By now you are likely aware that a Dallas police officer, Robert Powell, chased a family into a Plano, Texas hospital parking lot, and while his wife’s mother lay dying inside, detained the driver, professional football player Ryan Moats, in order to lecture Moats on his behavior, threaten to tow his vehicle, threaten to jail Moats, take his time writing the ticket, and then lecture Moats some more more before finally letting him join his family inside, some 13 minutes after the encounter began, during which period of time Moat’s mother in law passed away, and during which period of time hospital personnel twice came outside to ask that Moats be allowed in, because his family needed him and the woman’s time was near.

Amid outrage from his own department as well as the general public, officer Powell issued an apology on Friday.

In Oakland last week, 2 officers were shot, one dead on the spot and the other dead of his wounds the next day, after pulling over a motorist who, it turned out, was a parole violator and came out shooting rather than go back to jail. (He later killed two SWAT officers before being gunned down himself.)

As motorcycle officers, they had no cover and were easy targets.

In other words, any traffic stop has the potential to become brutally violent. For sure most don’t, but it’s the not knowing when one will that plays on an officer’s mind.

In a situation such as this, chasing a vehicle that will not stop, which veers suddenly into a spot close to the door of a hospital, and people leap out of the vehicle and begin to race into the building, an officer has a lot to consider and very close to zero time to make his assessment.

Thus, I have no quarrel with Officer Powell’s initial actions. His senses were on high alert, as they should be. His initial actions were chemically influenced by that adrenaline rush. A lot was going on and he had to determine what it was.

However, nothing explains almost every decision he made after that. Moats was completely physically compliant, but did continue to insist that his mother in law was dying. As in, at this moment.

That one piece of information was enough for officer Powell to put the entire incident, and the actions of every person in that vehicle, into perfect context. That one statement told Officer Powell everything he needed to know, to simply at that point say “I understand, sir, please be on your way. Best wishes to you and your family.”

Whatever it is that Officer Powell lacks - empathy? - that prevented him from making that simple judgment, must be assessed and addressed before it can even be considered to allow him back out on he street. As his own chief noted, his behavior lacked the discretion expected of a Dallas police officer, and I’m sure we all agree, of any police officer anywhere.

However, I want to reiterate that Powell’s initial actions made sense to me. In fact, he did make one good decision - to let the women go. In actuality, they disobeyed his command and he could have escalated on that simple basis. But he did the smart thing and the right thing in letting them go.

Why he then detained Mr. Moats for another 12 minutes is an eternal mystery that I doubt Powell himself will ever fully understand.

He needs counseling and certainly he needs further training, and he needs to be an object lesson for all officers: don’t treat people in a way that you cannot later justify. Your initial actions may be justifiably cautious, but your obligation is to shift along with information that you receive, and to at all times be able to justify your actions.

And please, don’t threaten us. We know you hold all the cards, and we’re already plenty scared. You look like jerks when you threaten us, and that just makes your job harder.

Believe it or not, respect works best. I have always given and received respect in my several encounters with traffic police, and of course received my share of tickets, but no high alert emotions or any chance of escalation.

Officer Powell ran a real risk of making a bad situation worse. Would he have shot Moats if Moats had insisted on joining his family? One real consequence of doing the wrong thing is that it usually leads to even worse things.

That it did not happen here is entirely due to Moats making the decision to sacrifice being at his family’s side, because it was clear to him that this officer was unhinged and capable of anything.

Officer Powell, your apology is only the start of the actions you must take to justify ever returning to the streets.

And I’d love to hear your explanation, if you ever figure it out.

I’ve always considered PeTA a strange outfit. They do things like throw blood on mink stoles, to protest the idea of wearing fur as a luxury. Their mission seems honorable: to get us to think about the way we treat animals. Certainly there has been known to be a lack of ethics in the treatment of animals.

So, to them goes a certain degree of admiration. But now, what have we? We have the case of Michael Vick, who will soon be released from federal prison, where he has been serving a jail term since 2007 for his role in the Bad Newz dogfighting ring in Virginia.

Vick, of course, was a number one NFL draft pick of the Atlanta Falcons in 2001, a star quarterback who could run and throw with the best of them. Vick expects to return to the NFL when he is released, perhaps in time to play for some team this season.

But what have we? A demand from PeTA that Vick undergo a brain scan to prove he is not a psychopath, before being permitted to resume making his living in the NFL.

And here is where PeTA finally crosses the line, finally reveals what we’ve suspected all along: PeTA is hostile to humans. PeTA believes that if it weren’t for humans, animals would be just fine. Just ignore the fact animals in nature are known to commit rape, assault, murder and infanticide, that animals in nature can be and often are hostile to each other, and barbaric toward each other. Never mnd that nature is a rough place.

No, you see: Humans are the problem. Not all of them, of course, just the ones who fail the scan.

George Orwell is thinking of suing for copyright infringement.

Big Brother, thy name is PeTA.

What I can’t understand is, why don’t they just ask Vick to do a PeTA PSA? For sure he’d love to. He’d love to be given the opportunity to publicly atone for his misdeeds, to demonstrate to the public that he has come to understand why it was wrong to treat dogs the way he and his friends did. PeTA’s letter to the NFL admits that Vick has volunteered to do exactly that.

And it would be wonderful for PeTA to show off their “convert”, a person who went from not getting it to getting it. A truly uplifting story of sin and redemption.

So, why not?

Hmm…searching for a reason…

Could it be Vick’s skin color? In fact, throughout this entire saga, who among us hasn’t wondered at least once: would they be looking to throw a white man in jail for two years for dogfighting? Would Brett Favre be doing time for something like this?

If you haven’t, well, I have.

And now, Vick is almost done serving his time, looking forward to resuming life as a useful person, atoning for his wrongs, standing up straight and accepting responsibility for his actions, as he has done all along (after a bit of a slow start).

And PeTA’s idea? Let’s body-slam the guy. Let’s put him through whatever sort of hell we can think of.

Why?

Why, indeed?

Well, let’s see: The New York Times is going crazy with this item, I’ve just written a post about it…

Just spell my name right, that seems to be PeTA’s motto. Just spell the name right.

If my view is not yet clear: this disgusts me. I think those who call for Vick to undergo a brain scan should be among the first to volunteer. Test one, test all. Call it your “brainprint.”

And don’t forget to drop off your DNA sample as well.

I hope somebody reads it. Hey, if you do read it and get something from it, how about telling a friend?

I started this blog after a chain of events led me to discuss the election last October as part of a panel of citizens on the Tavis Smiley radio program. I was told by the person who arranged it, “I don’t know why you’re not doing media.” In other words, he considered me to have been somewhat engaging, and that I ought to do more of it. Well, I had no idea that all I had to do to be more involved in media was to choose to, but now I was being told exactly that.

So, I started this blog. I’d started other blogs before, and some of them are still floating around. What I decided to do this time was to speak in as honest a voice as I could, with regard to the politics of these times and the politics of the economics of these times.

See, when you’ve grown up with something that always was, it’s natural to take for granted that this is the way it has always been and will always be. I grew up in a house with a single black and white TV, with rabbit ear antenna reception for most of that time. My children live in a house with satellite reception and five TVs, including a home theater. They only know it wasn’t always this way because I remind them.

My parents grew up in homes where the primary source of entertainment was radio.

Anyway, so I thought I would start this blog to remind people that nothing is forever. Just because we can’t imagine it any other way, that does not justify a blind acceptance that the current economic system should be salvaged. There were economics before this period of the last 50 years or so, and there will always be economics. There will always be the development, accumulation and trade of goods and services. Most likely, currency or some other financial instrument will be involved. We may or may not continue to gather “wealth” as a retirement hedge. It is possible that some other instrument will replace the accumulation of wealth.

The only way capitalism works, if it has any chance at all, is when people do not attempt to accumulate wealth, but rather when they understand that wealth must be put back to work. When done with entrepreneurial spirit and discipline, capital can very quickly flow to good ideas and help exploit them. What we have dsicovered, however, is that the unscrupulous have learned how to exploit that system for their own gain, to the detriment of all. And they have been allowed to get away with it for generations, because they learned two simple truths:

1. Humans are very easily led, and profit can be made by understanding how to control that tendency.

2. Politics can be bought.

The result of these twin discoveries was that companies formed one after another with one simple design: to convince humans that they needed something, no matter how frivolous it actually was. Certainly, many useful things also were developed, and continue to be. However, it is also well established that separating people from their money is the highest pursuit of capitalism. The voracious, zero-sum nature of this economic system practically requires such an approach.

The great consumption of resources which turned out to be possible within this rapidly growing system gave rise to issues of the health of the planet and its occupants. Industries routinely fought efforts to control such damage, primarily to avoid incurring any costs they did not absolutely have to incur. Some successfully argued that the government was interfering in free enterprise, and labeled their opponents as something which was bad for the economy and therefore bad for us.

And so you have likely grown up equating capitalism with democracy. After all, isn’t socialism the evil system that ended when the wall came down? Wasn’t democracy what they won? The right to live as they choose, to buy what they want, sell what they want, do what they want? Isn’t free enterprise a basic foundational virtue of democracy?

That sounds good, until you ask yourself some more questions. Such as: should access to quality health care depend on your income? Should a person be paid a fair wage for an honest day of work? Should energy be a for-profit enterprise? Should people have to pay for water, sewage and the garbage man? Should an elite few be permitted to control vast sums of wealth?

I’ve always looked at capitalism this way: the object is to own the most money. The object of capitalism, by design, is to accumulate as much wealth as possible. In theory, the game would be over and you would be the winner. In practical terms, a lot of people get abused along the way.

I look into the future and ask: why does it need to be this way? That one single virtue of capitalism, that it can flow very quickly to a good new idea and help to maximize that idea’s potential, has been so overshadowed by all of the system’s negative tendencies: to not care about the environmental damage it can do; to not care about the conditions of its workers, nor their fate when no longer needed; to not care about the future consequences of actions which are producing profit today. To not care that its very intertwined and complex nature makes it extremely vulnerable to unintended consequences with wicked potential.

Thomas Friedman, over in today’s New York Times, this populist poet, this chubby wonk with the bushy face, this oracle of whatever the hell he thinks he’s talking about, blathered on about how immature our democracy seems, when Republicans are attacking Obama for spending all this money, and Obama misses chances to be warm and fuzzy and above it all, and in the end Friedman uses the word “hopefully” incorrectly, four times. I use it correctly in the title to this post.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about “yesterday’s conversations“, that all I hear around me are points which seem so irrelevant to me now. And here is teacher’s pet Friedman talking about the good of the country and saving capitalism as though they are inseparable goals.

Whereas, I see the two as incompatible.

In recent days, President Obama has been seen picking winners and losers in the NCAA college basketball tournament, and on NBC’s Tonight Show, where he bantered with Jay Leno about the economy, and about his lack of bowling skill. He also opened his mouth and inserted his foot when he compared his attempts at bowling to “something from the Special Olympics.”

So brazen was his gaffe that, riding Air Force One back to D.C. after the taping in California, Obama called the director of the Special Olympics to apologize.

This is simply the latest in a series of statements or actions by Obama or a member of his team, which, taken in aggregate, begin to raise the suspicion that this administration is not quite ready for prime time.

Where is Obama’s comprehensive plan to combat carbon emissions? Wouldn’t step one be to curb the White House’s use of carbon emitting machines, such as, oh, just to pick an easy one:

Air Force One?

And I distinctly heard Obama say to Leno that Congress’ efforts to tax the AIG bonuses was misguided, that the effort should be spent on “making sure this doesn’t happen again,” leading to this question: if the Senate passes a similar measure and the bill is presented to Obama:

Will he sign it?

And when will Obama definitively declare whether or not he will rescue failing industries, and what the rationale would be for that in a free enterprise economy? And when will he declare that bailout funds are no longer available? And when will he weigh in on the Federal Reserve’s decision to print another trillion dollars of currency? When will he speak clearly with regard to the future implications of all of the loose money being tossed around today?

When will we see comprehensive job training for displaced workers?

On two separate occasions in the last month, Obama has assured the nation that stocks are a good long term investment (which ones, coach?) and that the economy will, he garuntees, recover (when will we get all the value back that we’ve lost, o wise one, and which sectors should we invest in and which should we allow to die?).

I’ve been saying for some time now that nobody knows what’s going on and thus nobody knows what to do about it, and thus we are trying everything we can think of, most of which has never been tried before, and so here is the only garuntee we can make:

There will be unintended consequences.

Some will say “we’ll just deal with that when it comes”, but what if what comes is worse than what we have now? What if the best course was simply to let it burn?

And remind me again, because I keep forgetting: Why are we so intent on saving the system that is designed to kill the planet?

Mark it down now and remember I said it when the time comes:

Obama will be a one term president.

As frightening a prospect as it is to envision Rush Limbaugh naked, it is equally fascinating. The de facto leader of modern conservatism, Limbaugh has wasted no time taking on the new President. To Limbaugh, Obama is a recipient of some sort of affirmative action agenda, and is surely a socialist, albeit perhaps in the European model moreso than the Soviet model.

And now that the Democratic party has chosen to accept this challenge, and to elevate Limbaugh to the actual position of Republican Party leader, Limbaugh is slowly but surely unraveling.

Soon he will be completely naked.

First, he chastened the new *elected* Republican Party leader, Michael Steele, for daring to challenge Limbaugh’s supremacy; Steele, an African-American and the first ever to hold this position, quickly retreated in a fusillade of apologia. It was unseemly and embarrassing for all concerned.

Now comes the cover of Newsweek magazine with the word “ENOUGH” seemingly taped across Limbaugh’s mouth. The article is written by former Bush43 speech writer David Frum, who is in the process of being lambasted from one “conservtaive” talk show to another. He is receiving a ton of email inviting him to get out of the party.

So, just as capitalism is in the process of eating itself, so is the Republican party and what is left of the “conservative movement” championed by Goldwater and Reagan. A movement that began as moderation defined as extremism has evolved into extremism defined as moderation, and the public is buying this version about as much as they bought the original version: with a heaping dose of skepticism.

It can very rightly be argued that the nation was due for a conservative movement 30 years ago, as a brake against the excesses of the post-war liberal society which had grown in the U.S. to dangerous proportions, affecting quality of life across the board. Too much of the peoples’ money went to things that had little or nothing to do with preserving prosperity.

As we gaze back on the wreckage of Bush43’s eight years in office, we see what happened to that movement. It replaced one form of big government with another, only more insidious. In place of a big government which considered war to be a last resort, we got big government that ran toward every frontier with guns ready to fire, and we stretched our forces too thin, disrupted the peaceful lives of millions of men and women, many of who had already served their time and were brought back because they were still considered part of the “ready reserve”. We destroyed our international prestige among friends and foes alike.  We replaced permissive government with ruthlessly doctrinaire government, telling people how to live and how not to live in ways that once would have been considered distinctly ‘un-American.’ We slashed taxes but kept such pressure on wages, through policies which made it much easier to import cheap labor and export actual work, that incomes remained flat through the entire period, even as costs went up.

In other words, it turns out that it wasn’t “liberalism” that was the problem, it was being in charge for too long that was the problem. We need turnover in order to take a fresh look at things and see how well ideas have been working. Instead, Limbaugh would have us believe that the ideas are fine, it is we who are wrong. LImbaugh insists that we want cradle-to-grave security and comfort, and we want all of it provided for us, and we will destroy the country unless we change our ways.

And you know what? Once, there was a grain of truth to that point. Once, this truly was a “welfare society”, with the expectation that government spending and services would continue to expand because we were aflluent enough to afford it. As economic growth slowed, we could afford less, and we had to make choices.  Republicans and especially Conservatives seized on this circumstance to push a “smaller government” agenda, much of which was achieved from 1980 forward.

The problem now is that “small government” turned into “lax regulation” and the pendulum swung way, way too far. The extremist conservative view, that the best government is the least government, has been shown to be a dangerous lie, in a way that “liberalism” never was. All of the things that conservatism was deigned to cure, even things that never happened, are now happening under “conservatism.”

Limbaugh is trying to make the case that conservatism did not go far enough, or was interfered with or poorly executed. He has no proof of this, no previous model to compare to. It’s all theory, and it’s all designed to accomplish one thing: keep his name front and center.

Which is why it will be impossible to miss his public unraveling. He will turn it into the most dramatic death scene ever, worthy of comparison to the most moving of operas.

And the lesson will be, as it always is: Evolve Or Die.

If you don’t love your babies,
it’s no shame.
We can’t help how we feel, who we are. Maybe you don’t even love yourself.

If you don’t love your babies,
maybe you made a mistake.
It’s OK, we all make mistakes, big ones and small.

If you don’t love your babies,
it’s not your fault.
We can’t turn love off and on like a switch.

If you don’t love your babies,
then maybe what’s best
is that you don’t try to raise them at all.

Do you want to be the next cautionary tale? Do you want the Washington Post to run a series of articles on what’s wrong with the system that let you kill your babies? You don’t blame your babies for your inability to love them, do you? After all, they didn’t make you the way you are. They came into this world as innocently as you once did.

Life chewed you up and spit you out, perhaps. Life dealt you some harsh blows. You never got enough hugs.

I feel you.

But you do not want to be the person who destroyed another life out of spite, or because you didn’t know any other way to be.

You know the pain that bad parenting inflicts, because most likely you experienced the wrong end of it first-hand. Times get tough and some people get tougher in the wrong way. They get tougher on those closest to them, those who they should be reaching out to for support, those they should keep on the most special terms, those who they should be able to trust and to love.

I feel you.

Life is brutal and for many it just keeps getting more brutal. But you do not want to be that person who looked at an innocent baby and saw somebody that should be blamed for your circumstance. 

Maybe you just don’t want to admit that it’s all too much for you. Maybe you just don’t have it in you to take that one big step, and give up your babies so they have a chance to live a different life than the one you did, than the one you are capable of giving them.

Do it before you harm them, physically or emotionally. Do it because they do not need to grow up with anger, fear and hate in their hearts, because they don’t need to live under the threat that any day may be their last at your hands, or that you will commit an unspeakable act of harm against them.

Don’t turn away. The horror is real. Don’t turn away and let it go on. You have the power to do one right thing.

If you don’t love your babies, learn to love them just enough to want for them a better life than you can give them. Just enough to know that they deserve a chance, a chance that you can’t give them.

It sounds awful: “Give up my kids.”

If this makes it any easier, just remember: they aren’t yours. They belong to the world. You don’t “own” them, you are assigned to care for them. If you cannot do that -

No shame. 

But then go do the right thing. And do it for yourself. You deserve to be free from the stress of having these terrible thoughts and feelings. You deserve to avoid doing something that could ruin the rest of your life.

Let’s take a situation where nobody wins, and make it into one where everybody wins. If you need help - reach out. Tell somebody. They’ll help you figure out what to do next.

Then do it.

I keep having this same pervasive feeling. No matter what I read, where I read it, I keep having this overwhelming feeling that we are having yesterday’s conversations.

On the Tavis Smiley radio program in October, I predicted that the American economy will shed 5 million jobs within the first two years of the Obama administration. It now looks as though it will be within one year. On the Washington Post in a blog exchange a few months later, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank below 10,000 and people were predicting that there would soon be a bottom, I said that the Dow won’t bottom out until it fell below 7,000. The Dow is now at 6,500 and nobody believes we are anywhere near the bottom.

I’ve reminded people that the 25% unemployment rate of the depression was a more honest number than the one used today, because today’s number excludes those who have become “too discouraged” to look for work. They are no longer counted as part of the work force at all.

Here is the real news:

Nonfarm payroll employment continued to fall sharply in February (-651,000)

The number of unemployed persons increased by 851,000 to 12.5 million in
February, and the unemployment rate rose to 8.1 percent. Over the past 12
months, the number of unemployed persons has increased by about 5.0 million,
and the unemployment rate has risen by 3.3 percentage points.

Among the marginally attached, there were 731,000 discouraged workers in
February, up by 335,000 from a year earlier

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more)
increased by 270,000 to 2.9 million in February. Over the past 12 months,
the number of long-term unemployed was up by 1.6 million.

When we include the 5.588 million people who want a job but for various reasons don’t have one, the total workforce climbs to 159,304,000, of whom 18,025,000 are currently unemployed, for a “real” unemployment rate of over 11%. If that number was to represent the population of a U.S. state, it would sit comfortably in fifth place, poised to take over fourth place from Florida within another month or two.

But I digress.

The point I am trying to make is that we lie about the numbers, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s like lying about stealing a pack of gum from the store when five minutes later somebody else came in and shot everybody dead. Yes you were bad, yes you lied about it, but it just doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ve been saying for months that we keep throwing the peoples money at “investments” that shrink perhaps even faster than we can keep up, and thus the liquidity vanishes almost immediately. There is already talk of the need for a second round of stimulus even before the ink is dry on the “first” stimulus, which of course is really at least the third bill designed to stave off economic doom.

And yet, we are arguably closer to that doom than we were in October, in January, even a week ago. It is unclear if Citibank can be saved; it is not known how bad the bloodletting will be at AIG, with two rounds of bailout down and nobody knows how many more to go; it is almost certain that General Motors will cease to exist before summer starts, and thus venerable brands such as Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Chevrolet will also cease to exist. Saturn has already been handed its death notice.

In other words, fundamental, permanent change is occurring, not only in the United States but around the world. The global economy is intertwined in a way that nobody can intelligently explain, which nobody - not a single human - has the capacity to understand nor control. We have built “HAL”, we just didn’t realize that the way to do it was not to build one supercomputer, but instead to connect thousands of computers which all obey similar instructions, and which are only as accurate at predicting the future as the people who wrote them, which is poorly.

We are only now coming to grips with the reality that we have no idea how to stop it, no idea how to fix it, no idea how to turn it around. Don Ameche screaming at the end of Trading Places: “Turn those machines back on!!!!!”

Of course, he was really wishing to have the value of his investments restored. Those investments were already gone, already worthless. Nobody wanted to pay his prices, not after the market had crashed.

Here we are. The market has crashed. Down around 50% from its high. We know it hasn’t hit bottom, and we have no idea where that will be. Will the U.S. economy lose another 3 million well paying jobs this year? Will it be more? Will 2010 be better or worse?

Nobody knows.

And yet, we find ourselves on Mo’Kelly’s blog discussing Michael Steele versus Rush Limbaugh, an utterly pointless diversion at such a time as this; Dwayne T. wants us to think about the meaning of commitment, as though that will drag us out of this mess. No offense to these fine men, but we don’t have the time for this. We have only enough time to decide who will be in charge when everything goes up in flames, and what the goals of the new order will be.

Zach bemoans his lack of a girlfriend and men’s poor hygiene; Zack, my friend: find out who your comrades are, man or woman, and don’t worry about how they smell. Worry only about how close by your side they will be when the end of life as we know it comes.

It is coming. It is unavoidable, and it exceeds all predictions as to its speed and intensity. So, we are also wrong about its depth, we just don’t know by how much.

We need to start having tomorrow’s conversations, and there is zero time left to lose.