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So long and thanks for all the fish.

by Norla M. Antinoro, Ph.D., editor

It’s been a great run and I have enjoyed every minute of it.  On June 22 I got married and will be involved with a variety of activities that preclude taking the time required to do a proper job of editing and publishing a progressive political magazine.

To our readers I recommend the online magazine LA Progressive for your enjoyment and edification.  Dick and Sharon, the editors there, helped give We! its standards and its contacts.  Their advice and encouragement was more than appreciated and I will always be grateful.  To our writers, I advise them to submit their work to LA Progressive as well.  It has an excellent audience and the best editors outside of We! that I have encountered.

Thanks to all of you, readers and writers alike.  I have enjoyed it all tremendously and consider it a privilege to have served as We!’s only editor.

To my silent and much appreciated partner, I offer my heart felt thanks.  You helped me find my freedom and relocate my self-respect and find my way free of what amounted to an insideous and destructivce cult.  I would have managed to escape eventually but due to your help and encouragement, I did it with my head held high and my mind and self-respect intact.  I don’t have your current emai address but I know you have mine so get in touch if you like.

If anyone has business with me as editor of We!, you can continue to reach me via this magazine’s contact function for about one year.

We! is no longer an active magazine.  It’s archives can be made available by request and author contacts can be arranged with the writers’ permissions.

“leave no mark upon the earth but the footprints of your compassion and the cechoes of your laughter.” nm antinoro, 2002

Obama’s A Genius! He Shows Why Unending Madness is Inevitable!

by George Thomas

Let the politics scream on.  The Bush Cartel may earn some comeuppance, or may not. A careful reading and listening to all the political talk either demanding accountability under law, or soft-pedaling the whole thing while urging that we “turn the page,” reveals little but shouting.  Finally, Obama appeared to invoke “the rule of law” in his May 21st security speech in one sentence, while in another describe the continued program of preventive long-term incarceration of ‘terrorists’.

What gives?

Dick Cheney did not disappoint. Within minutes he provided his usual mix of self-promotion in de-facto response to Obama. His speech was content-free, and we can ignore it as some more standard Bush administration dogma. Someone, somewhere, pule-e-ease find a way to shut Dick Cheney up before he convinces millions of our unread, unsophisticated citizens to swing US politics back to sheer madness.  It could happen.  I was alive way back during the second Dubya selection, and I know.  But the depressing thought occurs to me: What would it matter? Read more

Republican Opposition to the Stimulus: Wrong, But Not Treason

by Jeff Alson

One of my best friends and favorite writers, Robert Letcher, has accused those Republicans who oppose President Obama’s stimulus program of “treason by a thousand cuts” (Republicans Giving Civic Lessons?!!!??, We! Magazine, February 14, 2009).  I strongly disagree.

Even more important than the formal definition that Bob cites,  I believe treason has a clear and powerful “public meaning” of disloyalty to one’s country.  Accordingly, unlike words that lack such a universal public meaning, I believe words like treason should only be used when we really (really!) mean it.  Otherwise, they lose their powerful public meaning.  I personally believe that the stimulus program was a very good idea, to try to jump-start our economy and help millions of families survive.  But, I don’t think opposition to the stimulus program in general, or to the process that was used by the Administration and Congress to pass it quickly, comes even close to justifying the use of the word treason, whether by one or a thousand or a million cuts.

I think treason should be reserved for those issues with immediate consequences related to fundamental constitutional principles and which do not involve a “thousand degrees of grayness.”   And nothing involves so many degrees of grayness than a giant stimulus bill put together in a few weeks.  Would a stimulus bill 10 percent smaller or a debate a week or two longer so more members (and the public) could read and digest it, really be the difference between treason and non-treason?  Or, was Obama’s willingness to compromise to get three Republican Senate votes equal to one-thousandth of treason?  Or, was his unwillingness to support a bill 10 percent larger (or much larger as economists like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have advocated?) treason-like?  I think these questions point out the folly of bringing treason into the debate over an economic stimulus program. Read more

Holy Minerva! Scientists at War over Human Dignity

by George Thomas

The American voter has again convulsed, and the national pendulum appears to be swinging away from a kind of childlike overconfidence.

I shared that common sigh of relief as the world watched Barack Obama begin his term of office.  With this promise of competence at the top I’m not sure how I should act.  Among many other concerns, we might also get started trying to stop the hemorrhaging of government science advice.

The techie know-how and the appreciation of science that Truman inherited after World War II evolved into a somewhat legitimate process of science advice.  Even foreign policy was remade to cope with post-War realities.  Government appreciation of science, as well as a know-how, can-do, benign value for Western positivism expanded under Eisenhower and Kennedy, ran into a snag in Vietnam, then coasted through the ‘60s and ‘70s until we hit Reagan. Read more

Text of President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

as prepared for delivery and released by the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

January 20, 2009

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States:

“My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Read more

They’re Just Not That Into You, George

by Mary Lyon

Mr. Bush, you shouldn’t have bothered. It wouldn’t have mattered what you said on your last Thursday evening as White House occupant. I’m sure many Americans did tune in out of curiosity as to how you were going to try to talk your way out of your mess this time. You used the same familiar tricks – that right eyebrow cocking in unison with just a trace of smirk, suggesting that this is just all kinda funny and, hey, there were a few little bumps in the road but so what? Love me anyway. It didn’t work. The results, not surprisingly, were underwhelming. Thirteen minutes of “I did TOO do a good job” loaded with vague nothings, every sentence of which made you stop, scratch your head, and say “huh???”

It really made me stand back a moment and marvel. The final public address by the man departing the Oval Office, especially after eight long years there, ought to have received a bigger fanfare. For example, although we were pretty tired of Ronald Reagan too, by the end, people still made a big deal out of his finishing touches. Quite the opposite for the feckless Dubya, except maybe among the dwindling number of denial-steeped extremists who still love him, of course. I couldn’t help noting how decisively his important farewell speech sank from the top of the average evening newscast – almost faster than that US Airways jet sank out of the sky into the Hudson River. Irrelevance, anyone? Read more

The “Bush Effect” – Hopefully for a Third and LAST Time

by Mary Lyon

Third time’s a charm, maybe?

I’ve compiled three of these lists now. In 2006, I issued the first one, looking back on everything George W. Bush has adversely affected since he first arrived in the Oval Office. Just a damage assessment, really. At the time, I thought it would be instructive to look back, at year’s end, over what many Bush critics have come to refer to as his “Reverse Midas Touch” – everything he touches turns to something far more foul, germ-laden, and smelly than gold. It ran at least nine pages. Last time I looked, the page count had expanded to 17. Read more

Christmas at the Edge of Depression

by Norla M. Antinoro, PhD

I baked all day. Sugar cookies for a woman who is trying to get through her first Christmas without her children - seems Dad, her ex, offers a richer experience during these holidays having a larger family for the kids to play with. I bake and she decorates saying every now and then “There are no kids here.”

Her mother helps me shape the dough for the next batch. At the next table playing Rummikub are older people whose families have made one excuse or another for not coming to pick them up today. All of Portland is drivable except, it seems, the cul de sac where their children and grandchildren live…seems they all just happen to live on unplowed cul de sacs. They neither realize that no one came to get them because no one wants to have them over for the holiday. They are both rather obnoxious in the eyes of most people - I have never heard a group of people complain this much about anyone as about these two. I feel so sorry for them because they really do not know why they are being left behind - like the poor kid who ends up at school for the xmas break when the rest get to go home for the holidays. Read more

Worthy to Govern

by Norla Antinoro

First you must feed the people. You cannot win their hearts and souls until you feed their hungry bellies and quiet their fears of hunger, cold, and destitution. How many times must humanity learn this lesson? How many times do our leaders have to be overthrown, replaced or redirected before this simple fact is accepted and understood once and for all?

Gilles Duceppe said it well today. A leader who puts his own personal ideology above the economy shows a serious lack of judgment and is unworthy of governing. Not because we are profit driven. Not because we are greedy and materialistic. But because without food on the table nothing else matters. Without clean water to drink, shelter from the elements, and a safe environment in which to live no products are of any value, no ideas have any significance. Read more

Lingering Effects

by Norla Antinoro

We often think of that war as the Just War, the Good War.  But looking now at its effects, without even going into the details of it like A Bridge Too Far, it was a war with all the problems of war.  It scarred the participants.  It scarred the land.  It left memories so powerful and vivid they colored the next sixty years with their hue.

They gather for meals in a dining room fit for a cruise ship and talk.  Perhaps of today and its problems but every bit as often talk turns to The War, The Big One, WWII.  H. spent only five years in uniform, joining the national guard in 1938 before there was any talk of US involvement in any overseas conflict.  Today those five years influence his life more strongly than the intervening 60.  He does not leave the Portland area because of memories of walking through mud in the jungles of New Guinea, Australia, and Indonesia.  A soft spoken gentle man who is more comfortable with a drum stick or golf club in his hand than a rifle, he was in the military band.  Read more

Next Page »

• Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

  Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.

• Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm

  

• Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

  For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.

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  read more at Mother Jones

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• How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely

  

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