Friday, January 30, 2009

The Same Old Song

Published: January 26, 2009

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

What Life Asks of Us


Published: January 26, 2009

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect ... . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Finally!

Op-Ed Columnist

I Wish You Were Here



Published: January 19, 2009

And so it has happened, this very strange convergence. The holiday celebrating the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became, in the midnight hour, the day that America inaugurates its first black president.

It’s a day on which smiles will give way to tears and then return quickly to smiles again, a day of celebration and reflection.
Dr. King would have been 80 years old now. He came to national prominence not trying to elect an African-American president, but just trying to get us past the depraved practice of blacks being forced to endure the humiliation of standing up and giving their seat on a bus to a white person, some man or woman or child.
Get up, girl. Get up, boy.
Dr. King was just 26 at the time, a national treasure in a stylish, broad-brimmed hat. He was only 39 when he was killed, eight years younger than Mr. Obama is now.
There are so many, like Dr. King, who I wish could have stayed around to see this day. Some were famous. Most were not.
I remember talking several years ago with James Farmer, one of the big four civil rights leaders of the mid-20th century. (The others were Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.) Farmer enraged authorities in Plaquemine, La., in 1963 by organizing demonstrations demanding that blacks be allowed to vote. Tired of this affront, a mob of state troopers began hunting Farmer door to door.
The southern night trembled once again with the cries of abused blacks. As Farmer described it: “I was meant to die that night. They were kicking open doors, beating up blacks in the streets, interrogating them with electric cattle prods.”
A funeral director saved Farmer by having him “play dead” in the back of a hearse, which carried him along back roads and out of town.
Farmer died in 1999. Imagine if he could somehow be seated in a place of honor at the inauguration alongside Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Young. Imagine the stories and the mutual teasing and the laughter, and the deep emotion that would accompany their attempts to rise above their collective disbelief at the astonishing changes they did so much to bring about.
And then imagine a tall white man being ushered into their presence, and the warm smiles of recognition from the big four — and probably tears — for someone who has been shamefully neglected by his nation and his party, Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson’s contributions to the betterment of American life were nothing short of monumental. For blacks, he opened the door to the American mainstream with a herculean effort that resulted in the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He followed up that bit of mastery with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Once the black man’s voice could be translated into ballots,” Johnson would say, “many other breakthroughs would follow.”
Without Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama and so many others would have traveled a much more circumscribed path.
I wish Johnson could be there, his commitment to civil rights so publicly vindicated, his eyes no doubt misting as the oath of office is administered.
It’s so easy, now that the moronic face of racism is so seldom openly displayed, to forget how far we’ve really come. When Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, it was illegal, just a stone’s throw away in Virginia, for whites and blacks to marry. Illegal! Just as it is illegal now for gays to marry.
Less than a month after the speech, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed a black church in Birmingham, Ala., where children had gathered for a prayer service. Four girls were killed. Three were 14 years old, and one was 11.
My sister, Sandy, and I, growing up in Montclair, N.J., a suburb of New York City, were protected from the harshest rays of racism by a family that would let nothing, least of all some crazy notion of genetic superiority, soil our view of the world or ourselves.
My grandparents, who struggled through the Depression and World War II, and my parents, who worked tirelessly to give Sandy and me a wonderful upbringing in the postwar decades, seemed always to have believed that all good things were possible.
Even if the doors of opportunity were closed, they didn’t believe they were locked. Hard work, in their eyes, was always the key.
Still, the idea of a black president of the United States never came up. Perhaps even for them that was too much to imagine. I wish they could have stayed around long enough to see it.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A decade under Atlanta’s influence

Signature events of the 1970s in Atlanta

AJC
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

1970

January
Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, Sam Massell, takes office.
May
After 50 years of work, Stone Mountain’s Confederate Memorial carving is completed.
More than 1,000 revelers participate in the Ramblin’ Raft Race down the Chattahoochee River, one year after a group of Georgia Tech students started what would become a 70s phenomenon.
October
Muhammad Ali returns from forced exile, fighting Jerry Quarry at the old Municipal Auditorium.
November
Jimmy Carter is elected governor.

1971
March
Atlanta Municipal Airport is renamed to honor former Mayor William B. Hartsfield, who was instrumental in making the city a transportation hub.
July
Hartsfield Airport becomes international, with Eastern Airlines acquiring a nonstop route to Mexico City.
September
The city’s water department is desegregated in accordance with new guidelines that set a goal of 50 percent minority participation in all municipal enterprises.
November
A referendum to fund MARTA via a 1-cent sales tax passes in Fulton and DeKalb and is rejected in Gwinnett and Clayton.
The National Hockey League awards Atlanta an expansion team, the Flames. Though they would make the playoffs six out of eight years, plummeting ticket sales and rising costs force team owner Tom Cousins to sell the team to a Calgary businessman in 1980.

1972
February
MARTA buys the Atlanta Transit Company for $12.8 million.
August
Delta Air lines merges with Northeast Airlines.
September
Gwinnett County commissioners block a motion to give voters a second chance to fund MARTA.
October
The Omni complex, priced at $17 million, opens over the old railroad gulch.
November
Clayton voters again overwhelmingly reject participation in MARTA.
Andrew Young is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, making him the South’s first black Congressman since Reconstruction.

1973
February
A settlement is reached in a lawsuit over Atlanta school desegregation requiring at least 30 percent black enrollment in all schools.
March
The state legislature approves a new charter for the City of Atlanta. The Board of Alderman and the position of Vice-Mayor are eliminated; a 18-person City Council is created, to be presided over by a City Council President.
July
Dr. Alonzo Crim becomes the first black superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.
October
Maynard Jackson, the city’s last vice-mayor, is elected Atlanta’s first black mayor following a run-off against incumbent Sam Massell. The 35-year-old attorney won with 59 percent of the vote.

1974
February
Construction begins on MARTA’s first rapid transit line.
April
Atlanta Brave Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, belting his 715th career homer at Atlanta (later Atlanta-Fulton County) Stadium.

1975
June
A deal is reached to preserve the Fox Theatre, which had nearly been demolished a year earlier to make room for Southern Bell’s new regional headquarters.
December
Atlanta voters reject a $10 million bond issue for sewers, drainage and street improvements.

1976
February
John Portman’s Peachtree Plaza opens as the world’s tallest hotel and Atlanta’s tallest building.
May
Billed as the world’s first indoor amusement park, the World of Sid and Marty Krofft has a splashy opening in the Omni International complex. Poor attendance, blamed on rising crime downtown, was blamed for the park’s closing six months later.
August
The $35 million Georgia World Congress Center opens, adjacent to the Omni. Atlanta soon becomes a major convention destination.
November
Former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter is elected president, defeating Gerald Ford.

1977
June
Mayor Jackson refuses to recognize the annual “Gay Pride” festival, instead proclaiming a “Liberties Day” honoring all minorities.
October
Jackson is elected to a second term as mayor.

1978
January
A fire destroys Atlanta’s historic Loew’s Grand Theater, site of the “Gone With the Wind” premiere 39 years earlier.
The Sex Pistols make their American debut at the Great Southeast Music Hall.
October
The Sweet Auburn neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born is named a national historic site.

1979
June
MARTA’s first rapid transit line, from Avondale to Georgia State Station, debuts.
July
The first two known victims in the Atlanta child murders are reported missing. Over the next two years 29 African-Americans — most of them male and adolescent — were killed.

Sources: AJC archives, “Days in the Life of Atlanta,” by Norman Shavin, “Atlanta Rising,” by Frederick Allen, The New Georgia Encyclopedia

THAT SEVENTIES CITY / A look at the decade when Atlanta came of age

City leaders launch MARTA with an eye toward greatness

By CHRISTIAN BOONE

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

“Atlanta is on the threshold of greatness, but has a long way to go. A metro transit system is a must.” Former Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., 1960

On June 30, 1979, MARTA launches the East Line from Avondale to Georgia State Station, the first stage of its rapid-transit system and the culmination of more than 20 years of planning.
The vision for what would become Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority dates back to 1954, when the Metropolitan Planning Commission noted the need for transit. Five counties — Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton — are to be served by 66 miles of subways.
More than five decades later, the city continues to grapple with traffic. Cobb, Gwinnett and nearly all of Clayton still have no rapid transit. Many of today’s problems can be traced to decisions of the 1970s by local governments not to be part of the MARTA system.

The crucial year: 1971

A referendum on a one-cent sales tax to fund MARTA faces stiff opposition in Clayton, Gwinnett, Fulton and DeKalb counties. Cobb County refuses outright to participate.

Gwinnett and Clayton voters overwhelmingly reject the measure

The referendum passes easily in DeKalb, but in Fulton the vote is so close, opponents demand a recount. The tax is approved by fewer than 500 votes. If those votes had gone the other way, MARTA would have been disbanded.

The following February, the new transit agency buys the Atlanta Transit System for $12.9 million and takes control of the city’s bus lines. Subway construction comes later in the decade and continues for more than 20 years; the latest extensions open in the year 2000.

But nearly all of that expansion is in Fulton and DeKalb. Subsequent referendums to expand MARTA to Gwinnett fail. Today, Clayton has some MARTA bus service, but no rapid transit apart from the line to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

A question of race

Opposition to MARTA at first is found in both the black and white communities.

A $377 million bond issue fails in 1968, largely because of black opposition. African-Americans are barely consulted in planning for the system, and the community’s leadership opposes the idea as originally conceived.

Whites, meanwhile, are starting to migrate to the suburbs, and a significant majority fear subways will import crime from the city neighborhoods they had just fled. A derisive spin on the MARTA acronym becomes popular in the ‘burbs: “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”
Well into the 1990s, author Frederick Allen writes in his book “Atlanta Rising,” “MARTA remained a predominantly black system.”

Then and now

As more people move to the outer counties, more commuters fill the roadways. Today’s expressway network is in place by the 1970s. Aside from the opening of the Ga. 400 extension in 1993, it’s been a matter of widening, straightening and smoothing things out ever since.

In 1979, traffic is becoming an issue. Today, traffic is so bad, business leaders fear corporations are bypassing Atlanta for other, less crowded Southern cities. A 2007 Urban Mobility study finds only Los Angeles to be more congested.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Clap Trap

Republicans’ Latest Talking Point: The New Deal Failed



Published: January 11, 2009
On Christmas Eve, the conservative pundit Monica Crowley argued on Fox News that instead of rescuing America from the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s spending on public works made it worse. She insisted that this bizarre claim was confirmed by “all kinds of studies and academic work.”

Times Topics: New Deal (1930's)


The show’s host backed her up. “Yes,” said Gregg Jarrett, “I think historians pretty much agree on that.” In the same vein, a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece said F.D.R. helped turn “a panic into the worst depression of modern times.” Now, as Congress begins to debate President-elect Barack Obama’s ambitious economic stimulus plan, this anti-New Deal talking point is popping up all over.
Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”
But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.
In the 1934 midterm elections, the voters delivered their first verdict on the New Deal, expanding the Democrats’ margins in Congress. In 1936, F.D.R. won in a bigger landslide than he had four years earlier. By 1940, the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was supporting much of Roosevelt’s social welfare and regulatory regime.
Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life. When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for having presided over a “dime store New Deal.” But in recent years, the attacks have heated up.
At the start of the Bush administration, conservatives talked openly about rolling back the New Deal. They were trying to unravel the regulatory state, including protections for workers, consumers and investors. They were also promoting a favorite cause of Wall Street’s: privatizing Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal.
These days the public is in no mood, given the high costs of deregulation in the mortgage industry and the Bernard Madoff scandal, for more talk about dismantling regulations and federal oversight. But today, the new focus is Mr. Obama’s stimulus package. If F.D.R.’s New Deal spending made things worse, it follows that the Obama administration should not make the same mistake.
The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.
The second problem is that the criticism overlooks the relief Roosevelt’s programs brought to millions. When F.D.R. took office, unemployment was 25 percent, and families were losing their homes, living in shantytowns, even fighting one another for food at garbage dumps.
The difference that the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal public works programs made in people’s lives is incalculable.
F.D.R.’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, described in her memoir what a relief job meant to an “almost deaf, elderly lawyer” she knew whose practice had failed. He had gotten a job as a caretaker at a small seaside park. “He made little extra plantings,” she recalled, “arranged charming paths and walks, acted as guide to visitors, supervised children’s play.” When she saw him, she said, “he would always ask me to take a message to the President — a message of gratitude for a job which paid him fifteen dollars a week and kept him from starving to death.”
Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

Friday, January 09, 2009

Why Bananas are a Parable For Our Times


Johann Hari

Columnist, London Independent

Posted January 7, 2009 | 07:58 PM
(EST)



Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact:
bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or
potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and
it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.



There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in
five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist.
The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about
the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are
leading us.



Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas
were quite consciously created. Until 150 ago, a vast array of bananas grew in
the world's jungles and they were invariably consumed nearby. Some were sweet;
some were sour. They were green or purple or yellow.



A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type - the Gros Michael - out of the jungle and decided to
mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across
the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and
creamy and handy for your lunchbox.



There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there - but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver
it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: The
Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, it worked like this. Find a
poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it
won't, topple it and replace it with one that will.



Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of
trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from
the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump
tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn't
work, move on to the next country. Begin again.



This sounds like hyperbole until you study what actually happened. In 1911, the banana magnate Samuel Zemurray
decided to seize the country of Honduras as a private plantation. He gathered together some international gangsters like
Guy "Machine Gun" Maloney, drummed up a private army, and invaded,
installing an amigo as president.



The term "banana republic" was invented to describe the servile dictatorships that were
created to please the banana companies. In the early 1950s, the Guatemalan
people elected a science teacher named Jacobo Arbenz, because he promised to
redistribute some of the banana companies' land among the millions of landless
peasants.



President Eisenhower and the CIA (headed by a former United Fruit employee) issued instructions that these "communists"
should be killed, and noted that good methods were "a hammer, axe, wrench,
screw driver, fire poker or kitchen knife". The tyranny they replaced it
with went on to kill more than 200,000 people.



But how does this relate to the disease now scything through the world's bananas? The evidence suggests even
when they peddle something as innocuous as bananas, corporations are structured
to do one thing only: maximise their shareholders' profits. As part of a highly
regulated mixed economy, that's a good thing, because it helps to generate
wealth or churn out ideas. But if the corporations aren't subject to tight
regulations, they will do anything to maximise short-term profit. This will
lead them to seemingly unhinged behaviour - like destroying the environment on
which they depend.



Not long after Panama Disease first began to kill bananas in the early 20th century, United Fruit's scientists
warned the corporation was making two errors. They were building a gigantic
monoculture. If every banana is from one homogenous species, a disease entering
the chain anywhere on earth will soon spread. The solution? Diversify into a
broad range of banana types.



The company's quarantine standards were also dire. Even the people who were supposed to prevent infection were
trudging into healthy fields with disease-carrying soil on their boots. But
both of these solutions cost money - and United Front didn't want to pay. They
decided to maximise their profit today, reckoning they would get out of the
banana business if it all went wrong.



So by the 1960s, the Gros Michel that United Fruit had packaged as The One True Banana was dead. They scrambled
to find a replacement that was immune to the fungus, and eventually stumbled
upon the Cavendish. It was smaller and less creamy and bruised easily, but it
would have to do.



But like in a horror movie sequel, the killer came back. In the 1980s, the Cavendish too became sick. Now it too
is dying, its immunity a myth. In many parts of Africa, the crop is down 60 percent. There is a consensus among scientists that the
fungus will eventually infect all Cavendish bananas everywhere. There are
bananas we could adopt as Banana 3.0 - but they are so different to the bananas
that we know now that they feel like a totally different and far less
appetising fruit. The most likely contender is the Goldfinger, which is
crunchier and tangier: it is know as "the acid banana."



Thanks to bad corporate behaviour and physical limits, we seem to be at a dead end. The only possible glimmer of
hope is a genetically modified banana that can resist Panama Disease. But that
is a distant prospect, and it is resisted by many people: would you like a
banana split made from a banana split with fish genes?



When we hit up against a natural limit like Panama disease, we are bemused, and then affronted. It seems instinctively bizarre to
me that lush yellow bananas could vanish from the global food supply, because I
have grown up in a culture without any idea of physical limits to what we can
buy and eat.



Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful
of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and
allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good
entrepreneurial idea - and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they
destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit
itself.



But have we learned? Across the world, politicians like George Bush and David Cameron are telling us the
regulation of corporations is "a menace" to be "rolled back"; they even say we should leave the planet's climate in their hands.
Now that's bananas.

Monday, January 05, 2009

Gay Marriage is the wrong issue

Why Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue

Bob Ostertag, Historian, Journalist, and Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at UC Davis

Posted December 21, 2008 | 06:04 PM (EST) on Huffington Post

How is it that queers became the odd ones out at such a momentous turning point in history? By pushing an agenda of stupid issues like gay marriage.

"Gay marriage" turns the real issues of equal rights for sexual minorities upside down and paints us into a reactionary little corner of our own making. Yes, married people get special privileges denied to others. Denied not to just gays and lesbians, but to all others. Millions of straight people remain unmarried, and for a huge variety of reasons, from mothers whose support networks do not include their children's fathers, to hipsters who can't relate to religious institutions. We could be making common cause with them. We could be fighting for equal rights for everyone, not just gays and lesbians, but for all unmarried people. In the process we would leave religious institutions to define marriage however their members see fit.

That's how you win at politics, isn't it? You build principled coalitions that add up to a majority, and try not to hand potent mobilizing issues to your opposition in the process.

We have done the opposite. Instead of tearing down the walls of privilege enjoyed by the nuclear family, we are demanding our own place at the married couples' table (leaving all those other unmarried people out in the cold).
I know the idea of gay liberation is ancient by today's standards, but it wasn't so long ago that a lot of gay and lesbian activism began from the premise that the queer perspective was one that could offer a particular contribution to a more just society as a whole. My how times change.

Is this really where decades of struggle for sexual freedom ends? With the state granting its blessing to homosexual nuclear families emerging from City Hall, husband-and-husband or wife-and-wife, with the photographer and the rice and the whole bit, finally having become just like them?

Not for me. Not for my family, with its various men, each of whom I love in a different way, a child, and two moms. Not that my family is any sort of queer norm. But that's the beautiful thing about queer culture: there is no norm. We piece together our families, holding on to those relationships that work.

The fact is most of us won't marry even if we have the right to. We are putting all our resources into winning a right that only the few of us in long-term conventional couple relationships will enjoy. What's more, we are creating a social climate in which young queers are encouraged to recast their vision of the relationships they seek to favor the married couple. This is not only a loss for the vibrancy of queer culture, it is a disservice to young people who will not be well served by their nuclear family ambitions. Just consider the high number of gay and lesbian divorces (yes, the rate is already high despite the fact that we have not even fully won the right to marry yet).

It is no secret that marriage isn't working for straight people. That's why religious institutions are so up in arms about it. The institution of marriage is in crisis. On what basis does anyone imagine it is going to work better for queers?

Through years of queer demonstrations, meetings, readings and dinner table conversations, about gay bashing, police violence, job discrimination, housing discrimination, health care discrimination, immigration discrimination, family ostracism, teen suicide, AIDS profiteering, sodomy laws, and much more, I never once heard anyone identify the fact that they couldn't get married as being a major concern. And then, out of the blue, gay marriage suddenly became the litmus test by which we measure our allies. We have now come to the point that many unthinkingly equate opposition to gay marriage with homophobia.

Rick Warren is now the flash point, the one all our political allies, even Barack Obama, are supposed to denounce because he doesn't pass gay marriage the litmus test.

I disagree with Rick Warren on many things. To start with, he believes that 2000 years ago God sent his only Son to die on a cross so that mankind would not perish but have everlasting life. To me, that's weird. I don't know how to even begin to address an idea that far out. And he believes that everyone who does not accept Jesus as their savior will go to hell. He doesn't single out gays and lesbians in particular. To me, the weirdest thing there is not that he thinks queers will go to hell, but that he believes in hell at all. But mainline Protestants believe in hell too. So do Catholics, who also add purgatory and limbo.

Steve Waldman, founder of Belief.net (where you find the most thoughtful exchanges on present day religion), did an extended interview with Warren which has been hyped all over the blogosphere as an example of why we should all be screaming for Obama to disinvite Warren from the inaugural. The quote that got all the attention was when Warren said gay marriage would be on a par with marriage for incest, pedophilia and polygamy. And yes, I think that's off-base. Not up there are the scale of the whole God-sent-his-only-Son-to-die-on-a-cross bit, but weird nonetheless. But let's look the rest of the interview, the parts that didn't get as much attention as that one line:
Q: Which do you think is a greater threat to the American family - divorce or gay marriage? A: [laughs] That's a no brainer. Divorce. There's no doubt about it.
Q: So why do we hear so much more - especially from religious conservatives - about gay marriage than about divorce?
A: Oh we always love to talk about other sins more than ours. Why do we hear more about drug use than about being overweight? [Note: Warren is quite overweight.]
Q: Just to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?
A: I don't know if I'd use the term there but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don't believe we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles so I fully support equal rights.
Q: What about partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?
A: You know, not a problem with me.
I have an idea: let's accept equal rights for all. Equal rights are the issue when it comes to national politics. That's Obama's position, and I think he has it right.

Then, for those of you who are truly concerned with marriage above and beyond the issue of rights, you should go to your church, or synagogue, or mosque, and have that battle. In your community of fellow believers. I wish you all the best. And the rest of us can move on to things that matter to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs. Like, say, global warming.

Which brings us back to Rick Warren. Warren is the shiny new star of American evangelicalism. Just one of his many books has sold over 20 million copies. And his books, like his ministry, are all about rallying evangelicals to battle global warming, poverty, and AIDS. He rarely mentions culture war issues like gay marriage. And it is not just talk, he puts his money where his mouth is. As Waldman points out in a blog right here on the Huffington Post,
Warren has used his fame and fortune primarily to help the most destitute people in the world. He reverse tithes, giving away 90% and keeping 10%. Please contemplate all the religious figures who have gotten rich off their flock and pocketed the money... he's worked hard to get other conservative evangelicals to care more about poverty...
Just a reminder to all those gays and lesbians who never look beyond their cultural ghetto: we've got some serious problems going on in the world today that need to be addressed now. Global warming in particular can't wait. For thirty years Evangelical Christians have been the anchor that has pulled this country to the right, giving us first Reaganism and then Bushism. Wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And a decade of world-threatening climate change denialism.

At a minimum, 80 million Americans identify as evangelicals, and up to double that depending on how you define evangelical. They are the largest single religious group in the country, and the fastest growing. They are not going away. Somehow, some way, queers are going to have to share this country with all these people.

I am delighted that there is a new generation of evangelicals that thinks the biggest issue isn't homosexuality but global climate change, AIDS, and poverty. And who "don't believe we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles." I am so ready to make common cause with them. I couldn't care less about what they think of gay marriage.
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For more info, see the "I STILL Think Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue" group on Facebook.