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Steve Max : The Snare and Deception of ‘Family Economics’
Obama hits the trap running:
The snare and deception
of ‘family economics’
The trap that Obama and many Congressional Democrats constantly fall into is to act and talk as if Republicans are normal and that this is a rational situation.
By Steve Max / Progressive America Rising / July 26, 2011
Would anyone not have thought President Truman insane had he gone before the nation in 1945 and said, “I have had experience running a small business, and based on what I learned selling neckties I have decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.”(1)
Yet, when House Majority Leader John Boehner proposes to drop the bomb on the American economy based on his experience selling plastics with the Nucite Sales corporation of Cincinnati, no one thinks it at all odd, least of all President Obama.
In last night’s response to Obama’s televised address to the nation, Boehner referred at least twice to his own small business experience as the source of his knowledge that government, like small business, must live within its means.
The trap that Obama and many Congressional Democrats constantly fall into is to act and talk as if Republicans are normal and that this is a rational situation. Obama consistently tells the public what a fine fellow Boehner is, how they share the same goals of deficit reduction, how they agree that the nation must live within its means, and how the only differences are over the way to achieve their common goals. The sad thing is that for Obama this likely goes beyond being nice, he probably believes it.
Democrats need to start speaking the truth. The economy of nation states is nothing like a small business (or any size business) and the federal budget is not remotely like your family budget, another oft-spoken Republican falsehood. People who ignorantly think such things, the President should say, are not fit to be the nation’s decision-makers because it is too dangerous.
In addition, it is an outright lie that cutting government spending will create jobs. It is a lie that taxing the rich is bad for business. It is a lie that raising the debt ceiling discourages investment. Republicans never believed any of this when they were in power. They are lying now and they know it.
The idea that the federal budget is not like your family budget is particularly difficult to grasp because it is counterintuitive. Back when cars were first invented, many people turned their stables into garages. This contributed to the popular notion that if your car wasn’t working properly, a few days of rest in the garage would help it. People couldn’t quite grasp that while the car and the horse served similar functions and might even occupy the same building, they operated on totally different principles.
The federal government is not a family or a business, it is the administrative committee of the entire nation. While it must indeed live within its means, as the Republicans say and the President concurs, the potential means is the entire social surplus. That is the value of everything produced in America minus the portion that people live on, the portion spent on business expenses, the portion needed to maintain the infrastructure, and the portion needed for future investment.
What is left over is the social surplus. How the social surplus is divided between private profits, public services, and governmental administrative costs is entirely a political matter. Actually, the amount of the social surplus isn’t calculated by anyone, perhaps because that would raise too many questions about who owns it, but it exists, it is huge and it is the means within which we must live. And, as noted, whether it goes to Medicare or to the richest 400 families is a political problem, not an economic one.
When Boehner and the Republicans insist that government must live within its means like any family or business, what they are really saying is not that we have reached the objective limit of the social surplus (2), but rather that they will decide what the means are, and the rest of us will live within them.
Measures such as the money supply, the federal budget, and the debt ceiling are arbitrary political constructs that are not based on actual economic limits. In 2010 when the Federal Reserve thought it necessary to stimulate the economy, it basically printed $600 billion. The money wasn’t in the budget and it wasn’t borrowed, it was just created, showing how flexible the situation really is. (3)
The federal budget is a good example of this. There is certainly a deficit, but the amount is a function of how the bookkeeping is done. Surely, having run a small business, Rep. Boehner knows that businesses and almost all state governments have capital budgets for buying structures and equipment. When a business buys a computer, a machine or a warehouse, it is not considered to have lost money. Rather it has exchanged one asset (cash) for another of equal value (a truck.) After the transaction, its net worth on the books is the same as before.
Not so with the federal budget, which treats buying a computer as if it were the same as giving a corn subsidy to agribusiness. Never mind that the corn subsidy is just money gone, but the government now owns the computer which should be considered an asset. If federal bookkeeping methods were the same as in Boehner’s business, the deficit would be far, far less.
The point is that many of the financial measures that we tend to consider as reflections of objective laws of nature (you must live within your means) are really our own inventions as a society, and we have great, though not unlimited, latitude in which to change them. What they are actually reflections of is the balance of class forces within the political structure and they are designed to set the framework in which the owners of wealth can become even richer.
The fact is that, if the Republican goals in the debt ceiling debate were actually based on true economic principles and that debt really causes unemployment, then we would all be on their side and telling them not to compromise with Obama. Instead of saying that he shares their goals, the President needs to explain how they are simply wrong. Otherwise he will continue to muddle in the consensus trap.
(1) The actual reasons were equally as dubious, but that is another story for another time. Meanwhile see The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz. http://www.amazon.com/Decision-Use-Atomic-Bomb/dp/067976285X
(2) For example, that we are eating more radishes than can be grown.
(3) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-03/federal-reserve-to-buy-additional-600-billion-of-securities-to-aid-growth.html
[Steve Max, who was a major figure in early SDS, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and Three Parks Independent Democrats. He works as an organizing trainer at the Midwest Academy in Chicago. This article was published and distributed by Progressive America Rising.]
The Rag Blog
By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2011
In his novel Sidetracked, Henning Mankkel quotes a retired journalist:
There are two kinds of reporters. The first kind digs in the ground for the truth. He stands down in the hole shoveling out dirt. But up on top there’s another man, shoveling the dirt back in. There’s always a duel going on between these two. The fourth estate’s eternal test of strength for dominance. Some journalists want to expose and reveal things, others run errands for those in power and help conceal what’s really happening.
We here make note of the prior dismissal of Keith Olbermann and the recent firing of Cenk Uygur from our only “liberal” television outlet, MSNBC.
When I consider the lack of valid, intelligent information currently available to the American public it would seem that the dirt is being replaced in the hole much more rapidly than the honest, dedicated journalist can dig it out.
I thank my lucky stars for The Nation, The Progressive, and our own Rag Blog and similar credible online news sources.
I am reminded of the remarks made by John Swinton one night in 1880. Swinton, the former chief of staff of The New York Times, continued to write an occasional column but had abandoned full-time editorial work to become active in the labor movement. At a press banquet someone who understood neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. As quoted in Labor’s Untold Story by Richard O. Morais, Swinton, outraged, replied:
There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the papers that I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
We are the tools and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Some of us have fought a dedicated fight for serious health care reform in the United States, but I note in various polls that this issue has been relegated to approximately fifth place in the public’s interest. Of prime concern, some 80%, the public is interested in the lack of employment and, in my opinion, rightfully so. However, our chief executive and the dolts in Congress (save for a few compassionate thinking souls) are involved in theatrics that accomplish nothing for our citizens or for the welfare of the country at large.
The press, meanwhile, is consumed with the dubious presidential commission on debt reduction, the suggestions of “the Gang of Six” (three conservative Republicans, two blue-dog Democrats and Sen. Durbin), as well as numerous interviews with totally out of touch “Tea Bag” freshman congressmen — and various Wall Street characters who are presented to the public as “economists.”
The mainstream media largely ignores the efforts in several states to fix elections through such means as requiring photo identification cards and widespread redistricting (read: gerrymandering). Little note is made of the growing layoffs of municipal employees, and the fact that many of the 20% unemployed are losing their unemployment insurance and health care benefits.
There has been minimal attention paid to the punitive anti-abortion legislation being passed in many states, returning us, unhappily — and irrevocably, I’m afraid — to the era of “back-alley” abortion which I witnessed in my days as a resident physician, when I watched young women die a horrible death of gas gangrene sepsis.
We hear that “entitlement” programs are the cause of the national deficit, a claim that ignores the entire history of Social Security and Medicare as traditional off-budget items, to be paid for out of a specific “lockbox” fund, paid for by every worker’s employment tax which he/she paid for with a lifetime of labor.
No mention is made of the fact that successive presidents have raided that fund, set aside for entitlement programs, to pay for ongoing, unending wars, and for creating a large surplus of needless military hardware, and who have replaced the “lockbox” funds with government bonds, hence making the social programs part of the general budget.
And we find in the mainstream news media little or no detailed analysis of the cause of our military adventurism and its cost to the average American. We are conned with cries of “terrorism” and made to feel unpatriotic (and thus not to be counted among the “exceptional” American people) if we question the Washington establishment.
I would wager that nine out of 10 Americans are unaware that we have over 700 foreign military bases, many with 18-hole golf courses. Do we know who acquired the oil resources of Iraq after the large scale fighting ceased, and are we aware of the rich mineral and gem resources being exploited in Afghanistan, as has recently been reported in great detail in Fortune Magazine (“J.P. Morgan’s hunt for Afghan gold“)?
Has the mainstream media reported on the implications of the defunding of Medicaid as is being pursued by the Republican House of Representatives? Not only do we diminish the health care of our poor, underemployed, and unemployed, but we will also lose the prime support to the public at large for nursing home care. If we follow the dictates of these imbeciles in Washington, Cleveland and Detroit will, in the not too distant future, look like Calcutta in the 1920s.
There is hope in other lands (read Ezra Klein’s article in The American Prospect, entitled “The Health of Nations.” Unhappily our elected representatives have other interests and their self survival to consider. To hell with the American people; they bend their knees to the great corporations.
Life has it’s stresses as I — with my malignancy — approach the age of 90; however, never in my lifetime have I seen our nation run by such a group of inept, uneducated, grasping, cruel legislators — excepting Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, and many of the members of the Progressive Caucus of The House of Representatives. And never have I seen the public-at-large so lacking in notable leaders.
Where are the likes of John L. Lewis, Norman Thomas, Phillip Murray, Henry Wallace, and men and women of courage who will lead the sheep away from the precipice.
I cannot help but visualize the passive German masses of 1932 as I look about our nation today. I see multitudes who will respond in automatic obedience to an authority figure, not as individuals in search of liberty and justice. I fear Hannah Arendt had it correct when she coined the phrase the “banality of evil.”
Finally, on a more cheerful note, happy birthday to Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, who turns 66 on August 1st. You still embody that great generation which spawned the SDS, the underground press, the thinkers and concerned citizens of your era.
[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog]
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BOOKS / Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : Goodbye to the Joys of Browsing
The dying art of browsing?
Saying goodbye to Borders
By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2011
SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, California — It was too bad to find out that Borders bookstores are closing. Granted, in the past year the Borders here has been a shadow of its former self, and it never was all that good if you compared it to the old Barnes and Noble stores that departed a few years back. But it was a bookstore that was local, and you could browse.
There is now no bookstore that even resembles that store here in the San Fernando Valley. There’s a mystery bookstore all the way across the valley in Burbank, but when I called them they didn’t have any Alan Furst novels and didn’t even know who he was (a really cool Graham Greene sort of novelist who does fantastic World War II spy novels that are so historically accurate and so dramatically good they’re a time machine to take you back to then).
But no more general interest stores, where you can go where your interest of the moment takes you.
I think bookstore and library browsing — going looking for one thing, pulling out another book at random, and being interested enough to get it — has probably been one of the most important things in my life, especially in terms of life-changing events.
I remember being age 10, at the Eugene Field Library in Denver, and being tired of what passed for “young adult” books, so I stepped around the corner and discovered Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov in the science fiction section. I read everything that was there.
Then I would go downtown to the main branch and browse there (what absolute fun: take the bus at 9 a.m. and spend the day in the stacks — except when I’d go across the street to the Jewish delicatessen where I discovered the joys of corned beef sandwiches and pickles — then come back home with my arms full of books).
I never knew what I was going to get until I found it there on the shelves. And thus began my self-education — in spite of the public miseducation system.
Thirty five years after that life-changing event, I met Asimov and Bradbury as an equal (well, an equal member of the Science Fiction Writers Association [SFWA]; I’d never categorize myself as their equal as a writer). I even told them how I first met them. Asimov gave me his fourth Foundation novel and inscribed it, “To Tom, our minds met long ago.”
Just the other month, in our local Borders, I was looking through the military history section, and ran across a book with an interesting title, a book I hadn’t even known would be there and wasn’t looking for. I pulled it out, paged through it, read the introduction, thought it was interesting, and bought it.
Two weeks later I was friends with the author, who introduced me to his agent and publisher, and now my writing career has taken another big turn and I am writing a book I have thought of writing for maybe 20 years — to be published later this year.
Nowadays, assuming a kid can even find a public library that’s open, the librarians won’t let 10-year-olds into “age inappropriate sections.”
I’m sorry, but what passes for “progress” these days mostly isn’t.
[Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is an accidental native Texan, a journalist, and a produced screenwriter. He has written successful horror movies and articles about Second World War aviation, was a major fundraiser for Obama in 2008, and has been an activist on anti-war, political reform, and environmental issues for almost 50 years. Read more articles by Thomas Cleaver on The Rag Blog.]
SPORT / Dave Zirin : NFL Players are Bruised, Battered Victors
Against all odds:
NFL Players Association emerges from
lockout as bruised, battered victor
By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2011
A sports media consensus on the end of the NFL lockout has already emerged. Like six-year-old kids getting trophies after soccer practice, everyone’s a winner. As Don Banks at Sports Illustrated assessed, thrilled that the golden goose will lay eggs another day, “Neither side got everything they wanted, but good negotiations are like that. Now that this CBA fight is almost over, and labor peace seems finally at hand, both the players and the owners have the right to claim success.”
These parroted assessments, by focusing on the final score, miss the true, overarching story of the longest work stoppage in NFL history: at the opening kickoff, the sides weren’t close to evenly matched. I think that what the NFLPA has done is the equivalent of the Bad News Bears squeaking out a victory against the 1927 New York Yankees. It’s The Haiti Kid taking down King Kong Bundy. It’s workers, in an age of austerity, beating back the bosses and showing that solidarity is the only way to win.
When the lockout began, NFL’s owners had, in their judgment, and frankly mine as well, every possible advantage. They had a promise from their television partners of $4 billion in “lockout insurance” even if the games didn’t air. They had a workforce with a career shelf-life of 3-4 years, understandably skittish about missing a single paycheck. And most critically, they had what they thought was overwhelming public opinion.
After all, in past labor disputes fans sided against those who “get paid to play a game.” Owners wanted more money and longer seasons and approached negotiations with an arrogance that would shame a Murdoch spawn.
I remember talking to NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith at the start of this process, and hearing his optimism in the face of these odds, as he spoke of the bravery of workers in Wisconsin and the people of Egypt who he said were inspiring him to fight the good fight. He mentioned the books he was reading like the classic civil rights history Parting the Waters: America in the King Years by Taylor Branch. I remember smiling politely at De Smith and thinking, “This guy is going to get creamed.”
I was very wrong. I didn’t count on Judge David Doty, a Reagan appointee, putting an injunction on that $4 billion lockout slush fund, taking away the owner’s financial upper hand. I didn’t count on the way that health and safety issues would bond the players together, making defections among the 1,900 players nonexistent.
I didn’t count on the way many fans, upset at the lockout and well-educated on the aftereffects of the brutality of the sport, would side with the players. And last, I didn’t count on the way that reservoirs of bitterness felt by NFL players and the union would bind them together against NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and an ownership group that had just lied to them once too often.
They stuck it out and now the end results of the Collective Bargaining Agreement look quite good for players. We are looking at a 10-year CBA in which minimum salaries will go up 10% a year for the life of the agreement. Players get a slightly lower % of revenues (about 46% down from 50%), but they will receive 55% of future national media revenue, which, will mushroom in the years ahead. Teams also will now have to spend at least 90% of the salary cap on actual salaries. In other words, there won’t just be a salary cap there will be a salary floor.
In return, rookies will need to sign four-year contracts that are scaled at a lower rate. The net affect of all of this is that veteran salaries will go up, perhaps quite dramatically, and, if players can stay healthy beyond that fourth year, they will be very well compensated.
But there’s the rub. If the average career is only 3.4 years, how can players be ensured to stay healthy enough to get the big payday? Here is where I think the NFLPA made the most headway. Not only did they beat back the owner’s dream of an 18-game season, they also negotiated a much less arduous off-season regimen.
The off-season program will now be five weeks shorter. There will be more days off. Full-contact practices are going to be greatly curtailed. This matters because it will limit not just the wear and tear on players bodies, but also concussions and other brain injuries which are far more likely to happen in repetitive drills than in games.
Also, when careers finally do end, players can now be a part of the NFL’s health plan for life. This is a mammoth deal for players who previously were kicked off of all plans five years after retirement. Getting private insurance after playing in the NFL is a nightmare, as your body is a spiderweb of preexisting conditions. Retirees also will now receive up to a $1 billion increase in benefits, with $620 million going to increasing pensions for those who retired before 1993.
Yes, owners received a bigger piece of the pie, and yes they received their rookie pay scale. Yes, I agree with Brian Frederick, director of the Sports Fans Coalition, who commented that it’s a problem that “Fans were forced to sit on the sidelines during these negotiations, despite the massive public subsidies and antitrust exemptions we grant the league.”
This is especially true given the fact that, as SFC reported, “Thirty-one of the 32 NFL stadiums have received direct public subsidies. Ten of those have been publicly financed and at least 19 are 75% publicly financed.”
But in the end, this deal — against all odds — is a victory for players, their families, their health, and their long-term financial solvency. It’s also an example for workers across the country. There is power in labor and there is power in solidarity.
[Dave Zirin is the author of Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner) and just made the new documentary Not Just a Game. Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. This article was also posted at The Nation blogs. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]
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Tagged Collective Bargaining, Dave Zirin, Football, Labor, NFL, Sports
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Billy Wharton : Our National ‘Promissory Note’
The national debt:
A tribute to militarism and the rich
By Billy Wharton / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2011
During his much heralded 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of a promissory note to describe the civil rights that had long been promised in theory, but denied in practice.
Today, America faces a promissory note of larger proportions — one that is much less of a metaphor. Democrats and Republicans are currently negotiating whether to allow the U.S. federal government to raise the debt ceiling beyond its current level of more than $14 trillion. Raising the ceiling is just one part of the talks. In the process, the two parties are drawing ever closer to a consensus on sharp reductions to federally funded Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security programs.
The media has portrayed these negotiations as a sort of contentious quarrel between two political parties with vastly different ideas about the debt and the future of the economy. Such a distortion employs two falsehoods aimed at confusing the American public. The first is that the debt is the responsibility of the “American people.” Taken at face value, it seems that each person in the country is somehow personally responsible for the $14 trillion dollar budget deficit. This is clearly rubbish.
We should remember that nearly 50% of the federal budget, last year some $1.3 trillion, was spent on the military. Some of this was spent on maintaining the current bloated armed forces, but this figure has been vastly accelerated by the recent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the drone war in Pakistan.
These military adventures have been wildly unpopular with the American public and were rammed through thanks in large part to a series of carefully calculated lies concocted by the regime of George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Much in the same way that people should not be held responsible for debts run up by dictatorial regimes, the American people should not be made to feel “personally responsible” for debts run up by their rulers against their will. Debts that served to enrich weapon makers and project American corporate hegemony over foreign markets.
The second major falsehood is that the deficit is produced by overly generous “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. In fact, these programs are quite meager when compared to the welfare state enjoyed in many parts of Europe.
The “big three” public support programs grew out of upsurges in the labor and civil rights movements. They represent key gains for the poor and working class and, as such, should be vigorously defended. These successful programs should be viewed as blueprints for the expansion of human rights in America not, as the media would have people think, obstacles to a more “balanced” economy.
The deficit is more correctly understood as the direct result of tax policies designed and agreed upon by both Democrats and Republicans. This is where the squabble portrayed in the media falls apart. Simply put, since the mid to late 1970s, successive Democratic and Republican regimes have massively reduced the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans, thereby clearing the ground for the current crisis.
Some simple statistics can illustrate the change enacted by the two parties. When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 the highest income bracket in the U.S. was taxed at a rate of 70%. Today the highest tax bracket stands at 35% and a myriad of loopholes drive that rate even lower. And corporate America is an even bigger offender when it comes to paying taxes, as many corporations this year, including General Electric, paid nothing in taxes. Is it any wonder then that the Federal Government now holds a $14 trillion debt?
The national debt is the clearest representation of the militarism and pro-rich taxation strategies that are rotting our country away. In no way, shape or form are the American people themselves — the poor and working class people who have been throttled by the rich for decades — responsible for this debt. Lay it at the feet of those who greedily consumed it — the war-making elite.
Undoubtedly, the debt ceiling will be lifted and, given the limited political options available at this moment, it should be lifted. Not lifting it would risk a national default that would unleash mass suffering on a scale unseen in this country and would give a free hand to the extreme union-busters and privatizers. This is simply not an option.
However, simultaneously, the American people should say with one loud voice that we will not be made to suffer for the debts accumulated by the elites. There are no acceptable cuts to the Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security programs, regardless of whether the Congressional Democrats, Republicans, or President Barack Obama come peddling them.
Each must be resisted and each is evidence that the government is a tool of the rich and corporations. The simple solution to the deficit crisis, the only way to resolve this debate over the long term, is to make the rich pay.
A democratic socialist government, one that has interests of the poor and working class in mind, would certainly enact an immediate special tax that targets the richest 5% of the population and the top 500 corporations to wipe out the $14 trillion in debt. This would be a first step toward creating a just taxation system — that would take back trillions in wealth ciphoned off by the rich.
So, we might join in with the words of Dr. King, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” It is high time that we open this bank of justice for business in America. We hold the keys.
[Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and the editor of the Socialist WebZine. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Indypendent (NYC), Spectrezine, and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly@gmail.com. This article was originally posted to the Bronx County Independent Examiner.]
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Tagged Billy Wharton, Martin Luther King, National Debt, Progressive Taxation, Socialism, U.S. Military
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Lamar W. Hankins : Gov. Perry Promotes Religion for Political Purposes
State Seal on Perry’s proclamation:
Texas governor promotes
religion for political purposes
Rick Perry should be free to pray and fast every day of his life if he chooses, and do those things with whomever he wishes… But [he] has no business using his elected office to promote, organize, and sponsor such religious practices…
By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2011
Gov. Rick Perry’s long-running political show is picking up steam as he heads toward an announcement that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination, not because he wants the job, but because he has been called by God to seek the post.
His latest move in that direction — also stimulated by his familiarity with the Almighty — is his promotion of evangelical Christianity through a proclaimed Christian prayer event scheduled for August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston.
To be clear, Rick Perry, like all of us, has the constitutional right to practice whatever religion and engage in whatever religious practices he chooses. What he should not be allowed to do is use his public office to promote his religion and his religious practices. But this is what he is doing with the August 6 event.
Gov. Perry issued an official governor’s proclamation that includes the Seal of the State of Texas. The proclamation includes some historical references that appear to be intended to justify his official action as governor in calling for a religious observance and practice on August 6, including “A Day of Prayer and Fasting for Our Nation.”
Gov. Perry exhorts the people to have a “sacred assembly” which has been “consecrated.” There is specific reference to follow the example of Jesus to pray “publicly for the benefit of others” as a way to “express our faith.” This part of the proclamation refers to a bible verse (John 11:41-42) that is taken completely out of context to serve the governor’s purposes, and ignores Matthew 6:6, which provides, “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
The proclamation urges “the appropriate recognition” of the Day of Prayer and Fasting by the citizens of Texas. It is attested to by the governor’s official signature indicating that he is acting in his capacity as the Governor of Texas.
In a public letter bearing the State of Texas’ official seal, Gov. Perry urges people to join in this religious event. The letter states that “as a nation, we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy,” turning the event into a clearly sectarian activity promoting Christianity (a practice eschewed by James Madison when he served as president of the country).
The August 6 religious event is promoted further on Gov. Perry’s official governor’s website, which links to another website set up in collaboration with the governor by the American Family Association at TheResponseUSA.com. That website makes clear the sectarian nature of the religious event: “Who knows what can happen in our generation when we gather together to worship Jesus, fast and pray, and believe for great change in our nation?”
Beginning around July 20, Gov. Perry initiated robocalls about the evangelical religious gathering to people in the Houston area. The robocalls were a recording of his voice with the following message:
This is Governor Rick Perry and I’m inviting you to join your fellow Americans in a day of prayer and fasting on behalf of our nation. As an elected leader, I am all too aware of government’s limitations when it comes to fixin’ things that are spiritual in nature. That’s where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever. With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God’s help.
That’s why I’m calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did, and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel. I sincerely hope you will join me in Houston on August the sixth and take your place in Reliant Stadium with praying people asking God’s forgiveness, his wisdom and provision for our state and nation. To learn more, visit TheResponseUSA.com, then make plans to be part of something even bigger than Texas.
All of these actions make clear that Perry is acting in his capacity as the Governor of Texas, not a private citizen.
The Response website makes even clearer the Christian nature of the event called for by Gov. Perry. The website recites “What the Response Believes”:
- We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative word of God.
- We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
- We believe in the deity of Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.
- We believe that for the salvation of lost and sinful people, regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential.
- We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a Godly life.
- We believe in the resurrection of both the saved and the lost; that they are saved unto the resurrection of life and that they are lost unto the resurrection of damnation.
- We believe in the spiritual unity of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Response website displays the Official Seal of the State of Texas and includes other evidence that the governor is using his official status as the Governor of the State of Texas to promote and sponsor the religious event.
If anything more is needed to convey the sectarian nature of the prayer rally, it can be found in the words of the spokesman for the rally, Eric Bearse, Governor Perry’s former Communications Director, who said that the rally is intended to convey “the love, grace and warmth of Jesus Christ in that assembly hall, in that arena. And that’s what we want to convey, that there’s acceptance and that there’s love and that there’s hope if people will seek out the living Christ.”
Take that you Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, Taoists, agnostics, Unitarians, Sikhs, Jains, Pastafarians, and all you other non-Christians, as well as the Christians who do not follow the same evangelical dogmatism he is promoting. Gov. Perry is interested only in his kind of Christians, or those who seek out Jesus Christ in the way he approves.
If ever there was a case of a government official showing preference for a particular religion, and religion over non-religion, this prayer rally is it. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits such actions by government officials in their official capacities. After all, prayer is, as stated in a federal lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) challenging the event, “an inherently and quintessentially religious activity, which is the intended point of Governor Perry’s prayer rally.”
The FFRF lawsuit further makes the case against Gov. Perry’s unconstitutional action:
Governor Perry’s initiation of a Christian prayer rally at Reliant Stadium on August 6, 2011, is intended to and does have the effect of giving official recognition to the endorsement of religion; the event has no secular rationale; the purpose of the prayer rally is to encourage individual citizens to pray; persons who are not already Christian, moreover, will be fair game for conversion.
Our founders were concerned about just this sort of mixing of religion with the affairs of state. The founders were so concerned that religion not become a divisive force in our government that they included a provision in the Constitution that no religious test could ever be required of those holding public office. For those who aren’t aware of it, the U.S. Constitution is applicable to the states and to state officials.
In recent years some candidates for public office believe that their first requirement for office is to declare their strong religious convictions, as though that will lead the voters to believe that they have a personal link to God that assures their fitness for holding office.
All Gov. Perry’s promotion of evangelical Christianity shows is that he is a panderer to the religious right, and cares not one whit about the separation of church and state intended by the author of that constitutional provision, James Madison, who believed that an “alliance or coalition between Government and Religion” was detrimental to both.
President Madison was willing to sign a “day of prayer” proclamation urged by others, considering it a de minimus act, but he believed it a violation of the intent of the First Amendment to organize, promote, and sponsor such events in his official capacity.
Madison believed that mutual support between government and religion was a grievous error:
Such, indeed, is the tendency to such a coalition (between government and religion), and such its corrupting influence on both the parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded against… Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.
Rick Perry should be free to pray and fast every day of his life if he chooses, and do those things with whomever he wishes, including on August 6 in Reliant Stadium in Houston. But Gov. Rick Perry has no business using his elected office to promote, organize, and sponsor such religious practices, especially when those practices are rabidly sectarian.
[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.]
Kate Braun : A Hot Time for the Lammas Fire Festival
Lammas:
First Harvest is a fire festival
Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.
By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011, is a good day to celebrate First Harvest, a fire festival also known as Lammas and Harvest Home. And truly, with temperatures soaring into triple digits here in Austin, Texas (and through much of the country) it will feel very fiery!
Although fire is an important element to this Sun’s-Day celebration, I urge you to respect burn bans and closely monitor any fire you may build, even one in a grill, chiminea, fire pit, or cauldron. I also urge you to wait until late in the afternoon or after sundown to begin your festivities and to provide plenty of water for your guests to drink.
Incorporate the colors red, orange, gold, yellow, bronze, and citrine into your dress and decorations as well as your food and drink choices.
Corn is the focus of First Harvest, so it should predominate in the menu. Cornbread, corn sticks, corn on the cob, corn custard, corn chowder, creamed corn, corn muffins: all these and more corn-rich dishes are possible inclusions to the menu, as are summer squash and other yellow vegetables, berries galore, roast or grilled meats or shish kebab, lite beer or ale. Add some legumes (peas, lentils, beans) and dairy (cheese, yogurt, the milk that goes into custard, chowder, creamed dishes) and you will provide your guests balanced protein as well.
If your celebration is a pot-luck, be sure to apportion any leftovers so that each guest takes home some food he/she did not bring. Sharing food at this festival is a ritual promoting prosperity.
An important part of this festival is giving thanks: to Mother Earth for her bounty, without which we would not live; to friends, without whom we would live lonely lives; to family, without whom we would not be. While you enjoy the good food and good company make time for each person to say whatever it is that they want to thank Mother Earth for.
Another appropriate activity is to recognize what you no longer need in your life and release it by writing it on a piece of paper and burning the paper in your ceremonial fire (or by burning the paper and grinding the ash into dry dust which can then be strewn onto the lawn or garden).
First-quarter moons are times to create plans to be fulfilled by the next first-quarter moon, but in order for the new to be admitted into your life, the old needs to be released. What you release can be anything that has outlived its use, or become something you no longer want or need, or that has changed from a positive to a negative in your life.
Remember that 2011 is a year of change but that we are not likely to fully grasp the extent or meaning of the changes until 2012. I strongly recommend keeping an open mind and going where the flow takes you. If you don’t like the beach you are taken to, catch the current and see what the next one is like.
[Kate Braun‘s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. See Kate at the Soul Explosion and Green Living Expo at the Westin Galleria, 5060 West Alabama, Houston, TX, Saturday and Sunday, July 30-31, 2011 Read more of Kate Braun’s writing on The Rag Blog.]
Posted in Rag Bloggers
Tagged Astrology, Ceremony, Kate Braun, Lammas, Metaphysics, Ritual
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Today (Friday), 2-3 p.m. CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. (Stream at KOOP.org) Scott, who was a leader in SDS in Austin in the Sixties, is a major figure in the sustainability movement. AND THIS NEWS: Starting this week, Rag Radio will be rebroadcast every Sunday at 10 a.m. on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.
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Mary Tuma : When One Man Owns Too Much
The News Corp. scandal:
A case against media consolidation
What happens when one man owns too much?
By Mary Tuma / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2011
Before a UK parliamentary hearing (and in between being attacked by a cream pie) earlier this week, media mogul Rupert Murdoch — under investigation for allegations that his recently shuttered British tabloid News of the World hacked into the phones of some 4,000 individuals and bribed police for information — stunningly absolved himself of any responsibility in the alleged illegal actions of his company.
When MP (Member of Parliament) Jim Sheridan asked Murdoch if he was ultimately responsible for the “whole fiasco,” Murdoch replied, “No,” shifting blame to those he employed and trusted. “The News of the World is less than one percent of our company. I employ 53,000 people around the world,” Murdoch retorted in defense.
Whether or not Mr. Murdoch is telling the truth, his argument — that as a head of a media conglomerate it is unreasonable to assume — due to the sheer size of the operation — that he was aware of actions, however illegal or abhorrent, within the company he owns — should trouble the public almost as much as the scandal itself.
His multi-billion dollar global media empire, stretching from TV and film to publishing and online holdings, has garnered considerable attention for its growth and scope, not to mention the political and ideological leanings of some outlets, including Fox News.
Aside from what we might think politically of the News Corporation, we can legitimately ask whether one man, or one company, should have such dominant control over our media system, the very institution we as citizens rely on to function effectively in a democracy.
Murdoch controls a wide-range of media properties like The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, a number of cable channels including Fox News, National Geographic (part ownership), 20th Century Fox production company, film distributors Fox Searchlight Pictures, Harper Collins publishing, and some 120 international channels, according to media reform group Free Press.
The conglomerate’s expansion did not come solely by virtue of free market competition, but instead was greatly the result of a series of regulatory decisions fought hard for by Murdoch himself. The Australian born media mogul, infamous for his ruthless and ideological drive, has spent sizable energy lobbying federal regulators to relax media ownership rules in order to enable him to swallow up more media properties in more markets.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine, writes in a recent Washington Post editorial that, while media reform groups have battled hard to prevent the FCC and Congress from expanding media consolidation, Murdoch and his lobbyists, “have been a constant, well-funded presence — pushing to rewrite media ownership rules so that one corporation, and one man, accumulated extraordinary power.”
Dubbed the “Man Who Owns the News” by author Michael Wolff, Murdoch lives up to the moniker, having monopolized sectors of the media market with skilled leverage, even at one time securing an extremely rare waiver, not previously given to any other foreign firm at that point, which granted him license to start up U.S. broadcasting efforts. The waiver allowed Murdoch to begin Fox News while reaping the tax benefits of keeping his company in Australia.
And through all the “well-funded” wrangling, Murdoch has secured a legion of defenders in the media, an unmatched asset in a time of crisis. From leading cable network Fox News to the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch is doubly recused from guilt within the media empire he created.
The continually unfolding phone-hacking scandal shaking the UK and, to some degree, the U.S., has placed News Corp. CEO Murdoch (previously seen as “untouchable” but who has now been “mortalized”) in the hot seat — along with his son James, head of News Corp. Europe and Asia, and former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, among others.
With multiple arrests, mass resignations, and a company whistleblower found inexplicably dead, the News Corp. saga has effectively exposed the incestuous relationship among politicians, police, and the press — and is chipping away at the already questionable media conglomerate’s ethical credibility.
While allegations surfaced nearly six years ago, it was The Guardian’s investigation earlier this month, detailing the especially egregious instance of NOTW reporters intercepting and deleting cell phone voice messages of a 13-year old female murder victim, lending her parent’s hope that the deceased girl might still be alive, that spiked renewed and fervent interest in the claims.
Since then the scandal has not been contained to the UK, but has crossed the Atlantic, with a bipartisan coalition of U.S. lawmakers and activist groups calling on the DOJ, SEC, and FBI to investigate the media conglomerate for unethical practices including hacking into the phones of 9/11 victims and bribing foreign law enforcement.
Congressional leaders charge that the media company may have violated U.S. law under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which holds that U.S. corporations can’t bribe or attempt to bribe foreign officials; as News Corp. is now headquartered in New York City, the law may be applicable in this case.
Yet while the dominoes continue to fall in the scandal, Brooks and Murdoch remain steadfast in their claims of ignorance to the wrongdoing, and their apologies fall short of assuming responsibility. Even Murdoch’s “We are Sorry” weekend newspaper advertisements — an attempt to save his company’s tarnished reputation — didn’t assume full liability for the actions, stating, “We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred” (and not the “wrongdoing we allowed to occur“).
Aiding in the absolution of guilt are none other than Murdoch’s vast media properties. The highly profitable Fox News Channel, owned by News Corp., stayed silent on the most prominent media story in the world when it first erupted. Unfortunately, any claims of ignorance won’t hold water: this web video caught panelists on Fox’s ostensible media criticism program, “Fox News Watch,” in a verbal game of hot potato, as all present strove to avoid responsibility for bringing up the major media scandal on the show.
When contributor Cal Thomas asked, “Anybody want to bring up the subject we’re not talking about today for the — for the [Internet] streamers?”, a second contributor encouraged Thomas to “go ahead” and raise the issue. Thomas threw the idea back at him, concluding, “I’m not going to touch it.”
Eventually Fox did cover the scandal, albeit devoting considerably less time to the issue than did its cable competitors. Even so, some of Fox’s news segments sought to dilute the criminality of the situation through the use of dubious comparisons — or simply sloughed it off as an over-reported story.
In one particularly disheartening instance a Fox host and his guest attempted to frame the controversy as a mere “hacking story” (rather than what it is, a story about journalistic ethics), by unfairly paralleling it to when Citigroup and Bank of America were hacked. They missed the mark by a long shot, only providing further evidence the network actively sought to downplay the scandal.
The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch media outlet acquired in 2007 from the Bancroft family, ardently championed their owner’s veracity, calling the criticisms surrounding News Corp. a plot by competitors to smear the newspaper and “perhaps injure press freedom in general.” The editorial piece argued that governmental regulators, by drawing critical attention to the scandal, were essentially attacking the First Amendment, and that commercial and ideological motives are fueling the media spotlight on News Corp.
Almost mimicking their top executives’ blame-shift game, the Journal‘s piece placed British police (given they failed to enforce law) as more culpable in the illegal tampering than those who hacked the phone lines. A second WSJ article responded to accusations of the paper’s perceived ideological or commercial bias under Murdoch by citing The Simpsons’ satirical punches at Fox News. While the cartoon sitcom, produced and distributed by Fox, does occasionally poke fun at the news network, this embarrassingly weak example does little to counter the claims of bias.
It is also worthy to note that, just days earlier, WSJ publisher and CEO Les Hinton resigned his post in the midst of the phone-hacking scandal; Hinton had overseen News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the allegations. He too has pleaded ignorance to the nefarious activity, and clearly has the backing of his former colleagues. “We have no reason to doubt him, especially based on our own experience working for him,” the opinion piece read.
Similarly, News Corp.-owned The Australian, a major daily newspaper from Murdoch’s home country, claimed that a small group of elite liberal “hacks” were responsible for igniting what they called the “anti-Murdoch” campaign and bemoaned the heightened scrutiny on journalistic practices as an affront to press freedom.
Such instances of parent-company cheerleading by media are not novel and most definitely not exclusive to Fox. When it was discovered that media conglomerate General Electric did not pay federal taxes after earning some $5.1 billion dollars last year, all major media outlets but one swarmed around the story. NBC Nightly News — a GE holding — blatantly ignored the topic in its broadcast for four nights straight. NBC, of course, denies the decision had anything to do with its corporate boss.
Examples such as these are rife in corporate media culture and well documented by media watchdog organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Much of the censorship — or censorship by omission — is born from an increasingly consolidated media market. With just six major firms dominating everything we read, hear, and see (down from 50 companies in the ’80s), it is no wonder editorial pages, media criticism shows, and nightly news programs skirt around or entirely avoid critical mention of their parent companies.
The Murdoch saga affords us all an opportunity to seriously reevaluate — or at least to start paying attention to — the country’s media ownership rules. While a win for media reform activists came this month as an appeals court ruled to disallow relaxed ownership rules — and while Murdoch’s long awaited bid to acquire British Satellite company BSkyB fell through due to the scandal — the fight is far from over. Media consolidation, as activists know, hurts localism and diversity and also creates a landscape for multiple conflict of interest problems.
The UK is in the process of investigating media ownership in response to impropriety but the FCC has remained largely hands off during the scandal. The allegations may inevitably carry weight during a review of media ownership regulations by the federal agency later this year.
Just as the press held banking industry heads and BP CEO Tony Hayward accountable for dogging blame amid scandal, we too should press Murdoch — who has been granted unique and expansive rights to consolidate American media for his own financial gain — to assume responsibility.
If Murdoch refuses to take ownership of his media company’s wrongdoing, perhaps its time we take back ownership of our media.
[Rag Blog contributor Mary Tuma is also a reporter for The Texas Independent. A graduate of the University of Texas School of Journalism, Tuma has worked for The Houston Chronicle, The Texas Observer, and Community Impact Newspaper. She is in the process of obtaining her master’s degree in media studies from UT-Austin. Born and raised in Houston, she now calls Austin home. Read more articles by Mary Tuma on The Rag Blog.]
Rag Blog’s Dreyer : Another Year Older and…
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Party Down in Austin!
(And support The Rag Blog)
If you’re in Austin on July 29th, please join us at Maria’s for Rag Blog editor and Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer’s (66th) Birthday Bash and Rag Blog Blowout. It’s guaranteed to be a fun party and an opportunity for our friends, fans, and followers to get to know each other. (See Jim Retherford’s great poster above.)
The party, open to all, is at Maria’s Taco Xpress, 2529 S. Lamar Blvd., in Austin, Texas, Friday, July 29, 2011, from 6-9 p.m. Maria’s full bar and menu will be available and Flounders Without Eyes will play on the patio at 7. (Dreyer’s real birthday is August 1st — but who’s paying attention?)
There is no admission — and please don’t bring presents (Dreyer would just break them) — but a small tax-deductible donation to The Rag Blog would be greatly appreciated. We depend upon the support of our readers and friends — and if you can’t be at the party, please click here, or on the “DONATE” button on the sidebar — and send us a donation through PayPal or by check.
The Rag Blog is a progressive internet newsmagazine produced by activist journalists committed to social change. We are published by the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Our mailing address is PO Box 16442, Austin, TX 78761-6442.
Rag Radio, broadcast from 2-3 p.m. every Friday on KOOP 91-7 FM in Austin — and streamed live on the web — is produced at the KOOP studios in association with the New Journalism Project and The Rag Blog. Hosted by Thorne Dreyer, it features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. To listen to podcasts of earlier shows on Rag Radio, please go to the Internet Archives.
And, starting Sunday, July 24, at 10 a.m., Rag Radio will be rebroadcast every week on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.
So, we’ll see you at Maria’s. And don’t forget to bring your favorite geezer joke for Old Man Dreyer.
