Bernanke - no longer a Republican.....

In a bright ballroom of Seattle University, Ben Bernanke and Gary Locke took us back to a darker time, 8 years back when one-half of all mortgages were underwater, unemployment was north of 10 percent, and panic ran amok inside the American financial system. 

It’s a familiar history now – the subprime mortgage scam, the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, the near death of AIG - the world’s biggest insurer of financial deals - the still-debated $700 billion TARP bailout, and a regulatory system that couldn’t keep up with derivatives and other at the edge investment inventions.
Bernanke, director of the Federal Reserve System through all of it, came to the ballroom – interviewed by Locke – to tout his book about America at the edge of ruin (his spin), “The Courage to Act.”

Some moments:

- the subprime mortgage collapse and other events may have set off the financial run, but it was panic – a collapse of belief – that really caused the damage. An economic system depends on confidence; when that’s gone, the lights go out. 

- Lehmann Bros. went down because there was no buyer to save it, and no TARP yet to bail it out – Congress wouldn’t act, telling Bernanke “there’s been no real damage yet.” 

- Bernanke throws a lot of blame on that same Congress for its unwillingness to act on the fiscal side – pushing more $$$ into the economy – while leaving the burden to the Fed’s monetary moves re liquidity. They, he claims, just didn’t do their job. 

- he’s no longer a Republican, describing the party as in the hands now of know-nothings who know nothing about governing.

- asked about dangers to come, he warned that the current recovery still isn’t working for everyone, not with increasing inequality, and fails the basic purpose of an economic system – to produce broad-based benefit.

- asked if he’d seen the film about the near collapse of 2008-2009 - ”Too Big Too Fail” – he said “No, but I like to say that I saw the original………”

"Bridge of Spies"

Elegant.
That's the word I want to describe Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies."
Film as craft.

As in the way every scene - in its organization, extras, storefronts, clothing, whatever, absolutely recreates a time and place. Yes, it is 1957 again, at least on screen.

And though perhaps a touch stylized from setting to setting, it brings back - in a gripping way - the Cold War, the disastrous flight of Francis Gary Powers' U-2, and the dark mood of a time when nuclear war seemed possible, a time when we still drilled in school against that possibility. We live again in a divided Berlin, see the despair and death at the Wall, watch the potentially deadly (and never-ending) chess game of global power.

But what stays with me tonight is something one hero of the time asks without really using these words, "Who are we?" - meaning what are our true values as Americans?
James Donovan asks because those who chose him to defend the Russian spy Rudolf Abel seem to suggest that the verdict is certain, that the usual rules of American justice need not apply. Yet Donavan defends Abel the spy as he would any defendant, and nearly wins an evidentiary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, thus upholding enduring values worth far more than the fate of a single spy.

The impulse to fairness, to the right values, comes again when Donavan negotiates the exchange of Abel for Powers, insisting - against the CIA and others in government - that the spy swap also include a young American student imprisoned on the east side of the Wall.

"Who are we?" It's always the important question. Asked another way in a time of every-increasing surveilliance and fear of terror by John le Carré:
“How long can we defend ourselves – you and we - by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?” 

(And a cheer for Tom Hanks as Donovan, and Mark Rylance as Abel. 
Acting as craft....)

Our Time.....

When we were
Young
And dreamers
We imagined
No end
Only beginnings.

And when they
Came we
Lived them
Day by day
Believing that
Our time would
Never end.

And now I
Wonder what
Was the dream?
To live in health
And for so long?

To have worked
And thought, to
Find the narrative
In fragments
Of truth?

Or just to
Wake, to fill
The hours with
Query, with wonder,
Then to sleep again
'Til morn?

We lived that
Dream - perhaps
Not that one of
Youth, but
One of time and
Chance.

And no, we are
Not done
Not yet,
Only in search
Of the dream
To come.

What Rough Beast.....

Something is stirring, brooding, out there.
Sometimes, as Robert Reich said at Town Hall last night, we don't know what it is until after it happens.
But see - a Trump and a Carson getting half the votes in early polls of Republican primary voters.  One is all bombast and noise, the other quietly, as one GOP writer claims this morning, "imbecilic."  Yet they lead, for now, one of our two major political tribes.

When in any other time would a national political candidate - see Carson - be rewarded for comparing the United States to the Nazi Third Reich?  Or say of a medical coverage plan - Obamacare - that it is "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery."  Or claim that the sitting President of the United States is modeling his policies after those of Cuba and Russia?  See Carson, again.
Yes, there is always over the cliff rhetoric, but rewarded, cheered on, by so many?

As Peter Wehner, a GOP consultant who served in the last three GOP administrations, writes:"....the usual ways voters judge a candidate - experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues - have been devalued.........Reason has given way to demagogy."

Reich offers a sunnier view - that yes, there's a rumbling out there, but in his Berkely economics classes he sees an idealism, a commitment to public service, and in American history he sees a pattern - that when the political/ecnomic system goes off track, leaving too many out of its benefits, there's adjustment (see TR's progressivism, FDR's New Deal, Johnson's New Society).
That's his sense of this moment, of the anti-establishment fever - a moment for sweeping change, but with a warning that there are two kinds of populism.

- reform populism - see the Roosevelts and LBJ
- authoritarian populism - the rise of scapegoating, of government is evil rhetoric, of obstructionism as policy. See the GOP House, see Trump, Carson, Cruz, et al

Which way history goes depends on a citizenry, its information and drive to seek fact over noise, and its engagement.
Politics, says Reich as so many have before, is not a spectator sport.

Theater of War

It was a different setting - actors David Strathairn on the left, Lili Taylor on the right and Bryan Doerries in the middle, with Doerries narrating a kind of life story - his - and how it led him to discover the ways scenes from Greek tragedy could help PTSD veterans (and their families) cope.

It sounds improbable, but imagine a soldier coming home from war, returning after months away, at the edge, surrounded by death.  As one soldier's wife told Doerries at a performance, "A returning soldier brings invisible bodies into a home, making it a slaughter house - of the mind if not body."
Doerries has found a healing in the trauma of these Greek plays; they resonate because the families, the soldiers, know tragedy and death - witnessing it together, facing the darkness in these tragedies, creates a kind of bonding, a shared discomfort and a sense that they are not alone.

Strathairn - one of our great actors - and Taylor (from Six Feet Under, The X-Files, Mystic Pizza) were terrific in telling these stories, Strathairn almost visceral in his portrayal of a soldier gone mad (in Sophocles' "Ajax") who wants to kill his comrades, but instead takes his own life.

It's an unexpected therapy called "Theater of War" - taken to settings, many military, all over the country (and at Town Hall Seattle Tuesday evening).

Strathairn:
“These plays are part of a 2,500-year history of mental and emotional pain for soldiers that run up to the present day.”

Doerries:
"Sophocles was himself a general, and Athens during his time was at war for decades. By performing these scenes, we’re hoping that our modern-day soldiers will see their difficulties in a larger historical context, and perhaps feel less alone.”

Does it work?
In the sense that the trauma of war is timeless, yes, and in the sharing of that pain, perhaps yes, too.

As one soldier said, at one setting - “I’ve been Ajax. I’ve spoken to Ajax.”

(I thought Doerries made perhaps the sharpest point of the night, re why so many soldiers do have a sense of isolation on returning home.  I don't recall the exact words but close to this:
"When a small subset of a population fights all of its wars, there's something wrong, something that in time undermines a democracy."
Hard to argue.)

Beyond the Urban Crunch - how?

The buzz at the hair salon on Pike hasn't changed in months - it's about traffic snarls, density, growth, vows to never come into the city again, etc. etc. - but this time, walking out, it seemed to echo more than ever one end of a civic conversation re managing what's happening to us.

A NYTimes article tracks the mood this week (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/technology/seattle-in-midst-of-tech-boom-tries-to-keep-its-soul.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=technology&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Technology&pgtype=article):

- do we want to be San Francisco with crunching traffic and housing costs out of sight?
- are we rushing to that outcome with every crane that rises on the skyline?
- how do we get the growth we want - the jobs, the spinoff of restaurants, art, a 21st century boom - while keeping what some folks want to call the city's soul?

Walking across the street after the haircut, I thought how our own family's life has shifted urban.  We walk more than drive, I bus and rail whenever possible, love the fact that so much that we like about urban life is just minutes away on foot.  (I drove on Mercer the other afternoon - that's the street that cost millions and years of disruption ending with worse traffic than ever - and vowed "never again!")

And that's the question for the table.  In a city growing this fast, the acreage for cars in motion or in need of parking does not expand - we're not going to tear down buildings so we can widen streets, or rip up more homes to make I-5 eight lanes or wider, or dig more ditches to hold cars sitting for 10 hours, i.e. as one urban planner writes, "...it is impossible from both a practical and financial standpoint to build out of the problem by expanding the physical infrastructure adding lanes, decks, tunnels, etc.

We ARE giving travelers/commuters who recognize this and don't want to drive or hunt a parking space alternatives (bike lanes, transit, Uber/Lyft, etc.), but it's not enough, the technology/data/management systems aren't there yet - we're hunting a 21st century look at how to move bodies and vehicles.  Not there yet.

I often look while walking and driving - to see how many vehicles are carrying one person.  It's an overwhelming number, and understandable - control, flexibility, on demand, etc. - but it doesn't/can't work as a city (especially one virtually surrounded by water) rises.  One person one car multiplied thousands of times, with every vehicle needing a space to idle for 8-10 hours doesn't make sense - and yet the alternatives of transit, bicycles, vehicles for hire are not sufficient to displace the cars now crowded at rush hour into every lane and intersection.   We may need one day something like London's congestion charge - around $16 and up.

My responses are walking/transit/Uber/etc., but I live in a downtown and don't have a ready answer (beyond more investment in alternatives and better management of traffic flows) for folks outside the center who don't like transit, or don't have it nearby, or who need a vehicle to carry goods or equipment.

I do know it's got to be a top 5 civic focus (along with jobs, affordable housing, climate, race); we don't want to lose the plus side of urban life by failing to manage its explosive growth........

The Way We Were

The way we were; the way it was - is not coming back.

What was, back then - from the birth of television and into this new century -  kept running through my head at a labor meeting tonight, called to fight  against a new owner's insistence that all labor unions at KING Broadcasting agree to new jurisdictional language, the short of which is that unions will be much weaker, perhaps out of business, and that the age we knew - of professional photographers, experienced journalists, and a staff of tested engineers - will swiftly vanish.

The impulse - immediate - is to fight for the way it was - unions representing employees meeting with management (the KING management back in the way it was believed in organized labor; a management that, while tough at the table, knew that better products come out of a workplace treated with respect and fairness) to hash out working conditions, pensions, health care, pay, etc.  But the nagging thought is that we're in a different time.

 KINGTV then was family, the Bullitt family.  We could bargain across that table knowing the goal of better journalism and a workplace that could produce it was shared - with respect.  Now, a national corporation owning 23 TV stations is in charge and - as City Council Member Sawant (not always my favorite, but she was right tonight) said, consolidation and corporate power over local television and much else is on the rise.  She and Council Member Licata argued for organizing, pressuring legislators, using media - good on paper and yes, even a suggested city council resolution could help -  but I wonder if we can go back.

When I began in local journalism, the sources for news were countable on a single hand; now we have one less newspaper but also a smartphone full of news sources, and new breeds of journalist/writers who fill a Crosscut, a Politico, a Stranger and much more.  Information is a constant throb, a digital river, pulsing on your device of choice.  As a long-time news junkie, there's no way I can keep track of it all.

As a former shop steward and long time union member, as an employee who negotiated contracts and once threatened a strike, I know that the technological changes of this century will shift the makeup of local TV news, pushing it more on-line, changing its formats - more streaming and less of the actual news hour on a set time and channel - as they are changing the delivery of film, television, music, books, groceries, etc.  We're not at the same bargaining table.

This is long enough, and I hope will spark some conversation.  The problem discussed by broadcast jouranlists at Kane Hall tonight is real - unions are under threat, jobs as we've known them are in jeopardy, professionals may become low pay interns if they survive at all - but I doubt the old strategies can turn that around.  The way it was, the way we were, won't come back.

We didn't discuss a model for our time, this time and century - but workers everywhere, not just inside newsrooms, will need one.

And soon.