My Ripple of Hope

On June 9^th, two significant events happened in my life. First, I was elected to one of two Readfield [Maine] Select Board seats in a contested four-way race with a 66% voter mandate. Second, I only learned about the first outcome after being wheeled back from an MRI to Maine General’s emergency room in Augusta.

That Tuesday, I hoped I would win my election and also be joined by a fellow winning candidate dedicated to good governance for our town. However, at around 5:00 PM while working at home I collapsed with a grand mal seizure of which I have no memory. I vaguely recall two valiant 911 emergency responders calmly assisting me in my first ever ambulance ride. I was very fortunate that my wife, Barbara, was home and took action to secure vital assistance in what could only have been frantic and frightening moments.

I had no history of seizures. What followed were ten days that included emergency room care, blood tests, a CT scan, MRIs, doctor calls, an EEG, neurology consults, a spinal tap, anti-seizure medication, eventual hospitalization, and most concerning to any of us – the unknown. All signs pointed to a tumor and there were disconcerting matter-of-fact discussions about such an outcome. My father passed away many years ago of an inoperable brain tumor at an age not much older than mine. Needless to say my emotions were a roller coaster of fear and fate.

Finally, I was called to a hastily scheduled meeting with neurosurgeon in Portland. His reading of my MRIs led him to believe that I did not have a tumor but instead, a "venus sinus thrombosis." He theorized I had a blood clot in my brain that caused the seizure. He immediately admitted me to Maine Medical Center to have a more specific MRI in order to prove the clot and begin needed therapy.

On Friday, June 19^th, we had the answer that the neurosurgeon had it right. With great relief, he did not "have to go in" and a biopsy or brain surgery was not going to be my next challenge. The plan now is blood thinning to gradually dissolve the clot under the guidance of a specialty clinic in Augusta. I can see the pathway back to good health over the next several months. Most rewarding is the fact that all of this will not affect my ability to serve on Readfield’s Select Board.

I now appreciate with new eyes the concern and support of my friends, family, co-workers, the Readfield community, the emergency responders, the many medical professionals, and very especially my wife Barbara who kept my spirits strong and outlook positive during the past few weeks. Fortunately the journey was not without stress relieving lighter moments too. In one instance I received a letter from the office of the Maine Secretary of State which I assumed must contain some sort of congratulatory certification of my election. To the contrary, it contained a form letter advising me of the suspension of my driver’s license pending a seizure free period of recovery.

This entire event appears to be ending on a positive note. I know now what I face and what will need to be done to achieve good health in a relatively short period of time. But as I traveled this journey, I also discovered there are many other people with great courage facing steeper odds, far more serious outcomes, less support, and difficult financial stress. There are also many people who unselfishly offer encouragement, volunteer support, or undertake challenging careers to help others. Because of all these people, I’ll go on to serve on my town with greater aspiration to in some small way contribute to a challenge of Robert F. Kennedy’s that I have always cherished: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope... build(ing) a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

A shorter version of this column, "The good and bad of a red-letter day," was published in the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel on August 3, 2015. 

Happy Thanksgiving; Now Get Back to Being Poor

They come in a line; we dish out the holiday meal. They are far away; we mail them nice care packages. They are alone; we warmly gather them together.

We are generous in our efforts to ensure the downtrodden have a happy holiday. Our senses of goodness and rightness prevail; our own bounty pricks our conscience and stirs our sentimentality. Thus we share.

However these acts are for today, the holiday. As sincere as we may be the core outcome is starkly direct, "Happy holiday today but tomorrow get back to being poor."

This is not a condemnation of our individual generosity. This is not meant to criticize the spiritual or ethical impulses that drive our holiday benevolence. It is to prompt asking the greater questions.

Why do we condone throughout the long year of many hundreds of days the exclusion of the gifts that we so willingly and with moral concern bestow on a single day? Why is our eradication of the most visible outward conditions of poverty by alleviating hunger, satisfying small needs and sharing joys, sharing warmth and fellowship, and the extension of care limited to a handful of hours?

We only give so much, individually.

Our cares are individual and expressed through our volunteer organizations in these holiday efforts. And these generous actions are inherently good. And these resource strapped organizations that express our individual benevolence toil throughout many of the other year’s days to address the needs of the poor are also good. But our greatest organization at our disposal, the organizing fabric of our society that is under our collective control, our political and economic system is not bent toward the eradication of poverty.

Eradicating poverty in this nation is not complicated but it is a real choice we make about how we command our national resources and wealth. We have chosen one path that is ineffectual at best or negligent at worse and now it remains to be seen if we will ever gather the courage to chose to control of our collective destiny so we can say, “Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, everyday.

Affirmation, Aspiration, Articulation, and Application

We lost. Yes, there are some bright spots and bright leaders saved or on the horizon. But we lost.

This sounds like a bitter reality pill that we are forced to swallow but silently not accepting it or seeking excuses for it will lead to continued rejection. Redefining this moment as an opportunity seems perhaps trite but this is a time for an opening to be seized to renew our Democratic Party in order to serve people with a vision for a prospective future that they will desire, support, and protect.

We need to adopt a plan to build an affirmation of aspiration with articulation yielding application.

We must not be tempted to merely position the party on whim or poll or to craftily market ourselves to the electorate, but rather to know ourselves so we can build trust with citizens and offer them effective solutions to real challenges, based on moral assurances that help all of us meet higher objectives. We need to search for what our vision is in governance both pragmatic and moral, agree on the broad brush stokes philosophically, and then employ effective constant communication to build alliances and especially obtain individual allegiances to not just win elections but mandates of ongoing actions.

Affirmation of our fundamental beliefs is vital to ensuring that we have identified the essential ingredients of both the moral positions and pragmatic governance principles we value. It is essential that our core values are an expression of our deepest vision and not a whimsical reaction to polls, politicians, or perceived popularity.

Aspiration is what we need to shape from our core beliefs. We can only say “no” today to Republican rule with authority if we reject taking over their tactics of obstruction and division.  It may have the potential to yield electoral success fleetingly but it is a cynical strategy that contributes nothing to the common good. We can do better; we will say “no” because we aspire to a finer alternative that we must define completely that we make accessible.

Articulation of our message is critical to connect to citizens and is of far greater vital consequence to earn their trust. We must not solely wallow in the mechanics of communications but pay large attention to the message. We have to express our aspirations as the best possible, well thought out, and pragmatic but visionary alternative vision of governance. We must express beliefs that can be believed in, not puffery performed for the present.

Application of our principles is our ultimate goal.  We must not seek mere reactive moments of affiliation with us in the voting booth but build a foundation to elect and reelect individuals that articulate solid common aspirational goals. We must seek voter affiliation for the long term to ultimately govern well with trust to achieve worthy objectives. We must invest the time and energy to earn it.

Democrats form the party that looks forward; let’s move forward.

Life in the Circuses

I came to political consciousness under a tea party governorship. A shoot from the hip talker, tax axing - cut ‘n slash ‘guvmint’, state’s rights advocate, right wing constitutionalist misconstruing, shut the liberal whiners up, self-described successful businessman, welfare-baitin' chicken hawk, and legend in his own mind chief executive who ruled the state by anti-tax rhetoric and veto threats.

Paul LePage in 2014? Not quite; I’m speaking of LePage’s most likely and unknown to him role model, Meldrim Thomson, Jr., chief executive of next door New Hampshire from 1973 to 1979.

Mel Thomson won a three way race for Governor in 1972 with 41% of the vote after wresting the Republican nomination from a moderate sitting Governor, Walter Peterson. He defeated Democrat Roger Crowley who took 39% of the vote and a moderate independent, Malcolm McLane, who picked up 19% mostly to Crowley’s detriment. "Thanks to McLane, I'm governor," Mel told a reporter after the election. There's a similar line that could be uttered in 2014 if  people vote for an independent spoiler without prospects of victory in our upcoming election.

Like LePage, the new Governor did not waste anytime alienating the state legislature, paralyzing the governing process, and grounding the ship of state on the sand bars of senselessness. He acted as a bully and barred every sensible tax model the state needed. Conservatives today, especially in neighboring states, laud his legacy of no New Hampshire sales and income taxes. But of course these neighbors only see the walls; I got to live inside. Yes, we lived "free" and died "free" without sales or income taxes. But we paid enormous property taxes, fees galore, and lacked reasonable basic services. In fact, one plus of our move to Maine in the 1980’s was gaining access to public Kindergarten which we fought and fought for unsuccessfully in New Hampshire.

Mel could not idly abide the alienation and paralysis he created that exposed his inability to govern. So he made himself into the ringmaster in a circus of distractions. Like the tea party of today, Thomson said he was stuck in the current century but his philosophy was that of the 1700’s. And since he refused to govern with the legislature, he decided he would engage in antics, right wing symbols, and bully brutishness.

So our license plates got “Live Free or Die” stamped on them in lieu of “Scenic” by inmates at the state prison. Social issues got going. The previously abolished death penalty got signed back into law with Mel quipping that he felt like John Hancock when he affixed his signature, apparently equating signing the Declaration of Independence with execution by the state.

Our flags furiously went up and down for every conservative whim of Mel’s. We dropped the state building flags by executive order to half mast on Good Fridays, to protest the exclusion of Taiwanese athletes to the Olympics, to mourn the granting of amnesty by President Carter to those who objected to Vietnam and choose not to fight, the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, recognition of mainland China, and so on. He banned the use of “Ms.” By state employees. He called a news conference to publicly purchase Gallo wine during a boycott of it called by the United Farm Workers. He constantly referred to the deceased Martin Luther King as a “commie” and attacked UN ambassador Andrew Young as a one world fanatic.

Mel played intimidation politics too. He searched the tax records and the files of the New England Organized Crime Intelligence System for information about his political opponents; the latter he said was to test the system’s security. He pulled up a Massachusetts driver with his state limo for giving him the finger. Mel urged Nantucket to succeed from the Bay State and join New Hampshire as well as fomenting a so called “Lobster War” with Maine. As a tough on crime guy, he blocked federal money for New Hampshire Legal Assistance; tough on crime apparently meaning tough on due process.

Unlike LePage thus far, Thomson even went on to prance on the international stage. He toured apartheid South Africa and praised its white leadership and described Soweto as “just wonderful” and lauded the country’s “free elections” despite being only available to whites.

Vetoes were common, including an early one that would have helped the state hospital regain accreditation. Those at the margins of society did not gain his sympathy. He often spoke ill of those that needed government assistance. This tendency toward divisiveness is a common trait we see bursting forth in Paul LePage's tenure as Governor.

Never serving in the military, he was a typical chicken hawk, belligerent in his attitude toward communist nations. He suggested that the NH National Guard be given tactical nuclear weapons. Clownishly dressed in fatigues he showed up at a massive protest of the Clamshell Alliance at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant and had 1,414 protesters arrested and incarcerated at great state expense. He even needlessly deployed the National Guard when Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman spoke at UNH.

Mel’s damaging legacy lives on. All statewide politicians are forced to “take the pledge” against sales and income taxes. But you can load up on state sold liquor and pay a $2.00 toll for the privilege of traveling the 14 miles of I-95 in the state on your way to Boston. The Mel Thomson years did not give us a better life. We got his hollow promise of low taxes that were really only no state broad based taxes but regressive property taxes, in exchange for low living and low services. His son, Thom Thomson, is a big tea party organizer in New Hampshire today reminding all that his father’s motto of "Low taxes are the result of low spending".

Mel Thomson did not govern and neither has Paul LePage whose current catalog of head games, lies, and malarkey is well documented. Thomson paralyzed the state for three two-year terms and today LePage has held Maine back for four years. With each of these bad actors as Governor, we've gotten form not function; we've suffered symbols, and we have been denied substance. Let’s not deepen the damage already recorded in Maine by reelecting our Thompson-like, shoot from the hip talker, tax axing - cut ‘n slash ‘guvmint’, state’s rights advocate, right wing constitutionalist misconstruing, shut the liberal whiners up, self-described successful businessman, welfare baitin', chicken hawk, and legend in his own mind, Paul LePage.

Bruce Poliquin, Claim Creator

One of Bruce Poliquin’s claims in his run for Congress as noted on his latest website incarnation is that he has 35 years of experience in the private sector creating jobs. Since the GOP and all voters like accountability and since Poliquin is a numbers guy, it seems appropriate for all of us to have his job creation claim out in the public sphere for a hard numbers honest review. The last thing Maine needs to send to Congress is a smoke and mirrors overrated, self-inflated accountant, without the proven track record that person claims. A look at Mr. Poliquin’s career should at least help expose the potential for job creation claims by him.

Right out of college in 1976 he joined Harris Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago, working in the employee benefits area. The banking job’s work in the employee benefits area sounds like one of technical paper pushing related to existing jobs and not one of bold vision and responsibility for staff expansion. Maybe he gave new employees their benefit package orientation thus touching the magic of job creation. Anyhow, Poliquin only stayed 2 years, which if one thinks about it, did sort of create one job for someone else when he jumped ship.

He showed up next at Evaluation Associates, Inc. in Westport, Connecticut for what appears to be 3 years in that pension fund consulting firm that basically peddled Wall Street advice. Poliquin’s only likely defensive response might be that he helped advise funds to place their pension money of people eventually leaving employment into robust job creation machines. That being so, he should be able to put a number to it unless it’s similar to his fellow Wall Streeter Mitt Romney’s record whom he endorsed in 2012. So perhaps Poliquin is using the good old Bain Capital unverified approach to job creation through cost (job) cutting for shareholder profits to be reinvested in further job creation through cost (job) cutting hedge and money funds. At any rate, none of this play money was his “job creation” investment to risk.

In 1981 he became a principal partner in the investment management firm Avatar Investors Associates Corporation in New York. This was where the big bucks were and likely where Poliquin solidified his arrival in the 1% and when he left the firm after 15 years it is claimed by him that it managed nearly $5 billion of pension, endowment, and foundation assets. There is a lack of online information about Avatar or the claim of $5 billion under management but it known that it was acquired by Overture Asset Managers in 2003 with $1.5 billion being managed by it. Again, the claim to Poliquin’s significant job creation results is likely to be very elusive at Avatar.

But he did make his nickel and came home in 1996 to play with his money or as he might tell it, invest in job creation for Maine. In his 2010 failed GOP gubernatorial nomination bid his offered biography included the statement “I have started, invested in, and managed a number of businesses that have provided hundreds of jobs for Maine workers” presumingly during his previous 14 years as a state resident. Pine Tree Watchdog a publication of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting questioned Poliquin’s claim at that time and reported:

“After initially agreeing to supply the Center with corroborating material, on a second call, a Poliquin staff member said the campaign would not respond to the Center’s questions, citing objections to its previous stories on the gubernatorial campaign.”

Poliquin was also the sole owner and financier of Dirigo Holdings which has been involved in two ventures. It aimed to develop a 69 unit condominium in Phippsburg known as Popham Woods Condominiums and also marketing membership the nearby Popham Beach Club. Both have been controversial both in town and involved concerns that he had potential conflicts of interest when he served in the Constitutional Office of State Treasurer which barred him from commercial activities. Phippsburg, just for reference, is in Maine’s First Congressional District. So getting to the bottom of his job creation claim of “hundreds of jobs for Maine workers” remains elusive. While construction certainly results in temporary jobs and does contribute to the economy, it would be a stretch connecting this type of development to a sustained hard number job growth outcome for the state of the type of image he would like to project.

While he was State Treasurer, Poliquin was definitely not in a job creation role. In fact, a number of statements that he made about doing more with less state employees probably indicate that whatever back of the envelope number he can scratch up for job creation in Maine was negated by the loss of state jobs under the first two years of the LePage administration which he cheered on and on. Likely Poliquin supporters will say this is comparing apples and oranges but when it comes to job creation or job reductions, it seems that Bruce Poliquin in either private or public roles has merely been a sideline incidental walk on actor and not a mean, lean, job creation machine.

Finally in his failed Senate nomination bid, he kept the idea of his being a “job creator” alive. We can expect that maybe a couple of cut and paste jobs from that attempt to his latest search for electoral relevance could happen as he tries again to recycle his 2010 and 2012 campaign trinkets and baubles. The only job to be created by him between his Senate attempt after getting booted as State Treasurer and his latest reincarnation as a candidate for the House of Representatives seems to be hiring Brent Littlefield to polish and revise his résumé.

So my premise is simple: Bruce Poliquin has not produced any sustained jobs that give him the magical “job creator” crown in his run in the Second District race for Congress. It is possible that a few fact checker jobs may need to be created to dive into his statement exaggerations similar to his claim to be a “job creator” He should be directly and consistently challenged to come up with real hard verifiable numbers whenever he makes this claim. Until he delivers some solid evidence using his famous accounting number skills, Maine voters should be wary that he is mostly investing heavily to create one single job in Congress…for Bruce Poliquin.

I Miss Republicans

Aye, that may seem like an odd remark before I set off to the Maine Democratic State Convention as a delegate but a conversation yesterday set me yearning…yes, for Republicans. I’m not talking about the present tea-infused party built on rejection of ideas, consensus, science, and President Obama but an old party with grand ideals.


I grew up in a family of labor oriented Democrats and that no doubt formulated my ideas about fairness, convictions, and personal active participation in politics as a result. While we took philosophical exception with GOP ideals, we were never taught to despise Republicans. At that time, on the national level Democrats were a majority in Congress but in the politics of my state Republicans were on top, and the local city government seesawed back and forth. Yet ideological differences did not result in gridlock because the art and responsibility of governing was taken seriously. Things needed to get done. The majority got to set the direction and with a bit of cooperation and consensus, compromises containing concessions that neither undermined the majority’s bearing nor were completely void of some minority contributions became law.

Today attempting to replicate that governing situation anew operates under an illusion that it is centrist compromising which is missing in modern two party politics. However that is misleading when one considers that the center of our political historical thread moves slow and steady in pace with time. Progress in this country has generally always taken time and often far too much as in the cases of slavery or voting rights for women. In fact, we on what is often called the left currently are actually the center, especially when one discusses matters on an issue by issue basis with real discourse instead of the extremist positioning that quite frankly mostly originates on the new right.

Three quarters of a century of building a shared social contract in this country along with decades of step by step progress on worker rights, environmental protections, safety nets, and extending and protecting civil rights are utterly rejected today in a desire to push back all at once, on every front, this complete shared history of lawmaking by today’s right in obeisance by Republicans to the tea party, market manipulators, and social issue fundamentalists. When the center-liberal hand is extended across the aisle it most always finds empty air and the reverse when honestly examined is simply not the predominate case. Indeed, Democrats have often crafted legislation that contains great concessions as a good faith starting point much to the chagrin of many party loyalists but even those efforts are greeted by an impenetrable wall of rejection on the right.

This current observation is not just a reactive countering rejection of historical conservatism. Many past conservatives were fundamentally different than today’s GOP absolutism practitioners. Principled conservatives stand for something and should be debated, included in decision making, and respected but the pretenders of today ought not to be assigned any undue gravitas when they erect their walls.

This supposed void in the center also leads to independent candidates claiming they will be center players, people wanting the two sides to come together in center compromise without any real parameters of definition, and news reporting of supposed centrist positions without acknowledging that present day Republicans see the center not as a compromise between two points based on today’s reality of decades of law building but an expectation of reversal of almost all the ground covered since the Roosevelt administration. Society is not well served when wishful centrists place themselves in an erroneous concept of center because their outlook is about tone not merit and who sacrifice history and direction to the desire for expediency above all.

I respect and miss the old fashioned, small town conservative, child of immigrants who made good, part owner of the local hardware store or local bread and butter lawyer, who did a civic turn or two with the downtown chamber, and was a local deacon who might take issue with higher taxes but did not begrudge all taxes all the time and who in turn strove to understand and respect the moral issues involved and would take part in the debate or public political service to work toward possible eventual consensus. Unfortunately, that conservative has been often replaced by a grandchild of immigrants who despises new immigrants, had local ownership whipped out by big box stores, gets civics from single issue radio ranters, uses religion to create division, argues against all taxes for any purpose (except cops, firemen and soldiers to protect his private property), rejects any moral argument over unflinching trust in the never erring market, and uses outright falsehoods to defeat issues at any cost and considers consensus as something for losers.

Yes, I miss competing in the political world of ideas with Republicans who valued participatory governing with respect for progress and people.

Charter School Pirates

Privateers, sometimes known as pirates, were officially sanctioned by governments, including the United States, in many past wars that allowed the harassment of enemies and legalized the seizure of enemy property. The authorization took the form of “Letters of Marque” that would contain language along the lines of the following:

By virtue of the Power & Authority given to me, I do hereby Authorize and Empower the said Private Captain with his said Ship & Crew to cruise against all our Enemies, and am fully authorized to assure him and all others involved in said private Ship of War, that we will consider him & them as fully Entitled to having a just claim to all vessels & property of every kind which he or they shall make prize of from all or any of our Enemies.                                                                                            Duly Signed & Sealed.

In Maine we seem to be issuing “Letters of Marque” to Charter Schools to seize community funds from our Republican administration’s enemy, public schools. As early as 2012 the Morning Sentinel reported on the economic damage being done in SAD 54:

Students attending the two nearby charter schools this fall will pull from $350,000 to $500,000 out of the School Administrative District 54 budget, according to Superintendent Brent Colbry.

Under the state’s charter school law, money for education from the state follows students from the district where they live to the charter school they attend.

This raid by Charters taking over four dozen students is resulting in the capture of a prize of hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the authorizing Republican administration perhaps intended, it will leave the “enemy” weakened and vulnerable to more privatizing of education as further noted in Mr. Colbry’s remarks in the Sentinel piece:

“We lose 45 kids spread out over eight grades, but nothing changes here — our costs stay exactly the same. This money has been committed to operating this district so now we have to give it to somebody else.”

“This came about after we passed the budget; the public had no opportunity to have any input about this and it’s going to have an impact of reducing services for kids. What this means for next year most likely is we’ll probably ask for a tax increase or a decrease in programs for the remaining kids.”

I am personally not opposed to private, magnet, or alternative schools. But pulling the funding rug from under the egalitarian access to education available to all citizens by siphoning off money to weaken the system that in the long run will still serve the vast majority of children is wrong. And in effect giving “Letters of Marque” to unelected school boards is an attack on local governance and local community control. It will lead to two classes of education, one private and subsidized by the state and one public and damagingly underfunded that is left to sink.

Beware! Pirates ahoy, starboard!

True Revolution

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

The preceding quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. is one we ought to bear in mind in our efforts to define how society needs to deploy the social tool of government. It calls us to question our ultimate vision for how our communities, states or provinces, nations, and world are constructed in our dreams.

The incremental steps now underway in our own legislature and the disturbing realities of a paralyzed national political stalemate can only be finally accelerated in the former case or in the latter broken by an active and powerful majority addressing the future. Any examination of the “edifice” we presently endure, especially in the politically structured economic sense, comes up far short of any desirable dream precisely because it produces poverty either willfully via income gap widening or as just the acceptable collateral damage of market forces.

A true revolution of values, inferable in the quote examined, is what Dr. King called for in a fiery anti-war speech delivered on the anniversary of this day in 1967 one full year before his assassination also on this day in 1968. (One must regretfully digress in thought to wish that year had somehow stretched to decades so the dream of the future could have be continually placed before us, agitated for as necessary, and ultimately realized or on the pathway to realization.)

The quote in wider context still resonates today:

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Pausing for self-examination as individuals and parties to ensure we know what edifices to tear down and to build up for the long term is a task we need to remind ourselves to undertake periodically. Doing so keeps true values in the forefront as we strive to build the future.

We on the left truly need to illustrate our ultimate vision to expand our reach. On an issue by issue basis much of this country is already with us but binding many more to us with an overarching dream is what will create an active and powerful majority to yield substantive and transformative results.

In a macro sense it can be argued that the right has placed before this country a more cohesive dream of individually driven bootstrap independence and unfettered market glory to yield life’s satisfaction with winners and losers merely being the neutral output of the economy. Yet when distilled it fails on an issue by issue basis exposing its core philosophy as corrosive. Its overall approach is well entrenched and tried in our history and it has been and is an absolute failure.


Dr. King’s wisdom still urges us to strive beyond ‘tossing coins at beggars’ and remains a powerful argument that we must employ our collective values through our self-governance to restructure our society for achieving economic justice and equality today. We need to place a vision before our sisters and brothers that moves beyond transitory position marketing and into the realm of aspirations shaped by commonly held value beliefs.

Clean Elections - Essential Service

As we move toward the 2014 Maine legislative contests, many individuals who desire to serve our state on both sides of the aisle will decide to run as clean elections candidates. Maine’s public funding of elections aims at leveling the playing field against special interests in state House and Senate elections, allowing genuine grassroots candidates to come forward, letting aspirants for office talk issues not cash collections, and increasing citizen confidence that their concerns are being truly openly addressed in campaigns.

It is also the season when some beholden to outside cash collecting attack clean elections funding by calling it “welfare for politicians” while bankrolling their own campaigns with private funds that despite any disclaimer carry quid pro quo implications. Make no mistake, politicians that resort to such slurs will move to gut or kill clean election funding if elected when the first opportunity arises.

Public financing of elections needs to take place in times when the state is flush with funds and also in lean years to meet the goals of clean elections. Reducing moneyed interests or privately funded campaign machine advantages to give wider opportunity for non-wealthy voices and non-financially connected office seekers to address the issues that affect our lives is not a luxury. Clean election funding is about protecting our democracy from unspoken quid pro quo expectations and providing equal access to the electoral processes. It is about leveling the playing field for all candidates of all parties and ensuring we have everyday citizens’ voices in our citizen legislature.

 Maine has built a clean election model to be proud of with extremely broad popular support and it is an essential service to Maine’s citizens that deserves to be protected in concert with many other essential services. We should be proud that we have had a large number of clean election candidates committing themselves to the reduction of money interests in our state’s history during this law. However, we acutely and especially need public financing in lean times to protect our elections from being bought during moments of economic weakness. Lean times are prime times for threats to democracy.

Austerity or Vibrancy

The war has ended. You have been destroyed. You have been conquered. You have been forced to capitulate. You are now at the mercy of your conquering masters.

Twice in this century Germany faced these prospects. In the first instance, the nation was forced into paying reparations and extreme austerity. The result was chaotic and financial ruin that seeded political insanity bent on vengeance. In the second occurrence of Germany at the mercy of victors, a reordering of social priorities and massive infrastructure rebuilding investments yielded a strong economy and good governance that produced a rational political partner with its former vanquishers.

Economically within the United States we are at a similar juncture and could learn from the lesson of the two German outcomes. Many personal balance sheets containing falling housing equity, eroded retirement savings, and education debt have been a result of actions by our conquerors from the financial industry and their tight circle of corporate allies. Our jobs, indeed our livelihoods, have been commoditized for maximum return through minimum care and rendered available for impersonal trade and export.

We are at a fork in the road but unlike the tale of the two Germanys, we have an ever narrowing window of political possibility into which we can insert ourselves to help determine the terms under which our future will be formed. It is not conspiracy peddling to recognize that huge financial interests consisting of a relatively few large corporations, a handful of investment banks, and financial instrument dealers have purchased great political clout and are ready to dictate the terms of our capitulation. Recognizing this dynamic should compel us to act with political expediency.

There are many choices that face us in charting a better economic course for our own future and that of succeeding generations but the core choice is between austerity, onerous painful payment of reparations in service to the narrow, and vibrancy, focused investments to back the broadest components of our society.

Austerity in the form of slashing government services and long term investment, continued financial allowance of debt entrapment, cutting entitlements to place more money in limited private hands for esoteric gambling by financial instrument hawkers, and above all a focus on market machinations that serve a selfish few places us all in the destructive pattern exhibited in post World War One Germany. And the results will perhaps be some on paper declines in national debt with mega-trading wins back and forth between a few wealthy individuals and corporations for perhaps a decade or so. In the end this reparations for our past “misdeeds” will lead to a yoke that must be revoked and it will engulf those who commanded austerity in a destructive epilogue to their era and error of profiteering. Despite all talk of long term fundamentals, the masters of finance are incredibly shortsighted and the outcome of austerity is a weakened and limping economy begging for political chaos.

The beneficial outcome from aiming for vibrancy on the broadest levels for the greatest number of people, businesses, and institutions of value is the lesson to be taken from the rebuilding of post World War Two Germany. Massive investment broadly applied will yield massive returns with both financial and societal benefits. By aiming our publicly shared investments at infrastructure, education, health, environment challenges, and even personal debt remedying we can move into full employment, stabilize societal disarray, and just as importantly engender the predictability, reliability, and opportunity that allows businesses that produce goods and services for people to thrive. We need to avoid a misguided focus on cutting public services and debt devoid of strategic investments that in the long run will yield a strong economic model to pay for services and debt that provided a good return on our investments. Bracketing our investments with an overarching goal of supporting long term sustainable outcomes across widest possible spectrum of definition is an added factor we should also embrace.

The two German post war outcomes provide an allegorical representation of how we might approach this county’s future. We can serve narrow or broad interests. We can make our economy work well to serve a few fortunate placed individuals and corporations or the very broadest swath of individuals and businesses of all sizes. We can choose short term maximized returns confiscated from society or long term sustainable returns shared by many to stabilize society.

We have come to the fork in the road; our choice is between austerity or vibrancy.   

Govruptcy

A military strike on Syria responding to its use of chemical weapons is now on our horizon. Brute use of war power is always troubling in its myriad of near term unintended consequences and its reassessment in longer term historical reflection.

However, the question of just war always seems to haunt the United States whether it is to counter an invasion or engage in so called surgical strikes. Because this country to a great extent defines its history through the lens of wars past, has committed grave errors in its use of military might, and has a large portion of its economy and government bureaucracy firmly tied to militarism, the exceptionalism we employ in invoking military solutions is not just suspect but unsound.

Far more than the quality of our intelligence regarding Syria today or Iraq yesterday affects our war judgment for we as the world’s most out of proportion sized war machine need to question if we are capable of acting with wisdom. Our outcome calculations have so often become miscalculations and we have become so adept at marshaling emotions to underpin war making at the highest levels of our society that in reality our default understanding ought to be that our modern military judgment is faulty and incapable of rendering good decisions.

Yet as we turn toward the current situation in Syria, for liberals and progressives who have consistently opposed the use of military force as the default methodology for settling conflicts, there lies a deeply troubling set of sub-questions:

• Is war justified to prevent genocide?
• Is military intervention to stop ethnic or minority cleansing right?
• Is armed force appropriate to halt a sovereign nation’s internal civilian slaughter?
• And most troubling of all, where is the line in the aforementioned questions between six-million Jews or fourteen-hundred Syrians or one persecuted victim that creates an urgency to transform diplomatic and economic efforts into war making?

I submit that the difficulty with the preceding questions is the equation of

action X = military response Y

is far too complicated and laden with variables to ever answer. The trouble with our modern world “security” system is that we have refused to reach beyond the nation state to provide the calculations necessary. The world’s nations, especially the United States, are so mired down with their exceptionalism, internal pandering, and self interests that any decisions made on military action are flawed upon inception.

We need to do something on behalf of those being gassed by Assad on the streets of Syria, we need to do something about regimes using bullets or starvation to ethnically cleanse, and we need to do something to have a protocol ready to deal with genocide. Alas punitive strikes are like spanking and only harden a target regime’s determination to become entrenched in its exceptionalism with mere delays in deaths or even more troubling desperate escalation to complete the proscribed killings. The greater step of invasion is far more likely to widen the circle of violence creating more casualties and innocent war victims insensitively termed “collateral damage”

Thus we, both the United States and all nations, must confront our present ineffectiveness of regrettably only possessing the blunt instruments of war, exceptionalism, and self interests in order to help Syrian civilians and so many forthcoming future victims elsewhere. Only a new protocol with new tools applying wisdom based on moral precepts can solve the present concern in a manner that steps toward halting harm and healing hurt. It must be robust, it has to be neutral to sovereign interests, it needs to contain exceptionalism, and it must provide both the immediate term end of killing and a longer term stable solution. Like bankruptcy, a process for emerging on the other side of a governance failure must be implemented, monitored, and enforced.

The solution proposed only appears too late for Syria if we refuse to begin working on it with great conviction and energy now in a humble partnership with the world.

Foreboding Echos

I infrequently agree with viewpoints offered by George Smith but when he’s so completely on the right train track as he was in July 17th’s column, reinforcing his concerns, opinions, and questions should compel many to add greater citizen voice to his message.

In his column, Mr. Smith addresses concerns about trains carrying oil through our towns; he lives in Mount Vernon and I live in Readfield. Not only are these under-regulated and under-staffed trains lumbering through Maine communities in exponentially rising numbers but the larger questions he raises about the energy directions we truly ought to be pursuing and how we ought to really be investing security resources are key considerations that people, officeholders, and our professional public servants in Maine and this country need to be asking and addressing.

That Lac-Mégantic and its surrounding environment is so similar to many small towns in Maine makes the horror of this disaster delivered by low-regulation, skimpy safety margins, inadequate equipment, and most of all our oil dependency addiction, traumatically and immediately relevant. The very train that wiped out a town center and so many lives was headed to Maine to transit our towns and our precious environment. Many more trains are still crossing our state carrying an exponentially growing volume of unrefined oil and exponentially growing potential risks.

It used to be our family found the late night lonely whistle of a train rumbling along Maranacook Lake and through Readfield Depot a bit enchanting and a reminder of an earlier era when my grandfather worked a lifetime for the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad. Now that same sound imparts a far more foreboding and troubling echo.

The above post was published as a letter to the editor in the July 26 Kennebec Journal.

Profiles to Discourage

One understanding that President Obama lends to the national reaction to the Zimmerman verdict is racial context. A prime reason Barack Obama can easily identify with Trayvon Martin is that both share the experience of profiling.

My initial brush with the profiling of the President came in a discussion with two male relatives of my age from swing states prior to the 2008 election in the midst of exploding financial chaos and early indications that Senator Obama was likely to defeat Senator McCain. The verdict from these men was that perhaps it would be good for Obama to win so that 'one of them' got to see how complicated and difficult this governing stuff could be for once and all. The unspoken yet obvious implication was that this would provide a glimpse into majority white responsibilities and thereby prove to be a lesson for someone so 'uppity.'

The President observed on Friday, "There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me -- at least before I was a senator."

Unfortunately for this country, the profiling of Barack Obama did continue beyond his service as a Senator and has carried on into his Presidency. The tea party, as the most visceral example, profiled our President and recast the context of his efforts to level economic playing fields and provide better health care access for all in coded racial terms. And like a nervous populace profiling someone walking through their neighborhood in a hoodie, the situation lead to increased demand for 'policing.' Republicans in Congress react to that pressure from their tea party base by veering far to the right to demonstrate their role as protectors.

Time and time again as the Obama presidential-legislative vehicle carefully observed the rules of the road and used every compromising courtesy, the GOP cops have 'pulled him over' and engaged in harassing obstruction to ensure he has not been able to get us to the destination we voted for, by our chosen route, in a timely and satisfactory fashion.