The Rag Blog

Marilyn Katz : We Built It — But Not Alone

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

…with a little help from our friends. Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images.
But not alone:
Yes, GOP, ‘We built it’

The Republican Convention’s theme implies — wrongly — that entrepreneurs don’t rely on public help.

By Marilyn Katz | The Rag Blog | September 4, 2012

[As the Democrats kick off their convention in Charlotte, Marilyn Katz addresses a major theme of last week’s Republican gathering in Tampa.]

Campaign rhetoric is to be expected, but let’s not let it cloud our minds. The partnership of American business and government has been a good one, in which personal ingenuity is allowed full realization by public investment in education, roads, bridges, research, and technology.

Listening to the RNC rhetoric, I thought: I could be the poster child for the “We Built It” theme. Without inherited wealth, without financial banking, I founded a small business in 1984 on my wits alone that I have run continuously and successfully for the past 28 years.

The Republicans appear to think so, too, as they call me at least once a month asking for money and spouting some screed about Obama’s secret Muslim plot.

However, like Chris Christie’s, my momma always told me to face the truth, and the truth is that I — like everyone else in this country — am not the sole author of my accomplishments.

My business depends on my reading, writing, and thinking skills, all of which I gained in public schools — schools fought for by our forefathers and mothers to ensure an informed electorate that could counter the sway and privilege of inherited wealth. It’s true that my parents paid for my education at private colleges, but my brother was — and I could have been — educated at one of the many public state and land universities that, for most of the 20th century, ensured that America was one of the most educated nations in the world.

My initial and current employees were also educated not at my expense, but by the public. Most attended public schools throughout their educational lives, from kindergarten through college, and many relied on publicly financed loans to afford further higher education.

I set up shop relying on the publicly-financed and -constructed U.S. mail system and telephone grid to communicate with clients. And when my business was revolutionized by computers and then by the Internet, it was the government investment in military and intelligence research to which I owed my gratitude. My business benefits from the public roads and bridges on which I drive. I rely on the publicly financed Federal Aviation Administration to ensure that the planes on which I fly, fly safely. I have never taken any of this for granted.

When I was in college, it was often implied that inhabitants of the “third world” (i.e. Latin America, the Middle East, Africa) lacked the drive of Europeans or Americans. I’ve lived in Latin America and visited many other regions of the Global South, and in none did I witness innovation and social mobility being stymied by a lack of creativity or drive; rather economies and people were impeded by the lack of infrastructure and education.

It is the public infrastructure that supports entrepreneurship, that supports social mobility, that drew our forefathers here from foreign lands (and yes, that is true of all of us except Native Americans), and that continues to draw the most entrepreneurial folks — documented or undocumented — from across the world today.

Ann and Mitt Romney’s grandparents, too, started businesses and hired workers they didn’t have to educate and used roads they didn’t have to build. Chris Christie’s mom too rode buses financed by the public to ensure worker transportation to and from businesses, that themselves benefited from the public transit and the roads.

Campaign rhetoric is to be expected, but let’s not let it cloud our minds. The partnership of American business and government has been a good one, in which personal ingenuity is allowed full realization by public investment in education, roads, bridges, research, and technology. Our tax dollars for education, for health care, for infrastructure, are not charity or extortion; they are the foundation of our collective wealth.

Yes, “We Built It.” But the “we” in this case is not just we entrepreneurs, but the “We” who together constitute these United States.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. This article was also published at In These Times. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged 2012 Elections, Entrepreneurs, Infrastructure, Marilyn Katz, Public Sector, Republican Convention | Leave a comment

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Richard Seymour’s ‘American Insurgents’

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Opposing the eagle’s talons

“And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” — Mark Twain

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | September 4, 2012

[American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, by Richard Seymour (2012: Haymarket Books); Paperback; 230 pp.; $17.]

When my book The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground was published in 1997, at least one of its critics challenged my use of the terms imperialism and its opposite, anti-imperialism. These terms, he wrote, were specific to a time and no longer relevant.

My response was simple. These words would be irrelevant only when there were no more imperialist nations. Fifteen years and two wars and occupations later, these words are part of the general discourse and the concept of imperialism is considered by those who champion it and those who oppose it.

A book titled American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, by Richard Seymour, is a recent and important addition to this discourse. Seymour, who also wrote The Liberal Defence of Murder wherein he discusses the currently popular humanitarian rationale for imperial intervention, provides the reader of American Insurgents with a historical survey of the antiwar and anti-imperialist efforts throughout U.S. history.

Within this discussion, Seymour includes religious and feminist opposition; leftist and conservative; and various coalitions of all of the aforementioned manifestations.

From the beginning of the book, it becomes clear how fundamental racism is to the U.S. mission of Empire. If it weren’t for the historical fact of African slavery in the U.S. this would not be a cause for special consideration, since most European empires utilize racism and racial superiority as reasoning for their empires.

However, the special history of men and women of African descent in the United States makes the fact of racism in the U.S. pursuit of empire especially heinous and unusual. In addition, the internalized racism of most U.S. whites, even in the anti-imperialist movement, often made alliances across the color line difficult. Consequently, this limited the effectiveness of these movements.

According to Seymour, it wasn’t until the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam that white and black Americans worked together in a substantial way to oppose the U.S. Empire. Even though the links between the racism of slavery and U.S. Empire had been made earlier, it was not until the anti-Vietnam war movement acknowledged and learned from the civil rights and black liberation movements in the United States that the union of black and white made a difference.

While Seymour does discuss the libertarian and paleoconservative elements of the anti-imperialist movement in the U.S. — even praising the role those elements have played in the past 20 years with the website Antiwar.com and other endeavors — he focuses primarily on the left and pacifist elements. Given the predominance of groups with these sentiments in the movement throughout history, this makes sense. Although a longer discussion of the conservative side of the movement would have been useful, its absence does not detract from the book.

Addressing a discussion very familiar among those to the left of anybody in the Democratic Party, Seymour provides an ultimately tragic history of the role Democrats have played in diverting and destroying anti-imperialist sentiment.

It was during the Spanish-American War that the future Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would oppose that adventure and align with the Anti-Imperialist League most famous for the membership of Mark Twain, John Dewey, Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie. In 1900, the League would hitch its star to Bryan’s candidacy. He lost to the empire-builder McKinley, rendering the League essentially moot.

A remarkably similar situation exists today, except that the candidate of the liberals in the Iraq and Afghanistan antiwar movement won the election. Of course, I mean Barack Obama. As Seymour points out (and as most everyone knows), the war in Afghanistan saw an escalation soon after Obama’s inauguration and the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. continues, albeit with considerably less bloodshed.

Efforts to build a movement against a possible war on Iran have failed to excite everyone but the most dedicated pacifists and anti-imperialists, while U.S./NATO military and intelligence operations against the regimes of Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria have even been tacitly supported by some in the antiwar movement.

It is my belief that a good part of the reason for the disintegration of the movement against the war in Iraq has to do with that movement’s politics. Seymour agrees, pointing out that the millions willing to hit the streets to oppose the war when George Bush was president have not even called their Congressperson now that a Democrat is in the White House.

The presence of Democratic Party allies on the coordinating committee of the largest antiwar network combined with the acquiescence of former Communist Party members to the Democrats’ agenda ensured this disintegration. There was never a genuine anti-imperialist politics that guided the majority of the movement. That fact explains not only the belated opposition to the Afghanistan occupation but also the seeming refusal to address the belligerent role played by Israel in the wars against Muslim and Arab nations and peoples.

Any future antiwar movement must keep the Democratic Party at an arm’s length. Organizing amongst those who vote Democrat makes sense. Taking money and leadership from donors and operatives dedicated to the party’s domination of left-leaning politics doesn’t. In fact, as Seymour makes clear in his history of U.S. anti-imperialist movements, doing so is suicide for the movement in question. The Democrats cannot be anti-imperialist because they are essential to the very empire anti-imperialists oppose.

In the weeks and months ahead, as the nations of the Middle East remain in turmoil and Washington, Tel Aviv, and various European capitals debate how they want to control the region, the need for an anti-imperialist movement will grow. If we are to avoid making mistakes already made in the past, American Insurgents becomes essential reading.

[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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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged American History, Anti-Imperialism, Books, Democratic Party, Liberalism, Peace Movement, Ron Jacobs, U.S. Foreign Policy | Leave a comment

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

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Ted McLaughlin : The Never-Ending Fight Against the Plutocrats

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Sample plutocrat: William Henry Vanderbilt (1821 – 1885). Famous quote: “The public be damned.” From Famous Person Caricatures / TradeCard.com. Inset image below: Modern day robber baron David Koch. Caricature by DonkeyHotey.
The never-ending fight against the plutocrats

“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” — Thomas Jefferson

By Ted McLaughlin | The Rag Blog | September 4, 2012

The quote by Thomas Jefferson above is just as valid today as it was a couple of hundred years ago. When he said it, the choice was between being ruled by royalty and their appointees or a rule by the people. The Revolutionary War ended the rule by royalty, but it did not end all of America’s problems or firmly establish a lasting democracy in this country.

Jefferson knew that democracy was a never-ending fight, and that there would always be those wanting to seize power away from the people.

In the United States, those who have wanted to seize that power for their own benefit have mainly been the robber barons — and their preferred method of doing that has simply been to buy that power (although they have never shirked from using violence, mainly through their surrogates in the political establishment and the police).

By the early twentieth century, these robber barons had nearly succeeded in destroying democracy and establishing rule by themselves — a plutocracy.

The United States was saved from that effort at establishing a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy class) — but it took the greatest economic disaster of the twentieth century to wake up voters and spur them to seize their country back from the robber barons — the Great Depression.

The greed of the robber barons caused them to overreach, and that overreaching caused the most serious depression the country had ever seen. Voters replaced all (or most) of the politicians that had been bought by the robber barons with politicians that had the benefit of ordinary Americans as their primary interest.

These politicians (Roosevelt Democrats) began to reestablish economic justice through a variety of measures like government job creation, higher taxes on the rich, Social Security, and sensible regulations on banking and investment. The robber barons (and their Republican lackeys) whined that the measures would destroy America, but they only destroyed the plutocracy and reestablished democracy — and the country began to emerge from the plutocratic depression.

After World War II, the economy had fully recovered, and through new measures like the GI Bill and increased union power, the country prospered like never before. And this prosperity was further enhanced by the War on Poverty, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Civil Rights Acts. The country was well on its way to establishing a strong democracy with equal rights and economic justice for all citizens.

But the robber barons had not gone away — their names had simply changed. And they wanted back the power they had lost. But they were smarter this time. They knew they had to create a message that large numbers of voters could be fooled into accepting, so they couched their nefarious agenda into innocent sounding messages like patriotism (accusing those who opposed them as unpatriotic), spreading democracy (using American military power to steal the resources of other countries), law and order (misusing the law to attack those who disagreed with them), pro-life (an excuse to attack the rights of women), returning to traditional values (the new code for racism), and defending Christianity (using religion to achieve their political and economic goals).

But perhaps the most nefarious of these new political messages was trickle-down economics. Through a concerted propaganda campaign, they convinced many people that the way to economic prosperity was to deregulate corporations and the financial industry, and cut taxes on the rich.

The idea was that by feeding ever larger amounts of money to the rich and the corporations, much of that money would trickle back down to ordinary American in the form of rising wages and new job creation. The truth is that it was simply a return to the economics of pre-Depression era America — and it didn’t work back then and doesn’t work today.

The rising wealth of the corporations and the rich didn’t raise wages for anyone but the rich — who have seen their income rise by over 270% since the trickle-down economic theory was put into effect under Reagan, while the wages of ordinary workers have remained stagnant (and in fact, have actually lost much of their buying power).

Instead of raising wages or creating jobs, the rich just fattened their own bank accounts. And this had the same effect it did in the early twentieth century — it threw the country into a serious recession (depression?) and threw millions of Americans out of work (which was exacerbated by corporate outsourcing, which continues unabated).

Now we stand at the same place our forebears did in the Great Depression — on the edge of greater economic disaster and plutocratic rule. Will we reestablish economic justice and democratic rule, or will we give in to the robber barons this time? The answer is anything but certain.

Many Americans still buy the lie of trickle-down economic theory, or have fallen for the diversions created to fool them into voting against their own economic (and democratic) interests — like defending religion (against a non-existent war), pro-life (for the fetus only), patriotism (putting a pink sticker on a vehicle and continuing wars that can’t be won), low taxes (but only for the rich), and traditional values (opposition to rights for anyone but white men).

Will Americans vote for democracy and economic justice, or will they cement the power of the robber barons? We’ll find out in November.

[Ted McLaughlin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged American History, Corporate Power, Economic Justice, Economics, Plutocracy, Ted McLaughlin, Trickle-Down | Leave a comment

Muriel Kane : Austin Police Infiltrated Occupy Austin

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Front page of Austin American-Statesman, Saturday, September 1, 2012. Image from Occupy Austin / Facebook.

UPDATE: The Houston Chronicle reported on Sept. 5 that, according to Austin Assistant Police Chief David Carter, “High-ranking officials in the Austin Police Department had no knowledge that undercover Austin officers provided protesters with devices before an Occupy Houston event that led to seven demonstrators being charged with felonies,” and that he and Police Chief Art Acevedo “first learned of the lockbox accusations when the case went to trial.”

The Chronicle reported that District Judge Joan Campbell criticized Harris County prosecutors for not disclosing that the lockboxes were made by undercover Austin police, and also reported that defendant Ronnie Garza, who is seeking to have the charges dropped, “stood with about a dozen other protesters outside Austin police headquarters Wednesday to denounce the undercover officers’ actions.”

May have acted as provocateurs:
Police admit to infiltrating Occupy Austin

Attorney Greg Gladden of the National Lawyers Guild has accused the police of entrapment and possible misconduct.

By Muriel Kane / The Raw Story / September 3, 2012

When the local offshoot of Occupy Wall Street began a five-month encampment in Austin, Texas, last fall, the Austin police assigned at least three undercover officers to infiltrate the group and gather information on potentially illegal actions.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, court documents and interviews show that the infiltrators “camped with other participants in the movement, marched in rallies and attended strategy meetings.”

They may also have gone further, acting as provocateurs to encourage the use of lockboxes or “sleeping dragons” — lengths of PVC pipe into which protestors insert their arms to make it harder for police to remove them during a demonstration.

Seven protestors who used the devices while blocking a port entrance in Houston last December 12, have been charged with a felony and face jail terms of from two to 10 years under what the Statesman calls “an obscure statute that prohibits using a device that is manufactured or adapted for the purpose of participating in a crime.”

That’s “Butch” in the beard. Image from Occupy Austin / Facebook.
The question of the lockboxes came up during a district court hearing in Harris County last week at which one of those seven, Ronnie Garza, sought to have the charge against him dropped. It was disclosed at the hearing that Austin Police Detective Shannon Dowell — known to Occupiers as “Butch” — had purchased the necessary pipe and other materials using funds supplied by Occupy Austin, constructed the devices himself, and provided them to demonstrators.

According to Occupy Austin supporter Kit OConnell, the occupiers figured out “Butch’s” true identity after their encampment was evicted last winter. Affidavits from Occupy Austin members have pointed to Dowell as the person who pushed for the use of the lockboxes and allege that he would regularly pull participants aside “in order to express his frustration with debate and eagerness for more aggressive and provocative actions.”

Garza’s attorney, Greg Gladden of the National Lawyers Guild, has accused the police of entrapment and possible misconduct. Judge Joan Campbell, who had initially dismissed the case until prosecutors obtained indictments from a grand jury, says she will decide this week whether to allow the proceeding to go forward.

At the hearing, Dowell told the judge that he could not produce subpoenaed documents because emails he had sent about the operation from his work computer had been deleted and he had lost a thumb drive containing photos when it dropped out of his pocket and fell in the gutter.

Arrest during Oct. 29-30, 2011, raid on Occupy Austin by Austin police. Photo by Ann Harkness / Flickr .
The Statesman reports that Judge Campbell expressed frustration with Dowell, while Garza’s attorney remarked, “I think he decided it was time the dog ate his homework.”

Judge Campbell has threatened to dismiss the case unless the required documents and the real names of the two other undercover officers, “Dirk” and “Rick,” are presented at the next hearing on September 5.

Police officials declined to comment on the question of if it was Dowell who first proposed using the lockboxes, but they did confirm that their department had ordered the infiltration.

Austin Assistant Police Chief Sean Mannix said that his department had begun receiving reports from confidential informants that the occupiers might be planning illegal protests. “We obviously had an interest in ensuring people didn’t step it up to criminal activity,” he said. “There is obviously a vested public interest to make sure that we didn’t allow civil unrest, violent actions to occur.”

Mannix does not believe any laws or departmental policies were violated, but he confirmed that the infiltration effort is the subject of a high-level internal review which is “absolutely looking into all aspects of what their undercover work was.”

[Muriel Kane is an editor at The Raw Story, where this article was originally published.]

Read the full transcript of the August 27, 2012, pretrial hearing in the 248th Harris County Judicial Court.

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Austin Police, Espionage, Muriel Kane, Occupy Austin, Occupy Movement, Police Tactics, Provocateurs, Raw Story | 1 Comment

Tom Hayden : Save Democracy While We Can

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from OB Rag.
Stop the hemorrhaging:
Save democracy while we can

Democracy movements must try to stop the stolen elections now, and delegitimize any mandates claimed from them in the future.

By Tom Hayden | The Rag Blog | September 3, 2012

Only you and I can save democracy this time and for times to come. If we all play our part now, Obama and his popular majority will win. If not, we need to be clear and fortified for big confrontations ahead.

Let’s look at where democracy movements must intervene to stop the hemorrhaging before a final collapse. Democracy movements must try to stop the stolen elections now, and delegitimize any mandates claimed from them in the future.

1. Let the people decide: Stop voter suppression. Among “registered but unlikely” voters, Obama leads Romney 43%-20%, and in favorability by 55%-25% [New York Times, Aug. 18]. Examples: a Pennsylvania Republican leader bragged in June about a voter ID law “which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done!” The Republican governor blocks plans in that state allowing voters to apply for absentee ballots or to register online.

The naked Republican strategy is to make it as hard as possible for people of color, student, and the elderly to vote. Thanks to the civil rights movement, the 1965 Voting Rights Act provides tools to fight to maximize voter turnout. Local activists should be attacking their governors, legislators, and registrars for erecting unconstitutional barriers to voting, and for their refusal to permit early voting or provide enough accessible ballot boxes and election observers.

Civil rights lawyers should mobilize to monitor and protest wherever the machines break down and the lines become too long in freezing weather. Ballot boxes should be installed on campuses.

2. Stop secret corporate money. Buckley v. Valeo [1976] and Citizens United [2010] have opened the sewage gates to secret money’s power to pollute the democratic process. In the next two months, all people can do is make righteous noise against these pernicious threats and force their disclosure in the media on an everyday basis.

Besides attacking Sheldon Adelson [war against Iran] and the Koch brothers [big oil], the movement must make the case that this flow of private funds is creating a legitimacy crisis for democracy. This same worry apparently led Chief Justice John Roberts to narrowly approve Obamacare [but not Medicaid] while delegating its ultimate fate to the voters this November. President Obama has endorsed a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United, a good basis for a long-term organizing strategy.

But what is really needed is a new generation of law students who aspire to be the Thurgood Marshalls of campaign finance reform, attacking Buckley v. Valeo as a perverted violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments [money is not an unfettered instrumentality of speech]. Currently the weakest link in the Supreme Court’s case is the secrecy afforded big donors until after the election. A militant demand for disclosure before the election will put the Court and the Republicans on the defensive.

There are other battlefronts in the fight for democracy, from greater transparency in the derivatives market, to disclosure of thousands of unregistered corporate lobbyists, to the need for a rewrite of the War Powers Act to rein in drones and secret wars. But the sharp point of the spear in the next two months are [1] the Republican plan to keep people from voting, and [2] the Republican plan to keep millions in campaign contributions secret until after the election.

These lines of attack are complements to the growing hubbub about unprecedented levels of deceit by the Romney-Ryan ticket. They and Karl Rove believe that enough secret money and voter suppression can prevail.

The theme song should be Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy is coming to the USA.”

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Read more of Tom Hayden’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Campaign Finance, Citizens United, Democracy, Tom Hayden, Voter Suppression | 1 Comment

Roger Baker : Converging Global Crises and Why We Deny Them / 2

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

An unraveling earth. Graphic from Sound of Cannons.
Converging global crises
and why we deny them / 2

If the total human impact on nature is approaching a natural limit, we face difficult choices.

By Roger Baker | The Rag Blog | August 30, 2012

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” — Kenneth Boulding

[Second in a series.]

One revealing way to understand the total human impact on the natural world is by examining the implications of this formula: I = P x A x T. The formula tells us that the total human environmental impact is proportional to the total population, times its average affluence, times the impact on the natural world of the prevailing technology.

Meanwhile, the science is telling us with increasing urgency that we are headed into dangerous territory by ignoring the total global human impact of growth itself.

If the total human impact on nature is approaching a natural limit, we face difficult choices. Voluntarily reducing population is very unpopular, except through immigration control. So is voluntarily reducing affluence, since almost everyone seeks to “improve” their own personal circumstances.

Only a decrease in the impact of our technology has much popular support. It would call for a transition away from, and a reduction of the impact associated with, a prevailing technology highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. The expectation is not very realistic, but it’s way more than good enough when judged by our current standards of political spin.

The ideology supportive to growth will fight the growing pressure of evidence to the contrary; it will strain to convince us that the growth of our impact on nature will somehow lead to the best result. When the natural limits to growth themselves become a barrier to economic expansion, the science that warns of natural limits will itself meet with widespread opposition and denial.

Given the weight of the evidence, it is clear that capitalism and its integral expansionist philosophy represent the prevailing outlook of our time. The same outlook is shared by many liberals and socialists who likewise promise to get at least the domestic sector of a globally struggling economy back on the “right track.”

An economic road map arguing for the best of a list of unhappy, but still achievable, choices might be a smarter goal. But bad news does not sell very well in competition with optimism, concerning the prospects for an eventual economic recovery. The best basis for hope is really quite achievable and is moving forward, it being the earliest possible cessation of our denial.

Now for a closer look at the details of five core crises we face and their interactions. They all have different time frames and dynamics so nobody can now see very well where they are leading us. Hopefully this will help serve as an introduction and inspire further study. Despite denial, there is a growing awareness that converging crises might well lead to rapid change and the need for advance preparation. This is helping to stimulate a rapidly growing transitional community movement in the USA.

1. The Political Denial Syndrome; buying public opinion

The last century of economic expansion, based on cheap fossil fuels, has been highly profitable to a small politically powerful elite, who have in recent decades become active in preserving a profitable status quo. Since the dawn of the industrial era, the accumulation of capital has been constant, based on advances in science and technology. An increasingly for-sale political system has helped to encourage the beneficiaries of this long expansion to mobilize political opposition to reform, using private media funds for persuasion.

The climate change denial lobby has become so politically influential that President Obama has been avoiding the topic. Obama had anticipated last spring that he would soon be obliged by political pressure to talk about global warming. That hasn’t happened. In an April 2012 Rolling Stone interview he had said, “I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.”

The deniers seek to delay a united government policy response, which would mean abandoning trillions of dollars worth of investments tied to a world built with cheap energy. Here Naomi Wolf discusses the past focus on global warming denial:

As the U.S. faces record drought and an Old Testament-level pestilential heatwave in the midwest, American environmental denialism may be starting to change. The question is: is it too late?

America has led the world in climate change denial, a phenomenon noted with amazement by Europeans, not to mention thinking people around the world. Year after year, the U.S. has failed to sign global treaties or curb emissions, even as our status as a source of a third of the world’s carbon emissions goes unchanged.

It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies. Entire think-tanks to obfuscate man-made climate change have been funded by these interests, as have individual congressmen and women.

A recent book documents the reach of the science denial lobby, showing how it extends well beyond climate change:

In their new book, Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explain how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

In seven compelling chapters addressing tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and DDT, Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how the ideology of free market fundamentalism, aided by a too-compliant media, has skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

Recently the science deniers have gone on the offensive. ClimateDepot has it all: peak oil denial, climate change denial, and denial of any limits to growth. Climate Depot is sponsored by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has teams of paid organizers, starting chapters at college campuses across the USA.

2. Population growth in the face of peak food per capita

The gradual increase in global population to a current global level of about seven billion has been, by its nature, exponential, with a big acceleration during the last several hundred years, based on cheap fossil fuel energy. Even a slow but exponential growth in population must reach a limit at some point, historically a limit marked by periodic famine.

High agricultural output is in various ways tied to the the cheap energy which is now running short. In the absence of other limits, and especially in the context of global warming, food production tends to be erratic and has now nearly reached the limits of arable land globally available. Since food, and grain in particular, is now widely traded as an international commodity, global shortages tend to be more manageable by means of the richer countries which are able to outbid the poorer countries.

We saw a 2008 global food price spike related to the oil price spike, which led to a global outbreak of food riots. Current food price indexes are again approaching the levels that caused earlier unrest. The result is that a combination of worse global warming and a high price for oil tends to be reflected in rising food cost, which expresses itself through food riots and political unrest which Michael Klare terms “hunger wars”.

The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions.

This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains. This, however, is just the beginning of the likely consequences: if history is any guide, rising food prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.

Currently, about 60% of the total corn crop in the USA is not consumed by humans at all, but is being used for legally-mandated but energy-inefficient ethanol production, and for animal feed. This diversion creates some slack in the system, since the corn could be used to feed humans.

Global warming tends to reduce food production, but in such an unpredictable way that it is still possible to deny climate change and to blame the worsening heat waves, droughts, and floods on bad luck. Notwithstanding, an increasing incidence of crop failures is leading to food shortages and higher food prices.

Meanwhile, the groundwater used for irrigation is running short globally.

3. Global warming and climate change

Climate change is seen as a gradually emerging crisis by its nature, but it has become more noticeable over the last several decades. Scientists have been warning us that the current global temperature increase of about .8 degrees centigrade is only about half of what we can expect once the delayed effects kick in, as Elizabeth Kolbert tells us in her New Yorker story.

Before many effects of today’s emissions are felt, it will be time for the Summer Olympics of 2048. (Scientists refer to this as the “commitment to warming.”) What is at stake is where things go from there. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we could, without even really trying, engineer the return of the sort of climate that hasn’t been seen on earth since the Eocene, some 50 million years ago.

Along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, the words “climate change” have barely been uttered… There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious.

The political impact of global warming is being driven by an increasing pattern of weather extremes that everyone can see for themselves as droughts and wildfires. There are power grid failures even in the rich countries like the USA. Climate change is experienced through political unrest in poorer areas due to higher food prices as Michael Klare has explained.

Already the effects of global warming have been enough to convince about 70% of the general public that climate change is real. However climate awareness has not yet become a strong political motivation issue compared to chronic unemployment.

Affluent supporters of a free market and the status quo can still manage to ignore climate change, aside from having to turn up their air conditioners and pay a bit more for food and fuel. After running short of the cheap oil that used to run our world, we have been turning to unconventional oil in an attempt to maintain a constant level of liquid fuel output to power the economy.

Producing unconventional oil and fracking to produce gas and the like really means using a lot more fossil fuel as the input required to produce the same barrel of liquid fuel. This is like running harder and harder to keep up, and ultimately makes global warming that much worse. In the USA, we have been straining to burn enough coal electricity to run air conditioners, whereas India has been straining to use its coal to pump enough irrigation water to maintain food production.

4. Peak oil and peaking power generation per capita

When inflexible global oil production meets an inflexible global market demand the economic result can be dramatic. An oil price spike has the capacity to cause a serious economic shock that can, in combination with weak credit regulation, cause the global economy to stall without a lot of advance warning.

We saw this in 2008. The resource reality behind peaking oil and its economic consequences were described in detail in a Jan. 26, 2012 article in Nature (Vol 481, p 433): “‘Oil’s tipping point has passed; The economic pain of a flattening supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels,’ say James Murray and David King.”

The scientists are being joined by economists saying much the same thing. Due to the pervasive role of fossil fuel energy in powering the global economy, there is a growing awareness that high oil prices can initiate recessions. The following from McClatchy offers one example:

For President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney, the race for the White House seems indisputably centered around one issue: Who can do more to bolster the sputtering U.S. economy. But to some experts, spikes in oil prices over the last several years have signaled an ominous turn that could make it nigh on impossible for any president to expand the economy as it has in the past.

Unlike previous oil price jumps stemming from turmoil affecting Middle East oil producers, prices surged over the last eight years because tightening supplies couldn’t keep pace with Third World demand, researchers have concluded. “The question is how much can we keep growing without a growing supply of energy?” said James Hamilton, a University of California-San Diego economics professor who has been on the leading edge of research into the impact of high energy costs.

The context of this crisis is that the cheap conventional oil production has already peaked in 2005. Since then, the broader category of global liquid fuel production in all forms has risen to a plateau hovering near a probable peak of about 90 million barrels per day. Whenever the economy recovers enough to demand more liquid fuel than this, the price spikes.

This rationing by price tends to send the economy back into recession. The fossil fuel peak thus tends to conceal itself by generating an economic recession that temporarily reduces demand. This tends to lead to bust and boom cycles that decrease in amplitude over time, finally tending toward stagflation and permanent recession.

This boom and bust interaction confuses the cause and effect relationship between oil and the economy in the eyes of the public. We have recently seen a spate of denial stories proclaiming that peak oil is a myth, and that higher prices can provide all the oil we need from alternative sources like tar sands, but this myth has been skillfully debunked.

We cannot; make a smooth transition from the past world built with cheap conventional oil to a new world trying to keep on growing as usual by using $100 a barrel non-conventional oil, such as the oil that the Canadian tar sands produce. This core economic problem was described in a recent James Howard Kunstler interview in Rolling Stone.

The bottom line is, once you are trying to replace a shortage of easy-to-get conventional oil with unconventional, expensive oil, you’re stuck in a trap. There is a paradox there: you really need a cheap oil economy to support an expensive oil economy.

Some are now claiming that our electric power production problems can be managed by “fracking” to provide natural gas that is cheaper to burn than coal. While there has recently been a glut of cheap natural gas, what is probably going on is that a fracking binge has led to gas supply overshooting demand within the areas served by the pipelines. Cheap fracking gas is a Ponzi scheme, according to industry experts.

If we look at the recent oil market, we see that global oil prices, after a dip in benchmark Brent prices in recent months, have been recovering fast to over $110 a barrel. That is probably about all that a very weak global economy can pay, without falling back into contraction.

Consider the following: If the U.S. economy is increasing its dependence on Saudi oil, as stated in a New York Times article by Clifford Krauss, but the Saudis are now pumping flat out, where does that leave the U.S. economy in its attempt to buy the additional oil that the economy would need to recover or to restructure? The same article has charts useful in understanding the basic trends.

The United States is increasing its dependence on oil from Saudi Arabia, raising its imports from the kingdom by more than 20 percent this year, even as fears of military conflict in the tinderbox Persian Gulf region grow… “This is strictly, totally business,” said Sadad Al Husseini, a former executive at Saudi Aramco, the state oil company. “Saudi production is flat out. Where you send it is a matter of where you make the best profit.”

5. An unpayable debt burden in the wake of unregulated credit extension

The natural world is finite, whereas the world of unregulated expansion of credit and debt is not. The dollar, as a fiat currency, is not backed up by anything other than public faith in its presumed future exchange value; the worth of our dollar is now based on little more than psychology and tradition. This fact alone offers a considerable potential for abuse.

Experience has demonstrated that — given the absence of laws to prevent such activity — loan sharks are inclined, by the nature of their business, to try to extend credit in such a way as to lead borrowers to assume perpetual debt. According to a similar principle there has been little oversight to prevent an unregulated system of finance capital from doing much the same thing, but on a much larger global scale.

Our prevailing global system of unregulated finance capital has thus offered a powerful motivation to expand the debt on the books of its component institutions like investment banks to the maximum, just so long as someone, somewhere, can be held legally responsible for paying it back. The global expansion of private debt, secured by credit default swaps and similar paper promises, has been encouraged by central banks like the U.S. Fed, which sets the interest rates.

Meanwhile, the public sector of the U.S. economy, the U.S. Treasury, must always print or tax enough money to balance its books, including paying back a huge overhang of accumulated federal debt. And, as we have seen, the world we have inherited was built with cheap oil. Both borrowers and lenders are trapped in a transition to a much less profitable world, which is becoming constantly more costly to maintain in good condition.

A cascading financial crisis, a sort of domino effect of called-in loans, is unpredictable by its nature, but in our time of instant global transactions, such a crisis can be very fast moving. The scale and speed of federal action to prop up the credit markets after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, associated with an oil price spike, was an indication of what can happen, and how quickly, in response to loss of trust in the various securities and agreements which are basic to the world of global finance.

The scale of global finance capital debt on the books of the global lenders is impossible to repay in terms of its anticipated buying power, as Europe is beginning to realize. U.S. federal debt now appears to be growing at about $5 trillion a year.

It has long been accepted that any attempt to call in a substantial part of bank loans would reveal that the money isn’t really there, especially on short notice. This has led to fractional reserve banking to prevent bank runs, and to maintain lender confidence.

To actually earn all the money loaned out would demand the extraction of profit by such extreme and counterproductive exploitation of the natural world that the emphasis has shifted toward concealing and postponing an ultimate global debt crisis. Domestically and globally the debt on the books of the central banks cannot be repaid, in current terms of its promised purchasing power.

The same banks that are too big to fail are too smart to try to call in their loans, or to make their true condition too obvious. The economic warnings are now becoming more common. Jim Rogers is one recent example of those spreading the alarm.

Richard Duncan is another. This is from Terry Weiss at Money Morning:

Richard Duncan, formerly of the World Bank and chief economist at Blackhorse Asset Mgmt., says America’s $16 trillion federal debt has escalated into a “death spiral,” as he told CNBC. And it could result in a depression so severe that he doesn’t “think our civilization could survive it.” And Duncan is not alone in warning that the U.S. economy may go into a “death spiral.” Since the recession, noted economists including Laurence Kotlikoff, a former member of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, have come to similar conclusions…

One member of this team, Chris Martenson, a pathologist and former VP of a Fortune 300 company, explains their findings: “We found an identical pattern in our debt, total credit market, and money supply that guarantees they’re going to fail. This pattern is nearly the same as in any pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially fast before it collapses. Governments around the globe are chiefly responsible.And what’s really disturbing about these findings is that the pattern isn’t limited to our economy. We found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, and water systems as well.”

According to Martenson: “These systems could all implode at the same time. Food, water, energy, money. Everything.” Another member of this team, Keith Fitz-Gerald, the president of The Fitz-Gerald Group, went on to explain their discoveries. “What this pattern represents is a dangerous countdown clock that’s quickly approaching zero. And when it does, the resulting chaos is going to crush Americans,” Fitz-Gerald says.

Here Chris Martenson, in part of his celebrated “Crash Course,” explains how the three big E’s; the economy, energy and the environment, are linked by an ultimately futile effort to maintain exponential growth in a finite world.

Things are not just unsustainable on the federal level. One recent pattern of federal policy has been to try to expand the defense industry budget at the federal level, while pushing the social welfare obligations down to the state level. The state budgets are now often in precarious shape, such that their condition has the potential to lead to a crisis starting at the state level.

Ravitch and Volcker also recommended that federal and state officials work together on Medicaid and health care costs. States, the report said, should carefully monitor the financial health of local governments and address infrastructure maintenance. Ravitch said state and federal leaders need to address the issues immediately. “It is getting worse every day,” Ravitch said. “We have to stop bullsh—ing.”

[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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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Climate Change, Debt Crisis, Global Crisis, Global Warming, Peak Food, Peak Oil, Population Growth, Roger Baker, World Economy | 5 Comments

Robert Jensen : Learning to Hate Longhorn Football

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Bevo goes to college. Photo by Mose Buchele for KUT News. Inset photo of Texas cheerleader by Donn Jones / AP.
Learning to hate Longhorn football

Dealing with UT’s jock-obsessed culture is easy — I critique it, without hesitation. Dealing with student athletes is more complicated.

By Robert Jensen | The Rag Blog | August 30, 2012

[The opener of the 2012 Longhorn football season is Saturday, September 1. In this essay UT-Austin journalism prof Bob Jensen reflects on the downside of the team that is so beloved in Austin and around the state.]

I have never much liked football. But after 20 years as a professor at the University of Texas, I have learned to hate football, and really hate Longhorn football.

I’ve also learned that some players hate the football machine as much as I do.

As a child, I liked running, jumping, and throwing a ball around; like most kids, I enjoyed the games that let us enjoy our bodies. But I developed a distinct distaste for organized sports, especially football, as I learned about the different kinds of damage that the sport could do.

I grew up short, skinny, and effeminate in a small Midwestern city in the 1960s and ‘70s, which meant I was unlikely to measure up to the norms that football players seemed to embody — the celebration of domination and aggression, conquest and control. Boys like me dreamed not of playing football but of avoiding being beaten up by football players. My younger brother, the only one in the family with any serious athletic talent, had it worse — he played football well and by junior high he was on his way to knee problems. The smartest thing he did was to walk away from the sport while he could still walk.

Today, I dislike almost everything about football — the senseless violence, the fans reveling in that violence, the pathological glorification of competition, the sexual objectification of female cheerleaders and dancers, the obscene amounts of money spent on the spectacle.

Yes, I know that for some young people football can be a great character-building and teamwork-enhancing experience. But weigh it all up, the positive and the destructive, and football is a loser.

I have some of the same complaints about other sports, too, but I have learned to hate football — from the junior leagues to the NFL, with a special disgust reserved for big-time college football.

This presents a particular challenge at UT, home of the storied Longhorn franchise. Like many faculty members, I don’t hesitate to criticize the university’s obsession with athletics or to ask students to reflect on what that obsession teaches us about the university’s priorities and values. Such critique is easy when the head football coach’s salary gets bumped to $5.2 million a year as the university struggles with budget cuts.

Dealing with UT’s jock-obsessed culture is easy — I critique it, without hesitation. Dealing with student athletes is more complicated. I don’t dislike jocks; like any other group of students, athletes run the gamut from smart to dull, from hard worker to slacker. When we interact in my office, roles and rules are clear — I act professionally and they are generally respectful. At a university where football players are demigods, the real accomplishment is to treat them like normal students, and I pride myself on doing that.

The complication comes in my desire to help them, given the limits imposed by the system. Not surprisingly, many of the athletes’ problems are the same as students working a job (or two, or three) — students who work full-time need extraordinary focus and great time-management skills to succeed in class. The athletes in the high-profile “revenue” sports are unpaid fulltime employees, but the fact that they aren’t paid doesn’t mean their coach-bosses cut them any slack.

For example, one student was routinely late and missed the quizzes at the beginning of my 8 a.m. class. When I noticed that the lost points left him with a failing grade, I asked him to come to my office and explain his tardiness. He was a football player, and required weight training in the morning was delaying him. Why hadn’t he asked the coaches to let him leave early? He said that he had asked, but nothing changed.

He and I worked out an alternative assignment so he could recover the points. But I couldn’t help him with the coach who treated him like an employee. I asked the student if he wanted me to inform the athletic department about his situation, and he made it clear that would not be a good idea. He didn’t trust the athletic department and feared retribution. Even if he was wrong about that, his fear says something about the atmosphere in which he works.

After 20 years and several interactions like that, I have come to hate the football machine more than ever, just as some football players do. These players are not naïve and know, perhaps better than anyone, how they are used. They know that the university athletic department, like any other employer, is primarily interested in productivity, not the long-term welfare of employees.

My most memorable lesson in the system’s disregard for athletes came in a conversation near the end of a semester with a football player who came to my office hoping to make up enough points to pass my class. I don’t remember the details of the missed assignment, but the student seemed honest and sincere, and we quickly worked out a plan for him to make up the work.

He also was searching for the right questions to ask about his future without football. He was a scholarship player at the end of his junior year with a serious injury that meant he would never play again, but the university was letting him finish his last year on scholarship.

What’s next? I asked. If his hopes for a pro career were over, what would he do?

He said he wanted to be a high school coach. That means teaching as well, and I asked how he planned to get certified. He had no idea what that entailed; no one had advised him on that process. I suggested that he not rely on the advising in athletics and get the information from the College of Education for himself, and we talked about how to do that.

I told him bluntly that my main concern was that he understood what it took to be a good teacher and that he not become one of those coaches who treated teaching duties as a footnote to their “real” job on the field. There are enough bad teachers in the world already, I said. If you are going to do this, know that it’s rewarding but hard work.

Then I asked him what he wanted to teach. History seemed most interesting to him, which made me smile as I remembered my experience 30 years earlier as a college student getting certified to be a high school history teacher. I told him how intimidated I had felt standing in front of a class as a student teacher. We kept talking. I asked him what his favorite part of history was. U.S. history? World history? Any particular era?

He didn’t have an answer. I asked him what he knew about history. He acknowledged that it wasn’t much. Thinking back on my student teaching, which included several weeks of trying to get seventh-graders interested in the War of 1812 (something I wasn’t much interested in at the time, and must confess that I have never gone back to study in detail), I asked him what he knew about that war. Nothing, he said. Which countries fought the war? He didn’t know.

I wasn’t surprised, because I routinely talk with students who have significant gaps in basic historical knowledge. He was neither ashamed nor angry at me for pushing him; he was struggling to create a new life and knew he needed help. We talked about the inadequate schooling that he had endured. He was struggling, honestly, to understand who he was now that football was over. He knew he had a tough year ahead.

We kept talking. He told me a bit about why he loved sports. I told him why I loved books. We didn’t dwell on the fact that he was a jock and I was the antithesis of a jock, or that our childhood experiences had been dramatically different. He was black and I was white, he had grown up in poverty and I had been a middle-class kid, and we talked about what that meant for each of us.

I talked to him about why I went into teaching, about my own development as an intellectual. If his playing days were over, he was going to have to find a new identity, pick up new habits, see the world in a new way. After an hour, he got up to leave. I told him I would be happy to talk more, if he wanted. He thanked me, and I thanked him. Then he looked at me and said something I will never forget.

“No one has ever talked to me this way before,” he said. I asked what he meant, afraid I had been too harsh and he had felt disrespected. Instead, he was grateful that I had spoken honestly, that I had assumed he was capable of the conversation. His experience with education up to then had been sadly predictable: Few had cared about his mind as long as his body was performing on the field.

I told him I had enjoyed talking with him, which was true. I told him I hoped to see him again, which I knew was unlikely, simply because most students — athletes or not — don’t come back after such a conversation.

After he left, I sat by myself for a long time, thinking about how toxic masculinity norms in a white-supremacist society defined by economic inequality had structured both our lives. All the abstractions about the hierarchy in gender, race, and class were palpably real at that moment; he and I were individuals, of course, but we had lived our individual lives within those categories that had so profoundly shaped our choices.

I don’t really hate football, which is just one of many children’s games. But I do hate most of the things adults do with football, the way the destructive hierarchical values in patriarchy, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism are woven into big-time college sports.

I hate what the reality of football does to ideals of a university.

I hate what Longhorn football does to the University of Texas.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: Critical Thinking in Crisis Times (City Lights, coming in 2013) His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Campuses, College Sports, Football, Robert Jensen, Sports, Student Athletes, UT-Austin | 5 Comments

Paul Krassner : Are Rape Jokes Funny?

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Comic Daniel Tosh. Image from The Hollywood Gossip. Inset images below: Sarah Silverman and Louis CK.
Are rape jokes funny?

Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren’t. They are the risk of free speech.

By Paul Krassner | The Rag Blog | August 30, 2012

Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn’t allow victims to become the target of my humor.

There was one particular routine I did that called for a “rape-in” of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion. But my feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. And then I reconsidered.

Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men made the laws? Legislators’ wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves were the oppressors, and their hypocrisy was really my target. But for me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn’t self-censorship. Rather, it was, I rationalized, a matter of conscious evolution.

* * *

Now, in July 2012, more than four decades later, rape-joking triggered a widespread controversy when a woman who prefers to remain anonymous went to a comedy club, expecting to be entertained. She chose the Laugh Factory in Hollywood because Dane Cook was on the bill, but he was followed by Daniel Tosh, and she had never heard of him.

In an email to her Tumblr blogger friend, she accused Tosh of saying that “rape jokes are always funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape jokes are hilarious.” She was so offended that she felt morally compelled to shout, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” Tosh paused and then seized the opportunity, responding, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”

The audience laughed raucously. After all, isn’t anyone who yells at a comedian practically asking to become an immediate target? But this woman was stunned and humiliated, and she left. In the lobby, she demanded to see the manager, who apologized profusely and gave her free tickets for another night –admitting, however, that she understood if this woman never wanted to return.

In her email, she concluded that, “having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.” She added, “Please reblog and spread the word.” And indeed, it went viral.

Coincidentally, on the same night that Tosh, in his signature sarcastic approach to reality, provoked the woman, Sarah Silverman was performing at Foxwords Casino and she touched upon the same taboo subject:

We need more rape jokes. We really do. Needless to say, rape, the most heinous crime imaginable, seems it’s a comic’s dream, though. It’s because it seems when you do rape jokes, that the material is so dangerous and edgy, and the truth is, it’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy ’cause who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. They’re just traditionally not complainers.

Ironically, in The Aristocrats, a documentary entirely about a classic joke of the same name, Silverman complained that she was once raped by show-biz legend Joe Franklin.

* * *

In the fall of 1981, I booked myself for a cross-country tour, from New York to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. On stage I explained the true reason why: “He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life.” That part was true.

“So now I’m asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there.” They must’ve heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was “probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador.”

In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women’s caucus. Robin Tyler (“I am not a lesbian comic — I am a comic who is a lesbian”) served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination.

Tyler explained to me, “You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration.”

Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn’t until I was on a plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: “Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters.”

* * *

Although Tosh is a consistently unapologetic performer for the sardonic material he exudes on his Comedy Central series — which features a running theme of rape jokes, even including one about his sister — for this occasion he decided to go the Twitter route: “All the out of context misquotes aside, I’d like to sincerely apologize.” He also tweeted, “The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them.”

According to Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory, Tosh asked the audience, “What you guys wanna talk about?” Someone called out “Rape,” and a woman in the audience started screaming, “No, rape is painful, don’t talk about it.” Then, says Masada, “Daniel came in, and he said, ‘Well, it sounds like she’s been raped by five guys’ — something like that. I didn’t hear properly. It was a comment — it wasn’t a joke at the expense of this girl.” Masada claims that she sat through the rest of Tosh’s performance, which received a standing ovation, before she complained to the manager.

Fellow comedians defended Tosh with their own tweets. Dane Cook: “If you journey through this life easily offended by other peoples words I think it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” Doug Stanhope: “You’re hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you.” Louis C.K.: “your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes” — except that he wrote it after watching Tosh on TV, but before he learned about the Laugh Factory incident. Nevertheless, he was excoriated and accused of being a “rape apologist.”

But C.K. himself is no stranger to sexual-assault jokes. Onstage, he has said that he’s against rape — “unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won’t let you, in which case what other option do you have?”

Conversely, on the second episode of his series, Louie, on the FX channel, he reversed such roles. After leaving a bar with an especially aggressive woman, Laurie (played by Melissa Leo), he had inadvertently met earlier, she performs fellatio on him in her pickup truck, then insists that he in turn perform cunnilingus on her. And he refuses.

So, she attacks him physically with unabashed viciousness, mounts him, and he gives in to her demand. In other words, Laurie rapes Louie. No joke. To watch this scene was positively jaw-dropping. It served as a reminder of how often comedians–and their jaded audiences–find prison-rape jokes not only to be funny, but also, as in the case of Jerry Sandusky, an act of delayed justice resulting in laughter that morphs into applause.

Meanwhile, reacting to the Tosh tirade, Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, stated:

If free speech permits a comedian to suggest a woman in his audience should be gang-raped, then it certainly permits us to object, and to ask what message this sends to survivors or to perpetuators. Tosh’s comment was just one extreme example of pop culture’s dismissive treatment of sexualized violence, which desensitizes audiences to enormous human suffering. Internet outcry is encouraging, but popular media needs to push back too.

And the original blogger posted another message:

My friend and I wanted to thank everyone for there [sic] support and for getting this story out there. We just wanted everyone to know what Daniel Tosh had done and if you didn’t agree then to stop following him. My friend is surprised to have gotten any form of an apology and doesn’t wish to press any further charges against [him].”

What? Press charges? Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren’t. They are the risk of free speech. The blog concluded, “She does plan on returning to comedy shows in the future, but to see comedians that she’s seen before or to at least look up artists before going to their shows.” Wait till she finds out Dane Cook suggested that she kill herself.

* * *

What’s funny is always subjective but not incapable of alteration. Now, over 40 years since I stopped presenting my concept about a rape-in of legislators’ wives, I have changed my mind about that decision in the process of writing this piece. I sent the first draft around to several friends, and I was particularly touched by a response from Emma Cofod, production manager at my publisher, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press:

Thank you for sharing this! I truly appreciate your thoughts here. I read about this woman’s complaint last week, and the whole event turned my stomach. What Tosh did was personally threatening, which is not OK. But even though I fall neatly into the feminist camp, I think your original joke is hilarious — within context, and coming from a comedian whose philosophy I identify with. Color me conflicted.

I think that kind of conflict is healthy. And then the other shoe of my epiphany dropped when I saw Louis C.K.’s appearance on The Daily Show. This is what he told Jon Stewart between interruptions:

If this [controversy about Tosh] is like a fight between comedians and bloggers — hyperbole and garbage comes out of those two places, just uneducated, unfettered — it’s also a fight between comedians and feminists, because they’re natural enemies, because, stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke, and on the other side, comedians can’t take criticism. Comedians are big pussies. So to one side you say, “If you don’t like a joke, stay out of the comedy clubs.” To the other side you say, “If you don’t like criticism, stop Googling yourself every ten seconds, because nobody’s making you read it.” It’s positive. To me, all dialogue is positive. I think you should listen.

If somebody has the opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don’t wanna obliterate theirs with mine, that’s how I feel. Now, a lot of people don’t feel that way. For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that’s how I feel. Any joke about rape, a Holocaust, the Mets — aarrgghh, whatever — any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I’ve read some blogs during this whole that made me enlightened at things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might — I never — that’s part of me now that wasn’t before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes.

But this is also about men and women, because a lot of people are trading blogs with each other, couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes — that’s what I’ve been reading in blogs — but they’re both making a classic gender mistake, because the women are saying, “Here’s how I feel about this,” but they’re also saying, “My feelings should be everyone’s primary concern.” Now the men are making this mistake, they’re saying, “Your feelings don’t matter, your feelings are wrong and your feelings are stupid.” If you’ve ever lived with a woman, you can’t step in shit worse than that, than to tell a woman that her feelings don’t matter. So, to the men I say, “Listen to what the women are saying about this.” To the women I say, “Now that we heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute, and let’s all get back together and kill the Jews.” That’s all I have to say about it.

The audience laughed and applauded, as they did 50 years ago when Lenny Bruce ended a riff on prejudice: “Randy, it won’t matter any more even if you are colored and I’m Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then we’re all gonna stick together — and beat up the Polacks.”

My notion of a rape-in of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them was no more to be taken literally than C.K.’s killing the Jews or Lenny’s beating up the Polacks. Rape-in was a misunderstood metaphor; a pro-choice parable that, unfortunately, has become timely again.

[Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America’s premier satirical rag, was an original Yippie, and has been a stand-up comic. Krassner publishes the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster. Two of his books — both are expanded and updated editions — have recently been released: a collection, Pot Stories for the Soul; and his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. All three of those items are available at paulkrassner.com. The above article originally appeared on Reason.com. Read more articles by Paul Krassner on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Comedians, Daniel Tosh, Humor, Paul Krassner, Rape | 1 Comment

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

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Lamar W. Hankins : What’s Conservative about Paul Ryan?

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Ryan shrugged. Cover art by Drew Friedman for the New York Observer from his Facebook page.
What’s conservative about Paul Ryan?

Paul Ryan is an extremist on issues of restricting personal liberty and using government to benefit the wealthy to the detriment of middle- and low-income families, and he is a hypocrite when it comes to fiscal conservatism.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | August 29, 2012

Glenn Greenwald did a masterful job for Salon.com the other day outlining much of the evidence that demonstrates Paul Ryan has not acted to constrain government spending, nor to constrain the government during his time in office. For over a decade, Ryan has voted for the expansion of federal debt and the restriction of individual liberty almost every time he has had a chance to do so. How is such a person a conservative?

As Greenwald explains, Ryan presents himself as an Ayn Rand “Super-Hero of Individual Self-Reliance and Working Class Warrior against government debt, waste, and intrusiveness — whose actual life is a testament to the precise opposite values.”

Ryan managed to go to college after receiving Social Security survivor’s benefits through his high school years after his father died at an early age, benefits which he claims he saved up to pay for college. As Joan Walsh explained recently in Salon magazine, Ryan has “become the scourge of the welfare state, a man wholly supported by government who preaches against the evils of government support,” and he has become famous for “trying to dismantle the very program that helped him go to the college of his choice.”

After receiving a B.A. with a double major in economics and political science from Miami University of Ohio, he spent a few years on the payroll of several politicians and right-wing think-tanks. Occasionally, in the years before he became a Congressman at age 28, Ryan worked briefly for the family-owned construction business when he needed money.

Ryan seems incapable of acknowledging that government is a collective endeavor to cobble together a system that will make possible economic and social endeavors that can make life fulfilling for all the people. That’s the promise of our Constitution and the government it created. But Ryan has tried to fashion an image of himself as a self-made man who wants government to go away because it is not needed.

I recognized shortly after graduating from the college of my choice that I was able to go to college because of the sacrifices made by my parents, the excellent public school system I attended, the public transportation system that took me to school for several years, the public library I used regularly while in high school, the public roads over which I traveled to get to college and return home to visit my parents, the public postal system that allowed me to stay in contact with my family (and receive occasional checks for incidentals), the air traffic control system that looked out for my safety when I flew in an airplane, and the myriad other programs established for the safety of all Americans — food safety, water purity, air pollution control, mosquito eradication (particularly important where I grew up), flood control, fire protection, and police protection.

It was about the same time that I learned about the large sums of crop support payments paid to farmers in the county where I worked — payments that no one referred to as welfare, while assistance for other people was frowned upon and derided. I realized that all such government assistance was part of an effort to equal the playing field and create a fairer system so that the entire nation could prosper, no matter what personal circumstances or natural events interfered.

Obviously, there were abuses — it’s a system organized and operated by humans whose natures need to have some controls. Some people who received assistance did not need it, but the basic idea was to create a system that acknowledged that we were all in this together, and if we worked together, helping one another when needed, we would all be better for it. However, that spirit of cooperation was not infused in everyone equally.

Many years later I began figuring out that the tax system was rigged for the benefit of the wealthiest among us. All during this time when I was working, I paid payroll taxes on my entire salary to support the Social Security and Medicare system, but higher-paid workers did not have to pay those same taxes on much of their income. We allow major industries, such as the coal, oil, and natural gas companies to produce their products or conduct their businesses in ways that pollute our environment and leave the taxpayers to pay for the costs of environmental cleanup and health care for people damaged by pollution.

In a 2009 report, the National Research Council (NRC) estimates that the hidden costs of energy production in 2005 were $120 billion. Economists refer to these costs as external costs, including the economic effects to human health, structural damage, and the reduction in harvests caused by air pollution.

As the study explained, these external costs are hidden “because they are not reflected in the market prices of coal, oil, other energy sources, or the electricity and gasoline produced from them. Health damage from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation was found to be the largest single impact.”

During the 1960s and 1970s, my government spent nearly $600 billion to fight a war in Southeast Asia, a war that I did not support; but I was compelled to pay for it under threat of losing what little property I owned. The same sort of politicians who voted for the Vietnam War also voted for Bush’s two wars that have been continued under Obama and have cost the taxpayers about $3.7 trillion to date, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

Ryan has supported all of these expenditures as a Congressman and wants to spend even more on defense in the years to come. His support for wars and interventions overseas suggest an extremist view about the role of the U.S. in the world, believing that “American Exceptionalism” gives us the right to tell the rest of the world how to act. In what way are these the actions of a fiscal conservative, or any kind of conservative?

Ryan voted for the expansion of Medicare to pay for prescription drugs (in a way that favored the pharmaceutical industry) and for the Wall Street and bank bailouts at the end of Bush’s second term. In fact, Ryan seems to have no problem with propping up the too-big-to-fail banks with an annual $60 billion subsidy, while extolling the virtues of the Free Enterprise system.

Also, Ryan is all for the government-sponsored patent system that gives pharmaceutical companies 20-year patents on prescription drugs. Dean Baker reports that these government-created monopolies cost taxpayers $270 billion more a year than they would pay in a free market system, and that there are efficient alternatives to financing drug research (see the Center for Economic and Policy Research report authored by Baker in 2004). In what way are these the actions of a fiscal conservative?

When it comes to restraining the power of the federal government, Ryan can always be counted on to support the government and diminish the liberty of all citizens. He voted for the original PATRIOT Act, its later modifications, and then to make its intrusive government powers permanent. He voted for the Military Commissions Act, which provides indefinite detention apparently for both resident aliens and U.S. citizens, who can be denied the Constitutional right of habeas corpus under the Act — the right to have a court compel the government to justify its detention of such people.

Ryan voted for the Protect America Act of 2007 to expand the power of the government to eavesdrop on Americans without court authorization for up to one year if the conversation involves talking to a person “reasonably believed to be outside the United States.” In what way are these the actions of someone who wants to restrict the power of the federal government?

Ryan has voted to deny same-sex couples the right to marry or to adopt children. He wanted to continue the military policy of discriminating against gays in the military. He wanted a Constitutional amendment to make flag-burning a crime. He favors the restriction of abortion rights, even supporting criminally prosecuting women who have an abortion.

He has sponsored legislation to give a fertilized egg the constitutional rights of a person, though millions are destroyed nationally each year in the normal process of nature, making such a declaration irrelevant and foolish. His legislation would criminalize in vitro fertilization and some forms of birth control. In what way are these the actions of someone who wants to restrict the power of the federal government?

Ryan claims to be an Ayn Rand libertarian, but he opposes medical marijuana and needle-exchange programs to reduce the spread of diseases among drug addicts. He opposes all drug use, including recreational marijuana. As Congressman Barney Frank said two years ago in a discussion with Ryan and George Will, it should be an embarrassment to conservatives that they want to tell people whom they can have sex with, whom they can marry, what they can read, what they can smoke.

Frank ended the discussion with the observation, “It’s the conservatives who want to intrude on personal liberty.”

As Glenn Greenwald recently concluded, “Whatever one wants to say about Ryan’s record, it is the very opposite of constraining the power of the federal government to intrude into the lives of individuals; indeed, it’s a testament to massive expansion of intrusive federal government power in almost every realm.”

While I am not happy with how President Obama has handled many of these same issues, it seems plain to me that Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s pick for his vice-presidential running mate, is an extremist on issues of restricting personal liberty and using government to benefit the wealthy to the detriment of middle- and low-income families, and he is a hypocrite when it comes to fiscal conservatism. His views about America’s role in the world can fairly be described as megalomaniacal — an all too common view among many, if not most, Americans, who seem to believe that America has the right to do anything, anywhere.

I agree with Ryan that our government needs to change its ways. But the change Ryan wants will take us further from a government that honors the purpose of our Constitution: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. . .”

Ryan would diminish justice in an already harsh system, destroy the minimal economic supports provided for our most disadvantaged citizens, engage in more interventionist wars abroad, push the government to provide more benefits for the wealthy to the exclusion of all others, and further constrain our liberties.

To call Ryan’s political goals “free market conservatism” is Doublespeak at its most dishonest and shameful.

[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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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Ayn Rand, Conservative Politics, Lamar W. Hankins, Paul Ryan | 2 Comments

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