This really has little to do specifically with India, but for the fact that it was an Indian fellow I follow on Twitter who set me off on this direction of thought:

Allow me to follow a very simplistic rule for a moment: If everyone in the mass media hates it, and I still think it’s an okay idea, it’s probably a really good idea.

Recently, President Obama has proposed what the MSM calls a radical, unorthodox, and foolish idea: he’s going to stop giving companies incentives to move jobs overseas.  So says the LA Times, Washington Post, and to some extent, the New York Times.  In the midst of this all, I’m trying to find some equilibrium that keeps foreign workers employed (who, by the way, have nothing like the social safety net we have here in America) while giving American labourers the opportunity to compete for jobs in a global economy.

Can we achieve parity with the competing interests of foreign and local job numbers?

For one, I think this is more a problem that global corporations are creating.  I’m in no way xenophobic, and not for a moment do I think that this is any fault of a group of workers looking for a job.  Rather, I place fault in the corporations who are all too willing to set aside ethical and just job standards to gain the most they can out of a worker’s efforts.  It is the fault of the companies who are taking advantage of the people, and not the people who are being taken advantage of.

But what of Obama’s new foreign economic policy move?  Is it too radical, harsh, or unfair?  My instinct tells me no.

It doesn’t seem harsh to reincorporate a job that moved out of the country beacuse of cheaper labor and lax foreign laws.  Injustice is moving a job to another nation because it’s cheaper and easier to take advantage of its people.  Yet immediately after typing this, I find myself worrying about workers of other nations who will be left out of jobs if corporations retract and pull jobs back into America.  Where’s their justice?

And it’s about at that point that I get stuck.  My desire to have an equal, global job market trumps any other thoughts I have on this subject.  Ideally, all job markets would be equal, and thus more based on skill and proximity.  How to achieve that standard is an impossible goal which I can only charge myself to think about in the years to come.

Do you have any ideas?

First, go and read this Pew article which suggests something similar to what my original article posited last week.  Party alignment is down overall, but Republicans are suffering much worse losses.

Democratic party affiliation on the downswing could mean two things: a) that more moderates are leaving the party as it becomes more liberal, or b) that more liberals are leaving the party as it becomes moderate.  Or maybe it’s both, but I tend to think that it’s more B and less A.  Of course, things are much more complicated than this, and I’m oversimplifying, but bear with me.

As I stated earlier, at first I was a little weary of the party swinging further towards the right.  But after thinking about it for a while, I guess I see no problem with that as long as the radical Republican party becomes more marginalized in the process (which they are).

So I guess I’m wondering what this means.  If the Republican party is becoming a fringe group, and Democrats are becoming the moderate-to-right group, does this leave an opening for a left-of-center organization to take hold?

I realize this might be a crackpot idea, but I wonder if anyone else is seeing this with me.  Let me know!

What I find so interesting about Arlen Specter joining the Democratic party doesn’t lay so much in the changing dynamics of Congress, or the Republican response.  What’s interesting is the changing face of the Democratic party itself.  As Republicans lose any semblance of an ethos in trade for fringe votes from radical religious sects, they alienate anyone who might otherwise consider themselves a Republican.  In the meantime, Democrats are gaining members from this exodus.

See: recent Democratic wins in traditional conservative strongholds like Indiana, recent polls showing less people associating themselves with the Republican party, and, yes, Arlen Specter defecting.  While I’m cautious in claiming this is any sort of lasting shift, or even a major one, all indicators point to something changing.

We can also look to conservative Democrats like Jim Webb, who, in any other time, may have run under the Republican banner.  But as radical conservative religious organizations – like the Club for Growth – push moderate Republicans out of the party by cutting them off at the knees by funding more radical candidates and generating bad press, many have decided to switch over.  I’d suggest that something similar is happening on a more local level as well, with traditional conservatives being marginalized by these same kinds of people.

You reap what you sow.

Because of this, the Democratic party is more and more becoming the party of sanity, and less the party of liberal ideas.  They seem to be heading towards greater homogenization, while the Republican party is rapidly rolling towards a radical fringe existence.  I have mixed feelings about this if it’s true.  Initially, I find it frightening to think that the Democratic party may galvanize into something other than what was embodied in LBJ’s Great Society.  The rational side of me, however, sees an opportunity in this change.

For one, we may finally be able to put the nail in the coffin of fundamentalists holding power over this nation.  Radical religious groups have no place in any America with a future – we can be a nation with morality without the vitriolic rhetoric bordering on violent and absurd threats.  I’d feel relieved if we moved on from this chapter in our country’s life.

But the biggest opportunity, and the one I place the most hope in, is the possibility to build a more liberal consensus using the swelling numbers of Democrats.  As a nation, we’ve dwelt on the same issues for too long – abortion, gay rights and civil rights in general, unionization, taxing the wealthy, to name a few.  Now might be one of the best opportunities we’ll have to collectively choose to make the right decision, and then move on from these things and onto less contrived issues.[1. I realize these are important issues right now and in no way want to be seen as marginalizing their current validity, but, really, wouldn't it be great if we could tackle other major problems facing our generation rather than dealing with issues continuously being rehashed for political purposes?]

And so we come back to Specter.

Arlen Specter’s move acts as a barometer for some subtle shift in the political landscape, but is not a major change itself.  For at least the past 8 years, and probably since Reagan, the political landscape has slowly been setting itself up for this change; Arlen Specter is only the latest news.  Whether my hopes will come to be reality, or if we will ever see radical religion’s power over politicians curbed, is a quesiton I can only continue to mull over.  But I am convinced that something is happening, and if I can permit myself some optimisim, I think it’s for the better.

Not that I’m a medical expert, but don’t people die from the flu every year?  As a matter of fact, don’t people die in large, unthinkable quantities from things like lack of sanitation, curable disease, and war?

Aren’t people eating mud in some parts of Asia to fill their stomachs?

Or what about the nearly million people killed in a genocidal war sweeping Darfur?

I guess these questions are mostly rhetorical, but my point is: why does something like the swine flu get so much coverage and attention when it seems like a small threat, and something like lack of sanitation and access to potable water in many parts of the world get so little attention when it’s clearly so horrible and threatening to human life?

It’s that swine flu threatens us all, not just people overseas that we can’t see.  It probably also has something to do with our fear of the unseen and unknown.  And, in sum, these things are then taken advantage of by those who can gain whatever business they can from this unfortunate epidemic.

Why do I seem so angry about this?  Probably because there are so many other unfortunate things going on in this world that are much more dangerous, much more real, and have been going on for much longer with no attention at all.

The stairs of the Radisson Hotel Chicago weren’t really stairs at all, but escalators pointing downwards toward a sea of suits and ties mingling in multi-tiered, richly carpeted lobbies that always lead downwards toward another boring Wednesday.  Into the depths I went until I hit what seemed to be the final floor, and last security checkpoint.  At the base of the stairs was a desk for the local Public Radio station, and at the desk was a pair of girls who weren’t quite sure why they were there.  Looking around at the suits in the basement lobby, I realized nobody seemed to know why they were there.

At some point after that and the cash bar I found my way into a banquet hall lined with chairs – about 45 per row by another 45 or so – awaiting our speaker, Tony Blair.  As final microphone and camera checks were made[1. reminiscent of the Tom Hanks/Wayne's World roadie skit] my accomplice and I joked about what questions we would ask Blair if we got the chance.  ”Where’s your crown?,” “Can I get a picture?,” and various schemes involving fake Irish accents were discussed.

In the end, reason won out and we took our seats as Mayor Daley began his lackluster introduction for one of the biggest foreign dignitaries to come to Chicago[2.  at least he was respectful and gracious, which is about all you can ask for sometimes with Chicago's mayor].

So Tony Blair took the stage, and here’s where things get sketchy because at some point in this story I’ll fall asleep for about 20 good minutes and miss virtually nothing in the speech; Blair was that predictable.  He did not apologize for Iraq, he did not apologize for the global war on terror, and, in fact, he made the argument that we should stop “feeling sorry for ourselves” and move forward.  In essence, he was calling for a complete amnesia of the past eight years.

Tell that to the hundreds of thousands that have been displaced because of a lack of American foresight and planning.  This is my challenge.

As the speech continued onward, I began feeling less sorry for myself; not because Mr. Blair asked me to, but because I’d suddenly realized that at some point in my life I’d made a right decision which lead down the road to empathy and sympathy, and Blair chose a road that allowed him to defend his tarnished history and work.  Define: jingoism.  Define: strawman arguments.  Define: stubborn.

When the time finally came for audience questions, I was wide awake and more interested – the speech is never where you get the truth, and subsequent questions aren’t very different.  Sometimes you get a rare glimpse of the human being inside of a question.  As the meeting wore on, Blair dodged and parried questions about the impact of poverty in the Middle East and the intervention of the West in Asian conflicts.  Instead, he fell back on platitudes like “we must fight evil wherever it is,” and, “if we lose to evil anywhere, we lose to it everywhere.”  Another gem: we do not work with corrupt and bad governments unless they are workigng with us in good faith.

How charlatans like this are able to label themselves as moderates while supporting dangerous wars and aggression overseas is beyond me

Al Gore, forced to defend any vested interests he may have in climate change.  To summarize: “do you have any money invested in something you’ve been supporting for 30 years?”

And if he didn’t, I’m sure the line would be: “Why aren’t you putting your money where your mouth is?”

Quick Edit: This is why Al Gore doesn’t want to be in politics any more.  Someone has to laugh at these people when they ask questions like this, and you certainly can’t do that if you’re trying to win votes (for some damn reason).

This is going to be a short one because I got home late and haven’t had enough time to fully collect my thoughts on the event The Chicago Council on Global Affairs hosted tonight with Tony Blair.  Briefly: He was personable and likeable, and I’d take him over almost any conservative politician we have in this country to date.  Blair made cogent arguments for his actions, though I can’t say I agree with him much.

No apologies for the Iraq War, though there seemed to be a hint of regret.  He’s very good at setting up the typical liberal strawman who’s soft on dictatorships and weak in the knees when it comes to foreign policy.  He also made an odd claim that poverty has little to do with the problems we’re experiencing in the Middle East.  On top of that all, he drew a very thin distinction between his claim that we need to fight injustice everywhere, and his working with countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt (because they’re “working with us”, we can overlook their actions to some extent).  More on this later.

The Q&A from the audience was pretty soft, except for two interesting questions: one about poverty in the Middle East (I mentioned that earlier), and another about the distinction between Islamic radicalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the rather linear way we look at Islamicism in general that leads to certain semantic pitfalls (the way we call certain people “moderate” Islamacists, when they really aren’t any less devoted, just not inclined to violence).  This led to a quick, interesting comment on how we may alienate certain groups by calling them moderate and making the appear weak.

Anyway, happy Earth Day, I guess.

Be sure to check out all the green items being sold at Walmart.

There was one point during the “party” that really crystallized the entire event for me. The speakers had just finished, and everyone was all riled up and rearing to go. Some appeared to be taking off on a march northwards, while another large portion of them stayed behind in the plaza to talk to each other, to the media, or just to videotape the entire spectacle.  There seemed to be this sense of energy and general good feelings about what they’d just accomplished, and every protest member was pretty pumped up.

As I started towards the middle of the crowd, a voice got on the PA and gave this announcement: “The suburban bus for Elgin has arrived, and will be leaving in five minutes.”

I couldn’t have thought of a better way to summarize the entire event in all its ridiculousness, hilarity, and manufactured pomp and circumstance.

Inevitably, the magic gets ripped away from nearly every image we create. The fantasy steals itself away and leaves a naked, shriveled body in its place – a shell of what we once held up as an ideal. It’s at the point that we see the true face of the image, in all its blemished and pocked glory, staring us straight in the face, perplexed, as if to ask, “Well, what did you expect?”

At any juncture like this, a serious individual would pause for a moment of reflection, take a minute to readjust their belief system to something more practical & real, and tear the tarnished image down. All humans err, and surely, therefore, cannot be blamed for a change of heart like this. What they can be blamed for, however, is staring into the gaping maw of a failed ideology and, despite all warnings, continuing on into the void.

This is not bravery or loyalty, it’s drunken amateur bull fighting.

Toro!

Tea Parties were held today in every state around this great nation. To summarize briefly, these are parties for people who don’t want to be taxed by the government. Really, though, these meetings were a greasy glaze covering up all sorts of less-than-altruistic motives – all brought to you by a blind, jingoistic mob who have their own less-than-subtle reasons for being there. This is all played to the soundtrack of country music, by the way.

A sign seen being championed by its proud bearer simply saying “No!” sums up this event pretty well. These people come from all around Chicago to protest something. What that something is they can’t quite put their finger on, or would rather not admit to in public. To be sure, though, this is an event for disaffected conservatives who sense their 15 minutes – or eight years – of fame are over. Though some claim that this is a non-partisan event for all angry at the government, the advertisements and drive-by billboards I saw at the Chicago Tea Party event exclusively championed conservative causes, candidates, and talk shows.

But, whatever, this was a family-friendly event for everyone. Except for the Obama is Hitler paraphernalia meandering throughout the crowd. Which is confusing, because how could he be a fascist and a socialist, all at the same time? I digress.

Some other clever banners I saw at the rally likened Barnie Franks to some sort of flamboyant pimp, boldly stated “Join or Die”, or – and this is one of my favorite gems – flatly came on the out-and-out with it: “ENGLISH UNITES AMERICA”. I, too, am tired of being taxed, and hey, I’m also tired of people who don’t speak English! Right guys?!

Guys…?

—–

A few more photos, including the famous Join or Die flag:

When I first heard about this “TEA Party Day”, I though to myself, are they really going to be throwing tea into a body of water? As it turns out, this isn’t the case.  Nor will any attendants be dressing up like Indians or storming a wooden ship.

As a matter of fact, all of these things couldn’t be further from the truth.  TEA Party day is just a congregation of a group of (conservative) individuals who don’t like the idea of being taxed, and who probably clearly don’t understand that the upcoming tax increases will only affect the extremely wealthy.

Here in Chicago, Alan Keyes (who’s about as much of a Republican leader in Illinois as any of the others) will be speaking at our TEA Party Day rally.  It’s hard to decide what to think about this all, but I have a hard time believing any good can come from these “parties”.  Parties where people like Keyes are invited to speak.

I wish we could all just get back to work with a serious, more rigorous approach to policy than what amounts to a half-hearted, gimmicky version of an event that has a place in most American history books.

Happy TEA Party Day.

How charming.