Laurie Essig

God save the Queen and end the war in Afghanistan

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I just watched the Queen deliver a bit of a talk for Christmas.  I got that warm, fuzzy, happy holidays feeling inside.  Although I don't believe in Santa anymore, I really do believe in the Queen.  I want to grow up to be an old woman who dresses just like her and does that stiff wave of the hand to my adoring subjects.  Of course, I won't have any adoring subjects, but neither will the Queen if she keeps up her support of the war in Afghanistan.  In her Christmas message the Queen tries to support "young people" and the issues that are important to them while simultaneously giving a pro-war bit about Afghanistan. Who does the Queen think is being sent to fight this useless war in Afghanistan?  Old gals like her?  Or me?  Nope, it's young people and when the war in Afghanistan manages to collapse the American Empire, just like it did the Soviet one, I would hate to think that Great Britain would also finally collapse under the weight of its long dead Empire.  After all, that would lead (if I can push the Sex Pistols reference a bit farther), to Anarchy in the UK.  And then would the Queen be allowed to appear in a lovely aqua-marine frock with some costume-jewelry looking broach and address the young people of the Commonwealth?  God save the Queen. But even if the British Empire survives, it is pretty clear that the American Empire, like the Soviets before them, will collapse under the weight of the endless war in Afghanistan.  A recent video from Rethink Afghanistan makes that clear.[youtubevid id="gF3eq-8G4UQ&feature=youtube_gdata"] The US is making the exact same assumptions about fighting the war in Afghanistan that the Soviets made: that more troops would lead to victory, that they could win without the support of the people (a minority of Afghans now believe the US occupation is a good thing), and that spending that much economic and political capital on foreign wars would not lead to an eventual collapse at home.  It's pretty scary when every assumption of the Soviet government mirrors the assumptions made by Dubbya and now Obama.  It's also pretty scary when the likes of Mikhael Gorbachev are trying to warn Obama of the dangers of sending more and more troops to back up an unpopular government with an even less popular war and no one in the White House seems to care. According to Representative Eric Massa, Christmas Eve marks a sobering collection of milestones in Afghanistan.

As we begin our deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, this Christmas Eve will also mark the 3,000th day of the war in Afghanistan and the 30th anniversary of the initial Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Thus far, this war has already cost the American taxpayer a minimum of $300,000,000,000 according to the Congressional Research Service (and that's just the funding that's "on budget").

That's a lot of 3s.  Now we need 3 Wise human beings to make the US understand that Afghanistan is not "winnable."  The US can't even wage a war on drugs there successfully, let alone a war for what?  Democracy?  Christianity?  Who can even say what the goal is.  Because there is no victory in Afghanistan.  Only defeat. And as difficult as the collapse of the American Empire will be, as it sinks under the weight of costs of this war, losing the Queen will be like losing our belief in Santa.  We'll just never be able to get that warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing her wave and wish us a Merry Christmas again.

Time for Republicans to end marriage, not just their own.

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When Lyndon Johnson found out that his Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins had been caught having sex with another man at the YMCA bathroom down the street from the White House, he knew his longtime friend and comrade had to go.  As Lee Edelman points out in an essay about the Jenkins affair, "Tearooms and Sympathy: An Epistemology of the Water Closet," having gay sex meant certain death for a political career because having gay sex meant vulnerability and breached borders and that the Soviets would invade any minute.  This was all the more true since Jenkins was the receptive partner in the exchange and his lover was "foreign born." In midcentury America, it wasn't sex outside of marriage that doomed a political career (look at Kennedy), it was sex outside heteronormativity.  In other words, a patriot was always straight. Fast forward to the 21st century.  Governor Mark Sanford's political meltdown, brought on by an affair, a failed marriage (with four sons no less), and his absolutely pathetic attempts to lie about where he was (why didn't he just say "I'm going to Argentina to recharge?"), have brought down this once possible Republican Presidential contender. Mysteries Remain After Governor Admits an Affair - NYTimes.com. And this just a week after Senator Ensign, yes, Republican and a possible contender, also resigned from a party leadership position for an affair with a former aid. Why does all this exuberant heterosexuality, the sort that JFK dabbled in, lead to political scandal in the same way a homosexual encounter in a bathroom was political suicide (okay, is political suicide).  When did the patriot become not just straight, but also so utterly disciplined into marriage that any excess heterosexuality is scandalous? Perhaps it all began with Clinton?  That's when the Lewinsky scandal occurred and many of the same Republicans who are being caught took a stand on the sanctity of marriage, but it was also, just a few months before the Lewinsky scandal, that the Defense of Marriage Act passed. It was also sometime around then that we as a culture became obsessed with weddings.  Movies started being made, one after the other, in which weddings were the entire narrative thrust.  Even other sorts of films, action films, murder mysteries, began to include a "gratuitous wedding scene" the way that movies during LBJ's day often included a "gratuitous sex scene" or even a "gratuitous car chase." According to Chrys Ingraham, author of White Weddings, weddings started costing more and everything that went along with them, dresses, honeymoons, engagements, also got bigger and more expensive and more overburdened with meaning since if it wasn't perfect all was clearly doomed. And of course the gay and lesbian marriage movement began back then, as a national movement, and pushed the "sanctity" of marriage even closer to the center of our national consciousness. So now the patriot is not just straight, but also most importantly, conjugally disciplined. All of the patriot's sexual impulses must be confined to the conjugal bed (even if the patriot is gay!).  If the patriot does not exhibit sexual discipline, then he is unworthy to lead. There are well over 1000 rights and privileges granted just by the federal government because citizenship is increasingly based on marriage.  And, according to Ingraham, the number of federal rights has actually gone up since the passage of DOMA.   No wonder some gays and lesbians want marriage so much. So now Sanford's lack of marital discipline has ruined his career.  The fiscal discipline he showed, where he refused to take Obama's stimulus money because he wanted to pay down South Carolina's debt rather than use it for state programs, is of no use to him now.   The only kind of discipline that matters is conjugal- for citizenship or leadership. Perhaps all the disgraced Republican polticians can start a third party, the "End Civil Marriage Party."  By ending civil marriage and the civil rights attached to it,  American leadership could be based on things like policy and civil rights could be based on being residents of this country, rather than how much conjugal discipline we show?

Time for Republicans to end marriage, not just their own.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Image by mharrsch via Flickr"][/caption]

When Lyndon Johnson found out that his Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins had been caught having sex with another man at the YMCA bathroom down the street from the White House, he knew his longtime friend and comrade had to go.  As Lee Edelman points out in an essay about the Jenkins affair, "Tearooms and Sympathy: An Epistemology of the Water Closet," having gay sex meant certain death for a political career because having gay sex meant vulnerability and breached borders and that the Soviets would invade any minute.  This was all the more true since Jenkins was the receptive partner in the exchange and his lover was "foreign born." In midcentury America, it wasn't sex outside of marriage that doomed a political career (look at Kennedy), it was sex outside heteronormativity.  In other words, a patriot was always straight. Fast forward to the 21st century.  Governor Mark Sanford's political meltdown, brought on by an affair, a failed marriage (with four sons no less), and his absolutely pathetic attempts to lie about where he was (why didn't he just say "I'm going to Argentina to recharge?"), have brought down this once possible Republican Presidential contender. Mysteries Remain After Governor Admits an Affair - NYTimes.com. And this just a week after Senator Ensign, yes, Republican and a possible contender, also resigned from a party leadership position for an affair with a former aid. Why does all this exuberant heterosexuality, the sort that JFK dabbled in, lead to political scandal in the same way a homosexual encounter in a bathroom was political suicide (okay, is political suicide).  When did the patriot become not just straight, but also so utterly disciplined into marriage that any excess heterosexuality is scandalous? Perhaps it all began with Clinton?  That's when the Lewinsky scandal occurred and many of the same Republicans who are being caught took a stand on the sanctity of marriage, but it was also, just a few months before the Lewinsky scandal, that the Defense of Marriage Act passed. It was also sometime around then that we as a culture became obsessed with weddings.  Movies started being made, one after the other, in which weddings were the entire narrative thrust.  Even other sorts of films, action films, murder mysteries, began to include a "gratuitous wedding scene" the way that movies during LBJ's day often included a "gratuitous sex scene" or even a "gratuitous car chase." According to Chrys Ingraham, author of White Weddings, weddings started costing more and everything that went along with them, dresses, honeymoons, engagements, also got bigger and more expensive and more overburdened with meaning since if it wasn't perfect all was clearly doomed. And of course the gay and lesbian marriage movement began back then, as a national movement, and pushed the "sanctity" of marriage even closer to the center of our national consciousness. So now the patriot is not just straight, but also most importantly, conjugally disciplined. All of the patriot's sexual impulses must be confined to the conjugal bed (even if the patriot is gay!).  If the patriot does not exhibit sexual discipline, then he is unworthy to lead. There are well over 1000 rights and privileges granted just by the federal government because citizenship is increasingly based on marriage.  And, according to Ingraham, the number of federal rights has actually gone up since the passage of DOMA.   No wonder some gays and lesbians want marriage so much. So now Sanford's lack of marital discipline has ruined his career.  The fiscal discipline he showed, where he refused to take Obama's stimulus money because he wanted to pay down South Carolina's debt rather than use it for state programs, is of no use to him now.   The only kind of discipline that matters is conjugal- for citizenship or leadership. Perhaps all the disgraced Republican polticians can start a third party, the "End Civil Marriage Party."  By ending civil marriage and the civil rights attached to it,  American leadership could be based on things like policy and civil rights could be based on being residents of this country, rather than how much conjugal discipline we show?

Obama administration refuses to regulate executive pay

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I have been trying really hard to not spend all my time thinking about what the Obama administration is doing wrong.  I have been visualizing world peace, despite the continuation of two disastrous wars.  I like the vegetable garden; the dog seems like a good idea and doesn't shed. But the latest decision- or lack thereof- to come out of the White House on limiting executive pay is just too indicative of what is wrong with this administration to not merit some comment. White House to Propose New Rules for Executive Compensation - washingtonpost.com. For a man who was elected to change things, Obama and the Clintonites around him, seem set on keeping them exactly the way they are.  Rather than actually regulating the outrageous salaries of executives, the Obama camp is doing what they do best: talking the change talk and walking the status quo walk. So we are hearing from the likes of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that executives have been taking huge risks for years now with no costs to them. Executive pay stays the same or goes up no matter what happens to the companies they run.  Geithner even went so far as to suggest that this might be a major reason we're in this economic mess.  CEOs pursing profit for themselves regardless of longterm economic stability came up with brilliant plans to make money out of thin air by financializing everything and producing nothing. What did the executives care if rather than trading pork bellies, they were trading bundled high-interest loans from the poorest of the poor (e.g. subprime mortgages but also things like cash for paycheck interest payments and rent-to-own centers)?  The people at the top were taking in way more money than they ever had. But rather than stop such greed in its tracks, Obama has given us  regulation with no teeth. Instead of capping executive pay, shareholders of publicly traded companies will be able make nonbinding recommendations on compensation.   How will a nonbinding resolution ever stop the "greed is good" ideology that has ruled our country for too long?  Picture the scene.  A little Dickensian waif, hat in hand, tugs on the big fat cat CEO's incredibly expensive sleeve:  "Excuse me, sir.  Do you mind not taking your big fat pay check?  We need to get a Christmas goose and all the trimmings and we don't have any money?" I suppose that a lot of people who would say "bah humbug" to the plight of the Dickensian poor.  And somehow a sizable number of Americans, not terribly rich Americans, still believe that greed is good, that a "rising tide floats all boats" and other lies of neoliberal capitalism.  But most of us, a blessed majority of us, finally understand that greed is not good.  The wealth never trickled down to the rest of us.  Most of us and our boats are sinking, rather than rising. To make matters worse, the incredibly high salaries at the top did manage to trickle down psychologically.  According to Cornell economist Robert Frank, who wrote Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms America's Middle Class, when the super rich buy their super big mansions and their super fancy cars, then the rich feel pressure to trade up too and so do the kind a rich and so on and so forth until all of us are living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, needing designer clothes and Caribbean vacations.  Or at least most of us felt this pressure.  Because a person's sense of economic security, beyond the basic "food and shelter" stuff, is really about what we think other people have.  And since we couldn't afford what our neighbors had, we charged it, which left us with a negative savings rate and credit card debt at around $11,000 per household. Which leads us back to the disgracefully high interest rates and other schemes of financialization that led us to this mess in the first place and needs to be regulated, but will not be regulated- at least not through executive pay if we leave it up to the Obama administration. If Obama understands all of this rhetorically, if the man can give a speech about economic justice that brings me to tears, why can't he stop compromising with the exact same business execs who brought us Depression 2008 and start actually bringing the change that was so eloquently promised?

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Obama administration refuses to regulate executive pay

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Image by kellan via Flickr"][/caption]

I have been trying really hard to not spend all my time thinking about what the Obama administration is doing wrong.  I have been visualizing world peace, despite the continuation of two disastrous wars.  I like the vegetable garden; the dog seems like a good idea and doesn't shed. But the latest decision- or lack thereof- to come out of the White House on limiting executive pay is just too indicative of what is wrong with this administration to not merit some comment. White House to Propose New Rules for Executive Compensation - washingtonpost.com. For a man who was elected to change things, Obama and the Clintonites around him, seem set on keeping them exactly the way they are.  Rather than actually regulating the outrageous salaries of executives, the Obama camp is doing what they do best: talking the change talk and walking the status quo walk. So we are hearing from the likes of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that executives have been taking huge risks for years now with no costs to them. Executive pay stays the same or goes up no matter what happens to the companies they run.  Geithner even went so far as to suggest that this might be a major reason we're in this economic mess.  CEOs pursing profit for themselves regardless of longterm economic stability came up with brilliant plans to make money out of thin air by financializing everything and producing nothing. What did the executives care if rather than trading pork bellies, they were trading bundled high-interest loans from the poorest of the poor (e.g. subprime mortgages but also things like cash for paycheck interest payments and rent-to-own centers)?  The people at the top were taking in way more money than they ever had. But rather than stop such greed in its tracks, Obama has given us  regulation with no teeth. Instead of capping executive pay, shareholders of publicly traded companies will be able make nonbinding recommendations on compensation.   How will a nonbinding resolution ever stop the "greed is good" ideology that has ruled our country for too long?  Picture the scene.  A little Dickensian waif, hat in hand, tugs on the big fat cat CEO's incredibly expensive sleeve:  "Excuse me, sir.  Do you mind not taking your big fat pay check?  We need to get a Christmas goose and all the trimmings and we don't have any money?" I suppose that a lot of people who would say "bah humbug" to the plight of the Dickensian poor.  And somehow a sizable number of Americans, not terribly rich Americans, still believe that greed is good, that a "rising tide floats all boats" and other lies of neoliberal capitalism.  But most of us, a blessed majority of us, finally understand that greed is not good.  The wealth never trickled down to the rest of us.  Most of us and our boats are sinking, rather than rising. To make matters worse, the incredibly high salaries at the top did manage to trickle down psychologically.  According to Cornell economist Robert Frank, who wrote Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms America's Middle Class, when the super rich buy their super big mansions and their super fancy cars, then the rich feel pressure to trade up too and so do the kind a rich and so on and so forth until all of us are living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, needing designer clothes and Caribbean vacations.  Or at least most of us felt this pressure.  Because a person's sense of economic security, beyond the basic "food and shelter" stuff, is really about what we think other people have.  And since we couldn't afford what our neighbors had, we charged it, which left us with a negative savings rate and credit card debt at around $11,000 per household. Which leads us back to the disgracefully high interest rates and other schemes of financialization that led us to this mess in the first place and needs to be regulated, but will not be regulated- at least not through executive pay if we leave it up to the Obama administration. If Obama understands all of this rhetorically, if the man can give a speech about economic justice that brings me to tears, why can't he stop compromising with the exact same business execs who brought us Depression 2008 and start actually bringing the change that was so eloquently promised?

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