Thinking about the future

The macro social and political upheavals of the 1960s had already sent fissures along the micro Lavette, McAllister and Pavone street communities of America when my mother saw the Hatten family walking toward Columbus School for a PTA meeting.

The Hattens represented what was changing about Benton Harbor, Michigan. Sure, they had the same upwardly mobile spirit that had driven people a generation earlier from Benton Harbor’s low-lying, low-income Flats neighborhood to the highlands a half-mile away.

This was before the heavy industry economy collapsed, and the Hattens must have foreseen a bright middle-class future ahead that was based on hard foundry work or, if lucky, an assembly job at the Whirlpool appliance factory. They had earned a ticket out.

But the Hattens were different. They were black.

I don’t remember if my mother knew the family at that point. If she had, she probably felt some community bond with them. Their Lavette Street home, between the very American-sounding street names of Clay and Harrison, was just two blocks over from where my parents, two older sisters and older brother had moved just before I was born in 1965.

Our unspectacular but sturdily built frame house in the 700 block of Pavone Street dated from the 1910s. It was where my mother largely was raised by my great-grandmother as my widowed grandmother worked. My great-grandparents had lived there since probably 1919, themselves moving from Lavette Street.

Whether my mother knew the Hattens before that day, I guess, doesn’t really matter. What she saw was a family – one of the growing numbers of proud black families moving in as whites fled to suburbia – dressed in their Sunday best and voting to take part in their children’s education.

It was the American dream realized.

Except they were turned away at the door. No blacks allowed.

That was some 40 years ago, and though I regret never talking in depth with my mother about how it shaped her, I believe it was that moment that she committed to no longer standing on the sidelines.

She may have felt guilty for not standing up for the Hattens that day. I don’t know. But what bubbled out of that experience -- like a cauldron fueled by what her Congregationalist upbringing –-- was the belief that God didn’t mean for a black family to be turned away from a PTA meeting because of the color of their skin.

I’m reminded of the story for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration as president of these United States.

A black man. President.

I wonder what the Hattens would think.

But Obama’s inauguration is not the mountaintop. Instead, I would argue, an Obama presidency is the precipice.
We, as Americans, can forge a new era in our history. By reaching out and sacrificing –- splicing and reconfiguring the best parts of our cultural DNA –- we can create a new America. Or we can succumb to the worst that the past eight years has laid at our door.

Obama did not get to this point without the helping hands of many people -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian and otherwise. At the same time, his speeches, writings and potential policies leave me with a sense that he is a man who has searched his past -- even angered by it -- to find out who he is today and who he could be tomorrow.

It is who we ALL could be tomorrow. It is the hope of Barack Obama's presidency and the legacy I hope it/my generation leaves. Maybe then the Hatten families of this world will be invited through the school door.

Detroit's driving me crazy

I'm seeing the pros and cons of an automaker bailout. My heart and wallet sees all those jobs held by many of my friends and family in Michigan that are STILL tied to the auto industry; my brain sees years of mismanagement and Bob Lutz blabber-mouthing and political protectionism. (Where are you now John Engler?)

But I asked a friend of mine in Michigan, who for years was in community economic development in the Great Lakes State, and I'll share her thoughts below.

As an aside, for a sample of the frustrations that folks here in California and other places in the country have with the auto industry, see Thomas L. Friedman's "How to Fix a Flat" column in the Nov. 12 New York Times.
www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/opinion/12friedman.html

Anyway, here are my friend's thoughts:

1. Putting a car company into bankruptcy is NOT like putting an airline there. I'll take a risk that the airline won't be able to honor my $500 ticket. Not so much the warranty on my $25,000 car. I believe Chapter 11 = Chapter 7 and they may as well skip the middle man.

2. Plus, it will put the suppliers who've been struggling for years straight into the tank. The actual job loss dwarfs the financial services sector losses. Of course, automotive engineers and line workers aren't as cool as derivative salemen. Nothing creative about these folks, nope. They just build things. (Yes - I'm bitter.)

3. Best case bankruptcy scenario and GM goes into Chapter 11, reorganizes, blows out their legacy and labor costs and emerges "lean and mean." The U.S. government has just gone directly into national health care without
passing go — and without planning for it. We'll dump all those retirees, and many of the active workers, onto the Medicaid and Medicare systems. I think this would cost significantly more than a bail out. Which is not to say we shouldn't go there, but a little prior planning would seem to be in order.

4. Re: Some of the supposedly boneheaded product moves made by the Big Three: All the foreign automakers followed the Big Three willingly into the light truck/SUV world, because they make money and — oh, yeah — we wanted to buy them. The Japanese automakers came to hybrids, and the Europeans to clean diesel, because their home governments adopted policies that pushed the price of gasoline up and created market demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. It's no accident that electric/gas hybrids debuted in Japan years before they came to North America.
By contrast, our government adopted two equally short sighted strategies. They put the burden of fuel economy on the backs of the automakers, who logically argued that their customers were voting with their pocket books for low fuel economy. Then, they established policies that kept the pump price lower than it was in the 1980s, providing no market incentive for consumers to go for the more fuel efficient vehicles. You could not have designed a more perfect system to punish true innovation, and encourage growth of non-sustainable markets.

I'm not saying the Big Three hasn't done some really dumb things over the years. But there's more than enough blame to go around, and I don't quite know why it's more important to punish them for bad behavior than it is companies whose business decisions are responsible for the fact that many of us aren't retiring any time soon.

It seems to me that the financial meltdown has had a much more serious impact on Main Street — not to mention making the problems of GM in particular much worse than it would otherwise have been.

Eating crow

A few of my friends have pointed out this line from a mid-August entry: "You heard it here first: Obama has lost the election."

The Obama campaign at that time didn't have a message. It wasn't showing Obama as a leader, at least not the same type of leader he was during the primaries. And I saw the campaign going the wishy-washy way of the Kerry and Gore campaigns.

Thank God for John McCain and Sarah Palin! It was their election to lose.

At the same time, Obama found his message and pounded it consistently. He led. He breeds a level of confidence, that whatever gets thrown at him, he'll consider various points of view then act decisively.

McCain couldn't even lead his party beyond its own schizophrenia. He relied on the people who got George II elected twice and who failed to see that America had changed over the past four years. He pandered to the loudest, crudest voices in the Republican party -- the far right wing, religious conservatives -- instead of leading the party to a New Day.

He didn't put country first; he put party first because of his own (and Cindy McCain's) 20-year-old presidential aspirations.

McCain couldn't even lead through the financial crisis, despite "suspending" his campaign to get back to Washington. He couldn't even control a split in his own party.

And then there's Palin, the campaign's attack dog. McCain didn't control her, despite his well-crafted image as a leader, a moderate, a (dare I say it) maverick. He allowed the campaign shapers who pushed him away from the middle to change the minds of many moderates and independents who otherwise were ready to vote for him.

McCain's campaign can be summed up by the final crusader in the third (and what should have been the final) Indiana Jones movie: "He chose ... poorly."

I'm glad McCain was wrong. I'm glad I was wrong. And I'm glad the Obama campaign found its compass.

Now let's get the hard work done.

Glacial fog

One of the things that makes life here so cool is the weather.

This morning, as I'm sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window, what looks like a glacier of fog is rolling through the Golden Gate. I hear a foghorn, and I see a slight frosting of pink-yellow-orange sunrise over the top of the fog. It's like you can reach out and scoop it up.

A picture wouldn't do it justice.

Yesterday was beautifully clear and as I looked out the kitchen window I could easily see the Golden Gate Bridge towers and houses on hills in Marin County -- probably 10-15 miles away.

Rest easy, George

It's ironic.

The Bush Administration has ignored domestic policy, especially economic policy for eight years. It only steps in when its rich investment banking buddies start to lose money on the regulation-skirting financial instruments that they themselves devised.

Its foreign policy, meanwhile, has been almost entirely rooted in revenge. It has propped up its short-sighted aims by making the masses feel that if the country didn't spend thousands of lives and billions of dollars to invade other countries, our country would be less secure.

Now the irony. (See below.) A Japanese bank is taking a big stake in troubled Morgan Stanley. You can only guess how many other flush foreign institutions (Japanese, Chinese, British, French, Saudi?) eventually will take stakes in these bedrock institutions of American free-market capitalism.

How is America more secure by allowing unfettered, unregulated markets to undermine the economy's foundation, leading to our assets being handed off to foreign institutions?

Count another Republican free-market victory. Their friends will get their money, die comfortably, pass their money along to their children and complain about taxes. The rest of us will be left a) holding the bag for the government bailout of bad business decisions, b) less market security and c) less of our own financial security.

Union Bank of California’s future parent, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, said Monday it will take a stake in troubled investment bank Morgan Stanley for about $8.4 billion.
MUFG’s (NYSE: MTU) stake will range from 10 percent to 20 percent, based on Morgan Stanley’s book value and what the Japanese bank finds in its due diligence.
"This strategic alliance with Mitsubishi UFJ can put Morgan Stanley in an even stronger position as we look to realize the opportunities we see in the rapidly changing financial marketplace,” said John Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chairman and CEO.
MUFG’s buyout of the publicly held stake of San Francisco-based UnionBanCal (NYSE: UB) is pending. MUFG reportedly sees that transaction as the foundation for pursuing its ambition to be a significant player in American banking. Today’s plans to take a stake in Morgan Stanley moves MUFG further along that path.
Both Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) received approval over the weekend to become commercial banks. Monday’s MUFG-Morgan Stanley announcement follows a weekend of intense negotiations between Morgan Stanley and Wachovia, where a lot of closed door meetings at the Charlotte bank’s headquarters appears to have ended with Wachovia not taking on the risk of integrating a big investment bank like Morgan Stanley.
Wachovia’s (NYSE: WB) fate remains uncertain as the bank grapples with billions in troubled loans, many of them picked up in the company’s 2006 purchase of Oakland-based Golden West Financial. The bank acquired the parent of World Savings for about $25 billion. Today, Wachovia’s entire stock market cap is approximately $40 billion.

Can you put brains in a creationist?

This little diddy appeared in the Sept. 11 column of Debra Saunders, one of the right-wing representatives in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Obama just can't help himself. The Democratic nominee brought up the "Swift boat" ads again Wednesday - undeterred by the left's series of scurrilous personal attacks against GOP vice presidential candidate Palin and her family. It started with a Daily Kos story alleging that Palin was actually the grandmother of her infant son Trig.
But it didn't end there. The folks at Factcheck.org felt compelled to respond to a flood of falsehoods being spread about Palin. As the organization reported, "She did not demand that books be banned from the Wasilla library."
"She was never a member of the (secessionist) Alaskan Independence Party."
And: "Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools."
Straight news stories have probed meetings in which Palin, then a rookie mayor, asked Wasilla librarian Mary Ellen Emmons about removing books from the library. Palin never named any specific books. No books were banned. The librarian kept her job. But none of that matters.
In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, Palin said she believed in a "healthy debate" in public schools between creationism and evolution - and that reasonable view has been contorted into Palin wanting to force her creationist views down others' throats. Actually, it is the side that wants no debate that is intolerant.

Wow -- nice cutting around the words, Debra.

• Palin did not "demand" banning books but she inquired about it. If Hillary inquired about health care reform, the GOP would be crying "socialized medicine."
• Palin was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. She didn't ignore the idiots, either.
• Palin did not push for teaching creationism in Alaska's school. She merely wanted a "healthy debate."

This is where Saunders' (and the nut-job creationists') arguments fall apart, because there is NO NEED for a debate in public schools between creationism and evolution. Evolution is fact.

Calling for "healthy debate" legitimizes creationism. Just like inquiring about banning books is an implied threat to the librarian to fly-right or get checked out of her job, and not reminding the Alaskan Independence Party that they should be considered traitors and that they are a couple snowflakes short of a snowball is tacit approval of their mission to secede from the United States.

If you want your kid to learn creationism, 'intelligent design' or whatever name fundamentalists are putting on it today, send him/her to a parochial or private school. Just like if you want school-sponsored prayer.

It's a nice followup strategy by the GOP, though: criticize the tolerant for appearing intolerant and paint the intolerant as tolerant.

Different brand, same company

OK, I didn't mean for this blog to turn political, but it's the season. And we've got seven more weeks of the depressing knowledge that the Republicans are once again finding a way into the White House. From there -- with the collusion of key Democrats in Congress -- they can shove a conservative Supreme Court down our throats that will last two or three generations and implement such meaningful reform as creationism in schools and protections for companies that sell hurtful prescription drugs or toys with excessive levels of lead that were made in China simply to save the company money.

This rant, of course, comes after a rough night of sleep following Sarah Palin's speech at the GOP convention.

The Republicans obviously are distancing themselves from George Bush, the man with the lowest prolonged approval rating in modern American presidential history. Where's Osama bin Laden? Is the world safer? Is gas cheaper? Is our food less expensive? (If Republicans want to focus on gas, Democrats should focus on food -- except then the GOP will spin something about the farm bill ...) Will my son's grandchildren be saddled with this war-driven national debt brought to you by the party of fiscal responsibility?

Republicans are dousing the McCain-Palin ticket in the same bogus aw-shucks optimism that carried George II and Slick Dick Cheney into office almost eight years ago. Except this one they've packaged in the TV news show formula: pair the old male anchor (trust, strength) with the bright-faced, "young" female anchor (compassion, optimism, sexiness).

It may be the McCain-Palin brand -- with its implied message of "new and improved" compassionate conservatism -- but it's from the same company that sold you the Bush-Cheney model.

Don't buy it.