Category: politics

How Broken Are Our Politics? Will Gen X Save The World?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 9 Comments
Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United ...
Knew something about this.

A good friend engaged me about this via email this week.  I think it’s just about beyond question that our national political structures are utterly, fundamentally broken at the macro level.  A broad survey leaves little to the imagination: special interests, Big Whatever…in too many ways our politicians are not our own and are accountable first to their fundraisers and donors.  There are exceptions.  There are micro-level organizations of integrity, there are good candidates and great public servants.  But the system itself exists for itself in perpetuity.  Don’t believe me?  Try running for Super Congress.

Are our politics broken beyond repair, or can they be fixed according to the rules they’re governed by now?

How anxious are you?  If you’re between 18 and 100, are tech-savvy and engaged, your answer should be very.  If you’re between 30 and, say, 45 (the Upper Cusack Limit), you might also consider the total refusal of anyone to move a sane agenda forward as an unprecedented opportunity to lead.

Babyboomers, heel-graspers that they’ve been, have been uncannily quiet in all of this at the national level.  Sure, they’ve been the public face of so much chicanery since the Clinton Administration, but they’re not seizing any real opportunities to create something new or leave us with much. Barack Obama, young Boomer that he is, out to be the virile head of some great movement.  Alas, there is nothing.  If I’m being fair, and I do want to be fair, Obama has lead on a few key policy issues, but the wither, blister, burn, and peel of support from the progressive base is not news.  It happened for reasons.

We, the USA Network demographic, don’t trust national Republicans or Democrats.  We love the idea of hope and change and progressive causes but we don’t believe in attendant hype or machines. We like the idea of populist movements but have seen them be hijacked by agendas that couldn’t be further from our ideals.

We are displeased.  What to do? (If you’re picturing Billy Zane as an evil tycoon who doesn’t give a shit, good. We’re being taunted, everyday, by people who will never want for anything, people we’ve put in power, many of whom are apathetic at best toward our well-being or future.)

One impulse is to turn local, and I believe that localism, rightly channeled in all of its healthy forms, will go a long way toward changing our communities in radically sustainable ways.  But that won’t happen without you, Generation X.  You who are parents, you who are holding down jobs, paying bills, paying taxes, you great middle class getting screwed.  I’m asking you to do more.  I know, I know.  The good news is that in places like Allentown, PA, and, I imagine, its analogs everywhere, there are indeed many Boomers doing great things and looking for help.  Your vested interest is your children’s future.  Determined as you are to make damned sure the world they inherit is better than the shit-storm left you, you don’t really have much of a choice.  If you’re not already, please get connected.  Please make a difference.  Please build communities.

But we haven’t forgotten about you, Great National Mess. You are Das Nichtige, the unchosen nothing, the aggregate mass of political sin, of omission, of shirking, of all that is wrong with our government, our economy, our budget, our laws. You are our misplaced priorities. Your time is over, we cannot sustain you, but your enablers have said that you’re too big to fail, too big to move.

But you’re not.  We know your coordinates. You thrive at the intersection of political parties and the military industrial complex.  George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, two Citizen-Generals, warned us of you, but we were too busy moving west, killing Indians, too busy moving west, building suburbs, to listen.  We’re listening now.  We won’t support your national campaigns or your friends in Big Anything.  We don’t want Monsanto or Super Congress.  We don’t want your labels, your symbols, your platforms.  We want clean water, clean air, and safe food. We want safety nets and renewable energy.  Sustainability is our ideology, our children are our constituents, and our political leaders will answer to us.

And who will they be if not us?

Push For Cleaner, More Efficient Cars Now (60 mpg, get ready for your close-up)

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

A piece I co-wrote with Megan Fitzpatrick from PennEnvironment is in today’s Allentown Morning Call.   The essay is not featured on the Call‘s website, so I’ll paste the most recent version I have (may differ from what was ultimately printed in editorial details) and share some pictures of the hard copy here:

With the summer vacation season in full swing, many Pennsylvanians find themselves longing to be outside enjoying everything the state has to offer. Memories of summers gone by are vivid as we daydream about upcoming getaways – to the mountains or shore, to IronPigs or Phillies baseball games, to visit family and friends, or even as we look forward to weekend activities.

Unfortunately, great memories and hopeful plans will be as far as some of us get. Feeling the hurt of high gas prices, unemployment, and the still-sluggish economy, many families have decided to scale down their summer vacation plans or opt for “stay-vacations.” But due to increasingly bad air quality and high gas prices, even our stay-vacations and local excursions may be sabotaged.

The people of Pennsylvania have had enough of the dire consequences of our continued dependence on oil. We’ve had enough of the price spikes, the air pollution, the catastrophic oil spills, and the global warming pollution that threaten our economy, our environment and our public health. And now, our oil dependence is even jeopardizing something as basic as the ability to enjoy our outdoor resources this summer.

Just two weeks ago, both South Mountain and Blue Mountain disappeared from sight on an Air Quality Action Day, blocked by a haze of ground-level ozone. The temporary absence of the Lehigh Valley’s defining physical features reminds us that we need to take bold steps towards cleaning up our air by cleaning up our cars and changing our transportation habits.

The longer we stay addicted to oil and the longer we fail to utilize opportunities offered by ride-sharing and transit, the worse these problems will get. The time has come to take bold national steps toward oil independence. Simply put, we can, and must, harness American ingenuity in the production of cars and trucks that will get us further on one gallon of gas.

PennEnvironment recently released a report that found that the average Pennsylvania family could save $452 in one summer if our cars and trucks met a standard of 60 miles per gallon—a standard that the Department of Transportation and EPA have deemed within our reach by 2025. While Pennsylvanians are expected to spend more than $4.8 billion at the gas pump this summer, meeting a 60 mpg standard would save over half that, while reducing oil consumption by 600 million gallons and cutting dangerous carbon dioxide pollution by 6 million metric tons.

We know that we can harness American ingenuity and use existing technology to make our cars and trucks much cleaner and more fuel efficient. Just this week, we were pleased to learn that higher demand for Mack’s line of near-zero emission trucks is expected to bring more jobs to the Lehigh Valley this summer. Additionally, over the next three years, more than a dozen electric vehicle models will be mass-produced in the United States. These new cars offer superior automotive performance while consuming no oil on most trips and producing no tailpipe pollution. And, these rides can be operated for less than three pennies per mile.


Recognizing that we have the technology to break our oil dependence, the Obama administration set standards for new cars and trucks built between 2012 and 2016 that will save billions of gallons of fuel. This, too, was an excellent start, but more must be done. The standards the administration is now developing for cars sold between 2017 and 2025 offer an excellent opportunity to do just that.

President Obama should move clean cars into the fast lane by issuing standards that ensure that the average new car and light truck meet a standard of 60 miles per gallon by 2025. He has every reason to do so—not only will it benefit Pennsylvanians at the pump, but it will protect our health and environment.
Americans work hard and deserve stable access to affordable transportation and a healthy natural environment. The Obama administration should push ahead with clean car standards that will make these benefits a reality. We’ll all be richer, and breathe easier, for it.

Megan Fitzpatrick is the Federal Field Associate with PennEnvironment, a citizen-based, non-profit environmental advocacy organization.

Chris Cocca is the Outreach Director for the Air Quality Partnership of Lehigh Valley-Berks, a public/private coalition of volunteers dedicated to improving air quality in Lehigh, Northampton, and Berks Counties.

Does SteelStacks Have Its Head in the Sands?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 9 Comments
Bethlehem Steel
Image by Marty.FM via Flickr

Yes. Yes it does.

The skinny:

Once upon a time, Bethlehem Steel built something called America.  It also won some wars. Later, Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt and a lot of people got screwed. Around here, this is no footnote to the decline of American industry.  This is the whole sordid tale writ large in the Steel’s iconic blast furnaces, now owned by Las Vegas Sands, who also owns and operates Bethlehem’s Sands Casino on the former Bethlehem Steel grounds.

The blast furnaces are one of the biggest unprotected pieces of American history I can think of.  The feds don’t own them, nor does the Commonwealth nor some historical society or the city itself.  They’re owned by the casino corporation and not the people.  As such, they’ve been a big bargaining chip for the Sands.

We’ll give you access to your precious furnaces.

If.

If what, exactly?

The usual.  You’ll see. 

Being the very picture of corporate beneficence, the Sands sold land to the Bethlehem Redevelopment Authority (that’s another way of saying “the people,” or “the public,” isn’t it?) for $1 so the city could develop its plans for an arts and cultural center.  That arts and cultural center, SteelStacks, continues to come to fruition.

But here’s the catch, reported by the Allentown Morning Call: Under the terms of the $1 sale, public fomenting of anything disagreeable to the casino is not permitted, including, say, labor rallies and public debate about the efficacy of casinos as economic incubators (or dire social externalities).  From the Morning Call piece:

In the 15-page deed signed last week, the Redevelopment Authority agreed that labor unions can’t organize on the property. There also can’t be activities that would promote “a theme” that a “reasonable casino operator” would consider “offensive.”

Similar restrictions were written into the deals with nonprofits ArtsQuest and PBS39 for their properties at SteelStacks.

According to the Call, PBS39 (the P stands for “public”) has said their deal will not interfere with  programming and editorial choices.  That sounds like shorthand for “we’ve got an army of lawyers and a ton of cash you don’t know about,” which, of course, they don’t.  I wonder who at the Sands has the job of monitoring 39’s broadcasts?  Do they get nervous when Bruce Springsteen concerts from the 70’s run in the wee hours of the night during pledge campaigns?

As the Call points out, any talk of unionizing the Sands workers is prohibited on SteelStacks grounds by the terms of the casino’s “generous donation.”   My, how history repeats.  Just over a hundred years ago, labor toiled under management with similar attitudes and political muscle on this very spot.  This isn’t ironic, friends.  It’s Orwellian.

I should point out that many people blame part of the Steel’s downfall on the eventual excesses of power-hungry union heads. This narrative has been applied across all sectors of American industry and with reason. But it’s also the case that before the unions came, the hands that built America had no protection, no voice, and no organizing strength. The same is true for the casino’s workforce on these grounds even now.  And if you’re inclined to believe, as the numbers show, that casinos in low-income areas like South Bethlehem do more economic harm than good to people on the margins, this is all the more egregious.

Give us your tired and your poor so we can bilk them.  

Give us your jobless so we can bilk them, too.  

Give us your free-speech so we don’t scrap your history.

In the freest country in the world, what kind of choice is that?

Is This War Preemptive? Is Libya Sovereign? Do Words Mean Things?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

I think this is a fantastic assessment of President Obama’s basis of preemption in Libya.  It calls everyone out on the carpet and ends with this:

And for those Democrats who are either cheering on or grimly supporting the president’s actions…there’s a reason why the biggest fans of last night’s speech were hawks like William Kristol: If you didn’t like Iraq, you really won’t like Iran. And when that day comes, please don’t debase yourselves by crying crocodile tears over the Constitution, or pretending for even one second you are anti-war.

My only real point of contention with writer Matt Welch comes from this graph, in which he makes an important mistake:

Set aside the administration’s ever-elastic definition of “interests,” and instead grok this: The Democratic foreign policy best and brightest have admittedly adopted as their causus belli for dropping bombs on a sovereign country the same test that former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used for pornography: They know it when they see it. As for the rest of us taxpaying, war-weary plebes, we’ll receive an “update” from the president now and then to let us know where his own eyes have taken him next.

I agree that the president’s definition of “interests” is ever-elastic. I like that Welch used the word grok. I admire the Stewart analogy, although for some reason I thought O.W.Holmes owned the quote.  The last sentence would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

But the Gaddafi regime is not sovereign. When you murder you own people, you lose whatever tenuous grasp on those straws you ever managed to muster.  The Libyan people are sovereign.  Their idea of Libya is sovereign.  The reigning government is not.  But what does it mean to say that a people are sovereign if they’re not also free? If protests are met with bullets? If that popular sovereignty cannot be expressed. The truth is that we don’t know what set of priorities the sovereign people of Libya would choose for themselves if given the chance (apart from deposing Gaddafi).  That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the rights of self-determination. They deserve it and they deserve the support of free peoples.  But I continue to question the degree to which the Obama doctrine really supports the people of Libya. Yes, preventing a massacre of a civilians provisionally registers as a just casus belli, but Welch is right: people who based their opposition to Iraq on the previously unprecedented doctrine of preemption who don’t see the Libyan engagement as a preemptive war are kidding themselves.  This is a war, and it is a preemptive one.  I am wont to say that the disagreeable means justify the ends of preventing a civilian massacre, even as I’m wont to say that no one except committed pacifists would now oppose preemption in Iraq if WMDs addressed to the US had ever been found there.

Good God, what a mess.  And now there are reports coming from a Vatican official that US NATO bombs have killed 40 Libyan civilians.  Remember that line in the president’s speech about the Libyan civilians coming to the aid the American rescue team that came for the pilots of the grounded F-15?  For the first time ever, I have started to believe that Barack Obama has bigger brass ones than Bill Clinton, because guess what?  Our guys mistakenly shot six of those helpful, peaceful, friends. One was a kid.  No one died, but the boy might lose his leg.  Is this the acceptable collateral damage of “kinetic military involvement,” or is this the basic stupidity behind all wars and behind all acts of aggression?

Getting back to my original point:  Libya, the nation, is sovereign and is without a legitimate government.  That vacuum is dangerous, provisional, and fraught with hardship.  But it doesn’t cede Libyan sovereignty to NATO, the West, the US, or Barack Obama.  We’ve seen that play out here before.  It doesn’t end well.  As commenter SingleMaltMonkey said here on a recent post, none of this ends until we stop selling arms, until we get serious about dialog. Until we don’t brazenly assert our right to stop humanitarian crises when they’re happening in countries who’s fate is somehow fundamentally aligned with our “interests and values.” (Ed. note: the following sentence is added to clarify SMS’s position and what I’m adding to it as per our discussion in the comments below). To that, I’d add: until we stop saying we’re justified in intervening to protect civilians because our national interests and values are also at stake.  I mean, what the hell does that even mean?  It’s in our interest to stop humanitarian crisis everywhere, isn’t it, because that’s what people with souls want to do.  But when we say “yes, we can get kinetic on this one because, oh happy day, we can justify intervention by some vague appeal to natural law and universal rights and happy unicorns, and, um, also our (bwa ha ha ha) interests,” we sound like the opportunistic douches the most extreme haters say we are.   I guess that’s why John McCain and others are saying that regime change has to be our ultimate military priority like it was with Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I guess that’s why attacking military installations, sending the CIA, and hoping that the regime in Tripoli just says uncle strikes so many as the worst combination of a bunch of ways forward.

To recap:

  • This is a preemptive war.
  • War probably doesn’t really help the net good of Libya or the planet.
  • But Libya’s already in a war, and civilians should be protected by powers that can protect them.
  • By attacking his own people, Gadaffi has formerly ceded power. That power sits in a vacuum, and that’s cause for bot concern and hope. And that makes everyone uncomfortable.
  • This power does not belong to the US or any outside force.  It belongs to the Libyan people.  But ff the Libyan people are left unprotected, they might be massacred, even those who don’t pick up any arms to fight Gadaffi.
  • We feel like we should do something, but we can’t call it war or preemption because those are things George Bush does.  We are not George Bush.
  • So we call war “kinetic military action” and we say that the massacre of civilians is always bad, but it’s only bad enough to stop when our other interests are also at stake.
  • We sound like assholes.
  • We kill and maim civilians.
  • This all gets very ugly.

Does the humanitarian crisis end if Gadaffi isn’t deposed?  Does deposing Gadaffi ourselves line up with our humanitarian military mission?  Is a humanitarian military mission a contradiction in terms?  Does deposing Gadaffi ourselves ice the so-called Arab Spring?

Oh, and in case you missed it: this preemptive war just accidentally killed 13 rebels.

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Corbett Throws Rendell Under Rendell’s Own Bus, Bus Breaks, Corbett Sells It

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell at the Broad ...
I'm always shovel-ready.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett seems to have it wrong re: former Gov. Ed Rendell’s use of federal funding.  Line of the article: “I don’t see how education is shovel-ready.”  Yeah, a shovel is exactly what we need. I’m on record as not being the biggest fan of Fast Eddie (that is to say, I make fun of him on this blog every now and then), but Corbett is way off here.  Never mind the fact that funding transportation over education seems like a good idea to precisely no one besides Corbett: Eddie says he spent the money the way he was supposed to.  Rendell,  always too enthusiastically himself to rise to national office, appears nuanced and genteel this context.  It’s a day early for that, so I’m thoroughly confused.

In case you’re wondering, yes, Corbett really is selling Rendell’s bus, Commonwealth One (which doesn’t even run), as is.  Awesome.  Hey Tom, let’s not convince some energy company to trick it out with hybrid technology for free as a way of promoting Pennsylvania as a green-teach state committed to reducing emissions.  Let’s not do that.

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An Open Letter to the President on Libya, etc.

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments
Joseph Campbell
I look like the guy from Fringe, but I'm really Joseph Campbell. I totally called this.

Dear Mr. President,

This is the part of your hero’s journey where you’re tempted to refuse the return.  Having ascended to the greatest height of political power our planet offers, you have been expected for some time to bring the boon back from the heavens and bestow it upon the world, or at least upon your ideological fellows.  As you’re fond of saying, elections have consequences.

You have done some of this.  But in matters of war, of geopolitics, of, say, Guantanamo Bay, you have not. (There are some 70 fewer detainees at Guantanamo under the current administration, and Obama has reserved the right to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial. The Bush Administration released some 500 detainees itself, leaving 242, compared to Mr. Obama’s remaining 172. Yes, you can read that to say that George Bush release 10x as many Guantanamo detainees as has the man who made promising to close the facility and axiomatic plank in his election platform.)  Some might say, sir, that you are keeping the boon.

This brings me to Libya, where the complaint from many has been that U.S. air-strikes there, and our larger assumed role, smack of Bush Era (that is, like, so0000 three years ago) policy.  On Monday night, you tried to diffuse that.

You said, if I may paraphrase:

  • Some nations may turn a blind eye toward looming humanitarian crisis, but the United States is different. (American exceptionalism on Line one, sir.)
  • We are engaging in military action in Libya to prevent a humanitarian crisis.
  • We are protecting innocent civilians from the brutality of their own government.
  • We are preemptively ensuring that the likely exodus of destabilizing refugees into Tunisia and Egypt won’t happen. (Preemption on Line 2.)
  • We are not fighting on the rebels’ behalf.
  • Our goal is not regime change.
  • Our military action is focused on preventing a humanitarian crisis, but our larger interests (and our role in Libya’s future) is open-ended.  Because:
  • Our military goal is short and concise, but our long-term geopolitical, nay, geosocial goal is nation-building. (Campaign rhetoric denouncing nation-building is lighting the hell up on Line 3, Mr. President).
  • But remember, our military goal is not regime change.
  • But our larger, peaceful, goal, once regime change happens, is nation-building.
  • We have a duty (and an implied right) to do this.
  • We, the Administration, is really afraid of the phrase “regime-change.”  Except freaking Hillary.  Biden thinks it’s about the revolving cast of former popstars endorsing ProActiv.

Because you’re Barack Obama, I need to say something about your delivery.  The speech was clear in small pieces, but lacked the uniting coherence that got you elected (probably because it lacked all of the ideology that got you elected). At times, you seemed overly defensive.  Clintonian.  Which makes sense, given that I can’t be alone in thinking this is Hillary’s Kosovo.

What you need to do now:

Convince us that everything going on in the Middle East and North Africa will not end with yet another summit of rich Western nations drawing lines on maps.  We’ve been there before, sir, (see, if you’re Woodrow Wilson, nationalism and self-determination are all well and good for anyone north of the Mediterranean) and it, more than freedom, is why proponents of Arab nationalism and Islamism so often define themselves against a what they see as a recalcitrant, oppressive, evil West.

You’re on quite a tight rope.  Of course we can’t stand idly by while people are slaughtered by their governments, but shit, Mr. President, doesn’t it feel awful opportunistic to say that we’ll go ahead and spend our troops and treasure when there’s a humanitarian crisis that just so happens to also involve American (and let’s not forget NATO) interests?  Doesn’t that sound like so much bullshit?  Doesn’t that sound like imperialism?  What you’ve said, in effect, is that you won’t wait to see images of carnage before we act (asterisk) when there’s a clear and compelling national interest in stopping that carnage.  It’s like we’ve forgotten about the oil in Sudan, and that it goes, of all places, to China.  But yes, let’s secure Italy’s, France’s, and Spain’s Libyan reserves post haste, Mr. President.  This is alliance at its finest.

Mr. Obama, I don’t envy your job. I don’t envy your responsibilities. But I do have to live with the consequences of how you choose to execute your duties.  There’s that word again, consequences.  The consequences of your administration seem to be a muddled, confused, engagement against a regime that has, by any standard, forfeited its already-tenuous right to rule.  I understand that you don’t want to seem eager to orchestrate Gaddafi’s ouster (Ms. Clinton on Line 4, sir), and I respect that.  You’ve also said things like “Gaddafi must go”, but you announced yesterday that you’re not ready, yet, to call for negotiations that would send him packing.  That’s a little too cautious given that we’re already bombing him, don’t you think?  Actually, that’s the whole problem: you have to be overly cautious about calling for regime change precisely because we’re bombing him, don’t you?

What a mess.  Suspicion of chemical weapons in Libya is on Line 5.  There’s a G.W. Bush on Line 6, and he’s ready to help with your next crack at this.

Does President Obama Need a New Producer?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments
Wag the Dog
No, you're the greatest actor of our generation. No, YOU are! And then Bill Clinton's all like, heh guys, 'member me? I'm like the Pete Rose of disbelief suspension. Settle down.

Remember all those things we realized too late that we should have done before engaging Iraq in 2003?  John Boehner does, and he’s pretty sure the President doesn’t.  From CNN:

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, sent a letter to Obama Wednesday complaining that “military resources were committed to war without clearly defining for the American people, the Congress, and our troops what the mission in Libya is and what America’s role is in achieving that mission.”

“In fact,” Boehner said, “the limited, sometimes contradictory, case made to the American people by members of your administration has left some fundamental questions about our engagement unanswered.”

Among other things, Boehner asked whether it is acceptable for Gadhafi to remain in power once the military campaign ends.

“If not, how will he be removed from power?” Boehner asked. “Why would the U.S. commit American resources to enforcing a U.N. resolution that is inconsistent with our stated policy goals and national interests?”

Boehner also posed other questions for the president. Since the “stated U.S. policy goal is removing” Gadhafi from power, “do you have an engagement strategy for the opposition forces? If the strife in Libya becomes a protracted conflict, what are your administration’s objectives for engaging with opposition forces, and what standards must a new regime meet to be recognized by our government?” his letter said.

Another piece on CNN.com has John P. Avlon proposing that the Left feels as though the world  is experiencing a third Bush term.  An interesting excerpt:

An objective assessment of the Obama record on foreign policy shows that he has not been the soft liberal ideologue that conservatives want to run against. An excellent book by my Daily Beast colleague Stephen Carter, “The Violence of Peace,” analyzes Obama’s War Doctrine at length from a legal, but readable, perspective. Carter writes, “On matters of national security, at least, the Oval Office evidently changes the outlook of its occupant far more than the occupant changes the outlook of the Oval Office.”

While Obama has changed the unilateral style of the Bush administration, he’s kept much of the substance. He has drawn down troops in Iraq, as promised. But on many other fronts, he has found that campaign rhetoric often does not square with the responsibilities of governing.

Because many on the left define themselves in opposition to authority, they are historically quick to turn on presidents of their own party for being insufficiently liberal — whether it is Truman’s and Kennedy’s Cold Warrior enthusiasm, LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter’s budget cuts or Bill Clinton’s welfare reform.

Frankly, I’m surprised that no one has brought up the fact that Clinton’s 1999 airstrikes in Kosovo were basically lifted directly from Wag the Dog.