THANKSGIVING 2008

THANKSGIVING 2008

It's my favorite holiday. I love the colors, the food, the parade. 

And the fact that it's always on a Thursday. 

If a holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, you more or less feel ripped off, the victim of some sort of boss-led conspiracy to eliminate the extra day off. It can make you so mad you start flirting with the idea of moving to France . . . just to take off the whole month of August. 

If a holiday falls on a Wednesday, you pretty much need a shrink. It creates a kind of downside schizophrenia. The work week stops just as it is about to start, so nothing gets done. And then it starts up again when it is supposed to have finished, so no one wants to do anything. Can anyone think of single thing the world has accomplished during a mid-week holiday week? Maybe we've created material for the next Woody Allen movie. But that's about it. 

Tuesday, of course, creates a whole other set of problems. Tuesday is sort of a backwards Thursday. You get the four day weekend but everything goes in reverse. No one really likes eating a huge turkey with all the trimmings on the last day of a four day weekend. And no one can get to work the next day when they do so. 

So Thursday it is. And this year Christmas falls on a Thursday too. It's 2008's version of a double mitzvah, as some of my ecumenically inclined friends would say. Two long weekends. Month to month. Holiday synchronicity at its best. 

And the truth is, this year, we really need them. Let's face it. Though Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, we just do not have time this year for the requisite thank yous. The "to do" list is way too long. Wars to win. Credit markets to unfreeze. 401k's to cry over. A stock market to revive. A few banks to take over. 

Washington DC itself is awash in job applications . . . and applicants. Apparently there are in the neighborhood of 35,000 plus jobs that can change hands now that a new Administration is coming to power. And at least 200,000 people who want them. In fact, there are now so many applicants that the Obama transition team may not even be able to take Thanksgiving off. And they can certainly forget about sleepin' in on the Friday after. That is a work day, which more or less refutes the notion that there is anything French about this crowd. 

Of course, it must be said that the folks applying for these DC jobs clearly do not have houses to sell. Because, if they did, my real estate broker friend tells me there are no mortgages to be had and thus no buyers to beguile. So, the Washington political job pool this time around is comprised of the really rich . . . and the really young. In other words, pretty much like what it was the last time we changed Presidents. 

How does a transition operation process 200,000 applicants? Not very well, it appears. The Obama team has a web site which tells anyone interested that they should send their application in on line, and that this is the best way to "insure" a response. This is not very encouraging. The President-elect is promising to get to you. But he's not giving you any deadline. Sort of like W's Iraq policy for the last five years. 

My own view is that the whole process should be outsourced . . . to the nation's colleges and universities. Year in and year out, these institutions deal with millions of kids who apply for admission to their schools. Within a period of no more than six months, and as early as one if you want, they review the submissions, interview the candidates, and make the decisions. They are also pros at saying no, which the Government generally is not. 

I will not be among the 200,000 applicants. Because I have a mortgage. And two children about to be in college at the same time. That, however, does not mean I will not be sending in an application. The way I see it, Barack may get to it mid-way through his second term. 

By which time, my kids will be out of college . . . 

And houses may again be selling. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

PARDON ME

PARDON ME 

I guess bailing out the banks was not enough. Because now he wants to bail out himself. 

No kidding. 

There are rumors flying around Washington that outgoing President Bush plans to issue "blanket pardons" to preclude the prosecution of anyone for crimes arising out of acts of torture (euphemistically, but falsely, called "enhanced interrogation techniques") authorized by his Administration. According to reports, the incoming Obama team, torn between the notion that violators should be prosecuted now to the fullest extent of the law on the one hand or that prosecutions should be deferred pending the creation of a Congressionally sanctioned non-partisan commission to investigate alleged abuses on the other, is now faced with the unpleasant prospect that any decision made by it might, as it were, be moot even before it is made. 

But here's the beauty part. In issuing these blanket pardons, President Bush will even pardon himself. 

Wow. I guess we were right to forgive the Supreme Court eight years ago. Counting on it (forgiveness, that is), they ignored two hundred plus years of precedent to give us the pardoned reality of an unelected President. And eight years later, he gets to ignore two hundred plus years of precedent to give us the unelected reality of a self-pardoned President. Move over Jerry Ford. You've just been usurped. You too Mr. Clinton (you pardon amateur). 

In his 62 years, Bush's habit of "leaving messes for others to clean up" has been raised to an art form. As a college prankster and young adult, his family routinely intervened to save W from himself. As a would-be entrepreneur running businesses into the ground with other people's money, he regularly rang up enormous losses for his investors. As Governor of Texas, Bush left his state in a financial hole. And now as President, he leaves us despised abroad, and at home . . . broke. 

This latest gambit, however, clearly takes the cake. 

From the moment he assumed office, Bush II's was an in your face Presidency. I couldn't tell if it was inherent in his personality or just the predictable consequence of feared illegitimacy in the wake of having been shoehorned into the White House by five people who got to vote twice. Whatever the source, the Bushies regularly bulldozed their way to victory, from tax cuts for the rich that sank the surplus to a war of choice sold on false pretenses. Whether it was covering up the authorization of torture in the war on terror or moving the Supreme Court hard to the right, they literally never gave an inch. 

And they are going out the same way they came in. 

If he follows through on blanket pardons -- one for himself included -- President Bush won't be leaving a mess for Obama, he'll be sweeping that mess under the most impregnable of historic rugs. We will never know the full truth about torture . . . or WMD . . . or Gitmo. There will be no accountability. And Dick Cheney's dark side will remain forever hidden. 

Can we do anything about this? 

The short answer is (pace Sarah Palin) . . . You betcha'. 

The President's power to pardon is plenary and unreviewable. There is no recourse against a chief executive who exercises that power, at least none if the goal is to reverse the pardon. But that doesn't mean there is no recourse against Bush himself. He is President for sixty seven more days. He can still be impeached. More importantly, the new Congress will be sworn in on January 1, 2009. For nineteen days, therefore, Bush will be President while the Democrats enjoy enormous majorities in the House of Representatives and numbers somewhere between six and eight votes short of a two-thirds majority in the Senate. As we know from recent history, it takes a simple majority for the House to impeach and a two thirds majority for the Senate to convict and remove a President following a bill of impeachment. 

What would be the grounds for impeachment? The Constitutional standard is simple. Presidents are impeachable for "high crimes and misdemeanors." My guess is that the authorization of torture qualifies; at the very least it trumps lying about oral sex in the oval office. Between now and Inauguration Day, we obviously do not have enough time to subpoena witnesses and gather evidence sufficient to prove that Bush actually did this. But the reality is we need not do so. 

Because President Bush will have admitted his guilt. 

When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, Ford made much of the fact that acceptance of a pardon constitutes acknowledgment of guilt. When challenged, Ford regularly pulled from his pocket excerpts he kept from a Supreme Court decision which said exactly this. Let's test that proposition. If Bush pardons himself, we can impeach and convict him on the theory that the pardon is an admission. And we could literally do all this in hours. 

As for the need for six to eight Republican Senators to get the two thirds needed to convict, 2010 is an election year as well, and of the thirty five seats up that year, a disproportionate number are again held by Republicans. Look for the votes in that group and start with Pennsylvania's Arlen Spector. Pennsylvania went hard blue last week and hates W. Spector knows torture is illegal and was rolled by the conservative right when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. When motivated by a grudge, one Senator can get a lot done; when motivated by a principled grudge, he or she can move mountains . . . or at least seven votes. 

So, go ahead Mr. President. 

Make our day.

BAD ATTITUDE

BAD ATTITUDE 

I am starting to worry about the bailout. Or bailouts. 

Not the economics of it, or them. I think I understand that as well as most Americans who don't run around with Ph.Ds in economics mounted to their walls.

Certain institutions are too big to fail in the sense that the consequences of failure for the rest of us are enormous and inequitable. Neither you nor I, for the most part, made the bad decisions at AIG or Fannie or Freddie, so it's not right that we should feel the potentially fatal pain of their incompetence. If, however, they fail, we will too. Because we shouldn't, the Government intervenes. In saving the big shots from their bad bets, we also save ourselves, which was the main idea in the first place. The big guys become what economists refer to as "free-riders," unintended (and undeserving) beneficiaries of the safety net erected to catch the rest of us. 

All of this, I get. 

What I am failing to understand is the sheer idiocy exhibited by many of those who now have become recipients of our forced largesse. And I am now worried about the fall out. 

Here' s what I mean. 

When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, there were really only two ways to get in trouble at home. At a minor level, my sister or I could blow off a chore or not make our bed or get a little too sassy for a ten year old. These usually resulted in, at best, a raised eyebrow (or a forced march back to the unmade bed). I call these minor infractions because they compared not a whit at the level of consequence to what was the only major infraction. 

Which was Exhibiting a Bad Attitude. 

The attitude offender was in big trouble in my Brooklyn. After notice, indictment, trial and conviction on the charge -- for which, I should add, I still received more due process than the detainees at Guantanamo -- the penalty was a sour look of despair, one that said you were still loved but for now not respected. This was a killer for me. Mostly because I really loved my mother. Who, I believe, pretty much wrote the book on Good Attitude. In truth, it wasn't all that hard to avoid the problem of bad attitude. Generally speaking, good attitude was more or less a subset of good manners and keeping one's ego in check. If you said please and thank you, shared the toys (or even better, gave one up), did the minimal chores with a smile on your face, and made sure there was desert left for someone else when you eyed your slice of the pie, you were pretty much home free. 

That, it seems to me, is what is missing from all these bailouts. 

We just gave Hank Paulson $700 billion in walkin' around money, his to dispense in an effort to unclog the artery known as credit which is threatening America and the world with an economic coronary. This followed an $85 billion infusion to AIG. We now know, however, that the banks aren't lending nearly enough of the $250 billion they already have mainlined, and that AIG is still showering its executives with overwrought compensation and other goodies, and charging us for the privilege. 

This is bad attitude run amok. And it is catching. 

Today, the newspapers announced that GM's CEO, Rich Wagoner, was demanding a federal bailout for that company. GM apparently does not have enough cash (or cash equivalents) left to meet its operating expenses through the end of the year. The right and the left have now assumed their regular positions, the former arguing it's all the unions' fault, the latter pinning the blame on a management that wasted its time lobbying Washington to kill higher fuel economy standards while Toyota and Nissan were designing and building hybrids. Ford and Chrysler can't be far behind. Neither is profitable. And both endorsed the same failed business plan (if you talk to the left) or entered into the same union contracts (if you talk to the right).

In truth, both sides have a point . . . and are missing one. 

The business plans were stupid. They relied on the notion that oil would forever flow at $60/barrel or less, that climate change was a hoax, and that investing in a Congressman was better than investing in a plug-in. The labor contracts have now become unsustainable, but this is not because they are unfair. Rather, it is because the auto companies themselves have become so unprofitable. To lay that lack of profit at the feet of labor, moreover, is false. Toyota and Nissan aren't making more money just because they locate plants in right to work states and negotiate better deals with their workers. They often do neither of these things. 

The truth is, Toyota and Nissan are making better cars. 

They also are paying less in health care costs. When she was running for President, Hillary Clinton noted that GM was really a health care provider that happened to manufacture automobiles. And she was right. The solution, however, is not to blame the UAW for negotiating health care benefits for its members (or to praise Toyota and Nissan for having the foresight to avoid union contracts which could have required the same deal). It's to provide national health insurance. Unfortunately, when Hillary tried that in the mid-'90s, GM -- to use the language of my kids -- did not have her back. 

Americans are pissed. They did not give AIG $85 billion so that it could continue to run a toga-party at the public's expense. They were not interested in sending $250 billion to the banks so their CEOs could dither on lending the money while worrying about pools for executive compensation. And they don't want to give GM whatever it says it needs so that Detroit can lobby Washington to kill health care for all while it builds another gas guzzler no one buys. 

So here's my advice. 

Before Rich Wagoner goes hat in hand to a lame duck Congress and a now-I-am-worried-about-moral-hazard lame duck President . . . 

Before AIG spends another dime on an executive cruise . . . 

And before the banks hoard (rather than lend) another penny they get from Paulson . . . 

They need to talk to my Mom. 

'Cause these guys have a bad case of bad attitude.

REDEMPTION

REDEMPTION

For a good hour this afternoon, I walked around a grey, drizzled lower Manhattan, cluttered with commerce and the tense faces of brokers and others watching another stock market swoon. The sour looks of daily witnesses to three hundred point drops have these days become ordinary, and the diminishing light of a late November afternoon overcome by a steady windswept rain was of a piece.

But I was smiling.

Because yesterday, my country redeemed itself.

By birth (and a paradoxically loose but still abiding adult practice), I am a Catholic. So if slavery is America's original sin, we have spent much of the the past 232 years on our knees in the confessional.

Jefferson told the world that we believed "all men are created equal." But we were lying. And like all liars, we were crafting creative justifications. Blacks were slaves in 1776. Conveniently, when the Founders wrote a Constitution, those same slaves were turned into "three-fifths" persons just to give the slavocracy more seats in the House of Representatives and a lock on the Electoral College and therefore the Presidency. To salve our collective conscience, we had that same Constitution outlaw the slave trade. It turns out, of course, that our conscience was not all that troubled. We did not make the slave trade ban effective until 1808. And we certainly didn't end slavery.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, the great statesmen of our American republic -- Clay and Calhoun and Webster -- spent much of their time fashioning compromises with our original sin. In 1820, they drew a line across the country, outlawing slavery in territories to the north while enshrining it in those to the south. Fortunately for the cartographers, Massachusetts had enough left over land to create Maine (which became a newly admitted free state), permitting the admission of Missouri as a slave state. This, of course, didn't last, essentially because, when it comes to sin, line drawing is always a non-starter. Thirty eight years later, Kansas bled as slaveholders and free soilers battled for the soul of the nation in the territories of the west. And two years after that, we were at war with ourselves, often pretending the war was about everything -- states rights, property, traditions -- other than what it was really about.

That too is one of sin's solitary markers. We call it denial today. It makes smart folks dumb and dumb folks . . . dumber.

Lincoln became our great confessor. His journey from those great debates with Stephen Douglas to the tragic end of Booth's gun was preternaturally Biblical. In the first, he still played the racist we all were, laboring to assure Illinois that he did not want to marry a black or even hang with one. By April 1865, however, he had confessed that every drop of blood from the slave man's lash might have to be answered by one from the soldier's sword. Because, as he put it in his Second Inaugural, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

As it turned out, Lincoln was right. The Civil War didn't really end in 1865, it just morphed from an illusory Reconstruction of promised equality, where blacks for a time voted and were even elected as representatives in the newly readmitted Confederate states, to the savage reality of Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchings, disenfranchisement and the new slavery of sharecropper poverty. No lie was too egregious in the service of this continuing sin, from the Confederacy's decision to throw the Presidential election to the loser in 1876 in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the formerly rebellious states, to the Supreme Court's bastardization twenty years later of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection, legalizing institutionalized racism under the banner of segregation and the legal myth of "separate but equal".

If God works in strange ways, He seemed to be putting in overtime in the United States. We went through agrarian populism, the Progressive Era, World War I, the New Deal and World War II, each in its own way a triumph of the American ideals of freedom, equality and representative democracy. In the famous words of Mary Elizabeth Lease, our farmers raised "less corn and more hell." We rescued our children from robber barons, our productive capital from the trusts, our European ancestors from the killing fields of trench warfare, our economy from depression, and the world from Nazi tyranny. But we could not rescue ourselves from our past. The sons and daughters of former slaves couldn't vote in our elections, go to our schools, live in our neighborhoods, join our unions, eat at our lunch counters, stay in our hotels, or swim in our pools. When Al Gore's father was awakened one night in Washington by drunken revellers telling him we don't want to eat with them, or drink with them, or marry them or go to school with them, the senior Gore asked if they "wanted to go to heaven with them." To that rare Southerner who spurned the Southern Manifesto, they replied, "No, we'd just as soon go to hell with you and Kefauver."

Before Tuesday, the three most important black Americans in my lifetime were Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.

Robinson made America look in the mirror, exposing the hypocrisy of our fight against Nazism with black soldiers who could not drink from the same water fountain, or compete in the same league, as their white brothers once they returned home. He only asked for a chance. Not four strikes. Or three balls. And no one shortened the base paths when he ran them. After a ten year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers (begun later than most because of his war service and professional baseball's color line), he was a first ballot Hall of Famer. In retirement, he tirelessly worked to advance the economic fortunes of victims of prejudice and never let up in his demand that his own profession open its managerial and executive jobs to qualified people of color.

Today he remains America's most important athlete.

Thurgood Marshall made America look at its Constitution. At great risk to his own safety, he travelled far and wide representing (often without pay and always without much) the victims of America's original sin. He painstakingly shepherded more than a dozen cases through the courts, challenging segregation in a methodical attack that ultimately led to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of public schools. As the first black Justice on the Supreme Court, he never wavered in his commitment to equal protection and equal rights.

Today he remains America's most important lawyer.

Martin Luther King, Jr. made America look at its soul. If racism was fundamentally wrong, Christ had taught him that people could be fundamentally good, and that redemption was possible. The dream inspired by his faith was not one from which sinners -- of which he was one -- were excluded. Rather, it was possible because, as sinners, we still could change. He took his promise of redemption to the bus depots, bridges, slums and churches of America. And then to the White House and Lincoln Memorial. All these venues were his altar. Goaded by Dr. King's efforts, President Johnson lived out his own extraordinary profile in courage -- demanding that Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which LBJ knew would (and has) cost his party the South for more than a generation.

Today Martin Luther King, Jr. remains America's most important preacher.

Yesterday, America finally got off its knees. Its confession ended. Its sin was forgiven.

And today, somewhere in Islamabad . . . or Kabul . . . or Tel Aviv, there is a kid who will not strap a bomb to his body and blow up a bus full of innocents in part because we just elected as President a black guy whose middle name is Hussein, and have now practiced what for more than two centuries we have preached. All men are created equal.

We should thank Barack Obama for offering to serve.

And ourselves for having accepted.

And God, for Her infinite forgiveness.

VOTE

VOTE

If you want to complain 

'Bout Barack or McCain, 

Then please take note. 

You first must vote. 

Fore the future is cast 

And we throw off the past, 

That day arrives. 

We get to decide. 

Whether Palin or Joe 

Has the big mo, 

They say no more. 

We set the score. 

From the east 

To the west, 

We grade the test. 

Deciding who's best. 

Churchill as PM 

In what was his last gem, 

Said our system's not best. 

It just beats the rest. 

So now we are there 

And buyer beware, 

You can't rock Wednesday's boat. 

Unless you first go and vote.