Anderkoo

The insane proposals by John McCain and Hillary Clinton to provide a “gas tax holiday” has shaken me out of media-induced stupor: there are real issues and real values at stake in this election. Jeremiah Wright, “snipergate,” and all the rest of that is just soporific to keep us from facing hard realities. Shame on me for forgetting.

You want to talk issues and facts? Here are issues and facts: on this issue of gas pricing, Barack Obama is the only Presidential candidate who is showing real leadership on energy. McCain and Clinton can talk a good game, but standing up to the pressure to pander is the first test of political courage. Cutting the gas tax would not only be a prelude to an even more ruinous carbon policy, but it also continues to play into the false notion that federal taxes are what keep working-class people down in this country.

On the New York Times comment page in response to the paper’s editorial opposing the McCain-Clinton proposal, David Keppel, Bloomington, Indiana writes:

At a rally in Bloomington, Indiana tonight, Barack Obama talked about the importance of telling the truth — and he used the gas tax as an example. We must learn to conserve. Technological innovation — in clean energy — is important, but social innovation is even more important. That’s why the election is not just what Senator Clinton calls “a hiring decision”; it is about inspring a nation to live differently.

Bravo, Barack. Finally, I’m wide awake again to the issues that matter, not the garbage that doesn’t.

And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. ”
…
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;
And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

– Genesis 19:17, 24-26 (KJV)

If the Obama campaign entails a fairy tale, then my own bit of magical thinking involves the conviction that if we could only collectively suspend our disbelief for just long enough, if we can just have faith that something new can transcend what was, then we can cross the chasm that divides our nation. But like all magical thinking, there’s also a catch: to walk on thin air we must, all of us, believe it together. Open our eyes, and the magic breaks. The hopes that buoy us halfway across proves more fatal than staying exactly where we are.

Rationally, of course, I don’t quite believe this story. All politics are in the system, and all our politicians merely players. But I also believe in mankind’s occasional capacity to transcend itself and its own institutions. I’ve always considered JFK a rather bad President by the merits, and yet his overall power to inspire was clearly greater than the sum of his policies and actions.

Presented with the opportunity to move forward and leave behind our place of damnation, how many of us would nonetheless do as Lot’s wife did — whether out of fear, doubt, perhaps even mere nostalgia? How many would look back?

This Presidential campaign isn’t a battle between black and white: it is, as Obama himself observed, about the past versus the future. And the forces of the past — whether in the guise of Hillary Clinton or Jeremiah Wright — keep shouting, “Look back! Look back! You are doomed by the weight of the heavy hand of history.”

Perhaps we are. But I will keep walking this chasm, my wide-open eyes firmly forward.

To stave off recession, Congress and the President urge us to buy more stuff. Encouraging Americans to keep shopping, they tell us, will plump our economy — despite fundamental shifts in the world economy, not to mention two large-scale wars. Whatever the economic merits of this plan, I believe that promoting consumerism is bad for our national soul. Indeed, I see the government offering us empty calories to satiate a bottomless hunger. And that’s why I am donating my stimulus check to charity.

The consumerist economy

Consumption represents the majority of our GDP. Cars and big-screen televisions keep a web of people employed domestically and internationally, from store clerks to factory workers to the cargo handlers in between. Consumption and consumerism are here to stay, and we would be foolish and delusional to wish otherwise.

But the recent boom was built on an illusion: Americans spent at a historically unprecedented scale by borrowing heavily against artificially inflated home prices. Well, it turns out that you can’t have your house and mortgage it, too. The buying binge is over, and it’s time for Americans to confront what all of this consumption has wrought.

We are still wealthy

The truth is that the United States is still the wealthiest nation this world has ever known. While almost half of the world lives on less than $2 a day, Americans are blessed with domestic tranquility, high literacy, and tremendous life opportunities. Understandably, many Americans find cold comfort in statistics when struggling with job loss, mushrooming health care costs, and rising gas prices. These problems are real, and right now they are growing. But the paradox is that more wealth can feed our gluttony rather than salve our want. In fact, the more money we make, the more we spend on ourselves and the less of it we give to charity.

Deprivation is relative: we don’t compare ourselves with the unseen poor halfway across the globe, but the Joneses next door. “I don’t think most people who are affluent feel affluent,” observes a participant in one of the Boston Faith & Justice Network’s economic discipleship groups. “We feel we are in debt and someone else is affluent…For my kids, poverty is not having Nintendo.”

From deprivation to gratitude

Without denying the reality of domestic poverty and inequality, I decline to view our economic circumstances through the lens of deprivation. For me, a more spiritually sound way of understanding wealth is as abundance. The glass isn’t merely half-full; it overflows.

It is out of gratitude for our wealth that some of us are choosing to do something different with our economic stimulus checks: donate them to charity. Certainly, those of us who are struggling financially are thankful for the opportunity to pay down debts, invest in schooling, or simply put food on the table. But many of us would otherwise binge on stuff we don’t really need.

One man gives freely, yet grows all the richer;
another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.
Proverbs 11:24 (RSV)

From the point of view of our national economy, donating our stimulus checks to charity will produce the same multiplier effects as buying a plasma-screen television. But it will mean something quite different to our own spiritual well-being. It’s not about denying ourselves by resisting temptation, but expanding ourselves by giving generously to others. Indeed, as the proverbs suggest, it’s not wealth that leads us to give, but giving that makes us realize we are wealthy.

I know we can’t extinguish consumerism, nor do I want to, but we can ask for a different kind of consumption. After all, the word “consumption” can mean “to use up.” But it can also mean, quite simply, “to eat.” Perhaps, whatever your spiritual beliefs, you too offer up words of thanks before you sit down to eat a meal. If so, consider offering some words of gratitude before you “consume” that stimulus check. You might find yourself feeling a lot wealthier for it.

(Cross-posted to Off the Bus)

At about 7:45pm last night, at the eastern edge of Hunting Park in northern North Philadelphia, I knocked on a voter’s door with a last-minute reminder to get down to the polls only three blocks over. “You mean the voting is still open?” the woman asked. Yes, I reassured her, she still had 15 minutes to cast her ballot. “Oh dang, I didn’t know that!” After many fruitless door-knocks, I was excited to put a vote in the bag for Obama.

Then a girl shouted from inside the house, “Yeah go vote for Hillary!”

I had a sudden flashback to the moment in 2004 when I realized that our Boston phonebank was mobilizing Republicans in Ohio because we were working off bad lists. Somewhere along the way, Obama’s famed field operations had tripped up.

The first warning for me that something was amiss came on Monday morning at the North Philadelphia Obama for PA field office, where Black Philadelphia blends into Latino Philadelphia. Campaign organizers gave us walklists for the local neighborhood to drop doorhangers. These lists, they assured us, were confirmed Obama supporters. Looking at the number of Latino names, I rejoiced: finally we were making inroads to Clinton’s core demographic. It took only a few addresses on the list sporting Hillary signs to disabuse me of that optimism. Despite the campaign being on the ground in force for six full weeks leading up to election day, we were still cold-calling the day before.

Apparently, North Philly was understaffed, and had been since early on. On Primary day I did my last canvass with two locals who complained that, despite signing up to volunteer many weeks ago, they were never activated. Meanwhile, phonebank and canvass lists piled up, even as places like West Philly saw so many volunteers that they redistributed to SW Philly.

The failure to ID voters over the six weeks’ reprieve between primaries had measurable impacts on turnout operations in North Philly: not only did we risk mobilizing Clinton supporters, but we were drastically less efficient when we were chasing all voters everywhere in the neighborhood. Sure, we had done something similar in South Carolina, where the campaign strategists decided with just over a week left to target all African-Americans, whether they were positively ID’ed or not. But the SC campaign had only done this after polls confirmed that such voters would break very decidedly for Obama. If that was the assumption in Philadelphia, it was a bad one, because across the doors I’d knocked, there was also strong support for Hillary among a sizable minority of black voters.

As the smallest cog in a campaign’s machinery, I can’t really evaluate the overall strategy, although having seen the inner workings of Obama’s South Carolina operations, I have some hunches. It may well be that the statisticians and other campaign pros in the HQ “boiler room” saw patterns or gaps emerging that they needed to exploit or plug up. Indeed, sometime around the 5pm mark, the “last call” for operational redeployment, word apparently came down from central HQ to the North Philly office to redeploy canvassing teams out to the north North Philly satellite, where the organizer was in near-panic over the amount of turf still left to cover. That’s how I ended with the virgin walklist that put me out past Hunting Park.

Not that I saw a single Clinton volunteer covering any of the same turf, either. If Clinton had a ground campaign in Philly doing anything more effective than holding up signs, it must have been underground. Yet her supporters came out in sufficient numbers even without a solid ground push to cut meaningfully into Obama’s share of Philadelphia voters.

It could well be that intense GOTV efforts are overrated in effectiveness. Indeed, after threatening to go cast her ballot for Hillary, the woman I spoke with in the last few minutes of voting yesterday instead headed over to the local store to buy some drinks. I didn’t see her at the polls later.

Today, with three different partners, I hit 10 “turfs” (bundles of voter addresses) in North Philadelphia. At about 100 addresses per turf, I estimate I hit about 500 voters with Obama door-hangers reminding them that tomorrow is election day and where their local polling location is.

GOTV — Get Out the Vote — is as brass-tacks as politics gets. The key to winning this battle is a combination of massive manpower and operational efficiency: preferably, you not only throw more people at the problem of reminding (cajoling, pleading with) voters to vote, but also get more work out of them in the precious few hours of voting in a day. (Pennsylvanians get a few more hours than the average American: 13, between 7am and 8pm).

Door-hangers are how you get to voters when you know they’re not home, as you’d expect on a Monday. Though many of the households we lit-dropped today had someone home, usually because they work night shifts or, as they day turned to dusk, people came home.

The section of North Philly we covered had an interesting mix of old-school public housing and new mixed-income developments. One project we covered was a throwback to the bad old days of public housing, an 11-story concrete monster where the stairwells stuck to your shoes for reasons you’d rather not guess. There were low-rises too, many with open front doors where we could blow through and hit every apartment with efficient alacrity.

There were also some nice redeveloped homes, including some that took the place of the infamous projects where Bill Cosby grew up. The residents there were as likely to be Latino (generally, Puerto Rican) as Black, and most were friendly. True to demographics, though, many were also Hillary supporters. (The less-friendly Hillary supporters, whom we encountered later in the day, lived in the rougher parts of the neighborhood).

Perhaps with these newer residents, the face of North Philadelphia will change once again, as it has before. One of the old Baptist churches in the neighborhood still bears the name of the Jewish congregation that erected the building in 1911. Perhaps in the coming decades it will morph once again into Catholic or Pentacostal.

Youth remain the most enthusiastic supporters of Obama — I persuaded (I think) many older teens who lamented being too young to vote to show up tomorrow and put in some hours volunteering. Younger kids just like saying the name “Obama.” (I’ve often joked that the power of Obama’s name is in melding the three most primal sounds humans can make - “O Ba (father) Ma (mother)”.)

I certainly hope they will show up, as so many of the voters on our lists were newly-enrolled, often the most difficult to turn out, even a campaign as large and well-organized as Obama for Pennsylvania can run low on volunteers. At the end of this evening, we still had a good pile of turfs yet unturned — first priority for us tomorrow morning at 7am. A great war journalist might pull a great story out of the front-line experience of American democracy. But a media obsessed with glitter, scandal, and pablum never notice the grassroots, and perhaps that is a blessing.

I’ve landed in latte-sipping, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, um… scratch that. This afternoon my friend Baratunde and I canvassed southwest Philadelphia.

This is friendly territory for Obama, and if the strategists are right, the key to a a victory on Tuesday (however defined) will turn on the success of the ground game in ensuring that the supporters we identified today actually do vote. The neighborhood we canvassed was predominantly African-American and poorer, although individual houses and sometimes entire blocks seemed better-maintained than neighbors’. A surprising number of them were home (maybe about one-third) this Sunday afternoon, and they were very strongly pro-Obama. There were undecideds and Clinton supporters, to be sure, but the ratio was very high.

Although in some ways this part of southwest Philly is quite obviously different from Vermont, there were some similar features as well. A lot of doorbells didn’t work, and residents seemed to like keeping their doors open. Unfortunately it reminded me of Vermont in another way too: some of the places seemed possibly abandoned, and I saw at least one foreclosure notice, which had been affixed to the storm door.

With warm weather teasing the Boston area, it’s a little surprising to find a reminder of spring in your fridge drawer. But a few days ago I’d discovered a head of cabbage that I’d almost fully shorn was bursting forth with new life.

I don’t know if this cabbage is alive by the biological definition of “life” (if I plant it, will it grow?) but it certainly reminds me of the tenacity of life. If the carrot you’re chewing on is still crisp, you can bet it’s because the millions of cells that constitute it are still, in their own way, still “breathing and kicking.” I suppose there is a morbid edge to this realization — not unlike hearing the lobster tapping the side of a boiling pot — but truthfully, the world around us is teeming with life, and with every breath and heartbeat we are killing thousands of organisms that would otherwise do us in.

If you meditate on this long enough you may come to the conclusion that there’s no good reason why any one of us is any more deserving of life than a whale, a tree, a paramecium, or a sad little cabbage at the bottom of the crisper drawer. And I suppose there are many ways you can respond to that conclusion, but the one that I’ve come to is a deep sense of gratitude for the inexplicable privilege of living.

Prices of food have hit the roof, but nothing has gotten more expensive faster than organic foods. By the laws of economics, organic food consumption will surely fall:

“Man, $6.99 for a gallon of milk is pushing it. We have to be very careful about not pricing organics out of the market.”

– Perry Abbenante, global grocery coordinator for Whole Foods Market

Near-term inflation (stagflation?) in the US can be attributed to the falling dollar and the rising costs of inputs (namely, oil and energy). But there’s also a long-term force at work here: by outsourcing agriculture and manufacturing to extract lower prices, advanced nations have essentially exported social and environmental costs to their poorer peers.

I’m not advancing an anti-globalization screed: in the very long term, the pie will grow, and we can view this exchange as “borrowing” against the future in the hopes that by the time the payments come due (in the form of fair wages, human rights, and environmental repair), we will have grown to the point where we can pay it off. And that seems a fair moral balance to strike if we (capitalists and environmentalists alike) acknowledged the terms of the bargain. But as President Bush just made clear, he sees the deal as entirely one-sided: the United States gets to borrow, but never pays a dime in either principal or interest.

Americans may be familiar with this scenario: we’re watching another version of it unfolding called the sub-prime mortgage crisis. For almost a decade, many Americans — rich and poor — lived in a fantasy bubble in which their homes basically cost nothing, pumping their “savings” into massive and unsustainable consumption.

We also see now what happens when the bubble bursts.

Those of us who have gotten used to buying sweatshop underwear and industrial lettuce are living in the same bubble. By pushing the cost of these products on to abused workers and energy-subsidized processes, we’ve been able to spend the difference on luxuries like big, wasteful cars and televisions. But in this version of the mortgage crisis, we the consumers are more like the banks than the homeowners: we’ve bundled up our debts and spread them through the system in such complex and hard-to-measure ways that we have no idea where the costs will land.

In other words, the basics of human survival — food, clothing, shelter — have been unnaturally cheap in the developed nations because we’ve had the power to offload their costs on to people (sweatshop laborers) and systems (global carbon exchange) we don’t see and can hardly understand. And just as a return to normalcy in the housing crisis means that homeowners will once again start paying realistic monthly mortgages — after a harsh period of payback — likewise if we want to return to a sustainable global economy, we Western freeriders will inevitably start paying higher prices. And many of us have been doing that by buying, yup, organic and fair trade products.

I believe in the big picture, the economists and capitalists are right: centuries of innovation have produced massive efficiencies and, with it, a real rise in global wealth. In the very long term, most people on this planet will enjoy a better life eating healthy food, getting decent health care, and enjoying reasonable luxuries — if we can survive the medium-term payback that awaits us in the form of climate change. But we consumers and citizens need to start separating artificial cost savings that come from borrowing against our planet or our fellow man from the real cost savings that come from technological innovation. With that clarity, a just economy comes into view.

So, hoping to get to Long Island in time for Passover, I was shopping for tix that would put me somewhere near Penn Station, so the Chinatown buses were out. Amtrak’s still too expensive, so the old gray mare, Greyhound, was my next option. Turns out the standard price for Boston-New York is $32… but if you click on the “Can I get a cheaper ticket?” button, the answer is “Yes” — a $20 ticket. Nice, right? Well, after going through that whole process, I find that Greyhound’s picked up some tricks from its airline cousins:

Yup, a $3 “convenience fee” — for ME printing out THEIR ticket and avoiding THEIR line and horrible service. Nice bait-and-switch. Let’s see you do that trick again NEXT TIME I DON’T TAKE GREYHOUND.

I’m not sure if this is analogous to how people feel about the overwhelming electoral support African-Americans have been demonstrating for Barack Obama, but I’m bothered/embarrassed/angered by Chinese-Americans who came out yesterday in counter-protest to the anti-China rallies in San Francisco.

To the best of my knowledge, the protesters were out there criticizing Chinese policies, not the Chinese people. And I know that when international tensions get heated, sometimes there’s fallout for that nation’s diaspora (just ask German-Americans in WWI, or Japanese-Americans in WWII), but in this particular case — given that the main issue concern human rights, not trade — I can’t see what the negative effect would have been for Chinese-Americans. (Human rights activists are not known for giving a lot of beat-downs, physical, verbal, or otherwise).

So to counter-protest, and thus support the Chinese regime? Sorry folks, you’re on the wrong side of the issue here. And it’s embarrassing to have to assume that you’re on that side because of your ethnic heritage.