Great link for info on workings of local/national gov't

I became aware of a fantastic information source to satisfy curiosity anyone has on how local growth coalitions operate and why. This site was linked off of the blog Politics is a bloodsport. The address is http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/local.html.

I have only begun looking around on this site, there is a tremendous amount of information about every level of government. I encourage everyone to take a look.

A Short Stay for the Boomers at the Top

I have been wondering lately if Hillary's run for the White House will mark the last great attempt by her generation to secure the White House. If so, the Boomers succeeded in electing only two presidents and were summarily rejected for another go. Have the ideals of that generation, the quest for personal freedom and, for some- glory, reached their conclusion in our current economic and political situation? Has civilization found, again, the limits to the expression of individualism? And if so, can we really argue it's all been bad? I don't think so. I believe the legacy of the Boomers is a mixed bag of triumph and defeat on a scale rarely seen before.

Barak Obama's presidency heralds in the maturation of the successors to the Boomers and oh the work to be done. With the help of the Boomers and even the few remaining of the WWII generation, our legacy is one of breathtaking challenges and opportunities unimaginable to previous generations. Though the Bush administration represented a tremendous push back against the devotion to personal liberties precious to the Boomers via Cheney's proxy, we still have in front of us a nation ready to tolerate and accept personal expression on a level never before seen. In Portland, Oregon, their mayor is openly gay, in a smaller Oregon community, the new mayor is transgendered, and closer to my home, U.S. House Representative Keith Ellison out of Minneapolis, a practicing Muslim, became the first U.S. rep to do the Hajj pilgrimage. During his election campaign there was a story reported that he was confronted by one of the more traditional Muslim constituents about Ellison's support for Gay rights. Reportedly, Ellison explained to him that just as he was determined to protect this man and his community from prejudice and discrimination because of their race and religion, so he planned to support the protection of Gays from prejudice as well.

This is great stuff!! These are stories that should make us very proud to be Americans. And that's not even touching on the Obama story. But the shadows cast against these gleaming examples is dark indeed. The exhaustion of our medical, financial and social security systems can also be tied in the ideals of personal pursuits before community considerations. The fall of real wages, exponential rise in the prices of homes and education, and the dissolution of over half of U.S. families has led to huge jumps in poverty, drug addiction, and neglect of one another. This has been a high price indeed.

For myself (and because I'm the child of Boomers, I consider this point very important) I hope to integrate the beliefs and values of my grandparent's generation with those of my parent's generation. I hope to find in myself and in my life a middle ground where I feel free to explore and wonder at my experience of being alive, even when this experience varies from what I was taught was "normal," while working diligently in my community to promote social justice and economic stability.

Peace Through True Surrender

The tide of violence has again crested and is washing over the Gaza Strip with the waves of brutality from both sides rippling through the consciousness of much of the world. The Israeli-Palestinian situation feels hopeless to me when I view the reports. However, I strongly believe there is no impossible human condition, as these conditions are not imposed but agreed upon- a kind of macro decision consolidated from millions and millions of angry minds and hardened hearts.

For what it's worth, I do believe the situation is tractable- an astonishing thesis I'm sure. I believe the answer is one that is deeply psychological and begins with every individual immediately engaged in the situation. Surrender, not to one's "enemies" or injustice, but to oneself. The lamb on the alter for each person can be the ideas and emotions that entwine into a general condition of pain- mental and physical.

This is easy for me to write as my little boys are healthy and happy on this day. I do not fear mortar attacks or gun fire. My concerns for my sons are of flu viruses and whether they are enjoying their lives. I'm a privileged mother, I know.

But as the collective mental positions of Israel and Palestine continue to be expressed in their explicit form, violence, it is clear what is at stake. The health, happiness and hope for their children is the price of conflict. If fighting only causes more violence, then the fighting needs to stop. And in place of the actions of violence, people could learn to tolerate those powerful emotions of fear, hate and dread. For many, doing and receiving violence may be easier than sitting quietly with those powerful emotions. But in a place of inaction and intimacy with one's own feelings, good ideas for real change may arise.

Statue of Responsibility

It turns out someone has already thought to construct a Statue of Responsibility. Wikipedia has an article about it and the official website is: http://www.sorfoundation.org/. From the Wikipedia article, it looked like the project has been floundering for the last few years. I'm going to investigate this project further and see where it's at.

I suspect most of the culprits in the illegal Bush administration activities will not be brought to justice. This does not mean we, the citizens, cannot learn a few good lessons from the past several years of top-down political and economic irresponsibility. We would benefit from a public art project designed both to remind us of the necessary balance to liberty in our quest for freedom, and to inspire hope.

And it's never a bad idea to put artists to work,it keeps them out of trouble (FDR knew that).

Goodbye Mr. President: Please Just Leave

In seeking to understand the legacy of George W. Bush during these final weeks of his presidency, it becomes clear to me he and his administration have accurately expressed the imbalance in place in our national psyche and in understanding this we can also better intuit a remedy. To paraphrase once again Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps and went on to found the existential therapeutic approach of Logotherapy: the statue of liberty should be balanced on the opposite shore by the statue of responsibility. I couldn't agree more, but in the remaining sad weeks of this indefensible, truly terrible presidency, it becomes clear we will not enjoy anything like this sentiment from W.

W. and his fellow apologists are now insisting that, though their policy in Iraq has been correct, they were, themselves, misdirected and misinformed by the intelligence community on Iraqi WMD. This appalling shrinking from responsibility through purposeful and aggressive lies is par for the course in a power structure that justifies any and all injustice through a policy of power-over bullying. We can and so we do. We lie to make it seem otherwise when the consequences are terrible.

But this hideous warping of reality is truly the final insult to the world and the U.S. citizens and, in the end, the final act of cowardice by a man desirous of power without an acknowledgment of responsibility. He and his arcane, throw-backs from the middle ages of an administration (and in Cheney's case, this may be literally true)wanted and worked ruthlessly to secure the personal power necessary to enforce upon hundreds of millions of people, arguably billions, their will. It was not the liberty, or freedom to act, of the people they envisioned when they proposed the "spread of freedom," but their own liberty to act upon others without consequence and without brakes. These psychopathic men and a few warped women sought to establish a quasi-dictatorship under Carl Roves "permanent Republican majority."

To my deep relief, there was enough democracy left in tact to depose our stupid dictator and his dubious staff. But it is estimated that the Obama administration will be sifting through the thousands of orders meant to tie down our democracy even after the current administration is finally ousted for many months. There will likely be bills passed in Congress listing hundreds of these orders at a time just to undo the damage quickly enough to begin the real work. And there is so much to be done.

To fathom the damage done to our democracy, economy and social structure is painful To imagine the pain caused worldwide by our policies is almost unbearable. We cannot undo what has been done, no matter how sublime the voter's choice of new leadership. However, we can begin again anew to make our country a better place and our international influence earnest and hopeful.

I argue our government should aggressively pursue criminal charges against all of those responsible for the illegalities of our international and national policies including the president and vice president. In the mean time, our citizenry has collectively turned our faces away from W. and his cronies in a group rejection of their very existence as if to say, "Goodbye Mr. President. Please, just f---ing leave."

And as a reminder to how wrongly our political systems can go, and how fast this can happen, I propose a Statue of Responsibility to be designed and raised in the Pacific Ocean to balance the ideas of our American mindset.

Deserved Wealth Not "Bonus Bonanza"

This morning I read in the New York Times a front page article "On Wall Street Bonuses Not Profits Were Real." Having recently completed a series about "It's A Wonderful Life" and given a lot of thought to the higher ideals some Americans in the past imagined for our economy, I was particularly struck by the following paragraphs in the article:

A Bonus Bonanza: For Wall Street, much of this decade represented a new Gilded Age. Salaries were merely play money — a pittance compared to bonuses. Bonus season became an annual celebration of the riches to be had in the markets. That was especially so in the New York area, where nearly $1 out of every $4 that companies paid employees last year went to someone in the financial industry. Bankers celebrated with five-figure dinners, vied to outspend each other at charity auctions and spent their new found fortunes on new homes, cars and art.

The bonanza redefined success for an entire generation. Graduates of top universities sought their fortunes in banking, rather than in careers like medicine, engineering or teaching. Wall Street worked its rookies hard, but it held out the promise of rich rewards. In college dorms, tales of 30-year-olds pulling down $5 million a year were legion.

Compare these tales, if you will, with other tales of hardship and sacrifice for one's community and children. Spend a minute recalling the stories from your own family about your ancestors who moved here from other countries and worked tirelessly, often in dangerous situations to make a living and hopefully a future for their families

In my own family, my mother's father was the last child born to his Swedish immigrant parents. Their older children were brought over with them from Sweden. They survived the Great Depression by planting gardens and tending chickens on land they settled along the Puget Sound of Washington State. (I want to acknowledge here their land was likely taken from Native American people who had lived there for thousands of years- not something I'm proud of).

My grandfather worked in the forests as a logger. It was dangerous work and men frequently were killed by falling logs. The owner of one company he worked for was particularly scrupulous and wouldn't allow work to be delayed in order to return these bodies to their families in a timely fashion.

Instead, the bodies would remain until the section of trees was cut. It was often several days before a body was brought home and, without refrigeration, was often in very bad shape. The workers had to organize and demand that when a man died his body was brought home that day. They did not fight, at that point, for improved safety standards to protect their lives, but instead for a basic acknowledgment from their employers that their lives mattered.

This is a dramatic story. Perhaps it is not one immediately recognizable as related to those young people in the NYT article in their dorm rooms fantasizing not about the betterment of mankind but of themselves, but I think there is a parallel in mentality. It is a mentality of deep disconnect with their fellow human beings.

In the last several years the twin national humiliations of the horrendous Hurricane Katrina debacle leaving thousands of Americans, particularly African Americans, stranded in flood waters peopled by the floating dead, and the illegal, immoral and utterly destructive Iraq war, which has taken thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, have brought this nation to its knees and to its feet.

In counterpoint to the wankers, young and old, focusing their neurotic energy on wealth, there were the thousands of Americans, young and old, focusing their hopeful energy on changing their country from an increasingly unjust heartbreak to an example of the possibilities of civilization. There will always be those with a mentality of pure greed and the superficial, incurious thinking processes that mark that cognitive style. But as a culture and a nation, we need to make clear that these mentalities are not the ideal, but an unfortunate human occurrence, like the clap, that needs to be treated as a disease and protected against contagion.

Our highest ideals do not include outrageous personal wealth juxtaposed with the real human suffering brought when this wealth is stripped away from those people who work the jobs, buy the homes, and pay the taxes in our working class and middle class neighborhoods where the largest part of our economy is born and grows. Our highest ideal is when wealth and security is distributed fairly, not in fifty thousand dollar dinners paid for with real money gotten from imagined profits, but by families enjoying well-earned vacations at Disneyland or being able to pay for their child's tuition at the state school. And for those business people with the Midas touch who actually lead their organizations to real growth and the resulting prosperity (i.e. Bill Gates) go ahead, buy that fifty thousand dollar dinner. You actually earned it!

An American Hero Archetype: The Merciful Middleman

This is the final of my three pieces exploring the American classic film "It's A Wonderful Life" as a kind of projection from the deeper American psyche following the conclusion of World War II. I have maintained that the characters and plot provide us with a kind of dream scape of how Americans felt in 1946 and perhaps even today about the ideals of our economy, our ideas of the Divine Mother as represented by Mary Bailey, and finally, our heroes.

The character George Bailey, played by the ever-crabby Jimmy Stuart, is a unique expression of the age-old human prototype of Hero. Unlike other mythical heroes, he is not a warrior, a millionaire, or a religious figure. He is what I will term the Merciful Middleman. He represents the results of the combination in the American subconscious of the higher ideals of humanity with economics.

Other mythological representations of the hero archetype, explored exhaustively by such great minds as the late Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, include the pantheon of Greek and Norse Gods and typified by Homer in the Odyssey. I would also include the Christian figure of Jesus, and even more recently, Martin Luther King, Jr. in this group of men, historical and imagined, who come to represent the ideals of mankind including courage and intelligence. More recent representations of this ideal also tend to be attributed the qualities of kindness and compassion.

The cinematic dream of the George Bailey character conjured these higher ideals in a distinctly American manner. It took the stories of sacrifice, in Bailey's case his lifelong dreams to leave his small home town and explore the world, and merged them with economics. Bailey chose to respond to the greater economic needs of his community before his personal needs for adventure and personal glory. His community needed an honestly run savings and loan organization that made the collective American dream of home ownership possible for the average worker. For many reasons dictated by fate, he was the chosen one for this job.

This glorification of the middle man, a man of the sub-optimal merchant class, is a novel one historically. As far as I know (and if anyone reading this knows more than I on this matter, I encourage you to respond) this distinctly American melding of higher ideals with an economic system had not before been expressed in a hero myth. Although the intellectual underpinnings and necessary social changes had been evolving around the world for hundreds of years, the dream of this system seems to have crystallized here in the states.

In "It's a Wonderful Life" George Bailey is a kind of personification of a more abstract mental process where hopes and wishes congeal into dreams. In the final scene of the movie, this upholding of the Merciful Merchant above even the warrior hero is demonstrated when his younger brother returns fresh from his battle glories to offer his brother help in a supplicant manner. In fact, George is heralded as the highest form of hero even by free market standards when his self-made millionaire friend, Sam Wainwright, wires an open check to George as an acknowledgment of who the real winner is. So grand was it a thing, as imagined in this film, to be an every-man's economic advocate that the angel, Clarence, who reminded George of the profoundly positive impact his life had had on the world, was awarded the ultimate honor of wings for his efforts.

Although the climax of the film brought the idealization of America's Merciful Middleman to truly absurd levels, it serves as a useful reminder to us about how Americans once hoped a fair and honest economic system would bring all of us, including the movie's recently arrived immigrants, out of poverty and hopelessness into expressions of life that are joyful and deeply moral. (Remember, in the alternate, no-George world, the community of Bedford Falls was just another town overrun by vice and poverty).

If this movie expresses accurately some of the American subconscious, it would seem we as a people once prized prosperity, morality, and community above extravagant wealth, war, and even intellectual curiosity. All of these things are included in the film and included in American life, but I would argue that the protection of economic fairness should be a cornerstone of our political and economic systems. The higher ideals of justice, joy and equality are best served when our people are well-fed, healthy, and enjoy safe homes in safe communities.