Obama the Racist?

I generally ignore extreme wingnuts, left and right, but the latest nutty charge, that President Obama is a racist, seems to have some staying power. Let’s take a look at the people he appointed to positions of power in Washington. Here are his first 50 appointments, in no particular order. Go ahead, scroll down through all of them and see the results of his “racism”.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan	Secretary of Energy Steven Chu	Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan	Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis	Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar	Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner	Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki	Administrator of the SBA Karen G. Mills	Administrator, EPA Lisa Jackson
Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry	Chairman, SEC Mary Shapiro	Chairman U. S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission Gary Gensler
Chairman, Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System Daniel Tarullo	Chairman, FCC Julius Genashowski	Chairman SEC Mary Shapiro
Chief of Staff Fahm Emmanuel	Co-Chair of the President's Council on Science and Technology Harold Varmus	Co-Chair of the President's Council on Science and Technology Eric Lander
Coordinator of Climate and Energy Policy Carol Browner	Director Central Intelligence Agency Leon Panetta	Dir. Office of Science and Technology, and Co-chair of the President's Council on Science and Technology John Holdren
Dir., White House Council on Environmental Quality Nancy Sutley	Director NOAA Jane Lubchenko	Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair
Director, Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag	National Security Advisor James L. Jones	Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke
Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell	U. N. Ambassador Susan Rice	U. S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk
Deputy Assistant to the President, and Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs Michael Froman	Director, White House Office of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion	Director, U.S. Dept of Justice Office of Legal Counsel Dawn Johnsen
Chair, President's Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer	Commissioner, FDA	Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra
Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gray	Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts Rocco Landesman	Attorney General Eric Holder
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack	Asistant Secretary For the Department of Housing and Urban Development David Stevens	Head, NRC Gregory Jaczko
Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke	Secretary of Defense Robert Gates	Head, CDC Thomas Friedan
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano	Deputy Secretary of State for Management Jacob Lew

This looks more like a Rotary Club than the result of an African-American racist.

‘Nuff said?

Bill Way
New York, NY
August 2009

I love it when CEOs do what they say they will.

From today’s NY Times -

“We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe’s-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we’ve done our job, five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.”

[emphasis added]   link
— Kerry K. Killinger, chief executive of Washington Mutual, 2003

Well, Kerry Killinger with the oh-so-appropriate last name,  you have certainly done your job.

Let’s look at these exemplars of industrial leadership…

WalMart has single-handedly accelerated (measurably) Chinese ownership of the U.S. and has destroyed the economy in hundreds of towns across the country. It has wiped out  local businesses, and tied the unskilled population to their low prices, sub-standard wages, and a nearly complete lack of health care options.

CostCo is trying to do the same, although they are more effective at portraying themselves as a little less predatory, which is of course a complete fiction.

Both companies are performing well financially, but their business model ends up doing us far more damage than good. To paraphrase the gay cowboy, “I wish I knew how we could quit them.” (Disclosure: if I was still in the suburbs, I’d probably still buy car tires and other stuff like that from them, because I don’t know how to quit them.)

Home Depot – a great brand turned to trash by the ubiquitous Nardelli, who left HD with a $210-million package for his astonishing work:

wheeeee!

And Starbucks, home of the original $4 cup of burned coffee. We don’t know what Jim Donald’s severance package was, and as major CEOs go, he was on the low end of the earnings scale, at $1-million per year. But you know that, even with plummeting stock prices, they still manage to give the top boys (and they are all boys) stock deals that make them amazing amounts of generally undisclosed money.

These are stock charts you’d expect to see in a Dilbert comic strip. The pointy-haired boss lives, and apparently lives very well.

WW
28 December 2008

Teach Your Children

You, who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by.

And so, become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye.

Teach your children well
Their father’s hell
Did slowly go by

And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you’ll know by.

Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would die
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

- Graham Nash

Sex education is one of the messy issues brought up by the Presidential election season, with the current administration and the Republican party officially favoring “abstinence only” education. Many people who support this approach also like to teach that condoms are highly unreliable. No wonder kids like Bristol Palin are becoming pregnant too soon: once they decide to have sex, the follow their parents’ teachings and skip the condom, as “it probably won’t work anyway.”

But teenage pregnancy is one of the lesser hurdles faced by uneducated kids having sex. HIV/AIDS and other STDs are very much with us, and they can kill.

This is a crime, and cannot under any circumstances be termed “moral”.

Let’s look at a few of the problems with approaching sex education this way:

1. It leaves the kids woefully unprepared to make informed decisions that can affect their lives. Should they decide to have sex at any point, they don’t know what the physical risks are for different sexual practices, and that includes sexual practices with their new spouse in monogamous relationships.
2. Teaching that condoms are ineffective is just not accurate. They are not perfect, and everyone who wants to protect themselves from sexually-transmitted diseases deserves to know what the real risks are.
3. While abstinence-only education seems to slightly delay the first sexual experience, it does nothing to reduce teenage sexual activity. It may start a little later on, but the kids who take the pledges are still having sex, and they don’t know how to protect themselves.

There is an excellent piece about this written by advert.org, which is a UK-based HIV/AIDS prevention organization. This piece, which is extensively footnoted with many of the studies on various forms of sex education, is at this link. I strongly recommend it.

My question to abstinence-only proponents is this: why can’t you give your kids the moral teaching and strength so most of them will decide to have sex within committed relationships, and give them the knowledge they will need to protect their lives from the serious infections (and pregnancies) that can result from sex? The notion that teaching everything sends a “mixed message” is nonsense: teaching about the physical risks of sexual activity is completely unrelated from teaching about when your moral code says that sex is good. Sooner or later, we hope all our kids will have sex, and when they do, they deserve to know how to survive it.

The fortunate among us who have been in deeply committed relationships know that sex enters a wholly different realm, and that no degree of “hot” casual sex can ever approach it. Our kids deserve the chance to experience that. They also deserve the knowledge they will need to survive. Giving them anything less is highly amoral.

Bill Way
New York, NY
7 September 2008

Getting the News

Having bronchitis and fevers for this last week means I’ve spent far too much time online getting news and opinions about the amazing RNC convention. Far too much time, but I’ve learned a few things.

First, Campbell Brown’s interview of McCain campaign spokesperson Tucker Bounds should be studied by every professional reporter. We haven’t seen journalists who would press an interview subject like that in a very long time. Ted Koppel is the only reporter I can think of who even came close. The standard has become: 1) ask the question; 2) get the non-answer; 3) do a soft follow-up; 4) get the same non-answer again. We desperately need journalists who will get real answers from all the candidates and public officials.

One of the other things I’ve realized with all this time on my hands is that virtually every news organization is instantly available online, and if you look through them regularly, there are some surprises. Here’s a quick list, with my take on the quality of their reporting. I deliberately ignore editorial slants,  because I normally ignore editorials. Put another way, I don’t care what your opinions are, but I do care about the quality of your reporting. Yes, I am an unrepentant news junkie.

New York Times – great paper, great reporting; wretched, disgracefully sloppy web version. Hundreds of articles referencing non-existent pictures, and even their version of “TKTKTK” left in the copy. Hundreds of articles with “briefly” in their titles that consist of one or two sentences clipped from news services. This is a crime.

The International Herald Tribune web site is excellent, and easily a match for the paper version. This is all the more surprising, as it is owned by the New York Times.

London Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Wired — all great reporting. I have also been impressed with the online versions of the Japan Times and India’s Pioneer, though I’m not sufficiently familiar with local details to evaluate how good their reporting actually is.

Daily Kos, Huffington Post, intellwire, rawstory, slate, truthout, commondreams, cooperative research, and yes, even Drudge – occasionally gets stories out the mainstream news organizations miss, although some of them come with a decided slant.

No one outside the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Daily Kos reported on the 200+ arrests made in the Twin Cities over last weekend until days later, if at all. I find this very disturbing.

Jon Stewart is a bona-fide news source, and one of the few intelligent interviewers around. I enjoy The Daily Show, but would kill to have him doing news reporting and analysis full-time.

Fox is not a news organization at all, and CNN, despite its so promising start, has little left to recommend it other than Ms. Brown. The New York Sun is reported to be near death, and from their amazing error rate and complete failure to even try to separate news from opinion, it comes not a moment too soon.

The Wall Street Journal, which for so many years had such consistently great reporting, is pretty much gone. Another Murdoch “triumph”, and very sad.

So there’s the list, and it pretty much follows the Pulitzer awards. You can get so much so quickly… but I sure wish there were more Campbell Browns around.

Bill Way
New York City
5 September 2008

What’s so Scary about Sarah Palin?

We know so little about Barak Obama, but suddenly he seems like the fully-known quantity compared with the governor from Alaska. So what do we know about her?

First, she apparently has lots of energy, is personally engaging, and most likely highly disciplined That’s all good. She may be competent and effective as well.

Then we get to the other stuff, and this cannot be ignored.

She is virulently anti-gay, and I take that personally. She told the Anchorage Daily News that she supported the 1998 constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage (link). Although she vetoed a bill that would have stripped domestic partner health benefits for state workers, she did so only after the Alaskan Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. Further, she declared her opposition to those benefits in a published gubernatorial candidate questionnaire (link), and said in another published questionnaire taht she would support a constitutional amendment to achieve the same end (link). Now I’ve been pretty lucky: I had a twenty-one year run with my partner, the Cuban-American artist Danny Puissegur. So when I hear someone say that it was right for me to have to spend over $10,000 in legal fees to hold onto our New York co-op apartment after he died, or that it would be right to have blocked him from the health care benefits from my employer, that’s personal. We Americans are now getting close to the point where it is really possible to love and make your life with who you want. This is no time to go backwards.

She is an NRA member and supporter. As a gun owner and life-long hunter myself, I find the NRA to be one of the most despicable organizations around. The NRA makes no difference between firearms used for sport, and firearms used to kill people. Before we get into this, let’s simplify the argument: the Second Amendment to the Constitution should be repealed, and it should be repealed because it was so badly written that no one can agree to what it means. (I know of no one who actually tries to make the case for gun ownership based on “militias”. That should be a hint.)

So, if we take the Second Amendment out of the argument, we can then make the case for gun ownership for either sport or personal protection. For the NRA, that’s not good enough: it’s all guns, all the time, including automatic assault weapons. Years ago, my dad went into the attic and brought out his Army-issued .45-calibre automatic, which he had held onto since the end of World War II. He brought it to his local police department, handed it over, and asked them to destroy it. The police were somewhat taken aback – it was, after all, a nice piece in perfect condition. He said to them, “The only purpose for this gun is to kill people. Please get rid of it for me.” They did. Pop understood so clearly what the NRA and Sarah Palin never will: keeping a gun to kill people with, even if you feel threatened by your surroundings, is probably something most people should not want to do, because the price you pay, once you shoot someone, can be far greater than the original threat. Are there exceptions to this? Sure there are. If I was cruising on a sailboat in some areas of the world, I would absolutely have a gun, and, if boarded, I would not hesitate to use it. But for most of us in the United States, if you really think through the whole process, you end up realizing that using guns for protection is a bad plan. So, I can make the case for guns in sport, and even (rarely) for protection. But the NRA and its supporters like Sarah Palin want lots more than that, and we are, as a society, far worse off for their efforts. Footnote to the story: Pop continued hunting until he was 84 years old. At that point he could still shoot quail with amazing consistency; it was his driving down to the hunting areas of south Jersey that had become the real threat.

Sarah Palin wants us to teach religion in our public schools. “Creationism” or “Intelligent design” are nothing more than religion – they are not alternative theories to evolution. They are fundamentalist Christian religious teachings, period. Now I know I’ve spent far too much time studying religion; it was something of an obsession with me throughout my education, and, like Christopher Hitchens, I studied them all. (Actually, one of the few college text books still on my shelf is my Biblical Hebrew text, which I’ve kept because taking that course from a scary-smart Jesuit was something I will never forget. Or want to repeat.) After all that study, I realized two important aspects of my personal religion. First, my personal beliefs are closest to Buckminster Fuller’s “No More Secondhand God”. Second, one of our most precious assets in the United States is the freedom to believe what you want. To that end, the great declaration “A Shared Vision – Religious Liberty in the 21st Century” is one of the most important documents anywhere. Originally signed by more than 80 prominent religious scholars and six religious and civil liberties organizations, it was updated in 2002, and should be read by everyone. (link here) Teaching “creationism” is teaching religion, and it has no place in our schools. We can only allow freedom of belief if we keep religion out of the government.

We will see what happens with Governor Palin in the next few weeks. But anyone who promotes or supports her candidacy should know what they are supporting. It is scary.
Bill Way
New York City
August 2008

Looking Through Obama’s Laundry List

Like many, I was pretty impressed with Senator Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver last week. Also like so many, I had remembrances of a Clinton-like “laundry list” of policy items. So I looked back through the speech, and was  surprised to find just five items, although a couple of them have a bunch of sub-items. Here is the list, with my comments.

End dependence on middle-east oil in ten years

Harking back to JFK’s “before this decade is out, put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth,” Senator Obama set a decade-long objective for ridding us of middle-east oil. The President who gets this started will go down in history as one of our greatest. This item has a number of parts:

Drilling is a stop-gap measure

It is so refreshing to hear a politician actually say this. Oil companies are currently drilling in less than 20% of their available lands (and oceans), so adding a little more environmentally-sensitive areas will do little to help them. Drilling does not mean lower fuel costs. Also, as we have passed the point of maximum oil output world-wide some time back, it is time we as a nation realized that and started working on a strategy that frees us from oil completely.

Should new drilling be banned? Probably not. On the other hand, allowing drilling in any new areas must be recognized for what it is: a potential small increase in oil supplies that will not be usable for at least 20 years. New drilling must be planned as part of an overall long-term national energy strategy.

Tap U.S. natural gas reserves

I wish he had categorized this as a stop-gap measure, along with drilling. Natural gas is, like oil, a non-renewable fossil fuel. With provable natural gas reserves of about 167 trillion cubic feet (Tcf), this becomes a very good stop-gap measure – something to buy us a little time. This, like drilling for oil, should be fit into our long-term national energy strategy.

Invest in clean coal

We should invest in clean coal technology, but not for the reason he stated. Clean coal technology, which is certainly decades away from production, can be a U.S.-developed exportable technology, very suitable for the developing world, and a great source of jobs and improved trade balance for the U.S. We should not include clean coal in our energy plan – we have better alternatives.

Safe Nuclear Power

I think it is high time to take another look at nuclear technology, and the place to start looking is France. The French are the largest exporter of electricity in the world, and generate over 70% of their electricity from nuclear plants. Their safety record is actually very good – so good, in fact, that communities compete for the chance to host the next nuclear plant. Even better: they have made great strides in nuclear fuel reprocessing, greatly reducing the amount of radioactive by-products that have to be buried somewhere.

I do think that nuclear power should be a major factor in our intermediate-term national energy strategy, at least. It’s possible that is may end up being part of our long-term strategy as well. It all depends on the risks, the safety record we can amass here, and how effective we can become at reducing and disposing of nuclear waste.

Fuel-efficient affordable American-made cars

The only way I see this as a possibility is if the Japanese car companies that are already building cars here in the U.S. take the lead. I have no hope of saving General Motors, and very little hope of turning either Chrysler or Ford into anything approaching world-class competitors in the car business. What Toyota et al. have shown us is that they can make cars in the U.S. that are at least as good as what they make in Japan. Actually, most Japanese manufacturers who set up shop in America have broken all sorts of records for cost-effectiveness and quality. The combination of Japanese management and manufacturing technology (which yes, did originate here) plus American line workers is a formidable one, and should be encouraged. Putting any money into the carcasses of the Big Three American car companies is throwing it away.

Invest $150-billion in renewal energy sources

This is a huge unknown area, and I hope we actually make this kind of investment. While I see nuclear power as today’s best option, I certainly hope that in the long range we come up with something else: something with no risk and with no waste products problem.

What was not included in the items for this is developing a long-term national energy strategy, which has to be the framework upon which everything else hangs. I’m guessing that it is implied, but it should be an explicit part, indeed the most important part, of getting us off our dependence on middle-east oil.

Affordable college for those who serve community of military and
Increase teacher salaries

OK — I combined two items into one here, but they both have to do with education. Our competitiveness as a nation, and therefore our security as well, is completely dependent on how we educate our young people. Expanding the G.I. Bill to include some kinds of community service makes all the sense in the world, and should have a great return on the dollars invested. Bravo.

The best job I ever had was as a technical trainer for a software company. The pay was terrific, and I found teaching to be one of the most rewarding jobs anywhere. Think about it: how many jobs have built into them the fact that, if you have a cold or the flu, you know that within a minute or two of starting work in the morning, that cold or flu will completely disappear for the day? It’s amazing what that little shot of adrenaline will do, and teaching guarantees you that shot every morning, day in and day out. What always bothered me about the job was the money. I made about $100k in the late 1990′s for teaching adults how to use some company’s software. Teachers who did the really valuable job of teaching kids started out at $25,000 or even less, and maxed out somewhere around $45-50,000 which made no sense then and makes no sense today.

We need to pay teachers more and get better teachers.

Universal Health Care

Boy, do we need this. I think either the Obama or Clinton plan would make great strides. Overall, I think the Obama plan, which recognizes the entrenchment of the insurance companies in our political/economic environment, is more practical. Along with providing affordable health care, we need a concerted effort to rein in health care costs, and that is an area Senator Clinton could help with. Despite all the bird that got whipped over her health care effort when she was in the White House, her plan, which was largely lifted from an existing highly successful program in Florida, included regional review boards to make sensible decisions on major capital investments. Without that, we end up with expensive, under-utilized gear such as CT-scanners, MRI’s, etc. proliferating across the landscape, all of which we pay for, one way or another.

Change bankruptcy laws to protect pensions before CEO bonuses

This one should be expanded: we need to develop a strategy here in the U.S. to get as many citizens as possible into careers that will enable them to, at least, afford life’s necessities, and that includes the necessity of affording life’s necessities when you are too old to work. Right now, those who make it through college can generally do that; others are pretty much left behind. There should be a way to let the less talented share in the American dream a bit more. I’m not sure what that is.

Equal pay for Equal Work

This should be an easy one, but I don’t know how we legislate it.

So there are the five items. Looking through them, I’d say it’s a great list, with #1 through #3 being the biggies. It would be so refreshing to have an administration that actually gets started on even some of them.

There is so much we don’t know about Senator Obama. Will he be another Jimmy Carter? Or another Lincoln? Or something in between? Watching his campaign so far, I’m encouraged: in stark contrast to the campaigns of either Senators Clinton or McCain, he has run his so smoothly – one of the best I’ve seen in many years. There is always a risk with someone who is largely unknown, but so far all I’m seeing are signs that he may be the real deal. Depending on the results in November, we may get to find out.

Bill Way
New York City
August, 2008