losing a common reservoir of trust

Robert Reich’s book is not just for Boston. It should be an alarm for the entire country, and not a minute too soon. Why should we care about what a candidate for governor of Massachusetts thinks? Why should we care about his call for America to quit making the poor poorer as the rich get richer?

”Should you care? Yes,” Reich writes. ”After a point, as inequality widened, the bonds that kept our society together would snap. Every decision we tried to arrive at together — about trade, immigration, education, taxes and social insurance (health, welfare, retirement) — would be harder to make, because it would have such different consequences for the relatively rich than for the relatively poor. We could no longer draw upon a common reservoir of trust and agreed-upon norms to deal with such differences. We would begin to lose our capacity for democratic governance.”

Unfortunately, I think Reich is too conservative in his estimates. We have already lost that capacity, and the only question now is whether it can be restored.

Boycott Florida!

Yeah, I know, easy for me to say, since I’ve never been and am now, since November, 2000, in no hurry to go, but there’s another reason.

[Tim] McCarron and his supporters, members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, are calling for a gay and tourism boycott of the Sunshine State. Florida, they say, is in a “state of denial.” It has the third-highest rate of AIDS infection in the country, and Miami has more reported cases than the entire states of Georgia, Maryland or Massachusetts.
Despite these figures, Florida recently cut $10 million from programs including Medicaid’s Project AIDS Care Waiver Program, which supported people homebound with the disease. After the cuts, many were left without housekeepers, cooks or caregivers who used to help them to the bathroom.
At the same time, the state continues to be a mecca for gay and lesbian tourists, who account for 10 percent of the nation’s $540 billion tourist industry. Ads from Miami-Dade and Broward counties run in gay magazines. In Broward, gay and lesbian travel accounts for an estimated $570 million of the county’s $25 billion travel industry.
“The paradox is that so much money is being generated by tourism, but all this money left in the state doesn’t benefit those people who are in need,” says McCarron, who is gay. “The government says we can’t afford to take care of these people. But they can afford to appropriate $20 million for a TV ad when there’s no money in the budget.”

just another day for a snake oil salesman

The Republicans can’t afford to pay for their own campaign junkets. They need our [Republicans don’t pay taxes anymore] tax money.

CHARLESTON, S.C., July 29 — President Bush directed unusually harsh criticism at the Senate today for its version of a welfare bill, which he said would hurt the people it was trying to help. Almost immediately afterward, he collected more than $1 million at a Republican fund-raiser.
In an efficient and lucrative three-hour and 45-minute trip to this Republican-friendly state, Mr. Bush met in a private session with former welfare recipients, gave a speech at a suburban high school admonishing the Senate to pass his version of welfare reform, then spoke to 1,000 people at a fund-raising lunch for former Representative Mark Sanford, the Republican candidate for governor. The lunch cost $500 per plate, but the biggest contributors gave $10,000 to have their pictures taken with the president.
The visit was the usual presidential combination of political fund-raising and policy promotion, allowing the White House to charge taxpayers, not just the Republican Party, for part of the travel bill.
….
Mr. Bush spent an hour and five minutes at the fund-raiser for Mr. Sanford at the North Charleston Convention Center, where the president praised Mr. Sanford’s character.
“I appreciate having a man who understands the money he’s spending as your governor is not the government’s money [my italics],” Mr. Bush said. “It’s the people’s money. And he’s a man who set a good example.”

Have these people no shame? How do they sleep at night?
Note, in passing through this news article, that the “presidential” part of this fund-raising trip involved his attempt to sell, as more helpful to those on welfare than the alternative senate form, his callous version of a new welfare bill, one which would force people on welfare to work 40 hours a week (the senate would require 30 hours). [Black is white.]

just the smells and bells and funny tales, thank you

It looks like Mexico has the right attitude toward the Catholic Church: We’ll take the fun parts and the pretty parts, but don’t tell us what to do!

…there is a troublesome, yawning divide between the teachings of the church and the beliefs of Mexican Catholics. The divide is clear in surveys showing that Mexicans favor birth control, oppose religious education and are open to abortion.
….
“The church is always full on Sunday,” [said a seminarian in a working class neighborhood of GUADALAJARA] “Rituals are easy for the people. But they do not turn to the church when they are making choices in their lives. And if they do turn to the church, many of them reject what the church demands.”
….
Last week [the Vargas family,] David Vargas, 45, an ironsmith, and his wife Leticia, 42, invited the seminarian for lunch. The lunches offer an opportunity to spread Catholicism in an intimate setting, Mr. Barajas said. But the Vargas family seemed intent on giving the church a piece of their mind.
“Why is it that people who are divorced are prohibited from Communion?” Mrs. Vargas asked. “Divorce does not seem like a sin to me.”
The aspiring priest responded, “Divorce on its own is not a sin.”
But he was interrupted. “Why does the church consider it wrong to use birth control?” Mrs. Vargas said, turning toward her 23-year-old daughter, Janet. “Would the church rather we have children we cannot care for?”
While Mr. Barajas squirmed for an answer, Mr. Vargas tried to lighten the mood.
“My wife and I don’t always agree,” he reassured the seminarian. “We still believe in the Catholic Church. We just think it needs to grow up in some areas.”

through storms and Red Guards

I’ve had my disagreements with the Post Office, and with Columbia University for that matter, but if both can somehow persevere through the worst environments nature and man can devise, I have a new respect for both institutions, and some hope we will survive this week’s heat and even our current government.

The letters, from Columbia University in New York, have also been a sometimes tenuous thread between two worlds for more than half a century during which time this once cosmopolitan city was largely cut off from the West. Their uninterrupted delivery is one of the many small marvels of the mail, a testament to the reliability of the postal services on both sides of the Pacific.

hot town Summer in the City

[Miss Scarlet must have been told that a lady does not sweat in the summer. She glows. How were us northern folk supposed to know that? It would’a made all the difference for a lot of us, surely.]
The NYTimes editors like to regularly wax poetical about our more natural seasonal pleasures, and pains, sometimes actually adding something worthy to what we normally enjoy or suffer privately. Today’s notes are sort of a tribute to the fullness of summer in New York,

The thickness of the weather is most obvious just at dusk, when the heat tapers off a bit but the humidity comes into its own. Darkness seems to arrive from no place in particular. It condenses into a vapor that lies low over the hills north of the city and obscures the river edge of New Jersey. The damp air blunts every outline and blurs the distinction between colors until finally only darkness is left, but a darkness you can taste in your mouth and feel on your skin.

and yet they offer some sensible help in dealing with its discomforts.

Southerners know that the trick of living in damp heat is getting used to being sticky all the time. Northerners prefer to feel as though they’d just dried off after a long shower, their skin slick, except that in weather like this that effect quickly vanishes. For all the clarity of azure autumn days and the softness of the best weeks of spring, a few days of shirt-drenching weather in late July or early August are every bit as truly New York.

[I guess winter just doesn’t count anymore. I think we did away with it a little while back.]

really natural gardening

I came across this amazing site yesterday, but I doubt that we will have much call for the products it offers.

No matter what critter is eating up your garden or invading your yard, we have the proven, all-natural solution: 100% Predator Urines!

Even though both deer and coyotes have been found in Manhattan in recent years, I really doubt that either will be likely to get into our little roof garden, and the neighbors would in any event certainly not be happy with such a defense system.