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Water fights: A proud son of Everett swings back at the latest insult, this one about how well Everett’s bottled water lies on the exquisite stomachs of upmarket urban booksellers.

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 28, 2011

On Wednesday one of Crosscut’s elderly editors asked me the distance between Everett and Spada Lake, the source of most of Snohomish County’s water. “It’s about 50 miles,” I said.

The editor paused, fixed in either deep thought or a nano nap. “So, pretty far from all of those pulp mills,” he said.

Please forgive Crosscut’s well-meaning, albeit senescent, nonagenarian editors. They’re still stuck back in college, when they donned raccoon coats and straw boaters and played “Yes, We Have no Bananas” on the ukulele. They recall hopping the Interurban up to Everett for speakeasy gin. Now Everett is simply that blue-collar speck “up there,” drive-through country on the way to the Vancouver Four Seasons. Sigh.

Among Seattle plutocrats, Everett remains a “hey, my contractor lives there!” place. The inference is clear: Some of my best roofers are Everettites, I just don’t want my daughter to marry one.

My Spada Lake exchange was in response to Peter Miller’s entertaining Crosscut blog. Miller, a renowned Seattle bookseller, links his stomach discomfort with drinking purified Everett tap water from Spada Lake.

Alas, the otherwise brilliant Miller lost me with his pusillanimous first sentence: “There is a bravery to eating and drinking what is put in front of you, a thankfulness and can-do spirit.” Hmmm. A bravery and can-do spirit to eating and drinking what’s put in front of you? Pray tell who is providing said food and drink, and where do I sign up? Not since Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” have such un-Everett sentiments been expressed.

Make no mistake: No one in Everett has ever had a problem eating what’s put in front of them and, just as relevant, no one has ever experienced a stomach ache. I repeat: Never. Whether drinking Spada Lake water or, more commonly, Jack Daniels, discomfort is not an option.

Miller’s dyspeptic message is best captured in the hypothetical headline: “Seattle Bookseller Gets a Tummy Ache from Drinking God-purified Water.” Instead an unnamed editor (let’s assign him/her a random pseudonym, “David Brewster”) titled it “Think Before you Drink.” Oh the humanity.

Can a clash of perspectives be reduced to a brand catchphrase? No, but let’s do it anyway: Per Olympia beer, “It’s the Water.”

July 28, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

‘Today, we are all Norwegian’: Reflections on political terror and the Scandinavian experience in the Northwest.

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 25, 2011

A Facebook post has become an anthem of the chin-scratching class from Beijing to Ballard: I dag er vi alle Norske. “Today, we are all Norwegian.”

The scale of Anders Behring Breivik’s political terror is extraordinary. Even among Lutheran existentialists, violence is not suppose to be visited upon the innocent, and God is never so jarringly absent.

For Norwegian Americans, expressions of solidarity kindle feelings of both grief and ethnic hubris. Really, we are all Norwegian? We all rank first on the Human Development Index and produce above-average children? Oh, you wish you were Norwegian.

Scandinavian immigrants changed the cultural landscape of the Northwest, transplanting a tradition of political progressivism, fair play, and trade unionism. There might even be a link, however tenuous, between Norse immigrants and the Northwest’s appetite for clean, ponderous, process-heavy government. For a time, along with Swedes and Germans, Norwegians were the vanguard of Washington’s post-colonial settlers. The Norse were weaned and influenced by the Jante Law, a sense not that everyone is equal per se, just that no one is better than anyone else. Suck it up. Don’t be a braggart and accept life on life’s terms.

My paternal grandparents were part of the great Norwegian diaspora which, unlike other ethnic dispersals, never quite made sense. There was no political or economic disaster to flee. My grandparents received the promotional brochures brandishing the American West, and they bit. They discovered a near-identical climate and a land that blended nature with labor. After a time, they happened upon Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Everett and the stolid Rev. Karl Norgaard, who conducted his sermons in Norwegian. For them, the Pacific Northwest was Norway, only more so.

Like the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, and other immigrant communities, Norwegian-Americans have an emotive link to their ancestral home. That’s why the ripples from Anders Behring Breivik’s terror radiate with such force.

As a child I devoured Claire Sterling’s book, The Terror Network. Sterling was able to document the vast organizational web that knit together the IRA, the PLO, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades, and other disparate 1970s-era radical groups. Commandos trained together and learned the fundamentals of asymmetrical warfare. Here’s how to manufacture a car bomb. Here’s how to hijack a commercial airliner.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Sterling’s book reminded me of the difference between mass political violence — of violence with an ideological agenda, which 9/11 was — and the violence of a lone, apolitical actor. It’s one of the reasons why the expression “The War on Terror” makes as little sense as “The War on Fertilizer Bombs.”

In brief, Anders Behring Breivik’s mass shooting and bombing represent xenophobic political violence. Breivik had a strategic and instrumental purpose: To foster panic and to murder future leaders of Norway’s Labor party. Period. The “madman” explanation is a cop out.

Books such as Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam regarding Theo van Gogh’s killing illustrate how Scandinavia and Northern Europe are riven by ethnic and sectarian tensions. Breivik stands on the unsteady shoulders of Pim Fortuyn, Vidkun Quisling, and other master-race reactionaries. If there’s an American analog to Breivik it’s Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. So forget the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma version. Political violence is what it is: it has the power to inflame, diminish, or unite a people.

Here’s the takeaway: Breivik does not appear to be a mentally ill rebel without a cause. He is a political actor with a political agenda committed to mass political violence. It’s a horror narrative that would have repelled Sweden’s Igmar Bergman, who in his films explored God’s silence and the mystery of death. No, this is Costa-Gavras territory, an admixture of violence and politics and society.

Americans understand both narratives. Today, we are all Norwegian. We always were.

July 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Cantwell’s cheaper shoes are pinching

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 7, 2011

Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray have a proposal to lift tariffs from imported shoe wear, saving consumers (or shoe companies) close to $1 billion annually. But what’s in it for shoemakers in sweatshops?

On the sensibility spectrum, it’s hard to top a title like Sen. Maria Cantwell’s “The Affordable Footwear Act.” The words tumble out bourbon-smooth: affordable footwear.

The bill’s name even bigfoots the evocative Barefoot Schoolboy Act of 1895, the Washington law that established school-levy equalization. Americans sympathize with suffering barefoot schoolboys, but bargain shoes? That one transcends gender, race, and all manner of hoof-related wants.

Cantwell has teamed with Senate colleague Patty Murray and Republicans Pat Roberts and Roy Blunt to craft the legislation that knocks down onerous duties on imported footwear, a legacy of 1930s-era protectionism. The Tri-City Herald reports that the bill would have saved Americans $800 million last year, presupposing shoe distributors and retailers passed the attendant savings along to consumers.

Cantwell’s bill also throws light on the collapse of the nation’s shoe-manufacturing sector. Duties on imported shoes affect all Americans, because almost all shoes are imported nowadays. In a global economy, spookily cheap labor and often-Dickensian working conditions in China, Vietnam, and India are a windfall for American shoppers.

And so the Cantwell bill snaps into place: Erase an outmoded, regressive tariff, and save consumers millions on the price of shoes. Could there be enemies of affordable footwear, organized opposition to something so grossly obvious?

Cantwelll’s bill will pass Congress with the kind of ease that should immediately arouse suspicion in the hearts of Northwest Hobbesians. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and, well, you know. This good bill could be a great, substantive bill, one that also addresses some of the less-savory aspects of human nature.

Here’s a modest proposal: Somewhere in the Affordable Footwear Act embed a human rights carrot. Duty waivers would only apply to overseas factories that meet a specific human rights or anti-sweatshop benchmark. Receive the waiver and spur additional business.

Paul Wolfe, a legislative aide for Cantwell, said that such a provision is technically possible. However, various labor and environmental standards are already codified in NAFTA and other free trade agreements. Linking tariff reform to labor and human rights could be redundant or worse, toothless and ineffective.

The potential hitches are significant. Trade acts are dense and arcane, with industry lobbyists whispering to bill scribes and bill scribes scribing away. The central question of government, qui bono? (who benefits?), would reach from Nike’s Phil Knight to poor families hunting for affordable kids’ shoes. The benefits would not, however, extend to drained Vietnamese sweatshop workers (nor should they, many economists would argue).

We live in the post-GATT World Trade Organization era where fiddling with tariffs is a big no-no. This bill, however, offers a rare exception. It’s about eliminating, not creating a trade barrier. Lawmakers can be as innovative and nettlesome or as inspired and meretricious as they want.

There is at least one non-amending option: Sen. Cantwell and company could ape LBJ and convene a come-to-Jesus meeting with America’s shoe barons. We’ll do this, but you’ll be expected to demand X from foreign producers. The philosophy behind a closed-door shakedown is as transactional and crude as it is simple: When you’ve got ’em by the, er, aglets, their hearts and minds will follow.

In the coming years, Vietnam, China, and other developing countries will reach a tipping point. Something will give, worker discontent will manifest itself politically, or universal standards will ultimately shame the shameless.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, last spring’s Solomon Katz lecturer at the University of Washington and the author of The Honor Code, How Moral Revolutions Happen, posits that appealing to a nation’s honor is one of the most effective catalysts for advancing human rights. Tinkering with international trade could, however, produce a Niebuhr-esque outcome, underlining American hubris and the limits of prescriptive power. Would a human rights benchmark appeal to a country’s sense of national or cultural honor or would it have just the opposite effect?

In the end, a re-jiggered Affordable Footwear Act would attempt to harmonize men-are-no-angels American realism with the Judaic notion of Tikkun olam, to repair the world. Okay, yes, it’s a pretentious-sounding argument.  Advocates should nix any reference to Federalist No. 51 or Jewish mysticism. How about this: Cheaper shoes for fewer sweatshops?

July 7, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Burning holes in the state’s indoor-smoking ban

originally published on Crosscut.com

Wing chairs, tobacco smoke, rose-colored prints of…fox hunts. Throw in a whiskey sour (or two, or three) and you have the “Mad Men” meme, fully expressed in a bill wending its way through the Washington legislature.

Senate bill 5542 would crack open Washington’s smoking ban and permit special licenses for cigar lounges and retail tobacconist shops. It appears, at least on the surface, to be a trivial tweak of Initiative 901, the 2005 clean-indoor-air law that passed in every county in Washington. Northwesterners are free agents, mind you. If we walk into a cigar bar we should (gasp) presuppose that we’ll get blasted by cigar smoke.

On May 17, the cigar bill passed the Senate, albeit barely, with bipartisan support. It’s strange bedfellows at work: Democrats who want to bolster their small-business cred in common cause with conservatives who savor challenging a tribal monopoly on all things tobacco. In the midst of a recession, what could be more symbolically rich than politicians laboring to bring back the smoke-filled room?

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May 23, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Go West, Young U.W. President Young

originally published on Crosscut.com

The University of Washington, which is today announcing its new president, Michael K. Young of the University of Utah, is at an inflection point that will define higher education for decades. The next UW president needs to be a transformational figure, a savior who can finesse politicians, business barons, professors, and churlish alums. No job in the Northwest is freighted with higher expectations or longer odds.

In addition to enduring Olympia’s budget cuts, the UW is getting starved by the feds, including a potential 40-percent reduction in Title VI funding. At the confluence of these misery streams stands the University’s newly named president, Michael Young.

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April 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Why a Seattle church takes up the cause of a Guantanamo detainee

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 25, 2011

Adnan Latif, who suffers from mental health issues, was once cleared for release from Guantanamo. But he remains trapped by bizarre circumstances and political pressures.

Guantanamo Bay muddles the American narrative on wartime conduct. Torture and unjust detention are nothing new, but arbitrary, indefinite detention is.

On a Sunday in March, the University of Washington’s Jamie Mayerfeld spoke to congregants from the University Temple United Methodist Church about the case of Adnan Latif, a Guantanamo Bay inmate since 2002. Latif’s detention is one of the more bracing instances of knucklehead injustice, a Guantanamo prison saga that would have roused Kafka or Dario Fo.

The latest WikiLeaks revelations from The New York Times and other papers underline the problems and confusion that have marked the overall Guantanamo operations, including the particular problems for Yemenis like Latif with weak or no ties to terrorism. The newly published documents seem to confirm much of what critics have been saying about the lack of remedies where individuals appear to be wrongly or unnecessarily held.

Latif’s existential detour began in 2001 when the Yemeni national was snatched by Pakistani security and handed over to American forces for a $5,000 bounty. Mayerfeld, an associate professor of political science who writes extensively on human rights, observed that only 5 percent of Guantanamo prisoners were captured by the U.S. The rest were nabbed by others in a spirit of post-9/11 bonhomie. Bonhomie and, well, the hook of liberal bounties, sweeteners to lasso America’s real or perceived enemies.

Latif became a victim of wrong-place, wrong-time circumstance. He had suffered severe brain damage in a 1994 car accident, a condition that magnified his despair and greased subsequent suicide attempts. And his prison timeline hasn’t helped on the despair front. With no documented link to terrorism or a terrorist network, Latif was recommended for release in 2004. It didn’t happen. His release was cleared in 2007. No action was taken.

In 2009, the Obama administration initially consented to a transfer back to his native Yemen. Finally in 2010, federal District Judge Henry Kennedy, Jr. heard Latif’s habeas corpus petition and ordered his immediate release. The Obama administration needed to take “all necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps to facilitate Latif’s release,” Judge Kennedy wrote. This time, however, the Obama administration decided to appeal.

Latif’s nationality presaged the administration’s reversal. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber and a citizen of Nigeria, was trained and equipped in Yemen. After Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 over Detroit in December of 2009, the administration adopted a blanket ban on releasing Yemeni detainees. Largely as a result, Yemenis form the the largest group of current Guantanamo prisoners. It’s Camus meets the accident of birth.

Mayerfeld offered a primer: Guantanamo Bay held 779 prisoners in January of 2002. Today that number is just 172 (seven have died while incarcerated). All the while and as early as 2002, one CIA report declared that one-third to one-half of detainees had no ties to terrorism. Nevertheless, a utilitarian calculus infected executive-branch decision making. There are evil actors at Guantanamo. Better to delay justice for a few, the conventional wisdom goes, than imperil American security over the long term.

Most of Guantanamo’s overarching questions transcend partisanship. Separating the innocent from the merely suspect has been delegated to a body called the “Guantanamo Review Task Force.” Mayerfeld terms it “trial by bureaucracy.”

Improvements have taken place, Mayerfeld said, and the consensus is that by the summer of 2009 detainee treatment drew closer to international norms. There are still flagrant violations of normative justice, however, such as arbitrary detention, deprivation of due process, and the denial of a fair trial. The question of solitary confinement also looms large. “Imagine living and sleeping in your own bathroom for 23 hours a day,” Mayerfeld said.

Mayerfeld, whose scholarship revolves around issues of torture and human rights, teaches a UW class on Guantanamo. In addition to extensive research, students are required to keep journals documenting the quotidian and often soul-deadening anomie of specific detainees. Individual profiles range from an Adnan Latif to unabashed killers such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In a recent Crosscut interview, Dr. Esther Brimmer, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, said, “The president has said that he plans to close Guantanamo, and cases are under active, regular review. We’ve moved out 68 prisoners to third countries.” Brimmer, who said that she was not familiar with details of Latif’s case, insisted that Guantanamo’s future also depends on the consent of Congress.

For Mayerfeld the essential question centers on Guantanamo’s afterlife. The conundrum of arbitrary, indefinite detention will not disappear if the United States shutters Guantanamo tomorrow and simply scatters prisoners to mainland purgatory.

Here the proverbial lessons of history don’t apply. “The fallacy of prediction by analogy occurs when analogy is used to anticipate future events — as it often is, in the absence of anything better,” David Hackett Fischer wrote more than 40 years ago. It’s an axiom that resonates still.

Guantanamo Bay is not about American servicemen in 1898 learning a novel technique for torturing Filipino POWs called the “water cure;” it is not Camp Harmony, the Puyallup way station for Japanese-Americans in the 1940s; and it is not President Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of habeaus corpus.

If Guantanamo is without clear antecedents, then the model for combatting it seems equally elusive. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s isn’t instructive because so much revolved around a judicial strategy in addition to political mobilization. Thurgood Marshall was the linchpin and Martin Luther King, Jr., was the closer. Justice would be revealed in the courts.

Capital punishment may be the closest analogue: a manifestly moral issue that loses juice because the lead characters are often heinous or unsympathetic. Latif — an ill and troubled man, but not a terrorist — has become an accidental metaphor, a force greater than himself.

So on a cold spring morning, two dozen Methodists ask questions and grab letter paper to write their members of Congress about a 34-year-old prisoner.

“What has been done will be done again,” reads Ecclesiastes. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Well, mostly.

No one aims to amend scripture in the basement of a Methodist church. It’s tempting though.

April 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

AmeriCorps at risk in GOP budget plans

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 2, 2011

All that volunteerism? Apparently, it’s too Democratic, even though Republicans led the 2009 Senate action that more than doubled the number of AmeriCorps members. Or maybe it’s just too Northwestern an idea.

Sargent Shriver was the consummate public servant and pop to the Peace Corps (along with Hubert Humphrey, who merits a long-overdue hat tip). When Shriver died in January, former Republican speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote, “His restless idealism, his serious faith, his belief in the power of engaged citizenship, have been an inspiration to generations. And the institutions he shaped will serve the poor and struggling for generations to come.”

Gerson mostly got it right. The Peace Corps will continue to serve the poor and the struggling for generations to come.

Its domestic counterpart, AmeriCorps, however, may soon get the hatchet.

The U.S. House’s H.R. 1, a measure that’s a grab-bag of draconian budget whacks, would shutter the Corporation for National and Community Service and its various programs such as AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, Learn & Serve America, and VISTA. It’s a partisan slam of an inherently nonpartisan program. Had he been re-elected, President George H.W. Bush hoped to midwife his Points of Light initiative into what is now AmeriCorps. Instead it fell to President Clinton to elevate national service, subsequently branding the Scarlet “D” on AmeriCorps.

Fortunately the program’s return on investment was meaningful enough that, over time, partisanship fell away. It culminated with the 2009 passage of the Serve America Act, which more than doubled the number of AmeriCorps members. Its two shepherds in the U.S. Senate were — partisans, take note — Orrin Hatch and John McCain.

In Washington state alone, H.R. 1 will zero-out $38.5 million dollars and remove more than 3,000 national-service participants from community and faith-based organizations. That number doesn’t include 420 foster grandparents and 257 senior companions as well as thousands of kids who benefit from Learn and Serve America. If the Senate gives its assent, this measure will immediately extinguish or hinder service programs from Seattle to Wenatchee to Spokane.

It’s all disappointing because in DC-wonk vernacular, the Corporation for National and Community Service is “budget dust.” Instead of means testing or evaluating outcomes, it’s deemed nonessential and given the heave-ho. There are wiser ways to balance the federal budget, of course, beginning with a laser-like analysis of those departments with colossal expenses and redundant services. (No hints, but consider starting with that large, five-walled building across the Potomac in Arlington).

H.R. 1 may call for some volunteer-driven jingoism: a citizen-volunteer culture is after all part of the Northwest’s social fabric. Washington state contributes one of the highest number of volunteers per capita to AmeriCorps, many hailing from local colleges and universities (the UW also remains the number-one campus for Peace Corps recruitment). Giving back is a natural extension of Mother Joseph and the Sisters of Providence, dang it. The Northwest is a public-service heavyweight. Or was.

True, the sun will rise tomorrow and, hopefully, the day after that even if the U.S. Senate or President Obama doesn’t sprint to the rescue of national service. In the meantime it feels like a reprise of the 1975 New York Daily News headline, “Congress to AmeriCorps: DROP DEAD.”

March 2, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Everett and Boeing: Perhaps we should celebrate?: A Scandinavian community is not inclined to boastfulness. But the Everett plant will be at the center of work on the new refueling tanker.

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 25, 2011

A Scandinavian community is not inclined to boastfulness. But the Everett plant will be at the center of work on the new refueling tanker.

We lurch from bed, we stare in the mirror (with acceptance, not narcissism) and we whisper memento mori, remember you are going to die. It’s the Everett catechism.

Everett’s defining sensibility is a mix of manic optimism and the Scandinavian humility of Jante Law, the first rule of which is don’t think you’re anything special.

And so this afternoon’s news about the aerial refueling tanker unfurled like the French tricolor. Not. Rule number four of Jante Law and its pattern of Scandinavian group behavior: Don’t convince yourself that you’re better than the rest of us.

Is it possible to act prideful and be without sin? No, we’re never without sin, so sinfully we celebrate Boeing’s unexpected windfall.

The collective letdown was tangible after the Pentagon’s decision three years ago to award the $35 billion contract to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and EADS, the parent company of Airbus. Back then it was as if the serotonin god had turned down the rheostat. Neighbors shuffled. Playgrounds emptied.

We didn’t anticipate a Boeing victory, so conditioned are we to bad news. It feels like a slow earthquake that doesn’t register until it’s over. In 2008 we presupposed that the company’s implosion traced back to the hubris of Phil Condit, to the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, and ultimately, to the 2003 Darleen Druyun procurement scandal.

In 2008, the political hand-wringing combined boosterism and shock with an emotive country-first appeal. “We are outraged that this decision taps European Airbus and its foreign workers to provide a tanker to our American Military,” read a joint press release from eight members of Washington’s congressional delegation. “This is a blow to the American Aerospace industry, American workers and America’s men and women in uniform.”

Fast forward three years and here’s what Governor Gregoire had to say today (Feb. 24):

“What a great day for The Boeing Company, and for the 11,000 aerospace workers in Washington state alone that will play a role in assembling the NewGen tanker. Following an open, transparent process, the Department of Defense realized what I’ve been saying all along — and that is that Boeing has designed the safest, most cost-effective tanker to serve both our military and our taxpayers well.”

All communities have a creation myth and a defining sensibility. Everett was conceived as the Pittsburgh of the West, with street names like Rockefeller and Colby and other East coast investors — who quit and pulled out. Once in a while, on an afternoon like this, we buck defeatism and the sun filters through.

Everett doesn’t think it’s anything special, mind you. But we won.

February 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Can we discuss Tucson in a way that lets us learn?

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 11, 2011

Beyond the raw horror of Rep. Giffords’ attempted assassination, it will shape thinking for years to come.

The raw horror of Saturday’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has already become shorthand. It stings, and Arizona’s lax gun laws may partly be to blame, concludes the New York Times. It stings, and this is what you get when you incite the lesser angels, argue Democrats and Republicans alike.

“We all know that there are unstable and potentially dangerous people among us,” writes former Sen. Gary Hart. “To repeatedly appeal to their basest instincts is to invite and welcome their predictable violence.”

Hart is spot on, but a gut check is needed to divine the exploiters. In determining whether facts are cited authentically, historians employ the “drunk leaning on a lamppost” test: Is the light getting used for support or for illumination? Both?

The Tucson tragedy will insinuate itself in the collective memory of a new generation. Younger citizens, those recharged by the 2008 Obama campaign, may now think twice about a career in public service. Or perhaps they’ll feel more emboldened to give back.

Generation Xers replay the clouded image of President Ford wincing at the echo of Sara Jane Moore’s missed gunshot or John Hinckley Jr.’s rampage outside the Washington Hilton Hotel that nearly killed President Reagan. Both were senseless acts, however uncrowded by politics. All the while, we knew about the age of political assassinations that extended from President Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr. to the unsolved Shoreline murder of the Urban League’s Edwin Pratt. Politics as a career? A mostly honorable but dangerous profession, we Xers thought.

In the Pacific Northwest the coarsening of political speech, and what flows from it, is no abstraction. This winter my Seattle commuter bus will not be adorned with an “Israeli War Crimes” banner. That’s because last month King County Executive Dow Constantine put the kibosh on an ad blitz underwritten by the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign. Yes, it was a retroactive decision that felt heavy-handed. Yes, given the potential for escalating divisions and anti-Semitic backlash, I’m grateful. It would have defined political-hate speech down and made it normative. It might have (with a double emphasis on “might”) invited the violence of someone unstable.

So I’ll use Saturday’s raw horror as shorthand. I hope it’s more for illumination than support.

January 11, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Conservation projects need congressional action

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 5, 2010

Congress should support full funding of conservation projects that are paid for by fees from offshore oil and gas leasing. 

“Lame duck” seems like a self-fulfilling label. With just two weeks left, this (sudden death? two-minute warning?) Congress should defy conventional wisdom and stick its bill out.

Thirty years ago, a lame-duck Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands and Conservation Act (ANILCA) the signal law that overnight doubled the size of the National Park System. ANILCA was the coda to an eye-smarting process that traces back to Alaska statehood in 1959.

In 1980 Democrats acted more emboldened than paralyzed by the end-of-session blues. The cudgel was a just-elected President Reagan, veto pen in hand. Deadlines sharpen the mind. Mostly.

The final days of our sudden-death Congress will revolve around tax cuts, online gambling and enough picayune dreck to make a fifth grader lose faith. One low-hanging bill with a bipartisan history, S2747, might stanch some of that cynicism. S2747 is the Senate counterpart to a House bill that passed last August to provide full and dedicated funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The Fund, established in 1965 as a bipartisan solution to benefit states and local communities with conservation and outdoor-recreation needs, is paid for using a portion of the receipts from offshore gas and oil leases (Read: BP and Exxon-Mobil help underwrite projects in places like the Yakima River Canyon and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest).

Over the past 40 years, LWCF projects have added up to more than a half-a-billion dollars for Washington state and goosed an outdoor recreation industry that annually adds $11.7 billion to the regional economy, according to the LWCF Coalition.

Let-no-fund-go-undiverted budgeting means that the LWCF’s authorized annual level of $900 million has only been met a couple of times since 1965. S2747, sponsored by New Mexico’s Sen. Jeff Bingaman and co-sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell, will ensure the LWCF’s integrity and end the disconnect between mission and means. It has the power to appeal to Republican budget hawks and to conservation Democrats and, most critical of all, to a majority of Americans (77 percent, again according to the LWCF Coalition).

A lesson from 1980 is that history hates hangdogs. Passing S2747 should be easy, with one webbed foot in front of the other.

December 5, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,