Posted on May 13, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Fascinating stuff! From my interview with Chris Mooney, author of “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality.” Post includes the podcast of our hour-long interview. In his work, Mooney taps scientific research ranging from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to genetics, and concludes that “political conservatives seem to be very different from political liberals at the level of psychology and personality” — that they simply see the world differently!

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Chris Mooney Dissects the Republican Brain

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Author and Rag Radio guest Chris Mooney, shown researching the Republican brain. Photo illustration by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio:
Chris Mooney dissects the Republican brain

By Thorne Webb Dreyer | The Rag Blog | May 11, 2012

Chris Mooney surgically dissected the Republican brain on Rag Radio with the assistance of host Thorne Dreyer.

Mooney, who is the author of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality, and of the 2005 New York Times bestseller, The Republican War on Science, was Dreyer’s guest Friday, May 4, 2012, on Rag Radio, an hour-long interview show that first airs Friday afternoons on KOOP 91.7-FM — a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas — and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

The show is also streamed to a live audience on the Internet by both stations.

You can listen to Rag Radio’s interview with Chris Mooney here.


Scientific American calls Chris Mooney “one of the few journalists in the country who specialize in the now dangerous intersection of science and politics.” Mooney also hosts the “Point of Inquiry” podcast, writes the “Intersection” blog for Science Progress, and has written for Mother Jones, American Prospect, Harper’s, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Slate.

In The Republican Brain, Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments “to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things; appear more likely than Democrats to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts; and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs.”

Mooney wrote that, “As I began to investigate the underlying causes for the conservative denial of reality that we see all around us, I found it impossible to ignore a mounting body of evidence — from political science, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics — that points to a key conclusion.”

“Political conservatives,” he wrote “seem to be very different from political liberals at the level of psychology and personality. And inevitably, this influences the way the two groups argue and process information.”

“At first I didn’t want to believe this,” Mooney said on Rag Radio, but added that there is now so much research on the “differences between liberals and conservatives” that, “if you start to seep yourself in it, you’ll never really look at politics in the same way again.”

“I used to think that conservatives do what they do because they’re either in hock to corporate America or, you know, it’s just religion,” he said. “I still hear my fellow liberals say, ‘Follow the money,'” Mooney said, acknowledging that environmental factors do play a major role in the development of people’s politics. And there’s a legitimate argument, he says, “that these [personality] traits don’t matter in comparison to the incredible influence of media [and] political polorazition.”

But “there’s just a huge body of research, now,” Mooney said, that backs up the premise of his most recent book. “There can be any number of things wrong with any one study [but] when it works in a lot of different disciplines, when they’re all coalescing on the same information, that’s when you know you’re really not fooling yourself.”

The research is branching into fields like genetics, “which is controversial and drives conservatives absolutely crazy.” That’s because “they misunderstand it,” he says. According to Mooney, current research shows “that something like 40 percent of your political views” appear to be genetically transmitted. “There’s not a Republican gene or a Democrat gene,” he stresses. Just genes “that basically predispose you towards certain traits.”

Mooney said that, while liberals are much more willing to change and “to listen to people who say different things,” conservatives “are the kind of people who want certainty, who want stability, who resist change, who don’t like ambiguity, and who don’t like situations that are grey rather than black and white.”

“So that certainly pushes them towards religion,” he says,” and “pushes them towards traditionalist views about how the economic marketplace should work.”

Mooney says that “you’ve got conservatism, and fundamentalist religion, and authoritarianism — all wrapped up in a ball in the United States. And they’re all closely connected to one another. And I think that the underlying theme is need for certainty, need for closure, need for fixed beliefs…”

“And then, once you’ve got that, you limit your search for information, you try to find information that agrees with you, that makes you feel sure of yourself.” Which has led conservatives — even highly-educated conservatives — to believe things that require “such weird and outlandish rationalization, like global warming denial, that I think you really need a psychological explanation.”

Conservatives tend to be authoritarians, “people who view the world in black and white,” Mooney told the Rag Radio audience. “They think that there’s only two sides, and that they’re on the right side, and that everybody else is on the wrong side.”

And, he pointed out, “conservatives more than liberals view the distinction between what you might call the ‘in group’ and the ‘out group,'” acknowledging that this can result in ethnic prejudice and racial chauvanism. “Oh, absolutely,” he said. “This is the most explosive part of the story.”

According to Mooney, when these conservatives “see someone that’s a different color than them, essentially, they’re more vigilant about their risk, as they perceive it.” “The whole ‘Obama’s a Muslim’ thing, is clearly a kind of xenophobia, as well as misinformation,” he said.

Conservatives are very supportive of authority and hierarchy, Mooney said, and social structures “in which one group of people have more power.” And, he said, “they think that that’s great and they think that that’s fair. And usually those people are male, white, and straight.”

“Liberals,” on the other hand, “test high on a trait called ‘openness to experience,’” he says. “It’s about being willing to try new things, meet new people, try out new ideas.” Liberals “are okay with nuance and complexity and sort of taking a lot of time seeing the pattern.”

One of the most consistent themes the researchers have found “has to do with this relationship between conservativism and fear. And it’s not just that they’re cowering in their boots. It’s more like they’re kind of militaristic in the sense that they’re searching around the environment for threats, and trying to be ready, trying to be vigilant, so that they can defend themselves.”

The conservatives interpret his work “as an attack on them,” Mooney says, “even though a lot of this research makes them look good and makes liberals look really undisciplined and not very good at politics.” In an article titled “The Republican Brain on ‘The Republican Brain’,” written for Truthout and also published on The Rag Blog, Mooney reported that “even before the book was out, conservatives were attacking it without reading it.”

In the article he describes how the National Review previously attacked a study “on the psychological underpinnings of political ideology” by calling it the “Conservatives are Crazy” study. “But,” Mooney said, “the study did not ever assert that conservatives are crazy or claim anything of the kind.”

His favorite reaction to that study came from right-wing doyenne Ann Coulter who said, “Whenever you have backed a liberal into a corner — if he doesn’t start crying — he says, ‘It’s a complicated issue.’ Loving America is too simple an emotion. To be nuanced you have to hate it a little. Conservatives may not grasp ‘nuance,’ but we’re pretty good at grasping treason.”

“That’s a hilarious passage,” he chuckles, “because she’s writing about nuance without nuance. And her idea of nuance, you know, is that you either love America or you hate it.”

Mooney claims he’s not saying that conservatives are dumb or crazy. “There’s enough evidence now to say that we can link liberals and conservatives broadly to a set of strategies, both of which look like they should make evolutionary sense,” he says, and that “liberalism and conservatism essentially reflect strategies for dealing with reality.”

In fact, Mooney says liberals may have something to learn from conservatives, especially in the political arena. “Conservatives have got this great strength of unity and shared purpose,” he says. “And I would say, lets try to figure out how we can be more unified. Let’s follow the conservatives, not in substance, but in style a little bit.”

Liberals “need to get out of that habit of tearing each other to pieces over these little differences,” he says. And we need “leaders who understand that those [differences] are not what matter.”

Mooney suggests that liberals might take the advice of Yoda, the wizened old Jedi Master from Star Wars, who said, “‘You must unlearn what you’ve learned.’

“I’m supporting Yoda on this,” Mooney told us.

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.

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.

After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : ‘Inside/Out’: The Poetry of Marilyn Buck

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Inside/Out’:
The poetry of Marilyn Buck
 
By Mariann G. Wizard | The Rag Blog | May 10, 2012

The Rag Blog‘s Mariann Wizard will join fellow poets Czarina Aggabao Thelen, Lilia Rosas, Jorge Renaud, Michelle Mejia, and Jane Madrigal (San Quilmas) at “Inside/Out: a Reading and Celebration of a new poetry book by former political prisoner Marilyn Buck,” presented by Red Salmon Arts at 7 p.m., Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at Resistencia Book Store, 1801-A South First St., Austin.

[Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck;  Foreword by David Meltzer (2012: City Lights Books, San Francisco); Paperback; 128 pp.; $13.95.]

Marilyn Buck’s fellow poet and mentor David Meltzer writes that once when he was visiting her in Dublin Federal Correctional Center (prison), she expressed a desire to be known “not as a political prisoner poet, but simply as a poet.”

For this collection, racing against uterine cancer until her death, she and a small group of now-surviving artistic and political friends (Meltzer, Felix Shafer, and Miranda Bergman, with poet Jack Hirschman and City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger) selected 63 poems that will give general poetry lovers their first real opportunity to savor her body of work.

Marilyn Buck was a Ragstaffer in Austin and Newsreel activist in San Francisco before becoming active in the Black Liberation movement. She died in August, 2010, in her 63rd year, after 25 years in federal prison and 19 days of freedom.

She began writing poetry in prison as one of the few means of self-expression open to her. As she wrote in her Master’s thesis, On Becoming a Poet and Artist: Beyond Censorship to Re-Imagination (New College of California, Fall 1999, author’s copy), “I was a censored person by virtue of being a political prisoner. Ironically, defiance of State censorship reduced me to self-censorship. Nevertheless, I needed to affirm myself… I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.”

Buck’s earlier collections (a chapbook, Rescue the Word [San Francisco and New York: Friends of Marilyn Buck, 2001], and a CD, Wild Poppies [San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2004]), and other published works, while including poems that didn’t spring from political or criminal convictions or fugitive experience, leaned heavily in that direction and by her choice.

While Inside/Out certainly doesn’t slight her political and prison-related work, we may also see several other facets of a woman who was much more than a one-dimensional icon. In almost all, she preserves her hallmark “spare… but flagrant” style.

Some selections will be familiar to Buck’s readers, and already beloved. “Clandestine Kisses” celebrates love against the rules with defiant elán. Like many of her poems, it summons a vision of irrepressible life finding a foothold in a world of steel and concrete.

“Woman with Cat and Iris” is another understated, sleight-of-hand creation: a tranquil Sunday morning illusion of normalcy dissolves in clanging steel doors and the shouts of guards, but the cat and flower linger, Cheshire-like, in the mind.

Marilyn wrote often about how the human mind can escape the sterility of prison, even for a moment; road maps, perhaps, for other prisoners, of whatever barred crucible, with “Gone” the most direct. “Night Showers,” celebrating washing off the pain and grief of each day along with its grit and grime, and “Woman’s Jazz Band Performs at Women’s Theater” also mine this theme.

Incarceration is in large part a punishment because of its sensory deprivation. Deprivation from color, movement, textures, tastes, rain, the moon, etc., loom large in Buck’s work, but as Meltzer notes, it also bursts with music.

The jazz cadences of her longer poems beg for a saxophone’s honk and moan, a conga’s quick counterpoint. The centrality of music and poetry in liberation struggles past and present, personal and political, is never lost on her. Here are a few lines from the previously unpublished “Reading Poetry”:

Chao Ut reads Vietnamese poetry
I tell her she reads well
she smiles…

she reads another poem
                          it sounds like music, I say
       yes I’ll read it again
                 the way we everyday talk
she reads
            do you hear?
                      yes, I say…

Or this, from “Boston Post Road Blues”:

…I wait in the car’s darkness I count
minutes and coins
            11:00 I step through blinking neon
             into the vacant booth drop coins
             and hear a click

the plum-colored voice
             Baby I’m here
trumpet notes tap along my spine
my delight a waterfall
             blues turn bold
                       intimate in the dark…

Buck had a dry, playful wit, well-known to friends but seldom given rein in her published work. It’s nice to find it here in a few poems such as “Definition”:

when I was much younger
than I am now
my mom told me
look out for tall dark strangers
I thought she meant
look for one

Many poems seen for the first time in this collection are intensely personal. “Our Giant” recalls the darker side of Marilyn’s father. Louis Buck was defrocked as an Episcopal priest for opposing segregation. Crosses were burned on the family’s lawn during Marilyn’s childhood.

A courageous, outspoken crusader to the world, he was a controlling tyrant to his wife and children, demanding perfection, as he defined it, from each of them:

brooding Irish Atlas
props long-legged baby
in the window of a ’47 car
(a car I remember better
than my father’s sweet attentions)
the only clue left of kindness
             a bled-orange Kodacolor

a handsome rundown football player
like a thundering giant
he dangled our lives from his fingertips
            four morsels
we hovered over the chasm of his rage
our tears seasoned his wounds
swallowed whole
           we were regurgitated
                     each daybreak…

When Marilyn’s increasing radicalism led to her involvement in Black Liberation groups embracing armed self-defense, their estrangement increased. After she became a fugitive from the law, she and her father had no contact for many years.

Yes Louis’ uncompromising ideals and stubborn courage clearly informed much of her own conduct, including, some might say, the self-destructive parts. Their reconciliation before his death was extremely important to Marilyn. Here she expresses the terror, admiration, and eventual compassion he inspired:

…he was our giant, defrocked
he stomped in “jesus sandals”
stained the silken robes
           of rich men’s hypocrisy
a jeremiah in farmboy overalls
           and starched Mexican wedding shirt

titanic storms flayed his flesh
too angry to leave this too-small world…

Her mother, Virginia, to whom the volume is dedicated, is also recalled in “Loss.” Her death from the same type of cancer that would claim Marilyn was not only a grievous loss in itself, but a blow to the hope that Marilyn might survive to a healthy old age in freedom.

Virginia Buck defied (and eventually divorced) Louis, visiting as often as possible the daughter she “could not save… from vengeful-suited men nor from myself.” Marilyn was not allowed to attend either parent’s funeral, another deprivation that took a deep emotional toll.

Besides her poetry, much still uncollected, Marilyn Buck over time developed her ability to express herself “sparely yet flagrantly,” making significant contributions to radical and liberation theory and discussion, contributing to numerous journals and publications.

She taught herself Spanish, and in 2008 City Lights published her translation of exiled Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi’s collection, State of Exile, in a bilingual volume.

In prison, Marilyn became a certified literacy instructor and taught hundreds of women to read. She learned and taught yoga, became an advocate for women’s healthcare, and organized AIDS education and prisoner fundraising activities. She mentored uncountable prisoners, prisoners’ family members, and poets around the world. She was a voracious reader who maintained a vast and varied correspondence, including with my grateful self.

One fault with Inside/Out is that is doesn’t tell when the poems were written, except those with dates in their titles. This would have been useful not only to academic readers but to friends and fellow poets who will long to know when such epic works as “Blake’s Milton: Poetic Apocalypse” and “Revelation” were composed. Much longer than most of her other poems, these works blaze with intense visions wherein prison walls have neither substance nor meaning, such as these lines from “Revelation”:

…Do you see demons and desolation, hear sounds
of screams, wailing? Or smell sulfur burn
behind your tongue – a taste of wormwood
and aloes? Or encounter the touch as a torch upon the skin?
           You imagine fire but it might be ice…

There are no apologies here, no appeals for special consideration. As she rejected white-skin privilege in life, binding herself to oppressed people in words and deeds, Marilyn Buck sought no deathbed, deus ex machina salvation from prison, cancer, or the condemnation of the self-righteous.

For those who loved and miss her, Inside/Out is a special gift, long dreamed-of. For those who don’t know her, or who’ve had limited knowledge of her as person or poet, here she is at last free to speak outside State restraints. No more bars, shackles, solitary confinements, or super-max jails.

The last poem included is “The First Year You Learn to Wear the Robes”:

his teacher told him on stepping into the Zen priesthood

to wrap one robe and then another, is not as simple as it looks
rather this is not a simple matter of getting dressed, not a covering
a process of finding oneself inside one’s situation,
revelation

a prisoner must learn to wear robes of absence
prepared to live this day

In my heart, I see Buck’s eager spirit wearing new robes now, a rebel angel inspiring poets and activists around the world to work compassionately yet relentlessly for justice, peace, and freedom. She lives this day, and tomorrow, in the words left behind.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

Inset art above: Hand-rubbed woodcut print of Marilyn Buck by Chicana artist Jane Madrigal, from her forthcoming collaborative project/exhibition: “Revolutionary Women Woodcuts.”

Read articles (and poems) by and about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

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MUSIC / Greg Moses : ‘Grifter’s Hymnal’ is Ray Wylie Hubbard on the Cosmic Sly

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Tricked out tunes on the cosmic sly:
Ray Wylie Hubbard’s ‘Grifter’s Hymnal’

From the beats of the opening bar of the opening track you can tell that Ray Wylie is in a mood to groove right through this millennial year of long reputed doom.

By Greg Moses | The Rag Blog | May 10, 2012

So there I was hearing nothing but this wicked whirring Bandit Model Whole Tree Chipper rammed up against a load of Bibles, books, old newspapers, and brown-paper-covered magazines piled high as the Davis Mountains being scooped up and fed to the chipper by a Cat Ultra High Demolition Hydraulic Excavator.

And with the backup alarm blaring from a 469 horsepower Segmented Ejector Truck moving relentlessly into loading position I was finally able to focus my attention on the dusted vinyl lettering that marked every piece of equipment as the property of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Unlimited.

Because when you tune into the opening tracks of Hubbard’s freshly released Grifter’s Hymnal (2012: Bordello Records) you can’t help but thrill to the sound of re-shredding everything you thought you knew.

From the beats of the opening bar of the opening track you can tell that Ray Wylie is in a mood to groove right through this millennial year of long reputed doom. After all, there’s nothing at risk if your gods are archaic enough to come from places that can’t be undone. And all powers of such antiquity have something to say about eternal slyness and the essence of trickery that goes by the name of existence.

Go ahead, I dare you, roll tape, then see if you don’t start smiling right away, finding yourself snakebit before you hear the first warning rattle.

Mirothane is one word you might study up on in preparation for track number one. As defined by its inventors at Mirotone.com, Mirothane PU (TM) is a “flexible sealer with good clarity, superior chemical resistance and resistant to white marking under sharp impact.” Might be a sign of Hubbard’s acquired taste for custom interiority. Might not.

By the time we get to track two, we’re tuned up, warmed over, and rockin’, but not at one of those smokeless, sober, early venues like the kind they put Hubbard through at SXSW. No, no. Here we are full tilt throttled for that wide open midnight threshold where everybody grabs everybody else and jumps into the future unknown, crossing over into some other life that may or may not catch you just in time. Yes, yes.

Then, long after the midnight hour, some random mirror catches you reflecting on life and death. And if you’ve been reading Gloria Anzaldua lately, you’ll have some additional enrichment to draw upon as Wylie Hubbard sings in track number four about life up against the memory of Lazarus, who only died twice, not five times like Gloria did.

Track four finds us lighting up and looking around on “New Year’s Eve at the Gates of Hell,” somewhat like Dante, finding all these familiar faces and refusing to be all that repentant about it. So another year comes and goes and we’re still looking at all the souls who haven’t yet been sorted where they’re supposed to be. As our judgment turns on its own temper, lookout Ma, ain’t nothin all right now.

Nahuatl poetry is what you might be thinking about while you’re listening to track number five. Indigenous juxtapositions of beauty and death. The song is called “Moss and Flowers” so you have to know that if eternity is what you’re after then it’s not the kind of eternity that can be measured with an infinity of clocks. You get a very nice experience of duet here, with the harmonies on the guitar parts split between the buds of your Skullcandy (TM).

While speaking of death, “Red Badge of Courage” takes us into war zones of the mind where we have sent our kids these past decades. Somehow, you know the song already. It’s just a matter of hearing it played for the first time. Track six is an excursion into protest music, with the weariness of our war habits sounding deep down.

“It’s unbelievable” is how I want to sing the opening stanza of track seven’s “Train Yard,” and we are indeed treated to an unbelievable metaphorical trip involving a red hot penny. Even the great Yeats would nod to the greatness of this hot penny poem, looped in the loops of its steam-powered grip.

“Coochy Coochy” is a plain song of desire with a profoundly felt absence of the one thing that makes everything else sweat. It’s a fun song, simple, and I reckon it may begin to replace “Snake Farm” as a crowd sing-along favorite the next place Ray Wylie Hubbard plays. One more sing-along song is not surprising from Mr. Hubbard who, as we say in Texas, writes sing-along songs, “so well, so well, so well.” Thing is, this sing-along song was written by Ringo.

If we find ourselves lost in a mood for another Hubbard Mother song, track nine is called “Mother Blues.” It’s the longest track on the album and may be properly styled epic. The thing about Hubbard’s Mother songs is you can’t help but find yourself laughing from the gut. You may want to get yourself checked for hernia after this track, and if a professional is unhandy, perhaps a lay practitioner will have to do.

The genre that Hubbard works in is listed on my iTunes spreadsheet as “Country,” so you’ll not find it out of place for Mr. Hubbard to sing a little song about a rooster, some chickens, foxes, a blackbird, and the way truth stains our memories like wood. The song is called “Henhouse,” but the whole family is here, including a grandpa with Dixie roots.

The blackbird from “Henhouse” reprises its appearance in track 11. “Count My Blessings” is a song that weaves a grifter’s autobiography with reflections on the death of Sam Cooke. The grifter assures us that three card monty is a lucrative occupation if you keep the game moving fast enough. And the grifter somehow can’t forget how the jury acquitted Sam Cooke’s killer in 15 minutes flat. In such a fast-paced world, an ironic sense of gratitude can some days help a living body try to get by.

Pretty much everything I know about country music is what I’ve learned from Willie Nelson shows, so when country music concerts end with gospel tunes I think of young Willie playing honky tonks all night Saturday and then staying up to play church Sunday morning. Somewhere the line between Saturday night and Sunday morning gets crossed, you might say.

So when Ray Wylie Hubbard ends this Dionysian romp with a song about God’s light, it’s like we’ve all stayed up through sunrise. To our day-people’s routines we have been re-delivered. Nor have we forgotten to tip the night people for the things they come to do.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His entries on King and Racism appear in the Encyclopedia of Global Justice. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com. Read more articles by Greg Moses on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Nuclear Industry Meltdown in Japan, France

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Participants hold a traditional “Koinobori” carp-shaped banner for Children’s Day during anti-nuke march in Tokyo Saturday, May 5, 2012. Photo by Itsuo Inouye / AP.

Nuclear industry melts in Japan, France;
opposition heats up in United States

This weekend’s message from Japan and France could not be more clear: at nuclear power’s historic core, the collapse has come.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012

There are zero commercial reactors operating in Japan today. On March 10, 2011, there were 54 licensed to operate, well over 10% percent of the global fleet. But for the first time in 42 years, a country at the core of global reactor electricity is producing none of its own.

Worldwide, there are fewer than 400 operating reactors for the first time since Chernobyl, a quarter-century ago.

And France has replaced a vehemently pro-nuclear premier with the Socialist Francois Hollande, who will almost certainly build no new reactors. For decades France has been the “poster child” of atomic power. But Hollande is likely to follow the major shift in French national opinion away from nuclear power and toward the kind of green-powered transition now redefining German energy supply.

In the United States, a national grassroots movement to stop federal loan guarantees could end new nuclear construction altogether. New official cost estimates of $9.5 to $12 billion per reactor put the technology off-scale for any meaningful competition with renewables and efficiency.

In India, more than 500 women have joined an ongoing hunger strike against construction of reactors at Koodankulam. And in China, more than 30 reactors hang in the balance of a full assessment of the true toll of the Fukushima disaster.

But it seems to have no end. Three melted cores still smolder. New reports from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), confirm that at least one spent fuel pool suspended 100 feet in the air, bearing tons of hugely toxic rods, could crash to the ground with another strong earthquake — a virtual certainty by most calculations.

Those uncovered fuel rods contain radioactive cesium and other isotopes far beyond what was released at Chernobyl. A fire could render vast stretches of Japan permanently uninhabitable (if they are not already). The death toll could easily claim millions worldwide, including many of us here, where the cloud would come down within a week.

Japan’s total shutdown cuts to the core of the historic industry. The globe’s primary reactor designers, General Electric and Westinghouse, are now primarily Japanese-owned. Pressure vessels, steam generators, and much more of the industry’s vital hardware have long been manufactured in Japan.

But the archipelago’s antinuclear movement also has deep roots. In 1975-6, large, angry crowds I spoke to were already demanding the end of Fukushima and other reactor projects. They warned that all Japanese reactors were vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis, and that disasters on par with what happened at Fukushima were essentially inevitable. Now that it’s happened, the public rage in what has been a traditionally conservative, authoritarian society is almost unfathomable.

Along the way, local governments did win the right (not enjoyed in the United States) to keep shut nearby reactors that were closed for repairs and refueling. On Saturday, May 5, a deep-rooted, highly focused grassroots movement shut the archipelago’s last operating nuke. It’s bound and determined to keep them that way.

As summer air conditioning demand skyrockets, Japan’s Prime Minister will try to prove that atomic power is essential. But an efficiency-oriented public has dealt very well with cutbacks in supply since Fukushima. Each potential restart will have its own dynamic.

Japan’s stunning reality is that its gargantuan capital investment in more than 50 commercial reactors is now dead in the water… and being irradiated by its own deadly fallout. That can only drag the global industry closer to oblivion at a moment when the public’s financial and political commitments to renewables and efficiency are deepening daily.

Likewise the demise of Nikolas Sarkozy. His allies at France’s nuclear-commited utility, EDF, have been Europe’s primary pushers of the “Peaceful Atom.” Now his Socialist rival is running the country, backed by a constituency largely supportive of a green conversion to parallel the one in neighboring Germany.

America’s green activists also want atomic power ended. In Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere, escalating grassroots campaigns have put the future of 104 licensed reactors in doubt.

The confrontation may be most immediate at San Onofre, on the Pacific shore between Los Angeles and San Diego. Faulty steam generator tubes have forced two reactors shut. As in Japan, the industry loudly warns of shortages when summer hits. It wants at least one reactor back by June. But experts warn that San Onofre’s design deficiencies threaten the public safety, as does its uninsured vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis.

The battle parallels the one over new construction. Already plagued with faulty concrete and design-deficient rebar steel, two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle still await final agreement on federal loan guarantees granted by President Obama last year.

But Progress Energy’s guess that its own double-reactor proposal for Florida’s Levy County could cost a staggering $24 billion casts a long shadow over Vogtle, where tax/ratepayers are already being stuck with huge bills for a project that could be vastly underfunded. A national petition drive has been fired up to stop the guarantees from going through.

And while India’s growing nonviolent army of nuclear opponents vow to fast to the death, the global reactor industry awaits word from China on how many new reactors it thinks it will build. The world will then watch with bated breath as the Middle Kingdom’s own nascent anti-nuclear movement gathers strength in the inevitable race to shut the local reactor before it melts.

But for now, this weekend’s message from Japan and France could not be more clear: at nuclear power’s historic core, the collapse has come. Humankind is running ever-faster toward a green-powered Earth, desperate to win before the next Fukushima strikes.

[Harvey Wassermansoc edits www.nukefree.org. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org. The Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Show airs at www.progressiveradionetwork.com. Read more of Harvey Wasserman’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Bogus Republican Values on Texas Primary Ballot

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Art by DonkeyHotey / Flickr.

Texas ballot initiatives
illustrate bogus Republican values

The propositions fit into the typical Republican mindset — they tend to see things in black and white, without the ambiguities and complexities that exist in the real world.

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

AUSTIN — When I look at the most pressing issues of our time, I see the following: the economy is running barely above the stagnation level; we continue to drain our treasury of hundreds of billions of dollars in overseas wars; we continue to operate overseas prisons that are more reminiscent of gulags than they are of institutions that reflect purported American values; we continue to allow torture (indirectly if not directly); teachers have been laid off by the hundreds of thousands; and the Congress is not even a shadow of the institution our founders created.

But when the Republican Party of Texas looks at the most pressing public issues, it sees the need to focus on giving public money to religious schools, depriving 50 million Americans of vitally-needed healthcare, having government officials promote the practice of Christianity, and preventing the government from responding to fiscal emergencies.

Clearly, the Republican leaders of Texas have standards of morality different from those I find important and try to honor.

On December 3, 2011, the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) voted to place on the Republican Primary Ballot the following propositions:

  1. School Choice: The state should fund education by allowing dollars to follow the child instead of the bureaucracy, through a program which allows parents the freedom to choose their child’s school, public or private, while also saving significant taxpayer dollars. Yes or No.
  2. Repealing Obamacare:Congress should immediately repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare) and reject the rationing of healthcare by government or the intrusion by government into the doctor-patient relationship. Yes or No.
  3. Public Prayer:Government should be prohibited from restricting the content of public prayer. Yes or No.
  4. Balanced Budget / Combining Government Growth:Out of control spending should be stopped at all levels of federal and state government through constitutional amendments limiting any increase in government spending to the combined increase of population and inflation without voter approval. Yes or No.

These four propositions illustrate as well as anything the nature and character of the Republican Party in Texas, as well as the Republican Party nationwide. It wants to take state tax dollars and divert them from public education to private, mostly religious education programs. The public money cannot be given directly to religious institutions for religious education because the Constitution prohibits that, but it can be given to parents in the form of vouchers.

Those parents will be free to give those publicly-funded vouchers to the school of their choice, which data from areas where some form of voucher system has been used show will be mainly to religious schools — at the rate of 85% to 95%.

As Barry Lynn, executive director of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has said about such propositions: ”Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for religious schools. The principal purpose of a religious school is to spread its teachings, whether they be the Gospel of Jesus Christ or the words of Mohammed. They are specific teachings from ministries of religious denominations.”

The ballot proposition is worded in a way that few people would disagree with. But it is all deceptive. We all hate bureaucracies. Who would want to give them more money? Yet, we do so constantly, apparently unaware that sociologists for at least 50 years have found that all bureaucracies, government or private sector, have the same characteristics.

If you have ever had a bad experience with a telephone corporation, a banking corporation, or a private health insurance corporation, you will understand why I have found them no less difficult to deal with than government bureaucracies. Actually, signing up for both Social Security and Medicare were among the most positive experiences I have ever had with bureaucracies.

Of course, who wouldn’t like the freedom to choose the schools our children attend, but if you believe that this system will save “significant taxpayer dollars,” you might want to consider investing in a group organizing to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. The history of public funding of education has not shown that funneling public money to the private sector for education is cost-effective.

Our public schools are already underfunded. This proposition will only exacerbate that problem. And public schools accept everyone regardless of disabilities, test scores, religion, or other factors. Private schools can discriminate in selecting students, easing their performance burden, while increasing the burden on the public schools.

School vouchers are bad public policy as well as a thinly-veiled way around the Constitution, which requires that church and state remain separate.

The second proposition, which cleverly injects the name Obamacare to refer to the PPACA, could just as accurately be called the national version of Romneycare, which was the model used to create the PPACA. But Republicans are all about bashing Obama, so it is better from their point of view to use his name derisively.

But the healthcare act that will cover at least 50 million more people in the U.S. does not ration healthcare and does not intrude the government into the doctor-patient relationship. It is the private insurance companies that do that, as anyone who has used private health insurance has learned.

They require approval before being referred to a specialist, they require medically-unnecessary procedures before approving some treatments, and they reject drugs that my doctor wants to prescribe. Appealing any adverse decisions about these matters requires an enormous waste of medical staff’s and patients’ time.

The PPACA was not my choice of programs to provide healthcare services to all Americans because it does not do so in the most direct way or at the lowest cost — Medicare for all would do a much better job of satisfying those goals.

And the PPACA has taken a bad rap on the issue of being the only time in our history when the government has mandated that individuals must buy some product in the private sector. As Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law School, has shown, this assertion is not true, no matter what Justice Antonin Scalia says:

The founding fathers, it turns out, passed several mandates of their own. In 1790, the very first Congress — which incidentally included 20 framers — passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate.

That’s not all. In 1792, a Congress with 17 framers passed another statute that required all able-bodied men to buy firearms. Yes, we used to have not only a right to bear arms, but a federal duty to buy them. Four framers voted against this bill, but the others did not, and it was also signed by Washington. Some tried to repeal this gun purchase mandate on the grounds it was too onerous, but only one framer voted to repeal it.

Six years later, in 1798, Congress addressed the problem that the employer mandate to buy medical insurance for seamen covered drugs and physician services but not hospital stays. And you know what this Congress, with five framers serving in it, did? It enacted a federal law requiring the seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. That’s right, Congress enacted an individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. And this act was signed by another founder, President John Adams.

But perhaps the most hypocritical part of Proposition 2 is the language used to suggest that the PPACA would intrude the government into the doctor-patient relationship. That is exactly what virtually every Republican officeholder at every level of government has tried to do with a woman’s right to choose healthcare options when she is pregnant, or even if she wants to prevent pregnancy. The new Republican goal seems to be to turn back the clock even on contraception.

The third Republican proposition is arguably the most dishonest and deceptively worded of the four. Of course, the government should have nothing to say about how anyone prays, whether the prayer is done in private (as Jesus recommended) or in public (as the Pharisees preferred). But knowing Republicans as I do, I suspect what they intend by this proposition is to both promote government-sponsored prayer and keep the government from insisting that such prayer be non-sectarian, as most courts have held that it should be.

By using the words “public prayer,” rather than “government prayer,” they have created a proposition that will mean nothing to those of us who understand the distinction.

Anyone who wishes to pray at non-government public events or out on the public street corner should feel free to pray to any god they choose, whether Jehovah or Allah or Krishna or whomever or whatever. But if the Republicans are setting us up to argue that sectarian prayers at government meetings are OK with their constituency, they have worded the proposition incorrectly to make such an interpretation valid. The ambiguity of their wording makes any conclusion about the voting on this proposition without merit.

In some ways, the Republicans’ fourth proposition is the least troubling, but it is too brief to be useful in making public policy. In unusual times, it may be necessary for the federal government to borrow money to prevent a calamity — like the collapse of the banking system. Republicans and Democrats alike found this to be the case in 2008. What they did was not as effective as other actions they could have taken, but the course they pursued required spending money that wasn’t available in the treasury. There was no time to have a national referendum on the subject.

I would like to have a balanced federal budget, as we had in 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s two terms, and I would like to stop out-of-control spending, but there is no simple formula to get us there. A contrived ballot proposition is useless in achieving those goals.

The Republican propositions on the primary ballot this year fit into the typical Republican mindset — they tend to see things in black and white, without the ambiguities and complexities that exist in the real world. Their concerns do not reflect the moral imperatives that used to be common among nearly all Americans. Instead, the Republican Party of today represents the narrow, selfish, parochial interests and concerns of most of the evangelical community and the libertarians of the Ayn Rand mold.

If Republicans want to be taken seriously, they need to stop insulting everyone’s intelligence with deceptive and dishonest ballot propositions, something the Democrats (as well as most politicians) have done in the past with equal fervor. At least this year Texas Democrats don’t have any ballot propositions for voters to understand, or misunderstand.

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

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Danny Schechter : The Big Money That Is Sinking Democracy

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Titanic: Iceberg ahead. Image from Luther, Out of Station.

Iceberg ahead:
The big money that is sinking democracy

It is hard to wrap your head around the scale and immediacy of this danger.

By Danny Schechter | The Rag Blog | May 9, 2012

I keep thinking of that clear April night 100 years ago when the unsinkable HMS Titanic steamed towards New York. It was actually on its way to dock just a few blocks from where I live at what are now the Chelsea Piers. There was a sense of optimism abroad as a new record for a speedy transatlantic passage was about to be set.

There was music, dancing, and fine wine. That is, until they saw that iceberg high in the water. The Captain and his mates were aware that 80 percent of it was underwater and out of sight. They didn’t react in time.

Everyone knows the story — most recently recreated in 3D — but the lesson is really not just about that great ship that went down, or even the company that bypassed safety regulations, or even the hubris of the owners whose greed sent so many passengers to that legendary “watery grave.”

It was also about not seeing the dangers in front of us.

That’s the real story of this moment in our political lives, as the 2012 elections begin in earnest, and we ignore, to our detriment, that vast iceberg of money, stacked in the billions, that threatens to sink what’s left of our democracy.

It is hard to wrap your head around the scale and immediacy of this danger.

And it’s not just about the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court. It’s about the way Democrats think and Republicans act. It’s about the growing way money has been allowed to dominate politics in a game both parties play.

It is an outgrowth of our vast economic inequality and the policies that promoted it. Its about state laws limiting the franchise in the name of fighting voter fraud with so-called Voter ID laws, and ordinary Americans becoming so tired of electoral lies and the arrogance of power that they don’t vote.

Mary Boyle, a vice president of Common Cause is concerned about that, telling me,

one of the dangers, particularly around this campaign, is you read these headlines from people who aren’t really engaged in politics. You just read headlines about “super PACS raking in millions of dollars” or “outside groups spending 10 million dollars on negative ads.” And for a lot of Americans that’s just kind of background noise that makes them go, “Uh, they’re at it again.” And it does make people cynical. It makes them tune out and that is a huge concern because then that leads to people not voting and that’s a bad thing.

This information overload is a product of a media ecology that tunes us out and a news business that avoids truth at all costs. It’s about analysis that leads to paralysis and cynicism that allows political manipulators to prevail in league with a media system that simplifies, scandalize, and spins news to advance partisan agendas.

I recently sat in a lecture at the New School on “The Anatomy Of Campaign Finance,” featuring two experts, Professor Jacob Hacker of Yale and journalist Joe Hagen who writes for New York Magazine and described what he saw in Karl Rove’s living room.

They painted a picture of a vast organizational imbalance between the parties.

The lectures took place on May Day just as the impressive citizen “armies” of Occupy Wall Street were leaving Union Square for the trek to Wall Street.

Obama’s funding base is not, said Hacker, even comparable to the treasure chest that Rove has mobilized.

One factor: The Bush tax cuts have permitted the right to amass a major war chest, in part because the average Republican-leaning millionaire became $300,000 to $500,000 richer, 53 percent of all after tax gains went to the rich, the top 10 percent of 1 percent. 60 percent of corporate money comes from the finance sector.

The beneficiaries of this transfer of wealth to the top understood that their windfall came about through politics, and to keep it they have to invest more in politics. Says Hacker, “Everyone can vote but not everyone can donate. Money changes the relationship between the politicians and donors. Money has a ‘distortion effect’ on what politicians focus on.”

This is why the former Obama Chief of Staff and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said famously, You need three things to win in politics: money, money and money.

Chicago Magazine explained his well-honed technique back when he worked for Bill Clinton:

Here’s how to be the most effective fund-raiser in politics today: Plaster a phone to your ear. Speak rapidly, in barely restrained tones of impassioned outrage. Tell the important person on the other end of the line that the large check he’s just written for your candidate’s campaign isn’t large enough. Say this: “Five thousand dollars? You, you, you — I wouldn’t embarrass you by having it listed that you only gave $5,000? You’re a $25,000 person; better to give nothing and say you were out of town. If you want to give $5,000, fine, but don’t call me when people start asking you if you’re going bankrupt. People of your stature are giving $50,000.

The Republicans have more donors in it for the ideology, not the ego. They don’t have to be begged. Their greed, animus towards Obama, and sense of self-interest is their driver.

The effect of all this money has been different for Democrats and Republicans, “ says Hacker. Repubs have moved further to the right than Dems to the left. Money is not neutral in effect. Republicans have been emboldened.

On the basis of his reporting, Hagen notes how politics has become an industry with an orientation towards raising and managing money. It deploys its millions not only supporting candidates but backing the disciplined infrastructure led by professional political consultants who plan the strategies and run the show, coordinating the Super-posses and orchestrating the troops.

This fraternity, he says, convinces politicians that they are the “tool” they need to win, and get paid huge amounts of money.

He says that together they form a “presidential election industrial complex.” He says its point is destruction, with opposition research driving negative ads and vitriolic campaigns.

That’s one academic and media view. What about the people who are monitoring this madness, like Sheila Krumholz, the director of the Center for Responsive Politics, who posts data money in politics on the must-read website, Open Secrets.org.

She told me recently:

There’s been a seismic shift in money’s influence in politics and on legislation and policy, ultimately. Primarily because of the Citizen’s United decision taken by the Supreme Court in January of 2010, which opened wide the flood gates on money — and for the first time arguably in decades or even a century allows this money to come directly from corporate and labor union treasuries and trade associations — to be spent to influence the election of federal candidates.

I asked her, “Does this mean that American voters have less and less influence on what’s actually happening in America?”

Her response:

It certainly means that American voters have less information about the organizations which are trying to influence who wins office, and ultimately what laws get passed. Does it then take away some of the influence that they have? Yes, because they’re making decisions in the dark.

And there we are, back in the dark. On the edge of an abyss, as the Iceberg looms and many of us want to look the other way,

[News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at Newsdissector.net. His recent books are Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street and Blogothon (Cosimo Books). He hosts News Dissector Radio on PRN.fm Fridays at 1 p.m. His latest film is Plunder: The Crime of Our Time. Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more articles by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Rules are Rules: ‘The Passion of Bradley Manning’

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Rules are rules as any fool can see: 
‘The Passion of Bradley Manning’

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

[The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History by Chase Madar (2012: OR Books); Paperback; 190 pp.; $15.]

I remember the very first time I saw the Wikileaks-released video filmed from a U.S. gunship showing the murder of a dozen unarmed civilians including two journalists. The video proved the true brutality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the distressing disregard for human life common among U.S. soldiers.

Sadly, I wasn’t shocked or surprised at what I saw. Even after having heard about such incidents in conversations with returning veterans, the visual evidence was still quite disturbing to watch.

That video was the first time most Americans had heard about Wikileaks. Not long after, the name of Bradley Manning also entered the U.S. consciousness. He would be accused of releasing that video and thousands of other documents relating to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, along with thousands of diplomatic cables describing in oftentimes explicit detail the crimes and morally questionable actions and words of Washington officials.

Soon, Mr. Manning would be charged with treason and aiding the enemy (among other charges) for his actions. He is currently on trial in a U.S. military court located at Fort Meade, MD. and faces life imprisonment. It is my belief that only an immense and broad popular movement could possibly change that fate.

Bradley Manning’s decision and the subsequent reaction is the subject of a newly published book by civil rights attorney and commentator Chase Madar. This book, titled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, presents Manning’s decision in the context it was meant to be understood: as a political act by a man who saw his duty to humanity to be greater than his orders to protect the Pentagon and politicians that sent him and thousands of other GIs to war.

Madar attacks the very system of secrecy Manning is charged with violating. He details the overzealous use of secret and top secret classifications by government officials, calling it a “tragic, bloated farce.” He questions the use of the Espionage Act to charge Manning and other men whose actions are not about aiding the enemy, but about exposing the misdeeds of the U.S. government.

In discussing the frequent use of strategic leaks by government officials to get a piece of legislation approved, Madar surmises that Manning’s biggest mistake is that, unlike those government officials, he didn’t break the law properly.

What did the documents Manning sent to Wikileaks contain? While it is impossible to even begin to summarize the millions of words in those documents in the brief space of Madar’s text, he does list the basics of some of the content.

The documents showed a brutal pacification campaign in Afghanistan where civilian deaths were all too common and sometimes intentional. They acknowledged massive civilian casualties from U.S. fire in Iraq and detailed Washington’s retail diplomacy with the Vatican hoping to convince the Holy See to call the U.S. wars just.

 In other areas, the diplomatic cables exposed the role of the U.S. Embassy in Haiti in fighting attempts to raise the minimum wage there to 61 cents an hour and U.S. complicity in covering up Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Yet, despite the revelations they contained, the U.S. government has been unable to prove that the leaks harmed any individual. Unfortunately, neither have they changed the essence of U.S. policy.

After acknowledging this, Madar writes about two leaks that probably did matter. One was a 1968 leak by Daniel Ellsberg to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy that detailed the Johnson administration’s plans to expand the U.S. war to Laos and Cambodia. The leak and Kennedy’s revealing it probably prevented that expansion under LBJ. Of course, Nixon wasted little time in doing exactly what Johnson didn’t do.

Another more recent example occurred in 2003 when the national intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability was leaked. This document stated clearly that Iran had no nuclear weapons and was not building any at the time. That leak probably prevented the U.S. from attacking Iran.

Like it or not, since his arrest Manning’s treatment has been shameful. His imprisonment, which includes solitary confinement and forced nakedness, is nothing short of torture. Indeed it has been condemned as such by the German Bundestag and several other individuals in European governments and even some high ranking U.S. officials.

Madar’s discussion of Manning’s treatment is revealing and likely to garner a number of denials by liberals and neocons in the halls of power. This is especially true when he argues against the view promulgated by U.S. liberals that the treatment is an aberration.

The fact is, writes Madar, the abuses experienced by Manning and by prisoners in U.S.-run prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan are also commonplace in U.S. prisons. Furthermore, torture is a common occurrence in U.S. jails at all levels of the penal system.

In the early 1970s Kris Kristofferson recorded a song whose chorus includes the lines, “The law is for protection of the people/ Rules are rules as any fool can see…” The song proceeds to show the use of this maxim by the powers that be to lock up those that disrupt their rule. The sarcasm of the lyrics continues, pointing out how laws are not only applied unequally, but are often written only to protect the wealthy and powerful. If Kris Kristofferson were to add a verse to his tune in 2012, it could be about Bradley Manning.

When pressed to explain the charges arrayed against Manning, the reason given most often is that he broke the rules regarding classified information and that is reason enough. As Madar points out over and over in his book, these rules are broken quite often by government officials in the pursuit of certain policies and those violations are rarely challenged.

Furthermore, and considerably more appalling, is the reality that the atrocities and diplomatic maneuverings revealed in the documents Manning released are not illegal. Why? Simply put, because the laws are written by the warmakers and profiteers. So, those who reveal the machinations of the powerful are more likely to go to prison than those who kill, torture, bribe, and steal in the name of empire.

Simultaneously an indictment of a government obsessed with secrecy and a nation addicted to war, The Passion of Bradley Manning is also a concise and clear explanation of who Bradley Manning is. It explains why he risked his life and future by committing the overtly political act of exposing his government’s crimes and lies.

Perhaps most importantly, it is a call to us to act not only in defense of Manning, but in defense of our futures.

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

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Harry Targ : The War on Afghanistan is Our Biggest Fantasy

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Reuters.

The war on Afghanistan:
Our longest war and biggest fantasy

Obama’s announcement sounded eerily like the policy of ‘Vietnamization’ which President Nixon put in place in 1969.

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

On May Day 2012 President Obama made a secret trip to Afghanistan and spoke to the nation and the troops on the ground about past, present, and future policy. What the speech revealed was a replication of a 10-year fantasy narrative about why we went to war on Afghanistan, what our goals were, and what the future holds in the region for the United States and, most important, the Afghan people.

The President announced he was signing an agreement between the two countries which will define “a new kind of relationship” in which Afghans will assume primary responsibility for their security and “we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states.” The future of this relationship will be bright as “the war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

The announcement sounded eerily like the policy of “Vietnamization” which President Nixon put in place in 1969; handing over ground action to the South Vietnamese government while the United States escalated the bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam and invaded neighboring Cambodia. The South Vietnamese government and military were incapable of assuming “primary responsibility” and in the end were overthrown by powerful forces in the countryside.

The President explained that President Bush correctly launched a war on Afghanistan in October 2001, because the country allowed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden an al Qaeda “safe-haven” for terrorist planning and attacks, ultimately leading to the tragedy of 9/11. While Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan, the U.S. continued fighting the Taliban who have “waged a brutal insurgency.”

Subsequently, he claimed, using the dehumanized language of violence-prone discourse, the U.S. military has “taken out over 20 of their top leaders” including bin Laden himself. But the war continues. While the United States downsizes its troop commitments policy will include:

  • a transition of the war to our Afghan military allies. Importantly, Obama proclaimed that at the NATO summit this month in Chicago, “our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year.” However, “international troops will continue to train, advise and assist Afghans, and fight alongside them when needed.”
  • training of Afghan Security Forces, leading to an Afghan force of 352,000 troops which NATO will support to create “a strong and sustainable long-term Afghan force.”
  • increasing US/NATO/Afghan cooperation “including shared commitments to combat terrorism and strengthen democratic institutions.” President Obama declared that these commitments, in the short run involving counter-terrorism and continued training, do not include the building of permanent U.S. bases.
  • pursuing a negotiated peace with the Taliban if they break with al Qaeda, renouncing violence and to “abide by Afghan laws.”
  • working towards stability in South Asia, including partnering with neighboring Pakistan. The President assured viewers that “America has no designs beyond an end to al Qaeda safe-havens and respect for Afghan sovereignty.” In short, the central goal of United States policy is to destroy al Qaeda, in the short run to stabilize Afghanistan, and “to finish the job we started in Afghanistan…”

The speech reflects the classic pattern of U.S. military globalization coupled with tortured ahistorical fantasy narratives that have characterized policy since the end of World War II.

The President rationalized a 10-year war on a nation in which terrorists resided because Afghan leaders refused to hand over alleged perpetrators without some evidence of the connection between them and 9/11.

Also, the initial narrative, reflected in the President’s speech last week, conflated the al Qaeda terrorists with the so-called Taliban. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s with support from the United States. Some of these Afghan government officials had been recipients of military aid in the 1980s when they fought against the regime in Kabul that was allied with the former Soviet Union.

Neither Bush nor Obama has ever explained to the public who our enemy is. Has al Qaeda been clearly defined? What political, ethnic, and regional constituencies do the Taliban come from? Do we know much about the political forces in Afghanistan the Karzai regime represents?

Is the president correct to suggest that the United States and the Karzai government are winning the hearts and minds of the people outside Kabul, despite consistently negative reports to the contrary in the media?

Along with not telling us who the enemy is and why they are the enemy, neither Bush nor Obama has described how many of them there are, where they are located, how they are connected in a presumed worldwide network, and, most basically, how we know that a worldwide network of terrorists really exists.

Recently released documents from the bin Laden compound suggest that while he wanted to promote terrorist attacks on the United States there was a communications disconnect between the alleged worldwide terrorist leader and various related organizations around the world.

Mother Jones reported on its website on May 4 devastating statistics concerning the U.S war on Afghanistan since 2001. These included costs for military operations since 2001 of $443.3 billion; an estimated cost per soldier in country in 2011 of $694,000; 1,507 U.S. soldiers killed in action and 15,560 wounded. Also U.S military spending has doubled since 2000.

And between 2004-2112 there have been 296 drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan; 17 percent of those killed were not affiliated with targeted enemies. And the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011 totaled 12,793.

Former Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was interviewed in the Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds about why he turned against the war in Vietnam in 1965. His friend, President Lyndon Johnson, dramatically escalated U.S. military action in Vietnam, with Congressional approval, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident allegedly occurred.

Johnson claimed that the North Vietnamese engaged in unprovoked attacks on two U.S. naval vessels in international waters on August 2 and 4, 1964. Johnson used these claims to get Congressional approval of military escalation in Vietnam.

Fulbright said in the documentary that, “We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie, but a lie is a lie. It is a misrepresentation of fact. It is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. He just said it. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”

The war on Afghanistan since October 2001 has been a lie and U.S troops, the Afghan people, and all those who could have been served by a more just allocation of our national treasure have been victims of this lie.

There are many reasons to support President Obama’s reelection. However, the peace movement must increase its attack on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, as the U.S. continues to repeat the mistakes of the past.

[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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BOOKS / Tom Hayden : Was LBJ More Lear Than Machiavelli?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Was LBJ more Lear than Machiavelli?
Reflection on Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power

By Tom Hayden | The Rag Blog | May 8, 2012

[The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (2012: Knopf); Hardcover; 736 pp.; $35.]

Robert Caro’s impressive biography of Lyndon Johnson seems beyond the reach of criticism, having won the National Book Critics Circle Award and been described as a “monument” (Michael Beschloss) and “at the summit of American historical writing.” (The Washington Post) Yet Caro may have identified far too much with his subject, a form of Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, in which a prisoner identifies with his jailer.

Hardly mentioned in Caro’s latest 700 pages are two crises, each which left an indelible stain on the Johnson presidency:

  1. His secret deal-making to deny the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seating at the 1964 Democratic convention;
  2. The famous White House deceits leading to the Vietnam War after candidate Johnson promised not to send ground troops.

Rather than minor errors, these judgments led to the polarizations that eventually destroyed LBJ and the potential of the Great Society.

Regarding Mississippi, Caro says virtually nothing about the 1964 Democratic convention controversy; the word “Mississippi” appears only three times in the Index. Yet Johnson’s backroom pressure prevented the convention delegates from voting for Fannie Lou Hamer and other MFDP delegates opposed to the all-white Mississippi delegation that was pledged to segregation and defiance of the federal government. Johnson dispatched Hubert Humphrey to “put a stop to this hell-raising,” and to “get his Reuthers and the rest of ‘em in here — and Joe Rauh — and make ‘em behave.”[1]

By all accounts, LBJ was testing Humphrey’s loyalty, and that of his closest liberal allies, before agreeing to name him the vice-presidential running mate. These machinations, including wiretaps on the MFDP and Bobby Kennedy, were stunning errors of judgment by Caro’s master politician, for they alienated the MFDP and SNCC, sickened many northern liberals, led the next year to the formation of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, and, indirectly as least, four consecutive summers of black urban insurrections — and the gradual transformation of the Goldwater movement into the very white backlash Johnson feared but couldn’t prevent.

Caro mentions none of this, emphasizing instead LBJ’s masterful tactics in passing the 1964 civil rights bill.

On the tapes, LBJ reveals his control-driven fear of a floor fight over seating the MFDP, saying, “they’ll have a roll call… [and] the Northern states will probably prevail.”[2] Instead of accepting the convention’s majority choice, LBJ turned to his dark and questionable tactics, surrounded by his seeming lackeys. Humphrey told him, “We’re just not dealing with emotionally stable people on this.”[3] Reuther warned the president, “we can reduce the opposition to this to a microscopic faction so that they’ll be completely unimportant.”[4] LBJ was driven by exaggerated fears, at least at the time, of losing white Southern states if he appeared to cave in to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. He defeated Barry Goldwater handily that November. But granting his fear for the sake of the argument, the question is why he delegated the MFDP decision to Humphrey and others who were desperate for his favor.

A last-minute White House compromise proposal for two non-voting seats for MFDP observers was bound to be rejected as too little, too late — “Didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Ms. Hamer said in leaving. Another promise being floated — to seat the two non-voting MFDP observers and publicly guarantee a four-year track to full integration of southern delegations in 1968 — just might have succeeded if LBJ had used all his private and political powers in the weeks leading up to the convention. Instead LBJ was stubborn to the end.

“The only thing that can really screw us good is to seat that group of challengers from Mississippi… I’ll guarantee the Freedom delegation somebody representing their views like that will be seated four years from now. But we can’t do it all before breakfast,” Johnson privately said to Reuther on August 9. When the UAW leader tried to interject, “we’ll lose Mississippi, but the impact on the other southern states…” LBJ cut him off.

Whether SNCC, COFO, or the MFDP would have accepted a four-year enforceable transition is impossible to know, and probably doubtful. But the point here is that Johnson’s behind-the-scenes behavior was emotional and petulant, not that of a sophisticated Machiavellian genius. Throughout, he was convinced without evidence that Bobby Kennedy was plotting the MFDP challenge — “I rather think that this Freedom Party was born in the Justice Department.”[5] After several days of tantrums, LBJ told his aides he had drafted a lengthy retirement statement and, sunk in depression, went to bed.

The Vietnam Debacle

Beschloss’ LBJ book includes tapes exposing White House confusion and unmistakable deceit around the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in North Vietnam’s waters, which LBJ quickly used to push a war authorization through a gullible Congress, with only two senators voting against, Oregon’s Wayne Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening. Caro mentions none of this.

Caro provides evidence for the view that Johnson’s Vietnam escalation decision occurred immediately after John Kennedy’s assassination, marking a sharp turn in U.S. policy while masked in the rhetoric of continuity. Intriguingly, Caro promises to examine Vietnam decision-making in greater depth in the next volume of his history, including the question of whether the course of events in Vietnam would have been different had Kennedy lived, and whether other options were feasible.[6]

Caro writes that LBJ concealed his plans from both Congress and the American people. In Caro’s account, on October 2, Kennedy appointees Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara reported after a trip to Vietnam that 1,000 U.S. advisers could be withdrawn in 1963 and “it should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel” by the end of 1965, one year after JFK’s presumed re-election.“We need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it,” McNamara said, according to Caro.

President Kennedy endorsed the McNamara-Taylor recommendations the next day through his press secretary Pierre Salinger.

It may be just coincidental, but McGeorge Bundy was drafting a new National Security Action Memorandum on Vietnam on November 21, the day before Kennedy’s murder.[7] Four days later, on November 26, the new U.S. president approved the memo as NSM 273.

While the main thrust of NSM 273 was to emphasize consistency with Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, it included a proposal for “possible [increased] military activity,” a reference to the recommendations of a secret committee, led by Marine General Victor “Brute” Krulak, who were proposing “progressively escalating pressure” on North Vietnam.[8] The Krulak paper was presented to Johnson at his Texas ranch on January 2, just before the inauguration. The Krulak plan recommended one year of commando raids along the North Vietnamese coast, and shelling by U.S. ships around the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

Those operations were to begin on February 1, just as LBJ was “juggling the figures” to make it appear that the withdrawal of the 1,000 advisers was on schedule.[9]

Once again, the Bechloss tapes were available to Caro, but are not referred to. LBJ made his famous pledge to “seek no wider war” on August 4, ironically on the same day that the bodies of three civil rights workers were found buried in a Mississippi swamp. Johnson already was implementing the Krulak recommendations to attack North Vietnam’s coastal facilities and oil refineries — “there have been some covert operations in that area we’ve been carrying on… we’ve been playing around up there,” he confided.[10]

Defense secretary McNamara formally advised LBJ on Aug. 8 that the Tonkin matter was “a very delicate subject,” and, “one that you have to dissociate from and certainly not admit that any such incident took place, but neither should you get in a position of denying it,” since it was part of “that covert operational plan.”[11]

In Caro’s perspective, Johnson’s decision to escalate was based on his desire “to keep Vietnam from becoming a major political issue” in the 1964 election. Caro fails to explain how such an historically fateful and ultimately irrational decision fits with Caro’s narrative of LBJ as the master politician of his time. Instead it proved to be one of the worst blunders in American foreign policy history.

It is quite possible that Caro will pivot to depicting LBJ as a modern King Lear in the next volume. But for now, when similar controversies over military secrecy have surrounded both the Bush and Obama presidencies, Caro regrettably gives his Lyndon Johnson a pass.

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

References

[1] Beschloss, Michael. Taking Charge. 1997, p. 485-6.
[2] Ibid, p. 516.
[3] Ibid, p. 515
[4] Ibid, p. 535
[5] Ibid, p. 532
[6] Caro, Robert. The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power. Knopf, 2012. p. 434.
[7] Caro, p. 403
[8] Caro, p. 533
[9] Caro, p. 403
[10] Beschloss, p. 493-494
[11] Beschloss, p. 509

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Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Looking Back at Kent State and Jackson State

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

President Richard Nixon, pointing to a Cambodian map, announces the entry of American soldiers into Cambodia, on April 30, 1970.

Kent State and Jackson State:
Looking back / leaning forward

Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers | The Rag Blog | May 8, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation the U.S. had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving 120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each.

But in the common doublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the U.S. opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned.

The next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up the campuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue… you name it, get rid of the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black students formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black student unions, even at Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the warmongers, and themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 National Guardsmen amassed on the Kent State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed students — four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent State University, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed college students at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned. Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos and Cambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to the lavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa.

Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarily created its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened cruelty and callousness at home, the shredding of constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashing of armed violence on its own citizens. The 10-year war against Viet Nam and the murderous (secret) assault on the Black freedom movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State its offspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the U.S. military and its NATO spawn bring home their own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suicide rates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by their fellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race among ordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealed weapons to work and play.

Add to that the quiet violence of a 20% child poverty rate in the richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2½ million people, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education, health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home — all of it hitting people of color disproportionally.

Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth and directly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like national security state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusively at the Black and Latino freedom movements. In response, 80% of U.S. colleges and universities called for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to face being beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges and universities, 500 campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not reopen until the fall. In Washington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany the long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon, and inevitable resistance will surely follow.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted on May 3, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

In a fascinating intersection of history, real estate, and the legacy of a 1960s guru, Ivan Kuper tells the story of the Heaven on Earth Inn, an abandoned hotel in downtown Houston that was purchased by former Beatles spiritual guide, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, for use as a santuary for the Transcendental Meditation movement. But the hotel fell on rough and seedy times and eventually came to resemble — and be called — Houston’s “Beirut Hilton.”

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