, it's a bit too late to wiggle out unhurt. The question is, how long will we go on for the benefit of a few in a situation that costs so much?

In the interview on Fresh Air, Stiglitz says we have a new increment of measurement: what's the cost, relative to the war in Iraq? For a fraction of the three trillion dollars, we might've secured Social Security for seventy-five years. Or how about this one- President Bush gives more in US Aid to Africa than any other president, but our yearly expenditure (roughly five billion dollars) equates to just two days of fighting in the Middle East.

For the sake of redundancy, let me rephrase the question: who's paying the cost?

My Sentiments

I just got a mass e-mail from the "Responsible Plan" crew... normally I don't like repeating this sort of sentemantalism, but let's be honest, there's something valuable about sentiment. Just maybe it inspires us to make changes we're not necessarily eager to make.

Matt Stoller writes, "One piece of feedback from an endorser of the plan really stuck out to me. A couple from California signed their names, and said 'We don't know where our son is.'"

Make whatever jokes you want about the geography education of Americans, but I don't where my country is anymore- MIA.

http://www.responsibleplan.com

What's to like about Jim Hunt?

I’d ask people not to let Denny Rehberg off the hook this election. The Iraq war stands as a glaring defect on Rehberg’s argument for fiscal responsibility. A pair of Harvard economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, recently measured the cost of the war at an astounding three trillion dollars. As the American economy slows down, it’s likely the weight of that cost will become much more immediate. Rehberg’s first response to the President’s war was to criticize discontent: I quote from the US Today, “Now is not the time to be backbiting and picking at the President.” In retrospect, a little more critical analysis of the war might’ve been a good idea. Rehberg maintained in the last election, “We are doing good in Iraq.” He left the issue at that and now, it seems, Rehberg’s left the issue altogether. His congressional website makes no reference to the war, neither did his announcement speech for re-election. His voting record, on the other hand, reflects a “stay the course” policy. Aside from voting against withdrawal plans, Rehberg also voted for legislation permitting interrogation techniques exceeding those in the Army Field Manual (i.e. torture). Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, a victim of torture in Vietnam, was one of the most outspoken opponents of that authority.

Rehberg has yet to meet any of his democratic challengers, and seems to believe that he can win re-election by not making himself present. It’s a no news is good news mentality that denies Montanans what we deserve from our representative, open political debate. Democratic U.S. House candidate Jim Hunt has officially endorsed “A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq” (http://www.responsibleplan.com/), a plan drafted by some of America’s most prominent military leaders including the former Assistant Secretary of Defense under the Reagan Administration Dr. Lawrence Korb and Major General Paul Eaton, former Security Transition Commanding General in Iraq. While Rehberg and Bush continue to disregard the advice of America’s top military officials, Jim Hunt’s twenty-three years of service in the Montana Army National Guard seems to have bestowed him with the wisdom of listening.

It’s easy to give up on the issue of Iraq when there doesn’t seem to be a win-win solution, but it’s our failing if we, the American people, do so. The costs of the war, in human lives and national debt, will not go away simply by being unobserved. No matter how exhausting the war has become, the problem remains unaddressed precisely because politicians like Denny Rehberg have taken the albatross off their neck by ignoring the issue for the sake of political expediency.

The last, and somewhat unrelated point, regarding Rehberg: Comedians make offensive jokes in a benign context because they're comedians (not policy makers) and because audiences understand the intention of the joke. Politicians who have a history of disenfranchising particular groups in society don't have that luxury for good reason. When you consistently vote against basic work rights for Americans based on sexual orientation, an offensive joke made at the expense of others seems like a crude cheap-shot aimed at a familiar target. It's nothing short of public discrimination- institutional discrimination reminiscent of the 20th century's worst political leaders. I don't think it's necessary to clarify which infamous figures I'm referring to.