September 20, 2008
The financial crisis is constitutional
I have tried, Lord knows I have tried, to keep my political meanderings off-site, and over at dailykos where they probably belong. But what is going on just now, this weekend and early next week, is extraordinary, and extraordinarily important.
I am far from competent -- far, far, far from competent -- to discuss the proposed $700-billion bailout proposal being rammed through Congress by the same Administration which swore it had incontrovertible evidence Saddam Hussein possessed and meant to use weapons of mass destruction.
The three-page legislation drafted to authorize this contains the following language:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
What that means, for the two or three of you still following at home, is that it is seriously proposed that in order to save our economy from the next Depression we should give the Secretary of the Treasury -- an appointed cabinet official who serves at the pleasure of the president -- unbridled authority to spend $700-billion (or more). With complete immunity from meaningful oversight. By anybody, save the president he or she serves. No Congressional oversight. No judicial review.
We have eviscerated much of the Constitution driven by our fear of terrorism.
But this is outrageous on the face of it, and I have spent much of the afternoon reading liberal and conservative blogs on which this is argued.
I fear what the other hand may be doing while we fret over this language. Regardless, this clause, at least, must be stopped dead in its tracks.
Because otherwise I might have to buy that damned shotgun.
Write those who must be written. And store food for the winter. It could be a long, dark season.
Posted by Grant at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
September 16, 2008
Cats & Dogs as Economic Indicators, or, People Just Ain't No Good
Alas, it is true that I was raised by people who are far more gifted tending to domestic cats than they are with more advanced mammals, or each other. And it is also true that I stayed in a broken relationship for some months until the cancer-ridden dog we jointly tended finally expired, though in my own defense had it been my dog and not her dog I would have done the right thing and put him to sleep. But because I was leaving, and he was dying, and he was her dog...well, he was a good dog, anyhow, and he passed on with a bite of homemade muffin and butter on his tongue.
Fast forward a dozen or more years. I have fallen in with a family more closely attuned to the rhythms of nature, and settled into a pleasant corner of Appalachia. They garden; we garden. As noted previously here, we started with chickens last fall, and now are nourished by their eggs and their flesh, and I seem to have survived my first morning helping with that harvest with no long-term psychological damage.
We have been, this week, handed several further reminders that the economic underpinnings of our society are rusting through, and that we have largely forgotten how to make steel. The reminders out here in the country have four legs and empty bellies.
See, my inlaws live on top of what's called a mountain here, though it would be only a nameless foothill back west. It's a pretty place, connected to town by a long and winding road that is barely wide enough for two cars, which is how they build 'em out here in Kentucky. For the decade I've been a member of this family, and the four and a half years we've lived here, they have had one dog, and somebody dropped it by the side of the road a dozen or more years back. She's a nice dog, not very smart, and not much of a guard animal (she was chased around the house and bitten in the back by a deer, after all).
But even though we live in an especially poor section of Appalachia, to my knowledge that has been the only critter dumped on their 70 or 80 acres in a decade.
Until this summer.
Six weeks ago I went out to the barn to feed the chickens and found two starving puppies under one of the condo units we built. You could count their ribs, and yet they were still sweet wiggle dogs. Later I ran onto two more, who turned out to be their parents. The bitch had a bloody spot on her back, probably from going under a fence at a high rate of speed, and I saw the father only once. In the end, because our daughter has doting grandparents, they kept the little female, found some college girls to take the little male, and took the mother to the local shelter. Since I spent part of my junior high years volunteering at the PAWS shelter in Seattle, I suffer no delusions to her fate, but it was the best we could do.
The new dog has some terrier in her, and having sat through the French film Baxter long ago at the Seattle International Film Festival (sitting in the middle of a row, surrounded by people I knew, and so unable to leave), I have some misgivings about her, but she's a very sweet animal and our daughter adores her. Her brother's tail had been bobbed, and I have minor fears that the family had been raised to fight. Hopefully they were dumped by the side of the road because they were bad at it.
Sunday morning, anyhow, I went out to feed the chickens, harvest okra and peppers from the garden, and finish bushhogging; the rest of the family was at church, but I prefer to do whatever worshiping seems necessary in private. From beneath one of the chicken condos emerged one of the skinniest cats I've seen in many years. Purring. Mewling. We happen to have (courtesy of a local distributor, a friend of the family) some old bread which we keep to feed the chickens, or add to the compost pile, depending on how green it is. So I fed her a piece of bread. And then another. Slowly. Six or seven by the time I was done with my day.
She's an ordinary cat, a tabby. Nothing special. She has sharp teeth, but enough sense to nip, not bite. She's not feral, and didn't use her claws on me when I picked her up (though that's how I came briefly to be acquainted with her teeth).
Now, I know there are far worse things in the world, like the torture program promulgated in our name by the Cheney-Addington cabal.
It is telling, to me, however, that people are dumping animals in increasing numbers just now (ours is not the only story along these lines). And it doesn't speak well for those doing the dumping. But what it really suggests is how desperate times are here, and how much worse they can get. The cat and the dogs dumped on us had been well-tended, and probably well-treated; you can tell when an animal's been abused or neglected, and they're dangerous to rescue. Something happened, and the furry ones had to go. Maybe it was a marriage gone south, but far more likely it was an ugly choice between feeding animals and feeding children, or maybe homes lost to the mortgage crisis and landlords unwilling to house critters. Tough luck, anyhow the story went.
Unemployment went up to, what, 6.1% today? There was a piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader over the weekend arguing that the real unemployment rate -- counting partially employed folks or those who have quit looking or run out of benefits -- is a hair over 10%. So I understand why people can't feed their animals.
I just wish they had the basic decency to do something more responsible with them than dump them at the side of the road.
That seems a metaphor for our whole society, just now. But it's a good thing I'm a pacifist, and it's a better thing that I'll never know who dumped those poor little animals.
(This was originally posted, in somewhat different form, on dailykos.com.)
Posted by Grant at 11:44 AM | Permalink
September 3, 2008
An update from the curmudgeon emeritus
It is not like me to go several weeks without writing, and as this site continues to evolve I wouldn't want my long absence to suggest anything other than that I've been absent.
And in that absence, I've been busy.
The greasy beans are now picked, though we might be able to scrounge one more mess of them for dinner in a couple nights. Today I went through the cranberry beans, an heirloom sent kindly by a seed saver up east who I've never met and picked them, and began to shell them. Colorful, they are, though I've no idea yet what they taste like. And I pulled all the popcorn we planted, though I've no idea how much of it the bugs left alone nor what my wife means to do with it. (It was, I'm told, a great exercise for preschoolers.)
Having worried all summer that we would not have peppers and okra, it's now finally time to begin harvesting those happy vegetables, as well. This morning I cut up three cookie sheets of okra and put them in the freezer. With the half-dozen chickens now roosting in our freezer, that pretty much guarantees a pot of gumbo at least once a month over the winter.
The tomatoes...well...we planted poorly, too many heirlooms and not enough simple red canners, but we'll fix that next year. I mean to keep a notebook next year, so as better to know what we've done and what didn't work.
When it's all done, we'll have to burn the garden this year. Too many bugs, especially those little yellow bean-eaters. And then we'll spread leaves and chicken manure over it, and begin the process of setting new fence posts and doubling its size. Mostly so we can keep the blackberries we planted down the hill away from the deer.
In the evenings, I've been reading. And, of course, watching the political conventions. (And we tore down a wall in the Fuzzy Duck over Labor Day. There's that.)
A couple other times I've written here about torture, and my simple but acute horror that our nation, our people, our government, has found it necessary and appropriate to engage in this practice. The irony that the ruling party has nominated a former POW, that I watched Fred Thompson speak last night at some length about the horrors of Senator McCain's treatment by the North Vietnamese...all that makes little sense to me.
Regardless, I am here to beg.
Please read Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.
Please.
This is not how government is supposed to work, and it is especially not how our government is supposed to work.
And if torture is the new norm -- if we really and truly believe this is how to combat Islamic extremists -- it's something we as a society should have a long and profound discussion about.
I am not yet through with Ms. Mayers' book. It is difficult to read, shattering even to an old cynic's ideals.
As a tonic, I have taken up Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. It is a kind of updated and nonfiction version of The Ugly American, though that old Cold War classic is usually misunderstood in caricature: The ugly American was the hero of that novel. Greg Mortenson offers a different solution to our relationship with the Muslim world.
Both of these books are selling well just now. Our hopes and our fears.
Please read them. Please make time.
This is the season of hope, possibly our last season of hope.
Posted by Grant at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)