Archive for November, 2008
November 25th, 2008
With Bob Gates staying on for a year or so as secretary of defense, McCain-backer Gen. Jim Jones as national security adviser and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, the incoming Obama administration may not look so much like “change we can believe in” as we thought.
The Obama I know from my several interviews with him is intellectually brilliant, calm and extremely sure of himself. He’s not going to be a pushover. I think he wants experienced professionals of equal intellect and toughness to carry out his plans and programs. And he’s signaling to Russia, China and the terrorists that Obama the president does not view the world as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, rather as a dangerous place.
Obama knows that his first task will be to restore the economy to avoid a bad movie called Great Depression II, the i-Pod Years. To this end he will do what sinking economies always do and start spending huge money on a public works program, as did FDR. In Rockford, East and West high schools are legacies of FDR’s Works Progress Administration - the WPA. Park shelters, Levings Lake and forest preserve shelters and roads survive as examples of WPA programs, as do area roadways such as North Main Road — Illinois 2 from Rockford to Beloit.
I’m told that the Obama program will be huge, as much as $1 trillion. He wants projects submitted that can begin in 6 months, because the aim is to use public works to put people to work, stimulating the economy.
He’ll be hampered in doing this if the new president has to contend with resurgent Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda or Muslim Brotherhood bombers. And a strong, no-b.s. foreign policy team will tell Mr. Kim, Mr. Chavez and the comedy team of Medvedev and Putin that just because W has left the building, it’s still not smart to mess with the U.S.
November 21st, 2008
It’s really hard for me to have any sympathy for the Detroit Big 3 automakers when their CEOs acted clueless last week, flying in their private jets to the nation’s capital with tin cups in hand, begging for $25 billion in handouts.
They could have at least shared one of the Big 3 jets. Better yet, they could have scored a PR coup and all flown coach class in a commercial jet.
I’ll bet you the execs of Toyota, Honda, Nissan, VW, BMW and Daimler-Benz and wouldn’t have flown into DC on a private jet looking for a handout. Oh, wait a minute, they’re not looking for handouts at all, because they are making money, and employing tens of thousands of Americans making cars here in the USA.
I’m not in favor of Ford, GM and Chrysler going out of business. I want them to succeed. But I’m saddened that the company leaders remain so isolated from the general public that they didn’t understand, or didn’t care, that the spectacle of them arriving in DC on their multimillion dollar airplanes made them sitting ducks for Jay, Conan and Dave, and for Democratic senators on Capitol Hull.
Duh!
November 18th, 2008
The notice — advertisement, actually — in Monday’s paper said the city of Rockford is raising 2008 property taxes 4.83 percent. How can this be, I wondered. Mayor Larry Morrissey promised to lower the city’s property taxes. We took the capital improvements program off the property tax and put it on a specially-crafted one percent sales tax. So, as bonds to old property-tax funded street referendums are paid off, those taxes go down until 2017.
Overall, city property taxes are still going up 4.83 percent. However, that doesn’t mean your bill should go up. In fact, the owner of a $100,000 home should see their city property tax bill go down $8 , says Andres Sammul, the city’s finance director.
November 17th, 2008
The American auto industry can’t be allowed to go out of business, but only because the US would lose roughly 13 million jobs when you factor in the car companies, the dealerships, the suppliers and the other industries that serve all of those companies.
That doesn’t mean we should issue the car makers a $25 billion blank check. On the contrary, there are several models we could look at, including President - elect Obama’s suggestion of a bride loan made with conditions that include restructuring of the domestic auto industry to make it an efficient entity that produces 21st century vehicles, not 1950s cars with 2009 bodies.
Another model, and one I like, is what happened when the Penn Central Railroad went bankrupt in the 1970s. This company was a tragedy from the start, a mismatch merger of clashing corporate cultures between the New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroads.
The government took over the bankrupt Penn Central, whose lines were and are essential to the economy of the northeastern states. It created a corporation called Consolidated Rail (CONRAIL) which included Penn Central lines and those of several other northeastern railroads.
Long story short: CONRAIL was a smashing success, its diesel engines boasting the slogan “CONRAIL QUALITY,” bragging rights that by all accounts were well deserved.
The government put it up for sale in 1999; Norfolk Southern and CSX bought it for $10.3 billion. Norfolk Southern took 58 percent and CSX took 42 percent, according to a New York Times article from 1999.
By the way, that $10.3 billion from 1999 would be worth from $13 billion to $15 billion today, depending on which method you use to calculate the inflation rate.
The government’s handling of the Penn Central disaster proved to be an intelligent use of federal resources. Taxpayers got their money back and more, and they got a more efficient railroad out of the whole takeover.
We could do it again, using the CONRAIL model for the Detroit auto industry.
AS to all you uber-capitalists out there who think that the unfettered free market is god: Your god is dead. The market is like fire. It can heat your house or burn it down. That’s why we need smoke detectors, sprinkler systems and a good fire department.
November 14th, 2008
Barack Obama may have dealt a severe setback to his own chances of being seen as an honest broker in the Arab world when it comes to dealing with Israel.
During the campaign, Obama’s foes made much of his middle name, Hussein, his Muslim heritage on his father’s side and his four year residency in Indonesia as a child. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country.
Arabs, and Muslims in general, were hopeful that President-elect Obama would be more open than past presidents to the Muslim community, and particularly to the Arab community (which includes Arab Christians) in the long quarrel with Israel.
Now, their hopes have been tempered severely because of Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. Emanuel, a Chicago congressman who is Jewish, volunteered to fight in the Persian Gulf War — as a captain in the Israeli Defense Force. His father was a member of the Irgun, a militant Zionist paramilitary organization in Palestine the 1930s and 1940s, leading up to the founding of Israel in 1948.
Rahm Emanuel has already apologized to Arabs because of an ethnic slur his father made about Arabs.
In all probability, Obama named Emanuel because of his perceived ability to guide Obama’s domestic legislative program through the often-stubborn Congress, even a Congress controlled by his fellow Democrats.
But it’s not playing that way in the Middle East. Obama has to make it clear, perhaps through the appointment of a high-profile Arab American in a leading foreign policy role, that he is, indeed intending to be an honest broker between Israel and her Arab neighbors.
November 12th, 2008
There are two stories in the news: Barack Obama’s preparation for becoming president #44.
And Sarah Palin’s preparation for becoming president #45. She is literally all over the tube, giving interviews to multiple channels. Todd is giving Greta a snow machine ride, now Greta is driving a snow machine, now they’re having moose chili and talkin’ ’bout Alaska.
Palin is launching her presidential bid for 2012, make no mistake.
November 11th, 2008
What about a bailout for states and local governments? They may not have the clout of the auto industry or Wall Street financial houses, but state and local governments are reeling from the economic tumble. If the aim of the incoming Obama administration is to stop job loss, they’d do well to start with their brother and sister governments. Illinois’ revenue is down $800 million in Fiscal Year 2009, blowing a bigger hole in the budget that is already out of balance to the tune of $2 billion. States, counties and cities, and other governments, are no different than business, if the money is not coming in, they have to lay off people, who no longer have disposable income, making the nation’s economy worse.
Obama needs to assemble an aid package for states and local governments and begin a massive infrastructure program to put millions of Americans to work. Our nation’s infrastructure is sinking to third world levels, meanwhile Europe and China are rapidly passing us by.
November 9th, 2008
To those of you who think that the Republican Party is now toast, remember 1994. That’s when the GOP came storming back after Bill Clinton overreached in his first two years as president, attempting to nationalize health-care and allow openly gay people to serve in the military.
Newt Gingrich, who’d been planning a House takeover for a decade, organized a disiciplined campaign for House candidates, presented a 10-point agenda called the Contract With America, and picked up more than 50 seats in the 1994 mid-terms. Republican Senate candidates also regained a majority, resulting in a GOP Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Unlike 1994, today’s GOP has no recognizable leader. The party got shellacked last Tuesday, losing seats in both houses of Congress and the White House. Democrats shouldn’t gloat, though.
Sometimes a royal drubbing is good for a party. And the GOP now needs to regroup around a new generation of leaders, kick the “neo-cons” back to their National Review and Weekly Standard magazines, their Heritage Foundation institute, and restore the biggest spending political party in history (doubling the national debt in just 8 years) to being a conservative alternative to the Democrats.
They have young people who can do this, like:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a reform governor in Louisiana who’s not yet 40, and, who enjoys widespread popularity. He had the good sense to stay out of the bidding for vice presidential candidate on the doomed McCain ticket. Jindal is also unique in that his parents are from India. He’s our first Indian-American governor.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, re-elected soundly on Tuesday even though his state went closely for Obama. Daniels quit a Bush administration post because he thought it had strayed from conservatism.
Alsaska Gov. Sarah Palin. OK, OK, so she didn’t know that Africa is a continent, the woman can take a geography course. She has charisma galore, and if she goes on the GOP fund-raising circuit for other candidates and rents an apartment in Des Moines, we’ll know she’s serious about her political future.
Mike Huckabee, the gentleman’s conservative. He won the Iowa caucuses and impressed a lot of people. The former governor of Arkansas has got himself a FOX talk show and he books a wide variety of guests from left to right. Saturday night he was interviewing Oliver Stone, as well as Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to attend Little Rock High School, a feat that required Ike to federalize the Arkansas National Gaurd to protect them. Huckabee also plays bass in his band, the Little Rockers, on the show. You’ll be hearing a lot more from Mike Huckabee.
The party also needs to concentrate on economics and stop pretending that GOP stands for God’s Own Party. Also, it cannot continue to be the party of Grumpy Old White Men. There just aren’t enough white people in America’s future to make a majority. It mystifies me that the GOP hasn’t reached out to the minorities who will soon be in the majority. If the party is to remain viable, it must do so.
As I write, the neo-cons are conspiring in a hotel somewhere, I think in Virginia , to make sure their agenda — to build an American Empire – remains the core of Republican philosphy.. But Americans don’t want to be an empire, they want to be a republic.
November 6th, 2008
By Chuck Sweeny
RRSTAR.COM
Posted Nov 08, 2008 @ 09:51 PM
For most people, it was just a “fun” photo in a newspaper. A happy policeman leans back with a wide grin on his face as he looks at his signature, which he has just placed on a young woman’s Obama T-shirt with her magic marker.
She and hundreds of thousands of Barack Obama supporters were converging on the site of the election night victory celebration in Grant Park.
The caption said the photo was taken at Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway. That may not seem significant to you, but to me, it was one of life’s ultimate ironies. You see, in the summer of 1968, the section of Michigan Avenue from Congress to Balbo was the scene of an infamous riot that pitted anti-Vietnam war protesters against the Chicago Police Department.
The demonstrators, many of them college students who didn’t want to get drafted and sent to the jungle, had come to Grant Park to disrupt the Democratic National Convention, which was taking place at the International Amphitheater on the Southwest Side. (Don’t hunt for it. It’s long gone.)
Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee-to-be, and other Democratic powerbrokers were said to be holed up across Michigan Avenue in the Conrad Hilton, and the demonstrators wanted to make sure Hubert & Friends heard them.
“Dump the Hump,” they yelled. And the old reliable, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Mayor Richard Daley The First was outraged that these protesters were being televised worldwide, giving the City of Big Shoulders a bad name. And so he sent his police in to get them out of the park. This, too, was seen on TV, complete with cops clubbing protesters, tear gas and police dogs.
With his customary mangled syntax, “Boss” Daley defended his police, telling reporters: “Gentlemen, the police aren’t there to create disorder. The police are there to preserve disorder.”
“The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” the thousands of protesters shouted.
I remember that night well. I watched it on TV from the safety of my parents’ home 90 miles away in Rockford, wondering what fate would await me a month later when I was to move to Chicago to study at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
I soon found out. Mr. Daley’s blue-collar policemen were still angry at privileged college students, or “one a dem stoonts,” as a cop with a four-syllable last name ending in “z” called me when he pulled over my Rambler American, which, unfortunately, had a University of Illinois sticker in the rear window, on Sheridan Road.
He arrested me for a routine traffic violation — if you’re eastbound on Hollywood, you can’t hang a left on Sheridan — and made me follow him to the Foster Avenue lockup. I couldn’t get out of there unless I could come up with $50, the desk sergeant said.
I called Paul, a classmate who lived on Kenmore. After grumbling a bit, he came down and paid the 50 bucks to spring me. We figured that money went into the cops’ Christmas party fund.
And now, 40 years later, here’s this goofy picture of a grinning Chicago cop, surrounded by smiley-faced young people who have come to welcome in a new president.
Oh yes, and the president is a black guy from the South Side and he’s a Sox fan.
We have changed in ways I never thought possible. We are not who Rush Limbaugh and Louis Farrakhan say we are, after all.
Ever since Tuesday night, I have been trying to take all of this in, digest this, figure out the significance, get my head around it and whatever other cliche you can think of.
The black guy is to be president of the United States. The American flag, which in other countries is usually pictured on fire, is being hoisted aloft by cheering crowds in cities and villages in Asia, South America, Africa, Europe.
In the blink of an eye, America has gone from pariah to messiah. (In truth, we are neither.)
It is as if we have not just had an election, but a peaceful revolution, and “the whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”
The explosion of glee will surely be tempered soon by the hangover of reality. Obama is, after all, just a man, the leader of a government, not a king, not an emperor. He will make mistakes, people will grumble about his legislative program, foreign dictators will test his mettle.
We may even get fed up with him and turn him out of office in four years.
For now, we hope he will succeed, for we only have one president at a time. Obama has the ingredients for success. He has charisma, he’s extremely intelligent, he listens, he’s sure of himself, and he has Ronald Reagan’s “great communicator” gene, something that George W. Bush lacked.
I’ve known it from the time I first interviewed him, at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Rockford in December 2003.
“He really knows issues thoroughly, and he can explain them in detail. Why don’t we ever elect people like that?” I wondered after our hourlong meeting.
Obama was running for senator then, at that point polling just 3 percent in a five-man race for the Democratic nomination. I had no thought he would win. Dan Hynes, the state comptroller backed by powerful Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, would probably win, I presumed, or the rich guy, Blair Hull.
I just spent time with Obama because I thought he was an interesting fellow.
But Obama did win the primary. And he won in the general election, too, thanks to Illinois Republicans’ talent for self-destruction. A small group of Republican social conservatives, with Rockford’s Dave Syverson prominent among them, selected a wing nut from Maryland named Alan Keyes to go up against Obama, figuring that their black guy could beat the Democratic black guy. Why does the GOP remain stuck on stupid when it comes to race?
OK, Obama won a U.S. Senate seat, I thought, but he didn’t have to lift a finger to whip Keyes. I still didn’t think Americans would ever elect a black man like him president. There was just too much bad history. Americans have been arguing about race since the Founders punted the slavery question to another generation to deal with. From 1861 to 1865, America’s original sin of slavery cost 600,000 American lives. And it took another century to guarantee civil and voting rights in the Old Confederacy.
But you know, I also used to think that a black man couldn’t be elected mayor of Rockford. And yet, Charles Box won in 1989 with 63 percent of the vote. Rockford, an 80 percent white community, took a leap of faith and went with the black guy. Some of my friends believed Box to be a radical, but he turned out to be a strict, fiscal conservative who was re-elected twice.
The most significant thing about that April night in ’89 was when the defeated Republican, Len LaPasso, and his supporters came to Lithuanian Hall on the city’s southwest side, where Democrat Box was about to claim victory. They came to show their support for the city’s new mayor. It was a very special show of unity.
Backstage, I urged Box to tell the crowd that the Rev. King’s dream was still alive. And he did. On that night in 1989, we felt good about our city.
But I never dreamed that a black man would be elected president in my lifetime. Tuesday, Americans proved me wrong. For the record, I’m glad they did.
The margin of victory over the old war hero John McCain wasn’t even close.
Tuesday night at the UAW Hall, the Democrats were packed in like sardines. They were black, white, Hispanic, Asian. They looked like today’s Rockford. A DJ played some funky music as women did what I can only describe as a black version of the Boot Scoot Boogie.
I got there just after Obama had been awarded Pennsylvania and Ohio. At that point it was impossible for McCain to win, but TV networks were not making projections because the polls hadn’t closed on the West Coast.
And still, not everybody thought Obama would emerge victorious. Some were visibly nervous. The room quieted down. I’m sure that at least a few people thought that somehow, the mysterious “they” who control everything would not let Barack Obama be the president. Heck, I entertained the thought myself.
Instead, “they” elected him. He really won in a near-landslide. Black people from coast to coast pinched themselves to make sure they weren’t dreaming. Students at Howard University jumped for joy and hugged one another. Harlem erupted in song and dance. And at UAW Hall, they cried tears of joy.
This was not a Frank Capra movie. On Nov. 4, 2008, this really happened. And the Obamas celebrated, appropriately enough, in a park named for the general who won the Civil War.
Mr. Lincoln, it’s taken awhile, but we are all Americans now.
Reach Political Editor Chuck Sweeny at 815-987-1372 or csweeny@rrstar.com.
November 5th, 2008
What you saw Tuesday was the most amazing political campaign ever put together, steamrolling the most inept campaign ever put together.
McCain ran possibly the worst campaign of modern history. There was no central theme, the vice presidential choice of Sarah Palin drove voters away in droves, and McCain seemed either grumpy or angry most of the time.
Obama, however, assembled a tough, disciplined team from Chicago, where politics is a blood sport. They treat an election as a war, they target voters, assemble lists, make phone calls, knock on doors, and on election day they have a massive precinct army that makes sure people favorably disposed to their candidate votes.
That’s what Obama did, but not just in a city, or a state, but nationwide, taking the action to the “red” states and fighting the election on McCain’s turf, putting him on the defensive.
Combine the Chicago-style election machine with the power of the Internet, and the Obama campaign, with 5 million volunteers and donors, was unstoppable.
Meanwhile, McCain had no ground army at all. No volunteers, nobody making phone calls, nobody going door to door. That’s because that role has been played in recent elections by the Christian Right. But they’re no fans of McCain, and while they probably voted for him, they didn’t stuff any envelopes, walk any precincts or make any phone calls.
Thankfully, this election marks the repudiation of Karl Rove style politics of personal destruction. Republicans — not the McCain campaing, mind you — ran the dirtiest, sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen. Combined with that were the thousands of hours of anti-Obama vitriol on AM talk radio and FoxNews, the Republicans’ news channel.
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