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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : ‘The People’s Pension’ and the War Against Social Security

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

‘The People’s Pension’:
The war against social security

The opponents of this program are not interested in saving money, a fairer distribution of benefits, or helping the elderly. They are serving an ideological agenda of social Darwinism.

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | June 26, 2012

[The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan by Eric Laursen (2012: AK Press); Paperback; 750 pp.; $27.]

It seems like every few months alarms are sounded warning U.S. workers that Social Security is going bankrupt. Oftentimes, the follow-up to these alarms includes a warning that the only way to save the system is to turn all or part of the funds involved over to Wall Street investment houses like Goldman Sachs.

Usually the alarms are sounded by right-wing politicians from the Republican Party. In recent years however, this cacophony of lies has been assisted by more and more Democrats.

According to Eric Laursen, in his new book titled The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan, the desire to end what is Washington’s most successful government program has been underway since Social Security’s inception. It has only intensified in recent decades. As the title suggests, that intensification sharpened in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became president.

As anyone with an understanding of neoliberal capitalism and the role played by investment houses in this stage of capitalism knows, that year coincides more or less with an increased interest in Social Security funds by those houses. Why? Because their required growth requires more funds to invest and there are billions of dollars in funds sitting in the Social Security reserves.

Laursen provides the reader with a brief history of the philosophy behind Social Security. Harkening to the writings of 19th century anarchists and leftists, he describes part of the impetus behind Social Security as coming from the ideas of mutual aid; where every citizen is cared for. More specifically, he traces the institution of the social security system to the Townsend clubs begun in the 1930s by Dr. Francis Townsend of California.

It was Townsend’s idea that old people should be guaranteed an income based on their work and funded by taxes. His reasoning was simple, if senior citizens had an income, they could remain consumers, thereby helping stimulate the economy. Millions joined these clubs, exerting political pressure that led to the Social Security Act of 1937. Naturally, this act was fervently opposed by many corporate executives and the wealthy as being socialist and un-American.

Most of today’s opponents are not so blunt in their assessment. However, their proposals to privatize the system suggests that they too oppose a government program that does not benefit their corporate benefactors. Instead, they would rather turn it over to the Goldman Sachs of the world. This desire is certainly related to the substantial campaign donations they receive from Goldman Sachs and their cohorts.

One expects right wing politicians opposed to any government expenditures not related to benefiting private industry and the Pentagon to oppose Social Security. It is the Democratic opponents who deserve our real attention. Laursen’s history is also a history of the gradual shrinking of support among Democrats and other so-called liberals.

The People’s Pension puts the beginning of the current assault on Social Security in the lap of the Reagan administration. Laursen makes it very clear that the opponents of this program are not interested in saving money, a fairer distribution of benefits, or helping the elderly. They are serving an ideological agenda of social Darwinism.

Furthermore, every attack on Social Security is nothing more or less than an attempt by the corporate world and its right-wing supporters to end it once and for all. Laursen further points out that the arguments used by Social Security’s opponents never address the economic consequences of ending the program; they only draw up flimsy prognostications of disaster should the program continue.

Privatization would be nothing more than one more method for corporate America to take public monies and privatize the profits while insuring the continued socialization of the risks and loss. As Laursen points out, this is exactly what is done by the defense industry and any scheme to privatize Social Security would do the same thing.

A fact that is not very well known outside of certain circles is that the model for privatization promoted by the so-called supply side economists was developed in the fascist Chile of Augusto Pinochet. Championed by many Republicans and their banker/corporate sponsors, this model is ultimately more expensive than keeping things as they are and its greatest benefits would be to the banking industry.

Furthermore, this and other privatization schemes assume an ever-growing capitalist economy — a phenomenon less certain than it was before the crash of 2008. Despite this, politicians continue to include Social Security in their gunsights. Whether it’s Alan Simpson calling Social Security a “Milk Cow with 310 Million Tits,” or so-called Blue Dog Democrats suggesting that benefits be changed, the assault on the program never goes away.

Eric Laursen has written a comprehensive and exhaustive history of the Social Security program in the United States. The People’s Pension is an honest, detailed, and even eye-opening discussion of the program’s origins and continuing efforts to provide elderly and disabled Americans with a livable income.

Equally important, it is a discussion of the attempts to alter and ultimately destroy the program by forces whose only interest seems to be profit and the elimination of any government institution that guarantees every citizen worker an income in their old age.

[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 Books, Conservative Politics, Privatization, Ron Jacobs, Ronald Reagan, Social Programs, Social Security | Leave a comment

Harry Targ : Mitch Daniels, Educator!

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

All decked out: Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels models his new Purdue leather jacket after being named the school’s next president in West Lafayette, Indiana., Thursday, June 21, 2012. Photo by Michael Conroy / AP.
Purdue names Mitch Daniels president:
The crisis in higher education continues

Daniels has no administrative experience in higher education except appointing the Trustees who in secret carried out a presidential search that led to his appointment.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | June 26, 2012

Big banks, multinational corporations, political parties, and upcoming elections dominate our public discourse as they should. But there is a danger that the fabric of social institutions is being transformed before our eyes but yet beyond our consciousness. Such is the case of the radical changes occurring in education, from kindergarten through college.

Calls for free, open, accessible, and transparent education have been a tradition almost as long as the rhetorical commitment to democracy itself. In fact most people believe that education, democracy, and the economy are inextricably connected. However, the education/democracy connection has been weakening ever since the 1960s.

After World War II, the GI Bill began providing educational opportunities for returning veterans. They were to become the trained work force and expanding consumers for a booming economy. However, the expansion of higher education was coupled with a campaign to purge dangerous and subversive professors and curricula from the university. Access to higher education spread while the range of ideas studied narrowed.

In the 1960s, student activists, now enrolled in thousands of small and large colleges and universities, rebelled against the narrowing focus of knowledge. The university as the site for training to advance capitalism and technical skills, what Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, called “the multiversity,” was challenged; for a time successfully. Academic programs that did not fit traditional classical studies or new scientific/technical fields were allowed to flower and grow.

The so-called Reagan revolution brought a shift in economic policy downsizing the growth in the welfare state, government spending for social safety nets, and support for public institutions such as education. In addition, the new ideology preached privatization, shifting public sector spending for the provision of services to the marketplace.

By the 1990s, both political parties endorsed public policies that decreased support for the many to further economic rewards for the few. Tax breaks for the rich, cuts in welfare protections, declining support for public education, public libraries, transportation, and housing continued the shift in wealth from the working class to the economic ruling class.

Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh once remarked that the economic and political transformation of U.S. society was near complete. The only institution which the right-wing did not control was the university. By the 1990s powerful groups began to remake the university too.

Since the dawn of the new century higher education budgets have been slashed. College tuitions are skyrocketing, class size is increasing, and many of the programs designed to develop new ways of thinking about the world (particularly in the social sciences and humanities) are being cut.

State universities originally created to educate small farmers and workers in order to advance their economic status have become low-cost research arms of huge corporations such as Eli Lilly in pharmaceuticals and Monsanto in the agricultural sector (both are huge worldwide corporations). In the 21st century universities have not shrunk. More and more top heavy administrations and human relations departments control the main activities that used to be determined by faculty.

The process of selecting university presidents reflects the qualitative changes occurring in higher education. At the University of Virginia, President Teresa Sullivan was ousted recently in a secret coup engineered by the “Board of Visitors,” a 17-person body that controls major policy decisions at that university.

Of the 17, only four members had any higher education experience, but the body in total contributed over $800,000 to candidates for state office; $680,000 to Republicans and $150,000 to Democrats. The governor appoints this body. And in the case of ousted President Sullivan, it objected to her consultation with deans and faculty before making decisions about shifting budgets. Unusual in this day and age, 2,000 students and faculty recently rallied on campus to demand her reinstatement.

In Indiana the Purdue University Board of Trustees (10 of 12 selected by sitting Governor Mitch Daniels) announced that it was appointing Daniels to be Purdue University’s twelfth president. Daniels will be completing his second term as governor and will take office as Purdue’s president in January, 2013.

Daniels has been a visible politician over the last decade in several arenas. These include a stint as President Bush’s Budget Director from 2001 to 2004 when taxes were lowered, two wars were launched, and the seeds were planted for the current economic crisis. Daniels was elected Indiana’s governor in 2004. In his first day in office he eliminated the prior governor’s order that allowed public sector workers to unionize.

Subsequently, he led Hoosier right-wing politicians in supporting charter schools with public money, cutting education spending at all levels by $150 million (including a $30 million cut in higher education), sold off some of Indiana’s highway system to European investors, shifted family services to an ill-equipped private corporation, and cut funding for reproductive health services. He worked to pass a so-called Right-to-Work bill after telling union supporters that he would never do that.

In addition, Daniels served as an executive at Eli Lilly, and CEO at the conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute, and was affiliated with an online university, Western Governors University, that could potentially compete with state colleges and universities. Most important Daniels has no administrative experience in higher education except appointing the Board of Trustees members who in secret carried out a presidential search that led to his appointment.

The political corruption and dubious merit of the selection of Daniels as Purdue president are obvious. What is less obvious is that this appointment like the appointment of many other university presidents and the firing of Virginia President Theresa Sullivan, is part of the shift in higher education from a model of the university as a site for research and teaching about ideas and as an institution that serves the needs of the society at large to a corporate model.

The GI Bill educated a whole generation of veterans to lift themselves and society. The expansion of the meaning of the university as a result of student protest and the civil rights movements of the 1960s brought new ideas to a larger number of young people.

Educator Henry Giroux put it well: “Knowledge has become capital to invest in the market but has little to do with the power of self-definition, civic commitments, or ethical responsibilities… and with questions of justice.”

In the end, this is the most troubling aspect of the transformation of the modern university which the appointment of presidents like Governor Daniels signifies.

[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 new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged American History, Campuses, Harry Targ, Higher Education, Indiana, Mitch Daniels, Purdue | 1 Comment

David Hamilton : In France, Socialists Rule!

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Supporters of French Socialist Party react after the announcement of the results of the first round of the French parliamentary elections. Photo by Fred Dufour / AFP / Getty Images.
French election wrap:
Socialists rule!

Internationally, the main significance of the Socialist victory is that it changed the terms of the debate about the EU debt crisis.

By David P. Hamilton | The Rag Blog | June 21, 2012

The Socialist Party of France is on a roll. It has reached a historic pinnacle of unprecedented strength. In May, their candidate, Francois Hollande, won the presidency against the right-wing incumbent, the first victory by a leftist in recent European presidential elections and the first presidential victory by a Socialist in France since Francois Mitterrand in 1988.

Last year, the Socialists achieved a majority in the traditionally conservative French Senate for the first time ever. They also dominate a majority of the 27 French regional councils. And now they have won a resounding victory in the National Assembly as well.

The Socialist Party now dominates French politics at every level without compromising coalition partners. Past Socialist-led governments have always been part of coalitions that included either a strong Communist Party or center-right elements. Now they rule alone and they have also largely overcome their own internal divisions. They stand united and independent, able to put their program in place without serious interference.

Their victory in the 577-seat National Assembly was particularly sweet for the Socialists. In the last Parliament, they were heavily outnumbered by Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire), 317-204. In the election just concluded those totals virtually reversed. In the new National Assembly, the Socialists and two small affiliated parties will have nearly 320 seats and the UMP will have 218. Roughly 20% of the seats changed hands and the Socialists won a large majority of those.

The Socialist victory was largely expected, but press reports have failed to adequately emphasize its sweeping nature. A shift in party composition on this scale in the U.S. Congress is inconceivable. U.S. congressional districts have been designed so that they are almost all safe-Democrat or safe-Republican. Only 20-30 seats in the U.S. Congress are regularly competitive. That a change on this scale was possible demonstrates the more dynamic nature of French democracy compared with the stagnant and highly corrupted remnant extant in the U.S.

Like the French presidential election, the legislative elections are conducted in two rounds, but the runoffs are conducted differently. It is relatively easy for parties to run candidates in the first round. There were over 6,000 candidates running for those 577 seats. Any candidate that received more than 12.5% of the vote in the first round got to run in the second round. This often means three or more candidates make the runoff. The one with the most votes wins the second round.

There has been a long-standing agreement between the Socialist Party and the UMP to keep the National Front (FN) out of the National Assembly. This was originally based on the overt anti-Semitism of the FN’s founder and leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Growing out of its World War II occupation experience including the loss of one-third of their Jewish population, anti-Semitism is illegal in France.

So in cases where the Socialists and UMP were in a three-way runoff with a candidate from the FN, the one with less support would drop out, effectively denying the FN the possibility of a plurality victory. Although the FN regularly gets 14-18% in presidential elections, they have been shut out of the National Assembly by this means since the mid-1980’s.

This time, the FN won two seats in localities where the UMP candidates dropped out in favor of the FN in defiance of their party’s long- standing dictum. However, the FN leader and presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s more presentable daughter, winner of almost 19% of the national vote in the first round of the presidential election in late April, lost her race for a National Assembly seat to a Socialist in what was considered a relative FN stronghold.

This division on the right between the UMP and the FN is hard for Americans to understand. In the recent presidential election, the UMP’s Sarkozy and the FN’s Le Pen sounded much alike in their anti-immigrant stands. The original issue of anti-Semitism dividing the French right has diminished as Marine Le Pen has slipped into the racist closet by softening her father’s rhetoric and the UMP under Sarkozy has rivaled the FN in anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The division on the right is now sustained on issues Americans know little about, particularly membership in the EU, where the FN is ardently nationalist and opposes France’s participation. The FN wants to dump the euro and go back to the franc, opposing any EU imposition on French sovereignty. In contrast, the UMP strongly supports the EU and the euro.

There were election deals on the left too. The Socialists agreed to not run in certain constituencies in order to allow the Green Party to run unobstructed against the right. In return, they expect to have Green Party support on many issues. As a result of this agreement, the Green Party representation in the National Assembly went from 4 seats to 17, although the Green presidential candidate only received 2.3% of the vote in April.

Where they agree, which comprises a large spectrum of issues, Green support bumps the Socialist majority well above 330. In addition, there are the 10 seats held by Left-Unity. Add them up and the combined Left will have roughly 60% of the seats in the French National Assembly.

Diversity made strong gains. 37% of the winning Socialist candidates were women, leading to a record 155 women holding seats in the Assembly, up from 107 in the last Assembly elected in 2007. Nine members of “ethnic minority” groups were also elected, up from one, still a significant under-representation.

Joining the ranks of Socialist lawmakers are Razzy Hammadi, born of an Algerian father and a Tunisian mother and former president of the Socialists’ youth movement, as well as Malek Boutih, of Algerian origin and former director of the SOS Racisme rights group.

There were some very notable defeats in the National Assembly election. The 2007 Socialist Party candidate for president, Segolene Royal, was defeated by a “dissident” Socialist. The victor was a dissident because he was an established local Socialist leader in a district where the national party tried to “parachute” a favored candidate, Royal, into a safe seat. The locals rallied round him by 63%.

The leader of Left-Unity, Jean-Luc Melenchon tried to run in the same district as FN leader Marine Le Pen. They both lost to the Socialist candidate, he in the first round, she in the second. Centrist presidential candidate Francois Bayrou lost a seat he had held since 1988, again to a Socialist.

What does this Socialist dominance mean? Primarily, it means there is very little obstacle to the enactment of Hollande’s “60 pledges.” These revolve around reviving the economy with government spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and the growth of public employment. The tax measures include higher marginal tax rates at the top, financial transaction taxes, ending tax havens for the rich, taxing investment income at the same rate as wages, and capping executive compensation. It also includes setting up a publicly controlled credit rating agency and making banks separate their retail banking from their investment banking, a law in line with the now defunct Glass-Steagall Act in the U.S.

Other measures on the Socialist agenda include approval of gay marriage and adoption, recognition of the Palestinian state, reduction of French reliance on nuclear energy, and bringing home all French troops in Afghanistan two years early. Given the Socialist hegemony, it is hard to see how Hollande can escape enacting all of these measures expeditiously.

Internationally, the main significance of the Socialist victory is that it changed the terms of the debate about the EU debt crisis. Prior to Hollande’s election, austerity was the unrivaled approach of EU leaders in confronting the debt crisis. In the wake of the Socialist victory in France, aided by support from Obama and the growth of the Greek Left, stimulus has reentered the discussion. This is analogous to the change OWS made by introducing inequality into the U.S. political discussion.

Signals seen so far concerning the direction of the Socialist government are inconclusive. On the one hand, Hollande named 17 women to his 34-member cabinet, but with few exceptions they don’t lead the most important ministries. Overall, the cabinet is labeled as moderate within the Socialist Party spectrum.

An encouraging signal was Hollande’s insistence at the G-8 summit on pulling French troops out of Afghanistan this year. On the other hand, he has joined the chorus for greater intervention in Syria, albeit preferably somebody else’s. To his credit, he presented the argument for growth to the “austerians” and has changed the nature of the debate, but so far it’s largely just talk.

Most important, the French Socialists have a unique opportunity to reestablish the socialist brand in Europe. They doubtless hope to do as well as their Latin American counterparts in Argentina and Brazil. If France is able to create a successful new development model under Socialist leadership, Merkel, Cameron and other right wing EU leaders will face reinvigorated challenges from their left as a result.

[David P. Hamilton, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in history and government was an activist in Sixties Austin and a contributor to the original Rag. David writes about France and politics (and French politics) for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag BlogThe Rag Blog

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged David P. Hamilton, European Politics, European Union, France, Francois Hollande, Leftists, Socialistm | 3 Comments

INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Mariann Wizard’s Odyssey

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Above, Mariann Wizard at Threadgills, Austin, Texas, 2012. Photo by Gloria Badilla-Hill. Inset below: Mariann with former cable television commissioners, Jack Hopper and Tommy Wyatt, at ribbon-cutting ceremony to launch Austin’s public access TV. Mariann was the chair of the Commission. Photo by Stuart Heady.
A Rag Blog Interview:
Mariann Wizard’s Odyssey

“I love my country, but not always my Nation. I am a child of Mother Earth and loyal to her alone.“ — Mariann Wizard

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | June 22, 2012

Wizards really do work wonders and Mariann Garner Wizard — an icon of Austin’s radical movements and countercultural institutions — is no exception.

The feisty co-author of two popular books — the legendary underground comic, The Adventures of Oat Willie, and a classic study about the Sixties-era G. I. movement, Turning The Guns Around — Wizard was also a contributor to No Apologies: Texas Radicals Celebrate the ’60s, and to Paul Buhle’s Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History.

She has worked her wizardry all over Texas for most of her life, and especially in Austin ever since she moved from Fort Worth to attend UT. These days she works that wizardry, more often than not, on the Internet — as a professional science writer specializing in natural therapies, and as a contributing editor to The Rag Blog.

A writer for The Rag and later for The Daily Worker, she joined SDS in the 1960s, and later belonged to the Communist Party of the United States. Her activist life didn’t leave much room for studying and she left UT before she earned a degree. On July 23, 1967, her husband, George Vizard, was shot and killed in Austin, and, though 45 years have passed since then, she has never forgotten the murder that day or her own youthful self.

By the time that she went back to college, and graduated from Juarez-Lincoln University with a B. A. in communications, Texas wasn’t the same and the United States wasn’t, either. The War in Vietnam had ended, legal segregation was a thing of the past, and American women had liberated themselves from the narrow roles that had confined them in the 1950s. Wizard herself had been transformed by the waves of rebellion and resistance that broke all around her.

For her whole life, she has rarely if ever accepted any of the preordained roles that others might have tried to impose on her. Even as a child, she had a free, independent spirit. In the last half century, she has been the author of her own ongoing Odyssey, delivered her own irreverent lines, written and performed her own brand of satirical poetry, helped to give birth to Austin’s public access TV station, and served as a mainstay in a community that has sustained her for decades.

Loyal to friends and to family, she’s as much a part of Texas traditions as Molly Ivins, Ann Richards, and Marilyn Buck, a friend of 45 years until her death two years ago, in August 2010.

I met Wizard for the first time eight months ago, spent several days with her in Austin, where she introduced me to her son, Matthew, and her former partner, Michael Kleinman, one of the prime movers and shakers behind Seattle’s annual Hempfest.

We ate Mexican food, listened to homegrown music, and gazed at the stars at night. I think we may have had a margarita or two. Mostly we talked from early morning to late at night about Austin, burritos, cannabis, UT, the weather, the Yippies, and more. We’ve gone on talking ever since then. This is our first public conversation.

Mariann Wizard (left) with Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI in 1996. Inset below, from top: Mariann Vizard in 1968; with husband George selling The Rag on the Drag in 1966; the artist as a young woman; Oat Willie comic; Mariann reads her poetry.
Jonah Raskin: Wizard sounds like an unusual last name. Where does it come from?

Mariann Wizard: After my first husband, George Vizard, died and after my divorce from my second husband, Larry Waterhouse, I adopted the nickname “Wizard” that Alice Embree had given me. I made it my legal last name. I probably took the name in part because of “Mr. Wizard” who was featured on a science program for kids on TV when I was growing up.

Your husband, George Vizard, was shot and killed on July 23,1967. That’s 45 years ago. How does that event touch you today?

On a very real level, I will be “the widow Vizard” until the day I die. I was 20 years old, and although I’ve given it the good old college try on several occasions, there has never been another man who made me feel so totally secure, or so immensely proud that of all the girls in Texas, he picked me to be his wife. He was really somethin’ else! I would not be the person I am today had I not known him.

You were born in Fort Worth. What was it like growing up there after World War II?

It was a great town in part because as a little white girl I didn’t get segregation. The city had and still has a great library system, parks, art and history museums, public transit, and a feeling of unlimited opportunity. We also had something called “winter” with snow days, snowmen, winter coats, and winter wardrobes.

Were you a child of the Cold War?

The whole red terror was a part of my childhood. In high school, they gave us cardboard discs to write our names and pin them on our shirts in case of nuclear attack. That was the beginning of the end of my confidence in authorities.

When do you think you woke up and began to see what was happening in America?

When I saw black kids on TV fire-hosed in Alabama for doing what I did every Saturday: sip a soda at Woolworth’s. I thought it could be fixed if people would simply remember what they taught us in Sunday school about Jesus loving all the little children. I didn’t look deeper into the workings of our society until on TV I saw the bombing of Vietnam and the Vietnamese and made a connection between the war there and racial injustice at home. Thank goodness for TV!

Why did you join Students for a Democratic Society?

A very brilliant, now deceased Austin anarchist organizer, and Navy veteran known as Bob Speck — whose real name was Bob Baker — got me to staple booklets for a Vietnam teach-in when he found me drinking coffee in the Chuck Wagon, the UT Student Union hangout for beatniks, bikers, international and Negro students, civil rights workers, and assorted weirdos. A week or so later, I went to an SDS meeting and was blown away.

And why was that?

I’d been in girls’ organizations all through high school and knew that girls and women could decide things as well as boys and men. I had also been in mixed-gender groups where girls sat back and let the boys do the talking and pontificating. At the SDS meeting, two beautiful women — both of them hooked up with cute, smart, influential guys — stood up, spoke up, and got their points across. Even their men folk were pleased. That was Alice Embree and Judy Schieffer, who had been a civil rights worker in Mississippi, weighed about 80 pounds dripping wet, and was fearless.

Did you think that SDS would go on and on, forever?

As I came to know SDS people and “to participate” with them, I had the sense that our relationships would last forever, based not on some casual propinquity, money, or the bonds of high school, but because we believed in things worth struggling to achieve, struggling without cease, and perhaps without even a glimpse of the promised land. We had to learn to be kind to each other, to accept each other as we were, to love for real, and to keep the faith. Bob Dylan was a big help. I reckon he still is.

Do you think Texas is more violent than any other place in the States?

Hell no!… Do you want to step outside and ask that question again, Mr. Raskin? We aren’t a violent people. We’re just emotional. I support the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I have a Goddess-given right to self-defense by any means necessary.

When you think about Texas, do you consider it a part of the United States, or is it its own separate country?

Greater Tejas — say, the 1718 boundaries, when Mission San Antonio de Bexar was founded — is a vital geopolitical part of Mesoamerica, ripped from Madre Mexico by Yankees. The hideous border fence is an insult to Nature as well as Humanity. Imagine the influence of Mexico today if Texas had remained part of its Republic! Viva Zapata! Viva Juarez! Y Viva la Reconcuesta de Paz that we now witness in our changing demographics! If you can’t beat ’em, outbreed ’em. The most popular name for baby boys in 2011 in Texas, and several other current U.S. states, was Jose.

To many Americans in, say, New York or Berkeley, the idea that Texas has a counterculture and a radical movement seems implausible.

It’s not just Texas that leftists on the effete coasts don’t see, hear, or respect! They don’t know what’s going in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, or Arkansas, either! That’s why SDS had to have a “Prairie Power” movement. Texas is the Heartland, but all y’all bi-coasters just fly over it or motor through it looking for hicks.

How has feminism unfolded in Texas in ways that would surprise East Coast and West Coast feminists?

Hmmmm… Roller Derby, maybe? With the Internet, Grrrrl Power is everywhere.

How do you define yourself politically these days?

I don’t have a party; sometimes I think of myself as an unaffiliated working-class libertarian Marxist-Leninist, but I am more than that, too. I write satiric and outraged poetry, howling to the best of my ability at the moon of our discontent, trying to keep some sense of language alive wherein words have meaning beyond the convenience of the moment.

I hope that the generation coming into their prime now will embrace new paradigms of social and economic intercourse, redefine happiness as something that cannot be bought at a store, learn it’s okay to live on beans and bread, and put into practice a lot of what my generation dreamed.

You’ve been involved in the movement to decriminalize and legalize cannabis. What ideas do you have now to further the cause?

The legalization movement has allowed itself to be stigmatized as a kind of Cheeto-munching-couch-potato-smart-ass-white-boy-jerk. The public face of the movement is all too often exactly that. NORML’s new Women’s Alliance is a welcome development and one that we’ve been advocating for years. Grown-ups smoke cannabis, too. Until users start supporting professional, well-planned public interest campaigns, we can all go on reveling in our image as “rebels.”

You’ve been through several incarnations, if you can call them that, as a radical. Is there a cause or a movement that you belonged to and feel proudest about it?

I have always been an advocate and practitioner of the First Amendment. I’m a Free Speech and a Free-to-Assemble loyalist to the bottom of my soul. To speak and associate freely with people of like- and unlike minds is the essence of freedom. I’m a proud supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Civil Liberties Union, and have a long and proud roster of free speech causes, publications, and occasions.

What are some of your Austin activities?

I spent a good 14 years involved on a daily basis as a volunteer with public access television in Austin, and at the state-of-the-art television studio that I and a small group of people demanded be built in East Austin. When visitors ask me for a tour of “my town” it’s the first place I show them. Every day people at the studio learn to deconstruct the mass media and construct their own media. Public access is free speech television!

What about your involvement with the Communist Party, U.S.A.?

I joined in 1966 in part because it was then illegal under Texas law to do so. I was not then and never was a secret member, but a proud and open one. The CPUSA taught me critical thinking to go with my own critical feelings.

When you’re away from Texas what do you miss most about it?

My family, the big sky, the back roads, Mexican comida y cultura, and my own pad.

When you leave Texas what is it that you most want to get away from?

Nothing. I am going toward something special when I leave, not running away!

If you look at the whole state, in what part of it can one see the most glaring inequalities in terms of wealth and poverty?

I think it’s pretty well spread out, though the Valley is the poorest. Houston, Dallas, and Austin have enclaves for the super-rich juxtaposed with hairy areas where people live hand-to-mouth. Rural areas and small towns also show deterioration in the quality of life, but at the same time new construction is bringing in new populations.

Texas went from LBJ to George Bush; was that a big step backward or just a change of names and party designations?

Damn, don’t blame Texas! A lot of other states supported George I! And a lot of others supported LBJ, too! Texas liberals — many of them very sweet people — have a propensity for shooting themselves in the foot perhaps more than any other group. If there’s a way to lose, they’ll find it.

Even in Austin you’re aware of the border aren’t you?

Every town with a significant Hispanic population is a target for la Migra. We absolutely see it here. Austin was a sanctuary city, although the feds took that away from us. Many immigrants come to Austin because there are resources here. Barbara Hines, part of the Austin Rag community, is an internationally-known advocate for immigrant rights and we’re all really proud of her! Casa Marianella is a local group that helps people who are fleeing political and social persecution.

Austin is a cultural oasis, and an anomaly isn’t it. I guess that’s why you live there.

Well, it was, but not so much now, I don’t think. There are lots of towns where people are cooking Asian-Latin fusion food, where people talk with soft Caribbean accents, and where you can hear reggae. Of course, cannabis is everywhere, and sometimes more available in Boonietown, Texas, than here in the big bad city. And that has made all the difference culturally!

What about cowboy culture?

We still have unregenerate rednecks, and that’s their right and their freedom as much as yours or mine. I have conservative religious people in my family and we get along okay — though we can sure disagree — because we’re family first and commissars of political correctness much further down the line. I lived in a rural north central Texas county for seven years, between 1997-2004, and really enjoyed most everything about it.

You’ve known some famous Texas radicals including Marilyn Buck and Lee Otis Johnson, both of whom spent big time in prison. What do you remember most about them?

Buck was my friend for 44 years and I only now understand what a privilege that was and what an extraordinary person she was. I miss her very much. I longed for her freedom and hoped until the very end that we would meet again in this life; I wasn’t allowed to visit her for the last 14 years of her life. However, I feel her spirit very strongly moving in the world now. She’s a revolutionary icon for me with the same power as Che and George Jackson, forever young and beautiful, an inspiration to more people than we will ever know.

And Johnson?

I knew Lee Otis only briefly before his long tragic incarceration and only briefly after his release. Before, he was gallant, charming, bold, and beautiful, an articulate student leader at a repressive black campus where the Uncle Toms of tomorrow were taught. Instead of shooting him, they busted him for passing a joint at a party and gave him 45 years in prison on a first offense. I was one of those who advocated for his release for many years. A local movement law firm secured his freedom and there was a huge, heartfelt party for him.

What happened after his release?

Years of imprisonment, torture, and isolation messed him up, and it wasn’t long before he pulled the welcome mat right out from under himself. Today, we would understand, I hope, that he suffered from PTSD and had other serious medical issues. He got himself back in order, with the help of his family, before he passed away, but the prison system broke him, and we didn’t know how to help him get it together again.

You have ties with prisoners and ex-prisoners, don’t you?

These days I’m really happy to have Robert King as a friend, a former prisoner in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison and one of the “Angola 3.” He’s the only one so far to be released. King is an asset to our progressive community; a wise man who spent 29 years in solitary confinement, he doesn’t hate anyone, and continues to battle the system in a principled, disciplined way.

Are you the un-Texas Texan and the un-American American?

I love my country, but not always my Nation. I am a child of Mother Earth and loyal to her alone. Borders are drawn by men on maps, but they don’t exist in nature. Nation-states are social formations that have arisen as civilization has (presumably) advanced, built on specific types of economic interactions.

But when you walk the paths of Tikal, or other ancient Mayan cities, or think about the civilizations that have risen and fallen in the Near East, it seems clear that borders are impermanent. Different economic patterns bring different sorts of social interaction, and no doubt will again, as the world turns. Maybe our descendants will be nomads, hunter-gatherers, or live in the kinds of space colonies that Ray Bradbury imagined in his science fiction.

Find articles and poems by Mariann Wizard on The Rag Blog.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Austin History, George Vizard, Interview, Jonah Raskin, Lee Otis Johnson, Leftists, Mariann G. Wizard, Marilyn Buck, The Rag, The Rag Blog | 5 Comments

Betsy Leondar-Wright : Class and the Political Moment

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Protester in Olympia, WA, February 16, 2010. Image from the Washington State Wire.
Five well-known leftists, five strong opinions:
What’s needed at this political moment?

I was struck by how openly they disagreed [and] by how passionate all five of them are about creating a more just society.

By Betsy Leondar-Wright | The Rag Blog | June 21, 2012

Betsy Leondar-Wright and Gail Leondar-Wright will be Thorne Dreyer‘s guests on Rag Radio, Friday, June 22, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the web. Betsy and Gail will discuss their marriage, the gay marriage and LGBT movements in America, and the larger issues of class and progressive social change. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday, June 10, at 10 a.m. (EDT). After broadcast, all Rag Radio interviews are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

[The following article by Betsy Leondar-Wright was first published on June 12 at ClassismExposed, a blog published by Class Action, a nonprofit organization that was set up to provide a framework “for people of all backgrounds to identify and address issues of class and classism.” The Working-Class Studies conference was organized by the Center for Study of Working Class Life at Stony Brook University in New York.]

At the Working-Class Studies conference on Friday, June 8, I heard an amazing dialogue Friday, June 8, about class, race, and movement-building by five progressive journalists and activist scholars: Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now!, Frances Fox Piven, Bill Fletcher Jr. of Blackcommentator.com , and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert of Demos, with conference organizer Michael Zweig, author of The Working Class Majority moderating.

I was struck by how openly they disagreed with each other in front of us 200 listeners, by how passionate all five of them are about creating a more just society, and by what vast depth of experience they brought to the panel. Here are some highlights:

Juan Gonzalez: We have to start saying “working class” again. When politicians say “the middle class,” their purpose is to exclude poor and immigrant labor from the American people. The key responsibility of progressives is to reject this concept of the middle class.

Frances Fox Piven: The Citizens United Supreme Court decision (allowing corporate personhood and unlimited secret spending on elections) raises the problem of propaganda in the U.S. We’ve always had corporate and elite propaganda, but now the problem is much worse. The complexity of the financial crisis makes populist organizing difficult. The Citizens United decision is responsible for the defeat of the Wisconsin recall vote (to remove anti-union Governor Scott Walker); we are watching the downfall of representative democracy. A disruptive movement is needed.

Bill Fletcher: Just as in the movie When Worlds Collide, in which only a few people can escape a collision of planets, the capitalist class senses an impending disaster — and the disaster is all of us! They learned from Obama’s election and the Wisconsin recall (47% is a lot of people) that they can no longer rule through electoral politics, and they are debating among themselves what other means they should turn to. That’s the implication of the Citizens United ruling. The chickens are coming home to roost on unions’ failure to educate their own members.

Bob Herbert: The U.S. is in much worse shape than the media reveal. My next book is called The Wounded Colossus. 100 million people are poor or near poor, one-third of the U.S. population. Even the solidly middle class are in deep trouble, heading towards poverty, with the cost of college, homes under water, debt, health care costs, and no job security. We already were not a functioning democracy before Citizens United. President Obama won’t even say the word “poor,” only “the middle class.” There’s no way to replace 14 million lost jobs.

Frances Fox Piven: To revive working-class movements, don’t start with existing unions.

Juan Gonzalez: Latin America has broken free of the U.S. and gone in a different direction; so have parts of the Arab world, charting their own course. U.S. capitalists are desperate and are turning to re-conquering Europe by taking away its social progress. Immigrants are the most progressive portion of the U.S. working class. Think about the Republic Windows and Doors occupation!

Bill Fletcher: Economically precarious white people must come to see that Mitt Romney is not their champion. How can that happen? The difficulty in building working-class solidarity is race. Saying “middle class” symbolizes escape from the bottom, from poverty. It’s not about tactics; first we have to re-shape the concept of unions by re-defining class.

Bob Herbert: There’s no coherent message, no definition of “working-class.” The one unifying issue is employment. If you don’t address race you’re lost from the jump. If people aren’t educated about divide and conquer tactics, about how their interests coincide, about the common interests of all who work, we won’t be able to fight back against divide-and-conquer.

Michael Zweig: If we buy into the idea that “most Americans are middle-class, except for the poor and the rich,” we’re buying into a racialized concept, because “middle-class” is presumed white and “poor” is presumed black. It’s wrong: two-thirds of the poor are white, and three-quarters of African Americans are not poor. In New Orleans, John Edwards stood in the Ninth Ward [a mostly black neighborhood] to announce his “Two Americas” campaign, but there are more poor whites than blacks in Louisiana. When you allow that to stand, then poor whites say, “What about me?”

Bob Herbert: That’s an intellectual argument that won’t persuade white racists. Some whites don’t want to be associated with poor blacks. Just talk about jobs for all.

Frances Fox Piven: Bob says the two unifying issues are jobs and avoiding divide-and-conquer — but jobs have long been the Right’s issue; stressing them will lead to President Romney. We over-rely on jobs, but we do care about what kind of jobs, paying how much, producing what, how ecologically. Pay more attention to race. When the Tea Party members yell “Take it back!,” they mean take it back from people of color. We have to have a dialogue on race to get solidarity across race.

Bob Herbert: It’s not going to happen. Racism is too entrenched. The evil-doers are too well-funded. Blacks will get more by fighting for themselves, like in the 1950s and ‘60s. We have a black president who won’t even say the word “black”! Cross-race solidarity won’t happen.

Bill Fletcher: A militant African American movement is not inconsistent with working-class solidarity. When blacks are passive, racism and division increases. When blacks are active, they chip away at racism. A majoritarian block won’t include all whites, but will include some. To deconstruct the racial myth held by so many whites, we need a strong left, not wishful thinking about a “kumbaya moment,” but really dealing with the class divide.

Bob Herbert: They are still two separate issues: a militant black-initiated movement for racial justice and a working-class movement. If you focus on race, whites will bolt; they won’t enter.

Audience member: There were several historical moments when many whites stood up for black rights, in the 1930s, the 1960s.

Bob Herbert: I vehemently disagree. Most whites voted against Barack Obama. Look at the voting rights attacks now, and the police doing stop-and-frisk in New York City.

Juan Gonzalez: The persistence of racism is amazing. It used to be that the U.S.was segregated in two homogeneous worlds, white and black. Today’s young people are different, even young whites; they live mixed-race lives. But the ruling circles need those divisions. We fail to understand the critical role of the mass media, the absence of working-class perspectives in the media. What newspaper is waging a campaign against inequality? We need independent media. Democracy Now! is a phenomenal success, but it’s just one show.

The discussion after the panel was heated, with lots of arguing about racism, unions, and movement-building strategy.

I noticed that the most pessimistic panelist, Bob Herbert, was also the one with the least activist experience; the most hopeful panelists were those who have been social change practitioners as well as political observers.

For myself, my reaction was to agree with Bill Fletcher and Frances Fox Piven that the solutions won’t be found just in electoral politics and existing unions; change will come primarily from movement-building and strategic campaigns of (nonviolent) disruptive direct action.

[Betsy Leondar-Wright is the Project Director of Class Action. She is the author of Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists and the co-author of The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Boston College.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Betsy Leondar-Wright, Class Struggle, Classism, Leftists, Social Change | Leave a comment

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

American Botanical Council director Mark Blumenthal in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, June 15, 2012. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog. Inset photo below by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.
Rag Radio:
Botanical Council’s Mark Blumenthal
discusses herbal and alternative medicine

By Rag Radio | The Rag Blog | June 21, 2012

Mark Blumenthal, the founder and executive director of the American Botanical Council (ABC), an “independent herbal think tank,” discussed herbal and alternative medicine with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, June 15, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin’s cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station.

You can listen to the show here:

Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

On the show, Dreyer and Blumenthal discuss issues involving research, regulation, marketing, and responsible use of medicinal plants and other alternatives to conventional Western medicine.

Mark Blumenthal heads the American Botanical Council, an independent, nonprofit organization “dedicated to disseminating accurate, reliable, and responsible information on herbs and medicinal plants,” and is the editor and publisher of HerbalGram, an international, peer-reviewed quarterly journal.

Mark has played a major role in “opening the doors” between alternative and conventional medicine in this country and his group has worked to create an interface between the interests of consumers, the herbal industry, and the scientific and research communities.

Mark Blumenthal has been a leader in efforts for more rational regulations of herbal and natural product manufacturing, and education on alternative and traditional medicines. He has written that “herbs represent the collective heritage of our planet. The use of plants and plant parts for medicine and food is part of what we’ve inherited from our ancesters.”

Blumenthal was an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, co-founded the Herb Research Foundation (HRF), was president of the Herb Trade Association, and was a founding board member of the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA). He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows and has written reviews and book chapters for many major publications.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

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. (CST) on KOOP, 91.7-fM in Austin, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) 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 the KOOP studios, 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:

June 22, 2012: Gay marriage and social change in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.
June 29, 2012: Peruvian Sociologist Cristina Herencia on issues confronting indigenous peoples in global times.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Alternative Medicine, American Botanical Council, Herbal Medicine, Interview, Mark Blumenthal, Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer | 1 Comment

James McEnteer : Julian Assange, Come on Over

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Stencil of Julian Assange from Bold Legume.
Insane Asylum?
From Center Stage to Middle Earth

Is Julian Assange crazy to want to go to Ecuador, of all the obscure places on this globe?

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2012

QUITO, Ecuador — After the UK waived the right of Julian Assange to resist extradition to Sweden, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. He is seeking political asylum in Ecuador to avoid prosecution in Sweden and possible deportation to the United States for exposing state secrets via Wikileaks.

Western media are second-guessing Assange’s choice. Is he crazy to want to go to Ecuador, of all the obscure places on this globe? UK and U.S. officials are already putting pressure on the government of Ecuador to hand Assange over for prosecution for violating the terms of his bail. That pressure will no doubt intensify.

Assange interviewed Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa last month on his syndicated talk program with world leaders. The two men appeared cordial. After Wikileaks exposed U.S. accusations of Ecuadorean police corruption and presidential malfeasance, Ecuador expelled U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges from the country in 2011.

The United States and Ecuador have been on touchy terms since Correa’s presidency began in 2007. Correa refused to renew the U.S. air base in Manta, on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, choosing instead to open an oil refinery there in partnership with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Correa said at the time that he would be glad to let the U.S. maintain its base in Ecuador if Ecuador were allowed to open a military base in Florida. Rafael Correa is not likely to be easily intimidated.

Critics of Assange’s decision to seek asylum in Ecuador cite Rafael Correa’s crackdown on oppositional media. From the start of Correa’s term in office, media have attacked him politically and personally. He has responded with law suits, prosecutions of individuals and confiscations of media outlets, accusing his critics of colluding with the largest banks against the interests of the majority.

Correa’s censure of local media has brought him international criticism from organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Inter American Press Association. Under intense international pressure he pardoned several high-profile journalists who had been fined and sentenced to prison. To oppose a free press would seem a vile act. But opposing a Murdoch-like press, itself a vile species, is much less so. Quoth A.J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one,” aka the 1 percent.

Critics who believe Correa’s press crackdown should give Assange pause fail to realize that both men abhor media corruption, especially the complicity of mass media with governmental and financial interests and pressures.

Changes in the new Ecuadorean constitution, written since Correa took office, have empowered the environmental movement on several fronts, on land and at sea. Assange will find Ecuador one of the greenest governments on earth. And with his popularity at a continued unprecedented high, Correa is highly likely to maintain the country’s presidency in the upcoming 2013 elections. So there would be no likely radical change of policy in the foreseeable future.

Though it’s a small country, Ecuador is ethnically and environmentally diverse, with lovely tropical coast, high volcanic Andes, and Amazon rainforest. Indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians enrich the culture. Increasing numbers of U.S. retirees are choosing to move here. So while Ecuador may seem like a “last resort” for Julian Assange, he will actually have a number of resorts — and climates — from which to choose.

Mr. Assange will also find more than adequate high-speed Internet connections available, at least in the urban areas. It’s not exactly a hardship post. And at least some of us who have chosen to live in Ecuador would be proud to have Julian Assange as a neighbor. There’s a perfectly comfortable two-bedroom apartment downstairs from us that’s currently available.

Julian, come on over!

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger 2006). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Ecuador, James McEnteer, Julian Assange, Political Asylum, WikiLeaks | 3 Comments

Travis Waldron : Adidas and the ‘Shackle Shoe’

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

What was Adidas thinking
with its Shackle Shoes?

It’s hard to imagine a shoe company coming up with a worse idea than this.

By Travis Waldron / ThinkProgress / June 20, 2012

Adidas is notorious for pushing the envelope in sports fashion, most recently for outfitting men’s college basketball team in hideous neon uniforms for the NCAA Tournament.

The company’s newest product, however, reaches a whole new level of provocation, and it’s hard to imagine a shoe company coming up with a worse idea than this:

That’s the new Adidas JS Roundhouse Mid, a basketball shoe that was set to debut in August and was aimed at those who have “a sneaker game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles.” The shoe’s rather unsubtle use of shackles has, understandably, drawn criticism for symbolizing slavery and prison chains.

Adidas said the shoe represented “nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery.” Scott, the company noted, is known for “quirky, lighthearted” designs.

Adidas pulled the shoe out of production late last night, and I’m of the belief that it wouldn’t intentionally approve a design that symbolized slavery. But that is the problem: apparently, no one in any stage of the process stopped long enough to think that a product set to be marketed largely to African-Americans that included shackles and chains might have negative racial overtones in a country where slavery existed for more than two centuries.

It would be tough to mistake Mickey Mouse or panda bears — features of past Scott designs — as anything but “quirky” or “lighthearted.” To many Americans, though, this design’s dependence on shackles and chains isn’t quirky, lighthearted, outrageous, or unique — it’s offensive. Amazingly, it took a massive public outcry for Adidas to realize that.

[Travis Waldron is a reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Travis grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and holds a BA in journalism and political science from the University of Kentucky. This article was first published at ThinkProgress.]

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Adidas, Fashion, Racism, Sports, Travis Waldron | Leave a comment

BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Medea Benjamin on ‘Killing by Remote Control’

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Killing by Remote Control:
Medea Benjamin’s ‘Drone Warfare‘

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | June 20, 2012

“The drones were terrifying… the buzz of a distant propeller was a constant reminder of imminent death.” — Journalist David Rohde

[Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control by Medea Benjamin. Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich (2012: OR Books); Paperback; ISBN 978-1-935929-81-2; 262 pp.; $16. E-book ISBN 978-1-935928-82-9.]

President Obama makes jokes about them; Pakistanis — and others around the world — live in fear of them. They’re fast and efficient and they save the lives of Americans troops — their advocates insist. Drones — unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — are here now bigger and bolder than ever before, spying on more people than ever before and killing more people than ever before by remote control and at the behest, more often than not, of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Medea Benjamin — the author of the new book, Drone Warfare, and the cofounder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange — isn’t buying any of the buzz about the UAV’s. She thinks they’re illegal and immoral and ought to be banned except for peaceful purposes — like fighting forest fires.

Drone Warfare is a useful guidebook for organizers and activists, whether they want to educate themselves and others, or join the global movement that is calling for an immediate end to killing by remote control, and an end to the unending reign of terror that has been imposed from above on innocent civilians — men, women and children– ever since 9/11. Imperfect drones have also killed Americans soldiers in Asia.

As in all previous wars, the drone war has led to “doublethink,” as George Orwell called it. Senior White House counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, noted in April 2012 that “Unfortunately in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population,” and that “sometimes you have to take life to saves lives.”

About a hundred years ago, General William Tecumseh Sherman said “war is hell” and led Union troops on a rampage through Georgia, burning, looting, and killing. He was no less deadly on the ground that the drones are in the air, but he seems to have been more honest than the White House and its advisers are today.

Benjamin has talked to the pro-drone technocrats and to the representatives from anti-drone organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as to lawyers and their clients who have been arrested and gone on trial for demonstrating against UAVs.

She’s read the articles and the editorials about them, too, and she writes clearly and concisely about real people caught up in the machinations of war and with vivid quotations from them, some as recently as February 2012, which means that this book is as up-to-date on the subject as a book can be.

Some of the most powerful comments are by Americans who have experienced drone warfare while in Afghanistan. Perhaps the most electrifying is by David Rohde, a journalist who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and who was kidnapped by the Taliban. Like everyone else on the ground, he lived under the threat of death by remote control.

After his escape and return to the United States, he wrote an article entitled “The Drone War” in which he said that, “The drones were terrifying.” He added that “the buzz of a distant propeller was a constant reminder of imminent death,” and that “drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound.” The victims, he explained, never even hear the missiles that kill them.

Indeed, the main point of the drones seems to be to terrify human beings en masse in whole regions and across nations, whether Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen. Granted, drones have killed thousands of people, including American citizens, such as Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. The body count is not insignificant and at times the killing of a single individual may be critical to a military campaign.

But the psychological impact is the hideous big bonus of the drones, much as the threat of nuclear annihilation was a big hideous bonus of nuclear warfare. For the moment, the use of the drone as a psychological weapon by the United States government seems to have tipped the balance of power in favor of American military forces and American spy agencies, though debates about the efficacy of the drones can be followed on the Internet and TV.

The drone is much in demand and highly praised, with thousands of them named the Predator and the Reaper coming off assembly lines and with no end in sight. Indeed, U.S. taxpayers are shelling out more than $3 billion a year for them, and even if they can’t see what they’re doing, they’re hurting American citizens financially.

Benjamin breaks the “sordid” drone saga down into its component parts, looking at its economic, legal, moral, and political aspects. She also puts all the pieces together and shows how drone warfare has led to spirited opposition from citizens in Asia, in Europe, and in the United States. She even works up sympathy for the drone operators who are, after all, no more than lowly workers in the immense, hierarchal hive of military activity.

“For up to twelve hours a day, they stare at 10 overhead television screens, monitoring a constant stream of images being relayed to them from the battlefield while communicating on headsets with drone pilots at other bases and instant messaging with commanders on the ground,” Benjamin writes.

Reading her description of a day in the life of a drone operator makes it obvious that the highly touted drones are greatly imperfect and hardly efficient or inexpensive killing machines. Right now, though, they’re making millions for the super-duper, high-tech weapons industry.

Outlawing drones seems to be not only a worthwhile goal but also achievable. It wasn’t that long ago that governments tested atom bombs and that airplanes loaded with cancer-causing DDT sprayed millions of acres of American farmlands, forests, and suburban backyards, too. The world woke up to the deadly reality of atomic bomb testing and DDT-spraying and put an end to them.

Benjamin offers useful suggestions for readers who want to put drones out of business. At the back of the book, she provides a list of organizations that can help activists and organizers from New York to Nevada. If you want to get started you could go to “Robot Wars” which can be found here.

[Jonah Raskin is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

Also see “Drones Don’t Talk Back” by Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2012

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Aerial Drones, Books, Drone Technology, Jonah Raskin, Medea Benjamin, Military, U.S. Foreign Policy | 1 Comment

Lamar W. Hankins : Suppressing Democracy 101

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic from Other Means.
Today’s Republicans find
new ways to suppress democracy

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | June 19, 2012

Registering the poor to vote ‘is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.’ — Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum

It was a moving moment when Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) learned that his great-great-grandfather, Tobias Carter, a slave until 1865, had registered to vote for the first time in 1867. Ninety-eight years later, the civil rights activist and ally of Martin Luther King, Jr., had celebrated the passage of the Voting Rights Act after a long struggle, not knowing that nearly 100 years earlier one of his ancestors had been allowed to register and vote without opposition or intimidation.

But in less than 10 years from that act of freedom, African-Americans throughout the South had largely lost the ability to vote because of Jim Crow laws and acts of intimidation and violence, including murder, inflicted on them by white supremacists.

John Lewis was a guest recently on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.‘s PBS program Finding Your Roots. Gates delves into the personal history of his guests, usually public personalities, to find how their forebears came to this country, who their ancestors were, what happened to them, and what their DNA shows about their origins.

It took a few moments for the information Gates gave John Lewis to sink in. Then, Lewis seemed to recognize the irony that nearly 100 years after his great-great-grandfather registered to vote, the nation would have to reinstate that right for African-Americans. Lewis tried to hold back his tears, but he could not.

In the last three decades of the 1800s, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was mostly Democrats in the South who suppressed voting by minorities. That began to change during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt as Democrats over a period of 25 years became more and more identified with the movement for civil rights for all Americans, and became a minority party throughout the South.

Republicans in the North worked to suppress voting, too — mostly to prevent immigrants, blue-collar workers, and the poor from voting — with tricky procedural rules, such as requiring voters to cancel their registration after moving before being allowed to re-register, or commanding some voters to have authenticated naturalization papers with them at the polls.

Now, throughout the country it is the Republican party that systematically devises ways, old and new, to reduce registration and suppress voting by people they deem unlikely to support Republican causes: minorities, elderly people, and college students. The virtual Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party during the past two years has provided a new impetus for Republican voter suppression.

I remember learning about voter suppression first in 1971, during the nomination hearings into the appointment of William Rehnquist to the U. S. Supreme Court. In the 1964 elections, Rehnquist served as a Republican poll watcher whose job was to delay every minority voter that he could based on the supposition that they would vote Democratic.

Reporter Dennis Roddy described Rehnquist’s actions:

He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman. He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people who spoke broken English were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.

Rehnquist succeeded in holding up a line four abreast and a block long before Democratic poll watchers arrived at the polling station in Phoenix. The voter suppression was so well organized that it had a name — “Operation Eagle Eye.”

While the suppression effort was legal at the time, it was nothing but bullying of the less well-educated by the elite. The voter suppression efforts of Rehnquist were described by several people, including Lito Pena, who went on to serve for 30 years in the Arizona Legislature, and by a person who later became a deputy U. S. Attorney, as well as several others. But Rehnquist’s efforts were minor compared to what has been happening recently.

The mostly Republican modern voter suppression efforts include requiring photo identification in order to register, reducing the time allowed for early voting, ending same-day registration where that has been available (in Texas, voter registration ends 30 days before the election), creating greater difficulties for eligible ex-felons who have paid for their crimes, requiring proof-of-citizenship documents in order to register, and discouraging voter registration drives through new regulations that penalize authorized registrars who can’t immediately file registration forms.

The imaginary “arc of justice” that many orators like to talk about has seemed to be moving toward greater inclusion when the whole of American history is considered. Women achieved the right to vote only during my mother’s lifetime, poll taxes were eliminated, literacy tests were overturned, English-language proficiency tests were abolished, and property ownership was invalidated as a requirement for voting.

But none of these notable expansions of the voting franchise have been absolute. There have been periods of progress followed by retrenchment. Thankfully, we have had mostly progress for women and, since 1965, for minorities and the poor, at least until recently.

Both major political parties have been guilty of voter suppression at various times in our history. What is unusual in recent history is that nearly all voter suppression is tied to the Republican Party and has been aimed at systematically disenfranchising people who are believed to favor the other major party. When this is done by passing laws, the justification given is that the laws are needed to prevent voter fraud — an unsupportable canard.

A favorite new voter law is to require state-issued photo IDs. Twenty states either have photo-ID law requirements for voter registration or are considering them. Low-income people and students have disproportionately fewer state-issued photo IDs. Students may have IDs issued by their colleges, but these are not acceptable under some of the new photo-ID registration laws. Many low-income people do not have checking accounts and don’t drive, so their need for photo IDs are limited.

They live in a cash-only economy. Requiring them to obtain a state-issued ID just to be allowed to register to vote is a step most of us don’t have to worry about, but they do.

In five states that have new photo-ID laws, including Texas, 3.2 million people of voting age don’t have state-issued photo IDs according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School. Nationwide, 21 million Americans do not have state-issued photo IDs. Among African-Americans, 25% do not have state-issued photo IDs, as compared to only 11% of all Americans.

Obtaining photo IDs is not simple or cheap for many people. They need to get to the office that issues the IDs and then produce a variety of documents, such as a birth certificate, passport, marriage license, court record, or similar documents. If they don’t have such documents readily available, they will have to obtain them, which takes time — often several weeks.

All of these documents cost money — anywhere from $10 to $200 — not insignificant amounts for someone living on a limited income — such as $600 a month. In addition, the photo ID will cost from $10 to $30 in those states that require them for voter registration. This requirement sounds a lot like the notorious poll tax used to keep poor African-Americans from voting before 1965.

The nonpartisan League of Women Voters used to conduct voter registration drives, but new laws and regulations in Texas and Florida have made all such efforts difficult and risky. The laws impose tight schedules to turn in new registrations and significant fines if deadlines (such as within 48 hours of gathering voter registration information) are not met.

In the past year, same-day registration has been attacked by Republicans in two states, five states have reduced the length of early voting, executive orders in two states have revoked the right of ex-felons to vote, and three states have reduced the hours that state photo-ID offices are open or have closed some of the offices, making it more difficult to obtain the photo ID. In Texas, 34 counties do not have an office that issues photo IDs. Four of these counties have Hispanic populations over 75%.

If you think that changes to voting laws is just a happenstance, consider that in 2009 the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) issued a model Voter ID law that prohibited certain forms of identification, such as student IDs. This model law has been acknowledged by Tea Party organizations and legislators (mostly Republican) as the source of their inspiration to make voter registration and voting more difficult.

ALEC was supported in 2009 by Wal-mart, the Koch brothers, Coca-Cola, Richard Mellon Scaife, the John M. Olin Foundation, Kraft, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Exxon, Altria (formerly Phillip Morris tobacco), Kraft food, Pfizer, Reynolds American, State Farm Insurance, Wendy’s, Amazon.com, Pepsi, United Parcel Service, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and many other corporations and corporate associations, some of which have recently stopped their funding to protect their brands from public retribution. (For more information about ALEC and its funding sources go to SourceWatch.com.)

But Republicans don’t rely only on changing the laws to suppress voting. Florida’s Republican governor has ordered a purge of voter registration lists, much like what happened before the 2000 election that was contested all the way to the Supreme Court. In some places, voters are misled by mailings and circulars about when elections take place. In others, information distributed about voting locations is falsified.

In some minority communities, prospective voters have been intimidated by warnings that false voting will be prosecuted. And then there is the wide-spread use of systematic voter challenges by Tea Partiers in Wisconsin in 2010. Such efforts to disenfranchise voters, embarrass them, and intimidate them should be criminal, but the claim that changing laws is justified because of widespread voter fraud is merely false.

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.

It is difficult to believe that the Republican effort at disenfranchisement results from anything other than ideology. Leading Republican supporters have acknowledged their disdain for all Americans to be allowed to vote.

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum believes that registering the poor to vote “is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.” Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich is even more blunt: “I don’t want everybody to vote.” And in the 2008 presidential election, 3 million Americans who tried to vote could not do so because of voter registration requirements. Vadum and Weyrich must be pleased.

Both major political parties have been guilty in the past of rejecting democratic values in order to give their party’s candidates an advantage. Now the right to vote is under attack mainly by Republicans who reject democratic values. They want to discard the right that John Lewis has fought for all of his life and that Lyndon B. Johnson called “the basic right, without which all others are meaningless.”

[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.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged American History, Conservative Politics, Lamar W. Hankins, Racism, Republican Party, Voter Fraud, Voter Suppression | 4 Comments

Marilyn Katz : West Bank Diaries

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Shuttered Palestinian shops along Shashuda Street in Hebron, West Bank. Photo by Marilyn Katz.
The separation is total:
West Bank Diaries

More than anything it appears that these fences are cages, locking people in, restricting their movement, and ultimately making them prisoners in their own land.

By Marilyn Katz | The Rag Blog | June 19, 2012

[In May, Marilyn Katz spent 10 days traveling around Israel, Palestine, and Jordan with the liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization J Street. What follows are excerpts from the journal she kept during her trip.]

Day 1: May 3, 2012

We leave Tel Aviv, a sun-drenched city filled with beaches, high rises, and casually-dressed Israelis, on the only road across the West Bank to Jerusalem. It’s a slick highway surrounded on all sides by a “fence” — in some places cement and in other places barbed wire, dotted with armed checkpoints.

On the side of the road, Palestinian men walk through a narrow barbed wire pathway, some carrying bags, others carrying furniture. The road, I’m told, is for Israeli citizens only — those Palestinians who have permission to work in Israel must park their vehicles elsewhere, pass through a check poin, and board buses that exit the road shortly thereafter.

What is the purpose of this fencing? The ostensible reason — security — is less than convincing. The fences are made of barbed wire; anyone wishing to damage a road or a village could easily shoot over or through it, or simply take the risk of being cut. My guides estimate that thousands of Palestinians “penetrate” these fences to reach Israel each day. More than anything it appears that these fences are cages, locking people in, restricting their movement, and ultimately making them prisoners in their own land.

On to Jerusalem. When I was here 10 years ago, I saw many Palestinians working throughout the city. Today, I am struck not only by the absence of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, but by the massive numbers of Haredi and other Ultra-Orthodox Jews. With an average of eight children per family, the Haredi and other Ultra-Orthodox Jews are the fastest growing segment of the Israeli population, and they are a huge factor in Israeli politics and a huge drain on the economy and political life.

Some of the Ultra-Orthodox, particularly the Haredi men, do not work and have been exempted from military service so that they can “study.” They all receive a government stipend for each child born. Due to their growing numbers, they have a big influence in the parliament and in the military.

Impression: The separation is total. Despite the 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, it is totally possible for Israelis never to encounter Palestinians and for Palestinians never to encounter Israelis, except at checkpoints.

Day 2: May 4, 2012

Just returned from a day in the West Bank. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were meant to be only an interim step), the West Bank has been divided into three areas: “Area A” (large cities under the full control of the Palestinian Authority), “Area B” (smaller cities and villages supposedly under Palestinian civil authority and Israel Defense Forces [IDF] military authority), and “Area C” (the rest of the West Bank, which includes farms, villages, and individual houses the Israelis claim to be uninhabited, and which is under the complete control of the IDF).

Today, visiting Kafr-a-Dik, a Palestinian village about 20 minutes from Tel Aviv, I got a pretty good sense of what occupation means. We had lunch in the hills outside the village at the site of a summer “tea house” that had been razed the week before by the IDF. The young children of the family who built the house, which they used for shelter and rest while tending their olive trees, told us they came here last week after school only to find their “shelter” gone. It turns out that while they were at school, hundreds of IDF soldiers descended on the spot with bulldozers, destroying the shelter and the 250-year-old well along with the walled terrace that had protected the olive trees for centuries.

Day 3: May 5, 2012

How to consider Israel? It is a land of more than one reality — particularly since the Second Intifada of 2000, after which Palestinians could no longer travel freely through the country, and after which Israelis did not even go to East Jerusalem, which is like living in the New York’s East Village and never visiting the West Village.

Life in Jerusalem is pretty much like life in any urban center, except for the ever-visible presence of the Haredim, and their reflection in the larger society — there are no billboards with women on them, many radio stations do not play songs in which women sing, and on some bus routes, women are relegated to the back of the bus, despite a Supreme Court ban on the practice.

What is different is the absolute absence of the Other. As Palestinians are barred from entry to Israel, people in general don’t have to think about them, and there is a generation of young Israelis who may have never seen or met one.

In some ways it is not so different from those who live in American suburbs or rural areas and who rarely see anyone who is not like themselves. The situation in Israel is more pronounced, and is true in the cities as well as the suburbs. Ironically, it is probably only the Jewish settlers in the West Bank who have any real continuous “contact” with Palestinians, and then only as occupier of the land or as employer of menial labor — since Palestinians cannot enter Israeli cities, their only work is either in their villages for the Palestinian Authority, or as gardeners, etc., in settlers’ villages (with special work and travel permits, of course).

Day 4: May 6, 2012

After a fascinating morning meeting with the son of assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and other leaders across the political spectrum (with as many views as there were people in the room), we took an afternoon walk to Jaffa, the original Arab port just north of Tel Aviv, where most Jews landed when they came in the 1880s. An ancient city, Jaffa was home to 100,000 Arabs in 1948, before the war. Today, only 6,000 remain.

Dinner was at the sumptuous Tel Aviv home of an Israeli businessman. We were joined by four other “progressive” Israeli businessmen, the heads of hedge and equity funds, all of whom do business with Palestinians and with Arab countries. Three of the four, including the son of a former prime minister, are virtually uninvolved in politics and think that the market, with its lack of borders and its commitment to “innovation,” will simply take care of the issue. The most loquacious of them thinks the wall separating Palestinians from Israelis has actually helped both communities and that in separation, each population is beginning to thrive.

When I returned to my room, I wanted to see whether the most articulate and powerful speaker among these men, the one who stated that the wall has helped both Palestinians and Israelis, could have a point. The bottom line: GDP in Israel is $31,000 per capita; in the West Bank it is $2,900.

That’s all for my Sunday report.

Day 5: May 7, 2012

Today we traveled to Jordan, a stunningly beautiful country. Our first meeting was with King Abdullah, who turned out to be an exceedingly smart, thoughtful, and engaging man. Needless to say, the palace was gorgeous. What could be bad about sipping tea from a gold-embossed glass in a room that makes the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on Middle Eastern decorative arts look shabby?

We met with the king and the prime minister for about an hour. On Israel, the king was probably the most optimistic person we spoke to all day — and that wasn’t very optimistic. It is his opinion — and pretty much everyone’s we talked to — that the window for a possible two-state solution is closing fast, with Israel having totally rebuffed (to date) the Arab Peace Initiative, with Palestinians chaffing under accords that were meant to last two years, not two decades, and with the Arab Spring asserting itself as alternative mode of achieving change.

He thinks, as do others, that the growth of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and of the Palestinian population under occupation is such that if we don’t reach a two-state solution by 2013, the only options will be a dual national state (untenable for the Israelis) or an apartheid state (simply untenable).

Then on to dinner at the home of a former Jordanian Ambassador, joined by 20 other ex-ambassadors, sitting senators and leaders of Jordanian society. It was a sobering conversation. Contrary to the happy talk of the Israeli businessmen about “joint endeavors with the Arab world,” these business and political leaders have pretty much given up on Israel (despite many years of investment in the prospects and endeavor to find peace).

They do not believe that the government in Israel is interested in peace, and they feel that the demographics of the West Bank settlements, which have brought more than 500,000 hard-line settlers to the occupied territories, will continue to give right-wingers the vote. They believe that the total separation of Israelis from Palestinians is breeding a new generation that could care less about peace, and that the Arab world and the Palestinians will just give up on Israel as a “member state of the region,” since it appears to them not to be interested in being one.

They are horrified by the occupation and actions of the Israelis, even while understanding Israel’s legitimate desire for a state. They also rue the retreat into fundamentalism and extremism in both the Jewish and Muslim communities.

Day 6: May 8, 2012

Started off with a gracious meeting at the Jordan Parliament with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — a self-selected group (all men) who spent about two hours with us giving their prognostications on the situation of the Middle East. All are cautious about the Arab Spring (although remember they are all friends of the King) and worry about the rise of Islamist states.

Their main point was that the Arab Spring is a wave, demanding human dignity and full citizenship rights, and that this tide will also affect Israel. Like all others from whom we heard, they believe that the window for a two-state solution — which they all favor — is short, and they do not see a negotiating partner in Israel.

We spent the afternoon in the West Bank looking at Jewish settlements — all illegal, according to Article 49 of the Geneva Accords. Hundreds of thousands of settlers now live in the West Bank, and settlements and their “outposts” have been placed to totally surround Arab villages, confiscating Arab lands in the process and creating an internal colony.

(A note: I know when we think of settlements, we often think of the American West, where whole towns have grown. In the West Bank, settlements vary. In some cases they are huge, with thousands of residents, and resemble the gated communities of southern California or Florida. But in other places, settlements are one building on a street in East Jerusalem, or some cases whole blocks, where one or two lone Palestinian families remain.)

Day 7: May 9, 2012

Today was Israeli official politics day. We started off at the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) with a series of meetings with a variety of representatives of various parties — Labor, Meretz (the socialist party) and Kadima, which is a center-left (more center than left) break-away from Labor.

It is a very tumultuous time for the Knesset. Last week, Netanyahu declared that the Knesset would be dissolved and that elections for a new parliament would be held in September. Then, on Monday night, Kadima’s leader made a radical u-turn and decided to join the Likud (Netanyahu) coalition, giving Netanyahu a 94-vote majority — if the deal holds of course…

And there are reasons why it wouldn’t hold. Kadima, while not a strong party, represents the faction that in theory wants to freeze the settlements and pursue the peace process. Likud has shown little inclination to do so. There is much speculation among all about what will happen. All say they are committed to a two-state solution, and that there isn’t much time, but all doubt the political will of Netanyahu.

Day 8: May 10, 2012

We started our day off at Hebron, a large town in the Judean mountains. We were brought to Hebron by a group called Encounter, a Jewish organization that tries to expose Israelis, American Jews, and others to the realities of life in the West Bank, without commentary. Most of the Encounter members are rabbinical students, and quite lovely.

Some context: In 1929, during the Arab uprising against the British, 67 Jews in Hebron were killed by Palestinians (many, many more were sheltered and protected by their Palestinian neighbors). After that, Jews left Hebron, not to return until 1968 when they began to settle in an area just outside of the Old City’s downtown. The settlement they established grew into Kiryat Arba, which now has 7,500 residents. In 1979, a group of Hasidic families occupied an old, empty hospital in the Old City itself, creating another settlement.

After a 1994 shooting in which a settler killed 29 Palestinians (and injured dozens more), the government decided that Jews and Palestinians needed to be separated, and the barricading and death of the old Palestinian city began. Today, as you walk around the half-deserted streets of the Old City in which Palestinians still live and try to have shops, you see shuttered stores, their façades often graffitied with the Star of David.

Most disturbing is Shashuda Street, once a central street in the Palestinian community, where the vegetable and meat market stood. The remaining Palestinians’ homes are like hen’s teeth on the first blocks of the street, squeezed among the new settlements. Many Palestinians now put screening over their interior courtyards and over their stores to protect them from the feces and trash thrown down by settlers from their higher homes.

The next block is almost fully occupied by Israelis, and Palestinians are prohibited from driving on the street. Many are not allowed to exit their homes onto the street; rather, they must exit via the roof or an adjacent apartment onto the “Palestinian street” on the other side of the block.

Day 9: May 11, 2012

From the surreal experience of Hebron we went off to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), to meet with Salam Fayyad, the PA’s prime minister. Ramallah is a bustling, modern city, with cranes dotting the skyline and the same type of buildings that you see in Jerusalem. Israelis are not allowed to visit Ramallah or any other place in the West Bank designated an “Area A” without a special permit.

Fayyad, who got his degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, is responsible for the administration of the West Bank, while President Mahmoud Abbas is the political leader. A small, fairly quiet and compact man, he was engaged and engaging. He says that they are fully committed to a two-state solution, but feels a growing sense of despair due to the lack of response by the Israelis to the Arab Peace Initiative and the refusal of Israel to halt or freeze the settlements, which, if they continue, will make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

He talked with pride about the growth of Ramallah’s and the West Bank’s economy and the reduction of violence. But he fears that the delays in the peace process, the jailing of hundreds of Palestinians, the sense of hopelessness, the confiscation of Palestinian homes and lands, and the settler violence against Palestinians will once again lead to violence.

As for him, he is engaged in “constructive defiance.” For example, after the IDF bulldozed a road the Palestinian Authority had built in the West Bank to connect two villages, the PA rebuilt the road. After the IDF again bulldozed the road, the PA rebuilt it a third time, and for now, the road still stands.

Day 10: May 12, 2012

Lunch in Ramallah was hosted by the emerging young business and political leaders of Palestine. Among them were investment bankers, youth leaders and a number of entrepreneurs. All came back to Palestine — from Harvard, MIT, Stanford and the like — to nation-build, and all are frustrated, some only with the U.S., and others with the PLO and the Abbas leadership as well.

They speak of the degradation of being stopped at checkpoints on their way to business meetings in Israel (despite their permits). They speak about supplies and goods being held up by the Israelis for months at a time, and the impossibility of generating a real economy, as Israel controls the timing and the content of all imports and exports. While all believe in a two-state solution, they are really beyond that. Their demand, very simply, is that the occupation — it’s walls, its rules — be ended now.

The day ended with a trip to Neve Shalom, a community on a hilltop above the lush and fertile valley between the mountains and Tel Aviv, the green belt of Israel. Established more than 30 years ago, Neve Shalom is a “model village” where an equal number of Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews have created a community committed to providing a model of integrated living.

We joined members of the Sulha Peace Project for an evening of “encounter” between Palestinians and Israelis. Founded by Palestinian and Jewish leaders, the organization regularly brings together Palestinians and Jews for song, talk, and sharing. Not exactly my cup of tea, yet I was moved and impressed nevertheless with this people-to-people grassroots attempt to envision a new way of being.

In the end, though, it isn’t enough. The two groups may break bread and sing together tonight, but their ability to even come together at all is dependent on the benevolence of more gracious occupiers who give out “get out of jail for a day” cards to the occupied. And at the end of the day, the occupied go back to their cages.

[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.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Israel, Jordan, Marilyn Katz, Middle East, Palestinian Occupation, West Bank | 3 Comments

RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Pioneering Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, June 8, 2012, during broadcast of Rag Radio. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger,
founding editor of The Texas Observer

By Thorne Webb Dreyer | The Rag Blog | June 15, 2012

Legendary Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin’s cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station; Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

You can listen to the show here:

Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie Dugger “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961, and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid.

The Texas Observer is a muckraking journal that has broken stories on major scandals and played an influential role in Texas politics. Based in Austin, the Observer, in its own words, “specializes in investigative, political and social-justice reporting from the strangest state in the Union.” The New York Review of Books referred to the Observer as an “outpost of reason in the Southwest.”

In 1966, Dugger also proposed and co-founded the Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots anti-big-corporate organization.

Ronnie Dugger, who won the 2011 George Polk Award for his career in journalism, has influenced and mentored such progressive Texas journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. He recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Mass.

Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. He has also written for Harper’s, Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Progressive.

Dugger has taught at the University of Virginia, Hampshire College, and the University of Illinois, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

Dugger shared with host Thorne Dreyer some of the rich history of the Observer and of Texas progressive politics and journalism, marked by such seminal — and colorful — figures as Frankie Carter Randolph, U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, John Henry Faulk, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins.

Once, when Molly Ivins — who would become widely recognized as a national treasure for her special brand of populist Texas wit — was editing the Observer, Dugger asked her, “Molly, when are you gonna get serious?” Ivins replied (“quick as a whip”): “When we have a chance to win.”

On the show, Dugger discussed the legacy of the McCarthy era, the looming (both then and now) threat of nuclear war — an issue that he has always considered preeminent — and the Johnson presidency, which, he points out, made history with its courageous progressive domestic agenda. “Of course,” Dugger says, “the Vietnam War not only ruined that, but killed two million people.”

We discussed the way Lyndon’s unique saga was variously treated by the erudite Willie Morris in his heralded memoir North Toward Home and by Billy Lee Brammer, whose pre-gonzo novel, The Gay Place, Dugger called “one of the best novels written by anybody in Texas.” Brammer was Dugger’s first associate editor at the Observer, and Morris would later edit the Observer and then gain more fame as the editor of Harper’s.

And Dugger recounted a remarkable incident in 1955 that he later wrote about in an article titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me.” Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summoned Ronnie to the LBJ Ranch with an offer — “something of a quid pro quo.” After inquiring about the Observer‘s circulation (“Oh, about 6,000,” Dugger told him), Johnson made his proposal: “Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000.”

“Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically,” Dugger remembers. “Sing my praises, and we’ll make the Observer a whamdinger.” Of course Dugger, who according to Willie Morris became “one of Johnson’s main public antagonists,” chose to decline the deal. According to Morris, Ronnie Dugger “distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.”

Ronnie Dugger also shared with the Rag Radio audience his not-so-optimistic take on the current political scene. “I think both political parties have descended pretty low,” he said. And the Supreme Court “has opened huge corporate money vaults,” with “the scandalous idea that corporations have the same rights as persons.” Dugger fears that “we’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy… and a bought Congress.”

“Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse,” he said.

Above (and in inset photo): Thorne Dreyer, left, and Ronnie Dugger at the KOOP studios. Behind Dugger is Grace Alfar of ZGraphix. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

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. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, June 15, 2012: American Botanical Council Director Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine.
June 22, 2012: Gay Marriage in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Alan Pogue, Journalists, LBJ, Progressive Democrats, Rag Radio, Ronnie Dugger, Texas History, Texas Observer, Thorne Dreyer | 1 Comment

Harry Targ : Mitch Daniels, Educator!

David Hamilton : In France, Socialists Rule!

INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Mariann Wizard’s Odyssey

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine

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Lamar W. Hankins : Suppressing Democracy 101

Marilyn Katz : West Bank Diaries

RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger

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