Anderkoo

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.

I got my first overtly racist anti-Obama comment today while phoning central Pennsylvania. It was a 62-year old man, who said, simply, “I’m not voting for the black man.” I moved to end the call, but he continued, “I’ve worked with hundreds of black people.” He meant that as a defense (”Some of them are my best friends!”), but the point was clear. At least he was honest.

It’s interesting, then, to see in today’s NY Times, and then echoed on Daily Kos, on-the-ground reporting from Levittown, PA. “Levittown is whiter, older and less educated than the rest of the nation — and Pennsylvania is made up of many Levittowns,” writes Michael Sokolove, a Levittown native. Perhaps I was calling into one of them.

I grew up a short bike ride from the original Levittown — Levittown, NY, the one featured in all the social studies textbooks. Actually, I grew up in what Bill O’Reilly calls “the Westbury part of Levittown,” which is to say, Salisbury. In 1981, my family moved to a split-level (so, not a real “Levitt” house) just off Old Country Road. By then, suburban New York was in flux, and I suspect it’s around then that Levittown NY took a different turn than Levittown PA. Maybe a third of my high school classmates lived in Levittown proper, and I remember, as the Cold War wound down, hearing rumor of Grumman’s shrinking fortunes as demand for its F-14 began shifting away.

Back then, blue-collar work meant a middle class lifestyle. But the economic shock of Gruman’s decline and ultimate sale, coming so soon after the 1987 recession, put Long Island on the path to a post-industrial future. From Stony Brook in the east, biotech was coming; from the west lapped waves of money from New York’s capital markets. Gruman was to Levittown NY what Fairless Works was to Levittown PA, but with the luck of geography the older Levittown escaped the millstone around its neck. (Ironically, Fairless Works is called “the mill”). Today, the median household income of Levittown NY is $78,454 to PA’s $58,985; industrial work comprises 17% of PA’s jobs but only 9% of NY’s. (Latest data for NY, PA).

In other demographic matters, the two Levittowns are almost identical. They also share a similar history. As Sokolove reports,

And on matters of race Levittown has a particularly shameful history. It was billed as “the most perfectly planned community in America,” and part of the plan was for it to be whites-only: 5,500 acres, stretching across three Pennsylvania townships and one borough, closed off to blacks. The first development of mass-produced homes by Levitt & Sons, Levittown, N.Y., on Long Island, which dates from 1947, had the same exclusionary policies. William Levitt weakly insisted that he would love to sell houses to black families but had “come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours.”

And so, as of 2000, both Levittowns were 94% white, with PA’s having a few more blacks and NY’s having more Latinos (many of whom are counted as white) and Asians.

The racial history of Long Island was sometimes written in stone, as in the low highway overpasses that Robert Moses allegedly designed to prevent New York City buses from reaching the beach. It’s also written on the crazily overlapping boundaries that divide up our school districts. Mr. O’Reilly might be excused for not knowing whether he hailed from Levittown or Westbury; my high school drew from both, plus East Meadow, and belonged to the East Meadow School District. (Two other school districts also covered Levittown.) Yet our school did not take students from the other side of Old Country Road, a majority black and Latino community known as New Cassel. Those kids went to Westbury High School, in the Westbury School District.

I was one of about a dozen Asian kids in my class of 181 (ours was the smallest class the school had ever seen), and I’m pretty sure the only non-Hispanic black kid in the class was in the special education program (he was deaf). Unlike Sokolove’s experience in 1950s PA, Jews were much more numerous in my high school, and especially my part of town; today, Jews comprise some 15% of Levittown NY but only about 5% of Levittown PA. And while I don’t have up-to-date demographics at hand, from what I’ve seen Levittown NY has become more diverse since the 2000 census, especially among Latinos and East and South Asians.

I can’t speak directly to the Levittown, proper, experience, but growing up in the next town over in the 1980s, my experience of race was — while not uncomplicated — not fraught with hatred or even significant overt prejudice. I don’t know if it was our particular generation (the youngest children of the oldest hippies), religious diversity, or — as some of my friends have suggested — high marijuana usage in my school, but when I compare notes with peers from other schools from elsewhere in the country, I do believe that I had a uniquely peaceful, even idyllic, childhood. Which is not to say that race never surfaced in ugly ways (in retrospect, I think the Archie Bunker lookalike next door hit golf balls on our roof on purpose), but that it wasn’t quite as simple as kids lining the halls making Chinkie jokes, either.

On the other hand, I wasn’t black.

Still, it frankly surprises me that I haven’t encountered any overt racism in working on the Obama campaign these past few months until tonight. Even if racism is out there, it’s shrouded in code words or perhaps lying to pollsters — which implies that even racists of the old-school sort know that the public consensus is against them. There’s a lot to be thankful about in terms of race relations in this country, and the Levittown that I know in New York gives me hope about the future. So, too, do some of the Levittown, PA residents that Sokolove reports on. Said John Annunziata, a former local politician, “When he won Iowa, it touched my soul. I was very emotional. I felt like we were moving toward what this country should be.”

I’ve been ranting about the hidden costs of home ownership for some time now (here’s one rant), and today’s NYT features another that is often cited by economists but dismissed by home ownership zealots: job mobility

“You hear a lot about foreclosure and the thousands of families who are being forced out,” said Joseph S. Tracy, director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “But that is swamped by the number of people who want to sell their homes and can’t.”

I should reiterate that I’m not opposed to home ownership, just to the American romanticizing of it as some kind of rite of passage to adulthood + civic responsibility.

One of our fellow Obama for SC volunteers, Allison Lane of Baltimore, MD, popped up on NPR this morning as an Obama canvasser at the old Reading Terminal in Philly. Listen to her mad canvassing skills and interview (4:19 - 4:48), who notes that Obama’s support can’t be about race because “we’re only, what, 12% of the population?” You can also catch a brief glimpse of her here (0:43 - 0:45).

Keep it up Allison; our hopes are riding on you and the thousands of other volunteers!

What’s the advantage of acting privileged or entitled — basically, demanding things you don’t necessarily deserve based on the normal rules of the game? Perhaps it works like a loan — you get what you need now (presumably which is when you need it) rather than later, letting you profit off that thing, even if you have to pay for it later in ill-will or whatever.

Dear Governor Patrick:

This supporter and volunteer still stands by you… but it’s been hard, and I fervently hope to hear you once again taking up the moral leadership that so many of us invested in you as governor of our Commonwealth.

I volunteered many hours helping you win the nomination and then the election because you had explained to us all what a “Commonwealth” means: that we all share in a common civic, economic, and political life, and that we are each others’ keepers.

It was time for us to face tough questions about whether “Commonwealth” was merely a word, or represented our actual commitments. And we and you all knew that at the end of the day, this meant that we would have to consider reasonable, fair, and sustainable sources of revenue to enable the Commonwealth to keep its promise to all of us.

You were able to connect revenues — or let’s just be clear here now, taxes — to values that we all share: better education, health care, services, infrastructure. So when you were elected, I was ready to take up the cause and join with you to close corporate tax loopholes and then embark on a serious conversation with my neighbors across Massachusetts about what our own commitment might mean.

I hope you can therefore understand my disappointment when, since last summer, you instead pursued an unfair, unsustainable, and immoral source of revenue from casinos. I know that we need the money, and we need it badly. But going down this path meant losing your moral legitimacy. It took us off the idea that taxes represent our shared commitments and instead echoed the false belief that we can magically meet the state’s needs without personal sacrifice.

So rather than putting my energy behind supporting all that you stood for, I instead worked against you to battle casinos in Massachusetts. And I take no great satisfaction in winning.

But the fact is that the issue is over, and I for one and ready and willing to again join with you again in seeking reasonable solutions to our Commonwealth’s fiscal crisis. It is not an easy task, but we didn’t elect you to take on the easy tasks. We supported you, urged our neighbors to vote for you, and ultimately elected you by an overwhelming majority because we have faith in your ability to lead us through the difficulties ahead.

I still have faith in your ability to do just that. Please don’t let me down.

Sincerely yours,

Gene Koo
Cambridge, MA