thoughts on the Dems

By popular request (ok, it was only Tiara, but by the standards of this blog that is popular), here are my thoughts on the Democratic primary race.

My early favorite was Edwards. I voted for him in the 2004 primaries, and he continues to take the lead with ambitious, detailed policy proposals that, if implemented, would make a real difference. His focus on poverty, when no one else on the national stage was talking about it, shows both great character and political courage. He has been equally courageous with health care and global warming plans.

With Obama, on the other hand, I had doubts early on. He is a remarkable speaker, but his soaring rhetoric, while unquestionably inspiring, did not give many hints of policy substance. That doesn’t matter too much, though. There’s no way to predict the political environment or problems that a president will face when in office, so it’s more important to trust a politician’s instincts and character, in whatever situation he or she may face, than to know policy specifics.

But the policies can tell a story about character. That’s what Edwards’ focus on poverty has done for him. It shows he will look out for those who lack the power and influence of typical Washington players.

The Obama campaign’s heavy focus on bringing people together and changing the very nature of politics raised some warning flags. The typical voices decrying polarization in America are faux moderates like Joe Lieberman and John McCain, or vanity projects like the Unity ‘08 nonsense. It may be satisfying to pretend to be too good for either party, or too high-minded to engage in actual politics. At some moments in history it may even have been true that neither party represented what America needed.

But the story of the last decade is of the Republican Party run out of control, and a government run by very bad people. It took the Democrats a while to catch up to the cutthroat tactics of the right wing, and it took the American people a while to catch on to the giant scam that is the Bush administration, but now all that has started to change. A strong Democratic leader will need to start undoing the damage to our country and the world, but now is also an opportunity to do so much more. With 2008 looking very likely to give the Democrats control of both Congress and the White House, it will be a huge, and possibly fleeting chance to make great progressive changes on all fronts.

With that said, I’ve developed more faith in Obama recently. He may be just the type of leader who can make those changes, by inspiring us to take the necessary steps. If any of the candidates are to be the liberal Reagan, he is it. And the few times he has given some specifics on what he would do as President, they were pretty good.

I think Obama would unquestionably be the best candidate in foreign affairs. More than any other candidate, he seems to have a real understanding of the disparities in the world. Electing someone who grew up in Indonesia with a Muslim father would vastly improve our standing abroad, and it would show off a face of America that desperately needs reemphasizing. And his poetry isn’t half-bad, either.

So if we are keeping score, that puts Edwards ahead in domestic politics and Obama up on foreign affairs. I would happily vote for either, and I think they both would make great presidents.

Of course, the elephant (donkey?) in the room in all this is Hillary Clinton. Frankly, a lot of her support right now baffles me. But I get a strong impression that her campaign isn’t being run for me. It’s not only a gender thing, though that is what the media is most obsessed with. It’s generational. Clinton is very much a baby boomer, and while I can imagine the themes of her candidacy (Celine Dion theme song being the most recent example) being appealing to my mom and grandmother, they don’t do much for me.

That is a superficial complaint. However, I also have real doubts about where she would take the country. Most of her thinking about the presidency was doubtlessly developed during Bill Clinton’s administration, but that was a very different time. And the tactics he used, of triangulation, moderation, small but popular proposals, are exactly the wrong way to fix today’s problems. We need bold action and a leader who can stand down Republican bullies who are surely waiting to spring back up against the next Democrat in office. Bill Clinton may have survived his term in office, even remaining popular throughout his term, but he did it by moderating himself in many ways, not convincing us to go in brave new directions.

And it’s not only a matter of tactics. I think she truly believes in the moderate solutions. She won’t apologize for her vote on Iraq, because she still thinks it was the execution, and not the very concept of imposing democracy by force, that was flawed. This raises grave doubts about whether she would withdraw all the troops from Iraq, or undertake foolish new wars in the future. Mark Penn, her leading pollster and, by some accounts, de facto campaign manager, runs a polling firm that has a union-busting department.

And while her policies are too moderate, her reputation among a big part of the country is as a huge liberal. We need a liberal who sounds moderate for the Democratic nomination, not the reverse.

Not to mention that I very much don’t want us to spend three decades trading the presidency between two families. If President Obama symbolizes a bright new face for America, Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be a door slamming on the idea that anyone can become president.

So those are my thoughts. If that was more than you ever wanted to hear, well, you asked for it! For anyone who’s reading this, I’d love to hear yours.

spy games

This is a week old, but there’s a long article in my hometown paper about reactions to the bill to sever relations with the Cherokee Nation that has serious problems. It quotes a lot of people involved but does little to make the issue any clearer, and in some ways even adds confusion.

According to the article, Rep. Watson is going ahead with her legislation, but Oklahoma Representatives want it delayed until courts have more opportunity to resolve the issue. And then there’s this:

Tahlequah attorney Nathan H. Young III represents more than 300 non-Indian Freedmen appealing their citizenship status in Cherokee tribal court.

“This bill is unnecessary and based on erroneous information,” Young said. “The facts are that the Freedmen have been restored to full citizenship status. You’d think [Congress] would do some fact-finding before introducing that bill.”

Young believes Watson is being used by people with ulterior motives, and says her bill hurts the Freedmen as much as anyone else.

Leave aside that the reporter Bob Gibbins called them “non-Indian Freedmen”, which puts his own neutrality into question.

But how can you throw in a quote like that, from someone who is at least nominally working for the Freedmen, without any more explanation? Somehow I doubt that this was all a big misunderstanding, and everything would be hunky-dory if Congress had only done some “fact-finding”? And who are the “people with ulterior motives”? What do they want? There’s no way to know or even guess that from this article.

Later Gibbins writes that:

Smith said the BIA stood by the Cherokee Nation’s side to argue against terminating funding for the tribe.

I’ve seen Smith trying to put the BIA on his side in several stories, but his claims might be overreaching. The letter from the BIA that is available at the Cherokee Nation homepage reads simply:

This letter is in response to your inquiry regarding whether the Department of the Interior intends to continue providing Federal funding to the Cherokee Nation, in light of the activities in Vann v. Kempthome, Civil Action 03w01711 (HHK), (D. DC).

The Department intends to continue providing Federal funding to the Cherokee Nation, unless otherwise directed by a Federal court or Federal legislation. The Department’s position has been expressed in the United States Memorandum in Opposition to Plaintiffs’ Motion for a Preliminary Injunction filed May 29, 2007, in Vann. and accepted by the district court’s decision dated June 13, 2007.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. It sounds more like the BIA will do whatever the courts and Congress tell them, which is precisely what they should do. It’s presumptuous for Smith to claim them as allies.

But we don’t know the real position of the BIA, even if they do support Smith, because no BIA representative is quoted in the story.

And more from the department of unexplained charges:

O’Leary, who chairs the tribal council’s Executive Finance Committee, said she was told Smith offered to sponsor a casino for the Freedmen and also agreed to provide the group with a land base in the tribe’s Canadian District.

“He’s not [legally] capable of making that promise,” O’Leary said. “He’s kept the council in the dark on this.”

Smith denied any such offer was made, as did Wayne Thompson, a Freedmen negotiator.

I’m sure it was difficult for the reporter to sift through all the rumors and accusations cropping up around this issue. But he doesn’t even seem to try, and in many case makes it worse.

Photo by Flickr user jovike obtained under a Creative Commons license.

riddle me this

Take a look at this quote and try to guess where it comes from:

Doing the Lord’s work is a thread that’s run through our politics since the very beginning. And it puts the lie to the notion that the separation of church and state in America — a principle we all must uphold and that I have embraced as a constitutional lawyer and most importantly as a Christian — means faith should have no role in public life.

A right-wing evangelist? A Republican politician?

Nope. Barack Obama.

His speech given at a convention of the United Church of Christ also includes a personal account of Obama’s arrival at faith in Jesus Christ more detailed than any given by the other presidential candidates of either party.

Yet, as Daniel Pulliam over at Get Religion points out, the Associated Press completely ignored these statements, instead going with the typical political narrative of a liberal criticizing conservative Christians:

Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Illinois senator said.

It’s unfortunate that the AP left out the other half of Obama’s message, because both parts are crucial. He knows that criticism of the right-wing Christianity will fall on deaf ears to many audiences without a corresponding genuine assertion of his own faith. The only way to reduce the Right’s stranglehold on public expressions of Christianity is to provide not simply criticism, but a clear and viable alternative.

In addition, any religious faith that goes beyond the superficial must have an impact on a person’s life. Even as a non-Christian, I want to know and understand my leaders’ character-forming events.

I don’t buy everything Obama says about re-thinking politics to bring us all together. Many of our political divisions are real, not fake controversies blown up for partisan gain. And sometimes the villains are just villains. But for those of us who are sick of both the militant atheists and the Christian Right, a strong, liberal, Christian voice may be just right.

Photo obtained from Flickr user melissambwilkins under a Creative Commons license.

Freedmen update

There have been several recent developments on the Cherokee Freedmen. Chad Smith won reelection this weekend, beating Stacy Leeds, the former chief justice of the Cherokee Supreme Court, with 59% of the vote. Both candidates said they supported the tribes’ right to determine its own members, but Leeds had written the original decision that revoked the first referendum to exclude the Freedmen. The Freedmen were allowed to vote in this election, though their request to postpone the election altogether was denied in federal court.

The amendment to eliminate the requirement for federal approval of changes in the Cherokee constitution also passed. That too was entangled with the Freedmen issue, as the BIA had earlier sent very mixed messages about whether it would approve the expulsion of the Freedmen (including some bizarreness with an apparently unauthorized signing by autopen of a letter from Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb; for more on that see this earlier post).

Before the election there were some rumors of a compromise in which the Cherokee Freedmen would be recognized as their own tribe, but it looks like that has fallen by the wayside. So it seems the only path remaining for the Freedmen is an unfortunate confrontation between the tribe and the United States. U.S. Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, is incensed by the Cherokees’ actions and has already drafted a bill to sever all relations between the federal government and the tribe. This would take away $300 million in federal funds, shut down all Cherokee gambling operations, and cut off many other programs including health coverage. A similar action was taken in 2000 against the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, until they agreed to reinstate their own Freedmen members.

While I’ve heard some doubts about whether this bill will pass, it seems too soon to tell. This may be one of the few controversial issues where Congressmen don’t go into it with their positions laid out in advance. U.S. Representatives from Oklahoma, Tom Cole and Dan Boren, both have not committed either way so far. They say that they don’t want to speak on it before the BIA and the Bush administration makes a decision. But the BIA won’t sever ties without a Congressional order, so it will come down to what happens in Congress.

Though it may be the last remaining legal avenue for the Freedmen, a confrontation with the feds will surely result in more bitterness and division, both among the Cherokee people and between the Cherokees and the U.S. Whichever way it goes, it is tragic that it even had to come to this point.

who is an Indian

A recent Time Magazine article comes out strongly in favor of the Cherokee Freedmen. This point deserves reemphasizing:

When Cherokee voters decided to strip the Freedmen of their full membership they were essentially legitimizing the one-drop rule. At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. government relied on that racist tool, originally used to determine whether people were black or not, in combination with other factors for a census of people living on Native American tribal lands. Those who seemed Cherokee, or Cherokee mixed with white, were placed on a “Cherokee-by-blood” list. Those who seemed black, or Cherokee mixed with black, were generally placed on a “Freedmen” list.

For all the rhetoric about protecting Cherokee identity based on the Dawes Rolls, it’s well worth remembering what those rolls originally represented. They were the tool of a racist American government used to divide up Indian lands, to disrupt tribal government and make it easier for whites move in. By evicting the Freedmen, the Cherokees have taken some of worst tactics of their oppressors as their own, and it will be a sad irony if the federal government has to intervene against it.

Time also points out a broader dynamic at play:

The question of who decides Indian identity affects not just the 2,800 or so Freedmen and 100 times as many Cherokee Nation citizens, but the half a million people who identified themselves on the last census as being of Cherokee heritage but not belonging to the Cherokee Nation — as well as, potentially, the more than 4.3 million Americans who consider themselves at least part American Indian and who could find themselves randomly booted from their tribes.

The question of Indian identity is extraordinarily complex, and every tribe has different rules. The Cherokees are actually one of the most permissive when it comes to tribal membership. They have no blood quantum requirements, so as long as you can prove at least one Cherokee ancestor you can join. Some citizens have only 1/4096 Indian ancestry. On the other extreme, to be a member of the Miccosukee tribe of Florida, your mother must have been a Miccosukee (similar to the traditions of Judaism).

For an Oklahoma Daily article last year I spoke to several American Indian students and faculty at OU, among them a student who was very active in the community, and whose father was full-blood Miccosukee, but who still could not join the tribe. Yet he knew that his culture and heritage were bigger than any legalistic parsing of blood quantum. He was an Indian. The Cherokee Freedmen have the right to say the same.

It is no coincidence that all of this is happening on the eve of Cherokee elections being held this weekend. But denying the Freedmen their citizenship, for the short-term political goals of Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith and others, will not change who they are.

if only!

On the Plymouth Belvedere recently unearthed in Tulsa as part of a 50-year time capsule:

the car was interred with 10 gallons of gasoline, in case fuel would be obsolete in 2007

gold farming and the ’smiley curve’

One point that has always puzzled me about the rise of China, and the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas in general, is this: what do Americans actually do anymore? Certainly the United States has suffered in certain areas because of outsourcing, but taken as a whole, it is still the largest economy in the world by a large margin. But we don’t make the products, where does the money come from?

Fortunately, we have James Fallows to explain everything in a fascinating article about China. It’s all about the “smiley curve”:

The curve is named for the U-shaped arc of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product’s creation and sale. At the beginning is the company’s brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design—the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.

The significance is that China’s activity is in the middle stages—manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design—but America’s is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this—that the real money is in brand name, plus retail—may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating.

That makes sense, though to me it was counterintuitive. Transitioning from an industrial economy does involve real loss, but the loss is likely amplified by a psychological bias towards making things and against the more abstract tasks of designing, branding, and retailing.

Much of consumer society is based on fooling ourselves that a brand’s appeal is based on the product itself, and not our preconceived ideas about it as taught by advertising. Instead, as Fallows points out, whichever laptop brand you choose is probably made of the same parts put together in the same factory in China:

I saw a set of high-end Ethernet connecting cables. The cables are sold, with identical specifications but in three different kinds of packaging, in three forms in the United States: as a specialty product, as a house brand in a nationwide office-supply store, and with no brand over eBay. The retail prices are $29.95 for the specialty brand, $19.95 in the chain store, and $15.95 on eBay. The Shenzhen-area company that makes them gets $2 apiece.

For an even stranger example, we have the Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer by Julian Dibbell in the New York Times. All the elements of Chinese factory life described in Fallows story are there, but this time the workers (an estimated 100,000 of them!) are playing the online video game World of Warcraft, killing monsters in 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, to collect digital gold:

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.

Read the whole article for some amazing anecdotes, including the story of a 40-person squad of elite Chinese players working together to escort one paying American through the most difficult dungeons. And you might be surprised at what some of the workers do in their spare time.

Photo by Flickr user Arthaey obtained under a Creative Commons license.

You can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union. But which one?

In a recent episode of Open Source Radio, Ezra Klein outlined the main groups contesting the immigration bill. While restrictionists on the right did the most to bring it down in the Senate, Klein also touched on an interesting dynamic on the left. Unions were divided between the older AFL-CIO, which opposed the bill, and the SEIU, which supported it. The SEIU is a new coalition of unions that broke with the AFL-CIO in 2005, and represents mainly service workers, including many more immigrants than the industrial worker dominated AFL-CIO.  Immigration is upsetting the usual boundaries, at a time when American political parties are polarized on most issues.

I was reminded of this by Andrew Leonard’s post on more efforts by the SEIU to coordinate with the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Globalization is the dominant economic trend, often to the detriment of labor, and an international labor movement seems highly ambitious, unlikely, and yet necessary. But associating with a union that, as the only union allowed in China, also happens to be controlled by the Chinese government, has obvious contradictions. I don’t have anything original to say about it, but as Leonard puts it:

The obstacles to overcome in achieving global labor solidarity are vast. Some on the left call the very idea utopian and unworkable. The rump unions left in the AFL-CIO want nothing to do with the ACFTU, which they feel condones and facilitates slave-laborish exploitation. Sovereign governments and multinational corporations will both look askance at any kind of cross-border challenge to their autonomy.

But there’s a reason why SEIU is the fastest and largest growing union in the United States. And that’s because Andy Stern recognizes the nature of reality. One big union. Somehow, some way.

Of all the many unpredictable changes in a globalized world, this may be one of the most worth watching.

by any other name

One of the most irritating recent tendencies in American politics is the rise of PR-tested catchphrases meant to twist language for partisan ends (“death tax” being the nonpareil example). Now you don’t even need to live in Washington DC to play that game. Witness this statement on the Cherokee Freedmen by Principal Chief Chad Smith:

We have said that this group’s effort to stop the election was a remedy in search of a wrong, as all eligible non-Indian Freedmen citizens of the Cherokee Nation can vote in this election. We’re also pleased that his decision respects our tribal court decisions and the more than 300 non-Indian Freedmen who won a ruling in our tribal court to participate in the June 23 election.

loss

The human tragedy of Iraq continues every day. I see the headlines telling of bombs exploded, soldiers and civilians dead, but I only give them passing notice. I know that every story, while horrific for the loved ones of those killed, will be the same to me, so far removed from the events as I am.

But sometimes a story or an image breaks through. Above is the before and after picture of the al-Askari mosque, destroyed today in an attack that the American military is blaming on Al Qaeda. I won’t turn this into a political comment about what should be done in Iraq. But sometimes we need to be reminded: war doesn’t destroy only lives, though that is bad enough. It devours our culture, our history, our beauty. It tears apart friendships, breaks trust between neighbors, pervades with fear and anger every moment, big and small, that makes up our lives.

It may seem petty compared to the 3,000+ coalition soldiers and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have already died in this war. But the al-Askari mosque was a symbol, of a religion, of a people, of a city. Now it represents only destruction and hate.