North Sonoma County Democratic Club: News

Welcome to the North Sonoma County Democratic and Progressive Club!

The North Sonoma County Democratic Club is organized to promote progressive ideas and local candidates. The club serves Cloverdale, Healdsburg, Windsor, and several smaller areas south on the Russian River.
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Conspiracy Theorist Killed

The Press Corporate Democrat ran a story today on a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who attacked the Pentagon. He wounded two guards and then was shot and killed.

Knowledge Is Power

For about a year some of us have been trying to talk the City Council in Healdsburg into an ordinance that would require the gathering of information on the impact on the community of any large new property development. The big business majority on the council has dug in its heels, rejecting information. For a while this attitude baffled me. But then I noticed that Republicans on a national level were opposed to a health insurance exchange (a place where coverages and costs of different health insurance plans could be easily compared).

What it boils down to is this. The Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for ordinary citizens to compare one health plan to another; they want to make it difficult for ordinary people to gather facts about the impacts of a new property development. The less information available, the easier it will be to control the outcome.

Knowledge isn't always power. Just before the start of the second war against Iraq, many of us knew from UN reports that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but we couldn't stop the carnage. Sometimes, though, knowledge helps. The Republicans understand that. That's why they systematically block attempts to gather facts.

Gary Goss

ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM

In its March issue HARPER'S reports on the unusually brutal murders of Salah Ahmed Al-Slami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybe and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani at our secret Camp No in Guantanamo. We should try to remember their names. None of them had been charged with a crime. All had been eligible for early release. The Bush regime hid the murders by calling them suicides. The Obama administration has declined to investigate.

I mention this to illustrate why Americans ranging from Teabaggers to Greens to unaffiliated citizens don't trust what the government says. A recent poll found that 86% of Americans believe that their government no longer works. We do not expect our government to do the right thing. We expect to be lied to. This set of public expectations is relatively new in America, new in my lifetime, although similar beliefs were once common in 20th century dictatorships.

Who are these people who no longer believe in our government? We see oddballs on the fringes who are as paranoid as Dick Cheney on acid, but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about myself. Ask yourself. Have you been lied to? Do you expect the governments of America and California to do the right thing? What about the governments of Sonoma County or of our towns? Will they demonstrate something approaching common sense?

The assumption that a body of elected American representatives might exhibit common sense makes me smile--it seems absurd. But I hope there are occasions when it happens.

Contemporary life is confusing and relativistic at best. Each of us has countless decisions to make based on incomplete information. We might begin as Catholics and end as Protestants. We know we can't trust our elected leaders or our cultural leaders, who often speak from ignorance--I'm thinking of Noam Chomsky chastising tribal people in Central America because they'd voted for candidates he hadn't approved.

There is a way out, of course. That's what the teabaggers and Stalinists are about. If you want to be free from anxiety, adopt a set of absolutes (of the right or of the left) that induce black-and-white thinking. Fanaticism soothes the fanatic . . . as long as she manages to squelch the relativism lurking somewhere inside, as Berger and Zijderveld point out in a recent book, IN PRAISE OF DOUBT.

We understand this much: we know why people become dogmatic. They choose not to be free.

--Gary Goss

Peace Movements

About a week back, someone wrote a question on Facebook, asking why current peace movements seldom join forces with the 9/11 movement. The question was sincere, and I should have responded.

1. Peace movements cannot afford the loss of credibility that follows conspiracy theories.

2. Peace activists tend to be hopeful, looking toward a better future, while 9/11 people focus on a dark view of the past.

3. Conspiracy theories seldom prove out in the long run. They aren't a good bet.

4. Conspiracy theories divide activists and can break up a peace group or drive out more pragmatic activists.

For related reasons many institutions on the Left ignore conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, groups on the Right thrive on them. Go figure.

Corporations Rule

It is a standard comment on American governance to say that the most corrupt level is that of the city council. Few people want to serve on a city council. Among those who do want to serve are developers and their toadies. They come well funded and with endorsements from chambers of commerce, the Republican Party, libertarians and teabaggers. Often they run for office unopposed.

Recent examples of corporations rolling up city councils include the easy win for the Saggio Hills development in Healdsburg--which the voters would have rejected--and yesterday's victory by Target in Petaluma. In Petaluma, as is often the case, the developer threatened a lawsuit. Developers have deeper wallets and better lawyers than small cities.

Target, we all know, does not offer its workers a living wage. Our tax money will pay for much of the medical care the underpaid workers need. In other words, Target is a leech on the community and we supply it with blood. A progressive city council just told us that that was fine. Corporations rule.

Arne Duncan, Rebounder

I support Obama. I don't expect him to understand public education. He's never worked as an elementary school teacher. He hasn't spent a career trying to puzzle out how children learn. His comments on education have been conventional.

Obama named Arne Duncan as his secretary of education. Duncan has credentials. He headed up the Chicago public schools, about which I know nothing. Perhaps they are wonderfully successful. Even better, Duncan is about six and a half feet tall and has played basketball with Obama for many years, feeding him the ball. Arne Duncan is the hero's best friend.

Now Duncan has instituted a new federal program called "Race to the Top" (note the competitive sports metaphor).

Under Race to the Top, a state will qualify for a small bit of federal education money if it meets certain requirements. Basically Duncan wants to tie an individual teacher's pay to his or her student scores on standardized tests. Duncan wants a race. There are two problems with this approach: it will continue to reward teaching to the standardized test rather than reward exploration and creative thinking; and few teachers will want to take a pay cut after leading a classroom of students with weak test-taking skills, inadequate English language mastery, or the kind of gnawing hunger and worry that takes a student's eyes off the page.

In any circumstance, most teachers would opt to teach the educationally gifted. It's easier and more fun. Under Duncan, the easiest teaching would draw the highest pay.

If you bench Duncan the Rebounder, you could ask what is at the heart of America's educational problems? You can start with the usual list--little respect or pay for teachers, parental indifference, cultural anti-intellectualism, racism, decrepit buildings and materials, denatured subject matter--and go on to basic information about how children learn. How long will it take us to grasp that each child learns, one at a time, in a different way? A room with 30 children in it is not a factory floor. It holds 30 different learning styles.

The race Duncan plans will not move education forward. He doesn't get it. He thinks he's in the Sweet Sixteen when he's really playing HORSE.

POWER vs. Obama

The founders of the USA had reason to fear governmental power; the precaution they took to avoid tyranny was to divide power among six groups: the voters, the states, the presidency, the senate, the house and the supreme court. In time the presidency became the most powerful segment. That's why we used to capitalize the name. Under George W. Bush the president seemed able to do almost anything he wanted, even defy the voters. Why hasn't Obama been able to enact health care?

It might be Bush's nearly totalitarian power was an illusion. He (and the house, senate and supreme court) looked powerful because each worked for the same entity, the tireless Corporate Lobby. An elected official who works for the Corporate Lobby will look effective. His bills will pass. An official who bucks the Lobby will look ineffectual and weak. His bills will fail.

In other words, our current system is nothing like the system the nation's founders envisioned. It did not occur to them that a Corporation was a person, and what a giant person. . . . Imagine a giant with enough money to fund every election campaign in the country, enough money to buy the major news and entertainment outlets, a giant with enough lawyers to write our laws (and then hand them over to elected officials to enact).

That's power.

American politics tends to be fought over issues the Corporate Lobby ignores: the Lobby doesn't care about choice or don't ask/don't tell. The Lobby doesn't care if Christmas trees are erected in town squares or not. From the point of view of the Lobby, those are issues to distract the rubes who don't understand that the point of life is to amass personal wealth. Keeping divisive issues alive is good politics for the Lobby, of course. The Lobby wants the voters looking in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, the Lobby will write our financial laws and send them to congressional committees to pass.

***

Once I understood that Obama, Pelosi and Reid were not the most powerful people in Washington, I had a sense of why Obama had attempted to attract Corporate Lobby support for a health bill. When you lack power, you try to get the real center of power to work with you. If you don't win the backing of the Lobby, you will, in most cases, fail.

The Corporate Lobby rules us in the areas it finds useful. It has made discussion of this fact more or less taboo. But perhaps we are beginning to notice the Lobby--and like a vampire it will burn when exposed to sunlight.

Gary Goss

Can Democracy Survive the Voters?

I read about this initiative in the February HARPER'S.

The initiative will be on the ballot in the City and County of Denver in August. It was signed by 4,211 voters. (I've left out several paragraphs to make it shorter.)

**********************************************

The People of the City and County of Denver hereby declare that:

--The presence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings and vehicles on Earth, and within Earth's atmosphere, has been confirmed by credible evidence, official government documents, and whistleblowers formerly working for the U.S. government;

--Evidence of extraterrestrial beings has been known by U.S. presidents (sic) since President Franklin Roosevelt, including President Ronald Reagan as disclosed in his presentation to the United Nations regarding extraterrestrial matters;

--The United States Government has suppressed, and withheld from the public, evidence of advanced clean energy, transportation, and other technologies of extraterrestrial origin. These technologies could potentially offer substantial economic relief for our most pressing social and economic concerns, including a reduction of pollution and at least partial replacement of fossil fuels with affordable non-polluting energy sources, and other advanced technologies. . . .

Etc.

***********************************************

The above is an example of the opposite of paranoia. I doubt if it is listed in the DSM, a compendium of our approved mental illnesses, but I did see someone refer to it, many years ago, as "proanoia." It's the belief that everyone is out to help you, or at least that imaginary aliens want to save us from ourselves.

Gary Goss

El Supremo

Last night the Peace Project was talking about the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision to strengthen the ludicrous fiction that corporations are people. The Peace Project expects problems. For one thing, now that corporations are people, they can marry (unless they are gay). For another, the American Constitution makes it illegal to own a person; as of today our corporations have no owners. And what if Republicans start several more pointless wars and corporations get drafted?

Burning Down the House

The following reflection on negativity was written, as far as I can tell, by Kevin Drum, who is amazed at the speed at which some on the Left have turned on Obama.

--Gary Goss

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The frustration on the left with Obama — and with healthcare reform specifically — was almost inevitable. During the campaign, a lot of people chose to see in him what they wanted to see, pushing to the back of their minds not just the obvious signs that Obama has always been a cautious, practical politician, but also the obvious compromises and pressures that are forced onto any president. It was a recipe for disappointment. The striking thing to me, though, is how fast the left has turned on him. Conservatives gave Bush five or six years before they really turned on him, and even then they revolted more against the Republican establishment than against Bush himself. But the left? It took about ten months. And the depth of the revolt against Obama has been striking too. As near as I can tell, there’s a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they’d be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It’s extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

I think that this is one of the very rare instances when the famous ideological self-identification numbers are actually important:

Political Ideology: Annual Trends, 1992-2009 1

This chart is often used to support claims that I don’t think it really does support. But the chart does tell us something important about how people look at themselves. In particular, it tells us that a lot of people look at themselves as conservatives. So a president who says “I look at myself as a conservative, and you should look at me that way too” will still need to do some outreach to build a majority, but he’s working from a strong base. By contrast, a president who says “I look at myself as a liberal, and you should look at me that way too” is going to put himself in some pretty serious trouble.

Consequently, neither Barack Obama nor Bill Clinton nor Jimmy Carter nor LBJ self-identified in this way.

Politics, however, has a large tribal element. People like the people who are “on their side” and want to support politicians who are on their side. Not all Republican presidents do signal to conservatives that they are on the side of conservatives—George HW Bush didn’t, for example—but Ronald Reagan and George W Bush did. This is harder for Democratic presidents to do and they generally don’t do it. In particular, Barack Obama doesn’t do much of it. Nobody governs in an ideologically pure way, and every president who wants to sign bills has to make compromises with congressional squishes. But Reagan and Bush always identified with their bases and thus were forgiven a lot of compromises with congressional squishes. Bush senior didn’t—and Clinton didn’t, and Obama doesn’t—so they are forgiven much less.

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