Memo to Joe Biden: Represent!

Ezra explains the Biden pick better’n anyone else.

For progressives, this is encouraging pick. More encouraging than
Bayh, or Kaine, or even, in a way, Sebelius. More encouraging than
picks who might have been more progressive, but less pugnacious.
Elevating Biden suggests that the Obama campaign has decided to have an
argument. Not try to win on momentum and inspiration and GOTV, but to
engage, and win, an argument about which set of ideas is better for the
future of the country. And in Biden, they’ve engaged at the point of
greatest vulnerability and opportunity for Democrats: National security.

A political history of the past few years in Democratic politics is
a history of the party’s failed attempts to dance away from foreign
policy discussions. There was the Thomas Frank school of thought: Pivot
from "national security to economic insecurity." There was the George
Lakoff approach: Reframe the language. There was the Kerry approach:
"How can they be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in
Boise?" But even if these approaches had succeeded — they didn’t —
they would still have bespoke long-term weakness in the Democratic
Party: A fundamental inability to win arguments about American foreign
policy.

A Democrat has not been elected during wartime in over 50 years. A
healthy party cannot only prosper when the world is at peace and the
waters are quiet. But seven years of Republican incompetence and
failure have generated tremendous mistrust in the conservative foreign
policy approach. Iraq was a historic blunder, Osama bin Laden is loose,
America’s international standing is dismal. There’s an opening for
Democrats to press the advantage, argue that they, in fact, have the
better record, and the sounder ideas, on national security. But they
have to actually engage the argument. They can’t hope that events will
do the work for them. Picking Biden, the Obama campaign signaled that
this is a project they want to take on, and a project they realize will
have to be engaged affirmatively and aggressively. The fact of Obama,
the fact of Iraq, it’s not enough. You need to actually win the
argument.

Now we’ll see if Biden is up to the challenge. Go Joe!

[pic from democraticflickr]

Joebiden

LA Times: Not Dead Yet

The LA Times announced another round of cutbacks a week ago, and sometimes seems to be committing suicide in front of its Southern California readers…but despite all its financial woes the paper still has plenty of first-rate journalists on the beat. One of their best is Scott Gold, who yesterday wrote a story about my local burb, Santa Paula, that probably no other newspaper in the world could duplicate.

Check the headline: "In Santa Paula, a White Minority Blames the Poor for Town’s Problems."

That’s telling it like it is.

Santa Paula is a poor town, one of the poorest in SoCal, but it’s also a town riven by racial conflict, between the mostly white establishment and the mostly Latino populace. As Gold points out (here), a substantial portion of the town seems to think that the people of Santa Paula are somehow its problem — as if the folks who work the farms vanished, then the long-gone oil industry would come back.

Bizarre.

I say no other paper could take on this subject, because no other paper in Ventura County would have the guts to defy the wealthy white folk of Santa Paula. (Not all the white people are so craven: John Nichols, an acquaintance, a photographer, a shopkeeper, and a nice guy, dares to speak truth to power in the body of the story, which is well worth reading.)

Newspaper fans, take a look at Gold’s lede. A classic.

Many people in Santa Paula, when asked what they do for a living,
respond with the name of the fruit that they pick: "Naranja." "Fresa."
Orange. Strawberry.


The fields have long defined Santa Paula, literally and culturally. In
tidy rows, they stretch 10 miles to the east and west along the floor
of the valley in Ventura County. The workers tie little pieces of foil
on some crops to scare off the birds. On sunny days, there are
thousands of reflections; it looks like they’re harvesting jewels.
n the middle is a sweet, tired town of roughly 35,000 people,
three-quarters of them Latino and more than half considered low-income
under county standards.

For several years, there has been a tide of sentiment that Santa Paula
has missed out, that it has become a dumping ground of sagging roofs
and 99-cent stores while neighbors like Moorpark and Camarillo have
prospered. And some critics — many of them members of the white
minority — have decided that the poor are the problem.

All this because the town has built decent housing for farmworkers.

Sometimes my people, white people, make me sick.

[photo by Gary Friedman of the LA Times]

Santapaulastory

Hope vs. Greed, the Future vs. Today, Obama vs. McCain

The self-sacrifice involved in mutual sharing and co-operative action is impossible without hope. When today is all there is, we grab and hold on. We are afloat in an ocean of nothingness and we hang on to any miserable piece of wreckage as if it were the tree of life…

Those without hope are divided and driven to desperate self-seeking. Common suffering by itself, when not joined with hope, does not unite nor does it evoke mutual generosity. The enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, "their lives made bitter by hard bondage," were a bickering, backbiting lot. Moses had to give them hope of a promised land before he could join them together. The thirty thousand hopeless people in the concentration camp at Buchenwald did not develop any form of united action, nor did they manifest any readiness for self-sacrifice. There was there more greed and ruthless selfishness than in the greediest and most corrupt of societies. "Instead of studying the way in which they could best help each other they used all their ingenuity to dominate and oppress each other."

That’s from Eric Hoffer’s great book "The True Believer," and it’s true enough, but I’m still bummed…John McCain so reminds me of a miserable piece of wreckage. 

Bummerman

Mold: Toxic Menace or Life on Earth?

While I was gone, I missed a great (and long) story in the LA Weekly (here) about the mom who turned mold "toxic," creating a storm of lucrative litigation out of fear, misunderstanding, and greed.

Like those who would later join the cause, including Johnny Carson
sidekick Ed McMahon, [Sharon Kramer] saw a conspiracy funded by businesses out to
end mold claims while risking the public’s health. She believed that
the well-being of thousands depended on her exposing that deceit. Like
the fight waged by McMahon over the death of his dog purportedly from
mold, Kramer’s belief has consumed her. It has wiped out her
comfortable suburban life and financial security and caused her to lose
touch with many friends.*

But the great mold scare never rose to the level of accepted epidemic
among serious researchers. Despite public hysteria that continues even
now, science today finds no direct link between mold and serious
illness in people with normal immune systems.

The Centers for Disease Control now says: "There are very few
reports that toxigenic molds found inside homes can cause unique or
rare health conditions such as pulmonary hemorrhage or memory loss" —
the kinds of illnesses claimed in successful lawsuits at the height of
the mold rush. "These case reports," the CDC warns on its Web site,
"are rare, and a causal link between the presence of toxigenic mold and
these conditions has not been proven."

The story resonates for yours truly because we have a guesthouse/trailer that has begun to grow mold in spots during winter rains…meaning we can no longer rent it out. What to do? Destroy? Rebuild? (Or, as one former tenant suggested, simply find tenants with functioning immune systems who don’t freak out.)

But the story of Sharon Kramer is almost a Greek tragedy: a woman seemingly deranged by the near-loss of her beloved child. She appears utterly obsessed with mold, which for most individuals, whose lungs aren’t thick with mucus, is not a great menace. Even her husband seems fed up.

"Looking back at how a leak from a fridge complicated the last six
years of our lives is unbelievable," her husband says. "It doesn’t make
sense."

You said it, brother. But when it comes to fear, little does.

Themoldrush

Why Editorials Mean Nothing in the Age of Bush

Well, I exaggerate. A little. Not much. Here’s an example: The New York Times editorializing against the latest outrage from the Bush administration, their attempt to kill the Endangered Species Act:

The Bush administration has never masked its distaste for most
environmental laws or its ambitions to thwart Congress’s will. Now in
its waning months, it is trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act.

All true, all very polite, and an utterly bloodless statement aimed against an action drenched in the blood of innocents. ((The Los Angeles Times did a little better, by attacking the cynicism of the Bush administration’s action in their editorial.)

Note in contrast the genuine heat in the words  of veteran Democratic Congressman John Dingell, who for his advocacy of Detroit would not be considered an environmentalist by most, but nonetheless still is capable of outrage:

"We must always be concerned when an
Administration seeks to rewrite the rules months before they leave
office. This is especially true for the Bush Administration – which has
a long and dedicated history of arrogant behavior in its dealings with
Congress, a coequal branch of government – and which has consistently
shown its hostility to our cornerstone conservation laws. Make no
mistake, there is a reason they chose to do this in August when
Congress is out of session and Members are in their districts working.

"I wrote the Endangered Species Act and seeing it signed
into law was among my proudest moments as a Member of Congress. The
changes sought by the Bush Administration would seriously weaken the
law, eliminating the requirement that scientists be the ones making
decisions regarding science, instead giving political hacks and
unsympathetic bureaucrats another opportunity to attack the scientific
community. It is remarkable that this bill, signed into law by Richard
M. Nixon and accepted for decades as a pillar of American conservation
would be destroyed by George W. Bush in the final months of his
Administration. It is most peculiar that a statute which has done so
much good should be now jeopardized by the stroke of a hostile
Presidential pen."

Next question: Does the Bush administration have the power to
institute this radical change in the law, or will it be foiled by
Congress or the courts? No one yet seems to have talked to the
experts at Fish and Wildlife, the EPA, or the legal folks at
Earthjustice — one of those stories someone, maybe me, should be
working on right now! Stay tuned…

Joel Woolf v. Big Auto, Big Oil, Big Government…and Hippies

The idea of driving a vehicle powered by vegetable oil reeks of the
hippie lifestyle: It’s a homegrown technology, seemingly far out of the
mainstream, and requires a continuing commitment to the often messy
process of filtering waste vegetable oil, usually begged from
restaurants. The fact that the exhaust from a “vegged” vehicle can
smell like donuts or French fries or Mexican food only adds to the
overall hippie image. But though the leading purveyor of “veg-powered”
vehicles in Ventura County sometimes jokes about “running Mex,” he also
makes it clear that he doesn’t wear tie-dye, doesn’t eat granola and
just plain doesn’t like hippies.

“Not even a little bit,” declares Joel Woolf.

That’s the lede from my story on local hero Woolf, who I’ve mentioned before on this blog, but for the first time profiled properly this week. For more, please see the full story here.

Joelwoolf

Revered “National Poet” of Palestine Passes On

Mahmoud Darwish, the "National Poet" of Palestine, died yesterday. Though this will likely go virtually unnoticed in the West, his loss will be deeply felt in the Middle East. (His elegant website barely loads this morning, probably because the server is struggling to keep up with demand.)

Darwish reportedly was devastated by the conflict that broke out last year between Hamas and Fatah, and was "not optimistic" about the prospects for the nation into which he was born, 73 years ago. The report makes sense: certainly in his poetry, Darwish identifies himself so completely with Palestine that it’s difficult to find any separation between man and nation. Here, for example, from In Palestine:

So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Mohammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me . . . and I forgot, like you, to die.

Another Reason To Fear the Factory Farm

Superbugs. An alarming story in this week’s The New Yorker focuses on man-made new diseases that cannot be eradicated with almost anything except bleach, even inside hospitals. The writer quotes Michael Pollan to explain the connection to your local meat factory:

“Seventy per cent of the antibiotics administered in America end up in
agriculture,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at Berkeley and
the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” told [the writer]. “The
drugs are not used to cure sick animals but to prevent them from
getting sick, because we crowd them together under filthy
circumstances. We have created the perfect environment in which to
breed superbugs that are antibiotic-resistant. We’ve
created a petri dish in our factory farms for the evolution of
dangerous pathogens.”

Pigs in factory farm image courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.

Pigfactoryfarm