tales of copper city

A fundamentally different capitalism

John Judis of the New Republic has written a post, "Fundamentally Different," that captures almost exactly where I think Obama is headed.  Obama is attempting to reshape American capitalism.

If he succeeds it will change everything. 

If he doesn't we will move in a different and far less pleasant direction, a new version of that old malady, sectional politics.

The key to it all is health care reform. 

The elephant in the room in American politics is redistributing economic power to improve daily life. And a sound national health care plan is the crucial chage driving this shift , determining whether the shift will be permanent, supported by the voters in the years to come.

If reform is achieved we will have a new and progressive majority for permanent change and for a different capitalism.  And both parties wil be changed forever.

Praying with the body

On many occasions I have heard ministers or friends or strangers talk about praying and I've wondered about this.

And then I realize I do pray, in a particular way.

I call it praying with our bodies.

We usually think of prayer as a conversation with God, with us here, and God, well, God is somewhere else. This is prayer as talking to God, a kind of long-distance telephone call.

The silence of God and faith in life itself

I attended a meeting yesterday of Vestry members---a kind of lay council of leadership in local churches---from Episcopal churches in the southern part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. The topic was doing a better job of stewardship among the Episcopal church. It was an interesting meeting but the assumption of the meeting was that we need to work harder in "selling" the Episcopal church to our members and others by treating "pledging" or financial support, as a way of "strengthening our relationship with Jesus." 

Having grown up in the South that way of putting things really turns me off.

The passion of waiting

I have been re-reading Henri Nouwen's The Path of Waiting. I think it is among the best of the many books that I have read on waiting, a kind of brief, succinct summary of how large waiting does loom---should loom---in our life.

Nouwen relies on an Anglican priest, W.H. Vanstone, who wrote The Stature of Waiting, also a wonderful book that reminds us that, beginning with the trip to Jerusalem, Jesus "handed himself over" to the Judeans and to the Romans, and waited to see what would be done to him.Wwould they become followers or executioners?

Waiting has for a very long time been a big part of my life. 

I laughingly call the years in New York, from 1988 to 1992, "Waiting for Mario."  These were years of hope for me as I waited for a fine governor to decide whether to run for president and as my staff prepared a universal health care plan that he could use in that race. 

I was waiting for the big universal health care wave to come to shore, the one that Bill Clinton tried to ride. And we are all waiting for that wave, once again.

The elephant in the room of democratic politics

I recently was asked to answer three questions about the future for health policy from graduate students in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health of the University of Arizona:  Will the Obama administration achieve real change? Will these changes create a new public health for future students?  Has the change affected your (my) work? Here is what I will likely say at the school's annual internship conference on April 17.

1. Will Obama succeed?

I predict that Obama will achieve significant change in health policy and much else. However, permanent, lasting change will elude him and the U.S. unless Obama and his party enact a strong national health plan that changes our democratic politics and not just our policies.

The Elephant in the Room of all democratic politics is the redistribution of economic power. A national health plan changes more than policy; properly designed, it changes our politics by redistributing economic power to the public's benefit, giving a politics of division scant oxygen to survive.

To call into existence the things that do not exist

This was first published in 2004 and I am re-posting it to celebrate Saturday's annual Border Procession in Naco, Sonora. Tom Buechele was Vicar of St. John's then and is now in Hawaii. The Reverend Seth Polley is Vicar of St. John's and, along with the Bishop of the Arizona Episcopal Diocese, the Reverend Kirk Smith, will lead the Procession.

We were all standing in a small interior courtyard of a small motel in Altar, Sonora. We were a group of 15 or so emissaries from the faith-based community, as we say today, Episcopalians mostly, including the new Episcopal Bishop-Elect of Arizona, the Reverend Kirk Smith.

Altar is a hot, dusty and raw-looking northern Sonoran town about 60 miles south of Sasabe, AZ, a traditional jumping off point for migrants headed north to the U.S. for decades. We were part of a larger group of about 50 who had traveled to Altar to witness up close the migrant staging area used by many trying to enter the United States illegally.

It was the Tuesday after Easter. We were meeting with about 30 migrants, all men, most from Guatemala, all of us crowded into that small motel courtyard. The migrants were small, dark, and curious. Some stood above us leaning out from the overlooking balcony or hanging out of a second-story window, trying to get a bead on what we were up to.

I wasn’t sure myself.

A new Democratic majority?

Thomas Edsall is a political analyst I respect.  I used two of his books in my classes on the politics of health: The New Politics of Inequality, and Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes. Both books told how how we increasingly concentrated taxing and spending power in the hands of the affluent, as he puts it in The New Politics of Inequality, moving further and further away from the ideals of the Great Society.  In Chain Reaction he showed how race and oppositiion to taxes and more rights for women and blacks were used to create a more conservative climate in both parties.

In writing about health policy, from HIV to national health insurance, I came to call this a "politics of the divides,"  and more recently, "sectional politics" to stress the peculiar role that the South has played from the beginning. in blocking progressive politics.  

They were amazed

Easter in church always stirs up mixed feelings in me.  For me, there's far too much of "Christ died for us" talk and far too little celebration of the life of Jesus the man, the life he gave us and the life he was willing to die for.

That he died for an amazing and scandalous truth is a huge part of the reason that we remember, a truth that disturbed pious Jews, Temple leaders, a mob anticipating another Roman execution, and Roman authorities who were weary of all the trouble the Jews were constantly stirring up. 

The crowds on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, however, were amazed by this carpenter's son.

Frank Rich on Larry Summers

Read New York Times columnist Frank Rich's Sunday opinion piece on Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, about Summers's various lucrative dealings with hedge funds. 

Summers, an economist, raked in millions consulting hedge funds in recent years, including the years of his stormy tenure as President of Harvard, all the while excoriating Harvard faculty who dared to make a buck on the side, people like Cornell West who made a spoken-word cd for chump change. 

Wouldn't you know that West is only a philosopher and not in the same league as Summers who, as an economist, possesses knowledge of the foundations of the universe and therefore can do as he pleases and not be subject to questions from any quarter.

A democracy of days

This is from the lovely short poem, "Days," by the British poet, Philip Larkin.

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?...

I wonder if those in DC and the new Obama administration stop to think that what most of us want is our days back, the days where we live, the days where we are not beset with concerns about war, about a planet that is being destroyed, about how to secure good health care for every American, about an economy that seems beyond anyone's ken, about an end to attacks on unions and working people who simply want a job that pays enough for day-to-day living?