The War at Home

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled law enforcement officials in Arizona could ask anyone they stopped to prove their citizenship. The O’Reileys of the world would almost never be asked for their papers. And well, the Riveras? I think we know what they can expect in a state like Arizona, a cross between Alabama and Mississippi on the Immigration Rights battlefront. Romney spokesman Rick Gorka when asked for the campaign’s response to the ruling said in part, “Look, again, I¹ll say it again and again and again for you. The governor understands that states have their own right to craft policies to secure their own borders and to address illegal immigration." In a muddled decision, ironically, the court said the states do NOT have the right to enforce their own immigration policies striking down the rest of the Arizona law. Apparently Gorka wanted to “say again and again” pretty much nothing.  Gorka might have said, “Let me reiterate the candidate’s position—the same guy who called just a few months ago for “self-deportation”-- is opaque and we will work hard to keep it that way.” We can be sure that Arizona police will direct most all of their enquiries to minorities and citizens will face the same inquisition as non-citizens. Yesterday state rights trumped human rights, but hey man, Romney’s trying to become President here.  You can really expect him to talk about that.

Just a week earlier in a game that reminded me of the three card monte players I discovered on 14th Street a few decades back, Romney slid the cards around like the shark he so clearly was at Bain Capital. CBS’ Bob Schieffer asked Romney four times for his response to the Obama plan to allow children of immigrants legal status. On the third try Romney gave this response: “Well, it would be overtaken by events, if you will, by virtue of my putting in place a long-term solution.” Of course Schieffer gave it one more shot, but Romney behind in polls with Hispanics by 40 percentage points, shifted the last card off the table. Give me the $20, a**hole. Game over.

Leaders who choose to conceal their positions during the campaign cannot really be assumed to be leaders and the likelihood of a candidate like that actually breaking the catastrophic stalemate which currently exists in Washington is virtually nil. So we can ascertain, I guess, that Romney supports the posture which endorses the state’s right  to address immigration issues without actually saying he is for the right of police to ask almost anyone they want to prove their citizenship. 

To be fair as an executive order, Obama’s move will have little practical or lasting effect unless he is re-elected.  The criticism on the budget, environmental policy, gay rights, and yes here on immigration policy that he didn’t get a lot done in the first two years when Dems controlled the Senate and the House is about right. All of the capital went into healthcare and it very much looks like the core of that law, individual mandates to buy insurance, will be struck down. If the mandate is gone the rest of legislation becomes problematic from a cost containment standpoint.  The grand bargain was that the mandate would steer a lot more people towards private health insurers and for that they would have do more like allow kids to be on their parents policy and cover pre-existing conditions.

If you’re starting to feel that America is becoming a country with a Constitution that provides few protections to her citizens take heart. Yesterday the Supreme doubled down on Citizens United and eviscerated a Montana law designed to limit corporate control of state elections. While there had been some recent reports in the press that the Court was moving towards revisiting Citizens United, yesterday’s ruling indicated the opposite. There are judicial activists on the court determined to wipe out any semblance of balance between big money and America’s citizens. That’s freedom, right? The attack on campaign finance is true whether enacted legislative at the state or Federal level.  ONLY an Obama election and a potential switch of one of the solid majority of five in favor complete campaign lawlessness (Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito). Scalia and Kennedy are 76, but Thomas just turned 64. It should be noted that Ginsburg is 79 and Breyer is 74, so if Romney is elected the return of robber baron politics could accelerate dramatically by the end of the next presidential term.

At both the Federal and State level small “d” democratic electoral politics is at least for the time being completely confounded by the influence of big money. Open Secrets reports that in the 25 year period from 1989 to 2012, the top 140 donors contributed $2.4 billion to the two political parties. Campaign contributions this year will dwarf that. Shelly Adelson, a Las Vegas Casino potentate has vowed to spend $100 million to further his right wing, anti-union, anti-worker, myopic and dogmatically pro-Israel, agenda. The Koch brothers fresh from spending $8 million to defend anti-Union Wisconsin Governor against recall have also vowed to spend about $100 million. The Koch brothers are ostensibly supporting Republicans, but their real goal is to attack unions, environmental laws which impinge on their rapacious energy companies, and tax policies which will do anything to affect their already vast fortune. How quaint Nixon’s $500,000 slush fund seems now. One imagines today’s big money political gangsters patting Dicky gently on the head, and saying, “How sweet, now you go play over there…”

Middle class conservatives who supported the evisceration of any sort of campaign finance will pay with less workplace protection for them and their children and environmental policies that will affect generations beyond. Liberals who hold out hope that our billionaires are better than theirs are grasping a slim reed and it seems to me, Zuckerburg notwithstanding, willfully ignoring how someone might have accumulated such wealth.

More powerful than Christianity, the Church of Willful Ignorance is America’s looming theology.  Politicians, especially on the right, attack academics and intellectuals, science and discourse, as effete East or West Coast puffery. Real men wield money, I guess. The court has ruled that money deserves the same protection as speech. Romney has called corporations people. If all this is so then democracy is dead.  At every Citizens United turn Americans see their own voices drowned out by the larger and more pungent breath of corporate might. Perhaps we are all too busy surviving to do much else. How and why America and the world became mesmerized, seduced, addicted and attached to the love and admiration of the money as its own end for no purpose or positive societal affect is an ongoing fascination to me. Americans now know that they got hosed by big money. But at no level do they seem to have the spirit to fight it. Money is the reason that while 90% of scientists believe global warming is real, a small cadre of zealots has been able to stymie any action. It’s the reason that reforms on Wall Street are stalled. And it’s the reason that the rather meek Health Care Reform package has been vilified so effectively and will now probably be overturned by the activist Robert’s court.  The corruption of money has tainted the entire American dialogue.

Leave it to Aaron Sorkin to state the obvious results in the opening monologue in the new HBO series “Newsroom”. At a fictional give and take with students at Northwestern University a student asks a panel of news people and political operators to give their reasons as to why America is the “greatest country in the world”. After banality about freedom and liberty from other members of the panel Sorkin gives fictional TV newsman Will McAvoy the following words:

“…And yeah you, sorority girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know. And one of them is there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force and number four in exports.

We lead the world in only three categories. Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined 25 of whom are allies…”

I have always liked Sorkin’s work. I’m a pushover for his troubled, flawed, committed liberal characters. But according to Wikipedia the US rates 49^th in infant mortality and 10^th in literacy, so let’s say Sorkin character may have taken some liberties and the following will not be a totally finite point. I was struck in watching “Newsroom”, however, with the notion that no real person newsperson would ever portray such bitterness or truth. Can it be the only place America can get real truths anymore is from the mouth of fictional characters on TV or Jon Stewart?

Meanwhile, as my friends in Chicago know, gang violence is run amok. On the weekend of March-17 and 18, ten people were murdered including a six year old girl named Aliyah Shell. On the weekend of June-09 and 10 nine people were killed, including 16 year old Joseph Briggs. A stunning 43 were wounded. Last weekend four more were killed including two teenagers, Antonio Davis, 14, and Tyquan Tyler, 13. 30 more were wounded. Chicago is not alone. Capone-style gang violence is a problem in Denver, Indianapolis, and Camden, New Jersey and gangs are at war in virtually every mid or large size city.  Can it be that America has the strength to quit when casualties mount to unsustainable levels as they are in Afghanistan where fatalities are running about 35 per month through June, but not the soul to fight to end violence at home where guns and gangs take far more lives? Trayvon’s murder at the hands of a vigilante neighborhood watchman garnered headlines for a month and dominated every TV News broadcast.  No one seems to care about Aliyah.

While both Obama and Romney posture and position to speak to their base and ease an accommodation with independents, will either strive to expand our dialogue to those among us who hunger or hurt or die every weekend in a hail of nihilistic juvenile bullets? The answer seems to be an almost unquestionable no. I am so sick to death of all it. I have been fascinated with politics since I was a youngster. Before I was even a teenager Bobby and Martin showed that politics could be meaningful, that America was a great country, not always because of who we are, but because of what we wanted to be.  Now I just don’t know.