Joshua Holland : Governor ‘Goodhair’ and the ‘Texas Miracle’

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Praying for a miracle.

Texas is a basket case:
Right-wing governance in action

Conservatives claim the ‘Texas Miracle’ is a model for the nation, but it’s actually a blueprint for winning the race to the bottom.

By Joshua Holland / AlterNet / June 22, 2011

Conservative mythology now holds up Texas as a shining example of right-wing governance in action. Republicans would have us believe that gutting the state’s social safety net, denying workers the right to bargain collectively, and relentlessly cutting taxes unleashed a torrent of “job creation” and, ultimately, prosperity.

Under Governor Rick “Goodhair” Perry’s term in office, Texas has indeed been a model of conservative governance, but the truth is that it has resulted in anything but prosperity for the people of the Lone Star State. In fact, Texas is not only a complete basket-case, it would be faring far worse today without the help of policies enacted by Democrats at the federal level — policies Perry lambasted as “irresponsible spending that threatens our future.”

The kernel of truth on which the tale of the Texas Miracle is built is that the state has in fact added a lot of jobs over the past decade. In a gushing lead editorial, the Wall Street Journal noted that “37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas.” The Journal then spun that fact like this:

Capital — both human and investment — is highly mobile, and it migrates all the time to the places where the opportunities are larger and the burdens are lower. Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn’t impose unions on businesses or employees.

In the Journal‘s hyper-partisan view, the lesson to be learned is that “the core impulse of Obamanomics is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes.” That spin was echoed during last week’s GOP debate by none other than Newt Gingrich, who asked, “Why [would] you want to be at California’s unemployment level when you can be [at] Texas’s employment level?”

James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, scoffed at the whole narrative, telling AlterNet, “the notion that our state government is a model is almost enough to beckon the spirit of Molly Ivins back from the shades.” Galbraith said “Texas has been a low-tax, low-service state since the time of the Republic,” and noted that it’s “therefore impossible that this fact suddenly accounts for its better job performance over the past few years.”

(Texas’ record of job creation under Perry is the same as it was under former governor Ann Richards, a Democrat.)

“Texas is an energy state benefiting from high oil prices and the incipient boom in natural gas,” explained Galbraith. “That’s an accident of nature.” He added that the state “went through the S&L crisis, had major criminal prosecutions and more restrictive housing finance regulations this time around; hence it was not an epicenter of the subprime housing disaster. That’s called a learning experience.”

Tighter regulation of the lending industry is also anathema to today’s GOP.

Arguably the biggest sleight-of-hand in the Texas Miracle storyline, however, is that many of those jobs were a result of a huge surge in the state’s population, much of it fueled by immigration from Latin America (rather than liberal hell-holes like California).

Texas’ population grew by 20 percent over the past decade, and Hispanics accounted for almost two-thirds of that growth. A surge in people created greater demand for goods and services, which leads to more jobs. But the jobs being created in Texas aren’t keeping up with the state’s expanding workforce — the Wall Street Journal somehow failed to mention that during the exact same period in which it was adding all those new jobs, Texas’ unemployment rate actually increased from 7.7 to 8 percent. (It also failed to note that 23 states — including such deep blue ones as Vermont, New York and Massachusetts — enjoy lower unemployment rates than Texas.)

But perhaps the most laughable claim in this whole narrative is that Texas has been “fiscally responsible.” Perry certainly adhered to the conservative playbook, offering massive tax breaks without the deep cuts in services that might inspire a voter backlash. As a result — an entirely predictable one — the Austin American-Statesman reported that “state lawmakers have spent much of the year grappling with a budget shortfall that left them $27 billion short of the money needed to continue current state services.”

CNN adds that while Perry was railing against the Democratic stimulus package passed over the fierce resistance of conservatives, the state “was facing a $6.6 billion shortfall for its 2010-2011 fiscal years,” and “it plugged nearly all of that deficit with $6.4 billion in Recovery Act money.”

The stimulus package created or saved 205,000 jobs in Texas, second only to California. But as James Galbraith told AlterNet, while “the state budget has not yet been cut drastically” due to the stimulus boost, “the key phrase is ‘not yet.’” Now that the stimulus has run its course, “if projections for the current budget cycle are correct, things will get much worse in the next year.”

Indeed, those cuts are now on their way. The Texas legislature imposed draconian cuts to Medicaid, cut tuition aid to 43,000 low-income students, and is weighing $10 billion in cuts to the state’s education system. According to Texas state senator Rodney Ellis, D-Fort Bend, the 2012-2013 budget will underfund “health and human services in Texas by $23 billion, 29.8 percent below what is needed to maintain current services.”

But Perry’s tax breaks are indeed part of the state’s jobs picture; as Time magazine’s Massimo Calabresi noted, Perry established several massive business tax breaks “designed to lure companies from other states.”

[But] the funds have been controversial. They have channeled millions of dollars to companies whose officers or investors are major Perry campaign donors and Perry has allowed them to keep their subsidies in many cases even when they fail to deliver promised jobs. More important for the purposes of judging Perry’s job-creating record, even those that do produce jobs don’t necessarily create long-lasting ones, or increase the state’s overall prosperity.

In a report written for Perry last spring, Michael Porter of Harvard Business School noted that such tax breaks “ultimately don’t support long-term prosperity,” because companies that can move easily “are looking for the best deal and when the deal runs out they move” again, taking their jobs with them.

He also found that Texas’ per capita income growth was the eighth slowest of any state in the country between 1998 and 2008. That’s because, as the American Independent‘s Patrick Brendel noted, “Texas has by far the largest number of employees working at or below the federal minimum wage,” and the number of crappy jobs has exploded while this supposed Texas Miracle was taking place.

“From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers in Texas rose from 221,000 to 550,000, an increase of nearly 150 percent,” wrote Brendel. As a result, Texas is now “tied with Mississippi for the greatest percentage of minimum wage workers, while California had among the fewest (less than 2 percent).” It should be noted that the cost of living is higher in California than in Texas.)

At a fundraiser this week, Rick Perry, who despite toying with the idea of secession in the past may now be eying a White House bid, told a group of Republican fat-cats that in his state, “you don’t have to use your imagination, saying, ‘What’ll happen if we apply this or that conservative principle?’ You just need to look around, because they’ve been in play across our state for years, generating real results.”

In this, Perry is absolutely, 100 percent correct. He slashed taxes to the bone, handing out credits to his political cronies like they were candy. He decried the evils of Big Government while hypocritically using federal stimulus funds to help close Texas’ budget gap in the short term, and now he’s using the state’s longer term fiscal disaster — one of his own creation — as a premise for destroying an already threadbare social safety net serving the neediest Texans.

As a result of these policies, plus immigration and other external factors, his state’s added a lot of low-paying poverty jobs without decent benefits. He’s added very little in the way of “prosperity.”

In the final analysis, Texas is indeed a shining example of conservative governance, as well as an almost perfect model for winning the race to the bottom.

[Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. This article was published at and distributed by AlterNet.]

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Posted on June 22, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Social security in France and the US.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / June 22,2011

[This is the fourth in a series of dispatches from France by The Rag Blog‘s David P. Hamilton.]

Social security in France has a wider definition that includes health care, unemployment compensation, family support, disability, and other benefit programs. But in the U.S. social security is generally understood to refer to the federal old-age pension program that protects workers and covered family members against loss of income from the wage earner’s retirement.

There are basic differences between the retirement programs in France and the U.S. In essence, in France the system is more costly, more complicated, and provides more benefits, but employers and the wealthy pay a higher percentage of the costs.

There are, however, major similarities between the French and American retirement pension systems. Both are pay-as-you-go systems in which current receipts are used to pay current benefits. Also, both are under attack by rightists because of their projected future insolvency caused by changing demographics.

The ratio of active workers paying into the system relative to retirees receiving benefits is falling in both countries and will fall more quickly with the retirement of “baby-boomers.” In France, this “dependency ratio” is already much worse than the in the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. has the best dependency ratio among the G8 nations.

This problem is largely a distraction to focus the debate away from obvious solutions to what Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman describes as a “modest” long term shortfall. Krugman notes that “extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of GDP. That’s less than 3 percent of federal spending — less than we’re currently spending in Iraq.”

James Roosevelt, a former commissioner for retirement policy for the Social Security Administration, claims that the “crisis” is more a myth than a fact. Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz agrees.

Both France and the U.S. have a pay-as-you-go system. Money taken in from payroll taxes is used to pay current retirees. In the U.S., there have been more receipts than payouts since 1983. Excess receipts go into the Social Security Trust Fund. There they are loaned to the U.S. general revenue fund to be used for other governmental expenses.

The U.S. Treasury general revenue fund currently owes the Social Security Trust Fund over $2.5 trillion. In 2009, FICA taxes and interest on the fund took in $120 billion more than it paid out, despite a serious shortfall in payroll tax receipts caused by the subprime mortgage crisis and high unemployment. By 2019, the general revenue fund will owe the Social Security Trust Fund $3.8 trillion.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government has made no provision to repay these “borrowed” surpluses. They have gone most prominently to finance militarism, such as the recently passed 2012 $690 billion “Defense” Department appropriation.

There are various proposals being floated to repay this debt and rectify the shortfall by raising receipts, reducing benefits, or privatizing the system. But there are several other options that don’t ever get discussed. For example, had the government not spent a trillion on imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and trillions more to otherwise feed the voracious needs of the military-industrial complex, it would have the money to repay the trust fund.

As Ron Paul has suggested, were we to close down most if not all of the over 800 military bases the US has outside its borders and end the numerous wars (all in Muslim countries) in which we are presently engaged, we would have the money to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund. In other words, we could cut the largest discretionary element in the federal budget, the military/intelligence/homeland security expenditures that are greater than the similar expenses of the rest of the world combined.

But most military spending functions as a transfer payment from the general population to the rich who own and profit from the military-industrial complex. Hence, social security solvency achieved by reduced militarism is out of the question.

Revoking the Bush/Obama tax cuts for the most wealthy would largely eliminate the federal deficit, allowing general revenues to be used to pay back the debt owed Social Security, money owed to those of more humble means. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote in 2010:

The 75-year Social Security shortfall is about the same size as the cost, over that period, of extending the… tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans (those with incomes above $250,000 a year). Members of Congress cannot simultaneously claim that the tax cuts for people at the top are affordable while the Social Security shortfall constitutes a dire fiscal threat.

This approach is considered politically unviable despite broad popular support among the general population who don’t own a single member of Congress, a president, or a team of lobbyists.

Another option would be to remove the cap on FICA taxes that is currently $106,800. That solution would raise taxes on the richest 6% of Americans and largely restore perpetual solvency in the social security system, providing $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years according to the libertarian Cato Institute. Although the Wall Street Journal editors believe that lifting the cap would be “one of the greatest tax increases of all time” and “so crazy it’s beyond belief,” this richest 6% have seen their inflation-adjusted income increase about 90% over the past 30 years while wages of the less wealthy have stagnated.

A 2005 Washington Post poll found that 81% of Americans would favor lifting the cap altogether and it has been endorsed by those radicals at the AARP, the largest seniors lobby in the U.S. The precedent for removing the cap is that in 1993 Congress removed the cap on the tax to support Medicare.

The Social Security Administrations chief actuary stated that removing the cap, even if it included increased benefits for the wealthy paying more, would eliminate 93% of the projected shortfall over the next 75 years. Unfortunately, elimination of the cap is a non-starter in a Congress owned by the economic elite who might then have to pay the same tax the rest of us pay.

Or the government might tax property income, now exempt from FICA taxes, the same way wages and salaries are taxed. The current rate of taxation on long term capital gains is 15%, while the top marginal tax rate on wages is 35%. Again, such a tax would fall almost exclusively on the very richest Americans, the capitalist class, who derive most of their income from property investments. Hence, it is politically unrealistic and not considered a viable option.

A much less desirable approach would be to raise FICA taxes on everyone from the current 12.4% (half paid by employees and half by employers) to 14.4%, which would solve the future insolvency problem altogether. This could be done by raising just the employer’s contribution and leaving the employee contribution as it is now. This would still leave the employer contribution in the U.S. below what employers pay in France.

It is argued that such a move would stifle employment, but the latest figures (for April 2011) show the unemployment rate in France only 0.1% higher than the official rate in the U.S. that is widely considered understated.

In addition, we could simply bar the U.S. government from borrowing funds from the Social Security Trust Funds that it has no capacity to repay. But this would mean the deficit problem would become immediate, rather than being delayed by borrowing from the trust fund.

None of these potential solutions are remotely acceptable to the 1% of the U.S. population, the economic elite, who own the U.S .government. Hence, these options are all outside the realm of possibility within the capitalist hegemony in the U.S.

The demographic squeeze used to justify the insolvency argument is based on several factors, primarily greater longevity, declining birth rates, higher unemployment among the youngest and oldest workers, and unemployed older workers taking early retirement. In 2010, French president Sarkozy’s government, despite massive protests by the Left that brought millions into the streets, raised the early retirement age from 60 to 62 and full retirement from 65 to 67. These changes are not fully applicable until 2018.

The US system is in the process of a similar transition. In 2018, the retirement ages necessary for a pension is projected to be the same in both countries.

This change in the French system is supposed to make their system fully solvent into the foreseeable future. Yet in the U.S., rightists continue to argue that the U.S. system, with the same age of retirement and lower benefits, will not be solvent in the future, despite the fact that the demographics show that France has a greater disparity between active workers and retirees. One might reasonably ask why what works for France isn’t working for the U.S., which has less of a problem.

It is also notable that the solution Sarkozy chose to shore up the French system was considered a relatively moderate one. Given very high levels of public opposition, cutting benefits or raising taxes were considered out of the question and he paid a heavy political price for the measures he took. His subsequent approval ratings set record lows for any president in the post-WWII history of France.

Like in the U.S., social security pensions in France have huge constituencies and massive popular support. When recently polled on how to resolve the “debt crisis” in the U.S., respondents rejected changes in Social Security and Medicare by 68% to 28%. In France, the margin of support for the pension system is even greater.

In France, there are five categories of old age pensions, three of them public and universal, two private but strictly regulated. First, there is a minimum old age pension one may receive even if you have never been employed. It is means tested and to qualify you cannot earn more than roughly $11,000 annually (at an exchange rate of $1.40 equaling one euro).

It is also available to those whose qualifying earnings under the state pension system would result in a pension less than this minimum one. It pays about $12,000 annually to an individual or $19,500 to a couple.

The second tier of the French system has 26 compulsory schemes, based on occupational groups largely funded by contributions from both employees and employers. Although schemes are not run or financed directly by the government, they are regarded as public pensions, typically administered by boards composed of representatives of workers and employers, and have to conform to principles determined by the state.

The largest “general” scheme covers all wage earners in the private sector. This is a mandatory state pension program that aims to provide payments up to a maximum of 50% of the retiree’s highest earning years, with payouts limited to a maximum, of 35,000 euro/$50,000 annually.

In contrast, the maximum annual payout under the U.S. Social Security system is only $28,392. This French retirement program is funded by payroll taxes at a rate of 6.65% paid by employees and 8.3% paid by employers, collectively 1.55% more than is paid by workers and employers in FICA taxes in the U.S.

In comparison, social security taxes in the U.S. are currently 12.4% of wages up to $106,800 per year with employees and employers each paying half. Those making more pay nothing on what they earn above the income cap. Hence, the U.S. system is funded by a regressive tax with those making more than the cap paying at a lower rate than those making less than the cap.

In 2012, the employee contribution is set to be reduced to 4.2%, while the employee contribution stays at 6.2%, a peculiar step given the concerns over the U.S. “debt crisis” and the Social Security system’s long term solvency.

Third, there is a mandatory occupational pension program with separate categories for private sector workers, civil servants, and managers/executives. Contributions vary depending on your category, with higher rates for the managers/executive category and lower rates for workers.

Non-managerial workers pay nothing into this fund on their first $50,000 in annual income and 7.7% on earnings above that level. Civil servants pay 1.5% below $50,000 and 4.76% above. Managers and executives pay corresponding rates of 3% and 8%. Their employers pay more: none for workers’ wages below $50,000 and 12.6% above, 3% and 9.26% for civil servants, and 3% and 12% for managers.

The goal of this program is to raise the retirement income to 70-80% of the beneficiary’s highest earning years. These programs are now considered solvent despite France’s higher old age dependency ratio and the fact that French retire roughly four years earlier than Americans and live two years longer.

In addition to these public pension programs, France has optional private pension programs, both collective and individual, much like those in the U.S. These are strictly regulated. It is unthinkable that you could loose such a pension if your former employer went out of business. Nobody in France could believe what happened to employees of Enron or imagine that the stock market could have an impact on the pension system.

Because of the adequacy of the public pensions, most people in France do not have private pensions and those who do are mainly at executive level. The UK based Pensions Policy Institute asserts that French pensioners receive 90% of their pre-retirement income from their various pension resources.

In comparing the old-age pension system with that in the U.S, we see a representative example of results of socialism in France. Employers, the wealthy, and managerial personnel pay higher rates and those rates increase with income. Hence, the French system is funded by a progressive tax with the lowest paid workers paying little or nothing to benefit from some components of the system. In the U.S., FICA is regressive, the upper income brackets paying less or nothing if they derive their income from property.

This reflects France’s recognition of the inherently exploitive nature of capitalism that results inevitably in greater economic inequality that the state must ameliorate in order to maintain the equality component of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” In contrast, in the U.S., with a government of, by and for the richest 1%, individualism is glorified, the commons is denigrated, and principles of social solidarity are deemed unworthy of serious consideration.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : When Religion Restricts Our Freedom

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Crooks and Liars.

When religion restricts our freedom:
Catholic bishops and aid in dying

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 22, 2011

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently revised its policies concerning the care for the seriously ill and dying. While the bishops’ views about aid in dying for the terminally or seriously ill apply only to Catholic health care institutions, the bishops want their beliefs applied to the entire society. They clearly state this position in “A Statement on Physician-Assisted Suicide” issued on June 16, 2011.

In their statement, the U.S. bishops declared suicide “a terrible tragedy, one that a compassionate society should work to prevent.” Clearly, the bishops believe that the rest of our society should follow their beliefs on this subject. To underscore the primacy of their position, Cardinal DiNardo, quoted by the Catholic News Service, said the bishops were making a contribution to a “fundamental public debate” based on “our moral tradition and sense of solidarity with people.”

If that is all the bishops are doing, I would have no quarrel with them. I’m perfectly at ease with the Catholic bishops and cardinals telling their own believers how to behave, but they have no right to press upon non-Catholics the same behaviors and ethical standards that they accept within their religion, based on Catholic theology. My religious views and theological perspective lead me to conclusions about aid in dying different from those reached by the bishops.

The bishops begin their analysis of aid in dying by promoting their religious dogma concerning “Christ’s redemption and saving grace.” As one who holds different views, I don’t want our public policy to be based on Catholic theology. Only people who do not appreciate religious diversity and the freedom of religion would want to impose their religious views on others. The bishops fit into that category.

In a news conference about the statement, Cardinal DiNardo makes clear that the bishops want their religious views adopted throughout the U.S. The Cardinal said he hoped it would counter the recent “strong resurgence” in activity by the assisted-suicide movement. The statement asserts,

With expanded funding from wealthy donors, assisted suicide proponents have renewed their aggressive nationwide campaign through legislation, litigation and public advertising, targeting states they see as most susceptible to their message. . . If they succeed, society will undergo a radical change.

These remarks are made with no sense of irony. In both the California aid-in-dying campaign of 1997 and the Washington campaign in 2008, and in the Oregon referenda in 1994 and 1997, the Catholic church spent millions of dollars to defeat propositions that would have clearly expressed the will of the people had they been voted on without interference from the propaganda of any interest group. [Aid in dying was supported in both Oregon votes and in Washington, but was defeated narrowly in California.] Polls show regularly that 70% of the population believe that individuals should have the autonomy to decide their own fates if they become terminally ill and are suffering.

But the Catholic bishops want to impose Catholic doctrine on everyone. They argue that suffering is no cause for concern; it is redemptive because it relates to the suffering of Christ on the cross and, therefore, the public policy of the U.S. must follow Catholic teaching and forbid non-Catholics the right to determine their own fates.

The bishops argue that aid in dying “promotes neither free choice nor compassion.” That, at least, is not a faith-based argument, though I find that it fails to convince individuals who want to decide their fates that they would not be exercising their own free choice in doing so. And I find it uncompassionate to deny me the right to end my suffering. In fact, I find such a position cruel to the point of being sadistic.

One of the most specious of all the arguments made by the bishops is their assertion that “people who request death are vulnerable. They need care and protection. To offer them lethal drugs is a victory not for freedom but for the worst form of neglect.” In fact, the few people who have taken advantage of aid in dying in Oregon have the best of palliative care, emotional support, medical advice, and many opportunities to change their minds.

These people are not vulnerable, isolated, and hopeless. They have looked realistically at what living in suffering will do to them and their families and have decided to end that suffering at a time and place of their own choosing.

Jay Lee, a letter-writer to the Seattle Times, expressed the bishops’ position clearly when he wrote, “The bishops’ opposition to death with dignity is faith-based, not fact-based.”

Barbara Coombs Lee, president of the aid-in-dying organization Compassion and Choices, explained, “While we respect religious instruction to those of the Catholic faith, we find it unacceptable to impose the teachings of one religion on everyone in a pluralistic society.”

She emphasized that “end-of-life care should follow the patient’s values and beliefs, and good medical practice, but not be restricted against the patient’s will by Catholic Church doctrine.”

Cardinal DiNardo has accused supporters of aid in dying of encouraging terminally ill individuals to end their lives. On the contrary, aid-in-dying supporters do not advocate death for anyone, but the right for all of us to choose for ourselves when and how we will die based on our own values.

Such supporters typically believe that everyone should have access to the best medical care available. The Cardinal could better fulfill his religious values by fully supporting universal health care in the U.S., rather than working to deny a few people their personal autonomy as they near the end of their lives.

But for the Cardinal, everything is about his religious beliefs. He said, “Compassion isn’t to say, ‘Here’s a pill.’ It’s to show people the ways we can assist you, up until the time the Lord calls you.” For those with a different religious or theological position, the Cardinal could not care less. He wants to force his Catholic position on everyone.

Of course, what happens in both Oregon and Washington is not to give a person “a pill,” but to engage in an elaborate set of protocols that can allow a dying and suffering person to receive a prescription that they can fill when and if they decide to end their life. Only about 25% of people in Oregon who get such a prescription use it to end their life. About 80% of those who begin the elaborate aid-in-dying process never complete it.

Many find that having the ability to do so gives them great comfort. But that’s the sort of comfort the Catholic bishops will never understand.

[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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Robert S. Becker : The Environmental Rabble-Rousing of Diane Wilson

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Environmental activist Diane Wilson in a still from the PBS documentary, Texas Gold.

Eco-Outlaw Diane Wilson:
The environmental rabble-rousing
of an unreasonable woman

By Robert S. Becker / OpEd News / June 21, 2011

Environmental activist and author Diane Wilson will be Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 24, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on Austin’s community radio station, KOOP-91.7 FM, and streamed live on the internet. [UPDATE: Listen to the podcast of Thorne Dreyer’s interview with Diane Wilson on Rag Radio, here.]

Diane will also speak about her book, Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, at Book People, 603 N. Lamar in Austin, Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. and will appear at the Texas Louisiana Gulf Coast Shindig & Soiree at Pine Street Station, 1101 E. 5th Street, Austin, from 4-7 p.m., Saturday, June 25.

Legendary Texas journalist Molly Ivins once joked about rebel-rouser-activist Jim Hightower: “If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that child — mad as hell, with a sense of humor.”

Well, Hightower has a protest soul sister, the inventive, congenial, yet fierce “eco-outlaw” named Diane Wilson. Unlike armchair activists and witty journalists, this champion takes risks, gets bloodied and arrested, and endures jail — then turns her adventures into good-hearted, epic tales reminiscent of Mark Twain.

And what progressive battles need, more than ever, are inspiring protest leaders — and crowds in the street. Otherwise, we fail to learn from the insipid, conspiracy-ridden, if effective escapades of the Tea Party. One hard-won lesson I take from this hell-raising muckraker from Seadrift, Texa, is that petitions, donations, columns, and news interviews are nice but don’t save lives, jobs, America, or Mother Earth.

Diane was featured in a terrific PBS documentary called Texas Gold, voiced by Peter Coyote, and, with Coyote, produced a hilarious satirical commercial for the film — about bottled Gulf water you get to drink once. Wilso was interviewed on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, and performs daring CodePink disruptions. [Wilson was, in fact, a founding member of CodePink, the theatrical direct-action peace group.]

Diane has also penned two inspiring protest memoirs — real-life, laugh-out-loud, unflinching stories reliving what happens when a terrific activist puts her liberty on the line. This woman walks the line, until she gets forcibly removed. Her two full titles alone justify the price of admission:

  • An Unreasonable Woman, the True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas
  • Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth

Her tactics are “unreasonable,” of course, only to cancer-inducing, worker-killing resource predators (well-shielded by official protection) whom she ambushes with inventive schemes. Eco-activism here is downright fun, mostly, like anti-war ’60’s agitation (though absent the crowds). She invites all of us to do local agitation.

Where she’s best known as Corporate Criminal Enemy No. 1 is Calhoun County, Texas, which — alas, B.D. (Before Diane) — was a remote, Gulf coast pushover ripe for chemical dumpers, and by 1989 had won the EPA’s dubious prize as America’s most polluted place. That shocker woke Diane up, and she’s been confronting polluters (and now related war-mongers) ever since.


Teaching by bold example

I found out about Diane because my wife is writing a young adult novel and needed to check background about the Gulf, shrimping, and endangered sea turtles. So, who better to learn from than the liveliest, most notorious, ex-professional Gulf shrimper living between Galveston and Corpus Christi?

Naturally we jumped in the van and drove eight hours when hearing Diane was to keynote a women’s literary celebration in Santa Barbara. Her simple if hard to execute message: trust your heart, assess the damage, disregard most well-intentioned warnings and, above all, don’t sweat outcomes impossible to know in advance.

Progressives are forever talking and talking about direct protests, so time to learn from Diane’s fearless bravery, lit up by over 50 arrests. Would be 100 were she less even-tempered, her outrage tempered by quiet irony and southern courtesy, even to abusers.

She never hides, however, the fact that maximizing bad publicity against huge public menaces means getting roughed up, inconvenienced, and punished. The system discourages disruption and, judging by her harsh prison depictions, many here would pipe up, “Is there a Plan B?”

Climbing the protest tower

When not delivering subversive keynotes or satiric writing, being restrained in jail, or sidestepping Texas Rangers, Diane has initiated five hunger strikes (some surprisingly effective), performed inventive media protests and political theater (including nudity), done mock citizen arrests — and pulled off one truly notorious stunt — protesting 22,000 deaths in India by single-handedly climbing a 75-foot tower.

Here’s that tale, begun when “nobody particular” — right! — donned a hardhat, hitched a ride into the Dow Chemical plant, thus breaching its vaunted security, and unfurled this heinous banner: “Dow Responsible for Bhopal.” After which ensued 10 hours of Keystone Cops commotion, during which time our chained (thus hard-to-move) heroine was bloodied by a sadistic SWAT team, straitjacketed, whisked to the hoosegow, and eventually found guilty of criminal trespassing.

Protesting starts with intimidation on both sides. Apparently, in Calhoun County, Texas, educating folks about inhumane, criminal behavior is itself criminal — whereas officials dumping tax incentives to encourage the unregulated poisoning of the community’s most valuable resource, once lovely bay waters — no problema. Live jobs trump dead dolphins or toxic shrimp.

Diane then doubled her outlaw-rebel trademark by refusing to show up for prison. Talk about direct, predatory protest drones to offset all the fancy PR industry “goodwill” (payoffs like police cars, computers, and the like). What’s four-months prison time for “nobody particular” versus paltry wrist slaps to the Union Carbide CEO whose plant leaked so much lethal gas it wiped out a good-sized city while poisoning 500,000 others.

This episode encapsulates the plucky Wilson Way — brash, non-violent, dramatic, low-cost — and with a rippling unpredictability that unnerves testy execs. What makes Diane crazy like a fox, a match for the planet’s most shameless polluters (Dow, Alcoa, BP, Dupont and Formosa Plastics), is an uncompromising refusal to sweat outcomes.

Diane Wilson is arrested after pouring oil over herself during an appeareance by BP CEO Tony Hayward before a Congressional hearing in 2010. Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.

Commit all the way

Diane elevated the “Just do it” notion before the shoe brand. Why limit unknowable results, she implies, with Obama-like, risk-averse “pragmatism,” or entrenched group cautiousness, when you’ve got Wilson’s full-throated impulsiveness, inspiration, and fearless nonchalance on your side? From Diary of an Eco-Outlaw:

I can truthfully say that I’ve never planned a single action that I was in charge of. I’ve never thought of the outcome or the ending. My actions were not outcome driven. That’s not what propelled me. It was the urgency of the moment affecting my heart. I didn’t care if there was no hope. I didn’t care if no one was with me. I didn’t care if what I did would end there that day. I could be on the losing side. I could go to jail.

Wilson amplifies John Lennon’s quip, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” for she disowns planning, beyond scheduling the next cunning expose of corporate wickedness. And by any standards, Diane’s career achievement is impressive, awarding her highest honors in the nation’s demanding, shit-disturbing sweepstakes.

She shows how much one, non-ideological woman can do without initial fame, private angels or fortune, fancy friends in high office, or big alliances with well-heeled NGOs.

Just do it.

Her blend — sacrifice, risk-taking, trusting herself, and widening horizons (now anti-war) — identifies a true western maverick, literally an “unbranded calf.” In fact, the term “maverick” celebrates the independent, progressive Texas family of that name. There’s nothing right-wing or authoritarian about mavericks; au contraire, they boldly battle both the status quo and status holders.

True political mavericks like Diane insist those hell-bent on making money must not then negligently unmake the earth: thus, no industry is above federal clean air and water laws, or has the right to inflict cancer along with its paycheck, or devastation on treasured community resources.

Is this logic too hard for chemical companies — and public officials — or what?

[Robert S. Becker was educated at Rutgers College (BA) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D, English). Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, U. Chicago) for business, founding and heading SOTA Industries, a high-end audio company, from ’80 to ’92. From ’92-02 he did marketing, consulting, and writing; since 2002, he has been scribbling on politics and culture, looking for the wit in the shadows. This article was originally published at — and was distributed by — OpEd News.]

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Ted McLaughlin : We’re Killing Off Our Oceans

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Coral reefs are subject to “multiple stressors” that could destroy many within a human generation. Image from IPSO / BBC.

Multiple factors at work:
Killing off the oceans

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2011

There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about global climate change and how it will affect the world’s land masses. But a story that has largely been ignored by most people is that the world’s oceans are also being negatively affected by mankind, and the oceans are fast reaching a critical point — much faster than previously thought.

Some people think the oceans are too vast (covering about 71% of the Earth’s surface at an average depth of 12,430 feet and a volume of 310 million cubic miles) to be affected by mankind. That is simply not true. The oceans are being affected by over-fishing, pollution, and global climate change.

In the past these three factors have been considered by themselves in how they are hurting the oceans. But a recent meeting of scientists says the factors are working together and are destroying the oceans at a much faster rate than realized even as recently as a couple of years ago. The panel of scientists, from many different scientific disciplines, met at the request of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).

Alex Rogers, IPSO scientific director and professor of biology at Oxford University, said,

The findings are shocking. As we considered the cumulative effect of what mankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realized. We’ve sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we’re seeing, and we’ve ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we’re seeing changes that are happening faster than we’d thought, or in ways that we didn’t expect to see for hundreds of years.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, agreed saying,

The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago. So if you look at almost everything, whether it’s fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought.

The scientists believe we are facing a “globally significant extinction event” in the oceans. The last one was 55 million years ago, and was caused by a disturbance of the carbon cycle, acidification, and the depletion of oxygen in the seawater. We are facing the same things now (only caused by man this time and at an accelerated rate), and the level of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans is already greater than in that last extinction event.

IPSO will be issuing a report and making a presentation to the United Nations later this week. But they have already made three recommendations which they believe should be implemented immediately. They are:

  • Stop exploitative fishing, with special emphasis on the high seas where there is currently little effective regulation.
  • Map and then reduce the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilizers, and human waste.
  • Make sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (with a goal of bringing CO2 emissions to zero within 20 years).

This is a serious problem that could have drastic negative effects for all of mankind. I wish I could say that the world’s leaders will see this as that serious and begin to take action. But I don’t believe they will. Just look at all the procrastination that has already taken place in dealing with global climate change, even with over 90% of the world’s scientists agreeing that action must be immediately taken.

Last year’s climate conference in Mexico ended with no real action taken, and another climate conference has just ended in Germany, again with no action agreed to. And the United States is one of the biggest impediments to getting anything done. The corporate interests are making far too much money, and passing new rules that would stave off global climate change (including oceanic changes) might cut into their profits — and that is something they and their Republican lackeys are not about to let happen.

And as long as the United States refuses to agree to changes to protect the climate and the oceans, there is very little chance that the rest of the world will do so. Poet T.S. Eliot once said the world will end with a whimper and not a bang. He was close. That whimper will actually be the sound of dollar bills as corporate profits are counted and the world slowly dies.

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

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : When Muhammad Ali Took the Weight

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, was convicted by a U.S. federal court in Houston on June 20, 1967. Above, he is shown when refusing induction at the Houston draft board, April 28, 1967. At his right is the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This day in history:
When Muhammad Ali took the weight

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2011

In an era defined by endless war, we should recognize a day in history that won’t be celebrated on Capitol Hill or in the White House. On June 20, 1967, the great Muhammad Ali was convicted in Houston for refusing induction in the U.S. armed forces.

Ali saw the war in Vietnam as an exercise in genocide. He also used his platform as boxing champion to connect the war abroad with the war at home, saying, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

For these statements, as much as the act itself, Judge Joe Ingraham handed down the maximum sentence to Cassius Clay” (as they insisted upon calling him in court): five-years in a federal penitentary and a $10,000 fine. The next day, this was the top-flap story for The New York Times with the headline, “Clay Guilty in Draft Case; Gets Five Years in Prison.”

The sentence was unusually harsh and deeply tied to a Beltway, bipartisan consensus to crush Ali and ensure that he not develop into a symbol of anti-war resistance. The day of Ali’s conviction the U.S. Congress voted 337-29 to extend the draft four more years. They also voted 385-19 to make it a federal crime to desecrate the flag. Their fears of a rising movement against the war were well-founded.

The summer of 1967 marked a tipping point for public support of the Vietnam “police action.” While the Tet Offensive, which exposed the lie that the United States was winning the war, was still six months away, the news out of Southeast Asia was increasingly grim. At the time of Ali’s conviction, 1,000 Vietnamese noncombatants were being killed each week by U.S. forces. One hundred U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and the war was costing $2 billion a month.

Anti-war sentiment was growing and it was thought that a stern rebuke of Ali would help put out the fire. In fact, the opposite took place. Ali’s brave stance fanned the flames.

As Julian Bond said,

[It] reverberated through the whole society… [Y]ou could hear people talking about it on street corners. It was on everyone’s lips. People who had never thought about the war before began to think it through because of Ali. The ripples were enormous.

Ali himself vowed to appeal the conviction, saying,

I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in this stand — either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end, I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail.

Already, by this point, Ali’s heavyweight title had been stripped, beginning a three-and-a-half-year exile. Already Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam had begun to distance themselves from their most famous member. Already, Ali had become a punching bag for almost every reporter with a working pen.

But with his conviction came a new global constituency. In Guyana, protests against his sentence took place in front of the U.S. embassy. In Karachi, Pakistan, a hunger strike began in front of the U.S. consulate. In Cairo, demonstrators took to the streets. In Ghana, editorials decried his conviction. In London, an Irish boxing fan named Paddy Monaghan began a long and lonely picket of the U.S. Embassy.

Over the next three years, he would collect more than 20,000 signatures on a petition calling for the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight title.

Ali at this point was beginning to see himself as someone who had a greater responsibility to an international groundswell that saw him as more than an athlete.

Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some bloodthirsty people. I’m no longer a Cassius Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the world, the black world. I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia. This is more than money.

Eventually justice did prevail and the Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction in 1971. They did so only after the consensus on the war had changed profoundly. Ali had been proven right by history, although a generation of people in [Southeast] Asia and the United States paid a terrible price along the way.

Years later, upon reflection, Ali said he had no regrets.

Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted.

As we remain mired in a period of permanent war, take a moment and consider the risk, sacrifice, and principle necessary to dismantle the war machine. We all can’t be boxing champions, but moving forward, all who oppose war can rightfully claim Ali’s brave history as our own.

[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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FILM / Bob Simmons : The Cave of Forgotten Austin

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


And it’s all in 3-D!
Werner Herzog, Second Street,
and the Cave of Forgotten Austin

By Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2011

Bob Simmons will be Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, July 1, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP-91.7 FM in Austin, and streamed live on the internet.

I went to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night, the movie by Werner Herzog about the cave that was discovered in the Ardeche Gorge of France a few years ago. It’s the cave that features unmarred Neolithic wall paintings done in the Pleistocene Age. The movie is a 3-D jewel of sensitive movie making, but more important, it is also a thoughtful reflection on the state of humankind, now, 33 thousand years later.

The cave has reposed in silence for more than three millenia, sealed away with its secret cave bear bones, its dripping stalactites, its delicate crystal calcite depositions, and incredible renderings of horses, rhinoceroses, and mammoths.

The hypnotic voice of Herzog with his northern European accent set the tone for what is revealed as we are lured into the timeless void and the deep past through a tiny opening in the cliff face. The charcoaled figures are illuminated on the undulating surfaces of the limestone in ways that demonstrate the artists’ deep connection with the world they inhabited. The skill of the human hand or hands that applied the shapes to the wall rivals that of any modern day painter, but more important, the shapes capture a breathing essence of the creatures and moments in their lives. Below the drawings, on the cave floor, we see petrified animal bones sealed in pure crystalline calcite. They gleam and reflect in the flashlit darkness.

There are no human remains in the cave, nor representation of human forms, though the Sistine Chapel, the sculpture of Pythias, the terra cotta warriors of Xi’An all come to mind when looking at these walls as the shadows of camera lights play over them. Herzog comes in close, then takes us outside for some speculation and facts by the French caretakers, one of whom includes a very Gallic perfumier who appears outside the cave sniffing the rocks.

Just as the movie approached the point of being repetitious or too long, it was over. The credits rolled. I rose unsteadily to my feet and trudged out to the clanging modernity and angularity of Austin’s 2nd Street.


The span of human history isn’t something we think about very often, and indeed, as I emerged from the cave of the Violet Crown Cinema with its soft, first class airline seats, and mixed drinks into another of Austin’s latest “entertainment districts,” the contrast was so violent as to make it a jarring, psychologically-disturbing, experience.

I was suddenly mentally and visually assaulted by fashion, design, surfaces, human hubris and objects of commercial desire. I felt like the theater must have held me inside while all kinds of things had transformed around us. I had wandered out into a different era.

Somehow I found it hard to even say the word “we” when I looked at the crowds of young homo sapiens strolling past the sidewalk cafes and milling in front of the Mary Moody Theater (where the band “Widespread Panic” was playing for a second night).

The hard-edged architecture seemed to fit the sharply age-segregated crowd. Ninety-nine percent of the several thousand who were gathered in the street and leaning over the third floor balconies were between the ages of twenty and thirty with more males than females. But the ratio was close. Girls in sexy outfits and perfect hair, guys in shorts and flip flops, some in jackets and tee shirts. All stylized, looking like they were prepped for a photo shoot by a SoHo photographer’s assistant.

Backslapping, air kissing, high-fiving and a few hanging on the wall posing sullen and distant. None seemed drunk or overly bellicose. Mindless good spirits, youth mixing with itself. Not an old person in sight, except for me. I wondered how all those kids would be behaving if someone had dosed their drinks with LSD? It was just a random thought.

I plowed through this throng with my “age force field.” The youth detected me and magically parted to make way for the older gentleman, except now and again where some callow fat kid didn’t notice my distinguished bearing and mistook me for one of his own. (“Oh, excuse me sir.”) And then he shrunk back with a smirk at his own unfathomable wit.

Big truck rigs and two-band busses idled their diesel engines behind the theater. Shiny as firetrucks they were.

I was mixed in this bunch, and I marveled at the street where I used to walk in Austin, my home since the fifties. There, under that glittering boutique’s facade was the ground where Liberty Lunch once stood, where I saw a young John Hiatt, a cowboy attired k.d. lang, Doug Sahm in a long duster playing with Augie and Freddie, the Superior Dairy with its huge milk carton, railroad tracks in the street, a boxcar on a siding. The only reminder of the past was the brick building where Lambert’s BBQ now stands, the Schneider Building that housed the old Calcasieu Lumber company. I am old enough to have driven trucks into the lumber yard that stood behind and alongside this building.

Violet Crown Cinema and Austin’s Second Street District. Image from A.V. Club, Austin.

People stepped without a thought over the dust of those days that lie under this smooth clean pavement. There was a smell of pasta and BBQ in the air. A new Lexus hummed down the street. And I thought of the Cave of Forgotten Dreams and its whiff of the Pliestocene. A long sharp needle point stuck out of the roof and over the street of Austin’s City Hall and Municipal Building looking like a dagger or maybe a stalactite gone horizontal? Architecture with a point, literally.

I walked further, down to West Fourth Street where there were more happy crowds, but I also saw what was left of the warehouses where I used to come to pick up sheetrock and plumbing parts, and later where little theaters presented local plays and one could park at a meter for a nickle. I went further and turned onto Congress where I stopped in front of 316, the W.B. Smith building. It was once also known as the Vulcan Gas Company [a legendary Austin music venue].

I took out my camera and photographed the nameless office that now occupies the space. The photo will look like nothing to anyone but me. I wonder if it will be occupied by a CVS Pharmacy soon, or perhaps an ice cream vendor… or maybe it will become covered in calcite and a flashlight will drift over its gleaming surface and people will wonder if there are bones inside.

Where now Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bubble Puppy, Big Mama Thornton, Stevie Ray and Texas Storm, The Jomo Disaster? Where are the Snows of Yesteryear?

Where is Echo, beheld of no man?

[Bob Simmons is a veteran broadcaster with over 30 years experience in most aspects of radio. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and presently lives in Austin where he has business interests and pursues his longtime avocations of photography and video production. Read more articles by Bob Simmons on The Rag Blog.]

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Chellis Glendinning : ‘Decepción’ in Bolivia

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Militant ambivalence? A demonstrator holds portraits of President Evo Morales during a protest in La Paz, Bolivia. Photo from Reuters.

Evo on the rocks:
Decepción in Bolivia

By Chellis Glendinning / The Rag Blog / June 16, 2011

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia — A poster of “Guernica” was bursting from the wall, and the umpteenth Latin American rendition of “My Way” was booming from the record player. I was sharing a hand-carved table in a Cochabamba cantina with a cowboy from the Chapare, an anti-capitalist immigration officer, an anarchist surgeon, and a barbacoa-restaurateur. All had been supporters of President Evo Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).

The conversation was fiery and, as is normal here in the Andes, its topic was politics.

Despite this particular crowd’s claim to the middle class, the agreement among them echoed a truth of Bolivian culture: a tendency to view things from the perspective of the collective, rather than solely from one’s perceived interests.

And indeed, this conversation echoed other charlas I’d had with campesinos, taxi-trufi drivers, and union members — and I need to be straight with you: things are not going well for the government of Bolivia’s first indigenous leader in 500 years. It was only a matter of filling in the details — and, in between gulps of Auténtico beer and Cuban mixed drinks, said details were pouring forth at the cantina.

Then the question was put to me. What did citizens of the United States think? I had to admit two answers: 1) if my daily dip into The New York Times provides any indication, people in the U.S. are basically uninformed about goings-on in Bolivia; and 2) for U.S. leftists, environmentalists, and climate-change activists, the aura of hope unleashed by the 2005 election of Evo Morales lingers like perfume from a Cochabamba jasmine bush.

I offer, then, a sweep of an overview of what’s happening and what some cowboys and campesinos, taxi drivers, and rank-and-file, are thinking.

Bolivian President Evo Morales reacts during a nationwide message at the presidential palace in La Paz while vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera looks on. Photo by Reuters.

Forked Tongue I: Madre Tierra

Out of one tine of what has become the Morales administration’s two-sided tongue come blood-stirring proclamations like the president’s empassioned grito “¡Planeta o Muerte!” at the 2010 Cancun climate change talks. Brilliant. Then there is the stark refusal, that not even Cuba or Venezuela would match, to sign on to the watered-down agreement at said talks.

And now comes the nation’s new law proclaiming the rights of Madre Tierra — to some minds, a legal-philosophic leap forward that, a few decades ago, only bioregionalists, primitive-anarchists, and traditional Native peoples could imagine.

But, sorry to say, the other spine of the eco-fork must be noted:

  • the launch of genetically-modified agriculture into a countryside presently free of GMOs;
  • two under-construction hydro-electric dams 300% bigger than the U.S.’s Hoover Dam at a cost of $13 billion, slated to channel water to Brazil in exchange for monies to boost Bolivia’s petro and plastic industries — this, in a country where many communities have no potable water and water-borne illnesses are rampant;
  • in a nation uncontaminated by nuclear radiation: uranium mining, with future plans for nuclear power plants — aided by Iran;
  • blankets of electromagnetic radiation in the form of WiMAX over urban landscapes – with the state telecommunications corporation bragging of 1350 radiobases in an area the size of Texas and California combined, with many more to come;
  • commodity-transporting highways bulldozing through protected nature reserves whose treasures, in the case of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos road, include 11 endangered species and three Native groups in 60 communities living their traditional hunter-gatherer-fishing lifeways;
  • new oil excavations;
  • new gas excavations;
  • in partnership with Mitubishi, Sumitomo, South Korea, and Iran: massive lithium development — threatening leeching, leaks, emissions, and spills in the world-treasure salt flats;
  • Bolivia’s own Made-in-China satellite;
  • with the help of India, the construction of humankind’s largest iron mine;
  • 900 miles of pipeline slated to transport natural gas to Argentina; and
  • an explosion of airport and high-rise construction.

In other words: full-tilt, high-tech, colossal-scale, high-capital modernization — on a Madre Tierra in which such expansion has already been shown to be The Problem.

A Dec. 30, 2010 protest against gas prices turns violent. Top image from FM Center es Noticia. Below, from Reuters.

Forked Tongue II: Democracy

Regarding governance, from one side of Bolivia’s forked tongue is spoken the legal language of plurinationalismo. After centuries of dictatorships, neoliberal governments, and military juntas, the 2009 Morales-initiated Constitution legitimizes a form of decentralized federalism: a reinstatement of decision-making to local communities, whether defined by place, indigenous heritage, or worker identity.

But, from the other tine of the fork, we encounter unabashed state centralism — and the stringency of an If-You’re-Not-With-Us-You’re-Against-Us mentality to reinforce its dominion. A blazing example of such top-down musculature is the 2010 Christmas Time Gasolinazo: Decreto Supremo #748 in which Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera abruptly announced that gasoline and diesel prices had been jacked up — by as much as 83%. (“Joy to the World” notwithstanding, the violent uprisings that followed rerouted the government’s hurry to a slower pace of inflation.)

But the truth remains: ever since the immediate threat from the right wing subsided following Morales’ 2009 re-election by 62%, a chronic refusal to listen to the very social movements the president promised to follow has posed a disturbing blow to adherents of participatory democracy.

Indigenous woman in La Paz protests against high prices and low wages on Feb. 25, 2011. Photo by Juan Karita / AP / La Prensa.

When indigenous groups protest the bulldozing of their lands for the construction of freeways; when state workers call for increases in salaries against the reality of galloping food prices; when media workers fight for freedom of the press against regulations threatening fines and license suspensions, state control of 20% of the media, and state ownership of all of it — the administration’s reaction is knee-jerk.

Whether by the vice president or the president himself, citizens questioning the government’s dictates are received with neither concern for their suffering nor gratitude for their participation; they are bold-facedly dismissed as instruments of U.S. imperialism, middle-class whiners, out of touch, and/or dupes of the right wing.

The Who’s famed rock ‘n roll declaration, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss,” comes to mind, and the long-standing trade union congress Centro Obrera Boliviana (COB) is now seeking to unseat the vice president for just such a pronouncement aimed at workers.

A demonstrator sprays graffiti protesting fuel price hikes in Bolivia. Photo from Reuters.

Meet the new problems, same as the old problems

At the same time, Bolivia is rife with chronic problems that, according to some street-level opinion, the government has failed to address.

Corruption within government is an age-old theme. During the Morales administration, the most spectacular example occurred in February 2011: the U.S.-Chile-aided arrest of the national jefe of police, former head of the Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico, and founder of the Centro de Inteligencia y Generación de Información, General René Sarabria Oropeza — caught in the act of opening up cocaine routes to Miami. His accomplices included a mayor, a military colonel, and a captain.

Another revelation of corruption, more so perhaps for spiritual interest, was the June 2010 arrest of Valentín Mejillones, the amauta-priest who had led the purification ritual of Evo Morales’ inauguration at Tiawanaku in 2006 — for hosting a cocaine purification factory in his El Alto home.

According to Diego Rada Cuadros, a lawyer whose family was forced to flee the country during the 1980s dictatorships, in the nation-state boasting the severest poverty in South America and — save Haiti — all of Latin America, a position in government that may last but six years (or, most probably, less) is a one-shot chance to amass some longer-lasting plata.

Too, while Bolivian coca has been sold for cocaine manufacture since Vietnam War days, the country is fast becoming a global fount of cocaine — and this development also feeds popular discontent. In the tropical Chapare, where the leaf used for cocaine is grown, every family has a tale of relinquishing food crops to grow the more valuable produce, giving up agriculture all together to work in a lab, or loaning out a youth to play lookout at a staggeringly high salary of $200 a month.

According to satellite surveillance reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), since Morales launched his presidency, the number of hectares commandeered has expanded by fútbol fields: by 2008 as many as 28,000 hectares were ponying up some 130 tons of cocaine, and in 2010 the vice president divulged that el narcotráfico now contributes $700 million a year to the national economy. To boot, one out of every 20 workers in the country is engaged in the biz.

In truth, the location of drug production is most often determined by international events like droughts, floods, inroads made by drug-war efforts, and inter-cartel politics — yet many Bolivians contend that Morales is to blame. In 2008 he threw out the DEA; all the while, they contend, he was ignoring the expansion of cocaine production as he blithely touted the sacredness of the coca leaf and pushed for the right of cocaleros to plant it.

La Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) represents approximately 2 million workers and indigenous activists. Photo from AP /La Prensa.

Decepción and protest

Curiously, in Spanish, the word for “disappointment” is decepción — a term that, to the English-speaking ear, does not merely name a feeling; it proposes a dynamic between inner and outer by citing the presence of an impacting source.

In Bolivia popular decepción was measured in a Radio Fides poll in February 2011. The sample was conducted in the barrios of La Paz that are normally a MAS stronghold, and yet a whopping 84% of respondents reported loss of confidence in the government of Evo Morales, with 80% saying they’d go for a change.

In other words, the red-blue-white chompa-sweaters emulating the one Morales wore on his 2005 foreign-policy tour — that every Tomás, Ricardo, and Hari was sporting in 2006 — are now totally and completely… out.

Also reflecting growing disappointment is the fact that today’s Bolivia exists in a near-constant state of disruption due to non-stop huelga-strikes, paro-stoppages, bloqueo-road blocks, and manifestacion-demonstrations. Such extreme tactics were honed during the military dictatorships of the 1960-‘90s to force demands by taking the economy hostage — but they fell off during the early, hope-for-the-best years of the Morales administration.

As I pen this essay, the post office is closed down and a road block has halted overland travel between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Before that, in April, COB threw nationwide marches and paros seeking increases in state medical worker, teacher, and retired incomes to keep up with inflation.

During a (read: peaceful) demonstration by doctors, nurses, and educators in La Paz, a university professor nearly lost his eye when a tear-gas canister shattered his glasses. After multiple surgeries — performed by the on-strike eye doctor in an act of solidarity — he is now waiting to find out if his sight will return. His comment about the event: “This is my personal tragedy, yes. But it’s not isolated. It shows how really bad things are in Bolivia — for all of us.”

From December 2010 through March of 2010, during the worst global-warming-induced storms — when for months rain gushed as if being thrown from a bucket and floods washed over communities like raging rivers — the taxi, trufi, and bus choferes and transportistas shut down what was left of the water-logged economy with paros, bloqueos, and manifestaciones in all the major cities of the country.

Earlier, in October 2010, when the government began to whittle away at guarantees for freedom of the press via La Ley Anti-Racismo y Toda Forma de Discriminación — ostensibly geared to fight racism and sexism, but also containing two articles initiating government control over content — the nation’s periodistas hit the streets with coffins bearing microphones and reporter tablets, wrote protest placards with their own blood, hung like Christ figures from the balconies of buildings, collected thousands of signatures, and appealed to international press associations.

And in July and August of 2010, the city of Potosí – normally a MAS bastion — presented Morales with demands to be included in the promised proceso de cambio-process of change, mounting hunger strikes, bloqueos, and mobilizations of up to 100,000 protestors.

A Bolivian mine worker with a stick of dynamite on his helmet joins thousands of Bolivian miners in a protest rally in La Paz on April 6, 2011. Photo from Reuters.

The clutches of ‘Guernica’

I understand that the information I am laying out may be difficult to take in — and please know that activists in Bolivia have asked me to tell their compañeros in the U.S. what is happening here.

In a world laden with fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, and technological disasters; unending wars over land, oil, and water; the unfolding of Peak Oil and, frankly, of what scholar Richard Heinberg calls Peak Everything; a refurbishing of nuclear technologies and fears of nuclear war; swathes of electromagnetic radiation from consumer and military installations; increasing corporate power; decreasing social liberties; out-of-hand control by drug cartels; cancer epidemics; mass addictions; and growing social chaos — in this world, hope is a precious thing.

When my essay “The Techno-Fantasies of Evo Morales” came out in CounterPunch (December 24-26, 2010), the messenger was held guilty by a few — to me, revealing the distress at losing, or at least calling into question, the pure promise that Evo Morales’ Bolivia had once offered.

Such distress is not unknown to me. I left an established life in the U.S. to be part of history in Bolivia, and when I arrived in April 2010, my heart clawed at my throat upon encountering the cynicism and despair that had replaced 2006’s enthusiasm.

But now, if I may muster an iota of the courageous perspective my friend, the injured professor, has managed: the predicament isn’t isolated. It shows how bad things are — for all of us.

Indeed, the politics of the socio-techno-psycho-economic aggregate known as empire have had their way. As American scholar Arab Edward Said has noted, no one in this world has escaped the impacts of imperialist conquest. And yet, if we acknowledge that a better — and perhaps evolutionally built-in way of being human — is possible, we might also grasp that the conflicts, contradictions, and conundrum created through centuries of ripping people from roots in land and community, whether by force or seduction, have us by toe, throat, and tail.

Yes, ours is a world writhing in the clutches of “Guernica,” in which too many are dancing to the individualism of “My Way.” In such a world, how does the beautiful, spirited human being blossom out of the militaristic politics, oversize scale, sterile alienation, and brash egoism that have, in one way or another, infected every one of us and every institution in our midst — including in a mountain land called Bolivia?

I don’t ask my question seeking The Answer — for, after a lifetime of participation in the political, cultural, and psychological movements of our times, I am aware of the multitude of intelligent projects afoot. I ask my question rather that — if only for a moment — we may bring awareness and compassion to the sad reality of our world.

[Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books, including the award-winning Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. She is Writer-in-Residence at Asociación Jakaña in Cochabamba and may be contacted via www.chellisglendinning.org. This article was also published in the June 1-12, 2011 issue of CounterPunch. Read more of Chellis Glendinning’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Saving Granny from Vouchercare

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle.

Unkindest cut of all:
Saving Granny from Vouchercare

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2011

“Avarice has so seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.” — Pliny the Younger, Letters, IX, c. 110.

It would appear that the American media, including the so-called “liberal” media, have lost their way among the mundane and the meaningless. Even the “progressive” commentators on MSNBC have become so enamored of Anthony Weiner’s indiscretions and Sarah Palin’s travels that little else of import has been reported to the American public.

Little of economic interest is discussed in a meaningful way, virtually no mention is made of the worsening unemployment situation, the increasing numbers of those without medical insurance, and nothing, absolutely nothing, about the China-Pakistan mutual defense treaty reported on by Paul Craig Roberts.

One can find little hope in a culture of fragmentation as our news organizations contribute to the further dumbing down of our citizens. In this atmosphere we must tolerate continuous reporting on the likely Republican presidential candidates, including their physical presence on the Sunday morning talk shows. Which brings to my mind H.L. Mencken’s comment:

As democracy is perfected, the Office of President represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

In my June 1 article on The Rag Blog I expressed concern about a full-fledged counterattack on the Democratic commitment to preserve Medicare in its present form. The deluge of misinformation, obfuscation, and pure fabrication has already begun.

Already the standard conservative think tanks — the Cato Institute, Hoover Institute, Hudson Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and Americans For Prosperity — have sped up the flow of trash through newly formed on-line “organizations” like the Institute for Policy Innovation, Heartland Institute, Social Security Institute, and the 912 Super Seniors organization.

Because of the lack of transparency we remain uninformed about who funds these organizations, but one might assume that these groups include the Koch Brothers, the DeVos Family, the Prince Family, and the Waltons of Walmart.

All this proceeds as the health insurers are making record profits and as many citizens are forced to postpone care (as reported in The New York Times), and as corporations keep shifting health care costs to their workers (as Roger Bybee reported at In These Times), and as the death rate among the uninsured remains around 45,000 a year. I would give CNN some credit for reporting that the U.S. has the second worst newborn death rate in the modern world.

Paul Krugman reports in a New York Times op-ed that medicare is sustainable. (Also read his piece entitled “Vouchercare Is Not Medicare.”) Even the suggestion of raising the retirement ago for Medicare would disadvantage the poor as pointed out by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones.

We noted in our last presentation on The Rag Blog that the opponents of Medicare, which date as far back as the Truman Administration, will try their utmost to confuse the elderly public about the necessity of cuts in government subsidization of Medicare Advantage with cuts in the Medicare Trust Fund.

Many folks who have Medicare Advantage believe they are on Medicare and are not aware that they have private insurance. I would point out that there are various “Medicare Advantage” plans, plans administered by multiple insurance companies, and not by the Medicare Administration, although several insurance companies have recently dropped their plans because of insufficient profits.

There are many Medicare Advantage plans, for which the subscriber is charged variable amounts relative to the benefits provided. To review, we have:

  1. Medicare HMOs, which require the subscriber to use network providers in all cases except in emergency situations;
  2. Medicare HMO-POS, which provide a “point of service” option adding a little freedom to a traditional HMO as one can pay more for limited outside the network coverage;
  3. Medicare PPO, which are network-based plans that allow you to go out of network for an additional amount of cost sharing; and
  4. Medicare PFFS, which are private fee-for-service plans that allow you to use any provider that accepts Medicare assignment as long as the provider will also accept the plan payment terms and conditions.

Some of these plans, at an extra cost, may include certain dental care, and hearing and vision care, but with, of course, specified limits.

There is very valuable information available to the voting public here. It outlines the hazards to the elderly and poor if there is compromise by the Democratic leadership in specific Congressional districts. For instance, in my Congressional district, the Third District of Pennsylvania, the Ryan plan would increase prescription drug costs for 13,000 Medicare beneficiaries, deny 460,000 individuals aged 54 and younger access to Medicare’s guaranteed advantage, and increase the out-of-pocket costs of health coverage by over $6,000 per year in 2022 and by $12,000 per year in 2032 for the 107,000 individuals in the district who are between the ages of 44 and 54.

The good news is that the Vermont legislature has passed single-payer health care, and the bill has been signed by the governor. The federal health insurance law would not allow Vermont to enact single payer until 2017; but Vermont is asking the administration to grant a waiver so that it can get there faster, by 2014. It is projected that a single payer plan will be 25% cheaper for consumers, businesses, and the government, than the current system of private health insurance, saving about $500 million in just the first year.

Here I would like to once more call your attention to France, which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), has the best health care in the world. In case you missed it, please read David Hamilton’s Rag Blog analysis of the French health care system, written from on the scene in Paris.

One further encouraging observation amid so much very depressing news. Agence France-Presse reports that, according to a group of prominent world leaders, the so-called “war on drugs” has failed, and that decriminalizing marijuana may help curb drug-related violence and social ills.

The commission includes former Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso, former Columbian president Cesar Gaviria, Mexico’s former president Ernesto Zedillo, and ex-UN chief Kofi Annan. The report notes that the “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”

The conclusion is that purely punitive measures have led to a situation where “the global scale of illegal drug markets — largely controlled by organized crime — has grown dramatically.” The panel suggests that governments experiment with models of legal regulation of drugs (especially cannabis) to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.

[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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Kate Braun : Summer Solstice is Festival of Light and Energy

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

“Summer Solstice.” Image from LestOut.

A festival of light and energy:
Summer Solstice: Tuesday, June 21, 2011

“In the daytime hiding ‘mongst the dewy blade of grass but when it’s night, firefly’s lantern burns bright…”

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2011

Tuesday, June 21, 2011, is the quarter celebration Litha, Midsummer, the Summer Solstice. Lord Sun enters the sign of Cancer on this date and Lady Moon is in her third quarter, in Pisces. Balance is shifting as once again the Oak and Holly Kings execute their ritual dance or battle. The Holly King, lord of the waning year, emerges triumphant.

From this date to the Winter Solstice we shall notice the days getting steadily shorter as Lord Sun’s power gradually wanes. Remember that light and darkness are not about good and evil but about the natural balance of Planet Earth. Just as we need activity, we also need rest; and so does Mother Earth.

This is a festival of Light and Energy, fertility and abundance, creativity and vitality. The Goddess is now a matron, ripe with pregnancy. If possible, celebrate outdoors and have a fire (unless your area is under a burn ban). If you celebrate indoors, consider burning dried herbs over a charcoal tablet in an iron cauldron. Vervain, St. John’s Wort, lavender, and mistletoe are some of the herbs appropriate to the season. Use a feather to waft the smoke over you and your guests and any pets that are present; it is a ritual blessing.

Use the colors white, red, golden yellow, green, blue, and tan in your decorations and adornment. In addition to color, you may decorate with sunflowers, sun wheels, and bunches of fresh herbs tied with a yellow ribbon. Heliotrope is an excellent flower to display, as are lemon flowers and sprigs of saffron, oak, and laurel. The scents of frankincense, galangal, copal, and ylang-ylang would also provide a pleasant accompaniment to your festivities.

Any herbs gathered on this day are said to be exceptionally potent, so look for chamomile, fennel, hemp, lavender, pine, roses, wisteria, stevia, Dittany of Crete, and mugwort.

This is an excellent opportunity to perform a Self-Dedication Ceremony: in advance of your celebrations, take time to consider your past; actions, thoughts, beliefs, and priorities are all subject to re-evaluations and re-evaluations can prompt changes in these areas. Make “before” and “now” lists if it helps you. Pay particular attention to areas where you notice change; this is where you will direct your attention.

At a time you choose on this day, alone or in the midst of your guests, hold your list of what you are changing, then draw an invisible circle around yourself (you may use your finger or a wand or a crystal to do this). Say aloud “I am moving forward” and tear off one item from your list and gently toss it out of your circle. Repeat this action with each item you have chosen. Such an act will redirect your energies toward where you are going, not on where you have been.

Do not forget the fairies, earth sprites, and forest elves in your preparations. Leaving a bit of food and drink outdoors for them will increase their tendency to work for you and protect you and yours. To see fireflies on this night is also auspicious.

I will be participating in a Central Austin Holistic Living Fair on Saturday, June 25, 2011, at the Holiday Inn on Town Lake, 20 N. I-35 in Austin, from 10 a.m – 6 p.m. There is a $4 entry fee. For more information, go here. To reserve time with me please message me at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com or phone me at 512-454-2293 no later than noon Friday, 6/24,2011.

[Kate Braun’s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Read more of Kate Braun’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Christine Shearer : How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


Merchants of Doubt:
How a handful of scientists
obscured the truth

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway uncover the history of a small group of Cold War scientists and advisers who battled anything, including scientific research, that might threaten their vision of American free enterprise.

By Christine Shearer / Truthout / June 15, 2011

[Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (Bloomsbury Press, 2011). Reprint Edition, Trade Paperback, 368 pp., $18.]

Merchants of Doubt is a very well-researched book about a small group of scientists and scientific advisers to the U.S. government who transitioned from their role as Cold War warriors supporting nuclear weapons to ideologically-motivated “contrarians” battling anything they saw as a threat to liberty and free enterprise, even if that meant the science on acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer.

While many books have looked at the misinformation campaigns around issues such as tobacco and climate change, Oreskes and Conway take it one step further, locating some of the key players in multiple issues and situating them as products of a particular history: defenders of the American way of life against its perceived enemies, whether it be communists and socialists or environmentalists and science.

The authors are well-suited for the task as both are historians of science — Oreskes at UC San Diego and Conway at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They bring together considerable evidence to support the argument that a very small group of people has been particularly influential in shaping U.S. public opinion and policy on a number of very important issues.

Oreskes and Conway particularly focus on physicists Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and William Nierenberg, as well as a few other contrarian scientists, many of them connected to the politically conservative think tank, the Marshall Institute.

The book starts off by describing the efforts of some of these scientists in support of nuclear weapons and, eventually, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1983, to strike down nuclear ballistic missiles in the air.

The book examines how these efforts split the scientific community between those pushing for the phasing out of nuclear weapons (such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, founded in 1969) and the “political hawks” like Nierenberg and Singer who favored nuclear weapons and thought SDI was not only feasible but necessary for U.S. dominance.

Oreskes and Conway lay out how the latter began to see those opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons as traitors playing into Soviet hands. This set the stage for the contrarian crusade against science that threatened their worldview, from insisting that SDI was feasible (despite all evidence to the contrary, with SDI eventually derided by many in the U.S. as “Star Wars”), to challenging the research on nuclear winter.

Physicist Frederick Seitz, founding chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute. Photo by Laura Gilpin / AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives / Truthout.

The book then looks at how this small group of scientists went on to battle the scientific consensus on a number of issues, including the effects of acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, the dangers of cigarette smoke, and the existence of anthropogenic climate change.

The authors also present some of the revisionist arguments against Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring (1962), showing how contrarians are casting doubt on even supposedly settled issues such as the harmful effects of the synthetic pesticide DDT, as part of a broader attack on the legitimacy of the environmental movement and government regulation.

With all these issues, the authors demonstrate how these scientists — and their connections to think tanks and industries — show up again and again, playing a key role in the “deliberate obfuscation” of public understanding of science to try and prevent or weaken government policy.

Yet how much actual scientific research did these contrarians conduct on the subjects in which they disagreed with consensus? Little to none. The authors are therefore also critical of the media for its increasingly “He said, she said” style of reporting that often promotes the appearance of authentic scientific debate where it does not actually exist.

In exploring the history, Oreskes and Conway reveal deeper underlying motivations for challenging scientific consensus. One might be excused for thinking that the small group of people who have challenged the scientific consensus on tobacco smoke, the hole in the ozone layer, and the existence of climate change are motivated by money or attention. Maybe many of them are.

But Oreskes and Conway show that some were and still are motivated out of a deep sense of political ideology, brewing during the Cold War years and eventually displaced onto any efforts to institute government regulation of the “free market” within the U.S. — the internal Cold War.

Oreskes and Conway note that, in delaying public understanding of science to prevent regulation, people like Seitz and Singer allow problems to fester, eventually resulting in exactly what they fear most: governmental regulation to prevent public health problems like runaway acid rain or ozone depletion, which might have been effectively dealt with if the science was acknowledged and measures were taken earlier.

But I would take it farther than Oreskes and Conway. As the authors note, the great irony is that most of these “merchants of doubt” oppose government regulation and yet have historically worked for the government. In other words, these scientific advisers have used their positions to stall or prevent democratic action on a host of serious issues, drawing upon their influence in government to try and impose their will.

In that way, I think the book indirectly highlights that these scientists and advisers became what they claimed to hate most: government-connected bureaucrats deciding what was best for the people.

[Christine Shearer is an editor at Left Eye on Books, where this article was first published. It was distributed by Truthout.]

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Margarita Alarcón : Five Reasons to Remember the Pentagon Papers

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles on Jan. 17, 1973. Ellsberg’s co-defendant, Anthony Russo is at center right. Photo by AP.

Five reasons to remember
the Pentagon Papers

By Margarita Alarcón / The Rag Blog / June 14, 2011

Call it the granddaddy of WikiLeaks. Four decades ago, a young defense analyst leaked a top-secret study packed with damaging revelations about America’s conduct of the Vietnam War.
[….]
The National Archives released the Pentagon Papers in full Monday and put them online, long after most of the secrets spilled. The release was timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971, prompting President Richard Nixon to try to suppress publication and crush anyone in government who dared to spill confidences.

Prepared near the end of Johnson’s term by Defense Department and private analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in U.S. history.

— Associated Press / June 13, 2011

HAVANA — Daniel Ellsberg served in the Pentagon under then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Ellsberg had been on duty on the evening of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting the incident to McNamara.

For those of you who are rusty on U.S./world history, the Gulf of Tonkin incident served as President Johnson’s legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and for the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

When Daniel Ellsberg, back in 1969, photocopied classified documents from the Pentagon to which he had access, he did so because he was disenchanted with the war his government was pulling his country deeper into; he felt he had to do something to stop the lying and protect the lives of so many that would be lost in the end.

The government of course wanted Ellsberg tried and convicted, but due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and the defense work of Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, charges against Ellsberg were dropped.

After his trail ended Ellsberg learned that there had been a plan by the CIA to drug him with LSD and have him appear completely incoherent in front of a mass audience. This “Ellsberg neutralization proposal” originated with Howard Hunt and was recounted in G. Gordon Liddy’s autobiography.

Now here comes the punch line of my rant: who did the CIA have on board to carry out this fiendish act? Well, turns out it was 12 Cuban-Americans no less! Ha! We’re everywhere! The good ones and the bad ones! I leave it to readers to decide which are which.

But as fate or karma would have it, it turns out that the lawyers who defended Ellsberg in one of the most important and decisive trials in U.S. history included a young fresh-out-of-law school attorney who also had the first name of Leonard.

Leonard Weinglass had already garnered a name for himself during the trial of the Chicago 8. But little did Lenny know during the trials of Tom Hayden and Daniel Ellsberg that Cubans would be following him till his dying day.

Weinglass’ last case, his last battle against the same windmills of gross governmental misconduct, involved five Cubans unjustly imprisoned in the U.S. for divulging information to Cuba and the United States on terrorist activities against their Cuban homeland — and against all those in the U.S., Cuba, and everywhere else, who wanted to see normal relations between our two countries.

So now, 40 years after The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers — which helped lead to the end of the war in Vietnam — wouldn’t it be great if another truth came to light and President Obama, with or without the help of The New York Times, freed the Cuban 5 and, in doing so, took the next step towards ending the U.S.-Cuba conflict?

[Margarita Alarcón Perea was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in New York City. She studied at Karl Marx Stadt in East Germany and Havana, and is a graduate of Havana University in linguistics. She has taught English translation and North American twentieth century literature, and worked in the Cuban music industry. She is currently a news analyst for Cubadebate in Havana and contributes to The Rag Blog and The Huffington Post. Maggie’s father is Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly. Read more articles by Margarita Alarcón on The Rag Blog.]

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