Guest Post: Election Results-The Next Ten Years

Originally posted by Mark Orton http://currentmatters.markorton.com/2016/11/election-results-the-next-ten-years/ on November 9, 2016

– The Morning After –

The election of Trump and the continued Republican control of both Congress and Senate guarantee that the rich will continue to get richer at the expense of the shrinking middle class and further aggravate conditions for the poor. Trickle down economics and tax subsidies will flow for the rich and corporations. The financial sector will buy its way out of the weak regulations of Dodd/Frank and lurch towards new adventures in gambling; a financial disaster will once again require the socialization of their risk at taxpayer expense.

Our infrastructure will accelerate its decline. Think bridges closed and falling down; airports with bigger delays; transit systems overcrowded and unreliable. Immigrants will be plagued if not deported. Xenophobia will be fanned regularly with extra dollops of religious persecution tossed on like whipped cream. Women, particularly poor women, will find it more difficult to access abortion and reproductive healthcare services; an outright ban could be in place by the end of the period.

Our healthcare sector will take an ever larger portion of our incomes to deliver absolutely developing world results; currently we are 34th in longevity and 38th in infant mortality despite spending more than twice per capita compared to our developed country cohort; the portion of the population without health insurance will rise as the Republicans further cripple if not eliminate the failing Obamacare.

The US military and our empire overseas will continue to consume more resources than all of our enemies and allies combined; the domestic security apparatus, already fattened by 9/11 hysteria, will become more costly, intrusive, and oppressive, especially to minorities and political activists.

All of this will happen in the name of free markets and the withering away of the state. This is, after all, what conservatives mean by “small government”.

All of this is virtually guaranteed by the stranglehold Republicans have on 30 state legislatures and the gerrymandering tools available to assure that they will run from safe seats in election after election. The results are already in on this strategy and barring some seismic shift this fix will be in when the next decennial redistricting follows the 2020 census.

Looking to the Democratic Party to be a countervailing force is not encouraging. They have been unable, perhaps more accurately unwilling, to mount an effective rallying of the majority of the poor and middle class to programs to serve their interests. They remain largely in the thrall of the same free market policies that brought Bill Clinton to power and they continue to largely mimic the free market policies of the Republicans. Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union. Clinton signed the Republican authored “reform” bill Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 to “end welfare as we have come to know it”. In 1999, Clinton signed several laws deregulating the financial sector; these lead directly to the mini-depression (the so-called Great Recession) of 2009 – 2015.

These are capstone events in a twenty year transformation of Democratic policy from representing at least some of the interests of the poor and middle class to largely being competitors to the Republicans for money from the rich and corporations. Democrats have not put forth a program of government action to fight for and protect the interests of the poor and middle class for decades. This is most obviously noted in their appointment of Wall St. insiders to all of the important economic management jobs in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Neither administration was able, or even sought, to face down the healthcare industry. Its share of our national income goes up every year while producing reprehensible results. Though Obamacare brought millions of people into the healthcare tent, it is now failing because it is unable to control the costs of the most expensive and least productive healthcare system in the world.

The Democrats also failed to alter US foreign policy, continuing the militaristic approach that has brought us disastrously costly wars with equally disastrous results in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor have the Democrats ended America’s longest war, the War on Drugs, started by the race baiting Richard Nixon over 40 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost or ruined by the so-called justice system while the drug industry continues to produce profits on a global scale. Nothing like persisting in a policy that has only reinforced the positions of the drug producers and distributors.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign showed that it is possible to mobilize people around their own economic and social interests. The question at the moment is where is the party that can take up this quest and conduct the long campaign necessary to overcome the political and institutional barriers over the next ten years.

Of course, given the instability of the capitalist system and the likelihood that its speculative risk taking behaviors are not under sufficient control (around the world, not just in the US) to prevent another even worse financial disaster, an upheaval of broad social disorder could easily occur. In that case, we will most likely see that the rich and corporate interests will deploy fascist solutions to remain in power. There simply are no popular political parties or forces that can compete with them.

BTW – I think I would have written substantially the same commentary if Hillary Clinton had won the election. She would have clearly had better policy positions on many social issues, but she would have faced the same situation in the Federal and state legislatures. Her economic policies, even should she really abandon her connections with Wall St. money, would be thwarted in Congress. Her track record on foreign policy, the military, and domestic security has not been encouraging of a shift to a less militarist interventionist approach.

–Mark Orton

For many years, Mark Orton was a business executive who lived in Cambridge, MA. He currently resides in Hudson (AKA Cambridge on the Hudson), NY.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award winning public relations and digital marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. Guest commentators’ opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Rachel Yurman: Seeing Turner & the Sea at the Peabody Essex Museum

At the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem through September 1.

The Peabody Essex Museum’s major summer exhibition, Turner & the Sea is, in the broadest sense, about the maritime painting tradition. It is also about the evolution of this great artist’s particular vision of earthly elements, and the extent to which that vision influenced – and was influenced by – others.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), a star of the academic system and a rebel against its constraints, was an artist who annoyed contemporary critics even while inspiring champions like John Ruskin. Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843), which became a classic of Victorian literature in its own right, helped to place Turner in the Pantheon of British painters.

turner-staffa_fingals_ba-obj-5018-0002-pub-print-lg-2_small Concentrating on sea paintings, the PEM show includes a number of major canvases, several on loan from UK institutions, a roomful of astonishing watercolors, and a handful of works by such influencers as Claude Lorrain and admirers like Constable, Sargent, and others. Grand picture postcards like Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (1834) and monumental historical works like The Battle of Trafalgar (1805), paired with De Loutherberg’s Lord Howe’s Action (1793), provide a pleasing degree of “ooh” and “aah.”

Turner, inducted into the Royal Academy at a youthful 26, is associated with the age of Romanticism, with its penchant for “the sublime” and its dual consciousness of the terror and fragility of the natural world. The Venice and Trafalgar paintings – one all glassy beauty and the other complete turmoil at sea — are appropriate touchstones of the academic as well as the romantic. Turner, however, is an artist who seems to have mastered convention in order, eventually, to flout and override it.

His early devotion to watercolor, his spectacular abilities in that supposedly lesser medium, are apparent in an array of sketches and studies from the Liber Studiorum (1807-16) that greet us in one of the first galleries. Looking at his later works in oils, the light and transparent underpainting suggest the remarkable, even triumphant, adaptation of watercolor technique.

We have the chance to see how others – 17th-century Dutch painters like Ruysdale and Willem van de Velde the Elder — approached the seascape and maritime subjects, applying restrained palettes and exquisite control to create moody works of great precision and detail. In an essay on Turner in Looking at Pictures, Kenneth Clark discusses the difficulty of capturing the constant movement of waves. Whether in the stylization of Chinese painting or Japanese prints, the almost algorithmic precision of DaVinci, or these Dutch seascapes, one is conscious of an attempt to regulate, to govern the ungovernable.

Turner was, in his own right, a commander of the seas, to say nothing of notoriously difficult water-based media. The watercolor and gouache Pembroke Castle (first exhibited in 1806) sets detailed renderings of the daily catch — mussels and fish scattered on the sand – against a majestic expanse of sky. There is virtuosity here, but also a sense of freedom and a suggestion of the infinite that takes us far beyond the limits of the Dutch horizon.

Motion defines Turner as light does the Impressionists. His depiction of moving water, along with the even more evanescent steam and fire, set his work apart. Flicking paint with the aplomb and seemingly random motions of an abstract expressionist, Turner was an action painter no less than Jackson Pollock.

The principal subject of Clark’s chapter, Snowstorm – Steamboat off a Harbor’s Mouth, is actually on loan for this exhibition. In this 1842 work, a ship is nearly engulfed by steam, snow, mist, and foam. Clark hints that Snowstorm may reflect the painter’s mental state. He says, curiously, that “no one ever saw him at work,” as though there was some chicanery or secret amanuensis that history has kept hidden from us. But the mystery of Turner’s painting is really the miracle of perception – not how he painted, but how we see.That mere flecks of color can suggest so much to the eye and brain, and that we can translate them so readily, is what astonishes.

The late paintings have, of course, confounded many viewers. Here, the PEM show offers a response in the form of Turner’s late watercolors. Washes of color with a few figurative dashes, their simplicity seems to offer a key to the minimalism and near-abstraction of the late paintings. They also bring us full circle, back to the medium that so inspired this artist and was the initial proving ground for his technique.

The exhibition feels substantial yet doesn’t overwhelm, and its efforts to contextualize Turner through the work of others are instructive. It makes its points deftly and without overstatement – that, and a rare chance to see this range of work, should point the way to Salem before the summer’s end.

–c. Rachel Yurman, 2014

Turner & the Sea was produced by the National Maritime Museum, part of Royal Museums Greenwich, London. Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation, and The Manton Foundation provided generous support.

The East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum also provided support.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Guest Post: Mark Orton Reviews Greenwald, No Place To Hide

Joe, My friend got back to me. Her contact left the Review five years ago. Sorry. Mark

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment.¹ So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State might be greeted with a yawn, what could be new?

In fact, there is much that is new about how these stories have come to light and a very good overview of what we have learned about what Greenwald calls the US Surveillance State. This is a book in two parts. The first 89 pages read like a cross between a detective thriller and a spy story. There are hand offs of thumb drives at airport boarding gates, virgin computers, cell phones sealed off from the reach of the NSA by removing batteries or stuffed in freezers, meetings with a yet to be identified Snowden by an unsolved Rubik’s cube in hand. This part of the book also establishes who Snowden is and how he thinks and views the world and his place in it. This latter introduction of Snowden is completely consistent with the person we have already come to know through his video interviews broadcast a year ago.²

The second half (really it is 170 pages) is a well organized exploration of what has been revealed so far of the NSA’s goals and programs.

THE GIANT SUCKING SOUND – “COLLECT IT ALL”

It is chilling to understand that the internal ethos of the NSA is summed up by the phrase “collect it all” where “it” is all of the information flows in the telephone and internet in the world. As expressed in the presentation slide “New Collection Posture” from 2010, this is implemented through six strategies: “Sniff It All”, “Know It All”, “Collect It All”, “Process It All, “Exploit It All, and “Partner It All”. Even if you have been following the revelations as published in the various news sources favored with direct access to the Snowden documents, it was hard to envision quite how comprehensive the vision of the NSA is.

BUREAUCRATS DRESSED UP AS JUDGES

Greenwald reiterates the well-known fact that so-called court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, set up by congress to oversee activities of the NSA, FBI and others engaged in intercepting communications is not even an effective administrative element. He notes that in 2012 the “court” did not deny a single on of the 1789 applications. As i have argued earlier³ this so-called court lacks most of the important features that our tradition requires of a court – openness, representation of the plaintiff by a lawyer, and ability to confront accusers. The FISC is just a bunch of bureaucrats dressed up as judges.

BENIGN META DATA

Another issue that Greenwald deals with is the claim by the government and its apologists in the media and academia that the collection of meta data is not really an intrusion on privacy – the NSA is not collecting the content of the communications.(( earlier I have twice commented on this issue: “NSA Vacuuming, Meta Data, Mistaken Misleading Metaphors” and “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata“)) In a very telling note Greenwald repeats other privacy activists challenge to those claiming that meta data is benign that they release the meta data for all of their phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. None have thus far taken up this challenge.

Greenwald touches on many other topics: the role of corporations, surveillance of US allies, many NSA software tools to exploit their data warehouses, privacy in human identity, and more.

In closing, Greenwald’s book is an excellent overview of the issues presented to date by the work done to understand the Snowden documents. And, it is actually a great read with its detective/spy thriller opening that engages the reader so effectively in the drama of the early days of the Snowden whistle blowing.

NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014 [↩]
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-videoand http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/08/edward-snowden-video-interview both accessed 06012014 [↩]
“FISA Court – Not a Court – an Administrative Rubber Stamp – Bureaucrats Dressed Up as Judges” http://currentmatters.markorton.com/2013/07/fisa-court-not-a-court-an-administrative-rubber-stamp-bureaucrats-dressed-up-as-judges/ [↩]

–Mark Orton

This review was originally posted at

Current Matters

thoughts on the passing scene from Mr. Wonderful’s World

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. Mr. Orton is a HarrisCom advisor.