Dispatches: Wrong questions

I'm posting my Dispatches column a day early directly to the blog. I'll repost as a link tomorrow.

DISPATCHES: Wrong questions
On Afghanistan, it’s not how to win, but why are we still there
By Hank Kalet

If you keep asking the wrong questions, you are going to keep getting the wrong answers.

That’s what we have been facing in Afghanistan.

Rather than asking the correct question — why are we fighting in the south Asian country? — we seek the elusive winning strategy: What do we need to do to win what is, plainly, an unwinnable war?

The uproar over the comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff to Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine, comments that led to his ouster as commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, focused on the general’s insubordination, his dismissive attitude toward civilian leaders and the frat-boy environment the general appears to have encouraged. These were legitimate concerns, especially given the need to ensure civilian control of the military.

Gen. McChrystal resigned — or was forced to — and is expected to be replaced by Gen. David Petraeus, his boss and the chief architect of the counterinsurgency philosophy that is governing our war strategy. As Roger Daltry sang, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

President Barack Obama, in choosing Gen. Petraeus, made it clear that he is committed to his failed Afghan policy and is unwilling to ask the right questions about Afghanistan, the war on terror and U.S. war-making power in general.

As The Washington Post put it in its coverage last week, the decision to turn to Gen. Petraeus “allowed the president to keep his war strategy intact” and maintain “crucial (Republican) support for a war that a majority of Americans routinely say is no longer worth fighting.”

The president, in announcing the change, called it “a change in personnel,” but not “in policy.”

But shouldn’t the policy, itself, come under scrutiny? We have been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly nine years with little to show for it. The Taliban, which we forced from power, remains a factor and the government of Hamid Karzai, which we support, is viewed as corrupt and out of touch with the population.

Al Qaeda, which had used Afghanistan as a safe haven in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks, has moved across the border into Pakistan and has organized itself in a number of failed states around the globe, according to numerous press reports.

And yet, we continue to wage this misguided war.

The question is why. The answer, I think, is that the foreign policy establishment has gamed the argument by only asking questions that result in the answers it wants to get and by building its rationale on set of questionable premises designed to elicit its desired result.

Basically, it has built its arguments on statements of value masquerading as statements of fact. It is an argument premised on the notion that Afghanistan’s stability and movement toward democracy are imperative to safeguard Americans in the United States, and that our ability to disrupt terrorist activities and dismantle terrorist cells depends on victory in a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan.

These premises, however, are debatable; they express opinion and not fact. Before we can argue about the best strategy to employ in Afghanistan, we need to discuss the premises of the arguments made by the Obama administration.

Afghanistan’s stability and movement toward democracy are in our national interests. No doubt, a stable and democratic government will be better for the people of Afghanistan and the region, but are they any more important to our national security than a stable Somalia or a democratic Egypt? Isn’t it likely that the terrorist networks will just flee a suddenly stable Afghanistan for some other failed state, forcing us to chase them and putting us in a position of waging a roving, worldwide war?

Victory in Afghanistan is required to fight terrorism. Given that the United States has broken up several, unrelated terror plots in recent years, it seems evident that our efforts in Afghanistan are, at best, tangential to the fight against terrorism. Just as importantly, al Qaeda no longer calls Afghanistan home; rather, it has moved across the border into Pakistan, a nation we consider an ally. The foreign policy establishment is not questioning these assumptions and remains committed to this nasty war, one that has grown deadlier by the month for American soldiers.

The situation is analogous to the American experience in Vietnam, down to the language used to describe our counterinsurgency strategy, as numerous commentators have pointed out. There is no winning strategy in Afghanistan, but fight we must our leaders say because, well, to not fight is to admit defeat. It is a dangerous tautology, and not only because it has resulted in a growing number of American casualties. Our continued presence in Afghanistan — along with the seemingly forgotten, but no less deadly, misadventure in Iraq — is like a spark to the gasoline of resentment that creates new terrorists.

Like Vietnam, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are draining the treasury and busting our federal budget, siphoning needed money from domestic aid programs.

It’s time we asked the correct question about Afghanistan: How many lives are we willing to sacrifice to a war we never should have fought?

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Slashing public payrolls in a recession is like cutting off our collective nose to spite our face

This piece from The Washington Independent offers a clear explanation of the impact that state budget shortfalls are having not only on state-level taxes, but on the national employment picture.

States and towns, because they have to balance their budgets, have been forced into counterproductive binds, where they are left with the choice of raising taxes or firing workers.

Politics being what it is, layoffs tend to win -- the consequences be damned. That's what we are facing here in New Jersey with a budget gutting governor intent on pushing through an ill-conceived and foolish spending cap that might help keep taxes down but will result in problems for both the state and local governments down the road -- and for the economy at large -- problems not likely to crop up until Chris Christie has left the building.

Teachers already have been laid off, angering parents, and we can bet on cuts in police and fire and other areas.

Christie, of course, is just cleaning up after too many politicians from both parties partied hard and left the state in a shambles. The budget he signed the other day is pretty painful, though it also is filled with one-shot budget savings and gimmicks (we cannot keep avoiding making payments into the pension system) and it is brutally ideological.

He is just doing something that Jon Corzine lacked the will to do as governor and that Barack Obama has failed to do as president -- use the state budget crisis to impose his ideological vision.

But that is a tangent. New Jersey is dysfunctional in many ways -- too many towns and school districts, too much overlap, too much reliance on tradition and a legacy of inertia in Trenton -- but it is not alone on the Island of Misfit Toys. New York, Nevada, California -- the list of states that have failed in their fiduciary duties to taxpayers is long and bipartisan. Decisions made at the state level have generally been shortsighted, and the bill has come due.

That said, we have to acknowledge another player in this game: the Bush administration. The increase in aid to states and local governments during the Bush yearswas a little smaller than during the eight years of the Clinton administration, but it represented a much smaller percentage increase and a shrinking percentage of all state revenues. That only compounded the other revenue problems states have been facing.

As Ethan Pollack of the Economic Policy Institute points out in an issue brief, public sector job losses create private sector job losses:

So far local governments have laid off 3,338 public servants for each billion dollars they faced in deficits. Assuming the ratio remains constant, this suggests that local public employment will fall by 155,750 jobs between now and June 2011 and by 66,750 jobs between July 2011 and June 2012. This adds up to an impending 222,500 drop in local public employment between now and June 2012—in other words, over half of the local job losses have yet to hit the economy.

This back-of-the-envelope estimate may understate the total expected job impact: local governments tend to cut the low-hanging fruit first rather than immediately resorting to the politically unpopular and difficult option of publicsector layoffs. This suggests that the ratio of layoffs-to-deficits may increase in the future. For example, a recent report from the American Association of School Administrators estimates that through June 2011 around 275,000 education jobs (75% of which are funded by local governments) will be lost (Ellerson 2010).

This massive job loss will harm far more than the public servants who face unemployment. For one, our communities will be deprived of the vital services they deliver. Schools would see larger class sizes, our homes would be less protected from fire, and our streets would become less safe. This is already happening across the board—according to a survey from the National League of Cities, 71% of cities have instituted hiring freezes and layoffs (McFarland 2010).

These layoffs also ripple through the entire economy. Each 100 public-sector layoffs also leads to 30 private-sector layoffs, mainly due to a loss of incomes and consumer spending that reduces demand for goods and services across the economy. The total employment impact of these public-sector layoffs—including private job losses—would actually be just under 300,000 jobs lost.

While slashing public payroll to get state budgets under control would seem logical, it actually is counterproductive and will lead to greater deficits down the road. The fact remains, we cannot get control of deficits unless we get people back to work (the numbers of longterm unemployed and underemployed are at record levels), which will lead to an increase in tax revenue for all levels of government. And we cannot move our economy into the 21st century without investing in things like education and modern infrastructure.

A massive increase in federal aid to states is an absolute necessity -- along with federal transportation and education aid. Without it, our economy is just going to accelerate downward into a Japanese-style stagnation that Paul Krugman has repeatedly warned us about.

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NBA silly season is getting sillier

An already loaded free-agent class looks to be getting even more overstocked with talent, given reports that all-stars Paul Pierce and Dirk Nowitzki are opting out of their contracts and hitting the market.

Nowitzki would join premiere front-courters Chris Bosh, Carlos Boozer and Amar'e Stoudemire, while Lebron James (the prize of the off-season), Dwayne Wade, Pierce and Joe Johnson make up a serious set of twos and threes. And this does not account for David Lee.

There also are former stars -- Allen Iverson, Shaquille O'Neal, Jermaine O'Neal -- and some former high draft choices like Adam Morrison and Ray Felton that could help some teams. But the big eight will be the focus.

***

Ian Thomsen offers a bizarre scenario that he says is the Knicks' actual blueprint for landing James:

A league source with understanding of New York's plans told SI.com that the Knicks will recruit the Cavaliers' two-time MVP with a grandiose vision of surrounding him with Hawks shooting guard Joe Johnson as well as an elite power forward -- Chris Bosh of the Raptors or Amar'e Stoudemire of the Suns -- to form a starring trio capable of contending for championships for years to come.

The idea would be to take the Knicks' cap space and divide it by three, which would require the players to sign for less than they could get as max players. The draw is supposed to be the chance to bring New York a title and create history.

Is that something that might happen? Seems a long shot. More importantly, does it make sense? James obviously is a dominant force, while Bosh and Johnson are legitimate second bananas. The problem, however, is that the team would lack power in the paint (ask the Celtics what happens when you're undermanned in the middle) and a point guard.

The team also would lack something that David Lee, the odd man out, brings -- a lunch-pail ethos. The Celtics' success in recent years had as much to do with strong, scrappy secondary players as with the big three plus Rondo. This Knicks team would lack that.

In any case, I suspect this is nothing more than a pipe dream.

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Economists' notebook

I'm going to try to offer these tidbits somewhat regularly -- snapshots of how the conventional wisdom of the day on the economy is likely to lengthen the current recession, if not drive us into a real and ugly depression.

Here are some of today's posts on the economy from some liberal economists:

• Dean Baker offers some sanity on our fealty to the IMF here. (In general, his blog on economic reporting, Beat the Press, offers a necessary antedote to the nonsense generally offered.)
• Paul Krugman reminds us that austerity measures during a recession are foolish and counterproductive -- as in Ireland.
• Simon Johnson throws cold water on the euphoria surrounding financial reform.

Send me your reading suggestions in the comments.

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The left talks left-wingers and leftfielders, among others

A bunch of lefties talking sports? How cool is that! Check out Dirty Hippie Sports Talk.

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Maddow via OpenLeft: McChrystal comments bigger than McChrystal

We need more people to make this point: The war in Afghanistan is a failure, can be nothing more than a failure and we need to pull the plug.

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Cutting off our noses....

The shift toward deficit reduction is a dangerous one, given the unsettled foundation on which this less-than-modest recovery is built. We need more stimulus to pump more cash into the economy and create jobs, not cuts that will lead to a reduction in government payrolls and an end to programs designed to help the folks hit hard by the downturn.

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Out of work? Out of luck

We are facing the worst employment crisis in memory, but Senate Republicans insist on playing political games with jobless benefits, forcing the Democrats into a counterproductive slashing of the bill and then still voting as a block against it. I'm waiting to hear a coherent argument for why they pushed for this thing to play out as it did.

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New face, same failed war (cont.)

Anyone who seriously thought President Barack Obama might use the McChrystal affair to alter the course in Afghanistan needs to understand that the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal will do nothing to change direction.

On the contrary, his firing and replacement with his boss, Gen. David Petraeus, shows that the president is committed to the current course and has no intention to change directions:

In the short term, choosing Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal avoids many of the problems associated with removing the commander of a war effort involving 120,000 U.S. and NATO troops, billions of dollars in reconstruction projects and sensitive diplomatic negotiations.


As the head of the U.S. Central Command, Petraeus is more steeped in the Afghan war than any other four-star general in the military. He has played an active role in shaping the overall strategy as well as McChrystal's tactical plans, and he knows Afghan President Hamid Karzai and many other senior Afghan government officials. During a recent trip, he met with the Afghan leader's half brother, the chief power broker in the violence-plagued province of Kandahar.

"The decision to name Petraeus is the least disruptive way of removing McChrystal," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the leader of an Afghanistan-strategy review team for Obama in early 2009. "Petraeus knows the strategy inside and out, he knows the plans -- he is as much of an architect of this as General McChrystal."

The Petraeus appointment, therefore, stands as a recommitment to the failed policy, one that compounds mistakes made first by President George W. Bush and exacerbated when President Obama approved his surge.

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New face, same failed war

This is a dicey one, because there must be dissent within the war council and any administration, but it is clear that public ridicule of one's bosses is not the best way to get your point across. In any case, this was not about the conduct of the war -- which is, in many ways, a Gen. McChrystal production -- but about the president asserting his authority.

The saddest part of this mess, however, is this:

Mr. Obama stressed that the change in leadership did not signal a shift in his overall war strategy in Afghanistan, where thousands of new American troop levels have been arriving in recent months among increasing casualties and growing questions about the progress of the war.


“It is a change in personnel, but it is not a change in policy,” Mr. Obama said.

In the end, this is the real issue. We need a change in strategy -- i.e., we need to get out. The Afghanistan war has been a disaster and will remain so. Our best hope for stabilizing the region is to leave.

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Lead yourself

Several years ago, Neil Young issued a solid, if overrated, musical polemic directed against the Bush White House and its ideology of endless war called Living with War. The disc worked, as far as it went, full of piss and vinegar, as the saying goes, but lacking the kind of poetry that has made his best work remain timely and relevant in changing times.

In this respect, however, the record was no different than most protest records -- think of "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire or much of the Country Joe and the Fish catalogue. One song on the record, however, stood out for me as capturing the cultural zeitgeist. "Looking for a Leader," with its bald desire to have someone rise up and save us, some kind of political Christ figure who could lead us to a new promised land (or, given that this is Neil Young, back into the mythical American past), encapsulates our tendency to demand action through our own paralysis, the idea that all it will take is the right man or woman in the White House (or State House or mayor's house) to make things right and restore America's lost prestige and power.

One just has to look at our castrated left and its relationship to Barack Obama to see the devastating consequences of this kind of political sycophancy.

But this post is not really about the left and Obama. It is about Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the potential hijacking by the military of Afghan War policy. McChrystal did something that generals are not supposed to do: He spoke openly and derisively of the nation's civilian military leadership. McChrystal may be the "man" in Afghanistan, but he reports to Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and, ultimately, to President Barack Obama.

I was watching the news last night when the issue came up -- should Obama fire the general? My dad, who is in from Las Vegas, let slip with, "maybe the general should fire Obama," as though he had the authority to do so (a strange comment from my dad, who dislikes Obama but likes to offer a veneer of rationality and moderation in his political thinking). My dad's comment, though, comes from the same kind of thinking about leadership that de-animates the left when it comes to the president.

The problem is that we have invested our leaders with too much authority, too much prestige, with an almost royal sense of power. We have lost sight of our own authority, especially in regards to war.

Dispatches: Reform education by empowering teachers

Our obsession with accountability and market-driven educational reforms has turned teachers in to robots and robbed our students of our teachers' creativity.

That's teh point of this week's Dispatches.

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I'm from Jersey, you from Jersey?

I have lived in New Jersey for going on 40 years. I live here now by choice and bristle at some of the dumber jokes made at the state's expense (and laugh when the jokes are funny). So I can sympathize with the folks who have kicked off this campaign to combat the stereotypes.

And yet, I am flummoxed that its slogan is "Jersey Doesn't Stink." First, some areas do, but that comes with the territory (farms and industry) and is true for most states. More importantly, it is a dopey slogan, a negative that has nothing positive to say and that plays to, rather than against, the stereotypes. The campaign would have done better with one of those silly songs that made the rounds several years ago -- "I Like Jersey Best" -- or a billboard with famous Jerseyans (Springsteen, Sinatra, DeVito, Nicholson, Robert Pinsky, William Carlos Williams, Rick Barry, Franco Harris, etc.).

Now, that doesn't stink, right?

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Tunnel of the 'lost ARC'

I want to start this post with a couple of caveats:

1. I generally support the expansion of mass transit, with some exceptions.
2. I rarely agree with Paul Mulshine, the conservative columnist for The Star-Ledger, though I do think he is one of the more thoughtful conservatives out there.
3. In its most theoretical sense, the massive rail tunnel project under the Hudson River makes some sense.

Now, let's get down to the brass tax of this post.

The  Access to the Region's Core project, or ARC, is neither theoretical nor logical given the fiscal realities facing not only New Jersey but New York, as well. While a rail tunnel into the city that could expand rail access would seem to make sense, this project fall short of its original goals and appears headed for boondoggle status.

As Mulshine writes in today's Ledger, the ARC project falls far short of its original goals and may just be counterproductive in the long run. The

$8.7 billion plan would give Manhattan exactly what it doesn’t need: yet another railroad station that isn’t linked to the rest of the rail network.

The current plan calls for construction of a new station, next to Penn but deep underground, that would serve only the new lines. It would be so far below the surface, says Clift, that riders would wonder whether they were traveling on a rail line or an escalator line.

That's a lot of bucks for a lot less bang than we need.

Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club argues that “the riders of the lost ARC,” as he calls them, will never achieve the connectivity to Grand Central that was originally promised. The newer, deeper tunnel will dead-end at a water tunnel that New York City won’t be replacing anytime soon, said Tittel.

And remember, the tunnel is being built with money that we just don't hvae, as conservative state Sen. Michael Doherty pointed out to Mulshine.

“Frankly, nobody knows where money’s coming from,” Doherty said. “The Transportation Trust Fund is depleted and now we’re going to divert money that should be going for road maintenance for this tunnel?”

This in a state with crumbling roads and failing bridges and -- and this is key -- inadequate rail service on existing lines. It would seem to me that we do more to fix our infrastructure -- while creating needed jobs -- by putting our money into fixing what we already have (This might make for good housing policy, as well) rather than just building newer and fancier toys.

That remains to be seen. The trust fund doesn’t run out of money until next year.

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Playing politics with principle

I would applaud the governor if I thought he would go to bat for a school board member who was censured for being critical of the state's education cuts. He's right that the board should have let the school board member have her say, even if I disagree with what she had to say.

My suspicion, unfortunately, is that the governor is not interested in defending the rights of school board members to speak their minds, but only of those members that speak their minds and back his causes.

Gov. Chris Christie is nothing if not brutally political, to a degree well beyond any governor in my memory.

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Comedy that cuts like a knife

I post this video by the brilliantly funny Upright Citizens Brigade without comment because it speaks for itself.

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I love pitching

Everyone who follows baseball knows that for a long time the two leagues have had different strengths, with the AL being known for its hitting and the NL being known for its pitching. The differences, while apparent, have not been drastic in recent years, narrowed by a number of factors (steroids, expansion diluting pitching, park size).

Until this year, that is, which has witnessed a rebirth of pitching dominance in the National League. Here we are, about 60 games into the season -- almost 40 percent -- and just one hitter in the NL is on a pace to hit more than 40 homeruns (Corey Hart in Milwaukee), with just nine others in line to pass the 30 mark. Recent years finished like this: 2008, 40-plus, 2/30-plus, 14; 2007, 50-plus, 1/40-plus, 3/30-plus 15; 2006, 1/7/14.

Earned Run Averages also have shown a drop. In 2006, just one pitcher -- Roy Oswalt -- finished with an ERA under 3.00 and, in 2007, Jake Peavey was the lone pitcher under 3.00. In 2008, four pitchers were under 3.00. Last year, there was a huge jump, with eight pitchers finishing below 3.00. right now, there are 17 pitchers in the NL with ERAs under 3.00, four of which are under 2.00 and one -- Usbaldo Jimenez, of Colorado (COLORADO!) -- under 1.00.

The top three scoring teams in baseball are in the AL, four of five and six of eight. On the flip side, five of the top six teams (and seven of nine) in ERA are NL teams.

As a National League baseball watcher and lover of good pitching, I find the trend heartening -- especially having just watched the young Jon Niese toss a one-hit shutout against San Diego.

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A message to the Democrats

Glenn Greenwald today makes it clear just why a viable third party or alternative, progressive political force is necessary. We can't trust the Democrats to do what's right -- as if eight years of Bill Clinton and the party's complicity in getting us mired in Iraq weren't enough proof -- when Democrats are willing to go to bat for corporatists like Blanche Lincoln (who repaid Barack Obama and Bill Clinton's support during her primary fight by spitting in their face on climate change). This is an argument I've been making on and off for a long time.

And it was important that progressives not bow to the party hierarchy, that they band together to send a message to people like Lincoln (and Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieux and, if needed, Barack Obama).

The message was the point of the Bill Halter challenge, as he explains.

The point here, speaking just for myself, was not to put Bill Halter in the Senate. While I am convinced Halter would have at least been marginally better than Lincoln (he certainly couldn't have been worse), I don't know if he would have been substantially better. Nor was the point an ideological one -- the real conflict in politics is not Left v. Right or liberal v. conservative, but rather, insider v. outsider. Lincoln's sin isn't an ideological one, but the fact that she's a corporatist servant of the permanent factions that rule Washington. The purpose here was to remove Lincoln from the Senate, or, failing that, at least impose a meaningful cost on her for her past behavior. That goal was accomplished, and as a result, Democratic incumbents at least know there is a willing, formidable coalition that now exists which can and will make any primary challenge credible, expensive and potentially crippling -- even if it doesn't ultimately succeed. That makes it just a bit more difficult for Democratic incumbents to faithfully serve corporate interests at the expense of their constituents, or at least to do so with total impunity.


Beyond that benefit, the very significant divisions within the Party become a bit more crystallized as a result of this episode. In response to the White House's complaint that unions did not spend their money to help Democratic incumbents, an AFL-CIO official angrily replied: "Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party." Of course, that's exactly what much of labor has been up to this point, but the realization that the interests of the Party and these unions are wildly divergent will hopefully change that. There's clearly a growing recognition among many progressives generally that devotion to the Democratic Party not only fails to promote, but actively undermines, their agenda (ACLU Executive Directory Anthony Romero yesterday began his speech to a progressive conference with this proclamation: "I'm going to start provocatively . . . I'm disgusted with this president"). Anything that helps foster that realization -- and I believe this Lincoln/Halter primary did so -- is beneficial.

That is really the key point: it should be apparent to any rational observer that confining oneself to the two-party system -- meaning devoting oneself loyally to one of the two parties' establishments without regard to what it does -- is a ticket to inevitable irrelevance. The same factions rule Washington no matter which of the two parties control the various branches of government (see this excellent new article from Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson on the Obama administration's role in the BP oil spill, and specifically how virtually nothing changed in the oil-industry-controlled Interior Department once Ken Salazar took over [as was quite predictable and predicted]; Interior employees even refer to it as "the third Bush term"). There is clearly a need for new strategies and approaches that involve things other than unconditional fealty to the Democratic Party, which weigh not only the short-term political fears that are exploited to keep Democrats blindly loyal (hey, look over there! It's Sarah Palin!) but also longer-term considerations (the need to truly change the political process and the stranglehold the two parties exert). In sum, any Party whose leaders are this desperate to keep someone like Blanche Lincoln in the Senate is not one that merits any loyalty.

The deck, however, is stacked right now against third parties -- which is something I think this country desperately needs. First-past-the-post elections, combined with the massive amount of corporate cash and the privileges accorded political parties, ensures that challenges from the left or right that come from outside the party structure are doomed to failure.

However, we have to get past this notion that by voting for the third-party challenger -- or by voting for a challenger in a primary -- we are weakening the least worst and ensuring a win by the worst. Least worst too often turns out to be bad enough.

The fact remains that corporations win regardless of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in the White House or control Congress. The pro-corporate legislation that helped create the current financial crisis -- and the S&L debacle before it -- was decidedly bipartisan, as was the deregulation of the energy sector, the lowering of the top-tier income tax rate and flattening of its progressiveness (thanks Bill Bradley). A Democratic president gave us welfare reform, Nafta and GATT. And so it goes.

People who call themselves progressives or liberals or leftists make a huge mistake when they hitch their wagons to the Democrats come hell or high water. The American left, or what passes for it, must begin to recognize that there are good Democrats and bad Democrats and that the bad ones must be held accountable for the bad votes they've cast. The left is too often taken for granted by Democratic leaders who think progressives have nowhere else to go. It has to demonstrate that its votes matter.

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Nothing affordable about this housing reform

New Jersey's low-income residents looking for housing can stop looking for affordable housing. It is not going to be built anytime soon.

The state Senate today passed S1, legislation sponsored by Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-union, an awful piece of legislation that panders to the longstanding antipathy suburban communities have had toward the state's affordable housing requirements since their inception in the 1980s.

The bill, which passed today by a 28-3 vote, claims to meet the requirements of two state Supreme Court rulings -- Mount Laurel I and II -- and the state laws adopted in their wake, while essentially gutting the state's affordable housing program.

The bill prohibits towns from imposing development fees on non-residential development, effectively severing the connection between jobs created and housing need and making it impossible for towns to even acknowledge that they should make housing available for the people who work in the warehouses they all seem to want. (Warehouses are considered clean ratables that cost little, but generate lots of local taxes.)

The bill also does away with the Council on Affordable Housing, transferring authority to the Department of Community Affairs, which would be directed to help towns create housing opportunities. DCA, however, will not have the ability to impose numbers on towns; instead, the bill offers a series of set-aside targets, but leaves it to towns to manage -- which makes local mayors happy and leaves it unlikely that suburban communities will actually build housing for low-income people.

The governor, of course, is happy with the vote.

“The legislation passed by the Senate today eliminates COAH and goes a long way toward fundamentally reforming the affordable housing system which New Jerseyans have long demanded and that I have promised to deliver," the governor said in a statement.

But this is not reform; it is abolition. Rather than replace COAH with a new system designed to get housing built in an expeditious manner while ensuring that towns do not use zoning as a way to further exacerbate the racial, ethnic and class segregation that plagues this state, Bill S1 is just a sop to the suburban voters who swung the last election to Christie.

Peter Kasabach, executive director of New Jersey Future, a group that advocated intelligent planning and development in the state and has been an advocate for affordable housing, offered a blunt assessment in a written statement that I received via e-mail earlier this afternoon:

We have little doubt that the good folks looking to re-shape the state’s affordable-housing policy are doing so with their own reasonable intentions. Unfortunately, the product of these intentions, embodied in the just-passed S-1 legislation, creates an affordable-housing system that can only be described as a non-affordable housing system. The current proposal will: 1) produce fewer opportunities for low- and moderate-income households, and has the strong possibility of creating absolutely no opportunities at all; 2) generate less funding to subsidize housing; and 3) remove any accountability from the state or towns to even attempt to create affordable housing, let alone actually produce any.

He said that the bill "relies on local good will to generate housing that isn’t being produced by the market" and that "the Senate has thrown out the baby, the bathwater and the tub."

This may be viewed by some people as a necessary and radical re-thinking of affordable housing, but that would be the case only if the new system had some chance of producing affordable housing, especially near jobs and transportation choices. We have repeatedly asked those involved to explain how the new system will result in more affordable-housing opportunities (or any opportunities, for that matter), and we have yet to receive a cogent answer.

This is not a surprise, given that the backers of this bill have no answer to this question.

Just as troubling is that the bill will create a web of conflicts and counterintuitive results, according to Kevin Walsh, of the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group in Cherry Hill. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer before the vote that the bill "is going to lead to strange results, like wealthy municipalities getting off the hook and older towns that already have their fair share of affordable housing being expected to do more."

Rural towns, according to environmental advocates, are hit hardest by the new rules, or as hard as they can be given the toothlessness of the bill.

"All these places with more trees than people aren't exempt," despite the fact that they are not near jobs, noted Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

The bill now goes to the Assembly, but I have little hope that anyone in that august body will do anything to stop it. Then it is off to the governor to be signed into law -- unless the state Supreme Court steps in, as it should, and stops the entire effort in its tracks.

In the end, the legislation is nothing but a disgusting bit of pandering that will leave low-income people in the lurch, where politicians always leave them.

(Under the Fair Housing analysis, a number of Central Jersey towns would be exempt from the rather weak housing requirements proposed under S1, many of which already were exempt: Bordentown City, Bordentown Township, North Hanover and New Hanover in Burlington County; Stockton Borough in Hunterdon County; East Windsor, Hightstown, Lawrence and the Princetons in Mercer County; Jamesburg in Middlesex County; and Manville in Somerset County. This list only includes towns covered by our papers.)

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Grassroots: The money culture

My Progressive Populist column is on our devotion to the almighty dollar and how this lust for wealth is killing the planet.

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Dispatches: Electoral red herrings

This week's Dispatches is available on the site. Its focus: With broad agreement on the decal provision of Kyleigh's Law (it's bad), the candidates for the senate seat in the 14th District should move on to other issues.

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Nationalizing politics

All politics is local (isn't that what Tip O'Neill used to say?), but all coverage appears be national -- and it is skewing the storyline.

Blanche Lincoln's escape Tuesday, a narrow win for a conservative, probusiness Democrat in a conservative state, is being spun as a huge loss for organized labor (it wasn't) and a major rebuff of the Democrats' flaccid left wing. Democrats, the lesson appears to be (or so the conventional wisdom folks are telling us) that Democrats must move to the right or lose.

Except that two weeks ago, when Joe Sestak knocked off Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter on the same day that Bill Halter forced Lincoln into yesterday's runoff, the storyline was about muscle-flexing on the left.

I wish they would get their stories straight.

The problem with national coverage of U.S. Sente and House races is that most of the races do not hinge on national issues. These are local races that often turn on local and state-level issues.

When Bill Bradley nearly lost his re-election bid to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey in 1990, it was because the former Knick was seen as out of touch with the Garden State. He refused to take a position on the biggest issue in New Jersey that year -- the Florio tax increases -- and he allowed a then-relatively unknown Christie Whitman to capitalize and make the race close. (She then parlayed that campaign into two terms in the governor's mansion)

Chris Christie won the NJ governor's race in 2009 not because of some kind of national backlash against President Obama, but very simply because he was not Jon Corzine, a governor with approval ratings in the 30s.

Candidates who nationalize these elections often fail to make headway with voters, which is what appears to have happened in Arkansas, where Halter got tremendous help from "outside groups" and Lincoln made it an issue.

But this doesn't work on national television, so the narratives get rolled out: It is about Obama's coattails, the Tea Party, an anti-incumbent mood. True, generic polls show voters ready to throw the bums out, but voters do not vote generically and most tend to believe that the bums represent other districts.

We may as yet see a shift in numbers in both houses of Congress toward the Republicans, with a possible shift in majority; that's normal during off-year races, especially ones during economically volatile times.

But the winners will have won not because of Obama or the Tea Party. Rather, the peculiarities of the local landscape are likely to have the final say.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Extremism posing as reason

I was catching up on some podcasts today, including this interesting interview on Radio Times with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born critic of Islam now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

Ali makes some interesting points but shows a remarkably blind eye to other cultures, her anger at Islam being so great. Her basic argument is that Islam contains within it the seeds of its own fanaticism -- an argument that applies not just to Islam but to all religions.

Her argument offers a subtle conflation of culture and religion, attributing cultures practices from nations in which Islam is practiced to Islam itself and not acknowledging -- except when questioned -- that the practices are not necessarily Islamic in nature (I am thinking of female genital mutilation, which she admits is not contained in the Koran).

In general, her arguments are rather half-baked for someone so prominent, built on a mix of inuendo and rumor and lacking statistical backing. She talks about honor killings as if they are common, alludes to a few, and uses them to show that the progress being made by Muslim women in the United States is a mirage.

The inconsistencies are maddening, the biggest one being her contention that Christian groups should seek to convert Muslims -- especially Muslim women -- because Christianity is far more supportive of women's rights. Forget that Ali is an avowed atheist. Her view of Christianity not only exhibits a dangerously ahistorical view of religion, but a naivete about the kind of Christian fundamentalism that has left doctors and nurses dead in the United States. The recent incidents of Christian terrorism in the United States have been well documented, as has Jewish extremism and violence in the Middle East and Muslim fanaticism.

The Christian Right is far from sympathetic to the plight of women and it is no more accepting of reason or even of other religions than fundamentalist Muslims.

All of this leads Ali to traffic in the false assumption that only Muslims can be terrorists, that only Muslims can be extremists and that only Islam poses a threat to the values of the Enlightenment.

The enemy, however, is not Islam but a kind of certainty that shuts the mind to differences and disagreement and that transforms these disagreements into existential threats that require response. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists and the other major and minor world faiths are not going to agree on everything or even many things. But that does not become a problem until someone attempts to erase the disagreement by force.

Targeting Islam, as she does, without making these distinctions is foolish, dangerous and makes her little better than the people she condemns.

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So much like stone

I saw this photo on Friday and it took my breath away, this sea bird coated in thick crude, looking almost stonelike and polished. This is what our addiction does to our planet.

Here is the brief text from The Boston Globe explaining the photo and seven others included in the package:

A short entry - AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming more frequent, and the effects more evident.

I have been working on a poem on the spill, our oil culture and the damage that we do. I'll post it when it's done.

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$100 arm, 10-cent head

Ollie Perez is experiencing knee pain, which is why the Mets placed him on the disabled list. Yep. If you believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn that I can give you cheap. I'll even through in a certain left-handed pitcher.

I know I'm late to the party on this -- he was DL'd Saturday -- but I had to comment. I used to like Ollie, though he had a world of talent that, if it could be harnessed, would result in him being an elite pitcher. Now, I am convinced that his skills are eroding even as his head remains a problem.

We've had three-plus years of this nonsense, of Perez throwing a good game or two -- maybe even a gem -- and then imploding so spectacularly that you have to question whether he has a secret twin. Enough. The Mets need someone who can go out there consistently, pitch into the seventh and keep them in games. They do not need a guy who will strike out the side in the first and then walk the stadium in the second.

What's especially maddening here is that Perez apparently does not see that it is in his best interests to go down to AAA, as the Mets have proposed. For whatever reason -- pride, I suspect -- he'd rather eat up a roster spot and pretend that he can find himself while being kept out of games. Just dumb, dumb, dumb.

If the Mets did not owe him so much money, he would have been dumped by now.

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Bird in the pool

It was sad to see this bird try to flee the dogs' pool a few minutes ago. It must have fallen from the weepong cherry and was frantically trying to get out. There wasn't much water -- only a couple of inches -- but the plastic pool walls are about 2 feet tall and it couldn't make it over.

I noticed it as I was unwrapping the paper and drinking coffee and fan out. I grabbed a shovel and, as the bird made a leap, got underneath it and helped it out.

After a few minutes, with the dovs itching to see what was going on, it left. I didn't notice if it flew off or not.

Good moves by Mets

I like this as both a short-term and long-term thing. Matthews was useless, as we have known since spring training. And while the Tejada call up is temporary, he is the second-baseman of the future.

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More on the BP boycott

As I wrote in my column yesterday, a direct boycott of BP as a resposne to the gulf oil spill is badly flawed because it ignores the larger impact that oil has on society and that the oil industry has on the environment and the economy.

My friend Rob Stolzer, who lives in Wisconsin, commented to me on my Facebook page that the boycott also would have the unintended consequence of harming small businesses, the mom-and-pop owners of the service stations that sell BP gas.

But environmental columnist Jeff McMahon offers what seem like rational and potentially effective alternatives to a direct boycott, one that attacks BP but also the other oil companies while moving us toward a new paradigm of energy use.

McMahon (who quotes my blog in his piece) provides "Five ways to boycott without helping Exxon":

1. "Boycott bottled water," which is responsible for the use of about 50 million barrels of oil  a year "just manufacturing the plastic bottles for bottled water" plus an additional amout for transportation.
2. "Avoid plastics and other petrochemical products, including chemical pesticides and fertilizers," which are manufactured by BP and other oil companies.
3. "Buy bulk foods and put them in reusable bags" -- we could save 120 million barrels of oil worldwide annually by switching to reusable bags and loose produce, bulk items and nonprocessed foods use less oil.
4. "Be a locavore," which cuts down on energy used for transportation and the need for heavy fertilizer and pesticide use.
5. "Boycott aluminum cans," about a third of which are made by BP subsidiary Arco Aluminum.

And -- this is his sixth suggestion:

Don’t buy something new just to boycott BP. Some in the green-lifestyle press have advised people to buy aluminum water bottles instead of plastic, unaware BP may have supplied the aluminum. Others urge glass food containers instead of plastic, or petroleum-free cosmetics, etc. The green-lifestyle press often falls prey to the consumerist impulse to buy, buy, buy. But unless it grew in your back yard, every new product arrives with oily footprints. If you use plastic containers now, replacing them with glass will only burn more fossil fuels.

These are sensible suggestions; follow them and stick it to BP.

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Dispatches: The limits of a BP boycott

My column this week is an expanded take on my blog post about the BP boycott.

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Sweating the small stuff

Here is a story that demonstrates why budgets matter. Governments need money to perform basic services -- like cutting the grass that grows in the median strips along highways like Route 130, or fix potholes or replace bulbs in streetlamps or any of the dozens of other minor functions we take for granted.

We forget that someone has to sweep the floors in the state's school buildings, inspect apartment complexes, restripe roads and that the people who do these jobs deserve to get paid a living wage.

Government may not be popular, but it is necessary.

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Empire v. Empire

This gets old pretty quickly. A Celtics-Lakers matchup in the finals -- feels like we've been here before.

The teams have matched up 11 times, with the Celtics winning nine. Boston has won 17 titles, the Lakers 15 -- for a total of 32 of 63 titles overall. The Celtics dominated in the '50s and '60s, winning 12 of their championships; the Lakers have been more dominant more recently first behind Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar and more recently behind Shaq and Kobe.

So, here we have another go.

This should be a good series. Kobe Bryant is the league's dominant big-game player and he has an able supporting cast led by Pau Gasol in the paint. The Celtics are deep, boast one of the best young guards in the game (Rondo) and feature a trio of superstar veterans with varied talents.

I'm going to pick the Celtics because they can play suffocating defense, but this thing is going seven.

And I'm going to root for both teams to lose. As a Knicks fan, I have no other choice. If this were "Star Wars," both of these teams would be the Evil Empire.

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Kyleigh becomes political football in 14th

Legislation passed by a near-unanimous Legislature last year and signed by then-Gov. Jon Corzine has become the political football in this year's 14th District state Senate race.

Sen. Tom Goodwin, the Republican appointed to fill Bill Baroni's seat until November's election, has been pushing hard for repeal of a decal provision of regulations passed to protect teen drivers. The law, known as Kyleigh's Law, went into effect May 1 and requires first-year, probationary drivers younger than 21 to display a red decal on their front and rear license plates. The law also bars young drivers from operating vehicles between 11:01 p.m. and 5 a.m., prohibits more than one passenger in vehicles driven by first-year drivers and bans the use of any hand-held or hands-free electronic device.

The law was written and then passed in response to the death of Kyleigh D’Alessio, a 16-year-old from Washington Township in Morris County, who was killed in a car accident involving another teen driver in 2006.

The law was rather uncontroversial at the time of its passage -- it passed 78-0 in the Assembly and 36-3 in the state Senate -- but has raised some concerns among parents since taking effect. In particular, parents and young drivers worry that the decal provision makes younger drivers easy prey for pedofiles and scammers and could make it easier for police to profile.

In response, several bills have been proposed, some good, others less so, with Sen. Goodwin being aggressive in his push for change.

Both Sen. Goodwin and Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, the Democrat running for the Senate seat, are seeking revisions to the larger law. But the folks backing Goodwin are seeking to cast Greenstein as out of step, blaming her for sponsoring bad legislation (she was an early cosponsor, though her name was not attached to the legislation that passed) and making it appear as though Sen. Goodwin is the only one standing up for average parents.

I don't wish to weigh in on which repeal bill is better. What I find interesting, however, is the way that the 2008-2009 discussion of the bill has been recast in political terms. As I said, 78 Assembly members voted in favor of the bill, including Assemblywoman Greenstein; 36 Senators did the same, including Sen. Baroni. No one can say how Goodwin would have voted were he in the Senate at the time, but it seems unlikely to me that Goodwin -- who is running as the new Baroni -- would have voted any differently.

It is convenient for supporters -- you will see letters from two of them in this week's South Brunswick Post -- to attack a sitting Assembly member for her vote, especially when they know that their candidate can't be tied to any previous action on the same legislation.

If this is how the race is going to unfold in the district, then 14th District voters might be better off staying home.

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Tea Party seeks to disinvite voters

It was a chief demand of the Populists, an effort to cut corrupt state legislatures out of the national discussion by having voters elect each state's senators.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution, as originally drafted, left the selection of each state's senators to the states' respective legislatures, an effort designed to cool political passions and lessen the hold that the rabble might have on the federal government.

The states, however, were universally corrupt, beholden to the money interests of the day -- to the railroads and big tobacco -- and the small farmers in the South and Midwest who made up what became known as the Populist Party found themselves frozen out of the decisionmaking and feeling fleeced.

So the movement began, the Farmers Alliance and People's Party, calling for monetary reform, regulation of the banks and railroads, and political reform, including the direct election of senators.

While much of the reforms sought by the Populists failed to become law, the party had an impact as the Progressives, a more urban, middle-class movement, altered the way we think about government, instituting an array of regulations and restrictions we now take for granted (bans on child labor, the 40-hour week, health and safety inspections, etc.) and some basic changes in the electoral process -- including the 17th amendment, which forced senate candidates onto a popular ballot.

It was a victory for democracy, giving the American people another opportunity to choose for themselves people who are supposed to act on their behalf in matters of war, taxes, etc.

Flashfoward nearly a century and we have today's most notable populist movement, the rightwing Tea Party, advocating for repeal of the 17th amendment "convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights."

Senate candidates have to raise so much money to run that they become beholden to special interests, party members say. They argue that state legislators would not be as compromised and would choose senators who truly put their state’s needs first.

The argument is an interesting one, if a bit backward looking and anti-democratic. It acknowledges the Founders' concerns, which included the desire to have a house of elites to offset the people's house -- similar to the arrangement in Great Britain.

To Madison, Hamilton and most of the other authors of the Constitution, allowing states to appoint the Senate was the linchpin of the entire federalist system and the real reason there are two houses of Congress. It may be true that appointed senators, accountable only to state legislators, would never approve of many useful federal mandates designed to put the national interest above local parochialism — including everything from the minimum wage to the new health care reform law.

That in itself should be an argument against repeal (though, I admit, small-government types will not agree), but there is a better one that has nothing to do with political philosophy or ideology. Should New Jersey voters trust the folks who have made such a mess of the state to pick the people who represent us in Washington? Should the people in Albany, who have become national laughingstocks in their dysfunctionality, get to pick which New Yorkers should head south? Would these ethically compromised men and women do a better job than we do?

Do I need to answer?

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