BOOKS / Karen Lee Wald : Cuba From the Other Side

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


Voices From the Other Side:
Keith Bolender’s oral history
of terrorism against Cuba

By Karen Lee Wald / The Rag Blog / April 10, 2011

[Voices From the Other Side: An Oral History Of Terrorism Against Cuba by Keith Bolender (Pluto Press, August 15, 2010) Paperback, 224 pp., $21.]

I first learned of Keith Bolender’s book Voices From the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba when the author reached out to me after reading an article I’d written on Luis Posada Carriles on The Rag Blog.

The article, “Posada Carriles and the Puppies That Got Away,” was based on an interview with a woman who almost became a victim, along with three children she was caring for, in one of the hotels Posada’s thugs bombed in 1997. The title came from the coded message used by one of Posada’s hired killers in an earlier bombing that destroyed a passenger plane in flight, killing all aboard. The telephone message was “A bus with 73 dogs went over a cliff and all perished.”

Bolender thought I might be interested in his book, an oral history, like mine, taken from many of the survivors of the 50-plus years of terrorism against Cuba waged by the United States and Cuba’s former ruling class.

I was.

I thought it would be helpful if people who are always hearing and reading about the “repression of dissidents” in Cuba and jump to their defense could also hear the other side: what happened to the thousands of people whose lives were affected by the actions of terrorists from inside and outside the country.

I thought it would put a human face on the statistics regarding the material and human damage caused by counterrevolutionaries and mercenaries who are euphemistically called “dissidents” or “anti-Castro militants.”

Voices From the Other Side does this. But it also does a great deal more.

As expected, the first chapter gives an overview of the multiple forms of terrorism carried out against Cuba in what Bolender calls “the unknown war.”

He talks about “the bombs have that destroyed department stores, hotel lobbies, theatres, famous restaurants and bars — people’s lives.” He talks about the first airline bombing in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and also reminds readers of “the explosion aboard a ship in Havana Harbor, killing and injuring hundreds.”

He tells readers about the 1960s attacks on defenseless rural villages and homes, of “teenagers tortured and murdered for teaching farmers to read and write.” He reminds us of the biological terrorism (the dengue fever epidemic) “that caused the deaths of more than 100 children.” And he adds new elements for those of us used to thinking of terrorism solely as shooting and bombing by referring to the “psychological horror that drove thousands of parents to willingly send their children to an unknown fate in a foreign country” (Operation Peter Pan).

This kind of overview has been done before by authors such as Jane Franklin. What Bolender adds here is the lifelong effect terrorist activities have had on the survivors — those left with hearing loss, stitched-up wounds and such, but, even worse, lifelong emotional scars. Survivors who tell of being nervous and jumpy 20, 30 or more years after being in a room where a bomb went off.

And the other kinds of “survivors”: mothers and fathers who for decades mourn the needless deaths of their children; siblings and children of those who were cut up, castrated, and lynched by “anti-Castro militants,” or went screaming to their fiery deaths in an airplane that was already in pieces before it crashed into the sea.

I want these stories to be in the hands of those well-meaning people who ask, “Why does the Castro government repress dissidents?” I want these people to understand what terrorists have done that makes Cubans today so unable to give them the free rein they demand to carry out their actions.

Bolender explains in the very beginning:

Since the earliest days of the revolution, Cuba has been fighting its own war on terrorism. The victims have been overwhelmingly innocent civilians. The accused have been primarily Cuban-American counter-revolutionaries — many allegedly trained, financed and supported by various American government agencies.

And he explains that throughout the island of Cuba “it is hard not to find someone who doesn’t have a story to tell of a relative or friend who has been a victim of terrorism. The personal toll has been calculated at 3,478 dead and 2,099 injured.”

This, of course, is something few on the outside realize, and he talks about why we don’t hear or read about it, about the political/ideological justification for so much cruelty. But he also talks about the real reasons — acknowledged by numerous U.S. administrations — for U.S.-backed and -financed terrorist acts against the island, information that is every bit as important as the humanization of the victims.

Preceded by a well-researched and evocative introduction by Noam Chomsky dealing with the history of and reasons for U.S. policy toward this upstart island nation that would dare to remain outside the grasp of U.S. hegemony, Bolender goes on to give readers a better understanding of Washington’s Machiavellian policies toward Cuba.

He starts off simply, with the well-known fact that “[s]ince the earliest days of Fidel’s victory, America has obsessed over this relatively insignificant third-world country, determined to eliminate the radically different social-economic order” that Castro’s revolution brought about. He describes the various excuses Washington has used since the earliest days of the Republic to justify its attempts to maintain dominance over the island nation.

“America at various times has portrayed Cuba as a helpless woman, a defenceless baby, a child in need of direction, an incompetent freedom fighter, an ignorant farmer, an ignoble ingrate, an ill-bred revolutionary, a viral communist” during the two centuries of the Monroe Doctrine. This history in and of itself is useful for those not already familiar with it.

Where the history gets more interesting is when this researcher uses quotes from U.S. leaders to show both why and how Washington attempted to get rid of Fidel’s revolution:

Richard Nixon, who, Bolender notes, “was one of the first to promote the theme of preventing the revolution from infecting others,” commented in 1962 on the need to “eradicate this cancer in our own hemisphere.” Nixon’s comment reminded me of an explanation offered years ago by a Cuban-American friend of mine, Tony Llanso: “The Cuban Revolution is like crab grass growing in your back yard. You have to pick crab grass because it spreads.”

But it was one particular “how” that I found intriguing. Bolender shows the vicious cycle of increasing repressive measures by the U.S. as Cuba increased its reforms on behalf of the poor majority of its citizens. This quickly — and intentionally — escalated to terrorism on the part of the United States against its tiny but audacious neighbor. And here Bolender is worth quoting at length:

As the rhetoric increased, terrorist acts were formulated and carried out. In partial response to the terror and other hostilities, the revolution became increasingly radicalized.

From the start, policy makers knew terrorism would put a strain politically and economically on the nascent Cuban government, forcing it to use precious resources to protect itself and its citizens. It was to be part of the overarching strategy of making things so bad that the Cubans might rise up and overthrow their government. Terrorism was the dirty piece of the scheme, along with the economic embargo, international isolation and unrelenting approbation.

American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights, became easy targets for critics.|

And as most of us have seen, this has been a very successful tactic. Bolender goes on:

CIA officials admitted early on in the war of terrorism that the goal was not the military defeat of Fidel Castro, but to force the regime into applying increased amount of civil restrictions, with the resultant pressures on the Cuban public. This was outlined in a May 1961 agency report stating the objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert actions designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime,” only to accelerate the “moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.”

The CIA acknowledged that in response to the terrorist acts the government would be “stepping up internal security controls and defense capabilities.” It was not projected the acts of terror would directly result in Castro’s downfall, (although that was a policy aim) but only to promote the sense of vulnerability among the [populace] and compel the government into increasingly radical steps in order to ensure national security.

In his book Bolender constantly uses direct U.S. sources for his analysis that the terrorism and other aggressive measures against Cuba were designed, at least in part, to force the Cuban government into a “state of siege mentality” that would simultaneously alienate part of the Cuban population, weaken liberal support abroad and serve as an easy target for most U.S. attempts to demonize the Cuban government.

“Former [CIA] Director Richard Helms,” Bolender tells us, “confirmed American strategy when he testified before the United States Senate in 1978; ‘We had task forces that were striking at Cuba constantly. We were attempting to blow up power plants. We were attempting to ruin sugar mills. We were attempting to do all kinds of things in this period. This was a matter of American government policy.’ ”

Most of us who’ve followed Cuba closely have long known the U.S. government did those things. What is more interesting is the “why.”

American experts were hoping the terrorist war would drive the Cuban government to increasingly restrictive security measures; implicit in this was to prove how incapable the regime leaders were. These terrorist acts would not be publicized, recognized nor acknowledged outside of Cuba, so national security policies were portrayed as paranoia, totalitarian and evidence of the repressiveness of Fidel’s regime. To this day the unknown war remains that way…

Here Bolender delves into the psychological warfare aspect of U.S. policy — and its effects:

In the early years Cuban officials faced the problem where they couldn’t tell which citizens supported the revolution, and which were inclined to assist the terrorist organizations or to commit terrorist acts. Everyone was treated as a potential threat.

The consequence, besides the enormous amount of economic resources diverted to combat this war [….] is a society that in the majority has accepted certain civil restrictions in order to ensure domestic security. It is the way the Cuban government has tried to identify the terrorists and to keep its citizens protected. It is the way the government has fought its war on terror.

Bolender reiterates that while the focus of his book is on the victims and their stories, he also wants to show

how these acts of terror changed the psyche of the young revolutionary government, struggling to maintain itself in the face of the destructive actions of its former citizens, directed and financed by the most powerful nation in the world. Traumatized by these acts, this small island nation took drastic steps in the face of constant acts of violence.

Those reactions to the terrorists, and the measures taken to protect the Cuban people, continue to influence national government policies to this day, and have greatly shaped how Cuba is perceived to the outside world. It is the price that has been paid by a society under siege for almost 50 years. A siege in part the result of the hundreds of acts of terrorism.

His analysis goes on to explain that

[t]he key element of Cuban policy against terrorism has been the need of unity for the sake of security, manifesting in a demand for social and political conformity. The consequence has been extensive surveillance systems, arrests for political crimes, a low tolerance for organized criticism or public displays of opposition, suppression of dissidents seen to have accepted material or financial aid from the United States, cases of institutionalized pettiness, travel restrictions, a state controlled press and the rejection of a more pluralistic society.

And we’ve all seen the effectiveness of the tactic that forced Cuba into this position — it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. The tight control the Cuban government has adopted as a means of survival, Bolender tells us, does in fact destroy much of its liberal support abroad.

The Canadian author still has hope, however. “The termination of American hostility, including the absolute guarantee of the end to any further terrorist attacks from counter-revolutionary exile organizations,” he believes, could “offer the Cuban government the chance to breathe, to manoeuvre without a knife at its throat, as Fidel Castro once remarked, and to attempt to develop Cuban society that was hoped for.”

Put in this context, Bolender’s book achieves far more than the important goal of putting a human face on the victims of terrorist acts and an understanding of why so many of the Cuban people hate the traitors within their midst who work hand in glove with those from Washington, Miami, and New Jersey who fund and carry out these actions. It gives us a new understanding of the psychological warfare the U.S. has been carrying out parallel to its economic and military war.

This is a book that should be in every library and on every progressive bookshelf. I urge people to buy it, read it, pass it on to others.

[Karen Lee Wald, author of Children of Che: Child Care and Education in Cuba (Ramparts Press), has written about Cuba for over four decades, including two from inside Cuba, and continues to regularly visit and report from the island. She circulates a private list, Cuba-Inside-Out, at googlegroups.com. This article was also posted to Truthdig.]

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John McMillian : For Manning Marable

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Manning Marable. Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images.

Renowned African-American scholar, Dr. Manning Marable, 60, died April 1 of complications from pneumonia, three days before the publication of his long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, a book he had been working on for the last 15 years.

Marable was founding director of the Department of African American Studies at Columbia University. Since 2002 he had directed Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History.

According to National Public Radio, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, “introduces new information that could reshape the widely accepted narrative” of Malcolm’s life.

For Manning Marable

By John McMillian / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011

In hindsight, this is embarrassing to admit, but here goes. When I first met Manning Marable in 1996, at age 26, I was nervous. Partly I was on edge because I was trying to make a big decision: Should I pursue a Ph.D. in African-American history at either Rutgers or Michigan, where I’d been offered full funding? Or, should I go to Columbia (my first choice), with no money upfront, but with some vague possibility of securing a teaching fellowship down the line?

Months before, Manning had already written me to say that if I were admitted to Columbia, he’d be keen to take me on as one of his graduate students. (That was a thrill unto itself!) Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder (and this is the embarrassing part): did he know I was white? And if so, would he have any doubts about my commitment to Black Studies, or my intellectual authority to work in the field?

Keep in mind, by then I’d read virtually all of Manning’s major works, including the earlier, more polemical stuff, like How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, where he declared, “Progressive white Americans must succeed in overturning their own racism.”

No problem there, I chuckled. I’d long made a point of challenging racism in others, and I’ve always tried (to the best of my ability) never to tolerate it in myself. But then, he added this:

“Nothing short of a commitment to racial equality and Black freedom such as that exhibited by the militant white abolitionist John Brown will be sufficient.”

Oh.

There was only one way to gauge Manning’s attitude, and that was to show up at his office. I made the haul all the way from mid-Michigan to New York City in my Chevy pickup truck. At that point in my life, I’d never been anywhere near an Ivy League campus. My first memory of the area around Columbia comes from driving up and down Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and perhaps a dozen cross streets in-between, again and again, trying to find a parking space.

As soon as I met Manning, though, all of my anxiety melted away. As anyone who knew him would agree, one of his most striking qualities was his affability. And although I probably would not have said this in print while he was still alive, the plain fact is, he really did look a lot like a teddy bear.

One thing I remember from that day is how vigorously he stressed the fact that he saw himself as both a scholar, and an activist. For him, the two vocations were inseparable. What’s more, he wanted me to know that when he became the founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) a few years earlier, he’d envisioned it as fundamentally a community resource.

And by “community,” he pointed out, “I don’t mean just Columbia, or even Morningside Heights.” He gestured toward the window of his sixth floor office, which afforded views to the north and the east. “We’re not in Morningside Heights. We’re in Harlem!”

To this end, he had a remarkable capacity for making time for virtually anyone who wanted something from him, even including the conspiratorial-minded guy with the rusty stains on his shirt (or was it blood?) who would occasionally show up unannounced at Manning’s door, asking to bend his ear.

Then there was this other fellow: he was never around, except for on the periodic occasions when the Institute would lay out a very nice buffet in honor of some distinguished guest speaker, in which case he would always be there, first in line, testing the capacity of his Styrofoam plates with enormous mounds of chicken wings, mini-quiches, cocktail shrimp, and whatever else. (Okay, I’ll confess: I once watched as Manning observed this guy from the corner of the room in silent disbelief, before finally sighing and rolling his eyes.)

Manning also seemed like one of the hardest workers in all of academia. In the mid-to-late 1990s, you might recall, a contingent of “black public intellectuals” was suddenly gaining more exposure than they’d probably ever dreamed of. After a long period during which black scholars were more likely to toil away in obscurity, with their contributions being slighted or overlooked, now at least a few of them — through a combination of intelligence, charisma, and moxie — seemed to be everywhere.

And while some celebrated the new visibility of people like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson, others sensed a certain entrepreneurialism in their approach. Sure, they could all talk a very good game, people used to grouse. Hell, put them in range of a microphone, and they’ll talk about anything! But when it came to scholarship, what did they actually do?

That was never quite my own view, but regardless: nobody ever credibly said such a thing about Manning. True, he made TV appearances and gave paid lectures (oh, how he must have loved Black History Month). But he was also an author of god-knows-how-many books and articles, the great bulk of which showcased his immersion in fields as diverse as history, sociology, political science, economics, and even literature.

His new, nearly 600 page opus, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is already being celebrated as an exhaustively researched tome, one that will completely upend our understanding of that fabled leader.

What an incredible exercise in self-restraint it must have been to keep plugging away on that biography for 15-odd years, all the while sitting on so many explosive revelations. I remember him excitedly making a few vague allusions to the discoveries he was making, way back in the day. Now we all know just what he was onto..

The past few days, I’ve been sad about the fact that I didn’t stay in better touch with Manning in recent years, though I can take some solace from the fact that about six weeks ago, I sent him a warmly inscribed copy of my first monograph. I have so many fond memories from the three-year period that I worked for him, but I’ll always treasure that first meeting the best. After listening to my concerns, putting me at ease, and making me laugh, he said something I did not expect: “I might be able to help you out.”

Five months later, I’d relocated to Manhattan, and I was meeting a considerable portion of my grad school expenses by working as his research assistant. (We collaborated on two books.) Without him, I’m not sure I’d have mustered the courage to go to Columbia, something that later turned out — without question — to be one of the great blessings of my life.

And yet whenever I tried to thank Manning for anything — whether for helping to pay for my education, or for buying me a sandwich (as he sometimes did), I always got the same response. He’d shrug, smile impishly, and say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m a socialist!”

[John McMillian is Assistant Professor of history at Georgia State University. His most recent book is Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford, 2011).] A version of this article was published at The Atlantic.]

Manning Marable. Photo from the New York Daily News.
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BOOKS / Lewis Wallace : Jordan Flaherty Chronicles Post-Katrina Resistance

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


Jordan Flaherty’s Floodlines:
Community and resistance in New Orleans

By Lewis Wallace / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011

See ‘Jena Six activist convicted, faces decades in prison’ by Jordan Flaherty, Below.

[Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six by Jordan Flaherty (Haymarket Books, 2010); 292 pp.; $16.]

Parts of the story are familiar. In late August, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Floodwaters broke the levees in New Orleans and the city was devastated — first by floods, then by a shamefully underwhelming response on the part of the federal, state, and local governments.

While tourists were picked up and shipped out, poor people of color and prisoners were left with no food, shelter, or support in the aftermath. Some sat in Orleans Parish Prison, still in lockdown, as the waters rose inside their cells. In the years to follow, the situation worsened for many and improved only for those who could afford to pay their own way through the so-called “recovery.”

Parts of the story are less familiar. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, groups ranging from young public school students to Palestinian and Vietnamese communities organized for the right to play a part in rebuilding the city. New projects arose, providing services ranging from women’s healthcare to expunging criminal records, fighting for public housing, defending New Orleans’ historic black culture, and creating alternatives to the brutal and racist criminal legal system in New Orleans Parish.

Although the long-term demands of these organizations were too often quashed, the stories of those who fought back after Katrina are as precious as they are little-known.

Luckily for us, writer and activist Jordan Flaherty was there. And Flaherty was not in New Orleans to observe or cover a story — he was there, in 2005 and in the years that followed, because he lives there. He was one of the people who did not evacuate during the storm, and literally watched from a rooftop as New Orleanians were abandoned by the government and smeared by the media as “looters” and criminals.

He was one of the people to seek out and record the stories of those trapped in prisons with no charges and no trial for weeks, months, and even years after Katrina. He was one of the rare people to expose the continuing torture of political prisoners at Angola Penitentiary, the targeting of transgender women as sex criminals, and the outrageously lousy defense lawyers who did little to help poor New Orleanians after the storm, sometimes sleeping through their own court appearances.

He was also the first journalist to report nationally on the story of the group of young men from rural Louisiana who came to be known as the Jena 6. These young African-American men were arrested for attempted murder after a fight erupted at school in response to white students hanging nooses from a tree in the schoolyard; they have since had their charges dropped or reduced, largely due to a surge of national attention.

Floodlines begins with a firsthand account of Flaherty’s experience directly after Hurricane Katrina, and proceeds to weave together personal accounts, cultural history, detailed records of activist work, and reflective analysis. The chapters cover education, immigration, prisoner organizing, housing rights, cultural activism, and the workings behind the displacement and disillusionment of so many New Orleanians.

As he shares these stories, he is clear about his own privilege as both a white person and as a journalist. While Flaherty is not afraid to editorialize and criticize, a tone of both humility and commitment permeates Floodlines.

In his chapter on prisons, Flaherty is characteristically straightforward about his view: “Prison makes us all less free — by breaking up families and communities, by dehumanizing the imprisoned both during and after their sentences, by perpetuating a cycle of poverty, and by making all citizens complicit in the incarceration of their fellow human beings.”

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the United States, and the threat of incarceration is a constant part of life for many black New Orleanians. Flaherty paints a vivid picture of the “cradle-to-prison pipeline,” the process by which impoverished young people of color are funneled towards a life in prison virtually from the time of birth. As organizer Robert Goodman puts it, “Every time a black child is born in Louisiana, there’s already a bed waiting for him at Angola State Prison.”

Goodman is part of a new organization called Safe Streets/Strong Communities. Founded in 2006, the group interviewed over a hundred people who had been locked up prior to Katrina. Flaherty says that when he heard some of their stories, he “felt a chill.”

The stories included children abandoned in lock-down during and after the storm; the warehousing of massive groups of people in open yards with no food, shelter, or space to defecate; and a public defender’s office so inept that even a Criminal District Court Judge called it “unbelievable, unconstitutional, totally lacking the basic professional standards of legal representation, and a mockery of what a criminal justice system should be in a western civilized nation.”

Katrina opened up space for increased policing and militarization even as the city slashed funds for indigent defense and social services.

While exposing injustice is a part of Flaherty’s thrust, Floodlines does not come across as a shocking exposé, the kind of thing that flashes across television screens for a day or two and then disappears, leaving a sense of powerlessness in its trail. Instead, the book reveals how the events we see unfolding in the news are part of a complex history of black cultures of resistance dating all the way back to the beginnings of slavery in the south.

Taken all together, Floodlines is a hopeful, revealing account of five years of hardship and displacement. Outsiders and insiders alike will benefit from Flaherty’s uniquely personal and unabashedly political account of some of the most important untold stories of our time.

[Lewis Wallace is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Left Turn and make/shift magazines. He also writes about music for an educational website called Shmoop.com and works as an anti-prison activist. This review was also published by Prison Legal News.]

Caseptla Bailey (left) and Catrina Wallace were active in the campaign to support the Jena 6. Their door was broken down by police while they slept. Photo by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog.

Jena Six activist convicted,
faces decades in prison

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog /April 1, 2011

Civil rights activist Catrina Wallace, who received national acclaim for her central role in organizing protests around the Jena Six case, was convicted March 31 of three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. She was taken from the courtroom straight to jail after the verdict was read, and given a $1 million bail. Her sentencing is expected to come next month.

Wallace, who is 30, became an activist after her teenage brother, Robert Bailey, was arrested and charged with attempted murder after a fight in Jena High School. Bailey and five others later became known as the Jena Six, and their cause became a civil rights rallying cry that was called the first struggle of a 21st century Civil Rights Movement.

Their case eventually brought 50,000 people on a march through the town of Jena, and as a result of the public pressure the young men were eventually freed. The six are all now in college or — in the case of the youngest — on their way. Wallace and her mother, Caseptla Bailey, stayed in Jena and founded Organizing in the Trenches, a community organization dedicated to working with youth.

Catrina Wallace was represented by Krystal Todd of the Lasalle Parish Public Defenders Office. The case was prosecuted by Lasalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, who also prosecuted the Jena Six case, and famously told a room full of students, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.”

The case was presided over by 28th District Judge J. Christopher Peters, a former Assistant District Attorney under Reed Walters. Peters is the son of Judge Jimmie C. Peters, who held the same seat until 1994. The 12-person jury had one Black member.

Wallace was arrested as part of “Operation Third Option,” which saw more than 150 officers, including a SWAT team and helicopters, storm into Jena’s Black community on July 9, 2009. Although no drugs were seized, a dozen people were arrested, based on testimony and video evidence provided by a police informant, 23-year-old convicted drug dealer Evan Brown.

So far, most of those arrested on that day have plead guilty and faced long sentences. Devin Lofton, who pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute, received 10 years. Adrian Richardson, 34, who pled guilty to two counts of distribution, received 25 years. Termaine Lee, a twenty-two-year-old who had no previous record but faced six counts of distribution, received 20 years.

Community members responded to the verdict with sadness and outrage. “We don’t have any help here,” said Marcus Jones, the father of Mychal Bell, another of the Jena Six youths. “Catrina tried to keep in high spirits leading up to the trial, but when a bomb like this is dropped on you, what can you do?”

Jones and others are calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate.

Wallace, a single mother, has three small children, aged 3, 5, and 10. The youngest child has frequent seizures.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times and Mother Jones. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org.

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Lamar W. Hankins : Libya and the ‘Humanitarian Intervention’

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

In 2009, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to meet face-to-face with Libyan president Moammar Gadhafi. Photo from AP.

Libya and the dilemma of
humanitarian military interventions

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011

The debate over U.S. efforts to work with NATO in what has been described as an essentially humanitarian effort to prevent Moammar Gadhafi from killing more Libyans underscores problems with U.S. foreign policy. It’s true, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed out, that “we don’t have an exit plan, that (Obama) hasn’t articulated a grand strategy, that our objectives are fuzzy, that Islamists could gain strength.”

Some will argue that we don’t have a consistent foreign policy. After all, we refused to intervene in the slaughter in Darfur, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. We did intervene in Kosovo 12 years ago and the outcome seemed to serve humanitarian goals, though our involvement was slow in coming. Ronald Reagan sent troops to Grenada on a mostly foolish humanitarian mission (with ridiculous cold war aspects), and George H. W. Bush prevented Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait a few years later.

What distinguished these interventions from those we passed on is that they were of limited scope and duration. Militarily, their goals and objectives were possible, and relatively easy to obtain. Sending American troops to Rwanda or the Ivory Coast would bog us down in a military situation that would likely result in as great a loss of life as we would have sought to prevent. Worse still, the involvement would likely not end for decades, as has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So Obama’s calculation seems to be that we will intervene if we have lots of help from other countries and alliances, if the possibility of a short-duration intervention is realistic, and if the chances of success appear great. No matter how compelling the suffering in other locales, we will not commit military might if these criteria are not met.

I don’t like the policy and I don’t like the alternatives. But the world is not an orderly place, where all problems are solvable. Sometimes there are nonmilitary steps that can be taken in various trouble spots around the globe if we have the will, which we do not have, for instance, in the case of preventing Israel from taking more land from Palestinians, which continues unabated by humanitarian concerns.

University of Colorado-Boulder law professor Paul Campos offered this analysis of the Libyan military campaign:

Perhaps it’s desirable, or even morally imperative, for Western nations in general, and America in particular, to enter another civil war in the Middle East. But the framers of the Constitution had very good reasons for making it difficult for America to go to war. They knew that even wars that begin with the best of intentions often end up being driven by the worst ones.

They also knew that while war is almost never in the interest of a nation’s people, it is often in the interest of a nation’s rulers, who reap the political and economic benefits of war while bearing little or none of its costs. That’s why they designed a system of barriers to action — which is, after all, what the rule of law is supposed to be — before politicians could send others off to kill and be killed in the name of the noble national goal of the moment.

While I take the constitutional requirements discussed by Professor Campos seriously and believe that the Congress should have a vigorous debate before the U.S. ever embarks on making war for whatever reasons, no matter how good those reasons seem to the executive or to me, I realize that the Congress has abdicated its constitutional authority with respect to war-making.

Since World War II, the Congress has not ever declared war, yet the U.S. has embarked on military campaigns in over 70 countries by executive fiat. Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress has the sole power “to declare war [and] grant letters of marque and reprisal.” And Article II, Section 2, provides that “The president shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

While it seems clear, from the history of the Constitutional Convention and the views of most of the drafters of the Constitution, that they intended for Congress alone to declare war, presidents nevertheless often act unilaterally, or after some minimal consultations or discussions with members of Congress.

These arguably competing provisions in Article I and Article II have created a constitutional conundrum that will always be used by presidents to engage in war unless we find a way to reconcile the two positions.

After tiring of war by Executive fiat, in 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Act in response to the prosecution of the Vietnam War by both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, a war that had proceeded without a congressional declaration for at least eight years with devastating consequences for both American soldiers and Vietnam fighters and civilians.

Under the War Powers Act, the president is supposed to obtain congressional approval of military action within 90 days after introducing troops into hostilities. Presidents have generally ignored the War Powers Act, using Article II, Section 2 as their constitutionally-mandated authority to send troops into combat. While a few Congressional voices have been raised periodically against such Constitutional abuses by the Executive, Congress as a whole has failed to resolve this Constitutional dilemma.

But candidate Barack Obama, as a U.S. senator in 2007, said, “the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Apparently, he has changed his mind.

The author William Blum identifies the following purposes used by presidents to take military actions. They do not include humanitarian concerns:

  • making the world safe for American corporations to do business;
  • enhancing the financial status of U.S. defense contractors who have contributed generously to members of congress;
  • preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the American capitalist model;
  • extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a “great power” — a sort of exceptionalist argument that gives the U.S. license to do as it pleases.

While I believe that there is a humanitarian impulse that guides some U.S. foreign policy, I always look for other reasons, as well. Usually, I find another rationale from Blum’s list that is in play when we use our military might anywhere in the world.

In the case of Libya, Sen. Bernie Sanders has revealed in the last few days that Gadhafi’s Central Bank of Libya owns a 59% stake in the Arab Banking Corporation (ABC), which is based in Bahrain and has two branches in New York City. The ABC received at least 45 emergency, low-interest loans (0.25%) from the Federal Reserve between December, 2007 and March, 2010.

The U.S. Treasury Department has exempted the ABC from economic sanctions that have been applied to Gadhafi’s regime. Such contradictory relations with Libya make Obama’s military actions even more perplexing and suggest that Blum’s fourth reason for war may be in play.

The more we understand about our relations with Libya and other countries, the more difficult it is to accept Obama’s humanitarian rationale. As syndicated columnist David Sirota has pointed out, U.S. foreign policy had mostly ignored the humanitarian crises in Egypt before the recent fall of Mubarak, a dictator that we warmly supported financially and militarily for over 30 years.

We consider the totalitarian Saudi royal family a friend and ally, and our government continues to praise Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, as a reformer even as he slaughters his own people. Sirota sees the Libya war-making as related to oil, defense contracts, and the “Pentagon’s brand-new Africa Command establishing its first foothold on the resource-rich continent, … but it is not primarily about saving lives.”

Given these contradictions and the seemingly unassailable facts of U.S. interventions for nearly 65 years and the inability of the Congress to assert itself to limit the Executive’s war-making powers, the most palatable policy to me is one that involves cooperative international efforts to protect the helpless from slaughter or death.

Building and strengthening these international cooperative humanitarian efforts needs more attention and, if done properly, at least will not subject the U.S. to hatred and retribution for imposing our will in the pursuit of our own geopolitical objectives.

While I am not sanguine about what we are doing in Libya, it is a far less destructive policy than were the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is faint praise, but until Congress begins to care more about foreign affairs than it does about its domestic agenda, we cannot expect fealty to Constitutional principles.

[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.]

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Louis Bergeron : A Practical Vision for Global Sustainable Energy

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

L.A. Cicero Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering At Stanford University. Photo from L.A. Cicero.

It will take concerted effort:
A practical vision for alternative energy

By Louis Bergeron / Stanford Report / April 7, 2011

A new study — co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi — analyzing what is needed to convert the world’s energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today’s technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy.

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources — nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today — why wouldn’t you do it?

According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

“Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources,” said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. “It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will.”

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology, and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters — no more natural gas or coal — and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water, and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water, and solar, and by 2050, all preexisting energy production would be converted as well.

“There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering.

“We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure — for all purposes — with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years,” said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

“When you actually account for all the costs to society — including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today,” Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide “base load” energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

“The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle,” he said. “If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand.”

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

“One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites,” said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

“With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can’t use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management,” he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

“For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch,” Jacobson said. “Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those.”

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal. and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water, and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world’s land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world’s land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

“Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming,” Jacobson said. “The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world’s energy is less than the area of Manhattan.” If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

“This really involves a large scale transformation,” he said. “It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system.”

“But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies,” Jacobson said. “We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society.”

[Mark Z. Jacobson is the director of Stanford’s Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. This article was originally published by the Stanford University News on January 26, 2011.]

Professor Mark Z. Jacobson:
Global clean energy is within reach:

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Jonah Raskin : Michael T. Klare on War and Terrorism

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Michael T. Klare. Still image from Klare’s Blood and Oil.

A Rag Blog interview:
Author Michael T. Klare on terrorism,
paper tigers, Vietnam, and the Pentagon:

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2011

He grew up singing the lyrics to the anti-war ballad, “Ain’t gonna study war no more,” but all his adult life he’s studied war again and again. Since 1974, when his first book, War Without End, was published, until the present, Michael T. Klare has written 14 books about war, warfare, and weapons. No major war and few minor skirmishes in which the U.S. has been involved since the 1960s have escaped his critical gaze.

Perhaps before anyone else in his field of study, he saw that, even as the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam, Pentagon generals and U.S. cabinet members began to plan future wars. Klare has aimed to keep pace with them and to alert the public to the next global conflagration. He’s written about nuclear war, guerrilla warfare, and counterinsurgency, and he has exposed the machinations of the weapons industry in books such as American Arms Supermarket and A Scourge of Guns. Since the start of the 21st century, he has focused increasingly on global battles for control of oil especially in the Middle East.

A professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and the defense correspondent for The Nation, Klare speaks frequently about war and peace, and the economics and politics of the American Empire. Along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and others, he has helped to educate Americans about the realities of power, wealth, and the corruption behind the promise of American freedom and democracy.

In the wake of the recent upheavals in Egypt and Morocco and the bombing of Libya, the time seemed right for an interview with an old friend, college classmate, and the foremost global expert on “War Without End,” to borrow the title of his first book.

Q: For nearly half-a-century, you have been a student of war. What do you think the Pentagon has learned in that time?

A: That public opinion at home matters, and that it must shape the media coverage of military issues as much as possible to ensure public support for what it regards as its primary mission. We see this, for example, in Defense Secretary Gates’s reluctance to become involved in a ground war in Libya, which he (correctly, I think) believes would not enjoy public support.

Q: What have you learned in the past 50 years?

A: My biggest discovery has been the centrality of resource competition in warfare. During the Cold War, it seemed that ideology was the driving force for war. I now see that as an anomaly. Since the dawn of “civilization,” humans have fought wars for land, water, slaves, furs, timber, spices, oil, and other resources.

Q: What surprises you the most about the current state of warfare in the world?

A: The degree to which wars are being fought with the simplest weapons — small arms and grenade launchers — rather than the super-sophisticated weapons that dominate military planning in the U.S. and other advanced industrial powers.

Q: Are you a pacifist?

A: No. My father fought in the Pacific during World War II and told me (as a young child) of his belief in the need to resist Fascism and Nazism, and I’ve always felt that I would have done the same if I were in his shoes. I haven’t seen any wars since then justifying the use of force by the United States on that scale.

Q: Do you think that Obama has turned out to be a copy of Bush when it comes to war or is he a different kind of warrior?

A: Obama is more like Bush I than Bush II. He is unwilling to use force in a preemptive or unilateral fashion, as in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, but he’s willing to use force in conjunction with other countries when he feels vital U.S. interests are at stake (the threat from terrorism in the case of Afghanistan) or fundamental human values (as in Libya).

Q: Secretary of Defense Gates recently told cadets at West Point that any military men who urge the president to send large numbers of ground troops to Asia or Africa should have his head examined. Do you agree with him?

A: Totally.

Q: You grew up in a time when there were fears of nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. That never happened. Why?

A: We came very close to a nuclear war at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the leaders of both sides were faced with the very real prospect of mutual annihilation — and decided that nothing could justify such an outcome. After that, both sides took steps to reduce the risk of a nuclear conflict.

Q: Could you say how you were shaped in your thinking by the war in Vietnam?

A: I felt intuitively that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was not honorable like World War II, but rather was driven by crass realpolitik. At that time, I was studying to be an architect, but I found I couldn’t concentrate on my architectural studies and needed to learn about U.S. foreign policy and the strategies that led us into Vietnam. I wound up becoming a student of peace and conflict studies.

Q: Chairman Mao said the U.S. was a paper tiger. That doesn’t seem to be the case does it?

A: Mao was wrong about many things. He did understand, however, that the U.S. government is inhibited from its use of military force by U.S. public opinion and the U.S. public’s reluctance to become involved in a major land war in Asia. When U.S. public opinion supports the use of military force, as was the case in the first Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) and to a considerable extent in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (for the first few months), the United States is no paper tiger.

Q: The U.S. seems capable of carrying on wars in at least half-a-dozen countries at the same time? How much longer can it go on doing so?

A: I don’t agree with that statement. President Bush found that the War in Iraq consumed so many resources that he abandoned the war in Afghanistan — hence the revival of the Taliban — and now President Obama finds that he must draw down U.S. forces in Iraq in order to step up the war in Afghanistan. Modern warfare — as conducted by the U.S. military — is enormously expensive and the U.S. no longer has the economic wherewithal to fight many wars at once.

Q: Will the so-called war on terrorism ever end?

A: Terrorism is a tactic used by irregular forces without access to funds and armies and will never go away. Washington’s “Global War on Terror” will end when some future administration discovers a greater danger — China, global warming, mass migrations, or whatever.

Q: Are terrorists the new equivalent of the old Communists?

A: This seems to have been the case after 9-11, but in the absence of any similar event since then, and the continuing deterioration of the U.S. economy, I don’t sense that it still holds true for most people.

Q: What will be the long-term repercussions of the war on terrorism?

A: A systematic decline in civil liberties enjoyed by most American citizens, along with an abiding suspicion and dislike of the United States in the Muslim world.

Q: You were part of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Are there lessons for today from those movements?

A: At that time, we largely viewed people in the Armed Forces with suspicion and contempt, if not downright hostility. Over the years, I have come to appreciate that most people in uniform are decent and believe in the value of what they are doing. I feel nothing but sympathy for the soldiers who have fought three or more dangerous, grueling tours of duty in Iraq and/or Afghanistan for what I consider to be misconceived strategic purposes.

Q: Do you own a gun? Have you ever fired a weapon?

A: No and no. But I have accompanied U.S. soldiers on live-fire combat exercises and have seen the effects of U.S. military firepower up close.

Q: The U.S. never seems to change its basic strategy of supporting dictators and dictatorships around the world. Is that how you see it?

A: Since World War II, American leaders have supported authoritarian regimes because they believed it was in America’s best interests to do so. They believed that the damage done to the societies involved was outweighed by the benefits received by the United States. The U.S. will have to abandon this policy in the face of global hostility. We are already seeing the beginning of the end of this policy in the Middle East.

[Jonah Raskin is a prominent author, poet, educator, and political activist. His recent books include Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California and The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution.]

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Ted McLaughlin : Can an All-White GOP Win in 2012?

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Electoral College breakdown for 2008.

Can the GOP win in 2012
with only white votes?

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2011

This country was generally controlled by the Republican Party in the years between 1980 and 2008. Republicans controlled the White House for 20 of those 28 years — Reagan (eight years), Bush I (four years), Bush II (eight years). Even during the eight years of Democrat Bill Clinton the Republicans controlled the Congress and were able to make sure that Republican economic policies remained intact.

These were good years for the rich and for corporations. Taxes on both were continually being reduced, unions lost much of their protection and power, and both businesses and the stock market saw much regulation disappear. The theory of the Republicans was called trickle-down economics, and it said that allowing the corporate interests to make ever larger profits would result in much of those new profits being reinvested, creating new jobs and a rising income and wealth for all Americans.

It didn’t work. Instead of reinvestment, most of the money just went into ever-growing corporate bank accounts and enormous management bonuses. The rich got much richer while almost nothing “trickled down” to the rest of America. This set up the largest disparity of wealth and income between the rich and the rest of America that had been seen since before the Great Depression, and like in 1929, the economy crashed in 2007 with many millions of jobs being lost.

This resulted in a Democratic victory in 2008, and that scared the heck out of corporate interests. They were afraid they might see a new era of regulation to rein in their unbridled greed, and (horror of horrors) might actually have to start paying their fair share of taxes. They had enough Republicans left in the Senate to block any real change, but they knew they had to do something to return their Republican buddies to power.

These right-wing corporate moguls (such as the Koch brothers) decided they needed to create a “movement.” Using right-wing organizations they had created they funded and organized the teabagger movement. They tried to pass this off as a grassroots movement of dissatisfied ordinary Americans, but it didn’t take long for the corporate funding and organizational ties to become known.

I really think these corporate founders meant for the new “movement” to be an anti-regulation and anti-tax movement. But once it got started and needed members, some people were accepted into the teabagger movement who had a different agenda. These were the racists (who were unhappy with an African-American being president) and their brothers in the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim crowd. And there were enough people in these groups to make up a large part of the teabaggers and forever color their purpose and agenda.

The teabaggers joined with the neocons and religious fundamentalists and quickly took over the Republican Party. The Republicans already had an image problem, being composed almost entirely of whites, and this just became worse when these radical groups seized control and began to drum moderates out of the party. The result is a party that is not just made up of whites, but that is viewed as having anti-minority policies (by most minorities and many whites).

The Republicans were able to overcome this in the 2010 elections because of massive corporate spending in the election and a reduced turnout. But the turnout is unlikely to be that small in the presidential election year of 2012. Since the Republicans are not likely to receive any significant minority vote in 2012, the real question now is can they win with just a large white vote? And how large will that white vote have to be for them to be successful?

The National Journal has tried to answer that question, and I believe they have done a pretty good job of showing just how big a percentage of whites in each state President Obama needs to win election. They have done a state-by-state breakdown on this because, due to the Electoral College, state results and not the popular vote is the deciding factor.

As the map above shows, the Republicans won 22 states and the Democrats won 28 states. In 19 of those states Obama won at least 50% of the white vote. In the other nine he won less than 50% of the white vote, but when added to the minority vote it made up a majority of those state’s voters.

Using a variety of sources (2000 and 2010 census, 2008 American Community Survey, exit polling from the 2008 election), the National Journal has come up with figures for each state. In the list below the figure in parentheses shows the percentage of whites Obama got in 2008. The next figure is the percentage of whites he will need to carry the state in 2012 (marked in red), and the last figure is the amount of the white vote he will need to carry the state if he loses at least 10% of the minority vote he had in 2008 (an unlikely scenario considering the racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim feelings now associated with the Republican Party). The * marks the states Obama carried in 2008. Here are the state-by-state figures:

  • Hawaii* (70%) 15.8% – 26.7%
  • Vermont* (68%) 49.6% – 50.0%
  • Rhode Island* (58%) 41.2% – 43.3%
  • Maine* (58%) 50.1% – 50.3%
  • Washington* (57%) 47.8% – 49.3%
  • Oregon* (57%) 49.5% – 50.2%
  • Massachusetts* (57%) 40.4% – 43.0%
  • Wisconsin* (54%) 46.6% – 47.7%
  • New Hampshire* (54%) 49.7% – 50.1%
  • Minnesota* (53%) 48.2% – 49.1%
  • Delaware* (53%) 35.6% – 38.8%
  • New York* (52%) 32.6% – 36.6%
  • New Jersey* (52%) 41.4% – 44.3%
  • California* (52%) 33.3% – 38.2%
  • Michigan* (51%) 41.8% – 43.8%
  • Iowa* (51%) 46.0% – 47.0%
  • Illinois* (51%) 34.0% – 37.6%
  • Connecticut* (51%) 35.3% – 38.4%
  • Colorado* (50%) 45.3% – 47.1%
  • Pennsylvania* (48%) 41.2% – 43.5%
  • Maryland* (47%) 25.2% – 30.9%
  • Ohio* (46%) 43.8% – 45.6%
  • Nevada* (45%) 35.3% – 39.5%
  • Montana (45%) 48.2% – 49.0%
  • Indiana* (45%) 44.6% – 46.0%
  • North Dakota (42%) 47.8% – 48.5%
  • New Mexico* (42%) 27.2% – 34.8%
  • Missouri (42%) 42.3% – 44.3%
  • Florida* (42%) 39.6% – 43.0%
  • West Virginia (41%) 49.0% – 49.5%
  • South Dakota (41%) 46.4% – 47.4%
  • Kansas (40%) 49.4% – 50.1%
  • Arizona (40%) 46.7% – 48.8%
  • Virginia* (39%) 33.5% – 37.6%
  • Nebraska (39%) 47.9% – 48.6%
  • Kentucky (36%) 45.9% – 47.3%
  • North Carolina* (35%) 33.9% – 37.7%
  • Tennessee (34%) 43.2% – 45.0%
  • Idaho (33%) 48.5% – 49.3%
  • Wyoming (32%) 51.5% – 51.9%
  • Alaska (32%) 47.5% – 49.3%
  • Utah (31%) 48.4% – 49.2%
  • Arkansas (30%) 42.9% – 44.8%
  • Oklahoma (29%) 48.0% – 49.4%
  • Texas (26%) 34.9% – 39.6%
  • South Carolina (26%) 32.4% – 36.3%
  • Georgia (23%) 25.3% – 30.8%
  • Louisiana (14%) 27.8% – 33.0%
  • Mississippi (11%) 21.1% – 27.2%
  • Alabama (10%) 25.1% – 30.6%

The Republicans thought they could fraternize with the teabaggers to win an election and then go on about their business. They were wrong (as were the corporate moguls who thought they could use the teabaggers). The teabaggers and their unsavory cohorts have now taken over the Republican Party and tarnished it with a racist and anti-minority image even worse than it already had.

Now they have painted themselves into a corner. They must win, if they can, with only white votes. Can they do it? It is unlikely, but it is just within the realm of possibility. But it’s going to become more unlikely with each future election, since the minority population is growing much faster than the white population.

Unless the Republicans can rid themselves of the teabaggers and other racist elements they may well be charting themselves a course to future extinction.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Ed Felien : Obama and the Lies About Libya

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Mike Keefe / Denver Post / inToon.com

What’s really up in Benghazi?
Obama’s lies about Libya

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / April 5, 2011

Barack Obama tried to explain the U. S. war against Libya on Monday, March 28, and he said a number of things that simply are not true.

He said, “Gaddafi has lost the confidence of his people.” Compared to most other Arab countries, Gaddafi seems to enjoy widespread if not universal support. The city of Benghazi is an isolated exception. Thomas C. Mountain has been following events in Libya for 25 years. Here is his assessment:

In 1969 when Col. Gaddafi came to power by overthrowing the Libyan king in a military coup, Libyans were one of the poorest people in the world with an annual per capita income of less than $60.

Today, thanks to the “Arab Socialism” policy of the government as well as bountiful petroleum exports, the Libyan people enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world. Most Libyan families own their own homes and most Libyan families own an automobile.

The free public health system in Libya is one of the best in the Arab world and Libya’s free education system up to the graduate level is as good if not better than any other in the region.

So the question is, why has a revolt broken out?

The answer, which I have been intensely researching for the past month is not a simple one.

The revolt started in Benghazi in eastern Libya. A very important point not mentioned anywhere in the international media is the fact that due to geographic location, being one of the closest points to Europe from the African continent, Benghazi has over the past 15 years or so become the epicenter of African migration to Europe. At one point over a thousand African migrants a day were pouring into Libya in hopes of arranging transport to Europe.

The human trafficking industry, one of the most evil, inhumane businesses on the planet, grew into a billion dollar a year industry in Benghazi. A large, vicious underworld mafia set down deep roots in Benghazi, employing thousands in various capacities and corrupting Libyan police and government officials. It has only been in the past year or so that the Libyan government, with help from Italy, has finally brought this cancer under control.

With their livelihood destroyed and many of their leaders in prison, the human trafficking mafia have been at the forefront in funding and supporting the Libyan rebellion. Many of the human trafficking gangs and other criminal elements in Benghazi are known for racist pogroms against African guest workers where over the past decade they regularly robbed and murdered Africans in Benghazi and its surrounding neighborhoods.

Since the rebellion in Benghazi broke out several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian, and Eritrean guest workers have been robbed and murdered by racist rebel militias, a fact well hidden by the international media.

Benghazi has also long been a well-known center of religious extremism. Libyan fanatics who spent time in Afghanistan are concentrated there and a number of terrorist cells have been carrying out bombings and assassinations of government officials in Benghazi over the past two decades. One cell, calling itself the Fighting Islamic Group, declared itself an Al Queda affiliate back in 2007. These cells were the first to take up arms against the Libyan government.”

Obama said, “Gaddafi chose to escalate his attacks.” From the outset the Libyan revolt was different from the rest of the nonviolent revolts in the Middle East and North Africa: it was a violent revolt led by gangster elements and Islamic fundamentalists. The press has conveniently ignored this distinction.

Obama said, “I authorized military action to stop the killing and enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1973.” The very first statement of the UN resolution says, “1. Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians;” The U.S. has spearheaded an offensive against Libyan forces in direct violation of a ceasefire and an end to violence.

The resolution, “Decides to establish a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to help protect civilians;” The U.S. with its allies has established air superiority, but it is not complying with the ban on all non-humanitarian flights. It is not possible to verify, but it is very likely that the U.S. is sending mercenaries and arms to aid the rebels in direct violation of the UN Resolution establishing an arms embargo.

Obama said he had promised “we would not put ground troops into Libya.” While it is obviously true that no combat troops in uniform have landed on “the shores of Tripoli,” it seems very likely that with hundreds of thousands of paid mercenaries in the immediate area and tons of military hardware, the U.S. is most certainly playing a covert support role to the rebels with boots and guns on the ground.

And the Obama administration has admitted that CIA operatives have been on the ground with the rebels (in violation of the UN resolution) for more than three weeks.

Obama said, “Our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives.” Clearly the mission is to support the rebels, continue advancing to Tripoli and overthrow Gaddafi.

Then Obama tried to articulate the Obama Doctrine to justify intervention,

Some question why America should intervene at all — even in limited ways — in this distant land. They argue that there are many places in the world where innocent civilians face brutal violence at the hands of their government, and America should not be expected to police the world, particularly when we have so many pressing concerns here at home.

In Bahrain the King brought in foreign troops from Saudi Arabia to fire on protesters, and the U.S. did nothing. There have been demonstrations against the feudal autocracies in Morocco and Saudi Arabia and the U.S. did nothing. We have been mildly critical of President Saleh, but we continue to supply him with guns and technical support to suppress dissent. We are outspoken against Syria because Syria, like Libya, is a socialist country.

Most people in the world understand that the main reason the U.S. and NATO want to bring down the Libyan government is because they produce millions of gallons of oil, and a more sympathetic government would make it more profitable for American and British oil companies to do business there.

Obama concluded his explanation by saying, “That is why we are going after al Qaeda wherever they seek a foothold.” This was the most bizarre lie of the evening. Gaddafi has been fighting al Qaeda since 1995. Al Qaeda elements were part of the Benghazi uprising. We are allied with al Qaeda. They are a major part of the rebels.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, who fought against the U.S. in Afghanistan, said he has recruited around 25 men to fight against Gaddafi. According to Praveen Swami of the Guardian, “U. S. and British government sources said Mr. Al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996.”

Obama knows we are allied with al Qaeda. He knows there has been a civil war in Libya between the secular, feminist, and socialist government of Gaddafi and Islamic fundamentalists for almost 20 years.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. The major theme of American foreign and domestic policy for the last hundred years has been anti-communism. From the intervention against Russia in the 1920’s and the Red Scare in the U.S., through the Cold War and the McCarthy hearings, American foreign and domestic policy has been driven by a defense of capitalism and a hatred of socialism or communism.

That fixation and oil are the reasons we intervened against the Baath Socialist government in Iraq. And those are the reasons we are intervening against the government of Libya.

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly.]

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Marc Estrin : Pea of the Month

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from OB Rag.

PEA OF THE MONTH

“Keep your eye on the pea.” “What pea? Where?” “The one under the shell, this shell, here. Got it?” “Yeah.” “OK. Now watch carefully.”

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / April 5, 2011

First The Holy Trinity spoke only of imposing a no-fly zone. That — and “all necessary measures” — code for military action — to protect innocent civilians against Gaddafi’s forces.

It’s widely understood that “a no-fly zone” is most often the first step towards broader military engagement, and adding the UN license for unlimited military escalation was crucial to getting the U.S. on board. The “all necessary measures” language also appears to be the primary reason five Security Council members abstained. For Russia, China, Germany, India and Brazil, that phrase meant giving the Pentagon and NATO a blank check backed by UN legitimacy.

Some supporters of the resolution insisted on explicitly excluding a “foreign occupation force.” But any U.S., British, or French troops arriving in Libya could easily be disguised as an “assistance team” or “training mission” or any diplomatic pseudonym.

After getting support from international bodies on that understanding the Trinity immediately began to wage war against Libyan military forces, and whoever was nearby, a level of direct U.S., British, French, NATO and other international military intervention which went far beyond the “no-fly zone but no foreign intervention” that the rebels wanted, escalating the militarization of the entire region and internationalizing the military battle.

In yet another breach of international law, the president announced an “Obama doctrine” — an approach to situations where U.S. action is not imperative but desirable, in concert with the international community.

Then, to smear the blame, he shifted command of the no fly zone over to NATO — a front for U.S. military control — itself commanded by U.S. admiral James Stavridis.

The claim is that UN Resolution 1973 “allows everything except boots on the ground.”

So why are twenty-two hundred Marines and sailors from Camp Lejeune preparing to deploy off the coast of Libya? And who in Libya is gathering intelligence to call in all the air strikes? Those CIA trainers on the ground probably wear boots.

And who are the rebels we are supporting at the current cost of $100 million/day? It seems that the newly denominated rebel leader, Khalifa Hifter, has spent the last 20 years living just outside Washington, ten minutes from Langley, and with no clear means of support.

NATO, BTW, may order ground forces into Libya, Adm. James Stavridis admits. He recently told Congress that “while allied forces were not yet considering the deployment of troops on the ground in Libya, it was a possibility.”

Some have termed this mission creep. To me, it seems more like mission bait and switch.

The great American pastime

If one follows the money flow, the great American game is surely no longer baseball, but rather Bait ‘n Switch. Americans, for all their smarts around sports, are mindless suckers for various shell and pea games, in which they are always the victims.

Some peas begin with P’s — protect, preserve; others don’t — terrorism and defense, for example. Oh, here’s a good one: petroleum. When a P-word is mentioned, we seem to shift instantly from cognitive to limbic thinking.

Jon Stewart, though of somewhat suspicious politics, ran a segment which hilariously captures this behavior. His P-word is “squirrel.” (Begin at 4.00 minutes, and watch to the end — another 4 min).

What is one face of squirrel for us? The immediate equating of intervention with military intervention. We’ve got the biggest, most expensive hammer, so why diddle around? The UN resolution calls for an immediate ceasefire, for negotiations to reduce rather than escalate the level of bloodshed,– all sidelined or ignored as soon as direct military engagement was on the table. And for us, it would have to be on the table before we’d agree to play. “All necessary measures.” And now, of course, it’s too late.

Bait ‘n switch

I thought you might like to see it in action. A quite cool piece of street con. Here it is in its pure form. You might want to turn the sound off to better concentrate.

Slick, huh? What’s at play here is pure technique, leaving out the most obvious dimension of baiting. Here it is in street context:

You’ll notice the strong possibility that there is more than one perp. Given the particular surroundings, there may even be more. The TOSSER challenges the PLAYER to bet, say $20 on guessing which shell the pea is under. The first to volunteer is the SHILL — and by God, he wins, and the TOSSER actually pays up, saying that one was too easy, and he will make the next one harder.

“Harder?” an interested sucker in the audience thinks. “Maybe I should hold off to see what harder is.” So he does, giving SHILL #2 a chance to bet. And he also finds the pea, and now the sucker PLAYER (who had guessed right, too), goes for it — maybe is allowed to win one — and the psychology cascades from there. The dream team may also include a LOOKOUT, depending on the place.

Want to see how the trick is done? I thought so:

The President’s version

The above is not simply infotainment, but will serve as an angle for analysis.

As the tosser does not invite people to be stung, the first thing Obama does not do is say “I am taking the country into yet another war.” No, we are not at war. The Obama administration prefers the term “kinetic military action.” Bait ‘n switch: No war? Sure, let’s go. Protect the People from a dictator’s terrorism.

Our goal is not “regime change,” but on the other hand, we wouldn’t be unhappy to see Ghadaffi go (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

Obama:

To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

Damn. Left out the mushroom cloud. But still, “Squirrel!” enough.

This from the Great Moral Leader who every day murders civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, and now Libya, but who turns a blind eye when “the great democracy in the Middle East,” Israel, murders ever more Palestinians and our sonsa bitches exercise population control in Algeria, Tunisia, the Emirates, and above all, Saudi Arabia.

Operation Odyssey Dawn, the current name of the game in this Culture of Deception and the Stragegy of Imposture. Obama the TOSSER; NATO, and arm-twisted countries of the Security Council; The European Union, the endorsing SHILLS; the mainstream media, the LOOKOUT. What an all-star cast for a heavy-duty con game.

What would a clear eye connected to a sense of history discern?

That the deadly goal of this charade is to assert Western control over the Arab rebellions, to slow them down, channel them, co-opt them, confiscating their spontaneity, preventing these popular movements from changing the basic political realities in the middle east, and in the best case, restoring the statue quo ante.

If George W looked too scary, we’ll give you the more user-friendly Obama to pursue and escalate the same goals. If another mideastern war seems too scary, let’s identify another Hitler (cf. Saddam) and begin a kinetic military action, not to replace him, of course, but to protect the innocent uprising of democracy.

Operation (sterile, precise) Odessey (heroic, adventurous, sexy) Dawn (America brings you morning around the world!).

Who wants to bet $20?

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Ivan Koop Kuper :
Stacy and Bunni: A Montrose Love Story

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

If Stacy Sutherland of the 13th Floor Elevators were alive he’d be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

Stacy Sutherland tombstone, Center Point, Texas. Image from Mindspring.com.

By Ivan Koop Kuper | The Rag Blog | March 31, 2011

HOUSTON — On the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in the east Montrose section of Houston is a vacant lot with an untended vegetable garden. The lot was the previous site of a Craftsman-era bungalow that was recently demolished due to neglect. In this house lived Stacy Sutherland, lead guitarist of Texas’ legendary psychedelic music pioneers, the 13th Floor Elevators, and if Sutherland were alive, he would be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

Known as the soft-spoken member of the band, when the introspective Sutherland did choose to express himself, he did so not only with his thick central Texas drawl, but also with his reverb-drenched leads that cut through the band’s wall of sound, and whose sustained notes seemed like they would never end.

His signature guitar style appeared on four 13th Floor Elevator albums and countless live performances from Austin to San Francisco. But Sutherland had another side of his personality he kept hidden deep inside and that was known only to those close to him.

Stacy Sutherland. Image from Emerald Wood Archives / Flickr.

Montrose is a neighborhood still in transition whose early 20th century architecture has all but vanished. Once considered a “hippie neighborhood,” by the late 1970s this inner city community was approaching the eve of gentrification, with each neglected bungalow soon to be torn down and replaced with several modern townhouses per city lot with no particular continuity regarding their style or design.

Long time Montrose resident and small business owner Robert Novotney recalls a Montrose in the 1970s when rents were “cheap” and a party atmosphere prevailed in the neighborhood seven days a week. He also recalls a “repressive” police force that was always on the lookout for “longhairs” to harass and search, as well as a neighborhood where home invasion by the criminal element was a common occurrence.

“I was broken into once and I had friends that were always getting broken into because they had these nice stereos that you could hear from the street because nobody had air-conditioning back then and they always kept their windows open and it invited burglaries,” Novotney said.

Stacy Sutherland’s all too short life journey can be traced back to his early days in central Texas, when he used to skip high school and practice guitar all day on the banks of the Guadalupe River that flowed through his family’s ranch in Kerr County. Sutherland also spent a brief period in Port Aransas one summer performing with the Lingsmen, a band that included future Elevator drummer John Ike Walton, as well as future bassist, Benny Lynn Thurman.

When Sutherland joined the 13th Floor Elevators, his personal journey took him from the live music clubs of Austin in the 1960s, to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium of San Francisco and eventually to Houston, where he found himself out of money, out of luck, and on the skids.

The 13th Floor Elevators performed together from 1965 to 1969. The band’s core membership and songwriting collaboration always included Sutherland on lead guitar; Roky Erickson, vocalist and rhythm guitar; and Tommy Hall, electric jug, lyricist, and spiritual advisor.

They were just your average Texas rock band that openly proselytized the use of the psychotropic drug LSD as a vehicle to higher consciousness, and who spread their message through their music and lifestyle. They were also one of the first bands of their era to use the term “psychedelic,” and when the 13th Floor Elevators were guests on “American Bandstand” in 1966 promoting their breakout single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” a naive Dick Clark asked Tommy Hall, “Who is the head man here?” Hall then smugly replied, “We’re all heads.”

Sutherland was a survivor. He survived the turmoil of being in a band signed to a record label whose owners engaged in questionable business practices, numerous arrests for drug possession, an addiction to heroin, and seven months of incarceration in the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections near Huntsville. In exile from his central Texas home of Kerrville, in 1975 Sutherland decided to find refuge and a change of scenery in Houston.

Houston was very familiar turf to Sutherland. The 13th Floor Elevators recorded in Houston studios, as well as performed countless concerts in Houston nightclubs. The band also lived communally for a time in an old mansion located on Old Galveston Road owned by their record label and known as “Funky Mansions.” However, what really drew Sutherland to Houston after the demise of the Elevators was the fact that it was home to Ann Elizabeth “Bunni” Bunnell.

Ann Elizabeth “Bunni” Bunnell. Photo courtesy of Jim Hord.

“She was brilliant and a member of MENSA,” said longtime friend and former Montrose neighbor, Jim Hord, “but she couldn’t handle the everyday little things in life. Bunni displayed bad judgment in men and had a lot of slimeball friends.”Bunnell was a New Jersey transplant to Texas whom Sutherland initially met in the late 1960s during the time he lived in Funky Mansions. She was an “exotic dancer” who took the name “Bunni” when she danced at the “Boobie Rock” on Houston’s lower Westheimer Road. Bunnell was now working as a typist supporting herself and her two children from a previous marriage, and studying to be a court reporter at night.

Sutherland and Bunnell rekindled their relationship in the summer of 1976, and settled into east Montrose where rents were affordable, drugs were plentiful, and crime was rampant. The next year, on Sutherland’s 31st birthday, May 28, the couple married, traveled to central Texas to visit family and friends, and then returned to Houston to resume their domestic routine of volatility and substance abuse.

“Stacy had a very bad temper and the alcohol brought out the worst in him,” said Hord who now resides in Waco, “but Stacy and Bunni brought out the worst in each other. The house was always dirty, and it was infested with roaches. Bunni wasn’t the best housekeeper. Every time I went over to visit, the condition of the house used to really bug me. Bunni had some really bad times in her life, but the time spent with Stacy was the worst.”

516 Pacific Street, The Montrose, Houston. Photo courtesy of Paul Drummond.

Hord remembers Sutherland as someone always toying with the idea of putting another band together, but who went to extreme measures to forgo actually playing music during this unproductive time period. As a frustrated Sutherland sat on his front porch, neighbors were known to come up to him and ask for an autograph, which served as a reminder of by-gone days in the spotlight.

“I don’t remember ever hearing Stacy play guitar when I went over to visit. He used to talk about drugs a lot. He had a fascination with drugs, and he would do anything that came his way. Bunni once told me that when she and Stacy used to go out bar hopping in the neighborhood, Stacy would bandage his hand before leaving the house, and when people would buy him drinks and ask him to play guitar with the band, he would have an excuse not to play and sit in with them, choosing to drink all night instead,” Hord said.

By 1978, the Sutherlands were at an all-time low in their on again, off again relationship, and in the early morning hours of August 24, after a full day of drinking and arguing, Bunnell shot Sutherland in the kitchen of their east Montrose bungalow. The bullet severed a major artery causing massive internal bleeding. Later that day, the Houston Chronicle included the following story:

A Montrose resident was shot to death today in his residence at 516 Pacific Street. Police identified the victim as Stacy Keith Sutherland, 33. Shot once in the stomach with a .22 caliber rifle, at 3:30 a.m., Sutherland died at 5:07 a.m. in Ben Taub Hospital.

Officers arrested a 34-year-old woman at the scene. No charges have been filed.

Hord believes that Bunnell’s actions were taken as a measure of defense to protect her teenaged son who was staying with them at the time from an irrational acting and inebriated Sutherland.

“Stacy was making threatening remarks and acting belligerent towards Bunni’s 15-year-old son,” recounts Hord, “and when Stacy lunged at Bunni in an attempt to enter her son’s bedroom, she pulled the trigger to the .22 rife that the couple kept in the house for protection against burglars.”

On April 10, 1981, after seeing evidence and hearing arguments from council, the Honorable Judge Frank Price of the 209th District Court of Harris County issued a motion for dismissal to Ann Elizabeth Sutherland for the murder of Stacy Sutherland.

More than two years had passed from the time Bunnell was indicted for the felony offense by a Houston grand jury, and according to Bunnell’s attorney, Audley H. Heath, “because more than 120 days had passed since the commencement of the action, the defendant was entitled to a dismissal of the indictment filed in the cause in accordance with the ‘Speedy Trial Act of 1974’ of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.” This statute was later repealed by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2005.

Sutherland died before experiencing the worldwide recognition and the accolades now paid to him and the 13th Floor Elevators from adoring fans, musicians, and the music press. Their music has found a new audience from an entirely new generation, that discovered the band and the body of work they recorded, from that brief moment in time they performed together.

Sutherland is buried at Center Point Cemetery near his family’s ranch in Kerr County, not far from where he used to practice his guitar on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Bunnell eventually became a court reporter, remarried and continued to live in the house at the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in east Montrose where she died of cervical cancer in 1987 at age 43.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]

Also see:

The 13th Floor Elevators — Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy — at the New Orleans Club in Austin, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Roky Erickson, Stacy Sutherland, and John Ike Walton perform at La Maison in Houston in May or June, 1966. Image from last.fm.


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Ellen LaConte : Garden As If Your Life Depended on It

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Digging in for the future. Image from Civil Eats.

Because it will:
Garden as if your life depended on it

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / March 31, 2011

Spring has sprung — at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it — and the grass has ‘riz.

And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills, and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food — all of which are also becoming more expensive — or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops 20 percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread — and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it — will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity, and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.

What’s for supper down the road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect

  • the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again,
  • prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,
  • some foods to become very expensive compared to what we’re used to
  • and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually, and mentally healing activity — or all four.

Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

The rig is up. Image from The Market Oracle.

Why’s gardening so important now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake, and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the U.S. around 1971. Lest you’ve missed the raging, that’s the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We’ve shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter.

There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling, are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous, and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules — “The ABC’s of Peak Oil” — which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn’t leave much. (See Beth Terry’s website, for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil that’s hard to get because it’s located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones.

Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies, depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that system’s going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 that’s escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or thereabouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

Poppies for biofuel? Photo by Yannis Kontos / Polaris.


2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat, and soy for human and animal consumption — i.e., food — to production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and… Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive.

Some energeconomy geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel, which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, “The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year.” Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore’s deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.

Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food.

Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that’s seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed — read “First” — world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland — if its farmers didn’t go organic a while back — is comprised of dead soils.

Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution impossible, which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition.

Half the Earth’s original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries.

China’s soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Basket’s soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isn’t coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.

Peak dirt. Image from treehugger.

3) Monoculture: We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting of one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease, or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop.

At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the world’s wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times. Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia.

The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed “Ugh.”

4) Climate instability. Bad — uncongenial — weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa, and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe we’ve passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests, intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what’s being farmed for.

The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters,which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns, and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we’ve been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it.

When a whole nation’s or region’s staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry, and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn’t the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (Go here for that.) No pundits, talking-heads, or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs won’t be coming back.

The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we’re going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it.

Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each other’s food as seriously as we’ve taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us won’t have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what’s our recourse?

Urban garden in lower Manhattan. Image from Civil Eats.

Gardening like everybody’s business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We’ve become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about to have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, we’ll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally.

Gardening — and small-scale farming — while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion, will be less about doing business than about everyone’s having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.

In a subsequent column I’ll review five variations on the theme of gardening to counterbalance the five reasons I think we need to.

  • Back-yard, back-porch, back-40 gardening
  • Community gardens
  • Community Supported Agriculture
  • Urban gardening
  • Taking the ‘Burbs.

[Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, freelance writer, speaker, and editor, living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic and Advisory Board member at the EarthWalk Alliance. She was assistant to the late homesteader and bestselling Living the Good Life author, Helen Nearing. Her most recent book is the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once & how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010) can be examined at www.liferules-thebook.info. LaConte publishes a quarterly online newsletter, Starting Point, and can be reached at www.ellenlaconte.com.]

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Posted on March 31, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Garden as if Your Life Depended On It, Because It Will

By Ellen LaConte

Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more expensive—or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread—and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it— will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.

What’s for Supper Down the Road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect

§ the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again,

§ prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,

§ some foods to become very expensive compared to what we’re used to

§ and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

Why’s Gardening So Important Now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the US around 1971. Lest you’ve missed the raging (http://www.postcarbon.org), that’s the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We’ve shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter. There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules, “The ABC’s of Peak Oil” which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn’t leave much. (See Beth Terry’s website (http://myplasticfreelife.com/plasticfreeguide/ ), for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil that’s hard to get because it’s located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones. Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that system’s going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 that’s escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or there abouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat and soy for human and animal consumption—i.e., food—to production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and . . . Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive. Some energeconomy geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/putting-poppies-in-the-gas-tank/8379/ ), which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/bourne-text ), “The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year.” Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore’s deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.

Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food. Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that’s seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read “First” world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland—if its farmers didn’t go organic a while back—is comprised of dead soils. Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution impossible (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/green-revolution-illustration ), which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition. Half the Earth’s original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries. China’s soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Basket’s soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isn’t coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.

3) Monoculture: We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop. At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the world’s wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times (http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/14/science/sci-wheat-rust14). Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed “Ugh.”

4) Climate instability. Bad — uncongenial — weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe we’ve passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/stanmeyer-photography), intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what’s being farmed for. The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we’ve been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it. When a whole nation’s or region’s staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn’t the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (See (www.ellenlaconte.com/excerpts-from-life-rules/#chpfour) for that.) No pundits, talking-heads or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs won’t be coming back. The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we’re going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it. Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each other’s food as seriously as we’ve taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us won’t have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what’s our recourse?

Gardening Like Everybody’s Business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We’ve become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about the have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, we’ll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally. Gardening — and small-scale farming — while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion will be less about doing business than about everyone’s having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.

In a subsequent column I’ll review five variations on the theme of gardening to counterbalance the five reasons I think we need to.

§ Back-yard, back-porch, back-40 gardening

§ Community gardens

§ Community Supported Agriculture

§ Urban gardening

Taking the ‘Burbs

Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, freelance writer, speaker and editor, living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic and Advisory Board member at the EarthWalk Alliance. She was assistant to the late homesteader and bestselling Living the Good Life author, Helen Nearing, and as Nearing’s executor helped found The Good Life Center at Forest Farm in Harborside, Maine. Her memoir of Nearing, On Light Alone was published in South Korea as well as the US. Her most recent book is the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once & how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010) can be examined at www.liferules-thebook.info . LaConte publishes a quarterly online newsletter, Starting Point, and can be reached at (www.ellenlaconte.com).

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