October 2012 - Represent Consumers

Release the Kraken

I filled out my California ballot today, choosing candidates and wading through the propositions trying to figure out who’s behind what and why. I don’t blame people who feel like bystanders in democracy these days – that some ethereal dispute is underway that most of us aren’t meant to understand. It's like in the movie “Clash of the Titans,” in which the gods are fighting each other while mere mortals are mostly just trying to avoid becoming collateral damage, dodging the Kraken and other nightmares hurled down upon them from Mount Olympus.

The various official and Super PAC campaigns for the presidential candidates are expected to break the $2 billion barrier by Election Day, a dubious record made possible by several men in black on the United States Supreme Court, whose decision in Citizens United authorized corporations to take control of American politics under the guise of freedom of speech.

In California, meanwhile, well-heeled politicians and special interest partisans in the proposition battles are spending hundreds of millions more flooding the airwaves and mailboxes.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the electoral marketplace is prosperous – like the stock market. Meanwhile, back on the planet, those Americans not employed by the Money Industry (unemployment rate: 4.6%), or its dependent relative the Political Industry, are desperately trying to hang on to a job, or more likely a part-time job. And yet, as my colleague Marty Berg and Ralph Nader have pointed out, neither Obama nor Romney have had anything to say about raising the minimum wage. It’s $7.25 an hour for federal workers; a whopping $8 an hour in California.

We could probably increase the minimum wage significantly just by taxing political advertising in the United States. Doubt that would get past the Supreme Court, though.

It’s not only the amount of money, but how it’s being unleashed: in an extraordinary assault of distortions and lies, raining down on the heads of voters from incomprehensible, sometimes secret sources. Take the California elections, for example. Proponents of Proposition 32 on the ballot insist that by limiting the political activities of unions, it will increase government “transparency.” But the Proposition 32 campaign is being funded by out of state money of unknown origin. The lobbyists hired by Proposition 33, which is 99.4% funded by the long-time CEO of Mercury Insurance Company, sued several of us who are opposed to the measure in court last August. They lost; but last week they claimed that we sued them and we lost. Huh? Then there’s Proposition 37, which would accomplish the unarguable goal of requiring food that is genetically engineered to disclose it on the packaging. You couldn’t possibly understand that from the TV ad against Prop 37, which features doctors and farmers riffing on how Prop 37 will inspire frivolous lawsuits, raise your grocery bills by zillions of dollars and favor dogs over people. It's the Kraken, beamed into our living rooms to terrorize us.

Figuring out the truth about this proposition is hard enough; figuring out who's paying for the TV commercials is impossible. No, really: try it for yourself. Watch this YouTube video and see if you can read the 75 words that appear for exactly three seconds in block micro-print at around 27 seconds in. If you pause it and squint, you might catch the names DuPont, Monsanto and ConAgra. Kind of alters your view of Prop. 37, doesn't it?

The nation’s electoral discourse is so polluted by money-driven deceit these days that it has its own sociological description: “post-truth” politics.

Honesty in campaigns used to be policed by journalists, particularly newspaper reporters, who had the expertise and experience to weigh in on complex issues and call out the liars. But their numbers have dwindled, leaving the combatants (or in the case of the special interests, their highly paid surrogates) to slug it out. The Golden Rule often determines who prevails: he who has the gold, rules.

Or maybe it makes no difference at all. According to a story in this week’s New Yorker, the Obama campaign has concluded, after an exhaustive study of the 2008 race, that the most effective way to reach a voter is “not TV ads or glossy mail but contact from an enthusiastic human being.” Is it possible Americans have finally figured out that when “the TV tells you” how to vote, as one voter said to me back in a 1998, night after night without surcease, you can probably safely assume the sponsor of that ad is not on your side, and vote the other way? Maybe if someone you trust calls or shows up at your doorstep – but that costs a lot of money, too.

The average American cannot compete against the monied and powerful in the political or legislative arena. That's the betrayal of America's Constitution rotting at the core of the Citizens United decision. By equating money to speech, and decreeing that corporations have the same free speech rights as human beings, the high court rendered most Americans mute. We are now spectators, hoping we will somehow see the truth. Or at least not get hurt.

Illustration (c) Charles Lynn Bragg

Secret Money Stains California Election

Why is an Arizona-based organization called Americans For Responsible Leadership pouring a walloping $11 million into the fight over two California ballot initiatives?

It’s one of those supposed social welfare groups with a bland name that tries to get around the rules to deliver huge anonymous contributions to their pet political causes.

According to Common Cause, it’s the largest secret campaign contribution in the state’s history.

Welcome to the toxic brew of big money and anonymity poisoning our democracy.

This was not how it was supposed to work when the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed the flood of big money with its landmark 2010 Citizens United ruling, in which the justices allowed corporations to make unlimited donations to political action committees not tied to a particular candidate.

The justices said big money was just another form of free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

But in the ruling, the justices took a strong stance for public disclosure as the key to making Citizens United work.

Writing for the court in the 5-4 decision, Justice Kennedy said:

“With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of  expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected  officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation's interest in  making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

That’s not what’s happened, as big money donors have sought the anonymity offered by the “social welfare orgamizations” to conceal their intent.

According to its web site, Americans For Responsible Leadership “seeks to promote the general welfare by educating the public on concepts that advance government accountability, transparency, ethics, and related public policy issues.”

There’s no mention of motherhood and apple pie but, even so, who could argue with that mission statement, especially transparency?

Obviously they’re up to something other than those innocuous platitudes.

The Americans For Responsible Leadership, whose officers are Arizona Republicans, got its start supporting Tea Party candidates for local office and then moved on to statewide issues.

Now the ARL is jumping into California politics in a major way to oppose Proposition 30, Gov. Brown’s bid to raise taxes, and to support Proposition 32. While its supporters contend that Prop 32 is a campaign finance reform measure, opponents warn that it would bar unions from using dues collected from members to spend on politics. Prop 32 would allow corporations to continue to spend freely.

ARL’s $11 million has been funneled through the Small Business Action Committee, a California group that has focused on the two propositions.

ARL, a non-profit organization, doesn’t say where it got the money. And non-profits are generally allowed to protect the identity of their donors. But different rules apply when non-profits get involved in political campaigns:
California law requires that if its donors know their funds are going toward a ballot proposition, their identities have to be disclosed.

It’s not the first time that out- of-state, anonymous money has put its weight behind Proposition 32. Iowa-based American Future Fund, another non-profit “social welfare group” closely linked to the Republican Party and Mitt Romney, has already spent $4 million to boost Proposition 32. That organization has also been linked to the notorious Koch Brothers, the billionaire energy magnates known for backing up their opposition to labor unions, environmental regulation and President Obama with massive amounts of cash.

California Common Cause has filed a complaint over Americans For Responsible Leadership’s foray into California politics.

Common Cause’s Derek Cressmen told Frying Pan News’ Bill Raden that the group also has links to Karl Rove, another prime mover of right-wing anonymous political money: ARL employs the same Virginia law firm as the Koch Brothers and Rove super-PACS.

Responding to the Common Cause complaint, the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission has demanded detailed disclosure of the source of the $11 million.

On Frying Pan News, Raden suggests that the ARL’s motive for its California contribution may not have been entirely altruistic – in exchange for funneling the anonymous contribution into California, the Koch Brothers allegedly gave $350,000 for ARL to spend on politicking in its own state.

We can only hope that our state FPPC will give the Americans For Responsible Leadership a little taste of the transparency it says it favors. Tackling the Citizens United ruling will take longer. For a start, take a look at the constitutional amendment we’ve proposed and get some background here.

Citizens United / Martin Column - 10/29/2012

How Ryan's real math adds up

OK, so Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up.

But there’s another critical bit of arithmetic that has been working just fine for him, though you won’t read anything about it in the lengthy New York Times magazine profile now available on the newspaper’s web site.

Ryan is portrayed as the Miller Lite-sipping, regular guy NFL-watching, ribs-chomping, charmingly wonky, politically courageous future of the Republican Party.

Give me a break.

What the New York Times did not find newsworthy or illuminating is Ryan’s own money trail.

When you pull back the curtain on the slickly constructed down-home image, a starkly different picture emerges. Ryan, it turns out, is a magnet for Wall Street and hedge fund campaign cash.

As Politico and the Wall Street Journal have reported, members of the financial and insurance industries have been Ryan’s key backers since he first?? ran for reelection?? in 2000. The country’s commercial banks’ PACs and employees spent nearly $60,000 on his campaign. His top contributor that year was Bank One, which was later gobbled up by JP Morgan Chase.
In 2002, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors contributed $10,000 to Ryan – the maximum allowed by law. He also formed his own PAC that year, with the help of supporters from Goldman-Sachs and the Securities Investment Association.

The bankers’ and hedge funds’ generosity has continued – among his top recent contributors is billionaire Chicago-based hedge fund operator Ken Griffin, of Citadel Investment Group, who gave Ryan $5,000. Griffin has also contributed $150,000 to Restore Our Future, a super PAC that supports Mitt Romney, and another $800,000 to the Karl Rove super PAC, American Crossroads.

Over the years, as Ryan rose to head the House Budget Committee, Politico reports that he became one of the top fundraisers in the House, and he has shared his largesse with other Republican candidates.

Another of Ryan’s top financial boosters is Paul Singer, who runs Eliot Financial hedge fund. Ryan paid Singer back when he was one of only 32 Republicans to vote for the auto bailout, a vote that angered Ryan’s fans in the Tea Party. But the bailout boosted Ally Financial; the financial arm of General Motors – in which Singer’s hedge fund had a major stake, the Nation reports.

Hedge funds, banks and insurance companies groups stand to profit handsomely from Ryan’s scheme to privatize Social Security as well as Ryan’s continuing austerity blitzkrieg and plan to strip government of its regulatory power.

Seen from the perspective of his successful fundraising, Ryan isn’t a politician courageously pursuing unpopular policies to dismantle the New Deal and subsequent social programs (like turning Medicare into a voucher program); Ryan is actually acting as a faithful servant of the Wall Street bankers and hedge-fund money men who insist that the federal government’s budget be balanced – as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.

Ryan is also serving his corporate masters when he spreads collective amnesia about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, preaching the same gospel of deregulation that got the country into the mess we’re in. But Ryan wants you to believe he’s one of us because he digs ribs and roots for the Packers.

The man who would be vice president embodies a pretty twisted definition of political courage – protecting Wall Street while crushing the economic security of the little people.

Martin Column / Paul Ryan / Social Security / Tea Party - 10/18/2012

The Quiet Occupying of LA

The Occupy Movement changed the national policy debate last year, but then its supporters dispersed or – more accurately – were driven out of public parks by the police and winter.

A different kind of occupation has occurred, almost unnoticed, in Los Angeles over the last few weeks.

In late September, thousands of Californians waited in long lines at the Sports Arena in downtown Los Angeles for free medical and dental care provided by Care Harbor, a local non-profit organization. About 6.9 million Californians don’t have health insurance: about 1 in 5. They are not only the poor; about 27% of families making $50,000 or more each year are uninsured. Skyrocketing insurance rates, higher deductibles and dwindling benefits have left many in the middle class without insurance – or greatly under-insured, so that an unexpected illness or root canal can have a devastating financial impact. Thanks to the Financial Debacle, credit cards aren’t much of a fall back anymore. Hence the 3,754 patients, many of whom showed up three days early, grateful to receive the attention of thousands of doctors, dentists and other volunteering medical professionals, even if that meant being treated among strangers in a massive hall with no privacy. The sponsors of the event, now in its fourth year, call it a “health fair.”

Save the Dream

A week later and a few miles north, the line began forming early around the Convention Center, where more thousands hoped for a chance to refinance their mortgages in order to keep their homes. The five day event – part of a national tour it calls “Save the Dream”– was sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, another non-profit that has stepped into the breach opened by the failure of the marketplace. Operating in triage-like conditions in the conference hall, it arranged refinancing for beleaguered homeowners, many of whom were the victims of predatory lending, who would otherwise face foreclosure.

Monikers like “Health fair” or “Save the Dream” create a comforting, almost festive feeling about these occasions. But they can’t mask the despairing situation many of our fellow Americans now find themselves in.

The New Orleans Superdome 2005

The images of people seeking help with basic necessities – medical care, a place to live – reminded me of the breadlines of the Depression era, before the social safety net was put in place by FDR. The cavernous venues themselves recalled a more dire moment: the gruesome pictures from the New Orleans Superdome in 2005, to which residents were evacuated during Hurricane Katrina, and there left to fend for themselves for days. "I've seen things," NBC News anchor Brian William said of his time inside that nightmare, "I never thought I'd see in the United States."

The Occupy Wall Street supporters and their local affiliates across the nation were loud and angry enough to get the news media’s attention. A few instances of police brutality certainly helped. For all the many things the Occupy movement subsequently failed to do, like create a political force that could have been deployed in national and local election campaigns, just pointing out the wealth disparity – the 1% versus the 99% – vectored public attention from the abstraction of the national deficit to the concrete pocketbook issue of the imbalance of power between the powerful and everyone else.

But there was relatively little news coverage of the quiet, peaceful members of the 99-percent encircled around arenas that usually cater to business meetings or sports, people whose life stories have been derailed by credit default swaps, derivatives and other shenanigans by speculators over which they had no control.

Wall Street got it’s stimulus package – an estimated $29 trillion bailout, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, in the form of cash infusions, tax breaks, and the ability to borrow at an almost zero interest rate from the Federal Reserve. But Main Street’s stimulus package was $700 million – demonstrably not enough to do the job of getting Americans back in their jobs.

Compare the two stimulus packages and explain to me why we can’t afford to address the plight of job-less, home-less and savings-less Americans.

The total debt owed by consumers in this country for loans and credit cards is roughly $12 trillion, according to the latest report. Every dollar of it could have been erased (including everyone’s mortgage debt!) if those trillion$ had gone to taxpayers instead of Wall Street, as I’ve pointed out previously. Imagine the powerful spending effect on the economy if Americans were given the right to borrow from the Fed at the same low rate that the banks do. Or if someone in Congress or the White House had thought to impose a modest cap on interest rates for consumers as a quid pro quo for the bailout money that went to those firms.

Wall Street and its allies in government have tried to diminish the significance of the bailout, noting that most banks and other corporate beneficiaries have repaid most of the money. But that’s not the right way to gauge the value of what the taxpayers did for them.

Say two people are in a boat when it capsizes. One of them, the captain, throws a life preserver to his passenger. The passenger survives, but the captain drowns. Wall Street would measure the value of that transaction by the cost of the life preserver. The rest of us would say that the rescue came at a much, much higher price. That price can be measured by the anguish and fear on the faces of those waiting for big box style medical and financial assistance at the Sports Arena and Convention Center.

Federal Reserve / Harvey Column / Tax breaks - 10/11/2012

D.C. Disconnect: The New Normal, Election Edition

Nothing epitomizes just how detached our political culture is from the concerns of most Americans than the coverage of the latest dip in the unemployment rate.

For big media and the punditocracy, the major takeaway was that the latest slight decline, from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, constituted a positive for the president and his stewardship of an economy still struggling for traction after the greatest slump since the Great Depression.

So exactly what constitutes such good news for President Obama?

Dig a little deeper into the unemployment report, and you find an economy in which more people are forced to take lower paying part-time work with no benefits because the good jobs with benefits, pensions and security have disappeared.

While this is not exactly news, what is news is how blithely the two candidates have ignored this reality in their campaigns.

During their first debate, obsessed with tax rates and the deficit, neither the president nor Mitt Romney offered any substance about how they planned to offer leadership to stem this deterioration. Those good-paying jobs aren’t coming back under the policies supported by either the president or Romney, no matter how they try to sugarcoat their promises with soothing rhetoric and homilies about the free market and hard-working Americans.

The challenger stakes our future to a worn-out dogma of deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and promised cuts to education and other essential government services – except when he doesn’t.

The president asks for another four years in which he will presumably figure out how to get intransigent Republicans to work with him while offering his own modest vision for “getting the economy going again.”

In their first debate, there was barely a peep about the crucial issue of trade agreements– because both candidates support free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, now being negotiated in secret, which protect corporate rights and fat profits, but fail to protect American workers’ jobs.

The media has not exactly ignored the story of economic decline, but it hasn’t put it front and center, either, though it’s eating away at the lives of so many American families.

For example, late this summer the National Employment Law Project published a study on the low-wage recovery and growing economic inequality in the U.S. Among its findings: job gains in the recovery have been focused in lower-wage occupations, while mid-wage occupations, which accounted for 60 percent of job losses in the recession, have made up just 22 percent of the recovery through the first quarter of 2012.

You might have read about the report in the New York Times – if you were reading the B section Labor Day weekend.

You may also have missed this story that fleshes out the economic realities we’re facing: even when high-wage industries are hiring, they’re hiring at lower wages.

But you didn’t hear Jim Lehrer pressing the president or Romney to get specific on the crucial issue. Income inequality may have become a buzzword but our leaders and media have yet to absorb its full importance.

Martin Column / Uncategorized - 10/10/2012

In austerity fight, deceptions have just begun

Only time will tell how much of a boost Republican challenger Mitt Romney will get from his debate win over President Obama.

The president seemed flatfooted and unprepared to respond to Romney’s shift toward the center, even though Romney’s campaign had suggested that’s exactly what they would do - use the Etch-a-Sketch to pivot away from the extreme right toward a more moderate stance during the general election campaign.

The debate felt like a replay of the scenario that has played out so often over the past four years: aggressive Republicans concealing their real motives and putting passive Democrats on the defensive.

Romney was acting every bit the CEO in charge, telling the customers what he thought they wanted to hear to make the sale; in this case, that his deficit reduction scheme wouldn’t favor the wealthy and damage the middle-class.

The contrast between CEO Romney talking to voters (customers) and CEO Romney talking to his big contributors (his board of directors) at a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. in May couldn’t have been starker. In what he thought were private remarks that have now blown up, Romney, you recall, dismissed the 47 percent of the country that supports Obama as self-pitying moochers who need to be taken care by the government.

We know that all politicians say one thing in public and another in private. That’s not a shock. But what’s striking is just how much contempt CEO Romney expressed for nearly half the voters when he was talking to the people who will hold real power in his administration: his board of directors.

Most CEOs wouldn’t let such feelings slip, even in private. But just as Romney told the Denver audience what he thought it wanted to hear at the debate, so too he was telling his contributors what he thought would please them.

Because make no mistake, plenty of the big money is preparing to work with whoever gets elected in November to launch a major offensive against Social Security and Medicare as well as to end tax breaks that favor the middle class, such as the mortgage interest tax break, under the guise of backing a new grand bargain to balance the budget.

For example, billionaire hedge fund executive Pete Peterson, who has also spent $458 million of his own money to push an austerity agenda, is now backing a bipartisan group known as Campaign to Fix the Debt. Ryan Grim at Huffington Post reports that the initiative has raised $30 million so far, including $5 million from a single unnamed donor.

The operation has hired 25 to 30 staffers, with plans to double, Grim reports. Along with a paid-media campaign, aims to influence press coverage in 40 states with locally focused teams.

This “bipartisan” initiative is just the latest attempt by Wall Street and its allies to pass the costs of the government deficits created by the financial crisis on to the middle class and those who can least afford it. Though President Obama has said he won’t let these programs be cut in a way that hurts the most vulnerable, to keep that promise he’ll have to grow backbone that was missing Monday night – and through much of his first term.

Lobbying / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 10/05/2012

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Loss. That’s what I felt when I watched the space shuttle land at LAX, carried to our City of Angels on the back of a close relative, the mighty Boeing 747 – twelve years older than the shuttle and, though aging, nearly as inspiring when you happen to see one. I recalled where I was when Challenger exploded – studying in a library for the California bar exam – and when Columbia burned up on re-entry – at a cottage in Idyllwild with my family. But I’m talking about a different kind of loss.

When I was a kid, growing up in the Sixties, America seemed to be the land of limitless possibilities. President Kennedy launched the space program in 1961, promising we would reach the Moon by the end of the decade and though incredible, no one doubted the USA would do it. In the more distant future described by Gene Roddenberry, a “replicator” would eliminate want of food or material possessions and humans would be freed to explore any part of the universe they chose.

Sure, there were serious problems right here on Earth, and in this country, but the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement and a bipartisan roster of widely respected – even revered – public officials seemed determined to get these matters in hand. We were working on them, and nothing seemed intractable. The cynical snicker about the Sixties now. But such was the energy and enthusiasm of the economic prosperity of post World War II United States, an era that is already gauzy like our refracted impressions of ancient Rome.

Just after three in the afternoon on July 20, 1969, my friends and I gathered around the clunky RCA television in our den, understanding that the rest of the planet was doing the same. I was seventeen. Like all kids who grew up in the era before cable TV, video games and the Internet, we had spent many late nights outdoors contemplating the Moon, which seemed to us as distant as adulthood. Now we could barely discern the astronauts in the grainy black and white images as they walked on the lunar surface, but there was no mistaking the achievement of that day. And though it was America’s achievement, the whole world celebrated.

A few days from now, shuttle Endeavor will be drawn through the streets of Los Angeles– like a funeral caisson for a fallen soldier – by a magnificent technological beast. That journey, at 2 mph, will end at a museum twenty-four hours later. There it will rest much like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, monuments to human will and imagination left to puzzle future generations. No ambitious program to explore the universe will succeed the shuttle.

That’s because there's no money left to pay for our aspirations. The last decade began with a speculation-induced economic recession in 2001. In California, once the home of aerospace, the collapse of the tech-bubble was compounded by the disastrous results of the deregulation of electricity by local lawmakers, which included a bailout for over-priced nuclear power plants that cost consumer ratepayers $28 billion. Then Enron and other Wall Street firms that bought the power plants covertly manipulated the supply of electricity to jack up prices, bankrupting utility companies and forcing the state to buy long term contracts for electricity from the manipulators – at the grossly inflated prices – to keep the lights on and businesses going. The deregulation debacle cost California $71 billion – and the local economy has never been the same.

Many Americans had not recovered from the 2001 recession when the Wall Street derivatives frenzy collapsed in the Fall of 2008. Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. With incomes disappearing, Americans stopped spending. That hurt businesses, especially small businesses that could not borrow. And tax revenues declined. To pay Social Security and jobless benefits, and restart the economy, the federal government spent more than it took in in recent years.

This ignited the raging political debate over the federal government’s stimulus and deficit spending, though few Americans can claim to have been bailed out the way Wall Street was. After taxpayer cash infusions, subsidies, tax breaks and other favors estimated at between $9.7 trillion and $29 trillion, the Money Industry has emerged not merely intact but more profitable than ever.

Add $1.3 trillion for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and you can see why there won’t be a manned mission to Mars anytime soon, much less hyperdrive tours of the galaxy.

Our country paid a heavy price to save Wall Street. Consider that the cost of the getting to the Moon in today’s dollars would be about $26 billion less than taxpayers spent bailing out the insurance giant AIG – about $182 billion. And the Moon program was a massive stimulus program for America in the Sixties, and not just the defense industry. Its benefits included the research and development of a raft of technologies that led to enormous advance in computer, medicine and other industries – not to mention Velcro. Steve Jobs and his colleagues in Silicon Valley didn’t build the modern personal computer industry by themselves: you, the American taxpayer, helped.

Measuring the cost of government assistance to Wall Street versus to business innovators versus to Americans in need compartmentalizes the debate. What does it say about the country – and its future – that the average life expectancy of white Americans who did not graduate high school has dropped by four years, to where it was in the 1950s to Sixties?

Yet a majority of Americans – 54% –believe that the government should do less to solve our country’s problems… though there is a sharp partisan divide on the question, with 82% of Republicans saying less and 67% of Democrats saying more, according to Gallup.

There will be Americans in space in the near future, however. Using the technology and facilities taxpayers built, a number of private companies are developing plans to commercialize orbital space flight, the New York Times reports. And every American who wants to hitch a ride can do so – for somewhere between $50 million and $150 million a ticket, depending on your destination.

As the 747 and the shuttle swung low over Los Angeles, one of my favorite oldies from the Sixties came to mind:

The road is long, with many a winding turn,
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.

So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear - we'll get there.

For I know: he would not encumber me.
He ain't heavy: he's my brother.

I thought back to that humid afternoon in July, 1969, when Kennedy’s charge was fulfilled by Apollo 11. JFK was gone; along with his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, struck down by hate, fear, madness. At the time, they seemed to us pioneers in the still young and uncertain cause of Democracy, and had given their lives to better their fellow Americans and the Nation. The sense of purpose, destiny, determination and sacrifice – shared by the nation – was inspiring. At least to a young guy from a Boston suburb.

Harvey Column - 10/01/2012