Whiskey Fire

Molly Ivors Responds to the News

by Molly Ivors

Jesus. Fuck. No.

That is all.

Sign of Wasted Times

by Molly Ivors

2009 looms, less than two hours away. And I thought I'd take this opportunity to express my thanks and tell you my hopes for the future.

THANKS:

First, I'm thankful for Thers, the other half of my brain, who defines, more than anyone else, my day-to-day experience.

An actual conversation, more or less:

Me: Please consider paint colors for the kitchen renovation.
Thers: There is a difference between you and I
Me: What is that?
Thers: You like to do stuff. I do not.
Me: (laughs)
Thers: No, seriously You see a vacation, you say: project! You see a tax refund, you say: kitchen. I see a vacation, I say: sleep! I see a tax refund, I say: party!
Me: Well, I guess that's accurate.

Seriously, dood. You rock.

Thanks too to our cobloggers: Thers's jebby co-survivor VA; the wiseman/wiseass of the midwest Rip; the woman with the shit on the Left Coast, flory; and my lifelong friend and confrere Jake T. Snake (who, I confess at this juncture, is my cousin).

Thanks to the monsters of Liberal Mountain, only shards of whose adventures make it to your fine eyes.

HOPES:

I hope our new president, once he's in office, stops stroking people and starts kicking ass.

I hope our new president listens to Paul Krugman.

I hope our new president lives up to the things people swore to me about him.

I hope we can restore the economy and the climate at the same time.

What are you thankful for? What do you hope for? Have a wonderful New Year!

UPDATE FROM THERS.

BUGS!

I am also a "nerf-herder."

My Thoughts Are a Gas

by Molly Ivors

Well, we're back on Lovely Liberal Mountain and ready to buckle down and finish our summer writing projects, as Thers noted. And yet I find myself reflecting on the same worries I had before my bemusing week in Louisville (note to self: if you ever think it's a good idea to read 1100 essays on the same topic again, please seek professional help. kthnxbai.): what will be the role of populism in the campaign, and how will that populism be defined?

We're all panicking about the economy these days: from gas prices to food prices (which stand, in the wake of the midwest flooding, to push even higher) to loss of equity in our homes to a fucking insane presidential candidate whose campaign slogan, as Thers has noted, is "Everybody Dies!"  but also seems to have adopted a new mantra: "What Economic Problems?" Personally, I think we should all solve our economic problems by marrying pill-popping beer heiresses and calling them trollops and cunts in public: though I admit, the pool of people willing to share their bank accounts in exchange for such behavior may not be quite enough to bail out the whole country. Plus, some people are already married. But since we've essentially decriminalized polygamy, I don't think that will be much of a problem.

Anyway, back to the economy. In my College Writing class, I do a unit on the economy because I've found that the students I get--the traditional ones, anyway, who were generally born during Bush 1 at this point--have no tools whatsoever to dig apart the current economic ideology, even as they face it down and consider its effects in their own lives. I try to explain to them The Great Compression and what it meant in terms of the development of American civil society, and they're routinely blown away by the things  their parents had which they never knew.  (e.g. municipal garbage collection, which now seems weird and archaic, like one of those Little House stories about people making their own bullets). I'm no economist--just ask my credit union, who mourn my lack of numerical skills even as they rack up huge fees from my cluelessness--which is why I trust grownups like Krugman and Atrios to let me know how all this works. But I know what I see, and it's pretty grim.

And my students aren't stupid. They know what they see, too, but it has just never occurred to them to see it in any way other than a Norquistian Wet Dream. Taxes are bad, regulations are bad, globalization is good, corporate America has your best interests at heart. It's an essentially adolescent worldview, embraced by those who get to Ron Paul by way of Ayn Rand and haven't really figured out that they're supposed to outgrow that kind of selfishness at a certain point. (I'm totally rooting for a Ron Paul independent run, BTW. That would give Obama 49 states, rather than the 47 I've been confidently predicting. Go, Ron!) College students think they're Libertarians because they want to get high and make sure they have access to birth control. Oh, and they don't want to die in stupid wars. But they haven't thought much past that.

And so I try to reframe the economics debate via this concept I've been working on, and was delighted to see in the Washington Post this morning: taxes are the entrance fee into civil society.  And you can't cut taxes too far without having that civil society break down.

Let's imagine an alternate universe. The U.S. government is running a large and growing deficit. Not far down the road it faces huge increases in Social Security and Medicare costs. Naturally, the candidates for president want to remedy this by raising revenue. They don't want us to bequeath bigger deficits to our children or stake our future on foreigners' willingness to keep lending us money.

But have you heard this speech? "My fellow Americans, I have a plan to raise taxes so that the budget will be closer to balance and future Americans won't have to worry about their retirement security." Neither have I.

Somebody, though, should be giving it.

It's Roger Lowenstein, the "Exuberance Is Rational!" guy, and I think that's pretty compelling evidence in itself that we are poised at the edge of a sea change in economic policy and indeed, in the basic sense of what it means to be American. Lowenstein offers five points of argument, as follows:

1. End preferential treatment for private equity fund managers. (They pay 15%? Jesus fuck!)

2. Raise the cap on the payroll tax.

3. Reinstate a meaningful inheritance tax.

4. End unfair deductions.

5. (Best for last): Repeal the Bush cuts in income and capital gains taxes.

Is this what the New Populism is going to look like? If so, I guess it's a start. The fact is, taxes pay for things we need, like, oh, I dunno, food inspections. Personally, I'm swearing off tomatoes until my own are ripe--and they're still just little guys.

It's a sane and comprehensible response to be skeptical of taxation when your government allows shit like this to slide. As in noted wanker P.J. O'Rourke's famous aphorism, "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."  But Dems generally believe that government can do good, even though, in the same line, O'Rourke defines this as saying that "government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn." Well, I'm not aware of the party's position on lawncare, but progressive taxation and sane education policy would be objectively good for most people, in my opinion. And good childhood nutrition does tend to make people taller, so there's that. And that's worth some taxes, I think.

People are scared, and not without reason. But I think we can do something about it.

 

Not Behind the Fighter Jet

by Molly Ivors

The underlying debate in my last post, it seems to me, is a completely fair question: will the economy displace the war by the time of the election? I genuinely don't know, but like global warming, the damage seems to be increasing not linearly (thanks, MH!), but rather exponentially. And I think there's a good solid chance that for most people, the war will be eclipsed by November as the issue most on voters' minds.

Which is why, when the primaries conclude this week, it is imperative that Obama grab that populist banner and hold it high in the air. What I saw in my last post was a comprehensible response: I opposed the war, she didn't, I don't support her. Fair enough. (Or not, given that she's promised to pull out troops toute suite.) I support universal health care, he doesn't (UPDATE: at least not in any way that will work, actuarially speaking), I alloted my support accordingly. Maybe Obama's friend Edwards will change his mind. We can always hope.

But the lives of thousands of Americans and potentially a million or more Iraqis might seem less important to someone who is homeless, or someone who can't feed their kids, or someone whose job just went to Malaysia. And you know what? No, lots of those people didn't go to college, but somehow they have the vote anyway. Go figure.  I'm not saying the lives and money lost don't matter, or that they shouldn't--I'm saying that for some people that might not be the top issue. I understand from my commenters that this makes such people ignorant bigots.

And no, I'm not arguing that race played no role in the West Virginia and Kentucky races. But as I noted in one of my responses below, I think that's been blown out of proportion by people who can't believe that any rational person would support Senator Clinton for any reason except their own ignorance. Forgive me, but that in itself is a pretty ignorant position. (You know there are even black people in West Virginia! True story! One is my brother-in-law! And he comes from Beckley, which is practically Kentucky!) Try thinking outside the ideological box, people, and marvel that this population is supporting a Democrat--any Democrat--at all.

The level of engagement we've seen in this primary season is impressive by any rational standard. But that's because the primary has been so fraught, not in spite of it. I did not intend, in my last post, to convey any sense that I would not support the eventual nominee. Of course I will. All I'm saying is that after 6 months of being trashed openly and by implication, I'd like to see some gesture that yes, this is my party too. Or, as Digby has it:

I think the thing that has most exacerbated the fervent Clinton supporters' frustration, and frankly astonished me a bit, has been this endless drumbeat since February for her to drop out even though she was still winning primaries. Nobody should expect a politician who is still winning to quit. It makes no sense. It's not in their DNA. Certainly, in a race this close it made no sense whatsoever. I don't think that line has helped Obama (and I think it's why the campaign itself has been so careful not to publicly flog it.)

In 84 and 88, Jackson was seen as a potential party wrecker too and in 88 he took his historic campaign, in which he won 11 contests, all the way to the convention. He made a very famous speech which he ended with the chant "Keep Hope Alive," which could have easily been construed as wishing for Dukakis to fail so he could get another bite at the apple (something that people are accusing Clinton of already.) But it wasn't.

And that's because while Jackson went to the convention trailing by 1200 delegates, he was holding a very important card, which everyone recognized and respected. You can rest assured that people were worried that his constituency, many of them first time voters who he had registered, would stay home in the fall, and so Democrats treated him and his campaign (publicly at least) with respect and deference, and rightly so. He represented the dreams and aspirations of millions of Democratic voters, after all.

To many African Americans, a constant clamor for Jackson (or Obama if it had gone that way) to drop out of the race would have been seen as a call to go to the back of the bus. Likewise, for many of Clinton's supporters, it's been seen as a call to sit down and shut up (or "stifle" as Archie Bunker used to say to Edith.) I'm not saying it's entirely rational, but then these things rarely are. The extreme closeness of this race makes it even more frustrating and emotional for a lot of people.

And that's all I'm saying. Oh, for Digby's grace with words.....

And now, I'll "stifle."

Or not. I always liked Maude better anyway.

The Bus Will Get You There Yet, Part 2

(The second in an experimental series in which Molly Ivors attempts to suss out the potential of public transportation to and from Liberal Mountain.)

Part One, in which the experiment is described.

Yesterday was the first day of The Great Bus Experiment. The first means to be tested was the rural route bus.

I got up early, weirdly excited to be commuting by public transportation. I used to do this in Miami when I temped, walking five or so blocks to the train, then riding into downtown and taking the MetroMover for various jobs and back again in the afternoon.

This was much easier. My scheduled pick up time was 7:30 am, but the site said to be ready 15 minutes before. The bus, really a jitney, arrived at about 7:25. I got on and paid my $2. There were twelve seats, in pairs of six, but there was one person in each one, so I had to share. No biggie. I was the last morning pick up, and then we headed straight for the city.

Most of my co-riders seemed to be people who couldn't drive for various reasons: mostly MR adults on this particular run, going to assisted workplaces. I was told by the dispatcher that the later pick-up time (tennish) was mostly senior citizens going to day programs. This tells us something about the reliance on cars in our culture, but I'm not sure what.

We dropped off a few folks at one site, than another person at another, then drove a good 20 minutes over backroads to my part of town. There's another of those assisted workplaces near my campus, so we went there first, arriving at my stop about 8:10. 

Going home was even easier. I got picked up on my campus at 3:25 (scheduled time: 3:15). Thers had been in, and had brought our three year old to campus with him; she decided to stay and ride the bus home with me. (I called to check on this: it was fine, though I gathered on fuller runs I'd need to tell them in advance of any kids accompanying me.) This was a much straighter shot: aside from dropping off one person who had been on the bus in the morning, it was absolutely door-to-door, and precisely the route I would have taken had I driven. We arrived home about 4.

I asked the driver if I could use the bus to commute regularly, and she seemed surprised by the question, but said sure. You can book as little as one day and up to two weeks in advance. It would run me $20 a week, $40 if I can talk Thers into it. Still much less than we're paying to drive.

Pros: Cheaper than driving. Curb-to-curb service. Work time. Seatbelts. Kids ride free.
Cons: Seatmates. Stigma. Limited hours. Needs to be booked in advance. I am skeptical of my ability to convince Thers to do this too. Also, had to go out when I got home--though significantly closer to  home--to run errands I could have done on the way to or from school.

But still, a success. I could definitely commit to this for at least one or two days a week, especially if the kids ride free. Certainly, it eliminates the need for more than one car on campus.

The Bus Will Get You There Yet

(The first in an experimental series in which Molly Ivors attempts to suss out the potential of public transportation to and from Liberal Mountain.)

The cold, hard, facts: A monthly bus pass costs less than a tank of gas.

Here on Liberal Mountain, we have two cars. One is a minivan which assures us it's a low-emission vehicle, but gets crappy gas mileage (about 20 mpg). It has a 26 gallon tank which, at current prices, costs us just over $100 to fill. We generally do so once or twice a week. The other is a small economy car which mostly belongs to the teen now. That gets slightly better mileage (about 30 mpg, on average), but also has a smaller tank. We generally spend about $50 filling that one weekly.

A bus pass for one adult for one month, entitled to bring up to three children free, is $35.

Of course, we live together and work together, and so can often travel together. According to Mapquest, the trip from the ocelot-infested wilds of Liberal Mountain is 15.68 miles. That's just over 30 miles roundtrip, so one gallon in the small car, one and one-half in the large one. $4-$6 dollars a day = $20-$30 a week = $89-$126 per month. That gets us to and from work, but it doesn't get lunch or shopping or anything else done. And as I noted, our monthly gas bill for the van is about $450, and for the small car about $225.

Another problem: the bus doesn't actually come here. We have two choices, then. We can either (a) call the rural route bus, which is like a jitney and runs $2 per adult, or (b) drive to a place where the bus will meet us, preferably a parking lot where we can leave the car all day, maybe at a shopping center or similar. There are two places I can think of off the top of my head: one, a strip mall with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and Barnes & Noble and stuff like that; the other the local library. The strip mall is 9.15 miles from Liberal Mountain, the library is 8.3 miles. So getting to either of those would mean driving more than half the distance to work anyway.

The next county over also runs a bus to our campus, though on a much more limited schedule. It is  5.86 miles to that stop, but there's nowhere safe to park the car.

This summer, I will be conducting a series of experiments on the financial and environmental impact of these options. I'll also calculate in what one might call the PITA index, that is, how much of a pain in the ass this whole process is. I expect this to be pretty high: any of these routes means 2 transfers, one at the local university, and one downtown.

In doing so, I hope to bring to light some of the problems with our current public transportation system.

An Unmarketed Product

The Whiskey Fire Tee! (The green is darker than it looks here, more of a Jameson's green.)

Because, you know, your favorite blog sucks.

(These can be delivered at EschaCon or mailed: leave size and address in comment box. Leave size, in any case.)

The Old Grunt

by Molly Ivors

Courtesy of the NSA and the FOIA, we here at Whiskey Fire have acquired footage of John McCain having dinner with his family. Enlightening.

That dog needs to go to Gitmo, stat!

Father Logic Sometimes Gets Cosmic

by Molly Ivors

So I watched the Macy's Parade this morning. Well, not so much watched as listened while cleaning and cooking and stuff. If you're wondering what the demographic is, let me assure you that three year olds LOVE the parade. It's a little more hit-and-miss for those more dependably potty-trained, however.

But something struck me as I zoned out to the freaked-out chatter of Doogie Howser and similar: over and over and over, they noted that the weather was so warm that the crowds were huge. Three and  half million people, according to Mayor Bloomberg's office. Three and a half million.

So I got to thinking: the Macy's parade route is what, 40 blocks or so? And spectators are basically from the buildings to the street.  Three and half million people on 40 blocks, just on the sidewalks.

How, then, is it possible that thirty blocks of blocked-off avenue, with people from building to building, and thousands shunted off onto side streets and forced away from the protest proper... how is it possible that that crowd numbers between 100,000 and 400,000? It's a fucking miracle.

Maybe we need fewer bloody George Bush puppets and more Pikachu puppets.

Like a Metal Fan

by Molly Ivors

Continuing to fill in for the ailing Thers, I break a few WhiskeyFire rules and post (almost) without snark or profanity, because I am so pumped.

When progressives and conservatives look back at the scope of the last 125 years or so, they must see very different landscapes. In the age of the robber barons, I see grievous inequality where they see entrepreneurship. I see a rising interest in sharing the wealth of society where they see the dangerous Bolshevism of the progressive era. I see good government where they see that whacked-out cripple with the gay wife who did so much to relieve so many. I see what Krugman has called The Great Compression where they see the dangers of the union movement and Leave it to Beaver.

It's, umm, different.

Income inequality is rising in America. The poor remain mired in dead-end jobs, without health care. So do many of the middle class. People who worked hard and did everything right, worked much harder than their parents or grandparents, in fact, are still slipping behind. We do okay, but two incomes with doctorates barely buys what one income with a BA did in my childhood. Meanwhile, the unspeakable, obscene wealth of hedge-fund managers and real estate magnates and people who don't actually, you know, DO anything, continues to grow. Am I bitter about this? Absolutely. Am I jealous? Well, let's just say that if wealth were tied to how many people one actually helps in a day, the good one might do the world, I might be able to buy a butt-ugly penthouse that hangs over my neighbor's property, too. * But, you know, I wouldn't. We have enough, and more than many. Would that others could be happy with the same.

I'm human enough to feel guilty that my stability isn't shared by others, and to think about ways in which prosperity might be more broadly spread.

One of my dream ideas of late has been a WPA-style program designed to develop green technologies in every community in America. It's bold, and would take a lot of work and resources, but it looks like Al Gore is developing contacts which might make such a thing possible. Imagine the number of jobs which could be created when we begin assessing the most appropriate means of clean energy generation for each county or municipality and calculating and then producing the tools needed to achieve that goal. Manufacturing would be reborn in America, and new jobs would be created: wind-farm and micro-hydro maintenance positions, electrical retrofitters, geothermal engineers, and plumbers installing  heat pumps to lower the amount of energy required to heat or cool buildings.

In addition, a reformed WPA could start to take a crack at repairing the woeful state of the American infrastructure--not just the highway and bridge system but rebuilding the rail system for practical passenger transport. We had a lovely conversation at The Crack Den the other day about the relative economy of rail for both cargo and passenger service; if nothing else, it would start to wean us from our petroleum dependency and create new markets.

That's why I was so cheered to read this editorial in the NYTimes today.

The New Deal public works programs are mainly remembered for giving jobs to victims of the Great Depression, but as Robert D. Leighninger Jr. argues in his recent book “Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal,” they also transformed the American landscape and greatly improved the nation.

The story of the 1930s public works programs is timely again, because much of America is falling apart. The deadly collapse of a Minnesota highway bridge in August shined a light on the poor state of the nation’s bridges, many thousands of which are “structurally deficient” by federal standards. Georgia’s failure to build enough reservoirs has contributed to a water crisis that could cripple metropolitan Atlanta. We should be thinking today about replicating some of the successes of the Depression-era programs.

The P.W.A., the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps were primarily undertaken to put people to work at a time when the unemployment rate approached 25 percent, and to restart a woeful economy. Forward-looking officials like Harry Hopkins, the relief administrator, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins argued, however, that public works should be directed to socially useful programs.
..........

Some projects were high-profile — notably the great hydroelectric dams and the presidential retreat at Camp David — but many more focused on the unglamorous mechanics of modern living, like water mains, pump stations, and sewage treatment plants. The W.P.A. alone built 78,000 bridges and viaducts and improved 46,000 more. It constructed 572,000 miles of rural roads and 67,000 miles of urban streets. It also built or improved 39,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals and 12,800 playgrounds.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, Roosevelt’s favorite, sent hundreds of thousands of young people into the countryside. They landscaped, and made accessible, sites like the battlefields at Gettysburg and Appomattox, and cleared the way for Virginia’s Skyline Drive. Most of their time was spent on tree planting, flood control, soil erosion efforts and fire prevention.

We have needs in this country: for a shared purpose, for jobs, for involving young people in civic life, for infrastructure reconstruction, for new construction which will enable us to move into a sustainable future. Why should we NOT do this? Tell me strapped state and local economies wouldn't beg for new schools, new hospitals, new streets. Don't give me Broderific cries for unity which amount to rubber-stamping acts of a megalomaniacal freak with a scorched-earth agenda. We need a project. Jeebus freaking christ, people. Open your eyes. And it goes without saying, but a Republican won't do this.

It's ambitious and bold, I know. We've been told so often that we have no money for anything except war that we believe it. But that's not true. We're no worse off now that we were in 1932 (but, you know, not that much better). Roll up your sleeves; we've got work to do.

* As it transpires, Valhalla (yes, that's what it's really called) is a green building. But green doesn't have to be ugly or rude, you know.