Author: hankkalet

We are five days out from what has been disingenuously called the most significant election in our history. The polls show a close race, with the incumbent, President Barack Obama, leading the electoral vote.

The focus now is on campaigning, on the electoral machines and the count.

The question we should be asking, however, is this: What impact will this election have on the major issues facing the nation and the world? The answer, unfortunately, is not a lot.

On the most serious issues we face — global warming, income inequality, economic stagnation, the impact of decayed infrastructure, and the corporatization and militarization of our society — the parties differ very little. There are differences, to be sure, on abortion and women’s rights and gay rights, but not much beyond this.

Should we be surprised? Not really. Obama, when he ran in 2008, made it pretty clear that he was a centrist — he backed the Wall Street bailout, supported clean-coal (a pipe dream, at best) and nuclear power, called Afghanistan the good war, backed telecom immunity and so on. And he has governed as he promised, for the most part, though he has been more conservative in foreign policy than we might have expected.

He is, at best, an Eisenhower Republican (establishment-focused) running against a shape-shifter who has claimed to be a “severe conservative” and has moved back and forth across the moderate-to-conservative spectrum for the last five years.

So what is a progressive to do? That’s not an easy question. Chris Hedges and Matt Stoller advocate a third-party vote, which they say would help generate the mass movement and resistance necessary to wrest control of the country from the corporate oligarchs. I’m not sure this is going to work. As I wrote earlier this week, the likely outcome would be a Romney win and a bloodletting on the left — remember the opprobrium heaped on Ralph Nader in 2000? — that would leave us with a more conservative court and possibly an unleashed Republican majority in Congress (this is more doubtful).

Daniel Ellsberg takes the opposite tack — he says that, if you live in a swing state, you should vote for Obama because “It is critical to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.”

This not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive—primary challenger or major candidate—or even a Republican who’s good on foreign policy and civil liberties like Ron Paul or Gary Johnson. What voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing states are going to determine on November 6 is whether or not Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years.

A Romney/Ryan administration would be no better on any of the constitutional violations I mentioned, or on anything else. But it would be catastrophically worse on many other important issues: The likelihood of attacking Iran, Supreme and Federal Court appointments, the economy and jobs, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, the safety net, green energy and the environment.

He says there is “long-term merit for our movement in registering a large protest vote against both major candidates and in favor of a truly progressive platform.” That protest, he said, should take place in the “almost 40 non-swing states” where it “can be done without significant risk of affecting the electoral votes of those states or the final outcome in favor of the Republicans.” In the swing states “decisions by relatively small numbers of progressives to vote for a third party or not to vote at all would risk and might well result in a Republican triumph.”

This election is a toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives—a small minority of the electorate—could actually determine the outcome of a national election. We might swing it one way or the other by how we vote and what we say about voting to fellow progressives in the battleground states.
Given that third party candidates with genuinely progressive platforms are on the ballots of most of these swing states, their supporters—who might successfully encourage those with the same values to vote for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson instead of Obama—could well provide the margin for Romney that would send him to the White House.

If, to the contrary, such voters in those states could be convinced  to overcome their disinclination to vote for Obama, they could crucially block the far more regressive agenda of the Republican Party.

Our task is clear. The only way to block Romney/Ryan from office is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama—not stay home or vote for someone else.  And that has to include progressives and disillusioned liberals who are inclined not to vote at all or vote for a third-party candidate (because like me, they’re not just disappointed but disgusted and even enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).

What Ellsberg is arguing for is not blind support for Obama — that would be both foolish and dangerous and is partly what has been responsible for the weakness of the Obama administration to date — but for a strategic use of the ballot and a distinction between voting and organizing that gives more power to the organizing side of the mix.

We will be better off with Obama in the White House, but only if we remember to challenge him at every turn.

Here are some shots from around Kendall Park.

It’s been quiet here so far, but not everyone has been so lucky. Here is a photo from friends in Piscataway — a tree took out an old playhouse in their yard, which is probably a lucky stroke as well. Had the tree fallen the other way, who knows.

This is just the initial strike, just the early wind and rain in a storm that has not even made landfall. According to NJ.com,

In its 2 p.m. briefing, the National Hurricane Center said Sandy is now moving northwest at 28 mph, with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph, and set to make landfall as the most powerful hurricane to ever make landfall in New Jersey.

The hurricane has accelerated dramatically since the last briefing just three hours ago, with New Jersey bracing for the most intense weather starting to occur in the southern and central coastal areas. Now just 110 miles away from land, Sandy is already hammering New Jersey with lashing winds and flooding rains, bringing rail and road travel to a near standstill. Government offices are shuttered and towns along the coast have been evacuated.

Here in South Brunswick, there are reports of power outages. Friends in Kingston have been without electricity for most of the day and

Police spokesman Sgt. Jim Ryan said the high winds caused downed wires on Georges Road near the Wetherill House.

“We’re expericing more power outages as the storm progresses,” he said. “We’re still trying to determine the extent of the outages at this time. The wind is also causing a lot of downed trees in the area.”

Earlier, police reported

South Brunswick Police are reporting power outages along Route 27 near the Franklin Township border from Route 518 to Promenade Blvd., with some traffic lights on flash.

Broadway Road remains closed due to a fallen tree near Miller Road. Downed trees have also been reported on Riva Ave by Davidson Mill Road, Selma Drive, Georges Road by Deans Rhode Hall Road and on Deans Rhode Hall Road as well. Eiker Road by Rowland Park has been completely blocked by a downed tree.

Police spokesman Sgt. Jim Ryan said a roof partially blew off of Dayton Collision on Route 130, next to Dayton Toyota.

The Shore area already is underwater and New York City is experiencing flooding. And this is before we feel the brunt of Mother Nature’s strength.

No one weather event can be used to prove climate change, but there is a “bounty of scientific and statistical evidence now in hand” making it clear that Hurricane Sandy is part of a larger pattern of weather change being created by our warming world.

Today, another multibillion-dollar weather disaster — the very sort that scientists have been predicting for years would increase in frequency and intensity as the planet heats up — is now bearing down on the American East Coast. Roads and subways and homes will flood and lives might well be lost (the death toll in the Caribbean already is as high as 65). Property damages from wind and storm surges could break records. And as many as 10 million people will likely lose power once Hurricane Sandy comes ashore somewhere along the New Jersey coast later tonight.

Sandy — like Irene and other megastorms in the recent past — are being fed by increased ocean temperatures, according to Michael Mann, a physicist and the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He told The Huffington Post that “climate change is playing a role in setting the context for these storms, in particular the record levels of North Atlantic ocean warmth that is available to feed these storms with energy and moisture.”

Another research scientist, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the USA National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the world’s foremost experts on changes to global energy and water cycles, told The Huffington Post that Hurricane Sandy may be the “new normal.”

“Climate change is changing the weather,” Trenberth said. “The past few years have been marked by unusually severe extreme weather characteristic of climate change. The oceans are warmer and the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and wetter. This new normal changes the environment for all storms and makes them more intense and with much more precipitation.”

And yet, nothing during the debates — not a question from the moderators or any real sense of urgency from the candidates. No one wants to talk about the damaging effects of our addiction to oil, of our over-building and complete lack of regard for the natural landscape because that would interfere with corporate profits, which is the only thing that matters in American politics.

Chris Hedges today makes the point that the current political system is bankrupt and genetically incapable not only of challenging corporate power but of even doing the smallest things to help level the playing field. A mass movement is our only hope:

All the major correctives to American democracy have come through movements and third parties that have operated outside the mainstream. Few achieved formal positions of power. These movements built enough momentum and popular support, always in the face of fierce opposition, to force the power elite to respond to their concerns. Such developments, along with the courage to defy the political charade in the voting booth, offer the only hope of saving us from Wall Street predators, the assault on the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the rise of the security and surveillance state and the dramatic erosion of our civil liberties. 

He calls for an abandonment of the two-party system, with a vote for third-party candidates (Green Party candidate Jill Stein is his choice). And he damns those who will hold their nose and vote for President Obama and as “assur(ing) our mutual destruction.”

There is a danger in following his lead. He is right that we need a mass movement to create the moral and ethical momentum and that a progressive third party offers us a better chance of making change than to continue to back a bankrupt Democratic Party. But the Greens — like every other third party now in existence — are just too weak to be able to force that change. A vote for Stein ultimately is just a vote cast in a vacuum, one that carries with it the very real possibility that it will empower the GOP.

The movement Hedges calls for is in its infancy and just not strong enough to sustain the potential stain of apostasy that will be heaped on it by mainstream liberals. That ultimately was the problem with the 2000 Nader campaign. Rather than showing strength on the left, Nader’s failed candidacy was blamed for Al Gore’s loss — and George W Bush’s win. The lack of a strong left movement in 2000 left Nader vulnerable to the charge and has now left him a pariah among some on the left.

We are facing the same kind of conundrum today. Obama does not represent change or progress, but handing the reins of government over to the GOP will do far more damage at this point than we can afford.

The lights have flickered a few times and my radio went dead twice. It is almost 3 p.m. on Monday, and Hurricane Sandy is bearing down.

Looking out the window, I can see the sheets of rain coming at 45-degree angles. The leaves are being ripped from the trees. And, as my friend Megan said to me on Facebook, the trees are doing their happy dances (or should it be “unhappy dances”?).

This is just the beginning.

I’ve avoided watching TV for the past few hours, preferring to hear from friends on Facebook and Twitter how things are going. TV news has been in sensationalist mode since it became apparent that this storm was going to hit New Jersey and New York. Not to underplay what we are dealing with and will be for the next couple of days, but the tone of coverage was over the top and alarmist.

More straightforward reporting would have been useful, and we could have done without the various experts recruited to do analysis.

The reality is this: Hurricane Sandy is a big, nasty storm. There are dangerous winds expected and lots of rain and the potential for flooding in some areas, a softening of ground in most areas that likely will lead to downed trees and lost power. We all needed to take precautions, including having bottled water on hand, flashlights, etc. Those in low-lying areas needed to get to high ground, with their pets, and then we just ride it out. There’s not much else we can do.