Fracking Above and Below

       The really interesting thing about the state of Washington’s primary last weekend was that the entire democratic congressional delegation—all eight of them--supported Hillary Clinton who proceeded to lose to Bernie Sander 72.7 to 27.1 percent.

The deeper vibrations from this suggest that “the establishment” most actively opposing the Sanders candidacy is not the big corporation, the billionaire class or the

Republicans. It’s the Democratic Party.

        At least sometimes we know the reason for earthquakes. In Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, it’s fracking.   As an aside: according to Scientific American, “Until 2008 not a single earthquake had ever been recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey from the Dallas–Fort Worth area….Since then, close to 200 have shaken the cities and their immediate suburbs.  “Statewide, Texas is experiencing a six-fold increase in earthquakes over historic levels. Oklahoma has seen a 160-fold spike in quakes….In 2014 the state’s earthquake rate surpassed California’s. [Anna Kirchner, Scientific American, March 28, 2016]

         Political earthquakes are another matter. In last Saturday’s Washington State democratic results do we understand why Sanders’ won the youth vote by margins of 80 percent?  Economist Robert Kuttner describes the ground-shattering inequality that mainstream democrats have difficulty seeing. “Yes there is an uptick in entrepreneurship, but for every young person who creates a company like Amazon, there are tens of thousands working in its warehouses.”

”most of the unreliable jobs are not on-demand gigs [like Uber and Task Rabbit]. Rather, they are other forms of lousy “contingent” work. That category includes temping, contract work, on-call workers, workers hired by staffing agencies, workers with no job security, and inferior forms of conventional employment like adjunct college professors who can make less than minimum wage, Ph.D.’s and all. (So much for the education cure.)

        Not exactly a science magazine, ”The Economist,” admits that today

...opportunity is seen as the preserve of the elite: two-thirds of Americans believe the economy is rigged in favor of vested interests. And optimism has turned to anger. Voters’ fury fuels the insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and weakens insiders like Hillary Clinton. [March 26, 2016]

         Some details one wishes Bernie Sanders and his supporters would talk more about have been described by Financial Times reporter, Virginia Houlder, who reported on  Google and Amazon strategies to defray citizens of the tax payments they should have been receiving to help run their governments. “They” are merely the latest big international companies to come under fire for adroit tax planning. “The tech group chose to pay money back to shareholders by raising $17bn of debt rather than repatriate some of the huge reserves of cash it holds overseas, which would have resulted in it writing a big cheque to the US Internal Revenue Service.”

         The move had stoked the growing concern over corporate tax planning. As a financial crisis became a fiscal crisis and then a political crisis, public anger has risen over a flawed international system that allows billions of dollars, pounds and euros of profits to go untaxed.[Vanessa Houlder, Financial times May 3, 2013]

No wonder there’s no money for education or universal health care. While more up-to-date reports in the press this week contain the good news that “a global crackdown on tax avoidance includes the big U. S Tech firms, like Linkedin and Yahoo, pharmaceuticals, insurance and asset management firms like Blackstone and Carlyle.”   

         This came, of course, not as a progressive celebration but an estimated loss warning for large corporations.  The headline about this in the San Francisco Chronicle (3/28/16) reported that the “Global tax crackdown will damage earnings.”  The underlying “frack” making the earth tremble is the OECD report that it is costing governments $240 billion in tax lost to avoidance ploys such as the booking of profits in tax havens. 

        We may not know if the democratic Congressional delegation in Washington State is leading the charge against companies using tax avoidance ploys or just warning them so they can take defensive action.  But somewhere between the energy companies’ love of fracking for oil, and corporate love of control of the American political process, more earthquakes are coming.

        The churches could begin to recite their own parts in this drama. Studying and praying about the fract-like quakes that are slaughtering the innocents around the world, and in their own neighborhoods too. Moving into a public liturgical mode.

The Media Bubble Bursts

     At about 2 A.M (EDT) March 23rd just as the cable news anchors and pundits were going to bed, they finally began to smell the leak in their bubble.   Arizona was tighter than it first appeared; Sanders’ percentage of votes cast had jumped to 40 percent and he might walk away with 31 delegates. In Utah his big margin of victory seemed to take them by surprise, at 80 percent he was winning 24 delegates. Same story in Idaho: 78 percent of the votes going to Sanders together with 17 delegates.

      When the punditocracy next got out of bed (that's today) Bernie had won more total delegates than Hillary, 72 to 62 in the combined three states of Arizona, Utah and Idaho.

       This journalistic embarrassment seems more than a fluke or a too hasty conclusion, revealing instead the stakes for media establishment ownership (a central target of Bernie Sanders’ critique).  Reporters like all the rest of the human race must keep an eye on what their paymasters want and what the big media entrepreneurs seem to prefer is predictability and good connections.  

       Therefore happily Clinton’s large victories in the south were reported as closing the deal for her. But a dangerous leak in the balloon was already in the air. Throughout early March, according to Politico, the total margin in three states between Hillary and Bernie was only 55,000  (1,585 in Missouri), (34,898 in Illinois); (18,427 in Michigan).  In the same period Sanders had won 269 delegates in spite of his big losses in the south. This seemed not to deter the dominant media narrative on cable news channels (Fox, MSNBC, CNN, PBS) where, together with the New York Times, all had become habitually dismissive of Sanders’ campaign, constantly reiterating his hopeless position and Hillary’s sure path to the nomination.  Would we be wise to understand that at least at the unconscious level the media establishment is not amused by Sanders’ constant harping about inequality and the corruption implicit in one percent controlling the 99 percent?

       The huge Sanders rallies across the Western states all this week and his growing delegate count suggest a rising Pauline-like tide aimed at the “powers and principalities of this present darkness.” After all, Paul the Apostle, was also a good Jew, like Bernie Sanders. [See Ephesians 6:12]

       Stand by for the battle of the truth-tellers and the power-holders this Saturday in Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii.  

On Not Voting your Self-Interest

        A familiar pattern is again on display Super Tuesday.  Middle and working class Americans voted either for Trump or Hillary Clinton. While both White and African-American middle class incomes have been level or worse the past twenty years, they voted for Hillary whose husband created NAFTA, moving hundreds of thousands of jobs out of the U.S.  African-Americans, led by the Civil Rights hero John Lewis, seem to be fighting the last war, ignoring Bernie Sanders mantra that you can’t reform Wall Street if you’re taking their money. With 745,000 African American men currently in prison and fifty percent Black youth unemployment one has to hope that Bernie Sanders’ economic justice and independence message could attract more African Americans. It may yet. 

        Donald Trump’s “managerial skills” cast doubt on any capacity he may have for any commitments he may have to raise all the ships. See the Taj Mahal story.

        The New York Times block-buster investigative reports this week document Mrs. Clinton’s role in Libya as Secretary of State. They appeared just before Super Tuesday (click below to access the full texts) but went largely unreported on PBS and the cable networks MSNBC and CNN.  The dynamite in the reports shows Mrs. Clinton repeating her vote for invading Iraq by urging military intervention in Libya. Channeling George Bush’s infamous aircraft carrier celebration of Iraq, “Secretary Clinton appeared at the National Defense University with Leon E. Panetta, who had recently replaced Mr. Gates as defense secretary. She hailed the intervention as a case study in “smart power.”

Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.” The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.

Later Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.

 The Times series this week has this cautionary section for all to ponder;

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.