Tom Miller : Moving West, Writing East

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Welcoming Arizona rattlesnake: “Cowboys amble” — and, well, “snakes slither.”

Moving West, writing East:
The life of a writer in the Southwest
of the 1960s and ’70s

By Tom Miller | The Rag Blog | April 12, 2012

I moved west to escape the East. I stayed west to inform the East.

This took place in the late 1960s, when the anti-war movement and its cultural twin were both flowering. There’s that window of opportunity we all have in our early 20s when there’s nothing — love, family, job, mortgage, school — to batten us down.

“Arizona,” someone suggested with a nod and a wink. “Arizona.” I knew nothing about the youngest of the lower 48, except that Barry Goldwater and marijuana both came from there, and I thought that any place where those two elements are both at play is worth investigating. I jumped through that window of opportunity and landed in Tucson.

A squat two-bedroom adobe in a working-class neighborhood full of similar houses rented for $150 monthly. A friend and I took the place. My bedroom window looked out on a couple of lonely saguaro, and every morning, I awoke to a Western B-movie set.

An active anti-war movement was in place, and I found a freelancer oasis — a fertile town with no one else writing for the underground press or sea-level magazines such as Crawdaddy!, Fusion or 2-year old Rolling Stone. I could take part in affairs that mattered and write about Southwestern mythology at the same time.

For Crawdaddy! I wrote about the real Rosa’s Cantina in El Paso and the copper-smelter workers who sipped away their afternoons at its bar. For Fusion, about the acid cowboys of northern New Mexico. And the bi-weekly Rolling Stone? They put me on retainer, sending me $50 an issue simply to be on call and give them first dibs on story ideas. I arranged for a hipster country band to play for imprisoned draft resisters at a minimum-security federal prison, then wrote it up for the Stone. Like that.

The people, the issues, the land, the air, the music and, yes, the language. All these ingredients constructed my new West. I grabbed a picket sign to march for farm workers in front of Safeway. I joined another demonstration against a university’s Mormon beliefs of racial inequality. (That was at a college basketball game. Boy, were we popular.)

Late one night, I ran with a secretive group called the Eco-Raiders and wrote up their efforts to combat urban sprawl. The war against Vietnam was a constant reminder of global issues, while the desert Southwest taught me the fragility and permanence of the land.

I had not just moved to the American West. I had moved to a region with an odd-angled line running through it — the international boundary. The north of Sonora and Chihuahua had much in common with New Mexico and “dry-faced Arizona,” as Jack Kerouac called it. Mexico, too, became part of my faculty, and I, one of its pupils.

I spent time in Bisbee, Silver City, Cananea, Walsenburg (Colorado, but who’s counting), El Paso-Juárez, Morenci, Cd. Chihuahua, Douglas-Agua Prieta — many of these towns with huge mining and smelting operations. They were more than just colorful destinations on the map.

I cannot explain why I am attracted to mining camps and their stories. Traveling through the towns where copper, zinc, and coal rise to the surface and get processed, I’ve found a genuine kinship with miners and their families. Certainly it cannot be envy: I have no desire to descend hundreds of feet underground and extract ore or calibrate explosives in a shaft, nor do I want to drive mammoth yellow equipment pitched on tires three times the size of a pickup truck. It cannot be common background, either — the mining communities and I have no shared past.

Still, time and again, I have been invited into miners’ homes and felt privileged to listen to family histories and collective memories, to hear cherished songs explained and to read unpublished letters. It’s been an honor — one-sided, as far as I can determine — and I’ve benefited by it enormously.

Back in the late 1970s, the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border was a warm and inviting place (and still is, to a certain extent, though no one believes me anymore). I traveled that Third Country sandwiched between two large powers, listening to fronterizos and writing down my impressions. Only one other writer was traveling the frontier at the time, a fellow from The New York Times who invited me to contribute to his newspaper. And so I wrote about the American West for people back East — very part-time, nothing more than a stringer, but in a region full of life and rough edges.

They asked me to report conventional stories such as court cases, regional angles on national trends, and curious university research, but what assignment editors valued most was stories pitched from the field — all the more so, I discovered, if they evoked the Old West with dirt roads, dusty boots, and barbed wire.

Their notion of the Southwest was matched by my compulsive attempts to fulfill it, and soon, in deference to my editors, I put a sign over my typewriter: REMEMBER: COWBOYS AMBLE, BUSINESSMEN STRIDE, MARIACHIS STROLL.

One day, I learned about a Yaqui judge who helped a Jewish retirees’ club unearth the old Hebrew graveyard at Tombstone’s Boothill Graveyard. The rededication ceremony was to take place later that week. This Old West story linked Jews, cowboys and Indians — a threefer! I breathlessly called the National Desk. Instead of the usual follow-up questions, I was immediately green-lighted with an open-ended word count and a photographer.

Interpreting the Southwest for the East, I tried to give an accurate picture, though my credibility only went so far. To file a story, we’d type or handwrite our copy, then read it over long distance to the recording room in the bowels of the old Times building on West 43rd Street. A battery of transcribers would monitor our calls as we dictated our stories into their machines.

We e-nun-ci-a-ted each word, especially names, which we’d spell out, and always spoke dis-tinc-t-ly, even giving punctuation commands. The transcribers would call back if they had any questions, period, paragraph.

In one story from the frontier’s smallest border town, Antelope Wells, N.M. (population: 2), I wrote about the annual cattle crossing that attracted cowboys, livestock brokers, Department of Agriculture inspectors, ranchers and customs officials from both countries.

On my way to file from the nearest pay phone five miles away, I colored the story, describing the strong chuckwagon coffee served to gathering vaqueros at daybreak by “a few Mexican cooks.” The next day, I was chagrined to read in the Times that the event attracted “a few Mexican crooks.”

I liked interpreting the West for the East, and in chit-chat with an editor one warm day, he asked about the racket in the background. “Oh, that’s the swamp cooler,” I replied, as matter-of-factly as if I had said it was my dog barking. “The what?” I explained that a swamp cooler worked on the principle of a cool damp towel tossed over the metal grill of an electric fan. This led to a major conference among editors, all of whom were intrigued with this exotic contraption — should they assign a piece on the poor man’s air conditioner? (They did, but not until much later, and then to another contributor.)

One story I wrote included the word campesinos. A copy editor called back, insisting that I blend a translation into the article. I blanketed my exasperation and asked if he would agree that campesino is one of those foreign words that has been absorbed into contemporary English. The line went silent for a moment. “I’ll tell you what,” he finally said. “I’ll learn Spanish if they’ll learn Yiddish.”

Touché.

One morning, the phone rang at 7 o’clock, usually a warning that someone on the East Coast didn’t understand time zones. It was an editor at Esquire who, after describing a story he wanted pursued in Texas, asked if I would, and I believe these were his exact words, “mosey on over to Houston.” I informed him that if we both started moseying at the same time, he’d likely mosey into Houston before me.

The rhythm of the Southwest, its natural continuity and occasional brute force — I suppose that’s what keeps me here. I tried to move away. Twice: once to the San Francisco Bay area, and another time to Austin, Texas. Neither venture lasted more than six months. Both times, I maintained my post office box in Tucson. I knew.

Thornton Wilder lived in Southern Arizona at various stages of his life, once in Tucson in the mid-1930s, just weeks after Our Town had opened on Broadway. One early summer day, he was asked how he liked his temporary home. “I like it very much,” he answered, then tempered his reply. “There are three disadvantages, two of which would be curable. I miss a great library to browse in. I miss great music. And I came at the wrong time of year.”

The library problem and lack of great music have both been cured, but not Wilder’s third disadvantage. In more than four decades of living here, from my first arrival one August, I’ve never grown accustomed to the unrelenting heat of the summer, never liked it, and annually grumble that this summer will be the last one I spend here.

The sun bores a hole through your skull until it singes the synapses in your brain and renders you powerless and stupid. Like Thornton Wilder, I came at the wrong time of the year.

The rest of the year, I need the desert. Not all the time, please, but inhaling a good whiff of it now and then keeps the lungs satisfied and reminds me that I’m not too far from the dread unknown. I need the border for its anarchic sense of reality. I need Bisbee, population 6,800, for the stumbling satisfaction it conveys. I’d like a good river and more green, but then it wouldn’t be the desert Southwest.

[Tom Miller’s 10 books include Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba, and The Panama Hat Trail. He has previously written for The Rag Blog about Phil Ochs, Don Quixote, and Jerry Rubin. Read more articles by Tom Miller on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Jim Hightower and the ‘Populist Moment’

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer
Jim Hightower photo by Alan Pogue

Jim Hightower in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, April 6, 2012. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio: Jim Hightower and the ‘populist moment’

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

Jim Hightower will headline a “Spring Song Fiesta” at Scholz Beer Garten in Austin on Sunday, April 15, from 1-9 p.m. Hightower will speak at 7, following a live KOOP-sponsored debate among Austin mayoral candidates starting at 6. Bands will include the Therapy Sisters, Paper Moon Shiners, Bill Oliver, Son y No Son, Barbara K, Floyd Domino, and Ted Roddy and the Hit Kickers. It all benefits community radio KOOP-FM.

According to Jim Hightower, “even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.”

Progressive Texas populist author, commentator, and orator Hightower — perhaps our country’s most celebrated champion of the common folk — was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 6, on Austin’s community radio station, KOOP 91.7-FM, and streamed live on the Internet.

You can listen to the show here:


We discussed populism as a political movement — and what Jim Hightower sees as a “populist moment” existing in this country today.

“Populism is about confronting money and power in our society and realizing that too few people control too much money,” Hightower told the Rag Radio audience. “The few are doing extremely well, but they seem to think that they can separate their well-being from the good fortunes of the many.”

Hightower, who served two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, is a New York Times bestselling author. His weekly newsletter, the Hightower Lowdown, goes out to 135,000 subscribers, he writes a weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate, and his radio commentaries air on stations around the country, including Austin’s KOOP.

A former editor of the Texas Observer, Hightower has been involved in progressive politics for decades and has established himself as one of the country’s most influential consumer advocates, especially focusing on corporate power in the food economy.

Jim Hightower’s latest book is Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.

Rag Radio, hosted by longtime alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, editor of The Rag Blog and a pioneer of the Sixties underground press, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about progressive politics, history, and culture.

The show is broadcast on Austin’s KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run community radio station, on Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (CST) and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST). It also has a widespread internet audience and podcasts of all shows can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Populist moment

Jim Hightower said on Rag Radio that he thinks “we have a strong populist moment, a strong populist possibility, to make fundamental change.”

He says that the Wall Street bailout “was the initial spark for the Tea Party movement,” but that it got captured by former Texas Congressman and Koch-funded Washington lobbyist Dick Armey, and was turned into a “right-wing hugging organization.”

But Hightower believes that the Occupy movement could connect with the Tea Party rank and file, and “turn into something real, something that does try to decentralize power down to the grassroots level for ordinary working people.”

He sees lots of things going on in the country that make him hopeful.

He believes that all the Republican anti-union activity has reinvigorated the labor movement. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka “declared that he was going to make [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker the ‘organizer of the year.’” All the anti-union rhetoric “has given them their own sense of history back, and their own spirit back, and the recognition that the public is with them.”

Hightower spoke before 150,000 people in 20-degree weather last February in Madison, at a rally opposing the Wisconsin anti-union legislation. There were people “just as far as you could see.”

“It was just a beautiful, spirited moment.”

And he sees more positive signs.

People are working on a grassroots level for a “bevy of new and good candidates running for office all across the country” — like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Norman Solomon in Northern California, and Eric Griego in Albuquerque — and to overturn Citizens United (“the grotesque absurdity that a corporation is a person”).

“As we say here,” Hightower reminds us, “a corporation is not a person until Texas executes one.”

Jim Hightower supports a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

“We don’t have to convince people that Citizens United’s unleashing unlimited amounts of secret corporate money into our elections is a bad idea.”

“If we get that to a vote, we win.”

“There’s a movement, and the Occupy people are involved in this, to confront every candidate for every office in the country, at their public forums… at their political rallies… or just go to their office, and say, ‘Do you think a corporation is a person? We want you on record.”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, Jeff Zavala and Grace Alfar of ZGrafix, and guest Jim Hightower during Rag Radio broadcast, Friday, April 6, 2012, at KOOP-FM in Austin. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Coops and food economy

Hightower also believes that the fast-growing coop movement “is extraordinary in this country [and] there’s very little coverage of it.”

“[It gives us] models that we can go to… and say, here’s another way to organize it. It doesn’t have to be the CEO getting $50 million a year and workers having their wages knocked down and their health care and other benefits taken away.”

Another — and related — area of encouraging activity, Hightower said, is in the food economy. “We’ve had a revolution in food in America… It came from farmers saying, there’s gotta be a better way than all these pesticides… and making bad food and poisoning our animals and genetically manipulating our animals.”

And the consumers are saying, “We don’t like industrialized, conglomeratized, globalized, capitalized food. We want real food.”

“And the two found each other.”

“It began with ex-hippies selling bad tomatoes out of broken-down VW buses in the 70’s.” But then came the food coops and the farmers’ markets. “We helped to establish more than 100 of them [in Texas], just by putting the tools in the hands of local people.”

“It’s a tremendous movement,” he says. In Austin, “we have a dozen farms… linking up with chefs and linking up directly with restaurants and directly with government institutions to buy food.”

Privatization and the commons

An issue that Jim Hightower is especially concerned about is the alarming spread of privatization and the resulting impact on the public sector, on the commons.

He has recently written in his Hightower Lowdown about the move to privatize the post office, about the “corporate foreign legion” that “has taken over America’s intelligence and military functions,” and about the closing of state parks around the country. (“By axing parks, politicos are stealing the people’s property,” he wrote.)

“It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy, it’s dangerous for our health, it’s dangerous for our economy,” he said on Rag Radio. “Because it allows a few profit-seeking organizations to take charge.”

They’re saying that the post office is “wasteful, they’re broke, they’re bankrupt… and that they can’t compete with the internet and Fedex, etc… Well, as we say out in Lubbock, that’s bovine excrement. The post office last year had… an operating profit of 700 million dollars.”

“This is about the common good… The post office is in every community in America… They deliver by pack mule. They deliver by planes, they deliver by boats.”

“They get the job done.”

“And it is the most popular federal agency in all of government. People feel an attachment to their post office… because it is a community center.”

Hightower says that the move to privatize parks is happening all over the country.

“The workaday people… don’t fly to Aspen when they need a weekend. They don’t summer in France. They go to their parks.”

“These parks are jewels. And yet, we’re abandoning them. [Gov. Rick] Perry and the legislature just whacked the hell out of them” in Texas. The state parks director has been forced to make public appeals for support of the park system. “We’re out there with a tin cup on the side of the street saying, anybody got a nickel for a state park?”

“It’s a complete abdication of long-term responsibility to the people of this state and future generations.”

And now, Hightower says, privatization has moved, with almost no public notice or discussion by lawmakers, into the military and into the military intelligence agencies.

He says he was “stunned” when he researched the issue for the Hightower Lowdown. “I had no idea it was this big, this extensive.”

“We have roughly 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. And now we’ve got 113,00 contractors… And they’re not there just to do administrative chores. They’re doing war planning, they are targeting the enemy, they are killing.”

Hightower says we are giving up “the government’s most sensitive activities to corporations” whose “loyalty is not to the United States of America. It is to the bottom line, to the profit of the shareholders.”

Texas and the populist movement

Jim Hightower reminded Rag Radio listeners that the populist movement actually started in Texas — in Lampasas — “with four farmers sitting around a kitchen table over there in 1868, saying, this is killing us — [with] the railroad monopolies, and the bankers putting the squeeze on them.”

“They had to find some other way.”

“So they established what became the Farmers Alliance.” It failed at first but eventually, it “spread through Texas, all up through the Plains states, went through the South, went all the way to New York State, all the way out to California.”

“They created cooperatives, the financing mechanisms so farmers could get capital without being gouged by the banks, and then a holding mechanism for their crops, storage facilities, so that they could be in charge. And then a market mechanism.”

“And all of it was cooperatively-run.”

“And it was also a cultural movement,” Hightower added. “Because rural people were illiterate. They didn’t know how to write. They hadn’t read history. So they had educational courses, they had cultural programs, they created choirs, and concerts, and they had parades, and fun.

“Everybody could join it. And ‘everybody’ included African-Americns. Back in that day, in the 1870s.”

“It was a huge people’s movement.”

“In fact, Thorne, the original Texas constitution outlawed banks… They hated ‘em. Because we were settled by debtors, people fleeing out of Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi.”

We concluded by asking Jim Hightower if he plans to ever run for office again.

His firm “No” came with a satisfied smile. He’s having too much fun just being Jim Hightower.

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.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, April 13, 2012: Sustainability activist Bill Neiman of Native American Seeds.
April 20, 2012: David P. Hamilton on the upcoming French elections, and Philip Russell on the coming elections in Mexico.

VIDEO: Jim Hightower on Rag Radio

Video of Thorne Dreyer’s Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower, produced by Jeff Zavala of ZGrafix.org. The video can also be seen on Jeff’s Blip TV channel.

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Steve Russell : Traveling by Water

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Mar Caribe: Traveling by water. Photo by Jefry Lagrange Reyes / Wikimedia Commons.

Traveling by water

“We pray in English so we understand each other; we pray in Indian so God understands us.” — Lakota elder

By Steve Russell | The Rag Blog | April 11, 2012

“Coffee more… you want?” A young man, brown but of indeterminate nationality, is walking by with a carafe. My mind replies “Si, por favor,” but I quickly realize I have not identified his accent and his features do not look American Indian (as most Latin Americans do), so I mentally retreat to “Yes, please.”

I have yet to find an American working on this ship or, as a friend of mine maintains, a “USian.” Her position that Canada and all of Latin America are “American” is geographically unassailable but linguistically confusing. Whatever you call them, every individual I’ve seen so far is not, in the immortal words of the New Jersey bard, “born in the USA.”

The skipper is a Dane. The other folks important enough to have mugshots in the ship’s guide are from the UK, Canada, Austria, Croatia, and Ireland. Our waiter is Mexican and the barmaid is from Grenada. One of the dining options every day is Indian food… from India, that is.

I take my coffee out on the deck and sit down to drink it. There’s nothing but ocean as far as my eyes see, but I’m proud of myself for beginning to think in Spanish since I know the nearest land is the Yucatan. Of course, being happy at thinking in Spanish makes me ashamed of having surrendered the battle to think in Cherokee.

The only time I even come close to thinking in Cherokee is in ceremony, when English feels like a square peg for a round hole. I am reminded of a multi-tribal meeting where a Lakota elder who followed a Shoshone who had followed a Cherokee said, “We pray in English so we understand each other; we pray in Indian so God understands us.”

I’ll never forget that witticism, and “Indian” as a language makes pretty much the same sense as “Indian” as a race. The memory brings back my mellow mood.

Being at sea is oddly relaxing. Oddly, because of the obvious peril. If the boat breaks, are we going to swim home? My bemusement at non-swimmers who take cruises departs with that thought.

Speaking of peril, I was once inside a scale model of Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria. I remember thinking of the distance those genocidal goldseekers traveled in that little thing… with horses, yet! Leaving guns, germs and steel aside, our ancestors were not conquered by men without courage. Those Spaniards had to be tough SOBs to even make it here. SOBs, thieves, murderers — of course, but also tough.

Surrounded by ocean to all horizons, it’s easy to visualize how men think they can dump waste into it forever but still take fish out of it forever. It’s an understandable mistake. I find it harder to forgive what I saw in the reconstructed ruin of Ft. Laramie, Wyoming: a multi-hole outhouse jutting over the river. Upstream, cold and clear trout water. Downstream, a sewer. How could the colonists have thought that was right?

Of course, I’m biased. Our elders admonish us as boys not to urinate in the river. I can’t say we all obeyed, but I can in my own elder years drink in the metaphor, pun intended, as harsh reality. In fact, we humans have overfished the oceans and we have trashed them to a degree hard for those of us born landlocked to contemplate. Perhaps our mistakes are more significant than we are.

The peaceful feeling from the sea is also a feeling of insignificance. The absence of land or birds or other ships makes it easy to wrap my mind around the plain facts that the Milky Way Galaxy is not the center of the universe, the star we call Sol is not the center of the Milky Way, the planet we call Mother Earth is not the center of the solar system, North America is not the center of the earth, Oklahoma is not the center of North America, and Cherokee County is not the center of Oklahoma.

The Pope wanted to lock Galileo up for these kinds of thoughts, a pope like the one who sent those Spaniards to steal and kill and rape. Yet we indigenous peoples, who are thought to be the most primitive people on earth because we were last into the Iron Age, take that insight with our mother’s milk! We understand we are not the center of everything that matters.

How can I presume that the ocean will tolerate humankind’s mistakes and so we will always have fish to eat? Or that the whole planet will learn English for my convenience? Next time, I shall answer the man in Spanish.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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MUSIC / Ron Jacobs : A ‘New Kind of Lonely’

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer


Bohemian hoedown:
A New Kind of Lonely

I See Hawks In LA create music that might best be described as a twenty-first century manifestation of that high lonesome sound first introduced to the world by Bill Monroe.

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | April 11, 2012

Imagine yourself in a small cabin in the mountains north of Santa Cruz, California. There’s a small fire burning in the stone fireplace just warm enough to burn away the Pacific fog creeping through the space underneath the door. People are gathered in the main room. Some are tuning their instruments, others are twisting up a reefer or two, and still others are pouring pints of home brew. Everybody gets settled and the picking begins.

That cabin, that scene, is where the latest disc from the California band I See Hawks In LA takes me. This CD, titled New Kind of Lonely, is their fifth release (sixth if you include their “hits” collection) and, in a departure from their other work, is performed solely with acoustic instruments. Foregoing their electric guitars and pedal steel, I See Hawks In LA have turned in a solid piece of work that simultaneously enhances and expands their singularly exquisite sound.

Not quite country, not quite rock, I See Hawks In LA create music that might best be described as a twenty-first century manifestation of that high lonesome sound first introduced to the world by Bill Monroe and other bluegrass pioneers.

This CD, given the fact of its entirely acoustic performances, emphasizes that link to the lonely hollers of Southern Appalachia that one hears in songs like “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Uncle Pen,” or “I’ll Fly Away.”

The difference lies in the song’s topics. Instead of Kentucky, Jesus, or moonshine, New Kind of Lonely includes songs about painter Mary Sky Austin, the Grateful Dead, and weed. Unlike previous releases, the songs here tend toward more personal situations; personal situations that represent a life outside the mainstream.

The opening song is titled “Bohemian Highway,” and the listener then travels this highway while being entertained with tales from the outlands of California’s bohemia. It is a bohemia birthed in the hippie/freak culture of the 1960s and 1970s and still celebrated in song, literature and some folks’ daily lives.

Like the best fiction emerging from this metaphysical realm (Vineland by Pynchon, Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson), there are also warnings of the dangers one might find in a culture that accepts drug use and drifting as aspects of its essence.

Certain vocalists are instantly recognizable. One of those singers is the aforementioned Bill Monroe. Others include Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Mahalia Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, and Leonard Cohen, to name just a few. The vocals of I See Hawks In LA’s Rob Waller fall into this category. The smoothness of his delivery (unlike Dylan or Young, whose singing is anything but smooth) does not muffle its sweetness or singularity. There are songs of joy and songs of warning. Songs about wandering and songs about getting hitched.

The key to I See Hawks’ is their playing. This acoustic masterpiece features plenty of incredibly adept, pleasing, even achingly beautiful guitar playing. There are not enough superlatives to describe it. Indeed, it could stand on its own if the vocals did not exist. When one adds the fiddle playing of Gabe Witcher (Punch Brothers), the sound becomes sublime.

In the past, I have tried to summon musicians that I See Hawks In LA reminds me of. While not an easy task because of their genuinely unique sound, Gram Parsons, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and The Byrds have come into mind.

This release has reminded me of another. Back in the 1970s there was a group that hailed from Kentucky and Arizona called Goose Creek Symphony (they returned in the 1990s and still perform). Their sound was a combination of rock music, clogging, horns, fiddle music, and just plain awesome picking. Every once in a while their music became something as celebratory as a group of old timers celebrating their latest batch of likker.

You feel so good; you just have to kick up something.

[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 on April 11, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Is “Wealth Redistribution” Really A Bad Thing ?

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / April 10, 2012

Just the other day, Rick Warren (a powerful right-wing fundamentalist preacher) made the statement, “I do not believe in income redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.” He went on to say the only way to get people out of poverty is to create jobs for them.

My first thought upon reading that ridiculous statement was that Warren is either a liar or an idiot. He is either spreading a perverted definition of “wealth redistribution” or he has no idea what “wealth redistribution” is. Either way, he is misleading anyone who listens to him.

The idea he is spreading is that wealth redistribution is something that only goes on in a socialist economy, and it means that money is taken away from hard-working people and given to lazy people who don’t want to work.

This is the definition that rich people (and their lackeys, congressional Republicans) want the American public to accept, because if Americans accept that definition, then the rich will not have to share any of their wealth in the form of taxes or decent wages and benefits for their workers.

The problem with that definition is that it is simply a lie. It ignores the fact that wealth redistribution goes on in every society and country in the world every day. In fact, no modern economy can work without wealth being continually redistributed — and that is especially true of a capitalist economy (or as the right-wing now prefers to call it, a “free enterprise” economy).

Every time a consumer purchases a good or service, wealth is being redistributed. Every time a worker receives a paycheck, wealth is being redistributed. Every time an investor makes (or loses) money on an investment, wealth is being redistributed.

Every time a citizen pays a tax (at any level of government), wealth is being redistributed. Every time a person gives to a charity, wealth is being redistributed. Every time a financial institution (or individual) loans money, wealth is redistributed (and it is also redistributed when it is paid back with interest).

The truth is that a capitalist economy (actually any kind of economy) requires wealth redistribution. Without the redistribution of wealth, a modern economy would cease to function. Understanding this, we can see that the wrong question is being posed by the right wing in this country.

The question is not do we want wealth redistribution to occur — we obviously do, since our economy could not function without it. The real question is what kind of wealth redistribution do we want.

There are basically two choices in the United States (since the third choice, communism, is not an option most Americans would even consider). These choices are to have either an unregulated (or pure) capitalist system, or to have a regulated capitalist system. The difference is simply one of fairness.

In an unregulated capitalist system, there are no rules and few (if any) taxes. There are no protections for either consumers or workers. In this system, the wealth will eventually wind up mostly in the hands of a few. This few will be incredibly rich, while the rest of the people in the country will be left to fight for survival.

Since about 1980, the Republican Party has been trying to move this country toward an unregulated capitalism. They have removed many regulations and lowered taxes for the rich. The result is shown in the chart above.

By 2010, the richest 20% of Americans has 93% of the country’s total wealth (leaving 80% of the population to divide the other 7%). The richest 10% controlled 83% of the total wealth, while the richest 5% controlled 72% of total wealth, and the richest 1% controlled 43% of the country’s total wealth.

But this is not good enough for the Republicans (or their rich masters). They want to deregulate even more, and they want to cut taxes for the rich even more. Is this really the kind of economy you want to live in — where the rich have most of the wealth and everyone else must scramble for the scraps left over? If not, then a well-regulated capitalism is the only option.

The Republicans will tell you that a regulated capitalism is nothing more than socialism. Don’t let that scare you. In regulated capitalism, free enterprise is maintained. But businesses cannot treat consumers unfairly or rip them off, because there are legal protections (regulations). Workers are also protected by safety rules, minimum wage laws, anti-discrimination laws, the right to form unions, and other protections (regulations).

In a regulated capitalism, the rich (and the corporations) are also expected to pay their fair share of taxes. These taxes are used to build infrastructure, run government, defend the country, provide police and fire protection, help the needy and disadvantaged, fund education and training programs, and protect the environment (among other things).

In this system, all of the country’s citizens share in the nation’s wealth. There will still be rich and poor, but in general there is a much fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth — meaning everyone will be better off (and not just the rich).

In both systems there is a continual redistribution of wealth. In the unregulated capitalism, that wealth is redistributed to the rich. In a regulated capitalism, the nation’s wealth is shared more evenly and all citizens are helped. Isn’t that what we want?

So the next time someone tells you they are opposed to “wealth redistribution,” understand that they are either an idiot or a liar. Wealth redistribution happens every day. The real question is whether we want it to be fair, or to go only to the rich.

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : Sayonara to Mike Wallace and the End of an Era

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Mike Wallace hosting “CBS Morning News” in 1963. Photo from CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images.

Sayonara to Mike Wallace
and the news era he led

Mike Wallace turned the macho face-off into a personal signature that resembled nothing so much as wrestling.

By Danny Schechter | The Rag Blog | April 10, 2012

NEW YORK — Mike Wallace lived a long life and became one of America’s best-known non-anchor news stars, whose frequent appearances stirred controversies and broke countless stories.

The picture in The New York Times obit showed his wall of Emmys — I am sure he had a museum-full — all thanks to his relentless drive and unlimited energy.

Later in life, he would acknowledge that he was a manic depressive, but it was that manic part that pushed him to interview a Who’s Who of Who Was, and to expose endless bad guys for decades on 60 Minutes, often with gimmicky confrontational interviews that showcased his considerable talents, and which helped make 60 Minutes America’s most watched news magazine.

My earliest memory of him was not on CBS where he achieved iconic status but on a network that came and went called Dumont, where he did an interview show for many years before he went national.

The show was called Night Beat, and was shot in black and white in a darkened studio that Mike lit up with his questions and chain smoking, very much in the Edward R. Murrow tradition.

The episode that stuck with me was his interview with Michael J. Quill, the late president of New York’s Transport Workers Union who liked to strike on New Year’s Eve to get the best deals for his members.

The two Mikes were going mano a mano, when Wallace, with black hair slicked back, posed a simple question that I’ve never forgotten.

He asked: “How did you organize such a diverse group of workers into one union?

Quill smiled, and then responded with that Irish brogue of his, saying, “Well Michael, there was one issue that brought the men together.”

And what was that?

“There was a lack of toilets for the subway workers.”

“And not only that, Michael,” he added, “where there were toilets, there was no toilet paper.”

That was the issue: the lack of tissue.

The two men had a great laugh and I learned a big lesson about how it is often the small things that piss people off enough to stand up for their rights.

Somehow, because of that late fifties moment, I thought of Wallace as some kind of a progressive until it was reported that he had voted for Richard Nixon. (His son Chris now works for Fox News, perhaps because of the values he was taught as a kid. I am not sure about that!)

Many of Wallace’s interviews were far more combative and he turned the macho face-off into a personal signature that resembled nothing so much as wrestling, a far more successful TV format. At ABC he was labeled, “the Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition.”

Ironically, Wallace later said the interviews he enjoyed the most were the more honest probing ones he did earlier in his career.

Later in his life, he would become the center of an embarrassing scandal when 60 Minutes, at the behest of the CBS brass, killed an investigation of a cigarette company accused of knowingly manufacturing a product that caused cancer.

Wallace got into a very ugly spat with his long time producer Lowell Bergman that was later featured in a movie that exposed Wallace’s complicity. (He later did the story but his reputation suffered a blow.)

Wallace would became famous not for probing questions about the working class but for stagey interviews about the ruling class.

The New York Times cited one:

Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked “a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity.”

His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.

“Perjury,” he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon’s right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. “Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.”

Mr. Ehrlichman paused, and said, “Is there a question in there somewhere?”

No, Mr. Wallace later conceded. But it was riveting television.

Later he was caught paying for interviews and usually became more important in television terms than the person he interviewed. In TV, landing a big interview is called “Getting the Get” and he got some amazing ones including Ayatollah Khomeini.

His producers would be seductive and patronizing in setting them up, but then Wallace would find a way to go in for the kill.

He took pleasure in being seen as a tough guy, the role he played on TV. David Bauder of AP said of him,

Wallace didn’t just interview people. He interrogated them. He cross-examined them. Sometimes he eviscerated them. His weapons were many: thorough research, a cocked eyebrow, a skeptical “Come on” and a question so direct sometimes it took your breath away.

I hate to break this to you but that posture quickly became a ratings winning game, an act, a shtick, like so much of TV News. He later abandoned the sandbagging entrapment interview when others like Geraldo Rivera “borrowed” the technique.

Having worked at ABC’s 20/20, a 60 Minutes wannabe, I could see how many high profile segments were invariably dramatized and hyped. I wrote about my experience in The More You Watch The Less You Know, a title that expressed my view, but I did get to meet some of the 60 Minutes crew where a close friend of mine has worked for years at a senior level.

Don Hewitt, the demigod who ruled the roost there could be arrogant and condescending with his emphasis on telling stories, more than slaying evil individuals and institutions, but he created a family that took on important issues even as so many other TV stations began pandering by exploiting celebrities and kowtowing to power.

He and Mike were often at each other’s throats before they kissed and made up. Of them all, Andy Rooney was more the stand-up union loyalist than the egomaniacal personality.

I did get to know CBS’s Walter Cronkite, who endorsed our Mediachannel1.org in glowing terms. When Walter couldn’t show up for a discussion about the decline of journalism with Professor Ben Barber, Mike Wallace graciously sat in for him.

Mike didn’t relate to much to our brand of harsh criticism of network journalism but he gave as good as he took. In that moment, I saw him as a mensch, a phase of affection that I can use on this Passover weekend.

In a way, as serious as some of the subjects he took on were, it became more show business more than news business.

He was very competitive and in some cases competed against Barbara Walters who also grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he lived as a kid. He was not above stealing interviews and was a tough taskmaster to work with, but TV News was less when he left late in his own life.

He needed the oxygen of media attention and began slipping away when he lost it.

TV News is not what it once wanted to be. It had a way of losing its greats. Murrow was forced out and, now the anchor who aspired to be like him, Keith Olbermann, has lost his own job perhaps because a personal failing or impatience with what the business has become. Dan Rather was set up, and Peter Jennings died too young.

The values of the market have torpedoed whatever senses of mission most of our media may have once been seen to have, although there is more nostalgia than reality about the glory days.

But, even knowing what we do about Big Media’s function on behalf of the status quo — selling its wars and pumping deference to authority — let’s still say a dayenu for Mike Wallace who for a long time really cared and taught us real lessons about right and wrong.

News Dissector Danny Schechter has worked in TV News at the local, cable and network levels, before defecting to independent journalism and spends too much of his time challenging official journalism and its service to the status quo on his Newsdissector.net blog. He edits Mediachannel1.org and hosts a show on Progressive Radio Network. Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more articles by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.

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Mari Jo and Paul Buhle : Wisconsin’s Historic ‘Solidarity Sing Along’

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Solidarity Sing Along at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Photo from Solidarity Sing Along / Facebook.

The historic Wisconsin ‘Solidarity Sing Along’

Dubbed the ‘longest continuously running singing protest in history,’ the Solidarity Sing Along is about to celebrate its 350th performance.

By Mari Jo and Paul Buhle / The Progressive / April 10, 2012

MADISON, Wisconsin — More than once, left-leaning music critics have pronounced the demise of the Seeger-esque, Almanacs labor-themed song. Along with Pete goes the whole genre of political folk revival, including, for the most disparaging, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. A veritable mess of clichés, our critic snaps. This music, especially the lyrics, neither clever nor funny nor inspiring.

The appearance of Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger himself at the Obama inauguration might have prompted some doubts in this judgment. The Seeger Sessions recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 2009 might have ratcheted up those doubts.

What happened in the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011-2012 provides an even more persuasive counter example. The Solidarity Sing Along, which began on March 11, 2011, with a small group of singers and a one-page song sheet, revived the protest song and made it a major component of the political movement.

The Solidarity singers responded in full voice to Governor Scott Walker’s curtailment of the collective bargaining rights of state workers. In shaping their protest, they mixed familiar civil rights anthems such as “We Shall Overcome” with the sacred songs of the union movement. Every weekday, they engage a shifting population of singers in songs touting the rights of working people, the meaning of class struggle, and, asserting, in words of Billy Bragg, “There Is Power in the Union.”

Solidarity singers continue to gather at the Capitol in numbers ranging from 20-30 to more than 200. Barring officially scheduled events, they circle the Rotunda floor, with their conductor strategically placed before the bust of Robert M. La Follette, the state’s most beloved opposition politician.

Solidarity Sing Along group outside Wisconsin State Capitol. Photo by Rebecca Kemble / The Progressive.

On other days they brave the cold winds, rain, and snow of the Wisconsin winter and, in recent weeks, revel in the unusually warm temperatures. For the outdoor gatherings (Walker banned all instruments from the Capitol), musicians bring an assortment of instruments — violins, guitars, mandolins, sousaphones, and squeeze boxes — and play together as “The Learning Curve” pick-up band.

The selection of songs varies from day to day, but every sing-along concludes with the group’s theme song, “Solidarity Forever.” A timely favorite is “Roll Out the Roll Call,” with new lyrics by Sheboyganites Frank and Mary Koczan. “Recall Scott Walker…/Give him a kick in the rear!/ Recall Scott Walker…./Toss him right out on his ear!” If the chorus of Ralph Chaplin’s labor classic routinely produces raised fists, the updated “Beer Barrel Polka” invariably stirs a few in the crowd to polka, German-style. This is Wisconsin, after all.

The driving force through all these performances has been R. Chris Reeder. Although he worked as an actor and stage technician before moving to Madison with his wife, Lisa Penning, Reeder had never directed anything musical before taking on the Solidarity Sing Along. But he is tall and limber and comfortable with occupying center-stage. His voice is distinctive and deep and carries high above the rumbling of a crowd. He says he lacks prior political experience, but was simply eager to jump at the opportunity to oppose Walker’s draconian anti-union legislation.

In a recent interview, Reeder described the sing-along as a source of empowerment for the singers as much as a political statement aimed at the public. It turns out to be both: tourists to Madison regularly drop in the Capitol either to watch from a distance or to join in the singing.

Invitations to conduct sing-alongs are now coming from distant parts of Wisconsin. Recently a small group made the six-hour drive to Ashland to lead a sing-along far “up north.” The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a coalition of activist groups founded in 1991, posts songbooks on its website and encourages communities throughout the state to start their own Solidarity Sing Alongs.

Reeder, who was born and raised near Seattle, is at home in Wisconsin. He finds his way to the Capitol between making deliveries to grocery stores for a local artisan bakery. He also receives a small stipend from the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, and picks up a few extra dollars from the sale of Solidarity Sing Along t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with the motto “This Is What Democracy Sounds Like.”

So intimate is Reeder with the several dozen regulars and hundreds of admirers that the details of the recent birth of his first-born, August, reached his many fans on the Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page and generated thousands of “likes.”

Heroes, even those possessing great charm, are created by the times, according to the old saw. When Walker tried to force the sing-along out of the Capitol, the singers stood their ground. At every performance, Reeder read the relevant passage in the state Constitution: “The right of the people peaceably to assemble, to consult for the common good, and to petition the government, or any department thereof, shall never be abridged.”

On March 17, 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin presented Reeder, on behalf of the Solidarity Sing Along, a much deserved award, the William Gorham Rice Civil Libertarian of the Year Award “for the expression of the First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of assembly.” Even more recently, Leadership Wisconsin, a group that promotes the development of leaders to strengthen communities, tagged Reeder for yet futher recognition.

Dubbed the “longest continuously running singing protest in history,” the Solidarity Sing Along is about to celebrate its “semiseptcentennial,” that is, its 350th performance on April 26th at the Majestic Theatre, Madison’s oldest theater, a former vaudeville house that opened in 1906. The event coincides with the release of a CD of its standard repertoire of songs, which were recorded in February at a local Unitarian Universalist church. (Authors’ disclaimer: we were there for the major session, but sang softly far from the microphone, befitting limited talents.).

The lyrics may not be deft prose, but topicality and regionalism have their place. Woody Guthrie’s iconic ballad now goes: “From Lake Geneva to Madeleine Island/ From the rolling prairies,/ to our lovely dairies,/ Wisconsin was made for you and me!”

Lead violinist Daithi Wolfe seasonally updated the lyrics of a St. Patrick’s Day favorite: “Scotty Boy, Scotty Boy We Loathe You So…”

Several songs have inspired hand and body gestures. The chorus of “Bring Back Wisconsin to Me,” with new lyrics by Madison folk favorites Lou and Peter Berryman, involves “swaying the Wisconsin Way,” first left, then right. “Roll the Union On” prompts the “rolling” of arm over arm. The ever-popular “Scotty, We’re Coming for You!” (written by the local Indie-Irish-Rock band, The Kissers) ends energetically with index fingers pointed at the Capitol.

It should also be added that the Solidarity Sing Along is nothing but a joyous occasion. We wonder: When in the history of labor choruses did the singer-amateurs have more fun? It’s sheer pleasure to sing the rousing lyrics adapted from Florence Reece’s beloved “Which Side Are You On?”: “Don’t believe the Governor/ don’t listen to his lies/ Working folks don’t have a chance,/ unless we organize!”

[Mary Jo and Paul Buhle are the editors of It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (Verso Books). This article was first published at The Progressive. Read more articles by Mari Jo and Paul Buhle on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Labor and Farmer Activism in Texas, 1890-1920

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Southern Pine Lumber Company workers at the company store, Diboll, Texas, about 1907. Photo courtesy of The History Center, Diboll. Image from Texas Beyond History.

The hidden history of Texas

Part IX: 1890-1920/5 — Labor and farmer activism

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 9, 2012

[This is the fifth section of Part 9 of Bob Feldman’s Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

During the 1890-1920 period of Texas history a post-1900 revival of Texas labor and farmer activism developed into a worker-farmer political alliance which produced some pro-labor laws between 1900 and 1915 in Texas.

As F. Ray Marshall recalled in his 1967 book Labor in the South,

In 1900, the railway brotherhoods and the Texas State Federation of Labor [TSFL] established the Joint Labor Legislative Board of Texas. The board formed an alliance with the Farmers’ Union, organized in 1902.

The Texas Joint Board was instrumental in securing the passage of favorable labor legislation during the 1900-1915 period, particularly: a 1901 measure outlawing the issuance of company checks, tickets or symbols of any sort redeemable only in merchandise at company stores; a child labor law — first adopted in 1903 and improved in 1911; a 1907 law giving railroad telegraphers an eight-hour day; an eight-hour shift for state employees and persons working on government contracts in 1911; a 1913 law establishing a 9-hour day and a 54-hour work week for women in manufacturing; anti-blacklisting and mine safety codes in 1907; apprenticeship requirements for locomotive engineers and conductors, a full crew law for passenger trains and a requirement that railroads repair their equipment in Texas shops; and workmen’s compensation for railroad workers in 1909; workmen’s compensation was extended to industrial workers in 1911; a bureau of labor statistics in 1909 to enforce protective labor legislation; and the abolition of the convict lease system in 1910.

But by 1915 the political clout of Texas’s labor movement had begun to decline after cooperation with insurgent Texas farmers “began to weaken in 1911 when the Farmers’ Union secured the passage of the bill — over labor’s objections — to establish a textile mill in the Rusk penitentiary, and in 1913 when the farmers lobbied against the railway brotherhoods’ ‘full crew.'” Texas’s “Farmers’ Union had [by then] been infiltrated by the anti-union Commercial Secretaries Association,” according to Labor in the South.

Formed in Rains County, Texas, in 1902, the all-white Farmers’ Educational and Cooperative Union of America (aka The Farmers’ Union) excluded Texas’ African-American farmers as members. Yet “country teachers, mechanics, physicians, ministers of the gospels and publishers” who were not farmers, but who were white, were apparently allowed to be members, according to Labor in the South.

Despite having been able to recruit about 120,000 members in Texas during its early years, by 1919 the Farmers Union had ceased to exist as a significant and influential mass-based progressive political force within the state (although it still claimed 10,000 members in Texas in 1990).

The Texas labor movement’s political clout also decreased again by 1915 after Texas State Federation of Labor leaders complained that five of the six seats on the Joint Labor Legislative Board of Texas should not still be held by railroad brotherhood representatives — because the number of railway brotherhood members in Texas was only 16 percent of the 9,000 Texas workers who were members of the Texas State Federation of Labor-affiliated unions in 1906.

So in 1914, the leaders of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the Order of Railway Conductors, and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen decided to end their organizational involvement in the Joint Labor Legislative Board of Texas.

But despite the legislative gains made by Texas workers between 1900 and 1915, this was also a period when dissatisfied Texas workers in the lumber industry of East Texas — 7,958 of whom were African-Americans who worked mostly as laborers in Texas lumber industry mills — joined lumber industry workers of adjacent Southern states in a region-wide strike. As Philip Foner recalled in his History of the Labor Movement in United States , Vol. IV: The Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1917:

The magnificent forests of… East Texas… were literally stolen by the lumber companies from the public domain… They were handed over to the lumber kings for prices ranging from 12.5 cents to 75 cents an acre…

Having grabbed these forests — one company owned 87,000 acres in a single tract in Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas — the companies proceeded to operate them as feudal domains, filling the towns with gunmen whom the authorities had commissioned as deputy sheriffs, and jailing anyone who questioned their rule…

Following a… study in Texas, the Commission on Industrial Relations found “that in such communities, political liberty does not exist and its forms are hollow mockery… Free speech, free assembly, and a free press may be denied as they have been denied time and again, and the employer’s agent may be placed in public office to do his bidding…”

So, not surprisingly, according to Foner’s 1965 book:

The first widespread revolt of the lumber workers occurred in the autumn of 1907…The lumber companies, taking advantage of the panic of 1907, issued orders to cut wages 20 percent or more, and lengthened the hours of work. Against these orders, all the lumber workers in Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas rose en masse, and in a spontaneous general strike closed hundreds of mills…

Although most of the striking Texas lumber workers soon returned to work after “promises of wage increases when economic conditions improved were made” to them by lumber company managers, according to the same book, “not only were the promises not kept, but the oppression grew even worse” over the next few years.

Texas labor baron John Henry Kirby, circa 1925. Image from Texas Beyond History.

So after dissatisfied activist workers in the U.S. lumber industry joined together to create a national industrial union of lumber industry workers, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers [B. of T.W.] in June 1911, “the B. of T.W. spread rapidly over Texas,…recruiting Negroes and white lumberjacks, mill workers, tenant and small farmers who worked in the lumber industry for parts of the year, and town craftsmen,” according to Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States. The same book also described how the corporations that still controlled the lumber industry in Texas between 1890 and 1920 then chose to respond to the success that the Brotherhood of Timber Workers industrial union organizing drive in Texas was achieving in 1911:

The union’s rapid growth had alarmed the employers. In the summer of 1911, individual mill owners began to take action against the organization, requiring all workers to sign a card declaring that they would not join the union. This caused several strikes and a number of mills shut down, discharged every Brotherhood member, and kept closed down for weeks…

The Southern Lumber Operators’ Association was… reactivated and a secret meeting was called for July 19 [1911] at New Orleans. The meeting was attended by some 150 lumbermen from Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana… The meeting was controlled by John H. Kirby, the largest lumber operator in Texas, who… directed the activities of the organization. A one-time president of the National Association of Manufacturers, Kirby was determined to smash the Brotherhood of Timber Workers.

The leading speech at the session was delivered by Kirby. He began by announcing that “whenever any efforts are discovered to organize unions, the mills will be closed down and will remain so until the union is killed.” …Arrangements were worked out between Kirby and [then-American Federation of Labor Leader Samuel] Gompers for the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association to drive its workers out of the B. of T.W., and, after that union was destroyed, to extend recognition to the A.F. of L. which would send its representatives into the lumber camps and mills to recruit the skilled, white craftsmen…

During the next few months over 300… mills in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana were closed down, and union men were locked out of, or blacklisted from, every mill within the Association’s sphere of influence… “Good Citizens” Protective Leagues… were organized in Eastern Texas… to break up local meetings of the Brotherhood and to intimidate its speakers and organizers… During the summer and fall of 1911 between 5,000 and 7.000 of the most active members of the Brotherhood, white and Negro, were blacklisted…

Yet when the mills reopened in the winter of 1912, according to Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States, the not-recognized B. of T.W. union “still existed as a force after the infamous war to exterminate it [and] by May 1912, the Brotherhood had a membership of between 20,000 to 25,000 workers, about half of whom were Negroes.”

But following another general lockout throughout the lumber industry by the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association in 1912, the B. of T.W. industrial union was driven out of the lumber industry in Texas by 1920.

As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich observed, “before oil the greatest Texas fortunes were made in ranching and East Texas lumber, where success depended on exploiting the labor of blacks, Latinos, and poor whites [and] in the years before World War I, John Henry Kirby all but owned East Texas.”

And according to the same book:

Kirby put together a group of Boston and New York investors and spent… 20 years buying timberlands… In 1901 he merged these interests and took control, creating the giant Kirby Lumber Company — at one point Kirby controlled more pine acreage than any other man in the world — and the Houston Oil Company… By the 1920s Kirby had emerged as [the] Texan’s leading businessman… He maintained suites at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York [and]… a mansion called Dixie Pines at Saranac Lake, New York.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Culture and the Cuban Experience

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

The Cuban band Sierra Maestra was formed at the University of Havana in 1976.

Economics, politics, and culture:
The Cuban experience

Culture can be revolutionary when it expresses pain, implies a better life, and extends the experiences of some to others…

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

[These remarks were prepared for a presentation before a musical performance at Purdue University by Sierra Maestra, the stirring band formed at the University of Havana in 1976. The band was named after the mountain range in Eastern Cuba that was the site of the formation of the Cuban revolutionary force that overthrew the U.S.-supported dictator in the 1950s. The nine-person band promotes and celebrates the classic Cuba Son music that has its roots in the diversity of class, race, ethnicity, and gender in Cuban history.]

People’s lives begin with the struggle for existence and are supplemented by the pursuit of joy and liberation. Culture, often reflecting the pain of daily existence and the vision of a better life, is intimately embedded in history, economics, and politics.

Cuba’s revolutionary poet Jose Marti describes his place in history, economics, and politics.

I am a truthful man,
From the land of the palm,
Before dying, I want to
Share these poems of my soul.

My poems are light green,
But they are also flaming red
My verses are like a wounded fawn.
Seeking refuge in the mountain.

(Pete Seeger reports learning these two additional Marti verses from a Cuban of African descent in 1983.)

Red, as in the desert,
Rose the sun on the horizon.
It shone on a dead slave
Hanging from a tree of the mountain.

A child saw it, trembled,
With passion for those that wept,
And swore that with his blood
He would wash away that crime.

Latin American social theorists and activists of the era of the Cuban revolutionary process (since the 1950s) defined the economic and political context of countries like Cuba — less passionately but rigorously — as a result of dependency. For example, Brazilian social scientist Theotonio Dos Santos wrote about what he called “the structure of dependence.”

Dependence is a situation in which a certain group of countries have their economy conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to which the former is subject.

Andre Gunter Frank, looking at the broad sweep of history beginning with the rise of capitalism out of feudalism referred to “the development of underdevelopment.” During the fifteenth century the sectors of the globe now referred to as the “Global North” and “Global South” were roughly equal in economic and military power. But as a result of the globalization of capitalism and militarism, some countries, primarily in Europe and North America, developed at the expense of most of the other countries of the world.

Dependency theorists began to include domestic class structures in their analysis of relations between dominant and dependent nations. In addition to dominant and weak countries bound by exploitation and violence, within both powerful and weak countries class structures existed.

In fact, rulers in poor countries usually were tied by interests and ideology to the interests and ideology of the ruling classes in powerful countries. And, most important, the poor, the exploited, the repressed in both rich and poor countries shared common experiences, often a common outlook, and potentially a common culture.

I have written a book chapter about “Themes in Cuban History” from the point of view of dominance and dependence (from Harry R. Targ, Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992). The chapter addresses:

  • Spanish conquest between 1511 and 1515
  • Cuba as sugar producer
  • Cuba as slave society. By 1827 over 50 percent of Cuban residents were of African descent.
  • Britain’s economic and military penetration of the island beginning in the 18th century
  • Revolutionary ferment, particularly slave revolts, permeating 19th century Cuban society
  • The visions of U.S. leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, that some day Cuba would join the new nation to the North.
  • U.S. investor penetration of the island, challenging the Spanish and British. By the 1880s over 80 percent of sugar exports went to the United States and large plantations on the island were owned by Americans.
  • The Spanish/Cuban/American war of 1898 which lead to a full transfer of colonial and neo-colonial hegemony from the Spanish and British to the United States
  • The United States establishment of economic, political, and cultural domination of the island from 1898 to 1959. Subordinate wealthy and powerful Cubans controlled the political system, benefitting from U.S. hegemony, while “the poor people of this earth” on the island made up the vast majority.
  • 1953 to 1959 armed struggle which overthrew the Batista dictatorship and the elimination of U.S. interests on the island.
  • 1959 to the present Cuba haltingly, with international and domestic opposition, pursuing a new society to “wash away that crime” of long years of empire and dependency.

How is this history relevant to indigenous Cuban music and its connections with U.S. culture?

Culture, it seems to me, grows out of the experience of peoples. That experience is shaped by history, economics, and politics. Music is a common way of communicating and sharing experience, particularly of pain and joy.

The seeds of a common Cuban culture were planted in various fields — Africa, the sugar plantations of the island, and growing relations between Cubans and people of African descent in the region, including the United States.

Finally, culture can be revolutionary when it expresses pain, implies a better life, and extends the experiences of some to others — of similar class, racial, ethnic, and gender histories.

So as we listen to Sierra Maestra and reflect on the roots of its music, its contribution to jazz in the U.S., and the commonalities of Cuban Son and U.S jazz and blues, we might remember Marti’s expression from the poet’s point of view:

With the poor people of this earth,
I want to share my lot.
The little streams of the mountains
Please me more than the sea.

(All verses quoted here are from Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone?: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, A Sing Out Publication,1993).

[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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Harvey Wasserman : Two New U.S. Nukes in Big Trouble

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plant faces big challenges. Image from io9.

America’s two new nukes
are on the brink of death

The financial pitfalls of what may be America’s last two proposed reactor projects may write the final epitaph for an industry whose fiscal failures are in the multi-billions.

By Harvey Wasserman | The Rag Blog | April 9, 2012

The only two U.S. reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons.

If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here.

The much mythologized “nuclear renaissance” will be officially buried, and the U.S. can take a definitive leap toward a green-powered future that will actually work and that won’t threaten the continent with radioactive contamination.

As this drama unfolds, the collapse of global nuclear power continues, as two reactors proposed for Bulgaria have been cancelled, and just one of Japan’s 54 licensed reactors is operating. That one may well close next month, leaving Japan without a single operating commercial nuke.

Georgia’s double-reactor Vogtle project has been sold on the basis of federal loan guarantees. Last year President Obama promised the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power, $8.33 billion in financing from an $18.5 billion fund that had been established at the Department of Energy by George W. Bush.

Until last week most industry observers had assumed the guarantees were a done deal. But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, has publicly complained that the Office of Management and Budget may be requiring terms that are unacceptable to the builders.

Southern and its supporters remain ostensibly optimistic that the deal will be done. But the climate for loan guarantees has changed since this one was promised. The $535 million collapse of Solyndra prompted a rash of angry Congressional hearings and cast a long shadow over the whole range of loan guarantees for energy projects. Though the Vogtle deal comes from a separate fund, skepticism over stalled negotiations is rising.

So is resistance among Georgia ratepayers. To fund the new Vogtle reactors, Southern is forcing “construction work in progress” rate hikes that require consumers to pay for the new nukes as they’re being built. Southern is free of liability, even if the reactors are not completed. Thus it behooves the company to build them essentially forever, collecting payment whether they open or not.

All that would collapse should the loan guarantee package fail.

A similar fate may be awaiting the Summer Project. South Carolina Electric & Gas has pledged to build the two new reactors there without federal subsidies or guarantees. But it does require ratepayer funding up front. That includes an apparent need for substantial financial participation from Duke Power and/or Progress Energy customers in North Carolina who have been targeted to receive some of the electricity projected to come from Summer.

But resistance in the Tar Heel State is fierce. NCWarn and other consumer/anti-nuclear organizations are geared up to fight the necessary rate hikes tooth and nail. Should they win — and in a troubled economy there is much going for them — nuclear opponents could well take Summer down before it gets seriously off the ground.

Progress already has its hands full with a double-reactor project proposed for Levy County, Florida. Massive rate hikes granted for CWIP by the Florida legislature have ignited tremendous public anger. Unlike Vogtle and Summer, Levy County has yet to get NRC approval.

Progress is also over its head at Crystal River. Upwards of $2 billion has been poured into botched repairs at this north Florida reactor. Odds are strong it will never reopen.

The same may be true at California’s San Onofre, now shut due to problems with its steam generator tubing, a generic flaw that could affect up to about half the currently licensed 104 U.S. reactors. Nukes at Vermont Yankee, New York’s Indian Point, and Pilgrim, in Massachusetts, among others, are also under fierce attack.

These elderly reactors have been routinely issued extended operating licenses by the NRC.

But as their physical deterioration accelerates, official licenses may now be beside the point for these old reactors… and for new nukes as well. The major financial trade publications such as Bloomberg, Fortune et al, now regularly concede that increased efficiency and renewable projects are cheaper, faster to build and more profitable than new reactors.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency, could conceivably pick up the corpse and try to build new reactors, as it did at the dawn of the nuclear age, when no private utilities would touch the untested but clearly dubious promise of the “Peaceful Atom.”

In the decades since, the promise of electricity “too cheap to meter” has proven to be a tragic myth.

And all these years later, the financial pitfalls of what may be America’s last two proposed reactor projects may write the final epitaph for an industry whose fiscal failures are in the multi-billions.

At the end of the road, it will still take citizen activism to finally bury this industry. But we may be very close to making it happen, and now is a critical time to push extra hard.

[Harvey Wasserman 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 : Fighting Back Against Groups That Intimidate

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Transforming the discussion. Image from pennlive.com.

Voice of Choice:
Fighting back against bullies, stalkers,
and those who would intimidate

Maybe it is time to empower local citizens overwhelmed by moneyed interests and influential groups to find ways to ‘speak back’ effectively.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | April 8, 2012

“Voice of Choice” offers an effective way to counteract those who would deny us liberty. Its approach was born out of the experiences of those trying to secure their right to a safe and legal abortion. But its approach will work for anyone who is bullied, intimidated, stalked, threatened, ridiculed, disregarded, and harassed as they try to secure for themselves and others their rights under the laws and Constitution.

Last fall, when anti-abortion activists started picketing the middle school attended by the 11-year old daughter of a man who rented clinic space near Washington, DC, to a physician who performs abortions, the landlord decided not to put up with the harassment. There were anti-abortion demonstrations, all legal, with signs proclaiming, “Please STOP the Child Killing,” and posters showing aborted fetuses.

Some of the same demonstrators had been picketing the clinic for nine months before they turned their attention to this young girl in an effort to intimidate her father into getting rid of the doctor’s Reproductive Health Services Clinic. A website posted the picture, name, address, and phone number of the landlord, Todd Stave.

These are well-known tactics of those who would deny women their lawful rights to control their own health care and reproductive choices. Sometimes, the tactics have been even more confrontational.

Demonstrators shout at women who show up at clinics; confront them on the sidewalks imploring them not to kill innocent babies; pray loudly for them to change their minds; force them to run a gauntlet of screaming demonstrators to enter clinics; follow them to their cars; follow them home trying to make personal contact with them; picket the abortion providers (doctors as well as clinic staff); post their pictures, addresses, and telephone numbers in prominent locations; and take any action to hold these people, patients as well as clinic workers, up to ridicule and intimidation.

This particular demonstration at a middle school was organized by a group called Defend Life. It was done in conjunction with a larger effort of the Maryland Coalition of Life that focused on the clinic’s landlord. The intimidation included sending over 100 emails and making 25 or more phone calls to the landlord. To counteract the harassment, the landlord asked for help from volunteers to oppose these anti-abortion activists tactics.

In response to the call for help, hundreds of people in the community of Germantown, MD, reached out “peacefully and individually to each of the protesters” according to Stave. When the volunteers described the protesters’ behavior to them from their perspectives, many protesters came to see that their actions could be fairly described as “thoughtless, mob-mentality accusations and aspersions.”

These experiences led Stave to create Voice of Choice, which describes its views and intentions:

For too long, the abortion discussion has been dominated by angry, nasty protests fueled by individuals and organizations that thrive on sensationalism and extremism. Now it is our turn.

“Voice of Choice” was established as a calm, measured response to anti-abortion activists who engage in misguided, raging protest tactics that are often ill-informed and only serve to victimize women, pro-choice professionals, law-abiding businesses and unaligned bystanders.

We use email, telephone and social media in peaceful, person-to-person counter-protests against groups that target abortion facilities, providers and patients, as well as their families and communities. We don’t question anyone’s right to express opinions and ideals; we challenge their bullying tactics and their contempt.

Voice of Choice volunteers used Facebook and Twitter, as well as phone calls, letters, and email to explain their concerns to the antiabortion demonstrators. Within a few weeks of trying this new tactic against the anti-abortion demonstrators, as many as 5,000 people contacted Stave offering to help.

The response of the anti-abortion demonstrators contacted has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of the demonstrators had not thought about or understood the debilitating and frightening effects of targeting an 11-year old girl for the actions of her father.

Stave asks that his volunteers not argue with the demonstrators, be polite, explain the problem of harassing others for exercising their constitutional rights, and respect the right of the demonstrators to engage in their own protests against abortion.

Such approaches are worth trying against other instances of both legal and illegal protests and actions, such as religious intimidation, bullying gays and lesbians, and government promotion of religion. Locally, websites could be established or Facebook sites could be used to ask for volunteers to help oppose instances of bullying, intimidation, insensitivity, over-reaching, and harassment.

If offenders are approached respectfully, such contacts could lead to a greater understanding of the concerns of varying views on many public issues.

In fact, implementing this idea using readily-available internet resources could be effective on many local political issues. While only a few people attend city council, commissioners courts, and legislative hearings, using targeted electronic and personal communications locally that identify supporters of a proposition could generate many contacts with elected officials and those pushing them to act on many public issues.

Usually, such officials succumb to organized efforts by a few people to promote practices and regulations that are offensive to many of their constituents and sometimes unconstitutional.

Nationally, efforts to get people to sign petitions and occasionally send emails or call national officials are old hat to internet denizens. But using Voice of Choice’s approaches locally could transform discussions and positions on public issues in our community, or at least lead to greater understanding of these issues among the populace, and hopefully help some local officials see the insensitivity and unfairness inherent in some of their decisions.

The effectiveness of such an approach depends on volunteer activists being polite, not arguing, explaining clearly the purpose of their contact, listening to the others’ viewpoint, and being civil. Maybe it is time to empower local citizens overwhelmed by moneyed interests and influential groups to find ways to “speak back” effectively.

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

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Posted on April 9, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Fighting back against bullies, stalkers, and those who would intimidate

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog /

“Voice of Choice” offers an effective way to counteract those who would deny us liberty. Its approach was born out of the experiences of those trying to secure their right to a safe and legal abortion. But its approach will work for anyone who is bullied, intimidated, stalked, threatened, ridiculed, disregarded, and harassed as they try to secure for themselves and others their rights under the laws and Constitution.

Last fall, when anti-abortion activists started picketing the middle school attended by the 11-year old daughter of a man who rented clinic space near Washington, DC, to a physician who performs abortions, the landlord decided not to put up with the harassment. There were anti-abortion demonstrations, all legal, with signs proclaiming, “Please STOP the Child Killing,” and posters showing aborted fetuses. Some of the same demonstrators had been picketing the clinic for nine months before they turned their attention to this young girl in an effort to intimidate her father into getting rid of the doctor’s Reproductive Health Services Clinic. A website posted the picture, name, address, and phone number of the landlord, Todd Stave.

These are well-known tactics of those who would deny women their lawful rights to control their own health care and reproductive choices. Sometimes, the tactics have been even more confrontational. Demonstrators shout at women who show up at clinics; confront them on the sidewalks imploring them not to kill innocent babies; pray loudly for them to change their minds; force them to run a gauntlet of screaming demonstrators to enter clinics; follow them to their cars; follow them home trying to make personal contact with them; picket the abortion providers (doctors as well as clinic staff); post their pictures, addresses, and telephone numbers in prominent locations; and take any action to hold these people, patients as well as clinic workers, up to ridicule and intimidation.

This particular demonstration at a middle school was organized by a group called Defend Life. It was done in conjunction with a larger effort of the Maryland Coalition of Life that focused on the clinic’s landlord. The intimidation included sending over 100 emails and making 25 or more phone calls to the landlord. To counteract the harassment, the landlord asked for help from volunteers to oppose these anti-abortion activists tactics.

In response to the call for help, hundreds of people in the community of Germantown, MD, reached out “peacefully and individually to each of the protesters” according to Stave. When the volunteers described the protesters’ behavior to them from their perspectives, many protesters came to see that their actions could be fairly described as “thoughtless, mob-mentality accusations and aspersions.”

These experiences led Stave to create Voice of Choice, which describes its views and intentions:

For too long, the abortion discussion has been dominated by angry, nasty protests fueled by individuals and organizations that thrive on sensationalism and extremism. Now it is our turn.

“Voice of Choice” was established as a calm, measured response to anti-abortion activists who engage in misguided, raging protest tactics that are often ill-informed and only serve to victimize women, pro-choice professionals, law-abiding businesses and unaligned bystanders.

We use email, telephone and social media in peaceful, person-to-person counter-protests against groups that target abortion facilities, providers and patients, as well as their families and communities. We don’t question anyone’s right to express opinions and ideals; we challenge their bullying tactics and their contempt.

Voice of Choice volunteers used Facebook and Twitter, as well as phone calls, letters, and email to explain their concerns to the antiabortion demonstrators. Within a few weeks of trying this new tactic against the anti-abortion demonstrators, as many as 5000 people contacted Stave offering to help. The response of the anti-abortion demonstrators contacted has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of the demonstrators had not thought about or understood the debilitating and frightening effects of targeting an 11-year old girl for the actions of her father.

Stave asks that his volunteers not argue with the demonstrators, be polite, explain the problem of harassing others for exercising their constitutional rights, and respect the right of the demonstrators to engage in their own protests against abortion.

Such approaches are worth trying against other instances of both legal and illegal protests and actions, such as religious intimidation, bullying gays and lesbians, and government promotion of religion. Locally, websites could be established or Facebook sites could be used to ask for volunteers to help oppose instances of bullying, intimidation, insensitivity, over-reaching, and harassment. If offenders are approached respectfully, such contacts could lead to a greater understanding of the concerns of varying views on many public issues.

In fact, implementing this idea using readily-available internet resources could be effective on many local political issues. While only a few people attend city council, commissioners courts, and legislative hearings, using targeted electronic and personal communications locally that identify supporters of a proposition could generate many contacts with elected officials and those pushing them to act on many public issues. Usually, such officials succumb to organized efforts by a few people to promote practices and regulations that are offensive to many of their constituents and sometimes unconstitutional.

Nationally, efforts to get people to sign petitions and occasionally send emails or call national officials are old hat to internet denizens. But using Voice of Choice’s approaches locally could transform discussions and positions on public issues in our community, or at least lead to greater understanding of these issues among the populace, and hopefully help some local officials see the insensitivity and unfairness inherent in some of their decisions.

The effectiveness of such an approach depends on volunteer activists being polite, not arguing, explaining clearly the purpose of their contact, listening to the others’ viewpoint, and being civil. Maybe it is time to empower local citizens overwhelmed by moneyed interests and influential groups to find ways to “Speak Back” effectively.

[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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