A Visit To India Is Hard To Leave Behind: What separates New Delhi from the Everglades

(Counterpunch, March 20, 2012) At two in the morning, the sleek, modern airport at New Delhi hummed with activity. Most travelers pointed westbound to European capitals and from there, mid morning connections to the Americas.

What piqued my curiosity at that ungodly hour: airport security worked at half pace while the crowds piled behind. For the most part, India’s bureaucratic indifference was far from sight during a three-week visit.

Here at the moment of departure, anxious lines pushed and security responded with its own laws of gravity, and I felt the curious pull of the familiar, something that reminded me of home. You know what they say about Schenectady: it’s not hell but you can see it from there?

The places that hold us, whether in Uttar Pradesh or New York, have their tell tales. For example, in Florida –my home–, the sign of the eternal, damning wheel is the predisposition of bureaucrats to work hand-in-glove with politicians and lobbyists to destroy the Everglades.

The Dismal Future of America: Hostage to Fraudulent Elections

Reviewing for the New York Times the new book by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, David Frum asks, “Does America Have a Future”? The backdrop for the question is a combustible mixture of news: more Americans are living in poverty than at any time in the past 50 years and another shocker– the moment during the Tea Party debate among Republican presidential candidates when the audience cheered the idea of letting uninsured patients die. America has a future, but we are heading in an unrecognizable direction without navigation aids.

I recall an American president, Bill Clinton, speaking at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami in the spring of 1995. Clinton was a fabulous campaigner. Even his adversaries– especially his adversaries — would agree. He looked over the crowd assembled and sang the virtues of place. He said along these lines, “In the future America is going to look more and more like Miami. Diverse and vibrant and filled with hope.” I marveled from the audience of adoring supporters.

At the time, I was a year into the struggle to stop the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco– triggered by the Miami-Dade county commission and powerful campaign contributors reconstituted as HABDI from the board of directors of the Latin Builders Association. (Their goal: to convert the destroyed military base into a privatized commercial airport with the aim of using their control of access, to control the re-supply of Cuba, after Castro. HABDI needed the quick blessing of the Clinton White House.) Some were big Clinton givers, too.

Marco Rubio Faces the Nation: Not Ready for Prime Time

Marco Rubio has been in the US Senate nearly nine months. After a nine month gestation, last Sunday the junior senator from Florida emerged as tidy proof on “Face the Nation’.

Face The Nation host Bob Schaeffer led off with a question about the GOP stance on raising the debt ceiling. Rubio returned with spin: it is a problem of spending, not the debt ceiling. Spending cuts, spending cuts, spending cuts. Even rating agencies like Standard & Poors say so. Schaeffer asked the senator’s view of a compromise deal to allow the president to increase the debt ceiling without action by either party. Rubio stuck to his point: “it’s not about the debt ceiling, it’s about debt.”

Rubio used the phrase “credible solution” to the debt problem several times, including the rating agency’s emphasis on a credible solution in its recent report. When Schaeffer tried, twice– including a Rubio clip from a Fox News interview– to get the junior senator to acknowledge that not everything in the economy is President Obama’s fault, Rubio pushed back.

“People want to know when they will have a job. Until America has a credible solution to its debt problem, people will be afraid to invest in America.” Here, Schaeffer could have asked: name one investor who wouldn’t create a job in the US because of the national debt.

Victims of the Free Market: Predatory Speculation

Civil War in Libya. Oil speculators crowding into the market. For nearly a week running, network TV news has led with the story of rising gas prices and the “threat to the economy”. Really? The Federal Reserve core inflation excludes food and energy, on the basis that price spikes moderate and in any event (barring revolutionaries gaining foothold in Saudi Arabia) speculators come and go, exchanging futures for paintings by Michaelangelo. The price of gas goes from $3.14 to $3.55, and suddenly we are atwitter about tapping the national oil reserve?

In the week before TV news began to focus on gas prices, the Administration announced the jobless rate fell to 8.9 percent. The emerging story line is that rising fuel prices are threatening the economic “recovery”. That’s not why the seams are coming apart.

The Forty Year War on the Environment: Along Came Jeb

(Counterpunch) In The New York Times, Jeb Bush offers a rare glimpse of what we have been missing since the former governor of Florida– and putative lynchpin of the Karl Rove/ Grover Norquist wing of the GOP– left office. Jeb! derides President Obama blaming his brother’s administration for the nation’s ills. “It’s kind of like a kid coming to school saying, ‘The dog ate my homework… “It’s childish. This is what children do until they mature. They don’t accept responsibility.”

Watching Avatar in Miami: Where Natures Saves the World … from Us

(Counterpunch) In a Miami IMAX theater, I recently watched James Cameron’s “Avatar”. Judging from the cheers at the end, even teenagers yearn for a time when rites of passage meant embracing our connectedness with the web of life. Last week, the worldwide box office total for the movie approached a boffo $2 billion. So what conclusions to draw from what could be the highest grossing movie in history?

The Rising Tide: Sea Levels and Property Rights

(Counterpunch) Florida is a good lens through which to view the dilemma of delay and inadequate response by government to the challenges of global warming. There has been plenty of talk about reforming energy conservation in order to limited carbon dioxide emissions. The inconsistencies are only a few feet above sea level. The foot-dragging makes marks in the sand. Meanwhile, downtown Miami and Miami Beach are beginning to flood like Venice at seasonal high tides.

Recovery Without Feeling: No Mea Culpas, No Accountability

(Counterpunch) The economic calamity is abating according to Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chief. What else could he say? But it is hard to be optimistic if you are a small businessman in Florida. This doesn’t feel like a “recovery” at all. “For rent” signs on commercial real estate are multiplying. The force of this Great Recession or Little Depression, as the case may be, is turning the scrubbed cheeks of Chamber of Commerce ‘visionaries’ unusual shades of pale.

A first step forward would be for Chamber of Commerce members to return their membership cards. Why? Because the Chamber and its associated lobbyists serve their constituents very poorly. In brief, the Chamber of Commerce acts as though all we need to do is wait a little while and the good old days will reappear– poof– like pigeons from a top hat. In the meantime, their conception is to find distractions scaled to their constituents’ anxiety. That is what the huffing and puffing against Florida Hometown Democracy is about. FHD is the proposal for a constitutional amendment in the 2010 state-wide election that would require direct vote by the electorate on changes to local growth plans. The Chamber is bellowing– soon to be followed by ugly, lying mailers– that the current economic catastrophe was caused by too much regulation, by too much interference by citizens, and too much of everything but their own culpability.

Coral Reef Meltdown

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  The past few days I’ve been thinking about Dr. James Speth’s call for “civic unreasonableness” and NASA’s Dr. James Hansen’s appeal for scientists to drop “objectivity” from muting their involvement, communicating to the public the impacts of global warming.

Counterpunch: The politics of colony collapse

To Bee or Not to Bee?

Colony collapse disorder sounds so elementally human. A recent 60 Minutes segment featured the disappearing bees. Too bad bees can’t talk. Come back, bees! You’re part of the hive that humans have made of the planet. I was thinking about bees last night, driving and at the same time looking at my brightly lit, new cell phone named for a fruiting tree pollinated by bees.