The Way the Future Blogs

Pres. Barack Obama on “The Late Show” with David Letterman.

As you all well know by now, one of the subjects that I spend a lot of time thinking about is politics. What I think about I write about; it’s the way I’m constructed. And what I write about, I am more likely than not to publish somewhere or other, sometimes including this blog.

So I give you warning. This is my notion of what I would like to see in a New York Times op ed, which is to say that it is wholly political. If you have not yet reached the conclusion that politics is our only way of getting good government, you don’t have to read it.
 

Dear Mr. President:

As you know, you are well and truly hated by the people FDR’s generation called “the malefactors of great wealth.” They have found ways to divert an appallingly large fraction of our nation’s treasure to their pocketbooks and they are afraid you won’t let them go on doing that.

These are not decent, honorable people, Mr. President. Your one great mistake since you were elected was believing that they might be, and that once they were saved from Perdition they would help others. They don’t do that. They are busy pumping tens of millions of dollars into spreading fears, worries and outright lies about you into the media., trying to persuade the American people that you are a foreign-born Moslem who is laughing up his sleeve because he’s getting away with stealing the country.

Why don’t you talk to the people, Mr. President?

I don’t mean make a speech. They’ve been inoculated against that. I mean the kind of thing you came close to doing when you were visiting the talk shows. There you did very well, coming across as smart, funny and likable.

The only thing wrong with that is the American public didn’t hire you to be good on talk shows. They hired you to get us out of the nearly hopeless mess a Republican President, a Republican Congress and a Republican Supreme Court dumped us into.

So here’s an idea. Let’s say that next time you hold a news conference, you start out by giving a little civics lesson. You say something to your immediate audience like, “Friends, I’ll try to take all your questions, but this time I want to start by answering two that come from the people I work for. One is from Sam Brown in Pocatello, Idaho. He says, ‘The famous Bill Mediaman (choose examples from your daily mail, Mr. President. These are illustrative only) said on the radio that you weren’t born in America. Is that true?”

“No, it isn’t true, and Mr Mediaman knows that it isn’t because he has seen the proof. Therefore Mr. Mediaman is a deliberate liar. You must do as you think best, but I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the time of day.

“Then there’s this from Leota Durcher, in Schaumburg, Illinois. ‘I am 54 years old. I have cervical cancer and they say that under your plan I can get health insurance, but I have to wait until 2014 to get it. Why did you put that delay into the plan?’

“I didn’t put it there, Mrs. Durcher. Let me explain how a bill becomes a law in our country. The printed copy of the bill, as drawn up by its sponsors, is circulated to all the senators and they are asked to vote for it. Then each senator has a right to ask for some kind of change in the bill in return for voting for it. In this case, three senators got together to require the four-year delay. Since without those three I didn’t have enough votes to pass the bill in the first place, I had no choice but to accept it. So if you want to know why this is in the bill you must ask those senators.

“Thanks. And now, friends let’s get on with business.”

Same thing when you go on a talk show. Tell them you first need sixty seconds to answer a letter from a voter. And repeat as often as necessary.

You did promise transparency in your administration, did you not, Mr. President? Did you mean that kind of letting Americans into the real facts about why all our laws look like Christmas wish lists for very rich people? If so, when does that kind of transparency start?

Want me to tell you a funny story that doesn’t make me laugh at all?

Okay, here goes. First, you have to have seen the movie Wag the Dog or at least you have to know what it’s about. (I can help you there. It’s about an American president who’s congenitally unable to keep from getting caught in sexual messes. So when one of them is about to go disastrously public the president and his Brains Trust cook up an idea to cover it up. If the country began fighting a war, that would put the story of his sexual fling as a newspaper story back on about Page 32, and in small type. So they make up a war that they pretend the U.S. was having, and then they make up an imaginary victory.) It was actually, I’m told, a pretty funny movie.

Now comes the part that doesn’t make me laugh. If you remember, a few days before Election Day, a new terrorist action hit the papers, somebody in Yemen trying to send bombs to synagogues, including small Jewish congregations in Chicago.

And then Richard Roeper, who writes a pretty good column for the Sun-Times, began getting jocular little emails coming in to him, and many of them were saying things like, “Just like Wag the Dog all over again, right?”

As jokes go, that isn’t a bad one under certain circumstances. But when they start coming in numbers, it isn’t funny any more. There’s somebody around who is saying, don’t you believe that our president is capable of doing that if he thought he could get away with it? Or pretending to be a Christian when he’s really a Moslem? Or faking his birthplace so he could become president?

Or any other of those lies that apparently some people believe?

I know who’s spreading that stuff. It’s someone who has no honor or decency himself, and so doesn’t recognize it in any else. He really should at least sign his name.

    Newt Gingrich

Newton Leroy Gingrich’s latest I’ll-say-anything-for-a-headline proclamation is really pretty weird. What he says is that in order to understand President Obama’s political activities you have to know that Obama is really acting according to Kenyan, not American, political practices.

Actually, I think that’s pretty dumb. I’ve read a lot on the subject, and I’ve been there myself, but I couldn’t tell you how Kenyan political practices are different from those of any number of other little countries that are trying to figure out just how their new democracy thing should work, and I really don’t think Gingrich could pass a test on it himself. I’m pretty sure that the real purpose of that press release was actually a somewhat slimy one. That is, his intention was to reinforce that preposterous Tea Party nonsensical claim that our president isn’t an American at all.

Their claim is that, in spite of the fact that the official records, the newspapers that record such things and those people, still alive, who were involved in any of those activities at the time say he is an American (and they all say the same thing), they’re all lying. This is, of course, pathological. There is definitely no truth to the Tea Party goons’ claim that Barack Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii, a fully accredited state of the United States, but in some foreign country.

In spite of all the really unarguable amount of evidence that he was born exactly where and when he says he was, there are a lot of people who are going around claiming that Obama is a foreigner and thus his presidency is illegal under the Constitution and that the 2008 election that he won by such a smashing vote doesn’t count. My personal opinion is that most of them don’t really believe what they’re saying, because it’s just too ridiculous, but they hate Obama so much that they’ll say anything they think they can get away with.

And when I see Gingrich trying to lend credence to what he knows isn’t true, it makes me wonder who Gingrich is getting his political advice from these days, because I used to know one of his advisors pretty well.

 
You see, there was a time when I really thought that if politicians would get in the habit of reading science fiction for fun instead of sticking to, say, the shoot-’em-up Westerns preferred by Dwight Eisenhower, we’d have better government. But then along came Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and shot that speculation down in flames.

Gingrich liked science fiction. He took it seriously enough that he had a major sf writer, my good friend (and political foe) Jerry Pournelle, flying back and forth to Washington to advise him.

I don’t know exactly what the advice Jerry gave Gingrich was, but there was a lot of it — enough so that it used up a lot of Jerry’s time. Which had the result that Jerry was seriously late in delivering his part of a book that I also had a part in. And, as I wouldn’t get paid for my part until the whole thing, including Jerry’s part, was turned in, this caused me to get on Jerry’s case to get the damn thing done.

The advice couldn’t have been too bad, because Gingrich was flying high in those days. Some people were getting the feeling, in fact, that one day not too far in the future we might be looking ar a President Gingrich. Then, however, some of Gingrich’s political adversaries began digging up some of the, well, the nastier parts of Gingrich’s personal history and getting them published in the papers. And he retired from those heights in disgrace.

Well, if you dig deep enough in almost anyone’s past you’ll probably find something that he really wishes hadn’t come up. The Republicans proved that when, after spending $40 million of taxpayers’ money in the search, they finally unearthed Monica Lewinsky and thus stripped President Clinton of the power to act effectively for the last part of his presidential term.

But we’re a forgiving people, we Americans. Clinton is now most Americans’ best-loved living ex-president. Even Richard Nixon, the American president who avoided prison only because his successor gave him a full pardon, managed to raise his head after lying low for a while.

And, as we’ve seen, Gingrich is getting plenty of newspaper space and TV time for his political rebirth.

 
Apart from his (ick) politics, Gingrich didn’t seem to be a bad guy. He visited an occasional sf con and was pleasant to talk to on any nonpolitical subject. Indeed, if I was on my way by rocket to Mars and had to pick one other male as co-pilot of our rocket ship — and that other male had to be someone prominent in government — Gingrich might have been a possible contender.

At one con — I’m sorry to say I don’t remember which one (maybe one of you guys could tell me?) — both Gingrich and I happened to be present and the chairman got the idea of the two of us having a debate on some political subject.

So we did it. I don’t remember all that was said, but one of the subjects we agreed to disagree on was the heroic-sized U.S. defense budget. I said we could better use all that money for some peaceful pursuit, almost any peaceful pursuit. Newt said was I so ignorant that I didn’t know the world was full of enemies of America and we had to be ready to fight them whenever they might attack us? I said that throughout American history up to that point we had fought maybe eight or ten real wars, from the Revolution to WWII, and we hadn’t really been prepared — though our enemies were — for any one of them, but all the same we’d won them all. Newt said, aha, Fred, but you’re forgetting we had the might of the British Navy to protect us while we tooled up, and I said, right you are, Newt, but in at least two of those wars, the Revolution and the War of 1812, that mighty British Navy was on the other side and the side it was shooting at was us, and we licked them anyway.

So I marked that one a win for me. I don’t know how Gingrich scored it.

Oil slick around Mississippi Barrier Islands (NASA E0-1 Satellite photo).

 
Years ago, in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, I wrote a book on the environment called Our Angry Earth. It wasn’t particularly successful. I have to admit that it wasn’t quite as good a book as I could have wished, either. Isaac got sick almost at the very moment we agreed to do it, and so he wasn’t able to do anywhere near as much of the writing as I had expected — to the detriment of the book.

But there were several parts of the book that were all mine and had always been intended to be so. One of those was the section that demonstrated that many of the problems associated with pollution and environmental damage were simply a matter of bad bookkeeping.

For example. Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped some 1.3 million pounds of extremely toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), waste products from the manufacture of electronic devices in two of its factories, into the upper reaches of the Hudson River. GE did this because, although safe disposal of the PCBs was quite possible, it would have added significantly to the manufacturing cost of the devices. Dumping the PCBs in the river cost General Electric little more than the charge for trucking them to the river’s edge.

This is not to say that there were no costs involved in the dumping. There were many costs, and some of them were quite high. The pollution of the river made its fish inedible, causing the cash loss of a commercial fishing industry. The restrictions on even sport fishing meant that fewer vacationers spent their summers there, to the loss of tourism. The health of people living nearby was compromised, at an incalculable cost. Real estate prices dropped as the area lost some of its attractiveness. Put them all together and there were real costs amounting to millions of dollars for the dumping. All those costs, though, were what accountants call “externals.”

That means that they were costs that General Electric didn’t have to pay, because the bills went directly to the rest of the world.

Proper accounting procedures, on the other hand, would have immediately tacked them onto the manufacturing costs — thus making it better business to dispose responsibly of the pollutants.

And thus, if it were common practice to make enterprises pay for their externals, many of the problems relating to industrial pollution would simply disappear. (It is true, however, that the courts finally ordered GE to pay for a partial cleanup of the river. That didn’t heal all the damage done, but at least it was something, and it showed a dawning awareness that externals should not be neglected indefinitely.)

 
It is not only manufacturers that foist their external costs off on the public. The extractive industries, among others, are at least equally blameworthy if not more so. In the oil and coal industries we have only to look at the Gulf of Mexico to see what external costs British Petroleum has imposed on the nearby population. (It is true that President Obama is forcing them to pay billions of dollars in restitution, but it is impossible to make some of the losses whole. Even BP doesn’t have that much money.)

And, of course, the Gulf oil spill is only one, if so far the most severe, among many such disasters. Some of us will recall the Exxon Valdez back in 1989, but in fact there has been at least one major spill — “major” meaning at least tens of thousands, and all too often tens of millions, gallons of oil spilled — somewhere in the world almost every year.

Major oil spills in waterways, last five years, as supplied by Infoplease:

• 2010: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico
• 2010: Tanker Eagle Otome, Port Arthur, TX
• 2009: MV Pacific Adventurer, Queensland, Australia
• 2008: Barge, Mississippi River, New Orleans, LA
• 2007: Tanker Hebei Spirit, off coast of South Korea
• 2006: Calcasieu River LA, waste oil spill
• 2006: Israeli navy bombing Jieh coast power station
• 2006: Tanker sinks in deep water, still there leaking oil, Guimaras, Philippines
• 2005: 7 million gallons oil spilled during Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA

(Before that, the list is very long.)

All the same, it’s obvious that the costs of an oil well blowing out dwarf other oil spills. BP’s Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill — so far — is estimated at over 160 million gallons. The only other spill that came even close was the Ixtoc. of 1979, also in the Gulf of Mexico. That one spilled 140 million gallons over the three months before it got stopped — by drilling a relief well next to it And there too the party responsible for the disaster was an oil company, Mexico’s Pemex.

So much for oil. What about coal?

The coal companies are, if anything, perhaps a little more rapacious than the oil companies. In the United States, their main unmet external costs are floods, landsides, the conversion of beautiful mountain areas into open-pit mines … and dead miners.

And how do these giant companies get away with it?

The answer is simple: money. The officials you and I vote for to protect our interests are sometimes all too willing, for money, to sell their votes to the very people we most need protection against.. It’s not really a matter of party, either. The Republicans are traditionally a little more friendly to big business than the Democrats, yes. But there are some eight Democratic Senators who are known, for obvious reasons, as the Coal Democrats. And at least one commentator does not believe that in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico there is a single legislative or judicial candidate of either party who has not received substantial money from Big Oil.

That’s the main other contribution I tried to make in Our Angry Earth. We individuals do not have anywhere enough muscle to deal with thee giant corporations. Only government can protect us from their worst excesses.

And what is the key to controlling government?

It’s called politics. If those among us who would like to see less corruption and misconduct among elected officials would get even a little bit involved there would be wonderful changes.

What do you have to do to get a little bit involved?

You give up Dancing with the Stars for one evening and go to the next League of Woman Voters-sponsored candidates’ debate scheduled in your neighborhood. (They’re listed in your local paper. If you can’t find one, call up the League yourself and ask them what they’ve got.

When you see a candidate you’d like to vote for, introduce yourself and ask if he needs a volunteer to stuff envelopes or the like now and then. Then, if later on, you decide you don’t like it, or don’t like the candidate, you can always just walk away. It’s a free country, after all.

And the more you do of that sort of thing, the more you help to keep it that way.

Those among us who don’t want to be active in politics because it’s a dirty game just help to make it dirtier.

    Richard Shelby

Richard Shelby was first elected to the Senate as a Democrat,. Then, in the mid-term elections of 1994, the Republicans won back control of the Senate and Shelby changed his party affiliation to Republican, where it has been ever since.

Senator Shelby boasts that he is a watchful guardian of our country’s defense concerns who can be trusted with the care of them. Recently, however, he was mad at the federal government for some unannounced reason — gossip says it was because he had been denied two porkbarrel “set-asides” in a new bill — so he placed a “blanket hold” on all confirmations of new presidential appointments to federal office. This meant that, for about 70 functions of government, nothing could be done, since no one could be confirmed to do them.

This stopped progress on such defense-related activities as procuring new tanker planes for the Air Force and creating a big new intelligence facility. Because of the outcry that arose concerning this action Shelby quickly rescinded most, but not all, of the holds.

(We should bear in mind, though, that Senator Shelby isn’t the only clown here. There is no law, presidential directive or other enablement which gave Senator Shelby the single-handed power to “hold” back action on presidential appointments. It’s just a custom of the Senate’s. It’s quite likely that if any single Senator had spoken up to oppose it, it would have disappeared.)

All the same, by his act in capriciously and singlehandedly putting a stop to 70 of the functions of the U.S. government with one single blow, Senator Shelby has shown himself to be clown enough to have earned his listing as Senate Clown No. 1.

Vocabulary question: When your weird Uncle Mortimer left you all that money, the tax people who work for your other uncle — for Uncle Sam, that is — took part of it back. What is the name of the tax that gave them the right to do that?

Answer: It’s called an “inheritance tax.” If you said “estate tax” you would also be right. However, if you said “death tax,” you would not only be wrong but you would have fallen (I learned from reading the 21 May issue of the New York Times Magazine) for one of the sneaky tricks of a man named Frank Luntz who works for the Republican Party (and other right-wing bodies). What does Luntz do for them? He thinks up emotionally loaded names for things that they want people to have an emotional reaction to.

Take for instance President Obama’s health-care program. That’s a perfectly descriptive name for a specific plan, but it’s not how Luntz wants you to think of it. He prefers that you call it “a Washington takeover.”

That’s not one of his most ingenious creations, because it’s based on an outright lie: there’s no “takeover” in the President’s plan. The consumer keeps all his freedom of choice. He simply has more options to choose from.

But actually Luntz can get people to change how they feel — and vote — without even having to lie. Do the oil companies to want to make voters feel more kindly about despoiling an environment? Don’t call it “drilling for oil” any more. Call it just “energy exploration.”

If you want to see how this relabeling works in action, just turn on the Fox news channel for a while, or listen to a panel of Republican senators discussing world events.