Jack A. Smith : Obama and Romney Differ Little on Foreign Policy

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Obama and Romney: Birds of a feather? Caricature by DonkeyHotey.

Birds of a feather?
Obama and Romney have
similar views on foreign policy

The back and forth between the candidates on international issues is largely about appearance, not substance.

By Jack A. Smith | The Rag Blog | October 11, 2012

Despite the sharp charges and counter-charges about foreign/military and national security policy there are no important differences on such matters between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney. The back and forth between the candidates on international issues is largely about appearance, not substance.

The Washington Post noted Sept. 26 that the two candidates “made clear this week that they share an overriding belief — American political and economic values should triumph in the world.” Add to that uplifting phrase the implicit words “by any means necessary,” and you have the essence of Washington’s international endeavors.

There are significant differences within the GOP’s right wing factions — from neoconservatives and ultra nationalists to libertarians and traditional foreign policy pragmatic realists — that make it extremely difficult for the Republicans to articulate a comprehensive foreign/military policy. This is why Romney confines himself to criticizing Obama’s international record without elaborating on his own perspective, except to imply he would do everything better than the incumbent.

Only nuances divide the two ruling parties on the principal strategic international objectives that determine the development of policy. Washington’s main goals include:

  • Retaining worldwide “leadership,” a euphemism for geopolitical hegemony.
  • Maintaining the unparalleled military power required to crush any other country, using all means from drones to nuclear weapons. This is made clear in the incumbent administration’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), and the January 2012 strategic defense guidance titled, “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.”
  • Containing the rise of China’s power and influence, not only globally but within its own East Asian regional sphere of influence, where the U.S. still intends to reign supreme. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia is part of Washington’s encirclement of China militarily and politically through its alliances with key Asian-Pacific allies. In four years, according to the IMF, China’s economy will overtake that of the U.S. — and Washington intends to have its fleets, air bases, troops, and treaties in place for the celebration.
  • Exercising decisive authority over the entire resource-rich Middle East and adjacent North Africa. Only the Iranian and Syrian governments remain to be toppled. (Shia Iraq, too, if it gets too close to Iran.)
  • Provoking regime change in Iran through crippling sanctions intended to wreck the country’s economy and, with Israel, threats of war. There is no proof Iran is constructing a nuclear weapon.
  • Seeking regime change in Syria, Shia Iran’s (and Russia’s) principal Arab ally. Obama is giving political and material support to fractious rebel forces in the civil war who are also supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. The U.S. interest is in controlling the replacement regime.
  • Weakening and isolating Russia as it develops closer economic and political ties to China, and particularly when it expresses opposition to certain of Washington’s less savory schemes, such as continuing to expand NATO, seeking to crush Iran and Syria, and erecting anti-missile systems in Europe. In 20 years, NATO has been extended from Europe to Central Asia, adjacent to China and former Soviet republics.
  • Continuing the over 50-year Cold War economic embargo, sanctions, and various acts of subversion against Cuba in hopes of destroying socialism in that Caribbean Island nation.
  • Recovering at least enough hegemony throughout Latin America — nearly all of which the U.S. dominated until perhaps 15 years ago — to undermine or remove left wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
  • Significantly increasing U.S. military engagement in Africa.

Both the right/far right Republican Party and the center right Democratic Party agree on these goals, although their language to describe them is always decorated with inspiring rhetoric about the triumph of American political and economic values; about spreading democracy and good feeling; about protecting the American people from terrorism and danger.

Today’s foreign/military policy goals are contemporary adaptations of a consistent, bipartisan international perspective that began to take shape at the end of World War II in 1945. Since the implosion of the Soviet Union ended the 45-year Cold War two decades ago — leaving the U.S. with its imperialist ambitions as the single world superpower — Washington protects its role as “unipolar” hegemon like a hungry dog with a meaty bone.

The people of the United States have no influence over the fundamentals of Washington’s foreign/military objectives. Many Americans seem to have no idea about Washington’s actual goals. As far as a large number of voters are concerned the big foreign/military policy/national security issues in the election boil down to Iran’s dangerous nuclear weapon; the need to stand up for Israel; stopping China from “stealing” American jobs; and preventing a terrorist attack on America.

Since Romney has no foreign policy record, and he’ll probably do everything Obama would do only worse (and he probably won’t even win the election) we will concentrate mainly on Obama’s foreign/military policy and the pivot to China.

One reason is the ignorance of a large portion of voters about past and present history and foreign affairs. Another is that many people still entertain the deeply flawed myths about “American exceptionalism” and the “American Century.” Lastly, there’s round-the-clock government and mass media misinformation.

After decades of living within an aggressive superpower it is no oddity that even ostensibly informed delegates to the recent Republican and Democratic political conventions engaged in passionate mass chanting of the hyper-nationalist “USA!, USA!, USA!,” when they were whipped up by party leaders evoking the glories of killing Osama bin-Laden, patriotism, war, and the superiority of our way of life.

Since Romney has no foreign policy record, and he’ll probably do everything Obama would do only worse (and he probably won’t even win the election) we will concentrate mainly on Obama’s foreign/military policy and the pivot to China.

One of President Obama’s most important military decisions this year was a new strategic guidance for the Pentagon published January 5 in a 16-page document titled “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.”

The new doctrine is the response by the White House and Congress to the stagnant economy and new military considerations. It reduces the number of military personnel and expects to lower Pentagon costs over 10 years by $487 billion, as called for by the Budget Control Act of 2011. This amounts to a cut of almost $50 billion a year in an overall annual Pentagon budget of about $700 billion, and most of the savings will be in getting rid of obsolete equipment and in payrolls. This may all be reversed by Congress.

Introducing “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership” to the media, Obama declared:

As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and the end of long-term nation-building with large military footprints — we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces. We’ll continue to get rid of outdated Cold War-era systems so that we can invest in the capabilities that we need for the future, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.

So, yes, our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats.

Following the president, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared:

As we shift the size and composition of our ground, air, and naval forces, we must be capable of successfully confronting and defeating any aggressor and respond to the changing nature of warfare. Our strategy review concluded that the United States must have the capability to fight several conflicts at the same time.

We are not confronting, obviously, the threats of the past; we are confronting the threats of the 21st century. And that demands greater flexibility to shift and deploy forces to be able to fight and defeat any enemy anywhere. How we defeat the enemy may very well vary across conflicts. But make no mistake, we will have the capability to confront and defeat more than one adversary at a time.

The Congressional Research Service summarized five key points from the defense guidance, which it said was “written as a blueprint for the joint force of 2020.”

They are:

  1. A shift in overall focus from winning today’s wars to preparing for future challenges.
  2. A shift in geographical priorities toward the Asia and the Pacific region while retaining emphasis on the Middle East.
  3. A shift in the balance of missions toward more emphasis on projecting power in areas in which U.S. access and freedom to operate are challenged by asymmetric means (“anti-access”) and less emphasis on stabilization operations, while retaining a full-spectrum force.
  4. A corresponding shift in force structure, including reductions in Army and Marine Corps endstrength, toward a smaller, more agile force including the ability to mobilize quickly. [The Army plans to cut about 50,000 from a force of 570,000. In 2001 there were 482,000.]
  5. A corresponding shift toward advanced capabilities including Special Operations Forces, new technologies such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and unmanned systems, and cyberspace capabilities.

Here are the new military priorities, according to Obama’s war doctrine (notice the omission of counter-insurgency, a previous favorite):

  • Engage in counterterrorism and irregular warfare.
  • Deter and defeat aggression.
  • Project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges.
  • Counter weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
  • Operate effectively in cyberspace and space.
  • Maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.
  • Defend the homeland and provide support to civil authorities.
  • Provide a stabilizing presence.
  • Conduct stability and counterinsurgency operations.
  • Conduct humanitarian, disaster relief, and other operations.

In an article critical of the military and titled “A Leaner, More Efficient Empire,” progressive authors Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis wrote:

In an age when U.S. power can be projected through private mercenary armies and unmanned Predator drones, the U.S. military need no longer rely on massive, conventional ground forces to pursue its imperial agenda, a fact President Barack Obama is now acknowledging. But make no mistake: while the tactics may be changing, the U.S. taxpayer — and poor foreigners abroad — will still be saddled with overblown military budgets and militaristic policies.

“Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow,” the president told reporters, “but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow.” In fact, he added with a touch of pride, it “will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration,” totaling more than $700 billion a year and accounting for about half of the average American’s income tax. So much for the Pentagon’s budget being slashed.

The Obama Administration’s so-called pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, actually East and South Asia (including India) and the Indian Ocean area, was unveiled last fall — first in an article in Foreign Policy magazine by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton titled “America’s Pacific Century,” then with attendant fanfare by President Obama on his trip to Hawaii, Australia and Indonesia.

The “pivot” involves attempting to establish a U.S.-initiated free trade zone in the region, while also strengthening Washington’s ties with a number of existing allied countries, such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and India, among others. A few of these allies have sharp disagreements with China about claims to small islands in the South China Sea, a major waterway for trade and commerce. The U.S., while saying it is neutral, is siding with its allies on this extremely sensitive issue.

Over the months it has become clear that the principal element of the “pivot” is military, and the allies are meant to give the U.S. support and backing for whatever transpires.

The U.S. for decades has encircled China with military might — spy planes and satellites, Navy warships cruising with thousands of personnel nearby and in the South China Sea, 40,000 U.S. troops in Japan, 28,000 in South Korea, 500 in the Philippines, many thousands in Afghanistan, plus a number of Pacific island airbases.

This development cannot be separated from the increasing economic growth and potential of China in relation to the obvious beginning of America’s decline. Washington may remain the world hegemon for a couple of more decades — and Beijing is not taking one step in that direction and may never do so.

Now it turns out that the Navy is moving a majority of its cruisers, destroyers and aircraft carrier battle groups from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In addition old military bases in the region are being refurbished and new bases are under construction. Australia has granted Obama’s request to allow a Marine base to be established in Darwin to accommodate a force of 2,500 troops. Meanwhile Singapore has been prevailed upon to allow the berthing of four U.S. Navy ships at the entrance to the Malacca Straits, through which enter almost all sea traffic between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, a key trade route.

An article in the September/October 2012 Foreign Affairs by Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell, titled “The Sum of Beijing’s Fears,” paints a clear picture of American power on the coast of China:

U.S. military forces are globally deployed and technologically advanced, with massive concentrations of firepower all around the Chinese rim. The U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) is the largest of the United States’ six regional combatant commands in terms of its geographic scope and non-wartime manpower. PACOM’s assets include about 325,000 military and civilian personnel, along with some 180 ships and 1,900 aircraft.

To the west, PACOM gives way to the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for an area stretching from Central Asia to Egypt. Before Sept. 11, 2001, CENTCOM had no forces stationed directly on China’s borders except for its training and supply missions in Pakistan. But with the beginning of the “war on terror,” CENTCOM placed tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan and gained extended access to an air base in Kyrgyzstan.

The operational capabilities of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific are magnified by bilateral defense treaties with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea and cooperative arrangements with other partners. And to top it off, the United States possesses some 5,200 nuclear warheads deployed in an invulnerable sea, land, and air triad. Taken together, this U.S. defense posture creates what Qian Wenrong of the Xinhua News Agency’s Research Center for International Issue Studies has called a “strategic ring of encirclement.

An article in Foreign Policy last January by Clyde Prestowitz asked:

Why is the “pivot” a mistake? Because it presumes a threat where none exists but where the presumption could become a self-fulfilling prophecy and where others could deal with any threats should they arise in the future. Because it entails further expenditures far beyond what is necessary for effective defense of the United States and its interests. And because it reduces U.S. productive power, competitiveness, and long-term U.S. living standards by providing a kind of subsidy for the offshoring of U.S.-based production capacity.

This development cannot be separated from the increasing economic growth and potential of China in relation to the obvious beginning of America’s decline. Washington may remain the world hegemon for a couple of more decades — and Beijing is not taking one step in that direction and may never do so. (Beijing seems to prefer a multipolar world leadership of several nations and regional blocs, as do a number of economically rising countries.)

“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership,” as noted above, specified that the thrust of the Pentagon’s attention has now shifted to Asia. The most recent Quadrennial Defense Review already has informally identified China as a possible nation-state aggressor against which America must defend itself. The U.S. claims it is not attempting to contain China, but why the military buildup? It cannot be aimed at any other country in the region but China. Why also in his convention acceptance speech did Obama brag that “We’ve reasserted our power across the Pacific and stood up to China on behalf of our workers.”

The U.S. evidently is developing war games against China. On Aug. 2 John Glaser wrote in Antiwar.com:

The Pentagon is drawing up new plans to prepare for an air and sea war in Asia, presumably against China, in the Obama administration’s most belligerent manifestation yet of the so-called pivot to Asia-Pacific…. New war strategies called “Air-Sea Battle” reveal Washington’s broader goals in the region,” including a possible war.

The August 1 Washington Post reported that in the games “Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. The initial ‘blinding campaign’ would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.”

Both candidates have opportunistically interjected China-bashing into their campaigns, second only to Iran-bashing. Obama has several times told working class audiences that China is stealing their jobs. Romney fumes about China’s alleged currency “cheating.” Republican former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sharply criticized both candidates October 3 for “appealing to American suspicions of China in their campaigns.”

Kissinger, whose recent book On China we recommend, also wrote a piece in the March-April Foreign Affairs titled “The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations — Conflict Is a Choice, Not a Necessity” that injects an element of understanding into the matter.

The American debate, on both sides of the political divide, often describes China as a “rising power” that will need to “mature” and learn how to exercise responsibility on the world stage. China, however, sees itself not as a rising power but as a returning one, predominant in its region for two millennia and temporarily displaced by colonial exploiters taking advantage of Chinese domestic strife and decay.

It views the prospect of a strong China exercising influence in economic, cultural, political, and military affairs not as an unnatural challenge to world order but rather as a return to normality. Americans need not agree with every aspect of the Chinese analysis to understand that lecturing a country with a history of millennia about its need to “grow up” and behave “responsibly” can be needlessly grating.

Clearly, the Obama Administration is opposed to modern China even becoming “predominant in its region” once again, much less in the world. At this stage Washington is predominant in East Asia, and between its military power and subordinate regional allies it is not prepared to move over even within China’s own sphere. No one can predict how this will play out in 20 or 30 years, of course.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian — for decades the nation’s preeminent leftist newsweekly — that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Parry : Mitt Romney’s Lies and Distortions

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

That trademark Romney smirk. Image from policymic.

Mitt Romney lies to the world

Mitt Romney gave a rousing speech about how his foreign policy would be much more muscular than President Obama’s. But Romney displayed again his proclivity to lie on specifics and distort the broader reality.

By Robert Parry / Consortium News / October 10, 2012

While it’s true that all politicians play games with the facts, it is actually rare for a politician to be an inveterate liar. But Mitt Romney is one of that rare breed on matters both big and small. And with some polls showing his surge toward victory on November 6, his dishonesty may soon become an issue for the entire world.

Romney’s foreign policy speech on Monday, October 8, was another example of his tendency to lie on minor stuff as well as weighty issues. For instance, he claimed that President Barack Obama “has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years” though Obama secured passage of agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama and signed them in October 2011.

Romney apologists suggest that the Republican presidential nominee was hanging his truthiness on the word “new” since negotiations on the agreements began late in George W. Bush’s presidency. But the work was completed by Obama and he pushed the deals through Congress despite resistance from some of his own supporters in labor unions.

So, by any normal use of the English language, Obama had signed new trade agreements, but Romney simply stated the opposite.

Romney also accused Obama of staying “silent” in the face of street protests in Iran over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. But Obama wasn’t “silent.” He did speak out, with his comments becoming increasingly harsh as more images of violence emerged.

“The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the last few days,” the President said on June 23, 2009. He added that he strongly condemned “these unjust actions.”

If Romney wished to criticize Obama for not condemning Iran in even stronger terms or for not using his harshest language immediately that might be one thing, but to say, the President was “silent” is just a lie.

More broadly, Romney’s depiction of U.S. foreign policy as weak and feckless under Obama is almost the inverse from the truth. For instance, Obama helped organize an international military force to wage war in Libya, enabling rebels to overthrow longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi, but Romney acts as if that never happened.

Instead, Romney lays every foreign policy problem at Obama’s door and credits others with every accomplishment, including the killings of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

On that topic, Romney said: “America can take pride in the blows that our military and intelligence professionals have inflicted on Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, including the killing of Osama bin Laden.” But Romney gives no credit to Obama for ordering these strikes and taking criticism from many on the Left for his aggressive use of drone attacks.

The Palestine flip-flop

Another jaw-dropping example of Romney’s dishonesty was his sudden embrace of negotiations leading to a Palestinian state after he was recorded in his infamous “47 percent speech” last May as deeming such talks hopeless.

“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way,” Romney told a group of wealthy donors. “The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

As for what the U.S. policy would be in a Romney administration, he said, “we kick the ball down the field.”

However, on Monday, Romney declared: “I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel.”

And again, all the blame for the impasse is placed on Obama: “On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new president will bring the chance to begin anew.”

And then, there’s the traditional hypocrisy that you get from both parties but most notably from the Republicans, preaching the value of liberty and democracy but advocating ever closer ties with the oppressive monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Romney declared about Obama’s approach to the Arab Spring that “the greater tragedy of it all is that we are missing an historic opportunity to win new friends who share our values in the Middle East — friends who are fighting for their own futures against the very same violent extremists, and evil tyrants, and angry mobs who seek to harm us.”

However, Romney then added, “I will deepen our critical cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.”

One reason that I criticized Romney’s debate performance — though many other Americans, including many Democrats, disagreed with my assessment — was that I felt his lying and his squirrely behavior were more important than Obama’s sluggishness.

Neocon revival

Besides the lies and misrepresentations in the speech, there were some genuine policy differences expressed by the Republican presidential nominee. For instance, he vowed to expand the U.S. military and to deploy it more aggressively around the globe.

Romney also repeated his pledge to yoke U.S. foreign policy to Israel’s desires. “The world must never see any daylight between our two nations,” he said.

And Romney renewed his belligerence against Russia, which he had previously deemed “without question, our Number 1 geopolitical foe.” In his speech on Monday, Romney said, “I will implement effective missile defenses to protect against threats. And on this, there will be no flexibility with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

Despite the Depression-level economic crisis gripping Europe, Romney also announced that he “will call on our NATO allies to keep the greatest military alliance in history strong by honoring their commitment to each devote 2 percent of their GDP to security spending. Today, only three of the 28 NATO nations meet this benchmark.”

One might regard Romney’s neoconservative revival as delusional in a variety of ways — further driving the United States toward bankruptcy even as U.S. interventionism in the Muslim world would surely make matters worse — but it is Romney’s reliance on systematic lying that perhaps should be more troubling to American voters.

Romney has long been known as a serial flip-flopper who changes positions to fit the political season, but his pervasive mendacity has been a concern since the Republican primaries when his GOP rivals complained about him misrepresenting their positions and reinventing his own.

That pattern has continued into the general election campaign, with Romney telling extraordinary whoppers on the campaign trail and even during last Wednesday’s presidential debate, such as when he claimed his health-care plan covered people with pre-existing conditions when it doesn’t.

Strategic lying

One reason that I criticized Romney’s debate performance — though many other Americans, including many Democrats, disagreed with my assessment — was that I felt his lying and his squirrely behavior were more important than Obama’s sluggishness. Telling lies while waving your arms shouldn’t trump telling the truth in a moderate tone.

Indeed, as a journalist, I simply cannot abide politicians who lie systematically, who don’t just trim the truth once in a while but make falsehoods a strategic part of their politics and policies.

When I arrived in Washington in 1977 as a reporter for the Associated Press, the nation had just emerged from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. To reassure the country that the government could be honest, President Jimmy Carter promised never to lie to the American people.

But then came the Reagan administration with its concept of “perception management,” i.e., the manipulation of the public’s fears and prejudices for the purpose of lining up the people behind new foreign adventures. A chief  “public diplomacy” goal of the administration was to cure the American people of “the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Thus, minor threats, like peasant uprisings in Central America, were portrayed as part of a grand Soviet strategy to invade the United States through Texas. The strength of the Soviet Union was itself exaggerated to justify a massive U.S. military build-up. Today’s neocons cut their teeth of such distortions and lies.

Post 9/11, with George W. Bush in the White House, this neocon strategy of fear-mongering led the United States into the debacle of the Iraq War (in pursuit of imaginary weapons of mass destruction).

Now, less than a year after U.S. military forces left Iraq — and with a withdrawal from Afghanistan finally underway — the latest polls suggest that the American voters are shifting toward the election of another neocon President who promises more soaring rhetoric about U.S. “exceptionalism” and more interventionism abroad.

It’s almost as if many Americans like being lied to.

[Robert Parry is the editor and founder of Consortium News. Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.]

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Alan Waldman : Brit TV’s ‘League of Gentlemen’ a Hilarious Small-Town Horror Spoof

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

The League of Gentlemen is a mind-blowing British horror spoof.

Waldman’s film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

The League of Gentlemen is a bizarre, hilarious Brit TV spoof of horror films. It is one of the most original and unpredictable comedy series ever.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | October 10, 2012

[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix.]

The League of Gentlemen (not to be confused with the critically hated comic book movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) is a mind-blowing British spoof of the small-town horror genre. Three of its four writers play about two-thirds of all the 100 roles — male and female. They are Steve Pemberton, Reese Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss (who co-created, wrote for and co-starred as Mycroft Holmes in the recent dazzling Brit mystery series Sherlock).

League ran in the U.K. for three six-episode seasons — 1999, 2000, and 2002 — and a Christmas special. It developed a cult following in Britain and was nominated for 13 British awards (winning seven).

From the opening shot, I knew this was comedy from a different world. In Britain, hearses have glass windows on the side so you can see, alongside the coffin, something sweet written in flowers (such as “mum” or “beloved”). In this first shot you see a hearse moving through the small town of Royston Vasey, and written in flowers by the coffin is the word “bastard.”

This is an extremely dark comedy, but it is very, very funny. The many characters include a hairy transsexual cab driver; a deranged couple who run a local shop (and who murder every customer who is not “local”); a family obsessed with toads, hygiene, and masturbation; an incompetent vet; and a carnival operator who kidnaps women into marriage. It is credited with reviving the British sketch comedy and is therefore a forerunner of Little Britain, which Gatiss helped write.

The three stars are astonishingly good in their many characters, and they look and sound very different from each other — thanks to their talent and the show’s award-winning costumes and makeup.

Because it is so macabre and twisted, League is not to everyone’s taste, but it will be greatly enjoyed by fans of offbeat, highly original comedy.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : The Player’s Tweet that Told the Truth

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Cardale Jones’ revealing tweet. Image from BigLeadSports.

The smartest, or dumbest,
(or maybe smartest)
tweet an athlete ever sent

We are corrupting these young people by demanding that they become complicit in a sham.

By Dave Zirin | The Rag Blog | October 10, 2012

Many allegedly great minds from professors to school presidents have devoted peals of pages to the multi-billion dollar industry otherwise known as NCAA athletics. Yet no one has quite put their finger on the contradictions, frustrations, and tragicomedy of being the labor in this industry — a so-called student-athlete — quite like Ohio State’s third string freshman quarterback, Cardale Jones.

On Friday Jones tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

Jones immediately deleted the tweet — as well as his entire twitter account — but as many have learned before him, deleting a tweet is like cleaning a grease stain with fruit punch. As soon as the 18-year-old sent his tweet out into the world, Cardale Jones was held up as yet another example of (altogether now) “everything that’s wrong” with today’s athlete.

Even worse, Jones, who hasn’t played one snap all season, was benched for Saturday’s game. As the Toledo Blade put it, “Mark it down as DNP (tweet).

But Jones’s crime wasn’t authoring what the Daily News called a “lame-brained tweet.” It was committing, to paraphrase Michael Kinsley, the greatest sin in sports: he was caught telling the truth. “We ain’t come to school to play classes” will most likely be a quote of mockery that rings through the ages.

But Cardale Jones has also hit on something factual. Ohio State football, like a select sampling of the sport’s aristocracy, has morphed over the last 30 years into a multi-billion dollar business. Even in the shadow of sanction and scandal, according to Forbes Magazine, the Buckeyes program creates $63 million in revenue every year and accounts for 73% of all the athletic departments profits.

Columbus is where legendary coach Woody Hayes was pushed out after striking an opposing player in 1978. He was making $40,000 a year when removed. Their coach today, Urban Meyer, draws a base salary of $4 million and is the highest paid public employee in the state. Meyer also gets use of a private plane, a swanky golf club membership, and a fellowship in his name. He can also earn six figure bonuses as well as raises for staying on the job.

The football coach earns three times Ohio State President Gordon Gee. As higher education lawyer Sheldon Steinbach said to USA Today. “The hell with gold. I want to buy futures in coaches’ contracts.”

The source of the contradictions and confusion that create this moral cesspool is not the riches earned by the Urban Meyers of this world. It’s that the players are given nothing but the opportunity for an education they often have neither the time nor desire to pursue.

These are 18-22-year-olds treated like a hybrid of campus Gods and campus chattel. I once had a former All-American tell me a story of hitting the books until an assistant coach stopped by his dorm room and said, “You know you don’t have to do that right?” This particular athlete persevered and graduated and good for him.

I can only say that when I was 19, if an authority figure told me I didn’t have to study, I would have held an impromptu book-burning in my dorm room. We are corrupting these young people by demanding that they become complicit in a sham. We are telling them to be grateful for the opportunity to be party to their own exploitation. We are telling them effectively to do exactly what Cardale Jones said, and “play school.”

This mentality of “play school” and get a shot at the NFL or the NBA is profoundly effective. It acts as a form of discipline that keeps players in line. This discipline doesn’t only come from coaches, academic advisors, and family members, but other student-athletes as well.

A culture is created through “amateur athletics” that incentivizes keeping your head down. If you’re going to cheat, or take easy classes with compliant professors, you do it quietly and keep the trains running on time. One thing you don’t do is point out that the Emperor is buck-naked.

I have a friend who is a professor at Ohio State and he outlined this to me very clearly. He told me that in the wake of Cardale Jones’s tweet that “many student-athletes are enraged. They feel he makes them all look bad when all of them are busting their butts.”

Their anger is what allows this system to continue as sure as the NCAA. They are angry because Cardale Jones just pulled back the curtain on an NCAA moral terrain built on a 21st century bedrock of bewildering moral confusion.

This only changes if Jones’s fellow football players stand with him and ask the question: “Are we all just ‘playing school’ so Urban Meyer can live like some sort of absurdist sports Sultan? Are my blood sweat and tears first and foremost a means to pay for the fuel for my coach’s private plane?”

We don’t know if this will cost Cardale Jones his scholarship in the days to come. But one thing we can be sure about: whether or not he stays will have less to do with his effrontery than whether the freshman can effectively throw a football.

[Dave Zirin is the author of The John Carlos Story (Haymarket). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Turkey Plays Chicken for NATO

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Turkish soldiers stand guard in Akcakale by the Turkish-Syria border. Photo by Bulent Kilic / AFP.

A page from Washington’s book:
Turkey plays chicken for NATO

They manipulated an incident into an act of war much like the U.S. used questionable incidents to attack Northern Korea in 1950 and Northern Vietnam in 1964.

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | October 9, 2012

Turkey took a page from Washington’s play book on October 4, 2012. After an errant shell landed in Turkish territory and killed a family there, the Turkish legislature authorized the Turkish military to enter foreign lands.

In other words, they manipulated an incident into an act of war much like the U.S. used questionable incidents to attack Northern Korea in 1950 and  Northern Vietnam in 1964. By passing legislation giving the Turkish military permission to enter foreign territory, Ankara declared an undeclared war on Syria. Claiming that their intention is not war, the Turkish military stepped up its alert status and prepared for war.

Of course, Turkey’s status as a NATO member brought forth a barely concealed hope from Brussels that this might finally be the entry it has been looking for since the protests against the Assad regime started looking as if they might result in that regime’s fall.

I have a sister who has been a nurse working psychiatric wards for most of the past 45 years. Although she has misgivings about the use of psychotropic drugs in many instances, she has explained that they serve a useful purpose in that they create a predictable response for staff to deal with. In other words, once the drugs take effect, the medical staff can be pretty certain how the patient will behave.

When nations go to war they operate under a similar thought process. In other words, once a nation is attacked, it will fight back or surrender. The root causes of the conflict will not be resolved, but the behavior of the attacked nation becomes more predictable.

Of course, once the dogs of war are unleashed, anything can happen. However, like the fool who makes the same mistake over and over again, war-making nations act as if the next war they enter will end as predicted.

The case of Syria is a tough one. The Assad regime is quite authoritarian and, at this point, the word “murderous” also applies. However, the opposition as it currently exists does not seem to be much better. Indeed, the increasing role of radical Islamists with an apparently reactionary agenda in the rebel forces creates a scenario where both sides in this civil war are difficult, if not impossible, to support.

The element of the resistance that seemed to express popular hopes for a democratic secular government in Syria seems to have disappeared in the car bombs and aerial bombardments that tend to increasingly characterize this conflict. From where I sit, it appears the U.S. and its alliance are arming forces (by proxy) very similar to those it armed in Afghanistan, while the nation of Syria is looking more and more like Iraq circa 2007, when sectarian conflict split that nation into many small and dangerous combat zones. Neither aspect of this scenario is a positive.

As for NATO and Israel, it is important to remember that Syria has been one of several nations in the Middle East that Tel Aviv and DC have wanted to control for decades. Always a proponent of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, the Damascus government has been a constant threat to Israel’s dream of a Greater Israel and, simultaneously, to Washington’s plans to dominate the region.

A co-founder of the United Arab Republic and now Tehran’s greatest ally in the Middle East, Damascus has long been on Washington’s short list of nations needing a reformat into a friendlier state. Tel Aviv, of course, would rather just take over the whole place and make it their own as part of their dream of lebensraum for the Jewish people.

Since the protests turned bloody in Syria last winter, the western public has been shown numerous videos and images of mutilated bodies and destroyed dwellings. The historical context and the nature of the forces involved have been minimized while the human toll has been magnified.

Much of this destruction was caused by the Syrian military and associated paramilitaries. As the conflict turned into civil war, much of it has also been caused by the rebel forces. The images of the former were usually provided by freelance sources that often have an agenda to push — that agenda involves the entry of foreign forces to support their side.

This is where the west comes in. It is also where the recent threat of military intervention from Ankara comes in. If Turkey does enter the fray, NATO will not be far behind. As part of the alliance, Ankara knows this and counts on it. Its opposition to the Assad regime has been present since the beginning of the resistance and the resistance’s turn to military conflict has been supported and propped up every inch of the way by Ankara.

There is no easy answer to the conflict in Syria. However, turning it into a regional war is definitely not the right one.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator’s Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : From the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis / 2

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

John F. Kennedy and Rómulo Betancourt at Alliance for Progress meeting in La Morita, Venezuela, Dec. 16, 1961. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The Cuba story, Part 2:
The Bay of Pigs to the missile crisis

The Castros of this world, the Kennedy Administration believed (as has every administration since), had to be crushed at all costs.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | October 9, 2012

“I have called on all the people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress — Alianza para Progreso — a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools — techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela…

“To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany material progress. Our Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free governments-and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it has no rightful place. Therefore let us express our special friendship to the people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic-and the hope they will soon rejoin the society of free men, uniting with us in our common effort.” (Address by President Kennedy at a White House reception for Latin American diplomats and members of Congress, March 13, 1961)

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” (Address by President Kennedy to diplomats one year after his Alliance for Progress speech. March 13, 1962)

[Part two of three.]

The Alliance for Progress as a “non-Communist” path to development 

The Kennedy Administration initiated a policy of foreign assistance in Latin America to complement the United States’ historic use of military force in the region. The President’s economic program was announced in the aftermath of long-standing complaints from Latin American dictators and some elected leaders that the United States had supported European recovery, the celebrated Marshall Plan of the 1940s, but ignored the Western Hemisphere.

Most importantly, the Kennedy Administration and anti-Communist friends in the Hemisphere became increasingly concerned about the enthusiasm the Cuban revolution was generating in the region.

In the midst of what was presented to the public as the “threat of Communism” in Latin America, Kennedy presented his “Alliance for Progress” aid package to diplomats and Congressmen on March 3, 1961 (about one month before JFK authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion).

The Alliance, the President promised, would provide public and private assistance equivalent to $20 billion to Latin American countries over a 10-year period. The plan projected annual growth rates in Latin America of 2.5 percent and would lead to the alleviation of malnutrition, poor housing and health, single-crop economies, and iniquitous landholding patterns (all campaigns underway in revolutionary Cuba).

Loans were contingent upon the recipient governments, and their political and economic elites, carrying out basic land reform, establishing progressive taxation, creating social welfare programs, and expanding citizenship and opportunities for political participation.

However, the effect of the Alliance, even before Kennedy’s death, was negative. Problems of poverty, declining growth rates, inflation, lower prices for export commodities, and the maintenance of autocratic and corrupt governments persisted. The reality of the Alliance and most other aid programs was that they were predicated on stabilizing those corrupt ruling classes that had been the source of underdevelopment in the first place.

The connections between the Alliance program and the interests of United States capital were clear. For example, a section of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1962 authorized the president to cut off aid to any nation that nationalized or placed “excessive” taxes on U.S. corporations or which terminated contacts with U.S. firms.

The act also emphasized monetary stability and the kinds of austerity programs common to U.S. and International Monetary Fund aid, requiring nations receiving aid to reduce public services and to maintain low wage rates to entice foreign investment.

Further, Alliance funds were often to be used to serve the interests of foreign capital; for example building roads, harbors, and transportation facilities to speed up the movement of locally-produced but foreign-owned goods to international markets.

Finally, the symbolism of the Alliance proclamation by President Kennedy was designed to promote the idea that U.S. resources, in collaboration with reformism in Latin America, would create societies that met the needs of the people and encouraged their political participation. The Alliance was presented as a response to Fidel Castro, a “non-Communist manifesto”for development.

The record of poverty and military rule throughout the Hemisphere suggested that there was no correspondence between symbol and reality. Kennedy, in a moment of unusual frankness, was reported to have said that the United States preferred liberal regimes in Latin America, but if they could not be maintained, it would much prefer a right-wing dictatorship to a leftist regime.

After Kennedy’s death, Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the Johnson Administration, told reporters that U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere was not about economic development or democratization, but fighting Communism and protecting U.S. economic interests.

In reality, the frankness about the motivations behind U.S. policy expressed by Kennedy after the Alliance speech and Thomas Mann after Kennedy’s death clearly showed that the bottom line in terms of U.S. policy remained support for international capital.

The Castros of this world, the Kennedy Administration believed (as has every administration since), had to be crushed at all costs. What remained significant over the next 60 years was that the Cuban revolution could not be defeated.

As the next essay in this series suggests, the Kennedy Administration, having failed to overthrow Cuban socialism at the Bay of Pigs, nor diminish its luster in the region through the economic bribery of the Alliance for Progress program, was willing to go to the brink of nuclear war, the Cuban Missile crisis, to combat socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

This essay is the second of three articles that address U.S./Cuban relations that culminated in a crisis over Cuba that almost led to nuclear war. These essays are adapted from my book, Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II, 1986.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical — and that’s also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Ted Cruz Vs. Personal Liberty

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Tea Party darling Ted Cruz. Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr.

Ted Cruz:
Opponent of personal liberty

Like many right-wingers, Cruz has a limited understanding of our First Amendment rights.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | October 9, 2012

Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, presents himself as a champion of personal liberty, but he is far from that. Based on what he writes on his own campaign website, Cruz is a proponent of restricting liberty in vast areas of our lives.

Cruz opposes the right of women to make their own medical decisions in consultation with their physicians. Like many other right-wingers, Cruz does not believe a woman should have control over her reproductive processes. He believes that the government knows best what a woman should do about unwanted pregnancies. To Cruz, a woman’s reproductive system is mainly the purview of the state. Apparently, this extends even to the decision to use birth control.

Cruz’s views on religious liberty revolve entirely around the right of the government to promote religious practices associated with Abrahamic monotheism, though his views on Islam, one of the Abrahamic religions (along with Christianity and Judaism) are not clear. But he does support the government’s promotion of the Abrahamic God to the exclusion of the religious beliefs of more than 65 million Americans, and about 5.5 million Texans.

 It is politically convenient to side with the majority on religious issues, even if that means that the majority’s religious beliefs are, with the help of the government, crammed down the throats of those who believe differently.

Cruz does not seem to see the nexus between the need for access to health care and liberty, but without health care the liberty one has is severely circumscribed. Not only does Cruz oppose access to health care for all, he opposes George W. Bush’s prescription drug benefit for seniors.

I admit that I have a vested interest in the drug benefit, since I receive Medicare benefits, including those for prescription drugs. Cruz would take from me the financial security that Medicare and all of its benefits provide. Without Medicare, my life would be more limited and its length undoubtedly shortened. The evidence shows that many, if not most, seniors are in the same situation I am in.

When Ted Cruz discusses voting, he apparently does not connect it to liberty. Instead, Cruz believes that voter fraud is a serious problem, though he is unable to find evidence for any significant voter fraud — just like everyone else who has studied the data. That hasn’t stopped him from supporting laws and regulations that make it difficult for seniors and low-income citizens to vote.

No one who claims to believe in democracy can justify regulations that suppress voting, but Cruz is in favor of taking away from thousands of Texans this seminal freedom, without which we will have little, if any, liberty. The voter suppression Cruz favors most seems to be voter ID laws that require a state-issued ID to register and vote. In Texas, 34 counties do not have a state office that issues photo IDs. Four of these counties have Hispanic populations over 75%. Cruz has not protected the liberty interests of these citizens.

In a 2007 report on voter fraud, the Brennan Center concluded: “The type of individual voter fraud supposedly targeted by recent legislative efforts — especially efforts to require certain forms of voter ID — simply does not exist.”

For five years during the George W. Bush presidency, the Justice Department conducted a “war on voter fraud,” which resulted in 86 convictions out of more than 196,000,000 votes cast. This result was not unexpected. It is absurd to believe that there is a systematic effort by large numbers of people to cast a vote as another person.

Such projects would be an enormous waste of time, yield few results, be easy to detect, and are adequately controlled by existing criminal laws with harsh penalties. But Ted Cruz cares so little about the liberty of all Texas citizens that he wants to keep them from voting with such voter suppression laws and regulations.

Cruz’s campaign website claims that he has played an important “role in the fight against infringement of private property rights,” including those arising from the use of eminent domain by government or allowed by government.

But where has Cruz been in the fight against the abuse of eminent domain allowed by Texas law for such companies as TransCanada, which is trying to take the land of Texas citizens to build a pipeline to transport tar sands oil to be refined at two Texas refineries and sold overseas to increase their profits? This pipeline will not lower any Texan’s gasoline bill or provide any long-term jobs that will benefit Texans, but Cruz has not stood up for the liberty interests of Texas landowners to protect and preserve their land.

For Cruz and many right-wingers, same-sex marriage is not seen as a matter of personal liberty. Cruz thinks he and the government have the right to tell citizens whom they can love and marry. In fact, he is proud to deny citizens the right to choose the mate of their choice unless that mate is someone of the opposite sex.

No liberty interest is more personal than the right to choose with whom to live, love, and marry, yet Cruz places his personal religious beliefs and preferences over the liberty interests of the entire gay population. To deny anyone such a basic liberty grounded in religious belief means that other liberties can be denied also for religious reasons. Cruz’s position is antithetical to the Constitution and basic morality — and personal liberty.

Like many right-wingers, Cruz has a limited understanding of our First Amendment rights. To his credit, Cruz opposes “groups that spout hatred and bigotry,” but to Cruz this means that such groups cannot participate in civic projects of benefit to all.

While I have opposed the Ku Klux Klan longer than Cruz has been alive, it violates the constitutional rights of association and free speech to deny that backward group the right to pick up litter along the highways as part of a government-sponsored program, which is an action that Cruz is proud to have pursued.

Cruz may think he supports the liberty interests of all of our citizens, but he is mistaken. He is an extreme right-wing ideologue, selected by the Republican Party of Texas, mainly through the efforts of Tea Party zealots and their rich friends, to go to Washington to destroy the social safety net that protects all our citizens from lives of misery and poverty.

He has spent his brief career in the service of corporations and the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the plutocracy that is very near to complete control of our political and economic systems.

Texans have risen up in the past to oppose injustice and fight for liberty. Electing politicians like Ted Cruz is a step in the wrong direction. It is the direction that will ensure that we will all have less liberty and more government control over our lives.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Composer, Musician & Beat Movement Pioneer David Amram

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

David Amram at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 28, 2012. Photos by Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Virtuoso composer, jazz musician &
Keroauc collaborator David Amram

By Thorne Webb Dreyer | The Rag Blog | October 5, 2012

David Amram, a virtuoso composer and musician who has been a trailblazer in the American arts scene for decades and was a pioneer of what became known as the Beat movement — and who was called “the Renaissance Man of American Music” by The Boston Globe — was in Austin for the September 29 Texas premiere of This Land is Our Land, his folk-inspired Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie.

The orchestral work, which was commissioned in 2007 by Guthrie’s daughter Nora and son Arlo through the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was performed by the Austin Civic Orchestra under the spirited direction of Lois Ferrari as part of the year-long, nationwide Woody Guthrie Centennial celebration.

Amram was also Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 28, from 2-3 p.m. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio show produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer radio station in Austin, Texas. On the show Amram discussed his storied career and performed live on several instruments.

You can listen to the show here.


David Amram’s symphonic composition, This Land is Our Land, was first performed in 2007 by the Symphony Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, and was performed on September 21, 2012, by the internationally renowned Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and recorded for later release as a Master Recording.

In his “Symphonic Variations,” Amram draws from what Guthrie might have experienced traveling around the country, tapping a range of musical genres including a Cherokee “Stomp Dance,” gospel music, a “Texas barn dance,” Mexican music rooted in Guthrie’s time as a farm worker, a “Dust Bowl Dirge,” and ethnic music Woody would have encountered while living in New York City, including Caribbean and Middle Eastern sounds and the rhythms of a jazz block party.

“And,” David told us, “in each variation you hear, snuck in there, the ‘This Land is Your Land’ melody in counterpoint to everything else.” “Creating the work,” he said, “was almost like building a boat inside a bottle.”

Amram first met Woody Guthrie in 1956 and remembers that “he spent the whole day talking about politics, about traveling around the world as a merchant seaman, about Bach and Beethoven and Shakespeare, and country folks and Cajun music.”

“He was like an encyclopedia,” Amram said. “A wonderful, vital guy.”

David Amram, who will turn 82 in November, was a major figure in the early Beat movement. In December 1957 Amram participated with novelist Jack Kerouac in the historic first jazz-poetry reading at the Brata Art Gallery in New York City, which was, according to writer Paul A. Bergin, “the moment most chroniclers of the period regard as the birth of the Beat Generation.” (Amram said he didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Beat movement, “until I began to read about it.”)

In 1959 Amram collaborated with Kerouac on the landmark film, Pull My Daisy.

Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer with David Amram at KOOP-FM in Austin. Inset below: David Amram joined local activists and musicians at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Photos by Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog.

“I met Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in 1955 when I was playing at Café Bohemia with Charles Mingus,” Amram said on Rag Radio. “I was a 24-year-old hayseed studying classical composition at the Manhattan School of Music on the GI Bill… and Mingus chose me, by a miracle, to be in his band.”

Then, at a “BYOB party” at an artist’s studio in New York, “a young man came up with a red-and-black checkered shirt looking like a Canadian lumberjack, and said, ‘Play for me.’ I had my penny whistles and my French horn with me and so I began to play. Then I kept bumping into him, and finally he told me his name was Jack Kerouac.”

Kerouac “was a wonderful, friendly, warm person,” Amram says, and “was one of the first writers I met who really understood jazz.” Then, “On the Road comes out and in one night he became a world-famous figure.” He was shy, though, David said, and never dealt well with the celebrity that followed.

“Kerouac,” according to Amram, “was the engine that pulled the train.”

“Like Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers and so many others, he makes us see ourselves and treasure the place that we live, treasure the blessings of our own country, and realize that we live in a global culture, and we can all somehow join hands in some way.

“And it all starts out by digging yourself, and your own story.”

A virtuoso musician who was a pioneer on the jazz French horn — and also plays the piano and dozens of woodwind, percussion, and folkloric instruments — David Amram was part of the Charles Mingus Quartet in 1955 and has played with such luminaries as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk.

Over the years Amram has collaborated with artists ranging from Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, to Dustin Hoffman, Langston Hughes, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller. He is the author of three books — Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram; Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac; and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat — and is the subject of Lawrence Kraman’s new documentary feature film, David Amram: The First 80 Years.

David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works and two operas, and his film scores include Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate. In 1966, Leonard Bernstein chose Amram to be the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence. Also a pioneer in World Music and multi-culturalism, Amram has traveled all over the world as a musical goodwill ambassador for the State Department.

Amram, who has consistently merged various musical genres in his work — including popular and folk forms — remembers how the manager of the New York Philharmonic reacted to his approach: “‘How can you equate barroom entertainers with the treasures of European music?’ he asked. And I said, ‘it’s very simple. The commonality is that they both have purity of intent, and an exquisite choice of notes.’ I thought that would do it. And he looked at me like, ‘Man, what kind of psychotic, career death-wish moron has Leonard Bernstein chosen?'”

Amram, who has traveled to Austin since the ‘40s, told the Rag Radio audience that, in Texas, “the country players, the jazz, the folk players, the Western swing players, the symphony players, the opera singers… everybody who loved music or participated had a place in their heart for everyone else’s work, and everyone else’s expression.

“And it’s still that way in Austin today, all these years later…”

At the urging of singer-songwriter and historian Bobby Bridger, with whom he shared a passion for Native American music, Amram first attended the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1976, and has been back more than 30 times. He also has performed with Willie Nelson at his Farm Aid events.

David Amram said, “I’m still a work in progress as I approach 82.” Looking back over the decades, he says he tries to approach music “with an open heart and an open mind and to listen for the soulful, human, cultural qualities.”

“Even though I was living on a little farm during the depression, I had a sense that there was something out there, and that music was a gateway to traveling to those places and to look and listen. And it’s something that I’ve tried to do ever since — to learn how to pay attention.

“And once you do, you can see that there are things that are so beautiful that you’d like to share them.”

Pete Seeger’s Clearwater Foundation is honoring David Amram with the Power of Song Award on Friday, November 9, at Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space, in New York City. Lawrence Kraman’s film, David Amram: The First 80 Years, will have its world premiere, followed by a concert featuring Pete Seeger, Paquito D’Rivera, Peter Yarrow, Tom Paxton, and many more.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, 91.7-fM in Austin, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
TODAY, October 5, 2012: Author Tova Andrea Wang and Journalist Harvey Wasserman on Voter Suppression in America.
October 19, 2012: Singer-Songwriter Guy Forsyth.

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Roger Baker : ‘Class’ Used to Be a Dirty Word

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Class Warfare. Political cartoon by Steve Segelin / Charleston City Paper.

‘Class’ used to be a dirty word:
Elections point to new paradigm

The 2012 presidential race is shaping up as a new kind of political fight being fairly openly fought around the issue of class and inequality with racial overtones.

By Roger Baker | The Rag Blog | October 3, 2012

Not so long ago, during Barack Obama’s 2008 election for example, class was the “C” word; class was virtually a forbidden topic in American politics. During the Clinton era, politicians sidestepped the issue and got votes by appealing to the “middle class.” American voters were taught to think of themselves as members of a nearly classless society within a naturally prosperous nation.

During Obama’s first presidential election, his main response to the serious and growing economic crisis was to maintain the fiction that the interests of all economic classes, whether rich or poor, were identical. The 2008 presidential campaign, on the Democratic side, was all about hope.

The hope was that once the economy recovered, as it always did in the modern age, a new tide of economic recovery would lift all boats. This recovery would ease racial tension aimed at immigrants and the low income minority voters who made up much of the Democratic party base.

Especially under the post-9/11 period of corporate domination, the wealthy interests supporting the Republicans were benefiting from exploitative policies that resulted in extreme income inequity. This really amounted to class warfare, but to even raise the issue of inequality would bring immediate charges of inciting class warfare from Republicans.

Even as late as last year, frank discussion about economic injustice was deemed to be such a sensitive topic that Obama was afraid to discuss the issue of rampant and growing economic inequality. Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote at Politico that,

in May 2011, historian Robert Dallek finally asked Obama what the group [meeting in the White House’s Family Dining Room] could do to help him. Obama’s answer went right to a present-day concern: “What you could do for me is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality in our society without being accused of class warfare.”

In the 2008 election, Obama had been packaged and sold to voters as the wise and moderate choice. A reasonable African American, a non-partisan political mechanic willing to work with anyone to fix the economy.

He was elected as a man focused on helping a capitalist system, temporarily indisposed by financial excess, to recover. Fixing the economy would require everyone to pitch in and make some sacrifices to restore economic health to Wall Street, from whence benefits would trickle down for the common good.

How fast our politics can change. The 2012 election is now shaping up to be much more about anger and political polarization than hope. This election is now akin to choosing between two armies defined by class interests. Both parties are actively engaged in partisan warfare on the battlefield of congressional politics.

This legislative branch of federal government is essentially gridlocked and dysfunctional on basic issues of policy. Despite his willingness to compromise on virtually everything, Obama is being portrayed as a socialist intent on inciting class warfare.

Jason L. Riley wrote at The Wall Street Journal that,

After securing victory in all five Republican presidential primary contests last night, Mitt Romney told an audience in New Hampshire that President Obama is resorting to class warfare because he can’t run on his record.

During the Republican primaries, each candidate had tried to outdo the competition by appealing to the large numbers of voters identifying with an increasingly angry and extremist Tea Party faction that is united with corporate interests in unquestioned devotion to U.S. military power and global finance capital. Government regulation of private capital has become the new enemy.

The Republican party line is that with bold finance capitalists like Mitt Romney in charge, private capital can be freed from the crippling influence of government regulation, thus opening the way to a new era of jobs and prosperity. The Republican convention in Tampa was pretty much dominated by angry white high income party activists ready for a political war against liberals and their fellow travelers.

Many had assumed that with Romney safely positioned as the Republican party nominee, he would tone down his extreme right-wing positions and become more like the moderately centrist governor of Massachusetts he used to be. However, his choice of a leading anti-government ideologue, Rep. Paul Ryan, pretty much blew that theory. Romney has chosen to run as an extreme right wing, selectively anti-government candidate.

Tim Dickinson wrote in Rolling Stone :

The GOP legislation awaiting Romney’s signature isn’t simply a return to the era of George W. Bush. From abortion rights and gun laws to tax giveaways and energy policy, it’s far worse. Measures that have already sailed through the Republican House would roll back clean-air protections, gut both Medicare and Medicaid, lavish trillions in tax cuts on billionaires while raising taxes on the poor, and slash everything from college aid to veteran benefits.

In fact, the tenets of Ryan Republicanism are so extreme that they even offend the pioneers of trickle-down economics. “Ryan takes out the ax and goes after programs for the poor – which is the last thing you ought to cut,” says David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan’s budget director. “It’s ideology run amok.”

Why class conflict is back in style

With the help of the unlimited corporate cash made possible by the Citizens United ruling, it seemed possible until a few months ago for the Republicans to essentially buy the election. It is now beginning to look as if the Republicans have gone so far to the right, and so fast, that they have generated a backlash of fear that the polls indicate is likely to cost Romney and his corporate allies the presidential election. The Republicans now seem to be in panic mode, willing to use any means to try to hang onto power.

In the midst of this period of intense political polarization, Obama can’t expect to run again as a centrist, offering not much more than scaled back hopes and still expect to win. Since Obama’s election four years ago, the optimism of his core supporters has greatly faded. The public has watched Obama bail out the banks with their tax money without seeing much in return. Under the Obama administration, the rich have been getting richer fast, while most U.S. incomes have declined in real terms.

The 2010 movie Inside Job revealed the truth about institutionalized exploitation of the general public by the biggest banks and their allies. Wall Street bankers were revealed as gamblers promoting risky deals, confident that their bad bets would be covered by either the Federal Reserve or U.S. taxpayers. The public saw scandalous exploitation of the middle class by the unchecked power of concentrated wealth. Yet nobody went to jail.

The economic crisis was actually global, leading to a global upsurge of riots and protests. In early 2011, the Arab Spring, with economic roots, shook the established political order of the Mideast. In September of 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to come suddenly out of nowhere, a great wave of publicly expressed political outrage against gross inequality and rapacious class oppression by those the Occupiers termed “the 1%.”

The Wall Street Occupation captured headlines and stayed in the U.S. news for months, as government officials worked behind the scenes to stem a nationwide surge in regional occupations modeled after the original Zucotti Park Occupation in Manhattan.

The new middle class divide

The Occupy movement has portrayed the current situation as a battle between the oppressed masses and their ruling oppressors; a struggle between the few and the many. This picture presented by the Occupy movement, of the 1% exploiting the other 99%, is true in its way, but still too simple to explain the political dynamics behind this election.

The 1% formulation leaves out the economic forces that drive the Tea Party support and their less energetic sympathizers who also vote out of the political equation. As David Goldman points out in his “Spengler” column at Asia Times, the once monolithic American middle class is now internally divided into roughly equal groups, each with their own distinctly different economic interests and political perspectives.

The great split down the center of American society is not between the rich and the middle class, as the Obama campaign suggests, but within the middle class itself. This helps explain why Paul Ryan was a smart choice for the second spot on the Republican ticket. There are still more people paying taxes than getting a check from the government, and their patience with tax creep is exhausted. The home price collapse wiped out nearly half the median family’s wealth during 2007-2010, but the tax burden middle-class homeowners continued to rise…

Now the baby boomers are entering their 60s after losing nearly half their wealth, in the least business-friendly environment the country has had since the 1970s. Rising taxes at the state and local level, and unprecedented deficits at the federal level, worry the middle class, with good reason.

Americans are concerned about the lack of opportunity, but they are even more concerned about the risk that they may lose what little they have left. It’s not enough to promote entrepreneurship, as Romney does so enthusiastically. It’s also important to talk about deficits. That is the thrust of the Tea Party, a classic middle-class creditors’ party responding to the well-justified fear of higher taxes and inflation.

With this situation in mind, it gets a lot easier to make sense of the 2012 presidential election as a political contest between two emerging sectors of an implausibly large middle class, each with different perceptions and class interests.

The upper income sectors of the middle class tend to vote Republican, trying to protect their modest savings from federal taxation that would benefit the poor. They fear a loss of their savings that would be squandered on social programs to benefit the poor, those who don’t pay federal taxes, and who tend to vote Democrat.

The top 1% already have most of the wealth and all the political power they can buy, but they lack the numbers needed to win an election. This being the case, the natural course is for the 1% of Republicans to ally themselves with the upper income sector of the middle class, who vote Republican based on their hopes, fears, and class interests.

The video secretly made of Romney speaking to his wealthy contributors revealed a man who views the election in just this way. In order to win the election, Romney needs to pit the interests of the affluent 50% of middle class taxpayers, focused on their own wealth preservation, and get their support in opposition to those who depend on a multitude of federal benefits like pensions, social security, food stamps, and what remains of the social safety net.

The Republicans are united in opposition to nearly all government taxation in theory (excepting foreign domination and bank control perpetuation costs). This outlook is rooted in the Tea Party source of political support, since their anti-tax position requires the broad support of voters to win elections. Realistically the Tea Party is motivated by trying to minimize the tax burden placed on the “have a little and desperate to save what’s left” sector of the middle class, which is increasingly fearful of sinking toward poverty through taxation.

In this regard, the Tea Party sector is in a strategic alliance that overlaps with the prevailing desires of the 1%; the very wealthy who oppose nearly any changes to the status quo, which would be likely to cost them very much to implement. All this based on a predictable preference for the very rich to employ as little of their own money to stay as rich as possible, and for as long as possible.” According to The Huffington Post,

Voters remain overwhelmingly pessimistic about a still sluggish economy, yet appear poised to reelect President Barack Obama because of perceptions that he understands their lives better than Republican nominee Mitt Romney and would do more to favor the middle class rather than the very wealthy.

The nightmare scenario for the 1% and their Republican allies is that the currently repressed but still deeply held sentiments visibly expressed by the Occupy movement remain, ready to be channeled and expressed as support for Obama over Romney, as is indicated in an October 1, Gallup Poll.

More Americans believe middle-income earners would be better off in four years if President Barack Obama is re-elected than if Mitt Romney wins, by 53% to 43%. The public also says lower-income Americans would be better off under an Obama presidency, while, by an even larger margin, they say upper-income Americans would do better under Romney.

In other words the polls suggest that the public is really viewing this election in terms of their class interests. They suggest that a populist pendulum of political awareness may be swinging to the left, perhaps even picking up speed as it goes. Obama’s previous hope is now being replaced by fear of Romney’s rapacious greed-junkie reputation.

The context is that many American families are barely surviving now. Members of the Democratic Party base are pinning their diminished hope on the promises of a somewhat more combative and re-imaged Obama. If Obama isn’t FDR, at least he isn’t Mitt Romney, who scorns them in private on the secret video.

As Saul Alinsky used to say, there are only two real sources of power — people power and money power. If Obama fails to satisfy even on the scaled back expectations of his popular base during his second term, things could head in the direction of Greece. Lacking a decisive edge in corporate money power, he has to depend on continuing political support from his popular base for his people power.

Obama told a meeting of bankers in 2009 that he is the only thing standing between them and the mobs with pitchforks. In the absence of mobs with pitchforks, and also without effective support from Congress, Obama lacks negotiating power:

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Barack Obama told the CEOs of the world’s most powerful financial institutions on March 27, when they cited competition for talent in an international market as justification for paying higher salaries to their employees.

Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room, the bankers struggled to make themselves clear to the president, but he wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He interrupted them by saying, “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”

The latent potential of left populism

The 2012 presidential race is in this way shaping up as a new kind of political fight being fairly openly fought around the issue of class and inequality with racial overtones.

Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, describes the current reality of class in the USA as follows:

…in America today we have the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth and… the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider. Today, the top 1 percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent of Americans. In 2010, 93 percent of all new income went to just the top 1 percent. In terms of wealth, the top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the wealth in America while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent…

Most Democrats and Republicans are far too dependent on corporate money to talk as candidly as Sanders does. However, if Sanders and other independent progressive voices like him keep talking about class and civil rights in an honest way, people are likely to start listening to them more than Obama.

In proportion to the attention people pay to Bernie and other truthful populists, it is going to get increasingly harder for those like the Koch Brothers to maintain the control of the 1%. It is a lot easier when people are ignorant and there are only “lesser evil” choices.

Put in political context, this election outcome is of huge importance. Not because of what Obama can or will accomplish, but because of what the public desperately hopes and expects that he can get done — as a sign of a revival of American class consciousness.

It is important because of what is likely to happen in consequence if the public’s scaled-back expectations are not satisfied. This election is in an important way a de facto political referendum on the populist goal of preserving what remains of a social safety net dating back to the great depression.

Obama must depend on retaining wide support to deliver on expectations. His claim that he is the only thing standing between them and the “mobs with pitchforks” needs credibility. Lacking a threat of mobs with pitchforks that he can successfully restrain, plead for, and then help in some modest way, Obama lacks both political power and purpose.

The public will expect Obama to bring some relief as their benefit for electing him. If elections can’t bring change, then the public support for government plummets, meaning the 1% will increasingly have to resort to naked power to maintain class control.

This is not easy to do in a nation that can see more clearly than ever that class does indeed make a difference, and that they will probably be better off listening to Senator Bernie Sanders than to President Barack Obama.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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Carl Davidson : ‘Lazy’ People and Voting Rights

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Adam Zyglis / The Buffalo News / The Cagle Post.

‘Lazy’ people, voting rights, and
Republicans caught with their pants down

As the saying goes, most people work for their money, but a few people are able to let their money work for them

By Carl Davidson | The Rag Blog | October 3, 2012

Sometimes Republicans just can’t help themselves. Put a little heat on them, and they blurt out the truth, showing what they’re really thinking.

The latest case in point: The retrograde Pennsylvania “Voter ID” law was rejected on October 2, at least in part, by a state judge, Robert Simpson, allowing people to vote normally at least on this November 6. The decision was a victory for labor, the NAACP, retiree groups, and all who care about defending civil rights and liberties.

The main author of the bill, State Rep Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler), however, chimed in with this comment:

Justice Simpson’s final decision is out of bounds with the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances for the individual branches of state government, and most importantly, the will of the people. Rather than making a ruling based on the constitution and the law, this judicial activist decision is skewed in favor of the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic to meet the commonsense requirements to obtain an acceptable photo ID.

Yes, you heard that right. This guy thinks those objecting to this bill are “the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic.” And all of us here in Western Pennsylvania not fresh out of the pumpkin patch know exactly who he thinks he’s talking about.

When Gov. Romney went over the top in a recent closed session with his upper crust friends talking about a 47% of the population who wouldn’t “take responsibility” for their lives, I thought things had pretty much hit bottom in the racist dog whistle department. Little did I know!

Metcalfe has done us all a favor in self-exposing the racist mindset behind this GOP voter suppression effort, and revealing exactly why they thought that, if implemented, it could tip the state to Romney. Now they’ve been monkey-wrenched, at least for the time being.

But here’s an interesting thought. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, even though I’ve studied it some. But, where in the Constitution, or in our state voting laws, does it suggest that lazy people or people with a hampered work ethic don’t have the same right to vote as energetic workaholics?

The wealthy had best be careful here. As the saying goes, most people work for their money, but a few people are able to let their money work for them. They can laze about, enjoying the good life of the idle rich. There’s a slippery slope here they may want to avoid for the future.

[Carl Davidson, a longtime activist and author, is a member of Steelworker Associates. He lives in Western Pennsylvania and writes for BeaverCountyBlue.org, the website of the 12th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and blogs at Keep on Keepin’ On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

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Alan Waldman : ‘Intelligence’ Is a TV Treasure You May Have Missed

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

The late and lamented Canadian television series, Intelligence. Screen grab from NetFlix.

Waldman’s film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

The late and much-lamented Canadian television series, Intelligence.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | October 3, 2012

[In this weekly column I want to talk about some of the best films and TV series I have enjoyed (and that you might have missed). Most of them are available on DVD and/or Netflix. I will include superior TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Scotland, and Ireland.]

Intelligence is a wonderful multiple-award-winning Canadian organized- and corporate-crime series, which was suspiciously cancelled after two brilliant seasons (2006-2007) on The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

It has also aired in 55 other countries (including Sweden, Malaysia, Yemen, and Belarus) on the Hallmark Channel and in the U.S. in syndication. The pilot screened on CBC on November 28, 2005, and the 24th brilliant episode aired there on December 10, 2007.

Mary Spalding (excellently played by Klea Scott), director of Organized Crime Unit, and Jimmy Reardon (wonderfully realized by Ian Tracey) who heads a major Vancouver organized crime family (specializing in drugs and expanding into large-scale money laundering via Caribbean banks) secretly provide valuable intelligence to each other.

The cast includes Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) as a scheming OCU assistant and the astonishing Pascale Hutton (who won a Canadian Gemini award for this role) as a Russian prostitute who spies on the head of a sleazy U.S. corporation which turns out to be a CIA front.

The cancellation of this compelling, astute dramatic series is widely rumored to be due to pressure on the CBC from the CIA — which found plot elements to be uncomfortably close to the truth.

Intelligence was nominated for 24 major Canadian awards, winning nine for best TV drama, actor (Tracey), direction, sound, actress (Camille Sullivan as Reardon’s nutsy and jealous wife), casting, guest actress (Hutton) and editing.

There were also acting noms for Scott and John Cassini and writing, directing, and producer noms for series creator and show runner Chris Haddock. Haddock created the fine-if-short-lived American series The Handler and two other outstanding Vancouver series I will be featuring in future columns: Da Vinci’s Inquest and Da Vinci’s City Hall.

Intelligence was so good that it absolutely blew my mind both times I watched it — first on TV and later on eight Netflix discs. It is highly intelligent; it is wonderfully and slyly plotted; the cast is great and the production values are very high. The extra features on the DVDs greatly enhance the experience.

I love smart, creative TV and film, and this is one of my very favorites. I believe that if you are bright enough to be reading The Rag Blog, you will greatly enjoy Chris Haddock’s Intelligence.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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