Month: March 2016

Several weeks ago, during one of the Republican Presidential debates, Senator Marco Rubio was asked about an endorsement he received from the Mayor of Miami, Florida that was accompanied by a plea from the Mayor that Rubio advocate a climate change policy which would curtail the flooding in that city.

In response, Rubio gave the standard answer of the climate change deniers, saying; “The reason the climate is changing is because the climate has always been changing. The climate’s never been the same it’s always changed. I don’t believe that human activity is the cause of all of these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. And then, in any case, there is no law that can be passed that would have any effect on climate change. But I can tell you right now that I’m not going to destroy our economy.”

Parsing Rubio’s answer is interesting since the answer contains an acknowledgement that there have been “dramatic changes” in the climate which he attempts to assert are natural. In taking this position, Rubio has joined the ranks of climate deniers seeking the Presidency and senior members of his party. Both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are firm climate deniers. The former would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. The latter would abolish the Department of Energy and has voted against every environmentally sound proposal. They join Senator James Inhofe R-Oklahoma. Inhofe is one of the most famous climate deniers, even writing a book claiming that the scientific evidence in support of climate change is a conspiracy to destroy the business economy. He is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. He has compared the EPA to the Nazi Gestapo and its Administrator to the Japanese World War II propagandist, Tokyo Rose.

How did we get to this place?

The answer is simple. The United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions involving campaign financing has turned the American political system of campaigning into a giant cesspool. The Koch brothers, Koch industries and a network of wealthy like-minded donors have been allowed to secretly fund entities like Americans For Prosperity, the Club For Growth and create a number of tax deductible think tanks that specialize in specious research designed to oppose and weaken any regulation that threatens it’s business interests regardless of how sound the regulation is or the damage their corporate activity will cause to the environment. An excellent history of this activity is contained in Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right .
The ironic part of all of this is that some of best scientific minds in America saw the crisis we would face decades ago.

As early as 1968 the scientist David M. Gates warned about global warming declaring that “We will go down in history known as an elegant technological society which underwent biological disintegration for lack of ecological understanding.” He painted a grim picture for the future of the planet that would become “half-starved, depressed billions gasping in air depleted of oxygen and laden with pollutants, thirsting for thickened blighted water.”

By 1977, Gates was sounding the alarm about fossil fuels saying that their continued use “…would mean warmer global climate, raise ocean levels.”

The question posed to Marco Rubio inn the Republican Presidential debate was predicated on a request by twenty-one mayors in Florida to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the issue of climate change be included in the debate because of rising sea levels. In the past year and a half the seal level along the Atlantic coast has risen five inches. The city of Miami Beach has spent 100 million dollars on sea defenses.

Maybe Rubio and his fellow climate change deniers are right. Maybe the science supporting global warming is unsettled.

Maybe the theory that the earth is round is unsettled too.

There are certain events that occur during your lifetime about which you will always remember where you were and whom you were with when they occurred. The attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the airplane crash in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 is one. If you’re old, like me, you remember where you were on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was killed. So, the recent reports that a knife had been found on the former estate of OJ Simpson that could be the murder weapon, caused memories of that trial and verdict almost twenty-one years ago to come flooding back into my memory.

The discovery of the knife was as bizarre as almost everything else associated with the trial. A construction worker during the demolition of the Simpson estate allegedly found the knife and turned it over to a Los Angeles police officer. That officer, rather than turning the knife in to the department, kept it as a souvenir. This year, after trying to learn the Simpson case number which he was going to have engraved into the knife, it was confiscated by the department for testing.

The not guilty verdict in the Simpson case was initially stunning. The trial had lasted almost one year but jury deliberations took less than one day. In my view, it was the only criminal trial I watched in which there was not a single piece of exculpatory evidence. The swiftness of the deliberations led the world to assume that Simpson was about to be convicted. The verdict was also one of the most racially polarizing issues the nation had seen although recently, the Washington- Post reports that a majority of the African-American community now believes that Simpson was guilty.

With the benefit of two decades hindsight, it is easier to understand why the verdict was reached.

The trial judge was caught up in his own newly found celebrity and completely lost control of the trial. The prosecutors were totally inept putting a racist cop on the stand to account for the recovery of a key piece of evidence, a bloody glove allegedly worn by Simpson. To compound this error they allowed the witness to deny his racist views only to have them revealed in all their ugliness on tapes of interviews he had given to a writer. Moreover, the racism displayed in the tapes was emblematic of the culture that permeated the Los Angeles Police department which patrolled African-American and Latino neighborhoods like an army of occupation without any pretense of protecting and serving.

And of course there was the “Dream Team” of defense lawyers and experts who played to the antipathy that the minority members of the jury had for the Los-Angeles Police Department and the ugly racist sentiments expressed by the detective who discovered the glove. Of course, you couldn’t have a “Dream Team” that didn’t have a Kardashian on it. This was the genesis of the national affliction we are forced to bear by the incessant self-promotion of this family.

Most recently the Los-Angeles Police Department announced that the knife is unconnected to the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman but not before the Los Angeles Times reported that Simpson was “nervous” about the knife’s discovery and how it might affect his chances for parole in Nevada. Also, this week Alan Deshowitz, one of the members of the “Dream Team,” declared on CNN that it is possible O.J. Simson was both guilty and framed by the Los-Angeles Police Department.

In the end, it appears that O.J. may be the only inmate in the country who is serving a lengthy prison sentence in one state for a crime that he was found not guilty of in an another state.

God sees.

Last month in a post entitled ”Where Have You Gone Joe Dimaggio,” I discussed the civility that Senator Bernie Sanders has displayed in his contest with Hillary Clinton. That same characteristic is on display in the Republican match-up in the way in which Governor John Kasich has conducted himself.

The Republican candidates have had twelve debates. Despite being an admitted political junkie, I stopped watching them after the seventh one. My curiosity got the better of me before the eleventh and final one so tuned in. The reason why I missed debates eight through ten immediately reoccurred to me as the dialogue degenerated into a discussion of the size of Donald Trump’s hands and other anatomical appendages. Rubio became “Little Marco” and Cruz became “Lying Ted.” Alone on the stage attempting to inject some intelligent discourse into the event was the Governor of Ohio, John Kasich.

Kasich refused to engage in the name-calling and shouting that Trump, Cruz and Rubio incessantly resorted to. At one point, moderator, Chris Wallace, aired a somewhat humorous political ad that Kasich’s super PAC had run comparing Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin and asked Kasich if he really thought the comparison had merit. Kasich responded by telling Wallace that he “wouldn’t bite “on that question.

Reflecting on that debate, I was struck by how little time or attention that Kasich received from the moderators. Almost the entire debate was focused on the mud-wrestling Trump, Cruz and Rubio were engaged in. That mirrored what had occurred in the first seven debates that I watched. Those who received little attention inevitably sank in the polls and withdrew from the race. Most of them were far more experienced and credentialed than the three who received the time and attention.

It is clear that the various networks sponsoring the debates have committed an extraordinary amount of time and money to covering the 2016 race for the White House. They have a vested interest in insuring that they obtain the highest ratings for these debates in order to boost advertising revenue and recoup their investment. In doing so, they have skewered the outcome of the nominating contest on the Republican side by driving the adults in the room from the race.

This year we seem to have a penchant for Bullies.

The political rhetoric is abundant with calls for torture, waterboarding, carpet bombing and any other use of extreme and, perhaps unlawful, force against America’s enemies.

Actual violence has even broken out at some political events.

At a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama a Black Lives Matter protester was beaten and ejected from a Trump Rally. Asked to comment on it, Trump opined that “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” The following month at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump said he would like “punch in the face” a protester that was escorted out of his event.
Trump’s rhetoric encouraging such mob violence has been escalating since earlier events held in other locales such as his Miami Doral Resort. No one should be surprised at these turn of events since Trump has used bullying language to insult Mexicans, Muslims and the Disabled.

Trump, however, is not the only bully on the political stage.

Governor Andrew Cuomo is not above using bullying tactics to upstage his perceived rivals and those who disagree with him on public policy.

One would have thought that Cuomo and New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, would have been natural partners, both having served in the Bill Clinton Administration. Yet the Mayor was barely in office when Cuomo undercut his State legislative agenda which included tax abatement for affordable housing and a renewal of mayoral control over the New York City schools. The Mayor commenting on Cuomo’s actions said that “if someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows.”

No one knows that better than Syracuse Mayor, Stephanie Miner, who was on the staff of Governor Mario Cuomo.

When Cuomo proposed that municipalities could defer pension payments into the future to avoid borrowing and balance their budgets, Mayor Miner wrote a well-reasoned op-ed piece in the New York Times disagreeing with the wisdom of the plan. Time proved Mayor Miner right.

Since that article appeared the Governor rejected providing any assistance to help Syracuse repair its aged and crumbling water pipes, responding; “Fix your own pipes.” Apparently he believe the money would be better spent on a lake side amphitheater on Onondaga Lake or building a new football stadium for Syracuse University, a private educational institution.

Indeed the Governor has expressed his pique by refusing to set foot inside the city in all of his visits to Central New York since the article appeared. It leads one to wonder whether he is intent on setting a new standard for pettiness or is simply geographically challenged.

In the end these two bullies have two thing in common.

First is that they inherited highly recognizable names from their fathers.

Second, is that if they hadn’t been born with those names, they would both be homeless.