Montebello E-News

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October 30, 2008

Election Edition

...  And these and all other elections, especially of representatives and counsellors, should be annual, there not being in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, "where annual elections end, there slavery begins."

These great men, in this respect, should be, once a year,
"Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return."

This will teach them the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey. ...

“Thoughts on Government”
John Adams, 1735  –  1826,
was elected second President of the United States after serving as America's first Vice President for two terms. He is regarded as one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States.

  1.  A Word on the Presidential Election

2.  The President Who Would Be King

3.  Why I Won’t Vote for McCain or Obama

4.  When a Special Interest Defeats the Public Interest

5.  A Refreshing Thought

 6.  Announcements

7. About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello”

In early September, a friend forwarded an e-mail containing a list of shortcomings of one of the candidates for Vice President.  I wrote the following to the friend:  

We are asking the wrong questions.  

Why are we assuming that a structure for democracy set up in pre-industrial America would work as well today?  In other words, why should so much power be vested in the President, to automatically be vested in the Vice-President if the President were incapacitated?  Are we playing at democracy when, in fact, we have a leader wearing the emperor's clothes?  

In other words, are we being democratic when we are putting so much power and responsibility in the hands of one person, the President, and his substitute, the Vice President?  Do you not find it odd, if not cause for concern, that this question is not being asked?

Have you wondered why we scrutinize Presidential candidates ad infinitum, ad nauseam?

We look into their personal lives, their trips to the doctor, their misstatements made under stress and fatigue.  We criticize them for what they do and what they do not do.  We expect them to be prophets, meaning that they may not change their minds on an issue.

Why?  Because we have vested so much power in them.  We want to be able to trust them, to know that they would be healthy, ethical, and wise.  They are the most powerful people on the planet.

And why have we permitted them to become the most powerful people on the planet?

Part of the answer is that large corporations prefer dealing with one person instead of a multitude like Congress.  But why do we the public tolerate this antidemocratic phenomenon of one very powerful President?

Because we want somebody to decide for us.  Because life is complicated, and making decisions is hard and time-consuming.  And there is more than a remote chance that the decision would be wrong—better to blame the President and his pandilla of pundits, rather than to blame ourselves.

We are not democratic.  We do want a king.

The following is from an e-mail which I sent to friends on September 28, 2008.  

Friday evening [September 26, 2008], there was an interview by Bill Moyers with Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, who just published The Limits of Power.

Bacevich said it much better than I:  neither major-party candidate wants to dilute the power of the imperial Presidency.

My belief is that the more people involved in decision-making, including access to information to make those decisions, the less need there is for official watchdogs, like oversight commissions, as the people themselves become the official watchdogs.  Traditionally, we have had a relatively small number of official watchdogs, who have been overwhelmed, beholden or restricted.

Just now T. Boone Pickens broadcast one of his ads about alternative energy, "We have to get on the politicians to get it done."  My question is, "Why?  Why can't we be making the decisions ourselves?"  The Internet is the new Capitol--Castells' "public space"--enabling a far larger group of people to collectively, even authentically and securely, make decisions.

It concerns me that, in 1789, we had 27,000 constituents for every member of Congress.  We now have over 660,000 per member.  Decision-making becomes difficult.  Lobbyists become research assistants for burdened staff.

My unanswered letter to Obama, which, by the way, goes back a couple of years to an unanswered letter to him as a Senator, was to me evidence of what Bacevich stated.

There is a different take on this:  ever-increasing complexity compels specialized decision-making by a relatively small number of people.  In other words, democracy thrives under only certain conditions, and those conditions are disappearing.

The lesser of two evils?  Certainly Obama.  But because our system is fundamentally flawed and Obama is not addressing that flaw, other problems will arise in coming years.  It is as if we were in a continuing state of crisis.

The answer in the short term?  Ever-increasing local assumption of power, interestingly consistent with one of the ten key planks of the Green Party platform.  So, as Obama becomes the President, there certain will be alleviations, but the crisis will continue and the work to save America will neither progress nor regress.

As we hear the tiring, repetitious, often vapid arguments in favor of and against ballot propositions, we wonder how many of those arguments are underwritten by special interests trying to manipulate us away from the public interest.  My “lazy man’s” rule is to set aside the dizzying pro and con arguments, and to read about who will be watching over the money which a proposition-turned-law will collect.  If there are no public watchdogs, like you and me, involved, I likely would vote against the proposition.  Thus, I will vote against every proposition intended to collect a large sum of money, with one exception.  A better way to deal with propositions is to analyze with a group of friends;  thanks to a cousin, I am reading informal e-mail analyses by a group—although I do not know them.

Below are two examples of a special interest defeating the public interest.

“No Money Down”
from the upcoming Arthur Magazine No. 31, Oct 2008
Douglas Rushkoff, a New York-based writer, columnist and lecturer on technology, media and popular culture.

… The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. And not by a market bear or conspiracy theorist, but by the people and institutions responsible. The record number of foreclosures, credit defaults, and, now, institutional collapses is not the result of the churn of random market forces, but rather a series of highly lobbied changes to law, highly promoted ideologies of wealth and home ownership, and monetary policies highly biased toward corporate greed. …

The whole show was a fitting metaphor for the credit crunch, a misnamed sabotage of the credit system by institutions with the problem of too much, not too little, money to put to work. As I explained in my last column, banks and credit institutions simply had more money on hand than they had people who were qualified to borrow it. So they changed the law to create more demand for the money they had in oversupply. …

Meanwhile, the credit industry spent over $100 million lobbying to change bankruptcy laws. Although a corporation in bankruptcy still has its debts erased, the regulations surrounding personal bankruptcy were changed so that personal debts stay on the books forever. The logic they used to argue for the change was that debtors are smart, gaming the system to buy beyond their means and then declaring bankruptcy at the last minute.

But the very same creditors knew that just the opposite was true—as evidenced by their sales tactics and marketing campaigns. They turned to a social science known as behavioral finance—the study of the way people consistently act against their own best financial interests, as well as how to exploit these psychological weaknesses when peddling questionable securities and products. …

“One Nation, Uninsured”
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html?hp

Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's book "One Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract.

But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed. …

…So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all.

But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. …

The great advantage of universal, government-provided health insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run insurance system has much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our largely private system. … The savings from a single-payer system [universal coverage] would probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of covering all of those now uninsured. ...

Comment from retired physician Don McCanne:  With today's announcement that Paul Krugman is the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize, it seems appropriate to distribute once again one if the most important articles he has ever written, and the message could not be more timely. ...

“To the Farmer in Chief”
via “Culture Making” by Andy Crouch on 10/15/08

Andy:  … Michael Pollan makes a plea for leadership from the next president in changing America's relationship with its food. I hardly know which section to excerpt—they are all important, not least the idea of restoring farming as a viable and valuable occupation in the minds of youth and young adults. …

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. …

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. …

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America.  …

From "An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief," by Michael Pollan, NYTimes.com, 9 October 2008,  via “Arts & Letters Daily”

FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS, POLICY MAKERS.  A “no drug” solution for attention deficit in children?  …A small study conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looked at how the environment influenced a child’s concentration skills. The researchers evaluated 17 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who all took part in three 20-minute walks in a park, a residential neighborhood and a downtown area.  After each walk, the children were given a standard test called Digit Span Backwards, in which a series of numbers are said aloud and the child recites them backwards. The test is a useful measure of attention and concentration because practice doesn’t improve the score. The order of the walks varied for all the children, and the tester wasn’t aware of which walk the child had just taken.  The study, published online in the August The Journal of Attention Disorders, found that children were able to focus better after the “green” walks compared to walks in other settings. ...  The full article:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/a-dose-of-nature-for-attention-problems/

FOR YOUTH, PARENTS, TEACHERS.  Free services at our library.  Saturday, November 1, 2008, 2 p.m.  Library orientation on services, materials, databases, and websites readily available for homework help.  Learn more about what the library has to offer.  At the Montebello library.  For more information, 323.722.6551.

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter, and for submitting stories to “Montebello Memories” at the Web site.