OWS 1st Death: When Will They Stop the Police Abuse?

OCCUPY'S 1ST VICTIM  Jennifer Fox, 19, was told by doctors that the death of her 3-month-old fetus resulted from damage from a kick and pepper spray administered by police.  Photo: JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM

I wish I didn't have to say, "I told you so," but it appears the first death has come to an Occupy participant after police kicked and pepper-sprayed a woman while attending Occupy Seattle on Nov. 15. The woman, Jennifer Fox, has reportedly suffered a miscarriage. OWS Seattle Miscarriage 


News of the death spread yesterday even as new evidence of police-abuse video surfaced on the internet following pepper spray attacks on University of California Davis campus. Police actions throughout the U.S. that cross the line into unprovoked and violent suppression tactics are making a mockery of the supremacy of 1st Amendment right to peaceable assembly.


As I wrote here on Nov. 2 in an open call to federal officials, "Stop playing politics with the lives of our citizenry and call for an end to the unjustified attacks on OWS's exercising its Constitutional First Amendment actions."


If necessary, federal officials should call out the National Guard to keep our citizens safe from rouge law enforcement forces. This is the patriotic, moral, liberal tradition of civil rights protection every American (even the unborn) demands.

What's a Liberal Winning Strategy in 2012? Moral, Humane Courage

I have some good news today for our liberal-minded Washington leaders in need of a big dose of moral clarity: What ails our democracy can be fixed by adopting ancient Chinese political thought from wise men such as Mencius, Xunzi, and Confucius. Their roadmap to political power and success, basically, favors the adoption of "moral humane governance" over "economic imperialism" and "militaristic intervention" at home and abroad as its core concept, according to Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University.

The Chinese philosophers arrived at their crucial insights, Yan writes in today's New York Times, after studying the histories of those three governance types and concluding that the pursuit of moral humane authority at home and abroad inevitably wins the hearts and minds of the people. When followed with singular focus, this roadmap should make plain what liberals stand for and how our idea of morality and humane governance differs profoundly from the ideologies of our conservative opponents. A few examples:

• Liberals, by which I mean Democrats and most Independents, seek to create a desirable environment and standard of living for all its people by promoting benevolent policies favoring the general welfare while controlling the excesses of free markets. Conservatives, though, seek to govern in a militaristic fashion both in domestic and foreign affairs, promoting the fragmentation of our society and leading to vast gaps in political and economic power between the haves and have-nots.

• Liberals believe government promotes the greater good, and accept the responsibilities and costs that that belief infers. Conservatives believe government itself is problematic and are incapable of admitting to both the causes and costs of massive bank failure, growing income inequality, and steep, long-term unemployment that resulted from their political mismanagement.

• Liberals realize that our country's moral authority in international affairs demands humane treatment of our enemies even if that moral stance is not reciprocated, because exercising strong moral authority wins friends and inspires people around the world. Conservatives disparage those rules of international engagement and insist on the right to follow immoral practices, such as the Bush-Cheney lying about weapons of mass destruction as justification to invade Iraq and their water boarding of prisoners of war, carried out despite strong objections by American citizens and the international community.

• Liberals in touch with morally informed leadership are able to differentiate between nuanced government control and intrusion into personal privacy. Thus, liberals advocate the protection of women's reproductive rights as far more humane than the intrusive anti-abortion hardliners, who would let their moral rectitude on this issue result in our country going back to the era of back-alley procedures while never taking responsibility for the certain deaths and unwanted births that would result from ending a woman's privacy rights as currently embodied in American law.

Liberals in the past have let themselves be redefined ad nauseum with "tax and spend" and "big government" labels created by the right-wing oligarchs who now hold our society hostage both in Congress and in state governments. It's time we become the change we seek. Our country can no longer afford Republican-supported militarism, violence against its own citizens, and class warfare that has left us on the brink of economic and moral insolvency. This should be the laser focus of the Democrats and Independents seeking office in 2012.

Let us look ahead, then, aided by the wisdom of ancient Chinese political  philosophy, to the strong, courageous leadership that only liberals will deliver, and the renewed sense of America's strength and harmony that once made us the envy of the world. Past political warfare shows that only the party that embraces moral humane policies, not financial or military dominance, will thrive, and so too will our country.

Republicans to Obama: Take Your Hands Off Our Federally Funded Pizza

What I am about to advocate here is heresy among most of my liberal friends, yet I feel uniquely qualified to put to rest a question raised by recent Congressional action regarding our nation's school lunch menu: Is pizza a vegetable? The short answer: No friggin' way. I am certain of this because I was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, where I enjoyed two of the grandest brick-oven Neapolitan apizza (yes, that's the real word for it and it's pronounced ah-Beetz) establishments in the world -- Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Sally's Apizza, both of which routinely attract hordes of customers who line up outside on the Wooster Square sidewalks in bitter winter for a chance to consume their hot, heavenly creations.

The pizza-as-vegetable issue bubbled up in Congress earlier this week when lawmakers successfully added language to an Agriculture Department funding bill to block newly rewritten rules, first proposed in January by the Obama administration, that would have increased the required amount of tomato sauce per slice (to more than one-quarter cup) in order for pizza to remain on the department's approved list of vegetable servings for America's school lunch program. Schools participating in the $11 billion U.S.D.A. program receive federal funds and commodities only when they adhere to the department's nutritional guidelines, which are meant to provide one-third of a child's daily nutritional requirements. Those rules are quite extensive and can be reviewed at this State of New Jersey web site.

The U.S.D.A. effort to meet children's nutrition needs is laudable, especially at a time when childhood obesity has, ahem, expanded. By including pizza on its list of qualified servings of vegetables, past administrations were utilizing the broadest interpretation of that food group's definition because, well, pizza is king in the nation's school cafeterias. Counting it as a vegetable provides school dietary directors one highly effective weapon in its arsenal of healthy offerings.

If you are old enough, you may remember President Reagan's laughable call for ketchup to be included on the list of approved vegetables. That didn't fly. In contrast, the new U.S.D.A. school lunch overhaul under President Obama included a more generous portion of tomato paste in a comprehensive set of guidelines, such as cutting calorie-laden starches, reducing salt and adding more real fruits and vegetables, designed to help enhance children's health. If enacted, the new U.S.D.A. rules for school lunches would have added $1.36 billion annually to the program. That may sound expensive, but it amounts to 14 cents a meal.

The Republican-led, food-corporation-backed response in Congress this week prevented any of those health improvements from reaching America's kids by blocking funds to implement the new guidelines. So the news was all bad. Improving kids' health loses out to blatant Republican politicizing of the school lunch program. And pizza remains, at least for now in the eyes of Uncle Sam, a veggie. For liberals and conservatives alike, sanity remains on the menu nightly at Sally's and Pepe's. Just don't call it a vegetable.

A Balanced Budget Proposal in Name Only

Here's today's riddle: When is a balanced budget amendment not balanced? When the current crop of do-nothing Republicans in Congress proposes it.

To see why, let's first review some budgeting basics. A budget is a plan that projects income and spending for a discrete time frame, which typically spans a week, a month, or a year. In its simplest form, budgeting encompasses two basic estimated monetary amounts: income and spending. In a balanced budget, both of those numbers are equal. Here's a quick example: A person who earns $4,000 a month projects spending of $4,0000 a month. That is a balanced budget.

Simple, right? Perhaps for your family, yes. You might have two or three sources of income with regular amounts coming into your bank account. You certainly have regular bills to pay, as well as some optional spending to consider, making the spending part of the equation more of a guessing game. Over time and through experience, though, even that number is relatively easy to arrive at.

Budgets are estimates, then, derived from a process of review that considers historic amounts of known income sources and predictable spending commitments. In order for a budget to achieve balance on paper, all that's necessary is a pencil and eraser. In the real world, though, the only road to balance is to earn adequate income to cover your expenses and spend only the money you've earned.

And, as night follows day, balancing a budget always works out perfectly, right? Well, no, never has as far as I'm aware. That's because a budget is a plan, and achieving equilibrium is, to say the least, problematic. If your car battery suddenly dies, you buy a new one even though it wasn't included in your budget estimates. If your spouse gets ill and has no more sick leave left, your income falls short of the expected, budgeted amount. When the economy tanks and one of you is out of work for weeks or months, you do what more Americans than ever have done over the past decade: pull out the credit card.

A budget that anticipates all such unknown spending circumstances is a rarity, but a good budget plan usually comes close to achieving balance when it acknowledges such uncertainties, builds in a buffer, and encourages flexible reactions along the way to adjust for such challenges. Moreover, a good budget plan sets up guiding principals for making such adjustments on the fly without much argument over how to proceed.

OK, now that we have that down, let's look at the federal government's situation and the Republican Balanced Budget proposal. Like any other family, the United States has income and spending. It derives its income from taxes collected and depletes those dollars with annual spending to run the government, fund numerous programs for the general wellbeing of its citizens, and pay the interest on its loans. The estimated receipts for fiscal year 2012 (which began in October) are $2.627 trillion. Spending proposed for fiscal 2012 totals $3.729 trillion -- a difference of $1.1 trillion.

That single-year deficit amount, incidentally, equals the level of reductions mandated to take place if the Select Committee on Deficit Reduction fails this year in its efforts to take a $1.5 trillion slice out of federal spending over a 10-year period. Whether certain draconian spending cuts are even necessary has economists on opposite sides. Many argue that targeted deficit government spending, such as proposed by President Obama's American Jobs Act, could spur jobs and economic growth, leading to enough growth in tax revenues to wipe out the deficit over the next decade. Support for those predictions comes not only from historic data collected on the Great Depression-era budgets during the President Roosevelt era but also more recently from President Clinton's two terms, which by the year 2000 delivered federal budget surpluses.

But facts have never stopped Republican fiscal folly, nor would stimulus spending fit the longtime Republican strategy called "starve the beast" that is designed to shrink the federal government by denying Congress of needed tax receipts. Under President Reagan and both President Bushes, Republican in Congress cut taxes, thus decreasing U.S. government's income, in hopes that less money in government coffers would force Congress to cut spending. Instead, deficits under Republican rule have soared because they dropped any pretense of trying to balance the budget. Who doesn't recall Vice President Dick Cheney arrogantly declaring, "Deficits don't matter."

Of course, they do and they don't, depending on how the underlying economy is behaving. But that hasn't stopped the Tea Party-infected Republicans. Their latest House bill calling for a balanced budget would only restrain spending, while effectively taking the other half of the equation -- tax revenue increases -- off the table altogether. In fact, the balanced budget proposal would continue to permit tax cuts regardless of their effects on the deficit. In calling for an amendment, Republicans don't appear to have much chance of victory, because passage requires a three-fifths majority in both houses of Congress, and still has to pass the high hurdle of ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures.

Which raises the question: Why do Republicans bother bringing up a sure to be defeated Constitutional amendment proposal at all? Let me give you this explanation, revealed today by Bruce Bartlett, an adviser in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. “The truth is that Republicans don’t care one whit about actually balancing the budget,” Bartlett writes in a blog for the New York Times. “They prefer to delude voters with pie-in-the-sky promises that amending the Constitution will painlessly solve all our budget problems.” Bartlett concludes, "The idea of mandating a balanced budget through the Constitution is dreadful. And the proposal that Republican leaders plan to bring up is, frankly, nuts."

P.S. To understand our country's dilemma with budget balancing and the voters own part in fostering the nuttier aspects of it, I pass on the results of a recent poll by Politico: It finds that Americans support increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations (increasing income) 66% to 31%, while they oppose cuts to Medicare 76% to 19% (increasing spending). To quote a political savant, "Oops!"

Lennon Was Right: Life Happens While We're Making Other Plans

Sometimes, fate catches up with us despite our best efforts to run away. I am reminded of that point this morning after my wife, Eileen, and I enjoyed a lovely evening in the charm-drenched, upscale small town of Winter Park, Florida, joined by a longtime friend of mine, Chris, and his lovely wife, Mary. During the 1960s, Chris and I had bonded as best friends over timeless obsessions: a teen fascination with pretty girls, the many high-horsepower offerings from Detroit, and grades that would lead us to coveted college student military deferments that saved many of us from a growing quagmire in Vietnam that killed more than 50,000 of America's young men.

Our stomping grounds, a rough, working-class part of New Haven, Connecticut, called West Hills, was no guarantee of inheriting the American Dream. Homes there were cheap, small and cramped; fathers worked as cops, teachers, mechanics, house painters, and butchers, as well as drunks and philanderers; and moms were, well, mothers, wives, saints. It was the 1960s; youth was on the rise as a force to be reckoned with. The Beatles and Rolling Stones were our adoptive American Idols, and a young president was our Camelot knight in shining armor who stood between us and the threat of certain nuclear annihilation.

As we faced our high school years, Chris and I embraced the diversions of youth even as the losses mounted: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, all cut down by assassins. Some of our close friends and family members came home from their Southeast Asia nightmare, maimed physically and mentally, if they returned at all. We learned to look away, and to keep moving ahead of the wave threatening to overtake us. Counting the number of Corvettes and Porsches passing by and imagining owning one was a self-serving lifeline in an age of social upheaval and insanity.

After graduation, Chris and I took different paths that would foretell a far longer separation in the years ahead. I went away to study journalism at Syracuse University, while Chris stayed in New Haven and earned a degree in civil engineering. We got back together briefly in 1975 when Chris served as best man at my wedding. After that, Eileen and I lived in Baltimore for a couple of years, while Chris worked in Philadelphia. We reunited for what promised to be a carefree Bicentennial celebration in the birthplace of our country's independence, but it was apparent the time apart had already begun to thrust us further into personal separate places. Eileen and I shortly after moved from Baltimore to Central Florida to pursue career opportunities and raise a family. Chris went back to New Haven and a successful career as a construction manager for Yale University and a family of his own. The Bicentennial weekend proved to be our last visit for more than three decades.

Then in 2010 Chris came across my profile on LinkedIn and e-mailed me. Only months later, in May of this year, my father died. Chris was there by my side for greatly appreciated emotional support during the wake, funeral and burial. Some things in life happen for reasons we can never fathom, yet we must acknowledge them as the little miracles they certainly are. Chris's return was one of those moments for me. A father gone, a friend reconnected.

So it was fond childhood memories, but no heavy baggage. And, of course, even with my current foray into blustery blogging about politics and governmental morality within LiberalOutposts.blogspot.com, Eileen's meaningful glance with burning eye contact at one point reminded me there should be no talk of politics or religion. The reasons for our long midlife separation no longer matter.

As we sat down last night at a fantastic Thai restaurant called The Orchid, the world of West Hills seemed light years behind Chris and I. The four of us aging yuppies had fun recalling our younger selves, the bluster of youthful victories won and disasters averted. Each of us understood the important ground rule for occasions such as this: friendships are fragile, perishable, and problematic, but also precious and worth preserving.

We Are the Moral Majority

You have to admit, the two major news stories breaking this week -- the reported homosexual relations by a football coach and boys on the Penn State campus and the accusations by at least five women of sexual harassment by former National Restaurant Association head and Republican presidential frontrunner Herman Cain -- contain the ingredients for a potentially salacious media orgy that could last for the rest of the year. Just to be clear, I am not writing about them today to further fan the flames.

Instead, I want to make a moral point that goes beyond the particular parties or indignities in both these cases. It is that we owe it to ourselves as a freedom-loving, justice-seeking nation to re-examine our attitudes about how the powerful few exploit the less powerful among us.

Such an examination should confront a truth about human nature too often ignored in our public debates. Primarily, we must discover how can we better confront and vanquish vast inequities imposed by money, power, influence, and large institutional barriers of protection. We have to decide whether we want fairness, honesty, transparency, and justice when confronting the imbalances between the haves and the have-nots.

In doing so, we must face such questions as: How can we revive the performance of our once-envied institutions in promoting the common good while also protecting those who haven't the resources to defend themselves? When our courts allow vast, faceless institutions of commerce to exercise the same fundamental rights as citizens, how do we ensure those corporate monstrosities are prevented from unduly compromising the rights, privileges, and opportunities of the individual? When we witness people in authority compromising the dignity of the young and less powerful, how must we respond?

I believe -- and I suspect a large majority in America would concur -- that our current public institutions and leaders of commerce, lawmaking, leadership, information dissemination and jurisprudence today are far less likely to perform their public responsibilities than in past generations. Explanations for why this is so may abound in the blogosphere, but really, in some respects, we are all to blame, because, having been lured into apathy by the false promises of the powerful, wealthy and privileged few over the last 40 years, we have abdicated our democratic ideals for short-term gains. Post World War II, many of us have forgotten, let languish, or never discovered the part of our human nature that supports nurturing behaviors designed to protect our species from the predators among us. Whether they are hidden within a famed college football program, sit on a bank board or Congressional committee, or vie for the nomination for president, such predators must be uncovered, disarmed, and punished without apology.

To turn to the political implications of this, I say to both parties: Denial is not a party plank. Moral leadership derives from a fundamental truth: We are all born equal in the eyes of God. But I insist on recognizing who among us most contributes to our moral decline. Under cover of a "survival of the fittest" canon,  Republicans and Tea Party supporters often profess hearing a calling from God yet continue to favor draconian measures to end federal support for the old, the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Such cuts may feel justifiable to the far Right and many confused American voters in an era starved of rational conservative economic and political thought. But no political party should silently stand by, as Republicans did recently, after presidential debate attendees called out in favor of letting poor uninsured sick people die and booed a gay American soldier stationed in the Mideast. That is no more acceptable than leaving the scene of a child rape without trying to stop it or report it to police.

Nobody is arguing Democrats are morally pure, having given us both a Clinton-stained Monica Lewinsky blue dress and Anthony Weiner's crotch-gazing Twitter photo. Say what you will about the ineffective leadership within both governing parties in Washington; it hasn't been liberals and Democrats calling for drastic budget cuts on programs for America's most needy citizens. Liberals, progressives and Democrats have a long history advocating for programs that feed, house, defend and educate the underclass. That political legacy -- going back to Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society initiatives and continuing with Clinton's balanced approach to welfare reform and Obama's efforts to make health care more affordable -- explicitly defends minorities from the ravages of the better-off majority.

Moral courage shown in support of the most vulnerable among us is a fundamental value of Democrats and liberalism, and it is one value in which I encourage all openminded readers to become fully engaged.

Power to the People, Literally

Now that Occupy Wall Street has succeeded in raising our awareness of the growing exploitation by the top 1 percent of earners of the other 99 percent, I am ever alert to examples of big, monopolistic, tone-deaf public companies putting profits ahead of people. After two big storms have hit with devastating effects on my birthplace in New England, I have found a big example -- Northeast Utilities and its subsidiary Connecticut Light and Power.

As of yesterday, almost 500,000 CLP homes and businesses were without power following the earlier-than-usual snowstorm that hit the northeastern U.S. at the beginning of the week. Why the large impact and slow recovery? Mostly, it is because the company has trimmed back its maintenance spending by better than 25 percent in the last three years, records show. The storms may have been acts of God, but the lack of tree trimming around power lines that were taken down by the storm was an act of a greed machine, CLP, that took in $3 billion from customers last year while charging the highest electricity rates in the continental U.S.

Large public utilities, historically profitable even in less troubled economic times, are a license to print money in today's "corporatists are people" political reality. Northeast Utilities is no exception. As power service came back to CLP's customers, the head of the company was calling for rate increases to cover the repair bills.

What can people in such circumstances do? Organize within their communities and seek to take ownership of all of its public utilities. Such action may not turn the lights back on right now, but if local folks were running into their utilities chiefs down at the local grocery store, maybe those managers would better remember who is funding their paychecks.

The Washington Voice OWS Needs

In a time of broad public support for Occupy Wall Street amid violent attacks on OWC encampments by municipal law enforcement, I find it extremely disappointing that President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., and most every other elected official in Washington have yet to call on city authorities nationwide to stand down in their provocations against OWS protests.

OWS assemblies have been subject to weeks of violent, likely illegal, and certainly U.S. Constitution-defying strong-arm tactics by municipalities from New York City to Oakland, so far with very little comment or blowback by the usually voluble political class and commentariat in our nation's capital. This silence is deafening, considering that one Oakland OWC attendee, Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, had his head cracked open by a flying projectile which had been launched by police under orders from Oakland's Mayor Jean Quan.

To give credit where credit is due, Quan came out later to deplore the results of police action there. Tennessee officials capitulated after protesters went to federal court to end the illegal curfew and arrests of dozens of Occupy supporters, who argued those actions violated their rights to free speech and freedom of assembly. And Oakland's Citizens' Police Review Board is launching an investigation into police action there that resulted in Olsen's fractured skull.

Also, to be fair, Manhattan federal District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., investigated on Oct. 31 after NYC Policeman Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed some women taking part in OWS two weeks before. But apart from these few municipal reactions to uphold protestors' rights and protect their safety, our nation's political leaders have gone silent.

Mr. Obama -- and for that matter all sitting Congressional officials -- with all due respect, what are you waiting for? Stop playing politics with the lives of our citizenry and call for an end to the unjustified attacks on OWS's exercising its Constitutional First Amendment actions. Our people have every right to seek redress of economic and social injustice, and every right to expect official government action supporting and defending those First Amendment protections -- even when it means shielding them from aggressive police procedures.

Let freedom ring without the need for pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades. Wasn't that our official stance in defense of the Egyptian uprising? Didn't we support NATO action when Col. Muammar Qaddafi threatened to wipe out his own citizen protestors in Libya? What's good for Egyptian and Libyan citizens is good for Americans, no? If necessary, send in the National Guard to protect our fundamental right to peaceful assembly. What are you waiting for -- dead bodies in our streets?

Bank Tanks Debit Card Fee

The banksters blinked. Bank of America, along with most other large banking corporations, has dropped a $5 fee for debit cards that was supposed to be imposed this fall. It's not much to celebrate, though. Like Netflix and its dopey and dead Qwikster spinoff for DVD rentals, this is only good news because the biggest banks won't be taking a planned course of action that promised to add to customers' 3-year-recession blues while padding the banksters' bottom line with virtually no effort.

You'll still be better off if you get your money out of places like BOA, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and the like. BTW, this Saturday is Bank Transfer Day. Organizers suggest you put whatever savings you have left at this point into credit unions and community banks instead of the big bankster systems. They're still offering virtually no interest on savings deposits, anyway, and there are plenty of better alternatives in our local markets.

Don't think you're breaking the banksters' hearts by leaving, though. Our deposits in banks today are worthless to banksters. Listen to what Don Sturm, the owner of American National Bank, was quoted as saying in Sunday's NY Times when asked about checking and savings deposits: "We just don't need it anymore. If you had more money than you knew what to do with, would you want more?"

FDIC-insured accounts are being overrun with cash taken out of risky investments, and there's still no stomach for lending among banksters since the 2008 recession. So we sit in a standoff of declining demand and confidence. It's going to be years before we can get back to some kind of normal business picture after the Bush-era mortgage-lending defaults, deregulation, socialism for the rich in Republican tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%, investment fraud at the highest levels of finance, and a decade of anemic job creation and shrinking paychecks for the rest of us 99%.